Chapter 1
Margaret Maria Stark is born and she's soft pink flesh and gurgling noises that quickly turn into wails for attention. Her world consists of blurry shapes and either comfort or discomfort. Comfort is good, comfort is warm soft blankets wrapped around her, a filled belly, sweet songs sung to her while being held against a warm chest, a gravelly voice telling her things that make her head fill with knowledge and brighten her world. Discomfort is bad. Discomfort is cold, is hunger, is silence or sharp words like 'No' and 'bad girl'.
Maggie learns. There are two big shapes that move and make discomfort go away when she gives a sign. Small signs are often ignored so she has to be loud. She learns that the big one with the rumbling voice laughs when she grabs his fingers. The other one coos a lot, likes picking her up and walking around. If Maggie makes the right noises, the cooing one will get to see new blurry shapes.
As time passes, her eyesight grows sharper and her head begins to fill with words. A new big moving shape enters her world, called a 'nanny'. With the appearance of the nanny, the first two, now known to her as Mama and Daddy, all but exit her life.
Maggie does not like the nanny. Nanny tuts when Maggie yells, she chastises when she plays with her food, and she takes away the screws and bolts she enjoys pushing around and examining. Instead Nanny gives her dolls with dresses and shouts when Maggie takes them apart to see how they are held together.
From then on, she's only allowed to play with Nanny in the room, and the dolls get taken away when she leaves. She has to play the way Nanny likes it. Pretending that the dolls do stuff, that they talk, that they get married (but only the girl dolls to the boy dolls! No girls marrying girls!) and have parties.
Except they don't. They're just squishy plastic, they don't move, they don't talk, they are dumb and Maggie hates them and Nanny. She wants her to go away.
Maggie is smart and remembers how Nanny screamed when she saw the doll parts scattered around the nursery. Nanny didn't like that at all, especially when she stepped on a head. Nanny doesn't like a lot of the things Maggie does, and when Maggie does enough of those things, Nanny puts her in bed earlier without making her play much longer. Her 'theory' - a word Daddy had used once at dinner - is that if Maggie tries hard enough, she can make Nanny go away completely.
So she does. She rips apart the dolls in front of her, bites off the heads, she screams when Nanny touches her, she throws food at her, spits at her. She's a terror and Nanny doesn't last long.
Mama comes back and is disappointed, chastising her for being mean and a bad girl. Good girls don't do mean things. Good girls don't destroy dolls.
Another nanny takes the place of the old one. This one is nicer, she smells good and she shows Maggie picture books. "Look, this is a horse," she says, pointing at a picture. Maggie repeats the word carefully, and New Nanny is delighted and praises her. Then she goes to the next picture. "This is a dog."
New Nanny is nice but she's utterly boring, and Maggie wants Mama and Daddy, so she makes New Nanny go away. Next Nanny is an old biddy and all sharp tongue and strict rules. She thinks Maggie is too fat and needs to eat less.
But Maggie isn't soft pink anymore, she's tantrums and deviousness and learning, and where being a terror had worked on the last two, she realises very quickly that this Nanny will outlast her prior strategies. So Maggie does the opposite. She goes silent, whiny, sniffling sadly instead of talking and not looking anyone in the face. It's hard because being silent means not getting what she wants, but it's worth it in the end. Mama makes Mean Nanny go away when Maggie stops eating for two days 'because Nanny said she's too fat'.
Nannies come and go. Some are nicer, some last longer, some are terrible. None stay. Even if Maggie likes some of them, they soon grow boring. Maggie prefers the company of Mr. Jarvis, who doesn't talk to her as if she's stupid and who knows the best stories ever. Mr. Jarvis watches movies with her, brings her cookies, tucks her in at night.
Then one nanny comes who is as boring as the one with the picture books, but the picture books she brings have 'words' next to the pictures.
Learning to read takes Maggie two hours, and that's only because this Nanny is slow in turning the pages and so much more interested in looking at the pictures instead of the words.
Boredom is no issue from then on, because there are a lot of books in the mansion, and Maggie wants to read them all.
When she tells Mama "I can read!" at twenty months of age, she gets her first 'tutor' and her childhood is effectively over.
―~~―~~―
Maggie is four and in front of her is a completed circuit board. Her hands smart from putting it together with her little fingers, but it is done and she is so proud. She created something adult. Something that most adults don't even understand.
Dad even nods approvingly, and shows it to the guests at the dinner party that evening. They gasp and titter, 'oh aren't you a smart little thing', 'your daughter takes after you, Howard!' and 'smart and pretty' is what they say. Where Mom and Dad pretend not to hear and Maggie listening in goes unnoticed, they hiss other things, about how she's a girl doing boy things and how odd it is.
Maggie doesn't care about that. Neither does Dad.
Mom does.
"I'm not saying that building things is bad!" she insists. "But you need to be a girl at the same time!"
Maggie is a girl. She's a girl and she loves creating things that are useful and she dreams of creating things that are dangerous. And apparently, those activities are reserved for men, but Mom isn't going to forbid it because Dad approves, so Maggie just has to be more of a girl, and sell the engineering as a hobby. "These things matter," Mom says firmly.
Being more of a girl entails frilly dresses and cute, uncomfortable shoes. No running. Smile with less teeth. No loud laughs, make it soft and bell-like, giggle instead of snorting. No rambling for God's sake, and especially not about science. No too-long sentences. Always be polite. No wild gesturing, hold your head head high, you're a Stark. No, that's not how you walk, take small steps. If you ever sit like that in public there will be consequences, dear.
Maggie endures the etiquette lessons for exactly one day and only because her mother is giving them personally, and it means Mom is there and talking and paying attention to her. On the second day Maggie throws a tantrum of heretofore unseen proportions. She's not going to be some empty doll! She's Maggie Stark and-
"Then, Margaret, I suppose we will be closing down your workshop and take away your silly science books and the computer," Mom says calmly.
And the thing is, Maggie can't live without those things. Her hands are restless, they need to move, to do, to build, to create. Her mind is a wretched hungry monster, always demanding more more more, feeding it knowledge satisfies it at the same time as it makes it worse. She exists at a different velocity from everybody else, too fast for anyone to keep up with. She doesn't have tutors anymore. Learning by herself is much more efficient. Waiting for teachers to sound out words when she can understand a concept just from looking at a single formula just takes too long.
Take it away and she won't know how to breathe.
So she falls silent, gives in, and hates herself for it.
―~~―~~―
Maggie is seven. She's metal and grease, wrenches and screwdrivers and so much more. She's also Margaret who is sweet demure smiles and lovely dresses, ribbons in her immaculately styled hair. It's dark brown, like her eyes. Mother laments that she did not inherit her blond hair and pale blue eyes, but relents that Maggie is pretty enough.
Pretty enough for what, is the question, but Maggie is smart. She knows the answer.
It's a man's world, but she is going to rule it someday, she's going to be the queen and they will bow before her brilliance and nobody will ever make her do anything again. She will wear dresses because she wants to, she will wear green and purple and red and gold which Mom says she shouldn't because those colours makes her look pasty, and she will have boots and jeans and grease on her fingers and nobody will get to say a thing about it for fear that she will ignore them.
She builds her first engine. Father inspects it and of course finds something to criticise, it could be better here, this thing makes it inefficient, and on and on he goes. But he's looking and he's there. Later that evening he leads her to his own workshop and she has to sit quiet and still in the corner while watching him work and listening to him speak about Captain America, who was amazing and brilliant but didn't start out that way, who kept working hard and never gave up. "You were born gifted," Father says. "But hard work and perseverance like he showed is worth a thousand times your genius. Let his example inspire you to strive for…"
On and on he goes. Captain America is great. Maggie just got lucky with her brain.
The only inspiring thing she finds is the way Father's hands move as they work and the wondrous things she sees in his workshop. Some she can't even identify, and that is wonderful. She wants to know.
She's good at lying, her mother taught her well, even when truth just has a way of dripping from her lips without control. So she can lie and tell herself that his dismissive, condescending words don't hurt her somewhere deep within.
She's metal parts and grease, and words can't hurt her.
―~~―~~―
There are other people in her life besides her parents and the nanny that has been a fixture in her life since it was decided that Maggie has to be a good girl.
Then there's Obie, Father's long-time business partner, a family friend. He's warm and kind and he listens to her, and when he speaks he doesn't talk down. Maggie feels grown-up and heard when she talks to him.
There's Mr. Jarvis the butler, who is what she imagines a parent ought to be like, who makes sure she doesn't forget time in her workshop, that she eats and goes to bed. He's funny and teaches her how to throw a punch on her sixth birthday and gives her boxing lessons from then on. He always has a kind word for her, he never forgets her birthdays, he doesn't mind answering Maggie's endless questions. Some days he takes her with him when he goes into the city to shop, and downtown New York is a different world from the places she's seen before. Mr. Jarvis is her favourite person in the world by far.
And then there's Aunt Peggy, Margaret Carter whom Maggie was named after. Her godmother. Aunt Peggy rarely visits, is even busier than Father, but the quality of the visits is well worth the lack of quantity. Aunt Peggy wears lipstick the colour of blood and can insult people without them realising it. The heels she wears look unbreakable, and she walks like a soldier in them. Jarvis taught Maggie to throw a punch and the rules of boxing, but Peggy teaches her about fighting. Not the fighting itself, but the strategy of it. To use everything she can as a weapon, which parts of the enemy's body she needs to target, how to recognise that she's being followed, those kinds of things. How to hold a conversation with a man and demand respect with her very presence.
They are people who don't mind her rambling or care how she's dressed. That's balm to her soul.
It's also them who save Maggie the terrifying first time she gets kidnapped. Aunt Peggy comes in guns blazing, the sun at her back, and the kidnappers panic so hard they don't notice Mr. Jarvis sneaking up behind them and freeing Maggie from the zip ties binding her wrists and ankles together.
It's not the last time Maggie is kidnapped, but it is the last time she's unprepared and helpless for it.
―~~―~~―
Maggie is eight and sent off to school. She got to skip elementary school and middle school, and thank God for that, but Mother puts her foot down and insists on her attending a posh all-girl boarding school the that daughters of her fellow high society wives attend.
Maggie doesn't protest too much. She's insanely curious what other girls are like. The ones she'd met at parties were, like her, only there as accessories to their parents and not meant to say much, just to look pretty and smile a lot. This is going to be different. They'll be living together.
But unfortunately, Maggie quickly grows to dislike school. The girls are just so silly. They are nice, for the most part, but they giggle and they coo over her, treat her like a child because she's several years younger. Their preferred topics to talk about are schoolwork, clothes and boys, and all of those bore Maggie to death. At first she's happy when some girls make closer friends with her, but she knows what's up when they start asking about Maggie's family.
At least there's a workshop for her here, specifically built with Stark money for Maggie's use, and that's where she begins to spend all her time between lessons (torturously slow and boring, so painfully inane it hurts) and curfew. She's the first one up in the morning and the last one to be in bed. Every day, a teacher has to knock on her workshop's door to make her stop working.
There is one good thing though - Mother isn't here. No-one really cares if Maggie wears her hair in a messy bun and has grease-stains on her face. Well, okay, they do care and comment, but most of them don't mean it like Mother does. They don't want to press her into perfect-society-wife shape, they just want to help her look nice. 'Girls need to stick together,' some of them say, and help her clean up her hands and face, make sure her clothes get washed.
It's nice, sort of. But staying at school is still torture. Everything is so slow. No one really listens to her. They are silly and shallow, and lessons are torture, she learns nothing and it's just a waste of time and sitting still when she needs to be doing something is slowly killing her. But when she disturbs lessons or breaks rules, the teachers lock her out of the workshop and call her parents.
(She goes into her workshop anyway. Locks aren't a hindrance to Maggie, and security cameras are so very easily hacked.)
Four years of this she has to endure, the full high school experience. When she graduates, she's twelve.
―~~―~~―
At age thirteen, Maggie places second in a robot competition with contestants far older than herself.
She's not proud. Neither is she disappointed.
She's furious.
Hacking into the database is child's play. Pulling the files on the winner is even easier. He is thirty-three, good-looking, goes to a fancy university in Washington DC. His winning entry is a robot dog that can bark and imitate dog behaviour.
Hers was a fully functional robotic arm that responds to vocal commands, with a camera and image-recognition system. It's light and flexible and attached to a harness because she developed the system for helping disabled people. Mother runs a charity for war veterans and the sight of men with missing limbs made Maggie sad. She wouldn't know what to do if she lacked a hand.
Her entry is a million times better than a dog, it's useful, the programming is ingenious, it's even affordable. The winner's is a toy that'll never sell because it's way too damn expensive. It's a doll that moves and plays recorded dog-sounds at different intervals.
Her robot arm even has learning capacities, though limited ones. Point at an object and tell it what it's called, and it will remember. It can help cook, it can draw pictures (though only ugly ones), it can type on a computer if it's told what to write.
The robot dog can roll over on command.
She should have won, and the reason she didn't is because she is a she and he is not. Because it's a man's world and they are scared that she's better than them. They are right to be scared, Maggie's mind is terrifying and sometimes it scares even her how fast she's going.
But it's not fair. She should've won.
Father is disappointed, of course, if she enters herself into a competition without asking his permission then she damn well should have placed first. Should have worked harder, he tells her with a barely hidden sneer. Mother on the other hand is pleased, "Second place is perfectly appropriate, dear." Can't have her stepping on men's feet, after all, a woman's place is behind a man or under him.
Maggie is not going to take this. She should have won and she will make them see.
There will be a ceremony to give out the awards. The top three contestants have to present their entries, third place first, then second and winner goes last.
Here's the thing, Maggie has a whole lot of charisma, but she's not a great talker. Her mind is too fast, her mouth too slow, she says one sentence and her brain is already five ideas ahead, that's why she rambles so much. Unless she's well-prepared, unless she plans every word she's going to say.
And by God, she's going to be so fucking prepared for this presentation.
The day of the ceremony comes. Speeches (boring), third place's presentation (yawn), then it's her turn. Thirteen year-old Maggie is spite and fury, but she looks like an angel, hair perfectly coiffed, a modest skirt and blouse combo in shimmering anthracite. She smiles sweetly and begins, opening with her motivation and how important it is to support those that gave parts of themselves in service to the country, plays on patriotism. Mother looks pleased, especially when Maggie drops her name and that of her charity.
Then she presents her project, goes from sweet girl to frighteningly competent engineer in an instant. The programming, the hardware, the mechanisms. She only has twenty minutes for this presentation, but she's planned every word in her speech like it was a battle of war.
And she's good. Scratch that, she's fucking amazing. Concise, her explanations convey both the sheer complexity of her project (complex for regular mortals anyway) and the ingenuity of her solutions while still making it easy to follow. She'd practised over a dozen times with Mr. Jarvis and other members of the household staff. She's confident, she has a sense of humour, she makes the audience feel smart when she talks. Then she demonstrates her robot arm, asks a member of the audience to come up to try it out, shows off how easily adjustable the harness is.
Her father even looks pleasantly surprised, though a bit baffled because here's the big question: If she did so well, how could she not win? How amazing must the first place winner be?
The applause as she leaves the stage is deafening by the standards of this kind of setting. Maggie returns to her seat in between her parents and people come up to her to shake her hands and congratulate her, she's so smart for a girl.
There's a heavy air of anticipation hanging over the audience when the first place winner takes the stage. What marvel does he have, to have beaten Margaret Stark? How will he follow her act?
He can't. He knows it, too, judging by how pale he looks. The man keeps it together as he presents his dumbass dog robot. All throughout, Maggie resists the urge to turn her head and survey the crowd. She's hacked the camera and her computer at home is recording it. Later, she will savour the looks of confusion and dawning realisation of the audience. For now, she contents herself with glancing at her parents from the corner of her eyes, the fixed look of interest on her mother's face that doesn't quite hide her displeasure because her daughter's project, dedicated to her charity, was beaten by a toy. Maggie's love for her mother is tainted and stained by disappointment and betrayed feelings, but it does exist and she is grateful for that displeasure.
Even more gratifying is the growing outrage on her father's face as he realises just what cost her the win. Oh, he's not going to apologise for laying the blame for her loss on her, probably doesn't register that he might have said something wrong and hurtful, he's Howard Stark after all. But he knows now. That she should have won, that she is brilliant, and that even being a Stark doesn't change that she lacks male genitalia, which means something in this world.
He knows a Stark was wronged here, and if there's anything he cares about besides his futile search for Captain America, it's the family name.
She's the real winner here.
Everyone knows it, and the jury is red-faced with embarrassment, throwing her looks full of loathing as if this was all her fault.
They attempt to justify themselves by suggesting that her father helped her, while Mr. Winner did everything himself. It's the wrong move. Father is already furious, but suggesting that he'd let anyone take credit for his work?
No way.
Those despicable misogynistic old men will find themselves full of regrets very soon.
All in all, Maggie is satisfied with the outcome of the evening.
―~~―~~―
Maggie is accepted into MIT at age fourteen. Of course she is, she is brilliant.
She's giddy with anticipation. Her mind thirsts for new knowledge, and MIT is sure to satisfy her at least for a while. God, but she wants to take and take everything they have to offer, take it for her own and make it better, make it new, she's going to change the face of technology, she's going to change the whole damn world.
Her mother leaves her at the house near campus that's been bought and readied for her use, a disapproving look on her face, and Maggie is free. The entire basement has been converted into lab and workshop, and she can't wait to break it in. No more etiquette lectures, no more dinner parties and social functions, no more frilly dresses in pastel colours. No disapproving stares. No mother trying to unmake Maggie and disguise it as love.
She laughs and laughs as she looks over the security system and examines the basement to her satisfaction. All hers.
MIT itself is… a mixed bag. Maggie likes it, for the most part. Lectures are still too simple and slow, but they keep her mind on track when it normally skips everywhere it pleases, drawn from physics to languages to programming to robotics in no particular order in a two-minute rhythm. University lectures at least give her a red strand to follow.
Other students are wary of her. First, they laugh and whisper behind her back how she only got in because of Father's money. Then they realise that in her teenage body resides a genius even the professors couldn't hope to match and they are scornful instead, waiting for her to make the slightest mistake. Some see the Stark fortune instead and sidle up to befriend her. Maggie rebuffs all attempts.
She has trouble sleeping. She can't help it. For a mind like hers, a mind that rolls on and on and on, a maelstrom of ideas everlasting, rest and peace are a small price to pay. There's always one more idea that needs to be considered, another fact to be looked up, a new concept she needs to work out, a hypothesis to be proved, a new creation begging to be built. And there's a workshop and lab in the basement just for her and no-one to tell her to go to bed. Maggie can't sleep anyway with all those thoughts in her head, so she might as well do something useful, right? Coffee takes care of the fatigue, and napping whenever she has the time becomes her replacement for sleep. She can't stop, can't stand still, she has to keep moving forward.
It might not be healthy, but it's the best time of her life. The euphoria of creating and learning is a constant high. She gets to buy her own clothes, wears combat boots along with floral print skirts she found at a dollar store, baggy hoodies cover her upper body. Mother would have verbally eviscerated her for wearing any of these items and Maggie relishes in that fact.
Freedom is a heady thing. Two years pass in a rush. She goes home exactly once and never even sees her parents which is probably for the best, and takes it as an excuse not to come home again since Maria and Howard are never there anyway.
Mother threatens to cut off her money at some point, but she isn't authorised to do so and Father doesn't care enough to bother. Maggie churns out ideas and creations, and some of them he likes enough to have them produced by one of the smaller companies under the bigger wing of Stark Industries. She's a goose that lays golden eggs and she keeps getting better, so he isn't going to limit her.
'She's just a girl!' she'd heard her mother protest her move to MIT once.
'So was Peggy Carter once,' Father had replied with finality. He might not care about Maggie, but he's never treated her as anything less just because of her gender, unlike Mother.
So yeah. Freedom. Maybe too much of it, Maggie is a mess. At fifteen years old she hacks the Pentagon for fun, not that anyone ever notices, and commemorates it by dying her hair electric blue for reasons she can't quite recall.
'Partygirl', the tabloids begin to call her when she's never been to the kind of parties they're referencing in her life. But she's a Stark and the Starks are famous, and Mother and Father had made sure the public knew about her genius. Maggie is used to it, barely registers it anymore, and the articles are background noise.
The articles get her a strongly worded letter from her mother. Maggie burns it with relish in her lab, adding a few agents that make the flames burn in alternating colours of the rainbow.
Ignoring it doesn't stop the media, and there are many jealous students and even professors at MIT that sell lies to the reporters with relish. Maggie pins the best ones to her fridge and puts red highlights into her still blue hair. She doesn't look like a Stark anymore and she loves it. She builds herself a collection of sunglasses, orders some wigs, expands her wardrobe to contain just about anything, and when she goes out no-one ever recognises her anymore. She can sit in lectures in complete anonymity if she so chooses.
She finds it hilarious when she actually does go to a party in full disguise, drinks herself stupid, and dances with randomly picked men and women like the magazines accuse her of as if they have any right to judge her for her choices, and not a single soul recognises her. Maggie repeats the stunt a few times, but eventually it gets boring. She has things to create and drinking is a waste of brain cells.
Just for fun, Maggie sends photos of those girls on campus that love to sell their lies about her to the media with the note that Maggie Stark likes disguises, and laughs herself sick when the images are printed in articles about her because nobody knows what she looks like anymore.
But she has more important things to do than that, too many ideas to bother with shenanigans like that. There are important experiments to conduct, theses to be written, programs to be coded. She can't stop.
Life rolls on. Maggie's sixteenth birthday approaches and Mother orders her home because she's throwing her a birthday party for the Sweet Sixteen. Dress and everything already ready for her, her birthday present is a makeover, all she needs to do is come home for the weekend.
"Sure thing, Mother," Maggie says, phone in one hand, blueprints for her latest project in the other. "Father is still searching the Arctic?"
"He will be back mid-April," Mother answers, which confirms that suspicion. Searching for a dead body is more important than the birthday of his very much alive daughter. "I will send the jet to collect you on Friday."
"Good to know."
Maggie embarks on a road trip the day before her birthday. She's built herself a car in her workshop a while ago, papers are all in order, forging herself a fake license for one of her disguises is easy enough. Once she turns sixteen she can get herself a real one.
She goes off the grid for the week and takes vicious pleasure in imagining Mother having to call off the party which she'd invited oh so many important people to.
"Your father will hear about this!" Mother hisses at her when she actually shows up at Maggie's place to yell at her. "You are out of control, young lady!"
Maggie laughs. "If he can't be assed to show up at my birthday party, then neither can I. Daddy knows best, so obviously it couldn't have been that important."
It ends in a screaming match. Father does send a reprimanding letter a few weeks later once he's no longer incommunicado, and Maggie burns it. No follow-ups, no consequences, he doesn't even care enough to punish her. Life goes on as it has before. MIT begins to get boring, running out of things to teach her, she could be teaching the professors instead. Maggie gives herself one year for winning the MIT Robot Design Award, getting her MIT pirate certificate, and completing a PhD or three, then she'll move on.
A new semester begins. It promises to be a rush of creation and sleep-deprivation like all the others before it. Maggie is knees-deep into building a robot to enter into the robot competition. This one will surpass everything she's ever built before, she just knows it. It's not so much the hardware and construction aspect of it, but the coding and programming. The AI. Because this robot, she wants it to have personality. Learning capacity. Intelligence.
And maybe, she wants it to have the capacity for feelings.
Maggie can't program actual love, even if it were possible it would be wrong, that's not how love works, but the capacity for affection? That should be doable. She wants to do it.
She's lonely.
As for her PhD, she doesn't really know in which field she'll get one, probably robotics since she's already working on that, or maybe she'll go into physics, or both or something different altogether. So many possibilities, so little time.
And there are still lectures to attend, too, and some professors actually do take attendance seriously. Which is how Maggie's semester deviates into the surreal territory because Professor Bletchley assigns study partners. "Group E, Stark and Rhodes," he reads out from the sheafs of paper drawn from a box because the decision was made by drawing lots of all things, and Maggie sees some guy elbow his seat neighbour and whisper 'lucky' at him, so she guesses the elbowee to be Rhodes. Rhodes does not look particularly happy as he looks around for her. She gives him a wave because her hair is newly pink with purple strands and pulled into a braid, plus she'd gotten better at contouring, so even her facial structure is barely recognisable and there's no way he'd figure out her identity without the help. He nods at her, looking like he's been struck with a tooth ache.
Great. Well, she'll just pay him off, do all the work - it'd go faster that way anyway - and that'd be that.
"And for the beginning, I want to see what you are all capable of," Bletchley drones on. He's a grumpy old man, but his work is brilliant, which is why Maggie signed up for this class. "So you can each pick one of these boxes, and I expect you to have built something from the contents by next week."
Well, that sounds fun.
Bletchley tells them all to go find their partners and then pick a box. Rhodes ambles up to her, friend again whispering loudly about how lucky he is, 'worked with her before, you can just sleep away the whole semester, and she's easy too, man, if you know what I mean-'
Background noise. It's all background noise, and Maggie's never seen the asshole before. She's also pretty sure she'd remember giving her virginity to some moron.
"You're Stark?" Rhodes stops before her, eyeing her warily.
"Yep," she answers, popping the p at the end of the word.
"What the hell," he says incredulously. "You're a kid?"
"I'm sixteen," she huffs.
Rhodes looks pissed. "You're not even legal!"
"Sorry to disappoint," she shrugs with a smirk. "Did you have hopes?"
"What the- no! My friend just- he said-" Rhodes sputters. "I'm going to kill him, who messes with kids, what the hell-"
"I've never even seen him," she informs him lazily.
"Oh, that's good, he was just talking shit," Rhodes mutters with some relief, then he's pissed again. "I'm going to kill him for saying things like that!"
"Err…" Maggie says, this is a bit of an unusual situation, Rhodes is so weird. Like one of those things that evolution came up with that just exist to embody the words 'fucking weird'. Like ocean sunfish. Or platypuses. "Go get us a box instead, platypus."
"Platypus," he repeats, blinking owlishly.
"Box," she reminds him, twiddling her fingers.
He turns automatically, going to the front while muttering under his breath.
Dealing with Rhodes does not get any less odd. They agree to meet in her house and he's all "You live like this?" Then, when he comes back the next day, it's "Have you slept at all?!" and overlaid over all of it is a theme of "No, Stark, you're not doing this all by yourself, I don't care how clever and rich you are, we're doing this together and I'm gonna understand every single one of your crazy ideas so help me god and will you just go get some sleep and eat something other than pizza and blueberries, kid!"
Weird.
He's all in her space suddenly, takes over the kitchen which Maggie has only ever used to heat some of her experiments, crashes on the couch, yells at her to clean up after herself and that her home is a goddamn hazard to innocent feet because he stepped on a wayward screw, and also Jesus Christ go to bed for sleeping don't nap next to the chemicals you disaster of a human being how are you even alive. Maggie doesn't quite know what to do with him, but she can't deny that he's kind of fun to have around, especially in the workshop. He transforms there, he's not at MIT for nothing and he's full of crazy ideas and has a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night asking things like "What if coffee makers were sentient?" and making suggestions like "Let's build a microwave into a car!"
'Stark' becomes 'Mags' and 'Rhodes' turns into 'Rhodey', and he's all in her space and doesn't leave it even after the semester is over. No, instead he helps her with the heavy lifting for completing DUM-E, as the robot she's been building has been dubbed because the programming is brilliant but the result is altogether not overly intelligent. But it's a he, not an it. A tiny person, and Rhodey sobs about being parents when he's finally completed. Honestly, Maggie is no better.
"Hey, buddy," she greets with an enormous smile on her face. DUM-E gives her a wave and knocks a coffee cup onto the floor where it shatters and drenches a random invention which thus dies a sparkling death, and she chokes on a laugh. "Don't worry about that, kiddo, happens all the time, need to clean anyway-"
"Like you ever clean!" Rhodey sobs. "Mags, we have a kid!"
DUM-E makes a confused noise, he can do confusion, he's so beautiful, this big black metal arm on wheels. God, Maggie never thought about having kids, but this must be what it's like, right? She loves this robot with all the heart that isn't reserved for science or Rhodey (because Rhodey is her friend now and she's never had one before and she's just so happy), and maybe there's not enough space for all that love but it turns out hearts can expand to make that kind of space.
DUM-E is her baby and he's perfect and of course he wins the MIT Robot Design Competition.
Maggie's time at MIT ends with her getting four PhDs, top grades in everything, several patented inventions, and a standing invitation to return to hold guest lectures. But most of all, it ends with Rhodey by her side and a robot kid in her lab, and her heart has never been so full.
―~~―~~―
Her parents drop by for a tense and awkward graduation dinner. Well, tense and awkward for her mother. Maggie doesn't care much at all about her opinion anymore and Howard might have been tense if he hadn't been distracted by the blueprints she'd dropped into his hands since he was already here. They're not things she's particularly interested in anymore or has the means to build in her house right now, but she figured he might like a car that runs completely without fuel. It only runs on a battery which recharges as the car drives, as well as on solar energy. If the battery breaks, there's still a back-up energy source. It's clean and quiet and would drive just as fast as any other fuel-run car.
Probably won't be commercially available for a long while though, since the oil firms would probably get pissed if cars suddenly needed no fuel anymore. The economy couldn't take that blow.
Still, it's perfectly all right for private use. The Maggiemobile, as she has dubbed her car, hasn't needed fuel in years, and the Rhodeymobile has joined her in that independence last month.
(It was Rhodey's birthday present. Hey, she didn't spend money on him, just like he asked. Also, there's absolutely no need to stare at his car like it's about to eat him, or for him to lecture her about stealing his car to operate on it.)
"You are coming home, of course," Mother states stiffly. "Now that you are graduated. I think we should celebrate. Your seventeenth birthday isn't far off, either-"
"Actually," Maggie says cheerfully. "I'm going to go travel for a while. See the world. Meet some people, a few universities have invited me to talk about my work in physics and robotics."
Maria Stark's face goes pinched. "Margaret," she sighs. "You are getting too old for this nonsense, you need to grow up-"
"What I'm getting too old for is your attempts to make me into this air-headed society doll," Maggie counters evenly. "As for growing up, I did that somewhere around the time you left me on my own at boarding school. Or maybe when you shoved the inconvenient parts of raising a kid on various nannies. So… no!"
"Margaret Maria Stark," Mother chastises, and god Maggie hates it when her birth name is used on her like it gives Mother some kind of power over her. "Watch your tone! Good lord, where are your manners?"
In the same place where the thirty-five hours of sleep she's lacking this week went. And it's only Tuesday. She started with a deficit.
"I taught you better than this."
"You taught me to act like a giggling moron whose sole purpose it is to serve as decoration for a man," Maggie answers, though she knows it to be an exercise in futility.
"I only want the best for you!" Maria protests.
Maybe she really does believe that. God, Maggie wants her to believe that because it's so much better than knowing that Mother doesn't love the things that make Maggie Maggie. Doesn't love Maggie but the doll she wants her to be, which isn't how love works at all.
"You don't think about your future," Mother continues. "You go through life doing your - things - and you don't think about how things look and how it will affect you later, and all those parties and drinking and the men, my God, do you know what people are saying about you? And-"
Background noise. It's all background noise. Tomorrow Rhodey and her will sit in the Maggiemobile driving across the country while listening to loud music on a nice long road trip. Haha, a road trip with Rhodey. A Rhode-trip.
"Are you even listening to me?"
"About as much as you listen to me." Maggie rolls her eyes. "Do you have anything else to say, aside from how much I don't measure down to your standards?"
"Margaret! Howard, say something!"
Father looks up from the blueprints and Maggie sucks in a sharp breath. There is just something in his eyes that always makes her feel small whenever he bothers to look at her. Some part of her wants his approval when he never even tried to be a part of her life. She hates that, hates feeling small, hates not knowing why she isn't worth his time. "These aren't bad," he says, tapping his finger on the papers. "Where do you want to travel to?"
She swallows dryly. "Road trip around the States, for the first month. Then visiting some places in Europe. After that it's Asia. I haven't really planned a route out yet." She'd change her mind on the way anyway.
"And after you're done travelling?" Howard asks.
Maggie wonders why he bothers. "I have some ideas," she lies. She has absolutely no idea what she's going to do with her life. All her life she's been told she would inherit Stark Industries one day, and that's it. Mother made unsubtle allusions to her running the charities and having children as well after getting a suitable husband.
Neither option appeals, if Maggie is honest.
And neither is necessary. The charities have boards and directors and whatnot. So does Stark Industries. Maggie has a trust fund with millions in it. She could do whatever she wanted with her life and never worry about anything, never have anything to do with either career path. And maybe she will. Or maybe she won't. She doesn't know yet. The future isn't set in stone.
"I see," Howard says evenly. "No longer than a year of travelling, Maggie." They both ignore Maria's outraged gasp.
"Sure." Maggie shrugs.
In a year Howard will have forgotten anyway.