A/N Well, I thought I should write something here. I'm a shocking writer, so I don't exactly know what I'm doing. Meh. We'll see where this goes :P

Disclaimer: I don't own Iron Man. I wish I did, but I don't.


"The truth is… I am Iron Man." Holy crap the noise. I don't think I've ever seen the press riled up so much over something I've done. And all I was doing was standing there shocked.

"Tony! What are you going to do with the technology?"
"I thought you were trying to go weapon-free?"
"Isn't this another weapon?"
"Why are you doing this?"
The questions were in rapid-fire mode. I've never seen anything like it. Or heard anything like it.

"Tony, we're outta here. This is nuts," Rhodey yells into my ear, pushing me through the crowd of people. The press noticed me moving and swarmed toward me.

"Do you have anything to say?"
"Where are you going?"
"Mr Stark, what's your next step?"
The questions didn't stop coming. There was a continuous stream of them. Rhodey didn't stop pushing until we had passed Pepper and Agent Coulson and gotten into the car.

"What the hell, Tony! You were supposed to stick to the cards!" Rhodes barked.

"It seemed like the right thing to do. Hogan, drive. The cards were full of bullshit. That Agent Coulson guy didn't know what he on about."

"So you thought the truth would be better?"

"Ah. Yup. That lady reporter, Christine? She was shouting questions at me the whole time and every eye was looking at me expectantly. What was I supposed to do? The pressure was insane."

The car stopped and I looked outside. We'd made it home. And left without Pepper.

"What were you supposed to do? You were supposed to stick to the goddamned cards!" Rhodey yelled, his voice vibrating around the whole car.

"Chill out. I'll deal with it. Hogan, can you go get Pepper?" I say as I get out of the car and head into the house.

"How in the hell are you going to deal with this?" Rhodey says as he follows me inside. "You've basically dug yourself into a hole so huge, you're never getting out of it."

"You wanna know how I'm going to deal with this? I'm going to lay low until there's another bad guy out there that needs his ass kicked," I reply while pulling 2 beers out of the fridge. "JARVIS, get everything ready to work on Mark III." I hand Rhodey a beer.

"Right away, sir."

"That is how you're going to deal with this? 'Lay low'? That's a bullshit idea. What's the press going to say?" Rhodey asks, taking a swig of his beer and sitting down.

"I don't care about what the press is going to say. They can say what they want. That's my idea. I don't hear you coming up with a better one," I bite back. We've been discussing this for twenty minutes and he hasn't had a single idea.

"You wanna know my idea? My idea is that you release a statement in the next week and have a formal demonstration of the suit. We need to go public with this. People will be expecting to see this used in the milit—"

"The military? Hell no. The suit will not be made for the military. I will not be releasing some bullshit statement and I will not be doing a formal demonstration of any kind, Colonel Rhodes. This isn't some new weapon for the military, so you can forget that." And with that I get up and go down to my workshop.