Not One For Sentiment:
The obituary reads "the untimely death of Victoria Parks". She hates that word-untimely. Her mother had cancer for two years. Her mother knew it was coming. Her mother wasn't a woman who ignored the elephant in the room-she knew it was going to cut her life short. She was the one suffering and in an unbearable amount of physical pain, yet she was more prepared for her death than Erica was.
What is untimely, however, is the adoption process. Looking back, her mother must have told Tony that he had a child that would soon be in his care before she passed away because the next thing she knows is that a nice red-haired lady is taking her to a new home. She likes the lady-she dresses nice and has pointy-shoes that make sounds when she walks. She remembers that much of her first meeting with Pepper, yet she can barley remember meeting Tony. She figures that accurately sums up their whole relationship.
Rebecca doesn't look at Tony or Pepper once during the funeral. It's a sad little funeral-one of her mother's co-workers and a somewhat friendly neighbor. She's only met those two on a few occasions, but she takes comfort in their presence compared to the two complete and utter strangers standing to her left.
She's only seven years old when it happens.
xxx
She feels like a paper doll in a glass house that can't escape at times. The Stark Residence is gigantic-it's almost too big for Tony himself. Tony and Erica don't see much of each other during her first month living with Tony. Half of the time he's locked away in his garage so JARVIS keeps her company. Tony brings her down into his garage eventually, but she runs back upstairs into Pepper's arms. Tony looks back at his assistant helplessly like he's out of ideas. Pepper tries to keep her company, but the attempts are in vain. Once autumn begins, she's shipped off to boarding school the following month. It feels too spacious, too prestigious, and too lonely, but Erica figures it's better than living at the mansion.
She doesn't receive calls from Tony. She'll get an occasional "hey" shouted from across the room when Pepper's calling her. All the "love yous" are as forced on his part as they are on her part. It doesn't help that Pepper dotes and worries constantly and says Tony worries as well, but Erica knows it's a lie. When Erica is ten years old, she tells Pepper to stop lying for Tony.
xxx
Their relationship continues on a steady path towards forged sentiment. The calls become less frequent, the pointless texts increase, and each time they take more and more effort to answer. Erica's perfectly fine with staying at school. She takes solace in her pens, and paper, and books. She has her own room, which is good, but can get lonely at times. She has a few friends, not many, but they're good ones. She finds that most of the time she rather stay in her room than go to the rec center or cafeteria. She misses Pepper at times, she admits. When she goes home for summer she's relived to see Pepper in the car and feels horrible when she realizes she's happy her father is not in the car with her. Tony's her father, but she feels like he's the estranged, assistant instead of her biological father.
She never relies on Tony. Pepper's reliable-she's the most organized and headstrong woman Erica's ever met, yet she doesn't rely on her that way. She doesn't reply on her emotional support. She tries to convince herself that her borderline coldness towards Pepper is because of her fear that she will replace her mother, but Pepper doesn't want to replace her mother. She's afraid that deep down, she truly does want Pepper to replace her mother.
Her mother's death taught her to grow up. She learned how to take care of herself and accept things. Her mother wasn't coming back and her relationship with her father wasn't going to miraculously repair itself.
It wasn't really ever broken. She never had one to begin with.
xxx
It hurts her to think that the tabloids know more about her father's day-to-day life than she does.
Erica finds out about her father's womanizing habits through an online tabloid. She's thirteen so she's not entirely clueless, especially growing up in a dorm full of girls. She can't blame her roommate Alice for calling her father a womanizer because she didn't know that Tony was her father and secondly, she was right.
She appreciates Pepper more after that. She sees her father with new women on his arm every night, going to Playboy sponsored parties, yet Pepper's been his assistant for years. Pepper's a constant and Rebecca doesn't think that's going to change anytime soon.
xxx
Rebecca stops breathing when she hears about the abduction. Her palms begin to sweat and se makes a dash for the bathroom, dropping the phone on the marble floor as she slams the door behind her. She is able to hastily push back her father as she dry-heaves into the toilet.
"Erica! Erica-" she can hear Pepper calling from the phone. She reaches behind her, desperately feeling for the phone in fear that if she pries her head from the toilet she'll lose control of the bile she's holding back.
"Pe-"
"Happy's coming to get you right now. Uncle Rhodey will find him, alright?" Pepper's voice cracks at the end of the shaky, breathless sentence that's in a tone of voice laced with worry that Erica's never heard Pepper use. And that's when Erica loses control of the contents of her stomach she was holding back.
After receiving the news, she returns home a month early just before summer vacation begins. The mansion feels even more empty when he's gone. She watches the news reports like Tony's a stranger-like he's just Tony Stark, head of Stark Industries. It's a tragic case in a tragic war, but nothing special. It's just another incident except this incident has to share half her chromosomes. When tragedies like this hit close to home, you're supposed to feel changed, but all she feels is numb.
But by the fourth week, Erica cries herself to sleep for the first time since her mother passed away. She doesn't understand why she's so heartbroken over a man who she barley knows, yet she can't help but crying. Pepper must have heard her because the next thing she knows Pepper's hand is on her shoulder. She looks up at her father's assistant-no, she's more than that-and shakes her head. She hastily wipes her tears with the end of her hoodie when she notices that Pepper has tears in the rims of her eyes. Her eyes are even more bloodshot than Erica's-she's been crying since Rebecca felt asleep.
Erica doesn't cry anymore after that night. She promises herself she won't cry anymore-to be strong. To be strong for Pepper. There's a nagging sensation locked away in her mind that she's been acting too strong. Like she doesn't care that her father's missing and most likely long dead like every other soldier that fell victim to the senseless violence, but that's not true. She realizes that she'd always cared about her father, but neither of them knew how to properly express it. When it finally hits her, she cries for the second time in a year. In the back of her mind, she wishes Pepper would hear her and come into her bedroom to comfort her and hold her again, but Pepper never comes.
She finally musters the courage to go back to Boston to visit her mother's grave and crumbles. She cries for an hour until her throat is raw and her eyes won't stop watering as she walks to the cemetery's gates. She pretends that none of her anguish was for Tony.
xxx
"I should have done more to protect him, Erica. I..." Rhodey says.
She's always liked Rhodey. He always treated her like an equal ever since she was a little, brutally shy kid. He never looked down on her because of her age. She figures that's why he became such good friends with a fifteen-year-old Tony while studying at MIT.
"Please...it's alright. You don't have to...you don't have to say it," she says, her voice barley a whisper.
"I'm sorry-"
"It's-"
"I wasn't talking about that, Erica. I'm apologizing for him-for Tony. I know he wasn't always the best dad, neither was his own father, but he cared for you. A lot. He just...he had odd ways of showing it," he says.
All of a sudden, it clicks. Her father is an only child, raised in a huge mansion, and from the lack of family photos other than newspaper clippings about Howard Stark's various achievements, his parents appear to have had minimal interaction with him. He would have learned at an early age how to entertain himself and rely only on himself. She tries to remember if Tony ever talked about his father to her.
She's shaken out of that thought when it dawns on her that Rhodey was using past tense to refer to Tony.
xxx
The weeks pass and Erica begins to count her father's name in the weekly reports of soldiers killed overseas. She's just becoming accustomed to the relentless sleep pattern-falling asleep and then waking up, writing a bit until she falls asleep on her notepad. When she wakes up her cheek is imprinted in ink and her eyes swollen from the tears. Putting an old washcloth over her eyes every morning becomes a daily routine until she gets a call from Rhodey. Not Pepper, but Rhodey. It's the first time he's called her since Tony went missing.
Erica finds herself at a point of nausea when she's waiting for Tony's plane. She's happy, so happy, but she doesn't know what to expect when Tony gets home-if he gets home. Will he be emaciated? Most likely dazed. Ill. Harboring post-traumatic stress disorder, without a doubt. She's taking a mental tally of all the horrendous, but expected things her father could have while waiting in the car with Happy. She's jolted out of her trance-like state when someone wraps her into a tight hug.
It's Tony.
She can't breathe-her body coils up until every part is clinched. She's used to being touched by him, but they always seem meaningless. She leans into the hugs, as always, but she doesn't feel like he's truly giving them or she's receiving them. She doesn't want to receive the hugs. She guesses they're both just a little too confused, too cautious. He finally pulls back and gives her a smile-it's different this time. It's smaller-not the same shit-eating grin he flashes to the press or her. No, this time it's more reserved-it's almost pained. But for the first time, it's genuine.
After a handful of odd pit stops, including an In-and-Out Burger drive-thru, Pepper and Happy drop them off at the mansion. She tries not to stare at her father, examining the cuts and bruises on the patches of skin visible alone with the faint light coming from his chest. She figures she'll ask him in the morning, that is, if they can both get through the night. Her father's finally home, but she doesn't think she'll be able to get a night's rest without her mind swirling around the possible, hellish scenarios he was put through. Seeing him in the flesh doesn't serve as enough of a reminder that he survived it.
"I'm glad your home," she says timidly, turning to him as they eat Chinese takeout on the leather couch. She's in worn-out leggings and a T-shirt that's seen better years. Her father is in similar attire-sweatpants and a white shirt-with the exception of that old fashion robe he always wears. She assumes it was his father's.
"I'm glad I'm home, too, kiddo."
She stays up late with him watching shitty action movies. She must have fallen asleep on the couch because she wakes up at two in the morning with her arm half-asleep and a blanket draped over her. She smiles.
She stumbles down into the garage where she can see the light on. She sees him staring at his computers, studying something on the screen. She squints in order to get a better view but she's not wearing her glasses. There's something just so terribly sad about it-her father's first night home from three months of hell in captivity and he's staring at his computers, but then again, it's nothing different than the usual. She goes to bed soon after, but she wakes up an hour later to hear Tony screaming. She stays outside her bedroom and listens to him, but she's too afraid, she doesn't know what to do. This is her biological father screaming for his life in his own nightmares and she can barley walk down the hall towards his room to help him.
He's already back to work when she awakes again that morning.
xxx
He decides to show her the Arc Reactor the following week. She's been meaning to ask, but she couldn't bring herself to do it, and she doubts Tony would have been ready to confront her either. Even when he finally shows her the thing that's keeping him alive, she freezes. She's avoiding all eye contact with him when it dawns on her that that... electromagnet is bolted and screwed into his body. Bolted and Screwed.
It dawns on her that the night he came home from captivity, he wasn't looking at cars or designs of weapons on his computer. He finally got the chance to see with his own eyes just how deep this device penetrates his chest, which organs it has compromised and displaced. No wonder he looked so lost.
She's lost in her own thoughts when he mentions how the Arc Reactor was his father's greatest creation. She points out that he was the one who created it-not Howard-and she gets a genuine smile for the first time.