Tony stood outside the doors to the Stark Building watching Amii leave with pretty-boy Charles Mantle. He sighed and walked back in knowing that he had taken too long and that she was gone. The sky darkened, and the rain started to pour as he went back to his office to continue working on improvements to his the latest version of the Iron Man suit. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't concentrate, so he gave up and went home, his thoughts still on Amii.
Amii was Tony's oldest friend and an incredibly brilliant scientist. She was the one person, other than himself, who knew everything about the Iron Man suits. Tony ran a lot of his ideas by her and she always came up with something that improved upon his inventions and she had a unique capability to visualize how one of his modifications could work (or in some cases not work) in real life situations. He relied on her to always be honest with him and keep him on track when things got out of control.
Tony had met Amii in high school, the daughter of one of her father's employees – a brilliant man by the name TJ Singh. Both Tony and Amii being geniuses had been the youngest kids in the class and stood above everyone in terms of intelligence and sheer aptitude for scientific creativity. What had started off as a rivalry, with each trying to outdo the other, had turned into a strong friendship when, at age 11, Amii's parents died in a skiing accident and Howard, Tony's father, took the responsibility to ensure she got the best education that money could buy when he saw how talented and brilliant she was. Amii was grateful for this gesture and had gone to work for Howard after finishing her studies. She was one of the strongest willed person Tony had ever met and she had been his rock when he had lost his parents some years later. Tony's experiences in Afghanistan had changed something deep inside of him. He took the incidents as a second chance that life had given him, and he was determined to do it right this time.
After his return he had immersed himself into developing his armor so that he can defend the innocent as Iron Man. It was not easy, and he had to overcome tremendous opposition and life-threatening circumstances to get this far. Of all the people around him there were only a few who actually understood his motivations and were intensely loyal. Amii was one of them and had supported him, taken intense pressure from the board for him, while secretly helping him design improvements for the weapons that his suit used. But no one knew of her existence outside the company, and even within it she was considered a lone wolf, a weird nerd who kept to herself and her work – but no one, except Tony knew her brilliance and that she preferred to remain in the background.
Amii headed the defense R&D department at Stark Industries and, along with his assistant Pepper Potts-Hogan, was one of the reasons the company continued to function profitably while Tony had been on his spiral of booze, parties, girls, and pleasure. He had reached out to her immediately after he escaped from captivity and a lot of shit had happened since, but one thing that struck him was Amii's understanding of the motives behind his decisions and the way she recalibrated her division and handled the intense scrutiny that she was under. In more ways than one, she had saved his company from imploding. And she had realized that Tony was working on modifications to the crude armor he had built in a cave in Afghanistan and had offered to help him with the design and he had been grateful for it. Tony and Amii spent many an evening (and weekend) working on and testing tweaks to the propulsion systems, the repulsors, and flight mechanisms of the suit.
That's when he had begun to notice things about Amii, things he had never noticed before – the way her voice changed when she was excited about a new idea she'd come up with, her habit of tucking a pencil behind her ear just so that it was handy, the way she ribbed him when she found a flaw in his schematics, her fierce loyalty to the company, and to him. But now it was too late to do or say anything she seemed to be totally into Charles. Tony sighed and gave up on trying to work and decided to go to bed instead, hoping that some rest would help to clear his thoughts.