This is Audey Stark, red lipstick and grease on her shirt, with a metal heart and parents seven years in the grave.
She blows the press a kiss before she stands side by side with Steve, Hank, Charles, protest leaders and activists. She's got money to pour into their causes, and she became more than one kind of hero when she put on that metal suit.
Don't ask her how it feels to be a hero. She'll laugh and tell you it feels fabulous, just like she used to tell everyone that being a genius, billionaire, man eater, philanthropist felt fabulous.
She does not feel like a hero. She looks at her friends, mutants and super soldiers, lab accidents and humans. She is the least of them.
Her reactor could power a town. Ask anyone but her, they'd tell you that her heart could do even more.
This is Audey Stark, all five foot four inches of her, who had been a semi expert in thermonuclear astrophysics since college, thank you very much.
This is Audey Stark, who loved easily, loved like it was free, like she didn't already have shrapnel in her heart.
Peter and Jane offer to take her to temple sometimes, but she always declines. If there is a God, she will stand before him and take her punishment. It is her damnation to bear.
She doesn't know her father's God, only knows that He was a resented heritage, the kind your parents try to spare you, and your grandmother clings to. Her Yiddish is rough, and only remembered because of her genius. She has only words for praying and words for the home. She has the words for betrayal and heritage, because the only time her father speaks his childhood tongue is when they are fighting about him forsaking it.
Her grandmother never managed to teach her how to make challah, but she did teach her how to watch someone die. Her grandfather goes slowly, achingly, and she is seven when he finally leaves them.
Her grandmother is the Shomer, and Audey sits the whole night with her.
Staring at her grandfather's corpse and her grandmother's tired eyes, neither of them saying a single word. The silence is a choke chain around her neck that she can't be free off, and she is never still again.
Audey has the biggest mouth around, anyone will tell you that. Sarcastic comments, witty one liners, rambling, shrieking. If she is talking she is not alone with her thoughts.
Her brain and her heart are tied for who's biggest.
Her grandmother may teach her how to watch someone die, but that isn't a skill Audey has had to utilize. Everyone who's ever left her has done it suddenly.
Her grandmother dies before she is twelve, and so she never insists on a Bat Mitzvah. Instead of pretty candle sticks Audey gets an American Express.
The funeral is small and quiet, and Audey wondered if anyone had watched over her grandmother's body. They put her in the ground like it was a relief. Maybe to her father it was.
The rabbi could be a priest, and there is metal on the coffin, and no one's clothes has tears in it.
This is Audey Stark, earning the title Merchant of Death by twenty years old, and toasting herself with an entire bottle of scotch that she is not old enough to buy.
This is Audey Stark, self-obsessed and self-sacrificing.
She picked the name Audey for herself. Audrey sounded like the name of one of her mother's friends, and she wasn't going to use Anthony. That would have been surrender to her father's desire for a son.
This is Audey Stark, catholic middle name and a fistful of Yiddish. Her grandparents would have flushed with shame over her, and her father would have swelled with pride that he didn't know how to voice, and Audey Stark didn't give a damn about any of them.
Ask anyone but her, they'll tell you the truth.
Audey Stark has heart.