Sweat rolled off her face as Lindsay continued to punch and kick the giant bag that hung in the center of the room. After getting off work, she made her way to the gym down the street from the apartment, not even bothering to go home first. She had a lot of feelings going around her head, not many of them good, and she needed to work them out one way or another. She was currently the only person in the building, which is how she normally liked it.

After ten more minutes of the intense assault she was raining down on the bag, she gasped for air and backed away; the bag was swinging dangerously quickly back-and-forth.

"You hit that thing any harder and I'm going to have to hang it up again." Lindsay turned around at the sound of the voice, smiling once she located the source.

Alex Rivera smiled as he walked toward Lindsay, tugging on his jacket as he moved closer to the girl. His thick black hair was slicked back; the small scar over his left eyebrow standing out against his caramel-colored skin. Alex was the owner of the gym and had slowly become a friend of Lindsay's as she began frequenting the building more and more.

"That's sort of the point." Alex smirked at her as he made his way across the large room, finally stopping once he was about a foot in front of her.

"Rough day at work?" he asked as Lindsay turned around to wipe some sweat off her face. She simply shrugged, her apron removing the liquid from her skin.

"You could say that."

"What happened?" Lindsay turned her head and stared at Alex, one of her arms halfway through the black t-shirt she had stashed in her car for moments just like this.

"Let's just say someone I didn't want to see from my past showed up at the diner today."

"Ex-boyfriend?" Lindsay snorted, the sound echoing around the room.

"Hardly," she said, wiping her forehead once again before putting the apron back into her gym bag. Alex leaned up against one of the walls and snorted.

"Do I get any more information?" Lindsay rolled her eyes and glared at him.

"Nope." She pulled her brown hair into a ponytail and walked closer to Alex, who just kept on staring at her. "Like what you see?"

"Yes," Alex muttered as Lindsay leaned up and closed the gap between them with a kiss, breathing in his smell. A mixture of cigar smoke and the cleaning supplies they used at the gym; it made her head spin.

The chords of Lindsay's favorite AC/DC song began playing from her pocket, causing Lindsay to groan.

"Ignore it," Alex stated before kissing her yet again. Lindsay hit the side button on her phone, effectively silencing the room, before wrapping her arms around his neck. They remained like that for several seconds before the chords returned.

"What does he want?" Lindsay groaned as she fished her phone out of her sweat-pants. Pressing the green button, she lifted the small device to her ear. "Make it quick, I'm busy."

"Is that any way to greet your Father?" Tony Stark's voice resonated through the phone, making Lindsay roll her eyes.

"No, but it's how I'm greeting you," she said with a smirk as she heard Tony chuckle on the other end of the phone. She felt Alex staring at her, waiting for her to end the call. "Did you need something?"

"Know anything about Norse mythology?" Lindsay physically raised one of her eyebrows in confusion at her father's question, of all the things he could have asked her, this is not how she thought it was going to go.

"Um… no? Why?"

"Something Coulson told me," he said, the sounds of his computer in the background of the call. At the sound of the agent's name, Lindsay shuttered; not enough for Alex to notice but enough for her to feel the chill go down her spine. It was always awkward when her dad talked about Coulson, or the Iron Man incident in general, it always made her feel weird. Not him being Iron Man, that she had come to terms with a while ago. It was the fact that, out of every agent in SHIELD, Coulson was the one who went to him after his adventure in the Middle East… though if she had to guess, that wasn't a coincidence. So whenever the agent came up in conversation, Lindsay had to act like she hadn't spent two years of her life working with him, seeing as Tony had no idea her life with SHIELD was ever an incident.

"I mean, I took world religions in high school but it's been almost ten years so I'm not going to be very helpful," she bit out quickly, trying to figure out a way to make this conversation end quickly. "Wait, why was Coulson asking you about Norse mythology?"

"Just something he wanted help with."

"Dad…"

"It was just a question, jeez." She wanted to press more, but it didn't get to that point. Alex coughed, making Lindsay turn toward him. He had his arms crossed over his chest and a smirk on his face. Lindsay mouthed the word 'sorry' and turned back to the phone call. "I have to go Dad."

"Why? Have a hot date waiting for you to get off the phone?" Lindsay let out a laugh, the very sound echoing around the room.

"I am not going to discuss my sex life with my father." There was a long pause on Tony's end of the phone; Lindsay swore she heard him drop something.

"You have a sex life?" Lindsay rolled her eyes and looked up at Alex, a smirk clearly evident on his face.

"Goodbye, Dad." After hanging up the phone, she slid it back into her pocket. Alex walked toward her, wrapping his arms around her waist and laughing quietly at her.

"Your daddy still thinks you're a virgin, huh?" Lindsay looked at him and glared, though her glare was sort of canceled out by the smile on her face.

"Shut up."


2009

"What do you mean you don't want to go to college?" Tony screamed, following his daughter out on the patio of their Malibu home. Lindsay didn't respond right away as she sat down at the table next to Pepper, nursing a cup of coffee in her freshly manicured hands. She lifted the cup to her lips and took a small sip of the liquid before answering her father's rather loud question.

"I just can't think of a good reason to go to school if I don't know what I want to do with my life."

"That's the very POINT of college!" Tony exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air. "Millions of kids go to college without having the slightest idea of what they want to do with their lives."

"No one's going to want me after being out of school for five years," Lindsay explained. Even though she was only 21, she graduated high school a year early (she could have graduated even earlier, but she told her father she didn't want to.)

"Stanford, one of THE best colleges in the whole COUNTRY, has been after you since you left high school!" Lindsay rolled her eyes at how desperate her father was sounding right now, it almost sounded like Stanford was paying him for her attendance to the school.

"Tony, let her be," Pepper said from her spot opposite the young girl. She too had a cup of coffee in her hands though, while Lindsay's was splattered with cream and sugar, Pepper's was black.

"I'm not going to spend the next four years of my life with a bunch of Harvard rejects," Lindsay muttered, taking another sip of the warm liquid.

"You're a Harvard reject!" Tony shouted, slamming his hand down on the table, his actions causing the cups and plates to rattle. Lindsay, whose face was calm and almost void of emotion, turned and looked at her father in a way that almost seemed like he wasn't yelling at her.

"I can't be a reject if I didn't apply." The tone of the conversation seemed to take a nosedive as Lindsay's words set in. Pepper placed her cup down on the table and stared at the young girl, her face now serious.

"Lindsay, you told us you sent in the application," she said. Lindsay took another sip of her coffee before shrugging her shoulders.

"That was just to get this one off my back about it," she explained, gesturing toward Tony, who was being eerily silent this whole time. Lindsay shifted her gaze over to him and had to hold back the laughter she really wanted to let out. Tony's face was so red it looked like he had stayed out in the California sun for hours and hours again, and his eyes looked like there was a fire lit behind them.

"So, let me get this straight," Tony said, his voice coming out very rigid, almost as if he was trying to force himself from snapping at his daughter. "You didn't send in the application at all." Lindsay, very calmly and deliberately, lifted the mug to her lips and swallowed the last of her coffee, before setting the mug on the table and standing from her chair. She smirked slightly as she made her way toward the double doors leading to the house.

"I didn't even fill out the forms." With that, she quickly walked up the path and into the house, listening as Tony began yelling as Pepper tried her hardest to calm her boss down before he did something stupid. Without stopping to remove her shoes, she took the stairs two at a time until she reached the door leading to her bedroom, which she yanked open and slammed behind her.

The mid-morning sunlight streamed through the large window on the other side of the room, coating Lindsay and everything else in the room in a warm glow. The young girl sighed as she leaned against the door, closing her eyes and shaking her head as Tony's angry rant trickled through her half-opened window.

"He'll get over it," she muttered after several seconds. Opening her eyes, she stopped leaning against the door and walked over to her desk, opening her laptop and checking her cell phone for any new messages or emails she may have missed.

"Ma'am," JARVIS's chipper voice sounded over her head, making her groan slightly as her attention was turned from the message she had just started reading.

"Yes JARVIS?" she asked sarcastically, she knew the AI was going to continue talking weather she answered him or not.

"Miss Potts wanted me to remind you that a car will be here in two hours to take you and your father to the airport for the Apogee Awards." Lindsay let out a loud groan as she was reminded she had that today.

"Oh great." She shut her laptop, harder than was probably recommended, and leaned back in her seat. After several seconds of silence, Lindsay pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed yet again. "JARVIS, is Dad still yelling?" The AI didn't speak for several seconds until finally, his British voice filled the room yet again.

"Your father is in his workshop, currently doing diagnostics on one of his sports cars," JARVIS explained quickly. Lindsay bit her lip and tried to think of a way to fix this, Tony ever ran diagnostics on his cars if he was mad or was trying to avoid something.

"I may have screwed up here JARVIS," she muttered as she placed her head in her hands. The AI didn't say anything, it was almost as if he hadn't heard her. After almost ten minutes of sitting with her head in her hands, Lindsay leaned up and rubbed her eyes. Slowly, almost in a way that seemed like she was afraid, she reached forward and opened the drawer in the desk. Random papers and pens scattered the area, hiding the area in question Lindsay was currently searching for. Running her fingers along the bottom, she smiled slightly as she removed the false bottom of the drawer and pulled out a small frame. It was covered in dust from being hidden from the light of day for so long, but Lindsay could still make out the smiling faces of both herself and Clint Barton, who was holding her in a fireman hold after a particularly difficult training session. The image made tears prick the corners of her eyes, causing her to quickly place it back in her desk and return the false bottom, effectively removing it from view as if it didn't exist at all. Wiping away the tears, Lindsay put on a fake smile and stood from her chair, beginning her preparations for the awards, prepared to play the part of Lindsay Stark, the golden child of billionaire philanthropist Tony Stark.

There was a reason she didn't want to go to college, and it wasn't just that she didn't know what she wanted to do. She knew what she wanted, and it was to be as far away from SHIELD and anything they wanted from her as humanly possible. Staying off the radar, as much as the daughter of one of the world's wealthiest men could be, was the only way she knew how to do that. And that fact, in her mind, was greater than anything else a college could offer her.