Toni has no idea how they got inside the compound, but then again ever since she officially rented it out to the Accords Council, all security measure had fallen to them and they were hardly going to fit the building with a wide range intruder seeking weapons system.

It was impractical.

Expensive.

It was in Toni's lab.

Since FRIDAY was no longer installed in the compound there was no one to inform the only occupant at the moment—Toni—that a black standard 10 7CWT van filled with seven men in horribly made ski masks with weapons, had driven through the electricity-free fences which were turned off due to short wiring that Toni was here to fix, because surprise surprise no else seemed to give a shit that this compound held potentially world ending information that if were to be possessed by the wrong hands would fuck everyone over.

She was in one of the smaller social areas, smaller being the relative term since for some fucking reason she designed this place like the fucking Taj mahal. The accords council were not being billed cheap, but then again, the rent went into the Maria Stark Foundation which helped with the cleanup and repair of Avenger battle sites, so it was no skin off her teeth. Win-win for everybody and Toni wasn't footing the fucking bill.

The board had sent her ten different brands of whiskey and scotch by the truckload when that particular detail was mentioned at Stark Industries budget meeting for the fiscal year. Having all that alcohol was both painful and therapeutic. Every time she craved it's sweet burn down her throat, another bottle would be thrown against the wall to DUM-E and U's excitement. She didn't know whether their beeping was due to the stimulation or the fact that she wasn't drinking it but oh well, as long as her boys were happy, who gave a fuck? Not Toni.

Click.

Toni's relaxed form immediately stiffened, her spine ramrod straight, shoulders pushed back and ears poised. She pressed the enter button to activate the repaired sequence for the compound's security features. The flash of light from the edge of the perimeter signalled the electric fences had exploded to life, trapping the intruders inside with her. She was presented with a problem; her suit was downstairs in the lab behind impenetrable walls and could definitely bust it's way up here but that would leave the lab exposed to outsider infiltration and that might be the reason they were here and if she took down the infiltrators, armourless that might lead to speculation on how she did it. But at the same time… I can't just let myself be killed or taken…

Plan B it was.

She grabbed the umbrella from the stand beside the couch, the interior decorator thought they added 'character' to the rooms, made the place seem lived in, offered a 'welcoming' air. Well, Vision saw at least five 'umbrella rooms' on the way down to the mortar and Toni's pretty sure him moving into the old Stark mansion disproved the Umbrella Theory™.

She had it in her hand when the first man stormed in, and proceeded to hook the handle around her glass of water and fling it at his head. It smashed against his forehead and with loud squawk he fell backwards into the next attacker. It gave her enough time to stand by the archway and jab the third man in the side with the umbrella's ferrule, puncturing his lung and sending him into the bookshelf. He smacked his head with a resounding thud, which should disorient him for a moment or two, maybe even keep him down if she was lucky.

'FRIDAY! Call nine-one-one!' She said, fingers poised on her bluetooth.

The fourth man came in followed by a fifth, overstepping their struggling first responders on the ground, with their guns outstretched in hand it was easy enough to smack the first gun upwards with the umbrella's length and hooked the handle around his neck and pulling him toward her, causing his body to take the first gun shot from his partner's gun which issued a spray of blood onto her white shirt. She pushed the gasping man toward the fifth responder, who let loose a round in an arc toward the ceiling in surprise. She stepped close and cracked the handle on his head which caused him to fall like a puppet with its strings cut, aided by the weight of his partner dropping onto him.

By now three were out for the count except man one and two who were struggling under their men's weight piled on them, Toni reached down for a gun when shots ricocheted down the corridor which caused her to pull back and fall back onto her ass.

She pulled out her phone and slid it on it's side out into the hallway with a whispered call of "Friday, give me visuals!" She really wished she hadn't uninstalled the AI girl from the compound, it set her on edge to not have her eyes in the sky as usual. Her girl should be able to access the compounds camera's with enough prodding.

'There's a man down the hall from you, boss, one gun and another by the lab, he's in possession of a gun with a high radiation as detected by the armour through the doors—' If the suit was detecting it through the thick armoured walls and door, it had to be alien tech. They were still tracking Toomes' customers, from petty thieves to mafia types. The guy sold to everyone, at dirt cheap prices for that caliber of weapon. They were here for Toni, she didn't think that fence malfunction was an accident. '—it corresponds to the alien technology, Adrian Toomes was selling, it would seem that these men are his customers.'

And not very lucrative one's given they only possessed one high tech gun, but if they got into her lab they'd be a bigger threat...she'd have to use Plan C, the danger was too high now, Toomes' weapons could cut through nearly any metal.

She bolted across the room, ripped one of the napkins off the bar area, dunked it in the water jug and configured it small enough to fit in her exposed ear.

'FRIDAY, scramble the frequency on my bluetooth to one hundred and forty decibels and activate protocol Nine-Delta-Stane-Charlie-Fresno!' Tony shouted, clamping her hands around her ears as an almost inaudible ring echoed through the compound, causing all exposed bodies to drop as their muscles slackened and Toni to feel queasy and pained as one ear was blasting with unending noise from the bluetooth. She stumbled when the noise was cut off, retrieving her weapon of choice, ripping out the makeshift ear plug and rubbing her temples as a migraine set in from the scrambled frequency. She flopped onto the couch limply.

'Babygirl, status update.' She yawned, observing the now bent and bloody umbrella before throwing it onto the coffee table, luckily missing her laptop. Small mercies.

'Police are on route and should be here in less than five minutes, the seventh gunman penetrated the labs perimeter but was paralysed as he was walking over threshold, he hit his head on the floor and fell unconscious. Concussion detected. I recommend you start drafting your incident report for the Accords council before your attention is caught by something else.'

Toni groaned as she pulled herself up. The report.

There would be interviews, a police report and questions about the altercation, that would probably lead to questions on where she learned to fight like that.

An idea popped into her head.

She could erase the tapes...she could stage a crime scene in less than four minutes.

Buuuut...

She was accountable now, that's why she signed the accords in the first place, to give people peace of mind, to earn their trust back...it would seem really suspicious if the tapes were blank for the whole fight.

But if I erase or scramble them as far back as the fences cutting off…

'God dammit.' She swore as she hunched down over he laptop to start on the report. It would be fine, she was a high profile target, of course she would know self defense. The farthest those tapes would go was the council, at most; the UN.

She was wrong.

She was fucking wrong.

Some imbecile had leaked the video, audio and all.

Someone would pay for this.

Someone would be getting fired.

Breathe. Relax. Breathe. She chanted to herself, but really, she felt exposed. People seemed to take her in under all new eyes now. No longer looking her up and down with disbelieving eyes that this flirty eye candy was the world-renowned engineer and scientist Toni Stark?

Don't even get her started on the Iron Man pilot conspiracy theories.

The point being that Toni thrived on that disbelief, the feeling of proving someone wrong, of breaking their expectations, of being underestimated.

It was probably her greatest weapon.

Besides her lips. They were fantastic.

Her brain wasn't half bad either.

Her mood improved, until she caught another glimpse at the headlines.

Stark By Starkwest!

The Stark Identity

Toni Stark: Licence to kill

Mr & Mrs Stark

Starkfall

10 Times Toni Stark Was A Total Kween

The spy puns sucked. Couldn't they just follow Buzzfeed's example? Ugh, listen to her, hoping journalists take after Buzzfeed. Barf.

Though she did support their Avenger's Best Butt Poll, her's totally won, against T'Challa of all people. She had it framed and sent to him with a gift basket and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's shield. More of an ice breaker than anything, to say yeah, I know you're hiding my former teammates in your country, good luck with those assholes.

Yes, the card did actually say that.

So what.

Toni liked to be straightforward with potential allies. Plus she wanted that butt ugly shield out of her workshop and painting fuck you across the front with Steve's "Peace offering" cell phone taped to the front was cathartic. A weight seemed to drop off her shoulders, especially when she wrote to T'Challa that her one stipulation of her silence was to keep any and all contact of Steve Rogers to her was to be stopped immediately. For my credibility she wrote, but she was sure that he knew exactly why she wanted nothing to do with Steve Rogers.

So what if he knew. She was moving on and leaving them in the dust, she'd travelled to India. India! For mental health treatment. She was changing. She was letting it go.

The Avengers weren't her family any more.