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Chapter Text

Chapter One

 

January, 1942   

 

Working in weapons development, you were bound to suffer a few explosions, especially if you insisted on testing everything yourself. Howard was well aware of this fact, but it was not enough to stop him filling the few milliseconds available to him before he was knocked off his feet by the blast with as many curse words as his mind could process. He passed out.

                It must have been a bad one because he woke up in the military hospital on the edge of town, where they brought home the boys to that had been injured overseas or the rookies that managed to hurt themselves during training. It wasn’t Howard’s first visit since he had gained the US arms contracts just over a year before, and each time it was more humiliating to be back. Still, the nurses usually made a fuss of him, and it was the only holiday he’d got since the Europeans started kicking the stuffing out of each other, so he supposed the time wasn’t a total loss. That day, when he woke up, it was a nurse he hadn’t spoken to before who was attending to him. He knew her face, he had seen her flitting about the wards, but this was the first chance he’d had to study it up close. She was carefully wiping his face when he came round, in fact, so he was able to see her extremely up close indeed. It wasn’t a bad face either; a little pinched, perhaps, the face of someone who’d had a hard time of it ten years ago and never quite got their appetite back, or maybe she’d been ill a lot growing up. Other than that, it was a pleasant enough face, creased into a frown of concentration, blue eyes and blond hair. She was a mousy, thin, frail little thing, but appealing in a certain way. She was certainly attractive enough to warrant his attention.

                She saw his eyes open and immediately backed off, allowing him to haul himself upright with a grunt of exertion that was annoyingly un-dashing.

                “Urrgh, I don’t know what you nurses do to me, but I always feel terrible when I wake up.” He complained. It was a joke, of course, not one of his better ones, but a joke all the same. The nurse barely smiled, folding up the cloth she’d been using.

                “That’s your fault, Mr Stark, not ours.” She said. “Do you remember your accident?”

                “I remember a big fire ball.”

                “It wasn’t that big, you were the only one hurt. And your burns were only superficial.”

                “Tell that to the pain.”

                “Are you in pain? I can fetch the doctor.”

                “You could tell me your name.”

                “It’s Nurse Rogers. As I said, Mr Stark, your injuries were minor but-”

                “Your first name?”

                “-You’re not going anywhere until matron is satisfied that you’re properly rested and your fever has gone down. You’ve been overworking, Mr Stark, your body is run into the ground. You really should try to be a little more responsible.”

                “Has anyone ever told you that your bedside manner is terrible?”

                “Has anyone ever told you that this hospital is supposed to be treating soldiers, not profiteers?”

                Silence. That had been, Howard would admit, a little unexpected. Her face was turned away from him now, nominally as she straightened and smoothed his bed sheets, but he could see she was looking sideways at him, daring him with her eyes to contradict her. He couldn’t help but smile a little. This was going to be interesting.

                “You have a problem with what I do?” He asked, trying to sound curious rather than accusatory. “Listen, sweetheart, I save lives.”

                “You make guns.”

                “Yes, and if our boys didn’t have guns, the Nazis would still kill them. We aren’t going to beat Hitler with a white flag. So unless you want to be singing Deutschland über alles,doll-face, you’d better get used to people like me.” He looked her up and down again, taking in the blond hair and blue eyes. “You’d probably be fine though, you’re just his type.”

                “Our boys need guns, yes.” She agreed, brushing off the rest. “But you don’t have to make money off it.”

                “They aren’t free, sweetheart.”

                “No, but you’re not selling them at cost either.”

                She was completely unashamed, Howard thought, she had no qualms about saying these things to him. In fact, from the look of her, she had probably wanted to say them to him for some time. She looked like a woman on a crusade. The idea of the challenge made her infinitely more interesting in his eyes; the idea she had a cause, and passion, made her more attractive. He saw something in her, even then.

                “Well, why don’t you let me take you for dinner and I’ll tell you all about it?”

                “I don’t think so, Mr Stark.”

                “Never?”

 “Get better and then we’ll talk. I’ll fetch the doctor to come and examine you.”

                “If I can’t get a date, will you at least give me your name?”

                “It’s Nurse Rogers.” She repeated and left; but he had seen the small smile on her face. She was not immune to his sweet talk- in fact, if he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was flirting back.

 

 

April 2012

 

                SHIELD were, in Tony’s opinion, missing a trick by ignoring the intelligence-gathering skills of preteen girls. His twelve year old daughter, for instance, hoarded information like the most experienced of officers, and could use it against him to devastating effect. Not only did Penny have an encyclopaedic knowledge of British boy band and international pop sensation One Direction- which Tony now knew more about than any adult male should- she always knew when he was about to break a promise, whether accidentally or on purpose, whether the promise had been made drunk or sober, recently or aeons ago, none withstanding. Always. Usually she knew before he did himself. In the two years since his daughter had come to live him with him, Tony had learnt that sometimes, at least as far as promises to Penny were concerned, lying was not worth the effort.

                Goodness only knew the kid had probably had enough promises broken over the years. Her history was turbulent at best; Tony had never really been a part of her life when there had been others to take the responsibility. Her mother had been a one-night-stand of his, he had been a rebound after her engagement had apparently fallen apart. Of course, Parker had married her anyway and he had treated Penny as his own even before she was born; she even had his surname. While he had been around playing daddy, Tony hadn’t seen any need to get involved with the kid. He sent some money now and then, visited perhaps twice for just a few minutes on his way elsewhere, looked occasionally at the photographs her mother sent him and generally gratefully considered himself to have escaped any real responsibility.

                That had only lasted two years, then Penny’s mother and Parker were both killed suddenly, in the same accident. Tony couldn’t remember when or how he had learnt the news, but he remembered it took him a few days before it really occurred to him that the responsibility would now be on him, that he needed to work out what to do with his daughter. He was not in a good place at the time; his father had just died, and however volatile their relationship had been, it left a gap in Tony’s life. It also meant, of course, that the controlling shares of Stark Industries went to him and the company had been in absolute chaos, requiring Tony to put in long hours in boring meetings to try and straighten things out. Add in the fact that the kid was probably already traumatised by losing her parents, that Tony was basically a stranger to her and had no idea of how to take care of her, even if he’d had the time, and the suggestion of Penny coming to live with him became completely ridiculous. Her stepfather’s family had been taking care of her ever since the accident, and had considered her their niece ever since she was born. May and Ben Parker accordingly agreed to take the young girl in, but it had been on the strict condition that Tony became more involved. True, his biweekly visits were rarely more than bimonthly, and were usually spent in awkward silences as they wondered what to do with and say to each other, but at least he wasn’t a stranger to her anymore.

                That was probably why, when a robber broke into the house, killing her uncle and hospitalising her aunt, Tony was woken up in the early hours of the morning to find a terrified ten year old had come out of hiding and run straight to him.

                That night was his first real taste of what it meant to be a father. He had to stay with her, support her and listen as she told the police officers how she had woken up to noises downstairs, how she had gone out to look but her aunt and uncle, also emerging, had sent her back to her room. She told them how she had heard shouting and gunshots and run downstairs, slipped unnoticed into the kitchen looking for a phone, for a way to contact the police, but then heard steps approaching and had somehow managed to wedge herself into the cupboard beneath the sink before he came in. The man had the gall to stop and call 911 himself, making up a bogus story about it being a false alarm, saying a rat had got into the kitchen and his wife had tried to shoot it, obviously trying to buy time to get away in case the neighbours had alerted the cops. Hoping the noise would cover her actions, Tony’s brave, reckless little girl had pulled the door open a crack, trying to memorise every part of his appearance for the police. The man didn’t notice, and left. Penny had stayed in the cupboard, wanting to be sure he was gone- and then had come the sound of the door being broken down. Already more frightened than any child should be able to tolerate, Penny had bolted out her cupboard, out of the back door, over the yard fence and straight to Stark Tower without pausing to find out who the new arrivals were.

                It was the police, of course, who were not so easily duped by false alibis. For one thing, neither of the registered owners of the address held gun licenses, so at the very least there was a firearms offence going on. When no-one had answered the door, further alarm bells had rung and they had finally broken it down, to find Ben Parker already dead, his wife shot, unconscious but alive and their niece missing. They contacted Tony just as Tony had got enough out of Penny to realise he needed to contact them, and the rest was a sleepless night and endless questions.

                Aunt May had survived her injuries, but her recovery was long and slow and had mostly taken place at her sister’s house. Penny had settled in with Tony and had been staying there ever since, but the bright-eyed girl glaring suspiciously at him over her breakfast cereal was reassuringly different from the wild, near-hysterical creature that had come to him that night.

                The reason for her suspicious glare was simply this- Javis had announced that Tony had a call, from Doctor Banner, no less; Tony had taken up his headset and told him to patch it through, and somehow, Penny just knew that meant she wouldn’t be having dinner with her dad that night like he’d promised. Her unimpressed look spoke volumes.

                “I’m just taking a phone call, Penny. It doesn’t mean I’m about to jet off to Europe for ten months.” He said.

                “What?” Bruce said.

                “Sorry, I was talking to Penny. She never quite forgave me for the whole hostage thing. I missed her birthday.” Tony began pulling up what he could on Banner’s recent activity; if the good doctor was bothering to contact him, something big was going on. They had never actually met in person, but they’d had a lot of contact over the last decade through calls and e-mails and occasionally SHIELD agents in non-descript suits and pseudo-intimidating sunglasses, the exchanges mostly boiling down to “Can I have your father’s notes on the super serum?”, “No”, “Why?” and “I can’t find them”. His old man had never exactly been big on writing things down, his notes had mostly been in his head. The rest had been doused in whiskey and set fire to in 1945, when Howard had been in a drunken rage because the one successful candidate, a woman he called ‘Annie’, had died. Tony only knew as much about Stephanie Rogers, stage name Captain America, as every other kid did after they covered her in grade school history. That was about as much as he knew about his father’s war work too, as the old man had refused to reminisce but had always looked relentlessly forward into the future and fought nostalgia even on the frequent occasions he was drunk, which usually began with swearing and cursing at anything he could get to and ended with a teary-eyed rendition of When Irish Eyes are Smiling.  

                Bruce had finally given up on any assistance from the past and had continued with his own efforts, which Tony had watched with interest; occasionally making a contribution, but they were essentially beginning again from scratch and Bruce should have expected a few hiccups along the way. Even Tony, however, had not expected such a gigantic green hiccup and had been waiting for an excuse to meet Banner in person ever since. Unfortunately, given that most of Shield viewed Tony as a distinctly shady and unreliable personage, the opportunity had never presented itself, until now at least.

                “Can you get down to the Shield labs?” Banner asked him.

                “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t exactly been welcome there before.” He glanced at Penny, who was glaring at him more than ever. “And I’m not sure mommy is going to let me out to play.”

                Penny stuck her tongue out at him.

                “You’ll want in on this, Tony, trust me.” Banner said. “The expedition was successful. We found her.”

                Tony felt a little shiver run through his guts, the feeling of discovery. She could only be one person; the successful serum candidate. Shield had trawled the ocean more times than Tony cared to recall looking for the corpse, hoping it would hold the key to recreating the serum. This could certainly be a break through. Bruce clearly thought so- the man was generally quiet and not prone to prattling, but even now, he was still going.

                “The cadaver was perfectly preserved in the ice; there’s no deterioration at all, it’s scientifically perfect. I’m going to examine her now, just cursory stuff first, muscle development and so forth, and then I’m going to get into the blood work-”

                “Alright, alright, I’ll come down to view the results.” Tony said, curious in spite of himself. He’d always loved a challenge, especially ones that involved a puzzle. It sort of felt like a contest- his father had invented the serum, and now Tony was going to help reconstruct it, backwards, just from viewing the end results. The old man wasn’t going to beat him.

                Still. He had no desire to go corpse-digging himself.

                “Feel free to start without me on the post-mortem.” He said. “I don’t need to see anything squishy.”

                “Just get down here.” Banner said, and Tony hung up. Penny sighed, loudly, clearly having gathered he was going out again.

                “Sorry, kid.” Tony tried.

                “No you aren’t.” She said, matter-of-factly, because she always knew when he wasn’t being entirely sincere. She scowled briefly, but she was good natured beneath it all, and had an interest in science which meant she couldn’t dismiss a phone call from Doctor Banner any more than her father could. “What did he want?”

                It was entirely possible that Bruce and his buddies at Shield would not want Tony’s twelve year old daughter knowing this probably-sensitive information. Tony consoled himself, however, with the argument that if they did not want him knowing (and potentially sharing) their secrets, they should not have put their top-secret offices just a couple of blocks away from Stark Tower. Of course, their labs and buildings had been built in his father’s day, when Howard had been all buddy-buddy with Shield’s predecessors, but still. If they didn’t want him to spy on them, they shouldn’t have made it so easy for him to do so. Besides which, Penny was something of a Captain America fan. Ever since she had studied the woman at school, and discovered her grandfather’s personal involvement, she had been fascinated. Tony wasn’t quite sure the extent his daughter’s collection of memorabilia went to, but he knew there was at least a stuffed doll and a child’s dressing up kit involved, as well as some collectible postcards Penny had used to plug the gaps between the wall of One Direction posters and the tatty enlargement of an AC/DC album cover which she had put up to keep her father happy when he criticised her taste in music. One day she might actually listen to it. She was still looking at him expectantly.

                “Well, you know Doctor Banner’s been working on the super serum? He’s found something.”

                “He’s thought that before.” Penny answered, ever the sceptic. “Before he went all Hulk-y.”

                “Yes, but by something, I mean someone.”

                “Someone who knows about the serum?”

                “Better.”

                Penny thought for a second, then squealed in a way that only twelve year old fan girls could. Shield was definitely missing a trick.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Despite his specific request not to see any squishy bits, when Tony arrived Bruce still hadn’t got as far as cutting the cadaver open. He’d had one of his lab assistants hustle Tony in through a side door, hoping that somehow, just for once, the billionaire would go unnoticed. He knew there was some controversy surrounding Tony at Shield- some of them wanted him involved in a new initiative Nick Fury was putting together, and some didn’t. That was all Bruce had been able to gather from workplace conversation and a little innocent eavesdropping, and that was all he knew. Tony probably knew more about it, being that he had the time, skills and moral disregard to have hacked into the computer system more than once. This was the first time, however, that Bruce would see him up close; not on a TV screen or computer monitor. Tony was watching the progress of the post mortem from a glass wall in the floor above, with a perfect view of the table. Bruce would almost have been nervous, if he hadn’t been too excited. This was it. This was the clue he had been hoping for- surely, with a sample of blood, with the original serum in his hands, it wouldn’t be too hard to isolate the components? Perhaps he would even be able to unlock a cure to his own condition. The possibilities seemed to unfold endlessly before him, a winding, golden road.

                But that was all in the future. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand, or none of it would happen. Every inch of the body had been photographed, recorded and scanned; including by X-ray. Considering the speed she must have hit the water, she was in remarkably good shape, with no broken bones and no internal injuries. Most spectacularly of all, there didn’t seem to be any frostbite or major skin damage in spite of seventy years in deep freeze. The serum really was potent stuff. It was time to set up a blood drain and then remove some of the key organs, the heart and lungs, to study if the serum had affected them or simply the muscles, and if so how far beyond the norm they were.

                “Fitting the blood drain now.” He said, as his team silently and efficiently got themselves, and the cadaver ready for it.

                “Just make sure you leave something for the state to bury.” Tony’s voice buzzed over the intercom. “My little girl was very insistent about that.”

                Bruce rolled his eyes, plugging the drain into the wrist before turning to the intercom himself. “How do you feel about stem cell research?” He asked.

                “Why, have you got some?”

                “Mm, I’m not sure yet. From the looks of the X-ray, it seems like she was pregnant when she went down. No more than two weeks or so, I’d say, she probably didn’t even know herself.” He glanced again at the X-ray of the lower body. “It doesn’t seem to have any form yet, anyway, just a bundle of cells. At a guess, it probably got torn away from the lining on the impact of hitting the water. I can’t really tell until I get in there though, for all I know it could just be a spot… on the… um, on the…” He ground to a halt.

                “On what?” Tony demanded. “Bruce?”

                Bruce was no longer listening. He’d thought he’d been imagining it, but there was a definite spurt coming now and then in the draining blood, beginning to occur more frequently, slow, comatosely slow, but almost as if-

                But it was impossible. She’d been in ice for seventy years, and anyway, they would surely have noticed when they scanned her-

                But none of them had looked for a pulse. None of them had checked. Why would they?

               And there was the blood, not so much flowing, but occasionally being forced. As if her heart was still beating, slowly, slowly, but beating all the same- and quicker all the time.

                Bruce swore. He never swore unless the occasion really demanded it, but he felt it was justified. He pulled the drain out before it could do any more damage, yelling to his team, demanding a heart monitor. The room fell into chaos as they tried to reorganise themselves, to find one, searching for any other signs of life. From the outside, it must have been completely incomprehensible, which was probably why Tony’s questions of what was happening were growing more irritated. Bruce continued to ignore him, he wouldn’t say anything until he was sure; after all, there were plenty of other explanations, more logical ones- but he couldn’t help hoping.

                Someone had found a heart monitor. Bruce hooked her up, and felt his breath catch. His heart was as still as the flat line on the screen. The room was in silence, apart from the dull, continuous thrum of the machine.

                And then, there it was; a beep, a peak, followed a few seconds later by another, and then another, the gap slightly shorter. No-one was quite sure what to do. Bruce went back to the intercom.

                “Tell your kid the burial is going to have to wait.” He said. “She’s still alive.”

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Stephanie came round slowly, with a struggle. Part of her didn’t want to bother at all. Waking up had been an entirely unexpected occurrence anyway. She had accepted that she would die; that she needed to die, to save the others. Survival had not been part of the plan. All in all, though, it was a nice bonus. Howard would be pleased, if he didn’t kill her for being so reckless.

                She wondered what sort of shape she would be in. Perhaps she would be invalided out of the army, which, given how things were right now, might be the best outcome. Then again, she didn’t remember anything beyond hitting the water and feeling the first rush of cold. It was entirely possible that she was still in the water. She might still be in danger.

                She forced herself through the last few inches into consciousness. There was a ceiling above her, which was a good start. The tiles looked wrong, somehow, though perhaps that was just because they were unfamiliar. Ignoring the dizziness the movement caused, she rolled onto her side to see the rest of the room. It was fairly typical of a private hospital room she supposed, though it wasn’t the sick bay at her last posting, nor the military hospital back home in New York. Where on earth had they taken her?

                Something was wrong, though. Her instincts were recognising something off before her brain could. She struggled to her feet, shocked by how weak she was, looking around. There were no windows. Why would they build a hospital without any windows? Come to that, how could it be a hospital without any smell of disinfectant ingrained by long use into the walls and floors? She suddenly wondered, with a sickening twist in her stomach, if she had washed up on the wrong side. Maybe the Germans had her.

                But there was baseball on the wireless. It didn’t get much more American than baseball. She tried to calm down, to listen- she wondered how long she had been asleep. It took a few moments for her brain to catch up with the goose bumps on her arms, a few moments before she realised that she had heard this game before, around two weeks ago. It had been on the night- she couldn’t forget it, anyway. Somehow, someone was playing a recording. This was a trap, a trick.

                She wasn’t going to hang around. The lock on her room’s door didn’t give her a moment’s pause and she staggered out into the corridor, where the lights were just fluorescent tubes, but bright, brighter than any she’d seen anywhere outside of the Stark labs. Someone shouted behind her- she disabled them. She ran. She’d figure out where the hell she was and what to do about it once she was clear.

                There was a fire door at the end of the corridor, but it was like no fire door she had ever met before. She punched it, but either she really was weak or the doors were reinforced, because she did little more than dent it.

                An alarm began to go off; red lights flashing and a siren wailing, like inside the submarines. She had to get out now. In her panic, she turned to the control panel on the side of the door. There weren’t any buttons. It was a flat piece of glass, but the numbers were there, drawn on behind it. More importantly, there was the small logo of Stark Industries that marked it as Howard’s tech. If this really was an enemy base, it could be bad news; but for the moment, it gave her hope. There was the code, the code that only she knew, that Howard had put in because she had worried so much about his experiments going wrong again. It was meant to be compatible with all Stark Tech- but she couldn’t find any buttons on this thing, no keyboard, there seemed to be no input at all. The seconds were ticking by, she could hear people approaching, and all she could do was tap the glass.

                It seemed to work. The numbers lit up as she touched them, just as if they had been actual buttons. The door deactivated and she staggered out into the outside world.

                It wasn’t Germany.  She didn’t know where it was. If she had to guess, she’d say it was New York. She’d known the city all her life, she knew its street and its folks, and though she recognised nothing, it seemed familiar. It was like what New York would turn into in a hundred years’ time, with towers stretching right up to heaven, every road crammed full of cabs and cars, people of every race teeming together over the sidewalks. She wasn’t so sure that this wasn’t New York a hundred years in the future, that she hadn’t walked into a real-life Science Fiction. All she could do was stare, to stop herself screaming.

                But there, barely two blocks away, the highest skyscraper of all of them, the one that rose the highest into the clouds; the name was written ostentatiously enough on the side of it. Stark.

                Stark. There could only be one. Howard. It had be Howard. Howard would know what to do, Howard would know what was going on.

                There were pursuers coming up behind her now. She kicked the door shut in their faces and ran, ran as if her life depended on it, just in case it did; ran past all the cars that looked like spaceships and stores advertising things she didn’t recognise and people wearing clothes made of fabrics she never knew existed, heading for the one thing she could see that was still familiar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Text

Chapter Two

 

April 2012

 

                Working for Tony Stark, even just on the front desk, meant getting used to strange occurrences as a matter of routine. The change from weaponry to electronics had caused a certain amount of chaos, as had Mr Stark’s long absence when he was being held hostage abroad. There were the usual plethora of visitors a large company could expect- salesmen and students, journalists, scientists and the like- but so much more than that. Frankly there were not many receptionists that had to deal with their boss’ legions of sometimes-creepy fans, cosplayers, would-be heroes and sidekicks and villains; occasionally actual villains. When Pauline had come for her interview, Miss Potts had told her she would need nerves of steel and a level head, and she had been right. By now, Pauline was such an old hand that she barely bat an eyelid whatever came through the door.

                By far the worst group to deal with, however, was the ex-girlfriends. ‘Ex-girlfriends’ was perhaps not the right word; Tony Stark did not have relationships. He had encounters. Liaisons. One-nighters. As far as Pauline knew, he had never even taken a woman on a proper date; he just picked them up and tumbled into bed with them. He had a reputation for it, so much so that the main condition of passing her two-week probation when Pauline began the job was to have not slept with him by the end of it. It was true he had slowed down a lot since his daughter had come to live with him, but from time to time, his ex-lovers still wandered in, looking wide eyed and lost and shrieking about how they ‘had something’ and how much they ‘needed him’ and being generally unpleasant for all concerned.

                The one that burst in that day looked nuttier than most, almost falling through the doors when they opened automatically, moving in panicked circles, looking with wide, frightened eyes at everything. Her hair was loose and dishevelled, her feet were bare, she seemed to be wearing nothing but a night dress. Pauline cocked an eyebrow. Clearly drunk, she thought, hoping the woman would simply totter back out again, pressing the call button for security in case she didn’t.

                “Please, can you help me?” The woman gasped, falling against the counter, supporting herself on it. “I need to see Mr Stark. Is he here? I need to see him. Please, it’s important.”

                “I’m sorry miss, he’s not in.” Pauline said, obediently, but something in her eyes must have made it obvious she was lying, because the woman kept pleading.

                “Please. I need to see him, right away! Tell Mr Stark it’s Stephanie Rogers, he’ll see me, I promise, but please. I… I don’t know where I am or what’s going on.”

                The security guards had arrived and were sizing up the situation. They were obviously ready to see the woman out, but Pauline couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the name Stephanie Rogers was ringing a little bell; she had heard the name before, somewhere. Maybe Mr Stark had kept this one more than a night; maybe they had been at school together; maybe she was some small-time model or actress or heiress that she had seen somewhere. It didn’t really matter in the long run, though. These girls were to be kept away from Mr Stark, no matter what.

                But she didn’t look well. She was breathing heavily, deathly pale, wild-eyed and staring- she looked ready to collapse.

                “Do you require medical assistance, Miss Rogers? Can I call someone for you?”

                “You can call Mr Stark!” She said, finally seeming to lose her temper and slamming her first down on the desk. The surface was a reinforced resin designed by Stark Industries to withstand almost anything, but her fist still left a dent in it.  That was all it took for security to step in and see her out.

                Stephanie didn’t argue with them or fight against them. For one thing, she felt utterly spent, the flash of rage had burnt up her remaining energy and it was all she could do to stay upright. Emotionally she wasn’t in much better shape. She was beginning to realise she was a long, long way from home and all she knew; and if she couldn’t get to Howard, she might have to go through it alone.

                She knew she ought to keep moving, that her captors from the lab may still have been after her, but she couldn’t bring herself to. She was exhausted, in a way she hadn’t been since she had been given the super serum; it made her think of her childhood illnesses, weak with fever in a small apartment overlooking the Brooklyn Docks. Sitting on the steps of the building claiming to belong to Howard, staring out at a world that went by in a confused montage that she could not follow, that apartment seemed like long time ago, another world.

                “U-um, excuse me.” A tentative voice came from behind her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

                Stephanie looked up, sharply. A young girl was hovering nearby, a satchel of some kind over her shoulder. She had been in the lobby before and must have followed her out. Trying to ignore her dizziness and confusion, Stephanie forced herself to smile.

                “I’ve been better, but I’m alright, thank you.”

                The girl rocked on her heels slightly, glancing around as if worried she’d be caught.  “U-um, you said your name was Stephanie Rogers, right?”

                “Yes.” She hardly dared hope it, but this child seemed to know what was going on, to know who she was. The girl broke into a wide, excited smile.

                “S-so, you’re Captain America! You’re really her!”

                “Yes.” Stephanie tried to smile again. “That’s why I need to see Mr Stark, I woke up in a… a lab of some kind, I had to break out. They had Stark tech, we need to regroup… figure out what they’re planning…” Her head was spinning, making it difficult to speak. She suddenly realised she was gabbling away with no idea of who this strange child was.  “Who are you?”

                “My name’s Penny.”

                “I need your help, Penny.” Stephanie said, feeling rather distant. She was unused to asking for help from strangers, especially children, but something in the child’s features made her trust her.

                Penny nodded. “I’ll help you, I promise.” She said. “I, um, um, I-I have your pictures on my wall! They made collectable postcards…” She trailed off, realising how different the woman sitting on the steps of her father’s building looked to the one on the postcards. It was the same person, yes, but on the pictures she had looked strong and confident, determined. Now she looked ill and tired and altogether lost. Penny didn’t like it. She didn’t want to see Captain America looking like that. This woman was her hero; Penny had only ever been in a proper fight once in her life and it was when she had been five and one of the other girls had told her she wasn’t cool enough to be Captain America in the school’s American Heroes pageant. She wondered how much the woman knew, thought about trying to explain herself, but had no idea where to start. It would be better to take her in to see her dad. Her dad had been there when Doctor Banner had realised she was still alive; he would know what to do. “I can get you inside.” She said.

                “How?”

                “I… um, I know Mr Stark.” She said, biting her lip, wondering how explicit she should be. “Come on, we can get in round the back.”

                She helped the woman to her feet. Stephanie didn’t question things any further, feeling that she’d had enough surprises for one day. She couldn’t really accept that this child would just know Howard, but whatever their connection was, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know just yet. Penny seemed sincere anyway, and said nothing about Stephanie’s weakness as she struggled to her feet, simply biting her lip awkwardly and stepping forward to help. Hobbling along far more slowly than she had in years, and leaning more on Penny to support her than she would have liked to admit, Stephanie went with Penny round to the side of the building, through a gate leading off an alleyway and into what seemed to be some kind of service corridor. It felt like a marathon, though it was no more than a few hundred yards. Penny took her into an elevator, where instead of pressing any of the numbered buttons, she said “Jarvis?”

                “Yes, Miss Parker?”

                Stephanie jumped, crashing back into the wall of the elevator, which seemed to be entirely made of glass. She looked around, searching for a speaker, a radio communicator, anything from which the voice could have come. It sounded too clear to be coming any distance, and she half expected to find another person in the elevator with them that she somehow hadn’t noticed. There was neither. Stephanie had gradually cut down on the possible explanations for her current predicament until she was left with three; the most likely being that she had been injured and was at best delusional and dying in the cold water or otherwise mad. The other explanations were that somehow the bomb had sent her into either a. some sort of crazy scientific fiction universe, or b. the future. She realised b. was just as crazy as a. was, but she was forced to work with what she had.

                She hoped she wasn’t mad. There couldn’t be anything worse than being trapped in your own fantasies. The elevator suddenly seemed very small.

                “The top floors are all living quarters.” Penny said. “Though at the moment it’s only Dad and me-” She stopped, realising she had made a big mistake- and not just that she should have said Dad and I.  “A-and, um, Mr Stark.”

                It was a terrible lie. Penny was not a good liar. Thankfully, Stephanie didn’t seem to notice. Penny wasn’t even sure she was still awake, leaning against the glass, her eyes miles away. Penny hoped she didn’t pass out in the elevator. She wasn’t tall enough to move the older woman on her own.

                “This place…” Stephanie mumbled, looking out at Stark industries as they went up. She closed her eyes and didn’t finish the sentence. When they finally reached the apartments at the top of the building, Penny lead her out. Stephanie looked around at their sitting room, the large television screen, her father’s mini bar, the spectacular view of a modern city. She looked out of the window for a long time, in silence. Penny hovered, awkward, not sure if the woman would be able to stand up unsupported if she moved to find her father. She bit her lip, and then spoke.

                “Jarvis? Where is, uh, Mr Stark?”

                “In the labs, Miss Parker. I will ask him to come up.”

                Stephanie jumped again, startled at the disembodied voice. Penny decided to take her over to the couch before she fell over entirely.

                “Thanks, Jarvis.” She said, sitting down next to the woman. Next to Captain America. The thought seemed to freeze her brain, so she shook it off. She could obsess over it later, when her heroine didn’t need help. “Um, um… so… w-would you like a drink, ma’am?”

                It seemed a stupid statement, hanging in the air. The commonplace was out of place, there was nothing common going on here. Still, Stephanie smiled, and suddenly she looked like the super solider in the post cards. She would be alright, Penny felt suddenly, once she got used to things and had rested up a bit. She would be fine.

                “Thank you, that’s very kind. Some water, please.” Stephanie said. She seemed to be reviving slightly now she was sitting down, although she was still deathly pale. Penny nodded and leapt up to fetch it, but at that moment her father appeared at the top of the stairs and things quickly took a turn for the worse.

                Penny blamed Tony. Tony blamed Penny. But either way, in a very few minutes, they had an unconscious super solider on the couch and a lot of explaining to do to Doctor Banner and Nick Fury.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

January, 1942

 

                The crocuses had come out ludicrously early this year. It was only January, the snow had only just thawed, and yet they were already sprouting up outside the hospital window. Howard might have taken a moment to appreciate the beauty of creation, if he hadn’t grown tired of that same view after a minute or so about a week and a half before, and if he hadn’t had other frustrations taking up his time.

                He didn’t have time for crocuses. He was a busy man. It was bad enough that he had been stuck in hospital for weeks over some injuries that were really nothing to write home about, but now he was finally being discharged, his assistant had brought him the most ridiculous clothes. His own had been too damaged in the accident to salvage, and all he had asked for was a decent suit. They had managed alright on the rest, but where they had pulled the shirt from he could not begin to guess. Howard was not a short man, yet the shirt fell much longer than it should; he had to turn his cuffs over to stop them covering his hands, and the collar was detachable. Detachable.  The shirt was an antique, it was probably a decade old at least, perhaps older than him. It was as if he turning into his grandfather, and goodness knew nobody wanted that to happen.

                Besides, the damn thing kept coming unfastened from the shirt every time he tried to put             his tie around it. He was Howard Stark, the man who could make anything, the man with the cleverest hands in the Western World, and yet, as things stood, he couldn’t even get himself properly dressed. Not that he would call a shirt that went out of fashion with the Charleston ‘properly dressed’. That assistant was most definitely fired.

                The collar popped off again, almost strangling him with his tie, and Howard surrendered. Rumour had it that it was a woman who invented these damn collars to begin with; probably only women could get them to stay on. It was probably some sort of covert plan to make men dependant on them. He decided to seek assistance from the nurse’s station. He should probably make his goodbyes anyway, leave a few broken hearts as always. He was rather smug about his popularity, though Nurse Rogers was spoiling his perfect record. She came in to see to him every day, pointing out the beauty of the crocuses every time she opened his curtains, and ignoring his cynicism. He knew she was amused by him, he could see it in her eyes, but she refused to admit it. She had told him to hurry his recovery so that the bed could go to someone more deserving. She was always patient and mild mannered, but she didn’t mince her words. She was still rather plain, and it was no surprise to Howard that she seemed to be the only nurse who didn’t get any attention from the local louts. But they were ignorant. There was something in her, something he couldn’t quite identify- not yet- but that meant that every day she absorbed his complete attention.

                Every day he asked her to go to dinner or dancing with him, and every day she said no. While his body recovered, his ego was sustaining more and more bruising.

                Howard walked down the hallway to the nurse’s station, but as he did so, he passed the Matron’s office, from which he heard quite distinctly Nurse Roger’s voice. He stopped to listen. Technically it wasn’t eavesdropping if they had left the door ajar. He nudged it with his foot, to encourage it to open a crack. It was a success. He could hear clearly as his nurse protested:

                “But Matron, I-”

                “Nobody doubts your sincerity, Nurse Rogers, or your compassion. It is your aptitude that concerns me.”

                “No-one has any complaints about my care!”

                “No, but you do have by far the most accidents, you are clumsy, you are frail and injure easily, and you keep turning up to work far too ill to tend safely to the sick. It is a bad habit to overreach yourself, Nurse Rogers. I will not recommend you for a transfer.”

                “But-”

                “No arguments, Nurse. You will do far more good here than on the front. Now, attend to your patients.”

                “…Yes, Matron.”

                She came out of the room, pulling it shut behind her with a sigh. Howard had hastily backpedalled a few steps so that now he could walk towards her, looking like he had just got there.

                “There you are.” He said. “I was looking for you.”

                “Mr Stark? I was just coming to find you. Your car is here to pick you up.” She looked him over critically. “But let me fix that collar first. We can’t have you going out of here looking like a ragamuffin.”

                “Thanks, doll.” Howard stood still, letting her do it. Her face was much nicer close up, in his opinion, the pinched edges smoothed out a little. He thought about how easy it would be to kiss her.

                “I used to do this for my father.” She smiled as she refastened the collar and began to do the tie. “For Sunday best.”

                So he reminded her of her father. Wonderful. He hated this shirt.

                “So what was old sour puss bawling you out about?” He asked. Her hands paused for a second, startled, then went back to work.

                “I’m sorry if my private conversation disturbed you.” She said, mildly, in the clearest none-of-your-business tone he had ever heard. “I didn’t know anyone was there.” She pulled his tie through. Remarkably, the collar stayed in place. Howard did not know how these women did it.

                “Thanks.” He said as she released him. “As for disturbing me, well, why don’t you make it up to me and let me take you for dinner tonight?”

                “Dinner? And what would I get out of it?”

                “What? Well, a good dinner. Good… company.”

                “You’re a business man, Mr Stark, you’re all about deals.” She said. “The hospital needs more bandages. If you could see your way to supplying some, I could see my way to being ready at say, seven, to go for dinner wherever you like.”

                “You drive a hard bargain.” He remarked, wondering where someone so plain had got so much arrogance, considering she probably wasn’t overwhelmed with offers. Or perhaps she really didn’t want to go to dinner with him, and was just taking the opportunity to help the hospital. Either way, he kind of liked it. “This is turning into the most expensive dinner I’ve ever had.”

                “You can afford it.” She reminded him.

                “You’re right, I can.” He laughed. “Alright then, deal- but, as a sweetener, I get to call you by your first name, Stephanie.”

                “You’ve been asking around about me, Mr Stark.”

                “Call me Howard. And yes, I have. They all call you Annie, don’t they? I think that’s real pretty.”

                “Do you?” She replied. “Then you can use it if you want to, Mr Stark.”

                “So, I’ll pick you up at seven?”

                “I’ll be waiting on the corner.”

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

 

April 2012

 

                The best thing about promoting Pepper was that he had such capable hands to leave the company in; or at least the boring parts. That meant Tony had more time to slip away from the main labs and offices and scuttle upstairs to his own, personal, workshop; accessible only by stairs down from the main sitting room of the apartment only he and Penny could enter uninvited. He told Pepper that he was working on new products for Stark Industries, and occasionally threw one together to keep her off his back, but in reality, he was normally working on the Iron Man suits. Tony Stark had never been one for moderation. He worked hard and he played hard and he figured the more power he could get into the suit the better. Today, though, he was mostly tinkering; adjusting this and that, experimenting with changes to the odd variable. It was nice to be able to work on the suit without the pressure of impending doom for a change.

                “Miss Parker has arrived home, sir.” Jarvis informed him. “She has a guest with her.”

                Tony paused, screwdriver in hand. “Boy or girl?”

                “A woman, sir.”

                “Oh. Okay.” His work would have then regained his full attention, but Jarvis continued.

                “It appears to be Captain Rogers, sir.”

                “What?”

                “Miss Parker would like you to go up.”

                Tony went up. He couldn’t deny that this looked interesting.

                He went into the lounge to find Penny standing before a woman on the settee; a dishevelled woman who looked pale and wide-eyed and shivery, and not at all like the proud American hero Tony had half expected. She wasn’t even wearing shoes.

                She had come straight from the hospital, Tony realised. She probably didn’t know where she was yet. This could end badly.

                “H-Howard?” The woman said, struggling with effort to her feet. “…You’re not…”

                “No.” Tony agreed. “Howard Stark was my father. Now, why don’t you just sit down for a second?”

                “No.” She said, shaking her head, backing away as he went to take her elbow and sit her down again. “No, you can’t be, you’re too old, you’re older than him. How can you be his son?”

                “You were asleep for a really long time, Captain. You went under in, what, 1945? But now it’s 2012.”

                “I… I… this is… really strange…” She stammered, still backing away from him, from them, backing right into the mini bar. She looked panicked now, her breathing was heavy. “The bomb… how can I have…I don’t…” Tony did not like the sound of that breathing. He could see her chest heaving. The chances of her passing out seemed to be increasing steadily. “Who… who… are you? I…”

                “Penny, go to your room.”

                “What? Why? Is she okay?” Penny looked almost as wide eyed and panicked as their guest.

                “Captain Roger’s heartbeat is accelerating quite dangerously, sir.” Jarvis interrupted.

                “She’s having a heart attack?! Dad, do something!”

                “Penny, room!”

                “Who… are… you?!”

                “Tony! Tony Stark. Howard was my father, it’s 2012, and you really need to calm down!” 

                “Tony? Antony?” She repeated, clinging to his sleeve now instead of pulling away. She was sweating freely. She needed a doctor.

                “Right. Now, can we sit down?”

                “Antony…” She said, and suddenly smiled a wide, confused smile. “I always… I always hated… that name.”

                “What?” Tony asked, but she was in no state to answer as knees suddenly buckled and she collapsed, Tony just managing to stop her head from colliding with the edge of the bar. He dropped her gently the last inch to the floor.

                “Well, that was just rude.” He commented, as he and Penny contemplated the heap of unconscious super solider.

                “Is she… dead?” Penny whispered.

                “No, sweetheart, she probably just woke up too soon and overdid it.” Tony grunted, pulling the woman up by the armpits. “Grab her legs, I guess we’d better put her on the couch.” Penny hurried to comply and they carried her across the room. “Why didn’t you warn me that she didn’t know anything?”

                “I don’t know!” Penny practically wailed. “I knew she didn’t know where she was, b-but she just kept asking for Mr Stark! I thought she meant you! I forgot granddad would have been Mr Stark too!”

                “You’re an idiot.”

                “I’m not an idiot!”

                “The out cold woman on the couch says differently.”

                “That wasn’t my fault.” Penny pouted. “It was your fault. You surprised her.”

                “Yeah, well, see if you can wake her up.” Tony replied, taking out his phone, typing out a text with a practised ease that did not betray the nerves he felt otherwise. He decided to keep it simple.

                Lost something? Will leave it in the lounge for you.

                Penny was not having much luck reviving the Captain. Perhaps it was better that way. They could leave her in the hands of professionals, who would know what to do with an old war relic that had hung out with his father and had probably done as much for the war effort in her calendar shots as on the battlefield. Shield would probably find somewhere to hide her away, give her an enormous pay off, and leave her to quietly fritter her life away. He probably wouldn’t see her again.

                He felt a little sorry for her, but that was just the way it was. 

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

January 1942

 

                “Well, if it isn’t my favourite army pin up. Hello, Carter. Sweet of you to come get me.”

                “Shut up and get in the car, Stark. You need to get back to the labs.”

                “Why?” Something in Peggy’s tone made Howard realise she meant business, that this wasn’t the time for flirting and teasing. He got in. She locked the doors and began to drive.

                “The file.” She said, nodding to a buff folder lying on the dash board. Howard picked it up and flipped through, cursing when he realised what it was.

                “Erskine told them we needed to postpone the live tests!” He said. “They’re not trying to pin this on me, are they?”

                “Oh, they tried, but it’s hard to make things stick to a man who was unconscious on the other side of the city at the time.” Carter replied, and from her tone Howard rather thought she’d probably had something to do with speaking in his favour. It didn’t cheer him up much. He cursed again.

                “How many casualties?”

                “Five.”

                “Fatalities?”

                “…Three.” She guiltily caught his eye in the mirror. “They’re included in the casualties.”

                “That doesn’t really make me feel any better.” He sighed. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? I needed to know this, Carter.”

                “You were in a military hospital that is open to the public and staffed mainly by volunteers.” She answered. “It was hardly safe for a visit. Loose lips-”

                “-sink ships, I know.” He snapped. “But, you see, the thing is, tight lips kill soldiers.”

                “Howard.” She tutted.

                “What? You don’t think it would make a good slogan? Is it because it doesn’t rhyme?”

                “You’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t happen again, won’t you? If anything else goes wrong, they’ll discontinue the programme.”

                “If they’d listened to us it wouldn’t have gone wrong!”

                They fell into silence and Howard moodily flipped through the pages in the file, looking for the more explicit explanations of what had happened to the test subjects for the serum. He would crack this. He would.

                Peggy sighed and started to drive. As she turned, the wing mirror reflected the door of the hospital, where Nurse Rogers was emptying an ash tray into the bin. He wondered if she smoked. He would ask her later, when he met her again. Whatever else happened, at least there was that.

 

 

Chapter Text

Chapter Three

 

May 1942

 

                The first time a girl lets you kiss her is a rather important milestone if the relationship is more than just a bit of fun, more than just playing around. With Annie it had happened under a non-descript street light, nowhere special. The kiss wasn’t really anything special either, if he was honest, just a quick peck under the lamp on the corner of the street as he walked her home from the pictures. Walked. Howard was more than rich enough to have easily taken her home in his car, or at least a taxi cab. But no, she was a Brooklyn girl through and through, always the daughter of a docker, the bus was good enough for her- the bus and a half-mile walk at the other end. Howard insisted on accompanying her, of course, he was a gentleman. Besides, he’d grown to love those journeys home. What she lacked in beauty, she made up for in spirit, character. He loved her eyes and her smile, he even found the fact every date came with an attached condition somewhat attractive. It was a flirtatious dance, a game they played together; some bullets, some bandages, scrap metal, factory space, blankets; dinner and dancing and the pictures; a kiss.

                It was that first kiss that had given him the idea. It was terribly unromantic of him to be thinking about work in that situation, but he had started well, thinking how brave she was, how lucky he was, how caring she was.

               And then, suddenly, everything had clicked neatly together in his head. The reason Erskine’s serum had been failing, it was probably the overdose of testosterone. Being tested was an emotional experience, the blood would be flooded with all kinds of things- including its own testosterone supply. If the serum amplified everything that was already there, with the serum on top, it would be too much for the body to safely cope with. But it would be impossible to lower the amount in the serum; without it the vita-rays could do nothing. They needed to find a way, somehow, of lowering the amount in the test subject.

                There was a way. Of course there was. They could try it on a woman. A woman, and it had to be Annie, of course it had to be her, who else could it be? She was devoted to her country, she wanted so desperately to serve it, she had become a nurse even though that hadn’t worked out too well for her mom, she had begged a dozen times to be transferred to a hospital on the front lines, to help service men wounded in action, not in training. Howard often joked she would have been a solider herself if she could, and she laughed it off, but he was never sure if she was really joking too. She believed passionately in America. He knew then that of course it had to be Annie, his brave Annie. She wouldn’t have let him use anyone else. He’d wanted to kiss her all over again, and he had.

               And now here they were, nine weeks later, ready to test the theory out. Howard couldn’t deny being a little nervous. His role had only ever really been advisory in the development of the serum, and then only really on the technical side of things; at heart he was an engineer, not a scientist. He only really even made weapons because it was easier and more profitable than making flying machines. Only Annie knew that. She said that after the war, in the peaceful world she was convinced lay on the other side of it, he should give up on guns and start making aeroplanes. She said he was rich enough to give up on making money and do whatever he wanted. Howard thought she was an idealist. There would always be a demand for guns, but perhaps he wouldn’t be the one making them. The face of weapon tech was going to change today anyway. If there were going to be super soldiers in the world, the battlefield was going to become unrecognisable. His guns and bombs and mines might become obsolete. Aviation might become a more profitable route for him after all, if he could find some decent designers who understood aeronautics. Howard wouldn’t mind that. As long as he got his ten per cent from assisting Erskine with the project, he was happy to leave the government contracts to those who wanted them in future.

                Still, Howard was unusually nervous. He had read everything about the serum, and yet, there were one or two small details he admittedly hadn’t quite grasped; not to mention the fact that Erskine wasn’t quite as much definitely-not-a-mad-scientist as he would have liked. He would have preferred it to be all his own work, when he was entrusting someone as important as Annie to it. But they had checked and re-checked, tested and re-tested the serum before it had got to this point. He was sure it was safe. They were confident, so confident that Erskine had invited various government officials to come see the show. It was time they saw what the serum could do.

                Besides, there was no way Annie would have let him back out now. She had been completely in favour of it ever since Howard had suggested she be used as their participant. Still, she looked a touch nervous as she followed Agent Carter into the lab that day, wearing only a hospital gown. Howard tried to smile reassuringly and turned back to double check the machines before she noticed his expression wasn’t that reassuring at all. Leaving Erskine to do the talking- it wasn’t his strong point, but Howard supposed the scientist deserved his shot at the limelight- Howard went to help Annie get properly strapped into the chamber and ready to go.

                “Ready?” He asked, taking a moment to give her bare arm a rather unprofessional stroke. She looked smaller than ever, surrounded by all the equipment. He was beginning to have second thoughts.

                “As I’ll ever be.” She answered. “Are you?”

                “As I’ll ever be.”

                “This is more ready than your flying car was, right?”

                “My what?” Howard frowned, then realised she could only mean his appearance at the world fair, and the floating car he had displayed. It had crashed. “You were there?”

                “Yeah, Bucky wanted to go. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

                “You went on a date with Bucky?”

                “No, he had a girl and one of his friends there.”

                “So you went on a date with his friend?”

                “Howard, really, I was just tagging along.”

                “Yes, and just how far did you tag along, Annie?”

                Doctor Erskine cleared his throat. Everyone was ready for the procedure to start- and listening in, probably. Howard jumped away from the pod and nimbly back down to his machines. Erskine smiled and launched into his preamble. Howard coaxed his machines into life. The procedure began.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

May 2012

 

                Stephanie was making a mental list of what had been better in the forties, and what was better in the present day.

                Gyms. Gyms were better now, on balance. They had plenty of equipment that seemed entirely lazy, that practically did the work out for you, but they had traditional bars and beams and weights too. Best of all, they opened twenty-four hours, or close enough. She could go there and work out with the other insomniacs in the long and empty hours of the night. Or in the day. She had more money, and therefore more free time now than she had ever had in her life.  

                Manners. The manners here were awful. Even polite people seemed rude. She didn’t want to harp on like an old back-in-my-day woman, but every time she so much as tried to cross the street, horns would blare, people would shout. She’d had countless doors slam shut in front of her face as the people in front failed to hold it open, and she’d learnt it was now absolutely taboo to speak to strangers on public transport. There was no consideration for others any more. The elevator in her apartment building was usually out of order, and perpetually smelt of urine and beer.

                Cars. Cars, though, cars were better now. To her they seemed as smooth and silent as the sun setting and the night coming on in a clear sky. Unfortunately, none of them flew. She wondered if Howard had ever gone back to his prototype, or if he had just got bored of that project like so many others.

                Night time. She had grown to hate the dark hours here; not that there were any. New York, the City that Never Slept, the moniker was more than euphemistic now. People would work, drive, shout, curse, while they should be sleeping. She’d moved back to her old neighbourhood, in an apartment building that had been built well after her time, but was still falling into ruin and disrepair. All night she would hear people coming up and downstairs, music, arguments and tears as well as the traffic and noise of a living city outside, but she didn’t think that was what was keeping her awake. She felt very out of place, out of time. She hated the nights. She’d tried the pictures (Movies, they were certainly different now to the forties, bigger and louder and sometimes better, sometimes worse) and had once made the mistake of entering a bar, but they weren’t the sort of places she wanted to be. Mostly, she went to the gym, returning home to bed in the small hours, but still waking soon after dawn.

                In the day time, there was little to do but wander. She’d considered looking for work, but she didn’t know how people even began to look for a job in this age where people had computing machines small enough to be carried in a pocket. She didn’t need to work anyway, not with the pay out she’d been given from Shield and a grateful government.  She hadn’t really wanted to accept it, but she hadn’t known what else to do. They’d signed her up with an advisor, who was meant to be helping her to adjust to the modern world, but she had stopped attending the sessions after a week. The bottom line was that she was burying her head in the sand. The best way to learn about the new world was to live in it, and ever since she had been thawed out she’d felt an almost irresistible urge to be outside almost constantly. It was a strange kind of pressure, a mild claustrophobia perhaps; she hoped it would go away soon. There wasn’t much she could really do to force it, however, so she simply kept her head down and carried on. Sooner or later, she told herself, something would change. Some purpose would come up, or her feelings would change, and she’d adjust. It was just a matter of killing time until then, and trying to believe it would happen.

                Today she had been walking around the city as usual, trying to match the places she saw around her to the map she had in her head. Some things, sometimes entire streets, hadn’t changed a bit. Sometimes there were whole new roads squeezed in where there had never been one before. She wondered, often, if the locals appreciated what a place this was; it was rich and fine and so bright, so vibrant. In spite of her home sickness, she could admit, this was a remarkable place to be. She preferred to get out of her own neighbourhood when she rambled, though. She wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, she was a Brooklyn girl through and through, but it was strange to be so anonymous, to be a stranger, a foreigner, to a place that had always been her home.

                She was sitting outside a street-side café in the middle of the city now, watching the world go by. It was the strange double nature of her situation- she was homesick, out of time, disillusioned with the new world; and yet, she couldn’t get enough of watching it. It was terrible, but it was exciting, it was beautiful but dark, it was the same at heart, but different all over. She knew she was being too hard on the new world really. There were problems, but there had always been problems. The reality was, in the war, in that awful war, they had been fighting for freedom and justice and peace and the better world they were sure lay on the other side. This world, this New York, did not live up to those hopes. They’d all taken such delight in telling her that they’d won the war, no-one ever talked about what they lost.

                Still, the sun was shining, the streets were teeming with people of all colours and all walks of life, and, in the end, she was alive. In her last moments, before the ice, before her brain shut down, she’d been praying, praying for Howard, praying for the safety of the world, being thankful for the life she’d had; but it seemed someone wanted that life to carry on. She didn’t know why yet, but it had to be out there somewhere, surely. It would come soon. She just had to hold onto that.

                The waitress came to take her order, and when her voice came out hoarse, Stephanie realised this was the first time she’d spoken to anyone in three days. The positive thoughts she’d been working so hard to scrape together crumbled abruptly. The waitress must have seen something change in her face, because when she returned with the coffee (Coffee- Always awful, compared to the forties.) she struck up a brief conversation.

                “It’s a great drawing.” She said, smiling. Stephanie looked up, startled, and then down at her napkin. She had been doodling idly, but until then she hadn’t even consciously realised what it was. It was the Stark Tower, which, from this angle, still dominated the skyline. She suddenly felt embarrassed, as if caught at something illicit, realising her mind had been drifting back to old times, old people. She couldn’t allow herself to go there again. She mustn’t think of Howard, not too much, not in public.

                “Oh, thank you.” She said, resolutely screwing it up. She sipped her coffee.

                “Are you waiting for the big guy?” The waitress asked.

                “Excuse me?”

                “Iron Man. A lot of people wait here just to see him fly by.”

                “Oh.” Stephanie said, and, feeling that probably wasn’t sufficient answer enough, added “I see.”

                Howard might not have finished his flying car, but it seemed his son had a flying suit. Stephanie glanced towards the tower. She would kind of like to see that.

                There was a slight awkward pause. The waitress smiled and began to move on. “Well, the table’s yours as long as you want it.” She said. “Oh, and there’s free wireless.”

                “Radio?” Stephanie asked, accidentally voicing the word out loud. The waitress smiled in confusion, and slipped politely away. Stephanie drank her coffee as quickly as she dared, as if pretending she had some place to be would somehow make one appear. She had just stood to leave, when she heard someone calling her.

                “Stephanie?”

               It was Stark, Tony Stark, Howard’s son. She hadn’t seen him since the day she had first woken up, but there he was, standing on the curb, leaning out of the door of some fancy car, and calling to her.

                The surprise was so sudden, and so pleasant, that it was almost painful, like stepping into the sun after being in a pitch-dark room. Someone knew her name. Someone recognised her. Her guts wrenched and she didn’t know how to stop them; she found she was blinking back tears as she smiled and went over there. Thankfully, they were gone by the time she was close enough for him to have possibly seen them. She didn’t know how she would have explained. Tony would never know, would never understand, what it had meant to her, just to have someone here who knew her name.

                “Do you need a ride?” He asked, without further preamble. Inside the car, Stephanie could make out his daughter leaning forward to try and see, and smiled at her too. Penny smiled nervously back, and practically threw herself back against the seat, looking out of the other window. She was obviously a little shy, Stephanie thought. She could sympathise, she had been that way herself once.

                “Oh, thanks, but I was just heading home.” Stephanie replied, trying and utterly failing to think of some greater purpose to give herself.  “I like the walk.”

                “Oh. But, you know, have a ride anyway, because Penny’s already made me circle back round the block to come get you and if I think she’ll resort to drastic measures if I don’t get you in the car.”

                “Dad!” Penny protested, colouring. Stephanie smiled again, trying to put her at ease.  Although she was admittedly hazy on the details, she knew the girl had helped her out when she had first woken up, so she figured accepting the lift was the least she could do. Thanking them both, she got in.

                “So, have you two been out together?” She asked.

                “No, just school.” Penny answered.

                “I went to her school. It was parents’ day.” Tony elaborated.

                “No, it wasn’t, it was parents’ day last week. You just showed up.”

                Tony didn’t so much as look at his daughter, his gaze fixed on Stephanie as he brushed off his daughter, looking entirely sincere. “I took the assembly.” He explained.

                “Yeah, but they didn’t ask you to!” From Penny’s tone, Stephanie began to suspect she had stumbled into the middle of a family disagreement.

                “I had valuable things to say about the importance of the future of industry.”

                “You spent half of it talking about the Iron Man suit!”

                “Hey, I’m going to get around to making those commercially available to businesses… eventually.”

                “You spent the other half signing autographs!”

                “Sweetheart, what did we say about telling people things they don’t need to know?” Tony said, with a glare at his daughter and vaguely apologetic look at Stephanie, who found herself torn between being unimpressed with his irresponsible attitude to education and his ego, and yet, amused at his antics. She felt another sudden pang of loss as she realised she’d had very similar feelings about Howard, more than once. She hurried to move the conversation on, to a subject that had piqued her curiosity and could occupy her mind.

                “Iron Man suit? Is that your flying machine?”

                “Oh, you’ve heard about that?” He replied. “It’s not really a flying machine, it’s more of a personal high tech suit of armour. But yeah, it flies.”

                “I’d love to see that some time, Mr Stark.”

                “Sorry, I don’t really do demos.”

                “You can show her the lab, though!” Penny volunteered eagerly. Tony silenced her with a look.

                “I wouldn’t want to be an intrusion.” Stephanie ventured.

                “No, that’s fine. Just… watch your step in there.” He sounded doubtful. Stephanie wondered why; whether the problem was him, or her.

                “Alright.”

                “It’s really cool.” Penny said, with an air of confession, as if she didn’t want her father to hear the compliment. “I’m sure you’ll like it, Ms Rogers.”

                “Oh, Stephanie, please. If I’m allowed to call you Penny, Miss Stark, I think it’s only fair.” She smiled gently.

                “Parker. She’s Parker.” Tony said. “After her step-father.” He sounded rather put out by this, but Stephanie could have slapped him, with the expression he left his daughter’s face. Penelope looked almost ready to cry. Instead of asking about what was clearly a difficult subject between them, Stephanie ignored his comment and did her best to cheer up the child.

                “Or Annie. My friends back home used to call me Annie. Your g-grandpa did too.”

                She couldn’t help stumbling slightly over the word. Somehow she couldn’t quite align the concept of ‘grandpa’ with her memories of Howard, who had been so young when she had known him; younger than he had probably admitted. He had told her he was twenty-five when they first met, just a little older than she was, but she’d seen his hospital notes and he’d been born in the fall of ’21, three and a half years after her. If he’d lived, he would have been ninety by now. That thought alone was strange enough; but stranger still was the fact that his son still had to be on the shy side of forty. Howard must have been pushing sixty before he’d even got around to having children. She wondered if Tony had been planned. She didn’t quite dare ask.

                Penelope, at least, was oblivious to the thoughts swirling around Stephanie’s head, still smiling at the implication that they were friends.

                 “Annie is nice.” She said.

                “It’s old fashioned.” Tony was clearly in the mood to be contrary. “It’s a name that only grandmas and little singing orphan girls have.”

                “Singing?” Stephanie repeated.

                “There’s a musical called Annie.” Penny explained, rather apologetically. “It’s about an orphan girl, I think.”

                “Like the comics?” Stephanie asked, having spent much of her childhood reading every Little Orphan Annie strip she could find in used newspapers. It had been pretty popular, but she couldn’t imagine anyone making anything as grand as a musical out of it. (Although, she had walked down Broadway and it seemed like they made musicals out of anything these days. There was even one about the everyday life of cats. Musicals- definitely better back home.) At the mention of the comics, it was Tony and Penny’s turn to look blank.

                “I don’t know.” Penny said. “I have the DVD. We could watch it after dad shows you the lab, you can see if it’s the same.”

                “Sure.” Stephanie said, though she didn’t really have a clear idea of what a DVD actually was. There was something in her flat with ‘Blu-ray/DVD Recorder’ written on it, but she hadn’t got any further in her investigations just yet. “And Tony, you don’t have to call me Annie if you don’t want to.”

                “Fine, then I won’t.”

                “Fine.”

                “Stevie!” Penny blurted, clearly more to stop them fighting than anything else. “There was a Stephanie in my class at elementary school, she shortened her name to Stevie!”

                “Stevie…” Stephanie repeated. It tasted foreign to her tongue, and modern. The new name appealed to her. It was a name to help her forget the past. She could start a new life on a name like that.

                “I like it.” Stevie said; and all at once Stephanie blew away into the past.

               

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Tony wasn’t well-equipped to handle serious situations. Being witty and pithy was his coping mechanism, his one-liners were his response. Sometimes people couldn’t handle it, but they needed to lighten up. Life was full of assholes, and you could either take it personally or laugh with them.

                Just sometimes, though, there was a situation he couldn’t be an asshole about. Usually these were with Penny- she was only a kid and he didn’t want her to hate him, not if he could help it, so he had curtailed his jerkiness somewhat. This time, however, the problem was Stephanie’s.

                They’d had a nice evening, or, at least, it had been more fun than Tony had been expecting when Penny had talked him into inviting ‘Stevie’ over. Then again, it was never a bad day when he got to show off in his lab; although his guest wasn’t quite as easy to impress as he’d hoped. Maybe she was used enough to the modern world that some of the dazzle had faded, or maybe it was because, as she said, she’d spent a lot of time in the lab with his dad. It couldn’t be a lack of interest. He was always interesting. At least she had been more impressed with the suits, admiring them, asking a lot of questions, most of them revolving around whether the suit would work in space. She called it a space suit. Tony had not been terribly impressed with her, on that score at least.

                He’d been a little worried that she would enjoy the sentimental smaltzy-ness of Annie when they sat down with Penny and a Chinese take away to watch it. He figured someone, at some point, must have liked the insipid sentimentality, and if anyone would, it would be this woman from the forties. To his relief, Stevie had seemed more interested in her food, jokingly declared the movie ‘awful’ when they were half way through, and the three of them had spent the rest of the run time insulting it; something Penny was surprisingly good at for a child her age. Tony was proud of her. Unfortunately, she was definitely scheming something; deciding that, as Stevie had missed out on so many films over the years, they should do this every week and show her the landmarks of cinema that had passed her by.  Tony had tried to get out of it, of course, but the kid was surprisingly cunning, and had insisted on the basis that even if he didn’t want to join in, she and Stevie could still go ahead. Stephanie had mumbled something embarrassed about not intruding, Penny had pushed the point still further, and Tony had finally capitulated just to get out of an awkward conversation, just as Penny had known he would.  He had no intention of joining in with the film-fest though. He had things to do. Still, as a one-off, it had been kind of fun.

                He’d given her a ride home, also at Penny’s insistence. After so many missed dinners, it was Tony’s policy to appease his daughter as and when he could. Still, he might have refused if he had realised just what sort of area his car- his fancy, expensive, top-of-the-range-with-Stark-modifications car- would have to journey through. This was not the sort of place you’d expect to find a vintage American hero, it was not America at its best. It was more the sort of place where you locked all the car doors for fear of what might happen if you had to stop at any traffic lights.

                “It was nicer in the forties.” Stevie said, apparently sensing his thoughts.

                “Yeah, but… look, I’m sure Shield could find you somewhere better.”

                “I want to live here. I’ve always lived here. I’m not about to be chased out by some hoodlums with cans of spray paint.”

                Famous last words, as it turned out. She’d politely invited him in for coffee, and he’d accepted on the assumption that she’d actually meant coffee, and not ‘coffee’- though, honestly, she was Captain America, if it had looked like it was going the way of ‘coffee’ Tony would probably have just gone with it. She lived in a rundown apartment block, which she at least had the decency to look a little embarrassed about as they picked their way up a narrow, graffiti-lined stairwell. Tony watched where he was putting his feet, convinced he would step in something unpleasant. She was busy assuring him that her apartment was fine once you were inside, but then she pushed the door and stopped mid-sentence.

                ‘It was fine.’ She said, after a moment’s pause.

                ‘Oh… well.’ Tony said. He didn’t know what to say. Half a dozen quips ran through his mind, but he didn’t really want to test them out on a woman who, rumour had it, could easily throw him down the stairs.  

                ‘Why would…’ She stopped and swallowed. ‘Have they even taken anything?’

                The flat was a mess. The door had been broken down and the whole place had been turned upside down. She was right, this didn’t seem to be so much an act of theft as sheer boredom, vandalism. Words, large and explicit, had been sprayed over the bare walls. Clearly the whitewashed canvas had been too tempting not to deface in such a way, with, of course, the obligatory penis. The walls aside, all her furniture had been turned over and emptied out; there were shattered pieces of what Tony guessed had been her record collection all over the floor, there was stuffing from where her cushions and bedding had been torn apart, her clothes were strewn across the place, her plates were broken in pieces, beer was staining her carpet, and, judging by the smell, something, somewhere, had been urinated on.

                The contemplated the scene in silence. Tony went to open the window, but it was stiff and sticking in the frame. Stevie came and thumped it open. Super-soldier or not, it was kind of embarrassing to have less upper body strength than a woman who still styled her hair like a 1950s housewife. He really did need to get more exercise outside of the suit.

                “Do you think they knew?” She asked, tentatively examining some of the clothes. “I mean… is this because I used to be Captain America?”

                “I doubt it, Stevie, it was probably just some dumb kids, bored and looking for trouble.”

                She nodded, but said nothing, righting the bed frame. It was a cheap, metal affair; the kind with springs strung across it. It had probably reminded her of the army. For all the mess, Tony could see there hadn’t been much here to begin with. The records and the player, hopelessly smashed, must have been from an antiques or a second hand store, and had probably been her biggest purchase. There was the bed, a chair, and the wardrobe; but it didn’t look like there would even have been enough clothes to fill it. He was starting to pick out tiny scraps of paper littering the floor, so she must have either had books or some sort of sketches, the pieces were too small to tell at a glance. In the kitchenette at the other end of the room, the amount of crockery seemed to suggest she had just enough for one. She’d barely had anything, barely had any time to accumulate anything, and now it was all gone.  She’d lost everything again.

                Even he didn’t feel much like making a wisecrack any more. Stevie did it instead.

                “Um, we might have to rain check on that coffee.” She said. “The floor seems to have had all of mine.”

               “Look, just come back to the tower with me.” He sighed. “We’ve got a couple of residential floors that aren’t in use, but they’re fully stocked. You can stay there as long as you need to. There’s no point staying here tonight.”

                “You’re right. I’ll sort this out in the morning…” She said, sighing. “Thanks, that’s very kind.”

                She came with him with no further comment. Tony suspected it bothered her more than she was letting on, but what else could he do? All she brought with her was a few of the undamaged clothes; everything else she left behind in the apartment she couldn’t even lock. It hardly mattered. Everything was already broken.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

May 1942

 

                It was a comfort to have Annie there of course, but the serum had changed her. Her hand, as she rubbed circles on his back, did not feel like her hand. Her touch did not feel like her touch. She’d changed, and it was his fault.

                The serum had worked and worked well. It was obvious she was healthier now. She looked the same except that the harsh angles of her face, the weathered looks of hard years of childhood illnesses and going hungry in the economic disaster had been smoothed out. She’d grown an inch, her muscles were defined and toned; she’d gained the broad shoulders of a dancer or a swimmer. Even her hair was glossier. She looked as if she had never been ill in her life.

                Nor were the changes just physical. After the assassin had killed Erskine, Annie had taken off after him like a shot, running like a sprinter. Howard dimly noted that this was probably the reason he hadn’t had a bullet lodged in his head too, she had reacted so quickly. She’d caught up with the guy, but too late. He’d killed himself before she could do anything.

                But she was okay. She was here, beside him, shaken but unhurt, different on the outside, but still Annie, still his Annie, who had screamed and screamed so much when they’d given her the serum.

                Howard would hear that screaming as long as he lived. To know that she was in pain, and that he was the cause, he had never felt so awful. Worse, he had just frozen up, staring like a slack-jawed idiot at the capsule. Peggy had to yell at him to turn it off, to stop the procedure, before he even remembered he could, before he even moved. Those few extra seconds of agony had probably seemed an eternity to her.

                Annie had insisted on continuing, of course, even with the pain in her voice. Howard ignored her. He would have stopped it, but Erskine stopped him. Howard had never hated anyone as much as he hated Erskine in the moment when the doctor tore him away from the controls. But a moment later, the screaming stopped; and a minute after that, the procedure finished. A successful trial.

                Only then Erskine was murdered, and the lab was a mess, and Annie was gone before they’d done any of the post-op checks, before they’d worked out if it was really a success, for all he knew her heart could have suddenly given out, or the pain could have returned, or anything could have happened that would distract her, just for a second, long enough for the enemy to shoot her too-

                His hands were shaking. Howard had never felt so pathetic. He needed a drink. He needed to stop thinking about how many people were dead because of this stupid experiment.

                Annie pressed a kiss to the side of his head. It was the first time she had ever kissed him when there were other people around. Perhaps being so pathetic had its upsides.

                Phillips approached them and Annie stood, ready, no doubt, to give her best military report. She had taken to the soldier’s life like a duck to water during training. She said it was just because she wanted to help her country, but Howard rather suspected she enjoyed the army lifestyle.

                “Sir-” She began, but Phillips silenced her with a wave of his hand and a disbelieving look. He turned to Howard.

                “What the hell were you thinking, Stark?!”

                Howard stood too. “I was thinking what the Military thinking. You wanted a super soldier, and that’s what I’ve given you.”

                Phillips snorted at that. “Wrong. I wanted an army; what you have given me is a dead scientist, a ton of paperwork and a crazy experiment that you performed on your lady-friend here. Is this some kind of a sick joke? Are you actually insane?!”

                “Sir,” Annie interrupted. “I… I may not have taken him alive, but I caught up with the shooter. With respect, sir, none of your men could do that. Erskine did not give his life in vain. The experiment worked.”

                Phillips gave her a pitying look. “You were only ever the next step, missy, the next test run before they figured out how to get it working on a real soldier. Do you ever see Agent Carter out on the battlefield sticking her bayonet into a Nazi? No. That’s because we don’t put women out on the front lines, no matter how good they are. We need an army and you aren’t even a soldier. You are not enough.” He turned back to Howard. “And you, you could have killed her. You disgust me, Stark.”

                 Howard said nothing, glaring back out of pride, even though something in the back of his mind was thinking the Colonel was right. Phillips shook his head and went to leave.

                “Sir!” Annie sounded desperate now. “What am I supposed to do now?”

                “You were just a lab rat, Miss Rogers, and the experiment is over.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s an honourable discharge.” He began to walk away again. “I’ll see if I can get you a medal or something, in recognition of services rendered. What the hell, have an honorary rank; I’ll make the document say ‘Captain’ for you if it’ll make you feel better.”

                “Sir, I don’t want to be discharged! I want-”

                “Ma’am, I don’t care what you want. This is a war and we already have too many women caught up in it. If you want to help, go back to your home, go back to your family, and do what you’re supposed to do. Do what my daughters do. Join in the war effort. Go back to the nursing auxiliary. Knit us some blankets. Buy war bonds. Whatever you do, just stay the hell out of my ar-”

                Someone behind Phillips cleared his throat. “Ahem. Excuse me, Colonel, I believe I have a better idea. Miss Rogers, rather than buying war bonds, how would you feel about selling them?” 

Chapter Text

Chapter Four

 

June 2012

 

                Tony was getting a little impatient. Stevie had been in their apartment, in the TV lounge, for the best part of twenty minutes and Penelope still hadn’t emerged from her room. These film nights had been her idea, and the first three she had been totally over-eager, counting down the minutes, but on this, the fourth, she hadn’t shown up at all.

                Tony couldn’t help but be a little put out. The second time they’d done this, he had insisted he wasn’t taking part, but Penelope had given him the damn hurt puppy look until he had come up. And it had been fun.  The third time, he hadn’t needed so much persuasion. Stevie was not at all what he had expected. True, she was old fashioned and a little prim, there was the definite aura of a school teacher or librarian about her- especially her hair, which she wore in a style he had only ever seen in black and white movies, which never even slipped and in which no pins were visible, so he could only conclude was held in place by some sort of wizardry- but he was slowly discovering that beneath all that there was a deeper vein of sarcasm, of mettle, that was waiting to be tapped. It made sense, really. However goody-goody she was-and she was, in his opinion, a scarily good person who needed to learn that selfishness wasn’t selfishness if it didn’t hurt another person. Last time she had refused to eat the last spring roll even though no-one else had wanted it- she would have needed a backbone of steel and a streak of stubbornness a mile wide to get as far as she had in the forties. It was easy to see why she had been chosen for the project.  Needless to say, since she had been living on the floor below, he’d been finding more reasons to come out of the lab now and then.

                She was still looking for her own place, though. Apparently living beneath his lab was too reckless even for Captain America. The noise wasn’t a problem as he’d completely sound proofed the lab shortly after Penny had moved in and he’d discovered ACDC at 1AM was not good for ten year olds, but things did admittedly have a habit of dropping through the floor now and again. Luckily, it turned out Stevie was quite adept at plastering for a woman of her time, and repaired her ceiling without too much complaint. Tony was, however, seriously considering taking the sound proofing out of the floor. Stevie was in desperate need of a musical education. She was, at the moment, accidentally the ultimate hipster- she only knew bands no-one had ever heard of, or at least hadn’t heard of for fifty years. If there was one great passion in Tony’s life, after engineering and parties, it was music. Once they’d got her up-to-date on movies, then he would move onto the great albums she’d missed. He already had a list ready, which he’d put together on the same lazy afternoon he’d spent making a chronological list of all the classic movies she’d missed out on. Annie had been an anomaly. They’d started with Brief Encounter, which was not one of Tony’s favourites, but for some reason his dad had loved. Stevie had laughed at that, said Howard had loved ‘the sappy stuff’ and seemed overall to prefer the other 1945 entry in the form of The Lost Weekend. The week after, they’d tried the 1948 version of The Three Musketeers, in which all of them had admired the choreography of the fight scenes and which was a completely necessary restoration of Tony’s masculinity after sitting through The Bishop’s Wife, which was a stupid movie to watch in the middle of summer but did, strangely, reveal that Stevie had a huge girly crush on Cary Grant. Tonight, though, it was time to move things on a bit. Stevie was really never going to understand modern pop culture if she’d never heard of Godzilla.

                First, however, Tony had to coax his twelve year old daughter out of her bedroom. She wasn’t replying to his knocking, which meant he had to try and be stern. Being stern was not his strong point.

                “Penny, come on, open up.” He said. “Come on, Stevie’s been here ages, we’re waiting on you, kid. This was your idea.”

                It was annoying how much his stern voice just sounded like whining. He tried the door. It was locked. He had never known her to lock the door once.

                “Penelope Parker, you open this door.”

                Tony knew the power of the full name trick. Sometimes, in the back of his mind, he could still hear his mother’s voice saying ‘Antony Edward Stark’ , usually when he had done something wrong and knew he was about to be caught at it. It worked on Penny too, apparently, because the door finally clicked open. She looked pale, but her eyes were red. She’d been crying. Tony found himself hoping she wasn’t about to continue. He wasn’t good with tears. Tears were not his thing.

                “You okay?” He asked.

                “Dad…” She whispered, sounding embarrassed. “I got my period.”

                 “Oh.” Tony said. It was the strangest feeling. The internal monologue in his head, that had run continuously, almost unnoticed, in every moment of consciousness in his life, suddenly halted- not just as if there were no more thoughts in front of it, but as if there had never been any behind it. To say he was not prepared was to under-exaggerate. He had not even considered this. Ever.

                Besides, Penny wasn’t even a teenager yet, not for a few more weeks. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to girls until they were teenagers.

                It was happening, though, and Penny was looking at him, looking to him, for help.

                Crap.

                “Oh.” He said again. “Oh. That’s um… eww. Gross. Okay. Um…”

                “You think I’m gross?” She looked ready to cry again. Damn hormones.

                “No!” He was beginning to suspect he wasn’t handling this well. But what was he supposed to say? Suddenly, the panic in his brain swung into irrational rage. He didn’t want to know, he didn’t need to know. What did she expect him to do about it?

But he was her dad, and the only person around, and if this was her first one, who else was she supposed to ask?

                Crap.

                “What do I do?” She asked, looking like she was panicking as much as he was.  “My stomach hurts.”

                “Yeah, I… Um. Yeah. I think that happens.” He said, uselessly. He had no idea what to do. Weirdly, he felt much the same as he had when he had first woken up in the cave where he had been held hostage and found the strange machine crouched on his chest. Panicked, not understanding, with no idea what to do, but under a huge amount of pressure to do something.

                From behind him, Stevie gently cleared her throat. The rooms all opened into the same space as the lounge, and she must have approached unnoticed. “Penny,” she said, with a kind smile. “Why don’t you come downstairs with me for a while?”

                Tony had never felt such acute relief in his life. He was saved.

                Penny, of course, looked absolutely mortified. After all, Stevie hadn’t been in their lives that long and Penny was still a little in awe of her; the kid hadn’t quite separated her from the childhood hero on the postcards in her room. Even so, she took the lifeline offered, nodded ashamedly, and disappeared down to Stevie’s flat.

                Tony helped himself to a large whiskey while he waited for them, trying to get over the grossness of it all. Hopefully, now he’d survived that little disaster, he’d never have to hear about it again. He was just lucky Stevie had been there and been willing to step up to the plate.

                That was the first time he noticed how much he admired her, and felt slightly disgusted with himself for it. This was classic damsel in distress behaviour, passively falling for the person that had saved him. Of course, he’d known Stevie for a while now and interacted with her and got to know her a little and, yes, he was quite comfortable to admit she was physically attractive- she was Captain America, after all; she’d been America’s sweetheart in the war years, a chorus girl and a poster pin-up for a couple of years until she decided to be a proper solider. So yes, in summation, she was physically attractive, but he wasn’t about to try and seduce her because- goodness help him- he was actually beginning to like her. As a person, not as a woman.

                That wasn’t to say he would say no to a night time manoeuvre if she wanted one, but he wasn’t going to push it too much with a girl who could punch him through a few walls in the time it would take him to get the suit on, especially not when Penny would hate him if he scared her away.

                Penny. He supposed she was technically a young woman now. Tony did not want to think about it- he definitely did not want to think about it- but it made him more weirdly emotional than he wanted to admit. Her childhood was coming to an end. Soon there would be boyfriends or girlfriends or both, and experimentation with drink and drugs and sex and parties. He didn’t know where the years had gone, it was as if he had only blinked twice since she was born and now she was all but grown. Hell, you could probably have blinked once and missed his involvement in her early childhood. When he felt a lump in his throat that couldn’t be swallowed, Tony decided the whiskey wasn’t doing it and went to do some work in the lab. Some of his best inventions came about while he was semi-drunk. You got a lot further when you had fewer inhibitions about risk.

                A little while later, Jarvis informed him that they had returned and Tony returned to the upper floor to the sound of Penny laughing. She still looked a little embarrassed when she saw him, but she seemed a lot happier for the time being. And apparently the two of them were best buddies now, because the first thing she asked was if she could go shopping the next day with Stevie.

                “Sure.” He said. “As long as Stevie doesn’t mind.”

                “Not at all, it’ll be fun.” Stevie replied. “So, why don’t we get this film on?”

                Tony felt grateful again. Clearly she had sensed his discomfort- he had been desperately trying to work out if he should ask about it or not- and moved the conversation forward. He nodded.

                “Alright. Well, this is a good one. I mean, this movie got so famous it’s made its own adjective- Godzilla.”

                “No!” Penny said. “Dad, no, not Godzilla.” She looked at him with pleading eyes.

                “What’s wrong with Godzilla?”

                Penny shrugged awkwardly. “It’s scary.”

                “Are you serious? You’re not serious.”

                “I don’t like it.” She repeated stubbornly.

                Normally, Tony might perhaps have pushed it- there was nothing scary about the original Godzilla movie; the effects no longer looked realistic enough to make it any way frightening. Today, however, he decided to give way graciously and put on the next film on the list instead. Privately, he was a little relieved there was still something childish left in his daughter. He wasn’t ready to handle a teenager yet.

                Of course, he was absolutely wrong. The moment Stevie had left, Penny glared at him and said “Godzilla?! Dad, what were you thinking?! You can’t show Stevie Godzilla!”

                “Why not? Is she in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dinosaurs? I guess I better cross Jurassic Park off the list too, then.”

                Penny was clearly not in the mood for jokes. Periods made her pissed off, it seemed. “Godzilla,” She informed him, folding her arms. “Is a visual allegory for what the atom bomb did to Japan at the end of the War. For us it was years ago, but for Stevie it was only a few months- and she wasn’t even around then! Does she even know about the atom bomb? Do you know how she feels about it? It was only a few weeks after she went under, what if she’s thinking ‘If only I’d been there, I could have stopped it’? And Grandpa was her friend and he worked on the Manhattan Project, does she know about that? You could have really upset her!”

                Tony wondered vaguely what they were teaching at schools these days. The boarding school he’d been at had very much brushed over the devastation caused by the a-bomb as a necessary evil, but it sounded like the teachers at Penny’s school were being a little more honest about it, maybe even going too far the other way. At any rate, he hadn’t expected his twelve year old to be so knowledgeable, let alone opinionated. It was like she had aged years since last night- or he had just been paying no attention to it before.

                But come on. No twelve year old should know that Godzilla was ‘a visual allegory’. Why would they even know the phrase ‘a visual allegory’? He’d always just thought of it as a movie about a giant dinosaur totalling a city, and now he had been shamed by a child- who apparently was not as much of a child as he’d thought her that morning.

                So he told her it was time she went to bed. He still had that power, at least. 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Penny had breasts. Tony had no idea where the hell they’d come from, but, sure enough, when Penny returned from shopping with Stevie the next day, there was definite boobage involved. They were small, barely enough to fill an A-cup, but still. He was pretty sure those had not been there a few hours before.

                His brain quickly caught onto the fact that they were simply more noticable because she was wearing a bra now. Neither of them mentioned it. He didn’t even really want to think about it.

                “Did you have fun?” He asked, as an alternative.

                “Yeah.” Penny smiled, glancing up at Stevie. Her awkwardness seemed to have faded, she seemed totally relaxed around the older woman now. That, at least, was a relief. She needed more friends. “Stevie finally bought some jeans.”

                “Don’t get too excited, I don’t know how often I’ll wear them.” Stevie answered.

                “You know you’re in the 21^st century now, right?” Tony asked. “Women are allowed to wear trousers.”

                “You know they wore trousers in the 40s too, right?”

                “So did you.” Penny put in. “Your uniform- the proper one, I mean, not the one for the shows- that had trousers, right?”

                “Yes, but it’s a little different wearing them for civvies.” Stevie replied. “My mother always thought it was indecent; she would never have let me wear trousers when she was alive, and after she passed away I never quite had the heart to.”

                “I’d hate to have to wear skirts all the time.” Penny replied. “I’m sure your mom wouldn’t mind now…”

                Stevie laughed. “Well, maybe not. Don’t worry, I’ll try wearing the jeans later.”

                “Alright. I’m going to put my stuff away.” With that, Penny grabbed her bags and disappeared off to her room.

                “She seems a lot happier.” Tony commented. “Thanks for taking her out.”

                “It’s fine.” Stevie rocked slightly on her heels, a habit, Tony was beginning to notice, which came out when she was uncomfortable. “Do you mind if I say something?”

                “Go ahead. Come on, I’ll get you a drink.”

                Stevie nodded, and followed him over to the minibar, which also stocked bottles of water. He didn’t want to look like a drunk every time he had guests.

                “So what’s up?”

                “You need to educate yourself, Tony.” Stevie said. “This is a scary time for Penny and-”

                “Woah, woah, woah. Woah. No.” Tony held up a hand to stop her. “No, really, no. I do not need to know about any of those… girly things. Penny wouldn’t want me to! I’m her dad, it would be weird! She’d be too embarrassed to tell me, I’d be too embarrassed to hear it, so we don’t talk about it and everything works out great.”

                “Then why was she being picked on at school?”

                “…What?”

                “She told me last night she was being teased at school because she was the only one who hadn’t started wearing a bra yet.” Stevie was blushing slightly, but spoke firmly. She was obviously dead set on seeing this uncomfortable train wreck of a conversation all the way to the end.

                “She didn’t say anything.”

                “Because she was too embarrassed! She needs to feel that she can talk to you about these things, Tony. If you’re uncomfortable, it’ll make her uncomfortable.”

                “Alright, alright, fine. I’ll make sure she has enough bras.”

                Water was not going to cut it. He didn’t care what Stevie thought any more, he was going to find some alcohol.

                “And you’ll learn about the rest?”

                “I really don’t-”

                “If she had a mom around, it would be different.” Stevie interrupted. “But she doesn’t. You’re all she’s got. It’s hard on both of you, but you need to grow up and deal with it.”

                “Things aren’t like they used to be, okay? People talk about this, all the time. The school teaches-”

                “The school barely taught her anything. You’re lucky she knew it was a period and didn’t think she was suddenly bleeding to death!”

                Tony crossed his arms. “Well, what more does she need to know?! It’s not that complicated!”

                Stevie looked about ready to hit him, folding her arms right back at him. “How often do you need to change a tampon?” She asked.

                “What? I don’t-”

                “You don’t know? Well, what if she doesn’t know either? You can get into all sorts of trouble if you leave them too long. Can you sleep with them in?”

                “Why would I-”

                “Oh, you don’t know? Well, I hope Penny does. What about her age? Is she starting earlier than most girls, or normal, or too late? If it’s early or late, is she young or old enough that you should be worried about it?”

                “Alright, fine, so-”

                “What about the rest of it? How much pain is normal? How much blood is normal? How much pain or blood does there need to be before you get it checked?”

                “Alright, fine! Look, is she alright? I mean… is this normal?”

                “Yes, she’s fine.” Stevie sighed. “But you need to know this stuff, Tony, just in case.”

                “Alright, fine, I’ll deal.” He sat down opposite her. “Tell me.”

                “What?” She finally seemed taken aback. “No.”

                “You’re the one who said I needed to learn, so let’s talk about.”

                “I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

                “Come on, I’m all ears.”

                 “You can get some pamphlets or go to the library! I’m really not comfortable-”

                “Oh, so I have to get comfortable talking about this stuff and you don’t?”

                “That’s completely different.”

                “How?”

                “You have a responsibility towards Penny, I don’t.”

                “Oh, really? You didn’t seem to mind that when you were buying her underwear.”

                “I didn’t buy it, she bought it; I just helped out because she didn’t have anyone else.”

                “So you didn’t want to help?”

                “Of course I did!” Stevie sighed and got to her feet. “This is ridiculous. I’m leaving.”

                “Look, if you really think I need to know then I need you to-”

                “Tony, all my information is seventy years out of date.” Stevie sighed. “I can help out with the basics, but, heck, I’m from a time when half the time tobacco companies claimed smoking was good for you. For all I know, there’s a magic pill now that stops you from bleeding at all.”

                “Didn’t they tell you any of this?” Tony asked, slightly taken aback. “I thought you had a counsellor for the whole adjusting-to-modern-life thing. Hasn’t this come up?”

                “I stopped going after a week or two.” She couldn’t meet his eye. “It wasn’t really helping.”

                “But still, you’ve been here a while, way more than a month, you must’ve-”

                “No.” She cut him off, a note of upset in her voice. “I guess I don’t need a magic pill anymore.”

                “You’re not-?” Tony started, thinking of the terminated pregnancy Doctor Banner had found when they’d first pulled her out of the ice, the pregnancy so early that she couldn’t even have known about it.

                “No.” She cut him off short. “I don’t think that’s an option for me anymore. I guess being in ice that long messed something up.”

                Tony wondered, then, if he should tell her. But then, how could he look her in the face and explain that, so far as they could tell, she had miscarried when she had hit the water and that she had lost something she now seemed upset that she could never have? Besides, it would be a whole world of awkward. She would probably cry, and he didn’t do well with tears. It was kinder, much kinder, to just let it be.

                She bade him goodbye and left. Tony didn’t try to stop her.  Some conversations he was better off out of.

                That night, after Penny had gone to bed (at long last- one thing Tony had learnt was that periods equalled mood swings, and could turn his sweet little girl into a raging monster when the slightest thing went wrong), Tony got out his laptop. An honest-to-goodness laptop, which a keyboard, just to search the internet for something. He could have done it on any of his display screens, but would have felt somehow embarrassed getting Jarvis to look up these search terms; so, the old fashioned way it was. He logged onto his browser and went to Google, searching ‘periods’.

                 Too general, there were way too many results and the top few were just feminine hygiene companies looking to promote their products and the rest seemed to be Yahoo Answers of people asking ‘Is it true that…’. He went back to Google and searched ‘pubescent girls’.

                He really should have put the safe search on. Revolted, he left the page so fast it was basically a knee-jerk reaction.

                But then, there was something. Something he’d glimpsed for less than a second, and yet… reluctantly, he went back.

                It was there, in the previews of the image search. Going (having thoroughly steeled himself first) to the full image results, his suspicions were confirmed. The same girls kept appearing, not in foolish, self-taken attempts to look attractive on Facebook, but in ‘professional’ photographs; different backgrounds, leading to different websites, but the same fifteen or so faces. His stomach turned, his body already accepting what his mind wasn’t admitting. All his searches were pre-programmed to return local businesses and locations first, because his Googling was usually limited to take out numbers and dry cleaning services. What it meant was that this was going on in his hometown. Different websites, but one operation; or several operations passing girls around like trading cards. Someone was preying on a core group of underage girls, spreading the pictures around, making sure if the police shut one webpage down the ring could continue, probably from a central location.

                 “Jarvis, are you getting this?” Tony asked.

                “Yes sir, and I can’t say I approve of your taste.”

                “I’m investigating, Jarvis, not browsing.” He began- knowing he would have to destroy the hard drive after- opening up the various pages the pictures lead to. “I need you to trace some IP addresses for me, buddy. Iron Man is going to go and have a little talk to some guys about the age of consent.”

                By the time he’d left a note for Penny (the standard- ‘Out being Iron Man x’) and got the suit on, Jarvis had done his work. Each website lead to a different location, a different house, but Jarvis had taken the liberty of entering the servers and searching for other networks, soon finding one that connected them all just a few blocks away. This had now become personal, and Tony was going to sort it out, with only one brief stop on the way.

                Stevie seemed a little surprised to find him in his suit standing in her doorway a few moments later. He lifted the face visor.

                “Hey, Cap.” He said. “Come on, I need you.” He turned to lead the way.

                “What?”

                “Come on, it’s hero time.” He said. “Look, I just found out there’s a paedophile ring operating in town.”

                She looked blank.

                “Underage girls.” Tony elaborated. “Being used in pictures that no-one under the age of sixteen should have to know about.”

                “Sixteen?” She raised an eyebrow.

                “Eh, I’m a realist. We don’t exactly live in a great world.” He tried to wave her out of the flat. “Now, come on, come on, let’s go stomp some bad guys.”

                “Tony… this sounds like something you should get the cops involved with.”

                “Yeah, and I will, after we’ve kicked the crap out of them. Cap, I’ve seen the photos. Some of these girls aren’t any older than Penny.”

                Her face hardened, and Tony thought she was going to agree, but then she shook her head. “I can’t. I’m not Captain America any more, Tony.”

                “Why not? You can still do everything you did before.”

                “I was a soldier, not a superhero.”

                “Yeah, well, you don’t have any Nazis to fight right now, so why not go after the bad guys in your backyard?”

                “It doesn’t work like that. I’m not sure SHIELD-”

“Is this just because you don’t have the uniform? Because it was big news when you woke up, everyone will know who you are anyway.”

“I don’t want them to-”

“And to be honest, the uniform was a little… loud.”

“Hey! That uniform was America.”

“I knew it was because you don’t have the uniform.”

                “It’s not! I don’t have my shield either.”

                “Okay, so, step one, break into the SHIELD storage facility and steal it back.”

                “Tony!”

                “It’s not stealing if it’s yours.”

                “Technically it belongs to the military.”

                “Technically it belongs to you and Stark Industries.”

                Stevie looked disapproving.

                “Alright, fine, new step one. We go back up to my lab, and find you something to tide you over, Cap.”

                “…fine.” Stevie said. “But come in for a minute first.”

                “What is it now?”

                “Have you ever tried fighting in a skirt?” She asked, smiling. “I’m going to put my jeans on.”

                “Can I watch?” Tony asked, the answer to which was a firm slam of her bedroom door. He loitered, awkwardly, wandering into the kitchen. There was a pan full of rice boiling on the stove. “Are you cooking now?” He asked. He often ate at odd times himself, but he would never cook a full blown meal at eleven-thirty at night; especially not when he knew she’d had a full dinner earlier in the evening with Penny.

                “Just some supper.” She called back, her body following her voice and emerging behind him a moment later. “It’s practice, more than anything. I never had to do much cooking, before. I’m trying to learn how to make more things.”

                “Remind me to teach you about take out menus.” Tony replied, reaching out to turn the heat off. “Forget food, it’s time to go be superheroes.”

                “Well, how could I refuse?” She asked, smiling, and he knew she’d been waiting for this even if she hadn’t realised it. Being Captain America might have been a heavy duty, but she was lost without this. It was the whole point of the serum, it was what she had been created for.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Tony crashed down on the sofa, feeling worn out but satisfied. The police had the culprits- and the necessary evidence- in custody with the promise that the girls they had victimised would be taken care of. They’d avoided the press, everything but minor injuries, and it had given him ideas for some new suit specs which he was planning on getting to work on as soon as Penny- who had gotten up for school a few minutes after he arrived home and was now showering- was out of the way. Stevie had even promised to make him dinner sometime, when she was confident enough in her abilities. Tony did not usually do sit-down-with-people dinners, but he felt like he could make an exception for her. He would, he was starting to suspect, make an exception for almost anything for her.

                He wasn’t stupid, either. He knew this was growing into full-blown crush territory, like some sort of pathetic teenage fanboy and he planned to get a grip on that situation as soon as possible. But really, she was beautiful and famous, and she could sit and snark movies with them and she was good with his daughter and had rescued him from an incredibly awkward conversation, and at the same time she was as tough as nails and something of a warrior. As it turned out, watching her fight in her new jeans had been kind of sexy, a kink he had never known he had- or maybe it was just her. He admired her, in every sense of the word and he had, honestly, been a little disappointed that she hadn’t come upstairs with him. He was starting to think he needed to just seduce her and get it out of his system, but Penny would never forgive him if he drove Stevie away. He needed to be careful, and not do anything unless they were on the same I-want-sex-not-a-relationship page.

                Although, he had never even really tried being in a relationship, so if it turned out that was what she wanted it might not be totally unreasonable for him- No. Tony cut the thoughts off sharply at the head. There was a reason he didn’t get into relationships. Relationships were messy, people got hurt and he had Penny to think of. Sex was simple, easier. If he was going to do anything with Stevie, that would be it. Friends with one-time-only-benefits sounded ideal, enough to get the school boy crush out of his system but not enough to make it awkward. Maybe the next time Penny was safely out of the way.

                For now, though, he needed to stay on Stevie’s good side, and she was right, he did, unfortunately, have a responsibility towards Penny. He wasn’t going to risk Google again, not directly, so instead, with a heavy heart, he headed for a forum for single fathers. Sure enough, there was a topic about dealing with daughter’s puberty.

                And none of it was helpful. Most of the posts just seemed to be men complaining about how their heartless girlfriends/partners/wives left them and dumped the kid on them, or grieving widowers talking about how much they missed their wife and how hard it was to be strong when things like this came up. The remainder seemed to be about how to explain puberty to their daughters, how to broach the subject, how to put them at ease, not explaining it to each other. One guy was extolling the use of puppets for this purpose. Tony was beginning to suspect this was not very helpful to him. He began composing his own post, trying to get things back on track.

 

                This is gross, but can anyone tell me

 

                No. If he began like that, they’d think he was a bad father.

 

                My daughter is twelve and she’s just

 

                He couldn’t bring himself to go into specifics.

 

                Does anyone know what I’m supposed to

 

                Definitely not. He didn’t want to open that particular can of worms; or end up as misinformed about everything as most of the internet was. He pushed the laptop away, running his hands through his hair in frustration. Why did this have to be so difficult? He was Tony Stark, he was supposed to be able to do anything- but then, he should never have been expected to have to learn about periods. This was ridiculous.

                It then occurred to him that maybe he should do this the Tony Stark way. He changed forums, joined one for single mothers and began a new thread.

By the time Penny came out of the shower, the suitably sappy message- subtly containing all the questions Stevie had asked him, ha- had generated ten or twelve responses, at least three of which were just straight-up hitting on him and seven of which talked about how sweet he was and what a good dad he was, which made a nice change. All of them, however, were informative (more informative than he’d wanted, to be honest, and he could not escape the general skin-crawling feeling of eww) and he finally knew what to do if Penny ever came to ask him about stuff. Not that she ever would, because it was creepy and gross. But she could have, if she wanted to, and that would be enough to get Stevie off his back. And he had learnt something new, which would make him a generally better and more understanding person and so on.

                “Dad, you’re up already.” Penny seemed surprised. “Do you want breakfast?” She looked at him again. “…Have you even been to bed?”

                “Nope.” He answered. “And now I’m going to go and do some suit stuff in the lab, so, you know, I may be gone a couple of days.” He was joking, but he saw her face. Clearly she did not approve. “…but breakfast sounds good.”

                “Alright.” Penny smiled. “Come on, I’ll show you how to fry eggs.”

                “I know how to fry eggs.”

                “No you don’t.”

                She was right, now that he thought about it, so he followed her obediently. He was really getting too soft around these women.

                

Chapter Text

Chapter Five

 

July 2012

 

                Sometimes Tony got the distinct impression that he was something of a disappointment to his daughter. Not in his inventions and lab work, she always marvelled at that, but he got the feeling that in her eyes there was a little more to be desired in him as a person. Then again, he had apparently been in the lab for three days (he hadn’t realised it had been that long) and he had greeted her with ‘What the hell are you watching?’, so perhaps the exasperated look she shot him was fair. He sank down onto the settee beside her.

                “It’s the Women’s Groups of America conference.” Penny informed him as, on screen, the reporter commentated and the delegates filtered into a lecture hall. “All the different women’s rights groups- the normal ones and the really crazy ones- get together and discuss the issues.”

                “Sounds great. And they televise that now?”

                “Dad, we have eight hundred channels. Everything is televised somewhere.” She used the remote to gesture at the top corner of the screen where the station’s watermark was displayed. Tony was pretty sure he had neither seen nor heard of it before.

                “Okay. Sure. Isn’t this too old for you?” Penny glared at him, so Tony sat back with a sigh. “Fine, have it your way. Shouldn’t you be at school or something anyway?”

                “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

                “Uh, no, I don’t work for SI any more. I just… you know… tinker. I have new suits to show you soon.”

                “Cool.”

                “Seriously though. You probably should go to school or we’ll both be in trouble.”

                “Dad. It’s summer.”

                “Oh. That’s okay then. Good work.”

                “Ah! There she is!” Penny shrieked suddenly, sitting properly upright. “Aww, she looks nervous…”

                “What?” Tony looked at the screen. The cameras were focused on the lectern now, behind which Stevie was shaking hands with the event organisers. “Wait, what is she doing there?”

                “She’s a feminist icon, Dad. Now she’s back, of course they’re going to ask her to speak.”

                “She didn’t tell me.”

                “She tried, you were in the lab and didn’t take it in.”  

                “What? She didn’t come in the-”

                Penelope shot him another unimpressed look. “You know, you really should be nicer to the girls you like.”

                “I don’t-!”

                “Ssh! She’s starting!”

                Tony shut up and turned his attention back to the television, wondering vaguely when he had allowed himself to become so hen-pecked by a preteen. Whoever married her was going to be in for a rough time- although, so far as he could tell, she was only this forceful at home. In all the time she had been living with him, she had never once brought a friend home from school, and now she was spending her summer break inside watching TV. Not that he was one to criticise; he had hated the summers of his youth- but that was the lot of the boarding school kid. At home with parents you barely knew, on opposite sides of the country (or even the world) to your friends, and weeks of isolation to burn. He’d spent most of his summers making and inventing, the occasional ghastly holidays with his parents, a few crashed house parties with the local kids, nothing he remembered with any fondness. Except the summer he had lost his virginity, that had been a good afternoon. He couldn’t remember her name now, it had been foreign, German, maybe, he thought, or something like it. On holiday with her parents, maybe? It had been the tail end of the 1980s and she’d had seemingly endless dark hair, huge and puffed out in the fashion of the time, with no gap at all, it seemed, between her front teeth and thighs wide enough that when his hands wrapped round them his fingers were nowhere near each other. She was two years older than him (though how old either of them had been he could hardly remember, the details were lost in the drunken haze of the early adult years that followed) and he wasn’t her first. She’d all but talked him through it, quite gently, more like a lesson than an erotic experience, a lesson in what to do, where to touch, in the language of the flesh. Everything he knew about pleasing women was built on that first time, but he hadn’t thought about the German girl for years. He could hardly remember her, just strange disjointed parts of her body, just the teeth, the thighs, how she had felt. He did not even know where to begin guessing at her name.

                He wondered if she remembered him. Probably not. If she hadn’t been his first, she probably would have faded into the identity parade that was his record of lovers. There was no reason for her to remember. It was a pity, though. Even with all the scandals that appeared in the press with his name attached to them, she probably could have made a few bucks telling the story of how she took his virginity.

                Tony realised three things almost simultaneously. First, that his mind was wandering more and more lately, which was bad. It could have been an age thing, but he hoped it wasn’t. Secondly, he hoped Penny wasn’t spending her summer in that particular mode of recreation, not yet. With a sudden horror, he realised the time was rapidly approaching that he would have to have the talk with Penny. He’d like to try and fool himself into thinking he didn’t need to, that he had never had that conversation with his parents and he’d turned out fine, but realistically he knew that his number of lovers was probably greater than his pin code and it was hard to justify that argument when he was sitting next to his illegitimate child of a one-night stand. Maybe he could somehow persuade Stevie to talk to her about sex for him.

                Then he was thinking about Stevie, and sex, and momentarily forgot what the third realisation had been. The he remembered- he’d missed almost all of Stevie’s speech. He started to pay attention.

                The title she had been given was, according to Penny, ‘Women at War’. The subject did not particularly interest Tony, nor did he see how it could be particularly relevant to women today, but in fairness to her, Stevie did okay with it as a topic. She told a few amusing anecdotes, but, with the discretion and tact left over from her old fashioned upbringing, focused little on herself. She talked instead more generally about women’s contributions; what her mother and her fellows had contributed during what she still called ‘The Great War’, what women had been doing on and off the battlefield in the 40s. She spoke very highly of a woman called Margaret Carter, who Penny seemed to have learnt all about but whose name Tony only knew as a co-founder of Shield with his dad. Stevie had, it turned out, spent some time as a volunteer nurse in a military hospital, and was full of praise for the efforts made there. The talk had a slightly odd tone to it, she was speaking almost as if the conflict was still ongoing, or was at least recent- he supposed, to her, it was. When her talk was finished, she was greeted by a round of applause and the floor was opened up to questions.

                The first few were predictable enough. Somebody asked her opinion on the situation of women in the military today, to which Stevie replied she really didn’t know. Somebody then informed her that women were allowed on the front lines, and asked her opinion on that.

                “I think anyone who wants to risk their lives for their country and their freedoms should be allowed to do it.” Stevie said, generating more enthusiastic support from the audience. “As long as they are an adult, physically capable, and, um, properly trained.” She added, probably because she’d just become conscious of the cameras again.

                Someone then informed her that women soldiers were much more likely to be victims of sexual assault, spewing off a string of statistics and asking her opinion on that. Stevie looked totally lost, of course; in one sense revolted, and in the other, probably amazed at the audacity to talk about such things in public. “I think women that join the military are aware of that risk and able to minimise it.” She said, haltingly. “I, uh, I really admire their bravery.”

                This statement was not greeted with quite so much enthusiasm. People had probably expected her to talk more about what the military should do about it, to say that something must be done. It wasn’t really fair, Tony thought. She’d been on ice for seventy years and they expected her to have the same knowledge as a politician. Yes, most of it was floating around online, but they didn’t seem to understand that Stevie was still using ‘google’ as a verb to mean ‘to search’ in any context; she would ‘google’ to find where she had left her keys. Once, she had told Tony she had been ‘googling for him’ and for a moment he had been quite worried until he realised she had just been looking for him in the apartment.  They had mutually agreed she should stop trying to use modern terminology that same day. He hadn’t even broached the fact that Google was a company to her yet.

               Stevie obviously sensed her answer had not pleased the crowd, but it was too late. They went to the next question, which was the first in a stream about her missions during the war. Stevie was at first reluctant, partly through modesty and partly through uncertainty about what she was allowed to say, but eventually a piece by piece account of her travels across Europe with the Howling Commandos began to emerge. She was a lot more hard core than Tony had expected.

                He was also a little surprised by how often his dad’s name came up. He knew Howard had dominated most of the military weapons contracts at the time, but he’d imagined him firmly embedded state-side, well away from the front lines. The way Stevie painted him, he’d been around at almost every military base there was, providing tech support and engineering, catering equipment to the terrain, testing and refining, very hands on. He had also, apparently, been an excellent civilian pilot and had occasionally flown them wherever they needed to go if the military planes were unavailable or too ostentatious. This was all news to Tony, but then, his Dad had always skirted away from talking about the war, usually going to get a drink instead. Tony went for one now, noticed Penny’s worried look, wondered if he was drinking too much, and cheered her up by returning to the couch with two glasses of Coke. Penny looked happy. He very carefully gave her the one without Jack Daniels sneakily added to it.

                “Captain Rogers,” someone in the audience was asking. “Are you planning on being Captain America again?” This, Tony was interested in. He’d expected the subject to come up after their battle a couple of weeks before, but it hadn’t. So far as he knew, Stevie had just gone back to her normal life in the flat downstairs.

                “No.” She said, very definitely. “You may, uh, have heard, um, press reports that I assisted Tony Stark- that is, Iron Man- in stopping some criminals recently-” There was a buzz in the audience. Tony sighed. After he had done so well keeping that quiet for her, knowing she didn’t want any publicity, she just blurted it out. Stevie had no choice but to blunder on. “But that was a one-time thing. Captain America was very much a character made for war. I mean, you know it started as a stage show selling war bonds. Captain America was made to give our boys hope, the character was a symbol of strength to our friends and our enemies. It was never designed for peace time in 2012. In any case, I think it’s really down to the US Military.”

                This was greeted by disappointed groans. Tony agreed, but didn’t think it was true. He’d seen her fight, he’d heard her talk about justice countless times now. If there was a battle that needed fighting, Stephanie Rogers would fight in, in the suit or out. He voiced this sentiment to Penny.

                “Yeah, but she’s not like you, Dad.” Penny said. “You are Iron Man. She doesn’t see herself as Captain America. It’s like she said, she sees Captain America as a character, this symbol of hope or strength or whatever.”

                “But that is her.”

                “Well, maybe she doesn’t know that yet.” Penny smirked slyly at him. “I knew you liked her.”

                “Like her? Okay, seriously, how old are you?” Tony sighed. “Look, I don’t deny that she’s attractive-”

                “You so like her.” Penny laughed.

                “Attractive,” Tony continued. “And, you know, sweet, and, like, secretly bad ass, but-”

                “Admit it! You like her!”

                “Fine. I like her.” Tony sighed. “Just don’t get your hopes up, kid. I don’t do relationships.”

                “You should date her!”

                “Are you even listening to me?”

                Clearly Penny was not, as, at a surprised and half-outraged rumble from the audience, the television regained her attention.

                “What was that?” Tony asked. “What the hell did she just say?”

                “I don’t know! Ssh!”

                The questioner still had the microphone, and once the noise of the audience had died down, spoke with suitable indigence. “I’m sorry, Captain, but it kind of sounds like you’re saying the ordeals these women went through is justified.”

                “Of course I’m not!” Stevie replied. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

                “So explain!”

                “What those men did,” Stevie answered, her temper clearly beginning to fray, “Was not justified. Not at all. No-one has any right to do anything to anyone else that they don’t want done to them. You’ve got it on your poster over there- No means no. And, I mean, women that get treated like that are definitely the victims in the situation. I’m just saying people need to practice reasonable caution to keep themselves safe, same as you check for traffic before you cross the road. If you go out dressed like a harlot, you’re asking to be treated like one. As you say, no means no, but that refusal becomes a lot harder to hear if everything you’re wearing is screaming yes.”

                It took Tony a second to process what she was saying, and then he found himself laughing as much in surprise as amusement. “Is she slut shaming? She’s slut shaming at a feminist conference on national television.”  Penny was looking on in horror.

                “What do you suggest we do?!” The outraged questioner was demanding, hard to hear over the disruption in the audience.

                “Cover up.” Stevie said bluntly, clearly losing her cool now. “And, you know, watch how much you’re drinking, stay safe. I mean, um, girls that drink too much aren’t very attractive anyway. No-one wants to marry a drunk.”

                This caused Tony to start laughing again, though he couldn’t help but pity her. She was a product of her time, more than he’d realised; the opinions that would be forgiven- expected, even- of a grandma sounded abhorrent from her young lips. Poor Stevie had no idea.

                “Dad, don’t laugh!” Penny said. “They’re going to kill her!”

                “Alright, alright, calm down.” Tony said, getting over the last of his laugher and standing up. “I’ll go get her. Jarvis, get the suit ready, we’re going downtown.”

                Penny watched the screen anxiously. For the next few minutes, the tone of the conversation became much more dangerous, much more accusatory; Stevie was barely being given time to defend herself or her opinions. Penny’s eyes were fixed on the event organiser, who was making no move to end this circus, or even to calm things down. Somebody asked Stevie her opinion on homosexuals, although of course it was asked in the most aggressive way possible- “I suppose you don’t like the homosexual community either?”

                “I know nothing about the homosexual community!” Stevie protested. “I’m not even entirely sure what that is!”

                “Same-sex relationships!”

                “What?” Stevie was completely thrown now, and it showed. “I don’t know anything about that.”

                “So you don’t care about equal civil rights for homosexuals?”

              “Of course I- look, so far as I’m concerned, what someone likes to do shouldn’t affect what they are allowed to do.” She said, which would have made a fairly good sound bite, publicity wise, if it wasn’t destined to be completely overshadowed by everything that had come before, and the fact that Tony chose that point to enter the back of the hall, in full Iron Man gear, thankfully cutting off whatever Stevie had opened her mouth to say next. She looked at him, shocked. Tony strolled casually to the front of the room and edged his way in front of the microphone.

                “Hello, ladies.” He said, which did not help. He held up his hands, as if to push back the disapproving wall of sound. “Okay, okay, whew, let’s just take it down a notch here, this is all getting really intense. Can we just, maybe, like, take a second, digest everything? Everyone settle down, give the reporters time to catch up, let everyone finish their angry tweets, everyone take a breather, okay? Okay.” Seeing he now had the room’s attention, he moved away from the microphone, using the amplifier in his suit to talk to the audience as he wandered down into the aisles.

                 “You know, um, I’d never heard of this conference until the Captain told me about it.” He began. “But I was really excited to hear about it, almost as excited as she was, because this, you know, this just wouldn’t have happened in the 40s, we’ve come really far. But… you have to wonder why it is still happening. Why it still has to happen. I think sometimes women don’t get enough of a voice, you don’t get enough chances, cause even if, you know, a women is being awarded a noble prize or something you turn on CNN and you just get that weird dress up sweep thing. I mean, you know, she’s saying something that can change the world and all I’m getting is a commentary on her gown? What’s up with that?”

                This was greeted by a few stray bursts of applause. Penny, watching at home, couldn’t help but be impressed. This was her dad’s legendary charm coming into play. She was fairly sure he only agreed with about 90% of what he was saying, but he knew how to get the audience on side.

                “And, I mean, a lot was made of me promoting Pepper to be CEO of Stark Industries. I got all this weird good publicity and support from some of your fine, outstanding organisations,” he acknowledged the audience. “Just for putting another woman into the board room. But let me tell you, I didn’t promote Pepper to CEO because she’s a woman- and you know, I like women- Oh, for the record, I fully support the sexual liberation of women-” He got a few laughs at that. “I promoted Pepper because she was the best person for the job. And until more organisations, more businesses, see women as people first, we’re going to keep needing get togethers like this one. Because, you know what I think the problem is here?” He turned around, theatrically. “The problem I see is that there are like, what, five guys in this room, including me; and two of them are the camera men. Until the world realises that women’s problems are everyone’s problems, until events like this are split fifty-fifty right down the damn middle, we are always going to need to talk about this!”

                This was greeted, of course, by thunderous applause. Somehow, he had got the room on side and had gently detached the focus from Stevie’s unfortunate remarks. The questions resumed, but most of them were now directed at Tony, who fielded them perfectly. Stevie was able to stand back, let him take the reigns, let him rearrange anything she did say into a more acceptable answer, and by the time the session ended, everyone seemed to be excited and positive.

                Penny had never been prouder of her father. She just hoped Stevie felt the same.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

               

                Stevie was quiet in the car, once she had thanked Tony for his help. She sat, hands folded in her lap, looking out of the window. Tony couldn’t take the silence any more.

                “What’s wrong?” He asked. “Other than, you know, your disastrous first public appearance?”

                Stevie looked at him, slightly desperate. “Tell me honestly- ‘disastrous’, is that an exaggeration?”

                “Let me check Twitter and I’ll get back to you on that.”

                “Twitter?”

                “It’s an internet thing.” He would have explained, or attempted to, but the silence was broken by her stomach gurgling loudly. Stevie looked mortified. Tony couldn’t help but laugh. “Hungry?”

                “Um… no, no, I’m fine.”

                “Uh-huh. What happened, did you skip breakfast?”

                “No.” She said. “I just… I kind of eat a lot.”

                Tony snorted. “No you don’t, you’ve eaten with us a hundred times. It’s not like you pig out, I eat more than you do.”

                “I know… but when I go home, I usually make something else.” She looked down at the floor. “One of the side effects of the serum is that my metabolism is four or five times faster than it should be. I get hungry pretty easily.”

                “You should have said, we would have ordered extra.” Tony said, thinking back to all the take outs the three of them had shared while watching movies. “It’s not like money is an issue, you know.”

                “I know, and thank you, but… I just don’t like eating a lot in public. It doesn’t seem very ladylike.” She glanced over and saw Tony’s expression. “What?”

                “What kind of a reason is that?!” He asked. “It’s the 21^st Century, Stevie, people don’t care about that kind of thing anymore. If you’re hungry, just damn well eat!” He leant forward to speak to the driver. “Can we stop somewhere, please? Anywhere that serves fast food, thanks.”

                “Ah, you don’t need to do that!” Stevie protested. “I’m fine till we get back.”

                “Aww, come on, let me take you for lunch.”

                “It’s only 10:30.”

                “Well then, fine, it’s about time you learnt about brunch.”

                A few moments later, they were sitting in the nearest KFC, which was thankfully quiet. Even the cashier hadn’t seemed too surprised by Iron Man walking in with the revived Captain America and coming up to order in full armour. Such things were par for the course in New York these days.

                Tony joined Stevie at the table a few moments later with a single portion for himself and a sharing bucket for Stevie. She eyed it anxiously.

                “Tony. I cannot eat that much chicken. I think that is probably an entire chicken.”

                “You’ve never had Kentucky Fried Chicken before. Trust me, you can.”

                “Actually, I have.” She looked more than a little smug. “I ate there with your Dad and the others when the stage show was touring Kentucky.”

                “You’re kidding.”

                “No. It looks a little different, but I’m sure it’s the same.”

                “Well then, you know it’s good. Eat up.”

                She did so. She had obviously been hungry.

                “Why was my Dad travelling with the stage show?” Tony asked. “I thought he was in weapons development. I can understand him being out on the bases with you, but why was he touring the country with a bunch of dancing gir- Oh. Never mind.”

                “…You never saw his show at the World Fair.” Stevie answered, after a slight pause. “This was near the start of the tour. They asked him to come help us add some… you know. Razzle dazzle.”

                “Right.” Tony didn’t entirely believe her words, and from the expression on her face, neither did she. “You know, Dad never told me any of this. I only knew you worked together because of what we did in school.”

               “Oh… Well, it’s a hard thing to talk about. Those shows though, the costumes were awful. Especially mine, I hated it. I’m going to get called a hypocrite, aren’t I?” Her hasty change of subject did not go unnoticed, but for once Tony decided to let it go unremarked. He suddenly wondered if it hadn’t just been the dancing girls his father had been lavishing attention on. It would be just like Stevie to be embarrassed about spurning his advances; she probably didn’t want to tell Tony in case he was offended on his father’s behalf. If anything, he was offended on hers. Stevie deserved better than being fooled around with by someone who wasn’t serious about her.

                That wasn’t the same thing as his plan to sleep with her, either, not the same thing at all. He wasn’t going to play any tricks, he was going to be clear from the beginning that any sex would just be sex, just a bit of fun between friends; between really super hot, sexy friends, who were actually a lot of fun to be with.

                Maybe a relationship wouldn’t be so bad in the short term if it meant they could just have fun. It would be as if they were only friends, but interspersed with regular make out sessions. Or even in the long term, maybe, as long as it didn’t get too heavy, too trapping.

                He was running out of reasons not to ask her out. This was bad. There was, however, still the fact that she was out of her own time. There was still a lot she didn’t understand about the present day; even her ideas were old fashioned.

                “Probably.” He answered. “But I think most people will get that you didn’t like wearing those outfits. Still, you can’t say that kind of stuff anymore.”

                “I just want them to be careful.”

                “Look, I know, but women don’t like being blamed for tempting men. You can’t put the responsibility onto them like that.”

                She raised an eyebrow. “If they don’t want to tempt men, then why are they dressing like that?”

                “Well… I don’t know, maybe it just feels good.” Tony sighed, getting frustrated. It really was like arguing with his grandma. “I don’t really get it either. Point is, if a woman’s not interested you should just move along, whatever she’s wearing. It’s kind of pathetic otherwise.”

                “Oh, and I suppose you just move along, do you?”

                “I don’t have to.”

                “You don’t?”

                “No, because women are always interested.”

                Stevie laughed at that, shaking her head, and went back to her chicken.

                 “Come on, you know it’s true.”

                “I’m not getting into this.” Stevie said, but she was still smiling.

                “No, come on, be honest. Not even a little?”

                “Mr Stark, I don’t think it’s appropriate-”

                “Oh, so I’m Mr Stark again now? Come on, admit it. Not even a little, tiny bit?”

              “You are unbelievable.” She said, laughing. “Fine, I am a little tiny bit interested in you. But only because of the suit.”

                “I knew it, chicks dig the armour.”

                “Yes, we’re just not so keen on what’s inside it.”

                “Ouch.”

                Stevie laughed again, and grew more serious. “Seriously. You know, back in the forties, when we thought about the year 2000, we sort of assumed we’d have… I don’t know, moon bases and, and, personal space travel. Your armour is about the closest I’ve seen.”

                “I keep telling you, it’s not a space suit.”

                “I know.” She sighed, disappointed, then smirked again. “Really, what were you guys doing for seventy years? I was promised flying cars by the 1950s and family space vehicles by the seventies.”

                “What can I say? Dad was an optimist.” Tony finished his drink, looking at Stevie curiously. He was beginning to sense something of a pattern here. “So, you like all the space and sci-fi stuff?”

                Stevie cleared her throat awkwardly. “Well, if I don’t have to worry about being ladylike, then yes, I guess I do. It all just seemed so… possible back then.”

                “Ignorance was bliss?”

              “Maybe. Maybe people just needed to believe there was something better out there, believe in the human spirit…” She shrugged. “I used to read everything I could get my hands on. I had every issue of Amazing Stories. I made Bucky buy them for me, but the deal was I had to let him read them first. He was so slow, but it was his money, so what could I do?”

                “Bucky?”

                “Oh, he was my friend. His family did a little better in the bad economy than mine did.”

                “Were you and him…?” Tony cleared his throat, which had gone strangely dry. For some reason, he had never even thought about the possibility that she might have had someone in the past she still needed to get over.

                “What? Oh, no. He was more like a brother, he used to take care of me. I mean… everyone always expected us to get married someday- including us, probably. That was just the way it was done. If we’d got to the age when it was time to settle down and we hadn’t found anyone else to settle down with, then, I guess, maybe…” She paused, steading herself. “But, uh, he died. In the war. Just before I went under.”

                “Oh… I’m sorry.” 

                “He was on my team. I made a bad call.”

                “Stevie-”

                “No, I know, it was his choice.” She finished her food, wiping her hands off with a napkin. “We all have to make that choice in the end. He was a hero.” She smiled again. “…Thanks for coming to bail me out, Tony.”

                “No problem. It’s always nice to see someone getting worse press than me.”

               

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Tony was aware that the day had been one of the most fun he’d had for a while, possibly ever. This was strange, considering there had been a frankly distressing lack of alcohol and he had spent a good few hours of it standing in dirt and dung.

                Okay. So it hadn’t been the most fun ever. In fact there had been quite a lot of it he hadn’t enjoyed. But still.

               It was Penny’s fault. In one of her bff-conversations with Stevie (and Tony had no idea when they were happening, or how often they saw each other, so to him their connection seemed scarily telepathic) she’d told the older woman all about her Elementary school trip to a farm, where they had got to milk a cow and feed chicken and so on. These lead to Stevie asking if he could find out if it was still open, using the term ‘Google’ correctly for once, which lead in turn to her embarrassed admission that growing up in the city in the Depression meant she had never seen a cow before, at least not up close. She had apparently seen some from the windows of trains and cars as she travelled the US with the War Bonds tour, but only from a distance.

                Tony had laughed, but as he had done so, realised the exact same thing could be said of him. He hadn’t exactly been a nature lover as a kid, and neither his parents nor his school had been in any hurry to take him to the farm. The idea that he hadn’t ever seen a cow was ridiculous, but he honestly couldn’t call to mind a single occasion where he had. So they had gone to the farm, which totally wasn’t a date, but was a little like a date, or, at least, might have lured her into going on a proper date with him some time. It was not his idea of fun, but at least Stevie seemed to enjoy it. She petted the animals and fed the chickens and milked the cow, and tried to persuade him to do it too, but Tony had refused. There was something germy and kind of gross about the whole thing. His general conclusion on cows was that he had not missed much. He had rarely felt so out of place in his life.

                Still. Stevie had been so funny; her look of concentration as she tried to get the rhythm of milking right, her delight at having the chickens scuttling round her, her insistence that he stopped laughing and joined in; Tony couldn’t actually remember the last time he had laughed so much. He found plenty of things funny in life, but he rarely gave in to all-out laughter. There was something undignified about it, but not, admittedly, as undignified as squeezing milk from the underside of a cow. It would have been dumber not to laugh.

                But they’d managed to talk, too, as they walked around. He told her about (carefully selected and embellished) tales of boarding school and she told him about her (somewhat depressing) Depression era childhood. They talked a little about Penny, about his latest work in progress, about movies they’d watched and the ones coming next, about music. She was, of course, still woefully uneducated. He decided to get her an iPod for her birthday, and then quickly realised he’d already missed her birthday. It was one of their favourite things to teach you at school about Captain America, icon, woman soldier, born on that most American day, 4^th July.  He had always privately thought they had made that part up, but asking her about it, no, apparently it was true. Or, probably. Apparently they had also been less concerned about accurately recording births in 1918. The chances were, she said, that she had been born somewhere in the first week and her parents had just picked a good day when they finally got around to registering it. This, Tony decided, meant he was justified in her present being late, though he kept that part to himself.

               However, it seemed he wasn’t the only one interested in Stevie’s musical education. Things had been going so well, he’d invited her up for dinner, an unscheduled movie night. The moment they stepped into his apartment, however, Jarvis began blasting music at max volume.

                Got a feeling inside (can’t explain), It’s a certain kind (can’t explain)…

                “Cut the music, J.” Tony shouted over it. He recognised the song and knew where this was headed. His AI had chosen a bad time to develop a sense of humour.

                I feel hot and cold (can’t explain), Way down in my soul (can’t explain)…

                “Jarvis, music off!”

                “I’m trying, sir.” If anything, Jarvis sounded rather petulant. “The programming seems to be stopping me.”

                “Programming? What programming?”

                Dizzy in the head and I’m feeling blue, the things you’ve said, well, maybe they’re true…

                “Miss Penelope’s programming. She has instructed me to play music whenever you enter, sir, because, after all, I am a glorified jukebox.”

                “Penelope!” Tony yelled. “Penelope, what the hell have you done to Jarvis?!” His daughter, rather wisely, did not appear. Tony sighed. “Where did she even learn to do this? Open manual controls.”

                I’m getting funny dreams again and again, I know what it means but…

                “She used the Stark systems override code, sir.” Jarvis obliged, opening a projected control panel. Tony went over to it, beginning to access the necessary sections of programming.

                “What? I never told her that…”

                Can’t explain, I think it’s love, try to say it you when I feel blue…

                “Please hurry, sir.” Jarvis said. “There are 117 love songs in this album.”

                “Penny!” Tony yelled again, wishing the kid was a bit more scared of his anger.

                “Um, maybe I should leave you to it.” Stevie said, awkwardly. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Good luck.”

                She was gone before he could say anything. Annoyed now, he finally got the music to turn off and went to find his wayward daughter. She was sitting in her room, waiting for him.

                “I’m sorry!” She said. “I had no idea Stevie would be coming back with you! It was just a joke!”

                “You know thing about jokes is, they’re supposed to be funny.” He glared at her. “Penny, messing with Jarvis is not only dumb, it’s dangerous. Do you know what would happen to this place if he went down?”

                “Okay… sorry.” She pouted. “But I was careful!”

                She had been, that much was obvious. In fact, it had been quite a skilful piece of work, surprisingly advanced for someone her age. He couldn’t help but feel a little proud. She was definitely a Stark. Still, she didn’t need to know that.

                “You’re grounded.” He said, and felt uncomfortably like he was someone’s father.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                It was the final straw. He was going to end up kissing this woman before the night was out, and he knew it.

                He’d spent half the morning with Stevie, helping her get used to the iPod. He’d got hold of them and filled them up with the songs necessary to her musical education the night before, and taken them down first thing with a set of speakers. When she’d finally got used to operating it, Stevie was delighted. Tony couldn’t help but be a little smug. Maybe it wasn’t space, but the future wasn’t as unimpressive as she made out. After that, he’d disappeared back up to the lab for a couple of hours. It had been far too long and his hands had been itching to make something again. He’d got so caught up in what he was doing that he was later than usual heading up for movie night; but even then, Stevie hadn’t arrived. Eventually, he’d gone down to her apartment to investigate. Even before he reached the door, he could hear that the new speakers were being put to good use. He’d been a little surprised; he hadn’t had her down for the music-blasting sort; then he realised it was far more likely that she’d turned it up by accident and couldn’t work out how to put it down again. Laughing at the thought, he tried the door, which sure enough opened to admit him. Stevie still hadn’t mastered that in the future you really do need to keep your doors locked. He finally understood how her Brooklyn flat had gotten so trashed to begin with.

                She hadn’t even noticed him going in. She was in the lounge, but rather than sitting on the couch or any of the comfortable chairs he had provided her with, she was sitting on a hard-backed dining chair, her back to the door, leaning on a table she’d pushed closer to the window. She had a pencil and a sketchpad in front of her, and would probably have been drawing, had she not been completely distracted by the music, her whole body bobbing along in time to it.

                It was just about the damn cutest thing Tony had ever seen. He wanted to kiss her right then and there, so badly- more than kissing, really, but he tried to keep his thoughts PG during daylight hours. So, instead, he’d reminded her of the time, and gone on ahead.

                Unfortunately, it seemed like he wasn’t the only one with ideas about himself and Stevie. When she finally arrived, Penelope suddenly announced that she had chosen the film for that night, deviating from Tony’s carefully selected list. She had decided they should all watch Sleepless in Seattle. It felt, to Tony, more like watching a train wreck. He glared daggers at his daughter as the story unfolded, but Penelope looked back unabashed. Stevie, meanwhile, seemed to be getting into the film. Not only did she have terrible taste in dates, she had terrible taste in movies.

                Half an hour before the end, Penny yawned extremely theatrically, announced she had to go to bed, and fled the room. It was anything but subtle. Even Stevie looked awkward, and for a moment Tony thought she might leave, but no. She stopped to watch the end of the romantic movie, alone, with him.

                He felt like he should drop his arm down from the back of the sofa and around her shoulders as if he was a teenager again, illicitly hanging out with girls in his parents’ house. He resisted. They were both adults, after all. They could go into this, whatever this was about to be, adultly. He still hadn’t decided if a relationship was really a good idea. Frankly, he would have been happy just to have sex and see how it went- maybe not with Penny in the flat and knowing exactly what they were up to.

                But he was going to kiss Stevie tonight. On that much, at least, he had decided.

                “Oh, thank goodness!” Stevie muttered, when Meg Ryan turned round to discover Tom Hanks was still there. Stevie smiled, happy with the ending. “That was sweet.”

                “You think so? It seemed a little stalker-y to me.”

                “What? How?” She tutted. “You just have no sense of romance. Although… um, I think Penelope…” She trailed off, awkwardly.

                “Yeah.” Tony nodded. “I think she was thinking exactly what you think she was thinking.” The film had been about a son trying to find his father a new love. It had definitely not been subtle.

                “I’m sorry.” Stevie said. “Maybe I shouldn’t come over so often. We don’t want to give her the wrong impression.”

                “But she likes having you around.” Tony said. He decided the moment for subtlety had past; or more accurately, thanks to Penelope, had been destroyed. That was alright. Subtlety wasn’t his strong point either. “I like having you around.”

                “I… like being around.” She said, cautiously. Tony moved in closer, a normal move, a signal to her of what was coming, just in case she didn’t want it to. Of course, everyone had always wanted to.

                “Well then.” He said. “There’s no problem.”

                “Tony…”

                He closed the gap between them, kissing her. It was fairly tame, gentle, nothing too rough to start with. Her hands brushed up over his shoulders, reflex, he thought, and rested there as light as a bird. Encouraged, he went to make it deeper, but suddenly, she pulled away.

                “I’m sorry.” She said, flustered, getting to her feet. “I’m sorry, Tony, I shouldn’t. I can’t. I… I need to tell you something.” She sat back down again.

                “Look, if you don’t want to, it’s fine, it’s no big deal, you don’t need to explain-”

                “No, I do, I…” She ran her fingers through her hair, frustrated. “I should have told you before, I just… he never told you, so I didn’t think I should…”

                “Who? Who never told me what?” Tony asked, but his brain, as usual, was fantastically quick, accelerating through the fact that she had first turned up at the tower looking for his Dad, had kept mentioning his Dad, always spoke so highly of his Dad.

                She was in love with the damn bastard. He’d sneaked in seventy years before Tony and stolen her first. So everything since, everything with him, had just been because he was his Dad’s son. It had been nothing at all.

                “Y-your Dad and I…” She started, hesitantly, but Tony didn’t need to hear it. It was the last thing he wanted to hear. Of course the randy old coot had played around with her, her and every other 1940s chorus girl, no doubt. Bastard.

                 “It’s fine. I get it.” He said, coldly. For a moment, Stevie looked like she wanted to say something more, than shut her mouth and nodded.

                “I’m sorry.” She said, gently kissing his cheek. With that, she stood up and quietly left.

                For a few moments Tony sat on the couch, feeling generally bad tempered. Then he decided it was time for action.

                “Jarvis?”

                “Sir?”

                “Is Penny asleep?”

                “Yes, sir.”

                “Good.” He stood up. “Call my driver. I’m going to a bar.”

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

June, 1945

 

                Howard was not paying as much attention to his work as he was pretending to. His eyes kept flicking back to the clock on the wall. He’d switched the wireless off at the end of the baseball almost half an hour ago. She would be here soon, surely. He drummed the end of the spanner he’d been using against the side of the machine, restless. It was so rare they were in the same country these days, the odd snatched moments on army bases in the middle of nowhere between her attacks on Hydra bases, he thought she would have been a little more eager to get here; now all of them were home on leave together.

                “Howard?” Right on cue, Annie entered the lab, ducking beneath one of the lower pieces of ventilation tubing. He grunted in greeting. He didn’t want to seem too eager, even though he was desperate to have her back in his arms where she belonged. “There you are.”

                “Annie.” He turned to see her properly at last, and all his resolve to be cold to her immediately crumbled. He took her hand and pressed it to his lips, making her laugh lightly, so he did it again. He had missed her. “Here I am.”

                “I think the question is, where were you?” She asked, lightly scolding.

                “Working very hard,” he said, lifting her other hand to kiss that one too, enclosing her two hands between his. “Learning poetry for my beloved Annie.”

                “You’re ridiculous.” She laughed.

                “It was many and many a year ago,” He said stubbornly, pausing between words to press his lips to her hands again. She was here, and safe, and he’d missed her so badly. “In a kingdom by sea, that a maiden there lived whom you may know, by the name of Annabel Lee…” He paused, moving to kiss the insides of her wrists. As usual, she didn’t want any of his ‘nonsense’ and gently untangled her hands from his, but allowed him to pull her close instead. He stroked her hair, whispering in her ear. “And this maiden, she lived with no other thought, than to love and be loved by me.”

                “That,” she teased, “Sounds like very wishful thinking, Mr Stark.” She pressed her lips to his cheek and he released her, greetings done. Surely she had been sufficiently charmed now. She had to be.

                “Where were you, Howard?” She asked, trying to sound stern. “You were supposed to come to the game with us.”

                “Yeah, well, you know, too many cooks spoil the broth.” He said, trying to sound casual. “I thought you’d have enough people around, what with Bucky being there and all.”

                “Howard.” She sighed, frustrated. “Bucky’s my friend. He’s been like a brother to me ever since we were kids. He takes care of me.”

                Howard shrugged, taking up his spanner again and returning to his work. “…do you ever think about after the war, Annie?” He asked, as casually as he could.

                “Well, I’m praying for peace, if that’s what you mean.”

                “No, I mean, what are your plans?”

                “I don’t know. It depends if I get discharged from the army or not. If they let me go, then… I don’t know. I might go back to Brooklyn, see if I can get back into nursing. We’ll see.” She paused, watching him work. “What about you? There won’t be much call for armaments once we’ve got peace. Are you going to start working on your flying machines, like I keep telling you?” Her tone was light, teasing. It would have been easy to slip into flirtation, but Howard couldn’t allow himself to. He had something serious to ask her, the most serious question of his life.

                “Well, I was thinking… after the war, maybe I could look after you.”

                “Pardon?”

                He turned to her, took her hand again. “Well, I was thinking, you, me, a house, kids, a, a dog, a white fence, an apple tree in the yard, all of it. Everything. The whole nine yards, Annie.”

                “Howard, I don’t-”

                “Let’s get married.”

                “Howard-”

                “Stephanie Rogers, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”

                He had charmed her sufficiently. She said yes; and had, in their shared happiness, never looked so beautiful. 

Chapter Text

Chapter Six

 

June, 1945

 

                Stephanie sat outside Colonel Phillips’ office, drumming her feet against the tiles. It was, she felt, rather unfair that she was excluded from the conversation going on inside, but her dismissal had left no room for arguments. Besides, of the two of them, Howard was the better negotiator, and he had the leverage to work with- he was still the military’s main provider of weapons. Annie might have been their prize warrior, the only one capable of shutting down Hydra’s remaining bases, but sometimes felt as if she was still a chorus girl. Even though they would listen to her opinion now, it was only on a very small range of subjects, her potential marriage apparently not being one.

                Phillips was against it, of course. It was all the reasons he hadn’t wanted a woman super soldier to begin with. The serum, and by extension Stephanie, were considered to be the military’s property. They didn’t want her just running off and getting married. Even their reassurances that she wasn’t planning on trying to give up her work at least until the war was over, and would certainly try to avoid falling pregnant, fell on deaf ears. Stephanie sighed. This is why she’d told Howard they should wait until the war was over. Germany had already surrendered, the Japanese could surely not go on much longer, there was only one Hydra base remaining. But Howard, of course, was sceptical. He had never been as idealistic as her. He was busy all the time now, working on some new type of weapon, something to be used against the Japanese- but neither he nor anyone else had much idea of what it would do, and the Japanese, he said, would rather kill the entire nation than surrender. He thought they could go on for a while yet; he thought, though he would not say it, that any day could be the last for either of them. And so, Stephanie had cautiously accepted his plan to marry as soon as possible, knowing all the while that her commanding officers would never agree.

                There were raised voices coming from inside the office, made muffled and indistinct by the door. Clearly the negotiation was not going well. A moment later, Howard burst out into the hall, slamming the door shut behind him. His face was angrier than she had ever seen it, so dark that for the fraction of a moment Stephanie wondered whether marrying him was really a good idea. Then, a little horrified with herself for this act of betrayal, she put her arms around him and pulled him close.

                “Howard? Howard, it’s alright.”

                “They don’t want us to marry. Ever. He says you’ll still belong to the army, even after the war. Belong! As If you’re just some weapon I sold them.” He was shaking with rage. Stephanie ran her fingers over his back in a comforting circle, but it seemed to make little difference. “It makes no sense! He kept going on about how you were a standard and a symbol. Well, if that’s true, then I’d have thought it would be better to be married than living in sin!”

                Stephanie pulled away from him sharply. “Living in sin?”

                Howard sighed. “Annie, I didn’t mean-”

                “Who said I’d be living in sin?”

                “No-one! I didn’t mean it like that!”

                “Howard, I want to marry you, but if we can’t, then I’m not-”

                “I’m going to marry you, okay?! We’ll get married!” He took her hand, gripping it. He was holding too tightly and caused her some discomfort, but she didn’t dare ask him to let go. He began to lead her down the corridor, his shoulders still tensed and angry. “We’ll get married whether they like it or not. We’ll go the registry right now and-”

                “Howard!” She pulled away from him. “What are you saying? I can’t go against orders, I’d end up getting court martialled. And as for going to the registrar for our wedding, well, over my dead body.”

                “Annie…” Her words seemed to have drained the rage out of him, leaving him just looking tired. He always looked tired these days. Whatever it was he was working on, it was taking its toll on his health. He took both her hands, squeezing them in earnest. “I’m sorry. I just… Look, we don’t know how long either of us have. It’s not just you going round gunning down the most dangerous group in Europe, my work isn’t exactly kittens and rainbows, sweetheart. I was lucky I didn’t get bumped off when Erskine did, it was only because you… the point is, they know me, they know who I am, and if they don’t like what I’m doing, then, well…” He swallowed. “I want us to be married, Annie. I know you want the Church and the priest and everything and I swear, you’ll have it; but, just for now, just so if one of us dies we can do it without regret…”

                She wavered, unsure what to do. If he had still been angry it would have been easy to refuse, but this quiet despair was much harder to be stony-hearted towards. She’d never imagined for a moment getting married anywhere other than Church, she wasn’t even completely convinced a civil ceremony really counted, but Howard was there, looking at her so desperately, she didn’t know how she could refuse.

                “It would have to be a secret.” She said, glancing back towards Phillips’ office to make sure he hadn’t followed and that there was no-one else within earshot. “If the military found out… Howard, no-one could know. We couldn’t live together, or, or…”

                “We would know.” He answered, kissing her hand, and three hours later, for better or worse, they were married in front of the registrar and two state-appointed witnesses.

               

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

July 2012

 

                “Coffee.”

                Rather than acquiescing to his request, Penny glared across the table at her father, newly arisen from bed. Tony realised he would have to fetch his own coffee, trying to do so without moving too much. He was definitely hung over. It had been years since that had happened. He must have been very drunk.

               Penny was still glaring at him. The daggers her eyes were throwing were making his head pound. “What?” He asked.

                “Who’s that girl?”

                “What girl?”

                “The one in the shower!”

                This stirred a dim memory in Tony. He had brought someone back from the bar last night, and, he thought, they had probably had quite a good time together. Who needed Stevie? Certainly not him, certainly not when she had only ever really wanted his father. His head really hurt, but he thought the girl in the shower was probably a blonde. It was a cliché, but damn, he loved blondes.

                “No-one, Penny, don’t worry about it.” Tony said. It was true it had been a while, having a kid around kind of killed the mood, but he had had people back before. It was time she learnt to deal with it.

                “What about Stevie?!” Penny demanded. Tony was in no mood for this.

                “Well, as I’m not dating her, I’d say it was none of her damn business.”

                “You went to the farm.” Penny argued. “And you had brunch. And,” she said, with an air of conclusion. “You like her.”

                “Look.” Tony said, throwing coffee into the filter and slamming it shut. “I don’t know what fantasies you’ve built up in that little girly head of yours, but you need to get rid of them. It’s not happening. Stevie and I aren’t dating, we’re not in love, and she is never going to be your mom!”

                “You’re so stupid!” Penny shouted back, jumping to her feet. “You like her, she likes you, so you should be together! Why is that so hard?! Why do you always have to ruin everything?!”

                “Ruin everything? I’m sorry, did I miss the part when this became all about you?”

                “Sometimes I can’t stand you!” Penny said, running to her room, slamming the door shut.

                As tantrums went, Tony would have to give this an eight out of ten. It was very rare Penny ever shouted, so at least her confidence was improving. Still, when he was her age, he would have just straight out said ‘I hate you’, whether he meant it or not. She was still pulling punches, she was holding back; but for selfishness and annoyance at that moment, Tony would have given her a ten. He finished making his coffee, much more violently than necessary.

                “Captain Rogers is outside, Sir.” Jarvis said before Tony had even taken a sip. “She would like to come in.”

                “Too bad.” Tony replied. Stevie was the last person he wanted to see.

                “She says it’s important.” Jarvis tried. “She doesn’t look well.”

                Jarvis couldn’t lie. He had learnt sarcasm, he could be sassy, but he couldn’t tell an outright lie. Of course, he could have just meant that she looked unhappy or pale or worried, but there wasn’t much hope of Tony getting a straight answer out of him. Even Jarvis was trying to match make.

                But then, there was a chance that she was hurt. It wasn’t impossible, considering she was Captain America. Even now she had hung up the uniform, there were probably people who would like to be rid of her, if only as a political statement.

                Or maybe she felt so bad about what had happened, she had made herself sick with sadness and worry. Tony didn’t want her to be seriously ill, of course, but there was a savage sort of pleasure in this idea. He relented and went to open the door himself. It turned out what Jarvis meant by ‘not well’ was ‘tired’. Then again, Tony probably didn’t look so great himself.

                “What?”

                “Can I… can I talk to you?”

                “Go ahead.” He said, not moving out of the doorway. It was less friendly than he perhaps wanted to be, but he was very aware that he could no longer hear the shower running. The bathroom door, like all the others, opened straight out into the central lounge area. If Stevie was in there, the two would be sure to meet – and Tony wasn’t sure that was what he wanted yet.

                “Right. Um,” she seemed a little perturbed not to be invited properly inside, but she carried on anyway. “I think I owe you an apology.”

                “Oh?”

                “Yeah.” She half laughed, as if she wasn’t quite sure it was appropriate. “First of all, because I should have told you about your dad and I. I was just… so surprised he hadn’t told you. That sort of hurt, but I wanted to respect his wishes. And then by the time I realised you had a right to know it had already been so long, I just… but I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

                “Don’t worry.” Tony said, and more or less meant it. That, after all, had not been the main thing that had annoyed him. “It’s fine. I mean, to be honest, I think I’d rather not know when I’m just being used as a substitute for my dad.”

                “It wasn’t like that!” Stevie protested. “Look, I also owe you an apology for leaving like that yesterday. I was worried about the same thing, I was worried I was, I don’t know, displacing my feelings for Howard onto you. I didn’t want that to be… I didn’t want to be any more unfair than I already have been. I didn’t want it to be true, and I, I, I don’t think it is. I mean, it isn’t. It isn’t like that, Tony, really.” She took a deep breath, trying to regain her composure, and continued. “I’ve been up all night thinking about it, making sure of how I feel. And I was wrong! Tony, you aren’t your father, you’re nothing like him. And my feelings for you aren’t the same as what I felt for him. I… I really like you, Tony.”

                “Oh.” He said. “I wish you’d worked that out last night.”

                “Me too. I’m sorry. I was wondering if I… could have another chance?”

                “I guess I could consider it.” He smiled, and she smiled back. And then the blonde from the shower rested a hand on his shoulder.

                “Geez, at least get the last one out before you bring the next one in.” She joked. “Good morning. You don’t have anything good for breakfast, so I’m gonna split. I got your computer to call me a cab.”

                At least she was fully clothed. Tony started thinking up a lie. Judging from Stevie’s face, it was going to need to be a good one.

                “Oh, I can’t find my bra.” The shower woman added into the silence. “If you find it, could you mail it to me? It’s my favourite.”

                “Sure.” Tony answered. He wasn’t sure what else he could say.

                “Who is this?” Stevie asked, at last.

                “No-one. It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.”

                “Would that have been me?” Stevie demanded. “If it had gone your way last night, is this what it would have been?! One night and then off on my way?!”

                “No, of course not! I thought you’d rejected me, I was upset!”

                “So while I was downstairs worried sick over you, worried I’d hurt you, worried you’d hate me, worried that I’d lost you forever; you were busy falling into the arms of the first floozy you could find, because you were upset. Well, of course, that makes perfect sense. You know, I actually thought you might be serious about me, but obviously I was just the most convenient-”

                “I was serious! I am! It- it wasn’t like that!”

                “Oh, really?” She glared, furious. “Then what’s her name?”

                 “It’s Christine.” Tony said, without batting an eye, knowing any decent human being would back him up.

                “It’s not.” Shower girl said, helpfully.

                Stevie sighed, shaking her head, and began to leave.

                “Stevie!” It was undignified, but he couldn’t help but follow. “Stevie, wait, don’t-”

                “I was right.” She said, quietly angry. “You are nothing like your father.”

                That one hurt, even though Tony had spent most of his adult life trying not to be like his father. His anger returned; he had no reason to apologise, he had done nothing wrong- she had rejected him, it was nothing to do with her what he did. Just because she’d decided she’d made a mistake didn’t mean he’d done anything wrong.

                “Good!” He said. “Best damn compliment I ever got. At least now I won’t have the old man’s cast offs rebounding onto me!”

                His words had hurt her, and, savagely pleased, Tony continued, overriding her protest that it wasn’t true, that it wasn’t how she felt about him. “But, you know, maybe Dad and I weren’t that different. Even while he was wooing you he was probably screwing half a dozen other chorus girls on the side, that seems more his style.”

                “No, it wasn’t! I get you’re angry with me, but don’t take it out on him. Your father was a good and faithful man the whole time we were together, and I know for a fact he wouldn’t sleep with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Maybe you should take a leaf out of his book- I’d have thought you would have learnt your lesson from Penny’s mother!”

                “This isn’t the 1940s anymore! Everyone has sex and lots of it, and we’re not ashamed of it!”

                “Well, maybe you should be.”

                The condescension in her tone enraged him, and his words slipped out before he thought about it. “Urrgh, don’t act like you’re such a goody two shoes! You were pregnant when we pulled you out, so unless that was immaculate conception, sweetheart, you and some guy got hot and heavy in bed!”

                He realised, far, far too late, that the baby in question was more than likely his half-sibling. The only reason he hadn’t realised before was because, after she told him about the relationship with Howard, he had tried not to think about it at all. And then he had been hideously drunk.

                He began to get the feeling that he had seriously messed up.

                Stevie had grown pale. She no longer seemed angry. “What do you mean? I was pregnant?”

                “About two weeks gone or three weeks gone.” There was nothing to do but admit it, now.  “Doctor Banner thinks it must have… come loose when you hit the water.”

                “Why didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you think I had a right to know?”

                “There… we knew you couldn’t have known about it yet, we didn’t… we didn’t want to upset you.”

                “So you saved it up to throw it at my face during an argument instead?!”

                “No! Stop, stop twisting everything!” Tony was stubborn, and still angry and hurting. He was also feeling a little guilty, which made him angrier, so he had to fight back. “Anyway, it proves the point, doesn’t it?! Don’t lecture me on sex outside of marriage when you clearly did the dirty with my dad!”

                “We were married!”

                “What? But he never… what?”

                “He never told you.” She said. “Never told anyone, I guess. The military wouldn’t let us marry, so we did it in secret, about two weeks before I went under.  But he never made it public and I don’t know why!”

                Tony did, or he could make a pretty good guess. Suddenly, a lot of things were falling into place, starting to make sense. He remembered his dad, drunk, tearfully singing When Irish Eyes are Smiling, and thought he probably knew when the drinking had begun; why he had found records of hundreds of searches through a certain portion of the ocean labelled ‘unsuccessful’ when they had turned up the tesseract; why Howard Stark had been in his sixties before he’d even got married and had kids. He thought about how much his Dad had hated enemy armies, how ruthlessly he had pursued warfare, and felt he understood his father more than he ever had. Of course Howard wouldn’t have made the marriage public. If he had been as hard on himself then as he had been later in life, been as hard on himself as he had been on his son, he had probably been ashamed of his failure, ashamed that he let his wife die.

                “Oh.” Tony said. This was a much bigger mess than he had expected.

                “Is that why… why I’m not getting my monthlies anymore?” She asked.

                “Um, maybe. Being in ice won’t have helped. We could find a doctor, get them to run some tests. You might be able to-”

                “No.”

                “Stevie-”

                “You should have told me.” She said, walking downstairs towards her flat.

                “Alright, but, just for the record, are you mad at me for that or mad that I hooked up with someone else?”

                “Leave me alone, Tony.” A second later he heard the door to her flat close quietly, and, not sure what else to do, returned to his own rooms. Penny was nowhere to be seen, presumably still mad at him, and his guest had disappeared.  With nothing else to do, he went down to the lab, intending to lose himself in his work. For once, it didn’t seem to make a difference.

                “Jarvis.” He said, finally. “Get me all the records of marriages registered in New York in June and July 1945. We’re looking for Howard Stark and Stephanie Rogers.”

                “No results, sir.”

                For a moment, he felt a flicker of hope, then of concern. In spite of everything, he didn’t want the old man to have lied to her about something like that- and he didn’t think Stevie was lying to him. Then again, his dad had been tied up with the atom bomb in the summer of ’45, so he could have been almost anywhere. Tony had to work out how to widen the parameters.

                 “Sir, may I refer you to a point of historical context?” Jarvis asked. “In those days it was common for the marriage certificate not to be completed at the city hall until some days after the service had been conducted. If it was indeed a secret wedding, perhaps they never completed all the necessary paperwork.”

                “That sounds like my dad.” Tony sighed. “So, what, you’re saying they were never legally married?”

                “It’s possible, but it’s more likely that they were legally married and had simply not informed the proper authorities of the fact.”

                “Right. Well, how do we find that out?”

                “I don’t know sir.”

                “Her family were Irish, right? Irish Catholic or Irish Protestant?”

                “Catholic, sir, according to her Wikipedia page.”

                “Alright. Can you check the records of the Catholic Churches for those months?”

                “Sir, there were hundreds of Catholic Churches and few have digitised archival records.”

                “Just do what you can. Start with the ones around Brooklyn.”

                “Yes, sir.”

                The search turned up no results again. Tony was just starting to believe that maybe it wasn’t true after all, but he couldn’t give up yet. His Dad had told him before about being forced to attend Sunday school in his youth, so it was worth checking the protestant Churches too. When the results were again fruitless, Tony was all but ready to go down to Stevie’s room and demand an explanation.

                “One record found.” Jarvis sounded exasperated.

                “What? Where? Display.”

                On the screen, a scan of a record book appeared. The header announced it to be the books of a registry office on a street Tony had barely even heard of. Still, it made it pretty clear that Howard Stark had married Stephanie Rogers on the 8^th July 1945.

                Tony looked at it for a while, then, annoyed, swiped his fingers through it, closing it off.

                “If it was a civil service, why was it never registered with the government?”  He asked, though he could already imagine perfectly clearly why not. Money in the right hands, to buy them a bit of time before anyone found out about it… he wondered if Stevie knew exactly what his Dad had been up to.

                “Miss Parker has just left, sir.”

                “She’s probably going to tell tales on me to Stevie.”

                “She took a bag of her things with her, sir.”

                “What?”

 

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

July, 1945

 

                070104254218. It wasn’t bad, as security codes went. Besides, the only reason Howard had developed it had been to appease Annie’s worries, so it had to be something she could remember. So, it was 07, for July; 01, for January; 04 for the 4^th and 25 for the 25^th; 42 and 18 for the year. July 4^th1918, her date of birth.  May 25^th 1942, the day they had met. Both very important dates for her to remember, as far as Howard was concerned. Besides, there was a certain sort of humour in having her information tied into the new kill code for all Stark Enterprises technology.

                The first time they had met, of course, had been because he had been hospitalised following an unexpectedly explosive experiment. There had been a few more accidents after that, and eventually, Annie had insisted each machine should have an emergency override. Given the steps he was making in programming, in developing a universal language to talk to all his machinery, it wasn’t too hard for Howard to throw one in there. Of course, he hadn’t actually shared it with the lab staff like he’d promised to, and only he and Annie actually knew about it. The military would not have looked kindly on anybody having the ability to shut down the majority of their equipment, so Howard decided it was prudent to keep quiet about it. It was another secret that only he and his wife knew.

                He was counting on Annie to end the war. It was already over with the Nazis and she was out there, now, with her commandos, going after what they believed to be the last Hydra base. If all went well, next week they would all be heading out to Japan on a diplomatic mission. It was, in Howard’s opinion, likely to fail. That’s why he was going; he was going to tell them about the bomb, to show them the footage of the tests, to convince them that surrender, however culturally abhorrent, was totally necessary.

                He didn’t want to make threats in front of Annie. He didn’t want her to know exactly what he had been working on, either, but he did want the war to be over. That was why he was on board today, waiting to hear from Annie, from the squad at the base; to be on hand in case anything went wrong. But just how wrong it was going to go, he could never have anticipated. Someone sympathetic to their relationship- though not knowing exactly what it was- came to fetch him when she came on the radio.

                “What is it? What’s happening?” He’d already snatched the radio. Peggy moved aside to give him some semblance of privacy. The radio crackled as Annie hesitated.

                “Red Skull is dead.” She said. “The plane, that’s… a little more complicated.”
                 “ Just, just keep it level.” He said. “There’s a safe landing site about-”

                “There isn’t going to be a safe landing, Howard.” The radio crackled and quavered, but her voice was steady. “This thing is headed right for New York.”

                “Tools.” Howard blurted. “He must have tools, somewhere on board. Find them, tell me what you got, we’ll work something out. I’ll talk you through it, just like in the labs. It’ll be fun.”

                “There’s no time, Howard.” She said. “I’ve got to put her in the water.”

                “No. No, Annie, no, we’ll find a way out of this.”
                “There isn’t one.”

                “There’s always one.”

                “…This is my choice, Howard.”
                “Well, it’s the wrong damn choice!”
                “I’m sorry.”

                The radio crackled. In the background, the frequency of the throb of the engines changed. She was diving. She was dying. He was listening to the hum of her last moments.

                “Howard?” She whispered. For the first time, she sounded scared. His brave girl was scared, so he wasn’t allowed to be. He had to man up. He had to take care of his wife.

                “I’m here, Annie. It’s okay, I’m here.” He didn’t know what to say, but the seconds were passing, the vital seconds were ticking away and soon there would be nothing more that could be said. “I found us a house.” He said. “In Brooklyn, like you wanted. You’re going to love it, Annie, it’s got a, a white fence and a backyard the size of one of those warehouses and, and just round the corner there’s a bank and a grocers; it’s perfect, Annie, really, you’ll love it.”

                “It sounds great. When can I see it?”

                “A week Saturday. I’ll take you to see it.”

                “Alright.”

                “So what are the schools like in Brooklyn?”

                She laughed, but couldn’t keep it up. Howard ploughed on.

                “This place, it’s got a bathroom upstairs and an old one out in the yard, underneath the apple tree. And it’s got three bedrooms ,so that’s one for us, one for when your brother comes to stay-”

                “And one for the kids?”

                “Right. One for the kids. The whole nine yards, Annie.”

                “The whole nine-”

                The radio cut off abruptly, completely. His wife’s death, the death of Captain America, was not marked with an explosion or a bang or any noise of cataclysmic and heroic proportions. It was not marked by so much as a whimper. There was no simultaneous outpouring of nation grief. Nobody sensed she was gone, nobody felt a light snuffed out. Nobody knew but those listening to the static sound of a radio set reaching out to find nothing on the other side of the darkness.
                That static was the only sound Howard could hear. Peggy put a hand on his shoulder, saying something; that she knew, Annie had told her, that she was sorry, that she wouldn’t tell. He shrugged her away. He left.

                He was going to find his wife, and if she was somehow still alive, he was going to tell the military to back off that she had done more than enough. He would get her honourably discharged and take her home, home to a house in Brooklyn even better than the one he had made up to comfort her. They would live quietly and in peace.

                And if- if when he found her- she was- if she wasn’t alive, if she was the other thing, he would bury her with a wedding ring on her finger and under the name of Stark, and then everyone would know there was once a woman, a woman much loved, behind the mask of Captain America.

Chapter Text

Chapter Seven

 

As far as Penny knew, her life had probably begun at Stark Industries itself. Needless to say, she had been spared the exact details of what had happened, but no-one had ever pretended her parents had anything resembling a relationship. Her mom had started working as a lab assistant for SI before she had even left college, her summer internships finally leading to an actual paid job after graduation. Life must have, Penny thought, seemed pretty good back then. Her mom received regular promotions, got herself noticed at work, got to be involved in exciting research projects (though what, exactly, no-one would tell her; so Penny could only assume it was weapons) and then, at some function, got to meet Oscorp’s Richard Parker. It was love at first sight. Or so Penny believed, and no-one had told her differently. The photograph of them on her dresser certainly suggested they had been in love. They looked happy, swinging Penny-probably aged about a year- by the arms between them. 

Sometimes, Penny pretended she really was Richard Parker’s daughter, but then she always felt guilty about it. She didn’t do it so much anymore, not since coming to live with her real dad.

Anyway, Penny was old enough and had seen enough movies to understand that love didn’t always go smoothly. Aunt May didn’t know what the argument had been about, and her Dad had never asked, but for whatever reason it seemed the engagement had temporarily been called off. Perhaps it hadn’t seemed temporary at the time, though, and that was why her mom had ended up with her dad. Maybe her dad was just that charming. Once, when she had tentatively asked her dad if he had loved her mom- or if her mom had loved him- he had got annoyed with her interrogation and told her it was just ‘comfort sex’. She didn’t entirely understand that; it seemed a long way to go just to make someone feel better. In any case, it meant she was made by accident. Penny found herself thinking about that a lot. Her dad seemed to make a lot of things happen by accident, usually of the explosive and expensive variety. He hated those sorts of mistakes, judging by the swearing that issued forth from the lab when he made them. Penny tried not to think about that too much, but the fact that her dad had never really wanted her around was a fact she’d been forced to learn to live with.

Nobody had ever pretended that Richard Parker was her biological father, but according to her aunt, he had loved Penny like she was his own from day one, before, even; he’d loved her before she was born. May described him as being protective of ‘his’ daughter; Penny had decided that maybe that meant he hadn’t wanted her real dad involved at all. Sometimes, she tried to put herself in the shoes of a Penny that had grown up that way, tried to imagine whether she would want to meet her real dad or not. She probably would have been curious, at least, especially if she knew who he was. But then, having a famous dad was intimidating enough as it was. Maybe she would never have chased him up.

But of course, she wasn’t that Penny, she hadn’t been raised that way, she didn’t really remember Richard Parker or his wife. She’d been raised by her aunt and uncle, the people who, if she was honest, she still thought of as her parents even though she shared no blood with them at all. They had wanted her dad to be involved, nagged him into visiting as often as they could- which was not that often at all- and put the money he sent to ‘maintain’ her safely aside in a college fund. Penny had always hated that. When the bills were piling up on the kitchen table and her uncle was trying to put in the same amount of overtime as men half his age, she didn’t see why they couldn’t use it. Her dad didn’t seem to think the money was for college, he’d even said, on one of his rare visits, that he would pay for college when the time came. The money was supposed to enable her to live with her aunt and uncle then, so they could afford to look after her. But, of course, they never touched it.

Penny hadn’t really enjoyed her dad’s visits back then. She didn’t know him, Aunt May didn’t particularly like him, and they never really knew what to say to each other. Her dad had never played with her- it occurred to Penny that he probably didn’t know how- and they usually just sat awkwardly for half an hour or so before he’d make his excuses and leave. Aunt May always used to get so mad when he would cancel visits time after time, but Penny was always secretly relieved and never as surprised as she was when he actually came. Every time she did, she privately thought it would probably be the last time she saw him.

 It didn’t work out that way either, of course. She tried not to think about that night two, almost three years ago; but when she did, she could remember every bit of it. She had woken up to noises downstairs. This wasn’t entirely unheard of; her uncle could make enough noise making his last-cup-of-tea-before-bed to wake the dead. Then she’d squinted at the clock and realised it was approaching two in the morning, too late for anyone to be up for normal reasons. It was a testament to the safety and security that home had provided for her that even then her mind didn’t jump to robbers or burglars. She remembered thinking that perhaps her aunt was sick, and her uncle was trying to make a Lemsip for her. Slightly confused and disorientated, she had shuffled out onto the landing to see what was going on.

Her uncle, in his dressing gown, had just emerged from his room too and he told her, quietly but firmly, to go back to her room and not to come out until he said. Afraid for the first time, Penny had gone back to her room, wrapping her duvet around her. She heard her aunt following her uncle downstairs, hissing at him to be careful.

A moment later, she heard the shouting, the gun shot, heard her aunt screaming her uncle’s name, heard another shot. By that time she had already run out onto the landing, looking for the extension of the landline, knowing that she had to call the police, if she could only call the police it would be okay; but the upstairs phone hadn’t worked for weeks and tonight was no exception. She had to creep downstairs, she knew, and use the phone in the kitchen.

                It wasn’t that she wasn’t scared. She was shaking so hard she thought she was going to throw up. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the shots. She knew that if she didn’t call 911 right away, they really could die. She’d be alone. So she had left the security of her duvet abandoned on the landing, and crept down the stairs. She could smell cigarettes. Someone was smoking in the lounge. That, she hoped, would be enough to give her a clear run to the kitchen. The living room door was open a crack and, as she passed, she told herself not to look, not to look, but then she had felt the damp stickiness seeping through the front part of her slippers, where they were worn out, and realised the blood had splashed there.  It was coming from under the door and she could see her uncle, slumped against the frame. The police would say, later, that he must have been trying to stop the thief from getting away, stop him from getting to Penny. That didn’t make it better. She didn’t know how she managed not to scream then. She would scream about it plenty in the coming nights as she saw it again and again in her dreams. But just then, she kept it in. They needed her to dial 911.

                She made it to the kitchen, even had her hand on the phone, when she heard the heft of Uncle Ben being moved and the tread of the thief coming down the hall. At that point, she had been absolutely certain she was going to die. But there was a cupboard under the sink, with nothing in it but a few sponges and the rags her uncle used to buff the car with, the cupboard she had always used when she’d played hide and seek as a kid. It was smaller than she remembered, and the u-bend of the sink dug awkwardly into her neck, but she made it in there just in time. The thief had entered the kitchen.

                She had been so scared he would hear her breathing that it seemed to become even louder. Thankfully, his talking covered it- he called 911 himself, to explain about the shots. He was laughing, joking with the operator, saying his wife had seen a rat, that was all, and the gun fire was nothing to worry about.

                That was the scariest thing for Penny. Even if one of the neighbours called now, it wouldn’t make any difference. No help was coming. She didn’t know what to do.

                So she opened the cupboard door, just a tiny bit, just a crack, and held her breath as she pressed her eye to it. She saw the man for the first time, and did her best to memorise everything she saw. If she could get away, if she could tell someone, maybe they would be able to find him.

                He left the kitchen, but Penelope remained where she was. She tried to persuade herself out, to persuade herself to go call an ambulance, to try again with the police, but there was seemingly nothing she could do to make her body move. She didn’t know if the man was still in the house.

                She felt sick, but she still couldn’t move. She was paralysed with fear and shame. She knew it was her fault, that the longer she left it, the longer she couldn’t move, the more likely it was that help wouldn’t come in time, but there was nothing at all she could seem to do about it. She tried to keep her breathing quiet, tried to strain her ears to the uttermost to see if the man was still in the house. Just as she decided to move again, she heard unfamiliar thuds against the front door. Someone was trying to get in.

                She couldn’t take any more. Before she knew what she was doing, she was out of the cupboard, into the yard, and scaling the fence. She had never been good at running, or at scaling fences, but Uncle Ben had been helping her practice the latter because in a few weeks she was supposed to be climbing the rope in gym class and she really wanted to do it this year. For the first time, she made it up and over the fence. The shame was eating at her again- she could move when it was to save her own skin- but she was too scared to stop. It was late, later than she’d ever been out before, and she was alone on the street in nothing but her pyjamas. The payphone at the end of her street didn’t work and just then, she didn’t trust any of her neighbours who played music too loudly or put the trash out on the wrong days. She didn’t know where any of her teachers lived when they weren’t at school. She felt horribly alone.

                But she did know where her Dad lived- She’d never been there, but the Skyscraper with his name on the side was kind of hard to miss. And it was only three or four blocks away. That was what Aunt May said whenever she complained about how infrequently her Dad visited. It was only three or four blocks.

                And that was how she ended up at Stark Tower. Jarvis had let her in, her Dad had appeared, and then the police had called looking for her. Everything else was sort of a blur. At some point her Dad had made her sit down and then had eventually stammered out “I’m sorry, kid, I have some… some bad news. It’s not your fault, okay? Your uncle, um, your uncle… he died. He’s dead. Your aunt isn’t much better. I mean… just, just don’t get your hopes up. Okay? It’ll be okay. Sorry.”

                She’d asked if it was her fault, because she hadn’t got help.

                “No, you’re just a little kid, all you could have done was get killed too. Don’t worry about it, Pen-pen.”

                He used to call her that, when he was trying to make her like him. She didn’t like it. And it hadn’t made her feel any better then.

                The following days hadn’t been much better. He sent people out to buy her clothes and a toothbrush and other things she would need, but it wasn’t until day three or four he offered to take her back to the house to get her some of her own. But she was too scared to go back, so in the end he went on his own, or sent someone, and she was surrounded by familiar things again. But seeing them all packed up like that in a strange place made her think of the reasons they were like that, and made her cry, even though her Dad hated it and got all awkward when she did that. At night, when she had bad dreams, he didn’t come in to check on her like Aunt May did. Instead it would be Jarvis’ voice that woke her, asked if she was alright. She would always hear her Dad coming up out of the lab or out of his room and wandering about in the lounge at those times, and always felt slightly hurt that he didn’t come to her when she needed him. Later, when they knew each other better, she began to wonder if he wasn’t out there waiting to see if she wanted to come to him. He did try, it just didn’t feel that way at the time.

                Aunt May survived the gunshot, but her recovery was long and slow and she couldn’t have looked after herself in that time, let alone a child. So, after her release from hospital, she went to stay with her sister and Tony agreed to take Penny. Penny wasn’t quite sure when and how the arrangement had become permanent, but two and a half years later she was still at Stark Tower and- usually- quite happy. It hurt a little that Aunt May hadn’t wanted her back, but they spoke on the phone every week and that had to be enough. She’d had to learn to be a lot more independent than she had been at Aunt May’s, to do her own cooking and laundry and to get herself up and out and ready for school, and her Dad was still unreliable, but they rubbed along together alright. For a while, she had resented that he so often gave her extravagant and useless gifts as an alternative to any actual affection, but gradually she realised it was supposed to be an expression of his affection. It wasn’t that he bought her stuff to make up for the fact that he didn’t love her, it was that he did care about her- a little, at least- and didn’t know how else to let her know it. That was the first time she really started to realise that there were adults that didn’t know how to talk to kids, just like she never knew what to say when Aunt May and her friends had talked about the weather or gas prices or how difficult it was to find proper, non-polyester socks. Penny couldn’t really imagine her Dad talking about those things either, but the point still stood. 

                Of course, she’d forgotten the golden rule of her life was that no parental figure could be around for too long. Tony was only supposed to be gone for a couple of nights when he went out to demonstrate the Jericho, and it ended up being months. Penny had been absolutely convinced he would die. She had started to feel sure it was her fault, that she was cursed- but Tony did come back, a little changed, but back. When he gave up making guns, even though he kept joking that it was her inheritance down the drain, she had never felt prouder of him; and after missing him for so long, she was determined not to take his- or anyone else’s- presence for granted ever again. He was, honestly, not a very good father and perhaps not even the best person, but she loved him all the same. They began to talk more. He even started letting her in the lab from time to time, explaining things to her. They began to actually get on pretty well.

                When Stevie came, it felt like everything was going to be perfect. For one thing, Captain America- Captain actual America- was living in their building, in the apartment below theirs. That was awesome enough all on its own, but to make it even better, Stevie herself was super nice. Penny hadn’t actually realised how much she’d missed having another girl to talk to, but as she got to know Stevie better she wondered how she’d ever coped without it. If she hadn’t been there when Penny had got her period, then- well, it was too awful to think about. And she was just good to talk to in general. Even though she was a lot older and wiser than Penny, she never made her feel like she didn’t understand or was ‘just a kid’ like her dad still did sometimes; she really seemed to listen, and to care. Right from the beginning, Penny had been daydreaming about how good it would be if she and her Dad would fall in love; and when they did, it felt like something was finally, finally going her way.

                But, of course, it couldn’t happen. Life never did what she wanted; things wouldn’t go right, not for her. It didn’t matter that Stevie liked her dad and her dad clearly liked her, they would never be together because her dad was too pig headed. To say Penny was furious was an understatement. She wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but it seemed like her Dad had some sort of argument with Stevie, and then immediately slept with someone else. Now Stevie was mad, and she was going to leave, just like everyone else; like her parents, like her aunt had abandoned her, like all the nannies Tony had ever hired for her had gone after a month or two. She was getting a little tired of it.

So, this time, she had decided. She wasn’t going to hang around waiting for them to leave her. She’d go herself before anyone else had chance to.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

July 2012

 

                One of the most annoying things in the world, as far as Tony was concerned, was when people treated him as if he was being totally unreasonable when he wasn’t. Today, the person in question was Rhodes, someone Tony considered a friend- or had considered a friend, until today. Penny had now been missing for almost eight hours, and Rhodes was doing nothing to help.

                “Come on, Rhodey, even now at least eighty percent of military equipment is stuff SI made, and that goes up to ninety-five when you include everything modified from or using my tech. You owe me.”

                “Owe you? Tony, you were paid. It’s not like you were just doing the army a favour for the hell of it.”

                “It’s still my stuff. It’s my stuff and I think I should get some say in what we do with it.”

                “Come on, man, don’t be ridiculous.”

                “I’m not being ridiculous! Come on, Rhodes. This is Penny. You like Penny. You come to see her like every time she has a birthday.”

                “I know that, but I can’t scramble the military just to look for a lost kid!”

                “Wow, great, thanks; some friend you are. It’s been eight hours. It’ll be dark soon.”

                “So call the police.”

                “It has to be twelve hours before they’ll do anything.”

                “And throwing money at them didn’t help?”

                “No. They said I should check her friends’ houses.”

                “Well, did you?”

                “No, I don’t know who any of her friends are. I don’t know if she even has friends. She doesn’t have a Facebook.”

                “That doesn’t mean-”

                “You know I said she left her cell phone here? There are three numbers in it. Mine, her aunt’s, and Stevie’s. That’s it.”

                “Stevie?”

                “Captain America to you. Her place got trashed a few months ago, so now she lives downstairs.”

                “What?! You never told me!”

                “Is that really important right now?”

                “How could you not tell me?”

                “Rhodes, what about Penny?!” Tony swallowed, still thinking of the empty cell phone. You heard such awful stories these days about kids, kids bullying each other so bad that they killed themselves. What if something like that was happening to Penny, and his fight with Stevie- apparently the one friend Penny had- was the final straw? He could feel his breath catching in his throat. He wanted to throw up.

                “Tony? Tony, it’s okay, just breathe. We’ll find her. I’ll help you look, just stay calm. And no military jets.”

                “I am calm! I am calm, I just need you to-”

                “Tony, I can’t. Use the Iron Man suit; get Cap to help look too. I’ll be over in ten. It’ll be fine.” 

                The line clicked as he hung up. Tony threw his own phone down in disgust. He’d left it too long; he should have gone after Penny the moment Jarvis had told him she’d left. But it was Penny, always reliable, always responsible, and, at that point, super mad. He hadn’t wanted to give her the satisfaction of him chasing her, if that was what she wanted; or, if she really did want to express her anger in this way, he’d decided it was best to let her do it. He’d expected her to come back, but she hadn’t. It had been hours, and she still hadn’t returned. If she had only taken her phone he wouldn’t have been half so worried, but she’d left it in her room and the whole thing was beginning to look more and more like a genuine attempt to run away. After four hours, he’d gone to the police, who had refused to help- and taken rather unkindly to what they called his attempt to ‘bribe’ them, as if he hadn’t been making generous donations for years- and left him to search on his own. He’d scoured the city as best he could, but without results. And now Rhodes was all but refusing to help him too.

                He knew what he had to do next, of course. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to go downstairs and talk to Stevie, no matter how mad she was, and see what she knew. Assuming she would even speak to him.

                At first, he didn’t think she was going to answer the door. After several moments of frantic knocking, she finally came and opened it a crack.

                “I don’t want to talk to you, Tony.” She said, firmly, and looked ready to slam it shut again.

                “It’s Penny.” He blurted. “She’s been missing all day. Jarvis says she took a bag of clothes with her and I can’t find her anywhere.”

                Stevie frowned, then asked “Have you called May?”

                “No. It’s only been eight hours, there’s no point in worrying her yet, is there?”

                May already thought he was a terrible father. Tony didn’t want to add any fuel to that particular flame. Stevie, however, was looking at him like he was an idiot.

                “But don’t you think she might have gone there?”

                “Oh. I’ll call her.” He hadn’t thought of that.

                “And then you should call Harry.” Stevie added, busying herself pulling shoes on.

                “Harry?”

                “You know, the one she’s got the crush on.”

                “Crush? What crush? Harry who?” This was all news to him. “Wait, wait, not Harry Styles? Stevie, for crying out loud, he’s in that kid pop band she likes, she doesn’t-”

                “Not him.” She snapped, the irritation in her tone enough to assure him she was, in fact, still pissed about earlier. “You know, from her old school, before she came here. Harry-something. Harry Osborn.”

                “Osborn?!” It was no wonder Penny hadn’t mentioned it to him, or dared to store the number in her phone.  No daughter of his was associating with Osborn, or his kids, or their entirely questionable business practices. Besides, they were SI’s main rivals for a lot of lucrative contracts.

                “Yes, Osborn.” Stevie said, firmly. “He’s her friend, so call him. If she’s not there, or with May, we’ll go and look for her.”

                “I’m not calling Norman Osborn to tell him I can’t keep control of my kid.”

                “Would you like me to call him?” Clearly Stevie now thought he was a bad father too, if she hadn’t already. Tony was beginning to wonder if any super serum had even been necessary; Stevie could have beaten the Nazis just with her disapproving glare.

                “Fine! Fine, I’ll call him, but she won’t be there.”

                “Then we’ll go and look for her.”

                She was speaking to him as if he was an unruly child, needing a firm hand. Tony was sick of it. He didn’t have time for her little power plays whilst Penny was missing. “Alright,” He said. “You’re pissed off with me, I get it, everyone gets it, can we please focus on finding Penny?!”

                His breath was coming short again, as if he’d been working out. Maybe he’d yelled with more force than he’d thought.

                “Tony?” She looked almost concerned. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Please calm down.” She clearly wasn’t sorry, but he accepted the peace offering for what it was and went back upstairs without another word, leaving her to follow behind. She didn’t sit down, leaning up against the kitchen counter and watching Tony pace back and forth as he tried to talk to May without angering or alarming her too much. He was all too aware of Stevie’s presence, and so, was studiously trying to ignore any mention of the argument that had so upset Penny.

                He made the mistake of mentioning the girl in the shower- he had to give some reason for the upset- and was in the middle of a dressing down about how he was unreliable, irresponsible and a poor role model when he heard Jarvis letting Rhodes in. Even as May yelled at him in one ear, he kept the other on them.

                “Hello.” Rhodes said. “You must be the Captain. It’s an honour to meet you, ma’am.”

                “Thank you, Mr…?”

                “Rhodes, ma’am, Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes. I’m a friend of Tony’s.”

                “Nice to meet you, Colonel. You can drop the ma’am, I’m retired.”

                “I don’t think I can, ma’am, not when you’re Captain America.”

                “Not any more. In any case, you outrank me, sir.”

                “Honestly? I’m not sure that’s possible.”

                Tony cleared his throat, loudly. “Sorry to interrupt your little military reunion, but May doesn’t know where she is. We need to go and search.”

                “What about Osborn?” Stevie asked.

                “I’m not calling him. She won’t have gone there.”

                There was a long, tense pause.

                “I’d like to say I can’t believe you’re putting your pride before your daughter,” Stevie said, eventually, “But actually, it seems like exactly the sort of thing you’d do.”

                “What, so, I’m a terrible father now?”

                “Maybe. I never thought so before, but I didn’t think you were the kind to deliberately hold back hurtful things to throw at people’s faces in an argument, either, and I was pretty off on that one.”

                “Oh, you mean like you’re doing now?”

                “I’ll, uh, I’ll go call Osborn.” Rhodes said, standing up. “I’ve had a few dealings with him on contracts lately. I’ll make out we’re worried Penny’s been kidnapped and his kid could be targeted too or something.”

                “You’ve been giving contracts to Osborn? Traitor.”

                “Well, since somebody stopped making us guns we haven’t had a lot of choice.” Rhodes pushed Tony’s complaints aside and stepped into the other room to make the call. Tony and Stevie were left in awkward, frosty silence.

                “You two seemed to be getting on.”  Tony said, finally.

                “We were just saying hello, Tony.”

                “Oh? I’m sorry, I must have got confused because normally when people say hello I don’t drown in pheromones.”

                “In what?”

                “What is it about him? Does he remind you of my dear old dad, too?”

                Stevie looked furious, but replied very calmly. “Yes, a little. You’re right. Maybe I should go and sleep with him because I’m upset.”

                “Look, I am not the one in the wrong here.”

                “Oh, aren’t you?”

                “You turned me down. And anyway, you never told me you were married to my dad!”

                “And you never told me I’d lost his child!”

                Tony didn’t get chance to answer because Rhodes returned just then, announcing that Penny was not at Osborn’s. This did not give Tony as much pleasure as he expected. It essentially meant they were back to square one. But at least it had killed the last of him and Stevie arguing in circles.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                It was starting to get dark, and any moment now they would be shutting and locking the gates for the night. She had to decide where to go, Penny knew. As much as she had loved her Uncle, she had no desire to spend the night in a graveyard.

                That was where she had ended up, of course. She could no longer speak to her Dad or Stevie, and her aunt wouldn’t have understood even if she had been nearby. So, after leaving home that morning, Penny had gone to her Uncle’s grave. The grounds of the cemetery were well cared for and hadn’t needed any work doing, but she had cleaned the headstone as best she could with her sleeve and her breath.  She tried talking to him a little- she desperately wanted to talk to him- but felt foolish; and too sad that he couldn’t reply. The rest of the day she had sat on a bench nearby, and thought about everything, and tried to decide what to do. After a while she was hungry, and thirsty, but had no idea where she could go that her Dad wouldn’t find her. At least it wasn’t cold as she sat there and worried. She didn’t want to go home, but she didn’t want to end up in care, and she had no idea how to avoid the authorities. She probably should have planned this better.

                Just to make the final proof of how bad she was at the business of running away, she didn’t even notice Stevie until the woman was standing in front of her. She got up, tried to leave, but a firm hand on her arm prevented her. Penny looked up, and found her fears confirmed. Stevie looked altogether angry. This was not good.

                “What are you playing at, Penny?” She demanded. “Do you have any idea how worried your father and I have been?!”

                “I…” Her reasons for going, which had seemed so important, so unavoidable, just moments before, seemed to dissolve away in an instant. “I… I’m sorry.”

                “I’m going to need a bit more than that, Penny.”

                “I’m sorry… I’m sorry, I just got mad and… a-and, um, if, if you’re helping Dad, does that mean… um, um, h-have you made up?”

                “No.” Stevie said. “But I’d hope you would have realised you’re more important than any fight we’re having.” She sighed, her anger lessening as she sat down next to Penny. “Is that why you ran away?”

                “Maybe.” Hearing they were still fighting in spite of everything made her petulant again. “I thought I’d leave before you could.”

                “What?”

                Suddenly, all the feelings came back, exploding through the cracks. “People always leave me! They say they care and then they disappear! And now just because Dad’s been stupid you’re going to leave too! But you’re just as stupid as him! You like him and he likes you and you won’t be together because you’re both too busy being stubborn idiots!”

                “Penelope, take that back.”

                “No! I won’t! It’s true! You’re being so stupid, Stevie!”

                “And you’re being a child!” Her tone of voice was enough to silence Penny immediately. “I’m sorry you’re upset, Penny, but that is no excuse for being so utterly selfish!”

                “You’re being selfish! You and Dad!”

                “Why? Because we won’t date just to keep you happy?”

                “I…” Penny couldn’t answer that. It was true.

                “I was frozen for seventy years, Penny, have you ever really thought about that? Everyone I ever knew- not just my friends, or my family, or loved ones, everyone I ever met- is dead or dying. Everyone I was ever at school with, everyone I worked with, everyone I liked or disliked, everyone who ever served me in a store, everyone I ever sat next to once on a train, every single one. You aren’t the only one who knows how it feels to be alone.”

                “I know, I’m sorry. But… you have Dad. And me.”

                “Yes.” Stevie agreed. “And that’s made more difference than I think either of you know. But I needed some time, Penny, I needed some time to get over that. I was married, two weeks before I went under. To your grandfather.”

                “What? I… I didn’t know…”

                “No, neither did your father. Neither did anyone. I’ve only just told your dad, and I only told him because… because he told me there was evidence I was pregnant. Before I went under.”

                “B-but… is… is the baby okay?”

                “No, Penny, it would have died the moment I hit the water. They did tests; it’s gone.”

                “Oh… Stevie, I… I’m really sorry.”

                “Me too.” Stevie looked like she wanted to stop there, but forced herself to press on with the topic at hand. “You need to understand, Penelope, that love and relationships isn’t like in the movies. Even if your Dad and I did like each other- and honestly, the jury is out on that one at the moment- he wouldn’t necessarily want to date his father’s widow.”

                “…What about you?”

                “What about me?”

                “Do… do you want to date him?”

                Stevie sighed deeply. “I’m not his biggest fan right now, Penny. And… this has just brought back everything I thought I was over. I think if I’m going to start again, I need to do it properly. A totally fresh start. No more Starks.”

                “So you are leaving.” Penny looked away, knowing she was going to cry, and she so desperately didn’t want to cry.

                “I don’t know. It might be time I found my own place again. But, Penny, do you understand now? You can’t try to force two people together just because that’s what you want. You’ve been acting selfishly, okay?”

                “O-okay.” It was too late. She was crying. She didn’t want Stevie to leave, she wanted so badly for her to stay- and she felt awful, felt guilty and ashamed for pressuring them- and, still, in spite of everything, she was still convinced that they liked each other and should be together, but knew that it wasn’t going to work out. She couldn’t help crying.

                Stevie finally relented and pulled her into a hug, soothing her as she tried to contact Tony. A few moments later the Iron Man armour crashed down in front of them and Penny was in more trouble than she’d ever been in her whole life.

                Tony thanked Stevie for finding her, and after that, they barely said two words to one another. Instead, Stevie talked to Rhodes the whole way home.

 

Chapter Text

Chapter Eight

 

August 2012

 

                Things had settled into an uneasy equilibrium. Stevie had begun looking for another apartment, away from the tower, but by an unspoken agreement they were trying to let this upset Penny as little as possible. Goodness only knew that Penny needed some stability in her life and so,  although she avoided Tony as much as she could, Stevie still had regular contact with his daughter. Sometimes, this made Tony mad. Stevie had no claim to Penny at all, not really, and sometimes he found himself resenting the care and attention she gave the kid. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything, of course, not when she seemed to be all Penny had. And, he was bitterly aware, she was really her step-Grandmother or something. And so, he just did his best to be out or in the lab whenever Penny had Stevie over, and made sure he was civil whenever they had the misfortune of meeting. It was awkward, but they managed.

                But he did miss her. That seemed like an irony if ever there was one. Part of the reason she was mad was because she thought he didn’t really care about her more than a one night stand; and her being so angry was making him realise that he did, in fact, care about her a lot more than that.

                Still, it didn’t excuse her not telling him about his Dad, and, he suspected, it wouldn’t make up for him not telling her about the pregnancy. He didn’t know what he could do to make it right, or if it even could be made right. So, he decided to leave it alone. If she was going to be like this, he didn’t need her anyway.

                He especially didn’t need to come home and find her standing in the middle of his apartment all dressed to the nines and then find out it wasn’t for him.

                “Penny, I haven’t worn shoes like this since 1943. I’m not going to be able to walk.” She said, demonstrating her apparent inability to walk, which, incidentally, was still full of grace. Tony didn’t know where she had gotten the dress, but damn, it suited her. It suited her far too well, considering he wanted to be angry with her.

                “But you have to wear heels, it won’t look right otherwise.” Penny protested. Tony cleared his throat and the two of them looked up, startled.

                “What’s going on?” He asked, trying to sound casual.

                “Oh…” Penny shifted guiltily. “Pepper lent Stevie some dresses. We were just trying them.”

                “Oh.” Tony looked at Stevie again. “Well, it looks good. Better than it did on her, probably. But Penny’s right, you need to keep the shoes.”

                “Alright.” Stevie said, awkward. “Thank you. I’ll just go and change.”

                “Don’t rush on my account. I’m going downstairs anyway.” Curiosity getting the better of him, however, he had to ask. “So what’s the occasion?”

                “Um, Help for Heroes is having their black tie gala tomorrow. They help veterans and their families.  It… seemed like a good cause to support.”

                “Oh.” That was familiar. He was almost sure he had made an appearance at such a thing several times before. “I think I’m going to that. Jarvis, am I going to that?”

                “Yes, sir.”

                “Oh. Do I have a plus one?”

                “No, sir. In previous years you’ve just had Mr Hogun accompany you, as he seems to enjoy it.”

                “Oh, well, I’m sure he won’t mind a year off.” Tony turned back to Stevie. “Seeing as we’re both going to the same place, maybe we could, you know, go together.”

                It didn’t even feel like he was asking for a date. It felt like he was offering an olive branch. Unfortunately, it was about to snap beneath him.

                “Oh… I’m sorry, but I’m actually only going as someone else’s plus one. Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes invited me.”

                There were quite a lot of things Tony wanted to say just then, and quite a lot of things he wanted to call Rhodey up and yell about over the phone, but for once in his life he decided to behave like an adult. Making a fuss would only do more harm than good.

                “Oh.” He said. “Okay, no problem. Have fun. But if you’re going with Rhodes, you should wear a shorter skirt.”

                “What?”

                “He’s a leg man. So you should find a shorter dress. If you’re dressing for him, I mean.”

                “No, I think I still like this one.” She answered. “But thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.”

                “No problem.”

                “I’ll just go and change, Penny.”

                The moment she had safely disappeared into the bathroom, Penny got up from the settee and came over to hug her dad. Tony patted her back, awkwardly.

                “Okay, okay, enough, I’m fine.”

                “I’m sorry.” Penny said, sounding miserable. “She wanted my opinions on the dress and I didn’t see how I could say no, with everything she said about me trying to…” She trailed off, still in some ways unwilling to admit how she had attempted to push them together. She sighed instead, and rested her head on Tony’s chest, not letting go even as he tried to pull gently away. Clearly she thought he needed comforting. “But I’m proud of you, Dad. For helping out with the dress for Uncle Rhodes and, and everything.”

                “Oh. Yeah. Go me.”

                The truth was, he’d made up Rhodes’ supposed interest in legs. Actually, he was just interested in seeing them himself. But there was no reason to think that Rhodes wouldn’t like to see them too; and definitely no need to tell Penny he’d been doing anything but helping out a friend.

               Some friend, he thought bitterly, but knew it wasn’t really his fault. After all, he hadn’t known about him and Stevie. No, Tony blamed the woman herself; who was apparently going to date someone else because she was mad about him dating someone else. The double standard was so big his ego was dwarfed in comparison, and he had a lot to be vain about.

                He didn’t say anything untoward as Stevie left, of course. There was no point damaging the image of noble self-sacrifice Penny was apparently cultivating. But, at the gala, so far as he was concerned, it would be a free fight.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                All things considered, Tony thought he had behaved himself pretty well. At least, he hadn’t caused a major public scene, nothing scandalous for the next day’s newspapers- at least, not that would involve Stevie and Rhodes; nothing that would tell the world of their hypocrisy and betrayal. He had yet to decide which word was the more appropriate one.

                It had helped, of course, that he had been given so few opportunities to make a scene. Given his policy to never be on time to anything, he had entirely missed the pre-drinks and rolled up just in time for the meal, where he had been seated on the opposite side of the room to the budding new couple. Well, of course he was. He had donated a ton of money to be there, he was on the VIP table. Rhodes was there on a ticket bought by the Army, probably, to be there as their representative. And he was certainly making waves, there with Captain America on his arm. Everyone wanted a piece of them.

                Stevie, of course, looked stunning. It was hard for her not to, she had been scientifically altered to have a perfect physique; even if it did make her muscles a little too defined, her shoulders too broad. The dress was well cut, only a well trained eye could pick out the imperfections that showed it had been made for Pepper, not her. Her hair was well cut too, finally looking slightly modern. She had updated her hair style from the pins-and-wizardry that usually held it in place for Rhodes. That had hurt. Even seeing her hair finally loose didn’t really make up for it, so far as Tony was concerned. They didn’t seem to care that they were seated miles away from him at dinner. Rhodes nodded to him once and that was it. Stevie hadn’t even seemed to notice him, too busy talking to Rhodes and the other undoubtedly fascinating people they were sitting with. Tony had got through the meal in a bad temper, being unusually loud and boisterous even for him.  People thought he was the life and soul and Stevie didn’t even glance in his direction.

                That was suspicious. As the wine flowed, Tony became convinced she was not looking at him deliberately. So he got even louder, had even more obvious fun. He wasn’t going to let her put a dampner on his evening.

                He was behaving like a jealous brat, he knew, and he knew this was probably not being helped by the amount he was drinking. But he carried on drinking anyway, because he was there alone and he didn’t owe anyone anything.

                After dinner there was dancing. That was where she really twisted the knife, and shocked him beyond what he could make a fuss about. He wasn’t rude about it. He let her dance with Rhodes- he let her dance with Rhodes twice- before he even thought about going over there. Then he let her go another two dances with random guys, both looking thrilled to be dancing with a celebrity, just so he didn’t look desperate. He saw her return to Rhodes, who then disappeared off; probably getting them drinks. Perfect. He sauntered over there and asked her, quite casually, if she fancied a dance.

                “I don’t think so.” She said, quietly, firmly. Exasperated- even offended- that he’d even asked.

                Insulted, Tony had turned and walked away without another word. So far as he was concerned, that was it. He’d tried to play nice, but if that was how she was going to be he wouldn’t bother again. There were plenty of people who wanted to dance with him, plenty of people who wanted to party with Tony Stark.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Honestly, everything between asking Stevie to dance and the current moment was a little hazy, but now he was trapped in an elevator in Stark Tower, in the dark, alone with her. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen. His back-ups had back-ups, he hadn’t even known the elevator could fail. In fact, as he slowly sobered up, he began to suspect that this was sabotage. However, for the moment, he kept that idea to himself. Much more pressing was the irate super soldier leaning furiously against the wall. He hadn’t known it was possible to lean furiously, but somehow, Stevie was pulling it off.

                “If you have something to say…” He said eventually, trying to make it sound like a lazy, uncaring drawl. She didn’t even straighten up.

                “I’m not giving you the satisfaction.” She replied bluntly. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. You’re behaving like a child.”

                “What?” Suddenly he understood what she meant. “Wait, you think I did this? This is nothing to do with me.”

                “Stark elevators,” She said “Don’t just fail.”

                “Well, I’m flattered you think so, but apparently they do.”

                She snorted. For someone who had once gone hungry at every movie night because she thought it would be unladylike to eat any more, she didn’t seem bothered about it now. He missed those movie nights.

                “Look, seriously, this wasn’t me.”

                “Then why were you so eager to get me in here?”

                Tony opened his mouth to object, but realised he didn’t really have any basis to deny it. He had seen her and Rhodes leaving and scrambled after them. He had gotten out of his car just as they did, and rather drunkenly told Rhodes he would take it from here, forcing Stevie along with him. There was no point in denying it.

                “Like you couldn’t have shaken me off if you’d wanted to.” He replied. “You can lift a truck, I can barely lift a soldering iron.”

                “I was embarrassed, Tony.”

                “Of your strength? I’m pretty sure he knows what you can do. Everyone knows.”

                “No, embarrassed by your behaviour.”

                Tony laughed dismissively. “Right. Sorry, grandma.”

                “It was immature, spiteful-”

                “Right, but given that you married my dad, I’m guessing you like that kind of thing.”

                Her lips pursed at that. She was finally losing her temper. “Don’t talk about him like that. Have some respect.”

                “Respect for what? He was a mean, childish alcoholic who hated everything and everyone but himself. He was spiteful-”

                “Your father was many things, but he was not spiteful.” Stevie snapped. “He could be petulant, but he would never do this.”

                “I keep telling you, this is nothing to do with me.” She clearly didn’t believe him, so Tony gave up. “Look, maybe the person you knew was just that different from the one I did. Maybe your disappearance just messed him up that much. I don’t think he ever really stopped looking, he was always going-”

                “Don’t.” She said. “I’m sorry, but please don’t. It just makes it worse. I keep thinking about what could have happened, if I’d been able to stay…”

                “It wouldn’t have lasted.” Tony said. He’d been thinking about this too. “I mean, do you really think you could have been happy with him after he left Japan as a smoking crater?”

                “You weren’t there.” She answered. “You don’t know what it was like, that war, how desperate we were. People were bound to make mistakes-”

                “Pretty big mistake, Stevie.”

                “If he’d really understood how much damage it could do, he would never have-”

                “If that helps you sleep better at night, then think what you want.” Tony shrugged. “But we both know that isn’t true. All he ever wanted was to prove what he could do, regardless of who got in his way. And even if you did somehow forgive him for that, you can’t tell me you would have been happy; not with him, not as Captain America. The whole sentinel of liberty thing would’ve worn pretty thin, don’t you think?”

                She remained silent.

                “But even if you’d given up being Cap, what then? You wouldn’t ever have been happy as, what, my dad’s perfect little wife? No way.”

                “You don’t know that.”

                “Yes, I do, and so do you. You might have liked the idea of the whole house and kids thing, Stevie, but if you actually had it you’d get itchy feet within a month. You want to be Captain America. Anyone can see that, I saw it when we took down that gang. I just don’t get this whole self-denial thing.”

                “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter what I want, given that I apparently can’t have children.” She snapped. “You must be very happy for me.”

                “Don’t be stupid.” He answered, trying not to rise to the bait. “And you don’t know that’s true.  You just had a miscarriage. We have treatments, now-”

                “Just had a miscarriage?”

                “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m still half-drunk!”

                “Oh, well, of course that excuses everything.” Her eyebrows were retreating further and further up her forehead, simultaneously annoying and attracting him. If she could just behave like a normal person for five minutes they’d be using this time to make out, not argue.

                He’d had enough. She was just finding any reason to pick a fight.  “You know what? I’m done humouring this pity party. You said you were over my dad, you said that was why you liked me now!” It sounded childish, even to him. “You didn’t even know you were pregnant. You can’t be that upset about that, you’re just upset I slept with that girl!”

                “Anything else?” She asked, coldly.

                 “Okay, fine, seeing as you asked- don’t you think it’s a bit damn hypocritical to go off with somebody else when you’re mad at me for the exact same thing.”

                “Oh wow, now that you mention it, I suppose it is.” She rolled her eyes. “Because going on one dinner date with a nice guy weeks after arguing with the jerk who broke your heart is the exact same thing as telling someone you love them and then going off to sleep with someone else!”

                “Stop being so dramatic!”

                She gave him a withering look. “Well, that’s just the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?” She sighed. “Tony, we aren’t dating. We were never dating. Would you mind telling me what it is you’re actually mad about? Because we just seem to be touching on a hundred different things at once!”

                “Well, maybe I’m mad about a hundred different things.” He knew he was being petulant, but didn’t feel the slightest bit of guilt over it. There was a time and a place for being petulant, and this was it.

                “So you’re angry that I went on a date with Rhodes. And that I was married to your father, and that I didn’t tell you that I was married to your father. And, for some reason I can’t quite work out, you seem to be mad that I’m not Captain America any more. Is that about the size of it?”

                “Yes.” He agreed, but privately he thought he was mostly just mad because she was mad.

                “Well, let me tell you why I’m mad.” She said, folding her arms.

                “I know why you’re mad; you’re mad because I slept with someone else instead of you.”

                She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Contrary to what you might think, Tony, not everything is about your sex life.”

                “So you’re not mad I slept with that girl? Because you’ve sure been acting like it.”

                “I was hurt.” She said. “But I would have gotten over it, Tony. I’m more upset you kept the pregnancy from me-”

                “I didn’t want to hurt you!”

                “But you did want to hurt me! You saved it up, held it back, so you could unleash it the moment it would hurt the most!”

                “That wasn’t on purpose!”

                “And then, just as we’re starting to be okay again, you’ve been awful to Rhodes tonight. I mean it. You’ve been drunk and inconsiderate and asking me to dance when you could barely stand-”

                “I was-”

                “-And then you drag me in here and slam the door in the face of your oldest friend!”

                “And yet, you still love me.” Tony said, not without a hint of bitterness. If she agreed, it was a victory.  And if she denied it, well, at least that was that question settled.

                “I wish I didn’t, Tony.” She replied with a sigh. “I really wish I didn’t.”

                 She sounded disappointed. He’d been wrong. It didn’t feel like a victory after all. They stood in the dark in silence for a moment.

                “Are you going to see him again?” Tony asked, at last.

                “Yes.”

                “But you don’t-” He protested.

                “He’s kind. He’s reliable. I enjoy spending time with him.” She said, bluntly. “That’s three good reasons straight off, and none of which, currently, apply to you.”

                “You enjoy spending time with me.” Tony said, finding it impossible not to sound like he was whining. “And I can be kind and, and that other thing. Reliable.”

                “You’ve trapped me in an elevator out of spite.”

                “I told you, that wasn’t me!”

                “Please don’t lie to me, Tony. Not on top of everything else.”

                Suddenly, abruptly, the lights came back on and the lift began to move.

                “Apologies, sir.” Jarvis said, and that was all he said. It would only take a few seconds for Stevie to reach her floor. It was his last chance. Stevie seemed to realise it too, because she said, not without a hint of guilt:

                “Rhodes is coming over tomorrow. I found a place. He’s helping me move.”

                “You… you don’t have to go.”

                “Yes, I do.”

                The lift pinged for Stevie’s floor. She turned towards the opening door.

                Tony was desperate now, too desperate and drunk to have the slightest shred of pride left. Even if he had to beg. “Don’t see him again.” He said, grabbing hold of her.

                “Don’t be so selfish.” She answered, pulling her arm free.

                “I mean it, don’t see him again.”

                “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

                “Yeah.” He said. The elevator doors tried to close between them, but he rested a hand on the frame to stop it. “Yeah. That’s why the world needs you to be Cap again, Stevie, because right now, I’m all they have. Some hero, I’m just some show off in a fancy suit. They need you. I need you.”

                “Tony, I’m not even sure what you’re talking about any more. Is this about Captain America, or is it about-”

                “Us.” He said, and stepped out of the elevator to kiss her.

                She pushed him off gently at first, but he didn’t have anything left to lose, so he kissed her again. She loved him. She wanted this as much as he did. If he could just kiss her, everything would be okay.

                Except, of course, it wasn’t. A few seconds later and the door to her apartment was slammed and locked, leaving him with only the memory of the disgusted expression she’d given him, a black eye, a sore head and the slight, lingering taste of sugar. She must have had fun trying all the fancy desserts.

                She should have been at that party with him. If she was moving, it should only be to move in upstairs, with him and Penny, where she belonged.

                But then, the black eye and the bumped head suggested that perhaps she thought differently.

                Tony sat against the closed elevator doors for some time, before finally returning to his floor. One more thing, and then he could sleep and end this awful day.  

                Penny was probably expecting him to come in angry and knowing exactly what she had done, but Tony chose a different response. He ran out of the elevator, doing his best to look panicked, yelling for Penny and running into her room. She was already on her feet in alarm as he came in.

                “Penny.” He said, hugging her. He hardly ever hugged her. Usually only on her birthday. “You’re okay? Are you alright?”

                “I’m fine. What is it? What’s happening?”

                “I need to shut down Jarvis.” He said, heading for the lab.

                “What?!” She trailed after him, going pale. “No! Why?”

                “He was hacked; he just trapped me and Stevie in one of the elevators for like half an hour.”

                “M-maybe it was just a fault. Don’t delete him, you can fix him!”

                “I don’t know what caused it, Penny. I can’t risk someone else being in the system. I have to scrub him and start over.”

                “But he’s your friend.” She said, upset. Then, as he’d predicted, she broke. “I did it.”

                “Oh, see, I considered that, but then I decided it couldn’t have been because I specifically told you not to mess around with Jarvis!”

                This was true. It was the only time he had ever grounded her, the only rule he had ever attempted to impose. She must have known he was serious. She shifted a little guiltily.

                “I just… Uncle Rhodes had her all night! I just wanted you to have a chance. I wanted it to be fair.”

                “She’s not some toy we can just pass around, Penny.” He said, somewhat sourly. “And you can see how great your little trapped-in-an-elevator stunt worked.” He pointed to his black eye. “All you’ve done is interfere and make everything worse.  I hope you’re happy.”

                “I was just trying to help!”

                “Well, you missed the ball on that one, Pen-pen.” He said, not in the mood to humour. “Urrgh, forget it, just go to bed. And you’re grounded.”

                “Fine, that’s the last time I try to fix your screw ups! Ground me for as long as you want, it’s not like I ever go anywhere anyway!”

                That much was true.

                “Fine, then you’re, like, reverse grounded.”

                “Reverse grounded?”

                “Yep. Your room is off limits 10AM to 6PM.”

                “What?! What am I supposed to do all day?!”

                “I don’t know. Go out. Have fun. Do whatever normal kids do. Make friends.”

                “I was only trying to help you!”

                “Good.” He said, turning his back on her. “Because I’m only trying to help you. It’s about time you got a social life.”

                He couldn’t see Penny’s face, but he could tell she was hurt because she left without another word. It didn’t matter. She deserved to be punished, and if she was finally forced to make friends, so much the better. It was for her own good.

                And this way, she wouldn’t be around to mope as Stevie moved out the next day.

Chapter Text

Chapter Nine

 

August 2012

 

                Reverse grounding had turned out to be a truly excellent idea, Tony had to congratulate himself. Maybe he would write a book or something, because he had this single father thing down.  In the last couple of weeks since he had forced her to spend time away from home, Penelope’s confidence had soared. She seemed healthier and more co-ordinated than she had ever been. Maybe Tony’s nanny all those years ago had been right after all, and fresh air was good for kids. Whatever it was, it seemed to be doing Penny good. She had hardly moped at all when Stevie had finally moved out from downstairs and gotten out of their hair.

                Of course, she was also kind of jumpy and definitely cagey about what she was doing all day. She was a horrible liar, but Tony didn’t call her up on it. Honestly, he was sort of proud she was trying. Besides, he was pretty sure that she wasn’t shooting up or sniffing glue or whatever kids did these days when they wanted to get high. She was probably, he thought, seeing a boy. That or she was visiting Stevie on the sly.

                Tony hadn’t had any contact with Stevie since she had moved out, but it was okay because neither had Rhodes. Apparently she had broken things off with him when he came to help her move, and Rhodes, being the gentleman he was, had helped her to move anyway, agreed to stay friends, and then spent the rest of the evening sending increasingly abusive messages to Tony, which meant Stevie must have sent Rhodes packing because she still wanted to see him. So all he had to do now was wait. There was no way he was making the first move. Anyway, he had other things to focus on. He screwed in the last of the joints and headed for the surface.

                “Ready, Pen?”

                “Yes.”

                “Try to sound a bit more enthusiastic there, sweetie, this is kind of a huge deal. We’re going off the grid. Stark Tower is going to be running completely on green energy.”

                “I know Dad, and it’s great, really. It’s just not much of a birthday present.”

                Tony rolled his eyes at that. He did not like Penelope being thirteen, he’d already decided on that much. “It’s not my fault you said no to the pony. Anyway, a lot of people would kill to be the one to press that switch. You’re about to make history, Pen-Pen.”

                “Whoo.” She said, with all the sarcasm a teenage soul could muster.

                “Don’t be like that. Come on, light her up.”

                “Alright.” Probably in spite of herself, a note of excitement crept into her voice then. However much she wanted to punish her Dad for ignoring her birthday, she couldn’t quite ignore the call of science. A girl after his own heart.

                The arc reactor worked perfectly, of course, lighting up the tower- and his name- in letters high enough for the whole city to see. And, underneath, on the temporary display he’d had rigged up over the windows of the top twelve floors, a little additional message.

                “How does it look?” Penelope asked.

                “Awesome. Pull up the security feed and take a look.” He waited, listening to the click of keys as she did so. No matter how many times he told her about his revolutionary virtual interfaces, he could not seem to wean her off a physical keyboard. Then he heard her give a little squeak of excitement.

                “Dad, what did you do?!”

                “Hey, my little girl is thirteen. I wasn’t going to ignore that.”

                Indeed he wasn’t. Beneath his name was the message ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY PENLOPE- (PRESENT THIS WAY)’ and an arrow pointing upwards.

                “Is my present on the roof?” She asked, all excited now.

                “Yep.” Tony said, diverting more power to the suit’s thrusters. “Come on, I’ll meet you there.”

                “Okay. Thanks Dad!” She sounded happy. But then she had to go and ruin it. “Wait, did you spell my name wrong?”

                “It was a tactical decision.”

                “You tactically decided to spell my name wrong?”

                “It’s a ninety-three storey skyscraper, honey. I only had so much room. I figured you didn’t need that many Es.”

                “You ran out of room. On your ninety-three storey skyscraper.”

                “Yes. Why are you kids never happy?”

                She laughed. “I am happy. Thanks, Dad.”

                “No problem, kid. Now come on, I’m almost there.”

                “Okay.” She terminated the radio connection and, presumably, scurried off. Tony did one more lap of the tower- it really did look fabulous- and came into land just as Penelope came out, waving to him as his landing pad dismantled the armour.

                “Well? What do you think?” Unable to resist a touch of the theatrics, Tony spread his arms in an expansive gesture. Penelope looking around; amused, but baffled.

                “I don’t see anything.” She said.

                “Really?” Tony took her by the shoulders, steering her towards the edge of the roof, where the platform came out furthest above the city.  He pointed into the sky. “How about up there? What do you see?”

                “I see clouds.”

                “Yeah. Okay, but… pretend for a second that the meteorologists actually get it right sometimes, and that it’s a clear night. Then what do you see?”

                “Am I accounting for light pollution?” She said, so straight faced he had no idea if she was joking or not.

                “Penny, come on, I’m trying to be awesome here.”

                “I’d see stars.” She said, obediently.

                “Right. That’s your present.”

                “Imaginary stars?” She was not impressed.

                “No.” He gestured towards the floor, where there were several marks in builder’s chalk scattered about. “I’m putting you a little observatory in up here. There’s blue prints downstairs, I want you to look them over before any of the work gets started. Oh, and designs for a telescope, but it’s not really my area of expertise so you can check those too. Now, tell me I’m not awesome.”

                “That is awesome.” She admitted, giving him a quick hug. “Are you sure it’s not too much? Aunt May just got me some books.”

                “Would you have preferred books?”

                “No, I didn’t mean it like that!”

                “Oh? Because you’re kind of acting like that.” Tony didn’t understand it. He knew she liked stargazing. She’d told him herself, she’d been spending a lot of time at the planetarium since he reverse grounded her. Okay, so with everything else going on he hadn’t had time to do more than draw up the plans, but you’d think she’d at least be a little grateful. He was so done with kids.

                “Dad, it’s great, really.” She assured him, and started asking him questions nineteen to the dozen about the exact specifications of what he had in mind, until he felt better. After all, until she was ten, she had grown up in a much poorer family. Perhaps she just wasn’t used to all this yet. Before they got to the end of the discussion, however, Jarvis interrupted.

                “Excuse me, Sir, Agent Coulson is here.”

                “Did he bring birthday cake?”

                “No Sir, he says it’s business.”

                “Then tell him no. We’re having a party, here.”

                “We are?” Penny looked slightly queasy, glancing around the room as if hundreds of party guests were going to spring out and surprise her. Her confidence may have been growing, but clearly it wasn’t there yet. Tony rolled his eyes.

                “I’m afraid he’s insisting, Sir.” Jarvis said, his words punctuated by Coulson’s appearance from the lift.

                “Mr Stark,” he started.

                “Hey Coulson.” Tony said. “I hope you at least brought a present.”

                “Sorry, not this time. Business only.” He said, smiling briefly at Penny. “Happy birthday.”

                “Thanks.” Penny said. “I’ll go wait in my room.”

                “No, stay.” Tony said. “I’m not going anywhere.” He eyed the tablet in Coulson’s arms rather warily. He’d consulted for Shield more than once before and knew he never liked what was in those electronic files.

                “We need you in on this.”

                “It’s my kid’s birthday, come on.” Tony tried. “She’s thirteen.”

                “And if you want her to see fourteen, you should probably take a look.”

                “That bad?”

                “The end of the world as we know it.” Coulson agreed, mildly. “The Captain’s on board. She’s already out on an advance mission in Germany.”

                “Who? Danvers? I thought you’d farmed her out to Sword.”

                “No, not Major Danvers. The Captain. Captain Rogers, Captain America. I thought you two were…”

                “Is she in trouble?” Penny demanded. Coulson gave her another reassuring smile, leaving Tony to wonder- and not for the first time- why such an affable man had ever ended up signing on for Shield, he got on with everyone. Then again, something in the way he held himself meant Tony had no problem imagining him shooting down a hostile. Best to stay on his good side, all the same.

                “I’m sure she can handle it. We have agents there on back up.”

                “Dad, you have to go help her.” Penny said, and that was that. He was in, whether he liked it or not. He couldn’t say no to Penelope, after all, not when it was her birthday.

               

                  

                OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Stevie was not pleased to see him. Oh, she behaved professionally enough until they had Loki safely in the back of the jet, but then she proceeded to try and ignore him. It was refreshingly childish.

                “So, I see Coulson got you back into the uniform. Funny, I always thought he’d be trying to get you out of it.” She shot him a withering glare. “What? He’s a fan.”

                “They didn’t tell me you were going to be here, Stark.”

                “I guess I’m just a lovely surprise. Just like when you woke up, huh? Sorry Dad couldn’t make it.”

                “Me too.”

                “Seriously, though, glad to see the uniform’s back. It’s a good look for you. Bet Dad loved it. Did you ever, you know, with the suit?”

                “Yes.” Stevie answered, trying to turn his jibe against him. From behind them, Loki snorted, amused.  “Problem?”

                “Oh, don’t mind me.” Loki smirked. “Carry on. I live for your tiny domestic dramas. I had no idea I would be so warmly received; there was no need to lay on entertainment.”

                “Listen-” Tony began, but Stevie grabbed his arm, pulling him up towards the cockpit.

                “I don’t like this.” She said, in a low voice.

                “What, American Dream Barbie giving up so easily?”

                “I don’t remember it being that easy.” She snapped. “This guy packs a punch. Don’t underestimate him.”

                “Or maybe it’s just because you were all over the place.” Tony replied. “Admit it, Cap, you’ve got rusty.”

                “Oh, so after all that time bugging me to be Captain America again, now I’m trying you’re just going to criticise.”

                “Constructively. Why can’t you just stick to muggers, street crime, whatever? Leave the supervillains to the younger heroes.”

                “You know, for some reason, Fury didn’t tell me he was bringing you in.”

                “Yeah, there’s a lot of things Fury doesn’t tell you.”

                Stevie might have replied, but her words were lost under a sudden roll of thunder, and then there wasn’t much time for saying anything.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                As first impressions went, Tony did not have a particularly good one of Thor. Not because of the whole trying-to-kill-him-with-an-electric-hammer thing; such occasions were fairly standard in Tony’s life these days. He was more annoyed at the sheer rudeness of it. Thor had just strolled in and stolen their prisoner without so much as a word of explanation, no monologue, nothing. And now, to make things worse, on the journey back to base, he and Stevie were, well, the only word to describe it would be bonding.

                “Your shield is very mighty.” Thor was saying, folding his (extremely muscular and manly) arms. “There is not much armour in the nine realms capable of withstanding a blow from Mjolnir, nor many warriors able to stand up to its strength.”

                “Well, it wasn’t easy.” Stevie said, all friendliness now. “But your use of that hammer was incredible. To have that much control when the handle is so short-”

                “Mjolnir was forged by expert dwarf craftsmen to be the most perfect weapon. It can break any material- excepting your shield, it seems- it never misses when thrown, and it always returns faithfully.” Thor’s (enormous) chest seemed to swell with pride, then, just as suddenly, deflated a little. “The length of the fore-haft was caused by mischief, not design. Loki had a bet that he stood to lose, should the hammer be perfect- but he lost anyway. Mjolnir has never failed me and will only stand to be wielded by the worthy. That, more than anything, keeps me true and tells me if I have strayed.”

                “It sounds like quite the weapon.” Stevie answered.

                “Yep, I bet the ladies love his weapon.” Tony muttered, loud enough for them both to hear. He knew it was petty, but he had to do something- just being in the same room as Thor felt like a challenge to his masculinity. He was essentially stuck in a small room with two living legends, ancient and modern, and was being forced to watch them becoming bffs. Even if Stevie was glaring at him, at least it was acknowledgement.

                “Your lady is a great warrior.” Thor remarked to him later.

                “She isn’t my anything.” Tony replied, sulkily. Thor looked surprised, but then smiled, squeezing his shoulder.

                “Perhaps, but I suspect you are something to her. “

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Considering how reluctant she had been to get back into uniform, now she was Captain America again Stevie had settled into the role rather well, bossing everyone about and blindly obeying Fury. She couldn’t see what was right in front of her eyes. Tony couldn’t help being frustrated.

                “Stevie, you’re being moronic.”

                “Fury knows what he’s doing.”

                “I’m sure he does, but we don’t know what he’s doing. Don’t be stupid.”

                “It’s called trusting your superiors.”

               “Yeah? And I’m sure my Dad and a lot of others like him trusted his superiors not to drop an atom bomb on civilians. How much trust do you want to put in a super secret organisation of spies, Stevie? Dishonesty is sort of their thing.”

                “It’s an organisation your father and Peggy Carter started-”

                “That means it was untrustworthy from the beginning and you know it.”

                “Why do you have to bring Howard into everything?! I keep telling you that’s behind me!”

                “Because sometimes it feels like it’s the only thing you’ll listen to!” Tony turned, appealing to the only other person on the entire helicarrier that seemed to have any sense. “Banner, tell her.”

                Bruce threw up his hands defensively. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I don’t want to get involved.”

                “Nothing is going on.” Stevie dismissed, brutally. “What do you think about the mission?”

                “…Captain, you can’t honestly tell me none of this seems suspicious to you.”

                And after that, she went off and investigated. She would listen to Bruce.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Losing Coulson was hard. Harder than Tony expected- they had been friendly acquaintances, sure, maybe even friends on the rare occasions that they met socially rather than for business. It was always Coulson that acted as liaison when Shield wanted something from him. And now, all of a sudden, he was gone.

                They had let him down. For once, Fury was right on target- he had died believing in this joke of a team. As if any one of the individuals members had things together. They were falling apart on their own, without trying to stick them together. And he could never work with Stevie, not now.

                For a moment, it seemed like his death would reconcile them. She came to find him, after he walked out on Fury’s little pep rally. The perspective seemed to have changed. This was no longer chasing down a drama queen with a magic wand. People were dying. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so important to fight over a love affair she’d had seventy years ago, or the fact that she hadn’t told him about it. He let her come and put her arms around him and, for that moment, he thought everything was going to be okay between them. Then she opened her mouth and ruined everything.

                “Is this the first time you’ve lost a soldier?” She asked.

                Tony’s mind exploded into gun fire and sand and heat and confusion; to being alone in the Humvee, hearing the explosions, seeing men go down, having no idea where Rhodes was, soldiers dying, rebels dying, blood flying, waking up in a cave with a nuclear reactor hardwired into his chest made out of materials and with tools from the middle ages. He pulled away. No, this wasn’t the first time. Not his first time.

                “We aren’t soldiers.” He spat at her. “I don’t care what little fantasy you’re playing there, Stevie, but this isn’t 1945. We aren’t your little tin army, we aren’t a team, we’re a time bomb.”

                “Coulson sacrificed himself-”

                “Coulson was murdered! It’s twenty-bloody-twelve, Cap, okay? Those aren’t some Nazi storm troopers out there, those are aliens. This isn’t war, we aren’t soldiers or warriors or anything else. This is nothing humanity has ever faced before.”

                “It’s exactly what humanity has faced for the whole of its history.” She replied. “It’s an invasion, Tony, an army that wants to deprive us of everything we love. This is war, and Coulson sacrificed himself so we could fight it. He’s a hero.”

                “He was an idiot.”

                Stevie snorted. “You just don’t get it, do you? No, you’d never lie down on the barbed wire, let the other guy crawl over you. Of course not. Tony Stark doesn’t make sacrifices.”

                “Maybe because I’m smart enough to find another way out.”

                “Oh, because of course, there’s always some way out with you.”

                “Yep.” He agreed, heading for the door. “Like this one.” He went through it, going to find some corner away from her.

                That was rather good, if he did say so himself. Perhaps a touch dramatic.

                And then he realised. Loki was a drama queen, too. And if he wanted spectacle, and a power source…

                For once, there was no time for his pride. Tony turned and went back into the room. He knew where to find Loki, and Stevie was a closest thing to a leader this time bomb had.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                This was the final straw. Loki had caused untold damage, killed hundreds of innocents, murdered Coulson, taken over his tower, and now, now, to add insult to injury, he’d put up some sort of transmitter on the roof. Right over the chalk marks for the observatory. He’d put up an alien transmitter over his daughter’s birthday present. Okay, so the present wasn’t actually built yet, but enough was enough. Tony had lost patience with this long haired diva.

                But he bit his temper back. Tried the peaceful method. He wasn’t a soldier, he was Tony Stark and this was his tower, his home- he would do it his way, with as little collateral damage as possible. So, he tried to talk it out, with a little light intimidation. It was clearly working, in spite of all Loki’s posturing. He reached out with the mind control staff, just as Tony knew he would. It had to touch his heart, and it couldn’t. One more thing that would undermine Loki’s confidence.

                Unfortunately, Penny apparently did not realise this. Or Tony assumed she didn’t, given that she snatched the staff from Loki’s hands. Using some sort of sticky fluid that was shooting from her wrists. From her position on the ceiling, which she was holding onto using only her feet.

                “Penny.” Tony said, horrified. His brain seemed to be grinding to a halt. She shouldn’t be here. “You’re supposed to be reverse grounded!”

                “No I’m not, you ended it for my birthday!”

                “Penny, this is dangerous, you need to go.”

                “But-”

                “Now.”

                “I can help you, look!” She shot another blob of the glue straight at Loki, hitting him right in the face. Her aim had certainly improved since her last report card for gym class.

                “And since when can you do that?! You could have told me you were a mutant!”

                “I’m not!”

                “Sweetie, I don’t know what Stevie told you about periods, but I promise you that the sticking to walls thing is not a normal part of puberty.” He considered. “At least not according to any of the websites I went on.”

                “I’m not a mutant!” She insisted, warily watching Loki struggle with the gloop. “Technically I’m a mutagen.”

                “And since when have you been a mutagen?”

                “Um, well…” She shuffled guiltily, crab like, against the top of the wall. “You know how you reverse grounded me and I had to be out all day? I might have kind of, sort of, been hanging out with Harry a little-”

                “Not Osbourn?”

                “-and he might have taken me to look around Oscorp-”

                “You went to Oscorp?!”

                “-and, um, I might have gotten a bit lost. Well, kind of lost, sort of, accidentally on purpose lost, I guess, and there were these spiders and-”

                “You went to Oscorp?!”

                “I got bitten by a genetically modified spider and now I have powers!” Penny blurted. “Yes, I went to Oscorp, why is that the part that bothers you?! I’m sticking to the ceiling!”

                “Because you know how I feel about Oscorp! They’re our biggest rivals, Pen, if Harry’s pretending to be your friend it’s only so his dad-”

                “You’re wrong!”

They were brought back to the present rather abruptly, by Loki- having somehow removed the webbing from his face- firing a blast of magical energy that knocked Penny clean off the wall. Tony felt terror, then anger, then relief. She was hurt, but she was picking herself up. He could only be grateful it had been Loki’s own power, not the souped up blast from the staff. Enough was enough. He grabbed her arm, pulled her out towards the rings. “Suit her, J.” He commanded. “Get her out of here.”

Penny pulled herself free. “I’m not leaving you!” She said, refusing to go another step no matter how he pulled. He had to stop hanging around people with super strength. Or start hitting the gym.

“Pen, you’re just a kid, I can’t focus on what I need to do if you’re in danger-”

“And I’m not standing by while someone I love is killed! Not again!” She shouted, and suddenly it made sense. She was thinking about hiding in the kitchen cupboard while her Uncle, the only father figure she had ever known, bled to death in the next room.

He understood, but he didn’t agree. He shoved her into the rings, where Jarvis had her in an Iron Man suit in record time, blasting her away out of the city. The suit would be too big and she’d be rattled around and bruised by the time she arrived, but she would be safe.

Of course, now the child was gone, staff or no staff, Loki wasn’t holding back. Tony scrambled for a suit himself. There was work to do.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

There were many things that sucked about Tony’s current situation. One of them, though, was that Stevie was right.  Sometimes there was no way out. Sometimes, someone had to carry a nuclear bomb through a closing worm hole in order to save the world. Sometimes, that someone had to be him.

“Tony, you know that’s a one-way trip.” Stevie said, sounding desperate.

“I know.” He answered, the radio already hissing and crackling between them.

He couldn’t get through to Penny. Except for the War Machine suit, he hadn’t bothered to include a way to get calls between suits. He’d never thought there was a need. He was going to die, the day after her birthday. What a crappy thing to do; even if it was so she would live to see her next birthday. He hoped she would understand. Given how hung up she was on people dying on and/or abandoning her, he doubted it. This would be just let another loss in her short life.

He was sorry. He hoped she’d be happy. He hoped she’d forgive him. He hoped she wouldn’t marry Harry Osbourn. It was his dying moments and he could hope what he liked.

“Tony, listen, I-” Stevie said, and the rest was lost in static. It was a shame, but probably for the best. He needed to focus.

“Music to go out by, sir?” Jarvis asked, soft-spoken as ever.

“Sure, why not?” Tony replied.  He suddenly wondered if he was condemning Jarvis to death too; but worse, a kind of living death. Jarvis could run his own updates and bug sweeps and fixes; he could maintain himself for years if he had to. They wouldn’t come and dismantle his servers, would they, or leave them to gather dust? Surely Penny would go and talk to him, keep him company, do the updates and system maintenance Tony usually did. She wouldn’t let Jarvis die with him, surely not. Even if she went back to live with her aunt, she’d come home sometimes, right?

And Stevie would take care of them both. She wouldn’t let Penny go through this alone, not Howard’s precious granddaughter. And she would cope with the loss. It wouldn’t be the first time she had lost a soldier.

Jarvis was playing The Kids are Alright, by the Who.

Bells chime, I know I gotta get away; And I know if I don’t, I’ll go out of my mind; Better leave her behind with the kids, they’re alright, the kids are alright…

“You bastard.” He didn’t remember programming such a sordid sense of humour.

“A-apologies” Jarvis began, as his voice- and the audio- fell into a slur. All systems failed, the suit shut down. They were through the wormhole, in another universe.

Tony did his best to take everything in. He had to. He was a scientist, occasionally. And then he was falling.

 

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                It was so much worse from this side.

                As she watched Tony disappear, everything was mixing up in Stevie’s head, memories coming in a jumbled mess. The fear she had felt as the plane went lower. The crack in Howard’s voice- or was it a fault in the radio? Bucky falling, and Peggy telling her to respect his choice, and Tony pushing her away when they were talking about Coulson, and she had to make the call. Romanov was waiting for instruction, and the aliens were still coming through, and no matter what she would have to live with- or live without- afterwards, Stevie had to make the call for the rest of the world.

                “Close it.” She said, and for the first time in her life, really felt that she had spoken entirely as Captain America, and not at all as herself.

                She’d been too stubborn. So had Tony, but hadn’t she married a Stark? She knew how to handle their petulance. If she’d known how little time there was, maybe she wouldn’t have wasted it.

                Then she saw him, the impossible man, falling back though. He’d made it back.

                “He’s not slowing down.” Thor said, swinging Mjolnir, preparing to fly; but Stevie knew, she knew he wouldn’t reach him in time. There was nothing she could do, either, except hope that the suit would kick in. Tony’s precious tech had never let him down before. It had to work this time, now that it really mattered, really counted.

                The suit didn’t kick in, but the Hulk, impossibly fast for his size, made it. He caught Tony, set him down at her feet.

                “Is he breathing?” Stevie asked no-one in particular, trying to check. There was no way to check his heartbeat though the suit (she didn’t know if he even still had one, given the arc reactor in his chest), but his faceplate had gone. His eyes were closed. She leant closer, unsure if the slight touch of air on her cheek was from his lips, or the wind, or her own imagination. He couldn’t die; he had Penny to think of. But she didn’t see how he could have survived, either.

                The Hulk roared, sending her scrambling back, wondering, irrationally, whether she was somehow hurting Tony. Perhaps it was the Hulk that was in pain, seeing their comrade fallen. Either way, it did the trick. Tony was not only alive, but awake. He really was impossible.

                “What the hell?” He asked, his breath short, his eyes wide. “What just happened? Please tell me nobody kissed me.”

                Well, that just sounded like an invitation.

                “No. Somebody’s going to.” She said, and kissed him. “We won.”

                “Mm,” he said, tentatively pecking her lips. She didn’t stop him, moved closer to him. He continued, words flowing out seemingly unintentionally between the repeated contact of their lips. “All right, yay. Well done. Good job. Let’s take a day off tomorrow. You ever tried shawarma? I don’t know what it is, but I want to take you, I, mm…”

                The kissing took over from the talking.

                “My friends,” Thor said, after a moment. “I am overjoyed you have reconciled, but we aren’t finished yet.”

                Of course. Loki was still in the tower. This was no time for being unprofessional.

                “He hurt Penny.” Tony said, indignant.

                After that, it was personal.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

                Thor and Loki had gone, and Barton and Romanov had disappeared into Shield transport. Bruce was waiting for him by the car, but Tony knew he had to speak to Stevie first. She was obviously waiting for him, fussing with her motorbike. He wondered when she had even got it, and decided it suited her. So did being Captain America. She was a very different person on the battlefield, and yet, it was still part of her. There was more to her than the uniform, but the uniform completed her.

                “We good?” Tony asked.

                “Yes.” She answered, shaking his hand. It seemed a bit odd after the desperate kissing a few hours before (and Tony knew which he preferred) but some things had to be played differently away from the heat of the moment. Still, he squeezed her hand and smiled, and she did the same back.

                “Sorry they crashed our date.” He said, flicking his head towards where the rest of the Avengers had been.  Somehow everyone had ended up coming for shawarma.

                “Was that a date?” She asked, raising her eyebrows. She hadn’t been a fan.

                “I hope so, otherwise I have to ask you out again.” He answered, heading back to the car and getting in as Stevie shook hands with Banner and turned back to the bike. “Can I call you?”

                “I’ll think about it.” She teased, starting her engine. Tony grinned and revved his own. He pulled out behind her, and watched in the rear-view mirror as she sped away in the opposite direction. She’d be back.

                His phone started jangling. He nodded at it.

                “Get that, would you?” He asked Bruce.

                “Um, sure.” Bruce picked up and before he could say anything was subjected to the angry indignation of an outraged just-about-thirteen year old. At least he knew Penny had reached May’s safely.

Chapter Text

Chapter Ten

 

August, 2012

 

It was something Tony tried not to do too often, but he was on his way upstate to call in a favour someone owed to his Dad. He wasn’t looking forward to it. He had met the Professor once or twice during his childhood and always found the man slightly unnerving; he had made a lasting impression despite how little they knew each other. For a while he had believed the creepy feeling he got was because of the wheelchair and been slightly ashamed of his childhood fears; later, after his Dad died, he had found the hidden files and realised what, exactly, was so strange about the Professor and why the knee jerk animal reaction had been a sense of something uncomfortable. He also finally understood why his Dad had ever invested in something like a school. He’d always said to Tony it was to keep an eye out for the best new future recruits for Stark Industries. That was one thing when you thought Xavier was just running some kind of academy for the gifted and talented. It was quite another when you realised it was a school for mutants.

It also explained why Howard had never allowed Tony to attend there, even though Tony had been a certified genius since the age of nine. As he drove up the impressively long driveway, he hoped they would be a little more accommodating now.

Xavier greeted him in the study, and Tony wondered if he had already read his mind. The Professor went through the usual platitudes about enjoying working with his father and how surprised they were to have Howard Stark’s son coming to see them and how he had to understand that it wasn’t the best time of year to take a tour as class wasn’t in session, but they were grateful for his visit all the same. Tony agreed and kept his thoughts as much to himself as he could, given that he was in the office of a telepath. He tried not to think too hard about that.

Honestly, he had avoided thinking about the school as much as he could for years. ‘Different’, for him, had for the longest time meant partying with black guys or gay guys or trans guys. Before he became Iron Man, he tried not to think of ‘different’ in terms of potential, of what people could do. Now there were super soldiers and gamma rage monsters and pagan deities and honest-to-goodness alien invasions and there was a part of him, just a tiny part, that was starting to feel outpaced, that was starting to wonder if genius and invention and high tech armour weren’t going to be enough. And then, there was the feeling that for all those things, what had almost killed him was a bomb, fired by normal people, people like him, a bomb built on technology designed in part by his father. Neither of these feelings were good feelings. But he had to push them aside now, for Penny’s sake as well as his own sanity. He tried to keep his thoughts neutral.

It was a late afternoon in the late summer, the heat intense and concentrated on the lawns and the playing fields and running tracks and tennis courts and basketball courts. The grounds were full of students, playing carefully-ordinary games (they must have been told an outsider was coming) or sitting lazily in the shade. The Professor caught his gaze.

“Most of the students stay here in the holidays.” He said, mildly.

“How come?”

“The specific reasons vary, but in the end, for many of them it is simply that they aren’t welcome at home.”

They continued down the hall, slightly shadowy because the windows were too small for it, with honest-to-goodness oak panelling. Tony saw classrooms and labs and dormitories, all the things a wealthy investor would inspect to see on a tour of a private school. Every corner seemed to have a memory of his own boarding school days, some fond, some not so fond- but this wasn’t the same. It felt like being in another country, another time; it was like the schools of Enid Blyton, where boarding school seemed like an adventure rather than a gilded cage for kids. He persuaded the tension out of his throat and shoulders. It wasn’t like when he was young. Penelope could be happy here, she needed to be here. This was what was best for her.

They were back at the Professor’s study.

“I think that’s everything.” He smiled. “What did you think?”

“It was great.” Tony said. “But I wouldn’t mind seeing the rest.”

“The rest?”

“Yeah. Your ‘specialist’ facilities.”

“Mr Stark, you’ve seen all our facilities.” He tried. “I’m not sure what else you expected, but by all means suggest it and-”

“I know what this place is, Professor. I’ve read my dad’s papers.”

“And what papers would these be?”

“Well,” Tony replied. “If half of what they said about you was true, you know exactly what papers.”

For a moment, nothing moved. The Professor looked at him steadily, without embarrassment. Tony held his gaze, feeling the creeping sensation at the back of his neck. The moment broke, and the Professor smiled slightly, gesturing to a seat. Tony took it.

“Your father told us he would keep no record of the true nature of our work here.” The Professor sighed. “I suppose it was a little much to expect.”

“They were personal papers, completely off the record. I decided to keep it that way.”

“Then you have our gratitude. But now, Mr Stark, perhaps you can tell me what brings you here.”

Tony nodded, his mouth suddenly dry. Something about this man, this place, made him lose all the confidence he’d acquired over the last thirty-something years. Maybe because this time, it was nothing to do with him, or with the company, this was something he needed for Penny. She didn’t know it, but she was relying on him.

“You saw what happened in New York?” He asked, as if there was a person on the planet that hadn’t. He was glad the Professor only nodded without interrupting, he could hurry on, past a topic that made him feel like the ground would fall away beneath him. “Loki used my tower as a base of operations. And while he was in there, this happened.”

He slid his phone across the desk, displaying a still pulled from Jarvis’ security feed of Loki struggling with the web on his face. The Professor frowned at it.

“What am I looking at, Mr Stark?”

“My daughter fired that out of her wrists.” He took the phone back, flicked over to a video. He showed the Professor the moment Penny, climbing noiselessly across the ceiling, stole the staff. “She can climb walls, stick to any surface, lift hundreds of times her own body weight, fire webs from her wrists…”

“She’s a mutant.” The Professor looked almost surprised. Either he was just being polite, or for whatever reason, he had chosen not to pull Tony’s intentions out of his mind. Perhaps he was surprised that whatever system or network they had in place to find potential students hadn’t picked Penny up. Perhaps he was just reassessing Tony’s childhood applications, it was impossible to tell. Either way, Tony had to move the conversation on.

“Muta-gen.”

“Mr Stark?”

“This isn’t natural.” Tony said, tucking the phone back into his pocket. “I mean, not in the mutants-are-monsters way. I mean, this was done to her. She was bitten by some sort of genetically altered spider, and got its powers.”

“I see.” The Professor folded his hands, looking Tony straight in the eye as he spoke. “Mr Stark, I’m afraid I simply don’t know anything about cases like these. As far as I know, it’s unprecedented. If you were hoping for a way to reverse the process-”

“What? No, I want her to come to your school.”

“Excuse me?”

“I want her to come here. I mean, don’t get me wrong,” He added hastily. “I don’t want her being recruited into your not-so-secret super-secret army of mutant freedom fighters. No offense. But I do want her to be with other kids like her, to learn to control her powers-”

“Mr Stark, the other children are not like her. They were born different.”

“And you think when those crazy protest groups bubble out of control or the government forces through a register they’re going to stop long enough to ask for an origin story? Professor, she is like them. She is now.”

The Professor sat in silence, thinking. Tony took the opportunity to plead his case.

“Look, you, this place, you can give her something I can’t. You know how to train kids like Penny. She’s a good kid and she wants to help, and I’m just terrified she’s going to come chasing out after the Avengers and wind up getting killed. She’s just a kid. I need her to be safe.”

His voice creaked like an old door. He didn’t know where it had come from, but he hoped it would help his case. The Professor, however, was too well-mannered to pass comment.

“It is safe here.” He agreed. “But, Mr Stark, you have to understand. We are isolated here, for our own safety, yes, but it is lonely. The majority of our students would not be welcomed at home, do not have parents who entirely accept them, would not be able to live a normal life outside of these grounds. That isn’t something you should deprive your daughter of lightly.”

“She doesn’t have any friends.” Tony blurted, clumsy now. He’d run out of things he’d prepared, and now his brain had switched to a panicked frenzy. Somehow, this had become the most important conversation he’d ever had. “In her cell phone the only numbers are me, Captain America and her aunt. She never has anyone over, she only goes out when I make her, she won’t tell me anything about school-”

The man’s face had softened. He seemed old, and kindly, but there was a firm sadness in his eyes that told Tony he’d already decided. “I’m sure with your encouragement your daughter will thrive.” He said. “But even if you think she’s unhappy, I’m not sure sending her to a school for mutants would be the best thing.”

“Why not? Because she’s not technically a mutant?”

“Partly. We have no idea what the extent or the duration of these powers will be, or what would be the best method to prolong or dismiss them. She has the chance of an ordinary life, a loving father-”

“She needs your help.” Tony insisted. “You’re right, I love her. And I know she needs someone to train her and people around her that might understand how she feels. I’m not giving up until you agree. I’ll give you whatever price you want to put on it, just-”

“Mr Stark.” The Professor sighed heavily. “Are you suggesting that you’d pay for Penelope to attend here? Or that you’ll pull our funding if we say no?”

“I’m saying maybe you should think about what you set out to do, Xavier.” Tony said. “There’s a kid who needs your help, we both know that. And I want you to think good and hard before you turn her away because of where her powers come from.”

He stood to leave, having long since learnt that a well-timed exit could be key to winning an argument. That, and the office was starting to feel small and stuffy, oppressive. He needed some air.

“I will speak to my staff,” Xavier said, “And be in touch.”

“Thank you.” Tony said, pausing long enough to shake the man by the hand before walking out. He paused again when Xavier called after him.

“Antony,” he said, suddenly an old friend of his father’s again. “Are you sure this is the right time to be sending her away? For you?”

Tony pretended not to hear and strode quickly away. It was only when he got back to the car and fumbled with the key in the ignition that he realised his hands were trembling.

Nether the less, three days later Penny’s acceptance letter appeared in the mailbox.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

                Stevie’s hair was not held in place by wizardry after all, but hair pins. Lots and lots of hairpins, that had to be systematically removed before he could properly let her hair down and run his fingers through it. It was no wonder she was running late.

               “Tony,” she said, lightly scolding, turning her head so that his kisses missed her lips and his hands slid out of her hair. “Tony, I have to go. Stop, I have to go, it’s late.”

                He sighed theatrically and slumped back into the settee. She laughed, kissed his forehead and then stood, shaking out the sofa cushions searching for the grips, making herself ‘presentable’ again. He watched in silence. She was beautiful.

                Neither of them had mentioned Howard since New York, or the baby, or any of the other secrets they had kept from each other. Tony could feel them bubbling away in the background and dreaded the day they would resurface, but for the time being Stevie seemed as keen not to upset him as he was to keep her on side. New York had changed things, made them realise how much they needed each other. Penny was delighted, and the movie nights had restarted. They’d watch a film, Penny would head off for her room, and Tony and Stevie would have some precious time alone before she’d run off home. Stevie was back living in a place in Brooklyn again now, but it was at least slightly better than the dump that had started all this. He watched her fixing her hair, frowning as she fumbled behind her head, and wondered what he would have done if he hadn’t won her back. The near-death experience was almost worth it, to be doing this again.

                “Stay.” He said.

                “Tony, Happy is supposed to finish at eleven and it’s almost twelve. You can’t keep telling him to wait to take me home and then-”

                “So stay the night.”

                She crossed the room, away from him, checking her hair in the mirror. “You mean downstairs.” She said in a warning tone. This was not the first time they’d had this conversation in the last few weeks.

                “You know I don’t.”

                “Then you know that my answer is no.” She said, collecting her things. She went to kiss him again, but, feeling petulant, he turned away.

                “You know I’m pretty sure withholding sex is a form of torture.”

                “And soliciting is a crime.” She replied, not missing a beat, gripping his chin and lifting his head to place another kiss there. “It’s as hard for me as it is for you.” She murmured into his hairline.

                “If that were true we’d be in my room, naked, emotionally scarring Penny through the wall.”

                She laughed, shaking her head. “Good night, Tony.”

                “Stay.” He pleaded again, catching her around the waist as she headed for the door, pulling her back into his lap. “I’ll make it worth your while.” He promised, nuzzling into her neck. She bore with it for a second before shifting away, though she allowed him another kiss.

                “Good night, Tony.”

                “Come on, Stevie, it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t have to pretend to wait for marriage anymore.”

                “I did wait for marriage, Tony.” She said, exasperated. “And like I keep saying, right is right and wrong is wrong. That doesn’t change because society does.” She gave him one last quick peck and got up, going for the door. Knowing it was pointless, he let her.

                “You know, God would forgive us, that’s kind of his thing.” Tony tried. “Or we could get him to look the other way. I must have something he wants.”

                “Blasphemy, now?” She turned to roll her eyes at him. “So not sexy.”

                “Really?”

                “Uh-huh. Haven’t you heard the phrase, ‘Blasphemers don’t get any’?” She stepped into the lift.

                “You just made that up.” He said, crossing the room after her. Somehow, he couldn’t bear her to leave. He couldn’t let her go. He managed to hold back the elevator door just before it closed.

                “Tony.” She complained. “I have to go, it’s not fair on Ha-”

                “Marry me.” He said.

                “…what?”

                “Marry me.” He said again, realised he was doing it all wrong, dropped to his knees, keeping the door open with his shoulder until he felt it slide back into the casing, Jarvis quietly relieving him of it. “Stevie, will you marry me?”

                She looked at him, surprised. Beyond surprised, shocked. Then she smiled. “Tony… what are you doing?”

                “Um, well, proposing, I thought. I feel kind of dumb down here on my knees, Stevie, so if you could see your way to answering, then that would be awesome.”

                She put a hand beneath his elbow and pulled him upright, before wrapping her arms around his neck, pressing her cheek against his.

                “Is this just because you want sex?” She asked.

                “No.” He answered, holding her close, and was surprised to find it was true. He just wanted, more than anything, to keep her close; to have her there, and solid, and with him, and not to disappear. He wanted to be with her in every sense of the word and he’d do whatever was needed to make that happen. “I just want you.”

                She kissed him, then, breathing the answer onto his lips, and, for the first time since the portal had opened, something in Tony’s world made sense again. He curled his fingers into the material of the back of her shirt, pulling her as close as humanly possible, not wanting to let go- but after a minute, she made him.

                “I still have to go.” She said.

                “Sure? Because you know, I hear being engaged totally counts.”

                She swatted him away, straightening her clothes. “Jarvis, take me down now please.” She said. “Good night, Tony.”

                “Tease.”

                “Love you.”

                “Love you too.”

                The elevator doors slid shut and the lift went into motion. Tony stared at it for a moment, unblinking, then fell back into one of the chairs. These sudden developments in his personal life were rather startling.

                “Congratulations, sir.” Jarvis said, and with his words, everything suddenly clicked. Tony smiled.

                “Fire up the lab, J.”

                “Sir.” He said, disapprovingly. “It’s almost midnight. I do not think now is-”

                “We have to make her a ring.” Tony said, heading downstairs. “One that isn’t going to get ruined when she’s out being Cap. Oh, and tell Penny for me.”

                “I can see I get all the best jobs.” Jarvis said, dryly, as Tony headed into the lab. Even down there, he heard Penelope’s surprised squeal of delight.

                He could forget New York now, he knew, and he would. Things were going to be alright.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

 

September 2012

 

                “I don’t want to go.”

                “No-one ever wants to go to school, sweetie.”

                Penny slouched in the passenger seat, the picture of a typical incensed teenager. “You hated boarding school.” She said. “You always say it was awful.”

                Tony couldn’t deny it. “Well, this school is different.”

                “Why?”

                “Because it’s for-”

                “Freaks?”

                “People like you.” Tony sighed and glanced over at her. “You saw the pictures, honey. I really think you’ll like it there. And they’ll be able to help with the…” He flicked his wrist symbolically. He still wasn’t sure what to call it. “You have these incredible powers, Pen-pen, but you need to learn how to use them.”

                “You could train me!” She protested. Tony looked at her, waiting for her to remember who she was speaking to. She did, and deflated. “Okay, Stevie could train me.”

                “Sweetie, neither of us have any idea how to fight with super powers. I have tech, she just punches things till they stop moving, our styles are totally different-”

                “Dad?”

                “Yeah?”

                “You only call me ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ when you know something’s wrong.” She said, nervously. “You hated boarding school, Dad.”

                “This place is different.” He insisted. “And, let’s be honest, Pen, it can’t be any worse than where you are now. Could it?”

                “No.” She admitted, sagging more in the seat; finally admitting, maybe, that she was unhappy at her old school. “But it could be just as bad. And at least before I could come home after…”

                “Pen-pen, I’m not abandoning you.” He said, risking reaching over with one hand to ruffle her hair. “If you hate it, you can come home. You know that. But don’t you think it’s worth a try?”

                “…okay.”

                “Good. You go in there and own those powers, Penny. Climb the walls, swing from the chandeliers, go wild, whatever.”

                She laughed. “I’d be thrown out.”

                “Stark Industries has been bank rolling that place since it opened. They wouldn’t dare.”

                Penny laughed again and they went along in silence for a while. She still looked nervous, twisting her seatbelt in her hands, but he resisted the temptation to try and jolly her out of it any more. It was time to let her be.

                Stevie had offered to come with them, of course. Penny might even have wanted that, but Tony had said no. He didn’t like goodbyes, even ones like this, where it had been his choice and he knew it was for the best and wasn’t forever. He’d said he didn’t want Penny to get any more upset; if he was honest, he was more worried about himself. It was kind of strange, when he thought back to how much he’d first dreaded Penny coming to live with him, and now he didn’t really want her to go.

                Maybe it wasn’t goodbyes he didn’t like, maybe it was change, or just the idea of being alone. But he had Stevie now, and Penny, he was sure, would flourish here. They could call or text or e-mail and she’d be home in the holidays, maybe even some weekends. He was less alone now then he’d ever been in his life. He’d be fine. They pulled up at the school.

                “Dad?” She asked. “Are… are you going to be alright?”

                “Hey, I lived for a long time before you came along.” He joked, but knew he didn’t fool her. She reached over and hugged him.

                “Look after Stevie.” She said. “And be careful.”

                “I’m supposed to be the one giving you instructions.” He said. “Be good. Make friends. Don’t stick anyone to the walls who doesn’t deserve it.”

                What he really wanted to tell her was to believe in herself more. That she had taken good care of him, that in spite of all the crap she’d been through and all the self-doubt she carried, that she was a good person. That if he ever managed to grow up, he wanted to be like her. But there was no way he could say any of that, not without it sounding ridiculous. So he ruffled her hair instead.

                “I’ll come in with you.” He said.

                “No… I’m okay.” She said, not sounding altogether convinced; but he understood. She wanted their parting to be like ripping off a band aid, the sooner and faster the better. This way, they could say goodbye in private.

                “Okay. Call me later.” He said.

                “Okay.” She got out of the car, taking her case from the back. He got out too, watching her. Had she gotten taller since she had got the powers, or was that just her age? Or maybe it was just his imagination.

                They hugged again, he wished her luck, and got back into the car as she went into the school, hoping she didn’t feel too lonely, wishing she had let him go in with her. He remembered what it felt like, being thrown into a new place and being expected to live there. He wished he didn’t, then he wouldn’t be so worried.

                But when she called him that night, after an agonising couple of hours at his end, she was excited and talkative and happier than he’d ever heard her. Everyone was really nice. She’d won against a few others when they’d tested out their powers and everyone was jealous of her spider-sense (he didn’t know what that was, but it seemed rude to ask). Someone had lent her a book they’d all read over the summer and were talking about, and someone else had made her hot chocolate and brought it to her room. She ended the call then, abruptly, because someone came in to tell her they were all watching a movie downstairs and insisted she came; and Tony didn’t even care that the Tower felt strangely empty in the silence after her voice. He didn’t care that the other students were probably going out of their way to make the new girl welcome and that it would calm down after a few days. She sounded happy. He’d been right to send her there. For once, amongst all the screw ups and the messes he’d made, he’d got something, this one little thing, exactly right.

                “Sir,” Jarvis said. “Captain Rogers has just arrived.”

                Well, two things right. All in all, it wasn’t a bad record.

 

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

  

March, 1969

 

                Working in weapons development, you were bound to suffer a few explosions, especially of the personal kind. If he hadn’t chosen that line of work, Howard knew, he would never have met Annie. Never met her, never loved her, never lost her.

                It had been almost twenty-five years and he still missed her. Not as much, not as badly, but sometimes he suddenly felt it, as if grief was carried in on the wind and ran its fingers unexpectedly over his heart. If he had found her, he knew, it would have been different. If he had recovered her body, he would have told the world about the marriage, buried her under his name. Except he still hadn’t found her. And now, he knew, it had to stop. He was marrying again, marrying Maria. She was half his age and far too good for him and a little severe, and their love was not the same passion as he’d had for Annie, but he did love her. And that meant that he had to give up now, even if it killed him. He had to let Annie down, if he was going to stand by Maria.

                But it hurt. It still hurt that the grave in front of him was an impersonal monument to Captain America, to Stephanie Rogers, and not to Annie Stark. It was another failure. One amongst many. One that he had to bury now, and leave behind.

                He’d thought about reciting the poem for her as a goodbye; the poem he’d memorised in order to propose and never used all of. But she wouldn’t hear it, and someone else might. He didn’t want to have to explain what it meant, why it was important. So he stood in silence, rocking on his heels in time to the words that still tracked across his brain, even after all these years.

 

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

     Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

     Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

     Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

     In her sepulchre there by the sea—

     In her tomb by the sounding sea.

 

                It was a little morbid, now that he thought about it. It was all morbid, and he was morbid, and he was done with it. There was no more lying beside Annie, physically or metaphorically. He had Maria now, and that was enough. It had to be enough. He would make it be enough. And so he turned his back to the grave and resigned Annie to her tomb, somewhere out in the sounding sea. If there was a life after this one, he hoped she was happy there.