Exile All the Longer

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/29812755.

Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: Major Character Death
Category: F/M
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Iron Man
(Movies)
Relationship: Tony Stark/Original Female Character(s)
Character: Tony Stark, Original Female Character(s), James "Rhodey" Rhodes,
Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes,
Stephen Strange, Bruce Banner, Original Male Character, Red Skull
(Vormir)
Additional Tags: Romance, Angst, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying
Marks, Character Study, Set During the Five Years in Endgame, Sort of
a fix-it, If It Still Counts As A Fix-It When I Rip Your Heart Out In The
Process, a lot of sweetness, Locked In A Room trope, Humor, Infinity
War Feels, Endgame Feels, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence,
Tony's Haunted By Losing To Thanos, Tony Falls Really Hard Really
Fast, It Feels Like Slow Burn But It's More Like A Constant Rolling Boil,
Leigh's Hair Is Kind of a Character in This, Tony lives, Possessive
Tony, Rated Explicit For Language Yes But Also Sex, happy ever after,
Alternate Universes, Happy Ever After Takes a Really Long and
Convoluted Path, Okay This Story Is Kind of a Treatise On Grief, But
We Defeat Thanos TWICE and It's Awesome Both Times So You
Should Read It Anyway
Language: English
Collections: R's Marvel, Eddysfer favs, ReadLater7878, Fanfics To Read Over and
Over
Stats: Published: 2021-03-03 Completed: 2021-04-05 Chapters: 30/30 Words:
161963

Exile All the Longer

by Darsynia

Summary

Tony lost Pepper in the Snap. What he gains, what EARTH gains, is a 'gift' from Thanos:
Soulmates. Some say that the mad Titan used the stones to do this out of respect for Earth's
role in his grand design, others say it's to make those left behind complacent, docile-- even
grateful.

Tony isn't grateful. He's pissed. His Words are a cruel slap in the face, and the whole
concept is bullshit. He spends a year doing right by the world with his company and then
settles down to build his lake house. Tony falls for his smart, gorgeous architect as easy as
breathing, all the while feeling self-righteous about the whole 'inevitability' of Soulmates.
He's beat the system, fallen in love the old-fashioned way. All Tony has to do is get her to
actually speak to him, instead of by text or email.
 And then she does. She says his Words.

Notes

Inspired by my favorite trope in all of fanfiction: Soulmate-identifying marks. In this story

they're fairly straightforward, the first words your soulmate says to you are written in their
handwriting on your skin somewhere on your body. They don't react in any way, no
supernatural elements, just Words. I also want to add, as I've heard some folks express
distaste at the way the trope is most often used-- this story doesn't have 'insta love thanks to
soulmarks' or anything like that. If anything, they're a drawback, a hurdle to an already-
developing attraction. If the typical use of soulmate words isn't your thing, please try the
story anyway? You might like the way I twist it.

I'll be honest, the last third of this story hurts so good. Both Tony and Leigh are hurt by the
Snap in their own ways, and their journey is bittersweet and glorious as they heal each
other. I've never been more in love with an original character I've written than with Leigh
Balci, I WANT her style. But at first, theirs is no typical happy ever after, not when the
chance to bring everyone back is eventually presented.

I started this fic with two goals in mind: write a soulmate AU, and save Tony Stark at the
end of Endgame. This is the joyous, sexy, beautiful, painful, cathartic result. It includes, in
my opinion, some of my best writing, including the first few paragraphs.
 Chapter One
Chapter Summary

Tony has largely ignored the whole Soulmate phenomenon. He wasn’t much for
television, he’s got his own music collection, he doesn’t socialize much lately, and he
definitely doesn’t watch the news if he can help it. He’s heard that there’s a whole new
kind of makeup designed to hide them for those unlucky enough to have Words where
everyone can read them. He doesn’t have to worry about that. Tony’s are on his inner
thigh, and he’s one of the most recognizable people on the planet. Anyone close
enough to read them will be someone he wants to be there.

Chapter Notes

In this alternate universe everyone refers to it as the snap instead of the blip.

Amazing cover image by Grimmly! Notice that Leigh and Tony are on the porch,
Tony is dipping her into a kiss! Thank you so very much, this is amazing!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Part I: The Gift

Chapter One

Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance.

-Richard von Weizsaecker

Tony had already expected that the words he spoke into his helmet would be the last he’d speak to
Pepper Potts.

Still, when he walks off of the ship, broken, gaunt, and barely alive, it’s with an expectation. Tony
thinks that for all his hard work, for throwing his whole self at the problem of stopping Thanos,
after losing Peter and most of the people he’d fought with, he’s earned coming home to Pepper.

But she’s gone.

Tony’s knees give way underneath him like they are made of the dust of her.

***
They rejuvenate him with an IV, but to Tony it’s full of bitterness, and he welcomes that as much
as the nourishment. He sits, full to the brim with it, as Nat tells him Thanos achieved exactly what
he set out to do. He stands, choking on it, as he throws everything he’s got left at Steve, even his
ARC reactor. Rhodey tries to help, but Tony’s been practicing fighting with every ounce of energy
he has, so he does just that.

***

He wakes up in a hospital bed and looks around for the IV. Maybe he can convince them to shoot
him up with something that will let him sleep through about a week’s worth of self-recrimination.
Tony does it in his dreams anyway, which he can’t escape, but even as far gone as he is, he’d rather
hit back at dream friends than the real ones.

As if to prove that he’s through ever getting what he wants, Rhodey walks in.

“Next time you could try saying, ‘I’m not in the mood for company.’”

Tony smiles, a genuine one. “Rhodey, I’m not in the mood for company.”

“Cute,” his best friend says. “Problem is, I’ve got shit to do, things to tell you, and they have to go
in a particular order. You want to get it all out of your system first, or are you going to scatter in
your dungbombs while I tell you what you need to know?”

“You’re quoting Harry Potter, now?” Tony scoffs.

“Yeah, well, those stones were basically magic, and Thanos used them like magic. We’re looking
for him right now, but you are decommissioned until you get your strength back,” Rhodes tells
him. “There’s something else.”

“Oh, do tell,” Tony says, tasting bile. What else could there be?

“Thor was with him when he Snapped. Thanos told Thor he would do one more thing, a gift, he
said, for how hard we fought back.”

“What did he do then? Take a shit right there in front of the God of Thunder?” Tony asks,
knowing, relishing that Rhodey would hate his crassness.

“I’m not biting today, so you can put all your sass back where it belongs,” Rhodey says instead.
“He created a, a new thing. A condition? Soulmates, they’re calling it. You have the first words
your Soulmate says to you magically tattooed on your body somewhere, if you’re one of them.”

“You’re making that up. Trying to give me material to mock,” Tony derides him.

“I’m not.” Rhodey unbuttons his shirt sleeve and rolls it up. There, curled around his bicep, are the
words, ‘I’m not one for soldiers, but damn!’ He looks about as uncomfortable as Tony has ever
seen him, and Tony loves it.

“I don’t know which is better, that you laid your ass on the line to stop that guy and this is your
reward, or that you paid good money to put that on your skin just to make me feel better,” Tony
says.

“Laugh it up, but when you’re done, do a once-over.”

“I won’t have one, Rhodey. Pepper is gone.” Tony explains it like he’s speaking to a small child.
“Tony,” Rhodey says, his expression bleak. “I think that’s the point. They’re saying these are only
for the survivors. It’s only picking out of the survivors, I mean. That’s what they’re saying.”

Tony wants to argue, but it occurs to him that the only thing that could hurt more than losing
Pepper was to be told that cosmically, she wasn’t his perfect match anyway. So, he doesn’t do the
obvious and ask if Steve Rogers has Peggy Carter’s first words spoken to him written on his body
somewhere. Somehow he chases Rhodey away without losing his friendship, and as soon as he’s
gone, Tony uses the call button.

“Someone just filled me in on the whole soulmate words thing. I want this put in my chart: I don’t
care, I don’t want to know, and I don’t want them in my records, is that clear?”

The look of dismay on the nurse’s face tells Tony that it’s probably already too late. There’s an
argument to be made about how readily Earth’s humans seem to have adjusted to a literal mark of
the beast, but Tony’s not the one to make it. For the next week and a half before they release him,
he refuses any and all washing.

He’s not sure whether they’re releasing him because he’s ready (he’s still weak as hell, in a way
he’s never been before, and it’s sobering) or because he reeks, but either is fine with him. Tony
gives himself twenty-four hours at home before he’s got to do anything responsible, and the first
thing he does is get very, very drunk.

Then, he strips off, gets in the shower, and starts looking.

Tony’s Words are on his thigh, and being drunk doesn’t help.

Maybe it was too much to expect that you could save the world, but you didn’t stop there, no, you
had to take away all my hopes and dreams too!

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Tony had thought maybe Rhodey was playing a weird, PTSD-
inspired joke on him and got somebody to tattoo some temporary insanity onto his skin. But this?
No way Rhodey would ever do something this brutal. They’re on his thigh, written out as if his leg
was someone’s canvas for cruelty. Tony sinks to his knees in the shower and just stays there,
staring, for he doesn’t know how long. He’s lucky he doesn’t drown in there; it’s only thanks to
FRIDAY that he doesn’t fall asleep and do just that.

When Tony wakes up the next morning, his first thought is of Pepper. How hard she worked, both
to keep him alive and to keep his company afloat. The obvious conclusion is that he can’t let either
of those things slip now that she’s not around, not if she would have spent the rest of her life
holding him up. The problem is that he’s still Tony Stark, and he’s too selfish for ‘the rest of his
life.’ He decides he’ll do a year, but make it a good year.

The results are predictably grandiose.

Tony throws himself into Stark Industries in a way he never had before. The future, Tony says, is
in automation and human resources. His company is an innovator in both, becomes a world leader
in just a few months. No one should survive the Snap to have to go to work in a factory for barely a
living wage. He builds factories of his own and fills them with his innovative machines, adaptable
nanotechnology for the most wealthy of his customers, sturdy metal and easily swapped out pieces
for everyone else. If he had his way, most humans would only work at jobs that need them there
for their brains or creativity, not their ability to mindlessly push a button.

On top of that, he leads a push for worker’s rights. Mandatory grief days. A livable wage, with no
compromises for affordable healthcare provided by the company. Modular hours for parents.
Modular hours for non parents. He even goes and bitches at Congress about it once.

All of these things he does because he thinks Pepper would be proud of him. When every new day
that passes between then and now is one he isn’t ashamed of, Tony thinks maybe it’s time to start
looking into stepping back a bit. He’s done a year, he’s got a good team and a board he actually
fucking trusts. The thing he wants most out of what he can actually have is to swap his view of the
city for one of green trees and calm waters.

Tony buys property in the middle of nowhere, West Virginia. It’s a stretch of land with most of a
lake, covered in trees, lushly green and quiet as hell. He spends a week researching architecture
firms and settles on Charriotte, a small but prestigious company headquartered in Washington,
D.C. The CEO is a man named Branson Harriot, and Tony flies down to meet with him in person.

The firm emails him a list of suggestions of things to do before the meeting, and it’s a lot more like
an audition than he thought. Tony’s competitive, so he’s determined to do what he can to get them
to pick his project. He spends the day before setting up a visualization and shows up with his
portable holotable mat. Tony can tell that they want the project by the time he’s done. Maybe the
mat, too-- his company sells them for a large fortune.

“Here’s the tricky thing,” Harriot says. “I have the perfect person to work on this project, but, well.
They were supremely unlucky in the Snap. Lost twelve members of their family.”

Tony’s heard snippets of probability quirks like this on the news, human interest stories of the joys
or pains of being one of the people who fate dealt extremely kindly or poorly with. “Twelve! Big
family?”

“No, that about wiped them out. The superstitious folks have a field day with the whole thing,
unfortunately,” Harriot says. “Both parents, both brothers and their wives, both sisters, various
aunts and uncles. But Balci grew up on a farm, loves nature, and honestly Lee’s work is completely
gorgeous in situ. Perfect for your plot.” Harriot leans forward on his desk and pins Tony with a
pleading look. “Could you, just, create a new email account, keep your last name out of it? Pose as
a higher-up in the company, communicate with Lee by email for a little while, early planning
stages, all of that?”

The old Tony would never have been okay with this. “Yeah, I could do that. Based on the way
you’re asking me, it sounds like it’ll be worth my while.”

“It will, it will,” Harriot says enthusiastically.

Tony creates Mechanic270@StarkIndustries.com and sends it along to Charriotte without

expecting too much in the way of a back and forth. He’s pleasantly surprised to discover that he
was wrong.
TO: Mechanic270@StarkIndustries.com

FROM: FLBalci@Charriotte.com

SUBJECT: Preliminaries

Greetings from D.C.,

I like to get a feel for the people who want to live in the places I design, so I have a
few questions that help illuminate that. What colors do you like? Is there a place in
your current home that you feel most comfortable in, and can you describe it? Do you
enjoy warm or cool shades the most? What makes you think of home?

That’s probably enough homework for the man giving me a job,

Balci

TO: FLBalci@Charriotte.com

FROM: Mechanic270@StarkIndustries.com

SUBJECT: Re: Preliminaries

Hey,

I was about to get weird about your questions until I realized they’re probably
important and you know your stuff. I like warm colors. A lot of the places I’ve lived
haven’t been like that, but I wasn’t always the person who a) picked out construction
materials, and b) decorated. That’s a strange realization at this age, so I don’t know if I
should say thank you or not.

The home question’s harder. Do me a favor: you go first. What’s home for you?

~Mechanic

TO: Mechanic270

FROM: FLBalci

SUBJECT: Home
 Greetings from a finally thawed D.C.,

That was a very subtle rebuke, and I take it in the spirit with which it was given: it’s a
very emotional thing to answer a question like ‘what is home for you’ these days. My
apologies.

I thought about my answer for a few days, then a few more. It’s been over a week, and
that’s why. There are people who feel ‘at home’ when climbing in the Himalayas, but
not in their own houses, and that’s what I kept coming back to.

Home to me is about joy. Joy to me is about connectedness and peace.

I’ve felt a lot less of that since the Snap. Connecting it to architecture and design
before the Snap would involve making sure that spaces allow for connectedness.
Kitchens that aren’t cut off and hidden. Dining rooms that are a natural part of the
living space and can allow for spillover when hosting guests. A welcoming porch and
deck space.

Now, though? I think more about the individual. Bedrooms that are built to support
comfortable sleeping-- no bright morning sunshine if the very thought brings physical
pain, for example. Maybe an indoor sunroom over a porch, for an introvert. Hidden
balconies, that kind of thing. Inner, over outer peace.

As for me, the times when I have felt the most joy is either when collaborating at
work, or camping in the middle of nowhere. I haven’t quite figured out how I’d turn
that into a home, but my tiny apartment along with the whole world as my possible
campground will do, for now.

Your turn,

Balci

Reading Lee’s email feels like holding a midnight conversation with an old friend. Tony hasn’t had
that in forever, and he’s not sure whether to feel violated by the experience, or grateful. Because he
has some info to pass along in between the last email he’d sent and Lee’s response, Tony just sends
those along without an answer to ‘home.’

This gives him a glimpse into the other man’s subtlety, though, as they spend the next two weeks
talking mostly impersonally about logistics-- but in every email Tony receives, the ‘home’ one is
quoted underneath. Tony’s pretty sure Lee goes and copies it in, every time. When they hit the
third week, he opens Lee’s latest and starts chuckling.

Every instance of the word ‘home’ is in bold.

On a whim, Tony opens the thing in a way that’s meant to strip out formatting from the sender, but
they’re still bold. Lee’s hardcoded them that way.

Tony admits to himself that he’s been bested. It’s not that he can’t resist the question, or that he
feels defeated, it’s just that Lee’s earned it. If only Tony knew how to answer the question,
though…

The fourth week’s about to start when he finally buckles down to write his response. He realizes
halfway through that he can’t say exactly what he means, because if you tell someone that you’re
used to being able to have a basement full of fancy cars or a landing pad on the penthouse level of
your personal tower, that can give away a lot.

TO: FLBalci

FROM: Mechanic270

SUBJECT: Home

Hey,

All right, the ‘home’ thing. Home used to be the place I could do whatever I want and
have whatever I want. I altered my space to my needs, especially when tinkering on
machines.

I don’t know that I have an emotion connected with ‘home’ like you do, but I grew up
wealthy and still am. Most of my living spaces were obtained for status first,
functionality second. All of this is coming down to the truth: Home was about the
people and the ‘place in the world’ that I lost in the Snap.

Your comment about inner expressions versus outer ones seems particularly astute.
I’m definitely thinking more than doing, lately. You said something about your tiny
apartment with the world as your backyard, I like that. I can afford more than tiny, but
intimate might be a good word. If excessive wealth is denoted by wide open spaces
indoors pre-Snap, this house of mine could have the opposite feel.

Now that you’ve dragged that out of me, I can see why articulating it is useful. Damn
you.

~Mechanic

Ps. Elaborate on what makes camping ‘joyful’ for you

Typing that out and hitting send feels cathartic, and he almost wants to punch Lee for forcing him
into it. Tony’s postscript tries to hand the hot seat back, but after only a few personal exchanges
with the guy, Tony should have realized what was going to happen.

TO: Mechanic270
 FROM: FLBalci

SUBJECT: Home

Greetings from a fine, clear day in Pennsylvania,

Spending the weekend at the farm, thought it was a great time to type out an answer,
even though I’m off the grid here. I’ll send it later.

You asked what makes camping joyful for me, and I suspect that’s an attempt to get
some of your own back after the ‘home’ standoff. Careful what you wish for?

Before I lost everyone, I liked the night sky because of its immensity. All those points
of light were so distant, so unknowable! If gravity held me in place physically, those
stars held me in my cosmic place, in a way.

I don’t know what your experience was during the actual Snap, but mine was… bad.
We were having a family gathering, so it’s not like we were watching the news, or
monitoring Twitter updates. We had no warning. Maybe it’s because of not knowing
anything beforehand, but I threw myself into finding out everything I could,
afterwards.

So my sense of joy changed, and so did that night sky.

Mechanic (do you mind giving me a name? Even if it’s not yours?), I didn’t expect to
feel the way I do about camping, and maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s incomprehensible,
but there was one piece of knowledge I found out about the Snap that changed
everything for what I had left of my sanity.

We were far from the only ones.

I camp out now, after losing so many loved ones, and I know that some people see the
stars as a physical representation of the people we’ve lost, as if their dust floated up
and fixed in place, but I have to tell you, I have the opposite reaction. I see them as a
representation of what’s left, out there, among those stars. When in the course of
human history have we ever been able to look up and feel a kinship with cultures,
creatures unknown? Yet, now we can.

I take joy from the fact that I no longer feel so disconnected from those stars. We share
pain. We’re not alone. Do I wish it were for some other reason? Absolutely. But as
with everything after the Snap, I take what I can get.

Bet you’re glad you asked,

Balci

I met some of those creatures, Tony doesn’t write back. Most of them turned to dust in front of me.

Tony wants to know more about Lee’s family, but he doesn’t want to reciprocate. He’s not sure he
can talk about who he’s lost, the sheer magnitude of that loss, the way he looked at Stephen
Strange and saw in his eyes the certainty that Tony wouldn’t fail. He’s made an uneasy kind of
peace with himself about Pepper, he’s shoved how he feels about losing Peter down deep, but the
look on that sorcerer’s face will never not hurt.
Truthfully, Tony just wants to buy Lee a beer and thank him for everything he’s done so far. It’s a
definite friendship, by now, despite all of Tony’s insular ways over the past year. He’s spent time
with Rhodey, that’s about it, and even that friendship is strained, recently.

Rhodey’s the only one Tony let tease him about the Soulmate thing. He didn’t tell Rhodes about
what his Words say, just that they’re horrific, which Tony’s frankly grateful for. Those are the first
things his so-called Soulmate will ever say to him? Good. They’re distinctive. He’ll be able to
avoid her.

Rhodes, though, he hasn’t been all that successful. He tells Tony he stayed away from bars and
parties, not that he was that kind of guy when Tony wasn’t around anyway (and Tony is definitely
not that kind of guy lately), trying to avoid the kind of situation that would pull words like the ones
written on him. He still met the woman, though, and Tony can tell by Rhodey’s voice that he’s
fighting a losing battle against her charms.

Tony has largely ignored the whole Soulmate phenomenon. He wasn’t much for television, he’s
got his own music collection, he doesn’t socialize much lately, and he definitely doesn’t watch the
news if he can help it. He’s heard that there’s a whole new kind of makeup designed to hide them
for those unlucky enough to have Words where everyone can read them. He doesn’t have to worry
about that. Tony’s are on his inner thigh, and he’s one of the most recognizable people on the
planet. Anyone close enough to read them will be someone he wants to be there.

The strange thing is that he hasn’t really wanted to be that close to, well, anybody. The first few
months he’d been back, Tony spent all his time on the company and that hasn’t really slowed down
much. He never did do the wild, miserable, drunken things he’d told himself would be his reward.

Getting older isn’t really the problem. He’s more serious, now, and that’s just a drag.

TO: FLBalci

FROM: Mechanic270

SUBJECT: Fundraiser

Hey,

I attached the things you requested at the end, but I had a question. Would your
company be interested in joining mine in donating anonymously to the Shore Up
foundation? Before you give me shit for it, I am aware that asking like this is not
anonymous, but it’s a cause that means a lot to me.

Shore Up started out helping hurricane victims by buying their property and giving
them the equity to move away from dangerous areas. Nowadays they’re involved in
providing proper internet access, to the point of paying for the infrastructure needed
when the utilities balk. My company’s been supporting them for years, but they’ve
really ramped up in the past one.
 Let me know? No is a complete sentence, no judgment,

Tony (that’s my name, you said you’d like it and I forgot four emails in a row)

Lee has become a friend, for all that they’ve never met or chatted anywhere else than email. Tony
frets about putting his real name on there, sure that he’s left enough breadcrumbs to make it
obvious who he really is.

TO: Mechanic270

FROM: FLBalci

SUBJECT: Re: Fundraiser

Greetings from a rainy rest stop,

Writing this quickly on my way from a final wrap-up in Virginia. Thanks for the
invitation. I spoke to Branson about it and he’s happy to donate.

Full disclosure, though: Shore Up was the reason why I found an apartment in D.C.
and didn’t go quietly insane, after the Snap. They kitted out the farm (and you didn’t
read me wrong before, I *can* go off grid, but I don’t have to), connected me with
some people who had been unlucky in their losses, too.

It’s a great organization. I’m pleased to hear you’re involved with them, Tony.

Balci

Ps. let me know what you think about a site visit sometime in the next month

The idea of actually physically implementing some of the things he and Lee have been figuring out
about the house fuels Tony’s mood all day. The anticipation persists late into the night, when he
gets an idea.

Tony’s never really been camping. He was never a boy scout, literally or figuratively. He’s been
thinking about the location in West Virginia, though-- it’s pretty far from basically everything.
Tony decides to suggest camping out on the site, figuring if Lee isn’t up for it, that’s fine. Camping
under the not-so-unfeeling stars might be a private thing, for him.
 TO: FLBalci

FROM: Mechanic270

SUBJECT: Site Visit

Hey,

I had a thought. My plot’s pretty remote. What if instead of getting rooms at the
nearest, still very distant hotel, we just camped out? I don’t have any gear, but I’ll buy
whatever, or I can reimburse you.

As for scheduling, that depends-- camping? No camping? Let me know.

Tony

TO: Mechanic270

FROM: FLBalci

SUBJECT: Re: Site Visit

Greetings from the office in D.C.,

I looked up the weather in that area in early May, and camping is doable, but chilly. If
you’re comfortable with me using the credit line you extended to Charriotte, I can use
that for supplies. I’d drive up, then, since it’s halfway between D.C. and the farm
anyway, so I can bring the food, if that’s fine with you? I just can’t promise when I’ll
get there for sure, so I’d need to skip out on picking you up at the airport.

Only one caveat, and I am only mentioning this because of professional norms and
how important your contract is to Branson: camping attire will be less than office-
worthy. I’ll be a different person than you expect, almost certainly. If that’s all right
with you, I’ll start ordering you a tent and the other necessities.

No problem if you have to renege,

Balci

Ps. you eat S’mores, right? The whole contract’s off if you hate S’mores, no
exceptions

Chapter End Notes

I tagged a few other characters but the first chunk of the story, nearly all of part I, is
mostly just Tony and Leigh, just so you know.
 Chapter Two
Chapter Summary

“Sir, can you confirm that you are the client from Stark Industries? I have Lee on the
other line and she’s concerned about a strange man on the property, says he hasn’t
approached her.”

As if to reinforce what the secretary just said, Tony hears the sound of a gun cocking.
He looks over his shoulder, careful not to make a sudden move, and the woman he’d
been staring at is standing on this side of the bushes, pointing a gun directly at his
head.

He was right.

She’s gorgeous.

Chapter Notes

Friday counts as the weekend, right?

I just really wanted you to meet Leigh! What can I say, I'm an addict-- addicted to
writing like my life depends on it, and then addicted to hearing how the readers felt
about what I wrote! It means the world, folks, thanks so much.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Two

Tony sits back in his office after getting Lee’s email about the site visit and lets out a long, slow
breath. Planning is one thing, but it looks like they are about to transition to really building this
thing Tony has allowed himself to look forward to for over a year, now. It’s exciting.

Now all that remains is for Lee not to be upset when he finds out that Tony is Tony Stark. Tony’s
in a strange situation here, because he hasn’t done anything like the research Lee likely has about
the Snap. He didn’t have to. What kind of mangling of the truth has the world press done? What is
Lee’s impression of ‘Billionaire Superhero Tony Stark?’

He asks Rhodey, or rather tries to, but he is unavailable for the first time in forever. Tony wants to
feel happy for him, but he can’t help but think his friend has accepted the yoke of something that
will force him into some terrible catch he’s not expecting. Thanos’s ‘gift’ is tainted. It has to be.

After renting a pickup at the airport, he enjoys the thirty-minute drive of paved roads before he
gets to the dirt ones and has to roll his windows up. He’s got a baseball cap, jeans, sneakers, and a
Metallica shirt on, but his ARC reactor will stay in his truck. He still isn’t at the place where he
could leave it at home, but this hollowed-out world isn’t ever going to earn his trust enough to do
without it completely.
He parks beside the pickup that’s already there, a bright red beauty of a truck. It has Pennsylvania
plates on it, so he’s pretty sure it’s Lee’s. Tony gets out and looks around. He can’t see Lee, but the
property is decently sized, and a lot of the area next to the lake has clusters of bushes that obscure
his view. It’s a warm day, and Tony walks up to the lake, testing the mud around it with the tip of
his sneaker. That’s when he sees it-- a footprint. It looks pretty small, and Tony wonders if
someone’s kid from a neighboring plat went walkabout.

The view along the shore is pretty clear to the left, so Tony starts to walk around toward the right,
keeping his eye out for any kids as he looks for Lee. When he comes up on the bushes, Tony slows
down, hoping maybe he’ll catch the kid. He peeks through the branches and just stares.

There isn’t a kid walking around barefoot on the lake’s shore.

It’s a woman.

She’s wearing a cheerful-looking sundress, light green scattered with yellow and white flowers. He
can’t help but notice it shows off a lot of leg, but what’s really noteworthy about her is the mass of
honey blonde hair piled on top of her head. It’s a masterpiece of messy twists and flyaways, like a
wig in a fantasy movie.

She isn’t facing him but he already thinks she’s beautiful. Tony watches her, feeling like a voyeur
in the aforementioned fantasy movie, hoping she’ll turn around. He sees that she’s got a messenger
bag on one shoulder, an incongruously sturdy leather thing, completely at odds with the flower
child image she’s got going.

He backs off and takes stock of what to do. It’s possible that Lee has a girlfriend that he’s brought
along last-minute. It’s also possible, given the beauty of the lake, that this woman has come from a
neighboring property for a walk. He hadn’t put up ‘no trespassing’ signs, not yet, though he knows
he’ll want to do that soon.

Tony’s got a Satellite uplink for his phone, so he backtracks a good twenty or thirty feet more and
calls up Charriotte in lieu of calling Lee, whose number he doesn’t have.

“Good afternoon, this is Marissa from Charriotte Design speaking, how may I direct your call?”

“Yes, hello,” Tony says. “I’m meant to be on-site with Lee Balci today, and I just want to make
sure there aren’t any crossed wires, that kind of thing.” He phrases it like this on purpose. On the
off chance there was a concern Lee brought up at work, this woman might assume that’s what he is
referring to, and mention it.

“Lee wasn’t in this morning, and the schedule implies she’s off the rest of this week-- I’m sorry,
can I put you on hold?”

It’s not a video call, but Tony stares at the phone in his hand. She?

“Sir?” the tinny voice calls out. “Sir?”

“I’m here,” Tony says, clearing his throat because the words don’t sound quite right.

“Can you confirm that you are the client from Stark Industries? I have Lee on the other line and
she’s concerned about a strange man on the property, says he hasn’t approached her.”

As if to reinforce what the secretary just said, Tony hears the sound of a gun cocking. He looks
over his shoulder, careful not to make a sudden move, and the woman he’d been staring at is
standing on this side of the bushes, pointing a gun directly at his head.
He was right.

She’s gorgeous.

Tony already had his hand up by his face, and he slowly shifts its position to gesture to himself. He
turns so his face is fully visible-- he is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, after all.

“Tony,” he says to the woman, identifying himself.

Her reaction is everything he had feared it might be. Her face pales and the gun (which she’d been
pointing at him with expert precision, meaning she knows how to shoot it, which he really
shouldn’t find attractive) lowers to first his chest, then the ground. Lee makes the gun safe and
tucks it away in her bag, all the while looking utterly shaken. She pulls something else out and
backs away.

“Sir!” the voice on the phone demands.

“Yes, hi, I was making contact with Lee,” Tony tells the woman. “I think we’re good here, thanks
for the help.” He’s just about to hang up when he hears the secretary ask him to wait.

Feet away, he sees that the woman in the sundress is speaking quietly on the phone, one hand to
her throat. Her body language is closed down; arms crossed, shoulders tight, legs close together.
He wonders if he’s just lost a contract and a friend just by virtue of being Tony Stark.

“Mr. Stark?” the voice on the phone calls out. He lifts it and turns so he doesn’t see Lee’s reaction
to whatever bad news he’s about to hear. “Lee didn’t get a chance to let you know ahead of time
about this, but she’s recovering from laryngitis. Wants to know if you’re okay with written
communication, and says she’s extremely sorry for the inconvenience.”

Tony shoots a look over at Lee, who is now tapping out something on her phone, her conversation
with the secretary apparently over. It’s not a StarkPhone, which is rare nowadays. That
unfortunately tracks with her reaction to recognizing him, though.

“That’s fine,” Tony hears himself agreeing, his eyes on Lee. She reacts, closing her eyes in relief,
and it slices at him a little bit, this unexpected woman who was worried he wouldn’t trust her if she
couldn’t speak. It’s a relief too, in a way, because if that’s what she was worried about, then she
clearly didn’t demand an end to the contract. He refocuses on his own phone conversation.
Laryngitis, she’d said. “I’ve had that a couple of times. It’s fine. Thanks,” he says, and ends the
call. Tony and Lee look at each other for a moment, and then he smiles, holding up his finger.
“I’ve got-- I brought you something. I’ll be right back.”

Tony turns and starts jogging toward the pickups. His mind and body had been calibrated for
Camping Bros. This woman’s struck him in a way he wasn’t expecting, with her long legs and
thick golden hair. Tony’s completely off-kilter; he’s got to correct for this, and fast. He gives
himself exactly three seconds to rest his forehead on the sun-warmed metal of the car before
hauling the door open and fishing out the StarkPad he’d brought as a gift to Lee Balci.

Tony almost drops it when he turns around and she’s standing there. It’s his first full view of her
face, and yes, he had been completely right. She’s lovely, with big brown eyes and a dusting of
freckles. He tells himself he is not allowed to stare, so Tony holds out the device apologetically,
thumbing the power button as he does so.

“You don’t get to unbox it, but that’s because I hacked it to put a bunch of things you don’t usually
get on one of these. This case is a special design, holds a stylus,” he tells her. She’s still barefoot,
and her feet are dirty, and it’s charming, and Tony senses that he might be in trouble, here.

She walks around to her pickup, and he follows her. He’s parked on the other side, so there’s space
for her to open the driver’s door wide and climb up so she can sit and set up the tablet. It’s not one
of the transparent ones, because those are really pricey and Tony hadn’t wanted his new friend Lee
to think he was buying him off.

He’s really, really glad he made that call right now.

Instead of taking advantage of the way the truck’s cab height gives him a great view of her legs,
Tony goes over to get the rest of his stuff from the vehicle. Once there, though, he realizes
something. He didn’t know she was a woman, but she did, and she was comfortable with camping
out anyway. That says something about her confidence and her level of trust for him, but it isn’t set
in stone now that she knows he’s Tony Stark. So, he leaves his bag where it is, and comes back
with just his own StarkPad.

When she sees him, she smiles, and Tony bites his lip from the inside. Then, she holds up her
tablet.

I’m Leigh Balci. Nice to meet you, Tony Stark

“Do you want me to write mine out, too?” he asks, gesturing to what’s in his hand. Leigh shakes
her head. He looks up at her and says, “So which one of us got the bigger shock, do you think?”

Her smile widens, and she points to him.

“I’ll buy that,” he agrees.

Leigh makes a twirling motion with one finger pointed down. Tony shakes his head, confused. She
narrows her eyes a bit at him, and starts writing with the stylus.

Turn around.

I have to get down.

Tony suddenly realizes what she means, and he pops a thumbs up and walks away, feeling stupid
for not realizing her issue sooner. The Tony Stark of five years ago might have lifted up his own
StarkPad and used its black mirror to watch her get down in that dress, but he likes Lee-- Leigh,
now --and he values her friendship more than that.

“Do you want me to find a hotel?” he calls out. “I offer so you don’t have to feel obligated, but I’d
like to proceed as planned.” He hears a ripping sound, but it doesn’t quite sound right, as if she’s
unzipping something that pings every time it breaks apart a tine. Tony grabs his bag and shoulders
it, then walks around the pickup-- to find that Leigh’s now wearing a white shirt edged with lace,
and a pair of jean shorts covered with flower patches. He stands there for a moment, confused and
increasingly aware that he should not stare at this woman if he ever wants her to trust him.

Leigh takes pity on him.

Snaps.

She holds up the dress, which looks as if it had been unsnapped from neck to hem.

“I’ll uh, carry some of this, then,” Tony says, needing to cover his face, because he’s not going to
picture that, not going to picture that, yep, he’s picturing it. “Lead on, I’ll trust your expertise.”
Tony does help with the tents, even though he’s sorely tempted to act like his old self and sit down
to watch her put them up. In the back of his mind, he keeps asking himself if she knew who he was,
if that was why she brought an unsnappable dress to a campsite with him. Eventually, though,
Tony starts thinking with his head again, and they get the campsite set up. As he watches her putter
around putting the final touches on things, Tony realizes that he’s judging her by his metric, not by
hers. She’s brought a hummingbird feeder to clip to her tent, for God’s sake.

It’s not naiveté, either. Leigh Balci seems sincere as hell, she’s just somehow also the living
embodiment of cottagecore, and not because she’s trying to impress anybody. Tony knows.
Women who want to impress him wear Iron Man swimsuits under their work clothes if he’s going
to be in the area. They lift their tops to show him tattoos of his face or his ARC reactor on their
breasts. They think he likes flashy sex kittens, and he does, but nowhere near as much as he used
to. It was easier to be a completionist when he was trying to have as much fun as he could before
responsibility hit him in the face.

While Tony has a mini crisis about what he finds attractive anymore, Leigh single handedly drags a
huge cooler full of ice and food to the site.

“Okay,” Tony chuckles, impressed. He gets up from his camp chair and points at the unlit fire.
“You mind?”

She collapses into her own chair and waves him ahead. He lights the fire with a repulsor,
something he’s done before to a more appreciative audience, but that’s cool. He can already tell
that cooking on an open fire is more complicated than it looks, so he cheats and gets his headset,
asking FRIDAY about temperatures and the like. While he’s doing that, Leigh putters around near
the cooler. He’s just about ready to find out what to cook when she touches his arm, and he jumps.

“Sorry. Turns out people don’t get that close to me, anymore.”

She offers him a sad sort of smile for that, but then gestures to the folding table she’s pulled out of
somewhere. It’s got a meal’s worth of things to cook, and that’s how Tony ends up making food
alongside a woman he didn’t even know existed, less than three hours after meeting her. It’s
delicious. She’s one of those people who know a few obscure spices that change everything.

Tony’s pretty sure she’s just one of those people that changes everything.

Leigh turns in early. She writes that she’s still recovering from her illness, gesturing to her throat.
Tony watches her duck into her tent, pulling pins out of her hair as she goes. He half hopes the
mass of hair will fall while she’s still in sight, but has no luck.

That night, he thinks about Pepper.

It makes sense, in an odd way. This is the first time he’s been so strongly attracted to anyone since,
and Pepper had been his first really long-term committed relationship where he had felt safe and
free to be himself. He spends some time just comparing the two women, as if knowing Leigh from
her emails and spending a couple of hours with her is any basis of comparison with a woman he’d
lived around and relied on for years before he even truly knew her.

They’re alike, in strange ways. Both incredibly feminine, he feels, even though Pepper Potts was
feminine in a way that models aspire to, all power suits and perfect makeup and killer heels. Leigh
is much softer, so soft that he can’t even imagine what she’d do if she had to creep into an ARC
reactor room full of broken glass and sabotage it.

Tony spends time thinking about how they’re alike and how they’re different and how much he
really misses Pepper even though it doesn’t make him ache the same way anymore. Then he
realizes that he’s objectified his new friend in a really disturbing way, a shameful way, a
presumptuous way. Embarrassment flames up in his gut not unlike the Extremis test subjects, all
hot and uncontrollable and maybe related to a huge, irrevocable mistake.

Leigh Balci drew a gun on him and put it away when she realized who exactly he was, not the
other way around. She doesn’t deserve this from him.

Tony resolves to stop thinking of her as if she’s some sort of moon to Pepper’s sun. He tells
himself he’ll be different in the morning. He orders himself to.

***

He wakes up to the smell of coffee.

Tony checks with FRIDAY and finds out it’s 7:30 AM. He peeks out the front flap of his tent and
sees a sign that Leigh’s left him on the side of one of the food packages from the day before.

Sleep in if you want.

Coffee’ll be warm when you wake up.

He risks a look around the camp for her and spots her standing beside her tent with a coffee mug,
eyes closed, head tipped up toward the sun. Her hair is in a long, fat braid resting over one
shoulder, and she’s wearing a white blouse and a cornflower blue skirt full of gathers that her toes
barely peep out of.

Tony crawls back into his sleeping bag. He’s utterly screwed.

For one truly ridiculous second, he contemplates putting on the ARC reactor, tapping on the
nanosuit, and claiming there’s a work emergency before flying away.

***

Tony comes out after twenty minutes of self-recrimination. Leigh’s got some clever contraption
that lets her pull aside some separators and shake it, and boom! pancake mix without the mess. He
teases her about pancake art, and she retreats to the cooler for a few minutes while he makes some
pancakes of his own. When she comes back, it’s with a cup of mix she’d squirted out and dyed
with mashed blueberries. Then, she proceeds to make a pancake that passably looks like his arc
reactor, a triangle of blueberry mash and regular pancake. Once flipped, though, it’s horrifying, and
they both laugh and try to encourage the other to eat it with hand gestures.

It goes in the fire, and Tony’s heart is full of a warm, pleased feeling he hasn’t enjoyed in a really
long time.

It’s with that feeling heating him up from the inside that he and Leigh walk around to figure out
where the best place for his house would be. Tony’s brought battery-powered projectors that he
places at strategic points to create a blue wall of holographic light. They mark the boundaries of his
favorite location and Leigh writes out that they’ll have to do some other preliminary work, but it’s
a solid start. She’s obviously pleased.

“Do you want me to cook again?” he asks when it comes up to dinner time. Leigh shakes her head.

I’ll do it, but, chat?

“Absolutely,” Tony says. There were sandwiches for lunch, and her pancake setup hadn’t been
super close to the flames. As she arranges pans and the cast-iron skillet for dinner, though, Tony
winces as he sees her skirt come close to catching fire multiple times. “You’re a fire hazard,” he
tells her. “Might want to change out of the skirt.”

Leigh looks down, stepping back quickly in alarm. She sets her hands on her hips and frowns,
before grabbing her tablet.

Thanks, it’s my favorite

“It’s pretty,” Tony says. “I’ll give you some privacy.” He gets up and heads toward the lake.
They’re in a valley, and the sun sets differently here, the light cut in half much earlier than he
would have expected. So when he turns around to look at how far he’s walked, Tony’s shocked by
the fact that he can see Leigh’s silhouette in her tent, backlit by their large fire. Leigh leans over
right as he turns around, and her skirt falls to the floor of her tent, leaving the shape of her bare legs
visible.

His heart pounds. She can’t see him; the tent’s walls aren’t thick, but it’s the same model as his,
opaque except for the shadows of nearby things. He’s far away, and it’s only the unique situation
of the half-light and the fire that means he can see her at all. Still, Tony turns away. The image is
indelible, he’ll probably never be able to shake it: the warm (everything is warm around her, he’s
come to realize) orange of the tent combined with the firelight, and the shadow of her curves,
unexpected and devastating.

Tony kicks a rock into the lake and tells fate or his libido or something that it’s past time to settle
the fuck down. If he’s not careful, the last few days are going to be written on his memory banks as
something very different than he intended. He walks and walks some more, trying to walk the
tingle of attraction away. By the time he angles back around to their tents, he can smell a fully
cooked steak and realizes he’s been unfair to Leigh in a different way.

Because his body just won’t accept the rules he’s been trying to enforce, Tony comes clean, hoping
her knowledge of what he’d seen would make him feel ashamed enough to stop thinking of her that
way.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to ditch you. I looked back and caught a glimpse of you changing in silhouette,
purely by accident. Decided to take a walk, as penance.” He doesn’t look at her face, doesn’t want
to see her expression. “That smells amazing, I’m ready to admit I would not have done as well with
those steaks.”

Tony sits down and waits for her response, forgetting that it’ll be visual. He hears the swipe of her
stylus against glass, and looks over to see her smirking in the firelight.

I think you didn’t want to make dinner, and that’s your excuse

“It wasn’t, but I’ll be glad to adopt your version of events,” he says. “Better that than an article in
the weekend newspapers, ‘Exclusive: Tony Stark’s Empire Collapses Under Steak Allegations.’”

He had been so sure she would laugh, but Leigh’s expression falls. She bites her lip, presses her
eyes closed for a brief moment, and when she opens them, she’s a ghost of the person she had
been, seconds before. All Tony can think of is that he’s just reminded her who he is, which in turn
reminded her of what he’d failed to save.

“Can I get your food? Stay right there.” He pops up and starts looking for plates, only to find that
she’d already set two up. “Okay, I can hand it to you.”
Tony turns around slowly, convinced she’ll be gone, but she’s getting up to come over. He hands
her one of the plates, the one that has the most appetizing steak on it from what he can tell under
the cellophane she’d wrapped them both in. With her other hand, Leigh makes the hand gesture for
‘thank you.’

“You’re welcome,” he murmurs, looking over at her. “As long as you’re not Italian. That’s a whole
different gesture.”

Leigh laughs, and he’s relieved. Still, the specter of her reaction sits with them now, and Tony
understands that it’s something that won’t be soothed so easily.

That Leigh’s the one with the olive branch after their mostly silent dinner isn’t surprising, but Tony
feels convicted by it, a little. She’s brought the makings for S’mores. As they roast their
marshmallows, he regales her with the tales of the contraptions he designed as a kid to try to
perfectly heat the marshmallows and chocolate without burning his fingers. Each year, they got
more involved, of course, and she laughs until she clutches her throat in pain as he describes their
epic failures in great detail.

He doesn’t tell her that he’d always wanted to show them to his father, but he was never available.
Or that he found out his nanny actually hated S’mores after all the years of eating them with gusto
because she had wanted him to feel accomplished and loved. That’s not what the stories are about,
right now.

Finally, after licking her fingers clean, Leigh grabs the tablet.

Out of the whole family I was always the worst at these

Tony winces, understands immediately.

Practice doesn’t always make perfect!

“I get it. I was always shit at knitting.”

Leigh mimes throwing the tablet at him, but sets it aside to start clearing away the plates. She’d
pinned her long braid up that morning and it’s been slowly slipping out of its confinement all day.
Tony feels a powerful urge to tug on it and recognizes very well what the full spectrum of that urge
means. It scares the hell out of him.

“Let me guess-- you’re a champion knitter,” he says, for once sitting back to watch her instead of
helping. “You probably knitted those leggings. Thread almost too tiny to see, two hundred fifty
stitches an inch, admit it.”

Leigh turns and looks at him, her face lit up with amusement, braid about to let go, and opens her
mouth to say something. As Tony watches, she catches herself, her eyes going wide, and she turns
away as if she’s almost done something shameful. The force from turning her head so quickly puts
paid to the last pin, and her braid spirals free. She starts writing something on the tablet that he
can’t see, and sets it on her chair face-down. Then, to the sounds of the singing cicadas and the
crackling fire, Leigh finishes putting the dishes in their containers, and heads to her tent.

He’d sat and let her do what she needed to do, but now Tony snatches her tablet to flip it over.

Don’t ask, please.

Goodnight.
 Tony reminds himself that anyone with even a rudimentary amount of knowledge will know that
the Avengers and their associates were the ones who fought Thanos and failed to stop him. And
Iron Man is one of the most prominent among their number. He can’t skip ahead, she needs to
actually get used to him. If he wants this woman’s friendship, if he wants this woman’s anything,
he can’t forget that.

And he does. Oh, he does.

Chapter End Notes

I feel like Tony's not quite his bantery self in this chapter, but I can promise he totally
is, later on, so I'm going to chalk this one up to him being off-balance. Just wanted to
reassure you, though.
 Chapter Three
Chapter Summary

Tony decides that his goal for groundbreaking day is that Leigh Balci is going to speak
to him for the first time since he met her. It’s an odd situation, an odd goal, all things
considered, so he keeps it to himself. No need to jinx it.

Chapter Notes

This chapter has some emotional heft. Tony and Leigh are both messed up by the
Snap, in their various ways. Also, my version of FRIDAY is probably more casual/has
more personality than the 'real' version, but IMO Tony tweaked her programming to be
that way, without Pepper.

I have poor chapter posting impulse control. *shrugs*

Chapter Three

Tony doesn’t push her, in the morning. He remains coolly neutral and respectful, but he does
silently note that she’s wearing a lot of layers. He catches a glimpse of the leggings (did she sleep
in them? Did he make her afraid to change in her own damned tent?) under her favorite skirt. Over
the white blouse is a sunny yellow cardigan that’s knitted, possibly handmade.

They start to take down the tents and put everything away in silence, and it feels so condemning
that Tony pulls out his phone, walks over to Leigh, and hands it to her with the music app up.

“Pick a playlist? I’m dying, here.”

She levels her rich brown eyes at him for a few seconds, a tiny smile haunting her mouth, and then
nods. He doesn’t name his playlists anymore, thank God, but for the amount of scrolling she’s
doing, it’s possible she might get down to the ones from back when he did. Finally, she picks
something, taps it, and hands the phone back.

The screen is dark, but he can hear quiet music starting to build, so he gives her a bit of a
suspicious look, cranks the volume, and sets the phone up before he resumes taking his tent down.
Leigh had only scrolled up and down, then tapped, so he knows the song is in his library, but it
takes a long time to build, and he doesn’t recognize it.

Until he does, and his hands still. Nothing Else Matters, by Metallica.

He can’t change it, because doing that would just betray how well the lyrics of the damned song
fit. It’s about trust, and opening up. Tony forces himself to keep going, doesn’t turn around, doesn’t
acknowledge anything. Maybe Leigh liked the title, maybe she’s not much for metal music and
chose a ballad, there’s a million explanations that don’t have to have a deeper meaning.

Never opened myself this way / Life is ours, we live it our way. Eventually the song ends, the
playlist shifts to a harder one, and after a while the site looks pretty much the way it had before,
with flatter, trampled grass. Tony offers Leigh money for the supplies, and she reminds him via the
tablet that she used the line of credit he’d extended to the company.

He makes a flippant comment about still emailing, and she nods without a smile, and he’ll take it,
but ouch. He hops into the pickup and pulls out his phone, pretending to look down at it as he looks
at her reflection in his side mirror. She’s covered her face with both hands, and when she drops
them she’s looking up at the sky, shaking her head. Tony starts the truck, and she moves out of the
way, waving with a wan smile.

Tony thinks there’s a 50% chance she’ll offload the project, or at the very least, all communication.
On the drive to the airport, he impulsively orders FRIDAY not to let him look up anything to do
with Leigh Balci for a full two weeks, starting immediately. Only exceptions are for the project
they’re working on.

He regrets that the second he sets foot in the door at home, but FRIDAY is implacable.

At first he tries to banish all thoughts of her, because he doesn’t want to push too hard when it
comes to the emails. Ideally, she’ll send the first one. So Tony doesn’t let himself think about her.

That first night he dreams of honeybees. The house he’s so excited to build is finished, and out in
neat lines by the lake are five beehive boxes, just like he saw in a video once. Tony wears his Iron
Man suit out to collect the honey, in this dream, and is swarmed. He goes back and tries wearing
the regular suit, the kind that looks like something the bad medical people wore in the ET movie,
and he’s swarmed again.

Only when dream-Tony walks out wearing his regular clothes do the bees welcome him, their
honeycombs bursting with rich, golden honey. When he wakes up it feels like he’s had that dream
every night for a week, even though it was the first time. He has the dream repeatedly over the
next two weeks, and one of the times really sticks with him. In that one, he reaches out and grabs a
gooey, warm handful of honey, right from the comb. The golden color spills over his fingers, down
the back of his hand. When he wakes up, it’s with the image of Leigh’s hair in his hand, instead.
Before he understands what he’s doing, he brings that hand to his face and smells it. Tony’s
disappointed when it doesn’t smell like a woman’s shampoo.

He asks FRIDAY what the date is, and groans when there’s still three days left of his Leigh
embargo. The whole idea was a complete failure; in fact it may have even made him think about
her more than if he’d gotten it out of his system right away. He’s not used to waiting.

“FRIDAY, come on. This just made things wors--”

“Can’t do it, Boss,” his AI interrupts with her insolent deference. “Not sure why you chose a full
two weeks.”

“I thought, this is the earliest you can email her, so maybe keeping her out of your brain for that
long will help. Spoilers: it did not. Not at all. This is doing a friend of mine a disservice, FRIDAY.
This turned me into an obsessive.”

“Oh, I think we both know that’s not true.”

Tony has one more thing to try. “It’s my birthday tomorrow!”

“That sounds like a failure to plan ahead, Boss.”

He didn’t think it would work, but it had been worth the shot. He could recode FRIDAY, hell, he
could drop by a fucking library, make a show of giving a donation, and search her up at one of the
kiosks. But it’s the principle of the thing, and so he’ll wait, like he ought to.

“Okay, well, I’m off for three days, the embargo lifts in three, gimme a project I set aside. This is a
good time to get lost in something.”

He chooses the bunker protocol, an emergency safe room that will construct itself around him if he
calls it. It’s impractical and possibly dangerous, but it has the level of complication that he’s
looking for. The logistics that he has to sort through to make it even remotely possible are exactly
the right kind of distracting.

***

Tony had been hoping that fate would send him a message from Leigh on his birthday, but the
whole day passes with nothing. Then, very late in the evening, he gets a notification.

TO: Mechanic270

FROM: FLBalci

SUBJECT: Next Steps

Greetings from your exhausted friend,

Sorry for the radio silence (as opposed to actual silence, recently!). I lost a colleague to
a heart attack two days after I got back from West Virginia. Because we’re about to
start a new phase with your build, I set that aside and picked up for Frank as best I
could. I wanted to at least get his client in to choose a new architect or advise on a new
firm. It was rough.

I only just tonight finished transitioning him over to Branson, who is picking up the
project personally. I don’t know why, but it felt like I should let you know what’s been
going on before I pack up and head home. I’d like to extend a professional apology for
not communicating about this sooner; it’s the first time many of us have lost someone
since, well. Since.

Frank and his wife lost their only daughter in the Snap. His wife isn’t coping very well,
and neither am I, which is selfish as fuck because we weren’t even that close. I’m
probably not going to hit send on this, but it’s cathartic, so whatever.

When I was little, my parents were the ‘kneel by the side of the bed and say your
prayers’ kind. I used to forget family members as I listed them to pray. I hated it. Is it
bad that I feel guilty about that, now?

Stars, I know we all cope in our own ways, but how, how, Tony, do you cope? Or do
you? I should turn off the computer and go home, I’m tired and sloppy and I bet you
didn’t know I swore at all, much less this much.
 Because it’s what we do, I’ll answer that tough question, ‘cause I don’t want to
imagine what sort of question you’d come up with in its stead. How do *I* cope, you
ask?

Every month, I picked a family member and I took part in one of their favorite things.
This month was the last one, so I’m finally done with all thirteen. If you know about
me, you’re probably making a face, right? ‘But Leigh, all the news articles say you
lost twelve relatives in the Snap!’ It was thirteen, if you count my sister-in-law’s
unborn baby.

Lana was married to Kent, my parents’ second son. Charlie, the oldest, he was married
to Missy, and they wanted kids since forever. Married for ten years, no kids. So when
Lana got pregnant, she only told Kent, me, and Mom, because they didn’t want to hurt
Missy if there was a loss, you know?

And there was. A loss, I mean. They were all lost. So last night, in honor of Lana and
Kent’s baby, after I got home from work I curled up in bed, nice and tight in the
blankets, and I spoke out loud about every single wonderful memory I had of that
baby’s parents. Went through a whole box of kleenex and a voice box too, it feels like.
I ache.

I used to think of what I would do if there was a way to reverse the Snap. I know you
and your team tried to stop it with all your might, down to your very last atom. If I
could help that baby come back, Tony, I think I’d do just about anything.

This is dumb, okay, but: if you ever find out a way, tell me. Let me help. I don’t care
if it’s to sew up the holes in everyone’s socks before they leave, I want to help. It’s a
dick move for me to even bring it up, but I cried about as much water as sits in your
lake last night, and I’m dried up and sad about Frank, and Lana, and Kent, the baby,
Missy, and Charlie, and everyone.

I’ll only ever ask you this once, Tony, and then I’ll never bring it up again, I swear to
God.

Please tell me you punched that guy.

I just… I need to know.

All right, I’ll delete this in the morning,

Leigh

Tony stares at the name at the end of her email, looks at the time, and realizes that she’d probably
hit send by rote, by accident, when she was done typing it. Somewhere in D.C. right now, Leigh’s
probably got her hand over her mouth in shock, realizing what she just did. There is a tidal wave of
emotion Tony’s holding back. The thing is, he realizes he can help-- but he has to do it right NOW.

TO: FLBalci

FROM: Mechanic270
 SUBJECT: I did.

I punched him, Leigh. A whole lot.

And then he killed me, Tony doesn’t type. He hits send, instead. Then, because it’s no fun being a
billionaire if you can’t do impulsive things for your friends, he sends a taxi to Charriotte, the kind
where the guy parks, knocks to tell you they’re there, and holds the doors open for his passenger.
He gets the message that it arrived, five minutes after he sent the order.

Leigh shouldn’t have to drive home feeling like that. Or ride public transport.

There are stories all across the universe like hers.

“Happy Birthday, Tony,” he says. He didn’t get himself anything, but tonight, her email feels like
it might be what he deserves.

***

In the first week of June, Tony gets a call from Branson Harriot asking if he’d like to come to D.C.
and formally fill out all of the paperwork to start the construction. He’ll be finalizing certain parts
of the house, with more specific internal stuff still to be determined. Harriot tells him that he gave
Leigh the week off, and he knows it’s unconventional, but, he says, ‘knowing Leigh, she’ll drop by
anyway.’

Tony jumps at the chance. He offers to come the next day. He’s coming off of a two day Leigh
Balci marathon, having watched all footage of her that had been obtained by the news agencies
who wrote about her as a human interest story. He’s read hundreds of articles (it’s really
astonishing how many websites just crib off of each other!), watched family films, seen her riding a
horse with her hair flowing out behind her, the whole nine yards.

He had known when he woke up the morning his embargo lifted that he was about to do something
irrevocable. Tony’s not stupid, he knows he has a crush, and fostering it has potential to make it
grow into something else. But this feels wonderful, the kind of exhilarating that you can’t replicate
with adrenaline. She’s not entirely indifferent to him, he’s certain of that, but she’s also no easy
mark. For once, he’s the pursuer, not the pursued.

Tony thinks about the dream where he woke up seeing his hand buried in Leigh’s hair. He hopes
that might someday be possible. There have been women in the past he’s seen and wondered what
a night with them would be like, but Pepper had grown on him so slowly before he couldn’t do
without her that this thing with Leigh is an entirely different beast. Tony wonders what a night with
Leigh would be like, aches to find out, yes-- but he’s kind of curious about what a life with her
might be like, too.

Now he doesn’t know whether he’s grateful (this is too new of a conclusion for him to be in any
way prepared to see her in person) or disappointed (he just… really wants to see her) that she’s off
this week. He wears one of his nicest suits just in case.

Besides the prospect of seeing Leigh, though, Tony’s excited about his house. So, after settling in
at Charriotte, he gets engrossed in the details. It turns out that at this firm, the construction logistics
wouldn’t be handled by Leigh anyway, so he’s not missing out like he initially thought. He
chooses all of the most environmentally friendly options, even though going the other way might
be a specific fuck you to Thanos. Tony draws the line at screwing up his own planet to spite a
long-dead Titan.

He goes to a fancy restaurant with Branson Harriot that evening, and they have a great
conversation about Stark Industries, Charriotte, and Branson’s family. The other man never had
kids, is unashamedly grateful for that now, because he’s watched other people’s relationships get
torn apart by the Snap. Losing a spouse to that event is one thing, Branson says, but getting
divorced because you can’t take the grief of losing some of your kids? That’s worse, he tells Tony.
He’s seen it happen. The country’s divorce rate is only now starting to stabilize after a huge spike,
and Harriot says he thinks it has nowhere to go but down, thanks to the ‘soulmate thing.’

Tony’s been stuck in these conversations before, knows the only way out is through, so he sits
there and listens as Harriot tells him that he had never forgotten the first thing his wife said to him
when they met. When the awful day was over and they’d both survived it, he’d found those words
on his hand, written like an arrow straight across his palm. He shows Tony.

This guy? You have got to be kidding me!

Branson finds it deeply amusing that his response was chivalry. “‘I beg your pardon, madame.’
She never lived it down, and now it’s written on her knee!” he says, wheezing.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most accepted subjects for small talk, nowadays. Tony is grateful
for his eccentricities, which he can fall back on when asked about his own Words. Sometimes he
claims he doesn’t have any. One time, he told the absolute truth, and the stranger had laughed like
it was the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. What he doesn’t say, what he knows he absolutely
should not say, is that Thanos’s supposed ‘gift’ is a panacea, a placebo, a fix it with no heft, a fake,
a lie.

He’s met Thanos. He’s a murderer at a scale hitherto undreamt of, to quote a long-dead colleague.
There’s no mercy, there’s no grace, there’s just camouflaged cruelty. But no one wants to hear that
at dinner.

“So, Tony, what are yours? Have you found her? Him?”

Tony likes Branson, so he spreads out his hands in the universal sign of ‘what can you do?’ and
says, “Branson, I’m Tony Stark. What do you think my Words say?”

Branson chuckles. “That’s a good question. I’m torn between sex kitten and frigid scorn, honestly.”

“I mean, who isn’t?” Tony laughs.

The subject changes, and Tony rests a hand in his lap as if he can block out the Soulmark’s line of
sight, under the table. Eventually, his hand relaxes, and he forgets why he’d put it there in the first
place.

***

The next day, he’s at Charriotte only to wrap up. The paperwork is finished by 9 AM, and Tony
goes to say goodbye to Branson at his office. He’s just about to get up and leave when the door
opens and he hears a woman’s voice.

“Branson, honestly, you could have told me!”

Tony turns and it’s Leigh. He’d never heard her voice before, but now that he has, he can’t believe
he didn’t recognize it right away. It’s warm, vibrant, and his strong positive reaction to it has to be
showing on his face, because she literally jumps in surprise to see that it’s him.
“Ah yes, I don’t suppose I need to introduce you two,” Branson says, getting up and walking
around his desk. Tony goes to stand, but Leigh widens her eyes at him as Branson’s back is turned,
making a ‘sit’ gesture. Then, she pulls Branson over to the corner and starts speaking in a low
whisper that he can’t hear. Leigh’s faced away from him, so he just looks at her, taking in the
powder blue suit jacket and short, pleated chiffon skirt in the same color. It’s right on the edge of
professional office wear, and Tony thinks with a pang that she’d probably have to conform more if
it hadn’t been for the Snap.

Her hair, as always, is bound up in an 18th century masterpiece on her head, and Tony thinks he
can see dragonfly pins embedded in it.

Tony wants to take her home and introduce her to Rhodey and say, triumphantly, See! I don’t need
a soulmate!

Instead, he sits and waits impatiently, counting dragonflies (three) until she and Branson walk back
to his desk. Tony stands up, and when she turns around, he smiles as gently as possible at her. She
looks apologetic, starts to walk past, then seems to realize she hadn’t really acknowledged him
except to order him to sit, earlier. Leigh reaches out, squeezes his arm, and walks out without
having said a word.

“She took Frank’s death a little hard, I think,” Branson says. “So did you make a date for breaking
ground?”

“Ironically, I think I need to talk to her about it,” Tony says, turning back around to look behind
him at the door Leigh left through.

Branson’s smile is strained. “Well, maybe stick to email for a while yet. I think early July ought to
be fine for us, schedule-wise. I can mention it to her, if you like?”

“Of course,” Tony says, wondering what’s going on. He remembers her email and wonders if she’s
lost for something to make her feel grounded, this month. Would it be too presumptuous of him, he
wonders, if he suggested she do something Frank would have enjoyed? “It’s been a pleasure,” he
says, reaching out to shake Harriot’s hand.

“Likewise, Stark.”

On his way out, Tony looks around, ostensibly searching for the bathroom. He walks past an
unoccupied office with lace curtains and stops, bemused. Peeking in for just a second, he notes that
there is a plant stand beside her desk with a spider plant dangling from it, and on the desk is a pot
of violets. Her desk itself has one of those glass plates that lay across papers or calendars or
whatnot, but of course, Leigh’s is full of variously-sized white lace doilies and pressed flowers.

Tony wonders if anyone thinks of his workspace as that dedicated to a theme, and then thinks about
what it’s looked like over the years, and nods. Yes, yes they would.

***

TO: FLBalci

FROM: Mechanic270

SUBJECT: That was weird, right?

 Hey,

I’m thinking maybe I should have warned you that Branson called me to come down
and do the site paperwork. Sorry.

Tony

TO: Mechanic270

FROM: FLBalci

SUBJECT: Re: That was weird, right?

Greetings from aforementioned tiny apartment,

Full disclosure: I was not prepared to see you that day in the office. I don’t really have
an explanation, except for the fact that I’d been pretty emotionally ripped up the week
before, enough to take time off, and I’d poured my soul out entirely accidentally in that
email. I had compartmentalized you into the ‘emotional’ column, I guess, and seeing
you at work just threw me.

I’m sorry,

Leigh

He tells himself not to read anything into the fact that Leigh has put him into the ‘not work’
column, but it’s a losing battle. Tony decides that his goal for groundbreaking day is that Leigh
Balci is going to speak to him for the first time since he met her. It’s an odd situation, an odd goal,
all things considered, so he keeps it to himself. No need to jinx it.

***

They set the date for the start of construction for Monday, July 1st. Because he’s got some things
he wants to leave at the site, Tony rents a van, loads it up, and drives down from NYC. It’s a seven
hour drive and the groundbreaking is at 8 AM, so he does the ridiculous and naps from 7 PM the
night before until 11 PM and drives straight through. Tony doesn’t want the rented van to be in the
way, so he parks it off to the side, away from where all of the construction vehicles are staging.

He gets out, uses the portapotty with gratitude, and looks around for Leigh. It’s an unseasonably
chilly morning for July, 55 fahrenheit, and everywhere he looks are flannel shirts, like some kind
of cliche. Everyone’s wearing hard hats, and he snags one from a line of them near a table with
blueprints held down by rocks. Tony wonders if Leigh’s hard hat will have lace on it, or stenciled
flowers. He wouldn’t put it past her-- she’s dedicated to her aesthetic, and it really works.

Tony walks up to the guy wearing the different colored hard hat and they talk about the project for
a while as others gather around them, some of them taking out their cell phones to snap pictures.
He doesn’t mind, he’s used to it. The ceremony starts up, low-key but still exciting enough for him
because of the project itself, and for a lot of the workers because he’s still Iron Man. Tony’s
wearing the ARC reactor under his shirt, and he undoes enough buttons to show them its glow.

The foreman gets the whole thing in motion now that the ceremonial stuff is through, but he
catches Tony’s eye, letting him know he’d like to talk some more at some point. Tony nods, and
starts back toward the van, so he can show the guy the supplies he’s talking about, and figure out a
good place to store them. He almost walks right over Leigh on the way, mostly because she’s
wearing oversized tan overalls, a jacket from the same material, and a long braid. He didn’t
recognize her in the hard hat and construction clothes.

“Hey, good to see you,” Tony says, meaning it.

Leigh’s brown eyes are large and startled, and then, for some reason, sad. She makes a frustrated
face and just… scatters. It’s not running away, but that might be semantics. Tony remembers his
goal for today, and half wonders if she knows about it and is thwarting him. But no, she’d looked
unhappy, and he’s very confused.

Tony grits his teeth and heads to the van, setting things up the way he’d planned to, and then he
grabs his own StarkPad and stylus, scribbling an angry-but-legible message to hold up.

Then, his jaw set in determination, Tony stands in Leigh’s line of sight and holds his tablet with a
flat hand on either side. It’s obvious, and the message is clear. She’s not going to be able to ignore
him without the attention of the entire worksite.

I need to speak with you, Miss Balci. ASAP.

The man she’s going over supplies with points over at Tony, and he can see her reading it. Leigh’s
eyes fly up to meet his, and she looks nervous. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he’s known her for
nearly three months now and she hasn’t spoken a word to him yet, he would take pity on her for
that look alone. But not today. This strangeness stops now.

She shakes her head ‘no,’ and something inside Tony snaps. He starts toward her, setting the tablet
down on the table.

“I need her,” Tony says, reaching out and grabbing Leigh’s wrist to drag her along behind him. He
leads her toward the cluster of bushes where he saw her for the first time and past them; twenty
feet, thirty feet. The point is to get them out of earshot of all of her subordinates so he can properly
express his frustration without diminishing her authority.

When he stops walking, he turns around and sees that she’s lost her hard hat somewhere. “I didn’t
drag you too fast, did I?” he asks, frowning.

Leigh shakes her head, rubbing at her wrist.

“All right. What is going on?” he barks, sucking in a deep breath and holding out a hand in a slight
apology. She’s a grown woman, he doesn’t need to holler at her. “You recognize this is aberrant
behavior, right? Not speaking to a client is one thing, but I’d like to think we’re friends. So what is
it?”

Her eyes are screwed shut, her hands held at chest level, palm out, fingers spread.

“Is it Iron Man? You swore an oath on the life of your family, or something?” he snaps. It’s cruel,
he’s always had a vindictive temper.

Fire sparks in her eyes, and Leigh takes a huge breath, her mouth twisting in anger. She takes two
steps so she’s standing right in front of him, her hands in fists at her sides. “Maybe it was too much
to expect that you could save the world, but you didn’t stop there, no, you had to take away all my
hopes and dreams too!”
Then, she turns on her heel and stalks away.
 Chapter Four
Chapter Summary

Leigh’s left hand seeks out her right wrist, messes with it, pulling away a scrap of skin-
colored fabric. She holds that arm up beside her face. He sees that there’s a square of
dirt-ringed adhesive around a single, black inked word in his handwriting. The skin
around the word is lighter, as if it never sees the sun.

Chapter Notes

So in my defense with posting chapters quickly, that last one was a hefty cliffhanger,
am I right?

I have to laugh, because this chapter *feels* like it’s seven thousand words long, to
me, but it’s just over 4500. It's a roller coaster of emotional intensity, that's for sure.

Chapter Four

Tony stumbles back in utter, mind numbing shock. Nothing about the world around him has
changed, but none of it will ever be the same, either.

Leigh, his-- his soulmate, is walking away from him.

He starts after her. She must have heard his running steps, because she picks up her pace. Tony’s
heartbeat roars in his ears. If he doesn’t stop her now, she’ll make sure he never gets a chance to
come near her again. This had to have been building since she lowered the gun, all those weeks
ago.

Tony catches up, grabs her in his arms from behind, and in a burst of clarity he knows what he has
to do. He needs time, time to persuade her, time to understand.

“FRIDAY, activate bunker protocol!” he says, knowing she’s always listening through the receiver
he built into his ARC reactor. His AI is silent, but Tony knows what she would be saying, so he
adds, “Do it.”

Leigh’s not struggling, but she’s trembling, and Tony holds on with desperation, because if this
works, she’ll be in real danger if she breaks free of him right now.

He can hear a shout go up among the workers, even over the sounds of the backhoe, and suddenly,
a large metal rectangle slams itself into the ground beside them. Leigh’s reaction is to scream and
shrink back against him, and he turns her unresisting body around, pulling her head against his
chest. Three more slabs bury themselves in the soft mud around them, followed by the loud boom
sound of the ceiling piece landing exactly as it was meant to. A sizzling hiss echoes in the newly
dark space, chased by a red glow. The bunker protocol worked exactly as intended-- he and Leigh
are now inside a powerfully sturdy box anchored into the ground and self-welded into an
impregnable fortress.

The built-in lights flicker on as soon as the red glow from the welds start fading.

Tony opens his arms and backs away from Leigh. He’s bought himself the time, but he’s probably
squandered at least half of it by trapping her inside this thing with him. If she were any other
woman, if he didn’t have her first voiced Words to him written on his skin, he would never have
dared to do this.

For the first time, he realizes she’s marked, too. He’s spoken to her freely multiple times.

“What?” Leigh finally asks in a frightened gasp, her arms tight around her torso, eyes wide as she
looks around her.

Tony’s shot through with five kinds of desperation, and he’s burning through all of them, chasing
hope. “Bunker protocol. Self-building survival space.” He shakes his head, looking her right in the
eyes. “I didn’t know what else to do. Leigh.”

She shakes her head, scared and defensive. “Open the door.”

He winces. “There’s no door.”

Leigh stares at him.

“It’s designed for last-minute protection. I brought it to set up for an emergency in the future,
sometime. Not this, this was…” he scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s set to release electromagnetic
resistance after forty-eight hours.”

“Two days?” she gasps.

Tony backs up and slumps against the wall behind him. All of the walls are covered by a metal
sheath to protect the goods and tools buried inside each slab. “There’s food, water. Stuff to do other
than argue with me,” he says, offering her the barest hint of a smile.

“What… what if there was an earthquake--”

“This is West Virginia.”

“A flood, what if we had to get out?”

“FRIDAY, you’re configured for rescue, right? We aren’t set up for death by lahar or something,
in here?”

“You’re as safe as you can be after what you just did, Boss. Yes, is the answer.”

“That’s--” Leigh starts to say, looking for the speaker, and he finishes for her.

“My AI assistant, yeah. You’re safe.” Outrage crosses her face, and he recognizes it, but speaks up
right away to refute it. “You don’t want to be stuck here, you don’t want to talk to me. I get it. But.
There was only so long you could put that off.”

Immediately, she’s defensive again, pulling the thick braid over her shoulder, crossing her arms.
Tony widens his eyes expectantly, and Leigh’s left hand seeks out her right wrist, messes with it,
pulling away a scrap of skin-colored fabric. She holds that arm up beside her face. He sees that
there’s a square of dirt-ringed adhesive around a single, black inked word in his handwriting. The
skin around the word is lighter, as if it never sees the sun.

Tony.

It makes his heart sing, which is ridiculous, it’s preposterous, it is everything he’s pushed against,
everything he thought was bullshit. Thanos’s tainted, terrible gift, right there in the flesh in front of
him, and he wants her.

“I think if I tried to show you mine, you’d never speak to me again, and we were just making
progress on that,” Tony says wryly. “They’re on my thigh,” he explains. Leigh looks down, regret
painted across her features, and he’s only human, and those words had hurt, so he adds, “Yeah.
That was my introduction to the whole concept.”

He lets out a breath, turns, and walks a little ways into the other half of the bunker. Another light
flickers on. Tony wants to explain just how horrible those words were, how he’d seen them marked
on his skin at the worst possible time. That hearing them now hadn’t stabbed him quite as much as
they did on that day in his shower, but only barely. The time in between has lessened their weight a
little, but only because he’s lived with them for over a year.

Something about that thought stops him in his tracks. Lived with the words.

Tony spins around. “You planned that out, didn’t you? Since how long ago?”

“Can it be warmer in here?” Leigh asks in a small voice.

“Yes.”

Tony starts looking at the numbers on the metal sheathing, and finds the right one. He rolls it up
sideways to access the packed supplies. The battery powered device has a thermostat, but he frowns
and sets it down, looking for a different panel. “One sec, we can--” Tony breaks off and strides
across the space to the opposite wall, peeling back its sheathing. The carpet he’s looking for was
specially designed, with a thermoreflective layer embedded in it that will prevent heat loss through
the ground. “Come here?”

“Is that a rug?” Leigh asks.

“Yep, and it’ll roll out, if you’re not in the way.”

She walks over and presses against the wall, and he unfurls the rug. Both of them lean down almost
in unison to adjust it. Another minute and the space heater is on and pumping out the heat.

“There are chairs, but--” Tony breaks off.

“But you prefer me to be in the hot seat right now, instead?” Her lips curve into a self-deprecating
smile, and she starts fiddling with her braid. He takes these indicators as positive, but only
inwardly. Outwardly, Tony is implacable.

“How long ago did you start practicing what you were going to say?”

She holds his gaze bravely. “Months.”

“You still mean them?”

Leigh catches fire. There’s no other description for the way she shifts from confused and
uncomfortable to furious. “Yes I still mean them! You, you--” She throws her hands in the air.
“That word on my wrist was the only thing I had left. I stood in a house full of dust , that day, and
then there it was. Like a lifeline. Like someone was saying, ‘okay, so you’ve lost them, but this,
this is for you. This will make it better!’” Her eyes are bright with unshed tears and anger, and
everything she’s saying slices him to the bone.

“It’s a parlor trick,” he whispers. “Worse than a consolation prize. It’s bullshit, it-- It doesn’t mean
anything.” The familiar words taste like wax in his mouth now, slippery and hard to scrape away.

Leigh fixes him with a look. Tony can’t take it, he turns his head.

“You clearly don’t believe that,” she adds, twisting the knife.

How did he trap her in this enclosed space only for him to be the one exposed?

“Yeah, well, I’m about--” he checks his watch. “Fifteen minutes in, so it’s a new thing for me.”
Tony swings his gaze back to her, feeling the aggression settle into the set of his jaw.

“I’ve watched the people around me transformed by joy, with their soulmates,” she says, slowly
unraveling her braid, combing her fingers through the loose, wavy strands as they untwist. “I laid in
bed the night you first signed your name to that email and hoped.”

“You put the gun down when you saw who it was, that’s something.”

“I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Yes you did.” The bitter words spill forth before he can stop them.

Leigh’s braid is half unraveled, the cascade of honey-gold hair spread across her chest like a
breastplate. Tony thinks it’s ironic that this is the first time he’s ever seen her dressed like someone
else, her unique style stifled by the thick tan overalls and coat.

Suddenly he doesn’t want to hear how she crafted those words, the ones that bookended the past
year in such opposing ways. Tony goes back to the wall he pulled the rug out of and finds the camp
chairs, pulls one out and walks into the middle of the room. He sets the base of the thin package it’s
crammed into on the rug halfway between them, then shoves the top so it swings over to her,
turning and walking away instead of watching her reaction. Then he grabs one for himself, opens it
up right there next to the wall, and sits.

Leigh has a choice. She can place her chair wherever she wants, in whichever configuration, and
both of them are smart enough to know that what she picks will matter to him. Tony watches her
pick it up and loves the cascade of her golden hair that spills down when she leans over. To his
surprise, though, she walks straight ahead and leans the chair up against the wall. She then trails
her hand along the metal sheath of that wall, moving toward the one opposite him. Leigh touches
each pocket and indent, cataloguing what’s there, until she apparently finds what she was looking
for right in the center.

He watches her read the instructions, then pull out the tripod of tubing. It’s a lightweight
contraption for hanging wet clothes to dry next to the space heater. Leigh takes off her
heavyweight jacket and hangs it on the hook before starting on the metal buckles at her shoulders.
Tony can’t tear his eyes away, but after his confession to seeing her silhouette camping, he knows
she wouldn’t be doing this if she weren’t comfortable enough. She’d been wearing a white blouse
under the jacket, and he catches a glimpse of something yellow as she steps out of the overalls.

Tony wants to laugh when she’s done hanging those up. She’s wearing some kind of tapestry skirt.
It reaches down to her ankles, with enough fabric that she’d been easily able to wear the baggy
overalls over it. The skirt’s patterned all over like some kind of rich persian rug. It’s as if Leigh was
a nesting doll hiding all of her beauty under her work clothes, and it’s endearing as fuck. Tony’s so
distracted by this that he doesn’t see that she’s walking over until she unfolds her camp chair just a
few feet away from him.

“A dialogue box popped up just now, asking if you’re sure,” he jokes.

“I’d hit ‘okay,’ on it,” she says.

“You know what you’re doing, you’re saying,” Tony says, impressed and attracted by her
audacity.

“Not at all,” she smiles.

The lilting voice of his AI sounds in the space. “Boss, the foreman wants to know if you’re all
right.”

“Definitely. We both just needed a break, that’s all. Testing out a new product for Stark Industries.
We’ve caught a weird pathogen from the lake and are quarantining. I hit the wrong button,
whoops. Whatever you need to say, FRIDAY, you got it?”

“Got it.”

“Tony!” Leigh objects, laughing.

“Say it again,” he tells her urgently. The light in her eyes fades a bit, and she slides her legs up
underneath her in the chair, a compact, protective posture. “What, too far? It’s written on your
arm!” he protests, only half kidding.

“You want me to say mine again?” Leigh offers. It’s pretty incisive commentary, all things
considered, but he has a counter to it.

“Well, with all the time you spent practicing them, I suppose it’s only fair.”

“You could have figured it out,” Leigh says. “You know that, right? Day one, camping.”

Tony looks at her like she’s crazy, and she reaches out and grabs his hand, places her right wrist on
his palm, and closes his fingers around it. He’s distracted by the sizzle of contact, willing contact,
at that.

“Look at it,” she orders him.

He does. Tony smooths his thumb across his name, and then finally, reason breaks through. It’s in
his handwriting.

She can tell it has hit him. “From that first day, I was writing. Over and over.”

“You got lucky. My writing is not always this neat,” Tony tells her. She puffs out a frustrated
breath, but he presses on, dropping the joking tone. “You think I looked at those awful words more
than once?”

“You did.”

Tony looks down at her hand in his, his name on her skin, and he wishes so badly that everything
would be different, but it’s not. She reacts to his expression by pulling her hand back, and he stands
up and walks away from her.

“You’re right, I did. And you put them there. Not the way most people do, no,” he chuckles darkly.
“No. Not a surprised response but calculation. You meant to hurt me, after you knew who I was,
and what I was to you.”

“You said soulmates are a bullshit gift from a tyrant!” Leigh says, angry. “So don’t start with the-
-”

Tony’s heart is ratcheted open, and everything spills out of it. “That was before I met this gorgeous
woman that wasn’t connected to that!” he shouts at her, turning around. “That was before I started
thinking about what my life might be like with her in it!”

“What?” Leigh gasps, getting up, clutching the back of the chair.

“You think this is about the Words? Leigh! You were not what I expected when I offered to camp
out. I left the property that day with a hell of a crush,” Tony tells her truthfully. “After another
month of emails I was composing a speech to my best friend about how I’d triumphed over the
whole concept of soulmates. I’d found someone by myself, I didn’t need Thanos’s tainted fucking
gift.”

Leigh’s standing in the corner of the bunker with a hand laid flat on her stomach as if trying to
steady herself.

“You spent that time knowing you’d found your soulmate. I spent that time being proud that I’d
proved I didn’t need one. Which one of us was more wrong?” Tony asks her.

“Neither,” she whispers, dragging her chair over to where she’s standing. She turns it around and
sits, working on her braid, steadily unraveling it. Her hands are trembling.

Tony slides down the wall and just watches her. Neither, she’d said.

They sit in silence for a long time.

“You’re thinking so hard I can barely breathe in here, Stark,” Leigh finally calls out in a warm,
amused voice.

“You have to admit this is quite a situation.”

“You, the hero who wants to reject absolutely everything Thanos did, and me, the victim whose
family you couldn’t save? Yeah, we’re an afternoon special waiting to happen,” Leigh says. She
stands up and leans over a little, shaking her head as the mass of hair she unbraided cascades down,
all the way past her hips. After a few passes through it with her fingers, she starts to gather it up.

“Don’t,” Tony begs, the word torn out of him.

Leigh straightens and leans her head sideways, looking at him. “Why?”

He suspects she won’t respond all that favorably to, ‘because you look like a wood nymph I’d like
to be turned into a frog for the crime of trying to seduce.’ He goes for flippant, instead.

“Well, you know what used to be my day job. It’s real easy to defeat a hero with hair like that.
Totally against regulation. Makes me feel safe when you have it down. It means we’re not in
danger.”
“So, you’re saying you like my hair. You like looking at it,” Leigh says lightly, sitting down in her
now-turned-towards-him-again-thank-god camp chair.

Tony twists his lips sideways, trying to prevent the grin that wants to spill forth. If he liked her
before, when she didn’t say a word to him, now that she might be flirting, he’s a complete goner.

“I mean, it’s okay,” he manages. “Might be prettier if you tossed, I don’t know, three dragonfly
pins into it.”

“You counted them?” Leigh asks. Her cheeks are pink.

“Yes. I did not count the number of doilies you had at your desk, though, so we’re talking, bare
minimum of paying attention.”

“Because I totally showed you my office.”

“It’s right next to the bathroom,” Tony protests. His cheeks hurt from the effort of not smiling.

“It’s not,” Leigh says.

“It will be if I pay them to remodel the building,” he tells her.

“Suit yourself,” she says, her eyes lighting up as she realizes it’s somewhat of a pun when said to
Iron Man. Leigh leans back in her chair with a smug demeanor he completely recognizes, because
it’s one of his favorites to use himself. But she leaves her hair down, and that’s a big step in the
right direction.

***

They both get hungry at the same time and raid the walls for lunch supplies. He’d spared no
expense for the best of the so-called ‘prepper’ foods, things that would last for years stored up until
needed in an emergency. Tony makes the mistake of letting slip that he stocked the bunker less
than two weeks before, so technically, he could have had all manner of foods in there for them, if
only he’d known.

When they’re done, the table is set up in the middle of the bunker area, their finished meals wait to
be added to the deluxe garbage compactor, and Tony’s shuffling the deck of cards he’d fished out
of the wall.

“So, it’s been a few hours,” Leigh says in a careful voice from her position across the table from
him. “I can’t help but think if this were any other situation, you’d have laid out all of the supplies
from the walls in this thing and started using them to make an escape plan.”

Tony had been wondering and worrying about Leigh’s swift acquiescence to their captivity, and
now he realizes that she has a broad pragmatic streak. She isn’t resigned to their circumstances at
all. Incongruously, this pleases him. For most of his life, women have subsumed their wants and
desires in an attempt to trade them for proximity to him. It looks like Leigh might have set hers
aside to observe how best to persuade him to let her go.

Her choice would even be encouraging if it weren’t for the fact that it makes him feel just a bit like
a serial killer with a torture bunker.

“The design for this was about external forces, not internal ones,” Tony says. He thinks about how
impossible it would have been to try to protect all of the New Yorkers who died in the Chitauri
attack, back when that was the most incomprehensible and devastating thing that could have
happened on Earth. “48 hours to strategize, to survive, to coordinate, without having to worry about
fighting something off in the process.” Tony leans forward, hoping she’ll see the truth in what he’s
saying.

“How long ago did you design it? You said you stocked it less than two weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“Is it possible you rushed this? When have you been in an emergency and chosen to take two days
to decide what to do about it?”

Leigh’s studiously reasonable tone sets Tony’s teeth on edge, as if he has a Pavlovian response to
being managed. Unfortunately, she’s right.

He’s not willing to concede that, though. “I’m in a different place in my life, now. Consultant, not
contractor.”

“After years of watching footage of Iron Man, I’d buy that argument more if you’d framed this like
a pause button for your first instincts,” Leigh says thoughtfully, “But you’ve called it a ‘survival’
bunker multiple times, now. Survival, not strategy.”

“It’s a prototype,” Tony whispers, but that’s dandelion fluff in a hurricane. Leigh’s face twists, she
looks down, and with a kind of detached horror, Tony wonders what his looks like to make her
react like she’s done something wrong. Nothing springs to mind, so he just watches the play of her
emotions. Finally, she smiles, and it’s an upside-down version of what he knows her smile can look
like.

“Well. Of all the people in the world, you deserve some extra benefit of the doubt.”

Tony’s seen that kind of nobility before. He’d always wanted to be the kind of person who
engenders it in others, but this is not at all what he’d had in mind.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he blurts out. “It was selfish.”

Now her smile is genuine, but what she says after it cuts just as deeply. “You deserve to be selfish,
too.” Leigh gets up and tidies away the packages from lunch into the trash compactor, while Tony
has a mini crisis.

“But you’ve called it a ‘survival’ bunker multiple times, now. Survival, not strategy.”

The bunker was one of the first projects Tony had designed in a long time that was prompted by his
concerns, not saving the world, saving his city, saving his team, or saving a person very important
to him. He hadn’t seen its glaring flaws after spending five weeks perfecting it, but Leigh had
spotted them in less than a day.

8888888888

After he shakes off his Leigh-prompted introspection, they play cards for hours. Leigh is clever,
and Tony, who is used to wiping the floor with his opponents, starts to enjoy the surprise of not
being able to. He starts to suspect that her suggestion of darning socks for the Avengers if they
ever figure out how to reverse the Snap would be a waste of her mind. They’ve been chatting the
whole time, avoiding any hot-button topics, but after a comment about how many partial music
albums were released in the past year posthumously, Leigh grows quiet.

After ten minutes of silence, she sets her cards down. “I’m not going to kiss you in here,” she says.
“Controversial decision. My polling says that 50% of the bunker disagrees with that stance, ” Tony
tells her. Her lips twitch but she schools her expression back to a serious one.

“You locked me in here with you--”

“--to get you not to drop off of the face of the Earth, from my perspective. Which I’m still not
100% confident you won’t do, I might add,” Tony objects.

“...really?” Leigh asks, and her complete surprise makes him realize that he’s an asshole, that there
could be a whole bunch of physical expectations regarding soulmates and he would have no idea.

“You should know that I have done zero research on the soulmate thing. Twenty minutes after
finding out, I told the nurse, ‘don’t tell me IF I have Words, don’t tell me what they are, and keep
them off the chart.’ I went home after they released me, got drunk, took a shower, found the words,
and then proceeded to pretend that the whole phenomenon didn’t exist,” Tony tells her, all at once,
hands gesturing like crazy. “So I don’t know any… protocols. Or physical expectations.”

Leigh holds up a hand, her face creased with concern. “Rewind a bit,” she says. “You were in the
hospital?”

Tony doesn’t want to do this, but out of anyone on Earth, Leigh deserves not to hear him deflect
over this part of his life. “I was on Thanos’s planet when he Snapped. When we failed to stop him
from taking a component he needed, he left to get the last one, back here. The ship we took to get
home was trashed, it stalled out lightyears from Earth. I almost starved to death.”

The expression on her face is inscrutable, but her eyes are sober and sad. Finally, Leigh reaches out
and touches his arm with the hand marked with his name.

“Thank you for trying.”

“Yeah, well after he dropped the moon on my head, it was personal.” Tony sighs, looking up and
rubbing the space between his eyes. He’s getting tired and careless after being up for 18 hours
straight with no caffeine. Leigh’s hand on his arm squeezes tight, then tighter, and he finally looks
at her. Her face is ashen.

“You’re not kidding?” she whispers.

Tony realizes what he has to do, and so he takes a deep breath and tries to turn toward her in his
chair, but it’s a camp chair, and they don’t do that. So he stands up and kicks it out of the way,
crouching in front of her. Leigh’s still staring at him in shock, and she doesn’t know the half of it.
He takes both of her hands.

“Hey. We failed, but it was close. So close, Leigh.” He isn’t going to tell her about what Strange
did, and how he was wrong to do it. Tony has litigated that in his own head for months, and it still
doesn’t sit well. “Thanos knew my name. Told me--” Tony can’t say it. He shakes his head. “If we
could have won, we would have.”

Strange’s prediction, about the one timeline they came out on top, tantalizes him again, but he
shakes it off.

Leigh’s brown eyes are fond and warm, now. “All that-- that wasn’t in the news.”

“It doesn’t help much, does it?” Tony said.

Leigh smoothes her thumbs across his hands where he’s still holding onto her. “It helps me, right
now, in this place.”

He wants to kiss her, but he wants to keep her afterwards, so Tony swallows hard and tells her,
“Good.”
 Chapter Five
Chapter Summary

“You wanted your soulmate to make custom doorstops for your clients, admit it,”
Tony tells her, painfully aware of how much he does not fit the picture she’d painted
for him.

“Tony!”

“I want to punch that guy and he doesn’t even exist,” he continues, watching her. “So
what terrible scenario were you re-picturing, when it turned out to be me?”

Chapter Notes

'Tony and Leigh play chicken with each other for a whole chapter and we get to watch
in delight' was my other option for a description.

[[This is going to be much longer than Iron Helix, so I'm going to give myself
permission to post chapters as quickly as I like, while the story tries to eat me alive
before I get it all written out, haha. Enjoy!]]

Chapter Five

“So…” Tony starts, making a face as he looks at the air mattresses he included in the bunker gear.
“Are you a night owl, by any chance?”

Leigh is playing Solitaire on the table, and she doesn’t even look up as she asks, “Did you only
include one cot or air mattress, or did one of the two you did put in turn out to be faulty?”

“What are you, clairvoyant?” Tony says.

“How much sleep did you get at the hotel last night?” Leigh asks, still not looking up.

“I didn’t.”

“You drove straight through? Set it up and sleep first then, solved.”

“I don’t know why you even need a mattress. You can just sleep on all that hair,” Tony teases,
putting away some of the extra things he’d pulled out of the walls in search of the mattresses.
Then, he pictures himself lying in a sea of her hair. “In fact, why don’t I just--” he starts to say, but
Leigh cuts him off.

“No.”
“So did we skip the honeymoon period and I missed it? Just jumped over all my favorite parts, to
end up here in ‘say no to Tony’ land?”

“That’s amusing, considering this whole situation is one step up from you clubbing me in the head
and dragging me to your cave, wouldn’t you say?” she says, finally looking over at him.

Tony scratches the side of his head, trying to think of a comeback. “Yeah, okay,” he finally
concedes.

“I’m just saying, I could press kidnapping charges on you.”

“Please do not.”

Their banter is slowly but surely paving over some holes he didn’t know he had in his chest. Tony
starts to inflate the air mattress with the foot pump. Halfway through, she leans her head back and
starts to gather her hair up again, and he’s mesmerized. After a few minutes of watching her, he
sees Leigh’s hands freeze, and she turns her head to look at him.

“You let all the air back out,” she tells him.

“Got distracted,” Tony admits. When she looks puzzled, he goes a bit further. “I have a Thing.”

“A ‘thing?’” She doesn’t capitalize, but uses air quotes, instead.

“About your hair.”

Leigh gets up, and gives him a serious once-over. “You are about to hit the wall, I think. Go sit
down.”

“Leigh, I’m Iron Man. You think I can’t be sleepy and use a foot pump?” He wants to impress her,
so he says, “I once stayed up for seventy-two hours and tested subcutaneous chips to remotely call
my suit.”

Leigh walks around behind him and he moves out of her way so she can stand by the wall where
he’d been. “How did that go, in the end?” she asks, starting up the foot pump. She starts absently
pulling handfuls of her hair from the base of her neck and dropping them. They ripple when they
fall and there’s a scent he can’t quite place, spicy and tantalizing.

Tony tells her about the Mark 42, how he designed it so that it could come for him if he ever hits
terminal velocity again. Her eyes go wide, but she doesn’t ask him if that happens often, like he
would have expected.

“There,” Leigh says, interrupting him in the middle of his explanation as to why he ended up in
Rose Hill. “Are there sheets?”

Tony looks down at the mattress, which is now fully inflated. Leigh has the pump in her hand and
she’s looking for the nook it came out of.

“You’re handling me,” Tony says in a kind of delighted outrage.

“This is more self defense. I’m planning to try and bust out of here once you’re asleep.” She finds
the sheet and expertly installs it.

“You can’t,” Tony says, falling 15% more in love with her as she throws the blanket she’s found
straight at his head. “Really. I tested it, couldn’t get through even with most of my suit tools.”
“That’s why I said ‘try,’” she tells him maternally. “Sleep.” As if punishing him for not listening to
her, she pulls out a clip from a pocket in the tan jacket and cages her hair at her neck in it, twisting
it first so he can’t even enjoy watching the ponytail ends.

Tony lays down, and it’s a measure of how tired he is that the inflated bump that counts as the
‘built in pillow’ isn’t even that uncomfortable. He looks over at Leigh, who has picked up the deck
of cards and seems to be counting them.

“There’s one on the rug under the table,” he tells her. “Why are you so calm all of a sudden? Is this
Stockholm Syndrome? Radical Soulmate Acceptance? Are you planning to knock me out once I’m
snoring?”

She looks down at her hands, and again he notes how lovely she is. Tony knows that the ‘no
makeup’ look does actually involve a lot of makeup and subtlety, but he can see her freckles.
There’s something about her that’s just inherently beautiful, he thinks.

Leigh’s biting her lip and looking over now, and his stomach sinks, waiting for whatever
bombshell she’s about to drop on him. He’d screwed up, allowed himself to feel too comfortable
with the fact that she’s absolutely right, he kidnapped her and confined her in this bunker with him.
Soulmate or not, by all rights she should be furious.

“You aren’t going to like it,” Leigh says. Tony sits up. Something in her tone chases away the
sleepiness. “I mean, I hope I can explain it in a way that doesn’t sound... “ She sighs. “What’s that
thing that happens when you’re, what did that monster Loki call it? ‘Burdened with beautiful
purpose’ or something, from the video in Germany? The implication being that you’re the one
called to do something important that no one else can do.”

It was worse than she had implied. “Being my soulmate is like being a-- It’s a terrible
responsibility, to you?”

“No, it’s a privilege, Tony. But those aren’t always things the person chooses for themselves,
that’s all I’m saying.”

Her expression is so earnest, and the word privilege strikes him like one of Thor’s lightning bolts,
split into multiple arcs and hitting in a scattered field, all at once.

Leigh’s still talking, and he’s missed it trying to remember how to breathe. He struggles to his feet,
one foot on the unstable air mattress.

“I shouldn't have said anything, you need your sleep,” she says, startled to her feet by his sudden
movement.

“I drove everyone else away,” he says, the blanket draped around his shoulders. The card deck is
still in her hand, and her rich brown eyes are looking at him with the kind of dogged determination
and sense of responsibility he remembers seeing in Pepper. He’ll be damned if he will let another
young woman tear herself into pieces trying to keep him from flying apart. “That was on me, not
you.”

“Had your name engraved on their skin, did they?” Leigh asks, lifting a golden eyebrow.

He strides toward her. “This isn’t what I wanted, this isn’t why I did this,” Tony flares, gesturing to
the walls of the bunker.

“Then why did you?” Leigh asks, but her cheeks are flushed and she’s breathing heavily, pupils
blown out.
She said she wouldn’t kiss him, and, damn it, he hasn’t respected her freedom, he doesn’t respect
this opinion of hers, at the very least he could respect that choice. Still, Tony crowds her against
the wall. She’s looking up, her face tipped toward him, and he wants.

“I want your joy,” he whispers. “Not your sense of responsibility. This was never about soulmates.
It might be the most normal way anything has ever started for me,” Tony confesses. Her hands
creep away from her chest, where they’d been pressed, to his chest, lightly. It feels good. “I met a
woman, thought she was gorgeous, and I got to know her. The more I saw, the more I liked.”
Leigh’s blushing, and he wants to feel the heat with his own cheek, his fingers, his lips. “Hearing
those words from you shifted me that needed inch across the line into what’s acceptable, to stop
you from running away.”

“Whose line is that?” she asks, her hands firming their press on his chest. Not to push away, but to
soothe, and it does.

Tony allows himself a conceited smile. “Mine. My line. Why, you have a complaint?” He tucks his
chin in to look down at her as sternly as he can manage.

“I think there might be some calibration issues,” Leigh says. He presses closer to her, notes the way
her fingers curl a little into his shirt.

“Well. It is set for billionaire.” Tony looks down at her and he isn’t even scared at how honest the
look must be on his face for her to be staring back at him with her eyes wide like that. “Leigh.”

“Hmm?”

The noise is almost fond, and it turns his lips up to hear it. “I want to kiss you.”

“I guess you shouldn’t have locked me up in your soulmate storage container then,” she says, her
warm eyes dancing with amusement.

Tony takes a deep breath and carries on with what he’d planned to say, even though he’s not the
type to lay himself bare like this. Maybe it’s all right with just one person, though. She does wear
his name on her skin. “Will you kiss me back?”

Leigh understands right away what he’s doing. Her head tips to the side, expression softening as
she considers the question. Then, she leans forward just enough to press her lips against his chest.
When Leigh comes away, she’s smiling, but it’s an impish one.

“You’ll find out in, what? Thirty-six hours?”

Tony groans and pulls back, twisting around so he can slump against the wall beside her. His chest
burns from her lips. He could pick out exactly where she’d put them.

“You should sleep, I hear it makes time pass faster.”

“Like I could sleep now,” he says.

Leigh laughs, and then says something strange. “Hey, look over at the other wall for a sec.”

“Why?”

She looks genuinely flustered. “Because I dropped the cards, and I am not a tease. Well, not a mean
tease,” Leigh tells him, pointing at the floor.
Tony looks down at the scattered cards. The implications of what she’s just said-- the fact that she
completely understands that it would be cruel to sink down to her knees for any reason right now,
and the picture of her as a not-mean tease --has probably eradicated whatever percentage of Not In
Love he was.

He looks away, but Tony sees her lower herself down anyway, in his mind’s eye.

***

That night they sleep in shifts, which is actually nowhere near as fraught with possibilities as Tony
had been hoping. The rubberized coating on the air mattress doesn’t even retain the sweet smell of
her hair, he checked.

He does manage to get the Keurig working when she wakes up, so while it’s not campside French
Press, it’s something. Tony loves the way Leigh nurses her cup like a kindred spirit.

“Got a development for you, Boss.”

“Hit me,” Tony says, putting his foot up on Leigh’s camp chair. She’s sitting against the wall on
the air mattress, draped in blankets and sipping her coffee.

“The press has started gathering.”

“They think I’m missing, again?”

“At the lake, outside the bunker.”

The other camp chair falls over with the strength of his jerk of surprise. “What? Outside right
now?”

“The story they’re running with is that you’ve found your soulmate.”

“I’m sorry,” Leigh says quietly.

Tony looks over at her, brows furrowed. “Why?”

“I am the one who chose to say them. I could have done it whenever.”

“Nah, I was ready to make you talk to me, yesterday,” Tony tells her. Her eyebrows go up, but he
turns his attention back to FRIDAY, getting up to pace. “Is there drone footage of our
conversation? The bunker building itself? Or did someone just notice we were gone and jump to
conclusions?”

“Seems to be the latter. Surveillance from D.C. and New York City shows there are press vans
outside Miss Balci’s apartment building and the tower.”

“What?” Leigh asks, gulping the last from her cup and rising to her feet, the blankets sliding free
from her shoulders. “No, that’s-- I live on the first floor. The curtains don’t cover… oh, my God.”

“FRIDAY, we’d like to stay ignorant on whether there’s art of her apartment on the internet right
now,” Tony says, crossing the room toward Leigh. She holds a hand out to keep him at bay, and he
deserves it.

“You’ve got it.”

“Shit,” Tony says, realizing something. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “How many calls from
Rhodey?”

“Five so far this morning, Boss.”

“He is never going to let me live this down,” Tony groans. “I mean, yes, press infestation, very
bad,” he adds, noting the way Leigh’s twisting her fingers in the ends of a lock of hair, anxious and
upset.

“Rhodey?” Leigh asks.

“Best friend who listened to me rant about the uselessness of soulmates on multiple occasions.
Likely prepared to make me eat crow for fifty lifetimes, after this.” Rhodey will probably do more
than that. He’ll love Leigh, all five feet seven inches of honeyed sass that she is. The two of them
will likely ally against him, pick out Sith lightsabers, the whole nine yards. It’s really unfair, Tony
thinks. Leigh’s his, in soulmark if not in reality. She should be on his side.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Leigh says, as if she can hear his thoughts. Tony feels his heart
rate rise, lifts his eyebrows in the silent question. “You said that this--” she gestures to the bunker
“--was more about keeping me from getting away than about the Words? Why can’t it still be that?
Yours are hidden from view, and mine can be, too. I’ve worn a patch on my wrist for over a year.”

Tony shuts his eyes for a few seconds. There’s an unfamiliar jolt of possessiveness riding up from
the deep recesses of his animal brain to surge forth in cave man triumph. Even before he knew who
Leigh was, his name was on her skin. Not just first words. His name. As if to taunt him, an image
of Thanos’s face as he drove the knife into Tony’s side comes unbidden to his mind. Stark, he
seems to be saying, I’ll master you yet. Every time you’re pleased with her, it’s my gift you’re
admiring.

“Tony?”

He comes back to reality facing the wall, one hand flat against the plastic, head down, the other
holding his side. That side.

“What was that? You were far away.” Leigh’s voice is soothing, warm, comforting. He can tell
she’s sincere, and a selfish, insidious part of him wants to take advantage, tell her he needs her help
to forget the voice of the tyrant, her lips on his to banish the demons. Instead, he focuses on
breathing, and in a few seconds, she touches the hand at his side gently, so gently.

“I’m fine,” he lies. “I will be fine,” the amended, true version. Tony lifts his head and looks over at
Leigh. “Flashback? Embedded nightmare? Fever dream?” he suggests. Her hand leaves his side
and slides soft across his forehead.

“You’re a little warm, but I think that’s due to your heart racing,” she tells him, her fingertips
grazing his hairline before removing her hand. The path it took across his skin tingles. “You
looked like you’d just been--”

“Stabbed?” he finishes for her, making a wry face.

“You’re never kidding. This is going to be my life now, finding out all the terrible things that
happened to you in the course of regular conversation,” Leigh whispers hoarsely.

“I almost wish I could tell you that ‘the press is swarmed outside our impromptu soulmate
dungeon’ is far from regular conversation around me, but…” Tony trails off. Leigh comes closer,
rubs a warm hand along his arm, up his shoulder, down his back. It’s much-needed, this comfort,
even if he has unfairly coaxed it from her. Tony’s never told anyone about that moment, the point
where he fucked up and killed himself with his own blade, with Thanos at the other end of it.

Thanos and Leigh are two of a very small number of entities that have touched him without
permission, and isn’t that just a complete kick in the guts?

“Did you hear what I said before that?” Leigh asks.

“Tell me again?”

“Short version: it doesn’t have to be a soulmate dungeon. It could be a regular dungeon, instead.
No one has to know.”

“You’re saying…” he wants to know exactly what she thinks she’s offering, here.

Leigh comes around to rest against the wall he’s standing in front of. “I’m saying to tell people that
this situation came about organically. You wanted more time with me, you decided to be
persuasive and I decided to be persuaded, instead of, you know, pressing charges.”

“You know you don’t get to decide that, right? The DA decides that, and she doesn’t need your
cooperation, so maybe we drop that part?”

Leigh’s casual shrug bends him around her, metaphorically, as the arbiter of his future freedom.
“I’ll drop it permanently if you answer a few questions.”

“What kind of questions?” he narrows his eyes, not in suspicion, not in mistrust, but in genuine
concern for her welfare. “I sense this is about the stabbing thing, which, hear me out: you do not
want to know this stuff. Especially not if--” he stops himself, because it’s kind of a Commitment
Sentence, if he’s honest, and you don’t spring those on a woman this early, even if she is your
soulmate. Hell, Tony’s not sure he wants to spring that sentence on himself, despite how much he
wants her. He’s hardly ever had to deny himself, when he’s wanted someone physically. What
scares him is the suspicion that he wouldn’t be satisfied with ‘just’ a physical relationship. He’d
like her to want him in more ways than that.

He’d been about to say, Especially not if we’re going to try to make this work, like ‘make this
work’ didn’t evoke the kinds of scenes in romance movies where the two lovers stay in bed all day
and night, take cute photos of themselves at a museum or on a damned boat or something, then
fucking cook a meal together-- and oh, shit, oh shit, they’ve already done that one. Shit, Tony says,
in his head. He’s never, ever telling Rhodey about any of this.

Unfortunately, Leigh’s looking at him speculatively, and he realizes his mistake too late.

“Starting now. What did you stop yourself from saying?”

“You’re serious, with this? You’ll actually press charges, if I’m not down for the Balci
interrogation, right here, right now?” Tony blusters, hoping if he can get her to defend her choices,
she’ll forget what she’s just asked.

“What was it? And, before you try to deflect any more, I can tell that’s what you’re doing.
You’re… determined not to tell me whatever it was, which seems like a serious miscalculation,
from where I’m standing. You had to know I was going to ask.” She moves away from the wall
and circles around to stand in the very center of the bunker, forcing Tony to turn to face her. She’s
in complete control.

He wonders how far she’ll take it. Maybe he can derail her right now with the answer to her current
question, because Tony’s come to realize in the past twenty-four hours that he’s invested, despite
his current freak-out.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” Tony says, putting his hands up. He makes direct eye contact with her, and
says, “Last chance, though. I’m not ashamed of any of it. I stopped for your sake, not mine.” He’s
lying, lying, lying.

“You’re really going to play chicken with me over this?” she breathes, reading him like a spiking
odometer.

“Yes.” He pulls out the look that always used to pull the female reporters, sliding one hand into his
pants pocket, his thumb and forefinger framing his chin as he narrows his eyes at her.

“Tell me,” Leigh says, steely-eyed. Then she says, “Wait--” and lifts her hand, slides it through her
hair, and settles a swathe of it over her shoulder. Sliding her fingers through it until there’s just an
inch sticking through, she lifts that small, soft section and deliberately brushes it against her lips.
“Go,” she says.

When they get out of the bunker, Tony resolves to spend the next full month kissing her. Freak-out
about ‘making this work’ or not.

“All right,” he says, casting back to the conversation, to give the inflammatory comment context.
“You do not want to know this stuff. Especially not if we’re going to try to make this work.”

She’d steeled herself not to react, Tony sees, but it wasn’t enough. Her eyes widen incrementally
and her lips part to suck in a surprised breath. Then, suddenly, she’s doubtful. “That’s not what you
were going to say,” Leigh accuses.

Tony grins, triumphant. “It is. I thought it might be too much, too fast. Didn’t want to scare you.”

“Scare?!” she scoffs, but he’s got the upper hand, now. Tony takes a step forward.

“Yep. Because that whole time you were rehearsing your first words smackdown against Tony
Stark, I was falling for my feisty architect.”

“Feisty is a five foot five or below descriptor,” Leigh objects, but it’s a weak retort. Tony steps
forward again.

“Witty,” he offers. “Brazen. Sassy.”

Leigh’s eye roll on ‘sassy’ is heartfelt, and he thinks there might be a story there. He files that
away for later and takes another step.

“Anthony, you’re changing the subject, and you know it!” Leigh admonishes.

“You’re the one pushing, Felicia,” he says. Her reaction to her full name is about as unfavorable as
Tony’s to Anthony, and he files that away, too. “Come on, then. Bring the tough questions,
Firebrand.”

“You were stabbed? By whom?” She asks them quickly, matter-of-factly, and he answers in kind.

“Thanos.”

Leigh’s head tilt threatens fury if he’s lying, but Tony holds eye contact. He watches her
expression turn from disbelief to bleak acceptance.

“You said he spoke to you, recognized you.”

He nods his head up, slowly brings it down, knowing what she’s going to ask him. Tony’s a bit
irritated that she’s able to seep into his weak places with such startling perception.

“What did he say?”

“That he hoped the people of Earth would remember me.” He forces himself to smile, feels how
fake it is. “Kind of a megalomaniac, that guy. We were light-years from Earth, no security
cameras. Not sure how he thought they’d even know.”

“That you fought for us? We knew.” Leigh’s expression bears the kind of patriotic pride he’d seen
women show for Cap all the time. Tony always thought it was a put-on, trying to get in on
America’s Ass. Seeing it on her face, knowing she’s sincere… it has the potential to reshuffle
some of his opinions. The re-org isn’t welcome, not after the possibility of his death caused
Strange to give up so easily.

“This isn’t a therapy session,” Tony says, edging the words with venom.

“No, you’re right,” Leigh smiles benignly. “It’s a confessional. You’re supposed to speak truth
there.”

“So speak it, Felicia,” Tony says, and he recognizes what he’s doing, his Mom used to do this, the
way you only use full names when the person’s in trouble, but Leigh forced him to show her
something private, and he’s lashing out. He can see her regret, but it’s not enough to prevent his
next words. “You were angry enough to include ‘all your hopes and dreams’ in the words
embedded in my thigh, so what’s that about? Hmm? How did I take those from you?”

“You’re serious with this?” Leigh asks, mirroring his words from minutes before.

“When does anyone get to fight this dirty without somewhere to retreat to?” Tony asks her, careful
not to let his triumph show. He’s neatly turned the tables, shifted the conversation away from the
things he doesn’t want to tell her, but she’s sharp. He can’t overplay it. “They meant something, or
you wouldn’t have included them.”

Leigh comes over to Tony, but instead of saying something, she walks around behind him, out of
sight, but not out of contact. She’s so close he can feel her, the furnace-hot pull of her body. Leigh
Balci might look sweet, she might seem gentle, but Tony’s learning that she’s adroit. Tony
wonders how many people she handles without them ever realizing it’s happened.

She rests her hands on his hips, leans up, her breasts brushing against his back as she lifts herself up
just a bit. “I know what you’re doing,” she says, her lips to his ear.

Every single atom of his body is on fire. He’s getting hard. She’ll know it. He’s pretty sure she
expects it.

When Leigh walks around the other side of him, she looks as wholesome as ever.

“I told you I latched onto my soulmark pretty much as soon as I learned about soulmates, yes?
Well, I went a little overboard. You could say I Pollyanna’d my situation, if you know what I
mean.”

Tony shakes his head, unfamiliar.

“Hayley Mills Disney film, I think? Little girl has a shitty life, always looks on the bright side,
even when she falls down and gets paralyzed. My soulmate was going to make it all better. The big
family that was a sticking point for some men in the past? Gone. I’d be able to forget Thanos ever
existed and just focus on him. I came up with a whole persona, a whole life to look forward to.”
Leigh covers her face with her hands and makes an embarrassed little groan. “Me as the
breadwinner. He’d be, I don’t know, an artist, or even a carpenter. Someone whose work could
enhance mine.”

“You wanted your soulmate to make custom doorstops for your clients, admit it,” Tony tells her,
painfully aware of how much he does not fit the picture she’d painted for him.

“Tony!”

“I want to punch that guy and he doesn’t even exist,” he continues, watching her. “So what terrible
scenario were you re-picturing, when it turned out to be me?”

Leigh rubs her face with her hands, slides them down over her shoulders to her upper arms. “At
first? I thought you’d try to seduce me.”

Heat spreads from where she’d already sparked it. Tony’s grateful that the sweatshirt he’d dug out
of the walls is oversized, hanging far enough down to hide his reaction to her.

“I still might.” He shrugs like it doesn’t matter. “If you want.”

Incongruously, Leigh giggles, and he’s once again struck by the fact that he cannot predict her.
“No, no, I’m trying to tell you-- Can you imagine? What if our Words were the same?”

She means he’d make her cry out his name. He wants to. Tony doesn’t even hide it when he looks
over at her. “That would be worth practicing,” he says, holding Leigh’s gaze steadily before she
bites her lip and looks down.

“Boss?”

Tony lets out a growling sound and glares up at the ceiling, and Leigh sucks in an amused laugh,
so he glares at her too. “Yes?”

“ I’ve analyzed the correspondence you’ve received during the past thirty hours. There are a few
issues you’ll need to address before the bunker reaches the unlock stage.”

“Are they serious enough to enable the override?” Leigh asks.

“That would be inadvisable, Miss Balci. Your employer and Stark Industries have both sent
security to your apartment, but it appears that your landlord is displeased with current
developments.”

Leigh’s light-hearted attempt to persuade FRIDAY to let them out early collapses with this
revelation. It’s not disappointment, though. She almost deflates, and he gets the sense that this is
not a new feeling when it comes to her landlord. Leigh slowly moves to sit in a camp chair, and
then speaks in a resigned voice.

“Thirty day notice?”

“Three day cure or quit, handed over this morning. The lease our representative requested access
to includes a clause allowing such a request over excessive police, press, or employer activity.”

“I got you evicted?” Tony asks, horrified.

Leigh’s frustration irons itself out using humor as heat. “The press got me evicted. Your celebrity
status got me evicted. Your parents had a child, who then subsequently grew up--”

“All right, all right,” Tony interrupts, amused but worried for her. “You’re not more upset?”

“I hate that guy. I hate the apartment. And my lease term is up at the end of August.”

“You found a new place to live after the Snap,” Tony says, understanding.

“I signed the lease after a month in hotels, driving back and forth from Pennsylvania. Everything
was a mess; missing landlords, missing tenants. I was lucky to find anything,” she tells him. “Turns
out the place was pretty bad even before the tenant was Snapped. I know my rights, so my landlord
hates me right back.”

“You were planning to move anyway, then?” he asks, an idea starting to form in his mind. She
nods.

“Three days, though, that throws a wrench. Why do slumlords get more devious as time passes?”
Leigh asks, groaning.

“Translation?”

“The ‘employer activity.’ Excuse me, Miss AI, I don’t remember your name. Did you say there
were people guarding the apartment for me? Against the press?”

“Mr. Harriot requested security from Stark Industries to stand guard at your apartment until your
landlord threatened to trespass them from the property. Due to the level of press attention, Mr.
Fisher from SI is in the process of requesting an injunction against your landlord to prevent him
from requiring you leave your property unguarded.”

“It’s reached the level of legal intervention?” Tony breaks in, surprised. He’s even more surprised
when Leigh responds, instead of FRIDAY.

“This is perfect for that slimeball. He’s probably sooooo proud of himself, too!” she says. “I’m
evicted no matter what happens. Press activity, prompting police intervention if they manage to
break in, but if they don’t break in because of the guards from your company, that qualifies as
‘employer activity.’ That utter walnut is going to win.”

Tony holds back his laughter at ‘walnut,’ because Leigh’s situation is all his fault, no matter how
much she argues that she could have said his Words at a different time.

“Come live in my tower,” he says suddenly.

“I--”

“No, really,” he steamrolls her. “There are multiple apartments. I have the kind of tech that means
you could meet with clients in a virtual environment, wherever they like. I have a private jet to fly
you to what you can’t do virtually. It’s secure-- there are laws about flying drones up to look into
high rise windows, and no press is going to make it inside the building.”

“Tony, I can’t just--”

He knows he hasn’t learned a damned thing from locking her away with him in the bunker, but he
wants to protect her almost as much as he doesn’t want her to live in a different state. “You can.
You’ll probably have to. FRIDAY, are there any messages from Harriot?”
“Just one.”

Tony’s gotten the chance to observe Leigh for many hours at this point, and he finds it kind of
fascinating, the way she starts changing in various subtle ways to listen to the voicemail. It’s as if
she shifts into office mode. Leigh sits up, her shoulders straighten along with her spine, her chin
lifts, and the furrows of concern melt away on her forehead. He’s never really thought about how
much or how little of himself he ought to bring to work, like that’s something people need to
consider.

“Play it, please?” she asks FRIDAY.

“Hey, Leigh,” Branson says. Already, Tony’s on edge. Harriot sounds apologetic. “So, I’ll be
straight with you: the press are going crazy on us right now. I won’t pretend that this isn’t because
of Stark’s prominence, and I won’t lie to you that it’ll relax in any way once you’re out of there. I
like the guy, by the way, but if he’s holding you against your will, say the word, and we’ll unleash
hellfire.”

“Pause,” Leigh calls out.

“Duly noted,” Tony tells her, raising both hands in surrender.

“Play,” she says, her voice rich and amused.

“So we have a few options, but none are ideal. One, we upgrade security at the office. Our
building is classified as historically significant, and the process to do any useful alterations will
take eighteen months, at minimum. Two, you relocate to working from home, we give you a travel
allowance and other perks to compensate for the massive inconvenience. Three, a leave of absence
for however long until this dies down. Leigh, honey, I am sorry to have to offer these. You’re a
fantastic worker, an asset to the company. I’m hoping you’ll choose number two. I have reached
out to Stark Industries--”

“Stop,” Leigh calls out. Tony gives her a look, and she says, “I can listen to the rest later, in private.
I think it’ll be about the apartment, and, well. That’s enough news for right now, don’t you think? I
have no job and nowhere to live, without your help.”

She doesn’t sound as upset as she ought to, Tony thinks-- and he doesn’t feel as upset about it as he
ought to, either.
 Chapter Six
Chapter Summary

Seconds later the plane touches down, and Tony glances at Leigh to see if she’ll wake
up with the bump of landing. She does. Initially confused, she seems to get nervous
and agitated as she looks around at the unfamiliar surroundings. That is, until she sees
Tony. After she locks eyes with him, Leigh lets out a breath, possibly of relief, and her
death grip on her chair arms loosens.

It’s maybe too much responsibility for him.

Chapter Notes

I was never good at being patient. New chapter it is!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Six

Leigh actually heads to sleep after Branson’s voicemail, skipping dinner. She dons the noise-
canceling headphones he’d stocked in the bunker as a concession to the idea that the future
occupants might need the illusion of privacy. Her hair is braided up tight again, tucked around her
head like a protective serpent.

Bottom line, Tony has to make this better.

Telling himself it would have happened anyway, as Branson had hinted at, well. Whether that’s
true or not, it happened this way, and this is what he has to deal with. He huddles over by
FRIDAY’s speaker all evening and into the night, organizing things for the morning.

First, Tony sends a team of twenty guys to Leigh’s apartment to pack everything up and take it to
New York, to the tower. She’ll say yes in the morning, and if she doesn’t, he’ll find her somewhere
to live, without her ever having to deal with that landlord again. Packing sucks, she’ll get over it.

As a giant ‘fuck you’ to the press camped outside of Leigh’s apartment, Tony makes sure the
moving guys have a few full sized sheets made of that anti-paparazzi material that ruins flash
photographs.

He pays overtime for some of his tech guys to convert Bruce’s old lab next to his into a virtual
workspace for her. A late-night call with Branson allows one of his movers to drop by and pick up
some of Leigh’s work things, but not all of them, because Tony hopes that things will die down
eventually. Charriotte deserves to have the facility upgrade whether or not she’ll ever be able to
work there again, honestly, so for good measure he hires a legal team to get that in motion.
Branson is insufferable about the situation. He’s a smart man, and the whole office had known
about Leigh’s laryngitis fakeout. The thing is, Tony actually doesn’t want to tell Harriot what
Leigh’s first words were to him. He doesn’t want her boss to lose any respect for the kind,
competent person she is at work, because her decision to use them as a weapon against Tony is
their business alone.

He walks over to the air mattress at around one in the morning, ostensibly to check on her, but it’s
really just to ease his conscience. Tony’s no stranger to nightmares, and he knows their signature.
Leigh hadn’t borne those signs the night before, but tonight she has some new burdens, ones
Tony’s hefted onto her shoulders.

Leigh’s sleeping face is serene, he’s relieved to see. She’s huddled herself up against the wall,
which tells him that her bed is probably set up that way. In another life, or perhaps far in the future,
the space left beside her on the mattress would be enough for him to occupy, but not tonight.
Instead, he lays down right on the rug beside it, pillows his head on his arm, and closes his eyes to
wait for his turn.

***

Tony wakes up disoriented. His hips don’t hurt, his neck doesn’t hurt, and he’s lying on something
softer than a rug on top of the lakebed. He’s under a blanket.

When his eyes adjust to the low light, he understands that he’s on the air mattress. He would never
choose to sleep in this position, meaning-- meaning that Leigh had probably rolled him up onto the
mattress, covered him with a blanket, and left him to sleep. And Tony, the man of nightmares
about fighting aliens and dropping out of a portal in the sky, of calling his suits to protect him in his
sleep? Didn’t wake up enough to remember.

Fear grips him for a bizarre second. Is this an insidious way of lowering his guard? Are soulmates
designed to showcase human weakness? But he rejects this almost as quickly. Thanos is both dead
and finished, and the Titan hadn’t seemed to be bothered by either state of being. The insidious
part is simple: Tony failed, and now he gets to attribute his future happiness to an action by
Thanos, his mortal enemy. It’s causal. If (Tony fails) then (he gets a soulmate). If he rejects her,
it’s still a gotcha. A lose/lose.

Except, from where Tony is, literally tucked in by a person that’s becoming very important to him,
it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. If you are happy despite all efforts to poison that
happiness, aren’t you the victor in that scenario? It’s a new thought, and Tony’s not sure whether
he’s grasping at straws or a complete genius (there are levels of genius, and relationships were
never his strong suit). He’s not ready to accept that Thanos has done something valuable with
soulmates, but he’s not (as annoying as it is to even think the cliche phrase) going to look a gift
horse in the mouth. At least not right now.

He sits up slowly, looking for Leigh. Tony spots her sitting in the corner in a camp chair, her feet
up on the other one, reading quietly on the kindle paperwhite he’d stuck in a pocket on a whim.

“FRIDAY, what time is it?” he asks.

“It is 7:45 in the morning. You have forty minutes before the magnetic locks disengage. A
helicopter will arrive five minutes beforehand, and you and Miss Balci will trade places with the
security team that will pack up and dismantle the bunker, if that’s all right with you, Boss.”

“That’s up to the other boss,” Tony says, looking over at Leigh. She rewards him with a shy smile
at the term, then gets up and pushes a button. The Keurig starts up, and he mouths a ‘thank you.’
“Can you make sure someone returns the rental van and gets my StarkPad back where it belongs?”

“Already done.”

“Speaking of already done,” Tony says to Leigh. “I made a command decision to pack up your
apartment.” He stands by the coffeemaker waiting for her reaction.

“Thank you. With less than an hour to go, I’ll see what kind of last-minute moving van I can get,”
she says, making a face.

He’d forgotten she’s not calibrated to billionaire like he is. “No, I’m saying it’s probably done by
now. On one of our trucks.”

“...overnight?” she asks, disbelieving.

“Money can’t buy happiness but it sure as hell eliminates the shit that makes us miserable,” he
quips. His coffee is finished, but Tony pauses, looks at her stunned expression, and holds his hand
out. Leigh’s brow furrows for a second before she gives him her mug, and he hands her his full
one.

“Did you do this because the truck is on its way to New York City?” Leigh asks him, lifting the
new mug for a sip.

He didn’t, but it’s an easy way to break it to her. “Yes.”

“I don’t know anything about New York City,” Leigh says. Her eyes are guarded.

“I can show you.” Tony wonders if what he pictures when he says that (Leigh’s face when she sees
the view from his penthouse, sharing some of the good restaurants with her, maybe even taking her
somewhere with the suit) is the same as what she pictures (thrift stores? Museums, almost a
guarantee. Broadway? Tony winces inwardly).

“What about my five cats?” she asks, biting her lip and looking at him with crystal sincerity.

He almost, almost tells her, curtly, that he had them euthanized, because he knows she’s kidding.
He had been on the video call when his people first went in so he could ensure they took a ton of
photos to recreate her apartment in New York. He knows for a fact that she does not have cats.

“No cats.”

Leigh’s solemn demeanor fractures into laughter. “Aww, I was just about to tell you I named them
all after the Avengers. All but you,” she says.

Her amusement is infectious, but Tony’s immune. Being reminded of the Avengers means being
reminded about the text message he’d gotten from Steve and Nat, six months ago. No messages for
months beforehand, none since.

‘Barton’s gone rogue.’

There’s an inbox specifically designed to keep all attachments that Dr. Bruce Banner sends in his
emails, no matter how long they sit unread.

Another inbox (the one Tony’s most ashamed of) is set up to use FRIDAY to scan the sporadic
emails that Natasha sends him. The AI calculates a non-committal, cooly caring response to send in
return, without any input from him. Nat has to know, but she keeps emailing.
Tony thinks FRIDAY keeps the five emails he’s gotten from Steve Rogers over the course of their
association in an old file folder marked as something else. He’s never searched for them, because
then he might read them, and he can’t do that without feeling things he’d rather not feel. Things
he’s feeling right now.

Fuck, he misses them.

Fuck.

Leigh gets up and hands him her still-warm, half full coffee cup, and he drinks it, keeps swallowing
until it’s gone. When he looks for her afterwards, she’s putting on the overalls and jacket she’d
been wearing when he’d first seen her on-site two days ago.

“Do you want me to avoid mentioning them, Tony?” Leigh asks quietly.

He wants to say yes.

He needs to say yes.

“No.”

***

They hear the helicopter before the ceiling hatch releases. Tony can see that Leigh’s anxiety level
has skyrocketed, but he’s never really given that much of a shit what the press thinks. Advising her
on how to handle it when she is someone who does care is tone deaf. Especially since they’re only
swarming because of him in the first place.

So, Tony feels like the two of them are oddly disconnected from each other as he stands on the
collapsible step stool waiting for the seconds to tick down so he can open the hatch. When it
unlocks, he pulls himself up and out, sitting with his legs in the opening for a short while as he
looks around. His plan with the local police has succeeded, after a fashion-- the press were
trespassed off of Tony’s property, which extends to thirty more feet from the bunker. The airspace
above them is also restricted, with his helicopter exempted, of course. So, there’s no camp of
vultures nearby. They’re located far enough away that Leigh should be able to relax when she sees
things aren’t as bad as she’d been expecting. No matter who Tony’s neighbors are, the chances
they could turn down the amount of money those guys probably threw at them for access is
basically nil. He doesn’t blame them much.

“You ready?” he calls down.

“Almost,” Leigh responds. She sounds like she just got done laughing, and when she walks over to
stand under the opened hatch, she’s not wearing the overalls anymore. Her skirt looks different,
too.

Tony leans over to help her climb up. Once she’s standing beside him, Leigh straightens up and
lifts one leg to brush her hand over it, like she’s trying to hide something. Her ankle-length skirt is
now a miniskirt; he assumes the bulk of it is hiding under the work coat she’s still got on. His guys
come over with a ladder, and Leigh waves Tony on first. She’s still got her hand on her leg, as if
she’d injured it and she’s trying to keep the blood from staining her skirt, but the expression on her
face is barely-concealed amusement, so Tony’s at a complete loss.

Leigh climbs down the ladder and jogs over to get into the helicopter, and he climbs in after her.
They settle in with their seatbelts, and the stomach-dropping lurch of takeoff tells Tony that the
hard part is over.
He looks over at Leigh. She’s obviously terrified.

It hits him: she wasn’t afraid of the press at all. She’s afraid of flying.

“Hey, you still with me?” he asks her, pitching his voice in the middle of comforting and teasing.

“Oh sure, yep, you’ve got it,” she mutters.

“You could have told me.”

“Yeah, I could have. I mean, pile on the dramatic irony, right?” The helicopter banks into a turn,
and Leigh’s face loses all color. Tony unbuckles and scoots right up next to her, pulling her to his
chest. “No, no, no, buckle back up, that does not make me less nervous, God!” she complains.

“Nope, get it all out. Tell me exactly how much you hate this. Swear, even,” Tony tells her. She’s
trembling in his arms, clutching handfuls of shirt fabric. “It helps, didn’t you watch Mythbusters?”

“That was pain, Tony,” Leigh complains.

“I’m definitely a pain,” he teases. “Fine, if you won’t unleash a blue streak, tell me what’s up with
the skirt.” Leigh laughs into his chest, warm puffs of air that help him feel useful in his self-
appointed task to soothe her.

She pulls back and says, “I knew they’d be trying to take high quality photos to check for
soulmarks, so I thought I’d help a little.” Leigh rests her left ankle on her right knee. There, written
in blocky handwriting, are the words ‘Fuck the press.’

Tony reaches out and spreads his thumb across the letters. It’s the sort of thing he would have done
shortly after his parents died, rebellious, using his antagonists against themselves.

“I seriously considered using a Bible verse to make them have to look up a verse telling them off,
but I needed to pick something you’d actually say,” Leigh tells him. She sounds uncertain, and
Tony looks from the defiant words on her leg to her face.

“It’s perfect,” he tells her. The helicopter turns again, only slightly. Leigh gasps. Her hand is
resting on his arm from her change of position, and her fingers curl into a defensive fist around his
shirtsleeve. “What can I do?” Tony asks, tipping his head to the side.

Leigh closes her eyes tightly. “Distract me. Oh, stars, helicopters are like airplanes on speed, way
more responsive, I can feel every little adjustment.”

She’s got a death grip on his sleeve, so Tony takes his other hand and smooths it along her arm,
across the coarse fabric of the work jacket. The tension on her face eases a tiny bit. He slides that
hand up, taking a chance, rubbing his thumb on her neck. Leigh lets out the breath she was holding.

Desire tightens in his gut. Tony continues the sweep of his thumb along her neck, watching her
tension unspool as his ratchets up. He presses a little harder with the next caress. Leigh’s fist
loosens, and her hand grips his arm instead of his sleeve. The helicopter jumps, like it’s skipped
over an air pocket, and Leigh startles, turning her face into his hand, her lips on the base of his
thumb.

She lets out a breath, and the heat it generates for him isn’t only centered on where he’s touching
her. Tony’s breathing hard. He feels like a complete ass, because while he’s enjoying everything
about this moment, Leigh’s probably just trying to cope with being frightened. He’s taking
advantage. Tony starts to pull his hand away, but Leigh opens her mouth to object. The movement
strokes his thumb along her lip, ramping up his arousal like an uncontrolled burn.

In any other situation, Tony would be like his old self, pulling her roughly to him, mastering her,
taking what he wanted. But Leigh is like spun glass right now, delicate, breakable. He has no idea
how to handle a woman like that. He’s never cared to try.

Leigh opens her eyes. Tony’s hand is cupping her cheek, his thumb resting on her lower lip. He
takes a chance and moves it, the angle opening her mouth just a bit. Her eyes flutter closed for just
a moment, a sign that she’s affected, that she might want-- Then Leigh’s hand on his arm tugs him
toward her.

All self-control gone, Tony leans in and drags his thumb down, opening her for him. He’s eager
and desperate; none of his feelings about Leigh are subtle, and neither is this kiss. Tony loves the
warm, startled way she kisses back, her hand at his chest. Leigh’s every bit as dynamic now as she
has been for the past two days, pushing against him, then yielding sweetly. He’s greedy, sucking
on her lip, even though it could be too much, too soon for her.

The little whimper she lets out is everything. He’s burning up and she’s melting into him, her hand
caught in his collar now, hanging on. Tony takes the way she moves closer as a cue to be bolder,
letting himself taste her. Leigh answers the brushes of his tongue against hers, once, twice, more
confident each time. It’s perfect, she’s perfect, and he never wants to stop.

“Descending into the airport now, sir,” the pilot says over the PA system.

Leigh pulls back immediately but lays her warm hand on his cheek like an apology, resting her
forehead near his collarbone. Tony turns his head just enough to whisper in her ear.

“Well, you wanted to be distracted. You’re welcome.” He hears the huskiness in his voice and
wishes he could know how Leigh's body is reacting to it. One of Tony’s favorite things to do in bed
is to watch for and feel those reactions in a partner.

“We haven’t landed yet, and if you die because you’re not buckled in I will figure out how to
haunt you!” she hisses, once again caught up in her fear.

“You’ve got to tell me whether you’d rather yell at me about buckling or have me buckle up
because I’m game for either,” Tony tells her. She glares at him and points, forcefully, at the nearest
seat with a belt. He buckles in, but a minute later they’re down, so technically he chose both
options.

He doesn’t get to tell her that, though, because Leigh does not waste time getting out of the
helicopter. Tony’s barely standing when he hears her already speaking to someone. Their voices
are chased away by the rotor sounds, so he gets out and starts looking around.

Then he sees them. Rhodey and Leigh, shaking hands.

“No, no, no, break it up!” Tony says, waving his hand like an angry monarch. “You: over there,”
he points to Rhodey and gestures off into the far distance. “You-- back in the helicopter. No
fraternizing.”

“But I’m scared of the helicopter,” Leigh says, backing away from him towards Rhodey. “And
he’s a pilot.”

“You got to professions?” Tony literally can not believe it. They’re allies already.

“Hey, good to see you, man,” Rhodey says with an easy grin. “Been a while.”
“Yeah, I’m not the one dodging calls-- or, at least, I wasn’t, until yesterday.” Tony lifts his chin
and looks Rhodey in the eye. “Don’t tell me you’re here to gloat.”

Rhodes shoots a look over at Leigh, his brows furrowing, before he shakes his head. “Did you
listen to the messages I left for you?”

Tony makes a noise that’s somewhere between ‘profoundly hurt by the implication that I wouldn’t’
and ‘of course not.’ There’s only a five percent chance those messages weren’t about soulmates.
Then again, Tony’s always been the kind of guy who breaks all the rules about odds.

“Anyway, c’mon, the plane’s ready to leave.” Rhodes gestures toward the private plane and starts
heading over to it, and Leigh smiles sweetly over at Tony before she follows. She’s putting up a
good front, but he can tell that she’s still anxious.

Before they walk inside, she turns to tell him, “I’m at least grateful that we did the vehicles in this
order. You’d probably have to tranquilize me to go from plane to helicopter!”

“You’ll be able to sleep through the flight if you want. Pretty sure there’s a bed,” Rhodey says as
he steps inside.

Tony takes that as a subtle threat even if his friend hadn’t meant it that way. Rhodey knows what
he used to get up to on this thing.

Leigh stops in her tracks once she gets three feet into the plane. Her hands scrabble at the buttons
of the heavyweight jacket she’s wearing, and she strips it off as if wearing it in a place like this is
actively shameful. Tony snags it from her nerveless fingers, watching her remember that she’d
tucked up her skirt, and self-consciously tug it down.

“I didn’t realize…” she says, quietly.

Tony hands the jacket to one of the stewardesses, suddenly wishing there was a way to skip Leigh
ahead through whatever existential crisis she’s having. He walks up behind her and places his hand
at her back, close enough for her to sense its presence, but not actually touching.

“You don’t have to be Amelia Earhart, you’ll be fine,” Tony says, leading her to a seat. He sits
down across from her as she buckles.

“No, that was an Orphan Annie reaction, there. I’ve worked for wealthy people before, but--”

She’s interrupted by Rhodey laughing as hard as Tony’s ever heard him, his eyes wide, hands
clasped together. “Oh, this is going to be fun as hell, Daddy Warbucks.”

“Pipe down,” Tony tells him. To Leigh, he says, “You were saying?” But Leigh is almost a
shadow of her vibrant self, eyes wide, shrinking into her seat.

“Aerophobia?” Rhodes asks her. Despite being a pilot, his tone is kind.

“Yep,” Leigh says, leaning her head back on the seat and closing her eyes.

“I didn’t mean to--” Rhodey says, probably meaning his earlier laughter, but Tony shakes his head.

“Rhodey’s right, there is a bed, if you want to try to sleep through the worst of it,” he offers her.

Leigh opens her eyes and stares at him. “A bed.” She states it like he’s teasing her.

Tony can’t put his finger on what her issue is, but it’s starting to trigger his need to be defensive.
He reminds himself that she is very afraid right now, so he just lifts both hands in mock surrender.
“You can get drunk instead, if you’d like that better.”

“What if I want a shitty package of peanuts?” she asks, a bit of the fire he’s used to seeing back in
her voice.

“Sorry, nut free plane.”

Rhodey starts coughing vociferously. Tony really hopes the source of his laughter isn’t R rated.

“I guess money can’t buy everything,” Leigh says primly. The act doesn’t quite work, because he’s
been around her long enough to know when she’s holding back a laugh. The intimacy of that
knowledge sits pleasantly in his chest.

***

Leigh does end up getting some sleep on the flight, mostly thanks to the headphones one of the
flight attendants donates to the cause. The young woman even gives up her StarkPhone so that
Leigh, whose own phone is waiting for her in her new apartment in the city, can listen to music.
Tony and Rhodey mostly speak about inconsequential things, using low voices even though it’s
obvious to Tony that Leigh has drifted off by halfway through the flight.

As they descend into New York, Rhodey nods over at Leigh’s leg, a confused, amused look on his
face. Tony follows his gaze and laughs.

“Her concession to being hounded by the press the second we got out of the bunker,” he explains.
The only thing visible is ‘press,’ so Tony gets to tell Rhodey the entire line, which his friend
greatly appreciates.

“Tony, I truthfully did not come to gloat, man. I wanted to make sure you were all right. It’s…
look--”

Rhodey sits forward in his chair, tossing a look in Leigh’s direction, probably to make sure she’s
still asleep. Tony’s not sure what kind of deep truth is about to be imparted, but he doesn’t feel
quite as resistant to it as he might have been if he’d been trapped with basically anyone else for two
straight days.

“You’ve never been the type to hang out with a large group of close friends, but it’s felt like your
sphere has shrunk down to just me, and sometimes not even that, lately. I genuinely didn’t know
what kind of shape you’d be in, after forty-eight hours,” Rhodey says quietly. “I thought at the very
least you’d be manic, with your asshole switch flipped past eleven.”

“How does it feel to be wrong?” Tony asks smugly.

“Might want to check that last one,” Rhodes cautions. “But nah, I’ll cop to that. Glad to see it. But I
guess if you spent that time with a woman willing to write swear words on her body to troll the
press, it’s not all that surprising.” He looks down at the floor, glancing over at Leigh without
turning his head. “Especially if she looks like that.”

Tony gives himself permission to look over at Leigh, taking in the dusting of freckles over her
cheeks and nose, the way her chest rises and falls with her sleeping breaths. The hair around her
face has loosened from her braid a bit, with one lock pulled free and resting in a loop against her
cheek.

“One more thing. If I promise not to give you shit about it: is she your soulmate?”
Tony’s eyes immediately seek out Leigh’s right wrist, where it looks like she’s placed two large
square band-aids over his name as a precautionary measure. He thinks she probably expected to
hide them in the work coat.

“No comment, is the agreed line,” Tony says, sitting back with a deliberately insufferable smirk.
He knows the smile he’s wearing is insincere, knows Rhodey recognizes that too.

“There’s no shame in being happy, Tony.”

“Speaking of which, how’s that going, Colombo? Last I tried to contact you, you were on
vacation.” Rhodes isn’t really a vacation guy, not that Tony hasn’t dragged him on a few despite
that.

Rhodey’s smile is just shy of self-satisfied. “It was a long time coming. We had fun.”

“Yeah, not as easy to answer when the shoe’s on the other foot, is it?” Tony can’t resist goading
him.

“Hey, you’re the one who always told me to keep the soulmate shit to myself. I’m happy to
compare notes, but I’m just following orders, Mr. Stark.”

Seconds later the plane touches down, and Tony glances at Leigh to see if she’ll wake up with the
bump of landing. She does. Initially confused, she seems to get nervous and agitated as she looks
around at the unfamiliar surroundings. That is, until she sees Tony. After she locks eyes with him,
Leigh lets out a breath, possibly of relief, and her death grip on her chair arms loosens.

It’s maybe too much responsibility for him.

“Wow.” Tony compensates with a shit-eating grin on his face. “I can’t believe you slept through
that. There could have been Langoliers or something.”

“Your Stephen King is rusty-- the sleeping people are safe,” Leigh says, stretching her arms above
her head, then languidly pulling them back, hands fisted, back arched. She’s not doing it to be
alluring, but it is, very much so.

The seatbelt light goes off, and all three of them stand up to disembark, now that the ground crew
is attaching the stairs. Leigh’s strange, uncomfortable look is back, but Tony assumes it’s flight
related.

“I’m gonna drive back, got something to pick up for Leshia,” Rhodey says.

“Miss, ‘I’m not one for soldiers?’” Tony asks pleasantly.

Rhodey gives him a hard look. “That’s the one.”

“It was lovely meeting you,” Leigh says, holding out her hand to shake Rhodes’. Rhodey takes it,
shakes, then turns her hand to the side, looking at the cluster of bandaids on her wrist.

“Might want to get that looked at,” he says, hiking an eyebrow at Tony.

“If you’re looking for a soulmark, you’re a few feet too high,” Leigh tells Rhodey, pulling her
hand free.

“Oh, I disregarded that one,” he tells her, heading for the door. Rhodey turns around, nodding at
the flight attendant who opens it for him. “It’s not in Tony’s handwriting.” He nods at Tony and
jogs down the stairs, out of sight.

“I like him,” Leigh says.

“That’s because I’m a good judge of character,” Tony says.

At the bottom of the stairs, there are two cars, one of the black ones that Happy drives him around
to events, and the new Tesla he hasn’t gotten to drive yet. Tony tells Leigh he’ll be right back, and
he walks over to speak with the chauffeur. Hogan’s away on a special assignment for much of the
summer. The two people in the back seat roll down the window so he can see that, yep, they’re
passable. Tony pats the top of the car and jogs back to Leigh.

“Ready?” She nods. Tony doesn’t end up doing the chivalrous thing, because the guy who brought
the car opens the door for her and helps her in, but that’s fine. He settles into his seat and starts
adjusting things. “Comfortable?”

“Astonishingly so,” Leigh says in an awed voice. “This is… really something.”

“Yeah, I sprang for the Founder’s edition. Though, I think Elon might have comped it if I’d
pushed,” Tony admits. He starts navigating the complicated process of driving a car out of a space
designed for airplanes, grateful that Leigh doesn’t resent not being his focus of attention.

When they’re finally on an actual road, Tony looks over. Leigh looks stunned.

“Yeah, I was looking forward to this,” he says, satisfied. The car was definitely worth the wait.
“Handles just like I was hoping.”

“Y-you didn’t know?” Leigh questions, her voice a stutter of surprise.

“It’s new. Was delivered last week, but I was busy,” Tony explains, brows furrowing a little.
“Teslas, there’s no dealership.”

“I think I knew that, but I never really thought about the specifics. What was in the other car?
Things you’d brought back with you on the plane?” Leigh tells him, hovering her hand a quarter
inch above the dashboard like she’s petting a cat.

“No, that was the decoy.”

“Is there a working-class-to-billionaire dictionary you could order for me, maybe?” she laughs.
There’s a brittle quality to it that makes him look over. Leigh’s a little wild around the eyes, one
hand firmly planted around her braid, as if she’s holding on for dear life.

“The press is still camped out. I sent one of the cars I use for events, when I’m not driving. There’s
a blonde woman and a man with a goatee in the back.”

“You had them on retainer?”

“You okay?” Tony asks, instead of answering her. If she weren’t so on edge, he might have made a
quip about her being a nervous passenger, but Leigh’s natural fire and confidence seem to be
significantly dimmed. They have been ever since the helicopter.

Leigh leans back and makes a little surprised face at how comfortable that action is. “Tony, don’t
take this the wrong way, but: I can’t go home. I can’t go to work. I’m in a different state than my
driver’s license or any property I own. I hate flying, but that’s what I’ve been doing for the past
two hours.”
 “Okay, okay,” he says, laughing only because she’s got a wry, ‘can you believe this’ expression on
her face that seems to beg for a sympathetic reaction. “Well, that’s why I did it this way. The press
doesn’t know this car. They’ll be watching for the decoy, and we’ll sneak in, hop on the private
elevator, and get you into your new apartment.”

“Private elevator?” Leigh asks, like she’s not sure if he’s finally started to make shit up.

“Is it going to freak you out if I tell you I built the entire tower? Or that I live in the penthouse?” he
teases, reaching out and tugging on her braid.

She shakes her head, chagrined. “Those I knew. Though, I’m probably not picturing it properly.”

Tony thinks about the landing platform on the upper level, the curved walkway designed to take
off his suit without forcing him to slow down at all, the spectacular view. “That’s a given.”

“Honestly, today, I don’t need much. Coffee and a bed, that’s about it,” she sighs, turning her head
to look out the window. “Oh, stars, I forgot where I was,” Leigh breathes, now stunned for a
completely different reason. The curve of her neck is gorgeous, Tony thinks, thinking back to their
kiss. There’s so much he wants to show her, so much he wants to do with her. Some of those things
are even unrelated to the constant, low-level desire to touch her again that he’s had since the
helicopter.

“Wait till you see the view from your apartment,” Tony tells her.

“Wait! I thought it was going to be on the ground floor, like my old one,” Leigh protests. He
believes her for three whole seconds before she turns her head and he can see the impish twinkle in
her eyes.

Chapter End Notes

You can see why I can't quite tag it slow burn, but at 25k into the fic before a kiss
chapter, it's not NOT slow burn, you know?

/me tags it 'Slow Burn If By Slow You Mean Tony Is Forced To Be Patient and By
Burn You Mean They're Both Completely On Fire'
 Chapter Seven
Chapter Summary

The pizza delivery girl is very young and very peppy. She hands over the pizza,
declines Leigh’s offer to rustle up a tip, and heads off, leaving Leigh standing there,
bemused. The tape with Tony’s note on it has twisted, leaving the note face down, so
he gives himself permission to watch her take the box into her apartment, even though
it’s probably a violation of her privacy. Tony tells himself it’s just this once, and sits
forward in his desk chair to watch as Leigh sets the box down on the table.

She flips over the paper, leans in. Tony curses the position of the camera, as she’s
faced away from it, but then she reaches out her hand and runs her fingers across his
name. Seeing this is somehow painfully intimate, and Tony closes his eyes, even
though he feels an odd sense of relief and an even deeper burgeoning joy.

“FRIDAY, cut the feed.”

Chapter Notes

Explicit sexual content warning (probably 50% less exciting than that sounds)! I hope
you enjoy Tony's PA as much as I do, he was a complete surprise during writing and I
adore him now.

Personal note: I have been experiencing a worrisome eye condition over the past 24
hours and have an emergency appointment on Monday. Depending on how that goes,
speed may diminish for posting, cause I'll, uh, need to be able to see to write. Just
thought I'd give you all a heads-up.

Chapter Seven

Tony’s ruse works. No press is waiting at the entrance to the garage. He pulls his new Roadster
into its designated parking spot, hops out, and gets to the door just in time to help Leigh. She looks
around at the cars parked around the Tesla as she follows him to the elevator. Suddenly, she stops.

“Tony?”

“Yeah?” he says, tapping in the code for the elevator.

“All of the license plates say Stark.”

“Yeah, of course they do,” he says. The elevator opens with a ding, but she’s still standing in the
middle of the garage. “Leigh?”
“I have a feeling some of these cars cost more than houses I’ve designed,” she whispers.

“FRIDAY, hold the doors, will you?” Tony says quietly. He makes his way over to Leigh, notes
the way she’s standing, almost forlorn, a sort of stricken look on her face. “I have a really fancy
coffeemaker?” he dangles.

“I’m thinking that’s probably a given,” Leigh says. She allows him to guide her over to the
elevator. “I’ll stick to my own, for tonight, if that’s all right with you.”

“Miss Balci’s apartment, please, FRIDAY,” Tony says. Maybe it’s the close quarters, maybe it’s
because Leigh already knows his AI, but she seems to relax. After a ding, the doors reveal a wide
open space, lit by a wall of windows that span two floors. He turns right, leads her to the first door.
“Multiple avenues of entry: you can ask FRIDAY to let you in, set up a PIN for this access screen
here, or we can set it up for your palm print.”

“You mean you haven’t had her scan the FBI database for my biometrics yet?” Leigh asks, her
eyebrows shooting up.

“FRIDAY, can you unlock the door for Veronica Mars, here?” Tony says, stuffing both of his
hands into his pockets. “Before you disappear, though-- do you like pizza? There’s this one place,
kind of a ritual, if I’ve been away--”

He cuts himself off, because Leigh winces and steps close to him, her voice quiet but impassioned.
“Tony, I’ll be honest here. I’m an introvert. I’ve just spent a lot of time not alone, and I need to
just… be, for a while.”

Tony considers playing it off, acting like he was going to offer to send the pizza to her rooms, but
he doesn’t. “That’s fine,” he says, gesturing at the door. “Go, juice up.”

“Thanks,” she says, one corner of her mouth twisting up in an apologetic smile. Leigh rests a hand
on the doorknob, takes a deep breath, and goes inside.

Tony should walk away now. Leigh’s made clear she wants to be alone, she’s just had to make
huge adjustments to nearly all of her life and work routines, and there are undoubtedly things that
his guys didn’t quite get right about her apartment setup (for one thing, it’s almost certainly at least
twice the size of the last one).

He toes the floor, strains to listen in case he can hear anything, and lets out a breath. Rhodey had
been right. It has been a long time, over six months, since Tony has spent any significant portion of
time with someone, much less two days’ worth. He’s so used to keeping his own company now
that Tony’s actually kind of surprised the time passed without much in the way of--

Leigh’s door flings open and she skids out, catching sight of him immediately.

“How on Earth did you get it so--” she stops, obviously happy, emotional about it. “Everything’s
perfect. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Least I could do,” Tony says, but he’s pleased. This unexpected reaction is
apparently what had glued him to the floor out in this hallway, what made him wait, even though
she’d told him she needed to be alone.

Leigh gets a determined look on her face, and she starts towards him, only to falter after three
steps. “Thank you,” she repeats. She starts to turn, and Tony calls out to her, impulsive and greedy.

“You should do it.”

Leigh spins back to face him, a surprised laugh starting the word “What?”

“Whatever that was.” He gestures, vaguely.

Leigh regards him for a few seconds, then starts toward him again, that look of bashful
determination back on her face. When she’s close enough to touch, Leigh sets her ‘Tony’ hand on
his chest but doesn’t slow down, letting her momentum slide it up onto his neck. Tony is
completely on board with this, resting his hands on her hips gently, remembering the way she’d
seemed so delicate on the helicopter.

But this Leigh is fierce, not fragile. “Thank you,” she breathes, sinking her fingers into his hair,
pulling him into a confident kiss. She pushes herself up into his mouth, joyful, warm, and willing.
Tony only needs a second to adjust, and then he’s there too, one hand under her braid at her neck,
the other rough at her hip. It’s not a chaste kiss, but it’s not dirty, either. It’s a ‘start of something’
kiss, learning, enjoying, wanting. It’s like Leigh’s studying him, her fingers buried in his hair, lips
joining with his, clinging, adjusting to him, every time just right.

Tony’s grateful he doesn’t have any actual powers, because he is sure they’d be manifesting as
something embarrassingly revealing if he did. He is completely wrecked for this woman, he’ll
admit it to himself. He coaxes her mouth open and shifts his body closer, drags her to him, flush
with his hips but still not close enough. At the first sweet brush of her tongue to his, though, she
starts to pull back.

It’s a generous retreat, as she unwinds from him. Leigh’s fingernails scrape along his scalp as she
slides her hand back away, but the hint of suction on his lower lip when Leigh gentles the kiss
floods him with pure need. Tony actually puts his hands behind his back once she steps back,
allowing her to see something amusing in his internal struggle not to want to stop.

“I wanted to know what that was like, when I wasn’t scared.” Leigh says, her brown eyes amused
but heated, as if her shyness is only barely just overcoming her baser desires. Tony knows where he
stands on that sliding scale. “And thank you, for the apartment.”

“You’re welcome,” he tells her. He didn’t mean it to sound so much like an invitation, but he can
tell that she can also hear those undertones, because she bites her lip. “See you,” Tony says, and
walks away toward the elevator. He doesn’t turn around to see if she’s still standing there because
his self-control is still set for billionaire and she was very clear about wanting to be alone.

The elevator doors close and he allows himself to let out a loud breath. “Penthouse.”

Tony heads straight for the shower, because it’s been a while and because he’s tense and horny and
a jumble of a thousand conflicting impulses. He fools himself into thinking he’ll scrub and jump
back out, nothing else. Ever since losing Pepper, Tony has hated the aftermath of jerking off in the
shower (but of course enjoys everything else about it), because when he steps out he’s alone, and
Pepper can’t give him shit about indulging himself like that, because she’s gone.

Pepper had once thought masturbation was indicative of some kind of relationship flaw, Tony had
discovered-- and she’d very loyally never told him which of her few previous exes had prompted
that particular determination. Loyal to Tony, not the ex, because by then, Tony had the suit and
Pepper had the company and she wasn’t going to let him jeopardize either by impulsively blowing
some jerk’s house up.

Once she’d understood that his choice to touch himself had nothing to do with her and everything
to do with how much Tony both loves pleasure and needs that release sometimes, they’d teased
each other. Somehow she always knew when he’d done it, in that last year before he lost her. It was
a thing, their thing, something she could mock chastise him for with code words, keeping a straight
face right in the middle of a board meeting. Sometimes he’d have to pretend there was something
very important about the papers in front of him until he could get up without broadcasting how
hard he was as a result.

Once she was gone, he couldn’t stand the yawning emptiness that stood in place of that ritual.

Tony starts washing himself and his mind courses through a dozen different thoughts, always
catching on a particular one. Leigh’s hair. Tony swears under his breath. Her hair had been in a
braid all day, both times he’d gotten to kiss her. Tony’s goal-oriented when it comes to sex, dogged
about it, and he has goals when it comes to her hair. Multiple ones. At least one of them involves
her being comfortable and trusting enough for him to get to take handfuls of it, wrapped around his
hands, even, while kissing her. Another (that he has hidden down deep, because it’s assuming a
hell of a lot for such a new relationship that doesn’t even qualify as a relationship yet) involves
being buried inside her, his head bent over her shoulder, face sunk in the golden strands.

These are the opposite of the kinds of thoughts he is supposed to be having, though. Tony cycles
through projects in his lab, pausing on the bunker. He wonders whether he should ‘fix’ it, or
whether Leigh was right about its insuitability. He can’t bring himself to regret the time they spent
in there, though, despite how much more intense everything had been, including the intrusive
thoughts about the Snap and Thanos and his life Before. Kissing Leigh once they’d gotten out had
been every bit the sensual experience he’d hoped it would be when he’d thought about it in the
bunker.

“Get it together,” Tony tells himself. He’s hard now, a combination of his vivid sexual fantasy and
the very real memory of her unexpectedly kissing him, touching him without prompting . Leigh’s
constantly surprising; Tony’s spent a good portion of the day wired with an undercurrent of
curiosity, wondering what small thing she’ll do to delight him. It’s, again, different from Pepper,
who he had mostly figured out except for all the delicious ways he absolutely had not, the intimate
ways that she’d opened up to him once they were more to each other.

He leans back against the tile, slams his head a bit on it, trying to knock his thoughts back onto
their axis. Tony suspects that the reason he keeps thinking about Pepper in the same mental breath
as Leigh is that his heart is rearranging itself, and it’s not a clean process.

Touching himself right now would be the worst idea. He’ll probably regret it, not just because of
the ghosts of the past, but because there’s no way in hell he won’t be thinking about Leigh as he
does it. Tony doesn’t subscribe to the taboo of those kinds of fantasies, but he’s aware of the way
they can intrude on real life.

At this point he’s been dithering so long that his mind will file this memory into the same folder as
jerking off anyway, so Tony gives in, lets his hand drift down to rub a stripe of anticipation on his
thigh. It’s close but not anywhere near enough, just like when he’d been holding Leigh against him
with no friction, less than twenty minutes ago. Tony’s poised to grip himself and thinks back to the
moment when she stroked her tongue against his, taking his cock in hand at the very second he
relives it. The pleasure reinforces the memory. Next, he allows himself to picture his hand riding
up from her hip underneath the blouse to find that her bra is made of lace.

He swirls his thumb over the head of his cock right as he pictures thumbing her nipple for the first
time through the fabric. In his mind’s eye, Leigh pulls away from their kiss as she sucks in a breath.
He strips her blouse off in the fantasy, right there in the open area beside the elevator. Leigh buries
her face in his chest and he tugs her into an alcove, he knows exactly which one. As he pumps
himself with exactly the right pressure and grip, Tony pictures himself resting her up against the
wall. He leans beside her, dragging down the lace with his teeth at the same time as his hand dips
down past the waistband of her skirt and panties.

Tony’s panting, hand moving faster now. He turns to brace himself against the wall of the shower
with his free hand, so the hot water pummels his back. In his fantasy, he breathes hot on her nipple,
but lifts his head to see the look on her face when he slides his fingers between her folds to find that
she’s wet for him.

The desire-soaked look he imagines on Leigh’s face as she feels him touch her so intimately for the
first time sets Tony off, unexpectedly. He groans, hips jerking as he comes hard, chasing the
pleasure. Tony selfishly holds onto the picture he’s created of her: mouth open, face flushed, eyes
wide, pupils blown. He yearns to make it a reality.

“Fuck,” he shudders out, dipping his head down between both hands on the wall.

Tony stands there for a good ten minutes before he turns off the water and gets out. He doesn’t
regret a damned thing.

***

By ten AM the next morning, Tony’s loading up the video of his PA stopping by Leigh’s
apartment. He tells himself it’s not creepy, he just needs to know how she’s taking everything
without him there to observe. It’s scientific.

At the beginning of the video FRIDAY has compiled for Tony, his PA Chuck Fisher taps the Star
Trek-esque annunciator on the panel outside Leigh’s apartment. Leigh comes to the door, and
immediately Tony is gripped by a brief, irrational jealousy. Her hair is down. It’s clean, she’d
taken a shower of her own, and the heavy ends of her honey-gold hair are curling thickly. Tony
pictures fitting his fist between the curls, then lifting that hand to smell the spicy scent of whatever
shampoo she uses.

“Hello, Miss Balci? I’m Charles Fisher, Mr. Stark’s personal assistant. I wanted to speak with you
about some things you’ll want to know about the tower and your office, if you have the time?”
Chuck’s wearing one of his more expensive suits, which Tony finds amusing. It’s navy blue, not
black (which totally sets off the young man’s blue eyes, Tony has teased him about it before) and
has a bit more of a sophisticated cut. It also looks like he had his hair cut recently. Tony chuckles.
Chuck hasn’t had much work that involves other people lately, and his excitement kind of shows.

“Fisher, I recognize that. Thanks for stepping in, with the apartment stuff,” she says.

“Glad to,” Chuck tells her, his lips turning up into a bit of a surprised smile.

“Now’s fine, if you’d like to come in?” Leigh asks graciously. She steps back in the doorway and
gestures for Chuck to precede her. Once inside, she pulls out a chair for him at the square breakfast
nook table. “Would you like something to drink? It seems that someone, probably you, actually,
has already stocked my fridge with some things. I’d hate for some of it to go to waste.”

Chuck looks a little dazed, which Tony appreciates. It seems like Leigh just has that effect on
people. “You’re right. I’d take some apple juice?”

Her smile is warm. “Absolutely. It’s just through here. I can hear you, if you’d like to start.”

The two of them are both polite and genuine people, and it almost makes Tony’s teeth hurt to listen
to Chuck go over the security protocols for the tower, the non public entrances and their codes, and
the like. It goes on for fifteen minutes, the two of them polite-ing around each other, until finally,
Chuck says something that prompts something interesting from Leigh.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve been informed by my boss that if you end up seeing the view from the top
level without him, he’ll fire me.”

Leigh draws herself up indignantly in her seat across from him. “How much do you make a year,
Mr. Fisher?” She’d been calling him Charles on and off for a while, so this has Tony leaning
forward to examine the interaction.

“It’s a lot,” Chuck admits.

“I have quite an inheritance, you know,” Leigh tells him seriously.

“Please don’t waste it on me, Miss Balci,” Chuck says, aiming a crooked smile at her. Then, he
changes the subject to the computer system that Leigh has access to because of living in the tower.

A few minutes later, Leigh catches Tony’s attention with a request.

“Some of my clients are private people, and my work isn’t always easily contained as just what
happens in the office. Can we set up some kind of encryption for my internet usage, considering
there’s an AI integrated throughout all of the systems in the tower?”

Tony can see Chuck considering this. “I think we can arrange that, yes. It might trigger a legal
document to ensure we cover our bases from our end, if that’s not too uncomfortable for you.”
Chuck’s pulling out all the stops. Tony’s seen Fisher be a hardass before, is fairly certain he was
one just the day before with Leigh’s landlord, actually, but today, he’s a teddy bear.

“Whatever I need to sign I’d like Charriotte’s legal team to take a glance at, but yes, that’s fine,”
Leigh says shrewdly.

“I can respect that, Miss Balci.”

Leigh frowns. “Do you think you could call me Leigh? Something about the formality feels forced,
after everything you and Tony have done for me already.”

Tony winces at this assessment. He has ripped away her hopes of a burly carpenter soulmate, failed
to save her family from the vagaries of probability during the Snap, and his very celebrity has
caused her to lose her job and her apartment. Depending on the parking laws in D.C., it’s possible
he’s cost her up to $1,000 in towing fees, too. Tony makes a note to tell Chuck to check up on that.

On the screen, Leigh’s making a disappointed face, and Chuck is apologizing.

“--revisit that in a few weeks? I’m the ‘too soon’ meme right now, after hearing Mr. Stark speak
about his architect more than once.”

Tony rests his elbow on the desk and covers his mouth with a few fingers, waiting for her reaction
to that. Because of where the camera is, he has a full face view. Leigh looks down, almost shy for a
few seconds, a tiny smile haunting her mouth.

She says, “Well, now I don’t want to know how that translates to not wanting to use my first
name,” and Tony laughs and laughs, because Chuck looks positively mortified. If she hadn’t spent
less than 24 hours in his tower so far Tony would have wondered if she knew he was watching,
and said that just to catch him by surprise.

***
On the second day after they left the bunker, Chuck tells Tony that Leigh’s set up a standing order
at a local grocery store.

***

Early in the morning of the fourth day after they left the bunker, Tony sets up caution tape on the
top floor and makes Chuck pick up actual ‘CAUTION: WORK AREA’ metal signage to prevent
her from sneaking up there to take a look around. He’s certain he’ll hear something from her,
email, text (Chuck had given her Tony’s number. The real one, the one no one gets to have), phone
call, a visit, but by that evening, there’s been nothing.

Tony realizes that Leigh doesn’t mind waiting for something good. Something she’s been
promised. Something she doesn’t have to work for.

***

At 5:56 PM on the fifth day after they left the bunker, Tony has the pizza he’d told her about on
that first day sent to her apartment, with a note he’d written taped to the top of the box.

He has FRIDAY bring up the live feed of the delivery, because Tony hasn’t seen her in days, and
he’s any number of synonyms for ridiculous, even while he’s trying to respect her request for some
time to herself.

Leigh answers the door still dressed for work. Her hair is up in its Austen-esque concoction, and
she’s wearing an actual form-fitting miniskirt this time, in a rich gold color. It’s the shirt she’s
wearing with it that’s fanciful, made entirely of white, soft-looking geometric lace that drapes over
the gold camisole she’s wearing underneath it. The overall effect is that of a honeycomb,
reminding Tony of the dreams he’d had before she’d spoken his Words.

He considers buying her a bee brooch and paying Chuck to sneak into her apartment to pin it on the
shirt, once it’s back in her closet.

The pizza delivery girl is very young and very peppy. She hands over the pizza, declines Leigh’s
offer to rustle up a tip, and heads off, leaving Leigh standing there, bemused. The tape with Tony’s
note on it has twisted, leaving the note face down, so he gives himself permission to watch her take
the box into her apartment, even though it’s probably a violation of her privacy. Tony tells himself
it’s just this once, and sits forward in his desk chair to watch as Leigh sets the box down on the
table.

She flips over the paper, leans in. Tony curses the position of the camera, as she’s faced away from
it, but then she reaches out her hand and runs her fingers across his name. Seeing this is somehow
painfully intimate, and Tony closes his eyes, even though he feels an odd sense of relief and an
even deeper burgeoning joy.

“FRIDAY, cut the feed.”

“If you say so, Boss.”

Tony understands why FRIDAY finds his reaction illogical, but despite loving what he’s seen, he
knows he shouldn’t have been in a position to see it in the first place.

“In fact, restrict my access to videos in her apartment, FRIDAY,” Tony says impulsively, pursing
his lips against the resistance he feels somewhere deep inside him.

“Restricted.”
Tony leans back in his chair, fiddling with the Stark Industries pen he’d picked up to distract
himself with. “Set a random password, one of the days of the week, rotating daily. One wrong
guess locks out the feed for 24 hours,” he adds, knowing himself too well.

“Done.”

“Add a protocol that informs Miss Balci if I succeed in accessing the feed more than three times,”
Tony says, rubbing his chest against the way his heart is protesting the latest addition. If he doesn’t
screw things up, she won’t be staying at that particular apartment long enough for him to guess
correctly that many times anyway.

“Overkill complete, Boss.”

“That’s enough out of you,” Tony says.

***

On the eighth day since they got out of the bunker, at 12 AM, Tony installs a digital whiteboard
outside Leigh’s apartment door. He’s checked the surveillance feeds every day and knows she goes
to work at the lab, has gone out into the city once to get coffee in the morning (and the place she
went to was terrible, she would have known better if she would have remembered she actually
knows someone who lives in the tower and asked him about it), and has otherwise spent all of her
time in her apartment.

The whiteboard is his concession to the fact that he shouldn’t hound her about why she’s been
possibly avoiding him, even though he wants to hound her. So, he hasn’t allowed himself to send
emails (they would be needy, selfish ones anyway, not a good look when persuading) or call (it’s
honestly a concession to how much he likes her as a person that he hasn’t required that she swap to
a StarkPhone. He could get her one so tricked out she’d sleep with him out of sheer gratitude (he
knows that’s not true but maybe pictured it happening, once).), but this he can do.

The whiteboard is basically a huge touchscreen with an operating system that shows a half and half
display, half blank message board space you can draw on with the stylus, half calendar set to a
single-day list. You can be a heathen and write straight on the board wherever you like, or you can
tap a few options like ‘sticky note’ or ‘appointment entry’ and take advantage of the graphics. So,
because he’s not hounding her, Tony starts with a sticky note in red (it looks great on the white
surface, almost like it’s real, drop shadows and everything) saying Tony says hi, BTW.

***

On the ninth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck and Tony are in Tony’s SI office when
Chuck gets a call. He smiles, nods, smiles some more, and then says ‘I’ll let him know.’

“That could not have been a client,” Tony says, looking away from the device he is about to yank
apart, because he’s too lazy to grab the safety glasses.

“It wasn’t. It was Miss Balci asking me to tell you she says hello, and that your computer interface
is a wonder of technology which is wasted on the wall outside her apartment.” Chuck’s expression
tells Tony he knows that Tony won’t like hearing this, and that he’s looking forward to the fallout.

Chuck is a little shit sometimes, but Tony really likes him.

“It’s a whiteboard,” Tony says, kind of stunned. ‘Hello’ is not a Leigh word. ‘Hello’ is a client
word, a ‘distant politeness’ word. Leigh would say ‘hey’ or ‘hi’ or ‘oh my god, what are you
doing?’ She wouldn’t say ‘Hello’ to Tony. “I listened to you answer that call. You didn’t correct
her.”

“It seemed like the material point wasn’t what the device is, but that she isn’t interested in using
it,” Chuck says.

Tony swings by to check it, after dark, because again, not hounding.

The whiteboard is unchanged from the night before. He taps to open the next day’s events, and
adds ‘Thank Tony for whiteboard’ at 12:00 PM. Leigh’s smart, she should catch that this means
she could stop by his office (Chuck told her where it was, Tony checked) and they could have
lunch together.

***

On the tenth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck gets another call, at 3:00 PM. He walks
over to the window of the factory office he and Tony are visiting, and Tony can’t hear anything.
When Chuck comes back, though, it’s with a smile too broad to be anything but trouble.

“Leigh says thank you for the whiteboard, but it’s a massive waste of good tech and money to
leave it languishing outside her apartment unused.”

“The solution to that is to use it,” Tony says, frustrated. She hadn’t called, emailed, texted, or
dropped by at noon. “And, it’s ‘Leigh’ now?”

“She asked,” Chuck shrugs.

Tony hacks into the whiteboard that night, adding a recurring event to every day that month, ‘use
whiteboard,’ as well as another sticky note, in metallic gold this time because he can, that has an
arrow pointing to the note saying Tony says hi, BTW. Underneath the arrow, in an obnoxious
medieval script, it says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

***

On the eleventh day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck gets a call right before the end of
work, during which he is unnaturally smiley and polite.

“Give me the phone,” Tony tells him.

Chuck shakes his head and covers the bottom of his StarkPhone as if covering the receiver of an
old-style telephone, something Tony finds hilarious every time he does it. Tony’s devices come
with microphones that are way more intuitive than that, but Chuck is old school. “Stay strong,”
Chuck says to Tony in a stage whisper.

Tony is convinced it’s Leigh on the other end, and who knows what she’ll assume his PA means
by such a statement. “Phone. Now.”

“I will, thanks,” Chuck says, and hangs up.

“I’m going to put you on a Performance Plan,” Tony points to Chuck. “That was direct
insubordination.”

“My contract actually states that I am to take actions to protect your reputation, both personal and
professional,” Chuck retorts.

“And this is relevant because…”

“You’re hounding her.” Tony glares at his PA, mind rushing to fill out seven bullet points of
refutation before they’re interrupted by Chuck coming over and sitting on the chair beside the desk
Tony’s leaning on. “She sent over stuff about the lake house and said she’s been really busy with a
new client who specifically asked for her. The whiteboard makes her uncomfortable, she says she’s
worried that everyone who walks out of the elevator can look over, get curious, and read her
business.”

Tony hadn’t thought of it that way at all. The tower was mostly empty in the summer, a function of
the worldwide adjustment of population and the new uses he’d put to the subsequent lack of
demand for the space. No one had any reason to be on that floor anyway-- it was the same floor the
Avengers had lived on when it was still Avengers tower. He hasn’t let anyone live there or have
business there since the Snap. Leigh wouldn’t have any way of knowing these things, though.

“I’ll come up with something,” Tony tells Chuck.

***

On the twelfth day since they got out of the bunker, Tony doesn’t do anything with the whiteboard
to foster a false sense of calm. He doesn’t even check it.

***

On the thirteenth day since they got out of the bunker, Tony heads over to Leigh’s floor when he
knows she’s at work. FRIDAY won’t show him her itinerary, as per some of the ‘not hounding’
rules he’d set up, but she does let him know Leigh’s on a conference call.

He takes down the whiteboard, uses his master override to get into her apartment, and mounts it on
the wall beside the door, inside. When he boots it back up to make sure it’s working properly, he at
first thinks that she’s wiped it. On closer inspection, though, it turns out she deleted his messages,
and put up one of her own.

Your heart is in the right place, Tony, but this is too much. Sorry I’ve been so busy.

He wonders if ‘too much’ isn’t only referring to the assumed price, but that’s just bleak, because he
hasn’t spoken to her or seen her at all in nearly two weeks, so if that is too much, he’s basically
screwed.

Tony stands there in Leigh’s apartment and thinks, thinks some more, and finally sits down on the
floor (so as not to disturb anything), sets up a different interface for the whiteboard, and then
installs it, wiping everything from before. Her note is the only thing Leigh’s done, besides move
and minimize his notes. He appreciates that, so he preserves them and leaves them on the new
improved version.

The last thing he does is download one of the really high-res images of the house in Pennsylvania,
from one of the articles focused on her the year before.

When Tony lets himself back out of Leigh’s apartment, she has a whiteboard-sized picture frame
that can be tapped to reveal an itinerary synced with the Apple app she uses at work and personally
(Tony nearly chewed off his own fingers to do it, but he senses that he has left a sore spot outside
her apartment for nearly a week, and this is his penance). There’s a smaller section for notes, and
Tony leaves one there with usage instructions, mostly on how to upload and display different
pictures. He also leaves a message on a honeycomb patterned sticky note.

I hope this is better. Hi, BTW. ~Tony

***

On the two week anniversary of Tony and Leigh leaving the bunker, Chuck gets a phone call. His
poker face is utter shit.

“Yes, I’ve heard of them. We’ve actually been trying to-- Yes. Really? Wow.”

Tony snaps his fingers, holding his hand out for the phone. Chuck turns his back on him.

“That’s-- Yes, guaranteed. Yes. I’ll tell-- actually, are you sure you don’t want to tell him yourself?
He’s right--” Chuck laughs. “Okay. Yeah, I get it. Bye, then.”

“I could give you a written warning. In your file,” Tony tells Chuck. “What did she say?”

“I think there’s actually a file FRIDAY keeps with all the bullshit complaints you have about me. I
can’t remember the filename, though.” Tony raises his eyebrows, and Chuck holds up a hand.
“Okay, okay. You’re not going to believe this, though.”

Tony presses his lips together skeptically, crosses his arms, and pops his hip. “Hit me.”

“You remember Demetre Eusebios?”

“Hephaistos Systems, yeah. Guy won’t give us the time of day, we could double their profits if
he’d get off his ass,” Tony says.

“Turns out his sister hired Charriotte as the architect for their new house in the Hamptons, and
Eusebios called the office to talk to them about their association with you.”

“Do not tell me I’ve lost Leigh her job, Chuck.”

Tony’s searching Chuck’s face for the signs of trouble, but doesn’t see anything but excitement.
Tony hasn’t spent much time caring about the Bible in his life, but he knows what a Pharisee is,
and Demetre Eusebios is one. Guy is one of the most performatively pious people on the planet,
and his sole reason for buying what Tony believes are inferior products from their competitors is
because he doesn’t like Tony’s ‘lifestyle.’ Which is particularly stupid, because the things
Eusebios doesn’t approve of are at least five years behind him. He’s been practically a monk in
comparison, since the Snap.

“More like she got you one,” Chuck tells him. “The guy called her, and instead of telling him to
fuck right off, she got us their contract. She wants you to know that ought to cover the cost of the
whiteboard, and you’re welcome.”

“I’m gonna need a minute,” Tony says, falling into his chair. He doesn’t even see when Chuck
leaves, he’s too busy trying to comprehend the depth of Leigh’s sheer fucking audacity. He loves
her. It’s not even like she took the time to plan it all out, either! She just saw the opportunity, took
it, and rubbed it in his face with the confidence of a medieval ruler.

He wonders what she said, wonders if it’s about the soulmark, wonders how it is that she doesn’t
seem to miss him the same way he misses her.
 Chapter Eight
Chapter Summary

Tony looks down at her and offers her a metaphorical hand. “We could go steady.”

His unconventional phrasing draws a laugh from her like he hoped it would. “How
‘farmhouse in Pennsylvania’ of you.”

Chapter Notes

And now we set them on fire, in the good way! My new favorite phrase is 'well you
ASKED,' followed shortly after by 'Desire is this.'

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Eight

On the night of the fourteenth day since they got out of the bunker, Tony goes and knocks on
Leigh’s door. He’d been meeting with a client, someone who really loves Iron Man, so Tony’s
wearing suit pants, a wife-beater with the ARC reactor affixed to it, and a dress shirt. He didn’t
dress up specifically for her, but it feels appropriate for what he’s planning to tell her, tonight.

It’s Sunday night. Leigh opens the door wearing a white sleeveless dress with yards of lacy fabric
in the skirt. Her necklace is a double loop of blood red cherries, and most of it is caught in her low
neckline. Tony’s never seen her wearing a bold color, much less something red. The surprise of
seeing it makes him stammer a little bit in greeting.

“Hi, hey. I decided to give up and come by, see how you’re doing.”

“Hi, Tony,” Leigh says. He’d already forgotten how rich and warm her voice sounds. The
recording of her and Chuck didn’t do it justice, not that he’s watched it more than twice or
anything. She turns around to lead him into the apartment, and Tony sees that she has a red poppy
clip holding half of her hair back. The rest of it hangs down loose, curling in those large twists he
loves so much.

Once they’re through the doorway, Tony turns to see if the picture frame/whiteboard is still there.
It is, displaying an image of Niagara Falls. Leigh sees him looking.

“The farmhouse picture was a nice surprise, but too hard to look at every day, it turned out,” Leigh
says a little sadly. “I’m sorry abou--”

“Aht!” Tony cuts her off with a harsh noise that has Leigh blinking at him in surprise. “No stealing
apologies. You didn’t do anything wrong.” It’s far more harsh than he wanted to be about this, but
Tony’s been worried that Leigh has a deeply hidden inferiority complex. “I maybe got a little
carried away,” he concedes. It’s the apology he accused her of stealing, the best he can bring
himself to do.

Leigh looks at him for a long minute and nods. “I understand. Here’s hoping you didn’t take it out
on Chuck.”

“He can take it,” Tony says, following her further into the apartment.

Leigh’s living room is homey, but very comfortable. He sits on the couch, and Leigh sits at the
other end of it, turning to face him, her legs curled up underneath her.

“Worked on anything interesting since I’ve seen you?” she asks, and it’s surreal, the way she can
gloss over the knowledge that he was hoping to talk to her for weeks and didn’t get to. Tony knows
how to bide his time, though. He doesn’t like it, but he can do it.

He answers, relaxing into an explanation of the new metal alloy design he’s been trying to develop
in his lab. It has heightened conductivity, but with the ability to hold the electrical current or
magical power in a loop in its secondary surface. The denizens of Kamar Taj and their new
Sorcerer Supreme had come to him looking for help to create doors, cabinets, and armor that could
absorb the energy channeled into it, rather than being destroyed.

Tony had told them he’d give it some thought, but once he got deep into the weeds of the project,
he’d found there are practical applications with electricity, too. His design lays a warren of
conductive wires underneath the primary surface of the metal, allowing them to capture the energy
that might otherwise destroy it. The combination of metals includes Vibranium, and is inspired in
some ways by the technology of King T’Challa’s suit. Tony’s design includes the ability to switch
this absorption on and off with some intricate wiring and code. It’s that wiring that Tony’s been
working on for the past week, he tells Leigh.

By the time Tony’s done excitedly gesturing and telling her about this stuff, using his phone to
show her some of the schematics, an hour has passed. She seems to realize that at the same time,
sliding to her feet, straightening her skirt where it has crinkled a bit from sitting on it so long.

“I’m sure you’re thirsty after I made you recap your passion project like that, can I get you
anything?” she says, crossing the room toward the kitchen.

The way she phrases it makes Tony smile. Leigh has an odd combination of confidence and
hesitancy that keeps him off-balance. He loves it. It’s ironic, considering how many women around
him had tailored their looks, behavior, and conversation toward giving him exactly what they
thought he wanted, over the years.

He must have taken too long to respond, because Leigh steps closer to the couch. “Wait. You aren’t
going to ask for apple juice, are you? Because if that’s why your Mr. Fisher stocked that in my
fridge I’m going to be a little embarrassed to have drunk it all already.”

Tony leans toward her with a hand on the couch arm. “Can I be there when you suggest that to
him?”

“That’s a no, then. Water? Milk? My mother always told me milk would make me strong, so
maybe you don’t need any more of that,” she says, eyeing him speculatively. It’s an artful
compliment, but what pushes it into sexy is her body language, the way she traces her gaze over his
arms before letting out a little breath and turning back to head into the kitchen.

“Water is fine,” Tony tells her. When she brings it out, he takes the glass, chugs a huge sip, and
sets it down so firmly that it sloshes, his mind focused on what he’s planning to say. Leigh is
walking past the table to get to her seat on the couch, and she just takes the hem of her dress and
soaks up the couple of drops.

The mixture of pragmatism, unpredictability, and whimsy seems intrinsically Leigh.

“I miss you,” Tony blurts out, all semblance of his organized argument about how it’s ridiculous to
spend so much time apart when they live in the same building collapsing under pure sentiment.

Leigh stands across the coffee table from him, the damp handful of her dress still caught in her
hand, staring. Hers is an attractive surprise; she looks pleased, rather than shocked.

“I got used to your face, as they say,” Tony says, spreading out his hands helplessly. This is in no
way as eloquent as the things he’d planned to say, but he has an abhorrence of cue cards. “All jokes
aside, I didn’t want to push you at first, but it’s been two weeks, and I’m weak. I miss you.”

Leigh’s brown eyes are wide, and her cheeks are flushed now. She looks down at the dress in her
hand, then over at the couch, and just… sits, right there on the carpet across from him. It’s actually
more like a kneel, but it’s very, very good for his ego. It’s as if Leigh can’t figure out how to walk
anymore, under the burden of his good opinion.

She meets his gaze, bites her lip, and says, “I-- me too, not that I have any right to--”

“Stop. Look at your wrist,” Tony orders. Her cheeks pink further.

“I’m just saying, I walked onto your plane, and it’s just… lavish, and then that car-- Tony, I looked
it up, they only made like a thousand of them!” she says breathlessly, as if she really and truly is
trying to explain, with characteristic sincerity, why she’s not worthy of his attention.

“Wrist,” he says, implacably.

Leigh leans on the coffee table, her cherry necklace clattering on the glass, the white dress cupping
her body in an almost indecent way from his vantage point. “You are too rich to be believed, is
what I’m saying. It’s intimidating.”

Tony leans over too, his gaze skittering over her breasts in search of her right arm, which he pulls
across the table with a firm but gentle grip. He turns it over with no resistance from her, sees his
name, and before he even thinks about what he’s doing, Tony slides down off of the couch onto his
own knees. Then, now that he can reach, he lifts her wrist to his lips and kisses his name on her
skin.

He holds still because he can feel the way her pulse is jumping under him. When Tony finally lifts
his head, he looks at her. Leigh’s got her eyes closed, the fingers of her other hand pressed to her
mouth, and she’s breathing like she’s just run a marathon.

“Don’t be intimidated,” Tony says, swiping his thumb in the center of her palm before setting her
hand back down.

“Now he says it,” she says, her voice breathy and low.

If Tony had a time machine, he’d consider using it to skip forward to steal a night with her after
they’ve worked out all of the things that stand between now and happily ever after. The Tony of
the future might not even mind that much-- he’d know what this Tony was missing out on, after all.

“You still didn’t look at it,” Tony says, knowing he sounds insufferable.
Leigh recovers just enough to snark at him. “Shouldn’t have gone and covered it up, then.”

“Excuse you,” Tony says, outraged. “It was romantic!”

“I agree with you,” Leigh says. “But, the following must be said: Only Tony Stark would think
kissing his name on someone else’s body is romantic!”

She’s completely right, and he doesn’t know what he loves more about it-- the fact that she feels
comfortable calling it out, or that after being obviously affected by the moment itself, she can call it
out at all.

“Look at your wrist, Felicia,” Tony tells her sternly.

She looks down and lightly strokes across his name with two fingers. To Tony, it feels like she’s
touching him. Leigh’s eyelashes are a smudge of golden brown against the red of her cheeks, and
she’s propped up on the coffee table like she’s presenting herself to him. He needs to get up, but
he’s not sure how to do it without advertising exactly how turned on by the entire situation he is.

“It’s like we went from Earth to hyperspace, and back again, all that time together, and now… Is
there a middle ground between the basement and hyperspace?” Tony asks her. He shouldn’t, but he
can’t help but stare at her chest. Leigh notices, looks down, tries to tug her dress up, and when that
fails, she gets up. Instead of sitting up on the couch, though, she sits on the floor a few feet away
from him, resting her arm on the seat of the couch.

“Define the basement?” Leigh asks him, settling her voluminous skirt around her legs in her new
position.

Tony pushes the coffee table farther into the middle of the room to give himself more space. He
folds one knee up and puts his hand in his lap to hide his arousal, instead of symbolically sullying
one of her delicately knitted pastel pillows.

“No interaction for two weeks. You might as well still live in D.C.” Tony tells her, pressing his lips
together in disapproval.

“So, what would the kitchen be?”

Tony likes her expansion of his analogy. He leans his head back to think. “Coffee. There are a few
good places within walking distance. I’m sure there are some decent donut or bagel shops,” he
says. The latter is an understatement of course, it’s New York City.

“I could do that,” Leigh tells him. “What about the dining room?”

“I know some very nice restaurants,” Tony says immediately. He looks over at Leigh, who looks
uncertain again, so he adds, “Some of them don’t even have a dress code.” It’s a joke about
expense, and he hopes she doesn’t take it badly.

“I would be willing to try one,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him for a second. “Living room?”

“I have a large television, a large collection of good movies, and a large couch we won’t need most
of.”

“I’d like that,” she says. Her voice is warm and inviting. Tony wants her to fall asleep on his
shoulder so he can wake her up with the kind of kisses that would never be shown on a movie
screen for fear of raising the rating.
He watches her face as she realizes what the next logical room to list would be. The blush is back.
Leigh lifts a hand to her chin, rubbing her thumb on her lower lip thoughtfully. He’d seen her do
this a few times in the bunker, and it had never failed to give him Ideas. Tony thinks that if he had
any of his energy-absorbing metal in the room with them right now, it would be collecting the heat
between them, the longer she avoids saying the word ‘bedroom.’

“Hallway?” she punts.

Tony lets some of his unresolved tension show on his face. “Leigh,” he says.

“It’s open-plan up until the hallway,” she tells him smugly. “You want to take on the architect over
this?”

“Among other things,” Tony replies. “All right, hallway: I’d show you the suits. You’re a fan of
good design, and if you’re up for it, there’s a way to try on just the boots and levitate around three
feet up. It’s totally safe.”

“If you have to say it’s totally safe, that makes me question whether it’s totally safe,” Leigh points
out. “I’ll have to take that one under advisement.”

“Whose advice?”

“Not Colonel Rhodes, because he has a suit, right? Iron Patriot?” she asks. Tony nods. “Charles,
then. He seems like he’s practical enough to tell me the truth.”

“No making Chuck pick between us, he’ll pick you after what? Less than an hour total, talking to
you?” he says. Leigh looks smug, but Tony says, “Next?”

Leigh makes eye contact with him and simply holds his gaze for a long moment, her lovely brown
eyes speculative. Only then does she say it, her voice low and quiet. “Bedroom?”

Her earlier hesitation makes this bravery hot.

“That’s up to you,” Tony tells her, because it is. If it were up to him, that’s where they would be
right now, but he’s been forced to be patient because he’s mostly in love with her.

She takes in a breath, looks down, and then says, “I’m actually pretty interested in what your
answer to this one would be.”

Tony’s chuckle rumbles deep. “Might be faster to list the things I don’t want to do.”

Her startled gaze flies back up to his. Doubt crosses her face, confusing him until she explains,
“That’s a billionaire’s answer, isn’t it? When given a choice, the answer isn’t to pick between
them, it’s to say ‘yes.’”

“I won’t pretend I’m not greedy, Leigh,” Tony says, moving closer to her, close enough to reach
out and run the back of his fingers across the shiny coils of hair on the couch beside her. “But
that’s a function of desire, not wealth.”

“Oh,” she says. Tony sees a wave of something cross her face. Her eyes narrow very slightly and
her tongue comes out to wet her lips. Leigh bites her bottom lip next, but it’s not anxiety; if he were
forced to put a name to what he was seeing, Tony thinks he would call it recklessness. “Define
desire,” she finally says.

Tony really likes when she challenges him. He opens his mouth to answer her, not even sure what
he’ll say, but she interrupts him.

“Actually, I think maybe I’d rather you show me.” Her voice is low and resonant at a frequency
connected straight to his groin.

“Twist my arm,” Tony murmurs. His blood has thickened to napalm, he thinks, and the first touch
of her skin will set him alight. Leigh’s hair is puddled around where she sits against the couch. He
lets his hand fall into the nest of curls as he scoots closer to her. Leigh’s chest is rising and falling
rapidly, but her brown eyes are steadily watching him as he moves toward her. Tony shakes his
head in wonder, his pleased smile sparking up without any prompting. She’s beautiful in her
anticipation of what he’s going to do.

“Desire is this,” Tony says. Swiftly, he slides his right hand around her waist, pulling her onto his
lap, right there on the floor, against the couch. He has to tug her skirts up not to trap her legs, and
just as he’d planned, he’s able to twine her hair around his left hand as he guides her into position.
Then, he uses that hand and his grip on her hair to angle her head, just this side of rough, as he
takes her mouth. Tony’s held back twice, but he doesn’t, now.

He sweeps his tongue past her lips, chasing the sweetness she’d teased him with before. Tony’s
right hand is heavy on Leigh’s hip, and he thrusts up, blatantly grinding against her. She moans,
catching her breath right after in a sound halfway to obscene for the effect it has on him. Suddenly
her hands are on him, one against his cheek, the other braced on his arm, gripping with her
fingernails skating over the shirt fabric. Leigh moves her hips against him, and Tony lets go of her
and scrabbles at her skirt, finding her leg and gliding his palm up to her knee, intoxicated by the
feeling of her bare skin.

Tony’s desperate for another one of those moans of hers. He starts to rock his hips, letting go of her
leg to band his arm around her waist again. Tony wants to hold her still so she feels exactly how
hard he is, hoping for a gasp or a groan. At the same time, he thrusts his tongue in the same
rhythm, essentially fucking her mouth, drunk on the spicy smell of her hair. Initially, she tries to
move with him, but Tony’s too strong, and her hands flutter at his shoulders when she seems to
realize he’s completely in control. That’s when Leigh fights back by melting into him, submitting
totally, releasing all the tension in her body.

He hadn’t expected that at all, and Tony groans at the feeling of power it gives him, both hands
sliding up to tangle in her hair. That’s when she finally rewards him with another sound, a whimper
on the end of a sigh.

Tony breaks the kiss to look at her. Leigh’s eyes are dark with approval, lips swollen and red. She
says, “My god,” and drops her head onto his shoulder.

“Well, you asked,” Tony says, his husky tone back in full force.

“Full marks for being thorough,” Leigh says, her voice muffled against his shoulder. She lifts her
head and kisses his cheek, her body tensing as she is obviously about to get up. Tony, who has
always been an opportunist, braces his hand against the back of her head to stop her, and steals a
kiss. It’s slight, inconsequential, and somehow devastating; representative of the possibility that
Tony might be allowed to touch her without objection or explicit permission, if she’s near enough.

He helps her up, and she reaches out her hand to him too, even though it’s got to be obvious that
Tony Stark --Iron Man-- wouldn’t need her help. That seems like the essence of Leigh, though: the
benefit of the doubt, always freely given. A lowered gun, despite doing so the very moment she
finds out her hoped-for soulmate is the man who didn’t save her family. Card games and
discussion instead of an insistence that he release her, as an autonomous grown woman with her
own agency.

Her current hangup, his wealth, seems like more of a difficult compromise for her than anything
else so far. It’s as if the harder something is, the easier it might be for her to accept, like she’s been
raised with as broad a streak of responsibility as Steve Fucking Rogers was.

“It seems like we were in hyperspace again, for a little bit there,” Leigh says. Tony takes in a
breath to say something, and she adds, quickly, “Do not call yourself an astronaut.”

“I’ve been in space, I earned it,” he protests.

“It’s possible to stretch a metaphor too far, though look who I am saying that to,” Leigh laughs.
She lets out a breath and looks up at Tony, the faintest outline of vulnerability edging her features.
“So what now?”

Tony looks down at her and offers her a metaphorical hand. “We could go steady.”

His unconventional phrasing draws a laugh from her like he hoped it would. “How ‘farmhouse in
Pennsylvania’ of you.”

“It’s probably as domestic as I get, Dorothy, but you should know that no amount of heel clicking
will get you out of the publicity of this,” Tony said, reaching down to press his thumb against the
‘Tony’ on her wrist. “--whether or not the press has confirmation it’s actually there. Hide out in
your apartment if you have to, but remember you have an ally in the penthouse.”

He is trying to sound encouraging, with a large side portion of hardass, but what Tony sounds like
to his own ears is hurt, and Leigh spots that, easily. She catches his elbows in her hands, her warm
brown eyes concerned.

“I hurt you.” It’s a statement, a disbelieving one at that.

The thing is, she did. He still doesn’t quite understand why, no matter how responsive she is to his
kisses. It can’t be as simple as being freaked out by his money, no matter what she says. Tony
shakes off the ugly feeling of the lie and tells it anyway. “Not at all. Just not used to such an abrupt
shift, that’s all.”

The mild rebuke hits, she releases him, and Tony feels shitty about it. Not shitty enough to take it
back, though, and really, it’s true, isn’t it? She kissed him, then pretended he didn’t exist and made
nice with his PA as if he wouldn’t notice.

Tony’s rationalizing himself into being upset where before he was just hurt, like she’d said. It’s not
a good feeling, so he deflects.

“Hey, Rhodey was asking about dinner the other day, you interested? He suggested tomorrow or
the next day.”

“I would love that,” Leigh says with a big smile.

***

That night, Tony thinks over what happened in Leigh’s apartment and kind of wants to punch
himself. He’s got a penchant for self-sabotage, and apparently ramping himself up right after the
woman he wants agrees to go out with him is just the latest in a long line.

It’s more fun to think about that bow-string pull of tension between them when he was waiting for
her to say ‘bedroom.’ He kind of wants to pull up a dictionary of architecture words and make a list
of rooms so he can spring them on her and see what she comes up with.

‘Bathroom’ is easy: Tony wants to get one of those huge antique tubs, the kind with metal claw
feet. He wants the thing to be big enough for Leigh, her hair, and him, and he wants to wash her
hair and drape it over her body like a fucking mermaid. Maybe take pictures, he doesn’t even know
(only if she’s okay with that, of course).

It’s late, and Tony feels like he fucked up by lying about being hurt, and he’s not going to change
his mind about the lying, so it’s sitting in him like an embedded thorn.

He papers over the feeling by ordering the tub and scheduling a reno on the bathroom in the master
suite of the penthouse.

Presumptuous? You fucking betcha.

***

It turns out that their dinner with Rhodey has to be at the penthouse, because Tony has a video call
with someone in Tokyo at 10 AM JST, 8 PM EST. It’s fine, he’ll duck out for a half hour, let Leigh
and Rhodey start their plans of Stark Domination, and come back in time to dismantle whatever
they’re planning.

He tells both of them to dress up a little, and shows up at Leigh’s door to escort her to his place.
He’s wearing a deep blue shirt under a charcoal suit. Tony’d tried to buy a few gold shirts in
Leigh’s honor but Chuck had nixed them as looking bad with his coloring.

Tony rolls his eyes just remembering that whole conversation, but he trusts Chuck’s dress sense,
so.

Leigh comes to the door still fastening her second feathery dangle earring, and all the stress from
the past two weeks just leaves Tony’s body on seeing her. Her dress is bottle-green and hits below
her knees, and the top seems to be two large swathes of fabric just casually draped to cover her, so
loose that one shoulder is exposed. There’s a wide, sloppy bow at her waist and Tony has the
impression that if he untied it, the whole dress would collapse into a puddle at her feet. Leigh tells
him she’ll be right back, she forgot her shoes. When she turns, he sees that she probably spent an
hour on her hair alone.

Tony remembers one evening in the tower, before Ultron and the way the team split into factions,
when Natasha had a mission that required her to go undercover to observe someone at a carnival.
She’d decided to go completely opposite her usual route, probably because Clint had dared her or
she’d lost a bet or something. She was dressed up as Elsa from Frozen, seated at the table wearing
the blue dress braiding the ice blond wig into the character’s characteristic look. It had taken
forever, and Tony treasured the memory, because she and Clint had bickered, with profanity, for
nearly the whole time. Leigh’s hair is a warmer blonde, and she didn’t braid all of it, just a kind of
half crown around the back, but it had probably taken forever. It’s flattering, she looks beautiful.

He wants to mess it up in all the best ways.

He’s lost in his memories of Clint and Natasha on that day as he walks Leigh into the elevator, and
it’s only when the doors open again that Tony realizes that he likes the memory, that it hasn’t
ripped him up the way thinking about them usually does. It’s as if his brain has finally, finally
allowed that disconnect between the LOSS and the roots those people had left planted in his heart.
Tony’s been in that place about Pepper for about five months.
For the first time, Tony asks himself if it might not be worth spending a little bit of time trying to
not hate the very thought of these people he loves and misses so much. He’s standing there in the
elevator having this revelation, when something else hits him.

He hasn’t said anything to Leigh. Not about how she looks, not about how her shoes are somehow
very sexy despite having no heel, not about how much he wants to know if she thought about him
while she took so long to do her hair. She’d stopped a few steps out of the elevator to look around
(hopefully not having a crisis about the expense of it all), and he rushes after her.

“You look really great,” Tony says stupidly. She looks hot. She looks gorgeous. ‘Great’ is a
kindergarten descriptor for what Leigh looks like tonight.

“Thank you,” Leigh says. “You look like every woman’s dream date combined with, how do I
even put it?” she asks, a wicked little smile on her lips. “Just enough edge of danger. I think it’s the
goatee. You look like you are not to be trusted.”

Tony spends so much time internally preening that Leigh makes it down the first step into the
open-plan living room. He jogs up and sneaks a hand onto her stomach to pull her against him
backwards. “You’re right, I’m a rogue. Close your eyes anyway?” Leigh startles initially, but
relaxes against him.

“Is this ‘I forgot to clean up my penthouse’ related or view related?”

“It’s cute that you think I’d do any cleaning myself,” Tony tells her. “View related. Rhodey’s due
any moment, just walk with me about ten steps?” He takes her hand and walks her forward,
checking to make sure her eyes are still closed. When he gets a foot away from the picture
window, he indulges in a kiss under her ear, and says, “Open your eyes.”

“Okay, wow,” Leigh says. The city’s laid out in front of them; the way the windows don’t end at
the corner makes it feel like they’ve got an unlimited view.

“Yeah, that does not get old,” Rhodey says from behind them. Tony’s still got his hand around
Leigh’s right wrist, and he realizes as he turns to greet Rhodey that she’s not wearing the cloth
patch to cover his name. She’s got a delicate wire bracelet scattered with emerald-colored beads
ringing her wrist instead, mostly covering the soulmark.

“Hey, Rhodey,” Tony says. His friend’s dressed up too, wearing his black suit with a casual sense
of cool that Tony envies. Tony’s sense of cool is both monetary and a factor of cumulative articles
about his attitude, but Rhodey just is.

They head over to the dining room and sit down. The meal is set up at serving tables in stages, and
it’s delicious.

“This your cook or did you get it from a restaurant, Tony?” Rhodey asks.

Tony shoots a look over at Leigh, but she doesn’t comment about him having a chef. “Restaurant,
this time. I have to bring it here, Leigh doesn’t go out, apparently,” he teases.

“Not true,” she says, setting down her glass of water. “I went out today, even.”

“Please tell me it was not to that terrible bagel shop?”

“Nope,” Leigh tells him, her lips curving up into a shy smile. “I changed my residency today. Also
registered my gun legally, so we can get it out of the safe I don’t have the combination to.”
 “Residency?” Rhodey asks, not up to speed. Tony’s stalled out, because the implications are pretty
powerful.

“I used to live in D.C.,” Leigh tells him.

Tony gulps his water. ‘Used to.’ Three weeks ago this woman sitting in his tower, in his dining
room, in his heart, lived in another state, and had never spoken a word to him. The tectonic shift
that occurred when the two of them collided not once, but twice (and on the same exact patch of
land, he realizes) is enough to move mountains.

Chapter End Notes

Dress

https://www.asos.com/us/asos-design/asos-design-fallen-shoulder-midi-prom-dress-
with-tie-detail-in-bottle-green/prd/11354712?
colourwayid=16331467&SearchQuery=asos%20design%20falen%20shoulder%20midi%20prom%20dres

Bracelet

https://www.etsy.com/listing/192990920/61-green-bracelet-emerald-jewelry?
ref=shop_home_active_9&frs=1
 Chapter Nine
Chapter Summary

“They’re gone, Rhodey. I can’t ever get them back. But there are people out there that
lost Tony, and he’s still alive. There are people out there that Tony lost, and they’re
still alive. Do you know what I would do if I found a way to talk to the family I lost,
even if I could never see or touch them again? The *coals* I would walk over?”

Tony’s hand aches where it’s gripping the metal light fixture beside the door he's
eavesdropping behind.

“Losing them hurt him, I can tell. I don’t want to be the kind of person who drags a
loved one kicking and screaming to somewhere they don’t want to go,” Leigh says.
Tony can hear the tears in her voice, even as he stands there processing ‘loved one.’
“But from where I’m standing, Tony’s already been dragged. He’s already somewhere
he didn’t want to be. I just want to get him back home.”

Chapter Notes

This is a heavy chapter with a lot of character building for Leigh. It's also the end of
Part I, with Leigh's PoV coming up in Part II! I hope you enjoy.

Chapter Nine

They’re just starting dessert when Tony has to excuse himself for his phone call to Tokyo. When
he gets into his office, though, there’s a message apologizing for the inconvenience. The
teleconference software is down in various places worldwide, including Tokyo. Tony sends off a
message with his regrets and a link to Chuck’s work phone for rescheduling.

He walks back into the penthouse slowly and quietly, using the elevator that goes directly to the
back hallway. Tony wants to listen to Rhodey and Leigh planning his demise, so he can thwart
them and seem like a complete genius. Because he’s seen the two of them together. They’re
plotters.

He cozies up to the secondary dining room door, which is cracked already.

“--really, really like him,” Leigh is saying. “Which is why I’m actually glad he had that thing,
because I want to talk to you.”

“My pricing scheme for dirt on Tony is a bit higher than the tabloids, I gotta warn you,” Rhodey
tells her. Tony smiles in his hidden room at that.

“I don’t want dirt, I assure you,” Leigh says. “I want to know if more of his teammates survived
than just Captain America. I know Rogers works with the orphans’ association, I’ve seen it on the
news. I can tell that mentioning the Avengers is painful for Tony, and if I knew more about the
scope of that injury, I could avoid making it worse, I think.”

Rhodey is quiet, and Tony wonders if he’s picturing Tony’s flame-out, that awful day after he’d
got back.

“Of the original team, all six.”

Leigh’s voice is breathy in her shock. “What?”

“Excuse my bluntness, but if you could lose your whole family, why are you so surprised by that?”

Tony winces, but he can’t see Leigh, so he can’t judge whether Rhodes’ harsh tone is warranted or
not.

“No, I just-- from his reaction, I thought sure they were all gone.”

“They are, as far as he’s concerned,” Rhodey says.

Tony supposes that this is what he gets for eavesdropping. He takes a hand and rubs it along the
scar in his chest, wishing he could soothe the emotional ache that easily.

“It seems pretty obvious that he hasn’t dealt with the loss of his team, no matter what shape that
took,” Leigh’s saying now, her quiet tone sounding like a function of how shaken she still is.
“Which is totally fair. I think he’s spent that time coping with the personal stuff, which--” she
hisses in sympathy, like just picturing what Tony went through is like touching a hot stove. “But
it’s hard to want to let someone you care about walk around with an open wound like that. I don’t
want to make it worse, but God, Rhodey, if there’s a chance I can make it better?”

“Last time I tried that, he didn’t talk to me for three months straight.”

Tony purses his lips. Rhodey’s right, but what had caused Tony to pull back from their friendship
wasn’t just the fight about the team. What Rhodey had told him was that, far from only wanting
him for the funding he could provide, Steve and Nat in particular had come to him so often asking
for money because when they came to him for anything else, he lashed out. He can still hear some
of that argument in his head.

“Well, shit, Tony, what did you expect? You might be able to throw all that history in the trash, but
they aren’t the same kind of fucked up as you are. If you won’t be there for them when their hearts
are hurting, they’ll settle for coming to you when their wallets are. When you love someone, you
take what you can get!”

Tony had been so angry he’d shoved over a vase Pepper had kept back from the sale of his art
collection, right through a glass wall. Then, he’d accused Rhodey of taking what he could get, suit-
wise, only staying Tony’s friend to have access to the tech.

Rhodey had walked out without another word. Their reconciliation had taken humility from Tony
and grace from Rhodes.

“--a kind of a trump card, when it comes to that,” Leigh is saying.

“Is that-- Leigh, do not tell me the first thing Tony said to you was his name. Please.”

Leigh’s laughing. “It was kind of an introduction!” she protests. “Besides, I had a gun on him at
the time.”

“I am no longer surprised that he locked you in that bunker with him.” Tony recognizes his friend’s
laugh. It’s the ‘oh shit’ one, the one that almost got the two of them kicked out of a USAF event.

“Oh, that was months later, actually,” Leigh says.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’re perfect for him,” Rhodey says, coughing. “It’s a
shame he’ll miss seeing my reaction, too. He’s been tight-lipped about the mark, now I can see
why.”

“Oh, that’s easily fixed. FRIDAY, can you make a video clip of this conversation, including only
the part from the point where I say that I have a ‘trump card, and ending right here?’”

“Video created, Miss Balci.”

“Any chance you’ll delete the rest of the conversation?”

Tony straightens up from his slouch against the wall beside the door he’s listening at. He supposes
it makes sense; if she’s trying not to hurt him with mentions of his team, hearing her ask his best
friend about them the second he leaves her alone is not conducive to that.

“The best I can do is encrypt it under a password you set, and place it in an obscure folder. Mr.
Stark does not permit surveillance to be deleted, in case something valuable is lost.”

“All right, thank you. Can I input that password later tonight, back at my apartment? Will you
prevent access until then?”

Despite himself, Tony smiles. She’s smart.

“That is an acceptable compromise.”

“What’s that about?” Rhodey asks her.

“I’m about to say something I’d never in a million years say to Tony, and I don’t want him to ever
even get a hint that I’d say it,” Leigh says. She sounds serious as hell. The hair on the back of
Tony’s neck stands up.

“If it’s something you don’t want me to tell him--”

Rhodey sounds unhappy, using his command voice, but Leigh cuts him off. “Colonel, I think
you’ll understand why I said that in a minute.” There’s a few seconds of silence, and Tony listens
as hard as he can. He thinks he hears a sigh.

“Well?” Rhodey asks, his voice still fairly hard.

“Sorry, was gathering my thoughts. Here’s the thing: I’m the last person on the planet with the
right to judge how someone’s dealing with the Snap. I didn’t appreciate the ‘Who Suffered the
Most’ Olympics the press tried to stick me with last year. But the people I lost are gone,” Leigh
says, her voice shaking a little bit.

Tony can picture her face, her brown eyes large and full of emotion. He wants to walk away from
this. She’s right, he doesn’t want to hear it. Shouldn’t hear it. But he can’t-- he doesn’t want to miss
this, the deep, hidden core of what she thinks about the Snap and his role in it. This is more
penance, he thinks, and she’s worth it, as hard as he thinks this is about to be. In a twisting,
vindictive way, he’s grateful that it’s hard on her too. As awful as the thought is, somehow it's
easier to stomach this if when wielding the knife against him, she cuts herself a little.

“They’re gone, Rhodey. I can’t ever get them back. But there are people out there that lost Tony,
and he’s still alive. There are people out there that Tony lost, and they’re still alive. Do you know
what I would do if I found a way to talk to the family I lost, even if I could never see or touch them
again? The coals I would walk over?”

Tony’s hand aches where it’s gripping the metal light fixture beside the door.

“Losing them hurt him, I can tell. I don’t want to be the kind of person who drags a loved one
kicking and screaming to somewhere they don’t want to go,” Leigh says. Tony can hear the tears in
her voice, even as he stands there processing ‘loved one.’ “But from where I’m standing, Tony’s
already been dragged. He’s already somewhere he didn’t want to be. I just want to get him back
home.”

“And if you lose him on the way?” Rhodey asks, his voice a low rasp.

“It comes back to that open wound thing. I mean, shit, he’s Tony Stark, he lived for years with an
actual open wound in his chest, didn’t he? He’s used to it,” she chuckles darkly. “He avoided the
surgery to remove that shrapnel for years, didn’t he, living with the hole in his chest instead? But in
the end, he got the surgery.”

“Fuck,” Rhodey says, uncharacteristically.

Tony’s right there with him. Leigh’s view of him as someone with a festering wound is more
accurate than she realizes. Those first few months, he’d often felt like he was radioactive, spewing
toxic bullshit with every word and action. He’d reveled in it, because people left him the fuck
alone, but now he’s still alone, because he was thorough.

“Right?” Leigh sniffles, and Tony hears the sound of someone blowing their nose. He’s not close to
tears, but his hand aches. Tony looks over at the fixture he’d been crushing and sees that it’s
deformed, despite being made of metal. He wonders how much energy he sank into it in an effort
not to break, himself.

“Rogers is living upstate, volunteering at the orphan foundation. He travels around a lot, not just to
facilitate stuff for the foundation, but to collect data from the various observatories, hoping there’ll
be something we can use,” Rhodey says, clearing his throat. “Romanoff lives at the complex,
coordinating, and searching for Barton.”

“Was he off world when it happened too?” Leigh asks.

Tony almost walks in. He almost walks out. He’s not ready for this, he’s not ready to hear it again,
he’s not ready for the effect it’s going to have on Leigh.

“Fuck, fuck,” Tony whispers, but it’s too late.

“He lost his whole family too, Leigh. Didn’t take it well. Last time I spoke with Nat she told me
she suspects he’s taken it on himself to be a vigilante in South America. There have been a lot of
deaths among the cartels down there.”

“He had a family?” Leigh asks in a small voice.

“Not only did he have a family, but he was living with them off-grid. We didn’t call him in for the
fight.”
“Oh my God,” she whimpers. “The only thing worse than trying really hard and failing and losing
everything would be… oh, my God.”

“Thor lives with what’s left of his people in a town called New Asgard, in Norway. Doesn’t sound
like he’s taking it very well, either.”

Tony hadn’t known that last part. He rests his head on the doorframe, trying to picture what the
golden, joyful god would be like as wrecked by what happened as Tony is. Thor at least got to kill
Thanos, not that it had done any good. Tony had been too filled to the brim with vitriol to hear the
recaps of what happened on Earth, too furious at himself to explain what had happened on Titan.
He wonders if there was something that happened to Thor in his interactions with Thanos,
something similar to what he’d gone through.

“The happiest out of all of them is probably Banner. He doesn’t have to try to Hulk out anymore,
holed up in his lab. Not sure he ought to be alone, though,” Rhodey says. Tony knows Bruce’s
instincts well, knows that he’s probably deeply miserable despite having basically what he’d
always wanted-- the ability to do his research in peace. He remembers how Bruce thrived among
the team, an introvert glad to be able to step back and let the extraverts like Tony burn brightly
while he supported in the background.

“Why do I suddenly feel like I’ve gained six open wounds to heal, instead of just one?” Leigh
laughs weakly.

Tony pushes himself violently away from the door and stares at it, not seeing the wood but the
woman beyond.

He hasn’t known Leigh for long, but he does suspect that she has the most conviction out of anyone
he’s ever met. She’ll throw herself at the palaces of pain they’ve all constructed, and when the
impact breaks parts of herself off, she’ll see that as worth it. It’s already too late. Leigh’s like a
vaccine injected into the broken body of the Avengers, and the immune response she’s about to
prompt is inevitable. The only way to stop her would be to lock her away, and he’s already fired
that gun. It can’t be reloaded.

And he can’t tell her he knows.

Tony can still hear them talking, but he’s got both hands on the back of the desk chair in the small
side room, trying to breathe in and out enough to calm down.

“FRIDAY, I think that’s enough. Lock that conversation away, would you? Temporary
password… Ananke.”

Tony grabs a pen from the desk, scribbles it on his fingertip to start the ink flowing, then unbuttons
his shirt sleeve to write down the password.

“Greek god of -?” Rhodey asks Leigh.

“Necessity, inevitability. Mother of the Fates,” she says. Then, she lets out a shaky laugh. “Maybe
it’s good that’s encrypted. I can pretend I never said any of it.”

“A hard job can be the most rewarding,” Rhodey tells her.

“I’ll make sure you’re the one I bitch to about this, then.”

“Thought you were going to give that password later, though.” Shut up, Rhodey, Tony says. He
wants to watch the video, to see her facial expressions, her mannerisms. He wants to be a pain
voyeur, and fuck, isn’t that maybe one of his worst incarnations?

“Forgetting and leaving it unsecured is worse. I can change it later.”

“So, you said you held Tony at gunpoint-- was it loaded?”

“Of course,” Leigh says, sounding relieved that the iceberg she’s balancing on has collided with
more solid ground. “The time it takes to load your weapon after you already needed to use it is
probably the most easily understood illustration of regret there is.”

“That sounds like experience talking, there,” Rhodey says. Tony thinks his friend must have seen
something in Leigh’s face that’s lost to him, with the wooden door between them.

“That’s another classified conversation, there,” she laughs. It’s a brittle, false laugh. Tony checks
his watch and sees that twenty nerve-wracking minutes have passed, and decides to step out and
join them for this one.

“Sorry about that,” he says as he opens the side door. He slides into his chair and looks at their
desserts before looking down at the one at his place. “Is the rest for me?”

“Oh, we were distracted, going in-depth on the soulmate thing. Have you ever thanked this woman
for not shooting you after your one-word introduction saddled her with your name for all eternity?”
Rhodey asks. The ease at which he covers over the emotional conversation Tony knows took place
in his absence is a bit discomfiting.

“Thanks for not killing me softly with your gun,” Tony says to Leigh.

“Reserving judgment on the ‘your song’ part, are you?”

Tony sees that Rhodey’s getting up for more to drink, so he leans in and whispers, “More like
‘touch,’ actually.”

“I’ve got it on good authority that there are multiple deaths to be found along that path, and none of
them fatal,” Leigh says playfully.

“Might need to do research,” Tony tells her, holding his expression to a thoughtful one. When
Rhodey sits back down, Tony injects himself into their pre-existing conversation by asking Leigh,
“So, ever have to shoot at someone?” Rhodey sighs, and Tony looks over, confused. “What?”

“Think about the kinds of answers that question might get, man.” Rhodey shakes his head at Tony
in full ‘disappointed officer’ mode.

“No, it’s fine. Yes, I’ve had to shoot at a person. No, I didn’t kill him.”

Tony shoots his eyebrows up in the unasked question, and Leigh looks down at her lap. He
watches as she schools her expression along a spectrum from nervous to steely.

“You watched some of the specials they did on me? Or read an article or two?”

Or a hundred, yeah, Tony doesn’t say aloud. Instead, he nods.

“They always do this human interest stuff. It’s annoying that they add the same… modifiers, I
guess you could call them, even when the core of the story is human interest.”

“Not sure I’m following?” Rhodey says.

“So you’ve got the standard news story, right, eleven year old graduates high school, or something,
and they modify it by pointing out his mom died when he was five, or he’s got six rescue rabbits in
a cage in his back yard.” Leigh sighs. “But my story was already about the rescue rabbits, right?
Young woman loses whole family in the Snap. But that’s not enough, so they added their filler.
Young woman loses whole family in the Snap, even though she lives on a farm in Pennsylvania
without internet access. With only one phone line. After inheriting a decent fortune from her dead
parents, and as the beneficiary of at least six grown adults’ life insurance.”

“Shit,” Rhodey says, fully getting it now.

“Yeah,” Leigh says. “I was kind of wrecked by grief at the time, so I didn’t really think it all
through, not that I might have gotten any say over how vulnerable a picture they were painting of
me.”

“He’s in prison now, right?” Tony asks. He hates the picture she’s painting of a grief-stricken
Leigh having to actually shoot someone who came to take advantage of her terrible situation.

“How much havoc will you wreak if I tell you no?” Leigh asks him. Her tone is fragile glass
coated in vibranium, vulnerable as all fuck, but poised to retaliate.

Tony settles into the righteous anger, lets it sink into his joints, oily and insidious. “He’s in prison
now, right?” he repeats.

“My one-legged assailant is collecting disability from his parents’ basement, Tony,” Leigh says
evenly.

“How did any of this happen without so much as a news story?” Rhodey asks, incredulous. Tony
gestures with his head toward his friend, also demanding an answer.

“It made the news, just without all of the context,” Leigh says, taking a sip of her water with a hand
that shakes. Her lips twist wryly when she notices just how much, and she uses both hands to put
the glass back down. “Remember when Representative Ada Casca’s son was arrested?”

Tony shakes his head.

“Republican from Ohio? Something about a home invasion gone wrong,” Rhodey says.

Leigh spreads her hands out. “The thing about slashing tires and cutting the only phone line when
you show up to rob someone is, if you get shot in the thigh and she has to go get help, it takes a
long time.”

“Good,” Tony says.

“How in the hell did you manage to keep it quiet?” Rhodey asks.

“Small towns,” Leigh says, laughing. “It’s a real shame, too. This would have been a better story
for those vultures than the one they originally told.”

Tony doesn’t mind the image of the thief lying somewhere in Leigh’s lonely farmhouse bleeding
out. It actually kind of scares him how okay he is with it, considering she had to shoot the guy,
probably after feeling a great deal of fear. But, Leigh doesn’t look afraid right now. She looks
joyful, like she’d triumphed over that fear and gets to tell that story, not the one where she was
terrified and had to push herself.

“How far did you have to go for help?” Tony asks.

“Three miles to the nearest neighbor.”

“How long did it take?” Rhodey asks.

Leigh grins. “Not as long as you’d think. I took a horse.”

“Somewhere out there a journalist just felt like someone walked over their grave,” Tony laughs.

“Yeah, it was just a ridiculous combination of luck and circumstance,” Leigh says, sighing. “My
neighbor was the dispatcher. She called the police chief and the paramedics, which in our town is a
married couple. They didn’t end up needing their sirens because it was 3 AM. By the time he was
LifeFlighted out of the local hospital, the story of where he’d been shot had been garbled. He
crossed state lines to attack me, and thanks to a Pennsylvania state law that protects victims of
certain crimes, it wasn’t legal to release my name. I don’t think that would have held up in court,
honestly, because I shot him, and he lost his leg, but… small towns.”

“And Representative Casca buried everything that made it out of Pennsylvania, I assume,” Rhodey
says. Leigh nods. “Wait,” his friend suddenly says, as if what she said had finally registered. “A
horse?”

Leigh laughs.

***

Rhodey leaves after another half hour of much more pleasant conversation, and Leigh and Tony
settle themselves onto the couch. Tony offers her a drink, and she accepts, tells him she’ll have
whatever he pours. He pours her a whiskey, because he’d like to taste it on her later, see what kind
of an intoxicating mixed drink that would make.

He says, “If I’d known what happened to you, I wouldn’t have locked you in a bunker with me.”

Leigh fortifies her determined expression with a too-large sip of whiskey, and when she’s done
wiping her eyes, she tells him, “It’s only the decent people who would change their actions but for
the context they didn’t have.”

It means more, somehow, to have someone like Leigh tell him he’s a good person, more than the
number of prestigious people who have told him he’s not. “Can I ask you some questions about
what happened at the farmhouse?” he asks.

“Sure,” she says. He can see the alcohol working on her already in the loose way she agrees
without taking much time to consider the question.

“Who else knows?”

“Branson.”

“Were you already working for him?”

“Yeah, doing the prelim things, about to transition into designing my own stuff. I was actually in
between apartments, taking some time to find a good place in D.C. after my roommate got married.
I’d collaborated on projects, that kind of thing.” She takes another sip, smaller this time, almost
miniscule. It goes down more easily, so he doesn’t tease her. “After the Snap, not having internet
access seemed like a blessing.”

“I could see that. How long after, was it?”

“Three weeks.”

It hits him that he’d gotten back to Earth on the twenty-second day after, had fought with Steve on
the twenty-third. Leigh had been attacked the same day Tony had been rescued.

“Can I ask a shitty question?”

“Pardon me, but do you usually ask that, first?” Leigh teases.

“It’s a function of this thing we have,” Tony says, waving his hand. “This counts as politeness.”

She leans back, loose-limbed and lovely. One of the loops on the bow on her dress is very small,
threatening its collapse. “Go ahead.”

“You seem more okay about it than I would have expected.” Tony waits for her to be defensive,
waits for her to be angry, but he’s curious as hell, and she’s at least tipsy, so he has a chance at not
ruining things.

Leigh looks up at the ceiling, then out at the cityscape. “My dad taught me how to shoot. I wasn’t
actually that keen, only one of the five of us. My mom told me to do it anyway, that it was mean of
me to stop him from having the full set, but it probably wouldn’t have actively harmed our
relationship or anything.” Leigh holds up her glass, seems to look through it, out the window. “I
asked him once why it was so important, if I should be scared about his insistence, if there were so
many people who could wish me harm that I had to know how to hit them with a bullet to protect
myself.”

Tony watches her as she winds up to the answer, circling the thing she’s about to say like it would
hurt too much to say it outright. He thinks he’s going to regret it when she gets there, but it’s too
late now. There’s another thing he hadn’t considered, that it would be a father story, a loving,
protective father story.

“He told me it wasn’t about the bad guys, but about him. That he wasn’t always going to be able to
be there. That I was growing up, and I’d move out and away, maybe, and it made him feel good to
know that he’d equipped me in more ways than one. Good habits, you know?” she asks Tony,
rhetorically. Leigh takes another sip, too big, but she handles it, this time. “When I told him I was
moving out, I thought he was going to be upset, but he told me he’d taught me how to shoot and
balance a checkbook, and that was enough.”

Leigh finishes the glass, and it’s way too much, and her eyes water again, and it hits him: it was on
purpose. These tears hide the other ones.

“Dad was big on, I guess you could call it second chances, but that’s a bit more ‘moral of the story’
than it felt, at the time. He was about learning from mistakes, about-- yes! Course correction,” she
says, finally finding the right phrase. Leigh grins. “He liked it when we screwed up and fixed it,
told us it built character. I didn’t leave the gun loaded.”

A sharp, horrible stab of fear strikes Tony.

“It wasn’t in the gun safe,” Leigh continues, leaning her head back, definitely more tipsy than not,
too open, Tony thinks, too ready to trust that he’s able to handle this story like she handled the
whiskey. “It was by the side of the bed, next to the bullets. When he broke in, I’d already heard
him outside swearing. I think he cut himself slashing the tires. Honestly, the course correction
thing, Dad would have been so proud. The gun jammed at first, but I cleared it.”

Leigh says this conversationally, like she’s not building a terrifying scaffold for the lesson her
father had taught her, the blueprints twisted and terrifying to watch unroll.

“So by the time I shot him, he was way closer than I expected. I was aiming for his chest, but he
was trying to hit me with something, and so my aim was shit. He went straight down, and all I
could think was, I’d done just what my father taught me to do, and I didn’t even end up with the
trauma of having killed someone.”

Tony thinks of the people he’s killed. The first few in awful, miserable ways, by fire, by explosion.
He thinks about the course correction he made by changing the company, how he took what
Yinsen had asked of him and done his level best.

“Was it comforting right away, or is this hindsight?” Tony asks, reaching out his arm along the
back of the couch, offering to tuck it under her neck, if she’s willing. Instead, she scoots closer and
rests her head on his shoulder.

“I don’t remember. You know how they say when you get really badly injured, your body doesn’t
send pain signals, ‘cause you can see or know how bad it is, and your brain decides it doesn’t need
that kind of distraction?”

Tony knows. He makes an agreement noise, nodding.

“I think my brain decided I didn’t need to remember how scared I was, after the fact. It’s nice,
actually. I didn’t have a trial to deal with, so I didn’t need to defend the way it seems not to be the
worst thing that ever happened to me, you know? That’s one of the reasons I didn’t push for that.
Casca offered not to sue, and I took the deal.”

Tony wants to hate every single thing about what Leigh’s just said, but her ridiculous pragmatism
has worked out so impossibly well that he has no grounds for complaint.

“If you ever change your mind about retribution, please make me the first call,” Tony says, using a
lot of effort to make his tone sound flippant, uncaring. He’s going to spend most of the evening
looking into the guy, and then the rest of the night making damned sure that the well-adjusted way
Leigh seems to be able to talk about this isn’t some kind of frightening front for actual mental
damage she’s not dealing with.

“It’s a deal,” she says quietly. Tony looks down at her, surprised. “What?” she asks, leaning her
head back on his shoulder so she can see his face. She’s got makeup on, so no freckles, but the
trade-off is that her eyes are luminous, in Tony’s humble opinion. He almost rolls his eyes at
himself-- he’s all soft hearted over this Pennsylvania farm girl, with her brown eyes and blonde hair
and green dress. He hadn’t bothered to look up any of the articles written while they had been in
his bunker, but he bets they’re horrendous, all about how he’ll ruin her doe-eyed innocence and
she’ll ruin his hard-nosed business sense.

“You’re half drunk,” Tony tells her. “That’s the only way you’d ever contemplate letting me fuck
that guy’s life up.”

“It’s fucked up plenty,” Leigh assures him. She sounds different when she swears tipsy. He likes it.
“The internet is really bad in Toledo.”

“You are a lightweight.”

“Excuse you,” Leigh says indignantly. “You’re the one with thick fingers pouring me that stuff.”

Tony loses it laughing. “What!?”

Leigh, who he’d dislodged from his shoulder when he leaned over laughing so hard, still looks
indignant. “Isn’t that how you measure it?”

Tony’s still gone. “No it’s by eye, they just call it-- are you serious?” He turns and pins her with a
look. Her eyes are joyous, even after all the miserable things he’d overheard her say, with and
without her knowledge.

“You going to make fun of me for not being sophisticated?” Leigh asks, and Tony’s absolutely
certain that this would be a vulnerable, meaningful question if she hadn’t drunk his whiskey.

“You are one of the most sophisticated women I’ve ever known, I think,” Tony says, and he means
it. She’s principled, professional, passionate. Fuck the world’s idea of ‘sophisticated,’ which is
really snobbery, when it comes down to it, magazine fancy, not actual sophistication. Leigh’s
complicated, like the wiring on his suit, something he wouldn’t trust a layman to be able to look at
and identify properly.

“Thank you, I think,” Leigh says, bemused. “And you--” she stops, reaches out, and holds him still,
first by his shoulders, then his face, her hands warm, so warm, like she always is. How Tony ever
compared Leigh to the moon, he’ll never know, but he was wrong. She’s a meteor burning across
his surface, fiery and bright. “You’re Iron Man,” Leigh says, and she says it like it’s so profound,
like it’s meaningful, that Tony hooks an arm under her far arm and hefts her up.

“Bed, for you. You’re completely sloshed.”

“I am so not, but whatever,” Leigh says, good-naturedly.

She leans against him in the elevator, and he smells her hair the whole way down, because he’s not
a saint and never pretended to be one. When they get to her floor, he walks her to her door, and she
stops him.

“I’m only tipsy, and you didn’t let me finish,” she says. Her voice is low and gentle. Leigh leans
back on the door and looks at him, toying with the bow at her waist. “You were forged in flames.
Losing your parents as a kid, getting the company so young, dealing with that jerk trying to
manipulate you into things before he showed his true colors. I’ve read all the articles, you know,”
she tells him, her voice rough with disgust for Obie even without knowing he was the reason for
Afghanistan. “Three months in the furnace, and when you came back you skimmed all the slag off,
didn’t you? No more weapons manufacturing. You dropped off of the tabloids, for a while, too.
You changed. And every time things got tough, you skimmed more off. You’re Iron Man, always
making yourself better, more refined, stronger.”

Tony kind of feels flayed bare, right now, and the only thing he likes about it is the admiration in
Leigh’s eyes.

“I maybe skimmed off too much, last time,” he finally says. “Good night.”

“Night,” Leigh tells him softly, and FRIDAY’s always listening, so she unlocks the door.

Tony almost takes the stairs back to his rooms. He feels exposed, not just because of her frankly
generous assessment of him, but also because of what she’d told Rhodey she’s planning to do.
When he adds her revelation about being attacked, Tony feels a bit like he’s flying out of his skin,
holding too much in to be comfortable.

Leigh’s open wound analogy fits too well. It’s easier for Tony to focus on what she went through,
how he’s got a long night ahead of him full of research to make sure he can protect her if the guy
ever changes his mind about going after her. Tony wants to make sure she’s actually fine, not just
clinging to a promise of her father’s that she feels like she fulfilled, because if that punk comes at
her and the illusion crumbles, it’s going to hurt worse now than it would have if she’d dealt with it
properly. He doesn’t want her to go through that.

“Oh. Oh shit,” Tony says out loud. The conclusion he’s come to is both obvious and daunting.

He doesn’t want Leigh to walk around with an open wound either.

He’d go through a lot of things he’d really rather not experience to make sure she doesn’t have to.

Leigh’s about ten times more dedicated to doing the right thing than he’ll ever be in twenty
lifetimes.

She’s going to try to bring him back to his team. She’s going to make him want to.

“Shit.”

Knowing about it ahead of time doesn’t make him any better prepared.
 Chapter Ten
Chapter Summary

Tony ushers her farther into the room and pinches the bridge of his nose. “All right,
here’s what I’m going to do. FRIDAY, transfer the bonus to Chuck’s account anyway,
and you,” he says, dragging her over to the couch, “Sit. Stay.”

“You want me to just sit here and wait for you to come back to-- okay, I get it, I’ll
stay,” Leigh says, pulling the mass of her hair onto her shoulder and starting to finger-
comb it back into submission. “The thirty percent is…”

Tony’s already crossing back toward the elevator. “A concession to the fact that I will
neither be mentally nor in some ways physically ‘present’ at the meeting, all
observable evidence to the contrary.”

Chapter Notes

Here's Leigh's first PoV chapter. It's a DOOZY.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Part II: The Price

Chapter Ten

Leigh wakes up the next morning feeling like she’d left some really important mental papers
pinned to a public billboard. Even though she knows it is important to get Rhodey’s help finding at
least some of the former Avengers, the fact that she told him about her plan makes her nervous.

She’s still in her nightgown when she sits down to check her email, and after reading the third one,
she feels like she’s covered in miles of goosebumps.

It’s a list of contact information, from Lt. Colonel James Rhodes, USAF. Next to each is a blurb,
something personal, something he says he hopes will help. Leigh looks at the list and thinks about
how these people used to fight alongside Tony; each of them is a fully-fleshed out person, just like
Tony has become to her, now that she knows him as more than Iron Man. It seems unreal that she
would be trusted with this knowledge, even more unbelievable that she’ll maybe get to meet some
of them someday.

Leigh thinks about the list as she pins up her hair, dressing in a swingy little yellow skirt, matching
form-fitting top, and white lace bolero. Rhodey’s list says that the charity Captain America works
with nowadays has recently rented a building in the city. She puts on her shoes, grabs her purse,
takes a screenshot of the email with the address to that building, and heads out of the tower. It’s a
bit of a walk, but it’s a nice morning.

Five minutes from the tower, Leigh gets a text message.

Tony: Do not tell me you’re going to that terrible bagel place, please

She’s glad she has a Rule about not checking her phone in the middle of the street, because she
would have stopped dead no matter where she read this one.

Leigh: …do you have a GPS tracker on me somewhere?!

Tony: No

Tony: I can see how that would be something I would DO, but no

Tony: Chuck saw you leaving as he came in

Leigh: On a Saturday? Let the man have a social life, Tony

Tony: Rude.

Leigh has to stop in front of a dress shop, lean up against the brick facade, and just let herself grin
for a while. The man really ought to be regulated, if for no other reason than her inability to focus
on anything. He’s unbelievably handsome, knows it, witty as all fuck, and smarter than should be
allowed. She can’t believe how much he has upended her life, how much she’s happy about that
upheaval.

The warm July sun heats her face while the hot brick sinks through the clothes at her back, and still
Leigh shivers, thinking about kissing him.

She’s always been attracted to confidence, which almost makes Tony her dealer, given how much
she really loves how justified his sense of his own power is. He’d joked about Stockholm
Syndrome, but Leigh was already halfway gone when he’d pulled his bunker down on top of them.
Not enough to have prevented herself from saying the words she’d practiced in her self-righteous
sadness beforehand, but enough to secretly cherish the time alone with him.

Her whole family had gone on a vacation to California when her youngest sister graduated high
school. During that trip, they’d visited a winery and attended a tasting. It wasn’t really her thing,
but one thing Leigh never forgot was the unique experience of striking up a conversation with one
of the employees. They’d spoken about the way it’s possible to taste the various flavors in wines,
and he’d offered her a chance to try one that had no preservatives, a small batch, expensive offering
not usually brought out for tourists.

The difference between the wines was striking-- so much so that Leigh had foregone all wine for
nearly a year afterwards, unable to stop noticing their strong chemical-y taste. Leigh thinks of Tony
as the small batch, refined wine, as compared to the celebrity egos he’s surrounded by, in his
wealthy circles. So many of those other people rely on falsity as a stand-in for their sources of
confidence, but Tony is the real deal. And Leigh’s ridiculously, stupidly, obviously in love with
him, so much so that she hid in her rooms, trying to figure out how to function without permanent
hearts in her eyes.

Leigh loves Tony with an award-winning winery’s diverse bouquet, appreciating not just his
intimidating intelligence and innovative spirit, but his vulnerability, his caustic self-deprecation,
smart-assed humor, and, oh yes, his confidence. Their time in his barrel-bunker equipped her heart
with all the knowledge needed to be completely ruined for anyone else. And all of that had
happened before he’d touched her!

Tony Stark may no longer have a magnet embedded in his chest, but as far as Leigh’s concerned,
his magnetism is entirely intact.

Leigh reminds herself that Tony is the reason why she’s about to show up at a building that might
not even be open yet, seeking a teammate that he deliberately drove away out of grief and trauma.
This thought gets her moving again, and she gets to the building right about when her feet start to
hurt.

It’s open. Leigh walks in and notes the makeshift quality of everything in the lobby-- storebought
pegboard with a few important notes on it, folding table and chairs in the ‘reception’ area, packing
boxes piled in the far corner.

“Can I help you?” the fresh-faced young man at the table asks.

“Yes. Here’s the thing--” Leigh takes a deep breath, then shifts into business mode. It’s easier.
“This is probably unconventional. I’m not even sure what you do here, I’d just like to help Captain
America.”

“You would be surprised how many volunteers we get saying the exact same thing,” he tells her.

The building is destined to be a soup kitchen. Leigh finds herself signing up for the very first day of
operation, next week. They tell her to get a hair net, and Leigh laughs-- those almost never fit the
amount of hair she has. She’ll have to come up with something.

***

Dear Ms. Romanoff,

Lt. Colonel James Rhodes gave me your email address. I’m writing to you because

Dear Ms. Romanoff,

You don’t know me, but I’m friends with a few people you know, one of whom gave me
this email address. I’m reaching out to you because

Dear Ms. Romanoff,

My name is Leigh Balci. You may have seen me on the news recently thanks to one of
your former teammates, who took it upon himself to lock the two of us inside one of his
inventions for two full days.

I feel like you’re one of the few people who can understand the experience of being
 frustrated with, yet still liking this guy at the same time. I expect that his worst
instincts after your fight with Thanos contributed to the distance between you, but I felt
compelled to reach out.

‘Favors’ are reciprocal, and I’m aware that right now I don’t have anything to offer
you but a small chance at reconciliation. I’m asking you to meet with me as a favor of
sorts, with the hopes that I’ll be able to do something for you in exchange, sometime in
the future.

Tony doesn’t know I’ve done this.

I simply want to understand what he’s lost, how he lost it, and if there’s a chance to
come back from that.

Thank you for your time,

Leigh Balci

***

Tony: Come by the lab for lunch? Chuck brought an extra sandwich and I’m watching my figure

Leigh: You told him to buy me a sandwich, didn’t you?

Tony: I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. Hello? Hello? If you hear me, meet me at the lab at 12 PM

***

Leigh knows where Tony’s lab is because it’s next door to the office he set up for her. She’s never
gone in, though. She told herself that it was because she didn’t want to break anything in there, but
the truth is, Leigh’s pretty sure that once she sees Tony in his element working on something
mechanical, she’ll just up and tell him how she feels. Maybe it would go great, but if it didn’t,
she’s still entirely at his… if not mercy, then at least his good graces. They’re attracted to each
other, that much is obvious, but Leigh doesn’t want to be the only one invested.

A naughty part of her doesn’t hesitate to point out that at least she knows they’re physically
compatible. Not kissing him when they were locked up in that bunker was one of the hardest things
she’d ever (not) done.

There’s a familiar-looking keypad outside Tony’s locked lab, and on a whim, Leigh rests her hand
on it.

The door opens.

Snatching her hand back, Leigh retreats a few feet until the door shuts. Surely that was a mistake?
Will FRIDAY tell Tony she’d tried to hack into his lab somehow? The door opens again, and
Chuck pokes his head out.

“Was that you?”

“I think FRIDAY got overzealous there,” Leigh says. It’s a good explanation. She’s convinced
herself, and Chuck nods thoughtfully, standing back to let her come in.

“Avocado roasted chicken breast?” he offers.

“Always,” Leigh says, grinning. “Though it’s a bit intimidating to know that you guys can just scan
my grocery spending habits and extrapolate my favorite sandwich, especially in so short a time.”

“Whose favorite sandwich? They stuck an extra in the bag,” Tony says, coming out of a side room
rolling up the sleeve of the shirt he was wearing underneath a Black Sabbath printed tee. “Hey,
look, you didn’t combust or turn into a frog by coming in here.” He narrows his eyes at her and
angles his head to the side. “Weird.”

“Yeah, how dare I not waltz into Tony Stark’s private lab like I have a right to,” Leigh says lightly.
“Imagine waiting to be asked to visit! So weird.”

“Never know where you might belong ‘till you try it, Firebrand.” Tony unwraps his sandwich and
takes a challengingly large bite out of it, holding eye contact with her the whole time. She rolls her
eyes at him, and he does his own ostentatious eye-rolling in a performative display of enjoying his
sandwich.

“Has someone invented the anti-meeting yet? A gathering you can schedule yourself not to
attend?” Chuck says, reaching over to snag his wrapped sandwich from the bag.

“If anyone did, it’d be you, Chuckie boy. Go on, skedaddle.” Tony jerks up his chin in a type of
respectful farewell. “Thanks for setting up the thing.”

“It’s your money, sir, I just move it around for you.” Chuck walks over to the door, turns around,
and clicks his heels together with a loud clack, bowing his head sardonically at the same time.
Then he leaves, whistling.

“I think he mounts a little metal thing on both shoes to make that louder,” Tony says. “Sit down
wherever,” Tony says, taking another huge bite and moving over to a raised worktable to examine
an upside-down Iron Man helmet.

Leigh looks around, but the only place with a chair is at a desk full of precarious piles of papers
and machine parts of all shapes and sizes. The chair has a crisp red dress shirt hanging over the
back of it, and Leigh walks over and runs her fingers along the collar. It’s still warm, ramping up
her low-level awareness of him to high-level, instead.

“You can sit there if you want,” Tony says from across the room. Leigh jumps, looks up to see if
he caught her fondling his shirt like a lovesick teenager, but he’s focused on the wires under his
hands.

“Is there sauce on your sandwich?” she asks.

“I don’t think even an AI would be able to predict you,” Tony says, shooting a confused, indulgent
smile over at her. “No sauce.” When she nods in approval, he angles his head, obviously
employing his powers of observation to try to figure her out. Leigh can see when it hits him, her
heart throwing off a silent solar flare in response to the pleased, almost self-satisfied expression on
his face.

“That was about not contaminating the wires, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I have no idea how you make ‘maternal’ sexy, but I’m not complaining,” Tony tells her.

Scheduled combustion happening as expected! Leigh thinks to herself wryly.

She leaves the desk area and scans the room, seeing a child-sized stool that is probably there to
help him sit and work on something low to the ground. Leigh walks over to it but immediately
recognizes that, with a skirt like hers, she’d be gawky and indecent if she sat on it. With a shrug,
she picks it up, goes to grab her sandwich, coming over to the other side of Tony’s worktable. After
taking a bite, she sets her sandwich down on the stool, leaning with her elbows on the table to
watch him.

Tony does an actual double take, looking over at her. He even leans all the way over, as if
checking the position of her skirt.

“Was there something?” she asks, mentally blushing at her coy tone that seems to have come out of
nowhere.

“Nope,” he says, suddenly hyperfocused on the wiring. Leigh eats her sandwich slowly and
watches him for a good fifteen minutes. It isn’t a surprise that she finds him attractive even when
he’s working, but it’s different than she pictured. Tony’s whole body is focused on what he’s
doing, but he’s still animated, never still. His gaze is riveted to his task, but his body circles it,
head moving, knees bending to give him a better viewing angle, arm muscles tensing before they
release.

He’s also constantly commenting, and none of it to her-- praising, complaining, troubleshooting.
Leigh’s face flames as she eats the last bite of her sandwich, because she can’t help extrapolating
how he is now, with this task, with what he might be like at other, more intimate times.

“Better than homemade?” Tony asks her.

She offers him a crooked smile. “Sandwiches are always better when you’re not the one who has to
make them.”

“Among other things,” Tony says without looking away from the helmet he’s working on.

Leigh kind of wishes that she was one of the women she knows he’s been linked to in the past, the
kind of woman who would walk up behind him, slide her hand down the front of his pants, and ask
him if that’s an invitation. Suddenly she’s far too hot, and he’ll know why, and it’ll be pathetic,
how eager for his attention, affection, and approval she is. To cover herself, she starts pulling pins
from her hair, setting them in a little neat pile on the worktable. The twist she’d put it in is too
tight, its weight is pulling too hard, she needs to free herself before she does something rash.

Suddenly, Tony reaches across the table with a low plastic tray.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, not looking at him. “It’s just all tangled up, I need to--”

“Not complaining,” he says in a voice just this side of gruff.

Minutes later she’s nearly finished pulling them all out, and Leigh catches a glimpse of Tony
simply standing at the table, both hands gripping the edge, watching her. His gaze is intense,
almost angry, and her hands pause, just like she’d done in the bunker.

“Please,” Tony says.

“Please stop or please go on?” Leigh asks, unsure.

Tony pushes off of the table and comes around it, inches away from her, his eyes tracing her face
and her hair. “I don’t think you understand how many times I have pictured watching you take
down your hair in front of me, and none of them were in my lab,” he groans. “I’m not cursed with
a lack of imagination, so can I just--” and he reaches up, skating his hand across the disheveled,
mostly disassembled mass of her hair.

“Oh,” Leigh breathes, completely overcome. Her body feels heavy, like the weight of his words
have sunk into her skin, sparking the scientifically documented chemical reaction of flames,
unregulated heat, when they interact. “Yes.” She takes Tony’s hand in hers and guides his hand to
the next pin. He pulls it out slowly and gently, but nothing about the look in his eyes is gentle.
Leigh thinks that just maybe, the same runaway reaction that singes her veins might be blazing in
him, too.

With each pin, Tony drifts closer, until finally, he throws the last one and rushes to sink both hands
in the loose waves with a sound of deep satisfaction. He snags his fingers in the tangles, sliding and
tugging. Leigh’s caught at his chest, one hand resting on the table, the other clenched in a fist at
her side, trying not to grab at him and distract from the moment.

Tony’s height puts his lips at her hairline, hers near his neck, and Leigh’s rapidly losing her self-
control. She can smell him and feel his charge, all sweat and ozone, like he’s integrated his suit
with his body to the point where he’s electrified.

She breaks first. Tony’s hands tighten on her hair and Leigh’s left hand slips on the table, spilling
the pins. The sound prompts Leigh to clutch at Tony’s back and press her lips to his pulse point as
if she’ll die if she doesn’t.

“Yes,” Tony groans, and she can taste the sound of it, through his throat. He pulls one hand free of
her hair and the feeling of yanking desperation is fuel to the well-banked fire in her gut. He kisses
his way down her cheek to her mouth, his free hand dragging her hips right against his, holding her
there like he’d done on the floor.

Instead of a whirlwind, as she would have expected, Tony kisses her gently, despite the iron grip he
has on her hair and her hips. He captures her lips as if it’s their first meeting, angling his head and
increasing the pressure with each subsequent kiss. It’s like he’s drawing out her anticipation, and
by the time he nudges her mouth open for him, she’s shaking, needing it. Leigh kind of loves the
way Tony gives up on the slow build once she opens up to him. It’s like he likes to build a solid
foundation for what he wants, but once he has confirmation of its structure, he goes for passion
instead of perseverance.

Leigh gives herself over to him as Tony kisses her like he’s desperate for the touch of her tongue
and the taste of her little moans that he prompts when he combines the ungentle tug on her hair
with the blatant grind of his hips against her. She responds as best she can, arching up against him,
clutching his shirt, letting her hand drift down to his waist and burning a path for her fingers along
the bare strip of skin she finds there.

Tony starts to trail kisses down her neck. “Rapidly starting to devalue anything on a flat surface in
here,” he confesses in a low voice. “Want to shove everything onto the floor and make excellent
use of the empty space.”

She can’t see his face, but the huskiness in his tone is speaking to her in purely physical ways. Still,
Leigh knows that the room is full of things that are both irreplaceable and expensive.

“You’ll value them more if I made you pick up everything before you could touch me again,”
Leigh tells him.

Now Tony lifts his head and looks her right in the eyes. She’s pinned in place; he wants her, she
can see it, hopes he can see the same from her.
“Okay.” He kisses her temple and slowly pulls his hand free of her hair. Then, he grabs her right
hand, making an unbearably smug expression as he presses his thumb on the ‘Tony’ they both
know is there, and starts walking toward the lab door.

“Where-- Tony?”

“Trust me.”

“Always, but--”

He stops and turns, only a foot away from the lab door, head angled, curious, pleased. “No
hesitation.”

Leigh shakes her head, confused. “No reason to hesitate.”

Tony’s face scrunches into a brief frustrated expression before he explains. “I am going to hate
myself in the shower later, but-- those two weeks, they weren’t hesitation?”

Leigh can see what he needs, and she’s happy to give it to him right now. She’s probably lust-
giddy, but whatever.

“They were in no way hesitation. In fact, if anything, they were trying to give you leeway to
hesitate. Shit, we’ve said the word too much, it’s lost all meaning.” Leigh rubs her forehead with
two fingers and tries to focus. “I’m romance novel-levels of crazy about you, Tony. It’s
embarrassing.” She doesn’t let herself look at him.

“Erotic romance novels?”

Leigh’s shoulders rise up and she yanks her hand free so she can use both of them to cover her face.
It’s a classic Tony response, but it also completely deflects from the part where she handed him her
heart on as rich a platter as she can afford, knowing he can buy the top of the line without even
asking the price.

“Look at me, Leigh.”

It’s coming, she’s sure of it. The let-down. Leigh lowers her hands but tips her head down, letting
her hair slide forward, as much armor as she’s got, in the moment. Tony’s standing where he was
before, one hand in his pocket, the other jittering beside him.

“Me too.”

The two words strike her like heat-seeking grenades; where they hit she’s dizzy, delighted,
disbelieving. Tony can tell. He walks toward her, eyes locked to hers despite the vulnerability in
them.

“Han saying ‘I know’ so Leia doesn’t hear it as a goodbye levels of crazy about you. Superman
going back in time to save Lois Lane levels of crazy about you.” His eyes are burning with
intensity, they’re greedy, if an expression could be thought of as that-- Tony’s manic, like this kind
of truth telling is a dark art that consumes its practitioners.

“Did you just out-Solo Han Solo with that?” Leigh asks, coming up to him but stopping inches
away. The impact of his words are still sizzling under her skin. Kid Leigh had the world’s biggest
crush on Han Solo. Cocky confidence, yes. Clever competence, YES. Relentlessly cool but
vulnerable, solid core of decency despite not always being the best of men-- “Oh, my god,” Leigh
says, slamming a hand over her mouth.
“What?” Tony asks, reaching out as if drawn by the Force to her hair. He strokes it with the back of
his hand, searching her eyes for an explanation.

“I’m in love with Han Solo.”

Tony’s lips twist in an adorable mix of delight and annoyance. “You know Iron Man is an actual,
living superhero, right?” Leigh lifts her hand to slide her fingers through his hair. He hums for a
second or two, his eyes shut. “Come make out with me in the penthouse.”

“You mean the elevator,” Leigh corrects him. “Unless we take separate ones, because…” She lets
out a ragged breath.

“I accept,” Tony says. Leigh expects he’ll take her hand and drag her toward the door, but instead,
Tony picks her up, bridal-style.

“What--” she starts to say, but he kisses her quiet.

“Multitasking,” Tony tells her. “FRIDAY, open the doors to the lab and elevator, then take it up
top.”

Being able to feel his strength in this particular way is like an aphrodisiac (not that she needed one,
like, at all), and that’s before taking into account that her skirt is so short that his hand is basically
on her bare thighs. Leigh watches his face as he walks into the elevator. She’s waiting for him to
realize, hoping she’ll see the effect that knowledge will have on him. Because he’s Tony, he
notices.

“What?” he asks, nosing a hot caress into her hairline.

“Boss, I’m compelled to remind you of the meeting you have at 1 PM today. That’s in fifteen
minutes.”

“Reschedule it. What?” The second word is to Leigh, but the answer is given by FRIDAY.

“As much as Mr. Fisher would appreciate it if I didn’t remind you about this, you have promised
him a 30% bonus on current salary if you skip out on this meeting. It’s already been rescheduled
twice.”

“Thirty percent!” Leigh gasps.

“It goes up for each reschedule. There are only a few clients that qualify,” Tony sighs. “The
brilliant little shit invests it and makes even more. Wouldn’t bother me except that the less he relies
on his actual salary, the less he’s intimidated by me as a boss.”

“There’s a solution for that, you know,” Leigh says, kissing his jawline. The fact that she can, that
he might want her to… it almost affects her as much as the physical contact itself. “You could, I
don’t know, attend them.”

“Put your arms around my neck.” She does, and Tony shifts her, slides her down his body to stand
stretched across him. Her skirt does not slide down from the gravity. Leigh can see him looking
down at her ass, and she wiggles just a little to get the skirt to cooperate.

“Yeah. Fuck the meeting,” Tony says, turning their bodies to forcefully crowd her up against the
wall of the elevator, latching his mouth onto hers in a fierce, needy kiss. His hands trail down the
sides of her body, thumbs curving in to press up under her breasts. His right hand skates up over her
nipple and then back down to her hip, grabbing handfuls of the skirt until he can reach down to
grab her ass, nothing between them but the fabric of her panties. “Lace,” he groans into her mouth.

“Tony,” Leigh murmurs, pulling her head back with miserable reluctance. “Thirty percent of what
Chuck makes--”

Tony cuts her off with another brutal kiss, dipping them both down to catch her leg and hook it
around his hip. “If you don’t stop pushing I’ll give you both the money, and you can stress over
the implications of that,” he says, his words muffled as he kisses down her neck. “You are so
infuriating and gorgeous when you stress out about my money,” Tony adds right in her ear, breath
hot, lips brushing fire with every word.

The elevator door opens to the loudest ding Leigh’s ever heard in her entire time living in the
tower.

“FRIDAY, I did not design you to cockblock me,” Tony says, dropping Leigh’s leg to the floor
and his head to her shoulder.

“Go, it’s not like I live all that far away,” Leigh encourages him.

“You think I’ll be able to focus in that meeting?” Tony asks as she takes his hand and pulls him out
of the elevator.

“Do you ever focus in meetings?”

Tony ushers her farther into the room and pinches the bridge of his nose. “All right, here’s what
I’m going to do. FRIDAY, transfer the bonus to Chuck’s account anyway, and you,” he says,
dragging her over to the couch, “Sit. Stay.”

“You want me to just sit here and wait for you to come back to-- okay, I get it, I’ll stay,” Leigh
says, pulling the mass of her hair onto her shoulder and starting to finger-comb it back into
submission. “The thirty percent is…”

Tony’s already crossing back toward the elevator. “A concession to the fact that I will neither be
mentally nor in some ways physically ‘present’ at the meeting, all observable evidence to the
contrary.”

“Am I allowed to do anything?”

“Other than sit there and think about me the whole time?” Tony asks, backing all the way into the
elevator to lean on the far wall.

Leigh climbs up to kneel on the couch, leaning on the back of it, knowing that this shoves her
breasts up enticingly. “I do that pretty constantly anyway.”

The sound of Tony’s head hitting the wall is the only thing she hears before the doors close.

***

Leigh sits on Tony’s couch in Tony’s penthouse apartment and closes her eyes, drunk on the last
half hour. Suddenly she sits up, realizing she’d intended to call the lab that Dr. Banner had
contracted space from, hoping to get through to him. Her phone is in her purse at her apartment,
since she knows if she needs to use a phone while she’s in the tower, she can ask FRIDAY. Leigh
wonders, though, if she can use FRIDAY to call the lab now. The listed hours are until 2 PM on
Saturdays, and they’re closed on Monday.
“FRIDAY, are you able to access the number for Col-Lab in Georgia? Where Dr. Banner works?”

“Yes, I have the number, Miss Balci.”

“Could you call it for me? Is the call quality good enough on the room speaker?”

“I can boost the quality if you don’t move around during the call. Calling Col-Lab, Georgia.”

The ringing sound clicks to an automated answering system, and Leigh freaks out a little bit until
she realizes that FRIDAY can probably input the proper numbers if she says them aloud. This
works, and soon she’s faced with Banner’s voicemail message.

“You’ve reached the inbox for Dr. Bruce Banner. These messages are received and
screened by a secretary, and the pertinent information shared. He is unavailable for
all press and publicity requests. Those who are attempting to reach him for valid
academic, research, and personal reasons may leave a message after the tone.”

Leigh takes a deep breath and starts her message when the tone sounds. She hopes to hell that this
doesn’t backfire-- she’d called and heard the message that morning, but hadn’t decided what to say
yet. After thinking about it all morning, she has it down.

“Hello, I am calling on behalf of Leigh Balci at Charriott Design. Our records indicate that Dr.
Banner called the company some months ago, seeking information about some kind of protective
building. The notes here are unclear, and unfortunately the architect that he spoke with is no longer
with us. We’re reaching out both as a courtesy, and because some of the materials that would be
suitable for such a building have been purchased in excess for a separate project, and may be
available at a reduced price. Balci can be reached at this number--”

Leigh gives her own phone number, knowing that, as often happens, the secretary who listens to
the message will have no idea that the person leaving the message is the same ‘Lee’ who is
mentioned as a contact.

“I took the liberty of hanging up at the appropriate time, Miss Balci.”

“Thanks, FRIDAY.” Leigh wants to ask her to encrypt the message, but she doesn’t. The guilt she
feels about going over Tony’s head is still there, and while she doesn’t hope he’ll listen to the
message and ask her what the hell she’s doing, she thinks that might be less actively deceptive than
locking those few moments away.

As for lying to Banner’s secretary, she hopes that he’ll be curious enough to follow up. If not,
she’ll try something else. He’s the most secretive and private, Rhodey had said, but he was also
one of the ones closest to Tony, so he might be the most willing to forgive her deception.

Worst case scenario, once she hopefully reached some of the rest of the team, she’ll be able to try
again.

For now, Leigh slips off her shoes and tucks them under the couch, then she lies down on her back,
spreads her hair out on the cushion behind her, pulling her skirt as far down as it’ll go, crosses her
ankles, and closes her eyes.

‘Me, too.’
 It would almost be too wonderful to be believed if she hadn’t seen the look in his eyes that told her
it’s absolutely real. She shivers, thinking about his expression when he sees her all laid out for him.

Just the thought makes her curl her toes in anticipation.

Chapter End Notes

On (post-posting) reread, this is REALLY Tony centric in her mind, but hopefully you
all trust me that she's not always like that, it's just a very Tony-centric day...

It’s basically catching Leigh up to where Tony is, in one chapter instead of 9.
 Chapter Eleven
Chapter Summary

Leigh’s been on the couch for at least a half hour, her arousal ramping up in
anticipation. Every so often she slides up one knee and presses her thighs together.
About ten minutes ago she put her hands over her head, on top of her hair, to stop
herself from smoothing her hand across her stomach and down, to ease some of that
ache.

The small sound of the elevator dinging feels like a *reward.*

Chapter Notes

Welcome to Chapter 11 of Exile, the chapter that will FUCKING BANKRUPT YOU.

Legit, I don't even know, you guys. Enjoy 3200 words of sex scene followed by some
plot. Oh, and a third of that first scene doesn't even involve TOUCHING.

I just.

Yeah.

Chapter Eleven

Tony’s couch is ridiculously comfortable, even stretched out across it rather than sitting up as it’s
designed. Leigh hadn’t realized how much she’d been stopping herself from thinking about Tony
until she got this chance to do it without restrictions. Over the past weeks, she’d been telling herself
that she was lovesick, ridiculous, expecting too much, only to have that last belief (the other two
are still firmly established) blown away entirely by two words.

And honestly, weren’t they almost better than the other three? With ‘me too,’ your own agony was
over, after all. With ‘me too,’ you’re a team, there’s no uncertainty.

With ‘me too,’ Leigh’s even farther gone than she was before.

There was also ‘Fuck the meeting,’ those were three very welcome words too, despite not bearing
out. Honestly, though, the anticipation of Tony’s exhortation to wait for him is different from any
other sexual situation Leigh’s ever been involved in, and she’s here for it.

She can’t even credit herself for deliberately choosing the cute bra and panty set she’s got on.
They’re white lace, not the most comfortable that she owns, but outrageously, Tony’s people
washed her clothes during the transfer from her D.C. apartment over to NYC. She’s finally through
all of them (and that reminds her, she needs to ask FRIDAY about laundry after having checked her
apartment thoroughly and not finding any machines), meaning her ‘someday I aspire to be sexy’ set
is what she’s wearing today.

Leigh’s been on the couch for at least a half hour, her arousal ramping up in anticipation. Every so
often she slides up one knee and presses her thighs together. About ten minutes ago she put her
hands over her head, on top of her hair, to stop herself from smoothing her hand across her stomach
and down, to ease some of that ache.

The small sound of the elevator dinging feels like a reward.

“Oh my god, I’m going to catch fire, right here, right now,” Leigh whispers to herself. There’s no
way she can be more turned on, and yet she knows that as soon as he touches her, she will be. She
just knows. Leigh closes her eyes and tries to school her face to a neutral expression.

“I can’t even see you, but I know you’re there, and let me tell you, you are the only reason that
meeting was in any way worth it,” Tony says from across the room. Leigh grins. “You’re there,
right?” he adds.

Leigh slides up her right leg until her heel touches her ass, and then she lifts her leg up,
straightening it out and letting it fall back down out of sight. She hears Tony swear under his breath
and decides the movement was worth the fact that her flouncy skirt is probably not perfectly
arranged over her hips anymore.

“Can I hire you to make every single meeting worth it? Wait, no. That would make this dirty, and
that would be wrong.” Leigh can hear his (sarcastic, sexy) voice coming toward her, and she ducks
the fingers of one hand into her outspread hair to grab a handful, just to have something to hold
onto. Tony’s still talking, and she loves it. “Definitely not supposed to like dirty,” he’s saying. She
can hear the swish of fabric, and wonders if he had been wearing a tie or a suit jacket.

There’s a thump of something hitting the ground, and Leigh can only wonder what it was. Her hips
rock just a bit as she tries to adjust to the heat between her legs. She wonders whether she’ll be able
to tell when Tony is close enough to see her.

“I mean, if you are into that sort of thing, I suppose I can make the sacri-- fuck. ”

Leigh doesn’t wonder anymore.

“God, look at you breathing. It’s shaking your whole body,” Tony whispers. “That is painfully
hot.”

Leigh bites her lip.

“Fuck, you’re not going to talk to me, are you? Just like-- fuck. Did you turn your right wrist out so
I could see my name on you? You are everything right now. That outfit is the most innocent thing
I’ve ever seen you wear, and you’re still pure sex laid out like that.”

Tony’s voice is liquid metal cascading all over her, dipping down into her secret places and
lighting them up. Leigh can’t help her reaction, she tries to hold it in, but she can feel her nipples
tighten, her chest heave, and her hips arch as she listens to him praise her.

He’s walking around the couch, she can tell by the way his voice is moving. “Look, I know when
two people mean something to each other you’re supposed to do the wholesome stuff first, scatter
flower petals, or whatever, but I would really like to see how long you can stay quiet. Call it
penance for how this all started, hmm?” Tony says, his voice somehow both commanding and
pleading.
Leigh lets out a breath and somehow manages to nod.

“I bet you’ve been stretched out on my couch like that for at least half the time I was gone, haven’t
you?” Tony murmurs. She feels a brief weight on the cushion by her hips, but she doesn’t move
her head from its position, eyes closed, facing up. “Were you thinking about me that whole time?”
His voice is very near, and Leigh realizes he’s got to be kneeling beside the couch. Tony’s strong
as fuck, he wouldn’t need to steady himself on the couch. He did it for her, she thinks. To ramp her
up. “How wet do you think you are by now, do you think?” His lips are less than an inch from her
ear.

Leigh’s back arches up, her ass pressing into the couch cushion. Less than two hours ago she’d
been hoping he’d talk to her like one of his machines, and now she understands what that feels like.
Fuck, she wants to perform just like he asks her to. Her face flames at the very thought.

“Am I going to have to touch you to get any of those sexy noises?” Tony asks. His tone has a deep,
sensual amusement to it that makes her yearn to groan.

She absolutely will not, though.

Leigh wants to make him beg.

“Fuck I can practically hear your thoughts, you know that? They’re written on your face. Think
you’re more stubborn than me?”

Leigh turns her head to bury her grin in her right shoulder. Before she can move back the way she
was, she feels a heat around her left nipple. She can picture him, hair mussed from running his
hands through it during the meeting thinking about her, jacket tossed, tie loose, shirt unbuttoned,
kneeling beside the couch. His eyes would be dark with want, his body angled over her without
touching anything, core muscles tensing, mouth open to breathe heat over her nipple.

If it weren’t for his ego and her determination, she would have let out the most deep, agonized
moan right now. Instead, Leigh tosses her head back, holding her torso rigid.

When he touches her, it’ll be because he chooses to, not because she arches up into him, she
decides. Because yes, she thinks she’s more stubborn than he is. Tony might be Iron Man, but Balci
women are made of steel.

“How much do you like this shirt, Leigh?” Tony asks her next. Her shrug is as artful as a girl can
get when her veins are being slowly injected with whiskey from the cunt up. “Hold still,” he says,
and then she feels the hem of her shirt lift.

The absolute troll figured out how to pick it up without touching her at all, too. Tony’s probably
grinning, smug as heck.

Leigh sucks in a breath as her shirt jerks once. She imagines that he’s sliced it with some kind of
knife. It had never occurred to her that he was sexually imaginative, which seems like the most
naive thought she’s ever had in her entire life, from this vantage point.

“It’s a shame you’re so determined to keep your eyes shut, love, because this is probably going to
be hot, even if I say so myself,” Tony says. His voice is above her, and she can completely picture
him, one fist on either side of her tank top--

It only takes one mighty tear to rip the shirt up all the way to her neck. Leigh has to yank on her
own hair under her hands above her head to stop herself from doing anything more than tremble.
It’s the endearment that gives her the strength to hold it together-- Leigh’s face flames up again,
but all she can think to herself is that she wants to earn that ‘love,’ every bit as much as she wants
to fucking break him.

“I owe you a shirt, but looks like I won’t owe you a bra. Three cheers for front closure,” Tony says,
and the joyful, sardonic tone almost gets her to laugh out loud, something she never would have
expected. Damn him. “So, here we are, the first touch. I’m proud you’ve made it this far. I’m
proud I’ve made it this far,” Tony says conversationally. “But, where?”

Leigh sucks in a breath and holds completely still. She doesn’t even breathe. She’s not going to
help him.

“You’re a little minx,” he says, totally getting it. “Okay, you wanna play? Let’s play.”

He’s silent for thirty fucking seconds, she counts it out in her head, but then, shockingly, she feels
his warm palm on her knee.

Leigh bites her lip.

“Yeah, that’s right. Didn’t think that through, did you?” Tony says. He’s trash talking her, and it’s
the most sexy, ridiculous thing Leigh’s ever been involved in. She loves him so much it hurts.

Tony strokes up her leg in one smooth move, palm preceded by his fingers laid flat against her
begging skin. His fingertips are rough, and Leigh pictures them, meticulous, precise, working on
wiring, metal, silken skin. He’s moving slow. Every single part of Leigh is focused on that point of
contact as he gets closer and closer to her panties. Once on her thigh, Tony digs his fingertips in
just enough to catch under the thin band that holds the skimpy white lace in place.

There’s another yank on the material. He’s cut through it, too.

“I will buy you the sexiest red lace panties you’ve ever seen. They’ll wreck me, I promise,” Tony
whispers.

It’s hard to narrow your eyes when they’re screwed shut, but Leigh manages.

“Here, I’ll just--” and Tony sucks a kiss on her hip, right where her ruined panties were cut. His
lips are hot for the few seconds they’re on her, the few seconds before she arches her back so hard
she nearly sprains something, because that’s it, that’s the hottest thing ever, he hasn’t even
touched her anywhere important, but nothing could be better than that. Leigh feels like Tony’s just
welded himself to her heart, with that kiss.

Tony chuckles, but he sounds almost shaken. He’s accidentally lifted his hand, which means she’s
winning, too. “I’m convinced you made a noise there, it’s just only audible to small children and
dogs.”

There’s a period of silence during which Leigh seriously contemplates opening her eyes and telling
Tony to just take her, because tomorrow’s another day, and being generous is in her nature.

“I can smell you,” Tony says. There’s a different quality to his voice, and it’s somehow more
intense than it has been. It’s not playful anymore, it’s wanting, and even though Leigh didn’t think
there was any further for her to ramp, that tone has dragged her there. She feels her skirt being
lifted up, pooled across her stomach. “You know, that first day in the tower, after you kissed me, I
went up to the penthouse, got in the shower, and fantasised about touching you.”

Leigh can’t stop herself, she presses her thighs together, even though she knows he’s right there,
he’ll see.
“I pictured sliding my hand down the waistband of your skirt and panties-- they were lace. I
fucking love lace. I wouldn’t sacrifice these for anything less hot than this,” Tony tells her, tugging
on the remaining elastic of her white lace panties.

Leigh’s breathing hitches. She’s so wet, they’ll be sopping. Seconds later, he’s cut that last
obstacle. Adrenaline shoots through her, and in an instant, she feels vulnerable. Their sexy game is
one thing, but Tony Stark used to be the womanizer, even if he isn’t anymore, and he’s been with
so many beautiful women, experienced women. Who is she to even think she’s got any kind of
power over him?

“Yep. Single most erotic moment of my life, right here.”

Leigh opens her eyes and lifts her head up to glare at him in adoring disbelief. And, God, he looks
wrecked. He’s next to the couch, shirt undone just like she’d pictured, hair all fucked up, eyes dark.
Tony’s kneeling on his right knee, his left knee is up, and he’s leaning on it, looking up the length
of her body.

“You should believe me. Look at you. You haven’t asked me for anything. You never have. Out of
the two of us I genuinely can’t tell which is more turned on, and that’s saying something.” Tony
gestures to his waistband, which he has unzipped, the expensive material gapping around his
bulging boxer briefs. “Honestly, fuck holding out. I give. Ask me to touch you.”

Leigh knows she has a choice, here. Her instinct is to trust him.

She shifts her arms down from their position clasped over her head. Tony hadn’t explicitly told her
to leave them there, anyway. Her heart pounding, Leigh unfastens the front clasp of her lace bra
and reaches down to drag her skirt out of the way. Tony’s eyes are fixed on hers, hungry, admiring.
When her hand moves between her legs, though, his gaze shifts to watch. With every ounce of
courage she has, Leigh grabs the scrap of lace that used to be her panties and tugs them away,
lifting her hips so the soaked cloth will pull free.

Tony lets out a groan that prompts her to rock her hips, completely unconsciously. His hand flies
out and takes the white lace, and Leigh throws her head back and closes her eyes, because her hand
is wet, and so is she, and it’s not shameful, but it’s something. The last few minutes have been the
most intense, empowering experience of her life, and Tony’s still barely touched her.

“Hey,” Tony says, and she opens her eyes.

To her surprise he’s shifted forward, leaning over her. His left arm reaches over and grabs the back
of the couch, and with his right, Tony presses his thumb against his name on the arm she’s got
draped over her forehead.

“This is--” He looks down and swears, lightly, because he so clearly and obviously has forgotten
that she’d opened her bra. “Okay, that’s distracting,” he says, and it’s so him that Leigh laughs
silently. “Right. I was telling you something.” Tony’s expression shifts from amused to completely
serious. “Things you probably don’t know about me yet include the fact that I’m more than a little
possessive in bed. Here’s hoping you like that, because--”

Leigh’s already nodding, nodding, because she absolutely likes that. A lot.

Tony rests his head on her chest for one delicious second. “Excellent.”

When he lifts back up, Leigh reaches up and touches his face with her right hand. He grabs it with
his left and swirls his tongue on the Tony on her wrist. The heat and intimacy of it reminds Leigh
that they’ve been at this for at least twenty minutes and she wants him. She tries to pull his head
down to hers, and Tony’s there with her, leaning down and licking into her mouth like it’s his to
enjoy, and it totally is.

“So I gave in, but you won’t, will you? I told you not to make noise, and you’ll lie there and burst
into fucking flames for me, but you won’t make any noise?” Tony says between sucking, fierce
kisses. He sounds delighted and frustrated and sexy. Leigh is absolutely bursting into flames, and
for the first time in her entire life, she wants to be vocal. Next time, she promises herself.

She looks up at Tony, who has lifted his head to look down at her, and a tantalizing thought comes
to her.

Winning is one thing, but what about yielding? What if that’s exactly what this amazing man
needs?

Tony’s expression shifts, and he moves his body back, but not by much. He rests his left hand on
her stomach and one side of his mouth curves up at the way she immediately sucks in a breath.

Finally, Leigh thinks.

His gaze locked on hers, Tony slides his hand down, down, down, never pausing, his rough, warm
fingers sinking into her folds. Tony groans, the sound ripped from his chest, just about. Leigh
doesn’t even try to pretend she’s not affected. She arches her hips into his hand, her entire body
focused on where he’s touching her. The pleasure is unreal, particularly after such a wait. It takes
all her remaining self-control not to reward him with the moan that’s begging to tear free from her
own throat.

But Leigh has plans.

His gaze sharpens. “That’s all for me, isn’t it?”

Fuck, Leigh thinks. She nods.

Tony strokes her, confident and rough. She rocks her hips up, and Tony turns his body, resting his
right hand on her stomach, pressing. He’s working on her, and she feels a cry rise up in her throat.
If he’s going to exhort her, praise her, like he’d done in the lab, she’s not sure she’ll hold out for
what she wants to do.

“You’re going to come for me, just like I pictured while I was in the meeting, aren’t you?” Tony
asks. His voice is warm and raw.

Leigh reaches up and claws a hold on the top of the couch with her right hand, hooking her left
along the side of the cushion. Tony notices, chuckles, nods. Her whole world is centered on his
hand on her, and then he taps, just taps his thumb on her clit. Leigh digs in her heels and thrusts up
toward him, but Tony is strong, and he holds her down. She starts shaking. She’s not going to
make it, she’s going to moan. It’s building, just as surely as her orgasm.

Tony’s reaction to her orgasm is going to do it if nothing else does.

Then, he says what she’s been waiting for.

“You’re going to come for me, because you’re mine, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m yours,” Leigh gasps out, nearly sobbing with pleasure.
Tony’s reaction is immediate. His hands on her freeze for a split second, and then he’s standing,
hands scrabbling at his pants, his boxer briefs, shoving and yanking them down.

“Yes, yes, please, yes,” Leigh chants as he climbs onto her. Tony’s hand is rough and desperate on
her hip and then he thrusts home, actually shouting in satisfaction. He seems locked in that position
for a few precious seconds while Leigh admires the pained joy in his face, before Tony pulls her to
his chest and drops them both down onto the couch.

It’s like watching the creation of a whole new thing, to Leigh, and ‘bond’ isn’t quite enough of a
word for it. She buries her face in Tony’s neck, clutches his hip and his arm and shakes with the
joy of it, both physical and emotional.

“You are literally the death of me,” Tony kisses into her hairline.

“You asked,” Leigh teases, grinning.

“Not that I don’t enjoy your smile, but you owe me some noises,” he growls at her, darting his
hand between them toward where they’re joined. Leigh tenses up in expectation, and it must have
taken Tony by surprise, because he bites back a moan of his own at the way she tightened around
his cock.

“Oops,” Leigh whispers.

The sheer determination on Tony’s face after she says that is as sexy as it is intimidating.

“Look at me,” he commands. As soon as she leans back to better focus on his brown eyes, Tony
proceeds to take her apart like one of his suits, expertly and meticulously putting her back together
with the absolute knowledge of his mastery over her embedded in each swirl of his fingers.

Every time her eyelids close from the devastating pleasure of his touch and the thrust of his cock
inside her, he stops moving.

“Tony, I can’t--”

“You can. You will. Just focus on me. Anything that’s too much, you vocalize, you got it? Sing for
me.”

Leigh arches up against him, trying to speed his movements, but Tony’s inexorable.

“This is about you,” he murmurs, sinking into a kiss that’s complete sensory overload until she
understands he’s done it so she can close her eyes like she’d been begging to. Tony’s generous too,
and knowing that is both ruinous and revelatory.

It must have been exactly what she needed, too, because as soon as Tony leans back to look at her
again, Leigh looks into his eyes and it sends her.

“Fuck, just like that, yes, God, Leigh,” Tony groans, and he’s coming too. As soon as he can bear
to, he nuzzles into a kiss, almost like it’s a question. Leigh’s heart pangs-- could there be a person
who wouldn’t want to kiss him after that? But Tony’s hers just as she’s his, now, and anyone who
would waste that gift is to be pitied, anyway.

When Tony finally pulls up and away from her, it’s only far enough to sit with her legs across his
lap. Somehow Leigh’s not even self-conscious, but she is getting a little cold, so she pulls her hair
down from its mostly unsnarled position above her head, draping it across her breasts.
“That’s it,” Tony says. It’s a tone of utter conviction.

“What’s it?” Leigh asks, still boneless and deeply pleased.

“This is my favorite couch.”

***

Leigh wakes up on Sunday morning to her phone ringing. A quick glance at the clock tells her it’s
8 AM, not unheard of for phone calls, but still pretty early.

“Hello?” she says, hoping four rings isn’t too late for whoever is calling.

“Hello, my name is Dr. Bruce Banner, I’m calling for Mr. Balci?”

“...at eight on a Sunday?” Leigh blurts out.

“Frankly, Miss, I expected to leave a message. If you would like to take one--”

“You-- you don’t have to leave a message,” Leigh says, rubbing her eyes and sitting up in the bed,
against the headboard. She pulls her braid out from behind her so she can lean back more
comfortably. “This is Leigh Balci.”

There’s a period of silence as Banner takes in what she’s said. “I see. I suspect this is a common
misconception.”

He sounds unhappy, and Leigh winces.

“My purpose in returning the call is to tell you that on no uncertain terms do I intend to build
anything. I don’t know who contacted your company, but I can assure you that it was not me. I’d
like it if you could give me some information on that caller, as I was under the impression that
there were no problems here between myself and my colleagues.”

Leigh’s suddenly gripped by a powerful sense that she’s done something very wrong by lying to
this man. It didn’t occur to her that he would assume one of his coworkers had called, seeking to…
what? Contain him?

“Doctor Banner, please accept my sincere apology. I… No one called, sir. I do work as an
architect, but my purpose in contacting you was personal, not professional. I should have trusted
my instincts not to lie in that voicemail.” She draws her knees up against her chest in bed, holding
the phone to her ear with a trembling hand.

“Personal reasons. Is this to do with the Hulk?”

“No, sir. It’s--”

“Stop. Give me a minute, Miss Balci.”

Leigh sets the phone down beside her for a minute. “Fuck, I am such an idiot.”

“Miss?” Banner calls out from the phone. She grabs it, wondering if he’d heard her. Leigh had
meant to hit the mute button, but her distress has made her sloppy.

“I’m here.”

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re NOT going to tell me the reason you called. Instead,
you’re going to talk to me about something else. Anything else. Just talk to me. You have a
soothing voice, and I’m not going to call someone I actually LIKE at 8:15 on a Sunday morning.”

“I… okay,” Leigh says, incredulity bubbling up inside her. “I don’t know what--”

“What have you done in the past few months that would make a decent story, Miss Balci? Work
with me.”

He sounds… upset. This is Leigh’s fault, and this man used to be Tony’s friend, and instead of
reaching out and fixing things, she’s gone and fucked them up. Badly.

“All right. Again, I’m sorry. This past few months, well--” she laughs. “You’re in luck, I guess. I
have quite a story.”

“Go, then.”

“This past May I got a new client. Rich guy, remote property near a lake in West Virginia.”

“Slow down, I can’t smash you over the phone if this doesn’t work. You’re not in danger, okay?
We’re going for soothing, remember?”

Leigh feels like the worst person right now. She lets out a long, slow breath. “All right. So the
property is pretty remote, and after exchanging some friendly emails, I agreed that myself and the
client could camp out on-site to establish where he wanted the house to be situated. When I got
there--”

“Did that guy think you were Mr. Balci, too?” Banner interrupts.

“Yes. But I trusted him from the emails. You just get a sense, sometimes, whether someone would
treat you differently based on whether you have a female name. Is it unfair? Probably.”

“I wish I could say that academia and research is exempt from that.”

“Yeah, well,” Leigh smiles wryly, even though he can’t see it. “We do what we do. Anyway, I got
to the property first and decided to walk around the lake, looking at the perspectives toward where
I assumed the house would sit. After a little while I felt like I was being watched. I saw there was a
man hiding in the bushes, so I called my office and got out my gun.”

“There’s a twist,” Banner says. His voice doesn’t have the same weight behind it as it did after she
told him about her lie, and Leigh is grateful, for his sake.

“I advanced on the bushes and heard him speaking on the phone. He looked up and saw me,
pointed at himself, and said a name. It’s the name on my wrist.”

“Your client is your Soulmate? And here I thought I’d picked out the twist.”

“The thing is, Doctor-- I recognized him. He’s kind of a public figure. And I didn’t know what to
do, so I put the gun away and asked my coworker if by any chance she was on the phone with the
client. When she said yes, I told her to tell him I was recovering from laryngitis and could
reschedule if he wanted.”

“No way he fell for that.”

Leigh smiles. She can hear that smile in her voice as she responds to Banner, who seems invested
in the story. Again, Leigh notes that his voice sounds thinner than it had before. “Turns out this
man in particular thinks that soulmates are a bullshit consolation prize and likely hasn’t been
exposed to any of the structure society has created around it.”

“Like the idea that if someone adamantly refuses to speak to you, you might have spoken their
Words. Classic romance stuff. Unbelievable.”

The idea that the guy who turns into the HULK might indulge in the new genre of soulmate
romance is somehow not the strangest part of Leigh’s current conversation.

“So, what happened?”

“I feel compelled to ask if you’re feeling better?” Leigh says hesitantly. It feels just as deceptive to
slowly walk Banner to the end of this story as it did to lie to him in the first place.

“No backing out now. You made your bed, it’s time to lie in it, Miss Leigh Balci,” Banner says, his
voice full of amused chastisement.

“Fair enough,” Leigh says, letting her legs slide back down the bed now that she doesn’t feel as
defensive. “Two days of camping, I wrote everything down on a tablet computer. Then we went
our separate ways, communicating by email again.”

“You didn’t say a word to him? Impressive.”

“I’d decided to plan out what I’d say, eventually. It felt like an opportunity I shouldn’t let slip
away.” Leigh can hear the regret in her voice, assumes Banner will too.

“Plan it out? What kind of celebrity is this guy?”

“I saw him one time at the office before the day we broke ground, didn’t say anything,” Leigh says,
mostly ignoring the concern in Banner’s voice. He’d said Leigh’s voice was soothing, but his is
equally so. Bruce Banner seems like a compassionate guy, the kind of person she would value as a
friend. Leigh wonders whether he and Tony drifted apart, or if Tony pushed him away. “When he
saw me on site again, I chickened out. I didn’t want to say it anymore. But I didn’t know what to
say instead. It’s like he wasn’t that persona anymore, he was a real man, someone I could like. I
tried to avoid him, and he lost his temper. He pulled me away from the worksite, past those bushes
I told you about, beside the lake. He told me I was acting childish, and he demanded to know
why.”

Leigh stops, remembers the look in Tony’s eyes, his anger and confusion, the way he threw the
loss of her family in her face.

“How shitty was the phrase you said to him?”

Banner doesn’t sound upset, but he sounds unhappy. She knows she does, too. Her thoughts about
the words that are written on Tony’s body are complicated, and she hasn’t dealt with them yet, not
really.

“Pretty shitty, Dr. Banner. I said them, and I started to walk away, and that’s when he came up
behind me, threw his arms around me to stop me, and called down a contraption onto our heads.”

“Contraption?”

He sounds wary. Leigh doesn’t blame him.

“My soulmate’s something of an inventor.”

Banner sighs deeply, and Leigh hears a clicking sound. She recognizes it in the strangest, most
heartbreaking way-- it’s the sound of someone setting down a pair of glasses on a hard surface. Her
mother wore glasses, but the nosepiece never sat comfortably, so if she was on the phone for any
length of time with Leigh or any of her siblings, Miriam Balci would take them off and set them
down on the glass dining room table. The sound is unmistakable.

“What did you tell him, Leigh? What did you tell Tony?”

“How did you guess?” It’s a rhetorical question, and Banner is smart enough to recognize that.
“You don’t want to hear them. You really don’t. You fought Thanos too.”

“Let me guess: Tony’s invention was some kind of room constructed by joined metal walls?
Escape prevented by electromagnetism?”

Leigh’s stunned. “I--”

“That was originally created to contain the Hulk. I hope for your sake it wasn’t that one. How long
did he keep you in there with him? Are you all right? Do you need--”

“It was set to unlock after 48 hours. Honestly, it… wasn’t terrible. I don’t know why that magic
chose me for him, but… I can see the reciprocal.” Leigh says that last part in a voice barely
audible.

“Where are you now? Do… do you need help? Is he bothering you? Is that why you reached out?”

Leigh has a really strong sense that Bruce Banner might need a project, something to care about, a
cause to believe in. Failing that, he might just need a hug.

“I’m in the tower.”

“Are you free to leave if you wanted to? Did he force you to go back with him?”

Leigh tries to look at the situation as if she were Banner, and it’s easy to see how his concern could
be absolutely warranted. She has to walk a fine line, now, because the ability for her situation to
sound for all the world like that of an abuse victim is… surprisingly strong.

“I am. He didn’t force me, although if you do a google search of my name you’ll probably see
footage of us leaving the bunker thing he built around us. I’m at the tower mostly because there
were press camped out around both my home and my workplace, and the tower too, of course, but
as you probably know, the security there is a lot better.”

“Did you go out yesterday, by any chance, wearing yellow?”

“Shit are you kidding me?” Leigh says, high-pitched, freaked out. “I thought they were done,
they’re not clustered around anymore… shit. Did they follow me the whole way?” Leigh is
mentally kicking herself. She walked straight from Tony Stark’s tower to Captain America’s new
building, and took the press with her.

“So you’re reaching out to all of the Avengers?” Banner asks. There’s a change to his voice, but
it’s not an angry one. He does sound more distant, though.

“Something tells me I should have made nice with the Black Widow first, gotten her to teach me
some spy skills, before I tried to reach out to more of you,” Leigh says, groaning. “Yes, yes I am.
Tony doesn’t know, though he will if he ever googles my name, because I am a complete naive
idiot.”
“Well, judging by the pictures in this article, you’re at least a pretty, soothing-voiced, naive idiot,”
Banner says, in a voice too gentle for the shit she pulled on him today. “So all right, you’ve hooked
me. Why did you call, if it wasn’t on Tony’s behalf?”

“It is on his behalf, but my behalf first, I guess? Look, you learn a lot about someone when you’re
stuck in a room with them for forty-eight hours. My own story seems almost karmically opposed to
his-- probably why the press loves the story so damned much.”

“Yeah, I’m seeing that. Your whole family. I’m-- shit, what can I even say? I’m sorry, Leigh.”

“No, don’t. Don’t you fucking do that. Doing nothing should make you sorry. Trying? That made
you a hero,” Leigh says, her voice sharp.

“You speak to Tony with that mouth?” Banner says, but he doesn’t sound apologetic anymore.

“He probably loves it,” Leigh says.

“So you’re not-- He’s not keeping you there against your will? I was picturing the two of you at
odds, him asking you to live there so no one tries to use Tony Stark’s soulmate against him. I
figured you were reaching out to his old teammates in search of a reality check from a higher
power.”

“Not against my will at all. Soulmates might be bullshit but my feelings aren’t. And I can’t-- I
don’t-- He’s let slip how much he was messed up by his fight with Thanos. Tony told me point
blank that he drove you guys away. It’s like a second ARC reactor embedded in his chest, one with
spikes pointing outward. You can’t love someone this much and want to let that stand.”

Leigh’s managed to keep the tears from her voice but not her face.

“I have to tell you, Leigh, this is not what I expected when I dialed your number today.”

She laughs and sniffles at the same time. “Well you did ask for a distracting story.”

“I take full responsibility for my involvement, at this point,” Banner says, letting out a chuckle.
“All right. This is a lot to think about. I’ll be honest, I’d be very interested in meeting you, if for no
other reason than to see my friend’s name on your wrist and buy you a meal in consolation.”

“I’m accepting donations, just look for ‘Lost My Apartment and Almost Lost My Job, and All I Got
In Exchange Is Tony Stark’s Soulmark On My Wrist’ on GoFundMe,” Leigh laughs.

“It just so happens that I have business in New York next weekend, but this article I just read says
they saw black lettering on your leg. You should know that if you’re trying to trick me, it won’t
work out well for you,” Banner says gruffly.

“By any chance does the picture seem to have the word ‘press’ visible in any abbreviated form?”
Leigh asks, her tone light.

“E S S, yes.”

“I wrote ‘Fuck the Press’ in black magic marker on my leg so they’d catch it with their telephoto
when we moved from the bunker to the helicopter, two plus weeks ago. I’d take pictures of my
legs to show you they’re bare but I’m not sure I can trust you’re not actually soliciting for those
pictures, Doctor.”

Leigh bites her lip, her grin fading as the other line is silent for at least a full minute.
“Please tell me you like Thai food.”

“I’ll see you in a week, then? Is this a landline?” Leigh says, breathing out a sigh of relief.

“It’s my cell. I leave it off most working hours, just in case. Silent mode vibration can startle just as
easily as a ringtone.”

“I’ll wait to hear from you. It’s been nice to meet you over the phone, Dr. Banner.”

Leigh hangs up, holds her right wrist in the sunlight crossing her bed from the picture window, and
snaps a clear image of the word ‘Tony’ on her wrist. Then she makes a new contact in her phone,
names it ‘Dr. Banner, WHAT?!’ and sends along the photo.

After setting her phone down on the bed beside her, Leigh allows herself a long, luxurious stretch,
something she wasn’t able to do on the phone. That… had gone just about the best possible way
that could ever have been expected.
 Chapter Twelve
Chapter Summary

“Before I get into that, are you wearing a three piece suit? Do you dress *more fancy*
than Tony, sometimes?”

“Most days, no. The day after FRIDAY informs me that you’ve been inquiring about
the location of my office? Yes. I never get to put this shit on. Looks good, yeah?” His
blue eyes are sparkling with mirth.

Leigh really loves Chuck. He’s got a really quirky combination of enthusiastic
snobbery and genuine decency that is impossible not to find adorable.

Chapter Notes

So, you get the 1 2 3 punch today: some reckoning, some Chuck, and some... *cough*
forgiveness.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Twelve

She has dinner with Tony in her apartment on Sunday night. While she’s cooking, he tells her
about a breakthrough realization he’s had about the conductive metal he’s inventing. It has to do
with the malleability of the final product in a more limited form-- Tony thinks it might be able to be
used for prosthetics. This has some interesting applications for certain professions that are
generally considered very dangerous.

Leigh’s happy to listen, but after they start eating, Tony changes the subject and talks about Chuck,
other work issues, and a phone call he had with Rhodey. Honestly, he seems really distracted, so
halfway through the meal, she asks him what’s up.

Tony sets down his fork. Leigh thinks, ‘uh oh’ in her head, because he’s been gesturing with it to
talk since he picked it up.

“FRIDAY records everything that happens in common living spaces in the tower, in case you
didn’t know,” he tells her. Leigh nods. “I uh, watched yesterday’s.”

“Are you asking if I’m all right with your AI making a sex tape of us?” Leigh asks, a bit freaked
out.

“No, but that’s a very valid objection. Luckily I have access to the most secure encryption out
there.”
Leigh looks at Tony, notes that the lines of his jaw are tight, his posture stiff. This is clearly not
about that.

“I watched the whole video, from the minute I left.”

It’s about Banner. Leigh winces.

“That reaction, right there,” Tony says, pointing. She’s kind of glad it wasn’t with the fork. “I can’t
figure out if you did it in the penthouse because you wanted me to know --which, without talking to
me about it first, is kind of a dick move, and not like you-- or if you flat-out didn’t know it was
recorded, which I know isn’t true, because you managed to encrypt your entire fucking
conversation with Rhodey!”

He is obviously angry, but what stings the most is that he’s more hurt than anything else.

“I asked Rhodey about the Avengers, but I wasn’t trying to hide that,” she says. Tony’s face
darkens, and Leigh reaches out, not to grab him, and not to demand he touch her. It’s a hand slid
across the chasm she’d dug out between them, a bridge to understanding. Tony looks down at it,
his jaw chiseled with stubbornness. “I was hiding the way I asked. I said things I didn’t want you to
hear, because they’re unfair.”

“Unfair,” he says derisively, his head tilting in a sharp, jerky movement, his chin pulling in.

“Yes. Unfair.” Leigh leans her body toward him, possibly getting her blouse in her plate, but she
doesn’t care. This is her metaphorical set-down fork. “There are things about the Snap that are
fundamentally unequal. Being hurt and turning away from relationships happens even when the
source of that hurt isn’t an alien mass murderer, but when it’s the latter, those issues loom larger by
necessity.”

“Are you going to lecture me, Sandra Day, or are you going to explain what you were thinking in
regular English?”

Somehow the infinite amount she loves him increases. Even when he's kind of a jerk.

“My family died, Tony. You drove yours away.”

He falls backwards in his chair like it is a physical blow.

Leigh looks down and sees that the orange sauce from dinner has been wicked up into her shirt
collar in a way that’s probably irreversible. “Well, you asked,” she whispers. Louder, she adds,
“Be right back.”

She unbuttons the blouse as she walks, glad it isn’t the kind to pull over her head. There’s no way
she’s interested in washing her hair right now. Instead of grabbing a new shirt right away, she
walks into the bathroom and starts wetting the soiled fabric, catching a glimpse of her utilitarian
bra and her frowning face in the mirror. After she uses her fingers to rub in some soap, she leaves it
to soak.

Tony’s in her bedroom when she goes in to find another shirt. He’s standing on the raised step at
her window, his hands sunk into his pockets, shoulders drooping. There’s no way he doesn’t hear
Leigh walking in, but he doesn’t move, not even when she presses herself up against his back and
steals her arms around his chest. It’s similar to the position he held her in right after she’d said his
Words.

He only shifts a tiny bit, but it’s everything, because Tony rests his hands on hers. Leigh’s lower
than she normally would be, because of the step, and this feels more comforting, their slightly
different heights than normal.

The truth is, Tony has the high ground here. She’s the one who’s fucked up.

“It seems hypocritical to act like time has made anything better,” he sighs. She wonders if that’s
the reason he hasn’t tried to reconnect with his team.

“Time doesn’t make it better, Tony. Time makes it more distant and easier to look at. Like an
impressionist painting.”

Leigh can feel his slow, indrawn breath, and waits to feel it being released. Tony holds it so long
she moves to kiss his back, and only then does his chest start to let the air out.

Leigh says, “They were a part of your past, and I wanted to find out about them. At the time, it felt
more cruel to ask you than Rhodey, because it seemed like it was your choice to pull away.”

“Drive away.”

“Something tells me it was easier for you to be the pilot, there. Much easier than standing on the
tarmac and watching it happen because they wanted it to,” Leigh observes. She feels his body tense
underneath her and wonders if that’s because she scored a hit, or because he just wants her to stop
digging shards of glass out of his wound. “You don’t have to do anything, you know. I just want to
meet them.”

Tony laughs, and it’s not as bitter as it could be, but it’s not sweet, either. “Everything you care
about rapidly becomes important to me.”

Leigh’s laid out by that, right there. The thing is, it doesn’t sound like a compliment. She stands
there, warmed by him, and thinks about it.

“Do you want me to stop?” she offers, when she comes to a conclusion. It’s a world-shaking one,
really: Leigh can’t really make those decisions for herself anymore. Reaching out to the Avengers
affects him because he’s invested. In her.

Tony’s “No,” is deeply unhappy.

She throws an experimental rock into his contemplative pond, hoping for ripples. “What’s this
really about, Tony?”

Leigh longs to use an endearment, but none seem appropriate for the situation. Using anything
other than his name would make this about her, and it’s so, so obvious that Tony needs someone
who will focus on him right now.

He turns, and Leigh holds still, but Tony doesn’t step down. She slots into place at his chest
instead, and immediately, Tony’s hand drifts up to start pulling pins from her hair. Somehow it’s
not sexual at all, and the cosmic shift of that is so achingly sweet she nearly starts to cry.

Because he’s Tony, he drops each pin on the floor.

“I told you I was stabbed by Thanos,” Tony says. Leigh ‘Mmms’ into his chest. “It should have
killed me. It only didn’t because the thing I was fighting to prevent? Happened.” He pulls in
another breath, but instead of holding it so long this time, Tony lets it out with the next pin he
drops. “A colleague, one who was Snapped, he was guarding a stone. He put some kind of
enchantment on it, so Thanos couldn’t just take it. But when he saw that I’d been fatally wounded,
he gave up and gave it to Thanos.”

“He traded it for your life?” Leigh asks. She tries to keep any judgment from her voice, but that
question asked by someone who has personally lost twelve people will never not sound accusatory.

“Yes and no,” Tony says, reaching for another pin. “He had the ability to see possible futures. He
told me there was one where we would win.”

Leigh can feel the wave of goosebumps travel across her skin, knows he’ll feel them, but she can’t
stop them. Tony’s other hand, which had been smoothing slow, gentle circles along her bare upper
arm, pauses when they rise up underneath his fingers.

“Do you think he did it because it was one of the steps leading to that victory?” she whispers.
Another wave of goosebumps travel from her suggestion toward him.

“I wish I knew. It seems like, no, he gave it up for nothing. To save me, and doom the universe.”

Tony’s voice there is as bleak as she’s ever, ever heard it, and she finally understands that the
burden he’s carrying is monumental.

“Were you close?” Leigh asks gently. How utterly tragic, she thinks, if the only teammates that
Tony would have stayed close with were gone. The heavy weight of her hair is starting to hurt her
neck because he doesn’t know to spread out which pins he’s pulling loose, but she stays quiet.

Tony laughs. “Close? No. Not at all. He’d have gladly let me die, if not--” he stops as if he’s been
kneeling at the chopping block waiting for the axe, and it’s finally fallen.

They stand there while Tony processes what she said, and Leigh trembles at the idea that there
could have been anyone, alive or dead, who thought there was another possible outcome than the
one they experienced. His hands have stilled.

“There’s no coming back from what happened,” Tony says, but the hope he’d seeded in her heart
has grown a filter over her ears, somehow, because it doesn’t sound as bleak or absolute as it would
have, ten minutes ago.

“Finding a cure for cancer is one of the most present and discouraging wars humanity has ever
waged. There are multiple kinds of cancer, from multiple possible sources, and all of them react
differently, are prompted by different things, kill different people in different ways. Most of the
time, the breakthroughs are achieved by attrition, despite the brilliant minds who have set this as
their lifelong task,” Leigh says. She mostly wants to encourage herself, but knows (and not just
thanks to Dr. Bruce Banner) that her voice is soothing. “It’s probably one of the most discouraging
processes for researchers, because the longer it takes, the more people are lost. The distance
between when we started trying and now is one of the few times that feels more painful, not less.”

“Translation?”

“We’ve discovered and invented things that are life-saving and useful in the process. Similar to
when we went to the moon. Just because it’s hard and practically impossible, maybe actually
impossible, doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying,” Leigh says.

She has at least jarred him out of his immobility, because Tony reaches for another pin. He’s
swapped hands, so now his actions are acting to soothe the feeling of imminent collapse.

“So what are you saying in practical terms?”

“Because I’m always practical?” Leigh asks, teasing. Tony ‘Mm hmms’ and she loves the feel of it
against his chest. Usually (as if there’s a usually, and Leigh feels a prickle of delighted awareness
at the idea of a ‘usually’ when it comes to Tony Stark) she’s higher up, her lips at his shoulder, but
now Leigh’s against his heart. The architect in her loves this result of the decorative step. The
compulsively neat part of her finds it irritating, especially since it’s covered in the pins Tony’s
taken out of her hair. Leigh reaches up and takes out the last few swiftly, letting the mass fall and
untwist against her back.

“One of these days I’ll have you so far gone you won’t care what I break or how much money it
cost,” Tony promises her, sliding his fingers into her hair, predictable as the sunrise. “But yes,
you’re painfully practical. It shouldn’t be attractive.”

Leigh could lean into the subject change. She could unclasp her bra with very little effort, draw him
to her bed, and soothe him physically. But Tony doesn’t need that right now, and so she takes the
other path.

“In practical terms, we make a list.”

“A list.” Tony has the ability to make statements that sound like questions, but which also question
the sanity of the person who prompts the statement.

“Yes, a list. Of steps. To fixing it.” She’s beyond goosebumps now, into adrenaline, hope,
incredulity.

“Leigh, the first item on that list would be ‘invent time travel.’ That’s it, that’s the list.”

“Okay, that part’s impossible, sure, fine. Next list item.”

“Without the first one, there’s--”

“Tony, an alien teleported to Earth and snapped his fingers to remove half of life in the universe.
Maybe tomorrow, someone wakes up in a van down by the river and realizes the key to time travel.
If that happens, do you want to be behind on the other list items, or not?”

“How in the heck are you practical about this? Is that your superpower?” Tony asks, cupping her
face to tip it up toward him. “And how did you shrink?”

“You’re on a step. Must have been a bit out of it, yeah?”

He leans down and kisses her, and then angles his head. “And half naked! Okay, yes, I was out of
it.”

“Well, you told me you’re on the verge of something with your project, and I’m still waiting for
list items, so I’m going to put a shirt on,” Leigh says.

“Tease,” Tony complains.

“But not a mean tease,” she laughs. For him, she pulls out the one thing in her closet that’s red, one
of the few things from her sisters’ closets she’d brought from the farmhouse. The farmhouse is
large, and Leigh had spent her time after the Snap consolidating all of her lost family members’
items, ‘moving them in’ as if they were just temporarily gone. She’d made it into a hotel with a
host of missing guests, basically.

It seems appropriate of her to wear Lacey’s red shirt on a day she’s toying with the idea that they
might not be permanently gone.
“You have red clothes?” Tony asks as Leigh pulls it on. It’s a bit young for her, nipping in at the
waist with a flare out, the sleeves designed with layers and curls of fabric so they look like actual
roses.

“Yeah. Belonged to my youngest sister. You ran into the wrong Balci sister if you like lace, her
name is--” Leigh pauses, takes a breath, and continues. “Was Lacey.”

The look on Tony’s face when she makes the painful correction of tense is rough.

“We’d need someone capable of wearing the gauntlet,” he blurts out.

Leigh shakes her head, utterly lost.

“The stones, the things that gave him the power to Snap. They were mounted on a gauntlet. To
unSnap, someone has to be able to withstand the power of six Infinity Stones, and be able to keep
their mind clear enough to do it,” Tony says. He scrubs a hand through his hair. “Thor could
probably do it, he’s a god. Maybe the Hulk, but he’s not mentally there enough to use it.”

“Why do you need a time machine?” Leigh asks. “Is Thanos too strong with the gauntlet to take it
off of him and reverse it? I mean,” she hastens to say, “I assume that you all thought of this already,
I’m not trying to--”

“Thanos is dead and the stones have been destroyed.”

Leigh stands in the bedroom Tony gave her in his tower and stares at him, her heart sinking to the
sub basement.

“I didn’t realize it was that hopeless,” she whispers. Her sister’s shirt feels too tight on her, now.
Those fleeting minutes of hope she’d felt, the idea that Lacey might come bustling in with her pixie
cut dyed black and complain that Leigh’s ruined her shirt… they’d been bewitching.

“It’s not,” Tony says a smile on his face for the first time that evening. “That’s just one bullet
point.”

“So you’ve what? Done a 180?” Leigh asks, feeling a bit caught in his whiplash.

“No.” Tony rubs the back of his neck with his other hand crammed in his pocket. His eyes are lit
up, slightly manic. “It’s like your email, the one you didn’t mean to send. You spent a month doing
something for each person you lost.”

She nods, but still doesn’t understand the connection.

“So I’ll pick a bullet point, throw myself at the brick wall a bit. It’ll be cathartic.”

***

Leigh’s newest client is rapidly reaching ‘show me something worthwhile’ stage, so she buckles
down, locking herself away in her apartment that week to focus on design. When she gets a chance
to see Tony, usually at dinner or a visit after dinner, they gloss over the Avengers thing, and she
doesn’t know if that’s because he’s being all forgive and forget over it, or because he can tell now
isn’t a good time. Either way, it sits like an unwelcome visitor in the room with them, and Leigh
knows she’ll have to re-address it soon.

Mostly, she listens to Tony talk about the metal alloy and some of the things he’s started to model
with it, and he listens to her talk about the weird shit her new client keeps claiming he wants
designed for his house. Luckily for her it’s a standard plot size, but he keeps deflecting when
speaking about a site visit, despite the property being in the city. She suspects that Alden Marteau
has a love of the serial killer H. H. Holmes-- or at least, of his so-called ‘murder hotel.’

It’s taken a lot of effort on Leigh’s part not to suggest that the guy take his schtick back a few years
in time and set up around the Stark Expo. It’s no longer a year-round event that draws tourists to
Queens, similar to the World’s Fair that had drawn Holmes’ victims. But Marteau is fascinated
with hidden passages, the idea that he can have chutes instead of staircases, rooms with no
ventilation, etc. Luckily for Leigh, a lot of what he’s interested in happens to be illegal, but it’s still
essentially her job to pass that along, and it’s getting old.

By Friday, she’s certain that Tony’s preoccupation is standing between them, but she doesn’t know
exactly how to fix it.

So, she goes to Chuck.

“Wow, no one ever finds you in here, do they?” she says, when he answers the door, old-school
style, after she has to actually knock. There’s no keypad entry. “It’s because you know people like
me can charm FRIDAY, isn’t it?” She stands just inside the door and flat-out admires his aesthetic.
“Shit, I should be calling you Professor Fisher, look at this place! Does Sherlock Holmes actually
live here?”

Chuck is already seated at his mahogany desk, and he leans back in his ridiculously comfortable-
looking chair, putting his feet up. Leigh notices that there’s a subtle difference in color on the desk
under where he’s got his (those are absolutely Tom Ford shoes! Damn, Chuck) ankles crossed over
each other. The man’s protected his shoes and his desk for when he does this. Leigh’s impressed.

“I could probably convince you that Mr. Stark found out about my love of wood paneling and
bookshelves with built-in ladders, and did it for me without even being asked,” Chuck tells her, “--
but I won’t.” He leans his head to the side and says, “What can I do for you?”

“Before I get into that, are you wearing a three piece suit? Do you dress more fancy than Tony,
sometimes?”

“Most days, no. The day after FRIDAY informs me that you’ve been inquiring about the location
of my office? Yes. I never get to put this shit on. Looks good, yeah?” His blue eyes are sparkling
with mirth.

Leigh really loves Chuck. He’s got a really quirky combination of enthusiastic snobbery and
genuine decency that is impossible not to find adorable.

She sits down on the single chair he’s got facing his carved wooden desk, and sighs. “If you had
told me, I’d have dressed up too! But no, I was looking for you because I need some advice.”

“Please tell me this is about investments. Or scheduling.”

“It’s not romantic advice per se,” she tells him defensively. “Tony’s distant, and I need to pick out
what specifically to do, besides things that are obvious and won’t help in the long run, like having
you meet me in the penthouse, stealing his bathrobe, stripping naked, putting those clothes in a
bag, and having you put it in my apartment.” She grins at him. “Just spitballing here.”

“For the record, Tony would love that, and I refuse to help,” Chuck says with zero sympathy.

“You got your 30% bonus, and he went to the meeting! I think you and I might be frenemies, Mr.
Fisher.” Leigh leans back in her seat and frowns at him.
“Have you tried apologizing?”

“I--” Leigh thinks about it.

“To be clear, I’m talking about the kind of apology that doesn’t have qualifiers on it, like ‘if,’ or ‘I
only did that because,’ and so forth.”

“I didn’t. I thought I did, but… I didn’t, not even close,” Leigh realizes. She stares at Chuck, her
vision blurring past him to the wall of books and the actual wooden sliding ladder. “Shit.”

“If it helps, he doesn’t seem upset to me, so it’s not affecting his work. Mr. Stark’s every bit as
unenthusiastic as he has been since this past May, when he decided he’d rather build a house and
fall in love with you instead of running the company.”

Leigh sucks in a breath, shocked.

“Got you back, there. I’m saying, you should talk to him. Tell him you’re sorry.” Chuck sits up,
arranges some papers on his desk. “It’s actually not as bad as I implied. Having a project to design
is helping. I just know that when he hired me about a year ago, it was with a lot more fire to do
good. He told me it was just for a year, but I was hoping--” He cuts himself off and makes a sort of
resigned face. “I love this job. Part of why I love it is watching his mind work.”

“Yep, I could see that.”

“Hey FRIDAY, Code Amnesia for about five, will you?”

“Certainly, Mr. Fisher.”

“Are you going to show me your hidden passageway to Tony’s office?” Leigh asks, grinning.

“It’s actually just an unused liquor cabinet, sorry to disappoint. No, I was going to tell you my dirty
secret, if you’ll promise to do something for me.”

“Can I use Code Amnesia for myself? It locks down the recording, right?”

“Deletes it, actually.” Chuck looks rather proud.

“Tell me what you expect me to do first, please. You’re too fucking clever,” Leigh orders him.

“Find out whether he’s going to keep me on once he moves into that lake house of yours. It’ll still
be months before it’s ready, I think, right?”

Leigh nods.

“I enjoy the in-person aspect of the job, but I guess his holomeeting software isn’t the end of the
world. I’m hoping I can keep this gig, even if he pulls back. I just… don’t want to ask. So I figure,
you can ask for me.”

“Didn’t I come here to ask you something, not the other way around?” she asks him, ramping up
her fake outrage into narrowed eyes and crossed arms.

“I can’t help the fact that I’m good at manipulation, Miss Balci.”

She sighs. “All right, spill the tea.”

“I applied for this job because of something I promised my husband I’d do if something ever
happened to him.”

Leigh has to rapidly shuffle some of her expectations, the largest of which is the idea of Chuck as
someone’s spouse. He seems so self-assured, so self- contained, that it seems like a damned lie.
“And that was?” she prompts him.

“I had a huge crush on Iron Man. When Pepper Potts became CEO, Diggory teased me that he’d
put it in his will that I had to apply to be Stark’s PA if anything ever happened to him.” Chuck
looks younger with this fond expression on his face. It tugs at her. “I promise you, his parents
weren’t Harry Potter fans, or anything. Diggory’s Old English, from a medieval poem. Anyway,
I’d been working in finance, doing almost the same fucking things, but with expectations that I’d
be making the firm money, not the other way around. Cheap labor.”

Chuck is not wearing a wedding ring.

“What happened?” Leigh asks, as gently as she can.

“Dropped the crush after a day working for Stark. He is insufferable.” He grins, and if he has a tell,
Leigh can’t see it. Somehow that hurts more to observe than if he’d had some kind of tightened jaw
or downturned corner of his mouth. Chuck Fisher is meticulously put together, even now, waiting
for her to ask what happened to his husband.

“I won’t ask, if you’d rather not say,” she murmurs, standing. Chuck’s advice had been brutal and
obvious, and she’s basically done here.

“I don’t mind saying. He was Snapped.”

“I’m so sorry, Chuck,” Leigh says, and means it.

“Me too. I’m really grateful to Dig though. He definitely got me this job.”

“Because of the will?” Leigh asks, starting for the (heavy, wooden, expensive) door. She wants to
compliment his office again, but it’s not the moment for that, no matter how elegant and extra it is.

“No, actually. Because I don’t have a soulmark. It’s why Stark hired me.”

***

Leigh leaves messages for Tony multiple times during the rest of the day Friday, but hears nothing.
She feels increasingly like what has hurt Tony the most isn’t that she went over his head, but that
she’s acting like doing so wasn’t a big deal.

She’d only been joking about being naked in the penthouse, but when it comes 11 PM and she’s
too het up to sleep, feeling disconnected from Tony and wishing she could fix it somehow, Leigh
makes a decision. Chuck had told her about stepping out of his comfort zone when he’d applied to
work for Tony, and she decides to do the same. She takes her hair down and brushes it, so it’ll
hang with its curls down her back.

“FRIDAY, where’s Tony?”

“Mr. Stark is in his lab, and has been for the past thirty hours, Miss Balci.”

“Thirty hours!”

FRIDAY had volunteered the information, but from where Leigh’s standing, it sounds like a cry for
help. With anticipation slipping under her skin, she goes to her closet and finds her black sun dress,
the one with the ties at the back.

Then she takes off everything she’s wearing, and puts on the dress.

Leigh: Are you up, Tony? I can’t sleep. Wanted to see you.

He doesn’t respond right away, and she suspects he won’t respond at all. He never puts read
receipts on, either.

She goes up to his lab in her bare feet. It’s July, and the floor is chilly, but not so cold as to be
uncomfortable. As usual, Leigh’s overwarm anyway.

Tony doesn’t respond to knocking on the door.

He doesn’t respond to her hitting the ‘someone’s outside’ button on the digital lock panel, either.

But Leigh has a secret weapon (other than her nakedness under the dress), and that is that she has
unlocked this door once before, with her palm.

It works.

The door opens, and Leigh walks in. Tony’s soundproofing is top notch, because there’s some
unnamed metal music blaring, and Tony’s actually wearing noise-canceling headphones and
banging on some kind of metal. Leigh looks around the room and sees that he’s added about three
new worktables, and the objects on them are less haphazardly scattered than they were earlier in
the week. One of the tables, the one against the wall farthest away from where Tony’s working, is
completely clean, with nothing piled on it yet.

Leigh walks over to that one, and with only a small amount of difficulty, she climbs up to sit on it.
The thing’s higher than a typical desk or table, but not by much. She hasn’t brought her phone,
doesn’t have anything to do, and doesn’t know how long it might take for Tony to notice she’s
sitting there. She’s even a bit sleepy, but Leigh orders herself to stay awake and wait.

When Tony does finally turn around, she’s no longer trying to sit properly, because sitting ramrod
straight is for freaks like Chuck, people who are dedicated to the look. She’s long past given up,
and is by then sitting with her legs parted just a bit, leaning back with both arms angled out, palms
supporting her weight. Her hair’s so long that if she tips her head up even a little bit, it’ll pool on
the metal surface behind her.

Tony turns with the piece he’d been pounding on held up in some kind of metal pincers, and Leigh
can see the moment where he realizes there’s someone he can see in the background when he lifts
the thing up to look carefully at it.

He doesn’t smile. He does turn his head to the side and regard her, eyes tracing across her, toes on
up. With his eyes still fixed on her, Tony walks around his active work table, setting down the
piece and securing it with another object she can’t quite see. Then he starts towards her.

“You’re in my lab.” His tone isn’t upset, but it isn’t amused, either.

“It let me in,” she says.

He looks up at the ceiling, his face twisting in an almost extreme caricature of thinking. “Yeah, I
remember doing that. Handprint.”
Leigh wonders what day he did it, whether it was before or after he’d kissed her on the floor of her
apartment. “Yeah.”

“What can I help you with?” he asks, letting out a breath. He’s got on a black wifebeater, no ARC
reactor, but he’s sweaty, his hair sticking up, beat-up jeans, and he looks as sexy as anyone she’s
ever, ever seen, even on television. If this is what 30 hours of no sleep looks like on Tony Stark,
Leigh is on board.

Ogling him isn’t why she’s here, though.

“I did something wrong by going over your head, by not talking to you about the Avengers before I
brought it up to Rhodey,” Leigh says, fixing her eyes on the resigned set of his mouth. “I’m really
sorry about that. It was disrespectful. I assumed--” Leigh lets out a breath. “I assumed. I didn’t say
anything.”

Tony takes in a breath, lets it out, and with it, some of the tension in his shoulders seems to lift. “It
felt like you were in my tools,” he says. His expression is entirely serious, but Leigh’s been
watching him for a while now, and if she had to make a guess, she’d say he was mentally
deactivating some of the defenses he’d been constructing over the past few days. “I make them
myself, sometimes. They’re not--” He scratches the top of his head, flashes a tiny smile in service
to his own genius, and continues. “They’re not for the general public. You’ve got the key to the
toolbox, which is more than most people have, but you still don’t know how to use them.”

“I know just enough to mess them all up, you’re saying.”

Tony nods, then steps forward. “Nice dress.”

“It’s black, like my mood when I think you’re upset with me,” she says, biting her lip in case it’s
too soon.

It’s not. Tony steps up to rest a hand on either side of her hips. She wants to kiss every corded inch
of his arms. Leigh realizes he can see that in her eyes, because as soon as she looks at him instead
of his arms, a slow, self-satisfied grin starts to grow on his face.

Leigh pulls up her skirt to her knees and spreads them. Tony steps between them like they’re
practicing choreography. His right hand immediately starts stroking along her leg.

“So is this an I’m Sorry dress, or a Fuck Me dress?” he asks, feigning adorable confusion.

“Can’t it be both?” she asks.

To her utter surprise, he shakes his head. “No. Pick one.”

“It’s an I’m Sorry dress, then,” Leigh says, lifting her chin.

Tony’s eyes darken a shade and he moves his hand past her knee, rucking the material of the dress
against his wrist as he presses his hot palm against her outer thigh.

“What’s the material difference between the two?” she asks, her breaths coming more quickly.

“Selfishness,” Tony says, placing a firm hand on her chin to hold her still for him as he kisses her.
He tastes like coffee, which makes sense, because he probably has been living on it for the past
eighteen hours at least. Seconds later he slides his hand up her thigh and around to her ass, and
Leigh can tell right when he realizes she’s bare underneath the dress. He pulls back to look at her.
“Was this to persuade or to reward?” he asks, nudging her legs further apart with his hip.
“I really didn’t think all that farther ahead than, ‘Tony will probably really like this,’” Leigh
admits.

“I really do.” He looks at her, leans over and looks behind her, narrows his eyes, and taps his free
hand on his chin. Then, he leans over again and looks up at the ceiling as he reaches behind her,
finds one of the strings that holds up the neckline of her dress, and pulls it, slowly. When the bow
comes loose, he presses his hand at the small of her back, where the dress is cut out, and slides it
up, separating the two strings completely.

The entire dress from the waist up collapses.

“You bring me a present and I get to unwrap it? Yeah. Selfish. This is for me,” Tony says, his gaze
locked on her breasts.

Leigh feels like one of the expensive cars in his garage. He’s just taken her from idle to racing
speed, and she wants to purr.

Tony places one hand down flat on the metal table beside her and presses the other one to his own
chest under his shirt, leaning over to kiss her. He’s not touching her anywhere but his lips, but
Leigh loses herself in it, keeping her hands to herself, following his lead. When he pulls away it’s
with the first genuine smile of the evening, and she feels like it’s lighting her up like a beacon.

“Look at me,” he commands, and she meets his eyes, feeling exposed but excited. Tony lifts the
hand from his chest and the hand from the table, and then, with a look so intense she can barely
hold his gaze, Tony cups her breasts, one in each hand.

Leigh gasps. He’s circling her nipples with both thumbs, and one of them is cold from the table, the
other just slightly warmer than skin temperature. Leigh’s got one hand clutching at the fabric of her
dress, and the other is latched onto to the edge of the table so tightly her fingers ache.

“Tony, oh my God,” she moans. “Don’t take this as a negative, but what is wrong with you?”

“So many things,” he murmurs. Then he bends his head and takes her cold nipple in his mouth,
searing her in all the best ways. Leigh arches her back and he cradles her with his other hand,
burying his hand in the hair at the back of her neck and holding her steady. The swirling suction
builds her up in ways nipple play never has before, but she’s honestly not surprised. Tony’s taking
her apart and learning her, and he’s a genius, of course she’s going to work better once he puts her
back together.

“Can, stars, that’s just-- can I touch you?” Leigh gasps out.

“Yes, but--” he pulls back and away, and she frowns.

“I wouldn’t have asked--”

She stops because he swirls one thumb in the wetness left behind on her nipple and then presses it
on her lips.

“I’m going to ask a question, you’re going to answer it without being self-conscious about it--”

She huffs frustrated air through her nose, and Tony pushes his thumb between her lips, and Leigh
strokes it with her tongue.

“Miscalculation,” he grins, but leaves it there. “Again, without being self-conscious about it, and
then I reserve the right to take you on this table.” He shoots his eyebrows into the air in an obvious
 request for acquiescence.

Leigh smiles, then places her hand on Tony’s hand, slowly pushing his thumb into her mouth.

All amusement fades from his face, replaced by want.

She pulls his hand back out and, just because maybe she was lying about not being a mean tease,
swirls her tongue on the tip of it at the last minute.

“Did you have a lover in the past who refused to let you touch him, or made you hold back?” Tony
asks in a voice that commands her attention.

Fuck, Leigh thinks to herself. She goes to cover her face, and Tony steps forward almost angrily
and takes her wrists.

“What did I say?” he says harshly. “Did you?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“We’ll fix it,” Tony says, and pulls one of her hands up to place it on his face. He slides his fingers
in between hers on the other hand, her right hand, with his name. Then he kisses her, reaching
down between them to unbuckle his pants.

Leigh loses herself in the next few minutes, kissing him, appreciating the ridiculously demanding
way he practically requires her to open up, in all ways. Tony slides her across the table to one end
and shows her that the height is adjustable, shifting it down in increments until it’s just right.

Then he’s pulling her hands onto him again, commanding her to look at him, and thrusting inside
her like it’s the culmination of everything he’s ever wanted. Tony’s expression as he presses his
forehead against hers and shudders his release is the purest illustration of forgiveness Leigh thinks
she’s ever experienced.

Chapter End Notes

Lacey’s shirt: https://www.chicme.com/product/layered-sleeve-ruffles-hem-irregular-

solid-blouse/8618275b-095e-4331-958c-59e6f7458c1a.html

Leigh’s black dress:

https://www.asos.com/us/asos-design/asos-design-tiered-midi-sundress-with-lace-
inserts-in-black/prd/14742342
 Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Summary

“So you’re Tony Stark’s…”

“Girlfriend,” Leigh says firmly.

“And you came here -?”

“From the tower.”

“Where you live with him?” Rogers looks like she’s been explaining that she’s Tony’s
drug dealer instead of someone he clearly cares enough to perpetuate a joke on the
press with. One that brings more attention to this soup kitchen, even.

Chapter Notes

Just to reassure you all that there's no 'Team Cap' vs. 'Team Stark' or anything going on
here, even if there's some tension starting out.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Thirteen

The thing about soulmarks is that, while yes, people do try to fake them, Leigh’s heard about it,
that’s a difficult thing to do, given the fact that they’re in that other person’s handwriting.
Everyone’s heard the stories about obsessed fans wearing distinctive clothing and a faked
soulmark, trusting the intel they got about a certain celebrity’s Words. Then there are the stories of
celebrities in committed relationships, whether they and their partner really do have each other’s
Words, or are defying the whole thing entirely, and they don’t match. Most rare are the celebrities
in new relationships, since the Snap.

When Leigh gets dressed for her shift at the soup kitchen, for lunch on Saturday, she makes sure to
wear a short-sleeved shirt. She’d asked Tony to do her a favor before they parted ways the night
before (he’d practically demanded that she sleep in his bed, and as much as she’d really really
wanted to, Leigh had said no because of when she would need to get up), warning him that the
press would probably make something of it being Steve Rogers’ soup kitchen anyway.

So, before she walks into the elevator toward the gauntlet of press (Leigh really wonders if they’ll
follow her all the way to her destination), she checks that she has everything. Favorite skirt? yes.
Wallet and phone tucked into the big pockets that she’d had a tailor add to said favorite skirt, years
ago? yes. Hair braided into a crown on her head that will fit into a standard size hair net (she
checked)? yes. Short sleeve blouse so that the vultures will see the words Tony wrote on her left
forearm in his distinctive handwriting? yes. And finally, industrial strength makeup and durable
skin shields to cover the actual soulmark on her right wrist? Yes.

Tony had really really wanted to write ‘Hail Hydra’ on her, but she had threatened to have her
whole lower right arm amputated if he so much as started the H.

There are at least ten different people waiting for her at the front of the tower. Leigh knows she
could take an Uber, but then they’d hound that person about what she said during the ride, and that
could impact their day’s earnings. Besides, it’s a nice day.

Are you Tony Stark’s soulmate?

Is that really the first thing he said to you?

What do you have to say about Councilwoman Aldrew’s call to have Stark investigated
for kidnapping for his actions in West Virginia?

Are you seeking some kind of reconciliation between Stark and Rogers?

Has Rogers paid you to increase publicity for this new soup kitchen?

Do you really plan to walk the whole way there or is this an attempt to get rid of the
people’s voice, Miss Balci?

Leigh almost responded to that last one. After all, there was footage of her walk to the building just
the week before!

There are still four people following her when she gets there, but they’re nothing compared to the
group of twenty or more people shoving their microphones or recorders in the faces of anyone that
comes close to the building.

“Excuse me?” Leigh shouts at them. “All right. The way I see it, you have two choices: One, I
stand here and make shit up --sprinkling some truth so you can’t tell the difference-- for the half
hour till this place opens, so you leave the people who are here to eat alone. Two, you act like the
decent people your ancestors hoped you’d be, and stand back.”

One of the women snarks at her. “What, you going to tell Captain America on us?”

“I have eyes and ears of my own, Ma’am,” a man behind Leigh says.

Leigh recognizes the voice, and clearly the assembled press know who he is too, so they all crowd
toward him, nearly knocking her over. She reaches a hand out to steady herself, and it’s clasped by
a large hand with a strong grip.

“You okay?” Steve Rogers asks her.

“Yeah, thanks,” Leigh says, smiling up at him. Her first impression is that he’s really tall and
impossibly broad. She’d really thought at least some of that was just film trickery or good
costuming.

“Desk guy said there was some trouble,” Rogers tells her. “You here to volunteer, or are you a
freelance crowd control specialist?”

“Volunteer,” she says.

“I’ll escort you in, then,” Rogers says. He looks around at the waggling microphones being shoved
at them and sighs. “I didn’t miss this.” With a solicitous smile that probably lit up homes all across
the country, he holds out his right arm for her. “Nice to meet you, by the way. Steve Rogers.”

Leigh laughs. “Leigh Balci,” she says, hesitating only a second before she slides her left arm into
his.

As she thought he might, Rogers looks down, then really looks, his brows furrowing. “Is that Tony
Stark’s handwriting?”

“Shall we?” Leigh says. Around them there’s just a ridiculous flood of clicks and shouts, as the
press take photos of the interaction. Rogers nods and starts walking, sweeping his left arm in an arc
to clear their path to walk. He pauses twice to encourage a couple of people who are obviously
waiting for the soup kitchen, rather than its organizers.

“Did anyone suggest asking for a police presence?” Leigh asks.

Rogers gestures for her to walk inside, as he holds the door. “Generally speaking, a police presence
can discourage some of the people that need this the most. We might send some burly volunteers
out there, though.” He leads her through a second door from the lobby, so he can guide her around
the many tables and chairs in the cafeteria area.

“For what it’s worth, it didn’t occur to me that coming here would ramp up any of the coverage. I
hope it’s all positive,” she confesses when Rogers finally stops walking in front of the string of
tables where the food will be distributed from.

Rogers turns around, a polite but stern look on his face. “Yeah, about that. I recognize his
handwriting, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Stark say ‘feed the poor’ in my life. You want to
explain what’s going on?”

“Wow, 0 for 2 in meeting the estranged in-laws. I’m super great at this,” Leigh says. She resists
the urge to cross her arms protectively around herself, playing off the initial move to do just that by
tracing her palm over the phrase Rogers mentioned; ‘ Feed the poor. ’ “He wrote it on me last--
yesterday. Wrote it yesterday,” Leigh corrects. ‘He wrote it on me last night’ seems like the sort of
thing one just does not say to Captain America.

“So you’re Tony Stark’s…”

“Girlfriend,” Leigh says firmly.

“And you came here -?”

“From the tower.”

“Where you live with him?” Rogers looks like she’s been explaining that she’s Tony’s drug dealer
instead of someone he clearly cares enough to perpetuate a joke on the press with. One that brings
more attention to this soup kitchen, even.

“In a separate apartment, not that it should matter.”

He takes the rebuke, nods. “But, you’re his soulmate.” It’s a question, one he seems prepared to
doubt her answer to, should that answer be ‘yes.’

She knows that Tony lost his fiance. It wasn’t just ‘celebrity news,’ it was on actual news channels,
mostly because of her position as the CEO of his company. Leigh knew that Virginia Potts had
been one of the ones lost in the Snap before Tony Stark had even shown back up, alive but barely.
Steve Rogers had probably known Potts, had probably liked her. She’s trying not to take his
attitude personally, but it’s difficult.

Leigh says, “Are you a journalist now, Steve Rogers?” in as sweet a voice as she can for how
deadly her expression is.

“No, but I was-- am , his friend.”

She can’t help but admire his steely-eyed conviction in the face of her own resistance. Most people
Leigh knows aren’t prepared for pushback. They try to soften it. Steve Rogers’s faith in his ability
to withstand and deflect instead is a sight to behold.

“Miss… Balci, you said? How is he?”

“Leigh, please,” she says, rejecting her initial instinct to tell him to call her Felicia. Damned man
would probably make her like it again. “He’s… broken.”

Rogers’ reaction to that is the first time she’s seen him falter. It makes her feel some kind of way.

“Well. Francine can tell you what to do,” he tells Leigh, shooting a look over his shoulder at a
woman in a hairnet and apron, hovering behind them. “Don’t leave?”

It’s a command, despite the uplifted inflection he puts at the end of the phrase.

Rogers walks off, and Leigh watches him, despite herself. The man is large in every sense of the
word-- powerfully built, morally intense, and emotionally leashed, if only barely. She can’t even
imagine what the interactions between him and Tony had been like.

***

Even though Captain America seems not to have, Francine takes an instant liking to Leigh. She
gives her the cutest apron and the least messy station.

They bond over their mutual dislike of fake butter.

***

Leigh’s throat hurts from friendly chatting by the time the three hours are up. Once they’re
officially released from their volunteer duties, she pulls her hairnet out, fatally destroying the
braided crown in the process. Leigh pulls one of the chairs away from its table and starts to
dismantle the two braids, her fingers aching by the time she’s done. Instead of braiding it back up,
she does a loose twist and secures the ends, pulling the puffy mass over her shoulder and sighing.

“You waited,” Steve Rogers says from across the room. He’s coming out of the kitchen, which
must be empty, because he switches the light off and shuts the door.

“Yeah, well, it seemed important to you,” Leigh says, straightening up in her chair.

Rogers puts both hands out in front of him in a placating gesture. “We just served almost twice
what we expected to show up, today. Can’t help but think some of that came from you.”
“Something tells me that’s not the metric by which you judge a person’s character,” Leigh says.

“It’s not,” he smiles. “I just wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t expecting you, I guess.”

“No one has, so far,” Leigh jokes. She rubs her hands together and gives in to the urge to slide her
left palm down and hold it against Tony’s name on her wrist.

“Did he send you, Leigh?”

Rogers asks it gently, but she can’t not hear his air of authority, and it sets her teeth on edge.

“I think maybe you should stick to Miss Balci, if this is an interrogation.”

“I’m just trying to understand. A year ago he--”

“A year ago he was stabbed by a madman. Saved by a sorcerer, or so he says. Starved most of the
way to death, and came home to try to choke down the guilt of three billion handfuls of dust. It’s
not his fault he ended up with someone who can’t keep her nose out of his business.” Leigh stands
up. “I’ll see myself out.”

She starts toward the door, having to wend her way through the messy warren of chairs that
haven’t all been straightened up yet.

Rogers is loud, behind her. “Wait. I wasn’t trying to--”

She hears him moving and tries to ignore it, right up until a clean plate flies past her and hits the
top of the door to the lobby, knocking the locking bolt down into the floor.

Leigh stops walking.

“I’m not trying to upset you. I am not trying to imply that I don’t trust you. You took me off-guard,
that’s all. I--” Rogers sighs. “You didn’t have to come at all. Tony’s donation last Saturday was
enough to fund the whole operation for a year, even with numbers like today’s.”

Leigh spins around, stunned. “What did you say?”

“You didn’t have to come, but I’m glad you did. Just, you know, surprised. A year of no contact,
and then suddenly over a million dollars--”

She gasps, covering her mouth. “What time did it come in?” Leigh thinks back to last Saturday,
sets the day on a wheel and spins it past the meeting, past the lab, past coming to this very
building. Tony had texted her about leaving the tower, mentioned Chuck.

“The donation? Early Saturday, I think. Not everyone was here.”

He didn’t have a GPS tracker on her, but had Tony checked her email? The coincidence was just
too strong.

Unless Rhodey had said something.

“Are you okay?” Rogers had come over and was quietly arranging chairs at the tables nearby.

“Probably,” Leigh says, feeling a kind of hysterical laughter bubble up. “I had no idea he made a
donation. I didn’t think he knew I was going to visit. Clearly I underestimated him, which when I
say it out loud, is entirely embarrassing.”
“How long have you two…”

“That depends on how you gauge time, honestly.” Mentally, Leigh facepalms. Sure, tell that to a
man who was frozen on ice for seventy years. “We met in May. I’m--” she laughs. “I’m his
architect.”

“I gotta say one more thing. You’re welcome to slap me, if you don’t appreciate the question,”
Rogers says, walking closer.

“If you check to see if there are any more press outside, you might get another bump in attendance
for next time, if you’re so sure I’m going to want to hit you,” she says. Her voice is shaky, but that
can’t be helped.

Rogers smiles, then reaches down to lift up her right arm. He taps one finger on the well-concealed
place her soulmark resides. “Do you hide this from Tony?”

“You really can’t help it, can you?” Leigh says, astonished, amazed. “No, don’t frown at me, I’ll
answer you, but-- he says he drove you all away. I don’t doubt it, he can be infuriating. But you’re
still looking out for him, aren’t you? Even if it’s a safe bet he wouldn’t appreciate it.”

“Miss, you don’t go through what we did without having the kind of loyalty that lasts till the end of
the line.”

“That’s beautiful,” Leigh says, reluctantly.

“It’s the truth.”

“Well, Thoreau, I’ll show you this, but then I’ll ask you to back off, okay? You’re kind of
intimidating. For what it’s worth, my brothers are--” Leigh winces, wondering when if ever that
will go away or get easier. “--were, big fans.”

“Both of them? I’m sorry.” He lets out a puff of breath, his chiseled face full of compassion.

“Oh, honey, you have no idea,” Leigh can’t stop herself from saying. “Okay. Stars, I sound like
Tony today. That is just all kinds of not okay!” Leigh groans. She backs away from Rogers, using a
fingernail to break the makeup seal on the skin shield. Leigh almost never puts this much effort
into hiding the soulmark, but she’d known there would be press coverage. Rogers watches intently,
and when she lifts her arm to show him the name, a beautiful smile crosses his face. He looks…
relieved, and Leigh’s not sure what to make of that at all.

***

“Hello, this is Dr. Banner, Bruce Banner. I’m calling about-- I’m in town, as I said I would be. For
the next few days, at least. If you’d like to have dinner, talk about some of the things you’re
interested in, from the Avengers, I’d like that. If it’s all right with you, can it be just the two of us?
I’m not trying to step on Tony’s toes or anything-- god, that sounds absolutely-- Is there a reset on
this thing? No? Great. It’s just that you said he wasn’t involved in what you were doing, reaching
out, and dropping this on him last minute, doesn’t seem like it would be very kind. Well. If you’re
not running in the other direction, I’ll look forward to hearing back from you at this number.
Goodbye.”

***

By the time Leigh’s back at the tower, she has a message: Alden Marteau is finally ready to show
her something.
It’s not, as it should be, the actual property he wants to build on. No, apparently it’s a building
similar to the one he wants her to design. Leigh is skeptical and more than a little suspicious, but
Marteau is pushing her to come ASAP.

She leaves a message for Tony with the address, both as a text message and verbally, to FRIDAY,
puts her hair into a low ponytail at her neck, and calls an Uber.

It’s after four thirty when she gets there. As usual, she checks in with Charriott, as a safety
measure. The building is in a line of poorly-maintained brownstones, and its condition being the
worst of the lot gives the impression of a line of soldiers holding up a struggling compatriot.

Alden Marteau doesn’t live up to his name at all. He’s unnaturally tall and can’t be more than
forty, but he’s fully grey, and not in the way that some do, dyed to look cool. His is slightly
yellowed, like his teeth. He’s got a mustache, wild blue eyes, and he’s downright twitchy. Leigh
had been picturing the American version of a quirky aristocrat, even would have bet any takers that
he wore tweed. Marteau wears ratty jeans and a polo shirt on top of what just might be another polo
shirt. He smells bad, too.

Every single instinct she has is telling Leigh something is wrong.

He bounces on the balls of his feet as she talks to him about what his expectations are. When Leigh
balks at the idea of going inside the building (he confesses to her that the electric is off. When she
demands to know whether he even has permission to be in here, he has the audacity to tell her that
it isn’t her concern), he pulls out his phone and tells her that he’s not beyond calling Branson and
getting him to order her inside.

Leigh tells him to go ahead. Branson is at a family birthday party today. She stands at the bottom
of the stairs up to the front door and watches a line of ants navigate the peeling paint, as Marteau
lets the phone ring and ring.

“Give it fifteen,” he sneers, when he gives up. “How about we check the back? You have some
kind of moral objection to looking at the back windows?”

“Are they even visible? Have you ever been here before?” Leigh asks, her skepticism undoubtedly
written all over her expression. She wonders how much Harriot is going to be angry when she tells
him Marteau is a fraud who has been wasting their time. Honestly, the walk around the block is
probably worth the look on his face when he realizes she’s not as stupid as he thinks she is.

“Look, sweetheart, I can tell by your face you’re not up for the kind of hard work this contract is
worth. Before I demand your boss reassigns this, I want to prove you’re wrong. Testimony is
evidence, little one, and I will fucking sue you if you tell them I lied about this house right here,”
Marteau hisses at her, leaning over to get in her face. He reaches down and grabs her wrist,
dragging her up the stairs. Leigh tries to yank free right away, but all that manages to do is tear
away her skin shield under his scraping fingernails.

Leigh’s quick glance around the area tells her it’s basically deserted. She’s almost ready to scream
for help, even if the man-baby who’s gripping her arm really is the selfish, entitled prick he
appears to be.

“You’ll let go of my hand if you want to have anything to do with the company again,” Leigh
practically growls at him.

If she has to scream for help, she’s not going to hesitate to grab for her gun. Leigh’s purse is
hanging on the side he’s got ahold of, but she thinks she could grab it if she can bounce the purse
off her hip with enough force to swing it around her back for her left hand.

Leigh hopes she won’t have to, but if she’s honest with herself and how much disgust and outrage
she feels, she’s not going to mind the look of dismay on his face if she has to brandish.

Marteau gets the door open, yanking her by her right arm with the kind of torque that would have
broken her wrist if she had dug in and tried not to move. This launches her into the entryway,
jamming her shoulder painfully. It’s dark, and Marteau looms at the doorway. Leigh unzips her
purse as quietly as a person can when they’re frightened and furious .

“Missing this?” he sneers, holding up the scrap of fabric that had hidden her soulmark.

“What in the actual fuck is wrong with you? Get out of the way.”

Marteau starts laughing. “It only took a year. A year and that ridiculous romantic nonsense. Call
him. Tell him I’ve got half of his soul, ask him if he wants to make jokes about my brother in law
anymore?”

Being threatened is one thing, but being threatened by someone who seems completely deranged is
something else entirely.

“Blabbering gibberish at me isn’t going to make me call anybody.” She has a choice here. Most
houses of this style are pretty predictable, and Leigh’s sure he only chose this one because it’s
unlocked. She can probably find a secondary way out, but that would require going further in.
Right now, that’s too risky.

“HAMMER, you stupid bitch!” Marteau shouts. He reaches into his pocket, and Leigh pulls out her
gun, rocks her hips into a shooting stance, slides the safety off, and points it at him, both hands
held rock steady.

Suddenly, Marteau’s flying sideways, hands flailing everywhere, directly at her. A black-clad
assailant has his wrist, their gloved hands reaching expertly for his knee before it even flies in that
direction.

Leigh puts the safety back on and scatters, gun in her right hand, trigger finger laid flat. Marteau is
groaning expletives.

“You okay?”

It’s a woman’s voice. Leigh leans her head out of the doorway she’d run into. The woman’s hair is
two-toned, pale blonde and deep maroon red, but everything else about her screams Black Widow.

“Wow, really?” Leigh blurts out, looking down at the squirming asshole at the other woman’s feet.

The woman shrugs. “Gave me a weird feeling.”

“You were just strolling by, huh?” Leigh checks her gun and tucks it away. She sees movement,
looks up to see that Possibly Black Widow, WHAT is putting zip ties on Marteau’s wrists. His
arms are not in the most comfortable position, for which the other woman seems to have little to no
sympathy for. “I think what I meant to say is, thank you?” She starts slowing down her breathing,
hoping to settle her racing heart.

“You’d be surprised what a knee-length crochet sweater vest can cover up in the city these days,”
the woman says in a rich, amused voice. She nods expectantly at Leigh. “If you wanna call the
police and report this I can meet you down the street.” Something about her tone tells Leigh that
this is the least desirable of any available options, but that it’s not this stunning-looking death
machine’s job to lead Leigh to water.

“And tell them… what? He attacked me, someone attacked him, helpfully incapacitated him, and
here’s my number so he can absolutely sue me for whatever damages?” Leigh says, frowning.

“Well, I could notch out a chunk of that zip tie and we could leave. He’ll get free eventually, think
he’ll want to admit to breaking in and attacking you?” Her tone is much more pleased to relate this
option, Leigh notices.

At their feet, Marteau has rolled onto his side, and he’s squirming his hips frantically. It looks like
he’s trying to get within reach of Is That Black Widow’s knee high boot.

“One problem with that,” Leigh says. Her adjusted breathing has worked, she supposes, because
now she’s just confused and nervous instead of mostly terrified. “Not sure you can do anything
precise with a knife with him moving around like that.”

Marteau freezes, then starts to kick his legs, spinning on his hip to turn his whole body toward the
front door.

“Good point,” the other woman says. She leans over and whispers something, her hair swinging
down to cover her lips even if Leigh did have some kind of ability to read them. After a second, the
pathetic figure on the floor holds still, and Widow leans down, swirling around a knife that came
from somewhere. “Time to go, then,” she says next, gesturing to the door.

Leigh steps around Marteau, feeling like she somehow stepped into a surrealist landscape, with the
dark room, twisted figure on the floor, and the guide who looks more like the subject in a Titian
painting even without the brassy red hair Leigh knows she used to have. When she gets outside, she
sees that there is indeed a puddle of knotted yarn cloth at the bottom of the stairs leading into the
brownstone. She leans down to pick it up, shaking off the leaf and grass pieces.

The other woman takes it from her and shrugs it on. It actually does a decent job disguising just
how utilitarian her clothing is underneath its homey mesh texture. Leigh’s low-key impressed.

“Thank you,” she says, again. “I’m, uh, Leigh Balci, if you’re who I think you are, you clearly got
my email.” It seems a bit ridiculous to point out that there’s almost no way to connect an email sent
a week ago to the day’s events, so Leigh doesn’t try.

“Natasha Romanoff. You didn’t mention that.” She nods at Leigh’s wrist. The ‘Tony’ is clearly
visible.

“Would you have believed me?” Leigh asks, rubbing her left thumb across the black lettering. If
anyone had told Leigh last May how much joy, grief, and trouble those four letters portended, she
would never have ever believed them.

“Maybe,” Romanoff allows. Her grin is blindingly beautiful. She knows it, too. “You hungry?”

“Think it’ll be my last meal?” Leigh asks, angling her head back up at the house they’re still
standing in front of. Something about Romanoff’s presence makes her feel safe to be standing
there, despite knowing that the man inside would absolutely hurt her if he could.

“Already sent a profile of him off to a contact of mine when I saw him throw you inside. He’s out
on parole. I doubt you or Tony will ever hear from him again.” Romanoff tips her head to the side,
spilling her blonde-tipped red hair onto her cheek. “Do you need to tell him you’re all right? Did
you hit the panic button?”
 Leigh does half of a head shake. “No idea what you’re talking about?”

“Боже мой . Really, Stark? All right, I’m going to need to ask you some things.”

Chapter End Notes

Suffering from that thing where I want to read the rest, except it's my job to WRITE
what happens next, lmao. Thanks everyone for your kind words! Rarely have I
enjoyed the experience of writing so much--not just the writing part, but the delight
waiting to find out how everyone liked it, to the point of sometimes waking up in the
middle of the night and going 'okay I HAVE to check my phone.' It's been great,
thanks so, so much.

EDIT: 3/20/21
I hardly ever do this, but I altered a paragraph thanks to some things from chapter 14.
Here's a note to tell you no, you aren't crazy, it was different before.
 Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Summary

“Somewhere there are drawings on some artist woman’s sketchbook of you, I

guarantee it,” Leigh says softly. “I’m not even jealous, you’re--” she can’t say it, it’s
ridiculous, but Tony’s expression tells her he got the message, paused as he is with one
hand clenched into a fist at his side, the other holding his wet clothes in preparation
for throwing them aside. A work of art, Leigh finishes in her head. It still makes her
blush, just to think it. “C’mere?”

Chapter Notes

So I don't intend to have an intense sex scene in every chapter, but this one presented
itself and demanded to be written. I will say right now I have the intention of writing a
one-shot fic of Tony's PoV during that scene at some point in the near future.

Chapter Fourteen

“Here’s the thing,” Leigh says, looking doubtfully at Natasha Romanoff’s motorcycle. “It’s not
that I’m scared of the bike, it’s that I’m scared of you and the bike is just along for the ride.”

“I can respect that. Now, get on.”

“Where are we going?” Leigh asks, resigned.

***

Natasha (she practically orders Leigh to call her by her first name, but honestly, asking nicely
would have been enough) takes her to a truly superb diner at the edge of the city. The questions she
needs to ask Leigh have to do with the tower, the security there, the staff, and Leigh’s own habits
when she does go out. Leigh gets the impression that Natasha is thorough, dedicated, and angry.

“None of this is your fault. I think he’s gotten into the habit of thinking that since the number of
people who want a piece of him has been reduced by half, it makes him safer. Maybe it did, at
first,” Natasha says, gesturing with a french fry. “But the other factors-- reduced security across
the board, more resources, mental instability… it makes Tony, and by extension, you, less safe.”

“So basically you got my email and did a research project?” Leigh asks, grinning.

Natasha does a little shrug and then her lips curve into a smile. “Basically.”

“Well, I hope it comes with an essay page or a bibliography to hand over to Tony, because I’m not
going to be able to explain this very well, and that’s without the baggage of who’d be passing it
along. I mean, whether or not it’s true, no one wants to say to their loved one, ‘Hey, you aren’t
protecting me.’”

Even the way Natasha Romanoff chews is beautiful, Leigh can’t help but notice. “Oh don’t worry,”
Natasha says blithely after swallowing a handful of fries. “You won’t have to.”

Something about the way she looks almost gleeful makes Leigh want to check her phone. When
she pulls it out, though, she doesn’t even get to see the screen before it’s snatched from her fingers
and tucked into Natasha’s jacket (possibly inside her shirt, but she was so fast Leigh couldn’t tell).

“What just happened?” Leigh asks a bit plaintively.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll get it back later. Mind if a friend drops by?”

Leigh takes a sip of her milkshake. “Do I have a choice?”

***

A half hour of talking about Leigh’s childhood on the farm passes before the aforementioned guest
shows up.

“So she does go out to enjoy herself sometimes,” Steve Rogers says from somewhere behind their
booth.

“Hey, Cap,” Natasha says. Leigh can tell right away that the two of them have a close friendship.
There had been a small edge to Natasha’s demeanor since they got to the diner, and now, just like
that, it’s gone.

Then again, the woman has a reputation as a superspy, so it’s very possible she’s engineered the
situation to make Leigh trust the two of them. Either way, it’s working.

“Miss Balci,” Rogers says, nodding.

“Ooh,” Natasha says, holding a hand to where she tucked Leigh’s phone. “ Another message! And,
‘Miss Balci,’ really? Sit down, Steve.”

“Any particular reason you called me down here?” Rogers asks, pulling over a chair to sit at the
end of the booth. He’s on Natasha’s side, both literally and figuratively. Leigh is kind of fascinated
and intimidated by their dynamic.

“Nothing in particular, besides Justin Hammer’s brother in law trying to kidnap Leigh to lure Tony
down to a shitty brownstone in Bed-Stuy.”

“You’re kidding.” Rogers’ tone is instantly low and angry.

“What time is it, by the way? I texted work saying the guy’s a fraud, but that was about all I had
time for,” Leigh finally gets the chance to cut in. It’s not like she has any kind of curfew, of course,
but she did tell Tony where she was going, and that was two hours ago. “At this point, Tony’s
probably asking his AI where I am.”

“He’d better be,” Natasha says, shoving the remnants of her french fry boat towards Captain
America.

“Natasha,” he says, his tone halfway between a warning and a question.

Leigh sits up, realizing that her right shoulder hurts quite a lot, actually. “Okay, I recognize that the
two of you have a ton of expertise in just about everything I do not, so I can’t back this up with
anything, but: if there’s more to this than an extension of what I asked about in my email, Ms.
Romanoff, I’d like to know that now.”

Right as she seems to be about to answer, Natasha fishes out the phone she stole from Leigh and
frowns at it before putting it back into her bra. “We should sit outside.”

“If you were me, you’d take that as a ‘yes,’ wouldn’t you, Mr.-- uh, Cap?” Leigh asks Rogers.
Even though they have the same wholesome vibe, it’s just too weird to call him Mr. Rogers.

“I would.”

“‘Well, you’ll have to wait and see.” Instead of asking Rogers to move, Natasha just steps up onto
the booth seat, shakes the tall back of the booth a second as if testing its strength, and then does an
acrobatic move to hop over him. She goes over to the register to pay as if she hadn’t just done
something really cool.

“You really can call me Steve,” Rogers says, standing up and pulling out money for a tip.

“Oh, let me do that, you barely ate anything!” Leigh protests. She angles her right hand down into
the pocket of her skirt for her wallet and gasps. Immediately, Rogers is at her side, concerned.

“You’re injured?”

“Hit the wall shoulder first when that Hammer guy attacked me. All the adrenaline from ‘will I
have to shoot this guy’ and ‘oh hey look, super assassin’ kind of pushed that to the background.”

“Let’s get some fresh air, I’ll take a look,” Natasha says, coming over. Rogers helps Leigh up, and
as they walk out to the sketchy-looking outdoor tables taking up the plot between their diner and a
convenience store, Leigh tries to reach for her wallet again.

“Shit, okay, that’s… definitely not good.”

Natasha sits her down at one of the tables farthest from either building and sits behind her, setting
down a glass of ice. “Well, given that this shirt buttons up the back, it’s a good idea to see what’s
going on in there either way. I can’t imagine how you’ll possibly get out of it tonight otherwise.”

Leigh can’t see her, but the high level amused innuendo in her tone practically shimmers in the air
beside them. After about two buttons, the constant low-level tugging pain lessens. After four
buttons, Natasha folds the fabric back and immediately hisses in sympathy.

“Bad?” Rogers asks. He’s seated at the other side of their round table, facing away.

“I wouldn’t wear evening gowns for a few weeks, in this condition,” Natasha says. She unzips
something behind Leigh and grabs the glass she’d set down earlier.

“I don’t know, if it’s black and blue I could get a galaxy print,” Leigh tells her.

“Company,” Rogers says, suddenly.

“Hold still, okay?” Natasha says, when Leigh tries to look around at the road to see who is pulling
up. “Here,” she adds, and Leigh feels a cool, soft pressure on her shoulder. “Field dressing of
sorts.” Natasha secures the cold compress in place with some kind of stretchy wide fabric, finishing
up right before Iron Man lands with a loud thump on the concrete beside their table.
Leigh’s never seen him in the suit up close, only in videos, and never when she had feelings for
him. The arc reactor is heart shaped. She has no idea whether he’s done that for her (her practical
mind rejects this immediately) or if it had been like that before.

As soon as he lands, Tony taps the glowing heart on his chest, and his suit seems to particulate and
retract. Underneath it, he’s wearing his typical ‘lab’ clothes, scruffy and casual, but his expression
isn’t casual. Tony looks harried and on edge.

“Stepping out on me?” he says to Leigh, upset but still able to joke, which she’s grateful for. “Had
me worried.” He traces his eyes over her, catching the odd shape of her shoulder right away,
starting to walk over.

“Not worried enough, seems like,” Natasha says, getting up from behind Leigh. “What are you
thinking, not giving her some kind of a panic button? Did you forget your reputation?”

“Nice to see you too, Nat,” Tony says, pausing to look at her, then at Rogers. “Steve.”

“Tony,” Rogers says in the same dry, polite voice.

“Maybe I can get a cab, this is seriously uncomfortable,” Leigh says, standing up and turning to
step out of the wide bench seat attached to the table. Her shoulder protests painfully, and she stops,
her left hand flying to clutch it. “Right, right. Forgot about that.”

Natasha had braced herself to catch Leigh if she fell, but Tony shoulders her out of the way as if
she’s not even there.

“What happened?” he demands. In an apparent extension of the night before, Tony slides down his
left hand to link with hers, as if they’re not in public, as if he’s not upset, as if she’s not there with
people from his past that he has a lot of baggage regarding.

“I--” Leigh tries to think of how best to explain.

“She hit the wall, literally, after being jerked around by Justin Hammer’s brother-in-law,” Natasha
says harshly. “Who was looking for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Leigh offers, and all three of the Avengers object, with varying levels of vehemence.
It’s a bit much, and the cold pack is nice, but her shoulder hurts, so Leigh responds like a mature,
adult woman and buries her head on Tony’s chest. His free arm bands against her back, as if he
meant it to be comforting, but it’s shaking.

“Are you okay?” Leigh whispers to Tony. His chest contracts, and the sound he makes comes out
as a choked laugh, but it doesn’t feel that way to Leigh, crushed as she is against his chest.

“Where is he now?” Tony asks. He sounds furious, his voice without any inflection other than pure
rage .

She’d been clutching his shirt fabric with her left hand, but now Leigh slides it to the center of his
chest and presses her hand there, as if she could fill up the spaces currently occupied by anger with
her comfort, instead. She doesn’t move that hand, not to caress, not to ease the strange angle she’s
holding it to, as the seconds count by.

“He’s in custody,” Natasha says.

“Was it bad?” Tony’s voice has a catch in it that makes Leigh shift against him to kiss him where
she’d been resting her cheek.
“Decent chance Leigh was going to take him down if I hadn’t shown up.”

Tony’s body goes completely rigid, at that.

“Don’t. I carry a gun because I want to, because I’m ready to use it in exactly that kind of
situation,” Leigh says, pulling back from him so she can see his face. As she moves the hand on his
chest, he looks down and smiles at it, making her heart do a ridiculous little swoop to see it.

Tony had opened his arms readily, but keeps her right hand clasped in his. The size differential
between them means that her knuckles are starting to ache a little, but Leigh’s coming to accept
that this is part of loving Tony-- sometimes that process is going to cause some pain. Still worth it,
though.

Ever the peacemaker, Rogers speaks up. “It’s good to see you, Tony, even if the circumstances
aren’t great. Thanks for the donation. It means a lot.” He comes over to stand near them, and Leigh
notices something.

“You’re almost the same height!” she says, looking back and forth between the two men. “I totally
thought Steve was taller.”

She hadn’t meant to call him that, but the strangest thing happens when she does: where he’s
holding her, Tony’s thumb brushes a caress across her hand.

“It’s the shoulders,” Tony says, using his casual joking voice. “He’s built like a cartoon come to
life. It’s an impossible beauty standard, I’m surprised no one’s started protesting.” He nods at
Steve. “You’re welcome.”

Holding her arm in the same position for so long is starting to create a new ache in her shoulder, so
reluctantly, Leigh tugs her right hand free. “Positional pain,” she explains with an apologetic smile.
Tony nods, then moves behind her to gingerly lift up the field dressing-style treatment Natasha
placed on Leigh’s shoulder.

“Can’t imagine why, given what kinds of colors it’s turning.” He presses close behind her on
Leigh’s left side and just blatantly smells her hair, as if it’s the only thing that will soothe him.
“You’re right,” he says, presumably to Natasha. “Thanks for being there.”

“Well, now that I have sort of a project going, I might need to stay in touch,” Natasha says. There’s
a sweet kind of vulnerability to her words, which she seems to try to lessen by the way she moves
her head as she speaks, the studied, teasingly casual tone she’s using.

Tony lets out a breath. When he speaks, it’s vulnerable too, but in his cocky, flippant way, instead.
“That seems reasonable. Hey, Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“Let me know if you need anything else for that charity.”

Steve looks down; his bashful smile is brief. When he looks up again, he’s clear-eyed and grateful.
“I will.”

Leigh can tell that both Steve and Natasha are privately pleased about something, and she turns her
head carefully to peek at Tony. He’s smiling.

“Did I miss something just now?” Leigh says. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
“Okay, now it’s ringing,” Natasha says, pulling Leigh’s phone out of her bra. Instead of handing it
over immediately, she looks at it for a few seconds in surprise first. “You got in touch with
Bruce?”

“Yeah, is that him calling? He’s in town for a few days,” Leigh says, taking it. “Hello?”

“Hey, Doctor Banner here touching base,” he says. “Bit late for dinner, want to try again
tomorrow?” Leigh reaches down for Tony’s arm and checks the time on his watch. 7:34. Dr.
Banner apparently lives on country time-- dinner in the city tends to be late, Leigh’s come to
realize.

“Yeah, that would be perfect, thank you. Want me to call around, what? Five? Five thirty?”

“Yeah, great. Have a good evening, then.” Banner hangs up without an actual goodbye.

Leigh tucks her phone into her left skirt pocket and then realizes that Tony, Steve (Steve! She can’t
imagine she’ll ever get used to that, but she’s trying), and Natasha (it’s easier to be on a first name
basis when your life depends on it) are staring at her.

“What?”

“What did you do to get Banner to open up so fast?” Steve asks.

“‘Open up!’ What, dinner?” Leigh’s only half kidding with her casual incredulity there. She’d got
the impression from Rhodes that what had happened on Sunday morning last week was very
unusual.

“We’re a little confused because the first time I met the guy, I had to bribe someone to bring him to
me, and I took thirty of my closest armed and armored friends with me just in case he didn’t like
what I had to say,” Natasha says sardonically. “What did you offer?”

“I offered to show him my soulmark,” Leigh says truthfully. Natasha’s response to that is…
interesting, to say the least. She looks both amused and regretful, and she shrugs her left shoulder
as if it has started to sting.

“Ah, well,” she finally responds, as if Leigh’s answer has put paid to her hopes of following her
lead.

“You don’t have one either?” Steve asks Natasha, gently.

Her grin is bright, almost too bright. “I didn’t say that.”

***

Steve and Natasha had refused to allow Tony to even think about taking her back to the tower in his
suit, so Leigh had gone with Steve in his car. Natasha and Steve had then spent a good eight
minutes bantering back and forth about why he’s in a car over his motorcycle today, and whether
there’s any point in a supersoldier wearing a helmet. Leigh had enjoyed watching their banter,
especially as she was slowly coming to understand what it was that Tony had given up on purpose,
all those months ago.

Somehow, Tony is waiting in the elevator when she gets into the tower. He insists on taking her up
to his penthouse for a shower, bribing her with the fact that he just got the bathroom remodeled.
Leigh’s very grateful for his help unbuttoning her blouse, even if it does mean that Natasha will
look smug the next time they see each other.
“Honestly, I just want to curl up in bed, you don’t need to--”

“You think you know better than me when it comes to blunt force trauma? Get in the shower,”
Tony interrupts.

Leigh secretly loves when he gets bossy.

(She’s only going to let him know about liking it in bed, though.)

Tony’s shower is the kind of thing people design for rich apartments in movies, Leigh thinks. It’s
large, square, and as far as she can see, has two modes-- rain, and pedestrian. If she wasn’t so tired
and beat up after the day she’s had, she might consider making a joke about it. As it is, though,
Leigh steps into the shower on rain mode and just basks in the heat.

There’s only one problem.

“Tony?”

He comes through the open door to his bathroom so quickly that Leigh’s sure he’d been standing
there hoping. The only reason she can see him is because, while the glass walls of his lavish
shower room (it’s a room. It’s big enough to be a room in any other building, and just because it’s a
room inside another room in Tony’s tower doesn’t mean it’s any less room-like, Leigh decides)
have fogged up, she’d left the door open, giving her a glimpse into the rest of the huge bathroom.
So when he comes to see what she wants, Tony’s framed by the fogged glass except for the rich
colors of his bathroom tile.

“I can’t get my hair wet with only one arm,” Leigh tells him. The funny part is, it’s the truth-- her
arm would get tired and then sore, and she’d have two sore arms, without his help.

“I live to serve,” he declares, but then walks right into the shower fully dressed.

“Tony! You had better not have any electronics on you right now!” Leigh protests. He hadn’t been
wearing the ARC reactor when he met her in the elevator, but she supposes that it kind of has to be
waterproof, or Iron Man would have a rather obvious weakness.

“You and your ridiculous hang-ups,” he tuts, pulling down one of the shower heads from above
them and using it to wet her hair. “There,” he says, but though he allows the sprayer to slot back up
into place, he doesn’t actually stop stroking his hands through her hair.

“It’s helping a lot, the heat, I mean. So you were right, and thank you,” she says, turning around to
look at him. Her mouth goes dry.

Tony’s in the process of running a hand through his hair when she sees him, and it’s a professional
porn movie quality image, right there. His feet are soaked, his jeans wet in large sections at the
front, and his shirt is completely soaked, clinging to his muscles lovingly.

“You look like a sea nymph or something, with your long hair and rosy nipples,” Tony says. He
closes his eyes right away, scrunching up his face. “You’re injured, and I’m--”

“Incredibly sexy standing there all wet like that,” Leigh says bravely. “I think what I need for
optimum shoulder healing is to watch you take that shirt off.”

She can’t believe she actually said it!

“For… healing,” Tony asserts, a speculative look on his face. “I could probably do that.”
Leigh watches as Tony does just what she was hoping he’d do, reaching up with both hands to pull
the shirt off of his back first, revealing his biceps as the sodden shirt slides down. The glimpse of
his toned stomach beforehand has her leaning back on the wet wall of the shower to support her
legs. By the time Tony has the shirt off, she’s biting her lip, because now the steady scatter of
water droplets are going to work on the denim of his jeans, which are slung low on his hips by
now.

Leigh wants, and the thing is, she can have, but she’s still caught up in the newness of it all, so she
covers her face as she says, “This is-- I’m physically drained, honestly, but I sure would love to
touch you.”

Tony’s quiet, and she lowers her hands (because peeking is just not sexy) . His eyes are dark,
intense, and full of a really powerful kind of joy.

“Leigh, I… First of all, yes. YES.” He starts toward her, and she can’t get over how much she likes
this image of his feet with the wet denim framing them. “The shower is where I saw your words for
the first time. If you’re asking to--” he falters.

“Wash away that memory? I can’t promise that, but if it doesn’t work, we can always just try
again,” Leigh says, pushing off from the wall with just her left hand. Somehow her nakedness
doesn’t leave her feeling as exposed as she thought it might, though some of that could be her wet
hair draped across her shoulders and chest.

She reaches out toward the waistband of his pants, feeling like some braver, sexier version of
herself. Tony sucks in a breath and then rests a hand on both of hers.

“I need to--” He backs up toward the back wall of the shower, tugging her with him. When he’s
close enough, Tony puts his left hand palm flat on the tile, and the thin film of warm water that
flows down it cascades around his hand. It’s a gorgeous image, like something out of a fancy
magazine article, but then again, Tony is like that, all of him, she thinks. “Do you want me to keep
my hands to myself?”

“No,” Leigh asserts. A squirmy, unsettled feeling rises in her and she shoves it down. “You touch
what you want, but if you distract me, I’m not responsible for any hitches in rhythm.”

Her face flames, but Leigh’s tired, affectionate, and really into him, right now.

“Holy shit, okay,” Tony mutters.

“I might be considering this my revenge against that guy trying to throw me around in a criminally
abandoned house earlier,” she confesses, reaching for his waistband again. The wet denim is tough
to unbutton, but she manages.

“‘Criminally abandoned?’” Tony asks, clearly amused.

“Those brownstones are historically relevant and letting them fall into that level of disrepair is a
discredit to anyone who cares about good design,” she grouses, sliding down his zipper.

“Things I did not expect to love together: rants about architecture, and a sinfully gorgeous woman
undressing me,” Tony says, hoarsely.

Leigh steps closer to him so she can reach down his body more easily, but her mind is caught
repeating the compliment on some kind of encouragement loop. “Yes, well.” She slides his jeans
down. “We all have our quirks.”
Tony’s boxer briefs aren’t completely soaked, but they’re wet enough and therefore tight to his skin
enough that she can’t pull them down one-handed in good conscience.

“Can you--”

Tony steps to the side and strips off both jeans and boxer briefs with an alacrity that is truly
impressive. More impressive is the way he keeps his eyes fixed on hers for those actions, as if he’s
hungry for the look in her eyes as she sees his fully naked body for the first time.

“Somewhere there are drawings on some artist woman’s sketchbook of you, I guarantee it,” Leigh
says softly. “I’m not even jealous, you’re--” she can’t say it, it’s ridiculous, but Tony’s expression
tells her he got the message, paused as he is with one hand clenched into a fist at his side, the other
holding his wet clothes in preparation for throwing them aside. A work of art, Leigh finishes in her
head. It still makes her blush, just to think it. “C’mere?”

He tosses the clothes and moves toward her, fully erect, unashamed. It is, as he once said to her,
painfully hot.

Leigh reaches up and touches his face first. “Only one hand today, sorry,” she says, and then Tony
does the thing he’d done at the diner. Leaning back against the wall of the shower, he reaches over
and twines their fingers together, his left to her right. She smiles, leans over to kiss his chest, and
Tony gasps, actually gasps.

“Your hair,” he whispers. Leigh looks down and her wet hair has cascaded around his cock. Tony
bucks his hips. “Not asking for this, not today, not with an injured shoulder,” he tells her, the words
almost a chant, The streak of desire in his tone is broad.

“Someday,” she promises, and uses her left hand to pull her hair back over her injured shoulder. Its
wetness and weight acts like a kind of warm compress. There are quite a few somedays she can see
potential for, right now, truth be told.

Leigh squeezes their joined hands and looks away from the warm anticipation in Tony’s eyes down
to his cock. She reaches down to grasp him at the root, not rough but not gently, wanting the shock
of it, loving the hitched gasp from his reaction. Gathering some of the precome that’s already
waiting at the tip, she looks up at Tony’s face, and sees that he’s closed his eyes. Leigh sets a
rhythm based on the squeeze and tremble of his hand in hers, the rock of his hips, and the
vehemence of his swear words.

She’s pretty damned turned on, but it’s fueling her, rather than making her desperate. Tony’s
getting close, she can tell by the way he’s stopped caring about the way the flood of water from the
wall pulses against his hair where he’s thrown his head back.

Tony’s talking but she can’t quite understand him, doesn’t know what kind of praise or
condemnation he’s calling for, but the intonation is tuned to pleasure, and that’s enough for her.
She wonders if it’s like this for him working on his suits-- he can tell what they need, where they
tremble and require support, where they are flooded with energy and want a steady hand. Leigh
wants to learn Tony like that, not just here, not just sexually, but all of him.

The thought makes her speed up, adding an urgency to her movements. Tony responds right away,
chasing her with his hips, rocking their joined hands along with her movements. Then he’s coming,
a cry of pleasure that could be her name drawn from his throat. Leigh gentles her hand until she
feels like she can stop without stealing any of his pleasure.

He pulls her to him and presses a weak kiss to her hairline. It makes her feel powerful.
“Fuck, that was quite an understatement,” Tony says. A sort of delighted shudder goes through
him, and he closes his eyes for a few seconds.

Leigh laughs out a, “What?”

“‘I would love to touch you,’” he quotes back, dragging her to follow him out of the shower. He
hits the controls that turn it off and pulls a few towels out of an actual towel warmer.

“I did. I do!” she protests, as he starts to dry her off. Embarrassingly, she’s gripped by a huge yawn
almost as soon as he’s finished wrapping her in what she’s pretty sure is his bathrobe.

“I owe you a verbal run-down, and then a physical run-down of just how much I liked that, but I
think we’re both very tired.” He looks down at her. “Thank you for that. How’s that for an
understatement?” Tony says. “Stay?”

“I’d love to.”

***

Tony’s gone when she wakes up, but he had persuaded her to take some painkillers the night
before, and she’d slept in. What surprises her is that, instead of leaving a note, Tony’s left a pile of
clothing on a chair at the end of the bed. It’s made up of things she doesn’t need to move her right
arm much to put on, including the only other bra she owns with a front closure.

Leigh decides he did a decent job, once she’s got it all on. She’s wearing a white blouse with
purple embroidery on the sleeves, a lavender skirt with darker purple detailing, and a pair of cute
white lacy slip-on shoes. The breezy handkerchief hem of the skirt makes up for the slightly longer
sleeves of the shirt (which she wouldn’t choose to wear in early August, but that’s to be forgiven).

Her phone rings from Tony’s nightstand, and Leigh’s swept away by that image for a few seconds
before she picks it up.

“Hello, Bruce Banner here, calling a bit early.”

“Oh, hello, what can I help you with?”

“A restaurant was recommended to me as a great lunch option, but since it’s a bit fancy, I thought
maybe we could move up our chat?”

“That’s a practical choice I can get behind, Dr. Banner,” Leigh decides on the spot.

“You’re at the tower? I could swing the taxi by to pick you up. Half hour too early?”

“Nope, that’s fine,” Leigh tells him. She’ll have to get some painkillers to bring with her, but that’s
about it for preparation.

“Great. See you in about 25 to 40, depending on how much I look like I can afford a taxi outside
this hotel they’ve got me staying at. Bye.”

Leigh smiles, gathers up her things, and texts Tony.

Leigh: Bet you’d have picked something uglier than this if you knew you were
dressing me up to see your friend
 Leigh: I hope purple isn’t his favorite color. He’s moving the chat up to lunch

Tony: I’m sorry, were you trying to get me jealous? I can’t hear you over the sound of
your hand on me in the shower.

Leigh: I wasn’t, actually, just trying to be more interesting than ‘going to head out for
lunch, thanks for picking out an outfit’

Tony: Protip: next time do that with pictures of you putting on the outfit

Leigh takes the elevator down to the lobby, but she still has fifteen minutes to wait, so she texts
Tony again.

Leigh: This isn’t too fast, is it? I didn’t expect both Rogers and Romanoff to kidnap
me to a diner, yesterday.

Tony: It’s fine.

Tony: I’ve been thinking about it. We’re not all living together, I don’t have to take
orders from them, we won’t be up each other’s ass like we were before

Tony: ...here’s where you make a joke about being up America’s Ass

Leigh: The first rule of Fuck Club is You Don’t Talk About Fuck Club, Tony. You
should know that!

Tony: I

Tony: I should probably tell you I make FRIDAY read out your texts when I’m
welding

When Banner pulls up, Leigh’s still laughing, but she can’t bring herself to explain why.
 Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Summary

“Hey,” Bruce says, jogging to get in front of her and stopping. “You okay?”

“Do not tell Tony I’m crying over the thought of losing this bracelet. It’s a frivolous
waste of expensive technology and I love it with the power of a thousand suns and
he’ll never let me live it down if he knows,” Leigh says, furiously wiping away the
two tears that have managed to escape her moratorium.

Bruce pins her with a look, and says, “You mean I shouldn’t let Tony know you
actually like expensive jewelry? Seems like a timely thing to tell him.”

Chapter Notes

Here, have some heartwarming fluff before I end you!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Fifteen

Six Months Later

Leigh takes off her winter coat to hand to the coat attendant, checking at the last minute to make
sure her phone isn’t in the pocket. She takes the offered claim ticket and heads over to where she
can see Bruce in the waiting area. Today he’s wearing an actual suit, and he looks uncomfortable,
but his hug in greeting is anything but.

“Promise me you won’t take pictures of this to show Tony,” Bruce says, slipping a finger between
his collar and the expensive-looking tie he’s got on.

“Is that because you are going to someone else for funding, or because you’re dressed like you
care what other people might think of you?” Leigh asks, teasing.

“Sir, follow me to your table?”

“Nah, it’s just that he’ll give me shit if he finds out I wore it to the restaurant before the gathering
tonight.” Once they’re seated, he nods at her clothing. “Thanks for thinking of me.”

Leigh’s dress is green, the same color as the one she’d worn when she’d spoken with Rhodey
about the Avengers, though this one has lacy sleeves and a pleated skirt.
“Well, you know, I wanted to send in a picture so they could swatch the fabric to match perfectly,
but wouldn’t you know, all the news pictures of Hulk vary in color quality so much that I gave up,”
Leigh tells him.

“You joke, but with Tony’s money, you probably could actually do that.”

Leigh tries to think of a quip in response, but a waiter with some kind of fish dish walks past their
table, and the smell instantly turns her stomach. She goes with deflection, instead-- both from the
undoubtedly disgusted look on her face, and the favorite running gibe from Tony’s former
teammates: that she hates to waste (honestly, sometimes even just spend) Tony’s money.

“So you got the funding, then?”

Bruce looks down at the table, a pleased smile on his face. “Yeah. The thing is--” he cuts off, his
lips twisting the smile into a rueful one. “Did I tell you I went over to New Asgard right after
Christmas?”

The server comes and gets their drink order, informing them of the specials. Bruce’s face retains
its regretful expression, and Leigh starts to realize what he’s going to tell her. She sits forward in
her chair, her ankles crossing tightly, hand in her lap bunched in the napkin she’d grabbed to
protect the fabric of her dress from the condensation on her water goblet.

“He wouldn’t even let me in, this time.”

Leigh lets out a sad sigh. “I still think you guys should let me try. This has been like a kind of
talisman, seems like. It unlocks all the Avengers.” She holds up her wrist, covered by a new gadget
that Tony had made for her, for Christmas. It’s a bracelet made of nanoparticles that senses the
soulmark on her inner wrist and covers it intuitively. The rest of its composition holds to one of a
various number of delicate, beautiful structures, so it looks like Leigh’s just wearing an expensive
metalwork bracelet that happens to hide the word on her wrist.

Right now, she’s not referring to the bracelet as her talisman, but the word underneath.

“I know you can only go on what Nat and I have told you about what Thor’s like lately, but, I don’t
think it’ll work on him,” Bruce says. “Honestly, out of anyone in the universe, he may have had the
farthest fall.” He clears his throat, sits straighter in his chair. “That’s why I--”

“Please don’t,” Leigh says swiftly, desperately.

Their server has impeccable timing. He starts taking their orders for the main meal. The entire time
Bruce is ordering, Leigh stares at Bruce, knowing it’s rude, not caring, begging him with her
expression to change his mind.

She knows he won’t.

Bruce is a true gentleman. He sits still while she gives her order, doesn’t stare at her like he doesn’t
trust her judgment. Leigh feels a bit convicted by that.

As soon as the server leaves, Leigh rushes to speak.

“We don’t even know if you’ll ever need to do it. This is-- this is a crazy thing to change your life
so drastically over!”

“Leigh, the gauntlet is only a very small part of my reasoning for this,” Bruce says patiently. “The
truth is, I’m torn in half. You haven’t known me for long, all right? When this thing happened to
me, I thought of the Other Guy as a parasite, a toxic infection, something that I should be able to
figure out how to slough off.” He picks up his goblet to take a drink, then holds it up. “The balance
between us used to be more delicate than this. It’s better now, but that’s… that’s from trauma.”

“From what Tony said about what you’re planning, you’d-- I mean, I don’t mean to be crass,
Bruce, but you’d be different. Look , different. Irreversibly so.” Leigh doesn’t let herself think
about the implications for Nat, who she’s seen react to this nuclear option for Bruce with stoic
unhappiness. Their orbit around each other has been so wide that Leigh’s still not sure there’s
gravity there, but she thinks there is. It might well be as fragile as Bruce’s glass goblet though,
easily shattered by his plan.

Leigh can still kind of smell that fish, and the uneasiness from that is mixing with her dread over
Bruce’s plan to integrate himself with his alter ego. She hopes she can stand to eat anything.

“You’re asking if I’ll be okay if I don’t ‘pass’ in public anymore? Realistically, what happens
when I don’t? Total strangers aren’t afraid of me right now, but in my heart, I know they ought to
be, at least a little. When I’m done--”

“You don’t even know for sure it’ll succeed! Isn’t your work, the things that only your unique
mind is capable of understanding, more important than risking your life if you fail?”

“Is it going to remain worth it, if I’m still so miserable?” Bruce asks her with a textbook polite
smile.

Leigh’s slapped by this.

“Fuck, Bruce, really?” she whispers, conscious of the fancy restaurant they’re in.

“Really. You’re a fierce, kind advocate for me, Leigh, but not only have I made my peace with this,
I’ve spent more time questioning it than I really wanted to, because of my friends. It’s been…
actually very affirming,” Bruce says, his smile shining in his eyes, as it hardly ever does. He
presses down on a water droplet on the bright white tablecloth. “Who cares if I don’t pass in
public? What’s anyone going to do, try to beat me up?”

***

Outside the restaurant, as they wait for a cab, a young man that gives off a really strong ‘probably
a journalist’ vibe walks up to them.

“You’re Leigh Balci, aren’t you?” he says, as if that’s an appropriate way to greet a person. Leigh
doesn’t really mind that Bruce drifts backward and away from her, into a cluster of large potted
plants probably designed to prevent anyone from accidentally driving into the historic facade of the
restaurant they just left.

“What is it that you want?” Leigh asks, pulling her coat closer. She hadn’t fastened the front of it,
because it is usually too warm inside the cab. It’s the wrong move, though.

The journalist asshat reaches out and grabs her right wrist, still covered by her coat sleeve. Leigh
pulls back immediately, violently, and the man’s left with her coat, but no arm. With a swift move,
she cuts down with her right arm to dislodge her coat from his grip.

“Don’t mess with a woman’s Christmas present, okay? She’s liable to get a little cranky,” Leigh
tells the man.

“What do you say to the reports that you and Stark’s little mind games with magic marker
soulmarks are hiding the fact that you’re not soulmates?” the man says, holding out the
audiorecorder he’d had hidden in his coat pocket before.

“It was never about soulmates for us in the first place, so that lie is a complete waste of ink to print.
Get out of here before I show you what’s really on my wrist-- a panic button that’ll bring Iron Man
down on your ass!” Leigh shouts at him, turning away from him and shoving through the small
crowd that has gathered.

“Thank you, Miss Balci!” the man yells after her.

He sounds smug, and Leigh internally freezes, trying to think of what she might have said that
would make the man so gleeful. The panic button? That the panic button is on her wrist? It can’t be
that the press as a whole is convinced she has a soulmark on her wrist, because with the number of
times she and Tony have been photographed over the past months, the difference in skin color and
texture at that area is obvious, in high-res photographs.

Leigh’s inability to think of what might have pleased the asshat who’d accosted her is starting to
make her really upset. Her minor celebrity status as Tony Stark’s live-in girlfriend has been going
on for many months, and the onset of winter in NYC has actually lessened the number of times
she’s been confronted.

“I’m sorry about that,” Bruce says in a stage whisper, as he comes up behind her.

“You did exactly what I would have wanted you to,” Leigh says. To her horror, she feels herself
getting even more emotional, tipped over by how grateful she is that Bruce didn’t get recognized.
“If you’re worried about being trailed, you might want to come back with me and we can send
Chuck to your hotel room for anything.”

Bruce is perceptive enough to catch the little edge to her voice on ‘hotel room.’ He doesn’t stay at
the tower when he visits (which, honestly, has only been twice, but still) . “I promised Tony I’d
stay out of his hair for the most part, and I meant it.”

“He meant the lab, and he was lying through his teeth, you know that, right?” Leigh tells Bruce.
Her wrist hurts, but she doesn’t think the guy touched it, so it’s psychosomatic, like she needs that
right now. It’s hard not to wonder what might have happened if it had been fall, not winter, if she
hadn’t had a coat on, if he’d have taken her bracelet. She loves it, Tony outdid himself, the thing
can be programmed into many different beautiful shapes and colors. If the journalist had gotten it
off--

“Hey,” Bruce says, jogging to get in front of her and stopping. “You okay?”

“Do not tell Tony I’m crying over the thought of losing this bracelet. It’s a frivolous waste of
expensive technology and I love it with the power of a thousand suns and he’ll never let me live it
down if he knows,” Leigh says, furiously wiping away the two tears that have managed to escape
her moratorium.

Bruce pins her with a look, and says, “You mean I shouldn’t let Tony know you actually like
expensive jewelry? Seems like a timely thing to tell him.”

It’s a proposal joke.

Bruce just made a proposal joke.

On New Years’ Eve.

“If you ruin some sort of a surprise for him I’ll hold it over your head for the rest of eternity, just
see if I don’t,” Leigh says, but now she’s actually crying. “He wouldn’t, would he?” she whispers.

Bruce reaches out and holds her coat steady so she can put her freezing arm back into it. “The part I
like about this conversation is where I can’t tell if you’re asking if Tony would ask you to marry
him, or if he’d risk your ire by doing it with an expensive engagement ring.”

***

Leigh heads to the closet as soon as she gets home. She takes off the green dress and puts on her
favorite skirt with a soft cornflower blue sweatshirt. The hood is usable today because her hair’s up
in the crown braids she often wore for the soup kitchen, even though she hasn’t been able to
volunteer there for a while. The press attention has outlived its usefulness, and unfortunately it’s
disruptive, at this point.

She walks over to the couch and drops onto it, sighing. The unsettled stomach is still lingering, and
she’s a bit worried about how that could impact their gathering. Rhodey’s going to bring his fiance
Aleshia, who hasn’t had a chance to meet Bruce or Nat yet. The last thing Leigh wants to do is to
steal Rhodes’ thunder. He and Aleshia got engaged on Christmas, and this will be their first chance
to ‘step out’ in public afterwards.

The only thunder Leigh’s planning tonight is related to her dress. It’s red. She’s going to wear her
hair down with some clips she’d ordered for probably too much money online. They’re custom-
made red flowers with small arc reactors in the center.

The funny part is that when ordering them, Leigh had used Nat’s address, because she didn’t really
want to tell the etsy shop owner that she was making them for Tony Stark’s girlfriend.

“Miss Balci, the party organizers are here,” FRIDAY informs her.

“Thanks!” After letting in the team that were about to transform Tony’s penhouse into an intimate
New Years Eve gathering, Leigh heads down to her old apartment. FRIDAY can tell her if the crew
needs her.

Besides, it’s hard to keep an outfit hidden from your boyfriend when you share a closet.

***

Leigh’s almost finished drying her hair when Nat shows up. She looks fantastic, and all Leigh can
see of the dress so far is the knees down. It’s a black evening gown with two angled cutouts that
reveal her legs.

“I didn’t know if the black you’d said you were going to wear would clash with your two-toned
hair, but that, uh, really works,” Leigh says. Nat’s face is not completely devoid of makeup, but
Leigh can tell she’s not put her ‘game face’ on for the evening.

When Nat takes off her coat, Leigh’s even more appreciative. The neckline is asymmetrical to the
extreme, leaving her right arm completely bare and dipping down over her right breast. It angles up
to cover her left shoulder and arm with a half sleeve whose cut mirrors those from the front of the
dress.

“Convenient to find a dress that covers your left shoulder,” Leigh remarks as she brushes her hair.

“You are just desperate to see it, aren’t you?” Nat sighs.
“I mean, the level at which you hide your soulmark is completely unsurprising, given who you
are,” Leigh tells her. “I just feel like you’re overselling it unless there’s a swear word or two in
there. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to rat you out to the papers.”

“You think it’s about trust?” Nat says, seeming to be surprised. She pulls out some heavy duty
makeup supplies and sets them down on Leigh’s coffee table. “It isn’t. They’re--” she lets out a
long breath. “You’re not the only person who spent time hiding from their soulmate, Leigh. I don’t
even know if he’ll remember saying them, to be honest.”

“So it’s from before the Snap,” Leigh realizes aloud. “You already know them!”

“Him. Where’s the dress?” Nat asks pointedly.

Leigh accepts the subject change with reluctance. After she gets the simple, elegant red dress on,
she sits down on her couch and readies herself to submit to Natasha’s makeup expertise. The dress
is floor-length, with her favorite style of pleated, voluminous skirt. This particular skirt has a
scandalously high slit in it, not that Leigh will probably reveal just how high it is if she can help it,
tonight. While they have company, anyway. The neckline is low, V-shaped but with an extra little
curl of depth to create interest, and the sleeves are wrist-length. The redness of the dress and her
unfettered, honey blonde hair are really the stars of her outfit, tonight. She’d loved some of the
options she’d seen for red dresses, ones with lace detailing, or sequins and embroidery, but all of
those would have caught on her hair, maybe been too busy for what she’d envisioned.

Knowing that she should hold still, Leigh simply sits and listens to Nat talk about various things,
barely paying attention, until she pulls out a tube of mascara and unscrews it.

“Oh, wow, those come scented these days? That’s... Nat, I’m not sure I can wear that,” Leigh says,
leaning back away from the other woman. The smell of the mascara isn’t distasteful, like the fish
earlier in the day had, but it’s strong, far too strong for her.

Natasha lifts the tube to her nose and frowns. “Leigh, I can barely smell this.”

“That just tells me you’ve gotten kicked in the face and gassed too many times in your storied
career,” Leigh says with conviction. “It’s really strong. Did you have a cold recently or something?
Reduced sense of smell?”

Nat rescrews the tube and looks at her for a long minute. “Have you had a heightened sense of
smell lately?”

Leigh thinks back. “No, I don’t think so? I mean, there was a ghastly, stinking fish thing at the
restaurant today, but I think I can safely say I’ll always think that’s disgusting, no change there.”

“You were there with Bruce?” Nat asks.

Leigh holds her expression, certain that Natasha is information gathering. “Yeah, kind of a tradition
now, every three months. You’re welcome to join. I bet he’d love that.”

Except, if Bruce does what he’s planning, he’ll be incommunicado. For months. Maybe over a
year.

Natasha shrugs. “He wasn’t bothered by the fish?”

“Not that he said, but we were, you know, chatting.”

Their conversation shifts back to other things as Nat brings out another mascara and uses it,
instead. It’s only when they’re completely finished and Leigh goes to admire Nat’s handiwork in
her bathroom mirror that the other woman asks her something else.

“There’s this app I heard about, it was designed to go through and delete all reminders, calendar
entries, and contacts for people and services that no longer exist after the Snap. Cross-referenced
all of the missing people and business closures, people were swearing by it about a year ago. Any
chance you’ve run that on your phone?”

Leigh nods. “Yeah, it was really convenient. One of the most comforting things I’ve ever done,
honestly, because I didn’t have to constantly get hit with the enormity of how much changed when
I just wanted to call for pizza or something.”

Nat leans against the bathroom doorway, tipping her head to the side. “Think your OBGYN was
one of them?” she asks in a light, friendly tone.

Leigh catches Nat’s eye in the mirror, and time seems to completely halt. She casts back, using this
seeming pause in the time-space continuum to search her mind for the needed information. Yes, her
OB was one of the people Snapped. The practice itself had lost 65% of its staff, as it was a small
office. It had closed. Leigh’s habit of meticulous calendar entries for appointments, especially
those scheduled long in advance, such as IUD removal and replacement had undoubtedly been
influenced by the app Natasha had mentioned.

“You think I’m pregnant?” Leigh gasps. Her lungs are clogged with debris, it seems like, as if
she’s an engine seized up with self-doubt and fear.

“Hey, let’s go sit down, all right?”

“I swear to God, Natasha, if you treat me like a china doll--”

“I’m not, but you turned white as a sheet right there. You should be sitting down, that’s it, I
promise.” As if to prove her promise, Nat practically drags Leigh back into the living room and
shoves her into a seat.

“To--” Leigh can’t even finish his name, much less the sentence.

“I think he’ll be happy. If I’m right, which I think I am.”

Leigh thinks of her sister in law and bursts into tears. She flails her hands out. “Shit, Natasha your
makeup--”

“Waterproof, dearest, you think I’m an amateur?”

“This is the second time today I’ve cried. Natasha, I am not really a crier.” Leigh can’t say it out
loud twice, but this is as close as she can get. Pregnant. A chance to have more family in the world,
her family, Tony’s family. Their family. She wants that. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize…” she
whispers. “It’s been six years since the IUD. I just got so used to not having to worry--”

“I imagine that’s probably contributing to some kind of absent-minded baby boom, at this point,”
Nat laughs.

Leigh covers her face with her hands, careful not to smudge her makeup, even though she should
probably be more concerned that she’ll need some kind of special chemical to get it back off,
knowing Nat. “What if he isn’t happy? It’s soon, Nat, I only moved into the penthouse three
months ago. The press is going to think--”
Nat makes a loud, rude rebuttal noise. She’s on her phone, scrolling through google images, Leigh
can tell. “Солнышко, you meant this when you wrote it, didn’t you?” Natasha asks her. It’s the
picture, zoomed in, of the obscured letters from her ‘fuck the press’ Leigh had written on her leg,
leaving the bunker. “And if they say you trapped him, you go public with the name on your arm.
Tony trapped you first, don’t forget that.”

Leigh laughs, the absurdity of that argument being the absolute truth catching her in the exact right
place. “Stars, you’re right, aren’t you? That’s as documented as anything else!”

***

Nat makes Leigh promise to come up to the penthouse no earlier than ten minutes late. Leigh
spends the time waiting fiddling with her bracelet to find the exact right design (to wear on her left
wrist, today), and stressing out. She’ll have to get a pregnancy test somehow, but the press
attention has been unreal lately. TMZ has essentially declared war on her hidden soulmark,
offering ridiculous amounts of money to anyone who can confirm it. Charriotte has an actual legal
injunction against two separate journalists who keep using friends and family members to pose as
clients, similar to what ‘Marteau’ had done, trying to get close to her.

Leigh wouldn’t put it past the press to pay off someone at the grocery store, even if they were on
the lookout for Chuck or Nat, not necessarily orders for the tower.

She goes into the bathroom to make sure her makeup is all right, and to check on her hair clips.
Leigh smiles at her reflection; she looks beautiful, even if she does say that herself. The color red
isn’t her favorite, but it’s Tony’s favorite, and that makes it worth it.

It’s time to head up, and Leigh puts on her high heels, another concession to something Tony
enjoys.

“Miss Balci, the boss wants to know if you’re on your way, or if you would like him to, and I quote
under duress, ‘Come down and help you christen the dress, first.’”

“I’m coming, FRIDAY, thank you,” Leigh laughs.

The walk to the elevator goes well. Leigh’s been practicing with the heels, and not just because
she’s heard that Pepper Potts practically wore them in her sleep. Tony’s extraordinary first love is
not much of a specter in their relationship, she’s found, mostly because Leigh knows there
wouldn’t be a relationship to be had were it not for Potts’ loss. It’s hard to resent a woman for
giving you the greatest gift you never knew you wanted.

Leigh’s been planning this for a month, the moment when she walks into this little gathering
wearing Tony’s favorite color, in shoes that he’s confessed to having fantasies about her wearing
for him, hair down, wrist bare and proudly displaying his name.

She just didn’t think she’d be possibly bearing his child at the time.

When the elevator doors open, Leigh takes her first step with her left leg, where the slit is. She can
see everyone has turned to see her, but can’t see Tony at first. Finally she spots him, all the way
across the room, and Leigh laughs.

He’d seen the shoes. Tony’s going to make her cross the room in them, because he’s a selfish,
predictable asshole that she loves so much it feels like it should be unhealthy.

Steve walks over to greet her, and Tony yells at him.

“Back off Steve, this is a Thing.”

“Don’t be rude, Tony,” Leigh admonishes. “Hi, Steve,” she says, still walking.

“Red, huh?”

“Apparently it’s important enough to rekindle his rivalry with you,” she says.

“Far be it from me to stand between Tony Stark and what he wants,” Steve tells her, bowing his
head in a farewell, and stepping back.

“I can see you backing up, Tony. If I trip in these I’ll never wear them again. I miss being a
bohemian girl,” Leigh calls out, mock frowning.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tony says, taking a blatant step backwards towards
their bedroom.

Leigh stops and puts her hands on her hips. “We have guests!”

“All of whom love us anyway!”

“I don’t!” Nat calls out.

“I’ve only met you twice,” Aleshia says, leaning over past Rhodey to grin at Leigh.

“Pretty sure I almost destroyed your ARC reactor with my shield, once,” Steve adds.

“Fine, I’ll do it right here,” Tony says, and he stalks forward, pulls Leigh close, and kisses her,
starting with an obvious swipe of his tongue that she knows everyone in the room can see. It’s a
filthy, sexual kiss, complete with one of her favorite moves, when Tony winds her hair around his
hand to hold her still. He lifts his head thirty seconds later and wipes his mouth off with the back of
his hand. “Don’t taunt me in my own house, Avengers,” Tony says loudly.

Nat comes over after everyone settles back into socializing. “Damn, Tony, you might as well have
just posted an ad for a trophy wife, if that’s how you were going to treat her! Tell her she looks
pretty or I’ll flip you upside down by your shoelaces.”

“I believe I expressly forbade you to let them like you more than me,” Tony frowns at Leigh.

“That condition was violated before I ever met you, my love,” Leigh tells him. “Honestly, if this is
the mood you’re in, I need a drink. Preferably a cute, fruity one.” She starts toward the bar, getting
about five steps before she stops. Tony had started walking beside her, and when she stops, he does
too, looking over quizzically. “Actually, I think I’d prefer that you didn’t end up hanging by your
shoelaces today. Do go on?” Leigh says, adrenaline racing through her system at her near-miss.

‘Pregnant woman shouldn’t be drinking’ was not how she intended on telling him. Especially not
when she just had a vague feeling and no confirmation.

“Close one,” Nat says to the two of them, grinning.

She probably doesn’t mean the shoelaces.

“You are devious as fuck. Did you hide that dress in your old apartment? Did you let me see the
shoes so I thought I knew your secret?” Tony says. He leans back and looks at her intently. “Are
you hiding anything else?”
Leigh covers her mouth with her hand. Tony takes this to mean he’ll really like the next thing she
has hidden, she can see that by the look on his face.

Thinking fast, she reaches out for his hand, then pulls him close. It looks like their small group of
close friends are engaged in their plan of watching the fireworks being set off at 10:30 PM. “Look
at me at first, okay?” she says to Tony. He nods, obviously curious and possibly turned on, but that
might just be the shoes.

Leigh pulls his hand down to the skirt of her dress, then pushes her knee forward to find the slit.
Tony figures out what’s happening about fifteen seconds in, and his warm approval sets the fire
going in her gut. He leans down on his own accord and runs his hand along her leg, not too far up,
but enough.

“I love when dresses come with Easy Open,” he says, grinning. “Hold that thought for later?”

“Absolutely,” she tells him.

***

“--with their soulmarks in indecent or not easily accessed areas, you know?” Aleshia is saying.
“I’m grateful, that’s all.” She lifts her dress to show them the words ‘Excuse me, but it was nice to
meet you’ written in a neat line along her shin, in Rhodey’s handwriting.

“Fatal mistake,” Nat says to Rhodey. “You tried to get out of there but you still addressed the
words to her, didn’t you?”

“In my defense, I still don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to soulmates.”

“Well you didn’t commit felony kidnapping in the space of five minutes, so you’re doing better
than I am,” Tony says, tightening his arm around Leigh on the couch.

“Is it true you didn’t talk to him for two months?” Aleshia asks Leigh.

“That’s easier to do when you’re not in contact,” Leigh says, trying to play it off.

“Um, sorry, no, you’re leaving out the part where we were camping out for 36 plus hours right
after I spoke to you the first time,” Tony objects.

“I still can’t believe you fell for the laryngitis line,” Bruce says, pulling everyone’s attention.
“What? It’s soothing, these soulmate stories.” His face is reddening, and Leigh hasn’t spent much
time around him in person, but she can recognize the tension in his voice. “People who are
surprised by their words, that’s interesting to me. It’s a whole different dynamic,” he says.

Then, he looks straight at Natasha. Leigh catches her breath, and so, it seems, does the rest of the
guests.

“Five minutes until twelve, boss. You asked me to warn you.”

“Yeah, thanks FRIDAY,” Tony says. Leigh looks over at him, and sees that he’s looking between
Nat and Bruce in a really obvious way, a way that everyone else in the room is too polite to do. She
sets a hand on his leg, and Tony snaps out of it. “Hey, right, so: I wasted my hard-earned money on
a frivolous display that my girlfriend is going to bitch at me about, come over to the windows and
watch. I’ll be right back. All of you, stand about… there,” he says, pointing to a specific place in
the room.
Leigh isn’t able to stop him to ask if he’s kidding before he bounds off to the bedroom, so she
drifts over to the windows next to Nat. Without looking over, she squeezes Natasha’s hand. She
squeezes back.

“Ah, there you are. Go big or go home, right?” Tony says from behind her, pointing past her head
toward a specific spot in the sky.

At first, Leigh thinks he’s pointing at fireworks, but the closer she looks at them, the more she
realizes they’re too precise for that. The colors are too bright, they’re too well balanced, the image
of a starburst a little too expertly displayed to have the vagaries of fireworks. Letters start to appear
as the lights coalesce, and Leigh’s figured out what they say about a third of the way into the
sequence.

MARRY ME, SOULMATE?

“Tony, this has to be visible to at least half of the city!” Leigh gasps out. “How--” She stops herself
from asking the obvious question at the last minute.

“Pay up!” Nat whispers to Steve. Steve reaches for his wallet.

Leigh stares at the white and cornflower blue colors of the words in the sky. She can barely see
them because she’s already crying. Her heart is so full it hurts, and she both wishes she could be
alone and wishes she could show this moment to the whole world, especially the ones who have
been so derogatory to Tony. Leigh turns around, and Tony’s standing behind her, one hand stuffed
into his pocket, casual as a man can be when he’s standing there holding a ring box.

“Close the box,” Leigh says.

Everyone in the room makes a shocked noise.

“Leigh,” Tony says, and the trust in his voice undoes her. He knows she’s not trying to say no.

“I don’t want to see it, that’s not what’s important right now,” she says, walking over to him. “Yes.
Yes. Are you sure?”

Tony pulls her to him, and she’s almost the same height because of her ridiculous shoes. “You are
still impossible to predict,” he says, his voice shaky. “What the hell do you mean, ‘am I sure?’”

“The soulmate thing, that’s-- I mean, Stars, Tony, that’s quite a lean in,” she sniffs, laughing,
crying. “I thought you thought they’re bullshit?”

“If they’re bullshit, I still win,” Tony says, in a voice as happy as she’s ever heard from him. “No,
hear me on this,” he says, pulling back, putting a hand on each of her shoulders, one with only a
few fingers, as he’s still holding the ring box. “I win. I have you. Whatever his purpose was,
whatever the fucking justification, he’s dead. Death of the author, we interpret it our way, now.
Marry me. Marry me as that guy you almost shot for sneaking up on you, marry me as your
kidnapper, marry me as the guy bankrolling your ridiculous architect lifestyle, marry me because I
love you. Pick one. Pick all of them.”

Leigh’s sobbing, she’s nodding, and Tony holds out the ring box.
“Look at the damned ring, and if you say one thing about how much it costs, I’ll take it back and
make them double the size of the stone.”

Leigh opens the box and gasps. The stone is her favorite color or just a bit darker, a gorgeous
sapphire blue. It’s surrounded by a silver metal filigree scattered with smaller blue stones, and
edging them is a rich gold line of blue stones. It’s stunning, perfect, and he couldn’t have chosen
better for her if he’d taken her to whichever overpriced jewelry store he’d bought it from.

“This is--” she starts to say, hearing the stunned shock in her own voice.

“Leigh, so help me,” Nat calls out from the group of people huddled behind them, watching.

“--absolutely perfect, yes, I would love to marry you,” Leigh finishes, glaring over her shoulder.

“Good,” Tony says. He takes the box and pulls out the ring.

Leigh gasps again, wheeling around before Tony can put it on her finger. “Oh no! Rhodey, please
tell me he asked you if it was okay before he--”

“Woman! This moment is about you!”

To her complete surprise, Tony picks her up by hefting her over his shoulder. The voluminous skirt
splays out from the slit, her hair going everywhere.

“He asked me!” Rhodey calls out.

“Congratulations!” Aleshia adds.

That’s all Leigh hears before Tony crosses into their bedroom and unceremoniously dumps her on
the bed. He shuts the door, and Leigh’s still struggling out from under her hair and half of her skirt
by the time he comes back.

“I cannot believe you just did that!” she says, her face still wet from her tears of joy.

“Do you think they bought it?” Tony asks, grinning.

Leigh stares at him. “That was an act!?”

“I’m excited, selfish, horny, and you said yes. I did what was necessary.”

“They’re going to know, Tony!” Leigh hisses, her hands flying up to her face. The worst part is that
she’s tempted, because Tony has absolutely corrupted her.

“There’s a back elevator, and there’s still a made-up bed in your old apartment.” Tony smiles.
“There are also any number of walls and floors across countless floors in the building. I know, I
built it.” He kneels down in front of her and pulls the ring off of his pinky finger, where it barely
fits. “Hand?” he says, imperiously.

She gives him her hand, and he slides the gorgeous ring onto her ring finger.

“Now, can we go do things while you wear this that render it morally and ethically impossible to
return?”

Leigh grins. “Please.”

Chapter End Notes

New Years’ Dress: https://www.lalamira.com/A-Line-Princess-V-Neck-Floor-Length-

Evening-Dresses-With-Ruffle-017212101-g212101/?utm_term=212101&utm_size=06

Ring (let’s be real, this is just for the type of style, Tony’s going to spend a ridiculous
amount on one from a fancy well known jeweler but you can’t google those):
https://www.camelliarts.com/product/blue-diamond-engagement-ring-vintage-
engagement-ring-unique-14k-two-tone-gold-ring/
 Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Summary

Scott Lang gets up and walks over to stand beside her at the penthouse window.

“Do you think we can do it?” Leigh asks. The buildings crowding around the cityscape
in front of her feel like stand-ins for monumental loss, in this moment. One each for
the family members she aches to introduce to Ember. Each lit window is a potential
memory that can be made. There are thousands of them.

“I do. I really do. And if anyone can figure it out, it’s Tony.”

Chapter Notes

Another time jump, this time three years. As much as it would be so lovely to see them
live those years in between, that's not what this particular story is about.

Of course, it's uh, necessary to know they're still rabid for each other, on the threshold
of figuring out the Time Heist, right? I'll leave you the message I sent BrightestMoony
when I finished the chapter:

Wait, you say you DIDN’T order 2200 words of hot possessive Tony sex? I’m so sorry,
but there is no return policy

I am in no way sorry

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Sixteen

October, 2023

Leigh closes her eyes, dips her leg down off of the hammock, scrapes her toes against the ground,
and shoves. The temperature is warm for the season, but she’s under a knitted blanket anyway
because the breeze is chilly. It would be so easy to drift off, she thinks-- but nap time is nearly
over.

As soon as the thought crosses her mind, Leigh hears a familiar tiny voice from inside the house.
It’s as predictable as the sunset.

“Dis Book!”
“Your turn, I think,” Tony calls out to her, from inside.

“On my way,” Leigh answers back, getting up and slipping her shoes on.

“Mama and Daddy pitchurs in here. I like Dis Book!”

“Once you can lift it, I think you’ll probably carry it everywhere. Maybe we should make you your
own version, hmm?” Tony’s saying to their daughter, when Leigh walks up onto the porch.
They’ve decided not to correct her pronunciation too often yet, so they’re not discouraging.

“Mama has pitty dress. Aunt Nat pitty too.”

“Your Mama almost always has on something pretty, did you ever notice that?” Tony says in a
quieter voice. Leigh peeks in at the window to see which room they’re in. She loves watching Tony
with Em. She could play back the surveillance videos (and sometimes they do, especially when one
of them has missed something cute), but the cameras’ perspective is above their heads, and that
hardly ever captures Ember’s facial expressions.

As expected, Em is patting her hands on the wedding album. Leigh and Tony had brought the
album out on her birthday a few weeks ago to show her, and she’s been obsessed ever since. Em
had seen their wedding photo set up in their bedroom, and asked if there were more pictures of
‘Pitty Mama.’ He’d told her that being three meant she was a big enough girl to look without
getting them all sticky-- but Leigh didn’t think he’d expected her to want to look at them every day.

“I know you’re lurking, I can smell the shampoo you used this morning. You’re standing in the
wind, wife,” Tony says.

“Who designed this house so the front door is so easily exposed by the prevailing winds from the
west?” she complains, coming inside.

“Whoever she is, I think she might need a long, exhaustive lecture on the subject.”

“You’re going to have to stop using that word like that, Em’s going to pick up on it and she’ll be in
therapy by age 25 about how much her parents love lecturing each other,” Leigh laughs.

“Honey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but given who her father is, she’ll be in therapy by age 25
anyway.”

“Boss, I’ve got a video call comin’ in from the Avengers compound. It’s marked urgent.”

“Go on, I’ve got this,” Leigh tells Tony. It’s Saturday, so it’s the weekly check-in. Any number of
things could have happened, but Leigh hopes that no one’s gotten hurt, at least.

“All right, route it to my office, FRIDAY.” Before he leaves, Tony picks up their daughter and
kisses her cheek. Ember giggles, and he hands her to Leigh.

“Mama look at Dis Book, now pease?” Ember declares.

Leigh knows that at some point she’ll have to teach Em that it’s an album, and that ‘this’ isn’t
really its title, but there’s time for that.

She picks up the book, wincing at its weight in one hand, and sits on the couch. Ember already
knows that the album is too heavy for her little lap when she sits on Leigh, so as usual, she kneels
beside her Mama and leans in. Her honey gold hair is in pigtails, meaning Tony put them in,
because Em steadfastly refuses to nap in them.
They look through Ember’s very favorites first. Leigh in her filmy, practically petal-soaked
wedding dress (“Lotsa flowers Mama, so pitty”), Tony in his tuxedo (“Daddy smiling”), the
bridesmaids in their cornflower blue dresses (this time Em remarks on Nat’s hair, which she’d dyed
all blonde for the wedding. Ember has only seen it with blonde tips meeting deep red at the roots),
and the groomsmen in their tuxedos (“Who, Mama?” pointing to Bruce. “That’s Bruce before he
turned green, Em.” “Like green Buce. He funny!” Every. Time. Leigh has started to wonder if Em
picks up on the way she and Tony can’t quite explain the difference, and so feels compelled to
highlight it every chance she gets. This doesn’t bode well for their sanity once she gets older!).

Because she’s just woken up and hasn’t had a chance to dirty her hands yet, Leigh lets Ember turn
the pages. Em enjoys the process so much that she zooms, getting all the way to the back,
something she hardly ever does.

“What, Mama?” she asks, patting the packet of news clippings. Leigh can’t answer, ‘Those are
your father being smug,’ so she unfolds the first one.

Stark’s Girlfriend Confirms Soul Connection!

Billionaire Tony Stark’s architect-cum-live-in-girlfriend Leigh Balci recently lost her

temper at our own Bradley Sartorius this afternoon in front of the swanky La
Résistance Solitaire restaurant when he asked her about the two lovebirds’ habit of
writing fake soulmarks on each other’s bodies.

When asked about not being soulmates, Balci said, “That lie is a complete waste of ink
to print.”

Given Balci’s well-documented use of skin shields and makeup to hide something on
her right wrist, we feel comfortable stating that this is the location of her soulmark.

We look forward to seeing what it says! The small surface area implies it could be as
short as one word, so tweet at us your predictions with the hashtag #SoulStark.

“Daddy name,” Ember says when Leigh’s done reading it to her. Thanks to a slip-up at dinner
about a month ago, she knows what a soulmark is, and she knows her Mama’s soulmark is her
Daddy’s name, even though she can’t read it. Dutifully, Leigh holds out her right wrist for her
daughter to pat twice, her characteristic sign of approval. Setting that one back in the pouch, Leigh
pulls out the next clipping. This one is larger, because it includes a black and white image.

Billionaire’s New Year’s Resolution:

Cover Flowers For Each Wedding Prompted By His High-Vis Proposal

Tony Stark’s romantic drone display hung in the air for a half hour after the ball
dropped on January 1st last week, but what he couldn’t have known when he proposed
to architect girlfriend Leigh Balci was that the lack of specificity in his mid-air
 question would prompt a proposal boom in New York City.

“Read, Mama?” Em asks, pointing to the picture.

It’s a side by side. One picture was taken from one of the other high-rises, the other is an image
from the ground fairly far away, but the words are readable in both: MARRY ME, SOULMATE?

Ember grins up at her, her pigtails swaying adorably. Then, she pats the article once. “More read?”

Nearly thirty opportunistic couples said ‘yes’ to joining Stark and Balci in affirming
their intentions to wed that evening. When asked his opinion on the way his romantic
gesture was borrowed by so many strangers, Stark was clearly overcome by his own
good fortune. He promised that if contacted by this time next week, he’ll cover the cost
of flowers for every wedding prompted by his drone proposal. When asked why he
chose that particular gesture, Stark told our reporter that flowers are a symbol of
spring, of starting anew.

Something tells us that the Stark/Balci wedding may be only months away!

Em hugs her arms around herself and rocks back and forth, grinning. “Love flowas!”

“So do I, Love Bug. So do I.” Leigh gets up to put the album away, this time on a higher shelf
where Ember can’t reach it. When she turns back around, Em has her arms up, asking to be picked
up.

“Love you, Mama.”

“I love you, too.”

***

They’re at the table coloring recipe cards for Ember’s kid cookbook when Tony comes back down.
The look on his face has Leigh getting up and walking over.

“This is it,” Tony tells her, his eyes wild. He holds his hands up beside his head and mimes an
explosion with each. “Scott Lang walked out of a self-storage garage a few days ago. He says he
was in Hank Pym’s contraption for five hours before he stumbled back out. Five years in just five
hours!”

“That’s-- where was he?” Leigh asks, steadying herself on the wall. She doesn’t fully understand
what Tony’s saying, but the conviction in his eyes on the phrase ‘This is it’ is everything she’s
been waiting for.

“The Quantum Realm, he called it. He’s Ant-Man, can shrink down to a tiny size, apparently this is
even tinier, quantum tiny. If there’s a way to manipulate that--”

“Time travel?” Leigh asks. She’s covered in goosebumps. Tony’s still on the bottom step, and he
reaches down, cups her face with both hands, and kisses her.
“Are you ready for this? It’s rare, in modern marriages. FRIDAY, you getting this?” Tony says
when he lifts his head.

Leigh crosses her arms and waits. She has no idea what this is about, but it’s fun to watch her
husband when he gets like this.

“Here we go: You Were Right.” Tony holds his hands out as if presenting her a priceless gift.

“I don’t know, I think all that fanfare kind of ruined it,” she says, walking back in to see what Em
is doing.

“I already called Chuck,” Tony says, following her. “I’ve got some things here I’d worked on, but
there are more at the tower. Steve, Nat, Bruce, and Scott are going to come out and stay for a few
days while we work on this. Rhodey too, if he can catch a flight out of South America. Whatever
we come up with, I think it’d be better if we did it at the compound, but Em’s got a room in the
tower, and there’s better food.”

Leigh stops her daughter from grabbing a new recipe card to color on before she’s done with her
current one. “How long are you thinking? You have to, what? Figure out how to turn this theory,
the Quantum space, into a workable time machine, right?”

Tony has drifted into the kitchen, dipping his hand into a basket of nuts she had airing out to cook
with. He tosses one in his mouth with a challenging expression.

“You had better be eating that because you know we’re not going to still be here for dinner,” she
tells him.

“That okay?” Tony asks. He doesn’t answer her question, and she decides to let it lie. He’s a
genius, and they’ve been preparing for this moment for years.

“Yeah,” she says. He looks more hopeful than she’s seen him in a long time. “You want to pack up
first, or should I?”

“You can. I’ll keep an eye on Em.”

“Okay.” Leigh smiles, and the second wave of ‘this is really happening’ hits her as she’s leaning
over to kiss their daughter on the forehead. She braces herself on the table, breathes through the
episode of pure excited panic, and then shudders a little bit. It was one thing to be in rural
Pennsylvania when the Snap happened, but anywhere Tony is will be ground zero for world-
shaking, historic, terrifying changes. It’s kind of frightening and exhilarating at the same time to
picture standing against Thanos. She can’t stop herself picturing that horrifying donut-shaped ship
descending over a world with a child of hers in it.

Leigh’s eyes are closed, and she’s so engrossed in her little crisis that she doesn’t hear Tony
approaching, just feels him slide up behind her and stroke his hands up her sides, lifting her up to a
stand and then leaning her back against his chest.

“I get it. You’ve got part of your heart out in the open where it can get crushed, now.”

“Yeah,” Leigh says, reaching up to ground herself with a slide of her fingertips through his hair.

“It’s a good thing her daddy is so good at building armor.”

***
They order pizza to the tower. While they were still in the air, Natasha and Steve called from the
compound saying they’ve sent Scott ahead in a taxi, and they’ll be along in the morning. It makes
sense-- they have beds they’re used to and are comforted by, but making Scott stay one night in the
compound and then moving to the tower might be more stress for someone who has just
discovered a really horrible truth about the world he used to know.

Leigh wonders if Bruce is going to sleep in the compound, or if he’s still avoiding Natasha. Ever
since he’d succeeded in integrating himself with the Hulk, it’s seemed like the two of them have
circled closer, somehow-- if Bruce lets himself be in the same room as Nat, that is.

To Leigh, it seems like each of them has come to the opposite conclusion about Bruce’s new
physical appearance: Bruce has disengaged entirely, despite the fact that there’s no chance he
doesn’t sport a soulmark of Nat’s first words to him. And for Natasha? She wants to choose Bruce.
She’s told Leigh as much. Nat told Leigh that she’d be happy with just an emotional connection, if
that’s all Bruce feels he can offer, but that she has accepted his new persona, wants a relationship,
wants him.

The next few days in the tower will prove to be interesting for more reasons than Quantum physics,
Leigh thinks.

Complicating matters is the fact that Natasha has emailed Leigh that Rhodes found more evidence
of Barton’s activity in South America. It’s truly horrific stuff, she says, and the email is brutally
honest about how she feels about trying to comfort Lang in the midst of feeling like she’s failed her
best friend. Leigh sends back a message telling Natasha about how strong she always is, how it’s
long past time for her to accept a night off from her self-recriminations.

Leigh gets a single-line email back from Nat, after that.

“No rest for the wicked.”

Scott Lang shows up fifteen minutes after the pizza, and he’s quite the character. Tony and Ember
are setting up her bedroom and washing their hands, so it’s Leigh who greets him.

“Thank you so much for this,” he says, dropping his dirty backpack on the floor by the elevator
door. “Is that pizza?”

“Help yourself,” she tells him, sitting down on the couch to pull out her scrunchie to do a quick,
dirty braid so she doesn’t get sauce in her hair.

Scott’s got a mouthful of pizza before he sits up straight in the folding chair Leigh‘s set out for
Ember to eat in the living room. “I am in the right place, right? I mean, you’ve welcomed me, but I
don’t recognize you--”

“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry.” Leigh stands up and comes over. “You’re Scott Lang, right? Leigh Stark.”
She holds out her hand.

“Tony’s… sister?”

“Wife,” Tony says, strolling in. He walks up to Leigh and kisses her demonstratively, and some of
his insolent attitude wears off on her, because she grabs his shirt collar to keep him an extra few
seconds. “Hey, Scott. Glad you’re not dead.”

“So am I,” Scott says, his eyes kind of wide as he looks back and forth between the two of them.

“We all lost people,” Tony adds, and it’s a gentle push, Leigh can hear it in his voice. She sees the
words sink in, watches Scott’s shoulders settle into a bit of a slump.

“Yes, yes we did.”

“Can you grab a couple more chairs?” Leigh asks Tony.

“Yep.”

“I’m not in someone’s seat, am I?”

Leigh smiles. “Not technically, no,” she says, and predictably, Ember comes bounding in as if she
can sense that someone might be referencing her. She’s waving her hands in the way she always
does when she’s trying to ‘air dry’ her hands after using a towel.

“Mama!” Em says, throwing herself onto Leigh’s legs. Leigh picks her up.

“Wow,” Scott says. “You know, it feels like it was just five hours and a few years ago my daughter
Cassie was that small.”

“Your daughter, did she--” Leigh doesn’t let herself say ‘survive,’ because that’s the kind of word
you don’t want to try to explain to your three year old in 2023. “You got to see her before you came
here?”

“Yeah,” Scott says, around a mouthful of pizza. “She’s huge! In all the best ways, of course. Just…
that’s what made it real. The five years.”

“Tony told me you were inside the Quantum Realm, during the Snap. Hinted that you’ve got some
pretty exciting ideas about that.”

“Not during dinner, not around Ember,” Tony says, coming back into the room. He’s got two more
chairs, and he looks like he used his t-shirt to wipe off the dust from them.

“Yucky Daddy.”

“Daddy had to improvise, because he’s not wearing his suit all the time, now,” Tony says. “I’m
going to go change, will you set her up?”

“You got it,” she tells him. Ember doesn’t mind sitting at the table with Scott, probably because
she saw Leigh talking to him. She’s a social, intuitive kid, but Leigh worries about her easily
trusting strangers when she’s old enough to walk around without being permanently attached to a
parent’s hand. Thinking about Em growing up and growing more confident makes Leigh emotional
as usual, thinking about how many more family members she had around when she was so little.
She walks over to look out the window, accepting Tony’s trust in Lang, knowing that Ember’s
innate running commentary will alert her if anything’s wrong.

Scott gets up and walks over to stand beside her.

“Do you think we can do it?” Leigh asks. The buildings crowding around the cityscape in front of
her feel like stand-ins for monumental loss, in this moment. One each for the family members she
aches to introduce to Ember. Each lit window is a potential memory that can be made. There are
thousands of them.

“I do. I really do. And if anyone can figure it out, it’s Tony.”

***
Tony and Lang talk until Scott’s practically falling asleep between words, and Tony takes him
down to one of the empty apartments. When he walks into the bedroom afterwards, Leigh’s in the
process of putting on her nightgown, but Tony stops her. Even though he looks pretty tired himself,
he whispers something enticing in her ear.

“It’s 12:30 in the morning, and we have a three year old,” Leigh says sadly. “I want to, but wet hair
is one of the banes of a mom’s existence. I’ll have to take a rain check on sexy bathtub times.”

“Sometime this week, then?” he pushes, his hand still on her nightgown, other hand trailing down
over her bare chest with the backs of his fingers.

The desperation in his voice triggers something in her. “Tony?” Leigh lets go of the nightgown and
turns to look at him, reaching up with both hands to rub comfort along his neck, on his chest.

“There are a lot of variables, but I can figure it out. I can build a time machine. Not some distant
time in the future, either. Soon.”

“You’re worried about not making it. Getting stuck in the past, or in that Quantum Realm. You’re
afraid you’ll be stuck for a few hours and come back to a teenage daughter,” Leigh says, choosing
to include the latter statement in a light tone, hoping to pull Tony back from the worried abyss.
She’d dreamed of doing just that, once, but her arm had morphed into a never ending chain with no
ability to lock in place. He kept falling and falling, and she couldn’t stop it.

“Or something going wrong with the tech,” he says, nodding.

“I’m less worried about that,” she tells him, pulling his t-shirt up so he can take it off.

“Your confidence in me is delicious,” Tony says, moving in close as if to taste her. He traces along
her hair with his hand, following the sloppy braid down to its elastic, taking it off. Leigh is sleepy,
but his persistent desperation is sparking something in her, and she arches up, loving the way her
nipples brush against his chest.

“You got a little possessive there in front of Lang, like you wanted him to really know I’m yours,”
she whispers in his ear when he starts kissing her neck. “I liked it.” Tony likes being reminded of
that, she knows. What he doesn’t know, what she hasn’t been brave enough to tell him, is that
sometimes she wants to be reminded that she’s his. To the point of feeling sore, for his benefit.

“Leigh,” Tony says, a warning in his tone.

“It would be easier to remember being yours if I had some kind of a reminder,” Leigh muses, her
heart racing as she looks at Tony’s face for his reaction. He’s more awake now, and he looks
hungry. Leigh ducks under his arm and walks over to the bed, pulling out the tucks and folds that
the housekeeping service had performed on it after their last visit.

“Come back,” Tony says. It’s an order, albeit a gentle one.

Leigh grins where he can’t see it, and continues to work on the tucked-in sheets, on his side this
time. She knows that from Tony’s vantage point, she’s hiding behind a mass of golden hair, with
glimpses of her skin above the long skirt she’s wearing. Just to rub it in, Leigh pulls her skirt up,
ostensibly to reach the very center of the bed.

“Leigh,” Tony groans. She’s never defied him like this before, not that it’s really defiance as much
as a promise of greater pleasure. She trusts that he knows that, can actually tell that he knows that,
because instead of sounding upset, he sounds agonized in all the best ways.
“Bossy,” she tosses over her shoulder, sliding her feet back down onto the floor, plumping the
pillows. She hears him stomp over and suddenly the blanket is ripped from the bed, the sheet
clinging to it. Leigh turns, surprised and excited, to see that Tony’s thrown the whole lot halfway
across the room. He looks focused as he advances on her, hands curled up into fists --not to strike
her, but to stop himself from touching until he’s good and ready.

“Get on the bed, wife,” he says, adding the word at the end like a reward.

“No. I’m not dressed to sleep,” she says, gesturing down at her skirt. Tony’s eyes widen and then
settle into a look of keen anticipation.

She’s established their parameters by pushing him, and he likes it, she thinks. For her part, Leigh’s
aching, wanting him, wanting to push him away to enjoy the strength of his rebound. It’s heady,
especially with the edge of an uncertain few days ahead. Tony’s been known to work for hours
straight, and Leigh knows from experience that during those times, as much as he loves her, she
ranks somewhere slightly around food in his hierarchy of needs. That doesn’t mean as much as it
sounds, given how easily he starves himself when he’s feeding his inspiration.

Tony walks up so close she nearly falls over, his hands searching her waistband for the clasp to her
skirt. For a few tense seconds she wonders if he’ll break it, comes to accept that outcome, before he
finds it and the skirt sags around her hips. Leigh expects him to yank it down, but instead, Tony
pushes her onto the bed, and she barely catches herself with her hands. Seconds later, he’s dragging
the skirt off of her.

Leigh tries to roll over, but Tony’s hand comes down heavy on the center of her back, holding her,
hard enough that it stings just a bit. That sting sizzles down her backbone, sinking into her and
lighting a heartier flame than the one that was already blazing. She realizes that she doesn’t want
him to hurt her, but she doesn't want him to be overly concerned about not hurting her, either.
Leigh wants to look at him, but her hair is everywhere, and the weight of Tony’s hand on her back
means she’s trapped.

He uses his other hand to tear away her panties, and then Tony’s leaning on her, naked somehow,
she hadn’t even heard him taking off his clothes. “You’re trying to ramp me up, when you know I
need a good night’s sleep. Are you trying to get me to mark you so you don’t have to come
interrupt me while we’re working? So you can look in the mirror and see that you’re mine?”

Leigh already loves his voice, loves when he’s commanding, loves when all of his focus is on her,
but when Tony says that, her arms lose the ability to hold her up. She moans, can’t help it, arches
her ass right up into him. All she can see is her hair, but she can picture the look on his face after
she says what she’s planning to.

“No way would you risk all the shit you’ll get from Nat if she shows up tomorrow and I’ve got a
huge hickey where she can see it,” she says, laughing.

“Fuck, where did this come from?” Tony groans, biting a kiss onto her shoulder, sliding a hand
underneath her to slide his fingers around her nipples, but not touching them. “I should edge you all
night, fuck feeling sleepy. That’d serve you right.”

Leigh wriggles under him, trying to get his hand to slip and touch her nipple. He is so close to
where she needs him to be , it’s infuriating. Her groan of frustration makes him hum in triumph in
her ear. “You wouldn’t!”

“Thought this was a one-way ramp up, did you?”

“Oh my God, Tony, you win, fuck,” Leigh says. He’s slid his hand down between her legs, skating
across everywhere she needs him to touch, brushing warm, useless caresses everywhere else.

“Of course I win, I’m me,” he murmurs. To her intense frustration, Tony pulls away completely
after saying this, but he places another warm, heavy hand on her back, moving beside her on his
knees on the bed, from what it feels like. With his other hand, Tony brushes away her hair until it’s
all over one shoulder. “But, what’s my reward?”

Leigh wants to answer ‘ Watch me come,’ because he loves that, she’s discovered over the years,
but Tony’s a sexy, vindictive bastard tonight, and she can’t trust that he won’t give her the exact
opposite: bring her close, then order her not to come. He’s only done that once, and it was glorious,
and she appreciated it at the time, but right now she wants him, damnit.

“Hmm,” he says. “I wonder...”

Leigh goes limp for a few seconds. It’s his scientist voice.

“Lift up your hips, love.”

Leigh pushes up on her elbows so she can do as he asks, but Tony presses her back down. That’s
when Leigh realizes what he wants, and a delicious thrill goes through her.

“If you’re going to get picky, position me yourself,” she says, her voice low and challenging.

“If you make me do that, this won’t last long, you know that, don’t you?” he laughs, his voice
husky. But he grabs her hips, dragging them up against him, smoothing his hands out on her legs,
spreading them. “God, I love you.” He moves around until he's behind her, angling a hand down
toward where she desperately wants him to touch.

She moans encouragement, but Tony just dips his fingers into her, checking to see if she’s wet, she
thinks, which makes her laugh.

Tony’s revenge for that is to thrust in all the way, fast and hard. She gasps. This angle is rare for
them-- he likes to see her face. It’s an added intimacy, this closeness, and Leigh uses it to her
advantage as much as she can, clenching her internal muscles and arching her back. Tony’s
stuttered thrust of surprise is stimulating in every way, emotionally, physically, and sexually.

“Fuck, you own me, even now,” Tony mutters into her hair.

He curls himself over her, groaning with her every moan. Tony’s swearing lightly every so often,
praising when he’s not, and her whole world is where they’re joined. Without the visual stimulus of
seeing his expressions, watching him form the pained words of adulation, Leigh is caught up by
sensation. This is knowing someone in and out, she thinks, blushing at the inadvertent pun. She
knows his sighs, the twist of his hips, the sounds he makes when she clenches down on him inside.

“I’m going to mark you,” he mutters, shifting his position, adjusting hers with a heavy hand on her
hip. “I’m going to mark you back here. You’ll have to move your hair out of the way and hold up
your phone in front of a mirror to even see it, but you’ll know it’s there. You’ll, fuck,” he sucks a
kiss onto her shoulder and takes a second to catch his breath. “You’ll press your fingers into it and
think of me.”

“Stars, Tony, you don’t do anything halfway, do you?”

“Never,” he laughs. “One more thing?” Tony adds.

 “Not… articulate…” Leigh gasps out.

“I won’t do it until you come for me,” he says, right in her ear, pulling out to reach, dragging his
cock against her, wet and indecent. “Which you are going to do--”

Tony’s hand moves unerringly to her clit, which is completely unfair given how thoroughly he’s
avoided that begging organ every other time he’s been close. Leigh’s whole body is a well-tuned
machine in his hands, maintained and cared for by him, and he knows all of her quirks and trigger
points. Tony knows that waiting to touch her like this has made her turbocharged, and as much as
the thought makes her blush, a particular kind of touch in that particular place, that button, will
make her fire.

“Ready?”

“I’m going to use my mouth to wreck you tomorrow, and if you don’t touch me right the fuck now,
I’ll do it in the room next to everyone, and you’ll make noises,” Leigh grits out.

Tony’s response is to latch his lips onto the back of her neck, sucking and swirling his tongue,
scraping with his teeth. Then, mercifully, gloriously, he curves his fingers just so, thrusts into her
exactly the right way, and makes the noise he always makes when he can see her coming apart for
him. This time, the sound sets her off, instead of the other way around, and she’s coming, shaking,
clutching the sheet underneath her for what feels like forever.

Leigh comes back to herself on her side, Tony snuggled up behind her. She reaches down a weak
hand to thread through his, and Tony smiles against the skin of her back.

“So, you basically passed out, which is a new high, for me,” he chuckles. “I also apparently really
like this mark I made.” Tony kisses it, and it stings just like his hand on her back, earlier. It’s a
fantastic association, for Leigh.

“Yeah, I think I’ll keep you,” she sighs.

Chapter End Notes

Leigh’s wedding dress: https://www.galialahav.com/bridal/couture/florence-by-

night/coco/
 Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Summary

“I never asked this before, but how come all of you can recognize Tony’s handwriting?
Did he have a slam book with handwritten insults to all of you hanging up in the break
room somewhere?” Leigh asks Natasha.

“SHIELD made Tony sign all of the liability forms for our equipment. Every time we
got something new, it was on there,” Nat says. “I used to think it was him being
narcissistic about it-- you know, all, ‘I'm why you have this stuff,’ but now I’m not so
sure. Those forms were about who pays up when you break it. He probably could have
pushed back on that, but he didn’t. He just replaced it all, at his expense.”

“I’m the one supposed to be encouraging you right now, Nat!” Leigh says, a hand
pressed onto her heart.

Chapter Notes

Today is my 19th wedding anniversary! Setting up the Time Heist means Leigh gets to
meet Thor, Rocket, Nebula, and Clint. I hope you enjoy their first impressions as much
as I enjoyed writing them.

Chapter Seventeen

Over the next three days, Leigh keeps Tony, Rhodey, Nat, Steve, Bruce, and Scott fed and watered
as they work out the intricacies of using Scott’s Quantum Realm for the purposes of time travel.
For three nights in a row, Leigh hears from Tony about the simulations he’s running, explanations
of concepts like the EPR Paradox, Quantum fluctuation, and the Planck Scale. She’s not able to
attend many of their planning sessions, though, because she’s busy with Ember.

It’s… not tenable, for Leigh. On the morning of the fourth day, she calls up Mrs. Rhodes. She asks
her to pack for a few days’ worth of a trip, just in case.

It doesn’t take Aleshia Rhodes long to get set up with Ember when she gets there for dinner; the
two of them have been friendly since Em was born. When Leigh warns her friend that they might
get really busy, Leshia actually reaches out and puts her finger against Leigh’s lips.

“This is probably the most important thing any of us are ever going to do. Go do it. We’ll be fine.”

Tony had texted her not to worry about feeding them dinner, that they were on a roll towards a
breakthrough, but when she doesn’t hear from him going on 9 PM, 10 PM, 11 PM, she starts to
worry. Ember’s long since gone to bed when Leigh heads down to the cluster of labs on the 40th
floor that Tony has been using for this endeavor.
When she gets there, though, they’re empty.

“FRIDAY, where is my husband?”

“Ma’am, he asked me not to say anything unless you asked. He’s at the Avengers compound, with
the others. They left shortly after lunch time.”

“Are they close to implementing their Time Heist thing, FRIDAY?” Leigh asks. She feels a terrible
sense of foreboding, like she’s parachuted out of a weather plane into the path of a hurricane after
observing it for several passes. “And, please don’t volunteer information to him about what I’m
asking, or my subsequent movements, please?”

Two can play at that game.

“Right now they’re callin’ in others from around the universe, it seems. Part of their plan to gather
up a team. They’re constructing equipment, clearing out a large space in the main building, and
will be receiving shipments tomorrow for the time machine.”

“In other words, settling in at the compound.”

From her parachute, Leigh’s starting to feel the winds of the outer edge.

***

She finds it hard to sleep. Her first instinct is to set her alarm for 4 AM, pack enough clothes for at
least five days, and start driving one of Tony’s stored Audis up to the facility, so she can show up
to give him a piece of her mind at just about 6 o’clock in the morning. The thing is, though, she has
a sense of history, of the importance of what it is they’re doing, and Leigh feels like she has a part
to play in that. Depending on how that part plays out, she might be called on to be a member of
their team, and that means she wants to have some time with Ember before she heads upstate.

When she gets dressed in the morning, it’s with that possibility in mind. Leigh had included a pair
of black tactical pants that Nat had given her as a wedding present when she’d packed to come to
the tower. They fit perfectly, even though she’d had a baby in between being gifted them and
wearing them for real, which is a great ego boost on a day like today. On top of them, she puts on a
wrap skirt in a cheerful mustard color. It’s ankle length, and the ruffle that crosses up from her feet
to her waist covers the fact that she’s got pants on at all. For a shirt, she pulls on a black camisole
with lace accents and a soft, long-sleeved yellow mesh lace shirt. The tiny white flowers scattered
across her skirt have little black centers, and the whole outfit looks like her standard whimsical,
cute outfit. To complete the look, she uses a double elastic and puts her long hair up in a high
ponytail. Her hair’s so long it falls around her face like it’s past shoulder-length, but since she’s got
two on her, she can easily braid it and tuck it in, if she needs to.

Leigh looks at herself in the mirror, and feels like she’s wearing a disguise. Everywhere in her
outfit, she can see preparation, but she doubts anyone else will. Even her shoes are hiding
something-- they’re genuine running shoes, but she’d bought them from an Etsy shop that glues
lacy doilies in gorgeous patterns over the shoes to make them look unique and quirky.

She goes in to wake up Ember, having asked Aleshia if she minds that the toddler will be awake
and bouncy earlier than expected. Em doesn’t always wake up as early as 7, sometimes she sleeps
in till nearly 7:45, but Leigh wants to get on the road.

“Hey, Love Bug,” she says, when Ember wakes up to the weight of her Mama sitting on the bed.

“Pitty yellow, Mama,” Em tells her, rubbing her eyes.

“Thank you! Hon, I gotta go help Daddy with something. I might have to be gone past bedtime. I
need you to be good for Aunty Leshia, and I’ll talk to you on a video call if I get the chance, okay?
Eat your peas!”

Em giggles, as this is an ongoing battle. “Aunty Leshia no like peas too, Mama! Shhhhhh.”

“I am outraged,” Leigh says, pretending to frown.

“Go hep Daddy, Mama. I love you!”

Leigh leans over to scoop her up, and holds her close. “Love you too, Ember. See you in a little
while, okay?”

“You want pancakes?” Leshia asks from the doorway.

“YES yes YES yes,” the little girl sings, pulling free from Leigh and scrambling out of her bed.

“And just like that, I’m no longer relevant! Perfect, thanks. Any message for your own wayward
spouse?” Leigh asks.

“Nothing that won’t sound manipulative,” Aleshia says, smiling secretively. “Tell him I love him.”

“Will do.”

Leigh watches her friend talking to Ember as she gathers the ingredients for pancakes (something
they always keep on hand in each residence, considering their daughter’s pathological love of
them) for a little while. She wonders if Leshia understands the importance of the double pats she’s
being bestowed with, but Leigh knows that drawing attention to herself now would do more harm
than good.

***

Leigh gets to the Avengers compound at 9:34 in the morning. She sees that FRIDAY had been
right-- there’s a huge delivery truck there with no less than four men in uniforms unloading giant
crates of supplies. Not wanting to risk damage to one of Tony’s favorite cars, she parks pretty far
away, in the corner of the lot. With her overnight bag on her shoulder, Leigh walks toward the
compound.

A breeze has picked up here, and its persistent tug on her hair reminds her that she’s walking
straight into the wind-whipped storm surge.

When she gets inside, she can hear two sets of voices. Tony’s with Bruce, their voices carrying
along the long hallway to her left that leads to where the truck is unloading. Natasha, Steve, and
Scott can be heard laughing and talking to her right, but she can’t make out anything they’re
saying, they’re too distant. Ahead of her, she hears a door close. Leigh stands still and waits.

“Busted,” Rhodey says as soon as he sees her.

“What in the silver-soaked fuck were you thinking?” she demands.

“You know how he gets. He lent me one of his cars to drive half of us down here, that’s how far
gone he was,” Rhodey protests, holding up both hands.

“I just drove that myself. An hour and fifty minutes, give or take, and none of you could spare a
minute for a phone call or a text? You’d think you’re planning a kegger, not the rescue of half of
all life in the universe!”

“Shit, I was really hoping that was a voice call on an amp,” Tony says from behind her.

Leigh turns and looks at him. He’s strung out, she can tell that immediately, drunk on inspiration
and hubris. Eyes bright and manic, hair mussed, body language all tense and jerky. Tony’s got
some odd bracelet thing wrapped around his four fingers, and there’s a coffee stain on his golden
brown AC/DC shirt. For the first time since he left without telling her, Leigh feels like she might
want to cry.

“I can’t believe you thought that was okay,” she says, instead.

“I didn’t,” Tony says baldly. “I knew you’d be pissed. I just didn’t want to deal with it right then. I
don’t really want to deal with it now, but I don’t always get what I want.”

“I’m gonna go finish eating my Danish, because this is absolutely not what I want, right here,”
Rhodey says, power walking down the hallway to Leigh’s right.

“Go finish helping them unload that stuff, because the baggage you have to unpack between us is
going to take some time and dedication to keep it from catching us both on fire,” Leigh tells Tony.

“Did you plan that out over the hour and change you spent driving?” he asks, defensiveness tensing
his posture even further, despite the way he’s jammed his hand in his pocket casually. Leigh knows
for a fact it’s fisted in there, maybe even with a fingernail pressing into his skin to keep his mind
sharp. He’s probably the one that’s been planning his defense, Leigh realizes, because that? Is a
low fucking blow.

Luckily, she has the moral high ground, which is good because the floodwaters are rising.

“I don’t plan to say hurtful things anymore. They’re all purely reactionary, in the moment, now.”

Tony nods, looking off toward the truck that’s visible through the large windows of the hallway
he’d come through. He looks back at Leigh.

“If you need to do this now, we can do it now,” he says, pulling his hand out of his pocket, letting
it fall loose beside him. “What we’re trying to do is important to you, too.”

“I want to be part of the team, Tony,” she tells him.

“You are. I just acted, I still do that, sometimes. This-- it’s going to work. We’ve called in a couple
more people, and when they get here, we’re going to go get Thor, we’re going to go get Barton,
and then we’re going to figure out who goes and gets which stone from what time and place. You
want to sit in on all that? Great. You’re smart, you’re good at details,” Tony says, excitement
ramping back up. He walks over to her, ducking his head down a bit. “I assume you called Aleshia
for Em?”

“Yeah,” she says, letting his slight misread of what she meant about the team stand. If she can
listen in on their strategy meetings on what to do (after missing their meetings on how to do it), that
is better than nothing. “I’m gonna go find Nat.”

“She’ll tell you where my stuff is, to put that away in there,” Tony says, nodding at her bag. His
expression turns from cautious relief to vulnerable with just a small shift of his facial muscles. “If
you want to, that is.”

It’s the moment where Leigh can choose the type of the fuel she places in his engine, but she loves
him dearly, so of course she chooses the highest quality she has access to. “Of course I do. Just
because you’re a selfish idiot doesn’t mean I don’t want to listen to your weird sleep noises. Go on,
I’m sure they’re putting those pallets in the wrong place or something.”

“Goddess,” Tony declares, grabbing her hand as if to kiss it. Instead, he yanks her up against him
and kisses her, brief and fierce. When he walks back down the hallway, it’s with confidence.

***

Leigh, Nat, Steve, and Tony are eating Bruce’s tacos in the dining area when the two people
they’ve been waiting for show up. Nat has already warned Leigh that they’re aliens, real, obvious
aliens, different from the way that Thor is an alien, though Leigh hasn’t actually met the norse god
yet. When the two aliens in question walk into the room, though, Leigh immediately understands
what Nat meant.

The raccoon-looking creature is dressed for war, and so is the blue-tinged cyborg woman. Leigh
recognizes her from the story Tony told her about his journey home after being stabbed and losing
the young man he’d been mentoring, Peter. He had said he doesn’t necessarily like Nebula, but he
respects the hell out of her. When she walks in, he gets up to greet her.

“You don’t look half dead. It’s better,” she says to him. Her voice is rough, like the only way her
vocal cords make noise is by a concerted effort.

“Thanks,” he says, laughing.

“Tony, you wanna pick up where I left off, here? There’s only a couple left to make. I need to
leave and pick up Thor,” Bruce calls out. He’s wearing an apron, which Leigh finds only about half
as adorable as Nat clearly does.

“Oh, my god, I swear, he’s just doing that to set me off,” she mutters.

“Set you off or set you off,” Leigh asks, holding back from adding a wink, but only just.

“New recruit?” the raccoon guy asks Nat, walking over to Leigh. “Name’s Rocket.”

“No-- well, maybe? This is Leigh, she’s married to Tony. I never mentioned her?” Nat says,
frowning a little.

“Can’t see there’d be any reason to, you were coordinating a universal strike team, weren’t you?
‘Oh hey, this is my friend’s main squeeze, thought you’d like to know who he spends time--’”
Leigh breaks off at the completely delighted look on Rocket’s face.

“So when she says you’re married to Tony, she means you’re married to Tony, not just, you know,
a trophy wife, or whatever,” he pronounces.

“Okay, if you’re going to imply I’m pretty enough to qualify for that, I’ll decide to like you,” Leigh
says, grinning. She stretches out a hand to shake his, the action pressing the tag from her black
camisole to press against the hickey Tony put on her neck. He’s been reinforcing it every night--
except last night, of course. For his part, Rocket seems taken aback for a second, before he offers
her his own hand to shake.

“Married to Tony?” the cyborg woman says with interest. “Are you the helmet woman?”

“Uh, no, no, she isn’t,” Steve says awkwardly. “Tony recorded a message for Pepper, from the
ship, when they were stranded,” he explains to Leigh.
“Because he didn’t know she wasn’t there to come home to… Oh, Stars, that must have been even
more gutting,” Leigh says. Tony had explained that he was in a really low place towards the end of
his time on that ship. She can’t imagine how much worse it would be to have gone through what
Tony had, to be rescued so close to death, and then get that final, terrible news.

“Well, I gotta head out. Time to go threaten a drunken god,” Rocket says when they see Bruce
gesturing to him from the doorway.

“Hey, Rocket?” Leigh says, after he’s already gotten halfway to the door.

“Yeah?” he turns, but not much.

“Send me a message if you find out what beer he likes. Even a drunk god can’t quit cold turkey. If
you can promise his favorite, it might help.”

“Nice,” Nat says.

“Smart, I will. See ya later, Trophy Wife,” Rocket says, laughing.

“That went way better than I expected it would,” Nat says.

“Strange to underestimate your friends,” Nebula remarks in her odd, rough voice. She settles
herself into a chair across the room, facing away from them.

“So once they get back, hopefully with Thor, what’s next?” Leigh asks.

Nat looks down at the table for a few seconds, and when she lifts her head, it’s with steel in her
expression. “Next, I go get Clint.”

In Leigh’s mind, the palm trees are doubled over, but it’s not from hurricane force winds. It’s from
the force of Natasha Romanoff’s determination.

***

Thor is… not at all what Leigh was expecting.

She’d gotten the message from Rocket about the beer and left right away, but the ship is back
before she is, partly because it took a while to load up Tony’s Audi.

This time she parks near the door, popping the trunk and opening all the doors so she can get help
carrying it all in. Leigh uses the trick she always employs for groceries, she loads up a bag on each
of her forearms and gets two six packs in one hand, one in the other, because it’s all way too heavy
for longer than the twenty-five feet she’s going to walk with them.

When he sees her in the doorway to the cafeteria (coming in sideways, because she’s too wide with
the way everything’s swaying), Scott gets up right away to run over and help.

“Wow, you went all out,” Scott says, taking the two six packs and the bag from her left arm.

“This is a drop in the bucket. Remember whose credit cards I have access to,” Leigh laughs.

“Ahh, beer delivery. I should look into this for New Asgard. Much nicer,” a tall, blonde man in
scruffy clothing says in a distinctive accent as he shuffles towards her. In her mind, Leigh knows
this has to be Thor, but she doesn’t really want to believe it. He’s got a beer gut, his hair can’t have
been washed in months, and as he comes nearer, she realizes he stinks. Thor walks directly over to
stand in front of her, looking down in obvious approval. “Really pretty, too.”
“Your beer, my lord,” Leigh says in a tone of voice so obviously sarcastic she expects Thor’s eyes
to narrow, and for him to realize something’s up. From across the room, she can hear someone
cackling, and she leans over to see that it’s Rocket. Leigh wonders if he and Nat were waiting to see
Thor’s reaction to her beer errand before they left.

“Attitude could use a little work,” Thor says pleasantly.

“Yeah, well, I don’t get paid, so…” With her left hand, Leigh gingerly picks up the bag handle
from where it’s been digging into her right arm. “Here,” she says, offering the six pack she’s
holding in her other hand.

Thor takes it, then his eyebrows furrow. “Is that a brand?”

Leigh sighs, setting the bag down and rubbing the groove in her arm. “I’m going to find Bruce.”

“It’s Stark’s name, in his handwriting!” Thor calls out after her.

“Wow, I somehow went five years without noticing that, weird,” Leigh calls out behind her. In the
lobby on the way to the time machine room, she runs into Nat. “Hey, heading out?”

“Yeah, just had to change, grab some things,” she says. Natasha is dressed like a super assassin, it
seems like, but as Leigh watches, she puts on a soft-looking coat and holds up an umbrella. “It’s
raining in Tokyo right now,” she says, her expression a delicate mix of vulnerability, hope, and
determination.

“Am I allowed to hug you when you look like this? Is that, I don’t know, a violation of operational
norms?”

In response, Nat just comes over and hugs her with her free arm.

“There you are! I was speaking to you, beer girl.”

Leigh turns to Nat. “I never asked this before, but how come all of you can recognize Tony’s
handwriting? Did he have a slam book with handwritten insults to all of you hanging up in the
break room somewhere?”

“SHIELD made Tony sign all of the liability forms for our equipment. Every time we got
something new, it was on there,” Nat says. “I used to think it was him being narcissistic about it--
you know, all, ‘I’m why you have this stuff,’ but now I’m not so sure. Those forms were about
who pays up when you break it. He probably could have pushed back on that, but he didn’t. He just
replaced it all, at his expense.”

“I’m the one supposed to be encouraging you right now, Nat!” Leigh says, a hand pressed onto her
heart.

“Ahh, Natasha. Interesting hair,” Thor says.

“So yeah, good luck, have fun,” Leigh says, putting her arm around Nat’s shoulder and directing
her toward the door. “Rocket?” she calls out, hoping the creature will hear her.

“You’re ready? Good. I can’t believe you people think I’m strange.”

Leigh tries not to laugh, but Rocket’s already headed out the door. She spins around and starts for
the hallway leading to where she thinks Bruce will be, because if you’ve got fifty six packs to
carry, he’s your man. It appears that Thor has other plans for her, however.
“Why do you carry Stark’s brand? Did he become some sort of powerful beer distributor in my
absence?” He leans over, his eyes bright. “Do you think I could get a discount? We were warriors
together, you know.”

Leigh sighs, reaching up to untangle one of the filthy locks of his hair that is tangled around his
ear. “It’s a soulmark, Thor. I don’t work for Tony, I’m his wife.”

Thor reels back, and she smells the beer on his breath. It’s impressive how coherent he is (which is,
you know, not stunningly so, but still) with such a concentration of alcohol in his system. Must be a
god thing, Leigh tells herself.

“You?” Thor says, obviously shocked.

“Yeah, okay, you can fuck off now,” she decides, stung by his incredulity. Even though it’s
childish, she jogs off, wishing she’d pushed Scott to go get the beer instead. When she gets into the
large warehouse space, the crane is helping to mount strange-looking mirrors on long, flexible
stands, extending from the ceiling. “Bruce!” she calls out, seeing a tall green figure.

“Hey,” he says, smiling at her. It’s still hard to get used to, even after more than a year-- Bruce is
happy now. Almost all the time. “Hey Thor, what do you need?”

“I’ve caused offense,” Thor says, out of breath.

Leigh sighs, looking away from both of them to see if she can see Tony.

“I’m sure we can clear it up, what happened?” Bruce says easily.

“She brought me beer. A lot of beer. When I saw the mark on her wrist and she told me she’s
married to Stark, I reacted poorly. I was disappointed in the loss of a friends and family discount,”
Thor tells Bruce. He says the latter part in a small, sheepish tone.

Leigh sees Tony, predictably gesturing with his hands, a pencil caught in his mouth, leaning over
while standing in the lifted basket of a cherry picker, directing the workers below him. He’s not
strapped in. She starts toward him.

Someone grabs her by the wrist. It’s Thor.

“I was surprised because you look differently than someone I’d expect to be with Stark. I meant no
offense,” he says. Leigh winces, tugs at her wrist.

“Not helping there, buddy,” Bruce says, reaching out to dislodge Thor’s hand.

“No,” Thor says, scrunching up his face in a way Leigh’s seen Ember do when she’s been caught
doing something wrong. “You’re… real looking. Beautiful, but not covered in clothes that cost
more than most of the people of your country make in a year. You’re not wearing shoes that look
like they could kill both of us. I am sorry to offend.”

“As drunk compliments go, that’s a pretty good one,” she concedes. “If you excuse me, though, I
need to go drag Tony off of that thing and kill him myself, before he does it while gesticulating.
And if you are the one who let him go up there without a safety harness, Bruce? You’re next.”

“That’s fair,” Bruce says.

“I like her,” Leigh hears Thor saying in a terrible attempt at a whisper, as she’s walking away.
 ***

Nat’s face is red from being scrubbed clean when Leigh sees her next, hours later. If her
expression had been anything other than fiercely pleased, Leigh would have worried that her
hurricane has started to expand its boundaries to her friends, too, fueled by the hot tears she can tell
that Nat has shed in the past few hours.

“He’s taking a shower,” Nat whispers. “Made me promise not to lurk.”

Forty minutes later, they’re all starting to gather in the warehouse area. The time machine’s
apparently finished, and Tony and Bruce have finished doing whatever ‘make sure it’s safe’ things
they’d had planned. Leigh’s not sure whether to feel impressed or terrified that they’ve built the
thing in the space of a few days, and want to test it with an actual human being less than two hours
after it’s finished. Tony had told her they’d started it two days after Scott came to the tower, so it’s
been four days, but Leigh doesn’t think that diminishes her argument all that much.

As for Tony, Leigh’s barely seen him all day, so she drags him out into the hallway outside the
door, hands him a water bottle, and crosses her arms.

“I’ve had plenty to drink, Leigh,” Tony says, trying to balance the bottle on her folded arms when
she refuses to let him hand it back to her.

“Coffee is a diuretic, Tony.”

“All right, fine. Fine. But you have to let me smell your hair.”

“Do I ever not let you do that? Or am I supposed to pretend this is a victory for you?” Leigh
widens her eyes comically and presses a weak, Southern Belle hand to her chest. “No, not the
haiyah!”

“Just come closer and turn around, or I’ll push you up against the wall and do it,” Tony says,
waggling his eyebrows.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” she says, but does what he asks.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Tony says, pressing his thumb against his mark. Leigh shivers, shakes
her head. He kisses it, scrapes his teeth across it just a little. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” she whispers, feeling the heat in her face.

“I couldn’t picture it,” a sardonic voice says, behind them. Leigh turns, hears Tony’s quick, nearly
silent indrawn breath.

“Barton. Glad to see you,” he says.

Clint Barton does not look at all like what Leigh had been expecting, either, but unlike Thor, it’s
not due to disappointment. He looks like a character in an indie film in his tight black jeans, a
slouchy teal tank top that reveals a whole sleeve of tattoos, and a badass-looking haircut that’s half-
shaved but still shaggy.

“Hey, Tony.”

“Hawkeye, Leigh Stark. Leigh Stark, Hawkeye,” Tony says, pointing back and forth between the
two of them.
“Clint is fine,” Barton says, reaching out a hand. Leigh shakes it. “Nice to meet you, Leigh. Or
should I go with Mrs. Stark?” It’s softly spoken, but she suspects it’s a dig on Tony including the
‘Stark’ in the introduction, while avoiding Barton’s name entirely.

“Rocket calls me Trophy Wife, so Leigh is a step up, I think.”

“He what?” Tony laughs. “Where the hell did that even come from?”

“Yeah I’m going to erase myself from this narrative,” Clint says, shooting a look at her face. He
saunters into the warehouse room, and Leigh raises an eyebrow at her husband.

“Obviously I didn’t intend to imply that you weren’t hot enough to count as a trophy wife,” Tony
says with extreme care.

“The teammates I have met today seem to universally find it refreshing that you’re not married to a
bimbo, which seemed kind of hurtful to more than just me at first,” Leigh says, her lips twisting up
into rueful expression before smiling. She doesn’t say the name Pepper Potts, but figures Tony
knows that’s who she means. “But then I realized, everyone’s been fucked up by the Snap, Tony.
They all expected you to have a full-on billionaire tantrum, buy up some casinos or sports teams,
marry a plastic-bodied twenty-something, and drink all day. A thirty-something woman in a
handmade lace sweater is always going to be unexpected, in the face of that.”

“How shocking that instead, I’m one of the ones who has it all together, you’re saying? Kid at
home, cute wife on the streets, sexy wife in the sheets, you’re saying?”

“You’ve changed your shirt twice today after spilling coffee on it, Tony. Twice.”

“About to test this!” Bruce calls out.

It turns out that they have to wait a bit as Scott trades places with Barton. Seeing Clint disappear in
front of her is shocking and exciting. Life with Tony sometimes feels like being married to a living,
breathing science fiction script that’s always writing a new chapter that expands her expectation of
what could be possible, but this is beyond that to something tangible. Something world-- universe
changing.

Seeing Clint reappear carrying something he wasn’t carrying before? is a REVELATION.

Clint tosses the catcher’s mitt to Tony, and even though her husband is faced away from her, Leigh
just knows that he’s got a look of determined delight on his face.

It’s happening. They can bring everyone back.

Leigh’s hurricane lifts her straight up into the stratosphere.

 Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Summary

Rocket’s already vomiting into a bucket in the time machine warehouse when she and
Bruce get inside. Everyone’s huddled around him looking concerned.

“--so pissed about this, it hasn’t happened for six years. It can last for days,” Rocket’s
saying, between heaves.

“Speed is imperative. If Thanos became aware of our attempts, he would seek to stop
us. We should not delay,” Nebula says.

“Send me in his place,” Leigh says, walking up.

Chapter Eighteen

Leigh wakes up surrounded by Tony. His face buried in her braid, her head pillowed on his arm,
one leg insinuated between hers, his other hand warm on her hip. She usually can’t sleep like this
all night, but something about the knowledge of what’s at stake must have cast a spell on them and
made their intertwined positions possible, just this once. When she lifts her head, Tony nuzzles
even closer, sliding the hand from her hip across her chest possessively.

“It’s morning, you know,” she whispers.

“Doesn’t have to stay morning, I have a time machine,” he mumbles against her hair.

“Even you aren’t that selfish,” she teases.

***

Bruce makes everyone breakfast. He wears the apron again, and as soon as Natasha sees it, she
makes eye contact with Leigh, grabs a chair from the cafeteria, and walks into the kitchen to sit
there with him.

“How long has that been going on?” Scott asks, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb towards
the kitchen.

“At least seven years, give or take,” Clint says gruffly.

Thor doesn’t make an appearance at breakfast. He’s already seated in a corner of the meeting room
when they show up there for Steve and Tony’s presentation on the stones. Leigh had made Tony
start out wearing the black shirt today, so he’ll avoid the spilling issues today that he had the day
before, though they’ve planned to spend most of the day discussing the stones, now that the time
machine is working. She’d put on the same clothes from the day before, not that she didn’t bring
others, but they’re comfortable and happen to give the impression that she was so mad that she
woke up, got dressed, and drove for nearly two hours to yell at them for leaving her behind.
It’s a power move, basically.

Steve’s been on edge all morning. He’s got a list of the stones on a piece of paper, above and
beyond the display Tony’s set up for everyone to visualize. When he calls out for Thor to start, it’s
a sign that he’s been so focused on his task that he’s missed what’s been going on around him. For
his part, Thor rallies decently, but Tony and Bruce both have to cut him off several times.

As a brain break after that, Tony talks about the Tessaract. He mentions the fact that SHIELD has
more or less had control over it for as long as Steve was frozen in the ice.

“Depending on who goes on which mission, we may want to take it out of the compound in New
Jersey,” Tony says, leaning on the table and looking at Scott. “I mean, the chances of running into
our other selves is really high, in my tower in New York. In that compound, all we have to do is
outsmart SHIELD agents.” He winks at Clint and Natasha. Everyone ends up agreeing that it’s
smarter to try to take it (and therefore easier to give it back) during the chaos of the Chitauri attack.

They order Chinese for lunch and talk about the Power stone, meaning Leigh gets to watch
Rocket’s chaotic mix of disrespect, sarcasm, and unpredictability. It’s the first time Leigh’s heard
of most of these people and places, and after she listens to him for a while, she starts to understand
that Rocket is angry. He’s lost people he loves, and the places might not be gone, but they’re
different, now.

They spend an hour talking about where each of them remembers being, in relation to the scepter,
during the attack on New York. Slowly, a strategy emerges, including the fact that they know
about HYDRA’s SHIELD infiltration.

“Can you imagine the kind of trust they’d put in you, Steve, if you went up to Sitwell and said
‘Hail HYDRA’ in his ear? Man would give you the moon,” Nat teases him.

“As long as he hands me the scepter, it’ll be worth it.”

“Now, we don’t want to change anything, here,” Tony objects. “If Sitwell goes up to their Cap and
acts like he’s in on it, that could change plenty.”

“That would split off into an alternate universe, at that point, Tony,” Bruce says with quiet
confidence.

“Kind of wish we were living in that one right now,” Clint says under his breath.

By the time Nebula starts talking about what little they know about the Soul stone, they’ve given
up on the desk chairs. Tony’s leaning against the wall behind where Nebula is talking, and Leigh’s
on the floor against the windows, practically out of sight. Everyone else is on the couch, or nearby.
She hadn’t thought it was possible for Nebula’s voice to sound more strained, but when she
mentions the death of her sister, there’s no mistaking the pain in it. Unfortunately, they don’t know
much.

“You say murdered, is it possible they had to fight something, and he simply… didn’t prevent her
death? Used her as a shield? Wasn’t she a formidable fighter?” Rhodey asks.

“Very good fighter,” Rocket asserts.

“I believe he did it deliberately,” Nebula says darkly. “I think it pained him.”

“So if this is a ‘dominion of death,’ does that mean some kind of test of strength? An army that’s
protecting this thing? What?” Clint asks.
“He did not appear battle-weary on his return. That is all I know.” Nebula bows her head and says
no more.

Everyone needs a break after that.

***

Continuing her trend of leaning against windows, Leigh sits propped up against the glass wall of
their conference room and snacks on candy as Tony, Nat, and Bruce talk about the Time stone.
Almost everyone else has yet to wander back in, but it’s nearly dinner time, and they’ve been at
this since just after breakfast, so that’s understandable.

When Nat points out that if you count the Time stone, there are three stones in New York on that
day in 2012, Bruce sits up and stares at her.

“Shut the front door!” he says. It’s awkward and adorable, and Leigh’s not the only one to think so.

“Oh will you just come here?” Nat says affectionately, rolling off of the table where she’d been
lounging to kiss him. Bruce’s hands, which had been gesturing to his sides, freeze for a few
seconds, before they move to hold her.

Tony puts his fist up straight in the air, then points at the door, in a blatant use of silent team
signals. Leigh crawls toward the door and Tony rolls off the table in the other direction from where
Natasha and Bruce are kissing, and they both leave the room.

“Think she’ll be happy enough not to murder us for being silly?” Tony asks.

“There’s always that chance,” Leigh says.

***

Steve calls them to regroup in the first conference room right before dinner, which is a brilliant
move that Leigh appreciates. He points out that the ten of them can form three teams, with the four
that head to New York grabbing the three stones there in 2012, two heading to Asgard in 2013, and
four heading to 2014 and splitting up, with the help of Scott’s miniaturizing and maximizing
technology on Rocket’s ship. He then gives out the assignments-- Himself, Tony, Scott, and Bruce
to 2012, Rocket and Thor to 2013, and Clint, Nat, Nebula, and Rhodey to 2014.

“Tony?” Leigh says, when Steve pauses to take a breath.

“Our daughter is safe in the tower, I promise,” Tony says, acting like Leigh’s suddenly worried
that they left Ember alone in the time machine room. Some of the people in the room laugh, the
ones who know they’re parents.

“I was actually about to suggest you share the notes you made last year, when you were
researching where the stones would be, when we did end up having access to a time machine,” she
says.

“You knew this would happen?” Scott asks, incredulous.

“I hoped this would happen. And, that wouldn’t matter, honey, because we don’t have enough
capsules of Pym Particles to do more than a there and back.”

“Wait,” Scott says, holding up a finger. “This might be a Hail Mary, but: if we can steal Infinity
Stones, can’t we steal Pym Particles?”
“We can’t put them back when we’re done. And there’s no way to know what we’re hampering,
what those particular ones are meant to be used for, what terrible things might happen if they’re not
there,” Bruce objects.

“More terrible than the loss of half of the life in the universe, though?” Clint points out.

“I’m not-- I’m not saying it’s Plan A. I’m not even saying it’s plan B,” Scott says, putting up his
hands placatingly. “I’m saying, we fight with everything we have, and this is something we could
have. Let me write down the date and place where I know some of them are, okay? Put it in your
pocket. If everything goes well, we can burn those in the campfire with the S’mores we’ll eat with
the people we bring back.”

“Bruce, you did say that if we go back and change something, it doesn’t change our now, it
changes the now for a different us, right? So if we had to go steal those particles, and they were the
ones Scott needed for something, at that point, he’s not our Scott,” Rhodey says.

Leigh can just barely understand what he’s saying, and she can tell that not everyone in the room is
at the same level of comprehension. But Bruce nods. “Okay. Write them down. We’ll keep them in
mind, but please,” he sighs, “Please, only as a last resort. A ‘come back empty handed’ resort.” He
looks down at himself, holds his hand next to Tony’s where he’s leaning on the table. “I’m living
proof that our best ideas don’t always turn out the way we wanted them to.”

“Seems like an argument in favor of making the best of what we’ve got, to me,” Natasha says
gently. Bruce looks down, and Leigh’s delighted to see that his green cheeks have a tint of pink to
them.

“All right, break it up, I’m hungry. Scott, come with me to the supply closet, we’ll write out some
notecards,” Tony says, clapping his hands.

Steve suggests that each team eat dinner as a group so they can plan out what to do at their separate
destinations. Even though this leaves her out, Leigh has to laugh at the way Rhodey looks over at
Nebula with initial trepidation before nodding and gesturing that they should go grab something to
eat.

Leigh sits with Tony and Steve and their team for a while, but when she’s done eating, she decides
to go for a walk. She squeezes Tony’s hand and slips outside, pulling on a long-sleeved cardigan to
keep away the chill of the October wind. She’s done a circuit of the building twice and is thinking
of coming back inside when she sees Rocket and Nebula walking her way.

When they’re close enough to hear her, she calls out, “If you want to complain about recruiting
your spaceship for the mission, I want you to know, I have zero pull with any of the organizers!”
It’s a lie with no meat behind it, of course. She has pull with Tony, but it wouldn’t probably help
any. This mission is more important than one person’s unhappiness, no matter how profound.

“Nah, that ain’t it,” Rocket says, shaking his head. “Why don’t you turn back around and we’ll
walk back behind the building. We’ve got some concerns, and I don’t really want them overheard.”

“...okay,” Leigh says, looking between the two of them. She can’t read Nebula at all, and she’s
only just met Rocket, but he does look unhappy. “What’s this about?” she asks, once they’re out of
sight of the doors to the facility.

“Nebula and I were talking about what happened to her sister, on Vormir.”

“I do not think they understood,” Nebula says. “They think the danger was just to Gamora.”
Leigh sees the path she almost took the last time she walked here. It wends into the forest a bit,
which might give them even more privacy, and the trees might be a bit of a windbreak. She angles
that way.

“It sounded to me like they thought they’d have to fight someone for the stone,” Rocket explains.
“But Nebula doesn’t think so.”

“I have dwelled on this,” Nebula rasps. “I believe that if Thanos had murdered me on Vormir, he
would not have left with the Soul stone.”

“Wait.” Leigh stops, turns, and looks at the two of them. “You think he got the stone because he
murdered Gamora?”

“Yes,” Nebula says, her voice nearly throbbing with anger.

“She thinks that’s the whole reason Thanos adopted children. He’s wanted these stones for a long
time, and look what he did to her!” Rocket says, throwing a hand toward Nebula. “It’s almost as if
he’s taking some kind of revenge out on her. Maybe it’s revenge for not being lovable enough. Not
the right kind of sacrifice.”

“Stars, Rocket, she’s standing right there!” Leigh objects.

“What? She agrees with me.”

“Thanos used me. Thanos used Gamora. He got the Soul stone,” Nebula says, her hands tightened
into fists.

“So anyway,” Rocket says, leaning up against a tree. “Here’s my problem: Steve’s sending Barton
and Romanoff. Sure, they’ve been friends for over a dozen years, but… wasn’t he out katana-
murdering a bunch of criminals for the last five years? Did he call her? Did he write? Are we
sending the right people to Vormir to get this thing?”

“Natasha’s been a shell of a person when it comes to missing Clint,” Leigh says. “But, hang on.
Are you saying that if we send Clint and Nat, only one of them comes home?”

“That’s what I’m saying.” Rocket’s expression is bleak, even on a Raccoon.

“Oh my God, that would rip them apart, emotionally, both of them! How do you even pick, how do
you show up and decide which of the two of you is going to--”

“They would fight each other.” Nebula says. “If Gamora were on this team, we would volunteer to
go. It would be an honor.”

“Even if one of you would die?” Leigh asks, genuinely horrified.

“To save half the universe?” Nebula stands straight, her expression as condemning as Leigh’s ever
seen it, not that she’s known her for long. “Of course.”

“Yeah, well, she ain’t here, on account of she’s been sacrificed for the Soul stone already. And
from where I’m standing, I’m worried that the team we’re sending doesn’t have what it takes.”

Leigh feels compelled to defend Nat. “I promise you, Nat loves Clint. You didn’t see how much
she wanted to find him, to bring him back home.”

“Would you stake the lives of half the universe on that?” Rocket asks her point blank. “After five
years of evading her? Of no contact? Would you still love Tony the same way if he did that to
you?”

The thought is painful. “I--”

Rocket points. “That. That right there is doubt. And we can’t have doubt right now. We need a
doubt-free mission. And that’s why I’m talking to you.”

The inflection of his voice is odd. The way he’s looking at her, expectantly, makes Leigh feel like
she’s missed something.

And then she realizes what it is.

“Out of everyone in the team, if you had to pick a pair that you knew could do this, who would you
pick?” Rocket asks gently, when he sees her face change.

Ember patting the ‘Tony’ on Leigh’s wrist twice. Ember throwing her hands around Leigh’s neck.
‘I love you, Mama!’

Tony’s voice, shot through with pleasure, ‘God, you still own me, even now.’

Asking Tony to lose a woman he loves again, because of Thanos.

Leigh shakes her head. Tony would never agree to anything like this, even if they didn’t have a
daughter together. He’d shut it down, no matter what. Tony Stark would turn the planet inside out,
to stop her from doing this.

She says, “There’s no way I could ask Tony to--”

“You can’t ask him,” Nebula interrupts harshly.

“He’d never go for it. He’d probably scuttle the whole thing, or spend however much time trying to
find a suicidal married couple to sub in. The longer we take to do this, the more likely we fail.”
Rocket’s voice is urgent and desperate.

Leigh knows they’re right. Still, she can’t even fathom the cost this one act of sacrifice would
exact. “You’re asking me to--”

“Look,” Rocket says. “I know, I know, I keep interrupting you. But you need to know this. My
buddy Quill, I told you about him earlier today. He loved Gamora. Loved her kind of the same way
it seems like Tony loves you-- focused. Maybe even a little obsessive. Now picture us on Thanos’s
planet, big group of us, we’ve almost got the incomplete gauntlet offa the guy, we’re winning, and
then Quill finds out that Gamora’s dead, that Thanos killed her.” Rocket covers his eyes with his
hands and shakes his head. “He attacked Thanos, and we ended up losing, Leigh. We lost. Partly
because a guy couldn’t handle losing the woman he loved. And all across the universe, billions of
guys lost the women they loved. A lot of people did.”

Leigh slumps back up against a tree. Rocket’s argument makes a horrible, stomach-churning kind
of sense, and she can feel herself coalescing around the idea he’s proposing, like she’s made up of
a pile of iron shavings and Rocket’s the magnet ploughing through them. She slides down the tree
until she’s sitting on the cold ground underneath it. Her hands cover her face, then her ears, then
she huddles over her knees, linking her fingers together against the back of her neck. It stings in one
spot in particular, and that’s enough to make her start to cry.

“It doesn’t have to be her,” Nebula suggests to Rocket. “Stark could do it.”
“I’d rather it be me,” Leigh realizes out loud. Her voice is weak and thready. She feels dizzy.
“You’ll still need him, after.”

As soon as she says this, Leigh lifts her head and sees Nebula. She looks almost happy, or if not
happy, triumphant. So does Rocket. Their joy slices through Leigh’s resistance, cutting more of it
away. It presages the potential joy of countless strangers, all across the universe.

“If you don’t want me to tell him, how are we going to get me to Vormir?” she whispers.

Every time she blinks, she sees her daughter’s face. Every time she breathes, she thinks about how
much she loves her husband. But every time she looks at Rocket and Nebula, Leigh thinks about
the people they’ve lost, the people she’s lost, and the fact that if she does this terrible thing they’re
asking, they can have them back. She thinks about how proud Ember is of the things Tony’s done,
the videos she’s watched of him being Iron Man.

Leigh wants to make Ember proud of her Mama, too.

“Thor gave me some of that beer of his, and after about two sips, I was literally about to throw up,”
Rocket says, making a retching sound “I think if I drank a whole bottle, I would. I could make
myself sick, and you could volunteer in my place. Asgard isn’t all that dangerous, for the most
part. Tony could be persuaded that Thor could keep you safe, even in his current… diminished
capacity.”

“And then what, we get Bruce to swap the destinations?” Leigh asks. She presses a hand to her
stomach. Rocket’s not the only one feeling sick.

“We should go back. There’s not that much time,” Nebula says.

“I need to-- Stars, this is hard. I need to record something for my daughter,” Leigh says, pulling out
and fumbling her phone onto the underbrush. Nebula reaches over, finds it, holds it out. “Thank
you.”

“Tell her that her mother is a hero,” Nebula says. Without another word, she turns and starts back
toward the compound.

“Leigh, I-- For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry. This sucks. There’s nothing that can make it
better.”

“Can you tell Bruce I need to talk to him? I need a little time to work out a way to not show
everything I’m planning on my face, you know?” Leigh says, laughing mirthlessly.

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll send him out, all right?”

Leigh’s composing herself for her message to Ember, like there’s any way to prepare for that.
She’s got to do it now, though, because Tony had said he wants to do this thing before nightfall,
and she can see the way the light quality has already drastically changed. The sun’s going down,
maybe in more ways than one.

She props her phone up on a log, using the special, memory-intensive setting that will turn her
video into a hologram. Leigh lets out a breath, wipes the residual tears off of her face, and tells the
phone by voice command to start recording.

“Hey there, Love Bug,” she says.

***
Leigh’s almost through singing Ember’s favorite lullaby when she hears footsteps approaching. As
she’d planned to do, Leigh blows a kiss to the camera, smiling with all of her love shining on her
face, and then she reaches out and turns off the recording.

Without the cord of necessity holding her up anymore, Leigh collapses like a marionette with no
strings, falling first to her hands and knees, then over on her side. There are no tears this time, but
that’s because she’s holding onto them in a steel grip, knowing she has to maintain that hold until
the deception she’s planning is completely perpetuated, and she’s on the team, headed to Vormir.

“Leigh!” Bruce yells, rushing over. He picks her up, holding her against his knee, cradled by one
huge arm, as he searches her visually for any signs of injury.

“It’s all emotional, I’m fine-- I mean, I’m not fine, but it’s not fixable,” she says. In a strange way,
it’s the gentleness in his movements that help her hold herself together. Bruce hasn’t struggled with
how much effort, how much physical strength to expend when interacting with other people for a
while now. He’s reached that goal, and she’s glad for him.

“Oh,” he says, his body relaxing. “Tony’s going to be safe, Leigh. No one’s going to die.” His
cheerful optimism feels awful to puncture, like when Leigh has to let Ember down easily from
some adorable scheme that she has planned.

In a bleak voice, Leigh says, “Yes they are.”

She scoots off of Bruce’s lap into the path and explains the concerns that Rocket and Nebula had
brought to her. Then she explains the start of their suggested solution: a different team sent to
Vormir.

“I think she does love Clint enough for it to work,” Bruce says thoughtfully, “--but I understand
why someone might not want to hinge the whole mission on the possibility that she doesn’t.”

“It’s definitely not to impugne her character at all,” Leigh tells him.

Bruce’s expression turns more serious. “What if I took Clint’s place?”

It’s as unusual a love declaration as Leigh’s ever heard of, and she shakes her head vehemently.
“Think of what you’re asking, Bruce-- can you die? Do you want to find out that you can’t, that
you have to ask Nat to do it, instead?” His face falls and his eyes close. Bruce raises a hand as if
warding off the situation Leigh’s describing. “What you two have is too new for it to make sense
to either test it like this or rip the two of you apart. And what about Clint? Natasha finally brought
him back from the abyss, and he saw his daughter in the test you guys did. He knows it works. I
can’t ask him to forego that.”

“You could make a compelling argument against any one of the ten of us dying, Leigh. That’s not
the way to go about this,” Bruce says. “It seems like your mind is made up, but there are plenty of
arguments against sending you. Not the least of which is I am not sure Tony could handle that
choice.”

“Yeah, I know,” Leigh says, wincing. “The scarcity of the Pym Particles ‘help’ in some ways.
Once we’re there, it’s one or the other, pretty much. And I won’t let it be him.”

Bruce’s laughter is surprising and bitter. “Like he will let it be you? This hero gig isn’t what it’s
cracked up to be, is it? Most of us didn’t ask for the responsibility, and here you are, throwing
yourself into the most extreme deep end. In all meanings of that term, I might add. This is-- this is
crazy, Leigh. What we should do is walk in there and tell everyone what Nebula meant is that
someone has to die, and someone who loves them has to watch. Then we should all figure it out
together. I shouldn’t entertain this conversation at all.” He stands up.

“I’m not sure when there’s a time for cockeyed optimism, but this is definitely not it. Are you going
to help me?”

“Yeah, I’ll help you,” Bruce sighs, sounding defeated. He reaches down to help her up. “But have
a care: Tony won’t accept this. At all. You’re probably going to watch him experience the darkest
moments of his life, and that’s if everything goes well. You might have to watch him die, instead.
There are no other options.”

“Deep in my heart, there’s a tiny hope that it’s a test, that Thanos failed it in a way, but still got the
stone. That he was too thorough, and that Tony and I can both get out of this,” Leigh confesses.

“Deep in my heart, I want to ask you what you think you’ll be unleashing on the rest of us, when
Tony comes back without you. But the alternative is a fifty-fifty shot of losing Nat, and I’m not a
fan of that one either. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is,” Bruce tells her. “Okay, if I’m
swapping teams around, who goes where?”

“Swap Clint with Tony, in New York. He was there that day, and you can catch him up to your
plan. I assume you had uses for Tony’s suit, for that plan?”

“Just an actual business suit, everything else is just speed. I could send Nat with Thor, and put you
on the group to Morag. Rocket knows not to give his mini ship to Clint, then, right?”

“Yeah.”

***

Rocket’s already vomiting into a bucket in the time machine warehouse when she and Bruce get
inside. Everyone’s huddled around him looking concerned.

“--so pissed about this, it hasn’t happened for six years. It can last for days, ” Rocket’s saying,
between heaves.

“Speed is imperative. If Thanos became aware of our attempts, he would seek to stop us. We
should not delay,” Nebula says.

“Send me in his place,” Leigh says, walking up.

“No.” Tony’s adamant. He moves to stand beside her, reaching down to hold her hand. “We can try
again in the morning.”

“Rocket was supposed to go with Thor to Asgard, right? That’s not too dangerous, is it?” Nat says.
Leigh has mixed feelings about the fact that she’s the first one to express support-- what Leigh’s
planning is in service of saving Natasha’s life, of course, but Leigh had more than once expressed a
wish to be useful to the Avengers in some way. That Nat’s helping with what is essentially a one
way ticket to Vormir is bittersweet.

“Do you remember that email I didn’t mean to send you, Tony? Before I spoke a word to you?”
Leigh asks him in a quiet voice. “Do you remember the end of it?”

“Leigh,” Tony says, his tone threatening a burst of anger.

“I said even if it was to fix holes in your socks, let me help, if you figure out a way to reverse it.”
“Okay, passing out now,” Rocket says, and does just that.

“She’ll need a time-space GPS fitted. Rocket’s is too small,” Steve says, heading for the
equipment locker room.

“Steve!” Tony shouts after him, but Rogers is gone. “You’re-- I can’t--” Tony’s struggling with his
words, but then he snaps his fingers. “All you have are skirts. That won’t work with the nanotech
suit.”

“Grasping at straws, here,” Scott whispers.

“Wrong. Remember Nat’s wedding present?” Leigh says, surprised that she can find a reason to
smile right now. She unties the bow of her yellow skirt and undoes the snap, unwinding it to reveal
the tactical pants. Setting the skirt down on a chair nearby, Leigh hangs her cardigan over the back
and pulls off the lace mesh sweater so she’s just wearing the black tank top and pants.

“Okay, that was kind of hot,” Clint observes.

“Bruce, is this feasible in the next half hour, please say no?”

“I’m already swapping them out, Tony,” Bruce says.

“I don’t like this,” Tony says, which means he’s bending toward her, and Leigh knows how hard it
is, knows that he’ll be so very upset and hurt --more than that-- devastated beyond all reckoning,
when he understands what she’s done.

“I love you so much, I’m sorry,” she says, catching Bruce’s eye by accident as she moves to throw
her arms around Tony. Bruce offers her a twisted sort of frowning smile and turns away.

“I’m only saying yes because we need to get moving, and Asgard should be one of the easier ones,
even with a drastically different-looking Thor. Hell, it might work out better. You two might be
able to steal some sort of a handmaid’s outfit and you can grab the stone from Jane Foster’s room
that way,” Tony says reluctantly.

Leigh so desperately wishes that could be her real mission. She nods, smiling up at him.

It takes about twenty minutes, almost all the way to sunset, to get her fitted with what she’ll need
to join the team. In the interim, Nebula and Rhodey get Rocket to his room, and everyone else
watches her with Tony, probably wondering if he’ll pull the plug on the plan at the last minute.

He doesn’t.

They walk toward the platform, all dressed in their nanosuits, GPS’s firmly affixed, to listen to
Steve give a speech.

“Five years ago, we lost. All of us. We lost friends… We lost family… We lost a part of
ourselves. Today, we have a chance to take it all back. You know your teams, you
know your missions. Get the stones, get them back. One round-trip each. No mistakes.
No do-overs. Most of us are going somewhere we know. That doesn’t mean we should
know what to expect. Be careful. Look out for each other. This is the fight of our
lives.”
“We’re gonna win,” Tony says, confident.

“Whatever it takes,” Steve says, looking straight at him. “Good luck.”

Leigh bites the inside of her mouth until it bleeds, but she manages not to cry. She can hear Scott
saying something, but everyone’s stepping toward each other with their GPS-gloved hands, and she
does, too.

“See you in a minute,” Nat says, grinning flirtatiously at Bruce.

Yes. Yes you will, Leigh thinks to herself. It is exactly the right thing to make her feel better.

“Love you,” Tony mouths, across from her before his mask slides up to cover his face.

“Love you too,” Leigh mouths back before hers slides up, too.

Suddenly, she’s sucked into a crazy landscape, zooming through blue nonsense, hardly able to
comprehend what’s going on.

When she’s her full sized self again, Leigh’s standing on the surface of a dark, ghostly planet,
covered with mist.

“What--” Tony says. He turns around a few times.

“This has got to be Morag,” Rhodey says, hitting a button to reveal his Iron Patriot suit underneath
his nanosuit. “What are you two doing here?”

“Fuck, Bruce messed up.” Tony hits the button on his suit, and his black outfit complete with ARC
reactor becomes visible. “Leigh?”

Leigh hits her button. “That was intense. Honestly, I’m grateful it’s a screw-up, because, look at
this place! After everything I heard about Asgard, this is a bit of a let-down.”

Tony chuckles weakly. “Please tell me the Benatar is not still in Clint Barton’s pocket?”

“Rocket gave it to me instead. Something about the way Clint seemed too flippant when he told
him to keep it safe?” Rhodey says, reaching in to pull it out.

“Do you have the means to make it larger?” Nebula asks.

“Right here.”

“Okay.” Tony scrubs a hand over his face. “Okay. We can do this. Whatever there is on Vormir, if
we thought Clint and Natasha could handle it, I should be able to with the suit.” He taps his ARC
reactor twice, and the Iron Man suit forms itself around him. With the repulsors in his hands faced
down, Tony lifts up a few feet, then lands again. “After all, I can fly.”

With another few taps, the suit is retracting.

“Let’s get moving, then. We’ve gotta move the pod out, get you two in the sky,” Rhodey says.

Tony pulls her close and they move out of the way, watching Rhodey enlarge the Benatar, then
watching Nebula take the helm to set it up for their journey to Vormir. Leigh clings to Tony,
knowing he’ll take her reaction as fear about their unexpected situation. He’s strong, sturdy, and
comforting, and she just hopes he’ll be able to rally when he has the Soul stone in hand. He’s no
Thanos, to have met her and cultivated their relationship with the sole purpose of exploiting it for
this moment. She has some arguments prepared, but realistically, they'll only make him feel better
in retrospect, when he relives those moments over and over, once he's back home and everything is
fixed.

When it’s time to leave, she and Tony go up to Nebula and Rhodey. Leigh shakes Nebula’s hand,
but she can’t think of anything to say.

“Thank you,” she says in her odd, harsh voice. All Leigh can do is nod.

Then she’s walking over to Rhodey, who pulls her in for a huge hug. “It’ll be nothing. Let Tony do
it all, maybe even just stay in the ship. What a story for Em, yeah?”

Tongue-tied, Leigh nods, kisses Rhodey’s suit, over his heart. Then, Tony’s taking her hand and
they’re walking up into the ship. He lets go and jogs over to the piloting area.

“Coordinates for Vormir are laid in,” Nebula says loudly. “All you have to do is not fall out.”

Leigh’s still thinking about Ember, thanks to what Rhodey said. She’s turning away, steeling
herself for what she’s about to do, when she has a thought.

“Rhodey!” she calls out, even as Tony’s starting to close the door. “Tell Leshia I love her?” A
wayward tear escapes, and Leigh wipes it away with her palm.

“I will,” Rhodey says, but there’s trepidation in his voice, now. “Stay safe.”

Leigh doesn’t respond that she will.

 Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Summary

She turns away from the pain in his eyes, steps out onto the platform, sees the way it’s
set up, and realizes what it’s for. A fall from this edge would be certain death. Leigh
backs away from it. She’s not ready yet.

Tony slides up behind her, and the warmth of his touch makes her close her eyes
against the thought of losing him. She’d been so afraid he wouldn’t touch her again
after he realized what she wanted to do. Now, it’s almost too much to bear.

“You are a mother,” he says, his voice muffled by her hair. “You are a wife.” Tony’s
voice cracks at that last word.

“I want to be a hero,” Leigh whispers.

Tony breaks, at this, and so does she.

Chapter Notes

Okay. If you can't handle this chapter, I've got your back. It's... hard. It's also beautiful,
but I get it. You can go back and read it after Tony fixes everything later on in the
story, when you know for sure this isn't the end state for Leigh. Until then, though, if
you want to know what happens, but not read it as it happens, I will put a list of
relevant things in the end note for this fic. You can click that, read them, and move on
to the next chapter when it's posted.

Again, THIS IS NOT HOW IT WILL STAY. Also, as proud as I am of this chapter,
it's really fucking painful, as the summary proves. There's like, IDK, a bunch of 'okay
I'm crying now' places.

As you might expect, halfway through the chapter, the PoV swaps back to Tony, and
will be in Tony's PoV for the next chunk of chapters.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Nineteen

Tony has to set the ship down pretty far from the twin structures they’ve sighted, so he tells her it’ll
be safer to come with him. She’s grateful that the nanosuit covers her bare arms as they walk,
because the walk toward the mountain is cold and windy.

“I’m a complete idiot,” Tony says, when they’ve gotten about half of the way there.
“Well that’s just demonstrably not true,” Leigh says.

“C’mere.” He taps his ARC reactor, grinning. “I can fly us there.”

Leigh’s only let him do this a few times, because she hates how exhilarated he gets contrasted with
how terrified she gets. Today, though, Tony doesn’t lift up very high until he has to, setting them
down about halfway up the path to the huge rectangular structures.

“FRIDAY can’t sense any weapons or life signs, but stay right behind me, okay?” he tells her after
a quick kiss.

“Okay,” Leigh says. She’s shaking, but Tony wants his hands free, so he can’t sense her
trepidation. With every step, she has one thought, because she’s banished all of the other ones:

Please, don’t let it be too quick, and don’t let it take too long. A loving goodbye, that’s all I ask for.

Suddenly, Tony stops short, one hand falling back to protect her, the other holding up his repulsor.

“Anthony, son of Maria,” a rusty-sounding voice says. “Felicia, daughter of Francis.”

“Are you the guardian of the stone?” Tony asks in a determined, confident tone.

“Of sorts. I am a guide,” he says. “To you, and to all who seek the Soul stone.”

Leigh moves closer to Tony, sets a hand on his waist, so she can catch a glimpse of the speaker.
What she sees is horrific-- a ghostly figure, quite literally, like a combination of a Ringwraith and a
bloody skull. She wonders how it could possibly know her father’s name.

“Great. Tell me where it is, and we’ll get out of your nonexistent hair,” Tony says.

“Such an important object can rarely be obtained that easily,” the ghost intones.

“Whatever test, whatever fight you’ve got planned, I’m ready,” Tony asserts.

Leigh rests her head on his back, tears rising. Oh, sweetheart, she says silently. I should have
prepared myself for your hubris.

“If only you were, young man. If only you were. She is,” the skull says.

“Leave her out of it.” Tony powers up the repulsor and lifts it higher. “I could get more persuasive
if I have to. I’d love to know how this thing handles ghosts.”

“To leave this place with the stone, you must lose that which you love. An everlasting exchange. A
soul for a soul."

Hearing it so baldly spoken isn’t as shocking as Leigh expected it would be, but that’s likely
because she’s spent the last hour or so preparing herself. She tenses up for Tony’s reaction, but
understands in the next moment that she should have known what it would be.

“You’re lying,” Tony says with utter conviction. “You’re only saying that because you can
somehow sense our relationship to each other. What kind of bargain did you offer Thanos and his
daughter, hmm?”

“There is only one bargain, man of iron.” The ghost advances on them, and Tony backs Leigh into
the wall, standing firmly between her and the perceived threat. “You cannot leave with the stone
by protecting your wife. One of you must make the ultimate sacrifice, or you will leave empty-
handed. My task is now complete.”

Tony turns his body, so Leigh assumes the ghostly presence is moving in the direction her husband
is angling, as he blocks her from whatever it might do.

“Back off, Casper,” Tony says suddenly, powering up both of his repulsors, preparing to fire.

She can just barely see the creature, but what she can see is repulsive and terrifying.

“Felicia, I commend you. Rarely has anyone come to this place knowing of its dangers, and yet
you have come determined, with no weapon but love. Yours is a noble sacrifice.”

With that, the ghost completely disappears.

“Super great, thanks for that, helps a lot with the potential drama,” Leigh groans.

“Leigh?” Tony whispers, spinning around, his helmet retracting to reveal a look of absolute horror.
Seconds later, his entire suit retracts and he falls toward her, bracing himself on the craggy rock
wall they’d been standing in front of. “Tell me that was just mind games. Tell me.”

She’s only seen his eyes look this haunted and lost once: in the bunker, reliving the moment he’d
been stabbed by Thanos.

“I can’t lie to you, Tony,” she says, dropping her eyes to the ARC reactor. She’s not strong enough
to see more of the misery she’s wrought.

“You knew?” he whispers, staggering back.

“Rocket and Nebula were pretty sure this was the deal. They came to me, afraid the team didn’t
understand the gravity of retrieving the Soul stone,” Leigh says, walking farther up the incline
toward where she can see it open out into a platform of sorts. She stops under the edge of the
overhanging rock and turns around. Tony’s on one knee now, head down, one gauntlet covering
the fist he’s supporting himself with. “They worried that if we didn’t send two people who very
obviously loved each other without question, the task would fail.”

“So they talked you into a suicide mission?” Tony asks, without moving a muscle. “As if they’re
qualified to give that kind of advice?” He lifts his head to look at her. “As if you’re qualified--”

“Tony I don’t have a superpower,” Leigh interrupts. “But it turns out, I didn’t need one, not for
this. You love me, that’s all that’s required.”

“There has to be some other way,” he says, slowly standing. His eyes widen and his head shakes
vehemently, vulnerably. “We’ll find some other way. I’ll, I’ll--” he snaps his fingers and points at
her. “I’ll fly back to Morag and grab Rhodey. He’s in his suit. We can fight to the death, right here.
Whoever wins goes home with the stone. Rhodey’s been my best friend for over thirty years.”

Her heart leaps at the suggestion, but Leigh grits her teeth and asks, “How are you even going to
find him?”

“With your life on the line? I’ll figure. It. Out,” Tony says, biting out each word with furious
energy. His determination is thrilling, and his option is tempting, but that option could leave the
rest of the team-- of the world without Tony, and that’s not acceptable to her.

“What about the missing half of the universe, Tony? You do this and it’s you who dies, how will
the team finish up? They need you. They need you,” Leigh says, repeating the phrase with more
emphasis.

“I need you more,” he says, simply.

She turns away from the pain in his eyes, steps out onto the platform, sees the way it’s set up, and
realizes what it’s for. A fall from this edge would be certain death. Leigh backs away from it. She’s
not ready yet.

Tony slides up behind her, and the warmth of his touch makes her close her eyes against the
thought of losing him. She’d been so afraid he wouldn’t touch her again after he realized what she
wanted to do. Now, it’s almost too much to bear.

“You are a mother,” he says, his voice muffled by her hair. “You are a wife.” Tony’s voice cracks
at that last word.

“I want to be a hero,” Leigh whispers.

Tony breaks, at this, and so does she.

***

An untold amount of time later, Tony lets out a long breath. “We have Scott’s list of where to find
Pym Particles,” he says.

“And do what with them? Kidnap a homeless married couple and pay one of them to shove the
other off the edge? This is the only way, Tony,” Leigh says, pushing her misery up into the audible
range, making it sound like chastisement.

“Leigh, for fuck’s sake--”

She holds up her right arm, the ‘Tony’ on her wrist plainly visible. “You once said this was a
bullshit consolation prize awarded by a madman. How much more powerful will it be as a weapon
to reverse what he’s done? Thanos gave you a soulmate and she saved the universe!”

“If that’s winning, I’d rather lose,” Tony says. He drags his teeth across the mark on her neck, and
Leigh tries to move away, but he won’t let her.

“Don’t, Tony, that’s--”

“Cruel? This is what you’re doing to my soul, Leigh. You scraping away at it, tearing it apart,
making it bleed.”

Leigh stands there trembling against him until he stops and rests his forehead against the back of
her neck.

With his hot breath scorching her back, Tony says, “There’s no time limit to this. If I can’t change
your mind, then I’ll wait.”

“What do you mean, you’ll wait?”

“I know how long I can live without food. I just have to make sure you live longer than that.”

Leigh pulls free and turns around to stare at him. “No.”

His jaw is set, and she knows him so, so well. Every line of her husband’s body screams
stubbornness. She opens her mouth to object, but he points over her shoulder to the open air and the
ledge beyond.

“I’m not losing you like this. I refuse.”

“And when you’re asleep?” she says, hating herself, hating his completely reasonable, incredulous,
crushed reaction.

He’s horrified for a full ten seconds before tapping his chest, reaching out his arm, and binding her
to him with a nano-handcuff. “You want to try me? I’ll keep you going through sheer force of will.
This is my life now. Keeping you alive. Want to see how good I am at it?”

Tony ends up using his suit to create a harness that carries her with him down to the ship, which he
raids for supplies including water, food, and something to lay out to sleep on. His demeanor is
fierce and self-righteous. Leigh feels like she has wrecked a car that refuses to stop working long
after its gas tank has emptied and its tires have fallen off. The entire world is waiting for the
insurance payout, but still Tony Stark putters along, fueled by pure, miserable determination and
love.

***

By day five Leigh realizes that Tony was completely serious about his plan to keep her alive longer
than him.

He’s managed to figure out how to feed her in her sleep.

She wakes up with an odd grit in her mouth, and when she rolls over to look at Tony beside her,
he’s already awake (which is usual), and smiling (which is not). His face has started to change
shape ever so slightly, the skin pulling back, due to lack of proper hydration. It’s a self-
administered torture scheme designed to make her change her mind, and Leigh’s wrecked by it.

“I expected to have to fight your determination, but not your ingenuity.” Leigh sighs.

“That was naive.”

***

That night, Leigh realizes a few things in combination.

1. Tony sleeps very soundly when he’s starved for resources

2. She’ll probably die faster if she stays awake

This makes her cry, but she’s long past crying liquid tears, so she just shakes for a while. Then,
Leigh gets to work on figuring out how to get loose from the nanoparticle shackle Tony secures to
her wrist every night.

On night seven Tony wakes up right as she frees herself. He reaches out and grasps both of her
arms, throwing himself on top of her.

“Why don’t you understand? I can not lose you like this!”

“You think I’m ready to lose you?” she shouts right back. “The difference here is that the rest of
the universe can’t live without you, either! You have to let me go!”

“NO.”

Tony shifts his position so he’s straddling her. He reaches out and rips the elastic from her braid,
pulls the other off, taking down her ponytail, and then slowly winds her hair around his wrist,
securing that with a tight band of nanoparticles.

“No,” he repeats, sliding off of her, exhausted by the effort he’s just expended. Not long after, he
falls asleep, his hair-wrapped hand resting beside her head, his other hand still possessively
gripping her shirt over her stomach.

Leigh curls herself around him and falls asleep, too.

***

She wakes up to him feeding her some sort of mashed, horrible-tasting stuff. Leigh’s so, so tired, so
she just stares at him balefully, unwilling to try to push him away.

“I love you. You’re worth this. You always have been, and you always will be,” he whispers.

“Goddamnit, Tony,” Leigh says, starting to cry. There are real tears in her eyes, and the triumph in
his expression is both beautiful and terrifying. Her sacrifice will be worth nothing if Tony
succeeds, because that’s not the sacrifice she was prepared to make. The whole plan hinges on him
being the one who brings back the stone.

They hold each other all day.

That night, when Tony winds her hair around his wrist, it’s looser than it was the night before,
when he was angry. Once he’s asleep, she can move around a little, including roll over and reach
for the ARC reactor. To sleep, they’ve taken to extending their time travel suits, so Tony only uses
the nanoparticles from the Iron Man suit to bind her hair to his wrist, rather than wearing the whole
metal suit. This means that when she gently, oh, so gently tugs the ARC reactor free from his chest,
it doesn’t wake him up.

It’s heavy in her hands, and Leigh wonders if it would feel that way if she weren’t so very hungry
and so very weak.

She scoots her lower body away from his, angling so that her head is close to the hand it’s bound
to, but the rest of her is feet away. Heart pounding, Leigh presses the ARC reactor to her own chest
and taps it twice.

The suit enfolds her, sounding hugely loud in her own ears, but Tony sleeps on, despite the fact that
the nanoparticles have formed around the place her hair is pulling away from head. The slight
change of pressure isn’t enough to disturb him.

Seeing the inside of Tony’s helmet is a revelation. There’s information about everything she looks
at, including a dangerous resting BP for Tony. Whispering in case he can hear what she says inside
of there, Leigh asks for the suit to retract everywhere but the helmet. Then, she asks if there’s a
chance it can form scissors for her to use.

The effort it takes to lift her arms and cut her hair against the metal helmet is extremely tiring, but
Leigh manages it. When she’s finished, she lays still for a long time, almost falling asleep. Only
the terrible imperative of what she knows she has to do wakes her up enough to crouch beside
Tony’s sleeping body. Leigh pulls the red vial from her time travel suit and slots it into the space
next to the one Tony will use to travel back with the stone.

She’s so scared that Tony will wake up and stop her that she presses the ARC reactor onto the
fabric of his pant leg instead of his chest. Leigh slowly unfolds herself up to a stand; it’s been so
long since she’s done this that she almost falls back down to crawl over to the edge, instead. But,
Leigh thinks of Ember, of the time her daughter had told her tired Mama one day, ‘Just a little
more, Mama. You can do it!’

Turning her head feels so strange without the weight of her hair. Like she’s no longer Leigh Stark,
but someone else. She supposes that in a way, she is. She’s not just Tony’s anymore. Now, she
belongs to the universe.

Leigh doesn’t have the strength to jump. When she finally gets to the edge, she leans, leans, leans,
embracing the fear, whispering to herself.

I love you so much, Tony. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry

***

Tony wakes up lying flat on his back in a pool of water. Tired, disoriented, and wet, he struggles to
sit up. When he finally does, he sees a glow in one hand, and a mass of honey blonde hair wrapped
around the other.

“No,” he whispers, disbelieving. Tony opens his glowing hand to see the Soul stone and all he
wants to do is throw it. “FUCK! No, no no no no, Leigh no, you didn’t, tell me you didn’t,” he
begs, over and over until they’re nonsense syllables and his throat is raw.

Reason prevails just long enough for Tony to reach for his ARC reactor, looking to create a
nanoparticle shield for the stone to put it in his pocket. He doesn’t want to look at the damned
thing-- but his ARC reactor is not there.

Leigh used his own technology against him.

After searching around with his clenched fist, he finds it affixed to his pants. She’d probably placed
it there, afraid of waking him up. Tony wants to throw that, too.

He creates a carrying box for the Soul stone, crams it into his pocket, and cradles the hand with her
soaked, hacked off hair to his chest and screams out his fury. Creating a second box for her hair
doesn’t even feel strange, but allowing every strand of it to pull free of his arm does.

Tony takes stock of his suit and his clothing and finds to his great surprise that at some point,
Leigh had tucked her Pym Particle vial into his suit. A chill courses through him at the thought that
she might have done it days ago. Had Leigh been that confident? How long had she been sketching
diagrams in her head, waiting for him to sleep, charting blueprints of her plans to thwart his
determination to save her?

They need you, Leigh had said. It’s still true.

I need you more, Tony had said. That’s still true, too.

Tony taps out the coordinates for his exact location, one day before.

He thanks fuck for his suit, because the walk would have quite literally killed him. When Tony
reaches the rise that leads to where he knows he and Leigh will be asleep, tangled around each
other, he settles to the ground as carefully as he can. If he’s right, Leigh won’t have put her vial
into his suit yet. She’s the most practical person he knows, and he’s counting on the fact that she’d
only give away that resource when she knows for a fact that she doesn’t need it anymore. That
means she probably did it just before she jumped.

Adrenaline and joy are probably flowing in greater concentrations in his veins than the life-giving
energy that should be keeping him alive, at this point, but Tony doesn’t care. He’s going to take
her home with him. He’s going to bring home both Leigh and the stone.

“It is said, ‘Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’”

It’s the voice of the skull guardian. Tony powers up the repulsor in his hand and turns around,
aiming it right for where he knows the damned thing will be floating.

“Your services are no longer required, Skeletor.”

“You cannot do the thing for which you have come, man of iron. If you do, the Soul stone will be
ripped from your grasp.”

“A soul for a soul, you said,” Tony says, hating the querulous tone in his voice. He remembers it
from the first time he’d been this hungry, when he’d come back to Earth defeated to find the
woman he loved dead. Not this time. This time, he’ll come back to Earth in triumph with the stone -
-and Leigh. “We’ll bring it right back anyway,” Tony argues. “What does it matter if, for a few
seconds, that bargain wasn’t fully paid?”

“I don’t have the power to give you what you want. If there is a way to have both the stone and this
woman you care for so much, I cannot divulge it. All I can tell you is that if you seek to take them
from this place and time, you will lose both, and return with nothing.”

“That can’t be true. She’s right there,” Tony growls. “I can hear her breathing, you red-painted
fuck!”

“She is lost to you, as long as you wish to retain the Soul stone.”

Tony taps away his suit and flips off the ghostly spectre.

“That is as true here on Vormir as it is on your Earth,” the thing says, its voice louder, almost loud
enough to wake the sleeping couple he knows rest just a little ways away.

“Just stop,” Tony grits out, suddenly furious.

“I can see how your mind works. You cannot undo what has been done. Not here, not on Earth, not
on Morag, not on Asgard, nowhere.” It floats over to block Tony’s path and he wants for all the
world to blast it into a million smug red pieces. “Hear me. Do not invalidate that woman’s sacrifice
for you. If you love her-- do not.”

Tony’s shaking. He can’t stop himself. The stress is rattling through him, burning away what little
energy he has left. As it burns, though, a deep, miserable truth is being revealed.

Leigh’s gone. Really gone, even though she’s just a few breaths away, warm and vibrant as she
always has been, even this close to starvation.

Tony closes his eyes. When he opens them, the skull-head menace is gone.

Though Tony’s accepted what’s been told to him, he still needs to do at least half of what he came
to do. With as light a gait as he can manage on a week’s worth of an empty stomach, he creeps
forward to look at himself and his wife. Her left arm is thrown out beside her, but the rest of
Leigh’s body is curved towards this Tony. Leigh’s generous and loving in her sleep, even though
in this terrible, soul-stealing place, she had been so unrelenting and determined while awake.

Impulsively, Tony reaches down and taps the ‘release’ sequence on the nanoparticle bracelet he’d
given her years before. He holds it to his lips, hand shaking, suddenly desperate to touch her.

He reaches out his hand-- and slams it down on the button that will bring him back to 2023 without
Leigh.

***

Because of the nature of their time machine, everyone comes back at exactly the same time. The
second he lands, Tony can see that the space across from him is empty. He falls to his knees.

“Did we get ‘em all?” someone asks.

“Are you telling me this actually worked?” Rhodey asks. Tony can hear the delighted disbelief in
his voice.

“Where’s Leigh?” Nat asks.

Tony turns his head toward the sunset in progress and winces, closing his eyes.

“Tony?” Steve says, and it’s his command voice, his leader voice. He’s demanding an accounting.

“Ask Nebula,” Tony spits. “Ask Rocket. Ask Bruce.”

“I know nothing,” Nebula rasps out.

“Bruce?” Steve turns, focuses his laser-sharp concern away from Tony, which is a relief.

“There was a concern about the efficacy of the original team,” Bruce says carefully.

“No. I want to know exactly why Leigh isn’t standing here, and I want to know now.” Natasha’s
voice is sharp and furious.

“A soul for a soul,” Tony whispers. Leigh’s soul is-- IS, goddamnit, he’s not doing that, he’s not
using past tense. She’s been gone from him for barely a half hour --flamewrought and beautiful.
She’s worth more than all of the Infinity Stones combined, as far as he’s concerned.

“Guys, have you looked at him? He’s wasted away to practically nothing!” Scott says. It’s the
signal Tony needed to allow himself to let go, to fall. The strong arms that catch him are covered in
tattoos.

Bruce walks over, probably to pick him up and carry him to the medical room, but Rhodey reaches
out with one metal-wrapped arm, and stops him. “Get a gurney,” he says.

“What happened to you?” Clint asks softly.

“Took a while for her to outsmart me,” Tony answers back. Somehow, the thought makes him
smile. She’d made him earn the motherfucking thing, at least.

“He’s gonna pass out!” Scott yells.

“I’ve got him,” Clint says. He leans his head down, but Tony’s vision is rapidly narrowing, as if
he’s traveling down a tunnel, or worse: he’s still miniaturized, running from some danger, right
into one of the blueprint rolls Leigh leaves lying around her work table. The tunnel/roll starts to
spin, and Tony feels very dizzy. “Sleep, Tony. You need it.”

He does.
 ***

When he wakes up, he’s in the temporary hospital bed at the med room, hooked up to an IV. For
one horrible, terrifying moment, Tony wonders if losing Leigh means losing his Words, his one
permanent connection to her, besides their daughter. He starts fumbling with the sheet that’s tucked
around him, but he’s weak as fuck, and it’s hardly moving at all.

“Tony, hey, hey,” a voice says. It’s Rhodey, because Tony’s doomed to repeat history, here.

“I need to check. My Words, her Words ,” Tony begs, not even ashamed of how miserable and
desperate he sounds.

“Okay, lay still, I’ll look. Where are they?”

“On--” Tony laughs, a pathetic wisp of a thing, hardly worth the effort it took to release it. “On my
thigh.”

“If you’re shitting me, I’ll leave your dick to air-dry, you hear me?” Rhodey threatens.

“I swear. Check the chart, they probably never took it out even though I threatened to sue them.”

Tony does what Rhodey asked and lies still, because he knows he’ll be able to tell by the shocked
look on his friend’s face whether the Words are still there. They are.

“Holy shit, man, you never told me about this,” Rhodey breathes.

“Why do you think I hated soulmates so much?” Tony says, pressing a hand to his chest, wishing
he could reach through, like Vision or Wanda could, and rip his heart out. It’s only a ghost of its
former self anyway, red-painted and surrounded by a ragged black cloak. Only there to pump blood
and guide his daughter to the souls of others, now.

Someone taps on the doorway, and instinctively Tony knows it’s Steve. He reaches down for the
container he’d made for the Soul stone and tries to pull it out of his pocket, forgetting that he’s no
longer wearing pants.

“You’re weak as a kitten, man. What do you need?” Rhodey asks.

“The damned stone is in a nanobox in my pocket.”

“I know they’re going to load you up with something by IV, but do you want some water, too?” It’s
Nat, and she’s got a glass with a straw. She’s beautiful, Tony thinks. He wonders if they’ve given
him some kind of strong painkiller.

“Please,” he answers her.

“You mean these pockets?” his best friend asks, holding up his pants.

“Yeah.”

Rhodey hands over a box at the same time the straw is being guided to Tony’s lips, so he doesn’t
see that it’s the wrong box until Steve swears, actually swears under his breath. When Steve speaks
more loudly, it’s with hardly any more eloquence.

“Fucking hell, Tony, why do you have this?”

Tony looks up and sees the mass of Leigh’s hair. He shoves at the glass Nat’s holding, feeling
 desperate and violent. “Give that back. Please, don’t dump it, don’t--”

Natasha’s covered in ice water, but her voice is still calm and soothing. “Tony, no one would ever
dump that. We’re bringing it over, okay? Lay still.”

One single hair is sticking out of the join where the lid meets the body of the box, when Tony
finally gets it back into his hands. He winds that hair around his finger unselfconsciously, and
looks up with fire in his eyes, daring anyone to question him.

“I gotta ask what happened, Tony.”

“FRIDAY, get this, okay? I don’t want to repeat it,” Tony says.

“You’ve got it, Boss.”

“I-- I can’t,” Tony realizes aloud. “I’ll tell you why I have this--” he lifts the box “--but everything
else… I’m going to need time.”

The looks of disappointed acceptance on their faces feel like a compliment to his wife.

“I wouldn’t let her do it. There was a ledge, a huge fall, obviously there to facilitate the
requirement: a soul for a soul,” Tony says, leaning his head back but resolutely not closing his
eyes. He stares at the light, instead, hoping it’ll glare in his vision and obscure anything he might
unwillingly see regarding what he’s describing. “At first I used my suit to keep her with me at
night, in case she-- While I slept. But after a few days, she’d figured out a way to get loose, so I
wrapped her hair around my arm to sleep.”

“это пиздец,” Nat says.

“Last night she stole the ARC reactor off of my chest and used it to create a pair of scissors or a
knife, I guess, and cut it off without waking me up. Then I woke up with the stone and an armful
of her hair,” Tony whispers.

“Here, Steve,” Rhodey says, handing over the second box.

“You can use FRIDAY to access the locked vault I put the nanogauntlet in,” Tony says. “I-- you
don’t have to wait for me. In fact, don’t.”

“Nebula was worried that Thanos might try something if he knew what we were doing. Even if
that’s basically impossible, I’d still rather not wait any longer than it takes to construct the
gauntlet,” Rhodey tells them.

“Go on,” Tony says to Nat. “Sorry I made you all wet.”

“Better than smashing that box,” she says, smoothing a cool hand over his forehead.

All Tony can think about is how Leigh’s hands were always furnace-warm, and how Nat’s touch
feels clammy and impersonal, in comparison.

Chapter End Notes

For people coming across this note who have read the chapter already, this isn't
necessarily for you, but for the people who skipped ahead. So you don't have to read
it! Thanks for the time you've spent on my story, I appreciate you so much!!

IMPORTANT THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS CHAPTER:

1) Tony tells her he'll wait it out, keeping her alive so he dies first, of starvation
2) Tony keeps Leigh shackled to him at night with his suit so she doesn't jump when
he's sleeping
3) When Leigh figures out how to get out of the nanoshackle, he wraps her hair around
his wrist to keep her close, instead
4) Leigh takes his ARC reactor and uses it to make scissors to cut her hair off (leaving
it around his wrist), and jumps on Day Eight
5) Tony wakes up in the pool, finds he has the stone and her hair, and her extra Pym
Particle pack
6) Tony travels to the night before, intending to steal Leigh away before her jump, thus
having both Leigh and the stone
7) Red Skull tells him this is not the way to save Leigh, and even if he uses the stones
to bring her back, it will reverse everything the stone was used for
8) Tony collapses on his return, and in searching for the box he put the Soul stone in,
the Avengers find a second box with Leigh's hair in it, and he has to explain what
happened.
9) Tony asks Rhodey to check to see that his Words didn't disappear with Leigh's
death (he's in bad physical shape)
10) Tony is not going to be in the room when they unSnap
 Chapter Twenty
Chapter Summary

“So here we are,” Thanos says. He’s got the gauntlet on his arm, fingers poised to
Snap, and everyone around him is frozen in fear. “I know you regret what happened
the last time you fought me. In the interests of balance, I offer you one more chance,
without armor.”

Tony almost laughs. He’d seen Wanda strip the Titan of most of his. At the same time,
he remembers what Nebula had said over and over again as they had discussed the
teams, and whether to wait out Rocket’s illness. Delay gives the enemy the opportunity
to win.

Tony is Thanos’s enemy.

Chapter Notes

Time to kick some purple, groove-chinned ass.

Part III: Redemption

Chapter Twenty

Tony knows they’re about to unSnap. He doesn’t expect anything particular to happen that he
could sense from the med room, though he did tell Nat to instruct FRIDAY to institute the Barn
Door protocol, just in case. So when the shields go up over the windows, Tony is pleased.

Then, the building shakes.

He has a bad feeling about it. Clutching Leigh’s hair box to his chest, he sits up, looking for his
pants. He’ll be damned if he almost died to save his wife’s life, only to lose her and die himself,
without wearing any fucking pants. Any number of things could have gone wrong with the
gauntlet, but shaking the building shouldn't have been one of them.

The shields on the windows start to lift. The plates blocking the doors slide back up. To him, this
signals that they’ve done it. Whoever it was, probably Banner, has brought everyone back. Tony
has somehow managed, thanks to the IV he’s gotten about half of, to get some of his strength back,
and he’s juuuuust grabbing his pants--

When all hell breaks loose.

The building collapses around him, and as he’s falling, Tony double taps his ARC reactor, feeling
the comforting suit sliding up around him. He already has Leigh’s box, so he swiftly tucks it into
the side of his underwear before the particles sweep through.

This leaves him unprepared for landing, though, and he hits hard without the repulsors going.
Tony’s dizzy, disoriented, and somehow he’s in a hole under his goddamned building, with a wave
of water headed straight for him. The IV hadn’t really prepared him for this.

Without hitting so hard, though, Tony wouldn’t have had to take a few seconds to get his bearings,
and he wouldn’t have seen that the impact of whatever it was had broken open the equipment
lockers, including the case that holds the two prosthetics he’d made in preparation for a worst-
case-scenario with the Infinity Stones.

It sure seems like this is that.

Tony swears under his breath. He hopes that he hasn’t made a terrible mistake by not pushing
himself to be there when they chose a person to use the gauntlet. Bruce was the obvious choice,
and neither of these prosthetics would fit him. The hybrid metal he’d made them from was
specifically designed to protect the user by giving paths for the energy emitted from the stones to
travel. Bruce had asked Tony not to make one for ‘just in case’ right after he’d finished integrating
himself with Hulk, mostly because of the expense.

‘It’s Gamma radiation, Tony. If we ever get a chance to fix this, which I doubt it will, I will
probably be fine. Save the materials for something worthwhile.’

‘Don’t give me that. You’re worth the money. And the people we’ve lost are sure as hell worth it.’

Tony likes to be right-- but not like this.

Given the collapse of the complex, it’s possible that Bruce had been overcome by the sheer energy
of the gauntlet and may have caused the damage as he thrashed around, trying to master it.

He might not have even had the chance to unSnap yet.

Tony grabs the case, and it’s fucking heavy for a man in his condition. Tony is alone; there’s no
one in his particular pit to judge him. He drops the case and lays down on top, instructing his suit
to create a carapace around it so he can carry the damned thing without needing to use his
weakened arm muscles to do so. Then, with his dignity in tatters around him, Tony activates all
four repulsors, using them to fly about six inches above the ground.

He makes progress as best he can, calling out for anyone else who might be hurt and finding no
one. Finally, when he’s started to worry that he’s too far underground to ever find a way out, he
reaches a place where he can see the waning sunlight. Flying up and out feels triumphant, right up
until he sees the ship hovering overhead.

***

When he lands up top, the first person Tony sees is Thor.

“Thanos,” Thor says.

“Fuck,” Tony says. It’s heartfelt.

“We promised to bring those stones back,” Steve says from behind them. “We’ve got to keep that
promise.”

“So Bruce didn’t do all this with the gauntlet? Things are looking up,” Tony says sarcastically,
looking around at the complete devastation. He wonders if his insurance will cover Acts of Titan.
“Did he--”

“I saw Clint answer a phone call with a look on his face that defies all human vocabulary. I believe
it was from his wife,” Thor says.

Tony’s so happy to hear this that he forgets he’s using his repulsors to hold himself up, and as soon
as he releases them, he starts falling over backwards.

Steve catches him. “What’s in the box, Tony?”

A tiny part of Tony wants to rebel and tell Steve he doesn’t get to meddle with any of Tony’s
boxes, not after opening Leigh’s without permission. It’s unreasonable and childish, and he pushes
it away.

“Is Bruce all right?” Tony asks first, before he answers Rogers.

“He’s somewhere under this, along with the gauntlet,” Steve says dourly.

“Well, we find the gauntlet, maybe we don’t have to make Bruce use it again when we snap that
motherfucker right out of existence,” Tony says with real venom. He orders the suit to release the
box, and falls forward, when its weight no longer relies on him. Thor catches him this time.
“Prosthetics. Built to hold the stones and protect the user. Only reason I didn’t bring them up
already is because Bruce wouldn’t let me make one in his size.”

Steve smiles, crushes a happy hand onto Tony’s shoulder. “Why two?”

Tony’s tired, but the happiness from the knowledge that they might have actually brought everyone
back is giving him a second wind. He knows what he’s about to say might be an olive branch to
Steve, and he wants to see the other man’s face when he says it, so Tony turns, stumbling a little
bit, reaching out to grab Steve’s arm to steady himself.

“Because one of them is for Barnes.”

Tony can see the words hit Steve. He’s still Steve, though, so he’ll do what’s necessary.

“You know I have to bench you, you can barely stand up,” Steve says very gently. “Thanos would
kill you, and you gotta think of Ember.”

This is a low blow, Tony thinks, because Em’s a consideration whether or not Tony’s in bad shape.
Knowing Steve, though, it’s a manipulation intended to make Tony feel just comfortable enough
with sitting down and resting for a while.

“Guard that container. The magic in the stones appeared to lock the gauntlet into a shape fit for
Banner’s hand-- which means it will also fit his.” Thor points at a lone figure, seated far away,
standing next to a tall object embedded in the soft earth. “When we find the gauntlet, you must use
your suit to transfer the stones, and quickly.”

And then use it to eradicate Thanos, and whoever he’s brought with him, Thor doesn’t say. He
doesn’t have to. Tony understands.

“No matter what, you stay up here, you got it? It’s probably the most important thing left to do,
besides return the things,” Steve says.

“How swiftly does your armor unfold? Are you willing to remain unshielded by it, and thus less
visible?” Thor asks.

“I’ll just leave the comms up and cover the glow,” Tony promises them. “--and the pants. I was,
uh, in a hospital bed, when this all started, remember.”

He doesn’t roll his eyes at the two of them, though it’s a near thing, because this solicitousness is
uncharted territory. Some part of him wants to think it’s because of the prosthetics, or worse, losing
Leigh. Whatever it is, the cynic in him wants to tell them to fuck off, despite the nature of their
concern. Instead, Tony waves his hand. “Okay now you’re both freaking me out. Go kill.”

Thor shrugs his shoulders, his eyes turning bright with lightning. He reaches out his hands, and
Mjolnir and Stormbreaker slot into them seconds later. Steve smiles grimly, walking down the
debris toward the seated figure.

Steve pauses, looks back. “We’ll make sure it was worth it,” he tells Tony. Tony nods, knowing
that this statement is meant to be heartfelt and empowering.

When they’re far enough away, though, he shakes his head. “Not possible.”

***

It’s hard to watch Steve and Thor fighting Thanos. Their every advance on the Titan seems to be
followed by massive setbacks. Steve is beaten down so badly he has to rest in a heap. All of their
hopes rest on Thor-- who ends up struggling against his own weapon in the hands of their enemy.

Tony taps his suit on, lifting up to give himself a better vantage point to see where he can best land
his first strike.

Before he can fly down to help, though, Thanos is thrown off of Thor, and, as Tony hovers in
disbelief, Thor’s hammer flies back from where it had struck Thanos, landing firmly in Steve’s
hand.

Thor’s triumphant, ‘I knew it!’ is audible even from where Tony’s watching.

Then, Tony drops back down. Despite an initial amazing attack, Steve’s shield is being hacked
into, breaking into pieces. Steve rolls over on his back and Tony steps back in stunned shock, falls
over the prosthetic box. Steve looks just like the image he saw when Wanda was fucking with his
mind. It’s the worst possible scenario, made worse by what all Tony’s lost in the interim.

“It was never personal,” Thanos says to Steve-- but it feels like he’s saying it to Tony. “What I’m
about to do to your stubborn, annoying little planet-- I’m going to enjoy it.”

Thanos is speaking to Tony. He can tell. Stephen Strange thwarted Thanos’s attempt to kill him,
and now everyone on Earth is going to suffer unless they can stop him. ‘They,’ meaning a Captain
America with half a shield, a drunken, depressed norse god, and Tony Stark, with an invisible but
gaping hole where his heart ought to be.

He doesn’t want to say it’s hopeless, but it’s hopeless.

The comm he forgot he’s even connected to anymore crackles to life, and he hears the voice of
Sam Wilson. “On your left.”

IT REALLY WORKED.

The surge of complete joy is so strong it pulls Tony off of his knees, and what he sees is beautiful.
Everywhere he can look, he sees the golden spin of the Kamar Taj portals, and bursting forth from
them are countless thousands of reinforcements. Tony fires up his repulsors again. If he’s going to
fight, he’ll fight like this. If it means he’s going to die, he’ll die the same day as Leigh.

Just as he’s about to fly down, a familiar, swooping movement catches his eye. It’s Peter. Elated,
Tony starts down. A qualm of conscience pricks him-- the box is still important, and just the effort
of holding himself higher in the air is starting to tax him.

“Fuck,” Tony realizes. He can’t actually do this. He’s worn too much of his strength away. The
ground shakes, and he sees Scott in his suit, impossibly large, stretching out a hand to reveal
Rhodey, Rocket, and Bruce. It’s the signal Tony needed to settle back onto the box until he’s
needed, because at least with Iron Patriot, there will be one of his suits on the field.

He closes his eyes and groans. It’s not in his nature to sit while others fight, no matter what Steve
had accused him of on their first meeting. Knowing that this is the battle to end all battles just
makes it worse.

“Tony?”

It’s Pepper’s voice.

He drops the hand he’d covered his face with and looks up. Pepper’s wearing the suit he’d made
for her shortly after their impromptu engagement press conference. She looks fierce and beautiful.

“Hey, Pep,” Tony says, eyes full of tears. He’s too tired for a facade, right now, but he is very glad
that the suit is covering most of him, because he knows he looks sick, after a week of nearly
starving.

“Oh my God, Tony,” she says, throwing herself at him. She lifts him up and hugs him, her suit
awkward and bulky, because he hadn’t had a chance to make one out of the nanoparticles. His heart
is aching, because while he loves her, he’s not in love with her-- but she is in love with him.

In all their time on Vormir, Leigh had never once mentioned Pepper, but she had alluded to Tony
being taken care of when she was gone. The thought makes him sick, especially as a justification
for her sacrifice being more acceptable to him, but also because of how unfair that is for Pepper.

“I gotta guard this. You go, kick some Titan ass,” he tells her, gesturing weakly. “On second
thought, no. Stay away from that guy. Kick some ass really far away from Thanos.”

“You don’t sound well, Tony, are you okay?” she asks, touching his forehead, his face. Her hands
are cool to the touch, too.

“No. Not at all. Probably never will be again. Go on, Robocop. Feelings later,” he says, wincing.

“...okay,” she says, obviously hurt. Nodding, she flips down her helmet and flies off to join the
fray.

The battle is already raging, and Tony activates his shield just in case anything ricochets. Beyond
the fight, his goals sound simple, but they’re likely far from it. First, they need to find the gauntlet.
Next, he needs to transfer the stones onto one of the prosthetics, and someone, hopefully not
himself, needs to use it to snap Thanos and his band of merry men out of fucking existence.
Selfish? Sure, but Ember Stark deserves more than to be told her parents both died today.
“Cap!” Clint says on the comm. “Where do you want me to put this thing?”

“Here, bring it to me. Up above where the Wakandans are fighting!” Tony says, excited.

“Tony, we need to get that thing as far away as possible!” Steve protests. “That’s the only way we
can protect them until we can return them.”

“No way the Quantum Tunnel survived that attack, Cap.” Rhodey says.

“That’s not our only time machine, guys!” Scott says excitedly. “Anyone see a big brown van?”

“Yes, but you’re not going to like where it’s parked!” comes a woman’s voice. “I’ll guide you to it,
if you can fly.”

“Tony, can you take the box down to that van?” Steve asks.

He was afraid of that. “Yeah, Steve, I’m on my way,” Tony says, tiredly.

“Tony, if you can’t do it, just say that, you don’t have to--”

“Not sarcasm, Cap, just exhaustion, okay? Can you keep the aliens off my ass while I do this?”

“Yeah, I’ve got you,” Steve says, contrite.

Tony turns the container over so it’ll open from the part his back won’t be up against, lies on top of
it, and secures it to his suit. Then, his repulsors flaring, he takes stock of the battle in front of him.
Almost everyone is in motion, with a notable exception of a woman in ancient-looking armor,
seated on a pegasus. She’s circling, clearly searching for someone, but every so often she deflects
wayward projectiles.

“Van lady, you the one on a horse?”

“That’s me,” she says. She sounds sarcastic, which lifts his spirits.

On his way toward her, Tony’s struck on the shoulder by something and hits the ground. He fights
off some strange, alien animal thing and turns to look for what had attacked him, only to find it
being dispatched by Doctor Strange.

“Hey,” Tony calls out to him. “You said one in fourteen million we win, yeah? Tell me this is it.”
He puts a wealth of condemnation and hope into his expression. If this is it, Strange knew about
Leigh.

The sorcerer seems to understand the undercurrent in Tony’s question, because his answer is
cryptic but damning. “If I tell you what happens, it won’t happen.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Tony spits out. “We’re not done,” he tells Strange, lifting back off.

“That, I knew.”

Below him, Tony can see that there’s a concerted effort to get the gauntlet to the same place he’s
going, but Tony’s not in any physical condition to keep himself alive under the onslaught he’s
observing. For a while, it’s Peter with the thing, taken over from T’Challa, but Wanda’s red-
glowed attack on Thanos causes the Titan to call out for his own personal nuclear option, and Tony
loses track of everything except not dying.
He hears Pepper’s voice on the comm. The selfish part of him that still feels owed for what he’s
given up for this cause begs the universe not to take her too.

It’s probably not the reason why that’s the same moment that Carol Danvers shows up, but he’s not
complaining.

Everyone rallies, on both sides, and Tony’s basically a used-up shell of himself when he finally
lands near the front of the van. He finds James Buchanan Barnes standing on the top of it, firing
his gun and laughing like a complete maniac.

“Hey, you wanna do me a favor?” Tony says, flipping back his helmet.

“Holy fuck, Stark, you look like shit.”

“Yeah, thanks. So uh, I made this for you.”

He doesn’t mean to fall over and basically present the box on his back like he does, but holding
himself up by his hands and knees is about all that Tony’s capable of doing right now.

“It’s set up for the stones,” Barnes says, in awe.

“Yeah,” Tony groans, releasing the box. The other prosthetic tumbles out, but Tony’s beyond the
ability to care. If this doesn’t work, his whole life and everything in it will have been wasted for
nothing, anyway. “As soon as that gauntlet gets here, put it next to that arm, and the nanoparticles
will transfer the stones to it. Designed to keep you as safe as humanly possible, I--” he coughs, the
dust kicked up from falling on his face finally affecting him. “I promise.”

Tony tries to struggle to his feet, and a hand reaches down to help.

It’s the prosthetic.

“Even if it wasn’t safe, that’s not really what matters right now, is it?” Barnes says.

Tony leans against the van, panting. “Didn’t pick you on purpose. There’s two, the other clamps
overtop of an arm.”

“I saw that. I ain’t mad, Stark. I’m honored.” He looks up, and his face darkens. “You got a shield,
you might wanna use it.”

Tony activates it and holds it up, but something knocks him sideways, and he hits his head on the
van.

When he comes to, it’s because he’s been kicked in the gut.

“Get up, Stark.”

It’s Thanos.

Tony rolls over, knowing he’ll need both his arms and his legs to push himself to his feet, but also
that no force on the planet will stop him from doing it. Beside him, practically underneath him, is
the body of Barnes.

“Fuck,” Tony whispers. “For what it’s worth, soldier, that was not the plan.”

“Don’t count me out yet,” Barnes whispers, his mouth barely moving. Underneath Tony, Barnes
lifts his flesh arm to help him up, letting it flop back down once Tony’s standing, as if it had
simply gotten caught on his armor.

“So here we are,” Thanos says. He’s got the gauntlet on his arm, fingers poised to Snap, and
everyone around him is frozen in fear. “I know you regret what happened the last time you fought
me. In the interests of balance, I offer you one more chance, without armor.”

Tony almost laughs. He’d seen that Wanda had stripped the Titan of most of his. At the same time,
he remembers what Nebula had said over and over again as they had discussed the teams, and
whether to wait out Rocket’s illness. Delay gives the enemy the opportunity to win.

Tony is Thanos’s enemy.

Thanos waves the gauntlet in the air, creating a purple shield around the gauntlet but for the place
his arm blocks. He removes it, walks over to Tony, and sets it on the ground at his feet with a
smirk. The purple shield covers the whole thing, creating a line of purple energy where it touches
the ground.

If Thanos wants to fight? Tony will fight. He’ll die, if he has to, because the alternative is that
Thanos snaps his fingers and everyone and everything Tony’s ever loved dies. Fucking hell, Tony
thinks to himself. Thanos has made him grateful that Leigh died in a way of her own choosing,
instead of part of a massive genocide by a complete madman. It’s the last. Fucking. Straw.

“Okay, bring it, Grimace,” Tony says, tapping off his armor. His legs are bare, he’s a third the size
of the guy, but he’s ready.

Thanos pauses, looks him up and down, and his eyes are drawn to one thing in particular. “What
does it say?” he asks, pointing to Tony’s soulmark.

Tony knows it by heart. “Maybe it was too much to expect that you could save the world, but you
didn’t stop there, no, you had to take away all my hopes and dreams too,” he recites.

“Brutal,” Thanos laughs.

“Is it?” Tony says, feeling loose, combative. He doesn’t have a weapon, but he does have his
mouth. “From where I’m standing, it’s all been invalidated. She dreamed of a home, a family, and
she had that with me. Her hope was to be with a person who really loved her, and I proved that by
waking up with the Soul stone after she sacrificed herself to get it for me. And we’re just about to
finish up with the whole ‘saving the world’ thing.”

“It’s good that she’s already dead, Stark. She wouldn’t like to see you fail.”

“When you love someone, that doesn’t matter, you toxic purple marshmallow,” Tony says with the
power of a universe’s derision. “You know what? I have never met someone with more need of a
worldview overhaul than you, buddy, and that’s coming from me.”

“I grow tired of this,” Thanos says, stretching out his hand as if limbering up to punch him.

“Yeah, get in line,” Tony tells him. “I could do this all night.”

“You won’t have to,” Barnes grunts from behind him. He’s shaking, braced on the side of the van.
“You wanna punch him first, or should I just--” He holds up his Infinity Stone-studded prosthetic.
It looks as if he’s holding six different colored jellyfish, with the tentacles arcing and flapping
around the metal. Every so often one sparks in his face, but Barnes doesn’t flinch. It’s completely
badass.
“No, go ahead,” Tony grins, hugely relieved. “He’s not worth any more of my breath.”

“Gladly.”

Barnes snaps his fingers.

Thanos is frozen in an expression of shock for a few seconds, but then he looks behind him at the
multitude of his troops. They’d been holding steady, waiting for his orders, but now they’re
dissolving into a rippling cloud of dust.

“Defeated by a half naked human who didn’t even have to throw a punch,” Tony says with the last
of his energy. Thanos laughs, right before he is pulled apart into dust by the force of the stones.

Tony watches until the very last of him has collapsed, and then he spits on the ground. Barnes has
passed out, the arm still glowing with the arcing, still restless power of the stones. He crawls over
and hits the quick release, noting that the super soldier has some burns on his shoulder and the side
of his face.

Steve walks up, nods at him while helping Tony up. “We’ve got to take the stones back, no
delays.”

Tony knows what he’s really saying. “If I tried to revive her with them, it would invalidate all of
this, roll it back. I want to -- but we can’t.”

“I’m really sorry, Tony.”

“Me too,” Tony whispers.

He sits on a rock beside the van and watches Steve, Bruce, Nat, Clint, Rhodey, Thor, and the others
coordinate who is taking which stone, until they get to the Soul stone.

Nat walks over. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he says. “‘Not it,’ by the way.”

“I totally get that. Thing is, we need an exact time.”

“Yeah, well, I need pants.”

“You know you’re… bulging, one one side?” she asks delicately.

“It’s Leigh’s box. I didn’t want to leave it behind in the rubble. If I didn’t already have it in my
hands when I started falling, I’d probably still be back there looking for it, and we’d all be dust
right about now.” Tony rubs a hand over his face. He knows he’s selfish enough for that.

“I think you’re wrong,” Natasha says.

He can’t stall anymore, so he taps on the time travel suit and looks at the logs. “Here, I’ll just give
you this. I can’t pronounce it,” he says, taking the activation bracelet off and handing it to Nat.
“This is important, though: the last known location isn’t where to take it back. Take it back exactly
a day later.”

Nat looks at him, utterly confused. “How is that possible?”

Tony smiles at her. “Leigh gave me her Pym Particles before she jumped. Slipped them into my
suit while I was sleeping.”
“You went back for her, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t react.

“That’s how you know you can’t use the stones to bring her back.”

He is a stone statue with a bleeding heart.

“I’m so sorry, Tony,” she whispers.

“Yeah, everyone is,” he says, getting up. “I need to find some clothes.”

He makes it three steps before he hears a familiar voice, reporting to Steve.

“--sent back most of the casualties with Shuri, to Wakanda. The deaths--” Pepper breaks off.

“As much as I want to assign someone to that, we’re going to have to let local authorities in here
to…” Steve sighs. “Investigate. I don’t suppose you’re interested in a liaison position?”

“Would I even have enough knowledge to do that, after being dead for the past five years?” Pepper
asks wryly.

“Yeah, probably not.”

Tony’s pretty tired, and he almost starts walking again, but then he hears her hushed voice ask a
question.

“What happened to Tony, Steve? He looks… what happened to him?”

“There’s a lot more to the answer of that question than simply the reason he looks ill, Pepper, and I
need to delegate my time. It’s a rude, cruel answer, but it’s the only one I’ve got, right now,” Steve
tells her.

Tony hears the regret in his voice, but imagines it’s not all genuine. He doesn’t want to explain to
Pepper about what’s happened since the Snap. Anyone else has probably got more trepidation and
more impetus to avoid her completely.

“If you want to help Tony,” Steve’s saying now, “You might want to get him some clothes.”

Tony sighs. That’s probably the worst thing Steve could have possibly said. Tony’s clothes are
mostly at the lake house. There are a few left in the closet in the tower, where Pepper would know
to look-- but they’re sharing a closet with Leigh’s clothes. Everywhere in the tower, there is
evidence of his wife, of their daughter.

“Fuck. Steve, stop. Pepper-- no, don’t-- just--” Tony stumbles in his haste.

“What is it?”

“Oh, God, Tony, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking,” Steve says, his eyes wide.

“It’s ok, this is a new thing we all get to experience for a few forevers. Pepper, don’t worry about
it. I can find something myself.”

“I wouldn’t even have to fly back, Tony, I could just get Strange to portal me right to the closet in
the tower.”
“At the risk of stating the obvious: the tower’s a little different now.”

He really, really doesn’t want to do this now. At the very least, he’d like to be wearing actual pants
for this conversation.

“So different that you don’t have clothes there anymore?” she asks in a small voice.

“Not very many, no. I have a house on a lake in West Virginia. That’s where most of my clothes
are.” Suddenly, he remembers the silence around him during his verbal confrontation with Thanos.
“Hang on, where were you, just a half hour ago? Right before Thanos turned into Swiffer fodder?”

To his consternation, Pepper starts crying, and for a horrible moment he wonders if she’d been
putting up a front, and this is the thing he’s been dreading. A glimpse of Pepper Potts’ unfairly,
unfixable broken heart. The ironic thing is that he can completely, utterly sympathize.

“I was with a new recruit to Kamar Taj,” she says, instead, tears streaming down her face. “She
wasn’t all that great with the spells yet, missed a shield, and-- Tony, it was awful. She shouldn’t
have even still been alive. I stayed with her.”

“I’m sorry, Pepper,” he says.

She sniffles. “Me too. I just wanted to do something nice for you, give me something to focus on.”

“I don’t think finding out everything that’s happened with me in the last five years is going to be
particularly comforting for you, at the risk of a severe understatement,” Tony says.

“Whatever it is, I couldn’t possibly blame you, unless you turned into some kind of mass murderer,
or something,” she says, her expression painted with loving sincerity.

“Do me a favor?” Tony says, stepping closer and lowering his voice. “Don’t say anything like that
around Clint, okay?”

Pepper laughs and wipes her eyes. “You haven’t changed, Tony.”

He has to grit his teeth, close his fists tightly, and breathe in and out several times to stop himself
from losing it, emotionally. “Yeah, actually? I have. Most of it’s good, though. Talk later?”

Pepper walks over, still awkward in the silver suit. Now that Tony can really look at her properly,
he sees that it’s splattered with blood. She must have been in a really terrible situation, but Tony’s
selfishly grateful that she didn’t find out about Leigh and Ember from Tony’s taunt-fest with
Thanos.

“Later is okay. Not too much later, though? Apparently there’s already a massive housing shortage,
what with half of the population suddenly displaced and needing somewhere to stay.”

“I tell you what. I still have all your stuff. I saved it in one of the nicer apartments in the tower. It’s
yours, as long as you need it,” Tony says, feeling generous.

“Not--” she steps back, obviously stunned, and Tony’s confused until he suddenly, horribly isn’t.
“Not with you?”

“Yeah this? This was one of the ‘later’ conversations.”

“I’m starting to see that,” Pepper says. She draws herself up, and Tony can almost see her mentally
dressing herself in a power suit, killer heels, and a slicked-back ponytail. “I’ll look forward to it
happening on the ‘sooner’ spectrum of later.”

“I’ll do my best,” he promises, and turns away so he doesn’t have to keep seeing the hurt look in
her eyes anymore.
 Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Summary

Stark:
Yeah. My best friend James Rhodes had proposed to his girlfriend just the week
before, on Christmas. Almost as soon as Leigh realized the drones were for her, for us,
she chastised me. She thought I hadn’t checked with Rhodey. (Stark laughs) That’s
just the kind of person she is.

Stahl:
I notice you’re using the present tense.

Stark:
It’s been two weeks, Lesley.

Chapter Notes

Just a little note to say that, some of Tony's opinions in this chapter fall under the
unreliable narrator concept. They're not necessarily how he will always think about
things going forward, but he's hurting right now. I only mention it because a few
lovely reviews speak of things they're looking forward to (that will happen!), and this
chapter definitely implies some of those things aren't possible.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Twenty-one

“Sir?

The salutation is spoken right as Tony’s struggling to climb over a rise made up of debris from the
complex, as if one of the magic users had dragged them over to use them as projectiles. He
recognizes the voice and falters in relief. Of course Peter’s uncertain-- Tony’s half naked, half
dead, and not wearing the suit anymore.

“I did my best to make sure the battle ended by bedtime, Pete, but if you’re looking for a clock,
I’ve got some bad news,” Tony says, gesturing toward the piled-up, twisted metal.

“It is you,” Peter says joyously. Tony wonders if he’s more recognizable because of his voice or
his snark. Seconds later he’s being earnestly encouraged by the boy, who helps him up and over
their obstacle while explaining how he ‘woke up’ and Strange told him they were needed.

Tony’s barely holding himself upright, but as Peter keeps explaining how strange it was to ‘get all
dusty,’ it seems like the most natural thing in the world to pull him close for a hug. Peter’s energy
is infectious, or maybe Tony’s been holding some of his energy in reserve, only unlockable once he
can prove to himself that this very important young man made it through, because once they pull
away from each other, Tony’s reinvigorated.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Yeah, Peter?”

“It didn’t hurt. I was scared-- terrified, really, but it didn’t hurt.”

“That’s really good to know,” Tony tells him. He doesn’t, of course, tell Peter how much it had
hurt Tony to watch, to wait, and to worry, because that wouldn’t really serve any purpose but make
him feel guilty.

“Was-- was Aunt May upset?”

Tony curses the circumstances that have brought him to say his next words, because it’s upside
down that they’re comforting.

“It happened to her too, Peter. She didn’t get a chance to be upset.”

“Oh,” Peter says. He stops in his tracks. “So she just… reappeared where she had been before?”

“Ironically, I am the least useful person to ask about that,” Tony says.

***

Thanks to Strange’s portals, almost everyone regroups at Tony’s tower, which makes sense due to
the number of unused apartments available for people like Wilson, Maximoff, Barnes, and
everyone else who was brought back (not to mention people like Nat who had been living at the
facility that’s just been destroyed). Because everyone’s exhausted and in dire need of a shower,
food, and rest, Tony has Steve coordinate everyone’s food orders, while he arranges
accommodation. He has Strange take him to his tower, and they systematically go from apartment
to apartment, opening portals to let each person walk directly into the living space, without having
to exchange pleasantries or socialize if they don’t want to.

Pepper is among them, and he can tell that she does want to socialize, at least with him. Tony plays
his reticence off as businesslike efficiency, and if anyone wants to complain to him, they can speak
to him after he’s had to break the news to his daughter that her mother is dead.

It turns out that, of course, Ember is sleeping, because by the time he’s able to head up to the
penthouse, it’s verging on ten PM. Tony throws himself into the shower, puts on whatever the fuck
he can find, and then sleeps on the floor beside Em’s bed.

He wakes up to a tickling feeling and opens his eyes to see her leaning over and trailing her hair
across his forearms.

“Morning, Sunshine,” he says. Leigh’s nickname for Em is Love Bug, his is Sunshine. Tony
wonders if he should start to alternate them, if missing one will make things worse for her. There
are a million million future issues like that ahead of him, and he dreads every single one of them.

“Morning Daddy!”

Ember starts sliding off of the bed, and Tony catches her to his chest, hugging her probably too
tight, given the way she starts to squirm.
“I need to tell you something sad, Em,” Tony says. His throat is scratchy, as if the tears he’s
holding back are crystalizing into salt to etch their objection to being restrained into his vocal
cords.

“You haf to go away ‘gain?” she asks, sitting on his chest and looking down at him. Her big brown
eyes are so trusting. He hopes they still will be in a few minutes.

“No. I hope I don’t have to be gone for that long ever again,” Tony tells her. “No, it’s about your
Mama.”

Ember’s face lights up. Tony imagines his usually does, too. In that moment, Tony resolves to
make sure that her reaction is always to love her mother that way, no matter what that means for
his own misery.

“Mama got to be a hero, Em. She saved the whole world. Did she ever tell you about her Mama
and Daddy?”

Em nods. “Gone,” she says.

“Yeah. Well, your Mama brought them back. She brought back a lot of people who were gone,
Ember. But it meant that she had to be gone instead.”

Ember’s sad face freezes into fear. Tony scoots them around, leaning against the bed so he can give
her his chest to lean on. He holds out his arms and Em throws herself at him. He doesn’t have any
illusions that she really understands what he’s said, but the subject has been broached, and that’s
the first, hardest part.

As he strokes Ember’s hair, Tony holds his own tears back, not wanting to scare her. He casts his
mind around for something to distract him, and the thought that his painfully practical wife would
not have left their daughter out of her plans to sacrifice herself pushes to the forefront.

“FRIDAY, what is the location of Leigh Stark’s phone?” he says.

“The current location of your wife’s phone is in the rubble of the Avengers Facility, Boss, but
before she left with you on your mission, she uploaded the contents into my database. You should
be able to access it on any of the consoles here in the tower, and at home in West Virginia.”

“Thanks, honey,” Tony whispers into his daughter’s hair, his heart too full for any other words.

***

“--how in the name of the LORD you were able to get those stones out of there, man?” Sam Wilson
is asking Barnes when Tony comes down to the common area that spans the three floors of
apartments currently in use. Tony’s got Ember in his arms, and an iron grip on his own emotions.

“You saw when he put the shield up, it was wrapped around-- but it didn’t go through his arm.
When he put the thing down, setting it up gave me a chance to dig my arm down underneath it,”
Barnes is saying to the assembled group.

It looks like hardly anyone has opted to sleep in. Tony doesn’t blame them. He couldn’t either.
Ember has been subdued since he broke the news to her, whether or not she really understands it, so
she’s got her head down on his shoulder, and her favorite toy up by her mouth. He stands in the
back and listens-- everything Barnes did was behind Tony, so it’s good to hear what he missed.

“The ground was soft thanks to all that water, but the real brilliant part was, that gauntlet was made
out of the same nano shit that Stark’s suit is, right? So when I got the arm close, they just fuckin’
put the stones right in the correct slots, like it was designed to do that the whole time!”

“It was,” Tony says. Everyone turns around, even though he hadn’t said the words very loudly.

“Genius,” Steve says, inclining his head to Tony just a bit.

“Laziness, more like,” Tony says, swapping Ember to his other arm. He’s starting to feel less
weak, but his strength isn’t anywhere near where it should be, and three year olds are heavy.
“They’re all programmed the same way, just like the suit. I designed the suit to take the stones,
too, just in case. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it, not after--” He shakes his head.

“Tony-- is that your daughter?” Sam asks, his voice pleased but gentle.

Ember lifts her head and regards the room. “Daddy,” she says in a tone full of possessiveness. She
puts her head back down and wraps an arm around his neck.

“She’s beautiful,” Wanda murmurs.

“Thanks,” Tony says. His voice quivers ever so slightly, and he knows certain people will hear it.

“What’s her name?” another woman asks. It’s Pepper, and she’s coming over to him.

Tony shuts his eyes. He knew he wouldn’t be able to avoid some kind of confrontation with her
this morning, but he’d hoped that having so many eyes would make it easier, somehow, especially
if her reaction was going to be anger. Now, though, he feels like he’s on display, laid out on a table
for a team of developers to remark on, to observe his schematics and suggest improvements.

“Ember,” he says, after clearing his throat.

“That’s pretty,” she says, walking closer. “Unusual.” She’s in casual clothes. Tony wonders if
they’re some of the ones he’d had carefully packed and stored, or if she’d borrowed them. He
doesn’t remember seeing her wearing them before.

“Her mother--” Tony breathes in, breathes out, “She’s always warm, both in temperature and
personality. When she was pregnant, we joked that Leigh was baking a fragment of herself inside,
an Ember. It stuck.”

“Is that her name? Leigh?” Pepper’s eyes travel down from Tony’s face to his left hand, visible
against his daughter’s back. He sees her take in the wedding ring there.

“Yes.”

Pepper gets a look on her face that he doesn’t quite follow, as if she’s putting together a larger
puzzle, and the piece of his wife’s name has just illustrated something completely shocking.
Pepper turns away, looking through the room until her eyes light on a particular person. He can’t
tell for sure, but Tony thinks it’s Steve. She widens her eyes, and Steve nods. Pepper sucks in a
breath, her eyes shining, and then she walks away from Tony without another word.

He feels like he’s just missed something important.

“Tony?” Nat calls out to him. “You want me to take Em?”

“I don’t think she’ll go,” he answers. Ember answers this in her own way, her arm pulling tighter
against his neck. “Too tight, sweetie,” he says softly. He looks back across the crowd of faces to
find Natasha’s again. “I had to try to tell her, this morning…”

“Come sit.” Barnes gestures to a spot on the couch beside him that seems to have just been vacated.

“I’m not… I’m not holding court,” Tony objects. “I just came down to--”

“Sit down, Stark,” Doctor Strange says, frowning. “There’s a-- We need to talk to you.”

Tony had been in the process of walking over to the spot anyway, too tired and overwhelmed to
argue, but now he freezes in place. His arms tighten around Ember, and she squeaks a little in
protest.

“It’s about Leigh,” Rocket clarifies. Tony shoots him a look, and the creature nods. “I can leave, if
you want.”

He waits till he’s sitting, for once profoundly uncomfortable surrounded by attentive faces. “Why
bother?” Tony says to Rocket.

Steve gets his attention by saying his name. “Tony, the press attention has been… intense. They
want a focus point. We--” he pauses, looks around at the assemblage of Avengers and associates.
Tony has a sick feeling that they’re not all awake because they chose to be, but because Steve
asked them to. He seems to have brought in others who had places to sleep outside of Tony’s empty
tower, like Strange. All of them are nodding. “We think it should be Leigh.”

Ember slides down his chest to his lap, pulling out her favorite toy to fly it around. Tony suspects
she’s hoping someone will notice the gorgeous custom-made stuffed animal and comment on it.
She’s got his instincts, his charisma.

“It’s a phoenix, isn’t it? Her toy,” Wanda asks, her voice hushed.

Tony’s smile isn’t even that broad, but the edges of his lips hurt when he bends them up. “Yeah.
Crazy, right?” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Too bad that myth’s not real. What I wouldn’t
give if it was.” He sighs. “Steve, you’re going to have to explain like I’m five. Or, in this case,
three, because that’s about as much brain power I have this morning. What do you mean ‘we think
it should be Leigh?’”

Nat’s voice is businesslike. “They want a hero to focus attention on. Steve thinks it’ll be too much
for any one person to deal with, but if we tell them about what Leigh did, that she sacrificed herself
for one of the stones, it’ll give them a--”

“A martyr. You want to turn my wife into a martyr,” Tony breaks in, voice harsh. “After some of
you persuaded her to step in, in the first place? Breathtaking,” he says. The pain has glued his
lungs together, making it impossible to expand them. He chokes on the air he has left. “What do
even you need me for?”

“Daddy,” Ember says, looking worried. She pats him on the chest twice, looking up at his face for
approval. It’s their ‘magic’ way to cheer him up, and Tony has to buckle down with all his might to
smile for her, because he needs her to still believe that it works.

***

Meeting Chuck’s husband Diggory is the only thing good about that first week, barring the whole
killing-Thanos-and-saving-the-world thing.

Diggory Fisher has a British accent, Scandanavian good looks, and is built like a Greek God. All
he’s missing is height, which honestly, if Chuck can overlook it, who is Tony to judge? He’s also
sardonic, clever, and good with his hands.

The implications make Tony blush, but he’s really glad for Chuck’s existence in his life, and so he
enjoys their dinner together.

Oh, and just for fun, every time Diggory seems engrossed in something and can’t see Tony’s face,
Tony mouths some version of, ‘holy shit, Chuck!’ or ‘get it!’ and once, just ‘DAMN.’

Chuck’s face is permanently set to ‘delighted and embarrassed’ all evening, and it’s everything
Tony needed to feel better for just a few hours.

***

The World is Grateful After ‘Avengers’ Do the Impossible-- But How Can We Trust Them
Without Understanding Their Secretive Technology?

Opinion: Lance Cress, Chief Science Reporter

Last Monday was a day most of us never allowed ourselves to believe could happen, until it did.
The missing half of the world’s population has sprung back into being, thanks to the efforts of a
small group of people loosely known as the ‘Avengers.’ Without the cell phone camera footage of
a spaceship dissolving into the horribly familiar dust we all remember from five years ago, it
would be hard to trust that our loved ones’ return is permanent.

Now that it has been a few days, most thoughts have turned to the ‘how’ of this miraculous event.
Our own Michelle Constann has written an explainer on the so-called Infinity Stones after a few
hours spent with a representative from the Kamar Taj community, but they’re only one half of the
missing puzzle. We’ve been told by countless spokespeople (most notably, a Mr. Fisher speaking
for Tony Stark aka Iron Man, and an unnamed official from Wakanda on behalf of King T’Challa)
that these stones with the power to turn half the world’s population into dust, and an entire army of
alien invaders into dust as well, are ‘no longer available.’ We’ve been assured that they were
‘borrowed’ by the Avengers --some at great personal cost, as the emerging story about Tony
Stark’s wife Leigh is revealing-- and have since been returned. That they were, in fact, destroyed
five years before, by the very alien madman who caused the Snap in the first place.

When asked whether this means the Avengers used time travel technology, every Avenger or
known associate has answered ‘no comment.’

Even if we were reassured by every single world leader that the technology that made this event
possible has been completely destroyed, the records of its existence eradicated, and the scientists
who invented it sworn to secrecy by the power of actual magic, we should still be concerned-- and
these events as just now described are not what has happened.

How do we regulate that which we cannot be assured does not still exist?

How can we be certain that none of the small strike team who we have been told ‘borrowed’ these
stones from wherever they still existed will not exploit this knowledge for their own personal
enrichment? There are those who argue that these people deserve such an opportunity-- but at what
cost?
Until we can be assured that no one has a single-use time machine in their rural basement, this
publication and others like it will continue to demand accountability. If you haven’t read Stephen
King’s 11/22/63, I recommend doing so-- Captain America might be the sort to only use his hidden
time machine to enjoy the good old days of unregulated food, but can we expect billionaire Tony
Stark not to be perpetuating a rescue of his own personal John F. Kennedy, his wife Leigh, who
died making all of this possible?

‘The Girl Who Lived,’ ‘America’s Daughter;’

These Are Just Two of the Titles Being Bestowed on Little Ember Stark After Her Mother’s
Brave Sacrifice

A 60 Minutes Exclusive

Transcript: Sixty Minutes

Alternately bright eyed and stoic, three year old Ember Stark and her father Tony are the ones who
suffer while the rest of us rejoice. Billionaire Tony Stark granted just one interview out of over a
thousand requests-- with our own Lesley Stahl. Viewers know him as Iron Man, a member of the
controversial Avengers, one of the few who signed the Sokovia Accords as originally framed. But
what some may not know is that in his quest to bring back what the world had lost, his wife Leigh
made an impossible choice. Before we show you the footage from our visit with Ember, here’s
some of her daddy’s interview with Lesley.

Stahl:

I know this is hard, but, will you tell us about your wife? Just a little?

Stark:

She’s warm, passionate, practical. She was embarrassed about how much money I have, at first.
Leigh’s one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. When I proposed--

Stahl:

With the drone display?

Stark:

Yeah. My best friend James Rhodes had proposed to his girlfriend just the week before, on
Christmas. Almost as soon as Leigh realized the drones were for her, for us, she chastised me. She
thought I hadn’t checked with Rhodey. (Stark laughs) That’s just the kind of person she is.

Stahl:

I notice you’re using the present tense.

Stark:

It’s been two weeks, Lesley.

Stahl:

Can I ask you about when the press first discovered that the two of you were involved, on your
property in West Virginia?

Stark:

You can.

Stahl:

(laughs after a pause waiting for Stark to elaborate) Did you plan to use that invention to keep her
on the property with you?

Stark:

You mean, did I plan to kidnap my gorgeous architect? No. I was already half in love with her by
then, but she hadn’t spoken a word to me until about five minutes before I set the thing off. We’d
communicated through notes, texts, and email.

Stahl:

(shocked) You mean you didn’t know she was your soulmate?

Stark:

No. I’d spoken to her the first time almost two months before.

Stahl:

That’s the stuff of romance novels. (laughs)

Stark:

I had very little resistance to her, soulmate or not. I’d pulled her aside to basically demand that she
speak to me. I wasn’t expecting to hear those words at all.

Stahl:

And your first word to her was your name, that’s pretty on-brand for you.

Stark:

In more ways than one, I guess. (smiles) We can leave that part out, if you like.

Stahl:

You’re a possessive guy, you mean? You liked seeing your name on her wrist?

Stark:

Maybe not in the way that probably sounds. It felt like a talisman. If I had to have part of my heart
out in the open like that, not covered by my armor, at least she had that to hold onto. And, sure, as a
warning to others. Money can equal power, in various ways.
Stahl:

Your daughter is another part of your heart now, isn’t she?

Stark:

Yes.

Stahl:

It’s rare that we agree to have a separate interview with the parent, and another with both of you,
but this is a special case.

Stark:

I wouldn’t have agreed to come on, otherwise. At three, she’s too young to hear those details.
That’s one of the reasons we’re heading back to West Virginia soon.

Stahl:

You attended a historic state dinner at the White House with a record thirty world leaders, that was
also a once in a lifetime event. How did your daughter handle that?

Stark:

She and Emmauel Macron got along very well, and now the only chicken nuggets she likes are the
ones made by the White House chef. It’s been a trying time. (both Stahl and Stark laugh)

Stahl:

Can you tell us about losing your wife? I think it’s important for the country, for the world, to
understand that our gain was a tragic loss for your family, but more than that, it was a choice,
wasn’t it?

Stark:

Yes, it was a choice. One I didn’t agree with, even after it was too late. To get that particular stone,
someone has to die. A soul for a soul. It’s more than that, though. Leigh learned about it from a
teammate who was concerned that the ones we planned to send wouldn’t succeed. It has to be a
sacrifice for the person left behind, or it won’t work. Out of the eleven of us, she and I had the
closest bond.

Stahl:

Let me make sure I understand you correctly: if I went out right now onto the street, and took a
stranger with me to this place you’re talking about, and one of us died, the other wouldn’t end up
with that stone, would they?

Stark:

No.

Stahl:

And your wife wasn’t on the team at all, was she? It was ten of you, originally. She was the odd
one out. She volunteered, tricked one of the other members to change the assignments, so you and
she would be sent there.

Stark:

It wasn’t a trick. She persuaded him.

Stahl:

He was your friend.

Stark:

Yes.

Stahl:

Is he still your friend?

Stark:

I’m working on it.

Stahl:

I don’t think anyone on this planet blames you for that. So when you got there, what happened?

Stark:

I told her I didn’t accept her decision.

Stahl:

Did you offer to take her place?

Stark:

Of course.

Stahl:

She didn’t accept that either, did she?

Stark:

She said the team and the people who needed to be brought back needed me.

Stahl:

She was right, wasn’t she? You were the one who faced off with Thanos, stalled him long enough
for James Barnes to use those stones to wipe him off of the face of the Earth. In fact, you were the
one who made the prosthetic arm he used to hold them! (Stark doesn’t respond) So how long did
you argue about it with her?

Stark:
Eight days.

Stahl:

(Lesley’s jaw drops, she’s completely stunned, speechless. She starts to cry. Stark closes his eyes,
clearly struggling. This goes on for two minutes while both try to master their emotions)

Tell me how that is possible, Tony.

Stark:

We’re both very stubborn. (laughs) I told her on day one that if she was going to try this, I was
going to stop her. There was food and water on the spaceship we borrowed--

Stahl:

Which is a whole other story that we don’t even have time for.

Stark:

True. She wouldn’t eat during the day, but I slipped it to her at night. We slept with my Iron Man
suit configured into a handcuff to keep her with me. On day eight, she got free and jumped, while I
was asleep.

Stahl:

Without saying goodbye?

Stark:

We spent our days saying goodbye. I fully intended to starve to death or become so emaciated that
she would give in, to avoid seeing me like that. We tried to outsmart each other, and she won.

Stahl:

(shaking her head, horrified) What happened after she jumped?

Stark:

I woke up in a pool of water with the stone. I won’t-- I can’t describe what that felt like, but I think
anyone who has ever loved someone with their whole heart can imagine.

Stahl:

Was it worth it?

Stark:

(emphatic) No.

((commercial break))
 ***

There’s only one good thing about Tony’s misery: it’s made him unpalatable to others.

In the month since he lost Leigh, he actually hasn’t warred as much with his friends as much as
he’d expected, mostly because they don’t know how to handle his bitter grief. He doesn’t hide it
for them, doesn’t soften himself to make his edges easier to navigate around, and after a while,
everyone coalesces somewhere else, somewhere where he isn’t. It’s fine. He and Ember move back
to the house in West Virginia eighteen days after her mother's loss, and the Secret Service decks it
out as if he’s a former President, as a way to prevent needing a constant police presence to keep the
people the fuck away from them.

Leigh’s message to Ember on her phone is beautiful, poignant, and perfect. Tony sets up a device
that plays it for Em in her room whenever she likes. At some point it’ll be too much, but that’s
hopefully years in the future for them. He’s reached out tentatively to Leigh’s family in
Pennsylvania, requesting time, promising access. Their response so far has been supportive,
encouraging, and uplifting, especially as regards the media.

Now that all of NYC’s ‘Snap Orphans’ are back with their parents, Happy Hogan is technically out
of his job as the head of that organization, and he offers to come stay at the house, but Tony has
Plans that he’s not sure Hogan will approve of. Aleshia Rhodes has offered to help him out with
babysitting at the WV house while Tony clears up the rest of what he didn’t want left behind at the
compound. She does it by using Rhodey’s suit, flying in and out as needed.

The Secret Service think it’s Rhodey himself, which is why they’re fine with it, but Tony expects
to hear about it at some point, when they realize.

He’s only really doing this because he has to get the materials that made the Quantum Tunnel out
of there before someone sifts through and tries to make one of their own. As hypocritical as it may
be, Tony only trusts himself and some of his associates to make proper decisions on the proper
disposal of those components. The various government agencies who have sought to enjoin him
from being allowed to take anything from the site have been mollified only because Tony’s taking
all of it to West Virginia, where he’s ostensibly guarded by the Secret Service.

It’s an uneasy truce, and it’s not the only one Tony’s engaged in.

It is perhaps fitting that the two most difficult conversations he has before moving back home to
the lake house are with the two women closest to him before Leigh came into his life.

The one with Natasha comes seventeen days after losing his wife.

“So this is you now, then?” she asks him after hacking FRIDAY to let her into the penthouse at 10
PM. Tony knows her well enough to take hints from the time and place-- she’s here while Ember’s
sleeping, knowing that neither of them would ever scream at each other and give the little girl
something more to stress over. Nat probably also came late because he might be more receptive,
after a long day.

“Yeah, this is me. This has always been me, Nat, I just had armor on, before.”

“No, fuck that, that’s not true, and you know it,” she says, her tone somehow friendly but with the
right emphasis even so. Nat even smiles. He’s a bit blinded by the juxtaposition. “You’re flayed
open, right now, that’s the difference. Don’t rewrite the past four years because you’re hurt for the
next fifty.”
“Thank you,” Tony says, meaning it. “Everyone else seems to be all gung-ho on healing. You
would always be the one who understood, because you were missing Clint that whole time in
between. Fifty might not even be enough.”

“I can see why you might say that, Tony, but there are some pretty blatant differences there.”

“Why?” Tony asks, letting vitriol tip his head to the side quizzically. “Because he was technically
alive that whole time? Would you call that living? Clint wouldn’t. Ask him,” he challenges her.

“So Leigh’s alive out there somewhere waiting to be pulled away from a violent, retributory
rampage?” Nat challenges right on back.

“If only.” Tony smiles, pushes it too hard, into the absurd. He’s a clown for grief. “I’d take her
bloodsoaked and feral, if I had to.”

“I guess I’m just asking where you want your friends to land. How far do we let you lean, Tony?
All the way over? Do we lose you over this?”

“Do you want to?”

In retrospect, Tony realizes that Natasha’s played him. He didn’t want to ask that, it’s actually too
far of a lean, because the possible answers from her are all bad, every single one of them. Either he
loses them all because he’s too selfish not to stop grieving, or he doesn’t lose them, and has to
work on being worthy of their continued patience, their sacrifice. Just like Leigh’s, he doesn’t think
he’s worth it. Admitting that, though, that’s the step too far.

Somewhere deep down inside, he feels condemnation. The person whose opinion he values above
all others thought he was worth it. Is he impugning her memory by rejecting her estimation of his
worth now that she can’t fight back? Is that fair?

“Of course I don’t want to lose you. That’s why I’m here. I’m actually here to ask you for a loose
time frame. When do I hit the quick release on this misery, for you? I want to give you time. You
deserve it, this chance to wallow. You earned it,” she says, smiling in that way that Tony thinks
only Clint really gets to see. It’s a genuine smile, the kind that shows how much she actually cares,
how much of herself she puts into what she does. “Six months? A year? Two years? Tell me how
long, Tony. I’ll set an alarm and come get you. You just gotta tell me.”

“Five years.”

He blurts it out. It’s the estimate he’d come up with when, late two nights ago, he had come up
with something ridiculous, something impossible. Something he’s going to set aside with its own
timer, so he can re-examine it without the thick layers of grief that have scaled over his eyes and
his mind.

“You’ve got it, then,” Natasha says, like he hasn’t just told her to fuck off for as long as they’d
been in exile. She unwinds herself from the chair she’d been sitting on backwards, and Tony
realizes that he’d actually gotten to see more of her than he thought. Natasha has been real for him,
tonight-- tense, worried, relieved. She’d wrapped herself around his dining room chair like it
mattered what he had to say.

Tony wants to tell her the truth he’s been pushing away. He thinks she needs to hear it, but it’s so
black, so vile, so ugly in context, that he isn’t sure she’ll even accept it as honesty. It only exists in
a space where there isn’t an either/or, but that’s the thing. There isn’t an either/or. There’s no ‘what
if.’ There’s just Leigh’s death, the end. When he can look at it like that, when he’s acting like
enough of a fucking grown-up to do that, this truth is crystal clear.

“I’m--” he gasps, standing up, walking over to the couch and curling himself over it, his hands
nearly digging into the wood. “Fuck.”

“What, what is it? What’s happened?”

“I’m going to say this, and then maybe I don’t see you for a while, like we agreed, okay?” Tony
says in a pained voice.

“Okay?” Nat says, sounding uneasy.

“I’m glad it wasn’t you. Get out.”

***

Exactly a week after his interview with 60 Minutes, Tony gets a visit from Pepper. She makes an
appointment with Chuck and everything.

Tony puts on his best business suit for it, because there’s no point in breaking his habit of suiting
up for tough battles at this point. Her hair is down and curly (+45 minutes), makeup seemingly
non-existent (+30 minutes), fresh manicure (??? but bonus points for making an appointment
somewhere), sleek (possibly new?) clothes (+2 hours - 3 days, depending on methods of
acquisition), and 4+ inch heels. Tony walks her over to the couch by the window in his office,
instead of forcing her to sit across from him at his desk.

“I watched your 60 Minutes interview,” Pepper says, right after they both sit down.

“I’m sorry,” he says, heavily implying that watching it was a mistake for various reasons, and not
just because it shows, in brilliant, high-definition, how completely in love with his wife he still is,
even though she’s gone.

Pepper shakes her head, her eyes closed. It reminds him of the way she used to be, before she was
CEO, when she was uncertain about her place in his world. “Actually, can I start that all over?
That’s like, farther ahead in the conversation than I wanted to start.”

“Okay.”

She smiles brilliantly. “What you’ve done with the company, Tony--”

“That was all for you,” he interrupts her. She blushes, stammers out a ‘what?’ and he mentally
kicks himself. This woman is in love with him, and he’s got to watch what he says to her. He
doesn’t want to be cruel. “When I got back I was mostly dead. I hated everyone and everything.
The only thing that kept me going was knowing what you’d have done if it were you left behind
instead of me.”

“That’s a really lovely compliment. I… I’d love to think I would have done those things, but I’m
not sure I have the imagination.”

“It was really different, Pepper. Much easier to ram through social change when everyone’s too
shell-shocked to stop you,” he says. “We’ll see how much of it sticks.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here, actually,” she says, straightening her shoulders. “You’re--”
Pepper breaks off, her lips twisting into a sad, almost sardonic smile. “I’ve seen you fucked up
before, but this might be a new record.”
“Nice,” Tony says. She hardly ever swears.

“Well, you’ve earned it,” she adds, and Tony wonders if Steve had another one of his meetings.
‘The Care and Feeding of Tony Stark,’ where they all decided how much leeway he should be
given. Seems like it’s all of it, all the leeway, and if that’s not a recognition of the impact of one
person’s life on another, he doesn’t know what is.

Pepper gets a call, and he nods for her to take it. She smiles apologetically, gets up, and walks over
to the other side of the room.

Tony spends that time indulging in a painful exercise: picturing the situation in reverse. How
would Leigh, a woman on the cusp of marriage with a man she loved, react to coming back after
five years to find that her fiance had been involved with someone else. Not just involved but in
love, in adoration, in pure, dizzying bewitchment with someone else. So much so that there’s no
hope of ever reaching his heart again. What would she do?

He thinks Leigh would besiege him.

He thinks Pepper’s about to let him go.

He doesn’t know how to feel about those conclusions. The one thing he does know is that he
would never judge either woman based on the other’s metric.

“Sorry about that,” Pepper says, sitting back down, settling her hands in her lap. “That was the new
apartment complex contacting me to tell me they’ve accepted my application. There’s only one
catch: they want to know whether I’ve secured employment.”

“Do you want your old job back?” Tony asks her. He hadn’t even considered this possibility, but
it’s exactly what he needs, what she might need.

“I would, actually. I would absolutely love it. Is that-- would that be a problem for you? Personally,
I mean?” she asks, her voice clear and calm.

“Pepper, without you, there would be no company.” It’s a dodge, and she catches it easily.

“Personally, Tony.”

“You watched the interview. What do you think?”

Her smile is thin, brittle, and lovely. “I think you’ll be fine with it. Personally.”

“It wasn’t the soulmate thing,” he blurts out, wishing he could tell himself to shut the fuck up, but
this is Pepper, and she deserves the truth. “I’ve seen the articles. People whose loved ones came
back to find they’re with someone else, their soulmate, and that’s the balm that makes it better. It
wasn’t that. I didn’t even know she was my soulmate when I fell in love with her. I hated that she
was my soulmate. I would have burned those words off of me so fast it’d make you head spin.”

Her expression is full of compassion.

He never did deserve her.

“When I lost you, I had the company. I did what you would have done with it. It was a project. I’m
happy to give it back, step back and consult, or whatever. You’ll do great. You always did.”

“So what’s your project now?” Pepper asks, a little thread of the old ‘handler’ voice creeping in.
 “Ember, I imagine. Maybe she can be the youngest engineer to ever graduate from MIT.”

“Or the youngest architect. Did you know they have the best program there for that, maybe in the
world?” she points out.

Tony wonders if she knows that because of Leigh, because Ember is Leigh’s, because Pepper spent
time thinking about his daughter, what Em might want to be like when she grows up. It was
probably a self-destructive moment, for Pepper, if that’s how she knows. He wishes he could spare
her those, but he can’t spare himself from them either, and he might be one of the richest, most
respected people on the planet at the moment. If he can’t, what hope does she have?

“I didn’t want this to happen, Pep. Any of it. From the second I left the atmosphere.”

“I know.” She draws herself up, sucks in a breath, and pins him with a look. “You cannot make
that child your project. Pick something else, or I’ll retract my acceptance of your offer.”

“What?”

Pepper actually stands up and points at him. “You’re bad at this. The coping thing. When you
nearly died, when Vanko and Hammer were trying to tear the company apart and destroy your
reputation, you made all the wrong choices. But I could have left you if I had wanted to, and that
little girl can’t do that. Do not shuffle her off to her new-found family and wallow in online
curriculums and summer schools. Find another project.”

He wants to stand up, wants to pace, but Pepper’s pointy shoe tips are actually touching his own. If
he stood up now, he’d be crowding her, physically. The last time they’d stood that close, she had
every right to be there, to touch him, to kiss him, to call him hers. Pepper’s actually using her
knowledge of him as a man who knows better than to do that to her against him, right now. It’s
really fucking impressive.

“Okay, I won’t,” he says, blinking at her. “I’ve got some other things--”

She holds up a hand, and he cuts himself off. “You don’t have to tell me. In fact, don’t. I’m going
to need some time and distance.” Pepper lets out her breath and backs up a little. “Wow, okay, I
didn’t know I was going to get all the way-- you’re not mad. That’s good. But, yes. Distance. And
time.”

“I can do that,” he says. “I can do that.”

Chapter End Notes

A little elaboration on the 'glad it wasn't you' line, for Tony: The idea that it's not an
either/or thing is very very important to understand how he can say that. What Tony's
trying to tell Natasha in that moment is that if the team had gone as originally
configured, she could have died, and it would have been terrible. He's glad that didn't
happen. He can compartmentalize what did happen away from what could have, and in
that space, that 'not either/or, not Nat or Leigh' space, he can be glad Natasha's alive.
He considers it ugly because of the part of him that still clings to the either/or
prospect; it's an terrible truth when faced with his immense grief. Saying he's happy
Nat is alive is, at least in a small way, deep down, like saying he's glad Leigh is dead,
to him, even though he's trying to consider that a childish thing to think.

ALSO: I'm sorry that the formatting for the Stahl interview doesn't display in the body
of the story like it does in the preview chapter summary. It's meant to, with the bolded
name smack up against the dialogue, but I can't get it to display like that,
unfortunately. Even trying to use html br tags doesn't do it.
 Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Summary

“I’m saying this now because you won’t punch me with my son on my lap, Tony, but
you need to move on.”

“Take it from me, children know when your words are poison, even when they don’t
understand them, Rhodes,” Tony says coldly. “Of all the audacity,” he whispers,
knowing he can’t get louder, but understanding, thanks to learning about it from
Leigh, the power of getting quieter when angry. “Almost none of you were content,
after the Snap. There was no question about fixing it, when we were offered the
opportunity. I spent those years with my wife planning for that moment, and everyone
was fine with that. But now that it’s only one life lost instead of billions, I’m supposed
to accept it?”

Chapter Notes

Time to get moving on Tony's plans! Tell me what you think they are, if you feel like
guessing!

Chapter Twenty-two

It’s Leigh’s family that helps Tony cope with her fame the most.

During that insular first month of post-Leigh existence, he had operated as if curled into the fetal
position, his daughter at his chest, but Tony Stark was hardly the only person his wife had
influenced. When the news shows and serious journalists and gossip rags couldn’t get anything out
of him but creative, obscured links to the 60 Minutes website and his interview with Stahl, they
gave up on him and asked everyone else.

Those who are in the business of exploiting scandals (and quite a few who aren’t) try to find
something salacious in her past, but all they dig up is the story of the attack at the farmhouse 21
days after the Snap. Because there is an unprecedented wealth of goodwill and affection for Leigh
Balci Stark, this backfires. Spectacularly. The writers who had leaned in hard on the ‘beautiful,
isolated, possibly rich young woman’ are systematically shamed and ridiculed for what they
enabled. Leigh’s assailant and his mother (who is now a high-powered lobbyist at an expensive
firm based in Ohio) are called to account for their actions, both the attack and the cover-up. Tony
almost, almost sympathizes with the woman when she loses her job, because she points out that
Leigh’s career would have almost certainly gone differently had she been prosecuted for the
shooting, which is technically true.

Thanks to the nature of Leigh’s current fame, though, a letter from District Attorneys around the
country starts to circulate. Every single one of them state that they would never have prosecuted a
victim such as Leigh Balci.

Tony is only aware of these things tangentially, however. Even though he’d never met any of them
in his life, and had heard about them rarely, given how much their loss hurt his wife, his in-laws
step up when it comes to Leigh and the press attention. This shields Tony and Ember, of course,
because her family knows Leigh, but they can’t give out the information they don’t have. As the
press seeks to tarnish her sterling reputation in the way that Tony’s so familiar with personally
(‘Eat Your Heroes,’ he used to call the phenomenon), all they find is that Leigh was exactly the
person everyone says she was. The two groups that will talk to them, Leigh’s birth family and her
superhero family, paint a picture of the exact same woman: beautiful, practical, kind, clever.

Far from turning her into some sort of a twisted caricature of a martyr, as he’d worried, the world’s
press eventually settles on the image of an all-too-human, yet saintlike figure. Lovers across the
globe are thrilled and horrified by her sacrifice, by their eight days of stalemate, by the way he
discovered what she’d done (all horrified, of course, even though none of them have learned about
the hair wrapped around his arm). Talk radio debates whether most marriages involve the kind of
love that leads two people to fight for each other’s survival the way that they did. Morning shows
invite mental health professionals to opine over the strength of their bond. Congress convenes a
unanimous vote to award her a medal for her sacrifice.

It’s all too much, would be mentally breaking, for Tony, but for Leigh’s family.

They extend their first in-person overture by surprise, fifty days after Leigh’s sacrifice. December
in rural West Virginia is its own guarantee of privacy, or so Tony had thought when he went out to
bring in some wood for the fireplace to see a familiar red pickup truck pull up to the Secret Service
checkpoint.

It’s Leigh’s truck. He remembers it from their first meeting. She’d left it at the farmhouse
throughout their marriage, protected in the barn, fluids drained, perfectly preserved. That it’s here
means that one of her family members is here as well. He’d seen pictures of them when he had
done research into Leigh after they went camping, but Leigh had been pained by images of both the
house and her family, so they didn’t have pictures out for him to become familiar with.

The truck starts up the long driveway, and Tony meets it right outside the path to the house. The
woman inside has black hair cropped into a pixie cut, but her eyes are Leigh’s eyes, Ember’s eyes.

“Hi,” she says, her brown eyes wide.

“Hello. Lacey, right?” Tony guesses.

“Oh, wow. Yes,” she says, grinning. “And you’re Tony.” Her expression is slightly impish, as if
she’s daring him to object to her use of his first name. It’s charming.

“Come on in, it’s cold,” he says.

“I won’t argue with that,” Lacey grins. As they walk up to the house, she says, “I wasn’t expecting
the Secret Service.”

“Some people don’t understand how to be grateful without being creepy,” Tony explains.

Lacey stops, looks back at the single line of her tires across the snow, up the driveway. “Then why
did they let me through?”

“You showed ID?” Tony asks. She nods, her close-cropped hair bouncing. “That’s why. I white-
listed family.”

Lacey is so touched by this that she starts to cry, and Tony can’t take it, so he offers her a thin
smile and heads for the house, kicking a path through the snow so her fashionable boots won’t get
too crusted with it. When she makes it to the door he holds open for her, and Lacey Balci reaches
out and squeezes his hand briefly before going inside.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead. I got the feeling that the response would be, ‘this isn’t a good time.’”

“Hoped to get stuck in the snow and prey on my vaunted hospitality?” he guesses. There have been
multiple articles written about how closed-off and reticent he's been to practically everyone who
contacts him.

Her crooked smile is unapologetic as she nods. “This house is lovely,” she tells him.

“Your sister designed it.”

Tony’s emotionally unprepared for the way that Lacey leans against the wall beside the door when
she hears this, resting a reverent hand on the wood, whispering to herself. He recognizes that look,
sees a kinship in the loss, and she’s right, he would have rejected this chance to see her, if it had
been offered. Tony leaves her alone, heading into the kitchen to warm up some water for hot
chocolate, tea, or coffee, whichever she’ll choose. He lays out the packets for each option, using
the busywork to help him choke off the neural pathways that send those pain signals to his
receptive brain.

“Ember will be awake from her nap in about twenty,” he says when Lacey comes into the kitchen
to find him.

“I came for you, too, you know,” she says with a challenging smile. “Leigh always loved hard, if
that makes sense. She used to complain to me about how exhausting it was, sometimes, especially
in school. You know how they say that people die on Everest because they want the summit so
badly they use up the energy they needed to get back down? Leigh loves like that. She always
did.” Lacey picks up a packet of hot chocolate with rainbow marshmallows and holds it up. “Will
your daughter forgive me if I pick this one? It’s not the last one, right?”

“She won’t drink it. Wants the number of each color marshmallow to be equal, or it’s ‘not
yummy,’” Tony confesses. “Go for it.”

“Hell yes, I’m gonna love this kid, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Well anyway, about the loving thing-- I figure, she loved you, so she left a lot of herself behind,
inside you. And she took a lot of you with her. So you’re part Balci now.”

“I’ll give you a million dollars to leave and come back in about twenty years when I’m
emotionally ready for this shit,” Tony tells her impulsively.

“Nice try,” Lacey says, grinning. “Stuck with us, now.”

***

Christmas with the Balcis is bittersweet and wonderful. Ember thrives among Tony’s in-laws, and
their lives soon turn with a familiar rhythm over the next year. Sporadic video calls with Avengers,
frequent video calls with aunts and uncles and grandparents, and in between, holidays and visits.
By the anniversary of Leigh’s death in October 2024, Tony has been waiting with anxious
anticipation for the kind of easing of his grief that he’d felt in April of 2019-- but it doesn’t come.

He feels every bit as empty, lost, and broken as he had in 2023, he’s just better at hiding it.

--or so Tony had thought.

Rhodey sits him down the night before Ember’s first real Halloween. He’s got his son Ellis up on
his shoulder, he looks tired as fuck, and still he’s taking time for this lecture. Tony can see what’s
coming a mile away, and there are no countermeasures he can fire to head it off.

“I know you said fifty years, Tony, but you can’t realistically do that, you know that, right? Ember
deserves to grow up with a whole father,” Rhodey says.

“Better a shell of one than none at all, right?” Tony tries to joke.

“Look at me,” Rhodey says, though he’s less intimidating than he probably thinks he is, as he
settles his serious-faced infant on his lap. “You have to stop telling yourself that, and start filling
that shell back in. Pick a project.”

“You’ve been talking to Pepper.”

“I’d rather talk to you, but you’re so busy treading water you won’t even answer my emails
anymore. I’m stuck getting news about you from colleagues. What have you even been doing?”

“Nothing,” Tony says. “Everything. I play with Ember. I chop firewood. I fiddle with nanotech. I
daydream.”

He doesn’t have to say about whom, or admit the minuscule amount of time each of those activities
takes up, in relation to the last one.

“I’m saying this now because you won’t punch me with my son on my lap, Tony, but you need to
move on.”

“Take it from me, children know when your words are poison, even when they don’t understand
them, Rhodes,” Tony says coldly. “Of all the audacity,” he whispers, knowing he can’t get louder,
but understanding, thanks to learning about it from Leigh, the power of getting quieter when angry.
“Almost none of you were content, after the Snap. There was no question about fixing it, when we
were offered the opportunity. I spent those years with my wife planning for that moment, and
everyone was fine with that. But now that it’s only one life lost instead of billions, I’m supposed to
accept it?”

“That’s not what I--”

“How do you think it feels to have loved her that much, and to constantly hear, from everyone,
even strangers, that her sacrifice was worth the lives she saved?” Tony asks him.

“I didn’t realize that was hurtful to you, Tony,” Rhodey whispers.

“It is. You want me to have a project? Well, guess what. You’ve convinced me. Now I’ve got
one,” he practically growls at Rhodey. It’s too loud, upsetting Ellis. Tony pushes off of the chair
he’s been sitting on, looking around for Aleshia. It’s time to go back home.

Rhodey calls out after him. “Tony, you can’t possibly--”

“Watch me.”

***

When they get back, Ember’s unhappy about having to leave early, but he calls up her
grandparents and sets her up with the costume she’d picked out, so she can show them. He sits on
the couch and watches her show off the perfect edges of her giant juice box, how Tony’s shiny
color printouts are identical to the smaller version she holds up next to it, but his mind is
elsewhere.

Tony can hardly believe he’s allowed a year to pass by before he’s given this crazy long-shot idea
real scrutiny. He supposes it’s because he’d done just what Natasha had told him to do-- wallow.
Oh, he’d also focused on R&D for Stark Industries, spent a hell of a lot of time with the Balci
family, and devoted a lot of effort and love to helping Ember through that first year, but now? Now
it’s time to buckle down. Now it’s time to see if he can make this nonsensical idea work.

***

Tony goes to Hank Pym’s house the next chance he can get, after dropping Ember off for an
extended weekend at the farmhouse in Pennsylvania.

“I wondered if I would see you. Took longer than I expected,” Pym tells him at the door of his
(now tropical beach) house.

Tony waits until they’re seated in the quirky living room area before launching into his pitch. “I
know you made more particles for Steve Rogers. He never said anything, but there’s no way in hell
he would have let them stay stolen in the past if he could help it.”

Pym inclines his head. “You’re right.”

“I’m here to offer you whatever funding you want, for whatever research you’d use it for, if you
can make me a steady supply of particles for a project I’m about to start,” Tony tells him.

“I’m not interested in funding.”

“And I’m not interested in funding anything. What I am interested in is having the ability to use the
Quantum Tunnel I’m about to build at my lake house in West Virginia. Which is guarded by the
Secret Service, if you’re worried about access by any riffraff.” Tony leans forward in the easy
chair he’s sitting in. He knows he looks desperate. In fact, he’s counting on it. “I know you lost
your wife for a long time. I know you spent a lot of energy and effort trying to save her.”

“I lost a lot of myself in the process, Tony,” Pym says gently.

“It would have been easier to make that sound like sage advice if I couldn't see her by looking out
this window, sir,” Tony points out. “I’m going to do this. You can help me, make sure another little
girl doesn’t grow up with an obsessed, miserable single father, or you can watch history repeat
itself. I went out and bought a stack of postcards. I can send one every week. With pictures.”

Pym looks at him with what feels like new respect. That it’s tinged with disappointment is not
Tony’s problem.

“Help me, Mr. Pym. If I succeed, I won’t ever get the closure that you got. I think you know that.”
Pym nods soberly. “What I will get is the ability to sleep at night. A period of time where my
daughter knows her mother. More hope. And the knowledge that a version of myself has the life I
long for. If that’s enough for me, sir, it should be enough for you.”
Pym stands up. “I didn’t know if you knew what you were doing enough to say that.” He breathes
out, shakes his head. “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you.”

“I’m smarter than the ‘man in a can’ persona, at least sometimes.” Tony spreads his hands out and
shrugs.

“This is a lot of work for very little reward, you know.”

“A lot of my life has been like that, lately.”

***

Tony constructs his Quantum Tunnel in a sub-basement he builds himself. This makes sure it
won’t be on any blueprints, and he has to spend about six months teaching himself the kind of
things that he could have asked Leigh to explain to him in a few weeks, but it’s worth it. Part of
what takes so long is that Tony doesn’t allow anyone other than Hank Pym to know what it is that
he’s doing. If he comes up against a problem, Tony has to figure out how to solve it with just the
internet to guide him, without consulting any experts directly. He can tell that the older scientist
had been hit hard by Tony’s comparison between the two of them, and he trusts that Pym will keep
Tony’s secret to himself.

Ember notices some things. She teases that he takes a lot of showers, but that’s more innocuous
than her seeing obvious dirt and concrete dust particles coating his clothing. He has to replace the
washer and dryer he and Leigh had purchased when they moved in because of all of the particulate
he rinses out of his clothes in the wash. Ember picks out a blue set, and he overrules her and
chooses bright red. It’s close to her sixth birthday when Tony’s finished, which is lucky, because
he doesn’t have to make up a reason to ask his in-laws to take her for some time, so he can visit a
friend in the tropics.

Pym pores over Tony’s detailed pictures and schematics quite a bit before handing over the vials
he’d promised.

“What’s your step one?” he asks.

“I have a… friend with the ability to look into alternate universes,” Tony confesses.

Pym’s quick glance toward him is sharp. “So that’s why you are so confident. It’s still not-- You
can’t checkbox them with some kind of magic marker, you know. You’ll still have to figure out a
way to tell them apart.”

“One thing at a time,” Tony says casually.

He’s worried about that, yes. The likelihood of his plan succeeding is actually astronomical. He’ll
probably go insane first, which is exactly the opposite of what Leigh would have wanted him to do
for Ember, especially considering the bleakness of his optimum outcome, but Tony’s resolute. He
knows what to do, he’s going to do it, and when he’s finished, when he has succeeded, he hopes he
can live with himself.

If he can’t, he’ll find that one particular alternate universe and just… watch it. Like a soap opera.

There are worse lives to live.

***

For his first attempt to get Doctor Strange’s help, Tony picks a half hour before he knows that
Doctor Bruce Banner will come flying through the ceiling of 117A Bleeker Street. That will give
Strange no leeway to do anything about the things Tony asks him about. No time to do research, no
time to meddle, no time to do anything other than deal with the ceiling-crashing intruder and then
bring 2023 Tony in to explain the threat.

Ironically, Tony’s plan explains Strange’s hostile attitude toward him during that whole ordeal. He
supposes that makes an odd sort of sense.

Hank Pym had done a lot of fiddling with Tony’s time travel suit, adding extra protections thanks
to the possibility that Tony will need to make many, many trips with it. The extent of his meddling
has left Tony with the impression that he’s either very worried, or wants Tony to feel like he ought
to be.

In practical terms, this means that a lot, maybe everything, is riding on Doctor Stephen Strange.

Tony makes sure he has plenty of vials attached to his suit and a demonstrably different outfit from
what his past self is wearing today, and then punches in the coordinates of his destination. With a
deep breath, he slams his hand down on the button that sends him on his first trip of many.

He lands in a nearby alley. With a tap, his clothing shifts to the bespoke suit he has put on for the
occasion. Tony walks over to the door to the New York Sanctum and knocks. It opens inward, with
no visible human interference.

Tony decides to take this to mean the magic contained therein either approves of his mission, or it
knows better than to deny him the opportunity to plead his case.

“Hello? Looking for a grown-up Harry Potter after Lasik, anyone seen him?” he asks the empty
room.

“Tony Stark. You must want something, or you’d have gone with Snape, I think,” Strange says,
floating down the stairs with his pet cloak unfurling behind him.

Tony doesn’t call him a show-off, because he does want something. “You don’t have the hair to
pull off Rickman. I’ll concede you probably have the voice, though, if you ever decided to attempt
the accent.”

“What do you want? You already know who I am, I assume.”

“I am on a mission of sorts. Need your specific skill set, namely, the ability to scan alternate
universes,” Tony says curtly, nodding at the necklace Strange is wearing.

“It’s been a slow day for me, but are you-- did you dress up to come speak to me?”

“Whatever you need to hear,” Tony says with as much nonchalance as he can muster.

“You care about this,” Strange says, walking close to Tony and eyeing him.

“Most things worth doing have an element of that, yes.”

“How much do you care?”

“Please, all powerful magic guy, will you look into the alternate lives of this person for me? I’m
trying to find a specific set of criteria, if they exist in her possible lives.” Tony clasps his hands in
front of him but keeps as much sarcasm out of his tone as possible. He’s trying to walk the line,
here, because if Strange doesn’t twig onto the fact that he’s not the same Tony Stark that Strange
will be speaking to in a park in just over a half hour, he might mention something about this to that
Tony.

“What’s in it for me?”

“I don’t know, maybe the ability to snark about it to me in the very far future?”

“Why wouldn’t I snark about it to you the next time we see each other?” Strange asks, turning to
look at him sharply.

Tony looks down at the floor. He looks over at one of the cases of magical items, then at the
Cauldron of Destiny, an item he’ll possibly desecrate by using it as a stationary object for him to
stretch his leg, later this afternoon.

“How old are you right now, answer within the next five seconds.” The order is barked, and Tony
answers quickly, sardonically.

“Fifty-four, but I could have answered forty-seven with very little trouble. Should have chosen
instantly if you were trying to prove something,” Tony says. “You’ve figured me out, now will you
fill my request? Time’s wasting.”

Strange tips his head to the side, his brows furrowing. Tony can see him doing the math.

“My birthday is in less than two weeks, if that’s the source of your frown,” Tony says. He claps his
hands. “Come on, Strange. Yes or no? I have to get going. If you say no, you should know that my
next visit will be about…” he looks down at his watch. “An hour ago. I’ll keep pushing it back
until I get what I want. It’ll probably be very annoying.”

“I imagine you’ll dress down a bit for each iteration too, no doubt. Which tells me this is attempt
number one.” Strange sighs. “Tell me the name, let me do a search. If I don’t see any reason not to
help you, I will.”

“No time, Doc.” Tony smiles, putting all of his knowledge of the importance of Leigh Balci Stark
into the brilliance of it. “This person isn’t anyone right now. Won’t be for quite a while. Your
search will come up empty.”

Tony doesn’t tell Strange that once he will finally have time to go back to that search, after the
events that will happen in roughly twenty minutes, it will already be old news.

“Name?” Strange says, sighing.

“Felicia Lauren Balci.”

“Criteria?”

Tony grits his teeth, hoping that what he’s asking for won’t make what he wants to do painfully
obvious. “Single, no children. Dying of an incurable disease sometime in the next ten years. If
that’s too large of a time frame, make it five.”

Strange stares at him. “Stark, what--”

“Please.”

“Fine.” He makes a few strange gestures with his hands, holding them in a peculiar shape in front
of his necklace before sliding them away from each other. Tony feels a pang; the last time he saw
this man make this gesture, he had just been dealt a fatal blow by Thanos, and Strange was giving
up the stone, having seen the future.

Tony feels a shudder go through him. Not only would Strange see a future where they would win,
but now he would know why. He would know it was because of Tony’s wife, sacrificing herself.
He would know her name. Because of what they are doing right now.

Tony reaches back to steady himself on the large bannister, misses, and falls onto the stairs.

By coming here and doing this on the same day that Strange would see that one in fourteen million
futures, Tony had guaranteed that he would understand the connection between what he was now
doing, and that possible win.

By coming here and doing this, Tony has guaranteed to Doctor Stephen Strange that theirs is the
future he saw.

THAT was why he’d given up the stone to Thanos.

THAT was why he’d trusted Tony enough to sacrifice his life, knowing he would be turned to dust.

Tell me this is the one, Tony had demanded years ago, as they fought Thanos’s forces in the debris
of the New Avengers Facility. Strange had known it was the one. Not only that but learning about
his certainty had helped the Ancient One feel confident enough to give Banner the Time Stone
during their Time Heist.

By coming to Strange today, Tony has completed the circle of time that led to their victory.

All of these realizations are helping Tony feel like what he’s doing is the right choice. He’d
expected to live with a sort of self-condemnation, to always feel like he was cheating time by
perpetuating his plan.

Instead, he feels like he’s fulfilling it.

It’s overwhelming.

When Strange lifts his head, Tony has about six minutes before he knows Bruce Banner will come
flying through the ceiling.

“Why do you want to know this information, Stark?”

Tony can’t resist answering with, “If I tell you what’s going to happen, Strange, it won’t happen.”

“You clearly plan to visit this person somehow. How do you intend to distinguish her universe
from ours?”

Tony has no idea. “Through the information you’re about to provide, of course.”

Strange rolls his eyes. “A wild goose chase, wonderful. Tell me, is that thing on your chest actually
a heat sink for your massive ego? Is that the real way you power your suits?”

Four minutes.

“Tell me the information, or I’ll time travel back to Shakespeare’s time and inspire him to write a
rude sonnet about facial hair just like yours. You won’t even know why you’ll wake up tomorrow
morning with a completely different-looking face.”
“Felicia Lauren Balci. Diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in October of 2023. Further
diagnosis of stage four breast cancer in December of 2026, death in September 2028. Never
married, no children. Did your wife have heterochromia, Stark?”

Tony’s in a hurry and finding out this Leigh’s diagnosis of cancer happened in the same month and
year as his Leigh’s death is disturbing, so he answers without thinking. “No, why?”

Strange looks satisfied that he’s gotten the unwilling truth out of Tony. “Because this version does.
I’m only telling you that because I don’t want to do this at random points of my day for the next
five years as you try to figure out how to find her. And Stark?”

“Thank you,” Tony says, checking his watch as he gets up and starts for the door. “Yeah?” he asks,
not turning around.

“If you tell anyone about this, if I ever get a request to find someone’s long lost stuffed animal
from the 1970’s or something, I will curse you to never sit or sleep comfortably again.”

“Loud and clear, Doc,” Tony says, strolling out, barely able to contain his elation. Heterochromia.
That’s almost as good as a magic marker tick. Now all he has to do is figure out how to access
alternate universes with the Quantum Tunnel.

As Tony hits the button that encases him back in his nanosuit for the trip back, he hears a colossal
crashing noise from the building he just left.
 Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Summary

“Will you still be here if I run in and get my own coffee, so I can introduce myself in
kind?” Tony asks. His inner voice is screaming.

“That depends, are we the type of people who give fake names at coffee shops?” she
asks, setting the last page in between two stacks of slightly-wrinkled papers and
patting the stack.

He half expects her to pat it twice.

Tony hadn’t prepared for this at all.

Chapter Twenty-three

Spring, 2028

“I just think it’s a little much to be asked to sign what is basically an affidavit promising not to help
you with your science project,” Tony tells his daughter. “Do any of the other students have to do
this?”

“Da-aad, none of the other kids' dads are world famous science guys!” Ember groans, frowning at
him. She sighs, pulling loose the scrunchie holding her long blonde hair in a ponytail. Ember leans
over, finger-combing her hair before gathering it up in one fist to reapply the hair holder.

Tony tries not to stare at her when she does this, but it’s always a losing battle. She looks just like
Leigh, a genetic remnant of an action Em probably doesn’t even remember watching. She’s got a
bunch of them-- a particular way of crunching up her nose when she smells something foul, her
adorable squeak of a sneeze, even a certain hitch in her breathing while asleep if she’s disturbed. At
seven and a half, Ember Stark is precocious, articulate, charismatic, and organized. He’s so proud
of her he could burst, which is why Tony’s so frustrated with her second grade teacher. Of all of
the students in her Gifted class, Em is the one least likely to need parental help to ‘engineer a car
out of household objects, capable of sustaining movement over five feet of distance.’ She could
probably do it in her sleep.

“Your teacher knows you’re the daughter of an architect and an engineer, right?”

“She's more interested in the savior and superhero part, but, yeah,” Ember tells him matter-of-
factly.

“Most people are,” he says.

***

It’s spring break for Em and Easter weekend is approaching, which means that their family of two
is heading up to Pennsylvania to the Balci clan’s annual festivities. Ember’s close with her cousins
Susannah and Maizie, who at eight and six have been living with Tony’s in-laws Missy and Charlie
for the past three years after being adopted as a sibling pair. Em’s less fond of Lana and Kent’s
four year old son Frankie, but that’s probably to be expected.

Tony hasn’t ever told Lana that he knew she came back from the unSnap pregnant. It’s too private
a thing to share as a brother-in-law, but he still feels a special kinship to the boy. Leigh’s sacrifice
was, in some ways, directly and specifically so that he would have a chance at life, after all. Tony
thinks that someday, when it hurts a little less (so, never, Rhodey would point out, probably
rightly), he might get up the courage to share the email Leigh sent on his birthday so many years
ago.

Tony’s excited about the weekend for completely different reasons than Ember is. She’s looking
forward to nearly a week long sleepover at the farmhouse. He’s looking at finally using the
Quantum Tunnel to find a specific alternate universe.

It’s taken eighteen months, much faster than he had expected, really. Still, even though he’d
dreaded the turning of this year over into 2028, Tony knows that his device could set him down at
any point in the life of the version of Leigh Balci he’s hoping to visit. Just because she’s
‘scheduled’ to die in 2028 doesn’t mean he can’t show up in 2026 in her universe.

He’s gone over all of the variables, spending time in between the main project (navigating into
alternate universes) searching for the best way to find her once he lands there. It’s not statistically
likely that every single Leigh Balci in each universe lost all twelve members of her family in the
Snap, but Tony knows that the first story about his Leigh had been written by a local reporter who
had gone to high school with her. It’s possible that the guy will write about her situation no matter
how many members of her family turn into dust.

The plan is to arrive in what he hopes is her universe at one of the large libraries in D.C. and search
for her, looking for heterochromia. If she has it, he’ll search for her current location, after locking
in the signature of that particular universe, so he can find it again. If that’s not possible, Tony will
have Plan B already with him.

Plan B consists of a large packet of various currencies (surely some will make it through without
triggering counterfeit warnings in a universe so closely hewn to his), a small amount of clothes to
change into until he finds a temporary place to stay, and a second time travel suit complete with
Pym Particles, pre-set to bring the person home to his universe. Plan B is a long haul.

First, though, Tony wants to try Plan A. He has a large stash of the vials for his suit lined up, a
whole week of time to jump back and forth, and for the first time in nearly five years, a huge
reserve of hope for the future.

***

Because Plan B exists, Tony spends a stupidly long time trying to decide what to wear. He ends up
choosing a mid-range suit, the kind a higher level governmental official might wear, definitely
diplomat material. He rolls up the other articles of clothing and sets them in his briefcase, tucks in
the cash, and affixes his ARC reactor on his undershirt before buttoning up the dark blue dress
shirt. After activating the time travel suit, Tony adjusts the time/space GPS and ensures there are
four vials of Pym Particles slotted in.

For probably the twentieth time that day, Tony checks to ensure that the resonant frequency of his
own universe has been programmed in. He has three different markers for this universe, for home,
and all three of them are written into the code as the default-- if Tony’s unconscious, if he appears
in a crisis situation, FRIDAY is set to auto-hit the button for him, and unerringly, his suit will
bring him back home to his house, his daughter, his own special circle of hell. Because if there’s
only one thing he’s learned about meddling with time, it’s that there’s always a world that’s worse.

When he was a child, Tony had been fascinated by black holes. It had been a love/hate
relationship. When he had daydreams, they were about figuring out how to harness the energy
from a black hole so he could use it to solve all of the problems the world had with fossil fuels.
When he had nightmares, they were about being stuck in the event horizon of a black hole, being
inexorably sucked close enough to be torn apart by the tidal forces. He feels like that now, but
Tony can’t decide whether his plans will tear him apart or rescue him from that slow process of
being stretched beyond his ability to bear it.

Part of that stretch comes from the email that Stephen Strange sends him every three months
without fail.

Beware the hubris of messing with time. The laws of probability should tell you to
expect things to go wrong. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, Stark, but when things go
wrong, they don’t always explode or result in half of the universe turning into dust.
Sometimes when things go wrong, it’s subtle-- but no less devastating.

Think about what you’re doing.

Usually Tony sees the subject line, which is different every time (‘Earth to Stark, Come In, Please.’
‘Debating Tricks That Work Best With Extreme Arrogance’ even once, ‘Use This One Weird Trick
To Increase Your Dick Size By 100%! Cheap and Easy!’ Tony thinks that that particular one was a
concession to the fact that Strange knows he isn’t opening the emails) and just sorts it to the special
file that holds them. This week, though, he had clicked on the latest one (‘Why Does It Matter If
Han Shot First?’), read it through, and after he put it into the correct folder, Tony had tapped
through each one, making sure there wasn’t some sort of sequential secret message. They were all
the same, just as he’d thought.

“Well, you did promise to send Pym a postcard every week. This is basically that,” Tony says,
aloud.

He grabs the briefcase and hits the button to head to what he hopes is an alternate universe.

That first option is a New York City in ruins.

His second and third options look familiar, home-like. In the library of each, he searches for Leigh
Balci and finds her. Neither version has heterochromia. In one of them, she calls herself Felicia, and
she lost her husband and son in the Snap.

Tony realizes that his theory that he’d be able to jump to alternate universes that are similar to his
must be deeply flawed.

Either that, or Leigh Balci is just one of those people whose life is deeply affected by small choices
as much as the large ones.

It’s late evening when he gets back from the third jump, and as Tony reflexively fills the slots on
his suit with more particles, he wonders if he should jump back to test the ability to visit the same
universe twice now, when he still has the image of Felicia Roberts seared into his brain. How much
worse if he jumps into the universe he’s looking for, finds that version of Leigh, and she won’t
come with him? Without the ability to try again earlier in her timeline, erasing that first attempt,
he’ll have no hope, after all of this effort. Wouldn’t it be better to find that out now? he asks
himself tiredly.

“No,” Tony says. He goes up to the bank of equipment beside the Tunnel, grabs the frequency
switch and spins it. Fuck the idea that it’ll be easier to find the ‘right’ Leigh Balci, the one who’s
dying, the one whose life he might be able to improve until she fades away, if he turns the dial
incrementally slowly. That’s obviously not the case, if only four ticks from his universe there’s a
version of Leigh who had already been married when Thanos snapped his fingers the first time.

He’s jealous, Tony realizes. He hates the idea of any Leigh in any universe loving a man who isn’t
him. It’s… not healthy.

Tony hits the button to jump through time again.

***

Even though it’s ten PM at night in his own universe, Tony lands in the newest version at eleven
AM, just like the other three he’d tried. He walks up into the library as he had with the last two and
waits for his turn while ostensibly hiding behind his designer sunglasses (he doesn’t have so much
of an ego that he expects that Tony Stark is Tony Stark in every universe he visits, but the
possibility is enough to make him want to deflect attention, that’s all) (but he totally is Tony Stark
everywhere, he’s completely certain of it).

Typing in the name of the journalist from Pennsylvania doesn’t take long, and neither does the
search of the man’s published articles. He had to remind himself three jumps ago that, when
Strange had said only one reality won against Thanos, he’d meant it: the two previous realities
never got their people back in 2023 or at any other date. So there’s no triumphant article written a
little less than four years ago here, praising the efforts that brought everyone back from the dead.
What there is, though, is an article about a friend who is suffering from untold losses after the
‘blip.’

It’s the article about Leigh he’s been looking for. Including a picture of the woman who lost ‘half
of her family.’

In the image, Leigh’s hair is shoulder-length. He wonders if her hair’s even shorter now, from the
chemotherapy. Tony leans in; the software doesn’t allow him to magnify the color picture.

Her eyes are two different colors. One brown, one a mixture of blue and brown.

He’s frozen to the spot.

“Uh, are you okay?”

It’s the voice of the library attendant who had taken his (fake) name to use the computer. Because
he doesn’t have an ID to show (apparently that’s a thing, with libraries, who knew? Not this
billionaire), they gave him a time limit of ten minutes. That’s apparently about as long as he’s been
sitting, staring at the person he’s come to see.

“Yeah, yeah. Did you know that some people can have different colored eyes?” Tony asks,
pointing at the picture. He closes it quickly, bringing up a second tab and typing in the word
‘heterochromia,’ clicking on ‘images.’ No way does he want this fresh-faced kid to remember a
creepy guy wearing sunglasses indoors creeping on a woman who might go missing sometime in
the next few weeks.

It wouldn’t change anything, but it’s just bad form.

“Wow, that’s cool,” the guy says.

“Yeah, thanks for the loaner,” Tony says, tossing him the keycard that unlocked the keyboard for
his use. “Had an argument with the wife over it, she locked me out of using the internet, can you
believe that?”

“Huh, what a bitch,” the kid says. “Bad luck, sorry man.”

Tony staggers out into the street with his heart full and his mind empty. He has to find her, yes, but
he had prepared everything else, he’d checked all the boxes of the things he’d listed out to do-- but
he had completely forgotten this.

What will he say to her?

She isn’t his, this Leigh. She’s quite possibly far more broken than the Leigh he knew, already out
of remission from her cancer, with no way to get her family back. Even if Tony could fulfill the
one ridiculous dream/nightmare he’d had one night, the one where he hopped from universe to
universe teaching the people that remained , gathering up their versions of the Avengers and
holding their hands until they’d gathered their universe’s stones and brought their people back, it
wouldn’t be enough to save this Leigh. Because she’s going to die.

“What in the actual fuck was I thinking?” he whispers to himself.

Without his Leigh there to guide him, he’s gone and built a house without supporting structures.
It’s bound to collapse, it’s practically designed to, but the pattern it will fall down into is one that
will be the salvation of a completely different world, one he’s spent years sketching out and
planning the blueprints to renew. He’d known that the whole time, but now that he’s at the hard
part, now that he’s got the nozzle for the concrete foundation in his hands, he’s terrified.

Tony’s been walking this whole time. He’d made himself memorize the layout of Washington,
D.C.. It’s one of the things Tony had done early on, one of the mindless things he’d been able to do
while sitting with a preschool-aged Ember, looking up every time she’d called for his approval of
the structures she’d built with her blocks. The things she built got bigger and better, more complex,
made out of better materials as she’d aged, just like Tony’s plans had done.

At home, Tony knows, there’s a whole corner of Ember’s room where she’s constructed a Lego
world, entirely of her own design. It’s intricate and full of little loving details that her mother would
have loved to see.

That thought grounds him as he pauses on a corner and looks around to see where he is.

He’s in front of Charriott.

According to the clock attached to a building across the street, it’s 11:36 AM. Tony decides to find
the nearest coffee shop and fuel up, maybe drop into a corner store and buy a notebook so he can
write down some sort of framework of what to say. He spies a quaint little stand-alone building a
block away and heads over. When he crosses into the parking lot, a woman carrying a briefcase of
her own and holding a large to-go coffee cup walks out of the shop, tripping on something unseen
and dropping the briefcase.

Almost immediately, papers spill out, and some of them start to blow away. Tony can hear her
swearing under her breath, and he jogs over. She’s on her hands and knees, using her body to stop
papers from catching the wind.

“I’ll grab them,” Tony says, and looking around for a safe place, he sets his briefcase down on one
of the line of outdoor tables beside the parking area.

He chases after four separate pages, careful not to wrinkle them as he holds them tight to prevent
them from restarting their journey. When he comes back to the woman, she’s on the sidewalk,
moved over so as to be out of the way of the door to the coffee shop. She’s got one shoe off, her
bare foot resting on a pile of papers inside of the briefcase, and in her hands she has two separate
piles. The skirt she’s wearing is pooled around her, her hair held back in a lace bandana.

It’s Leigh.

As he approaches her with his heart in his throat, Tony sees her frown, then stick her finger in
between two pages and settle the next few papers on top of it.

“I think these might help,” Tony says, holding up the small stack he’s wrangled from the wind.

“Oh my God, thank you so much! I broke the binder clip I was using on these, and like an idiot, I
didn’t ask to borrow one when I found out the supply room was fresh out. I basically willed this to
happen,” she says, sighing.

Tony doesn’t know any other person who could seem so at home sitting on the ground outside of a
place of business.

He hands over the pages. “Do you want me to shut that for you?”

“The clasp broke. I kind of feel like this is safer, but if you’d like to hold it shut, I can stop making
a spectacle out of myself, I suppose,” she muses.

Tony leans over and puts his hand down flat beside her foot on the pages, and she lifts her leg out
of the way. Once the briefcase is closed, he hovers his own foot above it, waiting for her approval.
“I can take my shoe off if you’re more--”

“Oh, Stars, please don’t. I still have half a day of work and I’d like to do it un- mortified, if that’s
all the same to you. Shoed is fine.”

Tony doesn’t know whether to feel exhilarated or burst into tears. He’s not entirely sure he won’t
do both. To cover his undoubtedly strange expression in case she looks up to see it, he looks
around for her coffee cup and finds it on the ground out of her reach. He has good balance, so Tony
keeps his toe on the briefcase of hers and retrieves it.

On the side, where a barista had scribbled it in haste, is the name ‘Lee.’

“Leigh, I’m not a doctor, but I prescribe half a cup of this, STAT,” he tells her. The pure affection
in his voice when using her name is a big fucking problem, but what saves him is that the rest of
the sentence had been spoken in amusement, and the two tones of voice are similar. This woman
doesn’t know him well enough to know the difference.

“You are very right,” she says, reaching up for it. With the hand full of papers held away from her
body, she latches onto the coffee cup and drinks like her life depends on it. Tony can only watch in
captured, terrified delight as her throat works.

This is the BEST Worst Mistake You’ve Ever Made, you utter besotted idiot, he thinks to himself.
He both cannot possibly stop now, and should absolutely run away and save her from having to
deal with the wreck that he is rapidly becoming. It’s that scene in every single heist movie, where
the timer is ticking down and something terrible is about to happen.

“Will you still be here if I run in and get my own coffee, so I can introduce myself in kind?” Tony
asks. His inner voice is screaming.

“That depends, are we the type of people who give fake names at coffee shops?” she asks, setting
the last page in between two stacks of slightly-wrinkled papers and patting the stack.

He half expects her to pat it twice.

Tony hadn’t prepared for this at all.

“What name guarantees that I can see you again?” Tony asks, fixing her with an appreciative look.

Alt Leigh stands, blushing as she nods at him to lift his foot from her briefcase. “Ooh, that was a
good line. Maybe too good.” She looks at him critically, clearly trying not to smile.

“I promise I’m just clever like that,” he says.

“Prove it,” she challenges, standing still and giving him a full look-over. The approval in her eyes
slays him. “Come back. Same time, same day next week?”

“I will,” Tony says, and means it. He’ll find a fucking hotel and wait, if FRIDAY says there’s even
a .01% chance the frequency for this universe isn’t locked in.

***

He takes two full hours making sure he can come back to this particular universe, sitting at the
reflecting pool huddled over his phone, talking to FRIDAY. The last half hour of it is his AI
coaching him through the process of being comfortable with coming back and sleeping before
jumping back into the Quantum Tunnel.

Tony practically falls into his bed when he gets back home. One of his dreams that night is
particularly vivid; he’s on a boat on the lake in West Virginia, watching his younger self tend to
the five beehive boxes he periodically dreams about, ever since he’d first met Leigh. From the
lake’s vantage point, Tony can see symbols displayed on the boxes, one for each of the Avengers in
the first team, besides himself.

He remembers the first dreams, how he’d struggled to gather the honey, trying with varying
degrees of protective clothing until he’d given up and gone out in street clothes and succeeded.
Tony doesn’t understand what it means to find that the boxes he’s seen as symbolic of Leigh’s
influence on his life now seem to stand for Nat, Bruce, Thor, Clint, and Steve.

He has nothing to do but float on the stationary boat and watch the bees hover and zip around. He
wonders if the five boxes stand for the five years he’d told Natasha to let him grieve, actually.
There are only about six months left to that time period, unbelievably. It would feel like their
conversation about it was only a few months ago, but for the drastic difference in Ember over that
period of time.

Tony wishes he could wake up. There’s a surreal creepiness to the dream that mounts as every
unremarkable second passes. He watches his younger self, notes that he doesn’t actually touch the
boxes, even though he’s able to come close, brush past them, walk between them, with no hostility
from the bees.
“Tony!” he calls to his other self, wondering what will happen.

The bees react with instant aggression-- but not toward him. They attack his other self, instead.
Tony rows his boat up to the edge of the water and calls out, offering a hand, as his younger self
battles a swarm of bees around his head. The lakebed is marshy, and the man’s feet catch in the
mud and hold, keeping him still for the angry, vindictive insects.

Tony looks for some way to save his other self, but each time he gets close enough to hit the bees
off with his paddle, the boat rapidly floats backwards. He stares at the beehives, willing there to be
some kind of reset button. Every so often he can influence his dreams. What Tony sees instead is
that the symbols are not quite right. They’re like Dollar Store versions of Avenger emblems,
making him wonder if these impostor bees saw the younger Tony as some sort of a threat when he
called out and made it obvious there were two of him.

The whole situation is confusing and scary. He’s forced to watch his other self get weaker and
weaker until the bees leave his slumped, still body. They don’t return to their hives, though. They
start out over the water toward him.

That’s when Tony wakes up, chest heaving, alone and frightened in the dark.

It takes a long time for him to get back to sleep.

***

The next morning, Tony forces himself to eat an apple before he sets up to leave, right at eight
AM. His outfit is another mid-level suit, with a red shirt this time. When he checks himself in the
mirror, everything looks normal. He activates the time suit and punches in 11:15 AM, thinking that
it would be more natural for him to walk over from the library, as he’d done when he’d run into her
accidentally the first time.

When he gets to the shop, it’s just about half past eleven, and he finds the alternate Leigh at the
back of the line.

Tony simply queues up behind her and doesn’t say anything at first. She seems to have a similar
style to his wife’s, just with a more severe color palette-- her skirt and blouse are a deep purple,
with a soft, dark grey sweater over it. It is May 2027 in her universe, a warm day, and he wonders
how ill she might be. He’d tried to schedule his visits in a way that wouldn’t be in the midst of
intensive chemotherapy or radiation, but he’d had to go by research and statistics for her type of
cancer, and there are always outliers.

Her hair is shorter than he’d expected, just past her chin. It’s strange, but when she turns and sees
that he’s behind her, Tony decides that it suits her. Truthfully, Leigh Balci is just a lovely woman,
no matter how she appears to him.

“You came,” she says, smiling. “I figured there was a strong chance you would decide I was just
too odd to be believed.”

“The odd ones are the best company, I’ve found.”

“Fair enough.” She nods in approval, her short hair sliding into her eyes. Tony recognizes his wife
in the gesture this woman uses to brush it back.

They sit inside at a small table in the sun, which could confirm his concern about her health, or just
be happenstance. Tony asks her what she does for a living.
“You mean you didn’t look at the papers you brought back for me?” she says, laughing. “Actually,
they probably just read like legalese. I’m an architect.”

She talks a little while about her job, and Tony nods, sipping his coffee and enjoying watching her.
She’s like his Leigh, but also not-- her voice doesn’t have quite the same joy in it, when talking
about what she’s working on. It makes sense, because it seems that this version of Charriott has
their Leigh Balci working on corporate design.

“All right, you either are very good at faking interest, or you actually understand those obscure
terms I’ve been using,” she accuses.

“I’m close with someone who worked as an architect,” Tony tells her.

“Is that the truth, ‘Anthony?’” she asks him, turning his coffee cup around.

“Yes.”

A little alarm goes off in her purse, and Tony feels a chill go over his whole body at the way her
face falls. “It’s time to head back. Thanks for this,” she says, mustering up a smile.

Tony knows there’s a conversation he needs to have with himself, one about how he’s allowing his
plans to possibly color all of the signals he thinks this woman is sending about what her life is like,
and how happy or unhappy she might be in it.

“Same time next week?” he asks lightly.

She traces her beautiful, mis-matched eyes over his face, searching for something. Tony can’t tell
whether she finds it or not, but she nods, a ghost of a smile haunting her mouth. As she walks out,
Tony finally catches the thing that had seemed so ‘off’ about her while they’d stood in line
together: she’s wearing high heels. Not as high as the ones his wife had worn the night they got
engaged, but higher than the Leigh he knows was comfortable with.

Tony wants to head into the restroom and simply zap himself home, but he forces himself to walk
twenty minutes in a new direction, finding a disreputable alley and using that as an exit point.

When Tony steps down from the Quantum Tunnel platform he has to go drink a large glass of
water to get the ugly taste of bile out of his mouth. Something feels very wrong about the world
this version of Leigh lives in, but he can’t put his finger on it. Tony goes up to his bedroom and
takes off the suit, setting it aside to be washed. He’d only worn it for about an hour, but he wants to
wash off the gunk of that strange universe. He chooses another suit to wear, going for a more
expensive one that is comfortable and allows for easy movement.

When he puts his ARC reactor on, it’s with a purpose, this time, and when he buttons up the dress
shirt overtop of it, he leaves one undone, so he can slip his fingers inside more easily to tap it. In
his briefcase, he takes out half the money and all of the changes of clothing. He makes sure that
the extra time travel suit is configured for Leigh Balci, rather than putting it on the setting that
takes the time to conform to her. Though she’s different in many ways, her body seems to be the
same, and the time differential might matter, if they might have to hurry.

He also packs her gun.

Tony walks up to the coffee shop at 11:31 AM. It’s ostensibly been a week after the last time he’d
seen this alternate universe Leigh Balci. She’s outside with her coffee already, and her body
language is distinctly stressed.
“Hi there,” Tony says, sitting down.

“Hey,” she says quietly.

“What is it?” he asks, holding her gaze, putting all the meaning he possibly can into the question.
She falters but doesn’t look down. Her face pales.

“I figured out why you look so familiar,” she says. Tony’s every instinct is firing off warning
signs. “The thing is, you’re-- well.” She looks down, shakes her head in disbelief. “You’re dead.
You have been for years. If you’re that Anthony. Tony. Tony Stark.”

“I’m clearly not that Tony Stark, if he’s dead,” he says, forcing himself to relax, leaning his head
back as if just casually scanning his surroundings. He doesn’t see anything unusual, but he opens
up the briefcase long enough to pull out the headset for FRIDAY, setting it on the table in front of
him.

“What is that?” she asks. She doesn’t sound afraid of him, but she does sound afraid.

“Enhanced glasses. My eyes are tired,” he quips, tossing her a brilliant smile. Her reaction to it is
immediate; her cheeks pink a little, and she takes in a little breath, as if she hadn’t been prepared
for him to turn on his charisma. “So, what did you do when you decided your impromptu coffee
buddy is a dead man?”

“At first I thought I was crazy. I thought about being realistic, looked for an explanation. Then I
remembered something,” she says. Tony angles his head and nods to encourage her, still keeping
on the charm. Her lips twitch as if she wants to smile at him, nervous as she is. “May I?” she asks,
reaching out her hand toward his face.

Tony’s heart swells at the thought of her touching him. He holds back his external reaction, which
makes his nod less confident than he would have wanted. Internally, his whole body is a caught
breath, frozen in the seconds before the red light turns green, Times Square teeming with revelers
waiting for the turn of the clock to the new year.

“Right here,” she whispers. This strange, nervous version of the Leigh Balci he loves leans
forward, toward him. She traces a gentle finger across a cut he has above one eyebrow. It’s tiny,
inconsequential, but that’s probably the exact problem. It should have healed by now, if he had
indeed lived through the three weeks since the first time that they met.

Tony nods.

“You don’t have an explanation?” she asks, pulling her hand back. Tony fists the hand resting on
the table and claws at his leg with the one underneath, to stop himself from catching her hand in
his. So much about her is the same, so much is different. He longs to know whether she’s as warm
as his Leigh.

“Not one that would satisfy. How long ago did you realize?”

“The day after I saw you last.”

“What did you do about it?” he asks, sensing that there’s more to her concern, maybe a lot more.
To Tony, it feels like her anxiety has less to do with him than maybe it ought to, but again wonders
if that’s a function of hope, not reality.

“There’s a number to call, if you see something… strange,” she says, shooting a look at a beat-up
car that pulled into a space a full two minutes before. The driver gets out, and Leigh relaxes. It’s a
teenager in a school uniform.

“A number to call if you see something strange? What the fuck happened here,” Tony says, not
holding back his derision. He leans back again, scans the area, still doesn’t see anything. That
doesn’t necessarily mean jack shit, though, if this universe is one where the citizens of the United
Fucking States have a universal ‘something’s fucky’ number to call. He wonders exactly how
different this woman is, for having lived here.

“Why me?” she blurts out, shaking her head. “Are you… you are Tony Stark, aren’t you? From,
from some other place. A place not like this.”

Tony looks at her and puts on the headset. He immediately sees that she could be wearing some
sort of a listening device, or her bra could just have really conductive wiring on it. It’s a tossup.

“Who’s asking, Leigh? You? or you on behalf of the kind of people who would set up a hotline to
narc on your fellow comrades?”

She draws herself up, affronted, and he’s proud of the look of outrage on her face. This really was
the absolute worst idea, Tony thinks, but now none of his actions are about his original plan at all.
Now they’re about saving her from this unexpected hellhole.

“I’m asking. I hung up. I never said anything.”

“Call Branson. Tell him you need the afternoon off. Take a walk with me to your apartment, I want
to see something,” Tony says.

“H-how do you know--”

“My friend, the architect I was close with? She’s you. My you,” Tony says, every instinct in his
head shouting at him to stop, that he’s putting her in danger, that there’s no coming back from this
moment if this woman decides to reject the offer he wants to put to her. He stands up, holds out a
hand.

She rests her hand in his after only a second of hesitation. It’s warm.
 Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Summary

“Tell me what you want,” Tony says, “--and I’ll do it. If I can’t figure it out, give me
time, I’ll invent a way. I’m-- it’s my thing.”

“I’m figuring that out,” she says, shooting him an assessing look. “She was your
graphite, wasn’t she? Your boron, your heavy water. Your moderator. You’re a
nuclear reactor, and to save the world, you gave up the thing that kept you in check.
Ever since then you’ve been spewing radioactivity without anyone to stop you, and
going to my universe was your nuclear meltdown.”

Chapter Notes

Yeah so Tony's all the way off the deep end, now, and he's going to have to accept
help to pull himself back. We're glad he didn't, like, turn into a drunk, but-- hoo boy.

Chapter Twenty-four

This version of Leigh Balci walks beside him completely confidently in her three inch heels. Her
chin-length honey blonde hair practically glows in the noonday sun, complementing the gold and
green of her professional business suit set. It’s still ever so slightly fanciful, despite the jewel tone
colors, because the blouse she’s wearing underneath the suit jacket is scattered with gold
dragonflies. Tony doesn’t know what to make of her, but he does know one thing.

He is going to protect her.

“How much do you know about me?” she asks after a full ten minutes of the half hour walk to her
apartment. This Leigh is just as patient.

“Not as much as I thought,” he says wryly. When she looks at him in (adorable, captivating)
confusion, he elaborates. “Every universe is slightly different, that’s kind of the point. For
example, in mine, about five years ago, we reversed the-- what do you call it? The ‘blip?’”

She stops, reaching out with a steel grip on his arm. He looks down to see that she has fully
manicured nails, something his Leigh never bothered with.

“Tell me you’re serious.”

“I’m serious. Everyone came back.” He doesn’t elaborate further, mostly because his tongue seems
to have signed an NDA that is preventing all possible references to his wife’s sacrifice from
becoming a burden for this version of Leigh Balci to carry. She’s carrying enough.
“How is that even possible?”

Tony takes an Olympic-grade leap over the Sarlacc pits full of painful answers. “It’s probably as
simple as, the Tony Stark in this universe is dead.” He starts walking again, knowing she’ll follow.
She does.

“Well, your answer trashes my theory.”

“Which one is that?” he asks, looking down at her. When she smiles up at him, it feels earned.

“That you can’t really be Tony Stark. You can’t fake that kind of confidence.”

This time he’s the one who stops in his tracks, watching her walk along with perfect balance on
shoes his Leigh would have already taken off to carry in her hand. Tony takes the opportunity to
kneel, set his briefcase on the ground, removing the time travel nanosuit bracelet.

He hears her walk back to him. She simply waits for him to explain, offering no complaint about
his confusing actions, no rebuke for not asking her to wait. Tony locks the briefcase back up tight
without taking out the gun, though he’d meant to. No reason to scare her-- his Iron Man suit has
more firepower anyway.

“This is a method of escape, if it becomes necessary,” he says, straightening up and holding the
nano bracelet next to the one on his wrist to show her he’s wearing one too. “If you are afraid, if
someone’s trying to hurt you, you hit this button here, hard. It won’t work if you just bump it.”

“Do I need both parts?” Leigh asks, reaching out, tracing a finger across the other, simpler band
around his wrist.

“No, that’s--” Tony’s throat catches. “That’s something else.” It’s his Leigh’s bracelet, the one
he’d stolen from her an hour before her death. He’s planning to give it to Ember on her tenth
birthday, if he can manage to give it up. It’s been on his wrist so long he forgets it’s there, most
days.

“Okay,” she says. Taking a deep breath, she holds out her right wrist in the same way his is
currently positioned, palm up.

The skin there is, of course, bare.

“Turn over?” he asks. She can see he’s affected by something, but obeys him. Tony sets the
bracelet on, watches it until it blinks green four times, the signal that it’s settled and ready. He tugs
down her suit jacket sleeve to hide it, his fingers brushing against her skin. She sways toward him
at the contact.

Strange was right. When it goes wrong, nothing has to explode for it to be a catastrophe.

He’s an asshole, Tony knows. For the rest of his life, he could argue to every single human being
he came across that he did not, manifestly did not do the things he’s done and will do on this day so
that he could have his wife back, and no one would ever believe him. Only time will tell if he’ll
believe it.

“So I slam my hand down on it?” she asks, her eyes serious.

“A body-conforming suit will slide out, including a helmet that covers your face, and yes, that one
is configured to do both at once-- activate the suit and then time jump.”
“Might have been better to have it designed so you could activate with just one hand, but I’ll take
it,” she says, walking away from him.

She’s probably right.

Tony jogs to catch up with her. “How did your world get to this point?” He gestures at one of the
many surveillance cameras he’s seen along their walk so far.

“To the point where I’m afraid that simply calling a number has gotten me on a list?” Leigh asks
bitterly. “The Sokovia Accords opened a Pandora’s Box. It turned out there were quite a few
‘advanced humans’ in the world, even a hidden boarding school full of kids whose parents sent
them there to both learn how to control themselves and to properly hide in society. Then, Thanos
happened.” She shakes her head, tucking her honey blonde hair back behind her ears. When she
swaps her bag to her other shoulder, Tony offers to carry it, but she shakes her head. “I don’t know
if you’re licensed to carry what I’ve got in there,” she tells him.

He hopes this Leigh never had to shoot an intruder. Her life is crazy enough.

“They didn’t let the advanced humans out of their confinement--”

“A floating prison?” Tony asks, frowning.

“Multiple ones, yes. It wasn’t in enough time. That may actually have been the point, though-- they
were released, didn’t succeed in stopping Thanos, and the result was a severe, extreme backlash.
There were… executions,” she whispers.

“Hit the button,” Tony says. They’ve reached the street she lives on, and thanks to the headset he’s
wearing, he can see that there are three people inside her apartment. A black van is driving up the
road, and it looks like they’re braking by the reflection of their lights in the parked cars behind
them. “There are people in your apartment. I can see heat signatures. You live alone, don’t you?”

“Yes!” she gasps. “But--”

Tony grabs her hand and drags her behind him, running up between two buildings. He can hear the
sounds of more than one vehicle braking. He taps on his ARC reactor, letting go of her hand to
allow the suit to cover him.

“Tony.” Alt Leigh has thrown herself against the dirty wall behind them. “How do I know this isn’t
some sort of trick? A, a test, a--”

He pulls out his phone, taps it a few times, throws a holographic image between them, and hands
the device over. The image is of the whole Balci family, including he and Ember. Because Miriam
Balci is extra, something he’d delighted in discovering, she always has a metallic balloon display
in her living room of the holiday and year, without fail. It says, ‘ Christmas 2027!!!!’

“I can protect you,” he says.

That’s when a metal net flies out from some projectile weapon behind them, filling his helmet with
lightning and paralyzing him.

The sound of her time travel suit activating and the shouts of surprise from his assailants gives
Tony a deep sense of self-satisfaction. He gives himself over to the vibrating misery of electric
stimulation, knowing that if they manage to knock him out, his suit will automatically activate,
sending him back home.
 ***

“Who are you?”

It’s the fifth time this man has asked, and the only reason Tony’s still answering is that he’s
strapped down to the floor of a police van and unable to activate his time travel suit. He has to give
this universe’s version of Leigh Balci credit-- she was right. Needing two hands is a flaw in the
design.

“Your mom,” Tony answers, again.

He gets kicked in the head again, but the Iron Man suit is designed for that, and he isn’t knocked
out. In retrospect, Tony should have retracted the helmet the first time he mouthed off, because
that strike probably would have been enough to knock him out without brain damage. At this point,
the goon is so angry Tony would be risking his life to retract it now.

At least the damaged, miserable version of Leigh that grew up here is now beyond their reach. He
will be too, soon.

“How did you fake your death?”

“I ate my Wheaties,” Tony says, tiredly.

“What did you do with the girl?”

“I ate her, too.”

The truth is that he could use his Iron Man suit to get free, but these guys deserve to feel
inadequate, outgunned, and infuriated. They’ll be watching footage of these twenty minutes for
decades, and it’ll do them absolutely zero good.

“WHO ARE YOU?” the goon finally screams, his face red, veins popping out on his neck and
forehead.

“I’m IRON MAN, what are you? Stupid?”

It’s so easy to get out of there that Tony’s 100% certain someone will get fired. He activates his
time travel suit from 200 feet up.

***

He lands on the Quantum Tunnel platform across from a stunned and terrified version of Leigh
Balci. Tony holds out his arm with the time travel suit controls on it and shows her which one to hit
to retract her suit. She does that, her knees buckling underneath her.

He retracts his own and rushes to help her over to the expensive desk chair he has set up at the
computer down here. Then Tony backs up and crouches down to watch her as she adjusts to her
new surroundings.

“How do I know this is… someplace else?”

“Fair question. What would prove it to you?”

“If I can walk out the door of this place without a brand, a chip, handcuffs, an edict, nothing,” she
says, her eyes wide. Tony’s rage rises. If she lets him, he’ll burn all evidence of that universe from
his technology, as if it never existed. “Okay, that’s encouraging in and of itself, the look on your
face,” she adds. “You look like you’re ready to set my whole universe on fire.”

“You’re not far off,” Tony says. His heart’s on fire, melted down to be forged into something else.
That’s not what he wanted, but there’s nowhere to store it right now, where her influence won’t
reach. The whole situation is ruinous, a severe miscalculation on his part. “C’mon.”

He reaches around outside the hidden doorway for the flashlight he’d mounted on the wall in the
basement and gestures for her to precede him. She frowns at the floor and takes off her shoes,
tucking them into her first and second fingers in a familiar gesture that tugs at repressed memories.
Her steps are more sure on the stairs up to the main level, and Tony can’t help but smile when he
sees the look on her face to find that, instead of some sort of government facility, she’s emerging
into a home.

“This is where you live?” she asks, clearly entranced.

“Yeah.” There are pictures of his family up here, and that needs to be addressed. “Leigh.”

“Mm?” She’s drifting toward the front door, which is good, but this is not a conversation that can
wait.

“There are some things I need to tell you.”

“If it’s some kind of neural stimulus and I’m actually in custody, I don’t want to know,” she says
firmly.

“Do you make up half of those?” Tony blurts out. “Because, damn. That’s no kind of life.”

Alt-Leigh turns to look at him, her expression sheepish. “Yes, I make some of those up. It’s a
coping mechanism.”

“But your universe is still a hellhole, are we clear on that, at least?”

“I’ve been in yours for… what? Five minutes? Any universe with this house in it would seem like
heaven. Give me a minute, Iron Man,” she says, her tone gently chastising. “Let me look around.”
Her hand hovers on the door, but her gaze is caught on the shelf of books against the stone wall,
near the fireplace.

The shelf has a picture of his Leigh and three year old Ember, on her birthday.

He walks over in front of the bookcase when she starts toward it. “I told you that I was close with
the Leigh Balci from this universe?” She nods. “I don’t want anything personal from you,” Tony
says, carefully. “I didn’t know you were living in a disguised gulag and in dire need of rescue when
I chose your universe. But I’ll be honest: I was married to her. We have a daughter.”

Tony watches her process this information. To his surprise, she blushes, rather than seems angry.
Her expression does become more guarded, though.

“Did she die of cancer too?”

“No,” Tony says. He looks away, to the side, anywhere but at her familiar face and unfamiliar
eyes. “Her death was part of bringing everyone back. To reverse the-- the ‘blip.’”

“You said that was five years ago?” Alt-Leigh backs away from him, toward the front door again.
“What would you say to me if I asked you how many versions of me you’ve brought here since
then?”
He reminds himself of the world they’d just left behind ten minutes ago. It’s a reasonable question,
if asked by someone who was raised there.

“Just one.”

“Why me?”

Tony goes for honesty. “Because you had the least to lose.”

She laughs. “You had no idea how little it was, did you?” A haunted, miserable look crosses her
face. “What the hell do I do now?” She covers her face with both hands, another familiar gesture.
Seconds later, she’s dropping them as if she knows there are no better answers written on her
palms. “Tell me what your plan was.” The steel is back in her tone, despite her broken body
language. She’s clutching the doorknob, now, as if a desperate flight into the wilds of West
Virginia is her own personal Plan B.

“Find a version of my late wife who is dying of something incurable. Convince her to live the last
months of her life here, with us, with all of her family. Give my daughter a chance to know a
version of her mother, to be able to say goodbye, in a way Ember never had a chance to. Same for
that version of Leigh’s parents, her sisters, her brothers. It was--” he shakes his head,
“Unconscionably naive. Had you lived in any kind of a normal world, I probably would have
realized that sooner, and given up.”

Tony would like to believe that’s true, but the secret, shameful last step of his plan will remain
unvoiced, because he knows it’s even worse than what he’s already spoken about. That was always
something he’d planned to keep to himself for months, yet. Even if everything had worked out as
he’d originally, ridiculously planned. He’s not even sure, now that he’s rescued this woman, that he
could ever, ever ask her to perpetuate it. Even if she’s his (original self’s) only shot.

“And, what? That’s supposed to have been some kind of gift, just because I’m dying? I am, aren’t
I? I mean, they told me I am, but it’s one thing to be told that by a doctor, and another to be told
that by a, a time traveling widower,” she gasps.

Tony doesn’t move toward her, holding out his hand to beg her to stay put, not to run, despite what
she’s just said.

There is, of course, nowhere to run to.

“Context. Important context: this is the only universe where we’ve managed to bring everyone
back. The only one. That’s why. Not because-- Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she says, sinking down into a pile of misery against the door. “I was drowning, back
there. My oldest brother’s best friend was a so-called mutant. Tore the family apart. Besides he and
I, none of us are on speaking terms. The family I have left are as lost to me as if they’d turned to
dust that day.” There are tears streaming down her face unchecked, now. “I was going to die alone.
Alone, untrusted at work, doing designs I hated . And then, I run into this guy, and it was so lovely
to be looked at like a person worthy of…” she shakes her head. “In my mind I wove multiple
ridiculous scenarios about how that would go? This-- this was not one of them. But I’m grateful.
So grateful.”

Her shoulders rock with the strength of what is obviously grief, but Tony can do nothing but watch.
It’s excruciating. The seconds tick by, and he understands that he absolutely deserves what he’s
feeling. That if this went on for hours, it would still not be enough. This is what Strange had
warned him about.
Finally, she slumps back, clearly exhausted. “Coming here-- it’s both more terrifying and more
wonderful than anything I could have come up with-- but I literally have no idea what to do.”

Tony has no right to fucking speak, but he does, anyway. It’s a whisper, but a forceful one. “Just
don’t make me send you back there.”

She smiles at that. “Okay.”

“Tell me what you want,” Tony says, “--and I’ll do it. If I can’t figure it out, give me time, I’ll
invent a way. I’m-- it’s my thing.”

“I’m figuring that out,” she says, shooting him an assessing look. “She was your graphite, wasn’t
she? Your boron, your heavy water. Your moderator. You’re a nuclear reactor, and to save the
world, you gave up the thing that kept you in check. Ever since then you’ve been spewing
radioactivity without anyone to stop you, and going to my universe was your nuclear meltdown.”

It’s such a Leigh thing to say, and so true. All he can do is nod, helplessly.

“Just like a meltdown, there’s no way to unwind this.”

Tony shakes his head.

“I want to know where I stand. To know that, I need to know where you do.”

Tony will be forever grateful for whatever combination of genetics and upbringing that has made
this woman so generous. Though, he does remember her saying she’d woven herself imaginary
worlds that involved him, just from a few minutes’ worth of interactions. She’s not wholly
uninvested.

“We’re in West Virginia. I live here with my seven year old daughter Ember. Her mother was
Leigh Balci Stark. She died in October 2023, when Ember was three. Right now Em is in
Pennsylvania with the Balci family. It’s the week leading up to Easter, 2028.”

Alt-Leigh’s hand creeps up to cover her mouth. “And all of them are alive?” she asks in a cautious
whisper.

Tony nods.

“How long were you married?”

“Just under four years.”

“She’s lived without your wife longer than with, at this point?”

He nods, his teeth clenched. Last year had been hard, for that reason.

“Did she know what you were planning to do?”

Tony doesn’t answer, ‘she’s seven,’ because nothing else in regards to the woman seated on the
floor across from him has been done with anything resembling logic, either. “No.”

“How do you anticipate she’ll react?”

Tony’s thought about this for years. His answer always changes, but in the end, he always comes
back to a simple fact: Ember’s whole life has been defined by events that should be impossible.
“She’ll be confused, try to make sense out of it,” he says, his head moving in an approximation of
Em’s certain bafflement. “But, the evidence of what’s happened will be in front of her, and no
matter how crazy life has gotten, she’s always been able to orient herself to provable truth. She’ll
know you’re not her mother, if that’s a concern.”

The Leigh that is not his wife nods, as if what he’s just said is some kind of normal, sage truth.

“Are you thirsty? I’m thirsty,” Tony says. He gets up and heads straight into the kitchen. He is
thirsty, but he wants to give her agency. She can walk right the fuck out, if she needs to. Except--
fuck. He sneaks a look out into the room, sees that she’s standing, now. “If you’re noping out, wait,
because you should know: She’s famous. Your face. My wife. Is famous.”

“Because she was your wife?” she asks.

“Yeesssss,” he prevaricates. “But no. From her death. There were stones of power, full set equals
the ability to bring everyone back. One was obtained through an act of sacrifice.” He holds out the
cup of water, which she takes. “A soul for a soul. After the battle with Thanos, the world learned
about what she did.”

He uses the passive voice because while he’s made his peace with the furor around Leigh’s
sacrifice, it was absolutely not his decision.

“So I am free to leave, but if I do, people will think I’m her? And they’ll think… what? That you
were lying?”

“With my reputation? They’ll think I went back in time and got her,” he smiles, tipping his head to
the side.

“Didn’t you?” Her expression has no small amount of condemnation.

“No. You are your own person. My wife is irreplaceable.” He leans on the kitchen island and
holds her gaze. They look at each other for a long time, long enough for Tony to see her as more
than a pale, broken reflection of the Leigh he was married to. The differences are more than
cosmetic. He understands that, now.

“I believe you,” she says, finally.

Tony shakes his head, takes a long sip of water, and puts the glass down hard enough to make a
loud sound that echoes throughout the room. “No one else will.”

***

They agree to some time apart, a few hours, at least. She goes outside and settles into the
hammock, hugging the pillow there and simply looking up at the trees. Tony takes his camera and
heads into Ember’s room to document the progress of her Lego city. It’s farther along than he’d
expected, meaning she’s probably using the LED flashlight he’d given her to stay up late working
on it.

Tony supposes it’s genetic. He used to do the same thing, but with machines.

As always, he photographs the buildings before carefully opening them up to reveal the decorating
his daughter has done inside. That it’s populated now is a result of her grandparents’ discovery of
the project and their purchase of many sets of Lego people. The last time Tony had checked the
houses, there were only a few, but he’d seen that she had a notebook with little doodles that stood
for each of the figurines. Ember had been delighted by the task of creating a whole society,
complete with relationships, professions, and families.

Now, as he checks the houses for the results of her handiwork, Tony is impressed and delighted by
what he finds.

Until he realizes something.

Most of the households are made up of odd numbers. The Lego people are all the same size, their
ages and professions denoted by their markings. Still, he starts to understand that Em has structured
families and couples, but most of the families are single-parent, just like hers. The majority of the
female figurines aren’t with the families. They’re alone in classrooms, in science labs, at hospitals,
in grocery stores.

Ember has constructed a world without mothers.

Tony holds himself together until he’s put everything back, checking his camera when he’s not
sure if he’s done it properly. Then, he walks downstairs and collapses onto his couch and loses it.
About twenty minutes into his meltdown, because that’s what it absolutely is, he digs his noise
cancelling headphones out of the magazine rack beside the couch and puts them on. Tony blasts
metal music and tries to forget that anything but music exists, including himself.

***

He wakes up completely disoriented.

Part of what does it is that he’s never fallen asleep on this couch before. Tony’s a man of creature
comforts, always has been. This couch is not comfortable, not in that way, because that’s not what
it’s for. There’s a sink-in-and-stay-awhile couch up in the rec room upstairs, and he’d slept there
for weeks after he’d realized that he could still smell Leigh’s scent in the bed they’d shared. So
when Tony wakes up in his living room and can definitely smell dinner, he has a moment of
complete confusion. This isn’t eased by hearing Leigh’s voice.

“Your breathing changed. Are you okay?”

Understanding slams into him, and he gasps.

“What? What is it?” Alt-Leigh asks, swiftly moving into the room. She mutters under her breath as
she searches for the switch to turn on the lamp beside where he’s sitting.

“Sorry,” he says, forming the word out of the mothballs his mouth is filled with.

“Don’t be,” she says. With actual amusement, she adds, “At least, not about this.” She gestures to
the collapsed pile of limbs he’s still configured in. “You probably needed it. I’m pretty sure you
were held together with popsicle sticks and tar.”

“What am I smelling?” he asks, again feeling as if he’s only speaking with a concerted effort,
picking the words off of a fast-moving conveyor belt.

“Meatless spaghetti with canned sauce. I can only assume based on the dates on the bottles that
you’re doing the best you can with the training you have.”

Tony blinks at her. “Thank you,” he says. “You didn’t have to--”

“I know. Also, if you’re allergic to anything I’ve put in it, that’s too bad. That’s your penance for
stealing me from my miserable, lonely existence.”
She walks back into the kitchen, leaving Tony to stare after her in complete, numb shock.

Even though he made a resolution hours ago not to compare the two, he can’t help but think about
the pragmatic way his Leigh had adjusted to being stuck with him in the bunker he’d pulled down
on them. By the time they’d left, he had completed the process of falling for her.

Fuck, Tony thinks to himself. That wasn’t-- He didn’t--

A conglomeration of voices in his head, genderless, with vocal aspects of Natasha Romanoff,
Stephen Strange, Aleshia Rhodes, and Branson Harriot admonishes him.

What did you THINK was going to happen, you colossal, naive idiot?!

Not this.

And you call yourself a genius.

What he should do is pull back from her. It would be the respectful thing to do, the not-creepy,
not- ‘hey just steal a version of your wife from another universe, it’s cool’ thing to do. But she is
absolutely alone here, bereft. There is no one else. And he may be many things, but he never
wanted to be cruel.

“Stop thinking so hard and eat, for fuck’s sake.”

NO. Stop! Tony tells his heart when it flutters on hearing her affectionate insult.

“Like trying to stop a meteor from burning up in the atmosphere,” he mutters to himself. He’d
called his Leigh a meteor, once. He’d never realized how accurate he’d been at the time-- they’re
impermanent by their very nature. “Coming,” he says. He doesn’t add the ‘dear,’ but the weight of
it hangs in the air anyway. Fuck.

Leigh deserves so much better than this, Tony thinks. Both of them.

“I don’t know where you eat. I set the island, instead of the table, figuring that probably wasn’t a
memory you already had,” she says, her hands fluttering unspoken apologies around the set-up.

“That’s thoughtful.”

They eat in silence for a while. The whole time, he both tries not to stare at her, and tries to make
sure he’s not never looking at her, understanding that both might be hurtful. It would be easier,
Tony thinks, if he weren’t involved at all. He’s a backhoe doing the task of a chisel.

“We need to figure out what to call me,” she says after exactly ten minutes pass.

“Did you make an itinerary?” he asks. “Shit, that sounded bitter. But-- did you make an itinerary?”

“Not where you could read it,” she says, smiling around her fork. “Licia? Lauren? Though, maybe
we should steer clear from using L names. So easy to slip into the familiar.”

“My best friend’s wife is named Aleshia,” he tells her.

“What about Fianna? Fia? That’s what my parents wanted to name me before settling on Felicia.
It’s Irish; they went there on their honeymoon.”

“I didn’t know that,” Tony says, surprised.

Her smile is gorgeous. “There, see? Something new.”

“Fianna,” Tony says, trying it out. Her eyes are downcast, she’s looking at her plate when he says
it, but no matter what name the woman answers to, he knows her. He knows her body, her
responses, at least most of them . She likes it. More than she expected. “We can pick something el-
-”

“No,” she interrupts. Alt-Leigh-- Fianna meets his eyes bravely. Her cheeks have a very slight but
obvious tinge of pink to them. “I feel a connection to it. I-- it doesn’t feel like it’s not me.”

“Okay,” he nods.

They finish the meal in silence, but Tony thinks that his thoughts have never been so loud, so
obviously picked up, even by this woman who cannot accurately be described as a stranger. He
wonders if she knows just how much he can sense about her body language, how well he knows
her in so many different ways. It’s as if their every communication has five interleaved layers of
meaning to it.

“Let me,” he says, when she starts to gather up their used dishes. She lifts her hands away but
watches him with a perceptive look that tells him he won’t like what she says next.

“You keep treating me like I’m broken. You’re right. But you’re not treating yourself with the
same deference. It’s as if you can’t see how much you need fixing.”

“If I’m broken, that’s my fault, and my business.”

“Bullshit,” Fianna says. “More popsicle sticks and tar. It’s long past time for you to fill that in with
flesh, Tony Stark.”

“I don’t know how,” he admits, throwing his hands out at his sides.

“Well, you asked me what I wanted. You said you’d do anything, invent something, if you had to.
That’s what I want, since I’m stuck here with you, now. You have to stop allowing yourself to be
so broken.”

Tony stares at her in horror, thinking about Ember’s Lego society full of single fathers. He shakes
his head, speechless.

“It’s like you don’t know me at all,” she laughs. “You already rescued me, Iron Man. A life for a
life, right?”
 Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Summary

"Dad. What did you do?”

“I went into an alternate reality to see what it was like. It was terrible. I met a version
of your mom there, and she was in trouble, so I rescued her,” Tony says, covering his
eyes with a hand.

“Dad.”

“I know, I screwed up.”

“You can’t just--”

“I know.”

Chapter Notes

Driving my mom 2 hours into a different state there and back to get her vaccinated
today, so I don't know if tomorrow's chapter will get done on time or not! But thanks
for your support, everyone who has read this pet project of mine!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Twenty-five

It’s hard for Tony to think of Alt-Leigh as Fianna, but as the two of them spend time moving things
out of the small storeroom that was baby Ember’s first bedroom, he understands why she pushed to
use another name. She doesn’t just look like his wife, she shares most of her characteristics. Many
of the things in the room are Leigh’s, initially moved from the master bedroom through the
adjoining door. Quite a few times, when she catches sight of something as he’s moving it to his
office, Fianna will gasp, or reach out, or smile, and he’ll know that she’s recognized herself in what
she’s seeing.

At first he’d planned to move his office into the rec room. Now that Ember’s older, it’s full of
fewer toys and more bookshelves, which he can shift around, but Fianna insists she doesn’t want to
change much about the household setup. The side room has been storage for six years, and Em
doesn’t go in there. It’s a practical, sensible choice for Fianna to use it.

About the only non-practical decision Fianna makes is to completely reject the idea of using
Leigh’s clothing. This is strongly illustrative of the boundaries she won’t cross, because she also
shares Leigh’s abhorrence of wasting money. Tony found this out on the second day. He’d handed
her his credit card and an old laptop to shop online, told her to get whatever she wanted. That night,
curious, he checks the bank statement to find that she’d spent barely $150. The next morning,
Tony tells her that she has two choices: he can have Chuck file employment papers and pay her a
salary so high she’ll feel physically ill, or she can buy herself a reasonable wardrobe with his
money.

She gives in, but her initial argument that she has no legal residency or even personhood in his
universe reminds Tony of something important.

He dials Nick Fury’s number and expects to leave a message, but ends up patched through.

“Tony Stark. What can I do for you?”

“I did something that’s either completely shocking or entirely unsurprising, depending on how
much faith you have in me,” he says, foregoing a greeting.

“Hit me.”

“I built a Quantum Tunnel and started visiting alternate universes.”

Fury’s sigh isn’t a gasp, at least. “Took you longer than I thought it would. What went wrong that
you’re talking to me about it?”

“I came across a nightmare world and rescued a version of my wife from a miserable, lonely
death.”

“You’re going to need to give that woman my number so I can extract her from a second nightmare
if you’re going to insist on referring to her as a version of your wife,” Fury says in the tone of a
very disappointed father. “Did you think every alternate reality is split off from ours because
someone chose a cheeseburger instead of pizza? There are probably more miserable, deadly
universes than not. All we can do is try to ensure that ours is livable.”

“For what it’s worth, I see that now,” Tony says. He does. Of the four alternate realities he visited,
only one had seemed anything like their own. Two had been drastically different, horrifyingly so.

“So what’s with the confessional?”

“She’s got stage four cancer, Nick. She’ll need medical treatment from people who don’t turn her
existence into some kind of refutation of Leigh’s sacrifice, or demand an accounting of where she
came from and why.”

“THIS is why we don’t fuck with time, Stark. What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” Tony says. “But it’s done now. I can’t, I won’t send her back there. They sentenced
people to death for not stopping Thanos.”

Fury’s second sigh is so loud that the sound is distorted by his phone’s microphone feedback. “I
should put her in protective custody and put an RO on you, you selfish bastard. Did you even think
of your daughter?”

“I’ve always been thinking of her!” Tony protests. He can’t explain exactly how much, because if
he knew the extent, even Fury wouldn’t simply sigh and chastise him over a phone line over it.
He’d send a SWAT team and put Tony in a mental institution. “I thought seeing a Leigh alive and
happy in her life would give me some closure,” Tony lies. “I went to four realities total, Fury. In
one there wasn’t even a New York City. In another, she was married with a son, but lost both in the
Snap. In this one-- Look, I get it. I fucked up. All I can do now is fix it so this reality isn’t as much
of a hellhole for her.”

“I’ll see what I can do. But you’ll have to do me a favor, in return.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll have my guys send you some shielding for wherever you’ve got that Tunnel. Don’t destroy it.
Disconnect it, install the shielding, board it up, and make it your responsibility to guard the
fucking thing. You’re now part of a secret network of contingency plans we’ll hope to hell we never
have to use. You got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Fury laughs. “Well look at that. It only took the largest fuck-up I’ve ever heard of in my entire
career to make Tony Fucking Stark sound contrite. That might almost be worth it.” His voice
hardens into glacial condemnation. “You treat that woman like your sister, you hear me? I’ll be in
touch.”

Fury hangs up before Tony has a chance to agree. After every other aspect of his plan has gone
awry, it seems like he ought to reshuffle the whole thing and come up with a new one.

Maybe he can even persuade himself to believe that.

***

Tony stands in the hallway and knocks on the door to Fianna’s room. Before calling Fury, he’d
given her a box of Balci memorabilia that he thought she’d like to go through. He has no idea what
kind of mood she’ll be in for lunch. He hears her voice call out.

“Come i-- wait, I’ll--” He waits, and a few seconds later, she opens the door. “Figured it would be
surreal to hear her voice and then see me,” she says apologetically.

“You don’t have to--” Tony breaks off. “She’s been gone for almost five years.” He sighs, and
before he stops to think how fucking bleak the sentiment is, he says, sardonically, “I heard her
voice in empty rooms long before you ever came here.”

Fianna’s hand twitches at her side like she wants to reach out, but is holding herself back. Her
unusual, beautiful mixed-color eyes are sympathetic, mournful. After about thirty seconds, she
nods at him as if closing out their moment of mutual understanding.

“Everyone seems really happy,” Fianna says, gesturing at the couch covered with stacks of papers
and photos. “I can’t decide if there just aren’t mutants-- I really hate that term, but all of the other
ones have such nasty, governmental associations to them,” she shivers. “I can’t decide if this
universe just doesn’t have any, or if they’re still really well hidden.”

“If they didn’t help fight Thanos here, when they weren’t already locked up for existing, I’d say
they don’t exist. But I don’t know.” Tony raises his eyebrows. “Hungry?”

“Yes.” As she follows him down the stairs, Fianna says, “My clothes should come soon.”

“I forgot to tell you where the linen closet is,” Tony realizes. “If it’d make you feel more
comfortable, I can go for a walk, when you take a shower.”

“Are you implying I smell bad, Mr. Stark?” she asks, pulling out two slices of bread for her
sandwich.
“Are you trying to say your comment about clothes wasn’t an implicit apology in case you do?”

They look at each other across the island for a few seconds before laughing.

“I think that’ll take longer to get used to than everything else,” Fianna observes.

“What?”

“How well you know me.”

The solution to that is probably for Tony to get to know her better, so he can spot the differences.
But after a few days of charting careful courses around each other, Tony feels like moving in that
direction would be toward the part of the map with words written in careful script: Here there be
dragons.

***

“Should I dye my hair?”

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

“Don’t, then.”

***

The clothes help. Fianna had clearly spent some time looking at the clothes Leigh left behind, and
has chosen things that aren’t like his wife’s at all. She walks around the house wearing jeans and t-
shirts, her hair in styles his wife never wore.

Tony offers to get her a bed to sleep on instead of the dusty couch that had already been in the
small bedroom she uses, but both times he offers, she shakes her head. The second time, she
elaborates.

“That doesn’t depend on me, does it? It depends on your daughter.”

It’s a good point.

He tells Fianna all about Ember, how she likes to practice things that fall under the ‘hard,’ or
‘provable’ designation, like science, but sails through the ‘soft’ ones like social situations with
ease, needing little to no preparation. Ember’s already a compulsive list-maker at seven, but she’ll
blurt out her opinions on things with no thought about how they might land with classmates or
teachers. He sees himself in her so much it’s painful.

Their contingency plan if Ember is really upset about Fianna’s existence in the house is to set up a
campsite out of view of any windows.

Exposure helped. Tony realizes this while on the plane out to the farmhouse in Pennsylvania.
When he’d first brought Fianna to his universe, he couldn’t see how he could ever exist in the same
room with her and not feel halfway to insanity, given how many shared mannerisms, how much
she physically just sounds like Leigh. Six days later, he’s grown some calluses over those painful
wounds out of sheer self-defense.

It’s obviously too soon to even bring up her existence with the family. Eventually Fianna may need
to leave West Virginia entirely, if Ember (or Tony, he’s not ruling out that nuclear option, if he
finds that, without permission, his heart has become engaged any further than it already has been)
can’t handle sharing the house with her. Keeping what he’s done from the Balci family isn’t as
hard as Tony had thought, probably because he’d been planning to do it for so long.

Only one person notices a change, besides Ember.

“Are you drugged?” Lacey asks in his ear as they stand around watching Miriam organize
elaborate grandchildren photos.

“If I were, I wouldn’t be your supplier anyway. You give off narc vibes,” he whispers.

“I absolutely do not. In fact, now I’m even more suspicious something’s up with you.”

Tony turns to look at her. She’s dyed a chunk of hair beside her face pink, to the delight of all three
nieces. “Nothing is up,” he says.

“You forgot to shave,” Lacey accuses.

It’s true. His shaver lives in the hallway bathroom, a remnant from when Leigh hated seeing little
bits of beard hair in the sink. When he’d gone to leave, Fianna had been in the shower, and Tony
hadn’t left enough time to get it out of there.

“Scandalous,” he offers, but he sounds defensive even to his own ears.

“Well, whatever it is, it looks good on you. You really needed to unclench.”

There’s no possible way to articulate to Lacey Balci how frightening the implications of her words
are. Not without confessing what he’s done. Even the rationalization he comes up with that night
(Fianna had told him he needed to work on not appearing broken-- work on not being broken, and
Lacey’s comment is just the first observation in that long journey, isn’t it?) falls flat.

It’s got to be related to selfishness again, Tony finally concludes. There’s a woman living in his
house again, and that just makes him feel better, calmer. That’s all it is.

***

“You had fun?” Tony asks his daughter as soon as the fasten seatbelt sign turns off.

“Yep. Maizie has a bunch of those little squishmellow shopkin things. They are SO CUTE! But I
guess they’re a collector thing so they’re really rare.” Her tone tells him that she doesn’t want him
to look into getting her some because of the cost. Tony’s heard her use the same wording but with
an uplift in her tone that absolutely means ‘I want this, Dad, please take the hint!’ before.

“So, speaking of things, I did a Thing,” he says, looking out the window.

“Uh oh,” Ember says, her tone teasing.

“You remember that we used a time machine to go get the stones to bring everybody back?” Tony
shoots a look at her, searching for trepidation and finding none in her nod. “There’s a theory out
there that says when we make a big decision-- maybe even when we make a little one --it splits the
universe up into two pieces, one for each choice. That this happens over and over, so there are
millions of them.”

“Right. So out there in other universes, there’s our family, but with Mom,” Ember says. She looks
down at the jeans she’s wearing and picks at a string coming off of the side seam.
“Exactly.” He takes a breath. “Maybe even a bunch of them.” He doesn’t actually think so. It’s
possible, as horrible as it sounds, that theirs might be the only one with Ember.

“Dad?”

Now Em sounds scared.

“Yeah?”

“What did you do?”

“Why do you sound scared, honey?” It’s defensive of him, childish, even, but Tony’s trying to do
this the best way he knows how, and this question might illustrate the places where he needs to
tread carefully.

“I used to have nightmares that you went and got Mom from the past, but as soon as I got to hug her
everyone else turned into dust. And after we gave her back, it didn’t get better.” Her lip quivers.

Tony holds out his arms and Ember unbuckles and throws herself into his lap. He hugs her as tight
as he can without actually hurting her, petting her head as she digs her little hands between the seat
and his side, hugging him. There’s no point in asking her where the fear came from. It has always
seemed like everyone on the planet has an opinion on their family’s role in the return of so many
people. She could have overheard something and gotten scared at any number of events they’ve
been invited to over the years. Tony forgets sometimes that Em’s still very young, even though she
speaks so well and has so many strong opinions.

“I’m so, so sorry you had to worry about that. That is not going to happen,” Tony finally says,
kissing her forehead as she looks up at him. “I know right where your Mama is at every place she
exists in time, Ember. No one is ever going to touch her, and no one’s going to make you have to
say goodbye to your family.”

Theirs is such a strange existence, Tony thinks, that this is even something he feels compelled to
say. And yet, the woman currently living in Ember’s old nursery is proof positive that it needs to
be said.

“Okay,” she whispers, laying her cheek on his chest. After a few minutes of snuggled peace, she
says, “So what did you do?”

“Something crazy,” he says.

“Sooooo, typical, right?”

Kids shouldn’t talk to their parents in that tone, but Tony’s just glad it’s not the one where she’s
worried about half the world dying. He’ll allow it. Mostly. “Hey,” he says, looking down with a
fake outraged look.

Ember grins up at him. “Valid though, right?”

“Who even teaches you how to talk like this?”

“Genetics.”

“Again, I ask--”

“Should have sent me to a bad school, Dad. What did you do?”
“I went into an alternate reality to see what it was like. It was terrible. I met a version of your mom
there, and she was in trouble, so I rescued her,” Tony says, covering his eyes with a hand.

“Dad.”

“I know, I screwed up.”

“You can’t just--”

“I know.”

Ember pulls on his arm, scooting further back on his lap so she can see his face. Her expression is
sober, a little scared. “Are you serious?”

Tony nods.

“You’re like, so in trouble, right?”

“I don’t know, Em. But sometimes you have to do the right thing. She’s not as mad at me as I
expected, at least.”

Steve Rogers would probably never steal an alternate universe Peggy Carter, Tony thinks to
himself. Then again, Steve Rogers didn’t know what he was missing. Tony did.

“She’s still there?” his daughter hisses, completely shocked, nearly falling off of him.

“What, you think the time travel police shows up at someone’s house and confiscates the stuff you
take? It doesn’t work that way. If it did, they would have shown up when you were three!” he says,
shrugging, more joking than really defensive, but more defensive than 100% joking.

Tony doesn’t remember what it was like being seven. He knows he got yelled at way more often
than Ember did, but his dad was busier, more angry.

Ember hops off of him and throws herself into her own seat. “So there’s a fake mom at our house?
And you can’t take her back?”

“Do you want me to take her back?”

“Not if you had to rescue her! Nobody ever does that in cartoons, put the damsel in distress back!”

Tony can show her no proof that life isn't actually like cartoons. He wonders what it’s like being a
normal parent.

“I want to be clear, she’s not a fake version of your Mom,” Tony says, leaning forward in his seat
to look at Em. “She’s her own person, and her universe is different from ours. She’s never had
children. We decided that she should even go by a different name than your Mom.”

“But I’ll get to meet her?” Ember bites her lip, looking like she wants to be excited, but not if that
would get her in trouble.

“Yes. And if it’s too weird, she might go live somewhere else. But this is very, very important,
Ember: we can’t say anything about her to anybody right now.”

“Because you totally cheated time and stole her, right?” Ember’s really focused on the idea of him
stealing something, but he guesses that makes sense. She’s heard about the Infinity Stones almost
all of her memory-creating life. The tragic and ironic thing is, the stone Tony ended up retrieving is
the only one they didn’t steal.

Leigh had earned that one, fair and square.

Oh, how he wished she hadn’t.

***

When Tony and Ember get to the house, the porch light is on and the lamps inside are giving off a
cheerful glow. Tony hadn’t realized how much of a difference coming home to such a scene made,
or he could have approximated it with FRIDAY.

Then again, a welcome like this probably feels different when it’s been thoughtfully set up by an
actual person.

Tony goes in first, finding Fianna seated at the dining room table, her hands folded in front of her
on top of a notebook. She’s wearing a pair of Tony’s sunglasses, which triggers a little flood of
happiness that he ruthlessly suppresses. The feeling could simply be gratitude because Fianna’s
eyes are different than Ember’s mother’s eyes, which might be frightening to his daughter at first.
It probably isn’t because Fianna is wearing something of his, something she took without asking
because she’d known he would be all right with it. Whatever the reason, Tony ignores his reaction
besides mouthing a ‘thank you’ to Fianna.

Ember walks in and sees Fianna, stopping still to stare.

Fianna’s hair is in a ponytail, and she’s dressed in a CMU shirt with half sleeves, something Tony’s
definitely never seen Leigh wearing. She smiles at Ember and holds up one finger, pulling out the
notebook. There’s a sharpie stuck in the binding, which Fianna pulls out, turning to the blank first
page and writing something down.

Hi Ember, I’m Fianna.

“Hi,” Ember says.

I’m writing this way because my voice probably sounds a lot like your Mom’s.

Tony leans back against the wall beside the refrigerator, jamming his hands into his pockets. It’s
the most perfect thing Fianna could have done. It’s the kind of thoughtful thing Leigh would have
done, because of course it is. He wishes he could think of a way to thank her.

“Dad said he had to rescue you. Nobody hurt you, did they?” Ember asks quietly.

No, no one hurt me. That’s very nice of you to ask. Thank you.

“Good. I used to be scared of alternate re- rea…” Ember pauses to think of the right word.
“Universes.” She sighs. “But, yeah. I thought every time I almost hurt myself meant the other me
got hurt.”

“Theoretically--” Tony starts, but Fianna turns in her chair to shake her head at him, and he stops.
“It’s too complicated to worry about,” he says, instead.

“Do you have the same family? Grandma? Aunt Lacey?”

Fianna nods sadly. Tony sees her right hand drop from her lap to hang beside the chair. She’s
crossing her fingers. He thinks this probably means that at least one of the people Em mentioned
didn’t survive the Snap, but that Fianna doesn’t want to disappoint Ember.

His instinct is to walk over and lay a hand on her shoulder, to support her, but this is not the time
for that. The two of them have to walk such a fine line, and not just for Ember. He and Fianna have
spoken about how to make sure his daughter doesn’t see her as some sort of mother substitute, and
Tony knows he has to lock down any instincts he has along those lines for himself, as well. She’s
not his wife.

But comforting her would be the kind thing to do.

Fuck it, Tony says to himself. This is part of what she asked, for him not to be broken, isn’t it? He’s
strong enough not to take it the wrong way, isn’t he?

He walks over and squeezes Fianna’s shoulder. He can feel her draw in a surprised breath, watches
her head drift ever so slightly toward his hand, before she corrects it. Tony steps back, but when he
slips his hand back into his pocket, it’s warmer than it was before, and so is he.

***

Over the next weeks, the three of them settle into a kind of normalcy.

Ember slowly works up towards feeling comfortable with hearing her mother’s voice coming from
Fianna’s lips, and by the second week they’re through using the notebook and sharpie. Ember goes
back to school full time the day after they return from Pennsylvania, but Fianna deliberately limits
her time in the main parts of the house in the evenings when Em’s out and about. Because Tony’s
working with Pepper and Chuck (who is basically Pepper’s PA now, but they both humor him)
regarding a business deal that would be huge for Stark Industries, he hardly sees Fianna much,
through the whole month of April.

What eventually changes things is Fianna’s skill in the kitchen. Tony tries not to take it personally,
but it seems like Miriam Balci’s cooking is Miriam Balci’s cooking no matter what universe she’s
taught her daughters in-- and Ember prefers those meals above Tony’s by a long margin. His old
method of mixing his meagre skills with pre-made meals by the housekeeper that comes once
every two weeks won’t work now that Fianna is there anyway. By the end of the month of April,
Ember’s at Fianna’s door at around four PM every day, asking nicely, wheedling, and downright
begging her to take over the kitchen before Tony has the chance.

He feels obligated to help her out once she’s there, because Fianna’s manifestly not a housekeeper
substitute, or any other substitute for that matter. She’s really his guest, but every time he sits in his
office or goes for a walk during that meal prep time, Tony feels like he’s treating her like a servant
--or worse, his prisoner.

Once he’s there in the kitchen, Tony’s still stuck. He can’t not talk to her, and the truth is, he and
Leigh Balci really were soulmates. They’re attuned to each other, and it’s no less powerful with his
self-imposed restrictions.

He tries various things to cope, to restrict his reactions, to remind himself she’s off-limits, and what
finally helps him is his wedding anniversary, May 1st.

Tony spends the whole day in his office. He ignores the gentle knock on his door an hour after he
usually comes down for lunch. An hour after that he leaves the room to use the bathroom and finds
a saran-wrapped sandwich and an apple outside. Fianna has never done that before, even though he
had gotten wrapped up and forgotten lunch before. Instinct tells him to say thank you, but he takes
it and shuts the door. There are no instincts today. No emotions. Nothing but a blank slate with the
name of Anthony.

He can’t go by Tony on the anniversary of a day he’d been so overjoyed to see Leigh sign her
name legally as his, with the same hand that magic had etched the ‘Tony’ onto, before she’d ever
known he existed.

He doesn’t come out for dinner. Their family is lucky that there’s another coherent, responsible
adult to ensure that Ember has food on this day. Tony doesn’t come out until past Ember’s
bedtime, after he’s chewed off anything edible from the apple Fianna had given him and he’s still
too hungry to sleep.

That’s when he hears them.

Ember’s door is open, and so is Fianna’s. His daughter sounds upset, and Tony feels a horrible
gnawing guilt to realize he’d buried himself in work with his noise canceling headphones on. Em
might have knocked, and he hadn’t heard it.

“--don’t think your Dad would mind if I look, if you don’t want to bug him,” Fianna is saying
gently.

“I just can’t reach it. And I can’t use the grabby, ‘cause it’s metal.”

“That makes perfect sense. Here, let me move this a little bit and reach back, okay?”

“Okay.”

He’s flattened along the hallway wall, listening.

“There, try it now.”

There’s nothing but fabric moving noises, and then he hears the familiar voice and understands.

“Hey, Love Bug.”

“Oh, it’s a hologram,” Fianna says. “I’ll let you--”

“Stay, please? Stay?” Ember begs.

Fianna’s voice is gentle. “Wouldn’t you rather your Dad--”

“He never watches this on today. And I just want--”

“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay. I’ll stay. Go ahead.”

He slides down the wall, his legs unable to support him. There’s hardly anything he’d refuse to do
instead of this, tonight.
Hey, Love Bug.

I have some really exciting things to tell you, and a sad thing, too. Did you know that
your Mama has a Mama? I have a Daddy too. A few years ago, something happened
and they had to go away. But sweetheart, there’s a chance they could come back, and I
wanted to tell you about them.

Your Mama’s Mommy is a really good cook. Her favorite thing to do is make spaghetti
sauce herself, just like Mama sometimes does. It takes a really long time, and
sometimes when she did that, she’d make brownies with me, and let me lick the spoon.
My Daddy is a carpenter and a farmer. A carpenter is someone who makes things out
of wood. Your crib is something he made.

One of the most wonderful things about being a Mama is getting to watch your
children grow up and find out what they’re like. My Mommy had five children. I was
the middle one! That means you have two aunts and two uncles, Ember, and pretty
soon, you’ll get to meet them!

I wish I had time to tell you everything I love about my family. But right now, Love
Bug, I wanted to tell you how much I love you.

You’re still little, sweetheart, but I can already tell what kind of a person you are.
You’re smart. You pay attention to what’s happening around you, and you ask
questions, which is good. People like it when they get to tell you about themselves,
about the things they know. They love it when you listen. It shows you how much you
care about them.

I can see your Daddy in you, in the way you decide what you like, in your questions
about how things work, in the way you figure out what to do when something doesn’t
work right. I can see me in you, too. You’re so loving, honey, you reach out and share
that big heart of yours with everyone you can. I’m going to need you to keep doing
that, Ember, because it’s time for me to tell you the sad thing.

You know how sometimes when you want something, you have to give something else
up? Sometimes, Ember, we have to do that even when we don’t want to, and sometimes
we choose to do it, even if it’s hard. I have to make a choice to do something hard,
Ember, and there’s no way for me to do it without making you and your Daddy sad. It
makes me sad too. I don’t want to do it. But if I do this thing, Em, I can bring back my
Mommy, my Daddy, my brothers and sisters, and the people they love, too. I can make
a choice that brings back a lot of people.

You might not understand this now, but the truth is, five years ago a lot of people lost
their Mamas. A lot of people lost their Daddies. They lost their children, their aunts,
their uncles. Their husbands and wives. They didn’t have a choice.

This thing that I can do? I can make the choice to leave you and bring them all back. I
wish there was another way.

The next time you go outside at night and see the stars in the sky, I want you to know
this: there are whole worlds full of people up there. And those people lost their Mamas
and Daddies and children too, just like the people on our planet did. For the last five
years, Ember, I would look up at those stars and I would know that they were missing
their family, just like I was.
 But when you look up and miss your Mama, Ember, you can feel something different.
You can know that those people have their Mamas and Daddies and children back.
They aren’t sad, Ember, because your Mama and Daddy made the choice to help
them.

And at least some of them are going to KNOW, Ember, that it was because a little girl
had to give up her Mama to make it happen.

I chose to be your Mama, Ember. It is one of the best things I’ve ever gotten to do. And
today, I am choosing to save those people’s families. I really wish I could do both of
those things at once. I love you so much, Ember. If I can’t be with you and your
amazing Daddy, I can at least heal the stars.

Close your eyes, sweetheart, and try to sleep. I love you.

Oh hush thee, my darling

The night is upon us

And black are the waters that sparkled so green

The moon o’er the combers looks downward to find us

At rest in the hollows that rustle between

Where billow meets billow

There soft be thy pillow

Oh weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease

The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee

Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas

He practically knows the whole thing by heart, by now. It’s long since stopped making him into an
inconsolable wreck, but it still hurts, every time.

Tony’s on the floor outside of Ember’s room, his legs up, arms crossed over his knees, hands
dangling. His head is resting on his arms, and there are damp spots on the top one where his tears
have fallen.

The soft sound of footsteps alerts him to the fact that Fianna is probably leaving Ember’s room.
She pauses beside him.

Tony doesn’t know what he wants her to do, but he wants her to do something. And she does.

Gently, so soft it’s barely a touch at all, she slides her fingers through his hair in a caress. Then she
walks straight into her room and shuts the door.
 It’s just what he needed.

Chapter End Notes

Song at the end is Rudyard Kipling's Seal Lullaby, something I made up a melody to
when *I* was eight years old.
 Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Summary

“Go, man. Fix it.”

“There’s nothing to fix. I’m not kidding, we’re not involved.”

“Seems like you’re going to turn around and find out you’ve been involved for months
and neither of you realized it, but that’s just, like, my opinion, Man.”

“You really are a dad if you’re actually quoting The Dude at me,” Tony laughs. “I’ll
go find a hotel or something.”

Rhodey looks at him. “She lives with you?”

Chapter Notes

It's been quite a journey, but I do want to remind you folks that this story really will
have a happy ending (and there's one big twist coming, yet), and you'll be pleased with
it, I'm certain of that! So don't fret!

ALSO: this is not an 'April Fools' chapter. Just in case anyone's worried.

Chapter Twenty-six

In May, Tony, Fianna, and Ember start watching movies on Friday and Saturday nights, on the
couch in the rec room. Fianna makes fantastic popcorn from scratch.

In June, they make S’mores by the fire near the lake so often Tony buys a really high-end firepit,
and Fianna goes on strike for a whole week because it’s so expensive. He and Ember have to lure
her out by both promising to eat all their vegetables.

In July, Ember is scheduled to spend two weeks at the Balci farmhouse, and Tony will spend one
of those weeks at Rhodey’s. Fianna promises them both that she’ll be happy alone at the lake
house for that week.

Tony fully expects a confused call from his in-laws asking to explain something that Ember’s said
about Fianna, so much so that he checks his phone almost every hour for the first few days.

“What do you think is going to happen? Is one of your in-laws pregnant and about to pop, or
something?” Rhodey asks him.

“Got babies on the brain?” Tony asks, in turn.

“Just making them,” his friend says, grinning.

“Congrats in advance, on both the trying and the succeeding,” Tony grins back.

Rhodey looks at him, sits back on the couch and sighs, angling his head a little.

“What?” Tony says.

“You’re eating better, or something. More relaxed-- Tony?”

Fuck. “Don’t.”

“Do you? Have someone?”

“No.”

“I think you do.”

“I’ll tell you what I have,” Tony says, feeling reckless. “I don’t have a girl friend. I have a friend. I
have no intention of making babies with her. I have a friend who cooks for me sometimes. It’s
nothing. Movie nights with Ember. A female role model. Fuck off.”

“You are awfully defensive for someone trying to persuade me there’s nothing to defend yourself
for.”

“You think I don’t worry about what it looks like to my own stupid lonely heart?” Tony says,
hoping if he pushes hard enough into ‘Feel Bad For the Widower’ it’ll get Rhodey to fuck off. “I’m
handling it. Besides,” he reminds himself aloud. “She’s out of remission. Cancer. Shit, she’s
probably been hiding symptoms from me. There’s no way she isn’t.”

It’s as if mentioning it knocks the rust off of his memories about the cancer in the iron box he’d
hidden that information away in his mind.

“You sure it’s still lonely?” Rhodey asks, after Tony’s sat there ramping up in worry about
Fianna’s medical condition for a minute or two.

“Rhodes, go knock up your wife and leave me out of it.”

He feels around for his phone, and the reckless, impulsive mood has him dialing the number of the
phone he got Fianna.

When she answers, she sounds concerned.

“What happened?”

“Are you having symptoms from the cancer?”

There’s a long silence, and then she says, “What?”

“I repressed it. Locked it away. Along with the rest of the things I found out when we first met.
Except those things can’t hurt you anymore and this can. So, are you?”

“Tony, it’s 10 at night on a Wednesday.”

“That’s a yes, then. I should come home early and drive you into a clinic! What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I’m a grown adult woman who is in contact with a gentleman named Nick Fury,
who has provided me with a perfectly qualified doctor with whom I make telemedicine calls. Which
is none of your fucking business. Have a good evening, Tony.”

With that, Fianna hangs up.

“Did she break up with you for asking?” Rhodey asks, all amusement gone from his face.

“It’s not that kind of friendship.”

Tony feels like shit. Fianna’s perfectly right, her health is absolutely none of his business. None of
the things he can think of to do from a distance will help at all, either. Nearly all of them cost
money, which she’d hate for him to spend on trying to make amends.

Suddenly the last thing he wants to do is be visiting his friend’s house while the two of them are
thinking about expanding their family. He’s intruding. He wants to be home, he wants to mope in
his own bed, wants to know Fianna is safely sleeping in the bed one room over. He wants to know
she’s not in pain, that if she is, she’s handling it, that she’s not ignoring it, pushing through some
symptom that could turn deadly if she’d just noticed it earlier.

The next morning he’s surly and sarcastic, and by lunchtime, Rhodey’s pulling him aside.

“Go, man. Fix it.”

“There’s nothing to fix. I’m not kidding, we’re not involved.”

“Seems like you’re going to turn around and find out you’ve been involved for months and neither
of you realized it, but that’s just, like, my opinion, Man.”

“You really are a dad if you’re actually quoting The Dude at me,” Tony laughs. “I’ll go find a
hotel or something.”

Rhodey looks at him. “She lives with you?”

Fuck.

It doesn’t take long to gather his things. Rhodey doesn’t have to follow him around and ask more
questions for Tony to feel like he’s being interrogated. There’s no way to convince his best friend
that everything to know has already been ferreted out.

“See you, tell Leshia I’m sorry I had to go.” Tony says, hopping in the rental, and rolling down the
window.

“What’s her name?” Rhodey asks pleasantly.

He grins. “Nunya.”

“Tell her she’s doing great work. You look happier than I’ve seen you in years.”

Tony rolls up the window without answering with anything more than a single held up middle
finger, but the damage has clearly been done.

***

He’d taken an actual taxi from the house to the airport, unwilling to leave one of his cars at long-
term parking. What he should do is fly up to Pennsylvania and impose on his in-laws, but he just
wants peace and quiet, so Tony does that, but the billionaire way. He takes a taxi from the airport
to an REI because it’s what’s open, buys some camping supplies, has the driver drop him off a mile
from his house at sunset, and walks home.

Tony sets up the tent at the far edge of the property, in a place not visible from the house. It’s a
three person tent, because the one person tent is more like an Ember-sized tent, or maybe a person
who isn’t used to any fucking personal space -sized tent.

Because he’s awesome, the wi-fi reaches out this far.

He’d pitched his camp on Thursday night, and on Saturday morning, Tony wakes up to the smell
of coffee.

He’s completely certain he’s either hallucinating or daydreaming, right up to the point where he
unzips the tent and sees a stool with an open, steaming thermos on it, and a note.

You are entirely ridiculous.

Come home.

He scrambles for his phone inside the tent and sends Fianna a message.

How long have you known?

She leaves him on ‘read.’

It’s his property, so he leaves the campsite still set up, grabs the thermos, and marches up to the
house. It’s unlocked.

She’s not in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the rec room, his office, Ember’s room,
or the bathroom. Tony tries the door to her bedroom before knocking, only to find that it’s locked.
He knocks, belatedly, knowing that the action he just took to try to barge in has probably done him
no favors.

As expected, she doesn’t say anything, and doesn’t answer the door.

He’s petulant enough to knock for longer, but he knows her. She’s at least as stubborn as he is.

After standing outside the door listening intently for five whole minutes, Tony goes into his
bedroom and pulls open the adjoining door.

Fianna is sitting on the bed she let him buy for her, cross legged, hugging a pillow. She looks
completely shocked to find that he’s found a way in.

The problem is, he doesn’t have any idea what to say.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

“I didn’t know there was a second door,” Fianna says, still wide-eyed.

“This used to be a nursery. There’s no lock on your side, only mine. Otherwise--”
“Otherwise your enterprising daughter would have locked both doors and wreaked havoc while
you pried the hinges off?” She offers him a wry smile. “Middle kid of five, remember?”

“The medical stuff--” Tony blurts out, stopping only because Fianna holds up a hand.

“It’s bad, not as bad as it could be, I’m not in pain, just tired sometimes. And it’s still none of your
business.”

“Are you going to sic Fury on me?” he asks, wondering how much of an undercurrent of
discomfort he’s been missing from her. For months, Tony’s shut nearly all of his emotions down
around Fianna, seeing it as the only way to prevent himself from getting attached to the ways she is
just like Leigh. It was probably the right decision, too, considering how he has reacted in the past
few days after turning them all back on out of concern for her health.

“Do you mean, am I going to tell him you put me in a room with an unlockable, adjoining door that
leads to your bedroom?” Fianna asks archly, clearly in complete control over whether Tony spends
the next ten years in some sort of dungeon of Fury’s devising.

“Please do not.”

“Then go. Sleep. Thank you for showing me some more progress towards the thing I asked you to
do that first week.”

He backs up so that he’s standing in the doorway to his bedroom. “You think all of that shows you
I’m not broken?” Tony’s beyond dubious.

“Yes, actually. Good night, Tony.”

She gets up and walks toward the door, which opens into her bedroom, meaning she can push him
completely out, if he lets her.

“Fine. Good night,” he says, letting the door shut. Because it’s one hell of a last word on the
subject, Tony throws the deadbolt for the door on his side.

Her trill of laughter banks a small fire in his gut that doesn’t putter out for hours.

***

Ember isn’t coming home until next Monday, almost nine days after Fianna’s coffee offering.

Tony holes himself up in his office and attempts to shut his emotions back down the way they have
been for the past few months. For days he tries to lose himself in one project or another, only to
find himself pausing in the middle of some schematic, thinking back to whether there had been
pain on Fianna’s face as they carried S’mores supplies back into the house late one night, and she
tripped on something. He remembers that she’s fallen asleep for the past few movie nights, and
wonders if that’s just a function of the movies or a symptom. Her appetite has decreased, but is that
because she doesn’t like the fresh foods available in the summer as much as what they ate during
spring?

She’s taken to making crock pot meals or leaving out materials to make sandwiches, so Tony’s
eaten most of his meals alone for days on end. At ten in the morning on the sixth day, he decides to
confront her. Not accepting proper treatment is a sign of depression, and depression might mean
she’s not recognizing the extent of the advance of her cancer, or dismissing it. He… he doesn’t
want anything to happen to her at all, but the second worst thing is for any of it to happen earlier
than expected.
He steps out into the hall and hears a recognizable phrase in a recognizable voice.

It’s Leigh’s holographic message to Ember, being played in Ember’s room-- but Ember’s in
Pennsylvania.

He walks over to Em’s room to find Fianna kneeling on the floor, watching the hologram. Because
of where it’s kept in the room, he can see her in profile. Her expression is best described as
wounded, her body language tense, nearly pretzeled. Tony steps inside, visible in her peripheral
vision, because Fianna turns her head, sees him, and scrambles over to turn off the recording.

“Shit.”

“What--” Tony starts to say, but Fianna interrupts him, still crouched on the floor, almost as if
she’s begging him to not be angry.

“For five days you never came out of your office until past lunch-- I…”

“So for five days you’ve come in here and watched-- Why?” He’s baffled. She looks like she hasn’t
slept for any of the five nights in between; her hair is in a messy, matted ponytail, her shirt is
inside-out (and might actually be his shirt, he recognizes the AC/DC logo), and she’s wearing
fuzzy red pajama pants.

Fianna looks over at the square holographic projector he’d built for Ember, her expression a little
haunted. “She and I are so alike, I mean, of course we are. We enjoy a lot of the same things, have
even made a lot of the same choices.” She shakes her head. “She’s so healthy, so happy, so vital,
and less than two days later, she’s gone. I guess I’m just trying to understand.”

Tony wants to defend Leigh, because it sounds an awful lot like Fianna’s calling her ungrateful, but
she’s erratic today, mercurial. In an instant, she goes from a lump of unhappy confusion, to a blaze
of outrage.

“She has everything, anything anyone could want, at that moment. I just don’t understand! How
could she make that choice?” Fianna stands up and backs away from him, shaking her head. “I’m
the same person, almost, and I couldn’t.” She meets his eyes, an unreadable expression in her own.
“I couldn’t,” she repeats, all the fire gone from her voice. “What kind of a person does that make
me?” Fianna’s whispering, now. Miserable. “I couldn’t give up that life. If I had you, I couldn’t
give you up. Not for anything.”

Fianna runs from the room, pushing him out of the way as a consequence of where he’s standing in
relation to the door. He can hear her frantic feet on the stairs, hears the front door open, never
hears it close. He’s rooted in place. What she said echoes in his head, and he has to strip the words
apart from each other to define their individual meanings before he can let them fall back into the
confession he’s pretty certain they were.

It’s one thing for him to fight an attraction to her. That’s almost a given. On her side, though?

“I’d probably have a crush on me if I had rescued myself from that damned place,” he says aloud.

It sounds hollow. A rationalization, and a shitty one at that, once again removing her agency as a
grown woman. He’d showed up in her completely separate, autonomous universe without asking
her if she needed him to fuck her life all up. Once he’d done so, he’d stolen her away, just like
Ember had said. A reasonable woman would be angry with him. A reasonable woman would have
asked Nick Fury for a goddamned extraction by now. A reasonable woman wouldn’t stand in his
daughter’s bedroom and confess she has feelings for him, feelings she’s struggling to understand
by watching his dead wife’s suicide note.

“Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist, but I can’t buy myself a normal life for any amount
of money,” he mutters.

Tony puts the hologram back on, wanting to fast forward it so that Ember doesn’t find out that the
adults in the house have been messing with it. He watches her brown eyes fill with shining tears
that she manages to hold back with her iron will.

Five years have nearly passed, four of which he’d spent searching for a way to send this version of
his wife back to her version of himself. All the while knowing that he’s no longer that man. All the
while knowing that success would mean losing a second version of Leigh Balci-- and during none
of those four years did he ever really pause to think of how that would feel. That he would have a
kinship with the woman he’d persuade to do it.

Only now does Tony realize that he could have just as easily found a healthy version of Leigh, a
practical carbon copy, and grown old with her, for that matter, asking her to come with him to
Vormir and jump only when it became clear that their lives had reached their twilight. Hell, he
could jump, after instructing her to give the stone to her alternate self. After all, as Tony had told
Ember, he knows exactly where his Leigh is in every place she exists in time. Those moments are
immutable, except for maybe the very last few.

To save his wife for a version of himself he’ll never be again, Tony never needed to find Fianna, a
woman with a rapidly expiring lease on life. But now that he has, he doesn’t want to picture what
would have happened if he didn’t.

He sinks down to a kneel, just Fianna had. Leigh does look vital. She’s practically sparkling with
energy, and she looks so young. Tony shakes his head. He used to watch this and feel like if only
he could find a way to breathe life into this hologram, she could step free of it and into his arms
where she belonged. But this woman will never be his again, he realizes. Leigh Stark is a person
from his past.

Even if he could bring himself to ask Fianna to cheat the last weeks, days, hours, and minutes of
her life to snatch the Soul stone away before this woman sacrifices herself, he’ll never reap the
benefits of it. It had been a good plan, but the hubris required to perpetrate it is just not the person
he is, anymore.

Tony reaches out his hand and traces it along the edge of her hairline. He gestures, and the
hologram pauses.

“I love you,” he says to her. “I’m sorry that fighting your sacrifice for so long made it hurt so much
more.” He closes his eyes. “I just wanted more time,” Tony whispers.

Without opening his eyes, he gestures for it to continue playing. With the sound of her voice
singing Em’s lullaby following him out of the room, he goes into his office and shuts the door.

For the rest of the day, he blasts metal music so loud there’s no way Fianna can’t hear it from
wherever she’s walking. He’ll pay whatever fine the neighbors rustle up for him, if he has to.

***

Ember’s due back in two days, and Fianna’s avoiding him like the plague.

Tony takes those two days and rebuilds the secret entrance to the Quantum Tunnel. He’d installed
Fury’s shielding, but the basement still looks like there’s a passageway leading to a brick wall,
which basically screams ‘secret room.’ He has an email notification set up for vintage/old board
games, and that Saturday morning he gets a hit. It’s a big lot of boxes with partial game pieces,
sold by a game store that suggests the buyer should use them for an art wall or something. He uses
the suit to fly out to grab the stuff, taking an Uber back to the house.

Fianna had taken a shower while he was gone. The smell is soothing. It feels like home, in a way
that makes his insides twist up when he thinks about it too much. He ruthlessly suppresses any
temptation to wonder things he shouldn’t, like whether she thinks of him, while in there. Or what
she wears for the walk from the bathroom to her bedroom. They’re new thoughts, but they don’t
feel as new as he would have expected. It’s as if he’d been applying some kind of filter on those
thoughts, hiding them from conscious understanding.

Tony builds his fake bookcase door with meticulous, desperate focus, because every time his hands
still, the filter drops, and intrusive, delicious, unexpected, heady thoughts present themselves.
Apparently, this viral attraction to Fianna that has been multiplying undetected in his system has
reached critical mass, and his immune system is helpless against the onslaught.

Not even making the trigger for opening the door hinge on a game based on time travel is
distracting enough, though he does open the box to examine the rules before he glues it into place.
If it looks interesting enough, he might get it for Ember, as a joke.

There’s a stack of cards, and he flips one up. Out of Time, it says. Tony doesn’t know anything
about the rules of the game, but the description on the card hits a little too close to home for him.

Play this card on an opponent, and their Protagonist will immediately age up to
Elderly, limiting them to one more move before having to choose a new Protagonist.

I just wanted more time, Tony had said, to the hologram of his wife.

He puts the card back and glues the box together, unwilling to read about the gameplay anymore.
Fianna’s one bad card away from having a single move left, too.

Tony starts working on the wires for the door, but the music blasting from his phone isn’t quite
enough. He heads upstairs for a bluetooth speaker, because he hasn’t wired the basement for sound
like the rest of the house. As he jogs around the corner from the basement stairs toward the ones to
the second floor, he sees Fianna, her hair down and damp, carrying a sandwich and a thermos
toward the front door. She sees him too, bites her lip, leans her head down, and power walks out
onto the porch.

The look on her face makes him feel guilty. Tony recognizes longing when he can see it.

***

That night, the night before he goes to pick up his daughter from her time with his in-laws, Tony’s
body burns away yet another filter.

No, he tells himself, when he wakes up with an erection after a dream featuring Fianna. Not for
you.

These thoughts are easier said than done, for his lonely body and his lonely heart, though.
Especially when he suspects she’d be willing.
 ***

“Why are you fighting?”

Tony sighs. “Em, we’re not fighting. Being an adult is hard. It’s even harder when you’re not in
your own universe.”

“I don’t think being an adult is hard at all,” she says, crossing her arms.

“That’s because we have more money than God.”

“That’s not possible, you know. But you should stop fighting. She looks sad, Dad. That’s not okay.
You should fix it.”

Tony didn’t know Fianna looked sad, because in the week since Ember came back, he hasn’t seen
her for more than two minutes at a stretch.

He was never a man that enjoyed the chase when a woman was ‘playing hard to get.’ That is
definitely not what Fianna is doing, but the effect could be argued to be the same, and this time?
It’s working. She’s on his mind all the time, and he’s rapidly losing plausible deniability. There’s
only so much you can think about a person during a set period of time and still deflect it toward
‘just worrying about her health.’

He tells Ember, “I don’t think she wants my help this time, Em. I don’t blame her.”

Ember sighs and flounces upstairs. On the way, he thinks he can hear her saying, “It’s your fault
she never answers the door at night anymore,” but he’s not sure.

If his daughter is knocking on Fianna’s door instead of his, at night, Tony thinks that probably
ought to be addressed. First, though, he wants to talk to Fianna about it. He’s keenly aware that
Ember misses a mother figure in her life enough to manifest that desire in Lego form, but she’s also
sensitive to others when she’s close to them. If he asks Em about it first, she might get an
inadvertent message to leave Fianna alone completely, and then Fianna will be even more isolated,
and so will Ember.

Fianna is a night owl, he knows, so he knocks on her main door at 10 PM, softly, so as not to wake
Em with the sound of the knocks. There’s no response. He tries again, a little louder, but, nothing.

Tony goes into his bedroom, unlocks the deadbolt separating his room from Fianna’s, and knocks
on that door, to no avail.

“I really need to talk to you. I’m going to come in.”

He waits a good minute and a half to give her time to cover up if she’s not dressed, and walks in.

The room is empty.

Tony immediately figures out where she is, and he’s impressed at her audacity.

Fianna’s at his fucking campsite, he’s certain of it. She’s probably been sleeping and staying out
there for over a week.

He’s wearing cloth sleep pants and a black wife beater, but he doesn’t change, doesn’t put on
shoes, either. Tony just heads out into the sweltering night to where he’d left the tent set up. His
custom-built LED flashlight made of Damascus steel has a ‘moonlight’ mode that doesn’t cast a
bright beam but does illuminate his path just enough not to warn her that he’s coming.

When Tony catches sight of the tent, he sees that it’s lit up inside. He thinks he should have turned
off the fucking wi-fi booster first, to make her wonder if it stopped working or if he knows.

Tony turns his flashlight on turbo when he gets close enough.

“Gig’s up, Laura Ingalls,” he calls out. “Pack it up, come back home.”

The flashlight’s getting pretty hot in his hand. He turns it off. She undoes the zipper, lets the center
cloth fall in, but Fianna doesn’t step out.

“I’m not a vampire, you know. I could come in there.”

Fianna climbs out. Her movements are jerky with irritation. She’s dressed in tiny shorts and a tank
top without a bra. It is pretty hot out here, probably hotter in the tent, because the insect population
in the summer out here is unreal. She looks disgruntled and adorable, and there’s no way around
the fact that he wants her.

“I can’t believe you love the mosquitos more than me,” he says absently, smacking one on his arm.
He’s been living with the knowledge of his own feelings for over a week, and it’s seeping out
everywhere, apparently.

“Oh, fuck you, you actually know that’s not true,” Fianna hurls at him, aiming her flashlight right at
his face. It’s a Maglite, and he barely has to shield his eyes. “I’m trying, okay?”

Tony puts both hands up. “Wait, what? That was-- Fianna. I was joking.”

“Well, I’m not. So go back into the house and let me get some sleep.” She looks at him and freezes
in place, angling her flashlight from his face down across his chest down to his bare feet and back.
Fianna swears under her breath and climbs back into her tent. He can feel a heat that has nothing to
do with the temperature of the night around them.

“I could pry up the tent pegs and drag you back,” Tony tells her.

“Do it during daylight so I can watch!” she leans out of the gap in the tent and requests through
gritted teeth.

He’s tempted. “This isn’t over, woman,” he promises.

Her response is to zip the door back up and turn out the light.

The only reason Tony goes back to the house is because he knows that Ember’s been knocking on
her door in the night, and she’ll be genuinely scared if she knocks on both doors and gets no
response.

***

Tony has every intention of heading out to the campsite first thing in his Iron Man suit and taking
up the tent to pack it somewhere she can’t find. What happens instead is a knock on the door.

It’s Lacey Balci.

“Your daughter told on you. Where is she?”

***
“I’m not sure I really believed it until right now. That kid has quite an imagination,” Lacey says.

Fianna is standing on the porch wrapped in a blanket that happens to cover the fact that her hair
isn’t as long as Leigh’s was. Her eyes are brimming with tears. “Lace?”

“In the flesh,” her sister says, throwing her arms out. The two women hug for a long time, their
heads so close that Lacey’s black hair falls in with Fianna’s blonde.

In retrospect, Tony realizes he should never have expected his daughter not to meddle in Fianna’s
life. She’s actually done the exact right thing, somehow smoothing over the rough edges of his
fuck-up with childlike innocence by picking the exact right person to break the ice. Lacey came to
see for herself, it seems, instead of calling him and asking what the hell was up. And she’s been
rewarded with probably the greatest unexpected present she could have imagined.

Fianna does some smoothing herself, pretending that she’d just spent the night in the tent for fun.
It’s actually brilliant of her, because now Tony can’t just go dismantle the damned thing, since that
would look like a strange, insensitive act.

Lacey’s brought a bag to stay for a few days. Tony sets her up on the Rec Room couch, because
Fianna’s room is a bit small for two grown women.

“Ember’s probably going to end up challenging Fianna to a cage match for your attention, you
realize,” Tony warns Lacey.

Lacey’s face scrunches up in a delighted expression. “Honestly Fianna is the cutest name.
Especially since she’s always loved it, to the point of trying to name one of the barn owls that
every year without fail. Mom would never let her.”

“I suppose a whole duplicate human is better than a wild animal, so there’s a chance that Miriam
won’t assign baking penance,” Tony muses.

Lacey laughs. She looks over at the door to see if anyone is standing within earshot. “Em suggested
she had a really rough life in her original universe. Not sure how you could have known that when
you showed up there, though?”

It’s one of the nicest ‘do I have to kick your ass’ comments he’s ever heard.

“I did not go over there to replace your sister. Initially I was looking for closure.” It’s the truth, of
sorts. “As soon as I saw the life she was forced to lead, it became a rescue mission. She’s-- it’s not
my place, Lacey, but she’s ill. This doesn’t have the kind of fairy tale ending Ember might be
hoping for. I have fucked up many things in my life, and this whole situation might count among
the top three.”

“Second chances never rest easy,” Lacey observes.

Balci women are generous to a fault, it seems.

***

The three ladies spend the whole day together. By the time Ember goes to bed, Lacey is yawning
and calling herself names for being so sleepy so early. She turns in at 9:30.

Tony’s putting his watch away in his room in preparation for bed when he hears Fianna
complaining under her breath in the room next door.
“Why is this open?” she asks from the doorway, finishing the process of putting her hair up into a
caught ponytail.

“Ember said something about you not answering the door when she knocks at night. The door
being open was me finding out why that was.”

“And it’s still open because?”

“I slept with it open.”

Fianna shuts the door with herself on his side of it, and reaches up to trip the deadbolt. “Good
night, Tony,” she says with quiet dignity.

“You don’t have to do that,” he blurts out.

She freezes in the act of opening his bedroom door. “I’m not your soulmate, Tony Stark.”

“I know. Your first words to me were nowhere near as hurtful.”

It feels like a catalyst moment, where her response could mean a multi-million dollar construction
project has the authority to be built, or scrapped. Fianna can sense it too, he thinks.

“I don’t even remember what they were.”

“I do.”

She shakes her head in disbelief, then turns her back on him, opening his main door and slipping
through into the hallway. Tony lets her think she’s won, listens to her going into her room. He
waits a full five minutes before he walks back over to unlock the deadbolt.

Seconds later, Fianna’s throwing the adjoining door open. She’s got fire in her eyes, her hands
balled into fists. “Damnit, Tony! What are we? Are we friends?”

“Sure,” he says, unwilling to scare her away with conjecture.

“Friends respect each other’s boundaries.”

He hadn’t meant to get angry, but her rationale sends him soaring into outrage. “That’s bullshit,
and you know it. Friends don’t let each other make toxic decisions. Friends don’t ignore each other
when they know they’re lonely or sad. They don’t leave their friends without basic necessities. If I
find out you’re sleeping in that tent again, so help me I’ll chain you to my bed.”

He means it, not necessarily sexually, but as a deterrent. Fianna takes it as gunpowder to her open
flame, though.

“Don’t you dare use how I feel about you against me, you smug, insensitive bastard!” she hisses at
him, stalking over, raising a hand as if to slap his face.

Tony catches her wrist and yanks her closer. “Believe me, it would be self-flagellation.”

He wants to kiss her. He would have, if it had been any other situation, but he respects the kind of
determination it took to sleep in a tent for a week to avoid him. So Tony lets what he wants show
on his face, and gentles the hold on her wrist.

Fianna is at first incredulous. He brushes a light but obvious caress with his thumb across her pulse
point and then opens his hand to let her go. Her unusual, beautiful eyes search his for a few
seconds, and her body weight drifts toward him before she snaps herself back to reality. Tony can
see it happen, the point at which Fianna remembers the kind of world she grew up in, the way that
upbringing twists her hopes into shapes that never fulfill.

“Even if you weren’t just trying to make me feel better, aren’t we the same, in the dark? I could
never be sure you were with me,” she says.

The words sound calculated, like a Hail Mary pass thrown directly to the opposing team,
preventing the winning goal.

“The woman in my dreams these days has eyes that don’t quite match. Hair that reaches just there,”
Tony whispers, reaching over and holding a measuring hand to her shoulders. “If you need to sleep
further away, I’ll hire you to design an addition onto the house, Fianna.”

As he’d expected, Fianna seizes onto the expenditure of his money, not his heart. “You don’t need
to do that, it would cost--”

“The structure’s already there. You’d just be making it visible.”

She backs away from him, and a look of wistful amusement crosses her face. “Sabrina,” she says,
smiling crookedly.

Tony shakes his head, lost. He doesn’t miss, however, that she has already stopped arguing.

“A line from the movie. It’s one of my favorites, the remake with Julia Ormond is lovely. ‘I don’t
know how to believe you,’ Sabrina tells Linus. And I don’t. Know how to believe you. About any
of this,” Fianna says.

“Do you want to believe me?”

Her eyes drift closed. Fianna’s hair is up and she’s wearing something Leigh might have thrown on
in a pinch. There’s nothing about what Fianna looks like right now that denotes the difference
between the two women. But Tony sees her, not Leigh. He thinks he has for a while, now.

“Yes, Stars help me, I do.”

 Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Summary

“Tony?”

He looks over at her. She looks nervous.

“Yes?”

“If I ask you something difficult, will you promise not to get upset?”

“No,” he says casually, looking back at his screen.

“Tony!”

“You asked!” he protests.

Chapter Notes

I've had a few PMs and reviews expressing distress at the idea of Tony and Fianna
being in a relationship, for various reasons. I understand the issue, though I disagree
generally about whether it's 'cheating' or other negative terms. Simply put, this older
version of Tony can't take Leigh from the past without creating the same conditions
that created his destructive grief in the first place. Personally, I'd rather he get the
ending I have planned for him than find someone else, or live a life alone from that
point. I just want to encourage you to bear with me, when you see what I have
planned, I think what I've done makes sense. If it makes you feel better, the story
doesn't end with Tony and Fianna- there's a section of Tony and Leigh before 'the end.'

ALSO: this chapter depicts extreme grief, so this is a warning for that Realistic, but
yikes, dat angst tag be earning its keep

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Twenty-seven

You understand my hesitation

Why I get quiet sometimes

All the ways I've been conditioned

What I think is real, you redesign

It's how you catch me every time

I've been holding my hopes waist-high

So they don't tumble down

And keep me yesterday-bound

I've been holding my breath

Cause I don't want to be let down

But we're too far for that now

So I'm saying it out loud

It's different now

I don't need special attention

Just as long as you are mine

Then there's no reason to mention

What came before

The who or the why

Cause it all adds up this time

~It’s Different Now, Pentatonix

Fianna’s standing in his room, her eyes shut. Tony walks up to her.

“Then believe me,” he says. He leans over, lips close to hers, heart racing. “Take one step onto the
escalator. I’m at the top.”

She opens her eyes. Her unique eye seems to him like it’s carrying the whole world, brown dirt and
blue ocean. Fianna lifts her right hand, almost touches his face, but then looks at her wrist and
shakes her head.

“No trespassing,” she says in a voice rich with sadness.

He watches her step back and head into her bedroom. The sound of the door shutting behind her
has a finality to it that Tony rebels against with all his might.

Shit, he thinks to himself. If he’d only known she was watching the holographic message, he would
have stopped her. While he has been marking the ways she’s different from his wife, she’s been
hewing closer, finding flaws in herself as a result. Tony spent his teenage years wishing he could
be the man his father saw in Steve Rogers, so he knows how hard it is to measure up to someone
who isn’t around to show their imperfections.

What he wouldn’t give to come up with some approximation of Thor’s hammer, to show her she’s
worthy.
Tony shuts off the light and lays in bed trying to think of one. When he does, it’s the only thing that
prompts him to sleep.

***

Day two of Lacey Balci’s visit starts with a long walk around the property. Fianna’s with two
people who will absolutely contact him if she seems like she’s faltering, so he feels comfortable
leaving the area to pick up some food for the next two meals.

Tony comes back and sets up lunch (wraps from Roly Poly) and heads up to his room with a
sharpie, so he can check something in the mirror.

They come home while he’s up there, and he jogs down the stairs feeling like it’s going to be
instantly obvious to all three of them that he’s wearing his heart on his sleeve. Literally.

Tony hugs Ember and helps her take off her tennis shoes, as one knot has gotten tangled and turned
into a snarl that’s hard to untie. The two of them walk into the kitchen, and Tony leans on the
island as nonchalantly as he can to advise her on which wrap to pick for herself.

Lacey’s already in the dining room, and soon Ember’s rushing after her, gleeful that she gets her
aunt to herself for a short while. Tony holds still and waits. Because she obviously thinks she’s the
square peg in a round hole, Fianna stops on the other side of the island and regards him with a look
of frustration when he doesn’t move out of the way.

“Come get your food,” Tony says.

“What are you doing?” She’s suspicious, but he likes that. It means she knows him well.

Tony smiles. He turns on the charm, pushes it, lets how he feels show. “Nothing.” If she complains
about how obvious he’s being, it means she’s noticed. He’s an ass, but this is necessary.

Fianna rolls her eyes at him. “Serve you right if I don’t eat anything.”

“So you agree it would bother me if you did that?”

“What are you doing?” she gives up and hisses in a furious whisper, her face flaming.

“What do you want me to be doing?”

Tony can see her praying for strength before she heads over to pick which wrap she wants to eat.
The prayer fails, because she gasps when she sees his arm.

Written in solid black along the top bend of his elbow are the words, Oh my God, thank you so
much!

They were her first words to him.

Fianna’s eyes lift to his, vulnerable and hopeful before she pulls herself back, crushing the
emotions down into neutrality. She starts to walk away.

Swearing under his breath, Tony reaches out and pulls her to him, backing up so they’re out of
sight of the people in the next room. Fianna’s hands are fisted, her forearms pressed against his
chest. It’s the closest they’ve ever been, and his veins are burning with delight at the contact.

“Tony, I can’t--”
“Do it anyway,” he tells her, kissing her temple. She trembles, and her hands spasm, gathering
handfuls of his shirt.

“If I do, I won’t have anything left. I’ll be subsumed,” she groans, but she shifts just a tiny bit
closer.

“Stop comparing yourself to a ghost. If I don’t do that anymore, you shouldn’t,” he tells her.
“That’s the point of this.” He takes her hand, sets it on the words he’s written on his arm. “If
anything, this should mean more to you. I put it there myself. I’m the one choosing you.”

Fianna sighs, her eyes closed, but when she opens them, she smiles. “You really are just--” Without
finishing the sentence, she lifts herself up on her toes and presses her lips to his.

He’s wanted this for so many hours straight Tony can’t hold himself back. He bands an arm around
her waist, buries a hand in her hair, and turns them so he’s crowding her against the wall. Fianna
kisses like she’s stealing joy, with fierce determination and sweet advances. He’s desperate to keep
up, loving her unexpected onslaught.

He pulls back only because they hear the sound of a chair being moved in the other room. Tony
reaches up into the cupboard beside them for something, he doesn’t even care what, and Fianna
slips past him, squeezing an encouragement onto his hand before taking her plate to join her sister.

***

For dinner, Tony reveals that he’d gone all out on foods they can roast over the fire. After too
many S’mores and stories she probably wouldn’t be quite old enough to hear about if she had a
sibling to perpetuate them with, he ushers Ember to bed, leaving Lacey and Fianna to chat alone.

On a whim, he inflates the air mattress he pulls from storage in the very back of the closet. The Rec
Room shares a wall with his bedroom, and the truth is, his bed creaks. There’s… no way he wants
to deal with the implications of that, but also no way that he wants to give Fianna time to rethink
their kiss and what it might mean.

The two women talk late into the night, so Tony’s dozing on the air mattress when the sounds of
Fianna opening her bedroom door wake him up.

He’s barely awake enough to catch her when she trips on the mattress walking into his darkened
room. The adrenaline he gets from that simple action is enough to help wake him up the rest of the
way. She’d walked almost directly through the adjoining door, barely pausing to do anything else
in her room.

“What on Earth?” she says, slipping her hand over her mouth when she hears how loud her
shocked exclamation sounds.

“Loud, creaky bed substitute,” Tony admits, falling back with her onto the rubber mattress.

“There isn’t even a sheet on it!”

“I might not have been thinking with my brain.”

Fianna is resting against his chest, her hips beside his hips, bare legs curled up right where he can
touch her. Her tiny shorts have been driving him crazy ever since she changed into them thanks to
the heat from the fire.

“Is now the point where I tell you I know exactly how loud a bare air mattress can sound during
extracurricular activities?” she whispers.

“Is now the point where I tell you my heart is so far gone on you that I’d consider doing this on the
floor?” he says, lifting his head to chase her lips.

“I’m right there with you, because I’m considering letting you, despite--”

Tony stops her by rolling the two of them off of the mattress onto the floor, using his body rather
than his words to explain exactly how he feels, and why.

***

The next three months are a whirlwind of sensation and laughter. They spend a lot of it in
Pennsylvania, where his in-laws embrace Fianna with the kind of generosity he’s always seen in
both Balci women he’s fallen in love with. It’s as if all of them have checked their grief at the door,
along with their worries and concerns about health, the media, and anyone else who isn’t part of
their small familial circle. Ember’s birthday is a joyous occasion, and one of the things she
specifically asks for is a package of female Lego people. Tony supposes it makes sense-- she’d
created lives and storylines for all of the other figurines. Whether or not this is shade that his
daughter is casting on him, she doesn’t think it’s okay to simply take those characters from the
lives she’d given them so they can be placed in families that already exist.

Ember’s teachers all contact him within a month of school starting back up, praising him for
whatever it is that he’s done.

Their idyllic life made up of the most unconventional family on the face of the planet cannot, of
course, continue indefinitely. The result of letting themselves act like it can, though, is that no one
really pays attention to whether Fianna should be the one answering the door, come mid-October.

Ember’s at school, but they’re expecting some packages to make up her Halloween costume
(Ember had thought it would be hilarious if she dressed up as the Infinity Gauntlet, with Tony
dressed as Thanos, and Fianna dressed up as Leigh, but both adults had nixed that idea right out of
the gate), and the Secret Service who guard the property usually bring those right up, knocking and
leaving the packages. So when Fianna went to answer the door, she probably hadn’t thought it
would be a person at all.

“Tony!”

He hears her cry out, recognizes the fear in her voice, and grabs his ARC reactor from the desk,
tapping on a gauntlet as he runs down the stairs.

At the door is Natasha Romanoff, her gun drawn, head cocked sideways. The gun is leveled at
Fianna’s head.

“I need an explanation that isn’t sex robot or an affair with a wayward Skrull, Stark, and I need it
now.”

“Neither of those options require the use of that gun, Nat, so maybe you can fucking stand down?”
Tony says evenly, holding out his palm, repulsor first.

“Black Widow?” Fianna asks. Her voice is still shot through with fear, but she sounds excited, too.
“I’ve always wanted to meet you.”

“Charmed,” Nat says harshly. She’d pointed her gun down at the porch at Tony’s request, but she
looks no more ready to accept what she’s seeing than when he’d first come down the stairs. Nat
snaps her eyes up to meet his. “Tell me what large feature was on the roof of the diner where you
met Fury and I.”

“A giant donut,” Tony tells her right away. He moves to stand in front of Fianna, his own weapon,
the Iron Man gauntlet, still encasing his palm at his side.

“What did I give you there?”

“An injection to mitigate palladium poisoning.”

Nat shifts her head, making it clear that she’s addressing Fianna, though Tony’s blocking most if
not all of her from view. “What part of your body struck the wall when we were attacked in a house
in New York City?”

“I’ve never been to New York. In either universe,” Fianna says. Her tone is placating, but Tony
catches a note of stubbornness in it. She thinks he should tell his former teammate the truth.

Natasha’s expression is withering. “Really, Tony? She’s from an alternate universe? That’s selfish,
even for you.”

“Glad to know you thought there were depths I might not have reached.”

“Do you like sun-brewed tea, Ms. Romanoff? We still get enough light in the fall.” Fianna kisses
his back and walks away. He doesn’t check, but it’s probably into the kitchen.

“How charming did you have to be to manage that?” Nat asks him. She’s really angry, he can tell.

“It wasn’t on purpose,” he says. Of all the people that have met Fianna, Natasha has the potential
to suss his original idea out. If she does, he really doesn’t know what she’ll do. “How’s Bruce?” he
asks, hoping to change the subject.

Nat crosses the threshold, but her expression is stone cold. “I should slap you in the fucking face,
you get that, right? I could interrogate her right now and find a million reasons why you should be
in a jail cell--”

“I took the guess that you’re not much of a sugar girl,” Fianna says, holding out a delicate glass
filled to a precise three-quarters with amber liquid. “I can’t tell you why he came to my universe.
My guess is the answer has a lot to do with grief, as you suspect. But when I left, my life was in
serious danger, and I’ve been grateful ever since. Kick his ass, by all means, but do it for things
you feel hurt by. I can take care of myself.”

Tony takes the opportunity to tap his ARC reactor, prompting full coverage of his Iron Man suit.
“Just in case,” he says, voice distorted by the suit.

Natasha Romanoff does not have to struggle to repress a smile. If she appears to be doing so, it’s
because she trusts you to see it. He’s not so egotistical at this stage of his life that he thinks he
merits her trust, but he’s glad to see proof of it nonetheless.

She takes the tea from Fianna, and the three of them move to sit at the dining room table. “Always
wanted to meet me?” Nat’s expression is challenging.

Fianna’s smile is slow and brave. “It occurs to me that I could make up anything about my
universe, right now.”

Tony taps off the suit. “Don’t forget to tell her about President Rogers.”
“Stop,” Fianna says fondly. “Nothing so drastic. There was a particular reporter who was obsessed
with footage of a red-haired assassin-looking fighter during the Battle of New York. Compiled a
master-cut of footage, and I always thought it was particularly bad-ass.”

She looks down at the table, and Tony thinks to himself, Uh oh, here comes the shoe drop. When
it’s about her universe, there’s always a shoe drop.

“You were killed at the signing of the Sokovia Accords. You saved King T’Chaka’s life in the
process.”

“I like that better than some ends,” Nat says.

***

If he’d been given a choice, Tony never would have introduced two separate groups of people with
a draw on Fianna’s time within three months of each other. By winter, they were spending what
felt like every other weekend with someone, whether it was visiting Clint and Laura Barton and
their family, talking shop with Bruce while Nat, Fianna, and Ember did things he probably didn’t
want to know about, or painting nails with the Balci cousins-- all of the Balci cousins.

Tony starts to feel like they’re a snowball gathering responsibilities and obligations as they slide
downhill. He and Fianna do their best to keep to a schedule for Ember, but as Christmas
approaches, Tony notices that Fianna’s strength is flagging.

He’d once heard about a doomed aircraft, JAL 123. The pilots had done everything they possibly
could to prolong the flight, to keep their passengers alive. Unfortunately the plane itself had been
fatally damaged by circumstances beyond their control, and thirty-two minutes after the initial
explosive decompression, the plane crashed. The efforts of the pilots to keep the plane airborne
had enabled passengers to write letters to their loved ones-- they’d known they were going to die,
and had time to prepare themselves.

Tony had always wondered whether he would prefer to be on a plane with little to no warning
before crashing, or to have some time to prepare. He’d never come to a solid conclusion on that.
After living through Leigh’s unexpected sacrifice and as he’s about to begin a series of months
watching his current girlfriend’s health deteriorate, Tony is still no closer to an answer.

I think I’d just CUT the wire, he’d said to Steve Rogers, all those years ago. Oh, how he wishes
there were such an easy solution for this.

***

They stay back at the farmhouse instead of heading out for carol singing, on Christmas Eve. It’s
mostly because the Balci family’s habit of turning holidays into week-long affairs has been cutting
down on their alone time, but Tony also suspects Fianna’s just not up for the walk.

She settles into the couch beside him in front of the actual fire, slipping her hand up under his shirt
at the small of his back like she often does when they’re alone. Tony likes to joke that she’s his
own personal heating pad.

“We should talk,” she says, her eyes on the crackling blaze across from them.

Tony kisses her temple, then her cheek. “Yes, I ‘like you’ like you.”

Fianna turns her lips into his, presses a warm hand to his cheek to hold him there. It’s a searching
kiss, stoking a fire he hopes they’ll kindle further when she’s finished telling him whatever she
feels she has to say.

“I’m not doing well,” she confesses. “I’ve been pushing myself too hard, keeping it quiet for the
holiday. But we’ll have to ramp back on visits, and I might have to sort out a pain relief solution
sooner than later.”

“What?” Tony whispers, shaken. “That’s too soon. We should have months before that, yet.
Healthcare has to be better here, and you’re happy.”

Inside, Tony’s frantic. He thinks back to the time differential, how long Strange had said she’d
have, when he’d rescued her, how many months that meant. By his rough internal calculation, they
should have another year yet before her symptoms worsen enough to worry about her life being at
stake.

“Settle your mind,” Fianna says to him gently.

“I can’t. You should still have twelve months before you’re feeling this poorly!” Tony knows he
can’t argue his way out of everything, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try.

“For all you know, Tony, they had me on life support for ten months using my plasma for testing
purposes,” she says, pulling a blanket down from the top of the couch and spreading it across her
shoulders and his legs.

“Don’t say that,” he begs.

“Do you want me to make you forget I said anything?” she asks, sliding the hand at his back down
past his waistband a little.

He never claimed to be a well-rounded, responsible person, Tony thinks to himself as he loses

himself in the task of forgetting.

***

They get a reprieve throughout the winter of 2028, but Fianna breaks her leg the week before
Easter, and the scans they do as a result show a catastrophic spread of her cancer. While he waits
for her to be released from the hospital to home care, Tony designs a device she can use to zip
around the house, with an attachment that guides the svelte seating device (he refuses to call it a
wheelchair. Her doctors think it’s a fucking revelation when he brings it to take her home, and they
beg him to patent it, which he will do, once he’s not working on keeping Fianna alive) , or SSD up
the stairs.

Ember’s school allows her to have an extended Easter holiday, the non-holiday part spent, against
Tony’s better judgment, with Nat and Bruce at their house. He’s not sure whether she’s going to
come back knowing how to use some sort of deadly weapon or with science knowledge she should
probably be about ten years older before learning.

Fianna’s exhausted on her first night back, so Tony just holds her all night. In the morning, after
giving her pain medication, he slides back into bed with his laptop.

“Tony?”

He looks over at her. She looks nervous.

“Yes?”
“If I ask you something difficult, will you promise not to get upset?”

“No,” he says casually, looking back at his screen.

“Tony!”

“You asked!” he protests.

“The point of asking is to prepare the person for the difficult question, not give an opportunity to
reject it!”

“Sounds like a flawed system.” He doesn’t think he has the strength to answer anything she’d
consider a hard question, not today. He’s just glad he hasn’t had to lay in bed without her for
another night.

Somewhere in the depths of his mind, a dark truth stirs, but he stuffs it back down yet again.

“Did you come to my universe hoping I could take her place?” Fianna asks quietly.

Tony looks over at her in consternation. “No? You’re not still worried about that, are you?”

“No, Tony,” she says, and there’s a note of chastisement in her tone that touches up a spark of fear
inside him. “On Vormir.”

“I should never have underestimated your ability to ask a truly miserable question,” he says, the
words leaving his mouth riding on a cough of surprise.

“Don’t deflect,” she says, a touch of steel crusting over into her tone.

He closes the laptop, turns his body, sets his feet on solid ground. “Yes.” Getting up, he walks the
laptop over to its case, sets it down. Familiar movements, comforting actions. “I threw out the idea
before I met you the second time.” Tony crosses his arms and looks over at the bed from across the
room.

“I believe you,” she says. “Do you still have the time quantum machine… whatever thing?”

“That’s the technical term,” he says, smiling, hoping she’ll take the hint and continue with levity
instead of gravity.

Carefully, painfully, Fianna starts to lift herself to a seated position. He starts over, but she holds
up a hand. When she’s done, she fixes him with a look. “Maybe we should pick the idea back out
of the trash.”

“Absolutely not.”

Tony has hardly ever in his life been so frightened. The last time he can recall this level of
desperation, he was trying to figure out how to save Leigh. How ironic that his ultimate solution
brought him to Fianna, who has just started the same process over again.

He can’t handle it.

Tony walks out of the room.

“Goddamnit, Tony, you know I can’t follow you!” Fianna shouts after him, furious.

He’s hardly ever run from a challenge in his life, but he’s running from this one. Beside the front
door is a bucket of miscellaneous things that might be useful on the way out the door, one of which
is an old Iron Man bracelet. He grabs it and stalks outside barefoot, heedless of the blanket of
snow. It’d be less cold if he ran, Tony thinks, so he does that, runs and runs until he reaches the
clearing where he first met Leigh. His heart is racing, his feet ache, and he can’t breathe.

Tony jams the bracelet onto his wrist, taps it in sequence, and pulls the mechanism to pop out the
repulsor. Then he fires it, over and over and over again until the small battery inside is depleted and
it starts smoking. Falling to his knees, he starts to cry.

“How many times do I have to repeat history before I’ve done my penance!?” he screams with a
throat raw for some inexplicable reason.

“You’re going to end up getting the police called on us,” Fianna’s voice says from behind and
above him. It’s distorted, and when Tony turns to look, he sees that this is because she’s in his
fucking Iron Man suit, hovering above him.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” he whispers through what feels like shredded vocal cords. He must have been
yelling at the top of his lungs for the entire time he was firing his weapon, he realizes. The ground
in front of him is blackened, a miniature battlefield complete with impact craters and overturned
earth for a good twenty feet.

“Not as much as being stuck in bed hearing you scream like that,” Fianna says. Even through the
distortion of the suit, he can hear how upset she is.

“I’m not sorry,” he says, because he’s not. He’s not.

“Neither am I. I want to do it. I’m telling you now because I don’t think you can get more upset,
and you need to hear me.”

Tony falls onto his back in the snow and feels its coldness seep into his clothes. “I’m not strong
enough to do this,” he says. He doesn’t know if he’s talking about the action of going back to
Vormir, or talking about it at all.

She lowers herself unsteadily, clearly unused to the suit, but doing a damned good job controlling it
even so. Tony would be proud of her if he weren’t so fucking ashamed. “What would make it
easier?”

“My stock answer used to be a time machine, can you believe that?”

“I don’t want to be buried. I hate the idea of being cremated. Wouldn’t it be better if--”

“If your body spent eternity on a shitty planet a million light-years away?” he asks. His tears aren’t
freezing on his face fast enough, but they’re cold when they drip into his ears.

“If I could do something worthwhile, something to help, before I die?”

He’s being unfair, Tony knows, but he’d rejected this option before he loved her, so it’s even more
impossible to him now. “Loving me is worthwhile.”

“You wanted to do it once, you might change your mind again. At least one version of you should
get a happy ever after,” Fianna says. He can tell by the way her voice sounds in the suit that she’s
crying. “Don’t make me sleep out here with you, Tony. Come back inside.”

“Okay,” he says.
 ***

They agree to wait until her leg is fully healed to talk about it.

A week later, Fianna’s weaned herself down to one prescription painkiller a day with supplemental
tylenol. She sleeps a lot more than he’s comfortable with, but she’s coherent and vital when she
wakes up, so Tony will take what he can get.

He finds out just how coherent (read: clever and manipulative) Fianna really is when he gets a visit
from Natasha while Ember’s at school.

“Take a walk with me,” she says when he opens the door to find her there.

It’s a warm spring day, not unlike the day he’d first met Leigh on that very property. Tony fully
expects to get a lecture on making sure Ember’s prepared for what’s coming. He and Fianna have
had some talks with her. The truth is that they’ve kept Ember in the loop on Fianna’s cancer
diagnosis and the realities of her chances of survival long term after Christmas.

Em’s response had been both mature and painful to hear, but it also made sense. After having seen
her mother’s last message to her so many times, one thing had been drilled into Ember’s mind.

“It’s not on purpose, though, right? I mean, Mom made a choice that helped a lot of people. But it
was a choice. She would still be alive right now if she hadn’t have made it, right? You don’t have
that choice.”

“What are you thinking about?”

Natasha’s voice cuts through Tony’s reverie.

“I was thinking about Ember. We’ve talked to her about Fianna being sick, and her big thing is that
she’s not sick on purpose.” He looks over at Nat, whose expression is studiously blank on purpose,
he thinks. It’s a kindness. “Fianna’s not choosing to leave her, you see. It makes a difference.”

“What if Fianna chose a treatment that might take her life earlier than expected?” Nat asks.

“There’s no treatment for fully metastatic cancer, Natasha,” Tony says bleakly.

“Not a treatment, then. A decision.”

His heart sinks. The lesson of his entire romantic life just might be, never fall in love with someone
as stubborn as you are.

“She recruited you?” he asks Natasha.

“I was going to offer to go with you. If it’s too hard-- not just watching Fianna’s decision, but
handing over the stone to your other self, seeing what kind of life he’ll get to have without the loss
you went through.”

Tony holds up his two hands as if framing a photograph. He can picture that life. It’s glorious. He
can’t even picture himself partaking in it, anymore. That younger Tony isn’t really him.

“That’s the only good part. I’m an egomaniac, Natasha. A narcissist. I can bring another fucking
universe into being.” He rocks back onto his heels and tries to smile, but his lips won’t cooperate.
“All I have to do is relive the worst moment of my life-- worse than that. I didn’t have to watch, the
first time.”
 “You don’t have to--”

“I owe it to her not to look away.”

“She really wants to do this.”

He looks up into the sun and remembers lying on his back on a hospital bed staring at the
utilitarian lights overhead, barely a half hour without his wife, staring into them hoping to go blind.
That light wasn’t powerful enough, but this one is.

“I’m probably going to let her. Fuck, maybe I deserve this. Bury me under a single-word epitaph,
Nat. ‘Hubris.’”

“You don’t deserve it, Tony. It’s just that you were never taught not to try something that sounded
like it might work,” Natasha says, her lips twisting into a smile that would have looked mocking on
someone without her subtlety. “Over and over again, technology and power made those things
work. Sometimes magic did. That’s not your fault.”

“Yes, well. It’s time to pay the piper, and all I have left is my girlfriend’s life.”

“She was going to lose that whether or not you met her, Tony. Don’t forget that. She spent it better
here, and you know it.”

“Are you done manipulating me, or would you like to do it some more?” Tony asks her. “I think I
need to go research how to punch a ghost in the skull.”

Chapter End Notes

The phrasing Natasha uses at the end of the chapter had been bothering me for a
while, and I've changed it from 'instead of you' to 'with you.' As originally written, it
came across as though she was offering to fully take his place, but I intended it to
mean all three of them went, with Nat being the 'point' person and Tony hanging back
because of the emotional weight of the situation. However, that doesn't really come
across, and so I've changed the wording to reflect it more accurately.
 Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Summary

They celebrate Ember’s birthday, and Tony keeps his opinions to himself throughout
the morning, but he knows that Fianna is operating on fumes. He loves both of them,
so he doesn’t say anything about it, but when Fianna takes a nap between lunch and
dinner, he goes down into the time machine room with a few of his good flashlights
and the ARC reactor for Fianna’s suit.

They’ve taken to calling it the Honey Suit, both for the hexagonal power source and
its designation as a companion suit to his. Tony sets himself up on a chair, the blank
wall of the basement behind him. He doesn’t have notes. If he listens back to this and
it’s not right, he’ll re-record.

If he has time.

Chapter Notes

Well, we've made it to the last sad chapter of Exile (but not the last chapter)! I had no
idea how much we'd be plumbing the depths of grief when I started this story. I am
sincerely sorry if the promises I made at the beginning weren't enough to warn some
readers of how far it would actually go. I've added a tag or two with an eye towards
making it more obvious for future readers.

The last two chapters have included lyrics from a few songs that really resonated with
me while writing the Fianna/Tony sections of the story. There are probably countless
songs that would apply to Tony/Leigh, and I didn't mean to leave them out, as it were,
but Pentatonix's It's Different Now and The Greatest Showman's Rewrite the Stars are
so beautifully suited to Tony and Fianna's unique struggles that I had to share them
with you. If I had to pick one of the two to encourage you to check out, it's the latter.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Twenty-eight

You know I want you

It's not a secret I try to hide

I know you want me

So don't keep saying our hands are tied

You claim it's not in the cards

That fate is pulling you miles away

And out of reach from me

But you're here in my heart

So who can stop me if I decide

That you're my destiny?

What if we rewrite the stars?

Say you were made to be mine

Nothing could keep us apart

You'd be the one I was meant to find

It's up to you

And it's up to me

No one can say what we get to be

So why don't we rewrite the stars?

Maybe the world could be ours

Tonight

You know I want you

It's not a secret I try to hide

But I can't have you

We're bound to break and

My hands are tied

~Rewrite the Stars, Greatest Showman

Natasha goes in to see Fianna, but Tony goes into his office right away. He’d had a ghost of an idea
when Fianna had used his suit, but with Nat’s visit, he’d gotten a more fully-fledged version of the
same idea.

After all, he wasn’t the only one who struggled on that day in October 2023. If he can hand Leigh
the Soul stone, why can’t he hand her the power to make that day better for more than just his
family?

He starts designing.

***
Hours later, Tony finds out that Ember’s gotten home from school in a very typical way.

“Oh my GOSH! Dad, is that an Iron Man suit for Fianna?”

He doesn’t even bother to close out the screen to a blank one. “Roughly how many times have I
asked you not to walk in on me without knocking, do you think?” Tony asks his daughter.

“How many times is your music too loud to hear me?” she sasses back.

Tony turns his desk chair so he can narrow his eyes at her. She’s unmoved. “Yes, it’s a suit for
Fianna. Might be a little easier to walk around with the energy from an ARC reactor powering
movement. Plus, less chance she’ll hurt herself if she falls down.”

To his surprise, Em leans over and hugs him tight. “You’re always protecting us, Dad.”

***

Because the suit isn’t made yet, Tony does what he often does for Fianna at dinner time-- he
carries her down to the table. He’d brought up the rolling desk chair that used to be down at the
Quantum Tunnel controls, so she can have a bit of mobility.

Tony will be forever grateful for Nick Fury’s interference/intervention after Fianna’s injury.
Beyond making sure she had the right documentation to receive care at the hospital she was
initially taken to, shortly after she’d been stabilized Fury had gotten her transferred to the current
Avengers facility. Doctor Cho had done what she could, accelerating Fianna’s healing by a great
deal, but her cradle had struggled when faced with the metastatic cancer throughout Fianna’s
system. Simply put, the technology wasn’t configured to consider those cells as foreign, so the rest
of Fianna’s healing has to be done the old fashioned way.

The intervention has made a six month healing period something closer to a month, which is not an
insignificant change, given that she’s living with such advanced cancer.

“Woah, look at you!” Natasha says, carrying over a plate of mashed potatoes. “You’re way farther
along than I thought looking at you up there in bed.”

“Why, because I can bend my knee? Woo!” Fianna teases.

“Dad’s making you an Iron Woman suit! And the ARC reactor in the middle is a hexagon, just like
a beehive, like Grandpa keeps!” Ember blurts out, bouncing in her chair. When the other three
adults look at Tony for his reaction, she says, “Oops.”

“No, it’s fine,” Tony says. “Yours sounded way more excited than my announcement would have
been.” He lets out a short breath and makes eye contact with Fianna. “There are a couple of things I
need to decide about it before I get it made, though.” She nods at him.

“The Bartons were thinking of hosting a spring cookout in a few days, we could set up a
brainstorming session,” Bruce says around a mouthful of food. “Can you get the suit ready by
then?”

“Of course,” Tony says.

***

“You are a complete genius,” Tony tells Clint. The archer has a gargantuan pile of hay set up with
a spiral ‘staircase’ of bales leading up to a leap onto it, and the various Avengers’ kids are
completely entranced. Even Barton’s older kids, no longer kids at all but young adults, have taken
a few jumps.

“So you’re set on this path, then?” Thor asks, his expression serious.

“Seems like a waste not to,” Fianna says. “Farm life, right Laura? Never waste a resource.”

“Clint told me you can leave messages embedded in the suits. What if saving Leigh Stark’s life
isn’t the only thing you offer…” Laura trails off, grinning broadly, angling her head to the side.

“What, like warn them to pick off Thanos’s ship right when it shows up?” Natasha says. She’s
been pacing behind the rest of their hay bale chat circle, but now she shoulders her way onto the
stack of three bales Bruce is sitting on.

“Bad idea,” Bruce says, surprising Tony. “Think about it,” he says, standing. “How did you feel
when everyone, and I mean everyone showed up in that guy’s portals?” he points over at the
Sorcerer Supreme.

“That’s just the thing. I wouldn’t even cast them if they weren’t needed,” Strange points out.

“But they were inspiring. There was already a distant news helicopter and two drones up in the air
filming, when it happened. That footage was all across the world in less than an hour,” Bruce says,
gesturing expansively. “I don’t think we want to take that away, even if we do want to change
stuff. We can be prepared and still keep that.” He pats his withered arm. “I wouldn’t even change
this. Changing things too much could make a huge divergence, bigger than any of us would have
wanted.”

“So what’s the worst of what happened? What makes it feel earned without risking a defeat?”
Rhodey asks.

“Second worst,” Aleshia says, nodding to Tony. He smiles and looks down at the piece of straw
he’s been dismantling with his fingernails.

“That’s not quite the right question, is it? What do you feel comfortable sharing with your younger
self, Tony?” Steve asks.

“Save Leigh for her version of my family, that’s a given,” Tony says, choosing his language very
carefully. He sighs, and stands up, resting a foot on the bale he’d been sitting on, and leaning on
that leg. “Sure would be nice to show up there in fighting form.”

“I’m nixing that, if I have the authority,” Laura says, surprising everyone. “You were living your
own private hell, Tony, and I recognize that. But I don’t know if you ever saw the full effect of
what her sacrifice had on the rest of us. I never even got to meet your wife,” she says, tucking back
some of the hair that keeps blowing into her face as she talks. “But I felt a connection to her,
through how wrecked your body seemed to be. The fact that you were practically withered away
made the point more than footage of something that looked like an action movie. You were the
face of the physical and emotional cost of fighting Thanos. I think the world needs that as much as
they need the spectacle.” Laura gestures to Bruce, referencing his point.

“Especially since you’ll both look like that, when you come back. You’ll have, what? A message
from us, maybe? Explaining what to do? Doubt any of us will be interested in sharing that with the
media,” Clint says. “But there won’t be any hiding how half dead you are.”

“A message from me,” Fianna says, beside Tony. “Explaining that there was still a sacrifice, but
this one came from both of us.” She reaches up and takes his hand where it was resting on his knee.
“Pretty convenient that you have heterochromia, at that point,” Scott points out. “They’ll be able to
see the difference, if that message has video.”

“Daddy!” A little boy of about six comes flying toward Scott. He has shaggy brown hair and a
massive amount of straw dust covering him from head to toe. “Mommy wants you to come over so
she can shove you into the straw pile!”

“Sorry, he got away from us,” Cassie Lang says, jogging over. Tony had completely forgotten how
grown up she was. He wonders whether Ember’s teenagehood will zoom by as fast, and doubts it.
Hell, he wonders if Cassie’s already graduated from college yet.

He’s spent so much time trying to fix the unfixable, only to find a new unfixable problem: that he’s
missed the lives of his friends and associates.

“I needed a break, anyway,” Tony says, shooting a questioning look at Fianna. She understands
right away, tapping the armor from her suit on, to help her walk with him. Around them, the other
Avengers and their spouses get up, chatting amongst themselves.

“Need me to slip Hope a twenty for getting you out of the conversation?” Scott jokes, picking up
his son. “I’d need to bill you.” He winks.

“Talking about it is at least easier than doing it,” Fianna says.

As he and Fianna start toward the house, Tony hears Cassie whisper a ‘Yikes’ under her breath. He
wholeheartedly agrees with her.

***

As much as Tony had dreaded the various conversations they had over the three day weekend at
the Bartons, he got a lot out of them. What Laura had said about his appearance had really touched
him, especially because losing her had been one of the things which had driven Clint so far into a
dark realm of misery.

Still, having a plan isn’t comforting when it’s an end of life plan. He doesn’t want to live under the
gun, but he doesn’t want to be without Fianna, either.

Already a tactile person, Tony’s solution is to simply spend as much time close to Fianna as he can.
The days and weeks tick past, spring to summer, summer starting into fall. They celebrate Ember’s
birthday, and Tony keeps his opinions to himself throughout the morning, but he knows that Fianna
is operating on fumes. He loves both of them, so he doesn’t say anything about it, but when Fianna
takes a nap between lunch and dinner, he goes down into the time machine room with a few of his
good flashlights and the ARC reactor for Fianna’s suit.

They’ve taken to calling it the Honey Suit, both for the hexagonal power source and its designation
as a companion suit to his. Tony sets himself up on a chair, the blank wall of the basement behind
him. He doesn’t have notes. If he listens back to this and it’s not right, he’ll re-record.

If he has time.

He gives the command to start recording.

 This is Tony Stark, and I’m recording this on September 29, 2029. My purpose is to
provide a record of the events of October 15, 2023, in hopes that the plan Fianna
Balci and I plan to perpetuate will result in a chance to change some of them for the
better.

When I returned to 2023 with the Soul Stone obtained in Vormir after the sacrifice of
my wife Leigh, I was taken to the medical wing, where I remained while the rest of the
team constructed an Infinity Gauntlet. Dr. Bruce Banner donned the gauntlet and
reversed the Snap. At that point, across the universe, on a planet named Titan, Dr.
Steven Strange began the process of gathering forces across the world to resist an
attack he had foreseen through his use of the Time stone.

The attack is perpetuated by Thanos, who had become aware of our efforts to retrieve
the Power stone in 2014. He attacks the facility, fighting Thor and Rogers before
calling down the might of his army to obtain the Gauntlet he knows is on the destroyed
property. Thanks to the magic users of the Kamar Taj, the might of Earth is brought to
bear against Thanos’s army until ultimately, James Barnes uses the prosthetic arm I
designed specifically to hold the Infinity Stones, Snapping Thanos and his forces into
dust.

Tony takes a deep breath, rubbing the skin of his forehead and between his eyes. He refocuses on
the light on the helmet and smiles wryly.

Maybe I should have learned not to fuck with time by now, but sometimes the only way
out is through. Why am I telling you all of this? Because I’m about to do something
that should get this recording to you, and I just hung out with a bunch of you at the
Barton farm, where we all talked about what we would have done differently.

Not all of the awful things that happened can be changed. Some of them can, though.
Keep an eye on that two pack of prosthetics I designed to hold the stones. If you
REALLY want to piss off Thanos before we turn him into vacuum fodder, use the file
I’ve included with this message. Find Scott Lang’s van and armor it up. You won’t
have much time, though. Maybe an hour, before the ship shows up to fire on the
compound. Don’t worry about the property, worry about the people. We can-- and do -
-rebuild.

I have spent the past six years doing what I promised Leigh I would do, only to find
myself being driven inexorably right back to the same place I was on Vormir. I wasn't
lying when I told her I’d set myself on fire to keep her warm.

So Rhodey, Steve, Nat, Clint, Thor, Bruce, Scott, Rocket, Nebula: don’t fuck this up for
me, okay? If all goes well, your version of Tony gets to come home from Vormir with
his wife, and my daughter gets to build Lego societies where there are two parent
households as a matter of course. If all goes well, I’ll leave Vormir having given the
 Soul stone to two people who get to go home and live out the rest of their lives
together.

If all goes well, the woman I love --the woman I saved from a nightmare world, the
woman who is dying of a cancer that started to kill her before we ever met-- will give
up the chance to die in my arms to break the cycle of grief. But it won’t be broken for
me. I will have lost both Leigh Stark and Fianna Balci, two sides of the same coin.

I go home alone if all goes well. I’m relying on you not to make her sacrifice
worthless.

I also have the ability to check up on you.

Make it work.

Godspeed.

Tony smiles sadly, then leans over to turn off the recording. Sliding the ARC reactor into his
pocket, he scrubs his hands over his face and groans.

“Yeah, fuck ever doing that again. It’s good enough.”

There had been a huge discussion at the Bartons’ over whether or not to reveal the fake Nebula’s
treachery in his message. In the end, the ability to destroy Thanos and his army forever once he
shows up, and the ability to save both 2023 Nebula and 2014 Gamora from Thanos’s ship as it
hovers overhead outweighed the need to unmask her.

He goes upstairs and puts on a brave face for Ember’s birthday party.

***

Two days later, Fianna wakes up beside him in bed with a cry of surprise and pain.

“I think it’s time,” she says. They curl around each other under the blanket until morning.

Tony wakes up with salt crusted around his eyelids.

***

The plan has always been for Fianna to spend the day with Ember. Tony’s there, but it’s Ember’s
day, Ember’s choice. They hike, Fianna in the Honey suit, with Tony there to lift Em up when they
reach an obstacle she’s worried about. His daughter is far more concerned with her own safety than
she had been two years ago, but it can’t be helped. She’s got way more empathy than he ever did at
her age, and the best way to wean her from that worry is to spend less time being concerned about
safety. That’ll naturally happen once Fianna’s not with them anymore for him to fuss over, Tony
knows. It’s a self-solving solution, one he doesn’t want to be grateful for.

They put Ember to bed and head down to the basement. There’s no real reason to have someone
there to sit with her while he’s gone, because no matter how much time he spends on Vormir, he’ll
only be gone for a minute.

Fianna taps off the Honey suit and reaches for him. Only then does Tony see that she’s wearing a
grey long-sleeved shirt with a duplicate of one of his favorite shirts over it, the same one he’d worn
when challenging Loki on the day of the Chitauri attack on New York. It’s Fianna’s way of
showing his influence on her, his ownership of her heart. She looks beautiful, even as tired and sick
as she is.

His comments of appreciation, though genuine, sound distant, even to his own ears. Over the past
months, Tony has mail-ordered layer after layer of ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow’ and ‘not now’
until finally, it’s tomorrow, and he’s buried in bubble wrap and packing peanuts, all of which
absorb the sound of his heart breaking. Working As Intended.

Tony puts on his own ARC reactor, taps in the correct coordinates in time and space (Vormir,
2014, ninety minutes before Leigh Stark jumps from the cliff face and he wakes up with the Soul
stone) on both of their suits, kisses her tenderly, and activates the jump.

“I don’t know why, but I thought it would be more beautiful than this,” Fianna observes.

“You caught some viral Giddy Optimism from Steve, maybe,” Tony teases. He wouldn’t have
thought he had it in him to smile here, but Tony had dreaded this day for a long time, and maybe
it’s easier to smile now that he’s not bearing that weight on his back anymore.

They had landed near the place Tony had parked the Benatar the first time, and both of them fly
their suits toward the edifice of doom that dominates the landscape. He’s concerned about how to
avoid disturbing the other two people already occupying this space, but it turns out that’s been
anticipated.

“Anthony, man of heart. Felicia, woman of soul.”

The voice is familiar, but the words are not. “No parentage, today?” Tony asks in a tone just
edging on derisive. He’s not going to take any of this thing’s shit. Not this time.

“You find my words inaccurate?” The ghostly skull’s robes flutter in a breeze that Tony doesn’t
feel any evidence of. He wonders if it’s caused by the whispers of magic that expose all manner of
secrets. “You come armored with both time and metal,” it says, drifting closer.

Tony doesn’t activate his repulsors this time, but he does throw an arm out in front of Fianna. “Cut
the poetry, Crimson Tide. We’re here on a mission.”

“That much is evident. Yet, while your life force matches in both frequency and resonance, this
woman’s resonance is dissonant. She is not of this place.”

“No one should be ‘of this place,’ Tony says harshly. He lifts up in his suit, repulsors flaring, as he
searches for a path they can follow that bypasses this miserable Sphinx.

“What would you do if I told you that both frequency and resonance must be in harmony to retrieve
the prize you seek?”

Fianna falls back against the wall. They’d agreed that there was no need for them to be particularly
rested for this outing, that a full day of activity would not make much of a difference, might in
actual fact make the task easier. But he’d forgotten this cursed ‘guide’ and its emotionally draining
pronouncements.

Tony cuts the power and drops like a stone, landing directly between the red menace and Fianna.

“I’d leave. I have a daughter who needs me. Is that what you want to hear? That I’m not strong
enough to make the choice to die myself, this time? Circumstances change. I’m a shitty husband,
I’m a shitty knight in shining armor, and I’m definitely a shitty boyfriend, but I’m doing my best
not to be a shitty father.”

“Come,” the skull says, turning its back and floating toward a nearby wall. It turns out to be
somewhat of an illusion, an S bend passageway that only appeared solid due to perspective. Tony
takes Fianna’s hand as they walk, both pausing only to strip away the nano particles from their
hands so they can feel the heat of their connection.

Her grip is sure and strong. He isn’t so certain that his is.

The skull leads them to a platform that looks very familiar.

“Double decker death overlooks. I didn’t predict that,” Tony says.

The skull floats over to hover in the open space, right on the edge, seeming to draw itself up into a
sort of rigid attention. Its cloak even ceases to flutter, but only for as long as it takes for the thing to
speak its next words.

“Rarely has a being come twice to face this bleak precipice. Never has the same being come from
two separate sources, much less with the level of certainty and determination that you both have
shown.”

“She and I are not the same,” Fianna says, pushing past Tony to stand in front of the creature. She
retracts her helmet and points down at their feet, at the second platform below them where Leigh
and Tony are sleeping, curled around each other. “That woman isn’t dying already. She has a whole
vivid life yet to lead. I’m only strong enough to do this now, when I’m trading a few days of
excruciating pain for a moment of terror. And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get on with it.”

Tony’s long since gotten used to the feeling of his heart growing to accommodate the ever-
expanding love he has for this woman. Today, though, he feels like he’s not just adding yet another
tree ring of adoration, but pride, as well. She’s magnificent.

I could live on this for another twenty years, or so. If I have to, he thinks to himself.

The red skull darts closer, its cloak fluttering with sudden and rapid intensity. Tony hooks his arm
around Fianna’s waist, pulling her back down the incline.

“You doubt your sacrifice as worthy?” it asks, incredulously.

“I’m already dying,” she whispers. “Here’s the thing, though,” she says, struggling free of Tony’s
arm. He lets her, recognizing something in her tone that has him clenching his jaw to avoid a smile,
of all things. She beckons the damned thing closer.

When it’s only a foot away, Fianna reaches back for Tony’s hand again, and once she has it, she
squeezes.

“Fuck off, now,” she says, pulling her hand out of Tony’s and activating the gauntlet again, so that
she is pointing both repulsors right at it. “We’re busy.”

“Very well,” the thing says, drifting backwards rather quickly, Tony notices. It disappears from
view.

“Kind of weak, as last words go,” Tony says. “You are scary, did you know that?” he says to
Fianna, tapping off his Iron Man suit.

“Yeah, well, he got on my literal last nerve,” she sighs, falling to a half-kneel. “Probably should
hurry, since I doubt you’re up for drop-kicking me off of this thing.”

“I might never forgive you, yeah,” Tony says, helping her up. The tremble to her gait as they walk
closer to the edge slices through him, despite all of the calluses he’s tried to grow over his
emotions. Then she taps off her suit and pulls the hexagonal ARC reactor from her shirt, handing it
to him.

“Turn it on, I want to say something, okay?”

It’s not okay. He’s not okay. It’s too late to say no, though. He’s a shitty boyfriend, but notthat
shitty. “Okay.”

“My name is Fianna, but I was born Felicia Lauren Balci. I met Tony Stark many years after his
death in my universe, and he saved me from a lonely, miserable existence there. I’m making a
record of this moment, because though what I’m doing will invalidate the need for my namesake’s
death, I’m only here because she made that choice in the first place. I’ll never not be grateful. I got
to love him because you loved him first. My last act is to give him back to you.”

Fianna lifts her eyes from the hexagonal glow of her power source to his eyes. Tony reaches out
and she takes his hand, squeezing. The strength of it isn’t near as powerful as it had been just
minutes ago.

“I love you. I’m glad-- fuck, there’s no time,” Tony mutters, pulling her close, even though he’s
forgotten to turn off the recording. It’ll have to be too bad. He’s not ashamed of anything he’d ever
say to her. “I’m glad my life brought me to you. Even though it ends like this. It was worth it.”

"I love you," Fianna whispers.

They’re both crying, and she kisses his chest. Then, before he is ready, as if he could ever have
been, she steps back once, twice, and falls out of sight.

All Tony can do is activate his suit in the process of dropping to his knees. Seconds later, he blacks
out.

***

Tony wakes in a shallow pool of water. Instead of forcing his body up, he lifts his right hand and
slowly opens it to see that he’s holding the Soul stone.

The hard part is over, he says to himself. If only that were true.

The truth is that this hurts just about as much as it had the first time, even with warning. The truth
is that he better understands the loss, knows what the next few years are going to be like,
recognizes that he’s put his daughter through that on purpose this time, and that she’s old enough
to be warped by it for the rest of their lives.

The truth also is that loving Fianna has been a privilege, something he was never supposed to do,
something he’d done despite all warnings to the contrary, something he’ll never regret.

But he’ll regret losing her.

Always.

No amount of telling himself that she had a miserable, solitary life in her own universe and might
have died alone in a hospital surrounded by politely professional faces helps the way she’s just
 died instead.

After securing the stone in the container he brought, it only takes him a few seconds to fly back
over to the mountain. Instead of heading to the path this time, Tony powers around the outside,
studiously avoiding looking straight down. He looks for the platform where his younger self and
Leigh should still be resting. Catching sight of what looks like the correct outcropping, he heads
for it.

A black robed figure flies up toward him, and Tony angles for the top of one of the rectangular
features that jut up out of the mountain, landing with his arms already crossed, as best he can in his
suit.

“If I have to pop up in five second intervals all over this mountain to distract you while I hand the
stone over, I will,” he threatens. “I’ve got time, now.”

“Your solution was… admirable. You may proceed.”

The thing beckons, and, shrugging, Tony follows it. He’s led to hover with a view of the platform.
His heart pounding, desperation singing in his ears, Tony lands at the very edge, eyes searching for
the two lovers’ intertwined bodies. He sees only his own younger self at first, gasping at the
potential that he’s too late, even though he knows he can simply jump back long enough to fix it,
this time.

Then he sees her. Tony had missed Leigh’s prone body because of how still she lay, but also
because her head was covered by his other self’s Iron Man helmet. As he watches, Leigh Stark
rolls over onto her side, curling her knees up toward her chest in a momentary fetal position. She
tugs the ARC reactor off of her chest and her much-shorter hair drops over her face from where it
had been caught up at the back of the helmet. Leigh doesn’t see him, too concerned with the
business of struggling to her feet.

She looks weak, gaunt, and miserable. To his surprise, Tony doesn’t feel the flood of possessive,
desperate love he had expected. This woman isn’t his. He loves her, but he isn’t in love with her.
Not anymore.

How much he wishes he could share that fact with Fianna. It would probably have made her face
shine with joy, to realize how firmly and solidly his allegiance has shifted.

Leigh’s leaning over and affixing his other self’s ARC reactor to the other Tony’s pants, now.

It’s time.

Chapter End Notes

Did I manage to forget to tell you that 'Balci' is a Turkish surname meaning bee-
keeper?

I was looking through an amazing channel on Tumblr today and found an artist named
Hallpen on DeviantArt, and first of all, ALL the art is amazing, but this drawing of an
older Tony is just absolutely amazing. This is a link because I appreciate the artist's
work, it is NOT an endorsement by the artist of the story, just on the safe side. It
wasn't a commission either, but boy, it sure looks like it, doesn't it?

https://www.deviantart.com/hallpen/art/over-the-years-676662068
 Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Summary

“You’re going to troll Thanos?” she asks, kind of horrified.

He rocks on his heels and grins. “According to the recording, Stephen Strange
arranges for an entire fucking army to fight him, and the world ends up seeing it. We
need to stall him for long enough that the cameras catch the Dustening.”

Chapter Notes

It sure does feel fantastic to be back with Leigh and Tony! It's nearly Easter and I had a
complete blast figuring out how they would defeat Thanos this time. I hope you enjoy
reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The last chapter may be delayed as I have family obligations on Easter. I have timed
this poorly, sorry about that!

Chapter Twenty-nine

You're saying it's hopeless, that I should hope less

Heaven can help us, well maybe she might

You say it's beyond us, what is beyond us?

Let's see and decide

We've been meteoric, even before this

Burns half as long when it's, twice as bright

So if it's beyond us, then it's beyond us

Lets see and decide

And I will still be here, stargazing

I still look up, look up

Look up for love

I will still be here, stargazing

I still look up, look up

Look up for love

Don't you, give up, for me

Don't fall, don't give up, for love

I'm trying to save us, you don't wanna save us

You blame human nature, and say it's unkind

Let's make up our own minds, we've got our whole lives

Let's see and decide, decide

And I will still be here, stargazing

I still look up, look up

Look up for love

Stars don't disappear, they keep blazing

Even when the night is over

~Stargazing, Kygo (feat. Justin Jesso)

Leigh thinks it’s the eighth day when she wakes up with a powerful headache from how tight Tony
had wrapped her hair around his arm. He’s still asleep, but she suspects he probably woke up once
already, because he tends to move his head around in his sleep, and their foreheads are almost
touching. She traces her fingers very gently through his dirty, deflated hair, and he wakes up.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m very disappointed that you’re not a cheeseburger,” Tony
tells her tiredly.

“I’ll only take it the wrong way if you’ve had that thought at any point prior to the last week,” she
says, curving her lips up slightly.

“I plead the Fifth,” he tells her. He sits up and she hisses at the way it yanks her hair. “Shit, I
forgot. Hold still,” Tony says. They untangle her, and when they’re done, he frowns. “Not liking
the symbolism there.”

“Tony, you said to me once that I’d never asked you for anything,” Leigh says. His expression
shuts down, and she represses the need to say or do something that will jumpstart him back to
being Tony again, instead of an iron statue slowly turning to rust out of grief. “I’m asking for this.”
“I can’t give it to you,” he says. He’s not angry, this time, not even stubborn. “I don’t know how.”
Tony lays back down beside her, looking hard at the rocky ceiling. “I can promise you this: if you
do this thing, I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to take it back.”

Leigh rests her head on his chest and makes a mournful noise. She doesn’t doubt he’ll do just that,
and it kills her to picture it. Tony will break himself like a wave on the inevitability of death, and
she knows him so well. He’ll reject any and all mitigation measures by their friends. There’s only
one weapon she has left, and it’s been off-limits for their entire time on Vormir.

“Don’t you dare drag Ember through that,” she threatens. “I told her I was going to heal the stars in
the message I left behind on my phone. She’ll think you’re trying to blot them out.”

“She’s your flesh and blood,” Tony whispers. “She’ll understand.”

***

Leigh startles awake some period of time after cutting her hair free of Tony’s arm. She’s so, so
tired, but the adrenaline rush from nearly losing her only chance not to watch Tony die of
starvation in front of her gets her moving. After she presses his ARC reactor to his pants leg, the
effort it takes to pull her body to a full stand feels like trying to bend a steel rod back to level again.

She focuses on the ground under her feet, taking step after step. Leigh wonders whether she’ll have
the guts to just keep going when the ground stops.

Instead of seeing the edge in front of her, though, she sees boots made of the familiar metal of
Tony’s Iron Man suit.

Leigh stops and stares, her eyes following the lines of the suit up to the closed helmet. “What did
you do, figure out how to project a hologram to guard the edge?” she asks, affection coloring her
irritation. “It’s not going to work, love. I’m never afraid to touch you, and that will put paid to the
illusion.” She reaches out her hand, certain it’ll go right through his chest, but it doesn’t. When
Leigh’s hand flattens out on the cold metal of his chest, his arm lifts to support her. “What?”

“You don’t have to do it,” Tony says. He sounds miserably unhappy, as usual here on this
godforsaken planet.

“Tony,” she starts to say, but he pulls her away from the edge that’s only feet away, drawing her
back across the space from what she thought was his sleeping body. Then he holds up a box,
letting go of her arm to open it.

Inside is a glowing stone.

“Take it. Take him home with you. Bring everyone back. Destroy Thanos. Raise Ember. Be
happy.”

Leigh’s impressed by his illusion, but that’s what it has to be. She’s slept a good deal over the past
few days. He could have used his suit’s nanotechnology to create an entire display. She’d find out
when they walked off of the Quantum Tunnel platform that it was a fake stone, and they’d have to
send someone else to get the real one.

She wants to believe her scenario so much she can almost taste it.

“I want to believe you, but-- him?”

Tony’s helmet retracts to show his face. He’s… different. There are lines on his face she hasn’t
traced with her fingers, a sadness that seems baked into him, as if he’s spent half a lifetime trying
to connect two wires that constantly spark pain at their joining.

“I told you,” he says, a trace of stubborn pride in his voice. “I said I would find a way.”

She starts to fall, her body unable to hold her joyous incredulity at the same time as it keeps her
upright. In seconds, he’s tapped away his suit and is pulling her close. He’s real, he’s solid.

“Ember?” she asks, her face crushed to his chest.

“She’s nine. Smart as hell, as well-adjusted as I could manage, she loves her family, her cousins,
plural. She--” his voice breaks. “She said to say ‘hi.’”

“I can’t--” Leigh shakes.

“It’s okay. She’s so fucking proud of you. But I’d rather she have you in her arms than up on a
pedestal. That’s one of the big reasons why I did this.”

“What did you do?” she whispers, finally pulling back. He smells different but feels exactly the
same.

“This will help explain,” he says, pulling something from his shirt. He pushes it against her chest,
steps back a fraction, and taps it twice.

Suddenly, Leigh’s encased by a suit, just like she was earlier that night. She looks over her
shoulder and sees that, just like his suit had, this one registers the man sleeping as having a
dangerous blood pressure.

It’s not an illusion at all.

The different, worn version of Tony reaches out and taps the ARC reactor he’d just given her, and
her helmet retracts. He seems to be able to tell something’s changed in her.

“You fully believe me now.”

Leigh nods.

“It was worth it, you need to know that. Whatever you find out about what I’ve done, it was worth
it.” He reaches out, brushes a thumb across her cheek, and his helmet slides back around his head.

The sound of his repulsors firing to carry him out of the cave-like platform wakes the sleeping
Tony up.

“What was that?” He sits up, sees that she’s no longer bound to him. Tony struggles to his feet and
launches himself at her, only realizing she’s wearing a nanosuit like his when he’s pushed her
bodily against the side wall of their enclosure. “What?”

“It was you,” Leigh says. She holds up the box the older version of Tony had given her. “Look.”

He takes the box with his free hand and shakes his head as he looks at it. “This is real?” Tony’s
other hand is held tight to his chest, still wrapped in her hair.

They’ll address that later.

“Where would I have gotten this, otherwise?” Leigh asks, looking down at herself. She notices for
the first time that the ARC reactor powering the golden suit is shaped like a hexagon. “He said
there was-- hold on.” Leigh leans more firmly along the wall and looks down at her suit. “How do I
put the helmet on?”

Tony puts the stone in the hand pressed to his chest and reaches out, taps on the hexagonal reactor,
and the helmet slides over her head. He collapses his shoulder on the wall beside her, looking
down. He’ll see the ARC reactor there and put it all together, she knows, but she has to see what
message his alternate self has left.

“FRIDAY?” Leigh whispers.

“It’s good to see you, Ma’am,” the program says, with as much emotion as Leigh’s ever heard her
have.

“There are messages?”

“I’ll play the one Mr. Stark recorded first.”

“Here, watch,” Leigh says, not sure whether Tony can hear FRIDAY’s voice. “FRIDAY, can you
let my hand out?” The nanoparticles retract from her hand, and Tony grips it immediately.

A hologram projects from the hexagonal ARC reactor in her chest. It shows a clearly older Tony
Stark on a simple folding chair, sitting in front of a blank wall.

This is Tony Stark, and I’m recording this on September 29, 2029. My purpose is to
provide a record of the events of October 15, 2023, in hopes that the plan Fianna
Balci and I plan to perpetuate will result in a chance to change some of them for the
better.

“Stop playback,” Leigh says sharply. The image vanishes. “Tony, ‘Fianna’ was the name my
parents almost gave me.”

“We should go back,” Tony says. “Eat something. Save the universe. In that order.” There’s a
guilty quality to his voice that makes Leigh turn toward him and grab his arms. Because she’s still
got the gifted suit on, she can see that the action hurts him more than she meant to.

“I’m sorry,” she says, telling FRIDAY to retract everything back to the reactor housing. “But--”

“You’re here, and we’ve got the stone. We get to go home.” Tony shakes the box with the Soul
stone inside it. That arm is still held tight to his chest as if pinned there by cords wired directly to
his heart. She supposes it is, given how much he loves her hair. “We get to fix everything. That’s
what we both want.” He leans over and kisses her temple. “You’re not allowed to be mad at me for
something I don’t have to do anymore.”

“Yes, I absolutely am!” she says, horrified by the possible implications of what the holographic
Tony said.

“Okay but then I get to be mad that you were about to kill yourself and leave me a widower with a
three year old daughter. Those are the rules,” Tony says, his voice shaking with a mixture of
elation and shock.
Her legs fail underneath her, and Tony taps at her ARC reactor. The support of the nanoparticle
suit is enough to get her upright again.

“Home,” Tony says in her ear. “Together.”

“Yes,” Leigh says, finally smiling. She’ll set aside the haunted, deeply sad look on the face of his
older self for just a while longer. “Home.”

***

They land on the Tunnel platform and tap off their protective suits, leaving Leigh in her new
armor, Tony in his street clothes. The journey itself had been enough to shake both of them, and
Leigh reaches out to steady Tony.

“Are you telling me this actually worked?” Rhodey asks incredulously.

“Leigh?” Bruce says, sounding pleased and worried.

Tony struggles away from her, walking up to Bruce, tapping on his suit’s gauntlet, and punching
him right in the face. Bruce staggers back, but only because the hit was enhanced by technology.

“We’re done,” Tony spits out, turning his back on the scientist.

“No, Tony, don’t-- I asked him--”

“Someone want to explain what’s going on here?” Steve asks, stepping between Tony and Bruce.

“He didn’t send Leigh to Asgard, he sent her to Vormir,” Tony said. “Both of us.”

“I asked him to,” Leigh shouts at him. “We’re alive, Tony, can’t you--”

“It looks like that’s only because the first time around I spent six years looking for a way to save
you!”

Leigh taps off her new protective suit and nearly falls over. Natasha comes over to give her an arm
to lean on. “Please don’t take out your anger on the people trying to save the universe. Save it for
me, I’m the one who said I’d do it.”

“Why do you both look half dead?” Scott says at the same time as Rhodey asks, “Do what?”

“A soul for a soul,” Tony says, walking down the stairs for the platform halfway and sitting
heavily. “One of us was going to have to die for the stone. I wouldn’t let her do it. Were there for
days, stalemate.”

Leigh starts towards him, and Natasha helps her over. She kneels behind Tony and hugs him. “I’m
sorry,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says. “It was just… so close.”

He doesn’t know exactly how close it was-- though, she supposes he does. It wasn’t just close. It
had happened. The only reason they’re alive now is because it happened, because he’d become the
driven, desperate, depressed person he’d promised he would and found a way around it.

“So how are you both here now? With the stone?” Steve asks with a reluctant tone. Leigh can tell
he doesn’t want to poke the bear, but he has to.
“I was about to jump, and Tony stopped me. An older Tony. A Tony who had apparently spent
years looking for a way to save my life, and found it. Someone else jumped, Steve. He gave me the
stone.”

“We need to get them medical attention,” Bruce says. “Can-- Leigh, do you trust me to--”

“Yes.” She kisses Tony’s shoulder again and Bruce helps her to a stand before picking her up.
“Steve, there are messages from the other Tony. I imagine they’re important. I’m not sure I can
watch them, though.” She pulls the ARC reactor for her new suit off of her shirt and holds it out.
“He made this suit for--” Leigh stops and shakes her head, still stunned by what’s happened.
“Steve I think the first time around, Tony went and found another version of me. We watched a
tiny chunk of what he says, and he refers to a Fianna Balci. That was my parents’ second choice of
a name for me.”

Steve takes the device and looks down at Tony, who is being helped down the stairs and onto a
gurney.

“What happened out there?”

“We played a game of ‘who can starve to death faster,’ Steve. I was set to win, but she cheated, cut
her hair off when I used it as a leash. Shit, I think I’m going to pass out,” Tony says.

Leigh starts crying, but taking in the large breaths needed to sustain her misery is incredibly taxing.
“I was seconds from jumping when his other self stopped me. It was-- it was bad.”

From across the room, a rough voice calls out, “Leigh!” It’s Rocket, his expression horrified.

“We got the stone, but you were right,” Leigh says, craning her neck to see him.

“What did you do, donate half your body weight each? No way that would actually work, would
it?”

“Steve, watch the thing,” Leigh says, sensing that she’s about to become delirious.

“I will. Right now.”

***

Leigh wakes up to a horrific crashing sound. She opens her eyes and can’t parse what she’s seeing,
at first, but soon realizes that’s because she’s falling, and her vision is enhanced by the heads up
display inside the helmet she’s wearing.

“FRIDAY, is there some kind of safety mechanism for when I land?” she blurts out, arms flailing,
fear blasting her heart rate straight off of the charts.

“LEIGH!” Tony’s voice calls out.

“I’m here!” she yells, and uncommanded, the repulsors of her suit flare to life. The suit is moving
her arms for her, just as she’d asked, and the end result is that she stops a foot above the dirt and
mud and water sludge that is as close to an approximation of solid ground as there is.

“You were out for longer than me. Other me warned about this, so we put the suit back on you.
Good news: we’ve successfully unSnapped. Bad news: Thanos is here to undo it. Best news: we’re
prepared for him, and we’re going to turn his ass into air pollution.” Tony flips back his helmet so
she can see his expression. He has a bit more color in his face, even a small smile to accompany
the look of smug satisfaction. “Also, I love you, and I told you so.”

Leigh laughs, shaking her head. “You told me…”

“That I’d fix it. I think I’m allowed to take credit for this.” He points back and forth between them.
“Yes, you tried to kill yourself and yes, I am still very angry about that, but it was in service of
saving the universe, so I have decided I’ll forgive you. Eventually. You’ll have to make it up to
me.”

“I’d be happy to, but… we’re in a hole, Tony. What happened?”

He points at something that seems like it’s stuck to the back of his suit. It’s an arm, but it’s got a
shirt wrapped around the hand part. “This has the real stones on it. Other me appears to have
stagnated without you. He designed fake Infinity Stones, which we’ve synthesized and stuck on
the gauntlet Bruce used to bring everyone back.”

“You’re going to troll Thanos?” she asks, kind of horrified.

He rocks on his heels and grins. “According to the recording, Stephen Strange arranges for an
entire fucking army to fight him, and the world ends up seeing it. We need to stall him for long
enough that the cameras catch the Dustening.”

Leigh’s gaining strength just from watching him explain things to her, but he’s still left out
something rather important. “Tony, I love you so much, and I’m glad you’ve got a plan, but: we’re
in a hole. WHAT HAPPENED.”

“Oh!” he says, looking around. “Thanos fired on the compound. Blew everything all to hell.”

“You knew that was going to happen too?” she asks.

“Yeesssss,” he prevaricates.

“You didn’t think to wake me up or warn me?”

“There was a lot going on,” he says. “C’mon, I need to go check the pods we set up to protect
everyone.”

Leigh has no idea what he’s talking about, but she can guess that they’d probably activated her suit,
let her sleep, and set about protecting everyone that didn’t have access to a Tony Stark style
protective nanosuit.

***

They do end up having to use their weaponry to open the pod holding Rocket, Scott, and Clint. In
the process of leading them out, they find Rhodey, who has the fake gauntlet and has been fighting
some weird, terrifying-looking creatures. With him is a green woman and Nebula. The two women
explain that they had to kill the fake Nebula (the general consensus among everyone seems to be,
‘what do you mean, the fake Nebula??’) to prevent her from taking the gauntlet. Of course, the
green woman (she says her name is Gamora, and Leigh makes eye contact with Nebula at this, who
nods with the closest thing Leigh’s ever seen to a smile on her face) and Nebula don’t actually
know it’s fake.

The men all make faces at each other that seem to translate to: should we tell them?

Leigh holds her hand out to Nebula. “Shall we find a way out?”
Nebula’s only concerned with one thing. “Gamora?”

“I’ve got her, if that’s all right with her, of course,” Rhodey offers.

“Is there a reason why I need a metal guardian to escape this situation?”

Tony flips down his helmet. “Not sure where ‘escape’ is, just yet. I think Leigh’s just trying to
make it go faster with a passenger instead of searching and then coming back. Welcome to wait?”

“Ah. Good plan, I will accept.”

Leigh notices Nebula’s wizened, singed arm only after she has climbed onto Leigh’s back. They
follow Tony, who has opted to go passenger-less for ease of movement. The sounds of weapons
clashing leads them to a gap that all three can easily fly up through. They emerge into a twilight
world fraught with lightning, as it appears Thanos is fighting Thor and Steve.

Rhodey hands over the fake gauntlet. “These aren’t real. No reason Thanos needs to know that,
though,” he says, gesturing over his shoulder at the battle waging on the flatter part below them.
“Heading back for another load.”

Gamora draws herself up, frowning.

“My apologies.” Rhodey makes a quick exit back down the hole they’d escaped through.

Leigh activates her repulsors, but Tony flips his helmet down. “Stay? You’re weaker than me, and
you’re wired for sound. You can tell me if something changes up here.”

“Okay,” she nods. “Stay safe?”

“Oh, sure,” Tony says, looking around them. “Two daughters of Thanos, the dude himself down
there--” he breaks off, wincing. “Kicking some serious super soldier ass. Shit. Okay, I’ll hurry--”

“We should fight. They’re losing,” Gamora says.

Leigh steps closer to see what they’re looking at. Steve’s being completely pummeled by the
gigantic double-bladed weapon a truly huge purple creature is using on him. There’s an
undercurrent of menace to the larger fighter, and his sword is biting chunks out of Steve’s
vibranium shield.

“The older you said we beat this guy, right?” she whispers.

Tony kisses her cheek. “Yeah. I guess it was close, but we have the advantage this time.”

***

It is close. She does do some fighting, but while the suit makes up for a lot of shortcomings, Leigh
is pretty weak from her eight day Vormir camp-out. She mostly waits for the signal that everyone
has to protect the fake gauntlet as Tony locates and equips James Barnes with the real one.

The scariest point for Leigh is when, right when it looks like a really powerful female fighter has
Thanos cornered, he calls down multiple powerful laser attacks from his ship. Across the
battlefield, she sees yellow-orange shields lift at the hands of the sorcerers from Kamar-Taj, but
their coverage isn’t total, and everyone else must scramble to whatever safety they can find. Leigh
sees the shots advancing every three feet, and darts out to push a silver-clad Iron Man suit out of
the way of the next one. They land under the umbrella of one of the shields.
“Thanks.” It’s a woman’s voice, but Leigh doesn’t have a chance to exchange pleasantries, because
Tony speaks up on the comms, telling everyone it’s time to defend the van.

Leigh nearly falters when she starts flying to the meeting point. Tony’s got the fake gauntlet lashed
to his back now, instead of the real one. While that’s good in some ways-- he’d told her that he
wouldn’t give up the real gauntlet until it was in the hands of the man he’d built it for --it’s
terrifying in others.

Thanos doesn’t know it’s fake. Tony’s been haunted for years by his defeat at the Titan’s hands,
and he’s painted a target onto his back quite literally with this ploy.

She is impressed by his bravery, but she doesn’t want to lose him.

“Tony, pass it off, please. I didn’t starve myself for eight days to see you die like this,” she begs.

“Have faith, love,” he says. As she watches, he flies up close to Thanos, too close, she soars high to
watch, so frightened-- and Tony’s suit seems to fail him, releasing the gauntlet.

Thanos grabs the thing, letting out a roar of triumph, completely ignoring Tony, who lands not far
away.

All of the fighting stops, as everyone freezes. Leigh realizes that only about a dozen of them know
that this isn’t actually the real thing.

“Stark,” Thanos says, smiling. He’s holding the fake gauntlet in his huge hand, looking at it like
it’s the most valuable thing in the universe.

The smug purple asshole is going to taunt her husband, and Leigh is not about to let it happen. Not
after she’d seen how much Tony had beaten himself up about losing to him last time.

Knowing the gauntlet isn’t real helps, she’s not going to lie to herself.

“Which Stark, you big bully?” Leigh says, zooming in with her suit to drop directly beside Tony.

“Leigh, holy shit,” Tony says under his breath.

“Is this your soulmate?” Thanos asks, incorporating a skyscraper’s worth of shade into the term.

“Yeah, been meaning to thank you for that. Where do I send the thank you card once you’ve been
finely particulated?” Tony asks, moving to stand in front of Leigh, both repulsors on but at his side.

“This was never about ego, for me. It was never personal,” Thanos says conversationally, starting
to slide his hand into the gauntlet. He pauses, looking around and seeming to relish the way the
thousands of creatures on both sides hang on his every movement. “But now? You corrupted my
daughter. You turned her against me. This, after I gave you such a gift? Do you know what it’s like
to be a father, Stark?”

“You’re 100% sure that’s not the real one, right?” Rhodey says quietly into the comms.

“I’ve got you, Starks,” an unfamiliar voice sounds across the comms in response. “Give the word,
and he’s toast. Make it cinematic, so far this thing just tickles.”

“Don’t take longer than five minutes, Tony. Bucky’s struggling a bit, even though he’d never admit
it to you,” Steve’s voice sounds concerned in her ear.

“Yeah, I’m a father,” Tony says. “Can’t say I ever replaced my daughter’s body parts with
machines as a punishment though. I mean, I have anger issues, but not at that level.”

Thanos’s hand sinks further into the fake gauntlet, and the tension in every single body around
them ratchets up further.

“I’ve never planned to toss my daughter off a cliff, either. I don’t know, Grimace, seems like I
might be ahead on this one.”

“So you know of Vormir,” Thanos laughs. “I must thank you for sparing me the anguish. Kneel to
me, Stark, and I’ll restore that which you have lost to retrieve the Soul stone. Remain standing, and
your daughter will be the first to die.”

“Try to kill my daughter and I’ll turn you and your entire army to dust, Titan,” Leigh says, venom
and victory throbbing in her voice.

“Holy fuck, nice,” the man who had said he was ready to use the real gauntlet says. “I’m a
hundred percent behind this plan of yours, Mrs. Stark.”

“You dare?” Thanos says, finally sounding irritated. “With the world at stake, you seek to threaten
me in this moment? It seems my soulmate gift is truly flawless.” He jams the gauntlet on his arm,
so upset that he doesn’t seem to realize it is inert. “Your child’s screams will echo through the
universe, Starks. In the new world I will create, my people will dread that sound above all else.”

He raises his hand and snaps.

“Boom,” James Barnes says over the comm.

A hush of shock ripples across the assembled throng as a large cloud of dust rises up.

“I warned you,” Leigh tells Thanos. “In this world? Children will toss dirt in the air and call it
Thanos. What a legacy.”

The Titan looks at her in shock, then at his arm, watching as his body starts to fracture and blow
away. He looks up at the wave of disintegration that is flying through his ship overhead before the
same ripple tears him apart into nothingness.

A cheer rises up, so loud that she wonders just how huge the army that had been raised up could
possibly be.

“That was completely fucking amazing!” Tony says, eyes wide, staring at her.

“Maybe we’re even, now?” she asks, biting her lip.

“Yes. Fuck. I hope someone got that on video.”

That’s the last thing they manage to say to each other before they’re completely mobbed by the
people who run up to congratulate them.
 Chapter Thirty
Chapter Summary

“But, I should show you this.” Chuck hands Tony a folder.

Tony opens it, and Leigh peeks over his shoulder at it.

“Top page is just the influx of emails to give you a glimpse of what we’re dealing
with. I only included legitimate, reputable publications and programs.”

“Shit, Chuck,” Tony says. “What size font is this?”

“Ten point.”

The page is a solid block of interview inquiries, split into two halves. Tony turns to
page two and laughs. “You have a filter just for threesome requests?”

“You are making that up,” Leigh says, reaching over to grab the page. Tony is not
making it up.

Chapter Notes

Thank you for coming along with me on this journey! I hope the ending is as
satisfying to read as it was to write.

=====

Leigh's dress for the State Dinner: ((temporarily gone, as the site has stopped selling it.
I got pictures, I'll try to link one soon))

Ember's dress for the State Dinner: https://www.miabellebaby.com/products/copy-of-

girls-lace-long-sleeve-casual-dress?
currency=USD&variant=31409616814144&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Go

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Chapter Thirty

'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars

I'm gonna give you my heart

'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars

'Cause you light up the path

I don't care, go on and tear me apart

I don't care if you do, ooh

'Cause in a sky, 'cause in a sky full of stars

I think I saw you

'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars

I wanna die in your arms

'Cause you get lighter the more it gets dark

I'm gonna give you my heart

~Sky Full of Stars, Coldplay

“It’s a good thing I have a tower full of empty apartments,” Tony whispers to Leigh as they stand in
a large group of returned and remaining Avengers. Steve’s doing his thing, thanking everyone for
their hard work, asking for each group’s leader to ensure that anyone without accommodation has a
place to sleep and lick their wounds.

“As for New York--”

“Yeah, we’ve got you covered,” Tony steps forward with one foot, leaning far forward before
moving his other foot beside the first. “My giant tower of overcompensation has plenty of space.”

A mini cheer goes up. Steve holds out his hands, smiling with his Bureaucracy Face firmly still in
place. “Time enough for that. Tony, can we have an all hands meeting at the tower sometime
tomorrow? Say, 1:00?”

“What if we make it 12:00? I think I can arrange for some food. It’s one thing to find a place to
sleep, but it’s another to have food stocked, and a place to cook it. One fewer meal to worry about
would be great for morale,” Leigh says.

“America’s Mom, right there,” someone shouts from back in the crowd.

“The universe’s Mom, you mean,” another says.

Leigh meets Tony’s eyes and sees pride there as the crowd of people cheer again, louder than they
had for Tony’s offer of a bed. ‘Sorry,” Leigh mouths to him. He shrugs, points at her, and mouths,
‘mine.’

Tony’s good for her morale, anyway.

“Good idea, thanks Leigh. So that’s the plan, folks. Those who want to stay in New York, group
up by the Starks. Everyone else, find your region leader, and we’ll have a representative from
Kamar Taj touch base with them to ensure everyone makes it to the meeting tomorrow at 12, in
Stark’s tower,” Steve says. “Thank you again, everyone.”
A tall man with a goatee similar to Tony’s cuts through the group forming near Leigh, Nat, Steve,
and Tony. He’s got a fantastic red flowy cape on, and the way he comes right up to Tony tells
Leigh that he’s someone important.

“It’s late. There are two ways we can do this. One is a group portal similar to the ones used earlier
today. The other takes longer, but there’s less small talk.”

“I’m listening,” Tony says.

“We portal to your tower, you head straight to empty apartments, which I then portal individuals or
groups into. No large crowd milling around, no lost parties on the elevators,” the man says,
smiling wryly.

“What’s in it for you?”

Leigh stops just eavesdropping and walks over, on hearing the suspicion in Tony’s voice. It’s more
jovial than antagonistic, but it’s also not not antagonistic.

“I saw what I saw. I think if I looked at outcomes fighting Thanos now, I’d see two realities where
we won,” the man says. He watches her slide her arm around Tony, and holds out his hand. “Leigh
Lauren Balci Stark, I presume?”

She’s a little taken aback, but shakes his hand anyway. Suddenly, she realizes who he has to be.
“Strange! Doctor Strange, right? You gave up the Time stone. God, he was haunted by that for
years.”

Tony interrupts before she’s able to add more of her recollection. “No need to tell him that, honey.”
He does tip his head to the side to look at Strange. “Knowing your whole name, though. That’s
odd.”

“Ten minutes or so before Banner came flying through my ceiling, you showed up and threatened
to use your talent for being obnoxious against me unless I searched all possible universes for
versions of one woman.”

“That universe has since diverged,” Leigh says, smiling politely.

“I’m grateful for that fact. Now he can spend his time annoying you instead, with the bonus that he
won’t need a time machine configured for alternate universes in order to do it,” Strange says. His
tone is acerbic, but still somewhat friendly.

He and Tony seem like they get on like oil and water.

“Strange!” A stout man wearing robes calls out.

“Excuse me, this shouldn’t take long,” Strange says, inclining his head toward her. As he walks
away, his cape furls out close to her, even though there’s no wind. It grazes along her hand in an
action that feels for all the world like a kiss. Leigh walks after him a bit, trying to see if the cape
actually is somehow magical, or if there was a specific way he’d furled it that caused the odd
interaction.

“Tony,” a woman says, approaching him. Leigh recognizes her as the person she’d saved during
the time Thanos’s ship had been firing its terrifying blue lasers. She's wearing a silver Iron Man
suit, and for the first time, Leigh wonders where she got it from, and why.

“Pepper,” Tony says. His voice sounds closed-off, like he’d had to swallow back some amount of
emotion in order to even be able to say her name.

Leigh suddenly feels very weary.

“What you did, both of you…” The woman’s helmet is retracted, and her strawberry blonde
ponytail is neat as a pin despite everything they’ve all just gone through. She looks awestruck,
nodding in both of their directions, even though Leigh’s several feet away by now.

“I’m really glad you’re back. It was… it was a shock,” Tony’s saying.

Leigh sees that he’s holding a hand behind him, wide and reaching. Her heart soars, and she drifts
backwards, trying not to be obvious. When their hands meet, Tony clears his throat, and his voice
is much more clear as he answers a question she hadn’t quite been able to hear Pepper ask.

“--every last bit of it, set up in an apartment like you were on a business trip or something. I
couldn’t take looking at your things and knowing you weren’t coming back, but I couldn’t get rid
of them, either,” Tony says earnestly.

Leigh’s a little stuck. She doesn’t want to disrespect this woman who very clearly still cares deeply
about Tony, but there’s simply no way to stretch out her right hand to shake her hand without
obviously displaying the ‘Tony’ that’s inscribed there, in his own handwriting, no less.

Tony, as always, is on top of things. He’s holding her right hand, and when she gently tugs it so she
can be ready for the introduction he just… doesn’t let go.

“There’s no good way to do this,” Tony’s saying, turning toward Leigh.

“I can help. Hello. I’m Pepper Potts,” she says, reaching out a hand to shake Leigh’s.

Leigh can’t get free of Tony, and she doesn’t want to make a spectacle about it, so she offers her
left hand, instead. “I’m Leigh, nice to meet you.”

“Leigh Stark,” Pepper corrects with a sad but steady smile. “It’s okay. There was that whole…
thing, in front of Thanos. Something I would never have been able to do in a million years, by the
way.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Tony says.

“I prefer to think of it as valuing my mental health. And you don’t have to do that,” Pepper says,
nodding briskly at their joined hands, barely visible behind Tony’s hip. “I borrowed someone’s
phone and did a search. I know about the name on your wrist.”

“I’m so sorry, Pepper,” Tony says, his voice rough.

“So am I,” she whispers. “But soulmarks weren't the only thing I googled. You’ve taken Stark
Industries to places I am so proud of, Tony--”

“In your honor,” he interrupts.

“--so when I’ve had some time to adjust, I’d love to still be a part of that somehow.” Pepper lifts
her chin, manages a thin, delicate smile, and then turns away from them and starts walking over
toward a knot of people who call out to her in greeting.

Tony lets out a breath.

“Do you need a minute?” Leigh whispers.

“No. I need a lifetime. With you.” He reaches over and taps her hexagonal power source to retract
her armor, and then pulls her close with arms that grip her too tight yet somehow just right. “I
almost lost you. A lot of me is still tied up with her,” he says, his voice wavering between a
whisper and a quiet sigh. “I don’t want to imagine what kind of misery I was in that I spent six
years searching for a way to save you instead of stepping back into the life I had before.”

Leigh wraps her arms around Tony and holds him with a grip as tight as his.

***

Her husband is a tactile person with her, Leigh knows, but not as much with other people. This
makes his reaction to seeing a young man wearing a red skintight costume and a delighted
expression even more touching. Tony practically runs to him, grabbing the kid into a huge bear
hug.

“Mr. Stark! That thing you did was so cool! I’m sorry I passed out or whatever when we were on
that planet. When I woke up, that Doctor Strange guy said you needed us, and he made an actual
portal right to here! Do you think there’s a way I could learn how to do that?”

“I’m sure you could do anything, Peter,” Tony says, his voice choked with emotion.

Peter. Leigh understands, now.

***

It turns out that Leigh’s Iron Man suit-- which Tony has taken to calling the ‘Honey’ suit, a
nickname he is inordinately proud of for its double meaning --had been set to record everything,
meaning that there’s a direct record of her confronting Thanos. Hers isn’t the only such record, but
it is subpoenaed by the government as part of the official record of what they’re calling the Battle
for Earth.

Someone leaks the footage, which thanks to the included comm messages from Rhodey, Barnes,
and Steve reveal the ‘trick’ that their team played on Thanos. It’s a sensation. By a week after the
event, five separate videos from various vantage points are released, three of which show Tony and
Leigh’s ‘last, fierce stand’ against Thanos.

The nickname ‘America’s Mom’ catches on like wildfire, as does ‘America’s Daughter’ for
Ember. ‘America’s Dad’ doesn’t trend for Tony, but that’s because ‘World’s Sexiest Dad’ ends up
being more popular.

Tony is insufferable about it, which Leigh privately finds annoyingly attractive, even though the
whole thing is kind of sexist, if you examine it closely.

In the end, the Secret Service ends up being employed to protect them, not because there are
Thanos apologists (though Nat thinks they’re inevitable), but because so many people from all over
want to express their gratitude.

Because the governments of the world all want to know exactly what happened and how, their
team of eleven is very busy over the first week. Their images are ubiquitous on nearly every
newspaper, website, and news program, but Leigh and Tony initially refuse all media interviews. It
seems, though, that this choice will rapidly become untenable, so Chuck stops by the tower
apartment on day eight to talk to them about next steps.

Somehow it’s only when he walks in wearing a fantastic suit and a brilliant grin that Leigh realizes
that 1) he’s been MIA for a reason, and 2) that reason is that his husband is back.
“Oh my God, Chuck, how is Diggory?” she says when he steps out of the elevator at the penthouse
level.

“Perfect,” Chuck says without missing a beat. “He says he’s fairly sure he’ll meet the now-
requisite background check that he’ll need to come with me one of these days to meet you.”

“Only pretty sure? I like him already,” Tony says, coming across the room to shake Chuck’s hand.
“Thanks for coming in.”

“You’ve got it, though I’m going to need to get your help with some tech, I think. It’s public record
I’m your PA.”

That’s all he needs to say for Leigh to understand his dilemma. Pretty much anyone associated with
them has been completely mobbed with media requests and desperate, grateful people dropping off
gifts and letters. It’s completely fucking overwhelming.

Leigh doesn’t even want to imagine what would happen if the media were to find out about her
goodbye letter to Ember. Tony’s been joking (she hopes it’s a joke) that they should save it for the
one-year anniversary of the event and sell access rights to it for a billion dollars. It’s only been
eight days (a time period that will probably remain painful for the rest of her life), but given the
sustained frenzy about their actions, Leigh’s not that sure Tony’s number is as ridiculous as he
seems to think it is.

A sweet but painful subset of all of the attention is the fact that Leigh’s alive at all. Yes, there’s the
furor over time travel, the speculation about alternate universes, but the fact that both were used by
her husband to alter space and time to make sure he got her back? It’s being named the Most
Romantic Act Of All Time.

It’s a lot to live up to.

“You okay?” Tony asks, squeezing her hand.

“Sorry, I’m still just…” With both hands, Leigh mimes an explosion going off over her head.
“There are so many facets of what’s happened, and all of them are too much to comprehend.”

“Oh, I get it,” Chuck says sympathetically. “Even the little things, right? Diggory came to on the
side of the road in the city after having gone to the ATM after work. He was one of the only people
in the huge group of Returned with actual money that worked. Pretty much everyone else all had
credit cards that had been deactivated by then.”

“Here’s hoping he found you quickly?” Leigh asks.

Chuck nods. “Kept the phone number. And all of his things, for that matter. Even his stupid ugly
chair.” He looks up at the ceiling for a second, a completely goofy grin crossing his face for a few
seconds. “But, I should show you this.” Chuck hands Tony a folder.

Tony opens it, and Leigh peeks over his shoulder at it.

“Top page is just the influx of emails to give you a glimpse of what we’re dealing with. I only
included legitimate, reputable publications and programs.”

“Shit, Chuck,” Tony says. “What size font is this?”

“Ten point.”
The page is a solid block of interview inquiries, split into two halves. Tony turns to page two and
laughs. “You have a filter just for threesome requests?”

“You are making that up,” Leigh says, reaching over to grab the page. Tony is not making it up.

“That page is for the more amusing stuff,” Chuck says with professional understatement. “The
point is, I think this is your life now. I don’t want it to be my life, though, so the third page is a list
of applicants who took it upon themselves to offer their services as a correspondence screener. I
vetted all five from a list of about twenty, if you can believe that.”

“I don’t doubt it at all,” Tony says, leaning back on the couch. “I assume you saw the lobby and
sidewalk.” Both are a field of flowers, signs, and gifts. “Happy’s sick of dealing with it. Only took
five days. The first two days were taken in by the Secret Service on a just in case basis.”

“I heard about that,” Chuck nods. “I think you can safely say you’re both the most famous
celebrities on the planet right now. And knowing what we do about some of the worlds that are out
there, I would not rule out the possibility of neighborhood visitors.” He spreads out his hands in an
apologetic gesture. “Bottom line? You need to give, a little. Not because of your own image, but
out of-- and I know this sounds crazy --kindness to your fellow man. Let them love you.”

“Chuck,” Leigh says, doubt arcing like electricity through her expression and her tone.

“The White House is on the list, there. They’re going to host an unprecedented number of foreign
leaders at a state dinner for the eleven of you. Ember is specifically invited, too. Their letter
includes an exhortation that they don’t want to have to put pressure on both of you to be more
available to journalists.”

“What right do--” Tony starts to say, but Chuck winces and holds up a finger.

“Their people are getting the overflow. They’ve had to hire two staffers to deal with it. Official
feelings are going to start getting hurt, and it’s all goodwill, sir. Hell, I started to cry on the elevator
on the way up here, and I know what you’re actually like,” Chuck admits, smoothing his hand
down his tie. “This has the potential to bring the world together. In the way that we always see in
science fiction movies. It’s also wholesome as fuck.”

Tony turns and stage whispers in Leigh’s ear, “I love when he swears.”

The elevator dings. All three of them look over in slight trepidation, given the subject they’ve been
discussing-- but as soon as the doors open, Ember comes bounding out.

“Mama! Daddy! Ganpa yikes BEES!” She stops and frowns in the process of climbing up onto
Tony.

“Likes?” he suggests gently. “LLLLLLLLL?”

“LLLLL-yikes,” Ember says definitively.

“Sorry for the lack of warning,” Miriam Balci says with a rueful chuckle. “Your AI is basically
wrapped around her little finger. Get her on an elevator and she doesn’t have to be tall enough to
reach the button for the penthouse!”

“I’m sorry that the three of you have had to stay in for the whole trip so far,” Tony says, standing
up with Ember in his arms.

“We’d have had to stay in at home, too. Missy says the police have cordoned off the road leading
up to the farm! Frank and Lacey will be up shortly. They always watch to the end of movies now,
just in case the filmmakers add something hidden.”

Leigh goes over to hug her mom. “Ember is definitely not complaining about having family around
so much.”

“I hate to be ‘that guy,’” Chuck says, but Tony interrupts him.

“You love to be ‘that guy.’”

“Either way , I think if you do some of the events I’ve picked out in the folder, you might find that
the collateral damage will lessen. People are desperate,” Chuck says.

“Oh, go soak it up!” her mom says, stepping back but keeping one arm around Leigh’s waist so she
can see both of them. “You’ve made your privacy point for a week. If you don’t loosen up, people
will sneak around taking pictures of my granddaughter for the rest of her life, because that’ll be the
only way to get them.”

“In my experience, they’ll do that anyway, but fair point. What do you think, Em? You want to go
meet the President?” Tony says, looking down at their daughter in his arms.

“Which President?” Miriam asks.

“All of them.”

***

Leigh’s fretting over her hair when there’s a knock on the bathroom door.

“I promise I can restrain myself long enough to zip the dress this time,” Tony says.

Leigh smiles at herself in the mirror. She’d started dressing for their evening a full hour early
knowing that he absolutely would not be able to restrain himself (and neither would she). The
resulting intimate experience as Tony had tried to make sure they wouldn’t be late for the dinner
across town (but also show her exactly how much he loved how she looked in the dress before he’d
taken it off of her) had been thoroughly satisfying. It had been completely worth changing the
clocks in the room and getting FRIDAY to alter the ones on their technology.

Post-coital Tony had been impressed at her ingenuity.

“I already got the zipper. You can come in,” Leigh says. Tony opens the door, steps in, and does a
little twirl so she can appreciate how he looks. “Oh, Leigh,” he says, his eyes rich with admiration.
“It’s stunning. You’re stunning. On the hanger it looked completely different, maybe even lifeless,
in comparison.”

“Thank you,” Leigh says. Her dress is gold, a touch toward rose gold, even, body-hugging to the
knees in front, with many gathers at the back. It’s made up of multiple layers, the top-most of
which is sheer, but generously scattered with drips and trails and branches of pure gold. They look
halfway between paint and budding honeysuckle twigs. The designer had been completely
gracious, altering the original sleeveless design to be more White House friendly, with multiple
gold threads making up straps to hold up the low straight neckline. The true glory of the dress,
though, is the cape/train that falls from the elastic at the neckline all the way across her back. Its
sheer panel hangs with the same rich, scattered gold embellishments all the way to the floor and
beyond. When she spreads her arms out with the train caught against them, it looks like Leigh is
standing in front of a hundred golden weeping willow branches.
She’d fallen in love with the dress, not just for how completely gorgeous it is, but because no one
could look at a woman wearing that and think, ‘Yeah, the first adjective I’d use to describe this
woman is ‘Mom-like.’’

Leigh likes being considered a good mom. She’s even okay with being ‘America’s Mom.’ But
there have always been things about the mom stereotype she hated even before she was one, and
that’s the idea that you’re either sexy or a mom. It’s her goal to break that association tonight.

“You’re not happy with something,” Tony observes perceptively.

“I don’t know what to do with hair this short,” she admits. Chuck had arranged for a hairdresser to
come in and fix the hack job she’d done on Vormir. It’s an attractive cut, but she hadn’t had hair
reaching to her shoulders and not beyond for many years. Something that doesn’t help is the fact
that Ember hates it.

He laughs. “That’s ‘long’ for practically everyone else.” With a loving, gentle touch, Tony slides
his fingers through it, his hand warm on her upper back when he’s done. “Leave it down. It’s part
of the story, isn’t it?” Then he grins, devilish and handsome. “If anyone wants to criticize you over
how you wear your hair, I’ll just threaten to turn them into dust.”

Tony’s been making comments like this for days, and Leigh knows she shouldn’t laugh. “Tony!”

***

Rocket and Nebula have both bowed out of (or in Rocket’s case, refused, with a string of expletives
at the idea of the whole spectacle) the state dinner, but given his role in the final destruction of
Thanos, James Barnes was easily subbed in. Ten is a more satisfying number for the press anyway.

Ember’s white dress with goldenrod and white embroidery panels on the front, back, and sleeves
captivates everyone, especially because a florist had seen an article written on the designer who
had donated the dress, and sent along a flower crown that matches it perfectly.

Tony has been really kind to her, Leigh realizes, when it comes to her stressing out over the amount
of really lovely but expensive and high quality gifts people have been sending them. It had already
been hard for her to come to terms with his extreme wealth, but this? It’s been really hard. But
Tony has let her complain and fret in private while expressing gratitude and incredulity in public,
and hasn’t said a word in complaint.

Because Chuck is Chuck, he leaks that story, too. The general consensus in response to the
article/Leigh’s concerns is that she’s a really lovely, down-to-Earth person, and it’s a legit worry
when it comes to raising a child in the midst of all of that.

Leigh wasn’t even smug to either man about it.

After the dinner itself (during which Leigh was slightly mortified to find that Ember had whispered
that she’d rather have chicken nuggets to one of the servers, who had promptly managed to find
some and served them to her), there’s a period of mingling time that is humbling and
overwhelming. Everyone clusters around their table, world leaders and diplomats and their spouses.
After a half hour of it, Tony stands up and holds out his hand for her.

Leigh kisses Ember’s head, and the man she’d been speaking to, Justin Trudeau, offers to take her.

Ember likes him because he has ‘More beahd (beard) than Daddy!’

“What?” Leigh says, after they’re both standing and quite obviously the focus for the entire room.
“Dance with me,” he says, leading her out into the mostly empty space between all of the tables.

“Tony, no one else is dancing!” she hisses, but he’s inexorable. The music is live, and while yes,
it’s currently some kind of a romantic, swaying number, Leigh is acutely aware that they’re
probably inconveniencing the musicians at the very least.

Tony pulls her into the very center of the space and then steps back a second, bowing. Leigh’s
heart is entirely full, seeing how handsome he is, how smug and stubborn the look on his face is.
She sinks into a low curtsey once he’s standing, and his grin is as wide and proud as she’s ever
seen. Her heart pounding, Leigh gathers as much of her dress in her left hand as she can, so she
won’t trip over it. Tony pulls her closer than propriety allows, but she’s pretty sure no one in the
room would be surprised.

The music fades for a second, and Leigh’s face flames. Tony leans in and kisses her, something
she’s not sure a person is even allowed to do at a White House state dinner. The music starts up
into a stately waltz, right as they break apart. It’s almost like it was scripted, but the surprised,
pleased look in her husband’s eyes tells her that it wasn’t. He wouldn’t have been able to avoid
looking smug again, otherwise.

Leigh risks a look over at the corner where the musicians are sitting, mouthing a thank you. Then,
Tony says her name, and they’re dancing, her feet following his as if Stephen Strange is hiding
somewhere directing them to do exactly the right steps. It’s been forever since she’d done this, and
the literal eyes of the world will be on them, but the love on Tony’s face is carrying her through it.

“Thank you,” Tony whispers.

“For?” she asks, smiling up at him. “You haven’t even stepped on my cape yet, so there’s no thank
you for my forgiveness necessary.”

“Yet?”

“Yet,” she grins.

“No, it’s for still being you in the midst of all of this. I think your biggest frustration is a
combination of hoping it doesn’t go to Em’s head and hating being pigeonholed into a mom role.”

“And the gifts. And I can’t visit my siblings. And my parents and sister can’t go see anything in
New York because of all the attention, and, and, and,” Leigh reminds him, her lips twisting into a
rueful smile. “But you’re the one to thank.”

“You’ve already--”

“And I will again. Forever,” Leigh interrupts. “That other you knew he wouldn’t be the one to live
this life of ours. I could see it on his face. Tony, don’t ever, ever let someone try to tell you that
you don’t know what it’s like to be selfless. Unless…” she trails off, having thought of something
that makes her eyes widen and her lips spread into an incredulous smile.

“What?”

“Do you think part of why you did it was because someone told you that you couldn’t? That you
shouldn’t?”

“Obviously,” Tony says. He twirls her without any warning, and she somehow doesn’t trip. The
action reminds her that they have an audience, though, and it’s an audience. Cameras are flashing,
some of the people who lead countries of their own have cell phones out filming them, and
everyone’s smiling indulgently. It’s enough to go to a girl’s head.

“So instead of a Spite Fence, you have a Spite Happy Ending? Who gets the honors as the prime
instigator, then?”

Tony dips Leigh as the music swells, and right before he kisses her, he whispers, “You already
turned him into dust.”

***

America’s Heroic Stark Family

on the Legacy of Love, Loss, and Laughter

60 Minutes sits down with Tony and Leigh Stark in their first interview since defeating Thanos.
Stay tuned for the full family interview tomorrow at this same airtime.

(interview transcript, page 2)

Lesley: Just like the rest of us, you’ve been handed the dilemma of how to deal with pre-existing
relationships from before the Snap. Tony, you suddenly have twelve new in-laws! Leigh, your
husband’s fiance has reappeared. How are you coping?

Tony: The Balci family has been great. They’re under a lot of stress, too-- their house has been
assigned a police guard thanks to all the collateral attention. Besides, I’m not sure whether there’s
anything more I could do to earn their trust as an in-law! (he laughs) If they don’t like me now, I’m
out of ideas.

Lesley: That’s a very good point. Now, Leigh, the producers have whispered in my ear about
something they’ve just discovered. Is it true that your daughter’s middle name is in honor of Pepper
Potts? (her tone is incredulous)

Leigh: Ember’s middle name is Virginia, yes. Though to be fair, Tony and I met in West Virginia,
so I don’t deserve that much credit!

Lesley: (as an aside, to Tony) Does she realize how charming she is? I have to confess, Anderson
Cooper told me that he thinks it’s all real, and I was doubtful. You have quite a reputation for
womanizing, and I just couldn’t believe someone that earnest would have lasted this long!

Leigh: (interrupts) Where does that put Ms. Potts? (she and Lesley look at each other for a few
seconds)

Lesley: All right, I’m convinced. (very clearly scratches out a line on the notes in front of her)

Tony: If you’re looking for flaws, I have enough for the both of us. I admit, I pushed back on the
name at first. I didn’t want it to hurt Leigh at some point in the future, when she was past the first
rosy months of baby raising.

Leigh: He’d obviously not read anything about the first few months of baby raising at the time.
Lesley: (laughs) So what are your plans for the near future? The Secret Service has confirmed that
they’ve been granted money by Congress to upgrade your West Virginia lake house for your safety
and security. There have been questions about whether the heroic actions you took to save your
wife imply that the mere knowledge you hold about time travel should be legally restricted in some
way. After all, you brought back your wife’s parents from the dead. What’s to stop you from
bringing back your own parents? The world could benefit from Howard Stark’s great mind, even
here in 2023.

Leigh: When the 2029 Tony Stark saved my life, he went back to a world where I still didn’t exist.
If my husband went to 1987 and saved Howard and Maria, Ember would still only have one set of
grandparents living. Actions like that create a separate, new universe with the new timeline.

Lesley: (joking) Would you two consider teaching a class on how to understand all of this stuff?

Tony: Give our daughter another eight years and she might be able to.

Lesley: Has all of the fame gotten to her head yet?

Leigh: It’s been two weeks, Lesley.

***

“FRIDAY, activate Lift Ticket Protocol,” Tony says after the elevator doors close behind them.
They’re done with the day’s interviews, and Leigh had been about to take off her high heels.
Tony’s expression is pleased, nearly predatory, but nothing about the elevator or the AI seems to be
changed after his command, except for the fact that FRIDAY hasn’t responded at all.

“What is the Lift Ticket Protocol?”

He walks up to her and starts unbuttoning her blouse. “FRIDAY doesn’t tell anyone where we are,
this elevator stops halfway between floors, and it is marked as both off the tower grid, and
malfunctioning.” He leans down to swipe his tongue across the skin his unbuttoning has revealed.
“Your lace bra was ever-so-slightly visible from the chair I was sitting in during that whole
interview,” he groans. “And we never have gotten the chance to have elevator sex.”

Leigh grins and starts on his buttons, too. “Isn’t part of the allure of elevator sex the fact that
someone might catch us at it?”

“We’ve got an eighth of the world’s population gathered around the tower, and FRIDAY reports
that, every ten minutes, some scrub programmer tries to hack into our systems.” Tony breaks off to
unzip her skirt so it can fall into a puddle at her feet. “There’s still a chance.”

“Good enough for me,” Leigh tells him, ripping his belt out of its loops with ferocity.

“Besides,” Tony teases, nuzzling at her breasts. “An unauthorized sex tape would really destroy the
whole ‘America’s Mom’ image you find so irritating. If you like, I could--”

“Don’t you dare.”

Leigh makes sure that Tony’s so completely at her mercy that he’d never in a million years let any
recording of their elevator activities go public.

And even if it does, she knows someone who can build a time machine.
 THE END

Epilogue, 2029

Tony considers flying around Vormir until his suit is nearly depleted and his emotional distress is
more distant, but he doesn’t have the strength to deal with the damned specter of the stone’s
guardian again.

He’ll have to go home to an empty bed at some point. It might as well be now.

The basement room is dark, when he lands back on the Tunnel platform. Tony shuts everything
down and unplugs it, unwilling for Ember to somehow manage to get it working and turn what’s
already going to be a rough adjustment period without Fianna into a living nightmare.

He’s always been a little concerned about that, despite her intelligence and pragmatism even at
nine. Ember is impulsive, just like he is, and she has access to some pretty scary technology.

He really ought to cut the cords, but that action carries some miserable implications for him right
now.

Tony pushes the hidden door closed and latches it at the top where Em can’t reach it, which makes
him feel better. He moves up the stairs, pulling the ARC reactor off of his chest to leave it on the
kitchen island. The house is dark, cold, and lonely. Pushing the door to his bedroom open after
climbing the stairs, Tony’s only thought is that he’d thought he had left the light off.

Then he sees her.

“Hi,” Fianna says. She’s standing in the middle of the room, wearing the same Black Sabbath shirt
she’d put on to go to Vormir.

Tony falls back against the door, closing it. “What--”

“I woke up,” Fianna says, her eyes luminous and tear-filled. “I was back on the platform, but it was
empty, and that skull thing was there. He said that his quest for the stone had led him to be forced
to guide others to it. Then he said that whatever magic had acted on him to turn him into a specter
as punishment had chosen to reward my actions with a second chance. The next thing I knew, I was
standing here.”

He remains stock-still and pressed against the door. Tony can’t allow himself to believe what he’s
seeing, because when the bubble of joy bursts, he’ll be left with the splattered remains of what used
to be his heart. At least right now, his heart is withered but intact. “You’re a hallucination.”

Fianna starts slowly walking towards him, her advancing steps halting, as though she’s trying to
reel him in but being pulled out to his sea, instead. “What would prove it isn’t a hallucination?”

Tony closes his eyes. “Why would I want to prove that? If it’s a hallucination, you’re here with me.
I want to live in that reality, set up my tent there and stay forever.”

“What if it’s real?” the image of Fianna asks him. Tony’s so far gone into this lucid dream that he
can feel her warmth as she moves closer. “Tony? Trust me.”
That’s the only thing that gets him to change his mind. Even an imaginary Fianna deserves to
know he loves and trusts her, Tony tells himself. His eyes shut, he reaches toward where her voice
is coming from. Her hand catches his and presses it against her face, and he opens his eyes, gulping
desperate breaths to steady himself. Fianna’s crying, and he pulls her to his chest and slides down
the wall in a tangle of limbs with her.

“Please stay real,” he says.

“How about better than real? I think the cancer’s gone. I had a persistent ache in my lungs and I
can take a full, clear breath now. Which is good because I can’t seem to stop crying,” she laughs,
swiping the tears away with hands that tremble.

“I love you,” Tony says. “If this moment is all I get, great. Anything more is an unexpected
windfall.”

“It’s real. Which is good; I have a feeling you’re stubborn enough to spend another six years
fighting fate, and you’ve fought enough.”

“Never,” Tony says, kissing her hair. “I’ll just shift focus. Wasn’t your father saying he wants to
tear down the old horse barn, and your brother Kent is against it? Pick a side, we’ll either reinforce
it with the most durable metal known to man or set it on fire with space lasers. Say the word.”

“Translation: I, Tony Stark, need a new hobby.” Her tone is fond and very slightly censorious.

“Well you just trashed my old one!” he stretches out his legs and brushes her hair back away from
her wet face.

“Which was?”

“Keeping you alive.”

“How about you amend it to ‘keeping me happy?’” Fianna asks, kissing his chest and moving to
straddle him so she can see his face.

“Well now you’re just asking for the impossible,” Tony teases her. She’s one of the most easily
content people he’s ever known, and they both know it. Her narrowed eyes of mock outrage swiftly
turn to calculating ones of loving revenge, and Tony finally, finally releases his grip on ‘What If I
Fail,’ lets the words splinter into letters and become meaningless. Before they fall out of sight in
his mind’s eye, Tony sees a single word coalesce: FAITH.

He could spend their days worrying that some unseen force will take Fianna away from him again,
or he can have faith that their fight against fate and time is at an end. It’s his choice.

Her lips touch his, and he revels in their warmth, as always. When she lifts her head, Tony sees the
light and life in her eyes.

“Welcome home, honey.”

“I’ll never leave again,” she promises, throwing her arms around him and resting her head on his
shoulder.

He’d meant her heart at home in his, but there’s time enough to show her that. There’s time.
 Chapter End Notes

There are two schools of thought that I've come across about the Red Skull specter on
Vormir. One was that he had been banished to Vormir to be punished by being a ghost
with his 'villain' face, trapped and forced to explain the rules of the Soul stone
acquisition. However, there's a short answer given by the Russo brothers available as a
tweet, explaining that Red Skull was stuck on Vormir without someone to love and
thus unable to obtain the stone.

Frankly, I find the second answer short-sighted and unsupportable, despite the fact that
it's endorsed by the creators. He's not in his physical body, so clearly *something* has
affected him in a supernatural sort of way. He also, if I recall correctly, states that he's
'forced' to guide others to that which he cannot obtain. It's the idea that there's a
magical governing body punishing him for his misdeeds which I've drawn on for the
epilogue. If Red Skull can be punished for his actions, Fianna can be rewarded for
hers. Leigh's reward is to benefit from Fianna's sacrifice, IMO. They both get their
Tony.

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