Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Lyra opened her eyes to the sound of yelling. While this was not entirely surprising for her, it was something that she figured she should at least check out before deciding whether to ignore it or not. She slowly stretched the sleep out of her stiff muscles before dragging herself to her feet. Another day in hell. She squinted, trying to let her eyes adjust to the flickering light in the darkness. It occurred to her that her eyes should already be adjusted to this, since it hasn’t changed in almost a year. The fact that they were still hopeful for sunlight just depressed her more, since she had long given up. The yelling continued, and she looked over her shoulder to see Yinsen running down the hallway.

“We have a situation, follow me!” he yelled the moment he was sure that she would hear and then turned around and ran back down where he came from. Lyra heard the note of panic in his usually soft voice and that was the last motivator that she needed to shake off her haze. Yinsen wouldn’t panic unless something really bad was happening. Not sure if she needed to grab anything she looked around for a moment and then swore lightly and jogged over to the spot where he disappeared. It might be a trap, but what’s a trap to a mouse in a cage? The door to her room had been left open, which was odd, but she didn’t think about it as she passed through. She ran down the dimly lit hallway and when she didn’t see Yinsen she was beginning to wonder where he had gone. She spotted yet another open door to her left. She slowed to a stop outside of the door and the first thing that she registered was the smell of blood, hot and metallic against her nose. Inside was a stretcher, covered with a man who was covered in blood. Fighting back her sense of nausea, Lyra forced her feet to move her into the room.

“What is this? What happened?” She asked, arriving at his side and getting an eyeful of Yinsen already cutting into the man’s chest. She opted out to look at Yinsen, who had already put on his focused surgeon face and held out a small glass bottle, which she took automatically, still expecting answers.

“Shrapnel bomb,” Yinsen said without looking up at her. He turned and placed something into the bottle that landed with a soft clink. She looked into it to see a blood covered scrap of metal.

Lyra ventured a look down to where Yinsen’s hand were working. The man’s chest was torn and bloody, there were more holes than she could count and a lot more blood than she wanted to see.

“He’s dead. It’s in his chest, there’s really nothing that we can do for him, right?” she asked, sadly looking back up at Yinsen and silently wondering why he was still trying.

“It’s not that simple,” Yinsen said, as he put another large piece of metal into the bottle in her hand, “Raza wants him alive. If we don’t keep his heart beating…” He didn’t need to finish the threat. “Listen, the metal will be forced up and into his heart, we have maybe hours or days before this happens, but I need you to find a way to make sure that it stays clear of it, since some of the pieces are too small to remove.”

“What do you suggest that I do? If the pieces are too small for you to get, then how the hell am I supposed to do it? Make them magically disappear?” Lyra said sarcastically, starting to panic.

“I didn’t say that you had to remove them,” Yinsen said, still calm, “Just keep them away from his heart. Know of anything that will keep metal away from places where you don’t want?”

“A magnet? There’s no way that we could fit something like that into his chest and expect him to live.”

“We must do something, or he’ll die.” Yinsen said simply. “I don’t have the knowledge of magnetics to create something like this on such short notice, but I might know a way to get it inserted and we have enough sterile metal to get the job done.”

Lyra bit her lip, her mind already racing with a billion possibilities. “Who is this anyway, that’s so important…” she mumbled, almost to herself. She walked around Yinsen and moved his light slightly, so that she could get a good look at his face. When she did, she dropped the bottle onto the stretcher with a loud clink and gasped. The face was handsome, no doubt, even though it was pale, scraped, and bruised. She hadn’t been really expecting to recognize the man, but there was no mistaking that stupid goatee.

“You want me to save Tony Stark?!” she said in horror. “How did they even get him? Why is he here?”

“I don’t know any more than you do. All I know is what Raza told me.”

Lyra, still not taking her eyes off his pale and strained face, said “No. I won’t do it. I refuse.”

Beside her, Lyra could hear Yinsen slowly put down the tools that he was using and turn to face her. He put both this hands on her shoulders and turned her so that she was facing him too. His calm look only flared her temper, if this didn’t get him rattled then nothing would. “It is certainly your choice whether you will do it or not.”

“You know what would happen to me if he lives, right? They wouldn’t need me anymore, I’d be signing my own death warrant,” she spat, like he hadn’t just said that she could choose.

“Yes. If you do nothing, he will die,” Yinsen said simply and turned back to continue his work.

Lyra wanted to wrap her hands around the older man’s neck and scream at him to stop being so calm, so rational. There was no way that that would happen, though, no matter how unreasonable he was being. Thinking about his words, she took a deep breath and again looked down at the man on the table. His eyes were closed, but his face looked to be set in an expression of pain. Hate flowed through her at the sight. This was what he deserved. Ever since she could remember there had always been Stark weapons around, killing and hurting people. People that she had loved. This was the man who was responsible for all of it. So what if he died? He wasn’t worth the parts, much less her own life. It wouldn’t matter to her at all if….

“No,” Lyra said aloud and shook her head to clear away those thoughts. They were dark and nasty thoughts that she had never thought herself capable of. In this moment she had a man’s life in her hands. Could she really just let him die like that? She scanned his face again for some sign that he deserved to die, but this time all she saw was a man that was in pain, who was dying, and she was his only chance at life. She bent down slightly so that her mouth was near his ear and, even though she knew he was far from being able to hear her, said with venom, “You’d better be worth it, Tony Stark.”

She worked for more than 6 hours. It was a simple thing, an electromagnet powered by a car battery. She had several dozen better ideas, but all of which would take time and materials that she didn’t have at the moment. The only thing that she took special care of was how the connecting mechanisms that were going to be in the chest were designed. She knew that any upgrades to that part would rely on these, since removing and replacing it would be yet another major surgery with an even larger chance of failure. With only her limited knowledge of biology, she relied heavily on Yinsen’s input to determine what was possible. The matter of making it was simple with what she had on hand and when it was finally done, she presented the crude machine to Yinsen.

“It will work?” he asked, holding the decide in his hand, inspecting it.

Lyra said nothing, a dark expression on her face.

Yinsen looked at her sternly and then indicated the box of gloves to her right. “Get cleaned up, it’s going to be a long night.”

Resigned to her fate, Lyra did as he asked. She loathed assisting him in surgeries but was occasionally required to when he needed someone. It was really just a matter of following his directions and not letting your hands slip or shake. When she was as clean as she could get, she went back to the room.

For four more hours they worked on inserting her device into Tony Starks chest. Lyra following all of Yinsen’s orders as he gave them, even when it was something like manning the bone saw or moving organs out of the way. The whole time she kept thinking that he would die any moment, but the beeping on the monitor continued on. At some point in the night, they ran out of anesthesia, and the man woke up and started screaming. He grabbed the front of Lyra’s shirt and yanked on it, hard. She screamed and Yinsen called for more help. Armed men burst through the door and Yinsen yelled at them to hold him down. Eventually, though, he passed out from the pain and stress anyway, and Lyra was left with the memory of the crazy look in his eyes. They continued on with the procedure, screwing the bolts into bones and then closing up.

“If the surgery didn’t kill him, then an infection will,” Lyra stated, as she took off her gloves and facemask.

“Have faith,” Yinsen said, doing the same. “The longer he lives, the greater the chance that he will live longer.”

Lyra shook her head, still second-guessing her choice to help.

Suddenly the door burst open, causing both of them to jump. Two more heavily armed men walked into the room, followed by Raza himself. He scanned the room with the authority of a man in command and then said, “Give me news of the patient.” Lyra strained to hear his voice, Yinsen had only began teaching her the language and it was one she struggled with.

“He’s alive, recovery will take a while, I suggest that you don’t—” Yinsen was cut off as Raza held up a hand.

“Take him.”

Yinsen tried to protest more, but Lyra put a hand on his arm. She knew that once Raza had made up his mind there was nothing that could be done to change it. The two armed men lifted Tony Stark up by the arms and dragged him out of the room, with Raza following. Lyra and Yinsen looked at each other for a moment and then headed out of the room as well, but instead of following Raza further, they made their way back into their room in silence escorted by the rest of the guards that had assisted with the surgery. Neither of them really felt like talking.

Knowing that sleep would elude her, Lyra took some of the alone time to keep scribbling down ideas that she had for the chest piece, not having anything else to really focus on. Yinsen sat in a corner reading a book. After what seemed like a lifetime the door burst open and both Lyra and Yinsen jumped to their feet, arms behind their heads like they were trained. The two men who had dragged the half dead body out of the other room, returned with it, then dumped it onto the floor.

“Keep him alive, Raza’s orders,” one of the men said and then they left.

Yinsen strode over to the slumped figure and, reaching down, called to Lyra, “Help me with him, would you?”

Making a clear face of disgust she walked over to Yinsen’s side and grabbed a shoulder. Between the two of them, they got the man to lie down on Yinsen’s small cot. Yinsen put a blanket over him and began to re-secure the bandages around his chest. He did some other things, but Lyra had lost interest and returned to her sketches and numbers, where she was most comfortable. A sinking dread was beginning to form in her stomach with every shaky breath she heard the injured man take. His life meant her death, she was sure of it. Was she really ready? A part of her was saying that she should have died years ago, and this was just life’s cruel and ironic way of punishing her for challenging that fate. There was nothing to do but wait now though.

He came for her several hours later, when she had dozed off, laying her head on the desk. The door burst open again, but before Lyra could fully awaken and stand, he had grabbed a fistful of her hair and was dragging her out the door. She didn’t give him the satisfaction of her crying out, but she did manage to catch Yinsen’s eyes and gave him a silent goodbye. To her surprise, he ran after calling her name and begging Raza to let her stay, his characteristic calm finally broken. Tears came to her eyes at the sight, but she didn’t let them fall. If she was going to finally die, she would die well. At least she hoped.

He didn’t release his grip on her hair until he reached his private quarters. Unfortunately, she knew these rooms all too well. He yanked her hair forward, sending her sprawling onto the floor and he walked up and stood over her.

“What are we going to do with you now, huh?” He said and bent down to run a finger across Lyra’s jawline. She shuddered at his touch, but didn’t shy away. She knew the game, the more that she let him know he was getting to her, the worse it would be.

“You could always release me,” she said darkly, they were speaking Arabic, which Lyra was comfortable with. She sat up, keeping her posture straight and her chin up, keeping a cool calm.

Raza chuckled. “And waste such a wonderful prize? No. I don’t think I’ll do that.”

“So get on with it, then.” Lyra looked straight in his eyes, teeth clenched. She retreated deep into a place in her consciousness where she could pretend that she was strong. Not afraid. She was also too familiar with this place. She got a glimmer of satisfaction when she saw the discomfort in his eyes at her lack of emotion.

“I’m not going to kill you, ” he said, returning to the ease of a man that had absolute power over her. “Your usefulness in weaponry is overshadowed, but you can be useful in… other things.” His eyes had a wicked glimmer and Lyra’s stomach sank. It wasn’t going to end like this; she wouldn’t let it. “However, it was suggested that I let you teach Stark how things are to be done around here. But make no mistake, after we know that he is ours, you will be mine. At first.”

Revulsion crawled through Lyra’s skin and she broke eye contact, letting him win. After all this time where she had clawed and struggled her way to survive and she was seeing the end. The terrifying end. She knew what she had to do.
Raza barked some orders and she saw a man come in. He grabbed her roughly by the arm, forcing her to her feet. He marched her outside the room and then was joined by several guards, all heading back towards her room. They pounded at the door and Lyra could vaguely hear someone talking. They entered the room and she saw Yinsen standing, with his hands behind his head, but he wasn’t alone. Tony Stark stood next to him, looking confused and afraid. She simultaneously wanted to laugh at him and punch him in the face. The man drug her up to where Abu was talking and then let go of her and retreated back with the other men. She seethed up at the large man in front of her.

“Ah, Lyra, so glad that you could join us. Enjoying your last few moments before Raza’s special treatment comes to an end?” he taunted, with a cruel smile. He had made it no secret that he despised her.

“I never enjoy seeing your ugly face,” Lyra spat at him. Rage filled his eyes and in a flash he had stepped forward and backhanded her across the face hard enough so that she fell to the ground and the taste of blood filled her mouth. Lyra twisted to look back at him and gave him a smile, that she was sure was terrifying and full of blood. However, her ears were ringing and the entire right side of her face felt like it was on fire. She was so focused on not blacking out that she barely heard the next few words spoken. When she finally became aware enough, she heard the sound of the door closing and then Yinsen was there, kneeling beside her and taking her face gently in his hands.

“You should really learn to hold your tongue,” he said gently in English, turning her face to look her over. She pushed his hands away and got to her feet stubbornly. Putting her hand on her right cheek and gingerly feeling the swelling flesh, she looked around the room and settled on the unfamiliar face looking at her with surprise and pity. She glared at him.

“I can hold my tongue when I’m dead, Yinsen,” she said in Arabic.

“What’s she saying? What just happened?” Tony demanded, looking between the glaring girl and the doctor. He looked concerned. “Does she not speak English?”

Before Yinsen could answer, Lyra decided that it was time to vent. Switching to Russian, she said, “You motherfucking asshole, you can take your pity and shove it up your playboy—” She was ready to keep going all night, but Yinsen interrupted her.

“Lyra, you know that it is rude to speak in a language that not everyone can understand,” he chastised in English, knowing full well the extent of your colorful Russian vocabulary.

“Fine,” she said in English this time, then she walked up to Tony and spat, “Go to hell!” Feeling a little better at the surprise and confusion on his face, she stalked over to her desk, out of view from either of them and sat down. She put her face in her arms and finally let the stress and the fear silently wash over her. She could very clearly hear the conversation across the room.

“Um, who is she and why does she hate me?” Tony asked, in confusion. Watching the spot that she disappeared to.

“She’s the technology expert here. They tell her what they need and she makes it.”

“So what’s with the hate? Shouldn’t I be, like, her idol or something?”

“Look around you, Stark. What do you see?”

There was a pause. Tony looked around and saw piles of discarded boxes and parts, most of which had a very familiar logo.

“She’s a prisoner here, much like yourself,” Yinsen continued, “but she looks around every day and sees—"

“Stark Industries.” Tony finished blankly.

“Don’t judge her too hard,” Yinsen said gently and from across the room Lyra gritted her teeth to stop herself from yelling at Yinsen for defending her.

“So now what? I’m not building them the missile and—” Lyra couldn’t help herself after she heard that, she let out a scoff, louder than she meant to.

She didn’t know why they hadn’t taken him right away, but just then several men entered the room and drug Tony out with them. She dared a look across the room and saw him clutching onto his car battery as someone pushed him out the door and closed it with a slam. There was a sound of slowly approaching footsteps and Lyra looked up to see Yinsen, looking down at her with undisguised concern. She knew that she was acting slightly more reckless than usual and she didn’t meet his gaze. Instead, she silently wrapped her arms around his middle and pressed her face into his stomach. His arms circled around her and they stayed like that for a long while.

Lyra was lying awake in her cot when they brought him back, still clutching onto this battery and soaking wet. He walked into the room and then collapsed onto his knees and took long, shaky breaths. Immediately Yinsen was over next to him, checking to see that he wasn’t hurt too badly. Yinsen brought him to his feet and then led him over to the other cot in the room, covering him with a blanket. He didn’t look like he was ready to talk. His eyes were far away while he processed where he truly was and what the stakes were in this game. Eventually, they wandered over to Lyra, sitting on the cot across the room. She was staring at him, with an expression of pity and understanding.

Eventually she realized that they were sharing eye contact and looked away. He thought he saw her blush, but it was hard to tell in the dim lighting. He took a moment to more fully look her down. She was young, almost a child. He hadn’t noticed before because the grim expression and cold eyes had made her look years older, despite her petite size. It was no surprise that she looked underfed, dirty, and pale, but if he looked further he could see that underneath it all she could be pretty under different circumstances, with her big brown eyes and her brown hair fastened up into a loose bun. She was either brave or crazy, he decided, remembering the way that she had stared down the man called Abu and how she had yelled at him when they met. After what he had just gone through he thought that she must be crazy, because no one could go through this and still resist doing what they wanted. He didn’t blame her, though, she never should have had to go through this. If he was still alive tomorrow he decided that he would try to find out more about her.

Tony was asleep when they came for him next, though he had no idea how he had managed that. Lyra was working at a dimly lit desk, hunched over some papers and he didn’t see Yinsen. They came through the door and pushed him out like before, leaving Lyra and Yinsen alone again.

“They’ll get to him,” Lyra said, matter-of-factly, watching the door.

“He hasn’t broken yet,” Yinsen pointed out from across the room where he was making some food over the fire.

Lyra shook her head. “Did you see that look in his eyes? He won’t last 10 more minutes.”

True to what she had said, it wasn’t long before a man came into the room saying that they needed a translator to strike the deal. Yinsen went, leaving Lyra alone to try to focus on her project.

They both returned together and settled over the fire. Yinsen started talking and Lyra walked over to them, arms wrapped tightly around her middle. She looked over Yinsen once to make sure that he was okay and could tell that the act was not lost on Tony.

“Make a deal?” she interrupted quietly.

“One missile and they’ll set him free,” Yinsen answered and Lyra snorted in disbelief. They shared a look.

“What was I supposed to do?” Tony argued and Lyra and Yinsen stared at him quietly as he defended himself from an imaginary attack. “They’re going to get what they want anyway, what was it that you did again?” His accusation stung and he could tell from the look in Lyra’s eyes.

“I do what I have to do to survive, I don’t owe anyone anything,” Lyra said, but didn’t look at all convinced about what she was saying.

“Lyra has modified some weapons, yes, but they don’t think her capable of doing much. You, however, made them the weapons in the first place; they’re going to expect you to do more,” Yinsen said.

“I didn’t make weapons for them,” Tony said bitterly, looking up at Yinsen.

“They have them all the same, Tony.”

“It’s not my fault, I have no idea where they got them from.”

“That’s even worse,” Lyra murmured coldly, then stared straight into Tony’s eyes, “You’re too busy sleeping with women and figuring out where the next party is, while people are suffering and dying because of you. You..” she trailed off, it was the first time that Tony had really seen her show any emotion other than spite. Her eyes were wet with both anger and sadness, but she turned away before he could really get a good look.

“Your life’s work, in the hands of those murderers,” Yinsen said, recapturing Tony’s attention. “Is that how you want to go out? Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark? Or are you going to do something about it?”

“Why should I do anything? They’re going to kill me, you, her, either way. And if they don’t, I’ll probably be dead in a week,” Tony replied, looking defeated.

“Well then, this is a very important week for you, isn’t it?”

Tony looked up at Yinsen, and then stared at Lyra’s back as she walked over to her side of the room. Everything was looking so hopeless, what right did they have to make him feel guilty about any of this?

The three of them didn’t get very much sleep that night, all lost in their own thoughts about what would come the next day. When it did come, it was time to get started and people filed in, waiting for a list of what Tony needed. He sat down at Lyra’s desk and started writing on paper. He knew exactly what he would need to make another Jericho missile from scratch. He was a little more than halfway through when a hand reached down and snatched the list from under him. He looked up to see Lyra reading the paper, with a scowl on her face.

“Hey, I’m not done yet,” he protested, reaching back for it.

Easily holding the paper just out of reach, she read, “Advanced targeting microchips, pure filtered palladium, casting equipment. Are you kidding me?”

“Don’t think I know what I need to make a missile?”

“I don’t think you quite understand your position, Mr. Stark,” she said, exasperated. “You could get all this stuff if you were a rich industrialist, but here different militaries restrict all of these things.”

“I am a rich industrialist, darling,” he said, attempting a weak smile. Lyra cursed in Arabic and then threw the list back at him.

“Not here you’re not. And you’re going to have to listen to me. Most of your other weapons will have the different components that you will need. Finish your list and then I’ll translate it and make it into something that we can actually use.”

“I know what’s in my weapons,” he said, now a little bit angrily.

“Whoa, a miracle! He actually does know something about his own weapons!” Lyra said in mock awe.

“Why even help me at all?”

Lyra thought about it for a moment as he watched her, then said, “Truthfully? Because I feel sorry for you.”

He was taken aback by her statement, and the look in her eyes. This girl, this prisoner, felt sorry for him? What could she possibly have that he didn’t? If anything, he should feel sorry for her, but with her sharp tongue and touchy temper it was hard to. She turned and walked away while he thought for a moment. He eventually went back to his list, scratching off some of the things and replacing them with either weapons or small things that he was reasonably sure that they could produce for him. When he was done he brought it to Lyra, who took it without comment. She scanned it quickly and replaced one or two things. When she was done she handed it to Yinsen, who also scanned it and then walked over to the metal door and knocked. The door was opened and he handed the list out to them.

“What now?” Tony asked, looking between Lyra and Yinsen.

“They’ll take a moment to go over it and verify it, then they’ll gather supplies and bring them,” Lyra said, settling down at her desk and pulling out her own papers. Tony walked up behind her, which she was very aware of, but didn’t show.

“Whatcha working on, Cinderella?” he asked, then looked down at her papers, which at the moment mostly consisted of numbers and proofs. He looked surprised. Lyra shifted an arm over the paper, blocking it from view.

“Nothing particularly important,” she said, amusing herself.

“Lemme see,” he said and reached out quickly for the paper under her. Instinct took over, and Lyra shied away from his gripping hands, hating herself for it the moment that it happened. Realizing what just happened, Tony retreated, taking a step back from her. “Just curious,” he mumbled and then walked away.

He looked around the room and saw that Yinsen had been watching the entire exchange. He decided to go talk to him.
“What’s her story?” he asked quietly, settling himself by the fire next to the older man.

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Yinsen replied calmly.

“She’s a little intimidating,” Tony said throwing a glance back in her direction.

Yinsen chuckled. “An easy thing to think. She’s been here for almost a year. Before that, I don’t know she doesn’t like to talk very much about it. I think it was probably worse where she was, she was in a bad way when she was brought to me.” Yinsen shrugged, his eyes far away at the memory. “She likes to think that she’s given up hope for anything better, but I still see it in her eyes sometimes.”

Tony listened to Yinsen quietly, thinking about how hard it had been to be here for a few days and trying not to imagine what she had been through to be here for as long as she had.

“But, things progress. You coming here is going to change everything for her, no doubt,” Yinsen said, looking straight into Tony’s eyes in that way that told him something horrible was going to follow.

“Why’s that?” he dared to ask.

“Think about it Stark. She was their weapons expert, the only one that had a chance at understanding Stark tech. It made her useful. For all her talk of not caring about people, I know she often did less than she was capable of on her projects. Now that they have you, though—”

“What do they need her for,” Tony finished Yinsen’s thought, horror slowly dawning on him. He turned to find her, only to see that she had crept up to the fire next to them. Tony opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again.

“Lovely conversation,” Lyra said, sarcastically. Then she shoved all of her papers at Tony, finally done with her project.

“What’s this?” Tony asked, picking up the papers and turning them to look more clearly at them.

“Something that will keep you alive,” Lyra answered monotone.

Tony started reading through the papers in her neat, small handwriting. “A new chest piece,” he murmured to himself and then looked at it for a long time while Lyra walked over to sit next to Yinsen and rest her head on his shoulder.

“Self sustaining?” Tony asked uncertainty, still flipping through the design.

“Very nearly,” Lyra answered.

“That’s impossible,” Tony stated.

“The math is all there. You’re the one who invented it.”

When he looked again, he saw the math that it was based off of: his design for the arc reactor back home. But the final drawings were far too small to be possible. Doubtfully, Tony kept flipping through, looking at all the familiar but advanced proofs and watching as they slowly got more and more manipulated until they found the final parameters that would work. He searched for a mistake somewhere, because there had to be a mistake. If this were true, then this little girl had just revolutionized energy as the world knew it. The design was for a small, low wattage power source. Conservative. Just enough to power the magnet in his heart for a lifetime. However, the applications for this were limitless. Scaled up, this technology could power buildings, cities, even…

“Got a pen?” he asked, and when Yinsen handed him one over the fire, he began crossing things out and scribbling his own math down.

“It’ll work,” Lyra said, almost defensively.

“It will, but you’re not thinking big enough dearie,” Tony muttered absentmindedly, ignoring the sour look she gave him at the nickname. An idea was beginning to form in his mind.

After a while of writing and planning, there was a knock at the door and once they were all standing in view, it opened and men started walking in with boxes and crates, placing them down and then going back for more. Tony stood up and, holding the car battery said, “No! Not there, I need things organized, and I need more materials.” When no one appeared to understand him, he turned to Yinsen and Lyra and said, “I’m going to talk and you’re going to translate for me for a moment, got it?” Without giving them a chance to answer, he started giving orders rapid fire, which Yinsen started translating and Lyra joined in, amazed that they were doing just as he asked.

That was the start. From the orders and extra materials that he asked for, Lyra could tell that he was planning on building her design, though modified. The room was a flurry of activity for a while as they set up the way that Tony specified. Eventually they left and the trio were once again left to their own devices. Though this time it was Tony who was bent over a desk working on paper while Lyra sat next to Yinsen at the fire making food. Her project was finished. After a while, Tony called her over and asked her a few questions about her design and then showed her his revisions. She took the papers and squinted, thinking that she was seeing it wrong.

“Why on Earth would you need that much power?” she asked, letting curiosity get to her.

“Will it work?” he asked, though the question didn’t sound like he was unsure of himself at all.

She glared at him for a second before saying uncertainly, “It should.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

They argued for a moment while they split the tasks, though Lyra did appreciate that Tony never asked if she was capable of doing something, just assumed that she could. It had been a while since she had someone who understood that she knew what she was doing when it came to technology. Someone that she could argue with and who saw her as an equal. It made her happier than she would admit.

They worked for a few days with Yinsen helping out where he could. Though Lyra was not entirely comfortable with Tony, she was getting better, but she did avoid any personal questions thrown her way and he avoided what his plans were for the upgraded arc reactor that they were building. He just kept to himself and worked on his own designs. While Lyra hated him in principle, it was hard not to be impressed with how smart the man was. She could tell that he was thinking the same thing.

They finished more quickly than Lyra would have thought and when he first turned it on she found it hard to look away from the beautiful brightness of the small piece of technology. She had a depressing thought that it might be the last thing that she ever built.

An impatient call snapped her back to reality and she looked over to see that Tony and Yinsen had moved over to another table and were waiting for her. She slowly walked over. He slapped some papers onto the table and Yinsen picked them up. “This is our ticket out of here,” Tony said and then looked Lyra straight in the eyes. She walked over to stare at the papers over Yinsen’s shoulder.

“What is it?” he asked, looking at the partial drawings.

“Flatten them out and look,” Tony said, then did just that. Lyra and Yinsen looked at the picture that had formed wordlessly for a few seconds.

“This is what the arc reactor is going to power, then we’ll fight our way out.” There was a long pause. “Well, what do you think?” he asked Lyra.

“I think that you’re going to get us all killed, or worse,” Lyra said, rolling her eyes.

“No, I’m not giving up. I’m going to get us all out of here,” Tony said, very seriously looking her straight in the eye again. For just a second he thought he saw a flicker of hope in her eyes, but it was gone so fast that he questioned whether it had truly been there or not.

“There’s no point,” Lyra said ominously and then walked back over to the fire.

Tony looked after her, then turned to Yinsen, who shrugged.

“You’ll help me right?” Tony called to her.

“Yeah,” Lyra responded, poking the fire with a stick, “but only because you don't really have a chance without me, but you'll do it anyway. I don't have much of a choice here.”

“That’s all I’m asking for.”

After they ate, Tony and Yinsen sat down to play some backgammon after Lyra said that she didn’t want to play. She sat next to them and watched, though her thoughts were far away.

“You two still haven’t told me where you’re from,” Tony said, rolling the die again.

“I’m from a small town called Gulmira,” Yinsen answered, “It’s actually a nice place.”

After a pause Tony looked up at Lyra, who was biting her lip, looking uncertain. “Chicago,” she said finally, “That’s where I was born.”

“Ah, a US citizen then. What’s with the accent?” Tony asked and she hated how casual he sounded, like they were friends.

“I’ve been all over. I haven’t spoken much English in a very long time,” Lyra said anyway.

“Where does a Chicago girl learn to speak so many languages?”

“Yinsen has been teaching me,” Lyra answered. He appreciated that she was talking to him, he’d been less than successful when asking her other personal questions.

“Family?” Tony asked and Lyra shook her head saying, “Dead.”

Yinsen put his hand on top of hers and they shared a look before they realized that Tony was looking at Yinsen now.

“Yes, and I will see them when I leave here,” Yinsen responded. Lyra threw him a dirty glare, leaving Tony more than a little confused. However, she said nothing.

“And you, Stark?” Yinsen asked conversationally.

He looked uncomfortable, “No.”

“No? So you are a man who has everything… and nothing,” Yinsen mused. This time it was Tony’s turn to glare at Yinsen. The two of them seemed to be making it their life mission to make him feel guilty about his life and the worst part was they were clever enough so that he never had anything to say back. Or maybe it was just that they were right and he should feel guilty. The trauma and stress of this place was getting to him already and he had barely been there.

Similarly to when they made the arc reactor, the three of them split up the workload for the suit. It would go much faster with the three of them all hard at work. During this time, Lyra found herself getting more and more comfortable with Tony being around, which was something that she had never thought would happen. They seemed to think alike, which repulsed her, but she also noticed a huge change in him as the days went along. Before, she could see that the man was every inch the billionaire who had gotten everything that he had ever wanted; he would complain about little things and was sure of himself at every turn. After a few weeks of being with them, he understandably got tougher, but not only that, he got kinder, more aware of what was going on around him. He still smiled and joked a lot, which Lyra did not understand, but she was learning that that was just how he coped with hardship. He also listened to her more after several debates ended in her being right, which she was not going to complain about.

“Yinsen, hand me some bearing balls please,” Tony said, reaching out and not looking.

“The little ones?”

“Yeah.”

There was the sound of many impacts hitting the ground and then Lyra looked up to see Tony, right before he slid and fell face first onto the floor, taking the table down with him.

“Not what I was asking for, Yinsen,” Tony said, covered in papers and equipment. Then he heard an unfamiliar sound and looked up to see that Lyra was laughing. His initial reaction was to be angry, but before he could vocalize that anger, he got a good look at her. A genuine smile touched her lips and her eyes were almost lit up. He saw that the suppressed beauty that he had noticed before came out in full force when she smiled. It seemed to take years off of her face and he was painfully reminded again of how young she was under all her bravado. She caught his stare and quickly wiped the look off of her face. He supposed it wasn’t smart to advertise beauty for a woman in her position. Just the thought of what had been done to her made him want to punch somebody. He was going to get her out of here if it killed him.

It had been three months since Tony had arrived at the cave when there was a pounding at the door and Raza walked in. The three of them had been working day and night, barely sleeping trying to get the suit done. As a result, they were all haggard, tired, and unwashed. Raza walked toward them, looking each one down with an expression of distaste.

“Relax.”

They put their arms down and Raza approached Tony to examine his chest piece saying, “The bow and arrow was once the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to Rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine. An empire twice the size of Alexander the Great and four times the size of the Roman Empire. But today, whoever holds the greatest Stark weapons rules these lands, and soon it’ll be my turn.”

As he spoke he wandered the room, examining all of the equipment and papers around him. The three of them exchanged worried glances, wondering just what he was getting at.

Raza walked up to Tony and stared him down, then said in Urdu, “Why have you failed me?” It was obviously for Yinsen or Lyra.

“We’re working,” Yinsen answered before Lyra could, “Diligently.”

“I let you live. This is how you repay me?”

“It’s very complex. He’s trying very hard.”

“On his knees,” Raza ordered and immediately men were there, grabbing his forearm and shoving Yinsen down. “You think I’m a fool? I’ll get the truth.”

“We’re all working,” Yinsen said, trying not to show that he was nervous. Lyra kept looking between the two, a fierce expression on her face.

Raza walked to the oven and using a pair of tongs pulled out a red coal. “Open your mouth,” he ordered ominously. Tony spoke up now, asking what was happened. Slowly Raza forced Yinsen’s head down onto an anvil and held the coal up to his face. “You think I am a fool. What’s going on? Tell me the truth.”

At this point Lyra stepped forward, speaking quickly in Urdu, on the edge of yelling, “What else could he tell you? That’s what we’re doing!” Two men grabbed her before she could take another step, almost effortlessly holding her back and she struggled.

“He’s building your Jericho,” Yinsen answered, keeping his eyes on the coal in front of him.

“Tell me the truth.”

“He’s telling the truth,” Lyra yelled.

“Tell me the truth!” Raza yelled now and Yinsen and Lyra both answered in like.

“What do you want? A delivery date?” Tony asked and stepped forward. A lot of yelling and gun pointing followed and Tony took a step back. Everyone was listening to Tony now.

“I need him,” Tony said. “Good assistant.”

Raza dropped the coal and glared around the room. Then he walked forward to where Lyra was being held and then slapped her across the face then bent down so that their faces were inches apart.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“We are building your Jericho missile, sir,” Lyra said, emphasizing the formal term.

Raza let out a yell and then grabbed a fistful of her hair, again pulling her toward the door. This time she struggled, but there was no chance of getting free. To her surprise, both Yinsen and Tony started walking toward her, yelling, but they were forced back again by more yelling and several guns pointed at them. Raza drug Lyra out the door and the men followed, closing the door with a bang.

“Where are they taking her, what are they going to do?” Tony asked Yinsen frantically.

Yinsen didn’t answer, just stared at the door. The expression on his face said everything.

“We have to do it now. Go get her,” Tony said, then Yinsen spun around to face Tony.

“No. We keep working. It’s not ready yet,” Yinsen said, firmly. “She’ll come back to us.”

They proceeded to spend several tense hours trying to work, but barely getting anything done. They were so close. The two of them jumped right to their feet when they heard the door open and then close again. A small figure came into sight, saying, “Relax, it’s just me.” Tony could have cried hearing her voice, though it was quiet and shaky. They both rushed over to her. She was standing near the door, soaking wet, arms wrapped around her middle. The first thing Tony noticed was that her hair was unbound, he’d never seen it that way before it was brown, thick, and went down to her waist. Seeing her with her hair down, dripping wet she looked a lot younger and smaller than he had previously seen her. Several bruises were beginning to form on every inch of showing skin. He could hear her take shaky, wheezy breaths as they stared at her. She wouldn’t meet their eyes.

“We have twenty-four hours,” she said quietly, looking like just speaking was a lot of effort. Tony was amazed that she was even still on her feet. As if Yinsen had realized the same thing, he slowly walked up to her and put an arm around her middle, guiding her toward the fire. He sat her down and then draped every blanket around her shoulders. He wiped away some of the blood and water from her face tenderly. She allowed him to do whatever, as she blankly stared at the fire.

Seeing that she was alive and knowing now that they had a deadline, Tony and Yinsen continued to work at a fierce pace, picking up the last of Lyra’s work as well. Once it looked like they were going to make it, Tony dared to approach the fire. Both had heard when Lyra had started to cough, it didn’t sound good, but that had only made them work faster. Her best, and only chance was if they got her out of there. When he got to her, he offered her some water, which she looked at for a moment and then took. Taking a tiny sip and then handing it back. Still not satisfied, Tony sat down next to her. He was silent for a short moment, before he uncharacteristically reached his arm around her. She seemed surprised for a second, but then, to his surprise, she leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder. Her face was hot, but she was shivering, and he could feel her labored breaths. He held her for a long time like that, trying to convey without words what he was feeling. Somehow, he knew she understood. The two of them sharing a comradery that few others knew. Eventually she drifted off to sleep and he shifted, with the intention of letting her lay down next to the fire. As he moved, she started and gasped, pulling away from him for a second before she remembered the situation. Giving him a weak, apologetic smile, she let him get to his feet and then laid back down.

She awoke again to Yinsen gently calling her name.

“It’s time to start the startup procedure,” he said when she stirred. Feeling rested, but still sore and horrible she pulled herself to her feet. This was it; it was do or die right now. She needed to be sharp.

Yinsen was already getting Tony ready to go into the suit. Over the past month they had developed a plan, full of holes, but it was the best one that they could put together. They had gone over it so many times that she knew every word by heart. As per her part, she approached the computer and started entering the commands that they would need to load up the coding that would be put into the assembled suit. She trusted that they had finished her work for her while she slept. The three of them were all business for a while as they prepared. Lyra lost herself in coding, then went to help Yinsen get the rest of the equipment onto Tony.

Suddenly she heard a voice calling their names through the door. It was too soon. Yinsen yelled something back and then a moment later there was a huge explosion that left Lyra’s ears ringing. She continued to work, going back to the computer to start the upload. They were running out of time.

“We need more time,” Yinsen said, snapping Lyra back to awareness. “Hey, I’m gonna go buy you two some time.”

“No!” Lyra said and grabbed onto his arm.

Yinsen gently pulled her hand away from him with a look that made her heart sink and ran away from them as Tony yelled at him to keep to the plan. Lyra choked back a sob as she saw him disappear, but then she quickly went back to work, finishing bolting the suit to Tony and doing the last system check. They heard gunshots and yelling from outside the door. When the final program started running, the computer drew the power from out of the lights.

“Lyra, get to the safe zone. Then wait for me to clear it. Do you hear me?” Tony yelled, his voice strained and pleading.

Lyra, didn’t answer, just did as he asked, running across the room to the corner and sitting down, curling herself up, silent tears running down her face. She listened to the sounds of yelling and gunshots, all too close, but also the mechanical whir of Tony’s movement. There was nothing for her to do but wait now. As Tony walked for the exit the sounds got more and more distant. After a while of no close movement, she couldn’t take it anymore and crept out of her hiding space and to the door. Silently following Tony’s path and trying not to look too hard at the crumpled bodies that littered the floor. She heard Tony call out Yinsen’s name, followed by an explosion and then a quiet conversation. Creeping up and looking around the corner she saw Tony leaning over Yinsen, and with a cry of surprise she ran over to kneel beside him.

“It’s okay. I want this,” Yinsen said quietly, and then turned to Lyra and ran his thumb over her face, catching a tear. “I want this.”

“Thank you for saving me,” Tony said.

“Don’t waste it. Don’t waste your life,” Yinsen murmured, fading. “Take care of each other.”

“Yinsen,” Lyra said, her voice thick with despair and his hand fell away from her face. “Yinsen!” she yelled, crying now. She put her hands on either side of his face, searching for signs that what she thought wasn’t true. When she didn’t see anything she very gently closed his eyes, placed a kiss on the man’s forehead, and then put her own forehead to his chest, sobbing.

Tony just watched her, through tears of his own. Her grief seemed to fill the room and wrapped itself tightly around his chest. Yinsen’s last words echoed in mind over and over again. His heart filled with rage after a second. They would pay, everyone here would. He turned to Lyra and put a gloved hand on her back.

“We’ll have time to be sad later, Lyra. We have to move on, keep going,” he said, surprised at how steady his voice sounded. “I’m going out, but you have to promise that you’ll be ready when I give the signal to come out.” When she didn’t respond, he forcefully grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” Lyra murmured through tears.

With vengeance pounding through his veins Tony walked out of the cave to heavy gunfire. After a moment he let the flamethrowers loose, covering the camp and ensuring that a majority of the weapons were aflame. When he had stayed as long as he dared, Tony turned back and headed to the cave.

“Lyra!” he called and was relieved when she was there next to him a moment later. The gunfire had mostly stopped, but he hovered over her protectively anyway. He flipped a few switches on his arm and then grabbed onto Lyra. When she realized what he was doing her eyes went wide and she said, “Wait, no that’s not—” It turned into a scream as the jets engaged and they were both swept up. Tony tilted his body so that they kept low as he blasted away from the base with Lyra clutching at him, screaming. As he felt the jets failing he was able to turn at the last moment, so that he took the brunt of the impact with the sand, though he was sure hers wouldn’t feel much better. They both skidded and rolled and Tony felt a bulk of his armor detach from him. When he finally stopped, he shrugged the rest of the armor off. “Not bad,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Lyra!” he called out suddenly.

“Here,” he heard her call back miserably from a few yards away.

Slowly getting to his feet even though his head was spinning, he made his way over to where he heard her voice come from. To his relief, she was sitting, brushing sand out of her hair.

“You’re an idiot,” she said angrily and he laughed, earning himself a glare. When she shakily got to her feet he pulled her into a hug, which she let happen, but didn’t return.

“What’s the plan now? We’re in the middle of the desert with nothing. What are we supposed to do?” she said, still angry.

“We’re going to keep moving. And hope that the right people find us. Can you walk?” Tony asked innocently.

Lyra snorted unhappily and Tony noticed that she wasn’t putting any weight on her left foot. Gingerly, she put it down and let it take some weight. With a grimace she took a few steps and assessed herself for any other injuries. Tony watched her, painfully aware of her pale, gaunt face and malnourished, bruised body. He hoped that he had made the right choice because she certainly wasn’t going to last very long out here.

“Lead the way, your highness” she said snarkily, putting on her brave face.

Tony started walking in a direction that he was pretty sure was away from where they had come. Lyra followed behind him, struggling to keep up. They walked for what felt like forever and while Tony thought that Lyra might collapse any moment, she kept walking on, again showing Tony her iron core.

He was about to tell her that they were stopping when he heard the helicopters behind him. Looking up, he recognized American models and excitement filled his chest. He yelled and waved, even though he was sure that they had seen him. When they turned for him he fell to his knees, laughing like a madman in relief and happiness as the nightmare’s end was in sight. The helicopter landed and men ran out. Tony was even happier to see Rhodey running towards him.

“How was the fun-vee?” he said, and Tony couldn’t help but smile. Rhodes knelt down and place a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Next time you ride with me, okay?” Tony laughed and his friend pulled him into a hug.

Tony was still trying to convince himself that Rhodes was real when he heard Lyra behind him.

“Tony?” she called out, clearly and calmly.

He turned to see the other men approaching Lyra where she was sitting, guns aimed at her.

“Hey, she’s with me!” Tony called out, then scrambled to his feet. The men looked at Rhodes, who nodded, seeing that she was harmless. Tony walked back up to her and offered a hand, which she hesitantly took and lifted herself up. Her eyes were wild and unsure, she looked like she was about to pick a fight. She was out of her territory and scared.

Tony put his arms on her shoulders and said, “Didn’t I tell you I’d get you out, Lyrs?”

Chapter Text

Lyra sat sideways on the seat, holding her knees to her chest. She hadn’t taken the headset that they offered her and instead stared outside. Her expression was lost. Blank. Tony stared at her, worried that she might be at her limit. He was quickly distracted by Rhodey’s questions. All the standard stuff: are you okay? Where have you been? Tony answered them simply, not really giving much detail.

“Who is she?” Rhodey finally asked, indicating Lyra.

“Someone amazing,” Tony said.

They landed at the nearest outpost and Tony and Lyra were taken into a rather run-down looking building. Rhodey had warned him that there was going to be a long debriefing process. He hoped that they at least gave him time to clean up and eat something.

As they brought her up to the building, Lyra was still uncomfortable; looking around with a determined stare. Tony knew that she was memorizing their path, counting men and weapons. He wanted to tell her to relax but knew enough about her by now to know that it would probably have the opposite effect. Another man in uniform then indicated that Lyra should split off from the group and follow some other people. She gave Tony a look like she was debating about completely ignoring the man. He put a hand on her shoulder for a moment, trying to comfort her, and then headed in the direction that he was told. Soon this would all be over, and he could be free finally.

Lyra was taken to another makeshift building, led by a woman. She kept looking at Lyra with pity in her eyes. They walked into a small room (that Lyra checked out fully before entering) and Lyra sat on a tall metal slab that reminded her of death. A uniformed nurse walked in and told the other woman to wait outside. Lyra studied the new girl suspiciously. She looked friendly enough.

“Just gonna check all your vitals, hon,” the woman had a southern accent. She approached Lyra, who looked distrustful and threatening. “Nothing to worry about. We’ll do a more in-depth one later, all I need is a pulse and breathing from you.” She pulled out a stethoscope. Lyra reluctantly let her place the metal on her chest and back, and gave her a hand when she asked for it. The woman frowned, wrote something on her clipboard and then said, “If you feel up to it now there’s a small shower in that room over there. You can get yourself cleaned up and then some of the officers would like to talk to you.”

Lyra walked into the little room and they closed the door behind her. A quick scan of the room didn’t yield any cameras or traps, but that couldn’t be ruled out completely. She debated on what to do for a moment, but then the thought of an actual shower overwhelmed her. Stepping out of her torn and bloody clothes she got in the shower. The water ran cold for a moment and then got warm. It was nice and comfortable, and made her relax just enough for the pain to set in. She braced her arms on the wall of the shower and shook as she cried. The pain and stress of the last few days coming out in silent tears. And through it all the tremendous loss. Yinsen hadn’t deserved that. She wished that she could take his place. He would know what to do now. He always did. She was alone.

After letting herself cry until she couldn’t anymore, she finally finished up rinsing off and got out. She dried herself off and put on the clothes that had been left out for her. A simple black long sleeve shirt and some black kakis. She pulled her wet hair back up and looked at herself in the mirror, arranging her face back into a blank stare. When she was satisfied, she opened the door and looked around. The nurse was nowhere to be seen. In her place a young-looking soldier was standing at attention. When he saw her walk out he told her to follow him and then promptly left. Even though her body still ached from all that it had been through in the past few days, she kept his pace.

They put her in another small room with only a table and chair. A mirror lined one side of the wall and it didn’t fool her. She sat down and put her head down on the table. Dark thoughts continued to fill her mind. Everywhere was the same.

Tony positively leapt at the chance to finally take a shower, though as the water ran red with blood, both his own and Yinsen’s the experience was almost ruined. He wondered how Lyra was doing. Afterwards they led him into an interrogation room, and he was quickly followed by Rhodey and one other man that he faintly recognized but did not know. They asked him very detailed questions about the past few months, which he did his best to answer truthfully and quickly. They asked a lot about Lyra and it was clear how much Tony didn’t know about her. When he had finally told them everything the third time they all stood up. The woman from before walked in and just said, “Sir”, indicating that there was a problem somewhere that required his attention. They followed her out. She led them a few rooms over where another conversation was going on. Tony heard Lyra’s voice and recognized the tone immediately. He couldn’t help but give a small smile. At least this time it wasn’t directed at him.

“How long were you in there?”

“How long is this going to take?”

“You do realize that not answering these questions can lead to imprisonment, young lady?”

“What else is new?”

“We are the United States government and you will answer the question.” The older man was clearly getting frustrated.

“So if I answer your question you’ll let me go?” Lyra asked sweetly, looking up at him innocently.

“It’ll certainly be a good start,” the man said, sounding slightly relieved.

“Bullshit,” Lyra dismissed, fire in her voice, “You’re just like everyone else, murdering innocent people for some misguided sense of control.”

The man lost his temper and stood up, slamming his hands on the table. It was meant as intimidation, but Lyra didn’t flinch. Instead her face darkened as she retreated into herself.

“You sure that this was the amazing person that you were talking about?” Rhodey asked, throwing a sideways look at Tony.

“Just give me a minute with her,” Tony said.

“I can’t do that, it—”

“You can even be in the room and everyone can watch. I just need a moment. You won’t regret it I promise.”

Rhodey and the other man looked at each other for a moment and then Rhodey indicated the door. Tony walked in, causing both of the room’s occupants to look over.

“We’ve got this, Sanders,” Tony said and the old man walked out in a huff. Rhodey was right behind Tony.

“Someone really needs to loosen up,” Tony said, and sat down across from her. She glared at him. “Hey, I was talking about him.” He put up his hands in defense. “Lyra, these are the good guys.” He looked into her eyes, trying to convey that he was serious.

She muttered something in another language and looked away.

“Trust me,” Tony said, still seriously, “answer some questions, do some tests, and then we’re outta here. You just have to trust me.”

She looked back at him and he could see it in her eyes. She was scared, and alone, and a billion other different things that were making her do what came naturally: lash out. He just needed her to cool it for a moment.

“This is my best friend, Rhodey. He’s gonna ask the questions now. I vouch for him. He’s not a murderer of innocents, I would know. On my honor.”

Lyra snorted, but he could tell she was amused. She rolled her eyes at him, and then they shifted over to Rhodey, sizing him up. Finally, she relaxed her tense position just a fraction, and Tony stood up and left.

“What’s your name?” Rhodey asked softly.

“Lyra Elisabeth Smith.”

“Birthday?”

“1/1/91”

Rhodey shuffled some papers and then looked up at her.

“Social Security Number?”

“No clue,” she sounded bored.

Tony waited outside, just out of earshot of the conversation. She would have told him about her past already if she wanted him to know and he was trying to respect that. He was just a little bit nervous because during his interview he had sort of glossed over what she had been doing there and just exactly how smart she was. He figured that she would tell them in her interview so he left that up to her. Technically the iron suit and power source were his ideas.

When the door finally opened again Tony jumped and looked over as Rhodey exited. Tony rushed over.

“All her answers match up with what little records we have. Place of birth and address, death of family, human trafficking sales. Her story matches yours to a T.”

“So what’s going to happen to her?” Tony asked, trying not to show his relief and was simultaneously impressed that their stories had matched.

“I don’t know. She’s seventeen, still technically a minor. The government might try to find a home for her to stick to while she readjusts to society. This kind of thing is more common than I want to think about.”

“I’ll take her.”

“What?”

“I mean, I’ll give her a place to stay and readjust,” Tony said quickly.

“Tony, I don’t think you get it. There are people that are trained—”

“You saw how she was in there,” Tony interrupted, anticipating Rhodey’s skepticism, “She listens to me. Plus she’s already 17 so it’s not like it needs to be for long.”

“But—”

“You put her in another place, she’ll be gone by the next day. She doesn’t like people.” As he was defending the idea he became surer of it. He didn’t want her to disappear, he was just learning to tolerate her.

Seeing the determination in Tony’s eyes, Rhodey sighed. “I hope you’re sure about this. I’ll see what I can do.”
They had both Tony and Lyra recount their stories again that evening. There was also a more thorough medical examination and a bunch of different tests to run. Tony barely saw Lyra at all throughout the process, though when he was offered a bed he could’ve cried. Even a crappy military bed in that crappy building. But even though he felt like his body was telling him to sleep for a million years, he could barely catch any sleep that night.

The next day was more or less the same thing. More tests and more debriefing. Then they told him that they were finally going to send him back. After everything that had happened it felt like he was dreaming as he boarded another jet heading for the states. It was a small plane and he could see that Lyra was already there. They were alone for the first time in a long time.

“Hey,” Tony said softly, taking a seat opposite of hers.

She was sitting in the chair, fiddling with the seatbelt and she stopped and looked up at him.

“We finally get to go back. How are you feeling?” he asked. He wasn’t really sure how to talk to her like this. Back in the cave there had always been a mission. Something to focus on. Right now he was nervous (something that happened very rarely to him), trying to figure out the best way to offer his idea to her.

“I don’t really feel like this is ‘going back’,” she said carefully, like she was trying to put together how she was feeling herself.

“Right, it’s probably been a while since you’ve been to America? Where are you headed? They can probably take you anywhere you want to go,” Tony said casually.

Lyra looked away from him, considering the question. “Nowhere,” she said, then realized that that wasn’t exactly and answer and quickly continued. “Really, anywhere is fine. I can figure it out.”

“Why don’t you come with me?” Tony asked, just getting it over with. “I can give you a place to crash for a while. I have a pretty cool lab in my basement that I think you’ll like and…” he trailed off, realizing that he was rambling. He looked up at her and she looked confused and surprised and Tony couldn’t help himself but to laugh, which only made things worse.

“You want me to come stay with you?” she asked incredulously.

“Well…yeah,” Tony said, “It’s probably better than being placed with some other house and told to—”

“What do you mean placed?”

“You’re still 17 and so legally you’d still need a guardian.” Lyra’s face wrinkled in distaste. She didn’t like the idea of being under any sort of guardianship.

“I get it, that’s not what you want and I swear that if it doesn’t work out we’ll part ways and that’s that, but just give it a chance, Lyrs. It won’t be as bad as you think it is.”

Lyra looked at him for a moment, she was trying to figure out his motive in the offer. A scan of his face showed that he was being genuine. That, and a lack of better options had her saying, “Sure. But don’t expect anything.”

Tony smiled and Lyra marveled at how genuine and childlike his happiness was. Ever since they had been rescued he had just completely relaxed and talked and joked like he didn’t have a care in the world. It intrigued her because she hadn’t seen anyone like that in a long time. Maybe she should just accept that this was the end of her nightmare and learn to relax again, but she didn’t exactly know how to do that. But that smile had seemed so genuine, maybe if anyone could help her…

“You know, when a handsome billionaire offers a place for someone they’re usually more enthusiastic about it,” Tony said, though the look in his eyes that used to be serious was now filled with a sort of self-deprecating sarcasm.

Lyra just rolled her eyes and looked away, though he could see her start to smile as she turned. They spent the rest of the plane ride in a comfortable silence.

They switched planes a couple of times and had to go through a rigorous customs at the US, but when they landed, Tony stood up and walked down the descending ramp with Rhodey at his side. Lyra followed slowly behind them. They were approaching two people that Lyra didn’t know, but Tony seemed to. He waved off the stretcher that was brought out for him. Lyra didn’t catch the first couple of words that Tony said to the new people because she was looking around at the airport, but then she gave them her attention when she heard her name called out.

“This is Pepper, my assistant, and Happy, my chauffeur,” Tony said, pointing them each out. “This is Lyra, she’s going to be staying with us for a little bit.”

Lyra tried to nonchalantly observe their reactions to this. They both seemed a little suspicious of her, like she had somehow tricked Tony into something. The way they looked at her gave her the feeling that they were being protective of Tony, which she found strange. She’d never stopped to think that maybe there were people that actually cared about Tony Stark. She followed them to a car and took the back seat with Tony. Happy and Pepper got into the front.

“Where to, sir?” Happy asked professionally.

“Take us to the hospital please, Happy,” Pepper answered immediately.

“No.”

“No? Tony, you have to go to the hospital.”

“No is a complete answer.”

“The doctor has to look at you.”

“I don’t have to do anything. I’ve been in captivity for three months. There are two things I want to do. I want an American cheeseburger, and the other…”

“That’s enough of that,” Pepper said and Tony saw Lyra give him a side glance like she wasn’t sure where this was going either.

“…is not what you think. I want you to call for a press conference now.”

“Call for a press conference?”

“Yeah.”

“What on Earth for?”

“Hogan, drive. Cheeseburger first.”

The car started moving and Lyra could tell that Pepper was still tense. Tony turned to her.

“When’s the last time you had a cheeseburger?” He asked, she could tell that he was excited.

“Um, how about never?” she answered after thinking about it for a minute.

“Never had a cheeseburger? That’s a crime against America, we’re going to fix this right now,” Tony said and gave her a smile. She could tell that he was awkward around her now. Thinking about it, she didn’t know how to be around him either. She wasn’t quite ready to admit that they had become friends while they were together in the cave, even though he had probably earned it.

They got to the Burger King and Tony told Happy to order about a dozen burgers, which Lyra thought was excessive, but then he handed her one and she delicately took a bite and had to admit that it was wonderful. In a crappy America sort of way. She finished the burger quickly and Tony handed her another one with a devilish smile.

“See what I mean?” He said as she was finishing off his second. They had both been eating too much to say anything.

“Surprisingly, yes,” Lyra said and laughed a little as she took her time with the second. After going such a long time without eating a lot she knew that she needed to not be binge eating a ton of food, no matter how good it was. She also knew that Tony was blatantly ignoring that warning from the doctors and was going to have a rough night.

Tony snuck glances at her while she ate. She seemed to be enjoying herself for now. The plan that had been forming in the back of his mind ever since their escape was coming into light and he wanted her to be there for it. If she ran out now then his chance to prove himself would be ruined. He needed her, though he was very aware that she didn’t need him. If she could survive in those caves pretty much by herself she could get through anything he was sure of it. The next couple of hours would be very important.

They arrived at the place of the press conference that Pepper set up and Tony kept dodging questions about what this was all about, though there were none from Lyra. She seemed content to sit and observe. He found it a little disconcerting, like she was gathering intel on the enemy. He got out of the car to camera flashes and Obadiah welcoming him home. He hugged his friend and started towards the building while talking.

Lyra waited a minute and then when the media attention had followed Tony, she and Pepper climbed out of the car and followed. There was a lot to take in. Lyra hadn’t been in a city in a while and she found the whole thing overwhelming, but also familiar. It was a strange contradiction.

With Pepper still eyeing her curiously, they both walked into the building and Lyra seemed too distracted for Pepper to want to start a conversation at the moment. She figured that they’d have time. When they had almost settled into a spot in the back, Pepper heard someone call her name and she looked over to see a man in a suit.

While Pepper was busy talking to someone that had approached her, Lyra was marveling at the press conference. She could tell that Tony was excited and nervous about it. She just hoped that it didn’t involve her in any way, shape, or form. That would just be too much, but she thought that Tony would know her better by now.

“Hey, would it be all right if everyone sat down? That way you can see me, and I can… A little less formal and…”

Everyone slowly sank down and Lyra just rolled her eyes at them indulging his stupid request while she remained pretty much the only person in the room left standing. Tony caught her eye and gave her a wink.

“What’s up with the love-in?” Rhodey had walked up and stood next to Lyra. The question was obviously meant for Pepper.

“Don’t look at me. I don’t know what he’s up to.”

Tony launched into a very thought out and prepared speech, at least to Lyra’s ears. She just stared at him as he spoke, her face expressionless.

“And that is why, effective immediately, I am shutting down the weapons manufacturing division of Stark International until such a time as I can decide what the future of the company will be. What direction it should take, one that I’m comfortable with and is consistent with the highest good for this country, as well.” As he said it, Obadiah was pushing him off the stage and everyone was yelling questions at him. He pushed past all of the people crowding him and walked right up to Lyra.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked, because she was still holding her poker face, though he thought that he saw amusement in her eyes, if only just a little…

Lyra stared at him for a moment longer and then burst out laughing. He hadn’t seen her like this before and he couldn’t help but have a huge grin on his face too as she struggled for breath.

“Tony Stark you are the biggest idiot that I have ever met, and that is the smartest thing that you’ve ever done,” she finally struggled out through laugher. She could practically feel Rhodey frowning next to her, but pretty much all the cameras were pointed at Tony and it was so loud that she didn’t feel like anyone else had heard their little exchange. They walked out of the building together.

Tony insisted that the next place they go to be the arch reactor to go look at it in full. During the short car ride there, no one really said a word, though Lyra was in a better mood than he had ever seen her. A lingering smile stayed on her lips. Thinking about it, Tony wasn’t quite sure whether she was proud of him, or joyfully anticipating watching his life fall to pieces. He had thought that they had become friends while they were in the cave, though she held her cards so close to her chest that he could never be quite sure.

They both walked up to the arch reactor and Tony leaned on the railing casually. “Look at it,” he said, “Our saving grace. Only huge. Imagine what this one could save us from next time. Maybe some sort of giant lizard?”

Lyra raised her eyebrows at him. “You mean your saving grace. Given to you by me,” she said, though she still had a smile on.

“By the way, where did you get the plans for this?” he asked, kicking himself for not thinking about it sooner.

“Russia,” she said just as casually as his first comment. He waited for her to go on but she predictably didn’t. It seemed like he was going to have to pry every bit of information out of her one word at a time. This would require patience.

Lyra sat down on a raised part of the floor and then laid down, staring up at the reactor. “Can you really shut down the entire weapons division in your company like that?” she asked.

“I have the controlling interest, so technically I can do whatever I want,” he said, looking down at her. She looked confused still and he snorted. He finally found something that she wasn’t an expert in.

“Won’t you lose money?”

“Depends on what happens next. I have a something of an idea on how to make this up,” Tony said, walking over to her and looking down. “If you’re game.”

Lyra looked like she was about to say something when a different voice interrupted and took over.

“Well, that… That went well.” It was Obadiah. Tony straightened up and walked over to him. Lyra just sat and watched the exchange. They were talking business, which was something that she admittedly didn’t know much about. There was something strange about Obadiah, she realized as she watched him. His voice sounded familiar but they had never met before. She just chalked it off to thinking the worst of everyone. That had been a friend where she had come from, but she could feel herself starting to hope that things would be different here. That was dangerous. However, Tony seemed to be making a huge effort to impress her and she wondered why. Now that they were out of the cave she had almost expected him to get as far away from her as he could because seeing her was sure to bring up bad memories. Eventually she realized that she had been so caught up in her own thoughts that she hadn’t heard most of the conversation next to her. She tuned back in.

“I want you to promise me that you’re gonna lay low.” Obadiah said, then walked out.

There was a moment of silence after the door closed. Lyra sat up and looked at Tony. He had followed her through her world, now it was his turn to show her his. Probably thinking along the same lines, Tony smiled and said, “Do you wanna go home now?”

They walked into the dark house and the lights started coming on automatically. Tony was looking around at different things that Lyra was sure that he had missed while he way away. The house was huge and definitely the nicest place that she had ever been in.

“Welcome home sir,” a voice said, and Lyra jumped and looked around for the source. Tony chuckled like he had been expecting it and Lyra gave him a dirty look.

“Thank you JARVIS,” Tony said, taking off his jacket and tie.

“It’s been a long time,” the voice that Lyra assumed was called JARVIS said. “Based on news reports, I calculated your safe return at zero point two four percent.” Tony walked further into the room and Lyra followed cautiously. The sound of running water had her turn her attention to the stairs where there was a literal waterfall turning on. She looked at it with a combination of awe and disapproval.

“Yeah, I missed you too.” Tony let Lyra look around for a moment and he approached one of his holopad windows.

“You have one thousand, seven hundred and thirteen new voice messages. How shall I categorize for you?”

Tony swiped through a few and then said, “Delete all.”

Lyra finished looking around and walked over to Tony.

“JARVIS, there’s someone I would like you to meet. This is Lyra. Lyra, this is JARVIS my—”

“Self-gratifying AI butler?” Lyra guessed, though she was hiding how impressed she was. She had been listening to the conversation enough to tell this it was a pretty sophisticated piece of code.

“It is very nice to meet you Miss Lyra,” JARVIS said courteously.

“The pleasure is all mine,” she couldn’t help but to smile excitedly at being able to interact with such an interesting AI. She stopped short when she saw Tony’s smug look, though.

“JARVIS add Lyra to all your systems. Access level alpha,” Tony said casually.

“Very well, sir.”

“You’ll have access to all of JARVIS’s systems and protocols. I’ll go over it all with you when we get the chance.”

Lyra rolled her eyes. She’d pull his code apart when she got the chance to see exactly what kind of information he was giving her. She told herself that she should really be more trusting, but it just wasn’t in her nature. There was a reason that she’d survived so long on her own and this was just another chapter. She was, however, excited to get back to code. Making weapons was not a lot of code work and that is where she enjoyed working. She was good at it.

“Sir, I’m detecting presence of electromagnetic energy in the house,” JARVIS piped up.

“Boot up the scanner, will you?” Tony said and then turned around and started walking toward the stairs. Lyra assumed that she was supposed to follow him, and she did. They walked down and there was a dark room. She could vaguely make out some shapes from behind the glass and she recognized some of the shapes. This must be his shop that he had been talking about. She tried not to let her excitement show.

“Welcome to the candy store, kid,” Tony said, and with a flourish from him the lights lit up. She was so intent on seeing it that she didn’t even mock him for his extravagant showmanship. Instead, she focused on the lab and she was not disappointed. From what she could see there was everything she would ever think of. All top brand or home made of course. Everything looked new a sleek and she hadn’t been in a lab like this for such a long time.

Tony was smiling letting her take it in. He could tell that she was trying hard not to look excited, and that somehow just made him sad. He walked over to the scanners and started getting some full body x-rays done on himself. Priority number one was getting a good look at the device that they had inserted into his chest and making any modifications that he needed now that they were back in the right century.

“How exactly did you insert this thing? Did you bioimplant the surrounding tissue to make sure that I didn’t reject the metal?” Tony asked, snapping Lyra out of her thoughts. '

“Well, I really only did the mechanical design of the connectors, for all the biology you’ll have to ask…” she trailed off, painfully aware of the next word that she was about to say. She could see Tony’s mood change as his smile disappeared. They both shared a long look, the grief understood.

“We can figure it out if we look at it for a while,” Tony said, going back to what he was doing and trying to lighten the mood. He didn’t get the feeling that Lyra wanted to talk about it. Like she never wanted to talk about anything.

“I’m fairly certain that we…” Lyra proceeded to explain to him what she knew while he finished up the x-rays. She seemed eager to get off the topic of their deceased mutual friend.

They worked on ideas and schematics for hours into the night. Tony was impressed by how well thought out the connectors of the device were. They wouldn’t have to change them at all for what they ended up wanting to do. Tony showed Lyra some of his cool designing software and holograms, which she excitedly chattered about as she picked them up even faster than Tony had. They were back onto familiar ground now, with a mission and math to discuss. They barely noticed that time was flying by until Tony looked over and Lyra had fallen asleep on one of the desks. He smiled to himself. Her sleeping on her desk wasn’t an uncommon occurrence back in the cave. Their small cots weren’t much better than the floor so he had never bothered to move her before.

“Lyra,” he said gently, knowing by now that touching her while she was asleep was an invitation to getting jabbed in the ribs. “Lyra!” he repeated, louder this time.

“What?” she startled awake, looking around wildly until she found him. Her eyes were still bloodshot and it didn’t look like she was fully awake yet. He wondered just how long she’d been sleeping.

“Time to go to bed,” he said casually.

“What? We haven’t finished up the simulation mock up yet. I’m still good,” she said, her words just a little slurred. She yawned into her hand and pushed some hair that had fallen from her bun out of her face.

“No reason to rush,” Tony said, smiling. Lyra was always the most corporative when she was half asleep, her sharp tongue was dulled. Though she had been rather quiet the whole day. He guessed that there was a lot of new things to take in all at once. “I’ll show you your room.”

“My what?” She asked, rubbing her eyes.

“Room. Like, place to sleep.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said and stood up. She didn’t look like she was going to run into anything and break something valuable, but Tony kept an eye on her anyway as he led her upstairs to one of the guest rooms that had barely ever been used.

“If you need anything I’m right down the hall, or you can ask JARVIS. Bathroom’s this room right here. There’s towels and… ugh I don’t really have any clothes for you yet darn. I should’ve had Pepper run out and get something. JARVIS remind me to do that in the morning. Other than that—hey, you’re listening right? You got all that?” He asked, while she was looking around the room very much not seeming like she was paying attention to him.

“Bathroom, right,” she said distractedly. She was looking at the room. It was big and clean and bare, but it was still the nicest place she had ever stayed in. This whole day had seemed like some sort of fairy tale. She was certain that any moment now she would wake up and be back in the cave.

“Get some sleep,” Tony said softly and walked out of the room, presumably to his own. Lyra stood there and watched the spot that he disappeared from. This was a strange feeling. He had left the door open. She could choose to walk out of it if she wanted to. Even if the front door was locked (which she doubted) she could probably break a window and disappear into the night before Tony would even realize it. This newfound freedom was strange to her. It had been so long since she had an opportunity like this. A choice.

Slowly and silently she crept out of the room and down the stairs. She half expected alarms to sound, or at least JARVIS to say something and blow her cover, but nothing happened as she crept along the window. She stopped to take in the view. The city down the hill was still covered in lights and full of activity even through the darkness. It stretched out as far as she could see in any direction. As she stared she realized how tiny she felt in comparison. Sure, she could choose to leave, but then what? She had nowhere to go, no one to go to. In an unfamiliar city was absolutely no money to her name. It felt cold and lonely to her.

Then she turned around to look at the ridiculous waterfall that was still running happily next to the stairs. She thought about the CEO of a company that had very much ruined countless lives. She thought about how determined he had looked as he announced that he would be shutting down that company. How he had looked at her afterwards when he was asking for her opinion. She thought about his easy smiles and careless generosity. The way that his eyes lit up when he was talking about his favorite things.

“Take care of eachother.”

She turned back around and climbed into the bed.

Lyra slept for almost fifteen hours. At least according to JARVIS when she asked him. It had been a while since she had done something like that and she indulged herself further by snuggling with the blankets for two more hours, her mind trying to sort out everything that had happened. She kept looking around the room and pulling the blankets closer as proof that it hadn’t all been a dream. She also kept running all the different ways that it could turn into a nightmare through her head. There were plenty.

When she finally stretched and got out of bed, JARVIS turned on the lights slowly and relayed date and weather information to her. Looking around suspiciously, she knew there must be cameras or sensors around for that and she made a mental note to check in JARVIS’s code for that if she was going to be staying. That was nightmare #327. She walked into the bathroom and decided against a shower, even though she recognized that she still looked terrible. However, she noticed that the couple of days of care had put some color back into her face. She pulled her hair up and walked out of the room. No one was in the hallway so she made her way downstairs, where some voices could be heard.

“—two pounds of wafers, new welding gear, and about two dozen doughnuts,” Tony was saying. He was sitting at the table, papers spread out in front of him. Pepper was sitting next to him, an impatient look on her face. Lyra got the feeling that she wore that face a lot when it came to Tony.

“Lyra! Good to see you, kid. I thought that you might’ve vanished into the night,” Tony said, smiling genuinely at her. She had a suspicion that he knew exactly how close she had been to doing just that and she felt bad. Slightly. Tony looked her up and down and then turned to Pepper and added, “Oh, and add to the list some basics for our guest. Until she decides what she wants to do herself. Clothes and what not. Lady things.” Lyra raised an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t seem fazed. “You’ll probably also want some breakfast. Or really dinner now. There’s stuff in the fridge, but you can also call my chef. He makes the best omelets. Or also you could go out. There’s this really good taco place just down the street. That is, if they’re still there. Haven’t been there in months, but…”

He continues talking and she tuned him out. She had gotten used to his babble while he was working in the cave and it usually exhausted her. She would have normally told him to shut up by now, but she was grateful for it at the moment because she had no idea what to say. She wandered over to the fridge and opened it. There were so many different foods and colorful brands inside and it occurred to her that it had been a very long time since she had had a choice on what she could eat. Nothing looked familiar, so she closed it again and spotted an apple sitting on a tray of fruit. She also realized that what she had been smelling all this time was coffee. It was familiar from a long time ago. She picked up the apple and walked over to the source of the coffee smell.

“Cups are in the cupboard right above you,” Tony said nonchalantly from the table.

Lyra poured herself some and then joined them at the table. Pepper was still staring at her curiously and it made her uncomfortable. After a moment of silence, Lyra looked up to see them both looking at her.

“What?” she asked, trying not to sound as uncomfortable as she was.

“Have you been listening?” Tony asked.

“No,” Lyra said bluntly and then yawned. “Why? Was there something important?”

Tony and Pepper shared a look and then Tony gestured to the papers in front of him, saying, “These are the adoption papers. I need to go over some of this stuff with you.”

Lyra looked simultaneously stunned and confused. “My… adoption…?”

“Close your mouth, Golbat, this was the agreement, right?” Tony said, but he stared at her like he was expecting her to get mad. “I got all the paperwork rushed and waived the homestudy.”

Lyra looked down at the pages and then looked up at Tony. She could tell that his easy smile was holding worry behind it. She thought about what this would mean for her, and she resented the thought of anyone owning her, even in a loose sense.

“It’s not like you have them your real information anyway,” Tony said, figuring that that might get a reaction out of her. It was half a guess.

Lyra raised her eyebrows in surprise, but her smile was amused. “What makes you say that?”
“These papers say that you were born in Indiana.”

“And what makes you think that I didn’t lie to you instead of them.”

“Why would you lie?”

“Fair point,” Lyra admitted. “So I lied to the government and gave them foraged documents. Doesn’t that make me a criminal?” She was waiting for his answer. It was a test to see what he would do.

“Only if they find out. Those must’ve been some good fake records for the government to not be suspicious,” Tony said easily. Pepper was looking back and forth between them, like they were both crazy. “Didn’t you have to take the same lie detector tests that I did while we were there?”

“Lie detector tests are pretty easy,” Lyra said, still conversationally.

“Are you two insane?!” Pepper finally spoke up. “We can’t just lie to the government. They’re the GOVERNMENT. If we get caught—”

“Pepper calm down it’s going to be okay. IF we get caught then you can just say that you had no idea,” Tony said, trying and failing to calm her down. “So about these papers. It’ll be really easy to change your name to Stark. I’d understand if you don’t want to, but we just have to sign this paper right here.”

“You want me to take your last name?” Lyra said, but when Tony looked up at her, her face was unreadable.

“It’s perfectly fine if you don’t want to. With your family and all I’d understand—” Tony began, thinking that this was a mistake to bring up.

“Yes. God, yes,” Lyra finally said, and gave Tony a rare genuine smile. “Smith is such an awful fake last name. I mean, honestly.”

Pepper did not look any happier about what Lyra had said. Tony looked both surprised and strangely happy.

“And then if I ever decide that I hate it everyone will remember that a Stark was the one that ruined everything,” Lyra said, because she couldn’t let him get too happy.

“Sign here, sunshine,” Tony said and indicated a slot. Lyra signed.

“Is that everything?” Lyra asked, looking over the papers.

“For now, yeah.”

Lyra nodded and then finally took a sip of the coffee that was sitting in front of her. It was a the perfect temperature and tasted like liquid energy. Her eyes widened.

“This is great…” she said before she could stop herself.

Tony chuckled and said, “Of course. That swill that we drank in that cave was the worst.”

“I’m pretty sure that that was mostly dirt. With a little caffeine,” Lyra said, seriously enough for Tony to question whether it actually had been. She didn’t say anything more about it.

After eating they went back down to the lab to do more tests on Tony. Lyra took the time to dig into JARVIS’s source code and make a bunch of tweaks. It was good code. She was surprised. Something even more surprising was that according to the code, Lyra had indeed been granted top tier level access, equal with Tony’s. She had kind of assumed that he would hold onto his intellectual property, but there it was. She had full control over everything that Tony did.

They began working on a better arc reactor for Tony’s chest. With all the quality ingredients at their disposal they could improve the functionality of the piece by quite a lot. Lyra had a vague sense of where he was going with all of this, but she kept it to herself and worked. After not having been working together for several days it was a surprise to Lyra just how comfortable she had become working beside Tony. It had been so long since she had had a partner that knew as much, or maybe more than she did, and she realized that she didn’t want to lose that. She also knew that what he wanted to make was going to be something that could change the world. For better or worse she hadn’t decided on that yet.

It didn’t take long before they had a working reactor that was ready. There was just one last problem to solve. Lyra needed to be ready to remotely write and activate the code once the reactor was in place, but Tony’s hands were too big to install it. Tony had the wonderful idea to call Pepper in. Even though Pepper had started warming up to Lyra, she could tell that Pepper thought she was pushing Tony to obsessively work on their project. The installation went fine, despite some small setbacks and Tony had his new chest piece successfully installed.

When Pepper left the room, Lyra gave Tony a look and said, “I thought you said that you didn’t have anyone at home?”

“I don’t. I didn’t,” Tony said, still looking over to where Pepper disappeared.

Lyra smirked and Tony glared at her. She put both hands up in defense and said, “Okay, okay. So now what?”

“Now,” Tony said while tapping the glass on his chest. “We get started.”

Lyra had been more or less correct about what he wanted to do. Though the design didn’t contain any weapons to her surprise. Just a flight suit. They argued about designs and math for a couple of days before they finally picked one to try first.

“I’m gonna go visit Rhodey, you wanna come? Get rid of all that cabin fever, see the world?” Tony said, casually sitting on the holodeck that she was working on and blocking the light.

“No, thanks,” Lyra said, absentmindedly. She was obviously still deep in thought.

“You really need to get out more,” Tony said, still not letting her work. “Me? I’m dying over here.”

“Can you go die somewhere else please?”

“Ouch. You really are no fun.”

“Rhodey’s not going to join you on this,” Lyra said, ignoring his comment. “He’s even less fun than I am.”

Tony hopped off the table and called over his shoulder, “Not possible. I’ll prove you wrong. See you in a few hours.”

Lyra rolled her eyes and went back to work.

“Dummy, look alive. You’re on standby for fire safety. Lyra, you roll it. Keep the camera steady. Okay. Activate hand controls. We’re gonna start off nice and easy. We’re gonna see if 10% thrust capacity achieves lift.”

“That’s too much,” Lyra muttered under her breath, but Tony ignored her. He was confident in his math.

“And three, two, one.”

Tony immediately flew up like he wanted. Right into the ceiling when there was nothing to stabilize him and then fell straight down onto the floor. To add insult to injury Dummy also covered him in fire protecting foam. Lyra ran over and gave him a good look as he was pushing himself onto his knees. They shared brief eye contact and then Lyra burst into laughter, the camera still rolling.

“Okay, so maybe it was too much. Turn the damn camera off,” Tony muttered, still obviously in pain.

“Right…. right,” Lyra said between breaths as she tried and failed to stop laughing. “We need… flight stabilizers… that you can control.” She turned the camera off and wiped the tears from her face. “Can we use my math now? I told you you’d need to account for the center of mass even in a small sustained flight.”

Tony muttered something that Lyra couldn’t hear, though by his face she had a pretty good guess what it was. She looked down at him, with a big smile still on and then she wiped some of the foam out of his hair. He looked back up and couldn’t help but to also grin. Her happiness was contagious.

The next week or so was Tony designing and making the stabilizers and simultaneously working on the rest of the suit. Tony had several meetings that he had to attend, but Lyra worked on the code and interface almost 24/7. Pretty much the only breaks were when Tony would insist that they go out and get food. He tried to get her to appreciate quality food like she did coffee, but she just ate as much as her stomach would allow and told Tony that after years of eating awful food there was no room for her to be picky with what she ate. She was, thankfully, gaining weight from the scrawny underfed state that she had been when he found her.

They were just putting on the final stabilizers when Pepper walked in and announced that Obadiah was upstairs waiting to talk to Tony.

“I though you said you were done making weapons,” Pepper said, watching them attach the handpiece.

“This is a flight stabilizer. It’s completely harmless,” Tony assured her. Then he turned away and was looking at something else when the stabilizer suddenly powered up and let out a blast, directly at Lyra, who jumped out of the way as much as she could. The window behind her shattered.

“Lyra!” Tony called and dove towards her over all the scattered papers. She was on her knees with her hand covering her left arm, looking annoyed but okay. Tony gently picked her hand up and saw a red angry burn covering the side of her arm.

“Oh man, I’m so sorry,” Tony said to her and rushed over to go get some of the burn cream he kept in the shop. “I didn’t expect that.”

“I think you just lost your repulsor privileges,” Lyra muttered sarcastically, through gritted teeth. Pepper was kneeling down next to Lyra also worrying over her. Pepper barely dodged out of the way as Dummy, who had rushed over at the sound of crashes, doused Lyra in white foam. It actually helped to cool down the fire on her arm, but when Tony came back and saw her completely covered in the stuff it was his turn to laugh while Lyra glared at him.

“Go talk to your business partner. I’m going to go take a shower,” Lyra said grumpily and wiped some of the foam off her face.

“What? You don’t want to talk to Oby?” Tony said, jokingly, but got a serious look in return.

“No there’s something off about him,” Lyra said, rubbing at the burn on her arm and then disappearing upstairs.

“Sorry!” Tony called again after her, though he was still chuckling. The burn would hurt, but it was nothing serious.

“Day 11, test 37, configuration 2.0. For lack of a better option, Dummy is still on fire safety. If you douse me again, and I’m not on fire, I’m donating you to a city college.” Lyra had to smile at the way Tony treated his robots like they were children. He could never know that she had secretly programed Dummy to douse him no matter what.

“Seriously, just gonna start off with 1% thrust capacity. Three, two, one.” Tony gently lifted off the floor and used his outstretched hands to keep himself upright. Lyra was looking at the computer, reading the data that they were collecting for calibrating their balancing systems. She was absorbed in her work and she didn’t pay attention until she looked up and he was over the cars.

“Not the car, not the car! Table! Could be worse, could be worse. We’re fine. Okay.” Lyra smirked and watched him clumsily fly around the room. Their systems all looked good. Tony landed without a problem this time and stopped Dummy from dousing him, overriding her programming, but she was too excited to care.

“Alright, let’s go with the rest of it!” she said happily and Tony moved to where the rest of his suit was going to come on. Everything ran smoothly, as predicted and they checked out the interface Lyra had been so lovingly working on, integrating it with Jarvis and running diagnostics. She knew that Tony had to shut down the suit to finish the testing and so she left upstairs to go grab a cup of coffee.

When she came back, there was no Tony. A quick glance to the data screens showed exactly where he was and Lyra almost noped right back out of the lab to enjoy her coffee in peace. Instead, she reminded herself that he was her idiot and then sat down and pulled on a headset.

“Tony,” she said sweetly into the microphone, “you wouldn’t happen to be 70,000 ft over the city at the moment and climbing, would you?”

“That,” Tony answered similarly calm, “is a good question that really depends on your perspective. I haven’t left the stratosphere yet, if that makes any difference.”

“Well, why don’t you come back down before all the fluids in your suit start freezing?”

“Sir, there is a potentially fatal buildup of ice occurring,” Jarvis cut in. Tony could almost feel the look that Lyra was undoubtedly giving him.

“Keep going! Higher!” Tony said anyway, seeing how close he was to breaking the record.

Lyra noticed the power cut off on the suit and began to panic just a little bit. If Tony were to die right now she would no doubt get the blame for it and have to go back into hiding. She wracked her brain for a suitable solution while she patched herself through to the independent radio that she had put into his helmet for times just like this.

“Tony!” She called out, not successful in keeping all the panic from her voice.

“Lyra? Uh, maybe you were right. Little help here? Like, before I splat all over this street?” Tony called out, definitely panicking.

“Ummm there’s a switch just below your knee that will force the flight stabilizers to expand manually. Can you reach it? That might get enough of the ice out to reboot.”

There was a lot of silence on the other end and Lyra was praying that he hadn’t passed out. There was nothing she could do right now but wait and she hated herself for it. After a few tense moments that felt like a lifetime she heard a whoop of joy that was obviously Tony’s. She let out a breath of relief.

“Manual independent radio, huh? Good for contact when the suit doesn’t have power. Nice touch,” Tony’s voice came through.

“Anthony Edward Stark--” Lyra began, her voice shaking with fury.

“I know, I know, I’m headed straight back. I promise,” Tony interrupted, and Lyra rubbed her temples and then finished the cup of coffee in a gulp. She was ready to give Tony a huge piece of her mind when he got back. And that’s exactly what she did.

After the incident with the ice, Lyra realized that on top of trying to create a specialized flight suit with state-of-the-art tracking and visual systems, she needed to also plan for Tony’s recklessness and stupidity. She sat down to redraw a bunch of different plans for the suit and make improvements. She knew that she couldn’t fix everything, but the feeling that she had had when Tony had been falling without power had been downright terrible. She was starting to realize that she had grown closer to Tony than just about anyone, though she would never admit that.

“Wanna go to a party?” Tony asked, startling Lyra out of her work. She didn’t answer, just glared at him for a moment and then went back to working.

“You really, really, need to get out more, Cinderella. Go find a ball and a prince and—”

“Have fun, Tony.”

Chapter Text

The party was going great, in Tony’s opinion. He hadn’t expected to see Pepper there, but man did she look great. He tried and failed to keep his distance from her and before he knew it, they went from talking to dancing together to getting some air on the roof. He left to go get them drinks when everything fell apart.

“Wow. Tony Stark. Fancy seeing you here.” A voice called to him and he turned to see…

“Oh hey… Carrie.”

“Christine,” she corrected him.

“That’s right,” Tony said, still off balance and not knowing where she was going to go with this.

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here tonight. Can I at least get a reaction from you?”

“Panic. I would say panic is my reaction.”

“Accountability? I actually almost bought it, hook, line, and sinker. I can’t believe it.” Christine gave him a disgusted look and walked away.

Tony was confused for a moment and then regained enough sense to realize that his phone had been buzzing. It was Lyra.

“Hello?”

“Tony. You might want to look at this…” Lyra sent him photos from a news crew, which he studied in shock. There was no way that anyone legitimate had resupplied the Ten Rings that quickly.

“I didn’t approve any shipment,” Tony said softly.

“Well, your company did,” Lyra said, her voice taking the cold tone that he had come accustomed to in the cave.

“Well, I’m not my company,” Tony said stubbornly, though he knew that that was just going to make her more irritated.

“Well, maybe you should find out who is,” Lyra snapped and then hung up on him.

A dark idea was entering Tony’s mind as he walked out of the doors and back into the press. It wasn’t hard to find Obadiah in the crowd and he pushed his way through people to get to him.

“Have you seen these pictures? What’s going on in Gulmira?” Tony immediately asked, ignoring the comments and questions from the press.

“Tony, Tony. You can’t afford to be this naïve,” Obadiah said easily, his expression remaining steady.

“You know what? I was naïve before, when they said, ‘Here’s the line. We don’t cross it. This is how we do business.’ If we’re double-dealing under the table… Are we?” Tony was laser-focused on Obadiah and was surprised when the older man threw a hand around his shoulders. Like they were still old friends.

“Let’s take a picture. Come on. Picture time!” Stane seemed almost cheery as he smiled for the cameras. Tony had been trained well and also made an effort to not show what he was feeling as the press took the pictures.

“Tony. Who do you think locked you out?” Stane murmured into Tony’s ear as the two men posed. “I was the one who filed the injunction against you. It was the only way I could protect you.”

Even through Tony’s best efforts, he was sure that there was probably a picture taken of the exact moment that whatever remaining innocence he had had been stamped out. After that, Obadiah left and Tony headed straight back to his car and back home, not able to think about anything other than the total and utter betrayal he had just witnessed. All these years, he had relied on Obadiah, trusted him. Only to find out that everything he had done had been to use Tony for his own profit.

When he got home, Lyra was still understandably in a bad mood—she had been that way ever since his impromptu flight—but when she saw his face hers softened a little bit. He sat on the work bench and eventually found himself pouring out the whole story to Lyra. Everything. She didn’t interrupt or react, just listened and let him rest his head in her lap. In the background the news story about Gulmira kept running from when Lyra had been watching it before. They both found themselves listening in silence.

“I’m going to go,” Tony stated after a while. finally sitting back up. There were so many different emotions running through his brain that sitting there and thinking would drive him crazy. His old self would probably decide to drink the pain away, and he might just do that later, but now the most identifiable feeling that he had was guilt and shame, which weren’t so easily forgotten. Lyra had been right, the fact that he had been providing weapons for the company without every looking too closely at where they went made it his fault when they were used to kill innocent people. It was about time that he do something about that.

“Going to go where?” Lyra asked, still watching the screen. A deep look of empathy was on her face as she watched the retreating refugees.

“I have to stop that,” Tony answered blankly.

Lyra looked up at him, her expression also blank. He wished that she would share what she was feeling with him more. He had gotten her to open up just a little bit since she had joined him, but when it came to anything serious she was distant and cold.

“Then stop them,” she said simply, surprising Tony. Her face turned fierce, with all the same passion and fury that Tony was feeling at the moment. Tony took a deep breath. Of course she would be feeling something similar. She had also been supplying them with weapons for the last year. They shared a look like they were coming to an agreement about something and then Tony turned around and walked to the platform the put his suit on. In just three minutes from the time he decided to leave, he was gone.

Lyra monitored the news, the data coming in from the suit, and did small course corrections to smooth out the systems while he was gone. She hadn’t anticipated how much the gunfire would disrupt the systems and she had to compensate for that by sending manual updates to the suits drivers. The confrontation went smoothly, until on the way back he got tangled with the US Air Force.

“Tell Rhodey to call them off. Tell him it’s you,” Lyra said into the radio, clearly annoyed after hearing their conversation, as Tony clung to the bottom of the jet. She was looking at the radar of the area and intercepting their radio conversations. “Oh shit, they spotted you.”

“But he told me that he didn’t want to see what I was working on.”

“I don’t think that that applies to your untimely death at the hands of the Air Force, Stark,” Lyra said lazily. She was already hacking the jet’s computers so that they would lose tracking and weapon abilities. Then her eyes widened at the sound of the cry on the radio and a plane abruptly dropping off the radar. “Or anyone else’s untimely death. Did you seriously just knock a plane down?” She listened some more. “Their chute is jammed!”

“On it,” Tony answered and then Lyra could see the drop in altitude as he dived. Lyra held her breath at the silent minutes while everyone listened to the descent of the unfortunate pilot.

“Good chute!” The cry finally came and Lyra relaxed into her chair and took a breath. She listened to Tony talk to Rhodey some more, not wanting to interrupt. She also held her silence for the rest of his flight home, which scared him because he knew that it was going to be bad when he got back.

“If that pilot had died it would have been all your fault. What were you thinking? You could have waited like 20 more seconds for me to hack their radars and lose you, but no. You had to go flying around them like a kid flaunting your armor. You egotistical idiot. I can’t believe that you—”

“It was a mistake,” Tony said, putting his hands up in the armor to try to ward off her verbal attacks. She was always the most vocal when she was mad at him.

“You’re not allowed to make mistakes, Tony. It’s life or death out there. If you can’t rely on me to do my job then I’m not going to help you,” she knew that she was being hard on him, but she needed to impress upon him the seriousness of going on missions like that, just like she had been taught to do. She doubted whether he had ever been in a stressful situation like that, other than the cave.

“Pilot didn’t die. I’ll be more careful. Apparently you have a job now?” Tony said after a moment of taking in her words. She looked surprised as she realized what she had said. ”Hey, I did realize that this is something that I have to do now. I can’t just stop with that one. I need to erase all the misdoings of my past. If you feel the same, then we’re in this together. What do you say? Partners?” He extended a metal hand. Lyra bit her lip, thinking for a moment. Then she took it and shook.

“Ow, let go!” she yelped as he squeezed her hand and little too tightly in the armor. He let go and she shook her hand out, throwing him a dark look. However, she could almost feel the two of them start working out algorithms to make sure that the suit could have a more delicate touch when needed. Together, they could perfect the design and run missions. They’d be unstoppable.

“Now, let’s see if we can get this darn thing off,” Tony muttered, eyeing all the dents and damage from the bullets the armor had blocked. He already felt the bruises forming on his body. He stepped up to the platform and the robotics activated, attempting to take apart the armor, but their programming was thrown off by the damage. They were doing their best, but the result was just yanking Tony around.

“Sir, the more you struggle, the more this is going to hurt,” Jarvis advised.

“Be gentle. This is my first time,” Tony said, trying not to grunt when the robots hit down on a particularly large bruise. This was getting nowhere. “I designed this to come off, so… I really should be able to…”

“Please, try not to move, sir.” Jarvis sounded like he was enjoying this, curse him. Speaking of enjoyment, Lyra was watching him with a small smile on her face that she was trying to hide by drinking coffee and leaning against the work table.

“Hey, why don’t you give me a little help here, partner?” Tony asked sarcastically. Lyra shrugged and turned around to find something.

“What’s going on here?” Pepper’s voice rang out in the shop. Everything froze for a moment.

“Let’s face it. This is not the worst thing you’ve caught me doing,” Tony pleaded, earning a scoff from Lyra.

“Are those bullet holes?” Pepper asked, in shock. Tony and Lyra shared a glance, neither of them knowing how to explain this to Pepper. Pepper, regaining her senses, then whirled around at Lyra.

“It’s you! Ever since you showed up Tony’s been shutting down his business and working on secret projects and now showing up covered in bullet holes! I don’t know what you did to him over there, but I’m not just going to sit around and let you—”

“Pep! Hey, come on. It’s not her fault. This was my idea. All of it,” Tony got between them, stopping Pepper’s advance on Lyra. “I’m fine, really. It’s thanks to her that I’m fine.”

Pepper stopped, but kept glaring at Lyra, who was looking around in shock. She hadn’t expected Pepper to go off on her like that. It was evident that these had been things that Pepper had been thinking for a long time now and they had all come out at once. It really showed how much Pepper cared about Tony.

“If he gets hurt at all I’m going to make sure that you get all the blame,” Pepper said coldly, and then turned and stalked out of the shop.

“Sorry, I’ll go talk to her,” Tony said, making a move to run after her.

“Wait, no. She’s perfectly fine. Just looking out for you. Besides, you probably don’t want to go stomping around in that thing.” Lyra grabbed his retreating arm and yanked hard enough for the suit to register the force. Tony turned back around and saw Lyra holding an electric hand drill, an evil look in her eye.

“Let’s get started.”

“Welcome,” Raza said to Obadiah as he exited the car. Stane walked up to Raza and then turned to get a better look at the other man’s face. “Compliments of Tony Stark,” Raza explained, keeping a straight face.

Obadiah gave a businesslike smile and replied, “If you’d killed him when you were supposed to, you’d still have a face.”

“You paid us trinkets to kill a prince.”

“Show me the weapon.”

“Come. Leave your guards outside.”

After Obadiah signaled for his people to remain there, they both walked inside to where Raza’s men had reassembled the majority of the first iron man suit. Obadiah walked up to it to inspect it.

“His escape bore unexpected fruit,” Raza said, ignoring the suit and walking over to the table, he grabbed some of the papers that they had been able to scrap together from the mostly destroyed workshop. He held them up for Obadiah to see and then threw them back on the table.

“So this is how he did it,” Obadiah muttered to himself, still checking out the tech in front of him. Then he walked to the table to view the papers that Raza had indicated.

“This is only a first, crude effort. Stark has perfected his design. He has made a masterpiece of death. A man with a dozen of these can rule all of Asia. And you dream of Stark’s throne. We have a common enemy,” Raza walked across the room again and sat down. “If we are still in business, I will give you these designs as a gift. And in turn, I hope you’ll repay me with a gift of iron soldiers.”

Raza looked up to see Obadiah had walked over to where he sat and he put a hand on his shoulder, with a smile on his face. Then Raza heard a click and a high pitched sound, and his entire body froze.

“Technology,” Obadiah said, his ear protection glowing blue. “It’s always been your Achilles heel in this part of the world. Don’t worry It’ll only last for 15 minutes. That’s the least of your problems now.” Obadiah now held up the papers so that the other man could see them. “This. This isn’t even mostly Tony’s handwriting. Looks like you had a princess all along.”

Obadiah put the papers into his suit pocket and the smoothed it over and exited the tent.

“Crate up the armor and the rest of it,” he said, walked back to the car. Behind him the guards had all of Raza’s men on their knees. “All right. Let’s finish up here,” he said briskly. The sound of gunfire echoed through the night.

“We need to tighten up the plating and maybe give it another few millimeters around sectors 27A. I’ll get Jarvis on the fabrication while I disassemble it,” Lyra said, working on the holotable and holding up a big piece of the suit.

“It’s fine. That’ll take too long. Just leave it alone,” Tony said, seriously and she looked up at him suspiciously.

“The bruising along your back says otherwise. Besides, weren’t you the one that said that we have no need to rush?” Lyra asked curiously. Noting that Pepper had just made an entrance behind Tony.

“I said no,” Tony snapped, “We need to get it back up and running as soon as possible.”

Lyra held up her hands in surrender and then turned the holotable off, sharing a look with Pepper. Tony turned around to see what she was looking at.

“Hey. You busy? You mind if I send you on an errand? I need you to go to my office. You’re going to hack into the mainframe and you’re gonna retrieve all the recent shipping manifests.” He said all that while still focusing on his work. He handed her a thumb drive and then went back to what he was working on. “This is a lock chip. This’ll get you in. It’s probably under Executive Files. If not, they put in on a ghost drive, in which case you need to look for the lowest numeric heading.”

“And what do you plan to do with this information if I bring it back here?” Pepper said, picking up on what Lyra had seemed so exasperated by.

“Same drill,” Tony said, still not looking her in the eye. “They’ve been dealing under the table, and I’m going to stop them. I’m going to find my weapons and destroy them.”

“Tony, you know that I would help you with anything, but I cannot help you if you’re going to start all of this again.”
Tony finally looked up at Pepper and then his eyes flicked to Lyra, who was also giving him a look. “There is nothing except this. There’s no art opening. There is no benefit. There is nothing to sign. There is the next mission and nothing else.” He was looking Pepper straight in the eyes now. His eyes were cold and detached, but most importantly determined.

“Is that so?” Pepper asked coolly. “Well, then, I quit.” She threw the drive back onto the table and started to walk away.

Tony looked stunned for a moment, and then quickly made his face emotionless. “You stood by my side all these years while I reaped the benefits of destruction. And now that I’m trying to protect the people that I put in harm’s way, you’re going to walk out?”

“You’re going to kill yourself, Tony. I’m not going to be a part of it,” Pepper turned and looked at him just as emotionless.

“I shouldn’t be alive,” Tony said, sitting down. “Unless is was for a reason. I’m not crazy, Pepper. I just finally know what I have to do. And I know in my heart that it’s right.”

Pepper turned to Lyra and asked, “Is this you?” It was a vague question, more of an accusation really, but Lyra understood the meaning.

“Don’t look at me, I’m trying to tell him to wait until it’s safer,” Lyra said quietly.

Pepper slowly took a breath and then walked back and picked up the drive again. “You’re all I have too, you know.”

“She’s right, you know,” Lyra said softly when Pepper left. “This is reckless. And that’s coming from me.”

“I thought that you were all for making up for my past mistakes. What happened? You were the one that always told me how awful I was. If I die trying to do that, what’s it to you?” Tony taunted, but then regretted it when Lyra looked away, clearly hurt by his words.

“It’s all pointless if you die,” Lyra said, then looked back at him, genuinely angry. “Yinsen told you not to waste your life and throwing it away because you’re too dumb to not take advice from people who care about you seems like a pretty big waste to me.”

Tony looked shocked again and Lyra rolled her eyes in disgust. She thought that he’d have gotten the hint by now that he was being his old selfish self again. “Lyra…” he said uncertainly.

“Just leave. I’m going to finish loading the new sequences into the suit and patch it up. I’ll tell you when it’s done,” Lyra said, then focused back on the computer in front of her and ignored Tony until he went upstairs.

Still angry and confused, Tony wandered around his upstairs apartment. Not knowing what to do with himself or why he had allowed Lyra to banish him from his own damn lab. After a while, though, he cooled down and started to think about things a little more logically. Maybe being reckless here wasn’t the answer. Then there was also the other part of what Lyra had said about caring about him. With how much she had detested him while they were in the cave he hadn’t exactly been expecting that. At least not out loud.

He dramatically plopped himself onto the couch to finish moping. There was no way he was going to go back down there with an angry Lyra that didn’t want him around. After a while he looked down to see his phone ringing. It was Pepper. He scooped it up and answered right away, hoping that nothing was wrong. At that moment a mysterious stiffness entered his body and he realized that he could no longer move. Still holding up the phone he heard Pepper’s panicked voice.

“Tony? Tony, are you there? Hello?”

Lyra lost track of time while working, and the next thing that she heard was a familiar voice saying, “Turn around slowly.” She had been threatened enough times to know the tone and so she dropped what she was working on and put her hands up, doing as he said. She wasn’t entirely surprised to see Obadiah behind her, gun in hand. He had always given her a bad vibe.

“Let’s take a walk.”

He led her out of the room and up the stairs. Her hands were in the air in the classic “don’t shoot me I’m not a threat” pose, but she knew that if that had been his intent it would have happened already. They got up the stairs and Lyra saw Tony looking strained and slouched over on the couch. It took everything she had not to run over to him. She immediately noticed that the arch reactor in his chest had been ripped out and not gracefully. She looked behind her to see Obadiah had a case in his other hand. She had been too distracted by the gun to notice what else he was holding.

“Imagine my disappointment when I looked over all the designs only to realize that most of it wasn’t yours,” the man drawled, still perfectly calm and seeming to enjoy the panic in Tony’s eyes. “I have to thank you for discovering her. It’d be a shame to let such talent go to waste. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her.”

Lyra made sure to keep her face perfectly blank throughout the entire conversation. It was something that she had become really good at, though she slipped up a little as Obadiah grabbed her arm and led her towards the door. She looked Tony up and down like this was the last time that she’d ever see him. Then the door closed and she was gone.

Obadiah led her to a car and motioned for her to get into the back. He got in next to her, never taking the gun off of her. The driver started the car and they were off to… wherever.

“What do you want from me?” Lyra asked, her tone cold and even. She could see that Obadiah looked impressed by her act.

“The only thing you’re useful for,” Obadiah said casually. “The Ten Rings knew it, and Tony knew it too. Now it’s my turn to own you.”

Lyra sighed and settled into the seat, resting her hand on her chin she looked up at Obadiah. “Don’t count on it,” she said and then looked out the window silently for the rest of the car ride.

“You’re going to integrate this,” Obadiah held out the case with Tony’s reactor, “into this,” he motioned to an oversized mechanical suit, “and make it quick.”

Lyra took the case thoughtfully. “And what if I can’t?” she asked, more out of ceremony than inquiry.

Obadiah used his now free hand it grab her by the throat, not enough to completely cut off her air, but enough to show her that he easily could. “You can. And you will.”

He let go of her and she sucked in a deep breath, looking up at him with deadly venom in her eyes. He chuckled and then turned and walked out of the room.

Lyra got to work. The suit that he had already made was crude, but there was no denying its power. She did the bare necessities connecting the power source from the plans that they gave her. There wasn’t a whole lot she needed to change, and the lab gave her all the materials that she needed. Her mind was thinking of anything she could do to sabotage the system in the process without getting herself killed.

As soon as she finished the wiring and was about to run diagnostics there was a sound like a small explosion. Lyra looked up in the direction instinctively, but before she could get a good read on what was happening she was shoved aside as Obadiah ran towards the suit. She hit her head on the desk with a sickening crack and then everything was muffled and blurry.

When she came to, Pepper was standing a few feet away, nervously looking into the dark. With a groan she put a hand to her forehead and it came away bloody, but even through her daze she knew that being there right then wasn’t a good idea. Using all of her focus she got to her feet and then saw Pepper turn towards her, completely missing the grabbing metal hand behind her. In a burst of adrenaline, Lyra tackled Pepper out of the way, forced her to remain on her feet, and then grabbed her arm and started running the other way. Pepper was screaming and struggling to keep up in her heels, but behind them were the unmistakable sounds of Obadiah in the suit chasing after them. Lyra kept her focus ahead of her and eventually they ran past a couple of others, who unsuccessfully tried to shoot at the suit behind them. Lyra didn’t slow their pace until they were outside. The doorway was too small for Obadiah’s machine to fit through.

“Pepper?” Tony’s voice came through her earpiece, though it Lyra only heard a faint sound.

“Tony!” Pepper screamed in panic. “Tony, are you okay? Obadiah, he’s gone insane! He built a suit.”

Lyra was too busy watching the ground shake and crumble in front of her to pay much attention to the conversation. She stood in front of Pepper and got her attention when she forced her a few steps back, knowing that running likely wouldn’t get them anywhere once he started firing.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Obadiah drawled. He pointed the rather large gun at the two of them. “Your services are no longer required.” Lyra kept her stance in front of Pepper, glaring at Obadiah.

“Stane!” Tony yelled from above, effectively gaining his attention. They collided and then were pushed away from the area so that Lyra and Pepper were just left with sounds of metal crunching and bullets. Lyra ran back into the destroyed lab and snapped some agents out of shock, directing them to go give medical care to the injured. She approached a computer and efficiently gained access to the systems, which was easy since she had just been working on them. She found the right program and patched herself through to Tony.

“Tony!”

“Lyra, are you okay?” Tony asked, but he sounded understandably distracted.

“Yeah, we’re fine. What are you going to do about Obadiah?”

“I’m hoping I either get through this so that I didn’t have to listen to this shitty monologue for nothing.”

“Not helping, Tony.”

There was a lot of silence on Tony’s end, presumably while they fought, then he came back.

“Hey, we fixed that icing problem, right?”

“You know what problem we didn’t fix? Using a chest piece that doesn’t have enough power for it to matter,” Lyra said, immediately understanding what he was getting at and making her opinion on it clear.

“Take me to maximum altitude,” Tony demanded.

“With only 15% power, the odds of reaching that—” Jarvis began.

“I know the math! Do it!”

Lyra stayed silent, just watched the screen that showed some basic data and bit her lip. She knew the math too, and it wasn’t good. But she’d seen worse odds.

“Aaannd he’s down,” Tony said, and Lyra watched as he conserved power by slowly using it in bursts before he got to terminal velocity. She calculated that he would just make it.

“Potts?” Tony said, turning on the other COMM.

“Tony! Oh my God, are you okay?”

“I’m almost out of power. I’ve got to get out of this thing. I’ll be right there.”

“Look out!” Lyra’s warning rang out as she looked up to see the larger suit fly over. Tony barely had time to turn around and put his facemask back on when Obadiah came up behind him and hit him hard across the chest. Lyra watched as the damages on his suit kept getting worse, wishing that she was able to do more for him. If she were in the lab she could have been reading the data and rerouting power accordingly for the best efficiency on the fly, but as of now she could only sit and watch.

“Potts?” Tony whispered, chiming in both to Lyra and Pepper.

“Tony!” Pepper said back, still obviously panicking.

“This isn’t working. We’re going to have to overload the reactor and blast the roof.”

“Well, how are you going to do that?” Pepper asked, while Lyra already started getting through to the overrides on her already hacked computer.

“Go up to the central console, open up all the circuits. Lyra will reroute the power so that whatever’s open gets the juice. When I get clear of the roof, I’ll let you know. You’re going to hit the master bypass button. It’s going to fry everything up here.”

Pepper cautiously made her way through the broken glass into the lab. “Okay. I’m going in now.” She spotted Lyra, who was already working at the computer and walked up to her.

“Which ones do I open?” she asked, her voice wavering.

“All of them. The switched are over there,” Lyra pointed. “And then we need to get out of here quick.”
“Make sure you wait till I clear the roof,” Tony reminded them, startling both of them. There were more sounds of fighting above them as Pepper got to the switches and the two women shared a look. Pepper was slightly reassured by the confidence in Lyra’s eyes, but Lyra knew that it was all fake. She finished with the computer and went to the control panels, flipping the necessary switches. When she just had one more button to press to start the overload she gave Pepper a thumbs up.

“It’s ready, Tony! Get off the roof!” Pepper yelled into her earpiece.

They both looked up desperately where Tony was standing only to hear gunfire and then duck down as shattered glass fell from overhead. They saw Tony hanging from the ceiling where the glass had been. They could hear the conversation now.

“How ironic, Tony. Trying to rid the world of weapons, you gave it its best one ever. And now, I’m going to kill you with it!” Obadiah fired at Tony and Lyra and Pepper gasped, but it missed. “You ripped out my targeting system!” Obadiah bellowed in frustration.

“Lyra!” Tony called, “Time to hit the button!”

“You told us not to!” Pepper called back, keeping an eye on Lyra, who had her finger over the button, but kept her eyes on the situation above. Obadiah fired again, but it was another miss, though closer this time.

“Just do it!” Tony yelled.

“You’ll die!” The anguish in Pepper’s voice was heartbreaking, and Lyra found herself agreeing with it. She kept her hand over the button, hesitating. Trying to calculate in her brain the chances of success and any other way that they could get out of this. The third time that Obadiah fired and missed, Tony dropped down so that he was hanging from one hand and looked Lyra right in the eyes.

“PUSH IT!” He ordered. His eyes showing that he still wasn’t giving up. It snapped Lyra out of her hesitation and she slammed her hand onto the button. The reaction was immediate and powerful. She covered her head and then grabbed Pepper and made their way to the door, watching an enormous white beam of energy shoot up into the sky. There was one last explosion and then everything stopped. They stood outside listening to the creak of metal for a moment, before Lyra and Pepper shared a look and then both ran back in and up the emergency stairs to the roof.

Tony was lying on a piece of grating that hadn’t fallen in the explosion. Lyra’s first thought was that he looked relatively undamaged, but he was knocked out. Her heart sunk in horror as she noticed that the chest piece was flickering.

“Help me get him over here,” Lyra demanded, grabbing his arm and tugging. He was too heavy for her to move alone, but with Pepper’s help and a lot of adrenaline, they managed to drag Tony’s body onto more stable ground. Lyra immediately began taking apart the chest piece and inspecting it quickly. It didn’t look all that damaged, but it needed to be on again. Without it, Tony could die at any moment. It was just a roll of the dice.

“Do you have anything electronic on you?” Lyra snapped, and Pepper held out her phone, which Lyra took and then immediately smashed and started taking apart as well. She needed to jumpstart the piece. She prayed that it would work.

“You’re not allowed to die on me yet, Tony Stark,” Lyra said, while she worked. Pepper stared down at her in surprise. Lyra’s usually snarky and guarded voice was showing actual concern and pain. Her face was nothing but determined and hopeful. Just from that Pepper could tell how much the girl had come to care, and any past suspicion in Pepper had vanished.

There was the now all too familiar sound of electricity moving and then the chest piece slowly flickered to life. Breathing out a sigh of relief, Lyra backed away from Tony and ran a hand through her hair. That had been way more stressful than it should have been. Pepper gave her a confused look, which she returned with a small smile and then Pepper relaxed too. Pepper knelt by Tony and they sat there and listened to the sounds of approaching sirens, too exhausted to do anything anymore.

The TV showed the picture that was being recorded in the other room. Pepper was putting the finishing touches on the makeup that covered Tony’s visible injuries. Lyra was working on something on a laptop across the room.

“’Iron Man’. That’s kind of catchy. It’s got a nice ring to it. I mean, it’s not technically accurate. The suit’s a gold-titanium alloy, but it’s kind of evocative, the imagery, anyway. What do you think Lyrs?” Tony was holding the newspaper with the article across the front.

“I think, that you’re a self-obsessed dork,” Lyra said, barely looking up from what she was doing. Tony pouted at her, which she promptly ignored.

“Here’s your alibi.” Coulson said, handing Tony the cards and giving Lyra a suspicious look. When SHIELD had debriefed then both their stories had both been the same, that Tony had and was the sole creator of the suit, but he was getting the feeling that there was more to it than that. “You were on your yacht. We have port papers that put you in Avalon all night, and sworn statements from 50 of your guests.”

Lyra kept a lazy tab on the conversation while she worked on gathering all the known information on SHIELD, which at this point was mostly reading blog posts about shady government activity. She got the feeling that Coulson was suspicious of her and she told herself that she would check her forged documents over again to make sure that her story was as tight as it had been when it was made for her 12 years ago. If they found out exactly where she had been and what she had done they probably wouldn’t be letting her walk around like this. If SHIELD was going to look into her, she would look back and see just how much of a threat they were going to be.

Coulson left and Tony was finishing up getting ready before heading out in front of the cameras.

“Are you talking about the night that we danced and went up on the roof, and then you went downstairs to get me a drink,” Pepper was saying seductively. “And you left me there, by myself? Is that the night you’re talking about?”

Lyra let out a loud snort and covered her mouth with her hand to keep from laughing out loud. She decided that she liked Pepper. Tony just shot her a glare.

“Thought so,” Pepper said, smoothing out his suit for him. “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

“Yes, that will be all, Miss Potts.” Tony left the room with his cards and Lyra closed her research and walked over to where Pepper was, watching the broadcast. They exchanged a worried glance. Neither of them knew what Tony was going to end up doing when it came down to it.

“The truth is… I am Iron Man.”

Lyra rolled her eyes hard. This was going to be interesting.

Chapter Text

Lyra turned off the TV. There was only so much of Tony’s bullshit, self-obsessed rambling that she could take. She knew exactly what was going on with the expo and why, but that didn’t make her like it any more. People reacted in strange ways when they were dying she was sure, but Tony’s little streak was driving her insane while she worked in the lab looking for a cure. Her temper was high when she looked down at her buzzing phone.

“What?” Lyra snapped into the phone, seeing that it was Tony calling her.

“Hey, looks like I’ll be in D.C. for a few days. I’ve been summoned. Do you have that remote hacking unit ready yet? Can you put on a suit and fly it to me real quick?” Tony’s voice came through. It was obvious that he was in a car, that he had had a little bit to drink, and that he was by no means taking this seriously. They had expected this exact thing to happen sooner or later and had already prepared everything that Tony would need to defend himself. Lyra had even picked up a few law books and started reading, knowing that it might be useful for her to be involved in this part of the company. There was, however, some parts of the company that she knew she didn’t want to be a part of.

“Yeah, no. The last thing I want to do is put on a stupid suit and gallivant around with it like you do. You know that thing is killing you, right?” Lyra said, still annoyed.

“Hey, quiet down,” Tony said, laughing nervously. “Happy is like right here.”

“You know you should really just tell them,” Lyra reminded him for the millionth time while she pulled up the code for the hacking module.

“We talked about this, it’s fine,” Tony said vaguely.

“Uh-huh. Well, I uploaded the code onto your phone. You should be fine, just don’t do anything incredibly stupid and they can’t make you spend your last couple months in a prison.”

“Thanks Lyrs,” Tony said, then hung up before she could say anything else. Lyra knew that she was just stressing him out by reminding him constantly of his impending doom, but in her opinion he had given up way too early. She was still spending the same amount of time researching a cure that she had when they had first caught the poisoning. Tony, on the other hand, had turned to partying, drinking, and getting his affairs in order in the worst possible way that made him look like a complete jerk to everyone around him. At times he really was a complete jerk, but Lyra had more patience with him than others because she was the only one that knew the full story. She kept working into the night.

When Tony got home, Lyra stayed clear of him for the most part. Pepper was one of the people that didn’t know the whole story that was going on and she had even less patience than Lyra did. Needless to say they were always arguing when in the same room. Tony ignored all of Lyra’s attempts to get Tony to tell her and insisted that it would only freak her out. It wasn’t really Lyra’s place to tell her on her own, so Lyra just got to sit back and watch Tony tear his life apart one conversation at a time.

Lyra did, however, approve of Tony’s decision to make Pepper the CEO. Tony had been ignoring a lot of the responsibilities of the company in favor of doing whatever else that he wanted. Even if he weren’t dying she might have recommended the command change from the demand of being Iron Man and she had no desire to fill the role herself, even with all of the business training that Tony had been insisting that she take.

Lyra was sitting in a chair in the gym, watching Tony spar with Happy in the boxing ring while she looked over some data. She was expecting Pepper to bring the notary in so that they could sign the transfer paperwork. There was something there about Lyra being the next in line after Pepper if something were to happen to both of them that she needed to sign or else she wouldn’t have bothered showing up.

“What’s your name, Lady?” Tony asked suddenly and Lyra looked up to see a third woman standing in the room with them. She was very beautiful with curly red hair and something told Lyra that she was very dangerous. She shook off that thought, sure that it was just the nerves of getting too little sleep.

“Rushman. Natalie Rushman,” the woman answered quickly, and Lyra looked up. Something felt off, but again she just rubbed her eyes and put down the tablet to walk over to Pepper.

“Front and center. Come into the church,” Tony said and Lyra rolled her eyes. Of course Tony wasn’t just going to let this be easy.

Pepper was thinking along the same lines as she said, “No. You’re seriously not gonna ask…”

“If it pleases the court, which is does.”

“It’s no problem,” Natalie answered, and Lyra eyed her as well as she walked into the church gracefully.

“I’m sorry. He’s very eccentric,” Pepper apologized and Lyra just glared at Tony as he came towards them. He wedged himself right in between where Pepper and Lyra were sitting, forcing them to move over to the edges of the seat.

“Who is she?” Tony asked.

“She is from legal. And she is potentially a very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit if you keep ogling her like that,” Pepper answered, looking at her phone and Lyra laughed.

“I need a new assistant, boss.”

“Yes, and I’ve got three excellent potential candidates. They’re lined up and ready to meet you.”

“I don’t have time to meet. I need someone now. I feel like it’s her.” Lyra frowned at his words as Pepper dismissed them. Lyra was also definitely getting a feeling about her, but it wasn’t necessarily good. It wasn’t bad either, she was just uneasy. A few years ago she would’ve trusted her gut and made sure that she had nothing to do with the other woman, but now she had to remind herself that not everyone here wanted her dead. Her feeling wasn’t getting any better as Tony leaned over her to get at the holotable to look Natalie up and said, “She’s fluent in French, Italian, Russian, Latin. Who speaks Latin?”

“No one speaks Latin. It’s a dead language,” Pepper answered, getting more exasperated by the moment.

“I bet Lyra speaks Latin, Lyrs?”

Lyra ignored him and watched the woman in question completely take Happy down with a leglock. Tony walked down to talk to her and Pepper and Lyra followed.

“I meant your fingerprint,” Natalie said professionally. “Yours too,” she added to Lyra.

“Right,” Tony said, and he gave it to her. She then turned to Lyra, who did the same, though a little uncomfortably. She wasn’t used to giving out identifiable information about herself that easily, but she again had to remind herself that this was a whole new life for her.

“So, how are we doing?” Pepper asked Tony.

“Great. Just wrapping up here. Hey. You’re the boss.”

“Will that be all, Mr. Stark?” Natalie asked, and Lyra knew that that was the end of that. Tony never could resist a beautiful woman.

“No,” he said immediately.

“Yes, that will be all, Ms. Rushman. Thank you very much,” Pepper overrode him to Lyra’s relief.

“I want one,” Tony said as Natalie disappeared.

“No,” both Lyra and Pepper said in unison.

Shortly after signing over the company, Tony and Pepper left to Monaco, and Lyra saw a new employment record enter Tony’s books. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes when she saw who it was. She didn’t want to go with him with the way that he had been acting recently he’d probably get on her nerves enough for her to lose it and call him out in front of Pepper.

Turn on the Monaco races. It was a text from Pepper. Lyra wanted to ignore it, but in the end she ended up doing what she asked, knowing that Pepper wouldn’t text her if it wasn’t going to be important. She saw Tony climbing into a car and she resisted the urge to scream as she turned back to her work, leaving the race muted on the screen.

The next time she looked up there was panic all around the racetrack as an unknown man was tearing apart racecars with what looked like electrified whips. Lyra immediately began analyzing the footage and pulling the face and technology to get more information. She saw him approach Tony’s racecar slowly and gasped when he swung his whip through the cockpit, only to be relieved when he wasn’t there. She trusted that Pepper and Happy were on their way to him with the briefcase containing the iron man suit.

Sure enough, their car crashed into the racetrack and pinned down the mystery man. After a few tense moments Tony got the suit and put it on.

“Tony?” Lyra said through their direct patch in the suit.

“Hey Lyrs, what’s going on with you?” Tony said, though his façade of calm was breaking.

“Dealing with an idiot,” Lyra responded angrily.

“Hey, he attacked me,” Tony reminded her as he was getting swung at. “What’re we dealing with here?”

“Looks like he’s cycling power through the whips using… something that looks shockingly similar to what we’re using,” Lyra said, looking at what little data she could get from the images of his tech. “Don’t get hit.”

“Uh yeah, thanks,” Tony said sarcastically as on the screen the whips wrapped around him.

“The suits going to protect for a little bit. Maybe try getting in close to him?” Lyra suggested, still monitoring the levels on the screen in front of her. She then saw Tony start wrapping the whip around himself even more and crawling closer to the other man. That works too.

“I’m sending you over the schematics that I got of this design. Look them over,” Tony said and she saw him smash what he had in his hand. “I’ll go deal with the authorities. See what’s going on.”

“Okay, be careful, Tony,” Lyra said and they let the comm go dead.

Natalie arrived back at the mansion before Pepper and Tony and walked to the open area to wait for them. Lyra was already sitting in a chair at the table, with a large display obviously showing Natalie’s portfolio on it, she was looking at it intensely while sprawled out comfortably in the chair.

“Ms. Stark, what can I do for you?” Natalie said professionally.

“You can tell me who you really are,” Lyra said, looking straight at her. She was used to being able to catch when people lied easily, but Natalie was good. Very good. Lyra had caught a forgery sign in her documents that was so small that only someone who knew what they were looking for would have caught it. It was the same forgery sign that could be spotted in Lyra’s documents to the trained eye.

“You should know, I’m—”

“Cut the bullshit,” Lyra snapped. “Who do you work for?”

“Legal,” Natalie said, though she didn’t put much effort in the lie, knowing that she was already found out.

“Legal, as in the government?” Lyra asked.

“You think that someone planted a spy in your father’s company and you’ve figured it out. Why confront them alone?” Natalie asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“Honestly, a little monitoring isn’t the worst thing that could be happening at the moment and I don’t feel like you want to hurt us. I’ll figure out exactly who you are soon enough, I have connections in places that will do that for me,” Lyra said, turning off the screen in front of her and standing up. “I just have to know. Were you involved in this?” It was obvious that she was talking about the attack earlier the day before and as Lyra spoke there was a razor edge to her voice and her eyes turned cold. Natalie didn’t scare easily, but she definitely recognized that Lyra was intimidating like this. She was protecting Tony and it was clear that she was dead serious.

“No,” Natalie answered truthfully.

Lyra stared at her coldly for a moment more and then nodded, seeming to accept that answer. She stood up to leave. She might have said more, but there were more pressing matters to think about first, like how that man had gotten his hands on the plans for the arc reator.

“Ivan Vanko,” Lyra said to herself. “I swear I’ve heard that somewhere.” She and Tony were sitting in the lab, listening to JARVIS give his report on the man in the suit. They were both running on little sleep and tension was high. They hardly even noticed when Rhodey walked in until he spoke.

“Tony, you gotta get upstairs and get on top of this situation right now. Listen. I’ve been on the phone with the National Guard all day, trying to talk them out of rolling tanks up the PCH, knocking down your front door and taking these. They’re gonna take your suits, Tony, okay? They’re sick of the games. You said nobody else would possess this technology for twenty years. Well, guess what? Somebody else had it yesterday. It’s not theoretical anymore.” Rhodey was striding up to Tony, obviously furious. All Lyra could do is look at Rhodey helplessly. He reached Tony and got a good look at him. “Are you listening to me? Are you okay?”

“Let’s go,” Tony said, climbed out of the car, and promptly collapsed.

“Hey, man. Hey, hey! You all right?” Rhodey exclaimed as he picked Tony up off the ground. Lyra was already walking toward the desk, not looking panicked, but frowning. She pulled out a cigar box and headed over to Tony. She opened it for him and he pulled up his shirt to take the arc reactor out of his chest. Rhodey was peering into the box.

“It’s palladium,” Lyra informed him.

“Is that supposed to be smoking?” Rhodey asked nervously at the sight of the reactor.

“If you must know, it’s neutron damage. It’s from the reactor wall,” Tony answered gruffly, obviously in discomfort. Lyra pulled out the core and Rhodey stared at that too.

“You had that in your body?” he asked in horror, grabbing the core from Lyra as she put the new core in and handed it back to Tony.

“How about the high-tech crossword puzzle on your neck?” Rhodey asked accusingly.

“Road rash. Thank you.” Tony said to Lyra as he put the reactor back into his chest and grabbed his water bottle of chlorophyll. “What are you looking at?”

“I’m looking at you two. You wanna do this whole lone gunslinger act and it’s unnecessary. You don’t have to do this alone,” Rhodey explained, then looked accusingly at Lyra, who put her hands up in defense and gave Rhodey a helpless look back.

“Don’t look at me. I’ve been telling him the exact same thing,” Lyra said.

Tony sighed and said, “You know, I wish I could believe that. I really do. But you’ve gotta trust me. Contrary to popular belief, I know exactly what I’m doing.”

Rhodey and Lyra exchanged at doubtful look.

The sounds of the party below Lyra had been getting louder and louder all night as it got more and more out of hand. Despite Tony’s insistence, Lyra was not going to make an appearance at the party. She thought the whole thing was ridiculous and she was getting fed up with it. Then a series of explosions was rocking the house and she realized that in addition to all of the idiot proofing that she had been doing, she should’ve locked him out of access to his suits. She just didn’t ever think that he would be THAT stupid.

She walked down the stairs to see the entire party crowd backing up in fear, but staying in fascination as Tony was facing off against someone. Rhodey, she guessed, in the War Machine suit that Tony had been building for him. Rage built up in her as she watched them go at it for a little bit. Tony slammed Rhodey down into a wet bar in the middle of a room and there was a spray of water form the pipes. Lyra finally had enough and pushed her way through the crowd up to where Tony was.

“Everybody out!” She yelled, and then when people weren’t responding, she added, “JARVIS!”

There was a horrible screeching sound that came through all of the speakers in the house and Lyra shouted again over the noise.

“OUT!”

Seeming to get the message, people started running towards the exits, covering their ears until only Pepper and Natalie remained in the room, both also covering their ears. Lyra pulled out her earplugs and the sound stopped. Then she turned to Tony, who had been watching her. Rhodey had gotten up and was swinging the tabletop at Tony, which shattered and knocked him into the furnace. Tony immediately got up and put his hand up, charging the repulsor. Rhodey did the same.

“Put your hand down,” Rhodey warned. “Lyra get out of here.”

“You think you got what it takes to wear that suit?” Tony taunted. Lyra didn’t move.

“We don’t have to do this, Tony.”

“You wanna be the War Machine, take your shot.”

“Put it down!” Rhodey yelled.

“You gonna take a shot?”

“Put it down!”

“No!”

Lyra groaned and walked right up to Tony, then put both hands out and pushed his outstretched arm to the side of him. He stumbled a little bit.

“Lyra get—” Tony growled.

“Shut up!” Lyra growled right back. She looked both livid and exhausted. “I honestly don’t know what you’re going for with this one, Tony, because it looks like you’re trying to prove what an asshole you are. It’s working. I’m not just going to sit around and wait for you anymore so you either get your act together right fucking now or I’m done. Yinsen didn’t die for you to be like this and I won’t live with it.” The venom in her voice sank deep into Tony, sobering him up. He had never seen her this angry, she was literally shaking with it.

She stopped to take a deep breath and rub her face, trying to regain control. Then she looked up at the other people in the room. Rhodey had put his hand down and was watching. Pepper and Natalie were both staring horrified at the scene before them.

“Rhodey, take the suit. Go,” Lyra said after a moment, sounding much more calm.

“Lyra, I—" Rhodey began, putting up his mask to look at her.

“Just go. If he didn’t want you to have that then you wouldn’t be in it right now,” Lyra dismissed him, waving her hand. “I’m sorry,” she added as he turned to go. She sounded extremely tired in that moment as she rubbed her temples. She turned back to Tony as Rhodey left.

“Lyra, I’m sorry,” Tony said when he had her attention. The words were still slurred and barely intelligible.

“No. Just… go. I don’t care where you go, as long as you’re not here.”

“But I—” Tony started and Lyra cut him off with a glare.

“Don’t make me dump you out of that suit and throw you out myself,” Lyra said threateningly.

Tony got the message and stumbled over to the spot where Rhodey had disappeared and then flew off. Leaving the three women alone.

“Lyra, what’s going on?” Pepper asked timidly, as they all stared at where Tony disappeared.

“I wish I could tell you,” Lyra said regretfully, still rubbing at her eyes. That seemed to have taken a lot out of her. “I’ll be in the lab if you need me.” She picked her way through the destruction of the house and then down the stairs.

Tony turned up the next morning, with Natalie, Coulson, and another man that she didn’t know.

“Hello, Ms. Stark, I’m Director Fury from,” The man started.

“SHIELD, yeah I know. Hi Natasha. Coulson.” Lyra said, she was in the kitchen drinking her third cup of coffee when they had walked in.

“Natasha?” Tony asked incredulously. “You knew?”

Lyra didn’t answer, but shot him a glare. Then kept focusing on her coffee as they walked to the window to talk. She kept tabs on the conversation from the kitchen as they talked about Tony’s father.

“And Tony, remember, I got my eye on you.” Fury left.

“We’ve disabled all communications. No contact with the outside world. Good luck,” Natasha said, then left behind Fury, leaving Tony, Coulson, and Lyra in the room.

“First thing, I need a little bodywork. I’ll put in a little time at the lab. If we could send one of your goon squad down to The Coffee Bean, Cress Creek, for a Starbucks run, or something like that, that’d be nice.”

“I’m not here for that,” Coulson answered. “I’ve been authorized by Director Fury to use any means necessary to keep you on premises. If you attempt to leave or play any games, I will tase you and watch Supernanny while you drool into the carpet. Okay?”

“I think I got it, yeah,” Tony said, nodding.

“Enjoy your evening’s entertainment,” Coulson said, and then also left. Now it was just Tony and Lyra. Tony threw a foreboding look at the box on the ground next to them.

“Hey. I’m sorry. Really. You’re right. I was a total asshole and you don’t deserve that,” Tony said to her, and she looked up from her coffee.

“You’re damn right,” she said, though she didn’t sound particularly angry.

“Common, Lyrs. I need you. No more bullshit, I promise,” Tony said, walking over to her. She put her head back down into her coffee and he reached out to tilt it back up so that he could look into her eyes. He saw that hers were red. He couldn’t tell whether it was from lack of sleep or crying though. Maybe both.

“I don’t want to lose you too,” Lyra murmured softly and Tony’s heart dropped at the despair in her voice. She had been working nonstop to try and figure out how to help him and all he was doing was making her life harder.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Tony assured her and then pulled her into a hug, which she returned, holding him tightly.

“You’re right. You are an asshole,” Lyra muttered thickly into his chest.

They spent the rest of the day going through the contents of the box. There were lots of notebooks, some reels of tape, and prototypes that his father had been working on. Tony would occasionally tell her a memory of his father. They finally got to the end of all the tapes and saw the message that Howard had filmed for him.

“I gotta get out of here, Lyra,” Tony said suddenly and she looked up at him like she understood. Things between them were still tense after what had happened the night before, but she was still willing to help him out. Tony took a moment to appreciate how blessed he was to have her in his life. She wandered off to distract Coulson while Tony made his getaway. She half knew that Pepper wouldn’t be happy with him either and that she would also give him what he deserved.

Tony came back and started unloading four large panels from out of his car, putting them on a table.

“What’re these?” Lyra asked curiously as he brought the first one in. She had been going through Howard’s notebooks a second time.

“I think this is what my dad was trying to show me,” Tony said, then went back for another one. Lyra stared at the model doubtfully.

They scanned the model and then put it up in front of him.

“What does that look like to you, Lyra?” Tony asked.

“Not unlike an atom,” Lyra said, starting to catch on.

“Just a few modifications. Highlight the unisphere. Lose the footpaths. Get rid of them.”

“What is it you’re trying to achieve, sir?” JARVIS asked after doing what Tony wanted.

“I’m discovering… Correction. I’m rediscovering a new element, I believe. Lose the landscaping, the shrubbery, the trees,” Tony flicked away the features.

“Parking lots, exits, entrances,” Lyra added, starting to get excited.

“Structure the protons and the neutrons using the pavilions as a framework,” Tony expanded the resulting atom, putting it all around them as they looked around it in wonder. “Dead for almost 20 years, and still taking me to school.”

“The proposed element should serve as a viable replacement for palladium,” JARVIS informed them, having already performed the calculations without them asking.

“Thanks Dad,” Tony said in relief.

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to synthesize,” JARVIS said.

“Uh huh. Get ready for a major remodel, fellas. We’re back in hardware mode,” Tony said, getting up and walking out of the room.

The resulting frenzy of work reminded them both of their days in the cave together. Tony did a lot of the heavy lifting, breaking down walls and assembling the accelerator. They worked as fast as they could, knowing that Tony didn’t have a lot longer.

“Wait, let me check it before you turn it on,” Lyra insisted.

“It’s fine, let’s just get this show on the road,” Tony said, pulling the lever.

“Oh wait, I remember, I was going to ask you to—”

Lyra was cut off by the beam shooting in the exact wrong direction and burning into the wall.

“That?” Tony asked, quickly trying to turn the wheel, then grabbing a wrench when he couldn’t do it himself.

“Yup,” Lyra said as she watched him slowly burn a line through the wall trying to aim at the element. It finally hit and Tony held it there until the small triangle was glowing, then shut off the machine.

“That was easy,” Tony commented and went to go inspect it.

“Congratulations. You have created a new element,” JARVIS told them. “Sir, the reactor has accepted the modified core. I will begin running diagnostics.”

They were cleaning up while JARVIS made the finishing touches, though Lyra didn’t know why because the entire house was destroyed anyway.

“Incoming call with a blocked number, sir,” JARVIS called.

“Phone privilege is reinstated. Lovely.” Tony answered the call with Lyra listening in behind him curiously. “Coulson. How’s the Land of Enchantment?”

But it wasn’t Coulson that answered.

“Hey, Tony, how you doing? I double cycle.” It was the unmistakable voice of Ivan.

“You what?”

“You told me double cycles more power. Good advice,” the voice said. Lyra looked at Tony questioningly. She didn’t know what his voice sounded like.

“You sound pretty sprightly for a dead guy,” Tony commented, and Lyra understood. She pulled up her computer and started running a trace for where the call was coming from.

“You too,” Ivan laughed. “Now the true history of Stark name will be written.”

Lyra pulled up the location that she was getting and put it in front of Tony to look at. Every second the location got more specific.

“What your father did to my family over 40 years, I will do to you in 40 minutes,” Ivan continued.

“Sounds good. Let’s get together and hash it out.”

“I hope you’re ready,” Ivan said and then hung up. Tony and Lyra stared at each other for a moment.

“Call trace incomplete,” JARVIS said what they already knew. They got it down enough though to where they could guess that it had something to do with Hammer’s presentation. Tony immediately picked up the new arc reactor and shoved it into his chest. Lyra wasn’t really expecting anything else at this point and kept quiet while it powered on.

“You want to run some tests, run them. And assemble the suit while you’re at it. Put it together now.”

“Sir, we are unclear as to the effects.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Jarvis,” Tony said as the reactor started to glow.

“How’s it feel?” Lyra asked.

“Tastes like coconut. And metal. Oh wow, yeah! That’s better!” Tony looked happier than she had seen him in a while. They shared a victorious smile.

“I’ll meet you at the expo then?” Lyra said, then turned around and walked out. Tony knew better than to argue with her once she made up her mind.

Lyra got to the expo during the pandemonium of people evacuating and had to push her way to the building. She then took the back staff entrance and ran over to the demonstration computers to find Hammer already there.

“He’s locked us out of the mainframe,” a technician was saying.

“Who’s locked you out of the mainframe?” Pepper and Natasha had just entered and were also walking toward Hammer.

“Please, please, go away. Go away. I’ve got this handled,” Hammer was saying, watching the women approach.

“Have you now?” Pepper asked rhetorically.

“Yes, I do. In fact, if your guy hadn’t shown up, this wouldn’t be happening. So, please, now go away. Than you.” He turned to the technician. “Listen, we got to get these bitches out of here. What?”

Natasha slammed Hammer down on the desk. “You tell me who’s behind this. Who’s behind this?” she demanded.

“Ivan Vanko,” Lyra answered while Hammer whimpered under Natasha. They all turned towards her.

“Where is he?” Natasha demanded from Hammer again.

“At my facility.” Natasha had gotten what she wanted and promptly left. Pepper pulled out her cell phone.

“I need NYPD, please. Command Central”

“No, no, no. No honey. Don’t call the authorities.”

“Okay, Right away. Right away. Step aside. You too.” Hammer and the technician caved under Pepper’s wrath, and Lyra slipped into the computer chair that was now open while Pepper said to the technician, “Tell me everything you know. Go.” Lyra began the laughable task of hacking into Hammer’s system. Once she was in she connected herself to JARVIS and patched into the communications frequencies. She then began the much harder task of trying to get into Rhodey’s suit to give him back some kind of control.

“How are we doing, JARVIS?” she heard Tony ask.

“Remote reboot unsuccessful.”

“I’m working on it. Vanko’s system is a lot better than Hammer’s. Shame,” Lyra chimed in, still working. Hammer glared at her, but she ignored it. “You’ve got multiple targets locked onto you, watch out.”

She registered Tony and Rhodey talking over the line, but there was nothing essential so she focused on her work. With any luck, Natasha would be successful at getting into Hammer Industries and would be able to grant Lyra access from there. Unsurprisingly the entire codebase was in Russian, which she was fairly familiar with.

A few moments later Natasha appeared on the screen, along with access to the drone system. Lyra immediately began the reboot sequence.

“Thanks, Natasha,” Lyra said. “Reboot complete.”

“Thank you very much, Agent Romanoff, Lyra,” Tony said back.

“Well done on the new chest piece guys. I am reading significant higher output and your vitals all look promising,” Natasha pointed out.

“Yes, for the moment, I’m not dying. Thank you,” Tony responded. Pepper immediately pushed her way into the screen with Lyra.

“What do you mean you’re not dying? Did you just say you’re dying?”

“Is that you? No, I’m not. Not anymore,” Tony said, still trying to concentrate on what was going around him.

“What’s going on?” Pepper sounded like she was starting to panic.

“I was going to tell you. I didn’t want to alarm you.”

“You were gonna tell me? You really were dying? Did you know about this?” She shot the last question at Lyra right next to her. She gave Pepper a guilty look and let Tony answer. They argued for a minute and Lyra knew better than to get in the middle of that, besides, she was still working on trying to get into the drones systems and monitoring Tony and Rhodey’s at the same time.

The police finally arrived and took Hammer away while he was promising vengeance on Lyra and Pepper.

“Heads up. There’s one more incoming. This one looks different… it’s probably Vanko, based off the repulsor signature,” Lyra warned.

“We need to get you out of the park,” the officers came back and said to Pepper and Lyra. They looked at each other.

“Just go. We’ll be fine,” Tony said, hearing the conversation. Lyra dropped a huge virus into the system and wiped all of her involvement out of the computer before shutting it down and following Pepper out of the building. Pepper was talking logistics with the officer.

“Are you coming with us?” the officer asked.

“Lyra is. I’m gonna stay until the park is clear,” Pepper said with authority. Lyra was about to argue, but Pepper threw her one of those looks and she closed her mouth and followed the officer out of the park to wait, still mad that there was nothing that she could do to help at the moment. There was the sound and light of explosions all over the park and the officer had to hold Lyra back from running back in after Pepper. To her relief, they saw the lights from the Iron Man jets as Tony flew up from rescuing Pepper. Lyra sat down and let herself breathe for the first time in months.

Tony and Lyra were sitting in the SHIELD debriefing room, having just told them everything that had happened. Coulson had just left and there were a couple of files on the desk. Tony and Lyra shared a mischievous glance and then Tony grabbed the file and opened it.

“I don’t think that I want you looking at that. I’m not sure it pertains to you anymore,” Fury said to Tony, startling them as he sat down at the table. “Now that, on the other hand, is Agent Romanoff’s assessment of you. Read it.”

“’Personality overview. Mr. Stark displays compulsive behavior.’ In my own defence, that was last week. ‘Prone to self-destructive tendencies.’ I was dying. I mean, please. Aren’t we all? ‘Textbook narcissism’? Agreed. Okay, here it is. ‘Recruitment assessment for Avenger Initiative. Iron Man? Yes.’ I gotta think about it.” Tony ready from the file, Lyra stood behind him smirking.

“Read on,” Fury invited.

“’Tony Stark not… Not recommended’? That doesn’t make any sense. How can you approve me but not approve me? I got a new ticker. I’m trying to do right by Pepper and Lyra. I’m in a stable-ish relationship. Wait, there’s an edit at the end. ‘Unless the full team of Iron Man is present and available. Lyra Stark, required.’ Absolutely not. I’m not dragging Lyra around into crazy, dangerous situations. I’m Iron Man, not her. I can’t even get her to put on a suit.”

Lyra shot him a glare and he shut up.

“Which leads us to believe at this juncture we’d only like to use you as consultants,” Fury concluded. Tony stood up and they shook hands.

“You can’t afford me,” Tony said to Fury, causing Lyra to chuckle. “Then again, I will waive my customary retainer in exchange for a small favor. Rhodey and I are being honored in Washinton and we need a presenter.” Lyra laughed and Tony looked down at her, eyes bright.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter Text

Lyra looked up from her place in the lab, rubbing her eyes. She’d been there almost all night trying to finish all of the extra work that Dr. Squire had assigned her. It was a good thing that she was used to all the sleepless nights working with Tony, or she would’ve given up a while ago. She snapped out of her dreariness really quick, though, once she realized who had just walked into her small lab at MIT.

“Director Fury?” she asked, stifling a yawn. “What can I do for you?”

“You’re needed. We have a level seven emergency and we need your expertise,” Fury responded, ducking under one of the huge turbines in the lab.

“Go ask Tony, I’m busy,” she said dismissively.

“Doesn’t work like that. I need you both, remember?” Lyra stared up at him.

“Avengers,” she mused. “So why are you here, instead of with Tony?”

“I have an agent on that right now. We need to go, a valuable artifact was stolen from one of our facilities, and I need you on this.”

“What is it?” she asked, her curiosity piqued.

“So you’ll take the assignment then?”

“Oh, do I have a choice?” Lyra said sarcastically, and then stood up from her chair and stretched.

“Yeah, your choice is whether to let the Earth be destroyed, or to come with me. Now. I don’t have time for this,” Fury barked officially and Lyra’s eyes snapped to him, behind her snark he could see fear.

“Alright, then,” Lyra murmured.

She left all of her work where it was and followed Fury out of the building to see a jet parked in the field, looking very out of place and drawing the eye of anyone crazy enough to be out this early. Lyra sighed and followed Fury into the jet.

“Aren’t you guys supposed to be spies? How is this subtle?” Lyra asked, catching up to Fury’s long strides, trying to ignore the stares from the students around the jet.

“Like Iron Man doesn’t touch down in this lawn every other week?” Fury responded and Lyra was silent. He had a point. Like she really needed another reminder to all the staff and students of how different she was. For the short time that she had been there she had felt like Harry Potter in his first potions class with Snape.

Lyra boarded the jet and Fury went into the cockpit, coming back with a tablet, which he handed to her. She powered it on and was met with a flurry of information across the screen. She started reading, noticing all of the holes in the information that she would have given someone trying to consult. She supposed that it was out of her clearance range. Governments. She kept quiet and read for the rest of the flight, and Fury didn’t seem to be the talkative type so it went by quickly in silence until they started to approach the helicarrier.

“Is… that a plane?” Lyra asked, in awe as she stared out the small window, noticing that the aerodynamics of the boat were off.

“Yup,” Fury said, and then did the final landing. “I’m needed on the bridge. Have a look around and then meet me down there.”

“Yes, sir,” Lyra said, still distracted by imagining the types of design that had to go into making a plane this big. She could think of three improvements off the top of her head and she smiled. She stepped off the jet and looked around at all the activity on the deck. It was controlled chaos and very military, which set her on edge. She was wondering when Tony was going to get there when she spotted a different familiar face.

“Lyra,” Natasha called pleasantly as she spotted the younger girl. Lyra walked over to her, and then saw the two men that she was with.

“Hi Natasha,” Lyra said quietly as she walked up and Natasha gave her a strange look.

“Lyra, this is Captain Rogers. Rogers, this is Lyra Stark,” Natasha introduced them. Steve looked down at Lyra and offered a hand, which she shook, not meeting his eyes. He saw a small blush tint her cheeks as she smiled shyly at the ground.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Lyra said, still quietly, but Steve’s enhanced senses could still pick it up. Natasha was still looking at Lyra like this was completely out of character for her.

“The pleasure’s all mine,” Steve said back, and she gave a quick glance at him before looking away again, blushing even more now. “Stark? Are you Tony Stark’s daughter? You seem a little old…” He said politely.

Lyra pushed a loose curl behind her ear and then looked up at him. “Adopted daughter,” she said, a little louder now. “Sorry, I’ve read a lot about you. I’d heard that they’d found you in the ice. Waking up must’ve been rough, I’m sorry for your loss.” Steve stared down at her. Most people would thank him for his service or fawn over his title, but she seemed more focused on how he felt. He liked her.

“And you’re Dr. Banner?” Lyra said, turning to the other man.

“Yes. Nice to meet you too,” Bruce said, shaking her hand as well. There must have been some static in the air because when their hands touched, Lyra felt electricity zip up her arm. She noticed that he had a powerful grip.

“I’ve read all of your work on radiation based immunotoxins. It’s what got me into advanced spectroscopy when I was younger. It really is something else, I’d love to talk about it with you, if you have time,” she said and smiled up at him. Her eyes bright at the prospect of being able to talk with the expert. She seemed happy to be talking about something that she was familiar with and not at all concerned that the man in front of her could potentially turn into a big green monster and murder everyone in sight.

“Sorry to cut this short, but you might want to step inside in a minute. It’s gonna get a little hard to breath,” Natasha interrupted before Bruce could say anything back. There were now sounds of a siren and orders to clear the deck.

“Is this a submarine?” Steve asked incredulously, walking towards the edge with Bruce, while Natasha and Lyra stayed put.

“Really? The want me in a submerged pressurized metal container?” Bruce asked sarcastically. They looked down to the water to see the propellers lift out of the water and felt the entire craft lurch upward. “No, no, this is much worse,” Bruce said, smiling to himself. They all got inside before the craft could get much further and followed Natasha to the bridge.

Fury finished what he was doing and turned around. “Gentlemen. And lady,” he acknowledged them. Steve walked forward and handed Fury something that Lyra could see was money before continuing to look towards the now covered windows of the front of the craft. Fury then approached Bruce and Lyra walked over to hear what they were talking about.

“Where are you with that?” Bruce was asking and Lyra figured he meant finding the tesseract, which was the goal of the entire mission according to the files that she had read in the plane.

“We’re sweeping every wirelessly accessible camera on the planet. Cellphones, laptops. If it’s connected to a satellite, it’s eyes and ears for us,” Coulson answered and Lyra bit her tongue to stop an indignant retort about privacy. At least she knew that her own devices were secure.

“That’s still not gonna find them in time,” Natasha said from where she was looking at a picture of Clint Barton. The agent that had apparently been compromised.

“You have to narrow your field,” Bruce said and Lyra nodded in agreement. “How many spectrometers do you have access to?”

“How many are there?” Fury answered easily.

“Call every lab you know. Tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. I’ll rough out a tracking algorithm based on cluster recognition. At least we could rule out a few places. Do you have somewhere for me to work?” Bruce asked, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

“Agent Romanoff, would you show Dr. Banner to the laboratory, please,” Fury more ordered than asked.

“You’re gonna love it, Doc. We got all the toys,” Natasha said to Bruce and he shared a look with Lyra before they both walked off behind her.

“Lyra, why don’t you go over there and help Agent Sitwell with the facial recognition scan?” Fury asked, and Lyra walked over to where he pointed, taking over one of the monitors next to the agent and started looking at all the data coming in. She was still distasteful of using personal devices to track people, so she figured the faster that this worked the better. She pulled up the source code and started making adjustments to better narrow down the search. The agent behind her was staring intensely at her work and it sent uncomfortable shivers down her spine, but she ignored it. Not many of the people on this ship knew why she was here. She wondered when/if they had actually contacted Tony and why he wasn’t here.

Steve was also staring down at her. Coulson was still rambling about his trading cards in the background, which amused him, but he wanted to know more about her and what her role in SHIELD was.

“So, what exactly is she doing here?” he waved in Lyra’s direction. “I thought that Tony Stark was the expert in tech. That’s what all the files say, anyway.”

“Oh her?” Coulson said, following his gaze. “She’s the only one that can put up with Tony, whenever he gets here. Plus, I’ve got a feeling that there’s more to her than we know. SHIELD is still having trouble confirming the identity that she gave us, and we’re the top espionage organization in the world.”

“I must’ve missed that file, then,” Steve said, remembering reading every file on everyone else in the Avengers Initiative.

Coulson frowned and was about to say something when a shrill beeping stopped him.

“We got a hit,” Sitwell announced. “A 67% match. Wait. Cross match. 79%.”

Coulson left Steve’s side and walked up to look at the screen. “Location?”

“Stuttgart, Germany. 28 Konigstrasse. He’s not exactly hiding.”

“Captain, you’re up,” Fury said and Steve nodded and followed an agent off to where the new uniform was being stored.

“Lyra, you come too, in case you’re needed,” Fury added after Steve disappeared.

“Did you guys even talk to Tony?” Lyra grumbled, but didn’t argue further as Fury glared at her.

Lyra sat in the back of the ship and immersed herself in more of the reading. Seeing all of the data and logs on the tesseract. The data and figures scrolled across her tablet while she focused, occasionally interacting with a model.

“Are you reading that?” Steve asked, as he watched all the numbers flash for just an instant before being replaced.

“Uh huh,” Lyra hummed, not looking up. After a second though she paused it and did look up at him to see him staring again. “What? You think that Tony would bother with me if I didn’t do most of his work for him?” she said mock-seriously. Of course she was joking, but it was clear that everyone in the plane thought that she was actually serious. She smirked and then refocused on the screen.

“Captain get ready. Looks like you’re needed down there,” Fury said after a while and Lyra reconfigured the tablet to be something useful and stood up to get a look at what was happening on the ground. It looked like there were four Loki’s (who looked ridiculous in shiny gold armor and a horned helmet) all surrounding a crowd. She wondered for a moment what kind of holographic tech that he was using, since it wasn’t that good. She could easily pick out the real Loki. Then the remembered that the answer was probably ‘magic’ and she rolled her eyes.

She barely noticed Steve leave the ship until she saw him picking a fight below. Lyra had to give him credit for bravery after what she had read about his brother, Thor in the files that they were all given. Natasha hovered close with her hand on the trigger, ready if the captain needed her. He was doing fairly well for a moment, and then Loki knocked him down. Lyra could sense Natasha stiffen up on the trigger, but then she heard the very familiar sound of ‘Shoot to Thrill’ and Lyra smiled as she saw Tony taking control of the PA system on the plane.

“Agent Romanoff. You miss me?” Tony’s voice came over it. Natasha visibly sighed as Tony came into the fight, knocking Loki over.

“Will you turn that off?” Natasha said irritably to Lyra over her shoulder.

“Sure thing,” Lyra answered and with a few clicks on her tablet, which had just connected to the armor, the music stopped.

“Hey, Lyrs, who’s side are you on, anyway?” Tony piped up, noticing that he was kicked out. Lyra looked back up to see the fight already over and Tony and Steve standing in front of Loki, who had surrendered. It gave Lyra an uneasy feeling.

They landed to load everyone back into the plane, and had Loki handcuffed.

“So what, it takes a national security threat for you to come see me now, is that right buttercup?” Tony asked Lyra when he saw her.

“You saw me last month,” Lyra dismissed him. “And you called me last week.”

“You’re really going to avoid your poor old dad? I’m an empty-nester now, you know, since you went to college, you should really think about how I feel every now and then, chickadee.” Tony said in mock hurt.

Lyra rolled her eyes and noticed that everyone was paying attention to their conversation. “College was your idea. Live with it. Or else I’ll make you fly behind us and block your comms the whole way back.” She stared at Loki, and Loki was staring back silently, a look of confusion on his face. Meeting his eyes she felt like the temperature dropped twenty degrees in the ship. She put her arms around herself and shivered in the sudden cold and ripped her eyes away from Loki’s before she could see the god stiffen and widen his eyes in surprise.

They rode in silence for a moment and even while Lyra was looking at the floor she could feel the intense gaze that Loki was giving her. No one else seemed to notice though.

“Is he saying anything?” Fury’s voice was heard over the comm.

“Not a word,” Natasha answered tightly.

“Just get him here. We’re low on time,” Fury ordered.

Steve turned around to speak to Tony quietly, but Lyra could just barely pick it up. She knew that Loki could probably hear it too, then. “I don’t like it.”

“What, Rock of Ages giving up so easily?” Tony answered.

“I don’t remember it being that easy,” Steve insisted. “This guy packs a wallop.”

“Still, you are pretty spry, for an older fellow. What’s your thing, Pilates?” Lyra closed her eyes in frustration. It was just like Tony to pick a fight right now.

“What?”

“It’s like calisthenics. You might have missed a couple of things, y’know, doing time as a Capsicle.”

“Tony,” Lyra said sharply and gave him a look.

“What?” Tony said, mocking innocence and putting his hands in front of him.

The ship lurched as a bolt of lightning struck nearby and Lyra stumbled towards Loki to keep her balance.

“Where’s this coming from?” Natasha asked while Loki was staring out the window intently. At least he wasn’t looking at her anymore, Lyra thought to herself as she straightened up.

“What’s the matter? Scared of a little lightning?” Steve asked seriously.

“I’m not overly fond of what follows,” Loki said, looking nervous as the lightning continued.

There was the impact of something large hitting the jet that looked like lightning. While everyone was distracted, Loki shot up and wrapped his previously bound arms around Lyra. The door of the jet was pried open from the outside, causing several alarms and flashing lights to go on as there was a huge burst of wind in the cabin. Just as a figure was climbing its way into the plane, Loki took a couple of large steps and jumped out of the plane, dragging Lyra with him. All of this happened within a few seconds before anyone could even register what was happening. They heard Lyra scream out for Tony as she fell.

At the sound of his name, Tony snapped out of it and grabbed his helmet, jamming it onto his head, and jumped out after her, activating his jets. The new man that had hit the plane in the first place made to go after them, but Steve jumped and wrapped his arms around him. Seeming shocked, it was enough to put Thor off balance and they wrestled on the ground for a moment before they saw Tony fly back and land into the plane. Steve looked up long enough for Thor to break his grip and fly past Tony out of the plane after Loki.

“They’re gone,” Tony informed them, barely keeping the panic and fury out of his voice. “And now there’s that guy.”

“Another Asgardian?” Natasha questioned, still flying the plane.

“That guy’s a friendly?” Steve asked, walking right up to the edge and looking down. There wasn’t any sign of Lyra and Loki, but Thor could be seen falling back to Earth.

“Doesn’t matter,” Tony said, checking all of his sensors and data making sure there wasn’t something he missed. “He has Lyra,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice that made them all shiver. None of them wanted to be Loki in this moment. Then he turned back around, figuring that he needed to follow Thor to find Loki.

“Stark. We need a plan of attack!” Steve called out to him and he paused for a moment.

“I have a plan. Attack.” Then he jumped out of the plane again, following Thor as fast as his jets would allow. Steve looked around and then grabbed a parachute and started to fasten the straps around himself.

“I’d sit this one out, Cap,” Natasha called back to him.

“I don’t see how I can,” Steve responded evenly, finishing up.

“These guys come from legends, they’re basically gods.”

“There’s only one God, ma’am. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” Steve grabbed his shield and jumped out after them.

Lyra had barely felt the arms wrap around her when she registered that she was falling. Through clouds and lightning. She screamed out Tony’s name and then instinctively wrapped herself around Loki, clutching him. She heard him chuckle as he loosened his grip on her. His whole body felt like stone and was ice cold, but she kept her grip. If she was going to die by splatting on the ground, then so was he.

“You’re crazy!” She yelled out to him, earning another laugh.

“We’ll see,” He responded evenly and she was surprised how well she could hear him over the rushing of the air in her ears. She watched as the ground got closer and closer and when she couldn’t take it anymore she closed her eyes. Her heart was beating a million miles a minute and she drew in another breath to scream. She felt Loki shift suddenly. And then it was over. She felt herself lying on solid ground and Loki had disappeared from her arms, causing her to slam them into her body from how tightly her muscles had been working. Stupidly, she opened her eyes and blinked in the dim lighting. She let the breath out and gulped in another one, trying to calm down. She wished that she had kept her eyes open to see what had happened.

Loki was standing above her, a very amused smile on his face, but underneath he looked like a predator that had just gotten something extremely interesting.

“I can’t believe I’ve actually found one. And on Earth of all places, how ironic. I guess there was a reason that my idiot brother is obsessed with this place,” Loki mused to himself while looking down at her.

“W-what?” Lyra stuttered, still freaking out from the fall.

“An órjúfanleg sál , or whatever the equivalent here is,” Loki said dismissively. Then, when Lyra kept giving him a wide-eyed stare of confusion and panic, his smile faded.

“Wait… you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” Loki paused and Lyra still didn’t say anything. “Earth is so full of immoral scum that you don’t even have legends about this? Pathetic,” Loki continued spitefully.

“What do you want?” Lyra asked, completely not comprehending him.

Loki looked like he was about to answer when a huge red and gold blur crashed into him hard, sending him flying away from Lyra, who screamed again. They rolled a little bit away and Lyra scrambled backwards from the scuffle, out of earshot of the conversation going on and still dazed from the fall and from what Loki was telling her. The words that he spoke weren’t from any language she knew.

Eventually she had calmed herself down enough to try to figure out what to do next. She turned around to see a man that she vaguely recognized from the video as Thor holding Loki up and speaking, his face angry. The conversation seemed tense and she remembered that they were brothers. She should probably try to sneak off unnoticed while they argued. She pushed herself to her feet just in time to see another red and gold blur slam into Thor and from the sound of the jets, she figured that that was her red and gold blur. She brushed herself off and assessed for any broken bones that were masked by the surge of adrenaline coursing through her veins. Then, as quietly as she could, she turned around and took a big step in the opposite direction of Loki.

“And where do you think you’re going?” Loki’s voice drawled. “We wouldn’t want you to get lost, now would we? Come over here.”

He was standing just in sight of her and this time he looked a little shaken up, with dirt covering him as well. Lyra stopped walking and, calculating her chances of escaping at around zero, she turned and walked toward him. Hoping that if he had wanted her dead, he would have just let her fall out of the plane in the first place.

When she reached him, he turned and walked further toward the edge of the small cliff that they were on and she followed, not really knowing what else to do.

“An incorruptible soul. You’d be worth more than even I could ever imagine. And so young,” Loki murmured, turning to her and running a finger down her chin, making her shiver at his words. Maybe she would opt for having him kill her.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, finding her voice.

“You don’t know it now, but you’re going to be one of the most powerful beings in the universe. There will be songs sung about your very name in all of the halls of the universe. That is, if you live that long,” Loki stated. Lyra was confused, but then couldn’t shake the fear from her face fast enough to hide it from Loki.

“Ha. I would not dare kill you, I’m not stupid,” Loki said dismissively.

Lyra was just confused, and scared, and not really believing a word that Loki was saying. He was obviously mad. Motion below her caught her eye and she looked down to see Thor and Tony fighting each other, both getting some good hits in. Loki sat down next to her, also watching and she was hyper aware of where he was.

“Look at them squabble. That is their fate,” Loki commented and Lyra looked at him, wondering why he was still there and not trying to get away. “I need not interfere. They will destroy themselves,” Loki said, like he could read Lyra’s mind.

Lyra looked back at the fight. Now the captain had joined. Lyra watched as Thor ran and jumped at Steve, bringing his hammer down on the shield that he had put in front of him. There was a loud noise and a flash of light as all three men were thrown backwards. Lyra glanced back at Loki and said, “You’re wrong” before taking off running down the steep cliff towards them. Loki made no move to stop her.

All three men slowly got to their feet. Thor raised his hammer and yelled, while Tony raised both hands and Cap readied his shield. There was a tense moment of silence before Lyra came out of the trees and stood in the middle of all three of them, her back to Tony and both hands raised in the direction of Cap and Thor.

“Stop!” she yelled at them. “Stop fighting, you’re all on the same side here.”

“Lyra!” both Steve and Tony said in relief.

“Get out of this, you’re not safe here,” Tony said through the suit, keeping his hands pointed at Thor.

Thor was looking at Lyra was a mixture of awe and curiosity. Lyra slowly put her hands down as she stared right back, not backing down. Thor took a step forward, causing both Steve and Tony to shout out a warning, but with the next step he dropped his hammer and on the third he dropped to his knees in front of her.

“My lady, I am at your service,” Thor said and reached out and took her hand, giving it a kiss in a very old-fashioned greeting. Lyra looked stunned for a moment, and then pressed the knuckles of her free hand to her mouth, blushing. She hadn’t realized from the videos how attractive Thor was. She could tell that his gentle grip could have been stone, like Loki’s, but instead of cold he radiated warmth. Lyra looked away, blushing even more and caught eyes with Tony and Steve, who she gave a very ‘I don’t know what to do, help me’ look.

“Alright, alright enough of that,” Tony said, grabbing Lyra by the shoulders and moving her away. Thor let go of her hand and stood up.

“Forgive me, I did not know that there was an órjúfanleg sál on this planet or I would have paid my respects earlier,” Thor said, and Lyra’s small smile disappeared. Were all Asgardians crazy?

“A what?” Tony said, still between Thor and Lyra.

“Do you not--?” Thor began, looking puzzled.

“No, us ‘pathetic Earthlings’ have no clue what you’re talking about, so can you please explain?” Lyra interrupted him.

“Oh. Um, well on Asgard we, like many other civilizations have legends of being who are blessed by the universe itself called, er, ‘incorruptable souls’. It’s when someone has achieved a status of pure ‘goodness’. Then they are gifted with extraordinary powers. Many cultures, mine included, will always defer any judgement to the blessed One,” Thor explained lamely. He clearly wasn’t expecting to have had to teach them about this.

“But, I don’t have any powers. You must be wrong,” Lyra stated, her voice shaky.

“No, I am not mistaken,” Thor said, then looked around. “Can you not also feel the presence?” Everyone just stared dumbly at him, trying to take in what he was saying. Then he squinted at Lyra, perhaps getting a good look at her for the first time. “Ah, you are very young. A young One won’t have any control over the powers of the universe yet.”

Lyra looked up helplessly at Tony and Steve, who just looked back confused. She was about to say something when the sound of the jet landing in the broken down trees behind them startled them all. Natasha poked her head out of the jet.

“We picked up Loki a little bit away. How about we all go back to the base and talk about this somewhere that’s not here,” she said, seeing that there wasn’t any more fighting going on.

The three of them all shared uncertain glances before Steve put his shield away and Thor summoned his hammer back into his hand and they both headed toward the jet.

Tony approached Lyra and looked her over once again to try and spot any injuries. He reached out and wiped away some dirt on her face with a cold metal finger and then broke down and wrapped his arms around her tightly. She felt like she was getting crushed; hugs in the armor weren’t exactly her favorite thing, but she hugged back, knowing that it was out of relief that she was still alive. He kissed the top of her head and said, “You okay?” It wasn’t just about whether she was physically okay after falling out of a jet, it was about what Thor had just dropped onto her, too. Tony knew somewhere deep down that they both believed Thor.

“Say what you will about Tony,” Natasha said from behind Steve, who had turned and was watching the exchange between the two. “He loves that girl.”

“Yeah,” Lyra answered. Not completely truthfully, but she knew that Tony would get it and they broke the hug and headed back towards the ship where Steve and Natasha stood watching them and Thor was glaring at Loki.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” Loki commented with a smirk and thunder cracked above them.

“Say anything else, Loki, and I will rip that silver tongue from your mouth,” Thor threatened. When Lyra walked onto the jet, Loki waggled his eyebrows at her, but said nothing. They went the rest of the way to the helicarrier in a tense silence. When they arrived, about eight armed guards appeared to take Loki away, while the rest of them headed towards the briefing room. They were all still silent, even though Lyra’s mind was bursting with a billion questions that she didn’t want the answers to. Natasha looked around at everyone, sensing that something was entirely off, but not knowing what.

Bruce was already in the briefing room, staring down at the screens, which showed Loki, now in a glass cell. Fury was standing on the other side talking to him. It was a few moments before Lyra realized that she should probably be paying attention to this.

“The mindless beast, makes play he’s still a man. How desperate are you, that you call upon such lost creatures to defend you?” Loki was taunting Fury.

“How desperate am I? You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can’t hope to control. You talk about peace and you kill ‘cause it’s fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did.”

“Oooh. It burns you to come so close. To have the Tesseract, to have power, unlimited power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share? And all this time, real power has been staring you straight in the face, and you’re too blind to even notice.” At the last sentence Steve and Tony looked up at Lyra, who kept her face trained on the screen, though she saw Bruce and Natasha look up in confusion out of the corner of her eye. Thor was facing away from the screens, just listening with his arms crossed. On the screen, Fury looked confused for a moment too, but then bounced back quickly, though making a wrong conclusion.

“Well, you let me know if Real Power wants a magazine or something,” Fury said over his shoulder as he walked away. Loki chuckled.

“Okay, what happened while you were out there?” Natasha finally broke the silence, sick of everyone avoiding it.

“Your people really don’t have any sort of legends of this? Most planets do,” Thor spoke up, turning back around to look at them.

“None, nada, zip,” Tony answered.

“Legends about what?” Natasha snapped impatiently. Bruce was also looking around, confused.

“Lady Lyra,” Thor spoke up. “You mean to say that you cannot see it? Haven’t noticed that you understand things about other people that you perhaps shouldn’t? Your kind are supposed to be the strongest empaths in the universe.”

“Her kind?” Bruce said, looking between Lyra and Thor.

“Yes órjúfanleg sál,” Thor insisted. “Lyra is one of the only beings in history to be blessed with such an honor. And throughout history every single blessed one has changed the course of the universe. They are great leaders of men, respected by all. More powerful than the beings of old and conventional magic is useless on them.”

“Thor, you have to be wrong. There’s no way that I could be that. I’ve done a lot of things that aren’t ‘good’,” Lyra said back, helplessly, making air quotes around the word good. She mostly wanted everyone to stop staring at her. “Tony, you know that this is bull.”

“Sorry, Lyrs. But if anyone is so ‘good’ that they somehow get magical powers from the universe, it’s you kid,” Tony said, though he had a mischievous smile on his face and he also made the same air quotes.

Lyra sighed and ran her hand over her face. She then glared at him. “Well you’re obviously biased.”

“That’s how you figured out that I was a spy,” Natasha said slowly, as if putting pieces together. Steve and Bruce remained silent, they hadn’t known Lyra for more than a handful of hours so they didn’t really have a say.

“Hold on—” Lyra started, but was interrupted by Thor.

“See. Your comrades have already begun to notice,” Thor said happily.

Lyra looked around helplessly, but when it was clear that no one was going to argue anymore, she crossed her arms around herself. “Well, I don’t want it. Is there any way that I can get rid of it?”

“Wait a minute. Did you just learn that you have just about unlimited power, and your first reaction is to say ‘no thanks?’” Lyra hadn’t noticed when Fury and Coulson had entered the room, but it had obviously been some time. She looked up at him.

“Yes,” she said miserably. Fury eyed her suspiciously. The rest of the room shifted in surprise.

Thor’s smile only brightened. “You cannot change who you are that easily, my lady.”

Lyra took a deep breath, it looked like her mind was running a million miles a minute, trying to put together all of this new information. “Of course not,” she muttered. Then she suddenly shook her head and said, “Alright, well, even if this is real, which I’m not saying it is, it’s not like I’m going to suddenly learn how to summon the tesseract. Why don’t we focus on that?” What Lyra needed was time to think. She gave Tony a significant look and hoped that she had done enough to change the subject.

“She’s right,” Steve spoke up for the first time in a while. “We need to focus on the matter at hand. Thor, what’s Loki’s play?”

“He has an army called the Chitauri. They’re not of Asgard or any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth. In return, I suspect, for the tesseract,” Thor explained, though he will still looking at Lyra, distracted and making her uncomfortable.

“An army? From outer space?” Steve asked, like he didn’t believe it.

“So he’s building another portal. That’s what he needs Erik Selvig for,” Bruce commented.

“Selvig?” Thor asked, taking his eyes off Lyra and looking back around at him. It seemed like Lyra had succeeded in changing the topic.

“He’s an astrophysicist,” Bruce explained.

“He’s a friend,” Thor stated.

“Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours,” Natasha said bitterly.

“I wanna know why Loki let us take him. He’s not leading an army from here,” Steve said.

“I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell the crazy on him,” Bruce said offhandedly.

“Have care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he’s my brother,” Thor warned.

“He killed eighty people in two days,” Natasha informed him.

“He’s adopted.”

“Iridium, why did they need the Iridium for?” Bruce wondered.

“It’s a stabilizing agent,” Tony said. He, too, had been looking at Lyra, thinking about everything that Thor had just said. He had a hard time not believing it, though he knew that it was probably nothing. He hadn’t been kidding when he had said that if anyone deserved it…

“Means the portal won’t collapse on itself, like it did at SHIELD,” Tony continued, then turned around and walked towards Bruce, passing Thor on the way. “No hard feelings, Point Break. You’ve got a mean swing. Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants.” He walked further back to the bridge and up to the monitors at the helm. “Uh, raise the mid-mast, ship the top sails. That man is playing galaga! Thought we wouldn’t notice. But we did. How does Fury do this?”

Everyone groaned. Tony was back to being his annoying self and Lyra wasn’t about to stop him, everyone was focused on him now, which means they weren’t thinking about her anymore, which was exactly what she wanted at the moment.

“He turns,” Agent Hill informed him, she had been standing close and listening to the conversation as well.

“Well, that sounds exhausting. The rest of the raw materials, Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. Only major component he still needs is a power source. A high energy density something to kick start the cube,” Tony babbled on. He pressed the module into the computer while everyone was distracted.

“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” Agent Hill asked, her arms crossed.

“Last night,” Tony answered truthfully. “The packet, Selvig’s notes, the Extraction Theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?”

“Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?” Steve asked, trying to stay on topic.

“He’s got to heat the cube to a hundred twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier,” Bruce mused, pacing.

“Unless, Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect,” Lyra chimed in helpfully, happy to be on familiar ground again, but regretted it once everyone turned to her again.

“Well, if he could do that he could achieve Heavy Ion Fusion at any reactor on the planet,” Bruce concluded.

“Finally someone who speaks English,” Tony joked and walked up to Bruce and put a hand out for him to shake.

“Is that what just happened?” Steve asked, bemused.

“It’s good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled,” Tony said, reminding Steve a lot of Lyra. “And I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.” Steve rolled his eyes.

“Thanks,” Bruce said, looking down uncomfortably.

“Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube. I was hoping you two might join him,” Fury said, reminding them all that he was there.

“Let’s start with that stick of his. It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hyrda weapon,” Steve stated.

“I don’t know about that, but it is powered by the cube. And I’d like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys,” Fury said angrily.

“Monkeys? I do not understand,” Thor said in confusion.

“I do! I understood that reference,” Steve said excitedly. Tony caught Lyra’s eye and rolled his eyes exaggeratedly. Lyra stifled her laughter as Steve looked extremely proud of himself.

“Shall we play, doctor?” Tony asked.

“This way, sir,” Bruce motioned and walked off, with Lyra and Tony trailing behind him. Everyone watched them go.

“Lyra can’t just summon the cube for us, can she?” Fury asked Thor after she left, just to be clear.

“I expect that she’d be able to control it very mildly if she got her hands on it, but she’s so young. These are dangerous times, if more people knew what she was they’d all be after her,” Thor answered gravely.

“They’d want to kill her?” Steve asked, he had just met her, but he had already got the impression that at the very least she was a good person.

“No. Even Earthlings should have an instinct that that would be ill advised. It is a terrible curse to kill a blessed one. But there is great power in corrupting innocence,” Thor stated ominously. Everyone shared looks around the room. The story seemed ridiculous, but they didn’t really have a good enough reason to challenge Thor on it. Time would tell whether this is true or not, but in the meantime they had work to do.

Chapter Text

Bruce entered the lab with Tony and Lyra following closely behind him. Bruce walked right up to the scepter and started taking measurement from it, trying to confirm what they had read in Selvig’s notes.

“You go do the other thing, I’ll find the cube,” Tony said, then they both headed towards a large box with the Stark Industries logo on it. Lyra was thankful to have a distraction as she looked at the coding that JARVIS had already started for hacking into the SHIELD module that Tony had stuck the bug on. They all seemed to lose themselves in their work for a while, and when they looked up, night had already fallen.

“The gamma reading are definitely consistent with Selvig’s reports on the tesseract. But it’s gonna take weeks to process,” Bruce sighed, looking at the readings he was getting from the scepter.

“If we bypass their mainframe and direct a reroute to the Homer cluster, we can clock this around six hundred teraflops,” Tony said, messing with their homemade interface and Lyra nodded in agreement.

“All I packed was a toothbrush,” Bruce laughed.

Lyra vaguely recognized that Tony was using his usual charm on Bruce, that is, probably annoying the hell out of him, but she didn’t think that Bruce was really minding it too much. Oh man, was that part of her freaky powers that Thor was talking about? So what, she was good with people? That was something she HAD to learn growing up how she did, she needed to know who was a threat or not. Or maybe she survived this long because of the powers that she had? She sighed and concentrated on her hacking work, she was totally going to overthink it if she allowed herself to.

“Hey! Are you nuts?” Lyra looked up when Steve came into the room, looking angry.

“Jury’s out,” Tony said, and Lyra gave him an exasperated look. Did he really have to pick fights with everyone on the ship?

“Is everything a joke to you?” Steve asked after Tony kept pestering Bruce.

“Funny things are,” Tony said seriously.

“Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn’t funny,” Steve said, even more seriously. Then looked up at Bruce. “No offense, doctor.”

“No, it’s alright. I wouldn’t have come aboard if I couldn’t handle pointy things,” Bruce assured Steve.

“You’re tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut,” Tony said extravagantly.

“And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark,” Steve insisted.

“You think I’m not? Why did Fury call us and why now? Why not before? What isn’t he telling us? I can’t do the equation unless I have all the variables,” Tony said knowingly.

“You think Fury’s hiding something?”

“He’s a spy. Captain, he’s THE spy. His secrets have secrets,” Tony pointed at Bruce. “It’s bugging him too, isn’t it?”

“Uh… I just wanna finish my work here and…” Bruce stammered.

“Doctor?” Steve questioned, giving him an x-raying stare. Bruce paused a minute before continuing.

“’A warm light for all mankind, Loki’s jab at Fury about the cube.”

“I heard it,” Steve prompted.

“Well, I think that was meant for you. Even if Barton didn’t tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news.”

“The Stark Tower? That big, ugly—” Tony gave Steve a look, eyebrow raised, “Building in New York?” Steve finished.

“It’s powered by an arc reactor, a self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for, what, a year?” Bruce asked.

“It’s just the prototype. I’m kind of the only name in clean energy right now,” Tony boasted, and Lyra saw that he was only doing that to annoy Steve, which was working. “That’s what he’s getting at.”

“So, why didn’t SHIELD bring him in on the tesseract project? I mean, what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?”

“They did try to bring me in on it,” Lyra said, making all three men turn towards her. “Fury came to MIT a few months ago and talked about the project.”

“Why didn’t this come through me?” Tony asked, his voice suddenly sharp. “I thought that there weren’t secrets between us? Why would they go to you in the first place, don’t they think that I did all of the arc reactor design?”

“Because Fury asked me not to tell you. Guess they figured out that I’m the brains and the beauty of this duo,” Lyra said, never taking her eyes off the screen. “It doesn’t matter anyway, I turned them down flat.”

“Why?” Steve asked, keeping up with the conversation.

“I asked a lot of questions, and Fury told me that it was on a need-to-know basis. We already give enough funding to SHIELD without knowing where it all goes, and my all-knowing magical powers are screaming that there’s something shady going on at SHIELD.” She added the end in a sarcastic tone, so no one was sure if she was actually serious or not.

“Well, we can look into all of that once you’re finished breaking into all of SHIELD’s secure files. You should be about done, right, Ms. Brains?” Tony asked, walking over and looking at her screen. Steve looked visibly taken aback.

“I’m sorry, did you say…?” Steve trailed off.

“JARVIS and Lyra have been running it since I hit the bridge. Lyra’s idea, by the way and apparently she can do no wrong. In a few hours we’ll know every dirty secret SHIELD has ever tried to hide,” Tony patted Lyra’s shoulder, and she shook him off with a glare. He quickly offered her a blueberry, which made the corner of her mouth twitch up.

“Yet you’re confused about why they didn’t want you aboard.” Steve shot a disapproving look at Lyra.

“An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome,” Tony pouted, walking back toward Steve.

“I think Loki’s trying to wind us up. This is a man who means to start a war, and if we don’t stay focused, he’ll succeed. We have orders, we should follow them,” Steve looked around righteously.

“Following isn’t really my style,” Tony said, eating another blueberry.

“And you’re all about style, aren’t you?” Steve challenged.

“Of the people in this room, which one is; A. wearing a spangly outfit, and B. not of use?” Lyra looked up at Tony’s comment, smelling a fight coming on.

“Steve, tell me none of this smells a little funky to you,” Bruce said, trying to calm down the tension.

“We have our orders,” Steve repeated. “If you don’t follow them, you’re betraying everyone on this ship.” Steve didn’t back down as the two men stared each other down, tense, like a standoff.

“Tony, will you come over here and help me with this really quick?” Lyra called up to him, sounding too relaxed for the tension in the room.

Tony broke eye contact with Steve and looked over at her. “What? You don’t think that I could take Cap?” He jammed a thumb in Steve’s direction and the blonde narrowed his eyes even further at him.

Lyra looked up at Tony, a crooked smile on her face and an eyebrow raised mischievously. It was the happiest that she had looked the entire time that Steve had known her and it seemed to radiate off of her. She looked young and beautiful in that moment, not the weighed down girl who acted 20 years older than she was. But Steve did realize that he had caught her at a stressful time, he wondered what it would be like to know her when things weren’t so tense.

“I find your lack of faith in me very concerning,” Tony said to her, and turned away from Steve to walk back over to her and whisper something in her ear that made her laugh and hit him in the ribs. She had successfully diffused the tension in the room. Steve shot her a grateful look, which she returned with a small warm smile.

“We’ll find the cube, Captain, sir,” Lyra said, “Don’t worry.”

Steve nodded and left the room.

“That’s the guy my dad never shut up about?” Tony begun after Steve had left and Lyra resisted the urge to facepalm. “Wondering whether they should’ve kept him on ice.”

“They guy’s not wrong about Loki. He does have the jump on us,” Bruce said, getting back to work.

“What he’s got is an ACME dynamite kit. It’s gonna blow up in his face, and I’m gonna be there when it does,” Tony said, walking back over to where his project was. Lyra tuned them out for a while as she worked. Bruce was easy to like, if not a little angsty. He was too smart to let Tony’s little comments get to him, and if she was being honest she could tell that Bruce was just relieved to have people not trying to tiptoe around him, like he was used to. The three of them kept working together in companionable silence.

Eventually, Lyra noticed that Natasha had gone up to talk to Loki, she patched herself through to the camera as she worked. She was impressed by how well Natasha could act. Loki still gave her chills, though. She was brought out of the interrogation by a beeping that indicated that the hacking program had been discovered. She had expected that to happen hours ago, but she took the pen that she had been chewing on out of her hand.

“Heads up, they’re onto us,” she let Tony and Bruce know, as they looked up from what they were doing.

“Loki means to unleash the Hulk. Keep Banner in the lab, I’m on my way. Send Thor as well,” Natasha’s voice came through the comms and Tony, Lyra, and Bruce all looked around at each other before someone entered the room.

“What are you doing, Mr. Stark?” Fury’s annoyed voice came.

“Uh, kind of been wondering the same thing about you,” Tony said from where he was sitting on a table, looking at Lyra’s screen.

“You’re supposed to be locating the tesseract,” Fury shot back.

“We are,” Bruce said. “The model’s locked and we’re sweeping for the signature now. When we get a hit, we’ll have the location within half a mile.”

“And you’ll get your cube back, no muss, no fuss.” Lyra turned the screen toward him, she had finally gotten access and information was pouring through on the screen. “What is phase 2?”

There was a loud CLANG, as Steve slammed what looked like a large gun on the table. “Phase 2 is SHIELD uses the cube to make weapons,” he said. Then turned to Tony. “Sorry, the computer was moving a little slow for me.”

“Rogers, we gathered everything related to the tesseract. That doesn’t mean that we’re looking—” Fury tried to control the situation.

“I’m sorry, Nick,” Tony interrupted him. “What were you lying?” He turned the screen to show detailed construction prints for the very weapon that Steve had on the table.

“I was wrong director. The world hasn’t change a bit,” Steve said, eyebrows crinkling in disappointment. At that moment, Natasha and Thor walked into the lab and Bruce spoke up, glaring at Natasha.

“Did you know about this?” he accused.

“You wanna think about removing yourself from this environment, doctor?” she answered.

“I was in Calcutta, I was pretty well removed.”

“Loki’s manipulating you.”

Lyra watched in stunned silence as a huge argument broke out across the room, getting everyone involved and also very angry. She herself felt her head suddenly start throbbing, probably a headache from all the yelling going on around her. She rubbed her temples, then opened her eyes to see an alert on the screen. There was a ship requesting access that wasn’t on the log. She might’ve just thought that it was a discrepancy in the files, but something told her that this wasn’t that. Indeed, looking at the pictures she recognized the plane number to be one that had disappeared and was logged in the initial damage report. Sometimes it paid to have a perfect memory. She looked up to see that the argument was even worse.

“You wanna know my secret, Agent Romanoff? You wanna know how I stay calm?” Bruce was saying, looking a little green and Lyra looked down to see that he was clutching the scepter, which had been glowing faintly this whole time. Fury was reaching for his gun. With a couple strides, Lyra reached Bruce and pulled the scepter out of his hands. Immediately she felt power coarse through her fingertips and the glow from the gem in the top seemed to extend around her. She was pretty sure it must’ve looked creepy because everyone was staring at her open-mouthed.

“Everybody shut up! You’re so busy arguing like CHILDREN that you don’t even notice when your ship is under attack!” She jammed a finger toward the screen where the access logs for the ship were still up. There was a moment of silence that was interrupted by a shrill beep.

“We got it!” Bruce said quickly, looking at the screen. “The tesseract’s location.”

Tony had walked over to Lyra, who was still holding the scepter and glaring at everyone to look at the screen that she had indicated.

“Yup, we got a bogey. I’ll handle it, don’t worry any of your pretty little heads. Then I’ll even go get the tesseract for you,” Tony said after glancing at the screen and then walking toward where he had stashed his suit.

“The tesseract belongs on Asgard, no human is a match for it,” Thor pointed out.

“You’re not going alone!” Steve demanded, putting a hand on Tony’s shoulder to stop him. Tony smacked him off of him.

“You’re gonna stop me?” Tony said back, just as angrily. Lyra put down the scepter and walked over toward them, ready to stop their fighting again.

“Put on the suit, let’s find out,” Steve said, getting in Tony’s face.

“I’m not afraid to hit an old man,” Tony said, not backing down.

“Put on the suit.”

“Oh my God!” Bruce exclaimed, seeing the reading on the screen. Distracted, Lyra looked over just long enough to see that the tesseract was right next to them.

Before anyone could react there was a violent explosion, flinging them all backward. Lyra was thrown straight into Steve, who had the reflexes to at least somewhat catch her as they both went toward the ground. She was dazed for a moment, but then Steve was pulling her to her feet.

“Lyra!” Tony called out, his voice full of concern.

“Are you alright?” Steve said, and Lyra could just barely hear them over the ringing in her ears.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, regaining her bearings and standing on her own without Steve.

“Put on the suit,” Steve said to Tony, who looked back and said “Yeah”, and they both ran out the door while Lyra scrambled into the other section of the lab and pulled up the status reports for the helicarrier. She heard all of the chatter on all of the lines that were opened.

“Stark!” She heard Steve yell over the comm. “Stark, I’m here!”

“Good,” Tony’s voice came back. “Lyra, what have we got?”

Lyra scanned the malfunction reports quickly and determined which were the top priority. “You’ve got to get the superconducting coolant system online first, then work on the rotors. There’s debris and they’ll need a kickstart.” She left the line open, trusting that Tony knew what to do, but started directing other engineers on the different things that they needed to do to get the ship back running. She also kept an eye out for a status on Natasha and Bruce, but didn’t see anything. There was quite a bit of damage done to the ship and everyone was in panic mode, which meant hard to deal with.

“Something else is hacking in!” Lyra warned the bridge just before she heard a PA announcement about engine one being in total shut down.

“You got that Lyrs?” Tony asked, getting ready to jumpstart the other engine. The whole ship turned and Lyra stumbled, but kept her footing.

“Yeah, but you might want to hurry. This is going to take a few moments,” Lyra said back, already narrowing it down to correct access codes feeding in from the bridge. From the chaos that she heard on the comms she assumed that their turned agent had gotten there.

“It’s Barton! He took out our systems. He’s headed for the detention level. Does anyone copy?” Fury’s voice could be heard over the comms. Lyra was still hyper-focused on taking down the virus in the system. She had stalled its progress so that it had stopped shutting things down, but it was taking all of her concentration.

“This is Agent Romanoff. I copy.” Lyra heard from over the comms and sent out a silent prayer that she would be okay. That they all would. She saw that Tony was doing a good job jumpstarting the other engine, but calculated that with the damage, even if they were to get it running the ship would still lose altitude until it hit the ground. She doubted that anyone wanted that.

“I think I can bypass the hack and get engine one started if I reboot the system manually. Where’s the control deck for the turbine?” Lyra said through the comms, the last part mostly to herself, as she found the control panel in the schematics a few moments later.

“That panels on the edge of sector three,” Agent Hill’s voice came through. Tony had just finished jumpstarting the turbine and was pulling off his dead suit. “The only problem is that that’s where Barton accessed the ship, they probably have men guarding the area.”

“Is anyone around there?” Steve asked into the comm, but only got silence back for a moment.

“I am,” Lyra’s voice came softly back through, like she was still thinking about it.

“Don’t you dare!” Tony snarled into the comm, getting up out of the armor and running down the hallway, with Steve on his heels. They were pretty far from where they needed to be.

“If I wait any longer that virus will override my firewall matrix that I’ve written and the engine that you just got back online will fail again. And not just that one” Lyra said, calmly assessing the situation.

“Lyra, I swear…” Tony threatened, pushing an agent out of the way to try and get to her.

“I’m sorry, Tony,” Lyra said, biting her lip, then she took the comm out of her ear, threw it on the floor and went into a sprint. She reached the panel quickly, noticing that the hallway was empty at the moment. She pulled a wall panel off and revealed a series of complicated switches.

“Well, well, looks like we have a hero,” Loki drawled, coming up behind her. His armor looked to be in bad shape and he wasn’t walking with his usual grace. She turned around to face him.

“Whatever it is you want, Loki, you won’t get it. They’re not going to give up,” she said, jutting her chin out in defiance.

“Darling, I’ve already won,” Loki laughed. In a quick moment, Lyra reached behind her and pulled the lever, just as Loki pressed the tip of the scepter to her chest. A sudden cold filled her to the core, and she gasped, trying to hold on as her vision went black. She felt herself fall into Loki’s arms and he hoisted her into the air and continued on his way to the ship. After a moment, she couldn’t take it anymore and let herself slip into the black nothingness.

Tony got there just in time to see the ship disappear. Lyra was nowhere in sight.

“Agent Coulson is down.” Fury’s voice came over the comms.

“Paramedics are on their way to your location,” a different voice called through.

“They’re here.” Fury stated, sounding defeated. Tony fell to his knees and then sat down.

“Common Tony, we’ve got to get back to the bridge and figure out the plan,” Steve said gently, walking over to Tony and crouching beside him. Tony just nodded and followed Steve down into the plane, feeling numb inside. They all gathered in the briefing room, everyone looking as though they were in shock, which they probably were.

Fury launched into a speech, throwing some bloody trading cards onto the table that Tony recognized as the ones that Coulson had been so excited about. Tony was half paying attention, his mind still not being able to process what had happened. The only thing Fury was doing was making him even more anxious. At the word ‘heroes’, Tony couldn’t take it anymore and stood up straight, staring at nothing for a moment before walking off. He had to get out of there, to do something, anything, to take his mind off of what had just happened so that he could focus. Focus on trying to find his daughter. He didn’t really know where his feet were taking him and when he looked up, he found that he was staring at the empty slot that once contained the holding cell. The room where Coulson died.

“Was he married?” Tony didn’t look up when he heard Steve’s voice from across the space.

“No. There was a uh… cellist, I think,” Tony said monotone.

“I’m sorry. He seemed like a good man,” Steve said solemnly.

“He was an idiot. They both are,” Tony said, commenting about Lyra. Steve seemed to understand.

“Why? For believing?”

“For taking on Loki alone."

“He was doing his job.”

Tony scoffed. “He was out of his league. He should have waited. He should have…” He trailed off. “And Lyra, what was she thinking? She couldn’t wait one goddamn minute?”

“Sometimes there isn’t a way out, Tony,” Steve informed him.

“Right. I’ve heard that before,” Tony shot back, walking past him.

“Is this the first time you’ve lost a soldier?” Steve asked, causing Tony to turn around sharply.

“We are not soldiers!” Tony asserted, his voice sharp. Steve had obviously hit a nerve. There was a moment of silence before he continued. “Lyra is not a solider. And I’m not marching to Fury’s fife.”

“Neither am I. He’s got the same blood on his hands as Loki does. Right now we’ve got to put that aside and get this done. Now Loki needs a power source, if we can put together a list--”

“He made it personal,” Tony interrupted, starting to come up with an idea.

“That’s not the point,” Steve said, getting annoyed.

“That is the point. That’s Loki’s point. He hit us all right were we like. Why?” Tony continued.

“To tear us apart.”

“Yeah, divide and conquer is great, but he knows he had to take us out to win, right? That’s what he wants. He wants to beat us and he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience.”

“Right, I caught his act at Stuttengard,” Steve confirmed, trying to understand where Tony was going with this.

“Yeah, that’s just previews. This is opening night. And Loki’s a full-tilt diva. He wants flowers, he wants parades, he wants a monument built in the skies with his name plastered…” Tony trailed off, realizing what he had just said. “Son of a bitch,” he exclaimed, putting it all together. He walked off, past Steve.

“What’re you—”

“Stark Tower. He’s going to Stark Tower, the power reactor that I just installed would be a suitable enough power supply. And Lyra has all the access,” Tony called from over his shoulder.

“I’ll go get Natasha and then meet you!” Steve called after Tony, heading off in the opposite direction and hoped Tony heard him.

Lyra came to slowly. The first thing that she realized was that the smell filling her nose was familiar. She was lying down on a soft surface and she seemed to be okay. She opened her eyes to see that she was in the New York penthouse, laying down on the couch. Groggily, she sat up, wondering how she got there. Maybe it had all been a dream?

She knew that it wasn’t when she saw Loki enter the room, looking as ridiculous as ever.

“Feeling alright?” he questioned, with a victorious smile on his lips. “I’ll admit I wasn’t sure what this would do to you when I did it. It appears that you are at least resistant to its sway. I was so hoping that I would get to watch you destroy Stark, but I guess it’s not meant to be.”

Lyra just glared at him, but then something else caught her eye. There was a device on the roof outside that was glowing bright blue. She recognized the tesseract in the center of it and she vaguely recognized Dr. Selvig working on it, a few feet away.

“Ah, you see the portal? It’s too late to stop it now, they’ll be here soon. And then it will begin,” Loki commented, walking towards the window and gesturing with his stick.

“Why are you doing this?” Lyra asked quietly, getting up off the couch and slowly approaching him.

“I will show that it has always been I that is more worthy of the throne. And then I will take everything that my brother holds dear and crush it in my hand,” Loki said, letting her approach him.

“Can’t you just go to family counseling, like everyone else?” Lyra said back, rubbing her chest where the scepter had dug into her.

“Amusing. You will, however, be the greatest hostage in the universe. Not even Odin would dare stand in my way at the cost of your pain,” Loki continued, looking down at her like she was an object. The familiarity in it gave Lyra chills. She was standing next to him, looking slightly up to meet his eyes. “The mortals of Earth don’t respect you, but I know better than that. In time, you could rule at my side,” he continued and Lyra raised her eyebrows.

He made a quick gesture with his hand and Lyra felt warmth all around her. In a panic, she looked down to see a yellow glow make its way down her body, melting her clothing away and replacing it with a fine green and black dress to match the clothing that Loki was wearing. She felt golden jewelry weight down her neck and wrists and her hair fell down to her waist, braided in several spots with gold. She stared down at herself for a moment, dumbstruck. How could he have done that? She knew that she probably needed to start accepting that magic was a thing, but it still left her dazed and confused. Loki chuckled as he watched her.

“I could give you everything that you ever dreamed of. And all you need do in return is join me,” Loki said, causing her to look back up at him.

“I’ll never join you,” Lyra stated back immediately, though probably with little of the defiant effect that she had been going for. She felt violated that he had changed her clothes without her permission, and though the dress swept the floor, the front was more low cut than she was used to. It was all she could do to not cover herself and blush.

“We shall see,” Loki said, crossing his hands behind his back and walking outside to go and check on his device. Lyra watched him go, trying to figure out whether he would notice her slip off into the lab to get a suit. Something out the window caught her eye, and she looked up to see a red blur clumsily make its way to the roof. She let out a breath of relief. The first thing that Tony did was try to shoot the portal, which only resulted in a small explosion. Lyra felt the power release even from where she was watching inside. There probably wasn’t anything that could stop that thing now.

Loki watched it too, and stared Tony down as both men headed inside. Tony was pulling his armor off, which was smart because she knew that he had used its last legs to even just get him here.

“Please tell me that you’re going to appeal to my humanity,” Loki said, walking towards Tony with a smile on his face. Lyra saw Tony’s eyes glance over her for a minute in relief and then they turned back to fury.

“Uh, actually, I’m planning to threaten you,” Tony said back easily.

“You should have left your armor on for that,” Loki said, his smile widening as he stopped just behind Lyra.

“Yeah,” Tony conceded. “It’s seen a bit of mileage and you’ve got the glow stick of destiny. Would you like a drink?” Tony reached the bar and turned to face away from Loki.

“Stalling me won’t change anything.”

“No, no, no. Threatening,” Tony corrected. “No drink? Are you sure? I’m having one.”

Lyra stared at Tony, wondering what his play here was for a moment before she remembered the new armor that they’d been working on. It certainly wasn’t ready yet, but she had to admit that it was probably their best bet. Tony kept rambling, something that he was very good at. Lyra turned around and walked past Loki as Tony talked, giving him a small confident smile as she passed by close. Predictably, Loki’s eyes followed her and he turned, keeping eye contact with her. She hoped that that had been enough time for Tony to put on the bracelets. She walked around to the couch that she had woken up on and sat down. As long as she was away from Loki she should be fine.

“—and you, big fella, you’ve managed to piss off every single one of them,” Tony finished, walking toward Loki with his drink and, Lyra noticed, the bracelets.

“That was the plan.” Loki’s full attention was back on Tony.

“Not a great plan. When they come, and they will, they’ll come for you.

“I have an army,” Loki said confidently.

“We have a Hulk,” Tony shot back quickly.

“Oh, I thought the beast had wandered off?”

“You’re missing the point. There is no throne. There is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes and maybe it’s too much for us, but it’s all on you. Because if we can’t protect the Earth, you can be damned well sure we’ll avenge it.” It was a pretty speech and Tony delivered it so confidently that Lyra had to smile. Loki, looking serious, approached Tony threateningly.

“How will your friends have time for me, when they’re so busy fighting you?” Loki growled, then brought the scepter up to Tony’s chest. It hit the reactor with a clang and then powered down. Loki looked confused for a moment, and then did it again with similar results.

“This usually works,” Loki said, still confused.

“Well, performance issues, it’s not uncommon. One out of five—” Tony was cut off by Loki grabbing him by the throat and throwing him across the room. Lyra gasped and stood up quickly, almost tripping herself on the long dress.

“JARVIS, any time now,” Tony grunted in pain as Loki advanced again. Lyra also was striding toward him, but was too late as Loki picked him up by the throat again like it was nothing.

“You will all fall before me,” Loki growled, a crazed look in his eye. Then without wasting another minute he threw Tony again, through the window this time, just as Lyra reached him. Loki grabbed Lyra’s arm, stopping her from probably throwing herself out the window after Tony at the pace she was going. He roughly spun her around so that their faces were inches apart. His grip on her arm was excruciating and she let out a squeak of pain. His eyes were still wild as she stared into them and there was something else behind them that made her draw back away from him in fear as far as she could. He let go of her as a large metal object shot next to them, missing them by inches. She fell to the floor; his grip had been the only thing keeping her up.

“And there’s one other person that you pissed off!” Lyra heard Tony’s voice and she looked over to see him hovering in front of the window. “His name was Phil.” Lyra looked over at Tony in confusion, but he had raised his hand as Loki raised the scepter. Tony was faster and the repulsor blast knocked Loki back.

There was a loud sound behind them before anything else could be said, and they both turned around to see that the device on the roof was now shooting a beam up into the air. What looked like a large rip in the sky was forming as the portal opened. There were already several vehicles pouring out of it.

“Right,” Tony said, looking at his screens. “Army. Stay here,” he ordered Lyra, as he flew up to go deal with that.

Lyra ducked around and made her way to the lab in the building, past a still dazed Loki, grabbing an earpiece along the way and tuning it to the avengers frequency. She opened up a screen and started looking at the data that JARVIS was collecting. Chaos was beginning to take over.

“Stark, we’re heading north east.” Natasha’s voice came through the earpiece.

“What, did you stop for drive-thru? Swing up park, I’m gonna lay ‘em out for you,” Tony responded.

“There’s still a lot more where that came from,” Lyra informed them, looking up at the screens.

“Fine. Let’s keep them occupied,” Tony said, then headed back to the portal. Lyra heard the sounds of fighting going on outside followed by heavy artillery shots coming into the building. She looked at the screen and confirmed that the quinjet had made it to Stark tower, then had crashed onto the city ground. The comms all went silent for a moment and Lyra started getting worried.

“Stark, are you seeing this?” she heard Steve’s voice, sounding hesitant.

“Seeing. Still working on believing,” Tony answered, equally freaked out. Lyra grabbed a screen and crept out of the lab to go look at what was happening. She too, stared at the creature that had just come through the portal, vaguely hearing Tony ask about Bruce. She snapped out of it to see that Thor and Loki were still fighting outside on the roof. Loki rolled off, and Thor followed not too much later. She stayed inside, but made sure that she could see the portal as she kept working. She was trying to coordinate police to get a handle on the situation while also updating and doing all of the validation work on Tony’s new suit that he never bothered to do. She listened to Steve’s plan, noticing that it made perfect sense. She was glad that they had him. She called out directions for the team to head when they were out of Hawkeye’s line of sight based off of satellite imagery.

She had almost lost track of time when she noticed Natasha land and roll onto her roof, along with Loki. They both stood up to face each other, but were interrupted by the Hulk also joining the party. She stood still, frozen, watching it play out as it came dangerously close. Hulk threw Loki through the window and Lyra ducked out of the way, crossing though the broken glass as they fought. Or a better description would be as Hulk broke the floor with Loki’s face.

“Puny God,” she heard Hulk say and he turned around. His eyes landed on Lyra, who stood there frozen. He contemplated her for a moment, and then turned around and sauntered away, jumping back off the building. Lyra felt herself breathe again.

“Are you all right, Lyra?” Natasha snapped her out of her daze, and she looked up.

“We need to close this portal, you got any ideas?” Natasha asked curtly.

“I’ve been analyzing the energy signature. It’s way beyond anything that we actually understand,” she said quickly, starting to panic. “It’s magic, I can’t…” she trailed off helplessly.

“You’re supposed to be blessed by the universe, aren’t you? Common, if anyone can figure it out, it’s you,” Natasha said sharply, trying to snap her out of it. An idea entered Lyra’s mind and she dropped the screen in her hand and walked past Natasha, who followed her looking concerned. They reached the portal and they saw that Dr. Selvig was awake.

“Don’t get any closer, the energy will fry you with a touch. There’s no way to stop it now. I’m sorry, I couldn’t fight it,” he said, looking back at them in panic. Lyra walked right up to where she could feel the energy field humming, and then hesitantly stuck out a hand to touch it, ignoring Natasha’s warning and Dr. Selvig’s gasp. She heard Thor’s voice in her mind, saying that she was resistant to magic and prayed that he was right. To everyone’s surprise, her had passed right through the force field like it wasn’t there, but a second later she gasped and pulled her hand back.

“What’s wrong?” Natasha said quickly, walking up to her.

“Nothing,” Lyra said, still not quite believing it. “It’s just really cold.”

“Can you grab the cube?” Dr. Selvig asked, looking at the screen. Lyra hesitated for a second, but then nodded, looking determined.

“We can close it! Can anybody copy? Lyra can shut the portal down!” Natasha said frantically into her earpiece.

“Do it!” Steve’s voice came back immediately.

Before Lyra could even start, though, they heard Tony’s voice ring out. “No, wait!”

“Stark, these things are still coming,” Steve informed him, like he didn’t already know.

“I got a nuke coming in, it’s gonna blow in less than a minute. And I know just where to put it,” Tony explained.

“Tony, don’t you dare!” Lyra said, mirroring what he had told her on the helicarrier.

“Stark, you know that’s a one-way trip?” Steve said, bringing up the obvious again.

“Save the rest for return, J,” Tony said, before shutting off his comm.

“Tony!” Lyra yelled, her eyes wild. She shared a look with Natasha, who looked worried. Then they both followed Tony’s figure up as he guided the missile through the portal. Lyra took a step back in horror after seeing him disappear. “No,” she whispered, but it was still audible through the comm.

“Come on, Stark,” Natasha said, they were both still standing there, looking up. Lyra saw a bright yellow dot, indicating that the nuke had blown.

“Close it,” Steve said quietly after a moment of silence.

“No,” Lyra said back stubbornly. Natasha walked up behind her. There was sadness in her eyes, but behind that was a grim determination. Like she was ready to force Lyra to close the portal.

“If the debris and radiation get through to here, it would’ve been for nothing, Lyra,” Natasha said. Lyra swallowed back tears.

“No, he’ll come back,” she insisted, looking back up and realizing that she probably sounded hysterical. She was breathing hard in panic, her eyes frantically darting around, searching for any sign.

“Lyra, you have to close it! Now!” Steve’s voice was hard and commanding.

“One more minute,” she begged, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

“We don’t have a minute, now—" Lyra didn’t hear the last of Steve’s sentence as a numbing cold engulfed her body. She realized that Natasha had given her a sharp push into the energy field. It felt like being doused in cold water, she couldn’t breathe. The rapid change in temperature snapped her out of her panic, though, and she reached out to grab the cube. Her hand had gone numb the closer she got to it, but she saw her fingers wrap around it and she gripped it as hard as she could and yanked. The coldness left everywhere except her hand, that was white knuckled around the cube. She looked up to see the beam of light stop and the portal begin to close. She couldn’t take it, and was about to look away when she saw something small fall through just before the portal could disappear completely. She sucked in a breath, hoping.

“Son of a gun,” she heard Steve comment as she realized that it was indeed Tony. Though he wasn’t out of the woods yet. It didn’t look like he was slowing down at all. Lyra took a step toward the edge of the building, watching him fall in panic. Then a green blur collided with him, and she registered that the Hulk had caught him and was attempting to slow his fall. They fell out of sight.

Lyra looked around for any way to get down there quickly. She was on top of a building though, and there was not really a fast way to get there. No on was saying anything over comms. She was about to panic more, but then there was a vibration from her hand. She looked down in surprise to remember that she was holding the tesseract. Just like what had happened with the larger portal, a smaller beam of light shot out and made a portal a few feet in front of her. She stared through it for just long enough to see Steve, Thor, and the Hulk gathered around a fallen Tony before instinct took over and she ran through it. It disappeared just after she had cleared it.

Tesseract still in hand, she rushed over to Tony. Thor tried to block her for a moment, probably fearing what would happen if she discovered him dead, but she pushed him out of the way to get to Tony. She knelt down beside him and used her free hand to push on the manual clasps around his helmet, prying it off to see his face. His eyes were closed. There was a shocked silence around her as everyone took in the sight. She stayed there for a second longer, then abruptly stood up and kicked the armor in the ribs.

“Tony Stark, you are literally the worst human being that I have ever had the misfortune to meet. I’ve been meaning to say that ever since I first saw you,” she spat angrily at him and then turned around. Steve and Thor were behind her and they looked dumbstruck for a moment before they saw the pure relief on her face. She gave them a wide smile, looking the happiest they had ever seen her.

“You’re so mean to me, Lyrs. Can’t you even be nice when you think I’m dead?” Tony’s voice called back, drawing everyone’s attention.

“No,” she answered, then rubbed at her eyes and turned back around to face him. She was trying to look disapproving, but the smile kept returning to her face despite her best efforts.

“I meant to ask this earlier, but what the actual hell are you wearing?” Tony teased her, sitting up.

“Don’t blame me, Loki fairy-godmothered me,” Lyra defended herself, looking down at the dress in distaste. Her comment left Thor and Steve looking down at her very confused.

“So what just happened? Did we win?” Tony asked and Lyra rolled her eyes. That probably should’ve been his first question.

“We won,” Steve said, almost like he couldn’t believe it himself.

“Alright, yaay,” Tony said in celebration. “Hurray. Good job guys. Let’s just not come in tomorrow. Let’s just take a day. Have you ever tried shawarma? There’s a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don’t know what it is, but I wanna try it.”

“We’re not finished yet,” Thor said, looking back up at Stark tower.

“And then shawarma after. You wouldn’t happen to be able to make us another portal back up there Lyrs?” Tony asked, struggling to sit up in the dead suit.

Lyra looked back down at the tesseract in her hand. She tried to remember how she had gotten it to bring her down here, but she couldn’t remember. To amuse herself, she tried several different mental commands to make it work, but it just glowed happily and coldly in her hand. After a moment, Thor put his hand out for it.

“It might not be wise to continue holding onto that. I will take it back up to the container,” he said and she pressed it into his hand. The moment that it slipped out of her fingers, she felt like all of the energy had been drained out of her body. She started to collapse, but Steve caught her and held her up. She was shaking from exhaustion and from the cold.

“You okay?” he asked, trying to steady her on her feet.

“Just… tired,” Lyra said, letting out a big yawn and then immediately regretted yawning in Captain America’s face. She blushed, but he just looked amused and relieved.

“Common let’s get back up there,” Steve said and steadied Lyra on her feet. She was determined not to fall again, but it was hard to stay focused. She was grateful when Steve wrapped his arm around her steady her as they made their way back to the tower.

They got there just as Loki was pulling himself up from his fight with the Hulk. Lyra had to stop herself from cracking up laughing in her delirious haze as they all struck a dramatic pose.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have that drink now,” Loki muttered. Lyra saw Tony crack a smile, but Lyra frowned. It was probably just how tired she was, but the tone of Loki’s voice seemed different. In fact, in her eyes it seemed like he was completely different. She yawned again and fought to keep her eyes open.

“Let’s go put you somewhere you can lie down,” Tony’s voice said from behind her and she felt him guide her to the stairwell. He took her up to the room that she used when they were in New York and she collapsed onto the bed.

“Crazy day, huh?” he asked, pulling the covers over her.

“Crazy life,” she muttered back, burying her face into the pillow.

“You stay here, I’ll deal with the rest of the paperwork,” Tony said kindly and she groaned in agreement.

“I love you, Lyrs,” Tony said.

“Love you too,” Lyra said back, turning over and shooting him a quick glance. “But you’re cutting into my sleeping time so go away.”

Tony chuckled and left the room.

When he got back into the main penthouse, where all of the action had taken place, he found everyone still just waiting around for what would eventually be sure to be a lot of activity in a moment when SHIELD arrived. Loki was in handcuffs, still sitting on the ground. Someone, Thor probably, had procured a sort of muzzle that was now clamped around his mouth. Looking around, Tony didn’t see the tesseract either, so he assumed that they had also already put it in a case somewhere. Everyone was standing around in exhaustion, trying to process what had just happened in the last 48 hours.

“Will she be okay?” Steve asked Thor, looking up as Tony walked back in.

“She will be fine. What comes next for her, though, is yet to be decided,” Thor stated back, also turning around to look at Tony.

“Nothing’s yet to be decided,” Tony snapped back at him. “We’re going to clean up this mess, and she’s going to go back to MIT. Get her degree. Maybe meet a guy. Or three. You know, I was thinking that eventually she might want to—”

“It is not safe on Midgard for a young blessed one, I fear. She would fare much better in Asgard, where there are proper plans set in place for this type of thing,” Thor said.

“No, we don’t need proper plans,” Tony shot back dangerously. “What she needs, is to—”

“Lyra Stark isn’t leaving Earth,” Nick Fury’s voice came through the comms. He had obviously been listening in. “If she’s as powerful as you seem to believe then she’s an asset that we cannot afford to lose.”

Everyone stiffened at that comment. Tony looked furious. Clint was looking around the room confused and Natasha shot him an ‘I’ll tell you later’ look. Shield had arrived and several agents swarmed around the room. They collected the tesseract and Loki’s scepter and were looking through the building for anything else of use.

“She’s not your new toy, Fury,” Tony seethed. “No one needs a plan for—”

“Isn’t that exactly what Thor’s saying right now?” Fury reasoned. “Pretty convenient that his offered up plan is to keep her on—”

“The plan,” Thor insisted, “would be to educate her properly and keep her safe until—”

“Everybody be quiet!” Steve commanded, and they did. “Why don’t we ask her what she wants to do herself?”

“Bingo!” Tony said. “I agree with the Capsicle over here.”

“In any case,” Steve continued, shooting Tony a look at the tone that he was using, “we have time. Let’s wait until tomorrow when we all have some rest and some time away from this.”

Nobody wanted to argue with that so the damage control continued and somehow Tony convinced everyone to go down to the shawarma place that he had mentioned before. Everyone was shocked to see it still standing and they convinced the man hiding behind the counter to make them some food, which they all ate in silence. Everyone was coming down from adrenaline and the sense in Steve’s words about waiting was validated.

“Odin could provide you with the knowledge that you would need, you’d be treated like royalty,” Thor assured Lyra. After she had woken up and taken her sweet time with showering and changing clothes, Thor had pulled her aside for a private conversation, ignoring Tony’s glares. She had expected this in some form, and Thor was being quite polite about it all, which she appreciated. She was not expecting this same treatment when it was Fury’s turn.

“I’m really sorry, Thor, but Earth is my home. I can’t just leave it,” she said, walking down the hallway next to him. Even though his proposal had been gentle, she still braced herself for some kind of pushback.

“If that is what you wish,” Thor said simply, still smiling at her with kind eyes. Lyra stopped in her tracks, and Thor kept going for a few more before stopping too and turning around to face her.

“You’re not going to try to make me go?” Lyra blurted out. That had not been what she was expecting at all.

“Of course not,” Thor scoffed, “I told you that not even Odin would question your word. If staying is what you think is best, then that is what will happen.” He stated it like it was a simple fact. Lyra wished that everything would be this easy.

“Oh,” Lyra said, still in amazement. “Well, do you mind if I ask you a few questions, then?”

“Of course.”

“Can you tell me again, what this,” she waved her hand, “all is? You said that I was supposedly blessed by the universe because of how good I am?”

“Yes,” Thor replied patiently. “That is exactly what I’m saying.”

“Is this, like, an inherent trait or is it something that is earned?”

“Both.”

“But…” Lyra trailed off, thinking about everything that had led her up to this point. “I haven’t been ‘good’ all the time. I’ve made some bad choices and I’m not always right about things. How could someone like Odin just know what I am and take my word as law?”

“It is not necessarily each choice and action that you make that defines who you are. In your heart, you have never wished for evil or injustice to reign. Tell me, Lady Lyra. If you knew for sure that one would not take advantage of others or act out of self-interest, what would you have them do?”

Lyra looked up at him, thinking about the question for a moment. “I—I would have them making all of the tough decisions,” she said truthfully, after a moment. “But I don’t feel qualified to be doing that.”

“That is exactly what makes you qualified, my lady,” Thor spoke with a sparkle in his eyes. “And throw in the luck and power that that individual is blessed with, and you have yourself a great leader.” Lyra rolled her eyes angrily. “What is it?” Thor asked.

“Power and luck? I have literally never had either of those things. That might have been nice when I was growing up.”

“Strongest are the ones who have overcome the greatest hardships. Wisdom comes from struggle. Power comes from wisdom,” Thor said back, it sounded like he was quoting from something, but she didn’t bother to ask what.

“What if I change my mind? About Asgard?” Lyra said, chewing at her lip nervously. A little bit of education from people who knew what they were doing sounded like a pretty good idea to her right about now.

“You will always be welcomed at the gates of Asgard,” Thor assured her. “Whatever decision you make, it will be the right one. Just listen to what your heart is telling you.”

Lyra squirmed at the certainty in his voice. How could he be so sure in her if she wasn’t even sure of herself? She let herself imagine what it would be like to take Thor up on his offer and leave Earth. The thought of that excited the scientific part of her immensely. Getting to go up into space and interact with a bunch of scientifically evolved aliens was a chance that every scientist would kill for. Plus, they knew more about what she was and could maybe teach her to control her luck and power, or whatever. If Thor had asked her to run away with him three years ago, she’d have jumped right on that. But now…

She had seen what sorts of horrors also waited out there in the great unknown. She had watched as their government agency had lied to and used the most powerful people in the world. She had tasted what it was like to hold the infinite power of space in her hand. And through it all she saw what she had here. She saw how much she would miss Tony. Pepper. Happy. Her friends at college. She saw how much she could help this little planet. How much she was in a position to change the world. She couldn’t let go of the familiarity and warmth that she had finally found here. Thor had said to listen to her heart.

“I have to stay here,” Lyra said, sounding a little more sure of herself this time and Thor beamed down at her.

“As you wish, my lady.”

Lyra looked down as she felt the phone in her pocket buzz. She held it up to see that she was getting a direct call from Nick Fury. She considered it just for a moment before she pressed the ‘Ignore’ button. She had a lot of mess to clean up.

Chapter Text

"We're very sorry, but we've just been completely bought out."

Lyra resisted the urge to bang her head against the keyboard. This must have been the thirtieth place that she'd tried, even after disabling all of JARVIS's connections to her network, which was going to be a bitch to install back later. It seemed like Tony was prepared to buy all of DC just to force her to stay with him over the summer instead of doing this internship. She sighed, wishing that she knew more about property laws, but she was far too busy to start that particular process. The end of the term was coming up and she had finals to study for and projects to complete. Adding all of this bullshit to her life was something that Tony was going to pay for if he got his way and she ended up staying with him over the summer instead. Maybe if she was annoying enough he'd just give her one of the properties that he had taken over.

Getting bored with this, she found herself searching through possible embassies that she could perhaps be the occupant of. Throwing away her American citizenship just to have a place to stay for the summer would probably catch Tony off guard. She looked up from her screen when she saw that she was getting a call from a blocked number.

"Fury, I swear for the last time I don't want anything to do with--"

"Not Fury this time," a woman's voice came back. "He knows by now that you'll just hang up on him."

"Natasha?" Lyra asked, a little shocked and embarrassed. "What are you calling about?"

"SHIELD has been noticing some strange activity. You thinking about heading East?" Lyra bit her tongue hard. Of course SHIELD would be doing everything that it could to monitor her life. Purging JARVIS had also unfortunately gotten rid of the advanced security protocols that he provided. And she had thought that she was being so clever.

"No, I'm just trying to find the last corner of DC that Tony hasn't gotten his hands on," Lyra replied, putting the phone on her shoulder and continuing to read the document that she had been staring at.

"DC? What do you want there? It's just a bunch of grumpy old politicians," Natasha prompted.

"Just this law internship program that I got into. I need to find a place to stay during it. I put it off because I didn't actually think that Tony would rather spend millions of dollars than let me spend the summer in DC. I'll find something, though. SHIELD doesn't have to worry."

"What makes you think that I'm calling for SHIELD?" Natasha asked, though the tone of her voice was playful.

"I'm not an idiot. Well, if that's all you needed then..."

"Hey, wait a minute. I might just have the perfect opportunity for you." Her voice was still playful.

"If it's not some SHIELD grunt camp, then I'm listening..." Lyra responded, focusing on the phone again.

"Steve's living up there when he's not on missions. He's got a two bedroom apartment, you should give him a call and see if you could crash there for the summer," Natasha explained. There was definitely something else there, but Lyra couldn't quite tell what it was.

"Steve Rogers?" Lyra said, a little bit surprised. "There's no way I can do that. He's... old fashioned." She knew that she was just trying to come up with an excuse. She was still convinced that she had embarrassed herself thoroughly during the battle of New York and was in no hurry to continue that in front of her childhood hero.

"He owns the place, so Starkbucks can't sweep it out from under you. Just call. That guy could use someone fun in his life," Natasha offered.

"Yeah? fun as in law books and highlighters?"

"At least the highlighters are pretty colors."

Lyra laughed. "Alright, I'll call him, but only if I absolutely cannot find anyone else."

"Yeah, good luck with that."

A week of unreturned and negative phone calls found Lyra staring down at the phone in her hand at Steve Roger's contact. Fury had insisted that she keep some way of contacting SHIELD in case she ever needed to and she had jokingly suggested a line straight to Steve not expecting the contact to show up on her phone the next day. She hesitated, not sure that he even knew that she had his number. Besides, it's not like they really knew each other. The only time that they had really met was when they were fighting off swarms of aliens coming out of a portal in New York. She wasn't sure that he'd even remember her if it wasn't for all that drama about her 'goodness' that Thor had brought up. And she was eager to avoid thinking about that as much as possible. However, through all of it, her internship was set to start the next morning and she was out of options. She knew that if she wasn't there on time on the first day then she would be dropped from the program and have to spend the entire summer with Tony. That wasn't the worst option in the world, but she also knew that this was going to be beneficial to her and to him in the long run, even if he didn't see it that way. With a deep breath, she pressed the call icon.

"Hello?" Steve's voice came through the phone after ringing a few times. He sounded professional.

"Hi Captain Rogers. It's Lyra," Lyra began. "Lyra Stark. You remember, from New York?" She bit her tongue at how awkward that sounded. It was probably a safe assumption that he didn't know more than one Lyra and also that he remembered where she was from. She decided to just let that go and focus on being relaxed.

"Lyra? Hi, is everything okay?" Steve sounded worried now, like he wouldn't expect to be contacted by her unless another portal was opening up from the sky. To be fair that was probably a fine assumption on his part.

"Yeah, yeah. Everything's fine. Actually, I was calling you to ask a favor."

"Sure. What do you need?" Steve said, though he still sounded concerned.

"Natasha might have mentioned that you were living up in DC and that you had a spare bedroom that might be available for the summer? I have an internship up there, but I've been having some trouble finding somewhere to stay. I'd totally pay rent and all that. I'd also understand if Natasha was just being Natasha. You know how she is," Lyra said maybe a little too quickly. She could not believe how awkward she was being, she normally excelled in social situations. Or at least didn't care enough to notice when one wasn't going to great. There was a pause on the other end of the line and Lyra thought for sure that he was finding a polite way to decline. She almost started declining herself when he spoke up again.

"Yeah, I have an extra bedroom. You're having trouble finding something in DC?" Steve's voice came back after he cleared his throat.

"Yeah. Tony's been buying out every market and refuses to rent to me. He claims it's some sort of business market exercise. He's just being a jerk, though. I'd totally understand if you don't want to though, this is kind of out of the blue and all," Lyra said uncertainty.

"No, no, it's completely fine. This place isn't quite Stark mansion though," Steve chuckled.

"No issues here. I just need a place to sleep and read books. You won't even know I'm there, honest," Lyra said, excitement starting to flutter in her chest. She had already given up hope that she would be able to do this.

"I think that can be arranged. When were you thinking about moving?"

"Well... I can be there by 10? My internship starts tomorrow, but I think I might be able to find somewhere to stay for tonight if that's too soon for you," Lyra said, feeling bad about springing this on him.

"Wow yeah that's soon. Should be fine though, the missions that I've been going on have hit a lull; I'll be around. The bedroom is already fully furnished so we don't have to move everything into it."

"Really, thanks! You are really saving my life right now. I totally owe you," Lyra gushed out, excitement finally creeping into her voice.

Steve chuckled again. "You're welcome. You don't owe me anything. The address is 1614 Connecticut Ave NW. I'm on the fifth floor. Number 4."

"Great! This is great. Thanks so much. I'll see you soon!" Steve could tell that Lyra was positively beaming at this point and he was smiling himself as he put the phone down. This was definitely going to be interesting.

Lyra stepped out of the taxi after thanking the driver and stared up at the building. It was a cute building; it looked like it had probably been standing for about a hundred years. It seemed to be made out of red brick with a flourish of white accents. She could see why Steve liked it. She had two big suitcases in either hand and a backpack around her shoulders. Two of which were filled up with books, and the third contained clothes and some electronics that she couldn't live without. She didn't know what she was getting into so she had decided to pack light. It was really nice that the room was already furnished, so she didn't have to worry about moving anything else. She entered the building and looked around for an elevator only to see that there was none, further confirming her guess at the building's age. She stared upward at the spiral of stares and sighed. Well, at least this way she would get her cardio in. Beggars couldn't be choosers, she told herself and then hoisted up both suitcases and began climbing.

By the time she made it to the fifth floor, her arms felt like fire from all the heavy books and she was breathing hard. She set the bags down with a thunk next to the door and wiped her face. She hadn't realized how out of shape she'd gotten when she didn't have to constantly run for her life. She collapsed next to the bags and leaned against the door, planning on catching her breath and regaining a little dignity before knocking on Captain America's door. Her plan was ruined when the door behind her suddenly opened and she had to stop herself from tumbling into the person on the other side. She twisted around to see a very confused Steve looking down at her.

"Oh... hi," she said, still trying to catch her breath.

"Lyra, what are you doing?" Steve asked, looking down at her things and her spread around the floor. "Did you carry those all the way up here?"

"Yeah. I was just taking a quick break." Lyra sucked in another breath.

"You could've called me and I would have come down and gotten those for you," Steve said, frowning down at her.

"You're already doing me... a huge favor. I couldn't ask--"

"Nonsense. Here, let's get these inside," Steve dismissed her and then grabbed her two suitcases and brought them into the house like they weighed no more than pillows.

Lyra groaned and muttered, "No fair." Then she pulled herself to her feet and walked into the house.

What she saw was almost exactly what she would have envisioned. The space was decent, with bookshelves lining the walls leading into a living room with a small unlit fireplace. Another book lined hallway led to a small kitchen with a table that could really only fit two. There were some photos in frames scattered around the house and an old poster for the US Army. The boxes and other framed pictures scattered around the house showed that Steve still hadn't quite moved in all the way, but the rest of the place was clean and homey. She loved it.

Steve had disappeared into a hallway on her left and she followed him after taking in the apartment for a second. A small hallway led to a bathroom and two bedrooms. Steve was currently depositing her suitcases onto the bed in one of the bedrooms that she guessed was going to be hers. Like the rest of the house, it was simple, but clean. There was a bed in a corner and a dresser on one side of it, with a writing desk on the other that took up most of the space. It was clear that when this wasn't a guest bedroom its main purpose was supposed to be an office of some sort. Lyra felt guilty that she was taking up his space. She walked up next to him and deposited her backpack onto the bed next to the other bags.

"Is there any more?" Steve asked, looking over at her as she unzipped one of the bags.

"Nope, this is it," she said absentmindedly as she pulled out a couple of the books. There was still time to get some light reading in before bed. She hadn't had as much time as she would have liked to prepare. She noticed, though, that at her words Steve looked mildly surprised as he noticed that one of the large suitcases contained only books.

"'Constitutional Law: The Machinery of Government'," He read off the title of a particularly thick book. "Packing light?" he asked casually.

"Only the essentials," Lyra responded with a small smile.

"Reminds me of when I was in the army. I think I was the only one that packed books. But wait, I didn't think that people even used books anymore. Don't you have some sort of tablet screen thing that you can get all these on?" Steve asked.

"I grew up with paper books," Lyra shrugged. "They're easier for me to memorize than words on a tablet." Tony often joked about her love of paperback books.

"Oh," Steve looked at her before she realized what she had said. She really needed to stop dropping casual things like that. "Well, this is it. Sorry that there's really not a lot of space around here to--"

"It's wonderful," Lyra cut him off as he looked around modestly. "Really. Thank you so much for renting me a room, I really appreciate it Captain. Sir. Mr. Rogers," she fumbled with the title, not really sure what she should call him out of the uniform. From the looks of it, she wasn't even that much younger than him. She blushed and looked down. Not once in her life did she ever imagine that she would be roommates with the Captain America. The star of her favorite childhood comics.

"Steve is fine," he corrected her with a smile. "And it's really no problem. I'm just glad that I could help."

She looked back up at him and gave him a sweet smile. "Well, I have to be up at 6 tomorrow and there's some reading that I wanted to get to so I'd better get started on that if I want to be able to function in the morning."

"Yeah, of course. Bathroom's down the hall. Towels are in the closet. Make yourself at home," Steve said graciously and then walked to the doorway. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Steve," she watched him go and hoped that she would get over whatever was making her so awkward around him.

When Lyra turned off her alarm the next morning the first thing that she registered were the sounds of cooking and the smell of bacon. She groaned and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, regretting getting too engrossed in the books last night and losing track of time. She really wasn't a morning person, but for this entire summer she was going to have to be. From what she had heard, being late for this internship was just asking to be dropped. She pulled herself out of bed and collected things from her suitcase for a shower. The bathroom was small, and she'd be sharing it with Steve so she took extra care not to disturb any of his things as she got ready for the day, putting on her professional attire as the dress code specified. However, the mirror didn't lie and when she looked into it she saw that she indeed still looked incredibly tired. Oh well. It had never been a problem when she and Tony had been working in the lab. She pulled herself out to the kitchen to find Steve already at work cooking breakfast. He had apparently already showered and was ready for the day. She wondered just what time he got up and why.

"Good morning Lyra. Would you want some breakfast?"

"You know what time it is, right?" Lyra asked, sleep still evident in her voice as she sat down at the table.

"It's 6:45. Why?" Steve asked her curiously.

"Huh, so you're not ignorant, which means that you must be crazy," Lyra muttered. Her usual filters turned off by the early hours. She rubbed her eyes and yawned. "Do you have any coffee by chance?"

"I get up at 4 am every day to run," Steve said, matter-of-factly and shrugged and filled a mug with coffee from the pot, placing it in front of her and then turning back to the stove. "I hope I didn't wake you up."

"Thanks. Don't worry about it. I heard you get up before I went to bed," Lyra said and stretched.

"You only got two hours of sleep?" Steve turned back around to her with two plates, both piled high with various breakfast foods. He looked concerned.

"You should learn to sleep in, it's one of the luxuries of the twenty-first century," Lyra said, then frowned. "You know you don't have to feed me too, I can find food myself."

"It's no problem. Just for today while you don't have time to get things for yourself," Steve waved her off and then set the plate in front of her.

"Well... thanks," Lyra said and then picked up a fork that was already set out on the table and dug in. Steve raised an eyebrow at her after a minute when her plate was cleaned off.

"What?" Lyra asked, her cheeks lightly dusting with pink. "I don't get home cooked food a lot, I've got to enjoy it while it lasts."

"You don't cook?"

She shook her head. "Nope. Tony does. He's tried to teach me, but I've never had the patience for it."

"Well I don't mind it. Cooking for two is a lot easier than cooking for one and maybe I can give you a few pointers."

"You sure? I know I promised that you wouldn't even notice that I was here."

"I'd have to be blind not to notice you," Steve said back quickly, looking her up and down. Then paused. It was his turn to blush. Lyra put her fork down and then realizing what he just said a smile crept onto her face.

"Bet that line killed in the 40's," she said, but the smile still stayed. She enjoyed the compliment. Especially coming from him.

"I didn't get out much back then. You know, because of the war going on. There wasn't much time for coming up with lines." Steve still looked a little shaken, but recovered. After her awkwardness last night it felt nice to finally be the one on sound footing.

"When did you join the army?" She asked, the topic had been successfully changed. She leaned on the table, her chin resting on her hand and giving him her full attention. She would take any chance to discuss what his life was like.

"You don't already know?" Steve asked, looking down at her curiously. He was used to everyone already knowing most things about him through history classes and from his files at SHIELD.

"I like to get my information from primary sources when I can. I know how much bullshit can be crammed into an official document," she said, rolling her eyes. "For example, if you read a SHIELD file about me you might notice that literally nothing in there reflects anything that I've actually done with my life."

Steve stared at her for a moment. There was a playfulness behind her eyes that said that even if he asked she wouldn't tell him what she meant by that. To be honest he had been suspicious about that file from the start. Fury had provided it at his request after New York and it didn't read like the file of the girl sitting next to him. Fury had to have picked up on that too, but apparently he couldn't get her to tell him the truth either. It should make Steve uncomfortable that he barely knew anything about his new roommate, but for some reason he trusted her. Having fought a portal full of aliens with her probably helped that. He realized after a moment that he had been silent entirely too long and that she was still waiting for an answer. Doubt was beginning to enter her eyes, like she thought she had said something wrong. They were still little more than acquaintances. Steve wanted to change that.

"Well I started trying to enlist the moment I turned 17," Steve began.

"But they wouldn't let you because you were small?" Lyra asked, sounding grateful that he was talking to her.

"Among other things. I had so many problems that Bucky always told me that it was a miracle that I didn't collapse when the breeze hit me," Steve chuckled, remembering back.

"So how did you keep trying? Didn't they already have you marked in their system?"

"Everything was paper back then, if I moved around they didn't have record of me."

"Ooohhhh Captain America the outlaw," Lyra teased, but still looked excited. "How many times did you try?"

She asked questions and he answered them all as best he could. She asked about what kind of paperwork he had to fill out and what he thought of Roosevelt and the war back then. They talked about what kind of clothing the women wore back in the 40's and old movies. She asked a lot of questions and when Steve answered she just listened usually without comment. She seemed enthralled by his mundane experiences, like they were thrilling tales of adventure. She didn't even ask much about his time spent as Captain America, which confused him since that was usually what people wanted to talk about. They were in the middle of talking about the differences in ice cream when Lyra looked up at the clock hanging in the living room and started. She jumped to her feet, which alarmed Steve and he did the same.

"Sorry! I'm going to be late! I got carried away I didn't mean to take your entire morning," she said, disappearing into her room for a moment and then coming back with her bag slung over her shoulder. "I need to head out."

"Good luck!" Steve said, sipping his coffee and watching as she barreled through the door, throwing a 'thanks!' over her shoulder. Steve shook his head, a small smile on his face. He hadn't realized how solitary his life at home had gotten and having her around this morning was a nice distraction. Fury hadn't called him in today so he was free for the day. He wondered what time she would be getting back.

The courthouse where she was interning was a short bus ride away from Steve's apartment, but that didn't matter when she was already late. She spent the whole commute tapping her fingers nervously on the bottom of the seat, wishing that the bus would go faster. When she got off she all but ran through the final couple streets and into the building. There was a group right in the front reception area that she assumed was the group of interns that had all gotten into the program. There was a severe looking man in front who stopped talking when Lyra walked up to the group, panting.

"You must be miss... Stark," the man said, causing every eye to turn to her. She took a deep breath and straightened up, ready for whatever punishment that he would use. Even with her hurry, she was still a couple minutes late. "You'd think with all that money you might be able to buy a simple wristwatch. I do not tolerate tardiness and will give no favors for famous fathers. I hope you are not planning on taking after your father when it comes to punctuality?"

"No, sir. Sorry, sir, it won't happen again," Lyra said in apology, keeping her eyes downcast. A murmur went through the group of interns at the mention of her father. She cursed the man for mentioning him. Usually she would be able to get away with laughing off the fact that her last name was the same as a super hero's, but now there was no avoiding it. She immediately felt sorry for asking Steve all those questions that morning; she was no doubt going to have to answer a bunch of questions later.

"I'll make an exception for the first day, but next time you're out of the program, I don't care who you are," the man said and glared around the room until everyone was focused on him again. He continued on with telling the interns about the history of the courthouse and then explaining what they would be doing for the next few months. Lyra was glad that she was in the back of the room because even then she was still getting curious glances and that would have been so much worse if she were in the front. She tried to focus on what the man was saying. The other interns would get over it quickly once she gave the same boring answers that she gave everyone else who asked.

The rest of the day continued much like that, with lots of information and introductions between the interns and some of the lawyers that worked there. Everyone was looking overwhelmed by lunch. The firm had put out a spread of sandwiches to welcome the new interns and they all sat on the courthouse steps eating them. Some of the more serious interns had been taking notes through the entire presentation and pulled them out to review while they ate. The rest of them all rounded onto Lyra. They had all had to introduce themselves throughout the day so she already knew all their names and had suspicions about which ones to avoid. They were a group of about 8, which was fitting because of the large size of the firm.

"So you're Lyra Stark?" A boy named Whitney asked, sneering. He had that rich kid look with an upturned nose that made it look like he was always looking down at you. Lyra automatically put him into the avoid category. "You're that orphan that Tony Stark adopted for charity, right?"

"Yup," Lyra said, sounding bored, which she was. She'd heard this conversation a million times.

"Oh wow, what's that like?" A girl names Susie chirped excitedly. She was well dressed, but in bright colors that made her stand out. She had brown curly hair and her face was covered in freckles. She seemed genuine.

"Nothing special," Lyra said, determined to keep her answers short.

"What's Tony like?" That was Audrey, who was in the same category as Whitney. She also looked like she came from serious money with her hair and clothing all done to perfection. She had answered a few questions right and gotten the attention of the other lawyers already. She had that heartsick look on her face that a lot of women did when they talked about Tony. Lyra usually just found it creepy when girls her age had it.

"He's annoying," she delivered her usual answer. Then added, "I don't really see him much. He's always out." As predicted, everyone was starting to lose interest in her as she gave them answers that they didn't want to hear. She wasn't technically lying, since the attack on New York she had gone back to classes at MIT and Tony was up to his eyes in political work from the Avengers. The only times they really saw each other were when they needed to do some important testing and updates on the armor, and even then it was usually in passing. However, that answer worked well for curious people because it heavily implied that she was nothing more than the orphan that Tony had rescued to help clear his conscience and then never bothered to interact with. The students in this particular group were from the top universities all around the country, so most of them looked to come from wealthy families. If she couldn't answer questions about Tony or the Avengers, then she was just like the rest of them.

"Have you met the Avengers?" A tall scrawny boy seated in the back piped up. He was... Rodney. He had been quiet during the presentation and hadn't answered any of the questions, like her.

"Briefly. But after New York they all went their own ways. Tony tells me to stay out of their way so that I don't get hurt."

That was the final question. After that interest was usually done with her and this was no exception. It didn't hurt that everyone seemed nervous to be on their first day of the internship and there had already been a ton of information dumped onto them, so they didn't really need anything else. Lyra relaxed and ate her sandwich with the rest of them. Mostly watching them as they got to know each other more in the short time that they had for lunch. She noticed that Rodney's eyes kept coming back to her, though.

After lunch was more of the same introductions, but a lot more questions were asked to the group and the questions were getting more and more technical. Lyra mostly let the others answer, knowing better than the let the attention focus on her so soon. She used the same techniques that got her through college classes without making a big fuss. Eventually the lawyer singled her out to ask a particularly difficult question to try to catch her off guard, but she had read most of the textbook last night and knew the answer, which threw the lawyer off instead. She was used to being stereotyped as the rich kid that only got places through her famous father, so she wasn't too surprised. It wouldn't be long before they found out that that's not who she was in the slightest. The day ended without too much excitement and a long list of books and cases that the interns were asked to read up on for the next week. They would mostly be doing paperwork and filing for the lawyers, but there were opportunities for some of the high performing interns to get into the court room, they were assured.

Lyra was excited to get started. The pacing and content was a lot different from her mostly science-based classes and experience at the university. The reason that she was here, after all, was because she wanted to get to know law better to help Tony out when it came to legal matters. The only things she knew were what she had the time to read and she was eager to get some hands-on experience in the courtroom. That meant that she had to be high performing, though, so she decided to go to the library and get started on the reading that they wanted. They had let them out early because it was their first day, so she had plenty of time to get to the library and start on the reading before going back to Steve's place. The only problem was that when she was focused she nearly always lost track of the time, as evidenced by this morning, but she didn't learn from that and instead walked out of the library after dark, realizing how late it was only by the hunger that gnawed at her stomach. It was after 10, which normally wasn't late for her, but the lack of sleep from the night before and the fact that she needed to get up early again made her resigned to go back and get some sleep.

She decided to walk to a small deli that she had seen nearby for dinner and was grateful to see that it was still open. When she was done it was nearly midnight, when the buses stopped running. She thought about calling for a ride, but then the cool fresh air enticed her and she decided that the walk would be fine. It wasn't that far to Steve's apartment and she'd already come part of the way so she slung her bag over her shoulder and then began. The streets were mostly clear this time of night. The early summer air was sweet and crisp as a fresh apple. The few people that were out all headed along their way keeping to themselves. Lyra recalled Xi's often used phrase growing up, 'Nothing good ever happens after midnight'. Lyra wasn't particularly worried; the dangerous part of her life was in the past and the street she was walking down wasn't exactly secluded. Not being worried was perhaps the reason that she allowed them to sneak up on her.

"Hey lady," the voice came from behind her. She debated on ignoring it, though it was clearly meant for her, but there was something in it that hinted that she should turn around and face him. When she did, she encountered a stocky man, wearing a dirty suit with an unbuttoned white shirt and the tie know loosened around his neck. A quick glance to his stumbling feet showed her that he was probably just come from a bar. A longer look gave her the feeling that she was in danger. She waited for him to make the first move.

"Hey. Hey, I just saw you walking by, and I could-- I could tell like 'this girl needs a drink'. Why don't we go around the corner to the bar that I was just at and--oh hey wait a minute I was actually going to ask you whether you got any money. I seem to have misplaced all of my cash." He tried at a charming smile.

Or you drank it all away, more likely, Lyra thought to herself. This guy was pretty out of it, his speech disorganized and barely intelligible. Nothing about him seemed threatening, though. She wondered where she got the flight or fight instinct from here. She looked around for any other people that were around, but found no one. This was just great.

"Sorry, I don't carry cash on me," she said clearly. "And I'm expected back home, so if you'll excuse me."

"I'm celebrating my divorce tonight. You should come celebrate," the man said with a dopey smile.

"Congratulations," Lyra muttered, wondering how such an upright gentleman could possibly get divorced. She roller her eyes and turned to go, still being aware of him in case he tried to make a move. That focus in turn blinded her to when somebody stepped out in front of her suddenly. She ran straight into him and he caught her, wrapping thick hands above her forearms to steady them both.

"Why don't you want to celebrate with him, this is such a happy time. Common, just one drink. I think I have some beers in my car that we could all have." This man was taller and from his speech, obviously less drunk than the first man. He tightened his grip on her arm and made to drag her off away from the sidewalk. With the accuracy that only comes through practice, Lyra jutted out her arms into his elbows, forcing his arms apart and off of her. At the same time, she stamped down in his foot with the heel of her pumps.

"Bitch!" The man cried out in pain and then brought his fist down across her face. Pain blossomed in her left eye and the force of the blow put her down onto one knee. Her hand came up to cover her eye and she felt the tender flesh. There was no way that that wasn't going to bruise.

"Hey man, what're you doing?" The first guy, now behind her sounded like he was in shock.

"She can come with us, Frank. It'll be fine we'll just have a little fun and then she can get back to wherever she's going in such a hurry. One drink," she second assured the first. Lyra took a deep breath to calm the adrenaline raging through her veins. She silently slid her bag off her shoulder while he talked and then when he leaned down to grab her again, she put all her strength into slamming the bag across his head. The man was already unsteady and the bag was full of heavy notebooks and books. The combination of the two sent the man sprawling onto the floor with an audible thud in the silent nighttime air.

"Johnny!" the first man called out, still sounding confused. He rushed forward and Lyra, not wanting to take any chances, jammed her foot into his shin and then used her hands to throw his shoulder, sending him laying down next to his friend. She felt a little bad about that one, since he hadn't shown any indication of violence, but now she had the opportunity to get a clean getaway.

Or she would if the world didn't explode into brilliant lights of blue and red. Lyra groaned. Her vision was still blurry from the initial blow and the lights only expedited the headache that she knew she was going to have later. Not to mention that this ruined any chance at slipping away unnoticed. She walked over and leaned on the building next to her, her hand unsuccessfully trying to shield the light from her eyes.

"Miss, are you alright?" A new voice came from in front of her and she looked up to see a uniformed officer approach her. She debated on what to tell him for a minute and then she stood up and faced him.

"Yes, I'm fine," she said, while another cop was leaning down to look at the two men on the pavement.

"What happened?" he asked, looking at the scene around him.

"I'm on my way home. They were out looking for money and I didn't have any on me," Lyra said, starting to get impatient.

"So they assaulted you?" the officer clarified.

"Sure," said Lyra noncommittally and then said, "yes" when the cop raised an eyebrow.

"And then you did this?" he asked incredulously, glancing down at the two men on the ground and then back at her small frame.

"Self defense classes do wonders, don't they?" she said, resisting the urge to snap at him. "Well, if that's all then I'll just continue on my way." She pointed her thumb in the direction that she had been walking and then turned to go, not really hoping for much.

"Wait ma'am! We're going to need a statement from you and some identification." The cop stopped her with his voice. She sighed, noticing the similarities between the past two interactions she's had tonight. She turned around slowly, with a sweet smile on her face. "Oh, I'm not pressing charges," she said happily.

"Not- are you sure ma'am? That only encourages this kind of behavior," the cop frowned down at her.

"Yes, I'm sure. I really should be going."

"Well, can I at least see some ID for my report? I can call you for follow-up if you change your mind."

"I'm not carrying any ID, officer. Sorry," Lyra lied easily, smiling apologetically up at the cop. Some things never changed, like her aversion to cooperate with authority. "I'm a minor and I don't have a driver's license. And I won't change my mind, thank you." She knew she still looked young enough to get away with it.

The officer ran a hand through his hair, wondering what to do with her. He glanced at his partner, who was standing up, finishing a report through his radio. "At least let me drive you the rest of the way home then. I insist," he added as she started to protest. She sighed and gave in, walking over to the car that was still giving off a flurry of lights.

"The kid doesn't want to come to the station, so I'm going to drop her off at her place, Bernie."

"That's alright. I'll wait here the for ambulance."

"Ambulance?" Lyra asked in surprise. She looked down at the men on the ground again.

"That one's out cold. It's standard procedure," she second officer answered her, and she nodded and then climbed through the car door that the other officer had opened for her. She was sitting in the back, a cage separating her from the driver and she knew she would be uncomfortable through the entire drive.

"What's your name? I'm officer Jared," he asked kindly, probably noticing her unease.

"Lyra Smith," she said automatically and gave him a few directions to Steve's apartment. It really wasn't far from here, she thought bitterly, cursing her luck. On the bright side, though, throughout this whole thing, at least no one had recognized her. It wasn't really all that surprising, given that she did her best to keep a low profile, but the last thing that she needed was for Tony to hear about this. Of course this had to happen the first day she was here. She had no doubt that if Tony found out about this he would probably use it as an excuse to drag her back to LA on the first flight. She was still thinking about it when the car pulled up to Steve's apartment and turned off. It really had been close to where they were.

"Alright, is this it? I'll walk you up," the officer sounded cheerful. He got out of the car and opened her door for her.

"No that's really okay. I'll be perfectly fine from here," Lyra protested. This cop was really getting into his work. Most other people would be fine with dumping an uncooperative charge at the doorstep.

"I swear this really is just policy for minors," he said defensively, putting his hands up and looking genuine. Lyra decided to indulge him.

On the way up the stairs, the officer handed her his card, saying, "Just in case you do end up changing your mind." She wasn't going to , but she pocketed the card anyway.

When she reached the apartment, she realized that she had been in such a rush in the morning that she had failed to ask Steve for a key. She was going to have to knock, probably waking up Steve and she felt incredibly guilty. Wouldn't even know she was there, right?

"Is this it?" Jared asked her.

"Yeah, I--" she was interrupted by the officer stepping forward and rapping his knuckles loudly against the door. She had been about to do that herself, but she glared at him anyway, which he ignored and waited.

They didn't have to wait long as the door opened almost immediately, revealing a worried-looking Steve. He caught sight of her immediately and looked relieved. "Lyra!" he said, "Thank God you're back I was about to go out looking for you myself."

"Sorry, I got held up. Literally," Lyra muttered back at him. Steve then caught sight of the officer in the door, who stiffened when he caught sight of Steve, looking like he suspected who it was, but was not sure about it. Steve narrowed his eyes at the man, and stood up a little straighter.

"Officer?" Steve prompted after a moment of tense silence.

"Oh yes, well I picked up Lyra here a few blocks down. She reported that two men had tried to rob her, and assaulted her in the process," the officer seemed to be stumbling over what to say, still staring at Steve.

Steve's eyes flashed back to Lyra and settled on her face. She had to fight the urge to cover it up and instead just stared back. She had been so concerned about what Tony would say if he found out that she completely forgot about what Steve would do. She hoped he didn't kick her out and send her back to Tony. For now he just asked, "You okay?" and she nodded.

"Lyra told me that she won't be pressing any charges or providing information. That ties our hands from doing anything and I was wondering if you could do anything to convince her to help us," the officer explained and Lyra pointedly looked at the ground as they both turned to stare at her. She resisted the urge to snap that the officer was way out of line to be including Steve in any of this. Was is because the officer thought that she needed a man to calm down her hysterics so that she could think clearly? She didn't say anything though, the damage was already done.

"The men who attacked her, where are they now, do you know?" Steve asked after a moment of silence.

"Both of them are on their way to the hospital right now. She claims that she's done some self-defense classes. Nothing major, she just knocked them unconscious," the officer reported, sounding like he didn't believe what he was saying and looking to Steve for his reaction.

"Sorry officer, but if that's what she already told you I can't say any different." She could hear in Steve's voice that he thought the cop was out of line as well and she shot him a grateful glance.

"Well, here's my card if you two need anything else. Goodnight, Miss Smith." The cop turned to leave and Lyra finally looked up to see Steve frowning down at her. He opened the door and gestured that she should go in. He closed the door behind him and cleared his throat to stop her as she tried to slip away into her room. She stopped and slowly turned around. Steve's eyebrows were drawn together and his lips were pursed in a disapproving frown. The sheer force of that look was enough to make her feel more guilty than she already was, if that was possible. She wondered where he would start.

"Where were you? I called you like ten times." Okay, they could start there. With another pang of guilt, Lyra reached into her bag and pulled out the cell phone that she had forgotten to turn on after her day of work. Just as he said, the screen flashed with missed calls from Steve when she turned it on.

"Sorry, I forgot to turn it back on after work I guess. I went to the library to do some more reading after and I lost track of the time," Lyra said. She wasn't used to having someone worry about her staying out late anymore. In college it was normal and if Tony needed to reach her he could remotely turn her phone on.

Steve looked like he wanted to say more about that, but just shook his head and continued, "And then you decided to walk back. In the dark."

"Yeah, it was a nice night," she said defensively, her tone taking a dangerous edge as she realized where this was going.

"You didn't think that there'd be any trouble for a dame walking home alone in the middle of the night?" he prompted and her eyes narrowed at the term.

"No, Steve. I didn't. You don't exactly live in the slums. And I can take care of myself."

"Apparently not," Steve said and gently lifted his hand to brush it along her face under her swelling eye.

"Are you forgetting the part where I put them both in the hospital?" she asked, catching his hand and pulling it away from her face. "They snuck up on me is all."

"Yeah, well they shouldn't have been able to do that at all," Steve sighed and let his hand drop back to his side. The panic of not knowing where she was and then seeing her injured was starting to fade. "Why didn't you press charges?" He was more curious now than anything. He walked into the kitchen to get some ice to put on her eye.

"And have to deal with the media storm when they found out who I am? No thanks. And not to mention Tony..." she trailed off as if she'd said too much and he handed her the ice pack, which she took with a grateful smile.

"So that's why you told him your name was Smith? To dodge all of the media attention?" Steve asked. " You really shouldn't lie to law enforcement, you know. They're only there to help."

"Smith was my last name before it was Stark. And that's great, coming from the guy that lied on his enlistment forms four times," she shot back. She knew that he was just looking out for her, which she appreciated, but everything that had happened that night had put her in a bad mood. At this point she just wanted to go to bed.

Steve pursed his lips, but didn't say anything to that. Instead, he just walked into the living room and sat down on the chair to her right. Looking serious.

"I'm sorry Steve," Lyra finally said, genuinely. "I didn't mean to get you all caught up in this."

"You need to be more careful. It didn't happen this time, but there are probably some powerful people out there that would love to get their hands on you."

"You have no idea," Lyra muttered, looking away from him. There was a moment of serious silence and then she looked back up at him. "But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to live my life." She fingered the silver bracelets that Tony had gifted to her.

"Right. But there are some precautions that you can take. Like calling me to go get you when you lose track of the time at the library. And like turning your phone on in the first place."

"I couldn't do that, it's okay, really. Next time I'll just call a cab instead of walking."

"You can walk if you want to walk. Just have a walking buddy."

Lyra smiled. "Are you offering to be my walking buddy?"

"I enjoy walking from time to time," Steve smiled back, but then got serious again. "I really don't mind. And it's better than being up all night worrying that I just let the most upstanding citizen on the Earth die."

Lyra glared at him for a second and shook her head. "You sound like Tony."

"I get the feeling that Tony wouldn't be so happy with me right now if he were here," Steve said, looking a little ashamed of himself.

"Tony would be complaining that I let some drunk asshole get the jump on me after about a million dollars worth of self-defense lessons." Lyra rolled her eyes, wincing a little at the motion.

Steve frowned. "So you've had some training then?" Lyra nodded and Steve looked thoughtful. She could almost hear a plan forming in his head, but she didn't ask about it, figuring that there would be time later and that for now what she really wanted most in the world was sleep.

"If you don't mind, I'm going to get to bed. It's been a stressful day," Lyra groaned and then stood up.

"Oh that's right, how'd the first day go?" Steve stood also.

"Nothing of note to report. Just a tour and a lot of introductions." Lyra shrugged and then went into the kitchen and dropped the ice pack into the sink. her fingers probed the flesh around her eye and she was pleased to learn that the ice had helped bring down the swelling. She passed Steve on the way to her bedroom.

"Hey. Just promise me that you'll call next time you're out late," he said softly, pleading.

"Fine. I promise," Lyra said, giving in to the look that he was currently giving her.

"Alright. Well, goodnight," Steve said as she was about to disappear into the hallway.

"Goodnight Captain America," she said sleepily, giving him a little salute before stumbling into her room and closing the door.

When she woke up the second day there was no smell of cooking breakfast. In fact, the apartment was deathly quiet in the still morning air. She woke up when she turned just the wrong way and pain shot through her face. Groaning, she felt the stiffness that came from the morning after adrenaline. She had also been correct in predicting the headache that she would have when she woke up. Seeking relief from that, she padded barefoot into the kitchen and turned on the coffee pot, then searched around for the beans. She hoped that Steve wouldn't mind, she was probably going to buy him some new coffee anyway, since the beans that she found barely counted as coffee. When it was done, she poured herself a mug and then plopped herself down at the table. The lack of sleep for the past week was getting to her. She sipped on her coffee, trying hard not to think of anything in particular, since that just made her head throb even more.

After a little bit, the sound of the apartment door opening and closing broke her out of her stupor and she looked up to see Steve, apparently coming back from his morning run. It seemed he woke up a little later than usual and Lyra again felt guilty for keeping him up late last night.

"Good morning," she said once she realized that she had been staring at him a little too long (it was hard not to) and he startled a little bit, obviously not expecting her to be there.

"Good morning, Lyra," Steve said, coming into the kitchen. When he caught sight of her he stopped in his tracks, an unreadable expression on his face. "You look terrible."

Lyra burst out laughing at his bluntness and then said, "You know just what a girl wants to hear."

Steve didn't laugh, just approached her, his eyebrows knitting into a look of concern. He lifted his hand to her arm like he was going to touch it, but then paused as if he thought better of it. She looked down at where his hand was and noticed a string of bruises where the man had grabbed her last night. She was sure that her eye probably didn't look any better. When she looked back up, she saw Steve backing away from her, his face reddening and she realized that she was only wearing some sleep shorts and a tank top.

"Sorry, I'll go change," Lyra said, then stood up to leave, but Steve stopped her, still looking concerned.

"You should call in today. Rest up a little."

Lyra considered him for a moment and then said, "Would it make you feel any better if I said that I've had way worse?"

"No," Steve said dryly, ignoring her dark humor.

"Oh, well I'm fine Steve, really. What happened last night was an anomaly, I swear."

Steve just stared after her and sighed, so she took that as permission to go. She picked out some clothes with long sleeves, despite the warm weather, and took a quick shower before doing her makeup in the mirror. Her eye had indeed purpled overnight and was still tender to the touch, but it wasn't so swollen that some carefully placed makeup couldn't almost completely cover it up. It was a relief that she probably wouldn't have to answer so many questions.

When she made it back to the kitchen, Steve was just finishing cooking breakfast and was pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pot. He offered her some and they both sat together at the table like last morning. This time, though, she kept an eye on the clock.

"That looks a lot better, that's amazing," Steve commented before he could stop himself.

"It's an art," Lyra said, shrugging and picking up her fork to eat. It was almost time to get going. "Before I forget, how much do I owe you?" When Steve looked confused she continued, "Rent, food, and apparently now valet services." She said the last one with a small amused smile.

"You really don't have to--"

"Steve, cut the crap," Lyra cut him off, sighing. "These are all things that people pay for, and I'm sure that this place isn't cheap. Besides, with all of Tony's money this is literally the least I can do for you. How much?"

"Let's call it at... 300 per month?" Steve gave in, but still looked unhappy. Lyra was unhappy because she knew that that probably didn't even cover half the rent, but she knew better than to argue with him on this. She'd find other ways to even it out between them. She grabbed her bag from under the table, pulled out her wallet and fingered through the bills until she had enough and then threw it onto the table in front of him.

Steve grabbed it and raised his eyebrows. "You carry that much cash with you? No wonder you get robbed."

Lyra rolled her eyes and glared at him, but continued eating. Steve shrugged and then took a sip of his coffee, gagged, and nearly spit it out.

"What the hell is that?" he sputtered.

"Coffee?" Lyra said innocently, taking another sip of hers.

He considered her for a moment, then said, "Well now at least I know how you can function for days at a time with no sleep. Is that just pure espresso shots?"

"It's a lot better with higher quality beans," she defended, "I'll add that to the list. Anything else?"

"What?"

"I'm planning on going shopping on my way home tonight to pick up a few things that I'm missing. Do you need anything?" Her tone made it clear that arguing would be useless.

"There's a list pinned to the fridge," Steve surrendered and she smiled sweetly at him.

"Excellent. Also, do you have a spare key that I can use? I hate to disturb you every time I come back."

"Yeah, I have it right here. You ran out without it yesterday." He passed her a small silver key.

"Thanks!" Well, I'd better get going!" She quickly put her dishes in the dishwasher and snatched the list, then headed toward the door.

"You'll text me if you're going to get back late, right?" Steve called to her as she opened the door.

"You know how to text?" she asked with mock astonishment.

"Ha ha. Lyra?" Steve was unamused.

"Yes, I will text you when I'm done at work. Scout's honor," she called before stepping out and closing the door. She shook her head with a smile on her face. It was cute that he worried about her, but she was certainly able to take care of herself, he just didn't know that. She felt a little guilty about knowing so much about him without giving him anything about her. The more she thought about it, though, the more she agreed that she'd rather not have to see the look of pity that most people got when she was honest with them. She'd take misplaced concern over that any day. She got on the bus.