It didn't take much to bring her into conscious awareness of her fucked up present, but drowning out her sorrows to blaring music certainly worked wonders. She'd pulled up into Teller-Morrow at a reasonable hour, stalked into the office and asked for Juice. The blonde-streaked brunette woman stating that he'd been behind bars for a few months had her fuming for a few minutes until she got her shit under control, enough to ask questions and figure out just what the fuck was going on. She felt like she should have won a goddamn prize for not starting to spit out that she was fucking Ironsides and goddamnit just where the hell was her Juice Box. Nevertheless, she persisted. Gemma, she'd learned was the woman's name, lightly elaborated and brought Lotte into the clubhouse, where she'd met Opie, Chibs, and Kozick, outright characters if ever she'd met any. They made her miss the team, being here at all made her miss the team, but she pushed on. Cap was in the wind looking for a ghost and everything, everyone worth anything was outright scrambling at the moment. She took the time to get acquainted with the people her Juice Box called family and tried to settle into it. She remembered the compound-like place she'd built a few miles north and felt some semblance of reassurance of the fact that he wasn't as defenseless as he'd thought.

Regardless of working for Fury, working for Pops, Juice was her constant. They kept up communiques, they kept up movie marathons via Skype, they kept up their ridiculousness regardless of how hard and how loudly the world outside banged on them to change, to conform. She couldn't give a fuck if he was outlaw; her Pops had been called the Merchant of Death once upon a time, she'd been in that cave too, matching car battery heart and all. Juice still loved her, still joked with her about who shot first and the merits of their favorite YT-1300 freighter. He saw past the board seat of a fortune 500 company, past the flashy suit she'd made, past the poisoning, past the daring heroics and the bitter death wish she seemed to come with. He still saw the girl with milk braids and an endearing wish to create clean energy regardless of how futile it'd been until her Pops had had a missile blown at him with their own name outfitted on it.

Sometimes she resented him for his hesitancy, other times she just loved him for giving in to the vision she'd had long before their time in that fucking cave in Tora Bora. Nevertheless, the clean energy work made her giddy. Maybe he was resentful that she'd joined up with SHIELD, but it was another part of their legacy, regardless of how bitter it made him. Grandpop had been a founder, Grandpop had wanted better, so she'd strapped herself into a catsuit after swearing loudly and proudly that she may be a Stark, but she wouldn't be making weapons and that had been that. She'd trained and trained and trained. She'd been on countless missions before she'd met the Widow and Hawkeye, nevertheless, she'd admittedly shat herself a tiny bit when the Avengers Initiative was brought to her plate. She'd wanted normal, she hadn't planned for her suit play time to be brought into the whole mess, for her father to be a part of it. Then the helicarrier happened, then Loki happened, then her living room in Stark Tower had been abysmally trashed. Then she'd flown a goddamned nuke into a wormhole before her Pops could get a handle on it, because fucking hell if Pepper was going to raise a Starkling by herself. She'd never forget what she saw when she flew into that wormhole, thankfully JARIVS was ever the thoughtful recorder, never missing a second. He'd captured everything; from her tense murmurs to Juice, to her sarcastic mutterings to the world at large, to the goddamn hoard of a space army she'd stared down and blown up, he'd recorded everything for Pops to see. She'd never been alone in her fear, she never would be.

So when SHIELD fell, she wasn't surprised that JARVIS had dug up Juice's incarceration, she'd just been silently raging that Juice hadn't tried to get out of it, hadn't tried to call her to escape his metaphorical doom. Nevertheless, she wasn't surprised. Juice had a tendency to not want to drag her into his homegrown messes, even though it only made her more bitter.

So her presence on the lot had been a surprise. A shockingly welcome one if what she'd had to go on said anything. Gemma had floundered a bit. The boys had been gobsmacked. How does one explain ridiculous connections when they'd spent the whole of their lives time hiding them? Either way, she wasn't standing for bullshit pretenses any longer. With SHIELD's fall, she'd just been plain out fucking done. She'd served. She'd lied, cheated, schemed, seduced. She'd *tried* to keep on the Stark legacy of preserving freedom rather than just blowing shit up. Juice grounded her, she wasn't going to give him up to some stupid ass prison and she certainly wasn't going to play pretend when it came to getting him released early. Nevertheless, she'd called Coulson, she'd bartered and scraped, and then there she was with her Porsche and her promises. And then, and then there she'd been blasting down the highway going twenty over and smiling because she'd fucking pulled it off.

She'd easily beaten them home by fifteen minutes, then Gem had demanded 'family dinner' the next night and she'd smiled and nodded because what the fuck else can you do when Gemma Teller-Morrow demands family dinner from you? So she'd planned to go, even though everything in her was screaming for her to fucking run. Giving into Gemma had been entirely unnerving, as if she'd faced off with Pepper and come away swearing that she'd be out of the workshop and shuffling herself all fresh and clean into some designer duds before a benefit. Either way, the woman had won and she found herself burnt out, rambling off her goodbyes and heading back home in order to seek out some form of familiarity.

Now she found herself in her workshop, music on blast and vodka in hand as she tinkered and contemplated how exactly she found herself in a California spot that wasn't Malibu. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't sad, she missed the team, she missed what had been her normal. She felt raw and bitter at having to make her own new version of it. But she'd manage, she always had.