There are bars, and then there are nightclubs. Should he decide a more kinetic solution to the evening's boredom in a multiversal worlds he may find...
...Well, whatever she is, she's not human, but she wears it well. She's there at a table amongst the manic mood lighting and the thundering sound, swirling something dark around in a short glass with one long leg crossed over the other.
[What a fancy shindig. It's not her first or second and probably not her last, but it is the first one Angela's shown up to under the official title of Tony Stark's date. Of course, all eyes are on him and tongues are wagging, wondering about who she is and where she came from. Angela doesn't give a damn about the gossip; there's an open free bar at this charity event and a vodka straight with her name on it.
She's nursing her second one since leaving Tony to his own devices earlier and she's starting to feel the warm effects from the alcohol as they call people to the tables for the first of many long, boring speeches and dinner.]
[ Tony has distinctly been in a Mood. And yeah, she's an empath but she's not just going to use it to fix him being in a mood, that's unethical and even if he asked her to it would be the easy way out, would be cheating their way into a solution and not actually help beyond this moment. There has to be another way to solve it. And maybe it took her a little bit longer than she would have liked to come up with a solution (hopefully one that will actually work), but once she's turned it over in her head for a little bit she just waits for the next moment he demonstrates that Mood-ness.
And yeah, that wasn't cool, it's about time this came to an end. ]
Bedroom. [ Her mouth is set in a line, lips pressed together as she points up the stairs. Her tone of voice indicates strongly that listening to her right now is a very good idea. ] Right now.
[ Yeah, he'd definitely been in a mood. He felt as though his mood was entirely well justified, wholly within reason, and ultimately, forgettable, or at the very least, forgivable.
He scans back over the events of the last two minutes and considers what she's just told him. Narrows his eyes a little bit at her. ]
Are you seriously sending me to my room? Right now. This is a thing that you're doing.
[ The tone is one thing. The words are one thing. The fact that he is - however slowly - moving towards the staircase. ] My parents didn't even have success with that. I don't think anyone's ever had success with that tactic on me.
[ If, at any point in time, she has to fill out a 'things you hate most about living in a world with superheroes' list, number one on the list is going to be how you can just be walking down a street and find yourself caught up in some kind of battle or - what even is this? She's really not sure. Bank robbery gone wrong, whatever, she doesn't care, because there was screaming and then -
Well actually, she's not sure she remembers most of what happened in the past ten minutes. Which could be a result of someone hitting her kind of hard in the head from behind or could just be because adrenaline had whited out everything, fight or flight response and hers always had tipped towards fight.
There's someone lying very dead on the floor of the alleyway she's in, and the knife in her hand pretty much indicates it was her that made him that dead, especially since no one else is here at the moment. She's not really sure how she got in an alleyway. She'd been with Tony, they'd been in the street. She thinks they'd been laughing. Maybe the dead guy had tried taking her as a potential hostage and that's why they're in an alleyway, he'd been trying to get out of the area. She would have been standing still with the initial panic of the crowd flooding her, she would have been what looked like an easy target, especially if the crowd had managed to separate her from Tony.
Tony. Finding him, that's what's important, making sure he's okay, but her head is pounding and there's still panicked people everywhere pressing in on her mind. She thinks she's broadcasting, probably is, but she can't control it at all right now. And that's about when she looks down and remembers how she got the knife in her hand. There had been a gun first, knocked out of both of their reaches. But to get the knife she'd needed him close. Too close, and that's a lot of blood for a cut that has to be shallow, it's across the ribs it can't have gone too deep, just wide, wide and bleeding too much. She's going to stop thinking about this now. And she's going to get her mind under control, and bandage herself up, and find Tony, and things will be - just fine. ]
[ It was fast, when it happened, and he's pretty sure a bomb went off below then - the bank robbers, getting into the city underground - they'd never find them in time. Tony has the boots, the lighter pieces of the torso (no shielding, just there to link other armaments together) and a gauntlet. He can fly, a little, not much, so he's walking. Scanning for her, because he doesn't know how they got lost but he's terrified and full of nerves. How could he have lost his empath in a situation like this. How could he? But he's not talking; he's not asking other people if they know where this one random girl is, he's just looking for her... feeling. Her seity. It's so hard to find anything in all this noise, augh, these people, overwhelming him, too much sound, too much, and someone else, probably Natasha, who is receptive and can be helpful but only on her own terms, and those terms? Are blunt.
But he's been pushed into an alley to calm down, it's quieter here, and it only takes a few seconds to straighten back up, ready to keep looking, so he starts, turning to find Natasha and see if she wants to help, but ---
Oh, there she is. Right there. She's been right there. The kind of smile that comes from relief, a goofy, relieved smile, hits his faces and shines to hers.
He wastes little time, scrabbling over to her. ] Hey, found you first. You okay? What's this bleeding?
[ It wasn't that the day was terrible. But she'd dreamed, last night, in the way that's been slowly tapering off more these days and therefore becomes even more irritating when it does happen, and then when she'd gone out to try and shake it off the small things had crowded in on her, the way at the grocery she couldn't stop herself from watching the security cameras, the effort it took to keep from reacting to the man on the sidewalk who brushed too close.
Going out had been the sort of mistake that made her slowly feel more and more raw, like someone was stripping off the veneer of normalcy that she's been building, and she knows from past experience that by tomorrow she'll be able to breathe in deep and feel that one step closer to normal again but for right now that doesn't feel much like it matters.
Coming back home (Tony's, home, it's synonymous in her head) at least gives her more control over herself, some sense of stability, but she's still pent up and wound tight as she tosses her keys onto the counter and the groceries beside them and starts to search for Tony. It's instinctive, no real intent behind it but that she likes knowing where he is and that right now knowing where he is would be especially good. She doesn't call his name as she searches, just looks ahead of her with her mind and wanders. ]
[ They weren't really connected, and it was obvious in the way they had to look for each other from time to time, or the disagreements they had because neither one of them ever wanted to ask the other one for anything that meant anything, but both of them got angry when the other person failed to do the exact same thing in a fit of hilarious double-standardism. But even without being all that connected, they could still effect each other. Slight interactions in the morning - or the lack thereof - a general feeling and tone to things even without having been directly around each other. It's the same way that a house with non-pairs operates, if one of them is sick or didn't sleep well or is otherwise in an abnormal mood, that mood reflects on the others.
It's hard to tell today which one of them is reflecting on the other, or even if there's any reflection at all happening here, if they didn't both just happen to have off days coinciding with one another. He's not actually aware of whatever it is that's bothering her, and hasn't seen her today anyway. That in itself isn't really any cause for concern - they see each other in the evenings, the afternoons, and throughout the nights more often than they do anything else. It just happens to work out that way. But the notification of another car returned to the garage, a small catalogue of things shifting throughout the house to adjust for the second presence, alerts him to her return. The faint brush of her looking for him comes next, and he's not entirely sure he's in the mood for company, but he'll never do anything to bar her from an area he's in unless there is something absolutely unbearable happening that he doesn't want to involve her in.
Right now, it's nothing of the sort. Right now it's a bunch of things - no longer being CEO of a company doesn't mean that you don't still have a ton of things to do with it, regardless of your official position. You have to do a lot less, certainly, but the few things that do still require your attention just then stand out all the more. There are other people, too, who want his attention, and between them and that and the refusal of the combined laws of physics and chemistry to let him bend them over the table as he sees fit is catching up. Add to that the snowballing effect that too long without anything meaningful to focus and hone his senses on has had - generally a bit of irritability, given that an object designed with a specific purpose disallowed to fulfill that purpose tends to then react negatively with its forced place within its environment - and it probably would have been a good idea to direct her elsewhere for a while.
Instead, he brushes back, casually, neither en- nor discouragement, from where he's spilled a project out all over a table in one of the lesser used rooms. He doesn't know what to call this room, just that there's a rug and a couch and he's sitting on the rug in front of the table, occasionally on his knees to reach something on the other side. There's bookshelves filled with things he's positive he told the interior designer to pick out themselves, because none of them are books, and most of them are probably considered art by someone, somewhere. It's a project that seems like it should be simple, but really just continues to irritate him further, not cooperating like it should be, and he can't figure out why. ]
[ She really has just - no idea what's going on, at all. Twenty minutes ago she was puttering around her and John's apartment, doing nothing in particular on a Saturday morning because she finally had some free time and between school and work and vigilanteing that was rare, and then she woke up in a house she doesn't recognize and now she can't feel John, anywhere, not even the thread of the bond, and she's trying not to let the weight on her chest turn into panic but it's kind of hard.
Clothes first, and what's in the closet fits her. There's a feeling in the room that she recognizes, almost, familiar to how her apartment winds up feeling like her, but it's not really the same. If she was in the habit of putting colors to emotions, this was a darker duller hue than hers. She finds a knife sheath at the bottom of one of the drawers, straps it on, and ventures out into the rest of the house as quietly as possible, trying to keep an eye out for any cameras so she can dodge them.
She just needs to figure out where the hell she is and go home. That's all, really. She doesn't think that's asking too much. ]
[ Today is awesome. Today is a day for being fantastic and building cool shit and revolutionizing the world so that tomorrow looks like a distant memory from the past. Because Tony Stark is that awesome.
That awesome and totally not paying attention to things around him. He doesn't notice the shift in feeling, doesn't notice the absence of emotions, and doesn't notice that it's the wrong time entirely to be thinking that maybe he's hungry and that it's totally the wrong time to be kind of sleepy and considering actually going to lie down in that awesome, double king whatever size bed that he has.
What he does notice is a weird girl in the kitchen after he's managed to get the french toast pieces out of the freezer and into the microwave, when he turns around to jump up and sit on the counter top, and winds up pausing somewhere in mid-air instead. (It means his arms stop pushing him up and he sort of bounces off the edge instead, sliding back down to the ground.) ]
You're in my kitchen.
[ Squinting. Now he's paying attention, noticing things. She doesn't feel familiar, he doesn't recognize her, but he doesn't not recognize her, and that's a weird feeling. ] JARVIS? You, what are you - [ ....oh wait. Waaaait. Maybe sort of. ] What are you [ Meaning either 'you' timeframe!max or 'you' weird!person ] doing in my kitchen?
[ In Max's head this is going to be a totally normal day. Wake up early, head down to the workshop and put in some time under her car because she's making pretty good progress, chat with Tony while he's here or maybe just work in silence, whatever floats their boats today.
He doesn't have Avengers business today, but technically he's supposed to go to a meeting everyone expects he'll skip anyways. (Note: still need to find him a new PA, though at this point she's pretty sure she could handle it herself.) She takes the stairs down from her room two at a time, humming something tuneless, and then stops at the bottom because something feels... different. Almost immediately she broadens her awareness, searching for Tony, just to be certain that he's here and safe. ]
[ Different isn't a bad way of putting it. Tony himself hasn't been all that sure of things so far, only that he woke up on a cot in whatever room this is and promptly after waking up decided he never ever wanted to leave because it was awesome. So far he's been talking to JARVIS - who told him his name, even though Tony already knew his own name, and successfully passed a quiz on the Jarvis Tony already knew, and was calling him 'Sir', which he liked, but now calls him 'Master', which he also likes. He's learned this is a British thing, calling younger people 'master' and older ones 'sir', even though he thinks it should be the other way around.
Per normal things though: aside from JARVIS being Jarvis, things are... weird. His parents aren't here - he learned that very easily. And the bots are nice but he doesn't know what to do with them, really, which explains why all three of them are currently sort of doing whatever they feel like doing. He's alternating between reading everything he can find about himself - he's not all that impressed, although occasionally, sure - and looking at everything he seems to be doing. The age thing was obvious, please, and JARVIS told him anyway. But either way, he's been doing his best to not think about that, or the way everything feels. He loves the holograms because he doesn't have to touch them, JARVIS because he can mute and silence anything else that makes noise, and dim the lights if necessary. This whole room will basically conform to whatever he wants it to, and that... Is really cool. And nice. Not that he's needed it yet - not in anything beyond what a normal sentinel kid manages to need from everyday surroundings, and potentially even less than that because Stark men don't need pandering to, but it's still. Nice, to have the potential there to work with.
He's not totally accustomed to feeling empaths on a regular basis but he can still feel the difference anyway. He's not half as good at shielding as he is when he's an adult, which isn't to say a whole lot, but right now he's mostly just broadcasting curiosity about the feelings he's getting in return. ]
[ It's been...quiet. Pepper supposes this is, when she thinks of it, a vast improvement considering what she's had to deal with—botched interviews, rescheduling meetings, the press, everything. It's exhausting, it's repetitious, it's Tony, but it's normal. Their normal.
The thought is fleeting, though she smiles to herself as she walks through an equally quiet beach house. So much time had been devoted to Stark Tower, staying in New York and simply following through with their plans for another that it'd been almost too much to consider coming back. It's nostalgic though, like a get-away that probably could have been a million times more extravagant if she'd given into Tony's whims. There's something nice, something them before, well, them that Pepper likes; even if she doesn't voice it outright, it's still in her body language and that present twist of her mouth.
Clearing their schedule has been worth every moment.
So, when she finally makes it down the steps - barefoot now rather than in heels - to enter the workshop, Pepper leans against the doorway with her arms crossed. Still quiet, the softest smile, she debates whether to attract his attention or wait until he notices. She decides on a time limit: five minutes. ]
[ He still likes being here. This was his first getaway, when things in New York were too hectic, too pressing, too much too fast; when he'd needed to get away from the press and just be for a while, he'd come out here. And it had been great. Moved the company to the west coast, keep working, away from all those memories. And then he'd gone back to build Stark Tower, that had been fine too, because he was grown up, he was mature, and Pepper was there, and that made all the difference. New things, new stuff, new productions, new advancements.
But that doesn't mean he doesn't still think of this place as his true... Well, he wouldn't use the word 'home', but it's the closest to what he has of one. So when they got here, he sort of wandered off, let her do her own thing, and within minutes he was in the workshop again. Now this. This might be home. Not the whole house, just this room within it, and all the time and hiding he's done inside the walls, combined with all the things he's created and conjured within them.
Right now he's happy, he's chatting with his bots, because Butterfingers is in charge of holding something that he's soldering together and he keeps having to move around Butterfinger's adjustments. Dummy keeps trying to make him shakes - you can tell how long Tony's been in here by the number of empty glasses he has stacked up along the far edge of the table, which makes the one that Dummy's just sat down next to him number five. He's bantering with JARVIS who just informed him the smoothie is 'comprised of one banana, one pint of orange juice, one claw's worth of kelp, an intact strawberry, and what appeared to be roughly one teaspoon of engine oil.' He shrugs that off and tries it anyway, setting it down as he instantly forgets about it and goes back to what he was doing on his screens, sliding holographic prototypes around until they're more feasible, and then turning to solder the thing properly despite how Butterfingers has moved while he was attending to the smoothie.
He doesn't notice her watching at all, sry. Bots are distracting. ]
[ The fact that Tony's knowledge of self defense is minimal has been bothering her for a while now. She's essentially always armed, between what she knows of close quarters combat and her empathy - if the situation is one she can get out of, she's always ready to get out of it. And sure, he always has his brain, but without his suit he's a very breakable man with a lot of enemies and she hates the way worry seeps in sometimes when he's out, or when threats are made, or when he casually disregards danger.
It's not like teaching him some self defense is necessarily going to be an actual help against the type of people who would come after him, but it might ease a little bit of that worry and it might buy him time someday. Time's important. Once you have that - it's not a guarantee, but it helps.
So she waits until sometime she knows he's eaten food recently, slept a decent amount in the past 24 hours, and hasn't started something big yet, and waylays him casually, hair pulled back, leggings and tank top and already very prepared. ] Hey, c'mere.
[ It's not really that he has anything against self defense. He's actually pretty good at it, if not quite martially. He's sneaky, and ingenious, and all manner of crafty. And he likes the boxing he and Happy do sometimes, even if he mixes in a little something something every now and then. Mostly his method of attack is attacking. Blasting people off the battlefield - it seems to work pretty well, all things considered.
When she gets his attention, she doesn't seem to be wearing anything out of the ordinary, she looks normal, vibes normal, and he feels oddly good right now, so okay, sure, she wants to do something, he's not doing anything. ]
[ Nothing he hasn't seen hundreds of times. The mind of someone built to notice connections between things that should never feasibly be connected, to literally see things that other people don't, is extraordinarily good at doing that precisely when you don't want it to. The drawback of the benefit is the curse.
And what a curse. In the last few weeks, he's been sleeping less and less - not that he was ever particularly good at keeping to regular sleep cycles anyway, but this was growing to surpass ratios he'd sustained in high school and college, and those even he would admit were unhealthy. They were what created DUM-E and JARVIS, arguably both ends of the spectrum of positive outcomes, if to varying degrees of 'success'.
Falling, falling, choking on lack of air, in space, in water, it's cold in both places, cold in the cave, cold in the space, cold in space, and you can't breathe, you can't breathe when there's no air, for either reason. So he can't breathe, and it's not helped that much by the weight on his ribcage - 2.1 lb of extra weight when vertical, 0.3 lb lateral sheer pressure to the clavicles and sternum, converted to 4.3 lb extra pressure when lying horizontally owing to the structure's organization - the things that are missing as a result of the cave (not space, because a void can't take) - 6% reduced lung capacity, a 53% reduced flexibility in the sternum owing to replacement material lacking similar viscoelasticity - and he's so happy he can run the numbers at will now, even when they change from time to time.
And there's more, about losing people, about eggs (golden omelettes, and why does he dislike a lot of things to do with Easter, except he doesn't, not really, he doesn't care one way or the other, not like he does with Christmas), and other things, but it's the breathing that makes him twist a little in his sleep, and it's the cold (even though the desert is hot and he burned there just as much as he froze underground) that makes him sit up, and it's both that made that noise of inhalation - because he couldn't breathe, for a second in the waking world, he couldn't do it. It's the void that makes him instantly stifle any other noises, because there's someone here and a quick check indicates she's still asleep and he'd prefer it if she stayed in the void of sleep. He doesn't want to talk about it, you need breath for that, and he's trying to catch his right now anyway, so he couldn't talk even if he wanted to.
It's selfishness, he knows, that swings his legs over the side of the bed and pad out of the room in sweatpants and the thickest shirt he could find within easy reach. He's been reliably informed that keeping things all to yourself is actually the textbook definition of selfishness, but he figures if he's got other textbook definitions he's keeping to, he might as well go for some kind of collection. He'd stood in the doorway to the bathroom holding the sweats for a while before changing his mind. The cold sweat was fine, it just meant he'd wake up a little more, and that was good, because there's no way he's going back to sleep anytime soon.
For all the time he's spent in this house, he doesn't usually stay in the top part of it, and the way he's looking around at little things here and there you'd almost say he doesn't spend any time up here at all. It's not a reorientation tactic, reassurance that this is what was real, and totems are great and all but there's a seriously flawed piece of logic to those, he needs something a little better than 'I know something you don't know' to ensure his realities. His fantasies have a habit of becoming real, and what he'd previously considered out of the realm of possibility apparently runs a successful illegal smuggling operation on the side, so it's just hard to tell all around. After blinking at a few things, he pads into the kitchen, forces down a small amount of water, because gasping makes your mouth dry, then grabs a couple of grapes more for something to have in his hands than anything else before making the inevitable trip downstairs.
Downstairs is the real home anyway. Downstairs is safety, and comfort in the midst of things that operate the same way regardless of where you are in your subconscious. Metal doesn't move, give, or alter itself, and once something is coded, it's actually hardwired to be that way unless someone else comes along and fucks it up. Breathing, and cold are pretty easy ways to fuck up hardwiring, he thinks. Very effective, very difficult to fix, at least for the poor strings of code trying to reattach across bridges that no longer reach. So he spends his time instead pulling up other things, things that he can fix, much more easily, even if they're difficult, because this - this is what he understands. This is what can't be taken from him, regardless of his situation or handicap. This is what's ultimately comfortable beyond everything else.
[ She'd noticed that something was wrong. What, exactly, she hadn't been sure of at first. Just that the feeling of him was different, something under the edges and pushing out the corners. The first few days she'd let him have his space, because she knew those times that memories were just more insistent than normal for a few days, but it had persisted.
And then persisted, and it didn't take her long to put the pieces of him always being awake when she got up and never in bed when she went to sleep together and come up with it being a nighttime problem. And once she came to that conclusion, it hadn't taken her all that long to temporarily start accidentally sleeping in his room instead of hers.
She wasn't sure if the fact that he'd yet to ask her why was a sign of his distraction or of something else entirely. Most likely his distraction.
It's his dream that wakes her up. Not the movement, but the feeling. It's hard to miss, this close. And while the specifics are different, the overall spread of emotion is all too familiar. She's felt it a thousand times over, from herself and from the others in the cells around her. But waking him up from this - it's almost never a good idea with her, and she isn't sure she should risk it. She's still debating her course of action when he gasps himself awake, and she lets her eyes close and waits in the dark, thinking.
Waiting for him to leave the room, giving him some space - that's the best course of action, she thinks. Pressing him immediately might not work given how stubborn he can be about these things, and she wants a little bit to ensure that she's fully awake and shielded, wants to make sure that she can give him what he needs, whatever it is in the end. JARVIS gives her security footage as soon as she asks, lets her watch Tony's trip through the house, and then eventually she gets up and tugs on a sweatshirt to make up for her lack of pants before meandering down through the house after him.
She slides into the workshop quietly, heads towards him. ]
You're up late. [ Soft in the stillness, circling around towards his front as she watches him. ] Early? Not sure which one it is.
[ It's not all that rare for her to go out these days - for errands, sometimes at night when she's feeling restless and feels the need to go beat up people in the name of justice - whatever the reasons, she's comfortable enough in her place here to be able to leave it on occasion.
Lately she hasn't particularly wanted to, in part because there's something - she doesn't know the word she wants there. Tony's hardly sleeping, though, she knows that. He's always gone on even less sleep than her, but lately it's been worse.
She's not entirely sure what to do.
But today she did go out, regardless, just to pick up a few things, and when she comes back she calls out his name into the house and goes wandering down into the workshop when she doesn't receive a response, reaching out with her mind. It's when she brushes against his that she starts moving faster because something's wrong, she can feel it, and she pushes open the door to the workshop and looks for him, trying to calm him as she does. ]
[ He hasn't really seen anyone all day. It's just been a nice day of hanging out with the bots, with himself, you know, a good day alone at home with nothing to actually do aside from his own projects. Everyone deserves a day like that. Or maybe more like a week like that. Whatever.
But the rotations hadn't been high enough and he'd nearly beaned himself in the skull with an accidentally flying projectile and then he'd been covered in oil and that hadn't helped, so he'd gone off to take a shower. He'd started to go off and take a shower, and suddenly.
Suddenly he couldn't move. He was stuck, being all but fetal and not able to move. Sitting in his workshop, hands half-clenched and hovering up near his chest but not moving, breathing very shallow and head bowed, effectively stuck in place. ]
[ At first missing her period doesn't actually register. It used to happen pretty regularly, due to malnutrition or her rather physically demanding lifestyle, and if it's been regular lately it's still not something that particularly comes to mind as a problem. She's always been careful about ensuring that her birth control implant is well before its good-till date. It was important, back when she was never sure at any given moment whether she'd wind up in hands she didn't want to be again, and the instinct has stayed well ingrained.
It's about when her second period is due and doesn't show up and she starts to tally up how many mornings lately she's felt a little nauseous that the possibility sudden hits with a feeling somewhere along the line between 'I just got hit in the stomach with a basketball really hard' and 'I have a concussion'. She doesn't say anything to Tony, but she goes out to pick up a test almost immediately and when she gets back and finishes staring at the little plus sign she locks herself in her room for a long time and paces, back and forth, up and down. She'd drink, but she's not allowed any more right now apparently.
She'd really like a drink right now. Like, really really like it.
It takes her a long time to finally get up the courage to leave her room and go in search of Tony, the (positive, very very positive, she can't stop remembering that it's positive) test in her pocket. At first her wandering is kind of aimless, but eventually she asks JARVIS and goes where he directs her, says before she can lose her nerve. ] We need to talk about something. [ And then sort of freezes in still shell shocked confusion because she has no idea how she's supposed to say this or how he's going to react and how she feels and what she wants to do and literally anything important, she doesn't know almost anything right now and it's a really unsettling feeling. ]
[ He is, for his part, not really considering... Anything like what he's about to tell him. He's working on something to do with the output for his flight paths and chatting with JARVIS occasionally and mostly just enjoying the afternoon. Putting off contracts and signatures (again) for the pleasure of hanging out by himself with his toys and his robots and the ease with which that comes to him.
It's not all that uncommon for her to show up wherever he happens to be at any given point, so he's not that surprised when she does. He doesn't even register that she has, initially, although he doesn't make a show of it when he does see her. She introduces herself pretty quickly anyway, and if he's going to be surprised by her being there, or what she says when she is, he's going to choose to be surprised by what she says, because it's been his experience - as well as the experience of most people - that any unexpected conversation that starts off like that isn't going to be a good one. Even expected conversations that start off like that aren't typically good.
So he lags for a moment, mid-motion and thought, glancing over at her and then quickly off to some random area in the room, and smoothly goes back to what he was doing like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. He's not trying to figure out if he's fucked something up recently, or scanning over recent events from the news he's been secondarily aware of that might have involved her. ]
[ They both don't have very high opinions of themselves or their own worth to each other, when it comes down to it. In some respects it's easier for her to understand what she means to him because there's more tangible evidence of it, the obvious effect that she has on him when his senses are flaring or something's going wrong and she can soothe it because her mind is designed to do that for his.
Her own improvement is quieter, less obvious. In part because she's had years to become used to the idea of being broken and to learn to hide it from people very effectively, so the change is not marked. It is simply her day to day existence changing from a mask that keeps her hidden from scrutiny to something that is true and happy and herself. And when she does such a very good job of faking it, it becoming simply the truth is - perhaps less evident than she'd like it to be. She's told him that she's happy, but then he has no real way to measure that in comparison because he never saw how very unhappy she had been. When she still was so very thoroughly unhappy, she didn't know him well enough to let him see it ever, wasn't close enough to consider the possibility that he could help. And then he had anyways, without even knowing, without necessarily specific intentions to. Just by being. She's still not sure how he's changed how she feels about things so very thoroughly.
It's taken her some time to really realize the discrepancy in their ability to understand what the other person is doing for them. Time and having caught the impression in his mind more than once of one sidedness, of not reciprocating well enough, and that is something she refuses to let continue. She's tried to tell him subtly, to mention her happiness and her appreciation of him, but she's fairly certain he still doesn't actually get it, doesn't really understand how much he means to her and how much everything he has done for her means to her.
So she's going to make that clear, and it took a little bit to come up with this but now that she has she just waits for the next time they've idly kissed their way to the bedroom, slides her hands down his arms to wrap around his wrists and whispers against his mouth inbetween kisses. ] I'd like to tie you down. [ It's possible, of course, he's not in the mood for this and she'll just have to delay until the next time he is. But she can generally convince him to do what she wants, and what she wants right now is him in a position that he has to listen to her, can't brush it off as something she's just saying or doesn't actually hold meaning. What she has to say isn't the sort of thing she would ever just say without absolutely meaning it, and she won't let him try to take it as anything else. ]
i apparently read it and then fell asleep while sending you a text
[ It's not particularly something he intends on reintroducing her to, the feeling he has about how lopsided this relationship can be. How lopsided it is. Most of his relationships are like that though, the ones that mean anything - they all come out to a sense of indebtedness to the other person involved, purely for their willingness to stay involved despite the laundry list of reasons that are more or less daily pointed out why they shouldn't. It rarely stops him from continuing to take advantage of the fact that they are still around, but that just winds up being another reason they probably shouldn't be. That's just how things go with him.
She's one of the more tangible of those relationships. He can usually see the wear and tear he puts on things, but he can actually feel the way her moods change, and while he isn't solipsistic enough to assume that he is the cause of all of those, he still feels like he has a large enough culpability for them. Sure, he can feel some of the more direct evidence to where he's helping her in return, but it looks more or less like the proverbial drop in the ocean.
Right now though, he's not thinking about any of that. It's not something he enjoys dwelling on; is, in fact, something he actively avoids thinking about (because he feels bad about it but he's selfish enough to need her to stay with him even if he isn't giving her what he ought to be in return). He tries not to even consider the issue, and particularly not at times like this, when casual proximity has broken out into kissing and bedrooms again, and there are far more positive things on the horizon. He doesn't resist when her hands slide down to grasp his wrists, feels a frission of energy buzz under his skin for a moment when she speaks without moving away. He doesn't have a problem with that today, and the way he moves to kiss her harder for a few moments before replying indicates as such. ] You'll have to move to find something to do it with though. I'm not sure how okay I am with that.
[ She's been sleeping a lot more soundly these days, which is funny. She would have thought she'd sleep less, actually, but she's just tired a lot and easily and when she sleeps it's generally for a solid 8 hours at a stretch now. At least she does wake up feeling pretty thoroughly refreshed, at least temporarily. The morning sickness lasted less than a month for her, and that's pretty lucky. So far she hasn't really noticed much of a change beyond wanting to eat more than normal and being tired far more easily and the faint swell that's starting to show in her stomach. And her breasts being alternatively sore and almost too sensitive, which is weird.
It's all weird, but so far she's handling it fine, she thinks. Well enough.
Today she blinks awake slowly and fairly peacefully, sprawled partially across the bed. For a moment she just lies there, accustoming herself to being awake again, and then turns to glance over at Tony. She can feel his heat, so she already knows he's in bed with her now (though she'd gone to bed alone early, exhausted from not much at all which was frustrating), the question is whether he's already awake or not. ]
did you remind them it's actually your sister's door
[ He is already awake, he's just not really done anything about it. He woke up a little while ago and stayed in the quiet calmness of the room for a while, eventually whispered to JARVIS, who gave him the basic morning's rundown at a Sentinel's lower hearing level, and then just sort of decided to... stay there. It's comfortable here, and he likes listening to the different pacing of their heartbeats. He's been able to hear the third one if he concentrates on it for a couple of weeks now, and when it's quiet like this, it's even easier. It's a small luxury he's keeping more or less to himself, because he's not really sure how he would explain why he's doing it to her because he doesn't actually know. But maybe he'll try and let her use him to hear it too. He's not sure yet. There's a lot of things about all this that neither one of them seems that sure about.
But none of this means he's not happy when she does start to stir. He's been lying mostly on his back with his hips twisted to the side, one arm tucked under his head and the other resting on his stomach. It's a nice stretch in the torso - actually that's how he got into this position, stretching - and it's keeping the covers mostly off of a morning issue. He hasn't been up long enough for it to go down, has really only been awake for a short while at all. But he turns to look at her in return. ] Morning.
[ It's not really morning anymore, but then neither of them is terribly good at a specific sleep cycle, are they? Not really. At some point in time in the very recent past they both got some kind of sleep that was probably reasonable. She'd woken up after him, for whatever reason, and for a while she'd laid in bed with her eyes still closed listening to him move around the room because he has to be in the office today, apparently there's some kind of meeting later that he definitely has to attend or people will be upset.
It's not until she feels like she's actually awake (and taking those long moments to wake up instead of doing it all at once is always a nice luxury) that she rolls out of bed and wanders to find him in the bathroom, leans against the doorway. ] The meeting's at three thirty, right?
[ He's horrible at it - a specific sleep schedule. But at least by the time she gets up and comes to stand in the doorway, he's had a shower and dressed again up to his waist. He takes a moment, swirling the brush around in the dish to get the lather all nice and sudsy, to admire her in the mirror, the morning still lingering on her face and the sleepiness still seeping slowly out of her frame. ]
Or whatever time reasonably close to that I happen to arrive. You didn't have to get up.
[ She doesn't actually do a great deal of digging as to Tony's past. It's kind of a silent bargain between them, or maybe she's imagining that part but she knows he doesn't look into her past and fair's fair, right?
Nobody needs to spend all their time burdened by the past, and that includes the people around them knowing about it. Sometimes it's better to just leave it buried there.
But sometimes you find things out completely on accident, and when someone made a casual joking reference to Tony's long and storied history with kidnapping, well. She'd gotten a little curious. She knew about Afghanistan, but they'd made it sound a lot bigger than that, which dovetailed in with comments he'd dropped himself over time. It was somewhere in the middle of SHIELD's file on his childhood that she gets frustrated and pushes her chair clear so that she's in his line of sight. ] Exactly how many times have people tried to kidnap you?
[ He's just working, chatting with his bots as he and they by proxy shape whatever groundbreaking thing it is that he's working on now. Suits, maybe, maybe environmental, sometimes he just calls up the Oracle network so that he can get a good feel for what's happening out there in the world, what's out there that he's not supposed to even be aware of. (And he gets that. He gets keeping the majority of civilian America save and unworried, but dammit, he's not a part of civilian America.
So he's in a decent mood - didn't find anything new from SHIELD, didn't dig up anything interesting with his little bugs, Jarvis is being snippy with him but that's just because he's gone for a while without sleep again and after about fifty hours awake the AI starts to shift rapidly into mother hen mode.
He comes upstairs for some form of sustenance when Jarvis actually locks down everything in the lab just shy of turning off the three bots, because not even Jay-man has the heart to do that. Tony grouses, and complains, but goes upstairs for food anyway.
He does not, however, make it all the way back down when she asks him the question, and he pauses, apple in mouth and sandwich and water bottle in hand. He takes the bite out of the apple, free hand coming up to hold it while he chews, looking at her. ] Old news. You wanna see what I'm working on?
[ It's entirely on accident, when she stumbles upon it. She's just idly going through a folder of old projects from the Stark Tech servers because she can, because she always loves seeing what other people have gotten up to. She almost even skips straight over it, but her eyes flick back a moment later in recognition that she doesn't even fully realize until some thirty seconds after she's been staring at the file and the specs page, everything written down in technical jargon that she'd once spent a week and a half deconstructing in a dirty cellar doubling as her lab, trying to find countermeasures and methods of destruction. ]
I didn't know you'd done work in power nullification and amplification.
[ She doesn't even realize she's saying it until she's already said it, still watching the file, and if she sounds and looks calm it's mostly because she's frozen, temporarily very distant from the actual moment happening around her. Coping mechanism, she recognizes this one.
She wants to shut the computer down, but she can't seem to stop scrolling through the specifications, the blueprints and notations and footnotes. It looks so pristine and black and white from here. ]
[ Tony is predominately unaware of the significance of this. Of all the things he has worked on, somehow that's never really crossed his mind as something that was potentially horrific - mostly because it hadn't been as widely applicable. Much more specialized, much more marginal when he sat back and let the numbers and math scroll inexorably towards saving him a comfortable hot-seat in whatever manner of post-death one felt swayed to on any particular day, and much more likely to be forgotten amongst his other priorities.
So it's slightly absent when he replies, not even a glance over when he does so. She's allowed to look at most of his old projects - everything except the things he was even worried back then about actually handing over to people, because he couldn't not make them, couldn't not test them, but their functionality hasn't effected the fact that they're under multiple layers of lock-down. Regardless, it's not unusual for her to find something every now and then to spark her interest. It's really just more that she typically keeps it mostly to herself. ] What? A while ago. Unwieldy - it was a specific contract job. [ Like other things he doesn't really like to think about, like all the things he's built that correspond directly to scars he's seen on other people. He's got shards of his own missile in his chest, for god's sake. He's basically the god damn irony man. ]
[ She's done this before. She's done it before a few times too many, but it's not like that actually makes it easier. The days start bleeding together after not too long. She expected that, the lack of knowledge of how long it's been, how often she's been taken out of this cell and put back in to nurse her wounds, the loss of ability to do more than say no over and over again. After her shields snap (again) it becomes harder to put a coherent thought together in her brain, much less say it out loud. She can, in theory, but it's not all that necessary anyways. A little better to not be able to think too clearly.
It takes longer than she thought it would to stop believing Tony will come for her. Some part of her is still clinging to it stubbornly even still, even though she knows that if he hasn't come by now there has to be a reason. She's too far away, she's not findable - he's dead. The last one isn't acceptable. She has to believe that he made it, that he's still alive, or all of this becomes even more pointless than it started out as. Tony's alive, but if he hasn't found her by now then they have to be doing a very good job of hiding her.
In the end when rescue does come she doesn't even recognize it at first, fights them the same as she fights anyone trying to touch her, instinctive and vicious and with a total lack of care for any pain that results. It's only when she feels Tony's mind somewhere nearby and hears someone yelling for him that she freezes long enough for one of them to get just enough sedative in her that she's a little more pliant. Not that she believes it yet. Not that she has any faith she's not dreaming all of this, isn't just desperate enough that her brain is giving her something, anything to help her escape temporarily.
Her mind searches out through the rescue party again, cataloguing them even as she tentatively reaches towards the flame of Tony's mind (different, muted somehow, it's not quite right). He's nearby if it actually is him. Coming closer. One of the rescue party must have recognized her and that's why they called him. ]
[ It's been precisely three times Too Fucking Long, that's how long it's been. He can't believe how long it's actually been, how long their plan worked - they've been separated before, sure, they're both busy, both in various sorts of demand, but it's never been for this long. Never for nearly this long.
The fact that he was tricked for as long as he was, too, is... Difficult to describe. The sheer amount of self-loathing that's stemming from that has put anything he ever held prior to now to complete shame, and the determination to either rectify the mistake or pay them back tenfold for their kindness has become all but a doctrine or motto by which to wake up and sleep with every day. It just hasn't been that difficult to hold onto that feeling, the one he slowly realized one day when the empathic feedback he got from 'her', when 'her' shields dropped in the heat of the moment, felt the same. Never stronger, never altering. Slightly different, perhaps, but the same in several ways that mattered. Once that aspect of the illusion was shattered, it wasn't difficult to fracture and fragment the others.
He did at least have a three month crash course in interrogation techniques he was able to utilize. Let it never be said Tony Stark isn't a quick study, nor does he have difficulty taking his lessons and expanding upon them. He's been called 'creative' more often than even he has ever bothered to count.
However, the information was fairly vague before the impostor ceased providing it, and shortly afterward was taken elsewhere to be dealt with properly. Since then, he's been toeing the line between a balanced laser-like focus and sheer rage, reckless and ruthlessly efficient, all the strategy and war-mongering he'd been pushing aside and putting behind him come to the forefront once again. He doesn't even particularly expect to find her by now - it's been too long, and the enemy is too careful to leave people as resourceful as her just sitting around. On the other hand, they're reluctant to lose people as useful as her either, and it's that sad fact, combined with what he knows of her ability to survive, that's prevented him from losing hope altogether. It's double-edged, and more than anything else he's been able to ever compare it to.
They're following up on a lead - not a strong one, but when are they ever certain these days - when someone calls him. Senses high and on edge - as they always seem to be now - he can tell the difference in their voice, the tightness and emotional reaction involved, even if he can't tell precisely what it's for. Sometimes these rescues don't always go well, and those who haven't been on more than a couple can have adverse reactions. But he comes anyway, because this one feels different even if he built up shields to block out concern and anything else a long time ago, because maybe they need help. Maybe it's just a firm grip on their shoulder to get them back to rights.
It's really only the suit and JARVIS that prevent his knees from giving out when he comes over to see what he's been called for. He wasn't thinking much, giving in to that particular form of controlled rage that he's perfected lately, but when he sees her - and it's her this time, he can tell, because he can feel her now - everything vacates. Thoughts, fear, anger - everything. He still heads towards her slowly, stepping out of the suit midstride, because they've secured the area and even if they haven't, he doesn't care, he doesn't care if it's a trap because it's been too long and he doesn't care. He just needs to be sure that it's her, and to do that he needs to be outside his suit and vulnerable.
So he comes over slowly, but steadily, coming up next to her and altering his posture to avoid looming over her by accident. ] Hey.
[ It's not that she's been actually lying to him about it, or anything. It's just that he's still in recovery, still sleeping a lot and drugged up frequently and there are long spans where she has free time, and she'd been using JARVIS and her own not inconsiderable abilities to find out who gave the orders to get Tony in that house, who it was that said the words that meant that Tony was in pain.
And then she goes to find them, in short spurts. She has a suit for transportation, if she doesn't use it for the actual mission because that's too loud and obvious, so it's not like it takes her more than a few hours. Tonight she wiped out the next group up the chain, her second time out and a good source of information for the higher ups, and Tony should still be asleep but she's still very quiet as she gets out of the suit, moves tiredly towards the sink at one side of the workshop. There are bruises blossoming and there's some blood she has to clean off, a mix of theirs and a little of hers, incidental scrapes and a split lip. She'll have to do something about that - even drugged he's going to notice. She'll come up with a story.
It won't take her long, though, and then she needs to go up and check on him. JARVIS hasn't said anything so nothing's wrong, but she still - needs to be certain. She has to be certain that he's okay. ]
look i actually did sleep until eleven by mistake anyway
[ He is frequently not particularly in the sort of state one would expect someone to put that sort of two and two together in, and in all honesty he still hasn't actually done it yet. It's really more that he wakes up and when he asks JARVIS where she is, the AI feels... cagey. JARVIS doesn't protect just anybody, and he typically folds like a three year presented with an entire cake in the face of Tony's questioning, so the fact that he's staying loyal - more or less - means that it's important and potentially something he sort of. Is okay with.
And it has to be something important, because it's feeling like it's over the limit for one of these things he's taking, partially because ow and partially because he's just this side of not groggy enough to just roll over and go back to sleep. He's still not in the clearest of states - and honestly that's probably a good thing, because otherwise he still wouldn't be sleeping very well, and by 'very well' I mean 'at all', it's sad how shadows are still sometimes making him feel threatened - but he's well enough to notice something is wrong because he's a goddamn genius and he's probably not quite well enough to actually go downstairs and see what he can find out but he does that anyway too.
Actually he's sort of fallen asleep again by the time she comes back, in a comfy chair in the workshop with a big blanket on, and it's the sound of running water more than the sound of machinery (water is back on the list of worrying things, and how sad is that) that causes him to startle awake and notice her presence. When he talks, it's not accusatory - it's curious, and sleepy, and wow it's a bit later so a little pained but that's mostly his fault anyway for moving, and he's really just... asking. ]
[ Fury's death makes the news, of course. She's not entirely sure how Tony feels about it, knows that SHIELD sent him a very terse message that they and Captain America had the situation under control. They follow that up with an equally terse instruction to disregard official news sources, that Steve was working on a lead that would necessitate faking dissent between him and SHIELD.
The lack of contact from Steve was frustrating, but there wasn't actually anything further to go on and if Steve and Natasha needed help they'd find a way to reach them.
All of which became nothing but platitudes in the unraveling of everything. SHIELD wasn't Max's concern, this place, these people - she was tangential only to them through Tony, but she knew a few things. She knew his father had helped found SHIELD, knows Steve was his father's close friend all those years ago before the ice. And she knows that if she found the information about his parents with her skimming - well, Tony was actually scouring it. He found the information. He knows. So she sits back when she happens upon it, runs her hands over her face.
((I figured I'd ask before actually . . . leaving a comment response, but did you want to pick up on this thread here? I'm awful and left this hanging for 4 months, PEPPER COLD SHOULDER FOR THE TWO MONTH WAIT? Joking, joking. Things happen and life happens and hi, this is me saying I'd still love to play with you if you're okay with the snail I've been.))
[ ooc: Hi no that'd be great! Sorry, i've been sick and playing dragon age full screen p much all day to keep from like. moving and stuff. yay asthma. but no I'd be totally cool with continuing it on. here works just fine for me! I'm glad you remembered bc man my memory is not that good but looking over it again i was really digging it at the time, so i'm glad you PMd me yo. let's get this rolling ]
prompt: I don't like that you've been following me....
he'd kinda thought when he made pepper the CEO and everything that it would eliminate any possibility that he would himself continue to have to attend meetings (okay, he knew it wouldn't, but a man can dream) but apparently that was not to be the case. that's what you get when you make yourself the face of a company for a quarter of a century, he supposed - people tend to get attached to you. not that he could blame them, but honestly, some things he just didn't feel the need to be there for at this point.
granted, it did mean that pepper didn't have to go this time, and he figured she could use the break.
as it was, after people and times and spreadsheets and presentations and talks and walks and discussions, he was feeling the uncharacteristic pang of desired anonymity - the kind that one can only get in the middle of the night in manhattan, where nobody cares if you're homeless or hopeful as long as you don't get in front of them and suddenly start walking slower for no reason.
apparently he was also feeling poetic.
apparently he was also not quite as anonymous as he thought.
the great thing about growing up in the public eye is that you tend to recognize when it's actually turned on you or not. you also learn to recognize the early signs of a potential kidnapping once it's happened three or four times, and on top of that at this point he had a few years of general heroism under his belt. top that off with the fact that he was also just staggeringly intelligent, and he felt as though he was pretty good at noticing when he was being tailed. he doesn't alter his path too much, although he casually skirts a little closer towards the curb side of the sidewalk than the other, and continues on munching on his shawarma (yeah, yeah, sue him, it's pretty good now that he's tried it) as he makes his way home.
then, just as casually: ] I mean, you can keep following me if you want or you can just walk beside me. I might still have some fries in the bag.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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...Well, whatever she is, she's not human, but she wears it well. She's there at a table amongst the manic mood lighting and the thundering sound, swirling something dark around in a short glass with one long leg crossed over the other.
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She's nursing her second one since leaving Tony to his own devices earlier and she's starting to feel the warm effects from the alcohol as they call people to the tables for the first of many long, boring speeches and dinner.]
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yo
And yeah, that wasn't cool, it's about time this came to an end. ]
Bedroom. [ Her mouth is set in a line, lips pressed together as she points up the stairs. Her tone of voice indicates strongly that listening to her right now is a very good idea. ] Right now.
yaaaaaaaaaaaaay
He scans back over the events of the last two minutes and considers what she's just told him. Narrows his eyes a little bit at her. ]
Are you seriously sending me to my room? Right now. This is a thing that you're doing.
[ The tone is one thing. The words are one thing. The fact that he is - however slowly - moving towards the staircase. ] My parents didn't even have success with that. I don't think anyone's ever had success with that tactic on me.
/pets
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/leans on
Well actually, she's not sure she remembers most of what happened in the past ten minutes. Which could be a result of someone hitting her kind of hard in the head from behind or could just be because adrenaline had whited out everything, fight or flight response and hers always had tipped towards fight.
There's someone lying very dead on the floor of the alleyway she's in, and the knife in her hand pretty much indicates it was her that made him that dead, especially since no one else is here at the moment. She's not really sure how she got in an alleyway. She'd been with Tony, they'd been in the street. She thinks they'd been laughing. Maybe the dead guy had tried taking her as a potential hostage and that's why they're in an alleyway, he'd been trying to get out of the area. She would have been standing still with the initial panic of the crowd flooding her, she would have been what looked like an easy target, especially if the crowd had managed to separate her from Tony.
Tony. Finding him, that's what's important, making sure he's okay, but her head is pounding and there's still panicked people everywhere pressing in on her mind. She thinks she's broadcasting, probably is, but she can't control it at all right now. And that's about when she looks down and remembers how she got the knife in her hand. There had been a gun first, knocked out of both of their reaches. But to get the knife she'd needed him close. Too close, and that's a lot of blood for a cut that has to be shallow, it's across the ribs it can't have gone too deep, just wide, wide and bleeding too much. She's going to stop thinking about this now. And she's going to get her mind under control, and bandage herself up, and find Tony, and things will be - just fine. ]
ahhhhhhhh it's so perfect ;;
But he's been pushed into an alley to calm down, it's quieter here, and it only takes a few seconds to straighten back up, ready to keep looking, so he starts, turning to find Natasha and see if she wants to help, but ---
Oh, there she is. Right there. She's been right there. The kind of smile that comes from relief, a goofy, relieved smile, hits his faces and shines to hers.
He wastes little time, scrabbling over to her. ] Hey, found you first. You okay? What's this bleeding?
you are perfect ;;
no u
it is a title that can be shared /curls up with
well okay
see this is why kindergarten is important you learn how to share
my two week kindergarten experience just taught me to fear the gingerbread man
... why to fear the gingerbread man and i don't know how that happened
idk we just had this like, scavenger hunt for him one day and he was running around everywhere doing
personally i happen to think paranoia is a really healthy thing to have to an extent
as a 4yo? when i was 7 i thought my life was like The Truman Show. for /years/.
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Going out had been the sort of mistake that made her slowly feel more and more raw, like someone was stripping off the veneer of normalcy that she's been building, and she knows from past experience that by tomorrow she'll be able to breathe in deep and feel that one step closer to normal again but for right now that doesn't feel much like it matters.
Coming back home (Tony's, home, it's synonymous in her head) at least gives her more control over herself, some sense of stability, but she's still pent up and wound tight as she tosses her keys onto the counter and the groceries beside them and starts to search for Tony. It's instinctive, no real intent behind it but that she likes knowing where he is and that right now knowing where he is would be especially good. She doesn't call his name as she searches, just looks ahead of her with her mind and wanders. ]
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It's hard to tell today which one of them is reflecting on the other, or even if there's any reflection at all happening here, if they didn't both just happen to have off days coinciding with one another. He's not actually aware of whatever it is that's bothering her, and hasn't seen her today anyway. That in itself isn't really any cause for concern - they see each other in the evenings, the afternoons, and throughout the nights more often than they do anything else. It just happens to work out that way. But the notification of another car returned to the garage, a small catalogue of things shifting throughout the house to adjust for the second presence, alerts him to her return. The faint brush of her looking for him comes next, and he's not entirely sure he's in the mood for company, but he'll never do anything to bar her from an area he's in unless there is something absolutely unbearable happening that he doesn't want to involve her in.
Right now, it's nothing of the sort. Right now it's a bunch of things - no longer being CEO of a company doesn't mean that you don't still have a ton of things to do with it, regardless of your official position. You have to do a lot less, certainly, but the few things that do still require your attention just then stand out all the more. There are other people, too, who want his attention, and between them and that and the refusal of the combined laws of physics and chemistry to let him bend them over the table as he sees fit is catching up. Add to that the snowballing effect that too long without anything meaningful to focus and hone his senses on has had - generally a bit of irritability, given that an object designed with a specific purpose disallowed to fulfill that purpose tends to then react negatively with its forced place within its environment - and it probably would have been a good idea to direct her elsewhere for a while.
Instead, he brushes back, casually, neither en- nor discouragement, from where he's spilled a project out all over a table in one of the lesser used rooms. He doesn't know what to call this room, just that there's a rug and a couch and he's sitting on the rug in front of the table, occasionally on his knees to reach something on the other side. There's bookshelves filled with things he's positive he told the interior designer to pick out themselves, because none of them are books, and most of them are probably considered art by someone, somewhere. It's a project that seems like it should be simple, but really just continues to irritate him further, not cooperating like it should be, and he can't figure out why. ]
*__* you are great
more like crazy
it's an amazing kind of crazy
why thank you
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agh suddenly exhaustion i will hit the rest of these up in the morning
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i checked 'all of the above' this is older tony young max
Clothes first, and what's in the closet fits her. There's a feeling in the room that she recognizes, almost, familiar to how her apartment winds up feeling like her, but it's not really the same. If she was in the habit of putting colors to emotions, this was a darker duller hue than hers. She finds a knife sheath at the bottom of one of the drawers, straps it on, and ventures out into the rest of the house as quietly as possible, trying to keep an eye out for any cameras so she can dodge them.
She just needs to figure out where the hell she is and go home. That's all, really. She doesn't think that's asking too much. ]
and YAY
That awesome and totally not paying attention to things around him. He doesn't notice the shift in feeling, doesn't notice the absence of emotions, and doesn't notice that it's the wrong time entirely to be thinking that maybe he's hungry and that it's totally the wrong time to be kind of sleepy and considering actually going to lie down in that awesome, double king whatever size bed that he has.
What he does notice is a weird girl in the kitchen after he's managed to get the french toast pieces out of the freezer and into the microwave, when he turns around to jump up and sit on the counter top, and winds up pausing somewhere in mid-air instead. (It means his arms stop pushing him up and he sort of bounces off the edge instead, sliding back down to the ground.) ]
You're in my kitchen.
[ Squinting. Now he's paying attention, noticing things. She doesn't feel familiar, he doesn't recognize her, but he doesn't not recognize her, and that's a weird feeling. ] JARVIS? You, what are you - [ ....oh wait. Waaaait. Maybe sort of. ] What are you [ Meaning either 'you' timeframe!max or 'you' weird!person ] doing in my kitchen?
\o/
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and this for tiny tony and older max
He doesn't have Avengers business today, but technically he's supposed to go to a meeting everyone expects he'll skip anyways. (Note: still need to find him a new PA, though at this point she's pretty sure she could handle it herself.) She takes the stairs down from her room two at a time, humming something tuneless, and then stops at the bottom because something feels... different. Almost immediately she broadens her awareness, searching for Tony, just to be certain that he's here and safe. ]
\o/
Per normal things though: aside from JARVIS being Jarvis, things are... weird. His parents aren't here - he learned that very easily. And the bots are nice but he doesn't know what to do with them, really, which explains why all three of them are currently sort of doing whatever they feel like doing. He's alternating between reading everything he can find about himself - he's not all that impressed, although occasionally, sure - and looking at everything he seems to be doing. The age thing was obvious, please, and JARVIS told him anyway. But either way, he's been doing his best to not think about that, or the way everything feels. He loves the holograms because he doesn't have to touch them, JARVIS because he can mute and silence anything else that makes noise, and dim the lights if necessary. This whole room will basically conform to whatever he wants it to, and that... Is really cool. And nice. Not that he's needed it yet - not in anything beyond what a normal sentinel kid manages to need from everyday surroundings, and potentially even less than that because Stark men don't need pandering to, but it's still. Nice, to have the potential there to work with.
He's not totally accustomed to feeling empaths on a regular basis but he can still feel the difference anyway. He's not half as good at shielding as he is when he's an adult, which isn't to say a whole lot, but right now he's mostly just broadcasting curiosity about the feelings he's getting in return. ]
hey heyyyy
~~~~~~~~()_)
i see
do you not like marshmallows or something
i have never seen that before but okay marshmallow that's good
~~'~{@}
oh man upping your game
8D
i'm impressed
i can be your ASCII art master, baby
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I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING
The thought is fleeting, though she smiles to herself as she walks through an equally quiet beach house. So much time had been devoted to Stark Tower, staying in New York and simply following through with their plans for another that it'd been almost too much to consider coming back. It's nostalgic though, like a get-away that probably could have been a million times more extravagant if she'd given into Tony's whims. There's something nice, something them before, well, them that Pepper likes; even if she doesn't voice it outright, it's still in her body language and that present twist of her mouth.
Clearing their schedule has been worth every moment.
So, when she finally makes it down the steps - barefoot now rather than in heels - to enter the workshop, Pepper leans against the doorway with her arms crossed. Still quiet, the softest smile, she debates whether to attract his attention or wait until he notices. She decides on a time limit: five minutes. ]
i don't believe that for a second
But that doesn't mean he doesn't still think of this place as his true... Well, he wouldn't use the word 'home', but it's the closest to what he has of one. So when they got here, he sort of wandered off, let her do her own thing, and within minutes he was in the workshop again. Now this. This might be home. Not the whole house, just this room within it, and all the time and hiding he's done inside the walls, combined with all the things he's created and conjured within them.
Right now he's happy, he's chatting with his bots, because Butterfingers is in charge of holding something that he's soldering together and he keeps having to move around Butterfinger's adjustments. Dummy keeps trying to make him shakes - you can tell how long Tony's been in here by the number of empty glasses he has stacked up along the far edge of the table, which makes the one that Dummy's just sat down next to him number five. He's bantering with JARVIS who just informed him the smoothie is 'comprised of one banana, one pint of orange juice, one claw's worth of kelp, an intact strawberry, and what appeared to be roughly one teaspoon of engine oil.' He shrugs that off and tries it anyway, setting it down as he instantly forgets about it and goes back to what he was doing on his screens, sliding holographic prototypes around until they're more feasible, and then turning to solder the thing properly despite how Butterfingers has moved while he was attending to the smoothie.
He doesn't notice her watching at all, sry. Bots are distracting. ]
what can I say, I'm good at pretending to know what to do
some might argue that that means you actually know what to do
we could argue this logic all day
8D
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slides in here
It's not like teaching him some self defense is necessarily going to be an actual help against the type of people who would come after him, but it might ease a little bit of that worry and it might buy him time someday. Time's important. Once you have that - it's not a guarantee, but it helps.
So she waits until sometime she knows he's eaten food recently, slept a decent amount in the past 24 hours, and hasn't started something big yet, and waylays him casually, hair pulled back, leggings and tank top and already very prepared. ] Hey, c'mere.
oh baby slide right in
When she gets his attention, she doesn't seem to be wearing anything out of the ordinary, she looks normal, vibes normal, and he feels oddly good right now, so okay, sure, she wants to do something, he's not doing anything. ]
What's up?
i choked on my water when that landed in my inbox
/cackles
well played sir
/bow
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i accidentally read like. three of our other threads here before actually writing this one
And what a curse. In the last few weeks, he's been sleeping less and less - not that he was ever particularly good at keeping to regular sleep cycles anyway, but this was growing to surpass ratios he'd sustained in high school and college, and those even he would admit were unhealthy. They were what created DUM-E and JARVIS, arguably both ends of the spectrum of positive outcomes, if to varying degrees of 'success'.
Falling, falling, choking on lack of air, in space, in water, it's cold in both places, cold in the cave, cold in the space, cold in space, and you can't breathe, you can't breathe when there's no air, for either reason. So he can't breathe, and it's not helped that much by the weight on his ribcage - 2.1 lb of extra weight when vertical, 0.3 lb lateral sheer pressure to the clavicles and sternum, converted to 4.3 lb extra pressure when lying horizontally owing to the structure's organization - the things that are missing as a result of the cave (not space, because a void can't take) - 6% reduced lung capacity, a 53% reduced flexibility in the sternum owing to replacement material lacking similar viscoelasticity - and he's so happy he can run the numbers at will now, even when they change from time to time.
And there's more, about losing people, about eggs (golden omelettes, and why does he dislike a lot of things to do with Easter, except he doesn't, not really, he doesn't care one way or the other, not like he does with Christmas), and other things, but it's the breathing that makes him twist a little in his sleep, and it's the cold (even though the desert is hot and he burned there just as much as he froze underground) that makes him sit up, and it's both that made that noise of inhalation - because he couldn't breathe, for a second in the waking world, he couldn't do it. It's the void that makes him instantly stifle any other noises, because there's someone here and a quick check indicates she's still asleep and he'd prefer it if she stayed in the void of sleep. He doesn't want to talk about it, you need breath for that, and he's trying to catch his right now anyway, so he couldn't talk even if he wanted to.
It's selfishness, he knows, that swings his legs over the side of the bed and pad out of the room in sweatpants and the thickest shirt he could find within easy reach. He's been reliably informed that keeping things all to yourself is actually the textbook definition of selfishness, but he figures if he's got other textbook definitions he's keeping to, he might as well go for some kind of collection. He'd stood in the doorway to the bathroom holding the sweats for a while before changing his mind. The cold sweat was fine, it just meant he'd wake up a little more, and that was good, because there's no way he's going back to sleep anytime soon.
For all the time he's spent in this house, he doesn't usually stay in the top part of it, and the way he's looking around at little things here and there you'd almost say he doesn't spend any time up here at all. It's not a reorientation tactic, reassurance that this is what was real, and totems are great and all but there's a seriously flawed piece of logic to those, he needs something a little better than 'I know something you don't know' to ensure his realities. His fantasies have a habit of becoming real, and what he'd previously considered out of the realm of possibility apparently runs a successful illegal smuggling operation on the side, so it's just hard to tell all around. After blinking at a few things, he pads into the kitchen, forces down a small amount of water, because gasping makes your mouth dry, then grabs a couple of grapes more for something to have in his hands than anything else before making the inevitable trip downstairs.
Downstairs is the real home anyway. Downstairs is safety, and comfort in the midst of things that operate the same way regardless of where you are in your subconscious. Metal doesn't move, give, or alter itself, and once something is coded, it's actually hardwired to be that way unless someone else comes along and fucks it up. Breathing, and cold are pretty easy ways to fuck up hardwiring, he thinks. Very effective, very difficult to fix, at least for the poor strings of code trying to reattach across bridges that no longer reach. So he spends his time instead pulling up other things, things that he can fix, much more easily, even if they're difficult, because this - this is what he understands. This is what can't be taken from him, regardless of his situation or handicap. This is what's ultimately comfortable beyond everything else.
And so this is what he'll do. ]
you are just fantastic i can't even
And then persisted, and it didn't take her long to put the pieces of him always being awake when she got up and never in bed when she went to sleep together and come up with it being a nighttime problem. And once she came to that conclusion, it hadn't taken her all that long to temporarily start accidentally sleeping in his room instead of hers.
She wasn't sure if the fact that he'd yet to ask her why was a sign of his distraction or of something else entirely. Most likely his distraction.
It's his dream that wakes her up. Not the movement, but the feeling. It's hard to miss, this close. And while the specifics are different, the overall spread of emotion is all too familiar. She's felt it a thousand times over, from herself and from the others in the cells around her. But waking him up from this - it's almost never a good idea with her, and she isn't sure she should risk it. She's still debating her course of action when he gasps himself awake, and she lets her eyes close and waits in the dark, thinking.
Waiting for him to leave the room, giving him some space - that's the best course of action, she thinks. Pressing him immediately might not work given how stubborn he can be about these things, and she wants a little bit to ensure that she's fully awake and shielded, wants to make sure that she can give him what he needs, whatever it is in the end. JARVIS gives her security footage as soon as she asks, lets her watch Tony's trip through the house, and then eventually she gets up and tugs on a sweatshirt to make up for her lack of pants before meandering down through the house after him.
She slides into the workshop quietly, heads towards him. ]
You're up late. [ Soft in the stillness, circling around towards his front as she watches him. ] Early? Not sure which one it is.
that's one way of putting it, probably
the beeeeest that's you
well okay
am besten
are you just pidgining german into it now
no i am just talking my finals prep at you du bist meine Liebling
aww you're mine too
<3
his reasons?
her own past reasons for saying no to help i swear one day i'll stop shorthanding stuff
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you are adorable
Lately she hasn't particularly wanted to, in part because there's something - she doesn't know the word she wants there. Tony's hardly sleeping, though, she knows that. He's always gone on even less sleep than her, but lately it's been worse.
She's not entirely sure what to do.
But today she did go out, regardless, just to pick up a few things, and when she comes back she calls out his name into the house and goes wandering down into the workshop when she doesn't receive a response, reaching out with her mind. It's when she brushes against his that she starts moving faster because something's wrong, she can feel it, and she pushes open the door to the workshop and looks for him, trying to calm him as she does. ]
i am not. :|
But the rotations hadn't been high enough and he'd nearly beaned himself in the skull with an accidentally flying projectile and then he'd been covered in oil and that hadn't helped, so he'd gone off to take a shower. He'd started to go off and take a shower, and suddenly.
Suddenly he couldn't move. He was stuck, being all but fetal and not able to move. Sitting in his workshop, hands half-clenched and hovering up near his chest but not moving, breathing very shallow and head bowed, effectively stuck in place. ]
no you are you really are
i don't know why you think that
because you are!
pft
don't you pft me you are the best there are no two ways about it
http://images.plurk.com/zfKB-2d5NZjzW6fIUpzTw04bzEK.jpg
alskdfd that's beautiful
i thought it was a good business card for 'the best'
it is i support it
ty
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our plans are the best always
It's about when her second period is due and doesn't show up and she starts to tally up how many mornings lately she's felt a little nauseous that the possibility sudden hits with a feeling somewhere along the line between 'I just got hit in the stomach with a basketball really hard' and 'I have a concussion'. She doesn't say anything to Tony, but she goes out to pick up a test almost immediately and when she gets back and finishes staring at the little plus sign she locks herself in her room for a long time and paces, back and forth, up and down. She'd drink, but she's not allowed any more right now apparently.
She'd really like a drink right now. Like, really really like it.
It takes her a long time to finally get up the courage to leave her room and go in search of Tony, the (positive, very very positive, she can't stop remembering that it's positive) test in her pocket. At first her wandering is kind of aimless, but eventually she asks JARVIS and goes where he directs her, says before she can lose her nerve. ] We need to talk about something. [ And then sort of freezes in still shell shocked confusion because she has no idea how she's supposed to say this or how he's going to react and how she feels and what she wants to do and literally anything important, she doesn't know almost anything right now and it's a really unsettling feeling. ]
p much yy
It's not all that uncommon for her to show up wherever he happens to be at any given point, so he's not that surprised when she does. He doesn't even register that she has, initially, although he doesn't make a show of it when he does see her. She introduces herself pretty quickly anyway, and if he's going to be surprised by her being there, or what she says when she is, he's going to choose to be surprised by what she says, because it's been his experience - as well as the experience of most people - that any unexpected conversation that starts off like that isn't going to be a good one. Even expected conversations that start off like that aren't typically good.
So he lags for a moment, mid-motion and thought, glancing over at her and then quickly off to some random area in the room, and smoothly goes back to what he was doing like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. He's not trying to figure out if he's fucked something up recently, or scanning over recent events from the news he's been secondarily aware of that might have involved her. ]
What about?
high five you are the best
what this is a mutual thing here
okay okay mutual being the best i suppose i can accept that
good. you'd better.
are you going to bully me into accepting compliments now too
maybe.
well. okay, i guess there are worse things to be bullied over
8D
you are a pretty great person
wow stockholm syndrome sets in quick with you, doesn't it
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but once you read this you should sleep okay
Her own improvement is quieter, less obvious. In part because she's had years to become used to the idea of being broken and to learn to hide it from people very effectively, so the change is not marked. It is simply her day to day existence changing from a mask that keeps her hidden from scrutiny to something that is true and happy and herself. And when she does such a very good job of faking it, it becoming simply the truth is - perhaps less evident than she'd like it to be. She's told him that she's happy, but then he has no real way to measure that in comparison because he never saw how very unhappy she had been. When she still was so very thoroughly unhappy, she didn't know him well enough to let him see it ever, wasn't close enough to consider the possibility that he could help. And then he had anyways, without even knowing, without necessarily specific intentions to. Just by being. She's still not sure how he's changed how she feels about things so very thoroughly.
It's taken her some time to really realize the discrepancy in their ability to understand what the other person is doing for them. Time and having caught the impression in his mind more than once of one sidedness, of not reciprocating well enough, and that is something she refuses to let continue. She's tried to tell him subtly, to mention her happiness and her appreciation of him, but she's fairly certain he still doesn't actually get it, doesn't really understand how much he means to her and how much everything he has done for her means to her.
So she's going to make that clear, and it took a little bit to come up with this but now that she has she just waits for the next time they've idly kissed their way to the bedroom, slides her hands down his arms to wrap around his wrists and whispers against his mouth inbetween kisses. ] I'd like to tie you down. [ It's possible, of course, he's not in the mood for this and she'll just have to delay until the next time he is. But she can generally convince him to do what she wants, and what she wants right now is him in a position that he has to listen to her, can't brush it off as something she's just saying or doesn't actually hold meaning. What she has to say isn't the sort of thing she would ever just say without absolutely meaning it, and she won't let him try to take it as anything else. ]
i apparently read it and then fell asleep while sending you a text
She's one of the more tangible of those relationships. He can usually see the wear and tear he puts on things, but he can actually feel the way her moods change, and while he isn't solipsistic enough to assume that he is the cause of all of those, he still feels like he has a large enough culpability for them. Sure, he can feel some of the more direct evidence to where he's helping her in return, but it looks more or less like the proverbial drop in the ocean.
Right now though, he's not thinking about any of that. It's not something he enjoys dwelling on; is, in fact, something he actively avoids thinking about (because he feels bad about it but he's selfish enough to need her to stay with him even if he isn't giving her what he ought to be in return). He tries not to even consider the issue, and particularly not at times like this, when casual proximity has broken out into kissing and bedrooms again, and there are far more positive things on the horizon. He doesn't resist when her hands slide down to grasp his wrists, feels a frission of energy buzz under his skin for a moment when she speaks without moving away. He doesn't have a problem with that today, and the way he moves to kiss her harder for a few moments before replying indicates as such. ] You'll have to move to find something to do it with though. I'm not sure how okay I am with that.
i'm glad you did sleep that's excellent
last night i slept like a big rock apparently
i think our sleep schedules are synced and also i hear lots of sleep is good for you
so i hear
pretty sure that's not true though
what's not true
i was going to say sleep being important but i think i've decided that is going to be true eventuall
+y. also so i got distracted reading an old fanfic this thread suddenly reminded me of
Re: +y. also so i got distracted reading an old fanfic this thread suddenly reminded me of
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they are threatening to break down my door
It's all weird, but so far she's handling it fine, she thinks. Well enough.
Today she blinks awake slowly and fairly peacefully, sprawled partially across the bed. For a moment she just lies there, accustoming herself to being awake again, and then turns to glance over at Tony. She can feel his heat, so she already knows he's in bed with her now (though she'd gone to bed alone early, exhausted from not much at all which was frustrating), the question is whether he's already awake or not. ]
did you remind them it's actually your sister's door
But none of this means he's not happy when she does start to stir. He's been lying mostly on his back with his hips twisted to the side, one arm tucked under his head and the other resting on his stomach. It's a nice stretch in the torso - actually that's how he got into this position, stretching - and it's keeping the covers mostly off of a morning issue. He hasn't been up long enough for it to go down, has really only been awake for a short while at all. But he turns to look at her in return. ] Morning.
they vanished before i could
probably for the best
definitely for the best
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if we get one more our thread count can vote
It's not until she feels like she's actually awake (and taking those long moments to wake up instead of doing it all at once is always a nice luxury) that she rolls out of bed and wanders to find him in the bathroom, leans against the doorway. ] The meeting's at three thirty, right?
:') you remembered
Or whatever time reasonably close to that I happen to arrive. You didn't have to get up.
anything for you, baby
~~~~~~
is the entire row of tildes necessary
yes. yes it was.
so the more innuendo the more tildes, right?
i believe that's what i said, yes
i wonder how suggestive i would have to be to get you fill up the entire title thing with tildes
i... don't think anyone's ever tested it idk
my new goal
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Nobody needs to spend all their time burdened by the past, and that includes the people around them knowing about it. Sometimes it's better to just leave it buried there.
But sometimes you find things out completely on accident, and when someone made a casual joking reference to Tony's long and storied history with kidnapping, well. She'd gotten a little curious. She knew about Afghanistan, but they'd made it sound a lot bigger than that, which dovetailed in with comments he'd dropped himself over time. It was somewhere in the middle of SHIELD's file on his childhood that she gets frustrated and pushes her chair clear so that she's in his line of sight. ] Exactly how many times have people tried to kidnap you?
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So he's in a decent mood - didn't find anything new from SHIELD, didn't dig up anything interesting with his little bugs, Jarvis is being snippy with him but that's just because he's gone for a while without sleep again and after about fifty hours awake the AI starts to shift rapidly into mother hen mode.
He comes upstairs for some form of sustenance when Jarvis actually locks down everything in the lab just shy of turning off the three bots, because not even Jay-man has the heart to do that. Tony grouses, and complains, but goes upstairs for food anyway.
He does not, however, make it all the way back down when she asks him the question, and he pauses, apple in mouth and sandwich and water bottle in hand. He takes the bite out of the apple, free hand coming up to hold it while he chews, looking at her. ] Old news. You wanna see what I'm working on?
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sleep well
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I didn't know you'd done work in power nullification and amplification.
[ She doesn't even realize she's saying it until she's already said it, still watching the file, and if she sounds and looks calm it's mostly because she's frozen, temporarily very distant from the actual moment happening around her. Coping mechanism, she recognizes this one.
She wants to shut the computer down, but she can't seem to stop scrolling through the specifications, the blueprints and notations and footnotes. It looks so pristine and black and white from here. ]
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So it's slightly absent when he replies, not even a glance over when he does so. She's allowed to look at most of his old projects - everything except the things he was even worried back then about actually handing over to people, because he couldn't not make them, couldn't not test them, but their functionality hasn't effected the fact that they're under multiple layers of lock-down. Regardless, it's not unusual for her to find something every now and then to spark her interest. It's really just more that she typically keeps it mostly to herself. ] What? A while ago. Unwieldy - it was a specific contract job. [ Like other things he doesn't really like to think about, like all the things he's built that correspond directly to scars he's seen on other people. He's got shards of his own missile in his chest, for god's sake. He's basically the god damn irony man. ]
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just casually gonna use today's date because idek
you totally skipped forward a year on accident
TIME LORD
yes you are my love yes you are
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this is still the absolute worst
It takes longer than she thought it would to stop believing Tony will come for her. Some part of her is still clinging to it stubbornly even still, even though she knows that if he hasn't come by now there has to be a reason. She's too far away, she's not findable - he's dead. The last one isn't acceptable. She has to believe that he made it, that he's still alive, or all of this becomes even more pointless than it started out as. Tony's alive, but if he hasn't found her by now then they have to be doing a very good job of hiding her.
In the end when rescue does come she doesn't even recognize it at first, fights them the same as she fights anyone trying to touch her, instinctive and vicious and with a total lack of care for any pain that results. It's only when she feels Tony's mind somewhere nearby and hears someone yelling for him that she freezes long enough for one of them to get just enough sedative in her that she's a little more pliant. Not that she believes it yet. Not that she has any faith she's not dreaming all of this, isn't just desperate enough that her brain is giving her something, anything to help her escape temporarily.
Her mind searches out through the rescue party again, cataloguing them even as she tentatively reaches towards the flame of Tony's mind (different, muted somehow, it's not quite right). He's nearby if it actually is him. Coming closer. One of the rescue party must have recognized her and that's why they called him. ]
yes basically it still completely is
The fact that he was tricked for as long as he was, too, is... Difficult to describe. The sheer amount of self-loathing that's stemming from that has put anything he ever held prior to now to complete shame, and the determination to either rectify the mistake or pay them back tenfold for their kindness has become all but a doctrine or motto by which to wake up and sleep with every day. It just hasn't been that difficult to hold onto that feeling, the one he slowly realized one day when the empathic feedback he got from 'her', when 'her' shields dropped in the heat of the moment, felt the same. Never stronger, never altering. Slightly different, perhaps, but the same in several ways that mattered. Once that aspect of the illusion was shattered, it wasn't difficult to fracture and fragment the others.
He did at least have a three month crash course in interrogation techniques he was able to utilize. Let it never be said Tony Stark isn't a quick study, nor does he have difficulty taking his lessons and expanding upon them. He's been called 'creative' more often than even he has ever bothered to count.
However, the information was fairly vague before the impostor ceased providing it, and shortly afterward was taken elsewhere to be dealt with properly. Since then, he's been toeing the line between a balanced laser-like focus and sheer rage, reckless and ruthlessly efficient, all the strategy and war-mongering he'd been pushing aside and putting behind him come to the forefront once again. He doesn't even particularly expect to find her by now - it's been too long, and the enemy is too careful to leave people as resourceful as her just sitting around. On the other hand, they're reluctant to lose people as useful as her either, and it's that sad fact, combined with what he knows of her ability to survive, that's prevented him from losing hope altogether. It's double-edged, and more than anything else he's been able to ever compare it to.
They're following up on a lead - not a strong one, but when are they ever certain these days - when someone calls him. Senses high and on edge - as they always seem to be now - he can tell the difference in their voice, the tightness and emotional reaction involved, even if he can't tell precisely what it's for. Sometimes these rescues don't always go well, and those who haven't been on more than a couple can have adverse reactions. But he comes anyway, because this one feels different even if he built up shields to block out concern and anything else a long time ago, because maybe they need help. Maybe it's just a firm grip on their shoulder to get them back to rights.
It's really only the suit and JARVIS that prevent his knees from giving out when he comes over to see what he's been called for. He wasn't thinking much, giving in to that particular form of controlled rage that he's perfected lately, but when he sees her - and it's her this time, he can tell, because he can feel her now - everything vacates. Thoughts, fear, anger - everything. He still heads towards her slowly, stepping out of the suit midstride, because they've secured the area and even if they haven't, he doesn't care, he doesn't care if it's a trap because it's been too long and he doesn't care. He just needs to be sure that it's her, and to do that he needs to be outside his suit and vulnerable.
So he comes over slowly, but steadily, coming up next to her and altering his posture to avoid looming over her by accident. ] Hey.
you're terrible i'm terrible nobody can ever be happy
\o/
your sense of celebration is terrible
thank you
you're welcome
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for lateeeer
And then she goes to find them, in short spurts. She has a suit for transportation, if she doesn't use it for the actual mission because that's too loud and obvious, so it's not like it takes her more than a few hours. Tonight she wiped out the next group up the chain, her second time out and a good source of information for the higher ups, and Tony should still be asleep but she's still very quiet as she gets out of the suit, moves tiredly towards the sink at one side of the workshop. There are bruises blossoming and there's some blood she has to clean off, a mix of theirs and a little of hers, incidental scrapes and a split lip. She'll have to do something about that - even drugged he's going to notice. She'll come up with a story.
It won't take her long, though, and then she needs to go up and check on him. JARVIS hasn't said anything so nothing's wrong, but she still - needs to be certain. She has to be certain that he's okay. ]
look i actually did sleep until eleven by mistake anyway
And it has to be something important, because it's feeling like it's over the limit for one of these things he's taking, partially because ow and partially because he's just this side of not groggy enough to just roll over and go back to sleep. He's still not in the clearest of states - and honestly that's probably a good thing, because otherwise he still wouldn't be sleeping very well, and by 'very well' I mean 'at all', it's sad how shadows are still sometimes making him feel threatened - but he's well enough to notice something is wrong because he's a goddamn genius and he's probably not quite well enough to actually go downstairs and see what he can find out but he does that anyway too.
Actually he's sort of fallen asleep again by the time she comes back, in a comfy chair in the workshop with a big blanket on, and it's the sound of running water more than the sound of machinery (water is back on the list of worrying things, and how sad is that) that causes him to startle awake and notice her presence. When he talks, it's not accusatory - it's curious, and sleepy, and wow it's a bit later so a little pained but that's mostly his fault anyway for moving, and he's really just... asking. ]
Hey. Where've you been?
i am glad you got sleep <3
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The lack of contact from Steve was frustrating, but there wasn't actually anything further to go on and if Steve and Natasha needed help they'd find a way to reach them.
All of which became nothing but platitudes in the unraveling of everything. SHIELD wasn't Max's concern, this place, these people - she was tangential only to them through Tony, but she knew a few things. She knew his father had helped found SHIELD, knows Steve was his father's close friend all those years ago before the ice. And she knows that if she found the information about his parents with her skimming - well, Tony was actually scouring it. He found the information. He knows. So she sits back when she happens upon it, runs her hands over her face.
Damn. ]
JARVIS, where's Tony right now?
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prompt: I don't like that you've been following me....
Re: prompt: I don't like that you've been following me....
he'd kinda thought when he made pepper the CEO and everything that it would eliminate any possibility that he would himself continue to have to attend meetings (okay, he knew it wouldn't, but a man can dream) but apparently that was not to be the case. that's what you get when you make yourself the face of a company for a quarter of a century, he supposed - people tend to get attached to you. not that he could blame them, but honestly, some things he just didn't feel the need to be there for at this point.
granted, it did mean that pepper didn't have to go this time, and he figured she could use the break.
as it was, after people and times and spreadsheets and presentations and talks and walks and discussions, he was feeling the uncharacteristic pang of desired anonymity - the kind that one can only get in the middle of the night in manhattan, where nobody cares if you're homeless or hopeful as long as you don't get in front of them and suddenly start walking slower for no reason.
apparently he was also feeling poetic.
apparently he was also not quite as anonymous as he thought.
the great thing about growing up in the public eye is that you tend to recognize when it's actually turned on you or not. you also learn to recognize the early signs of a potential kidnapping once it's happened three or four times, and on top of that at this point he had a few years of general heroism under his belt. top that off with the fact that he was also just staggeringly intelligent, and he felt as though he was pretty good at noticing when he was being tailed. he doesn't alter his path too much, although he casually skirts a little closer towards the curb side of the sidewalk than the other, and continues on munching on his shawarma (yeah, yeah, sue him, it's pretty good now that he's tried it) as he makes his way home.
then, just as casually: ] I mean, you can keep following me if you want or you can just walk beside me. I might still have some fries in the bag.
Re: prompt: I don't like that you've been following me....
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