The Last Chronicle

by Miss Starfire

After years of struggling to build their lives together, Tony Stark and Pepper Potts have lost everything. But as all-out war looms, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance, Tony and Pepper are ready to take it all back. It has all come down to this. Story 8 of 8. The epic finale to The Last Chronicles Saga.

3. Chapter 2

Guest Review Responses

Iron kid: This was a great chapter and I can not wait to see more so please update this as quickly as u can it is killing me wait for the next chapter – Hello, Iron kid! Here's the mother of all updates. This chapter will probably be the longest of all in this story. Not by much, just a thousand words or so, but it was so needed to get the point across.

faithful reader: so heart attack has been added to the list. but on another note boomdoom who would have guessed also the hell happend to pepper – How about we add strokes, too? Uncontrollable sobbing ranks up there, as well as hyperventilating and screaming at the top of your lungs. Make sure you're in a place where you can scream to your heart's content. Pepper's whereabouts are going to be the least important part of all this :P

Guest: You know what? You created a plot that is easily far better than the plot of the show. Always unpredictable. I give up. Just kill them all. somehow kill Rhodey. Turn howie into the mandrin. Turn Pepper into a maklun ( like you did with that avengers fic.) Turn fury into the red skull. YOU CAN NOT SURPRISE ME ANYMORE. I WON'T LET YOUUUUUUUU. – CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! I WILL SURPRISE YOU! MUAHAHAHAHA!

apps: OMGGGG...you came up with an update!...this is something out of the blue...beyond my expectations... Shocked/surprised to see you... This time I must say I became stalker of yours by keeping an eye on frequent updates of your Arrow fanfic keeping you occupied from updating the last chronicles...can't resist...he he he:)..:)..)...superb revelation of (D)Boom behind all this...AnnnnDdddd...I know she is alive!...he he he...:)...so happy to see you...once again Welcome back...cheers! – Stalking is good. It keeps me writing and thinking about the weirdest plotlines ever. And your and everyone else's reviews make my day; ya'll have no idea how much they DO brighten my dull days! Yes, I said ya'll, 'cuz I live in Texas and that's how we all talk 'round here. Thank you for coming back for more!

A/N: OK, my Faithful Readers, here we are with the next chapter to this story. Like I said in the last chapter, while that one had a lot of big reveals, the rest of the really big answers are found in this chapter. While there are still some questions to be answered in future chapters, the ones that you'll finally get here are going to knock your socks off. How shocking can they be, you ask? I've got two words for everyone: buckle up!

---

Chapter 2

"Stark!" Fury raised his voice and almost physically shook the inventor back to reality. "Stark, are you listening to me? Stark! Dammit! Hansen, get him out of here!"

Tony's eyes blinked a few times and he shook his head to regain his senses before his focus slowly returned to him. He had no idea why everything and everyone was on high alert, and he had the slight suspicion that he should have been worried about it as much as Maya and Nick appeared to be, but he could not bring himself to care about that at the moment. All he wanted right now was to do something – anything – to know if Pepper and Gene had made it out of the lab before it had blown up.

Did she forget the sequence? He asked as he cursed himself for not forcing Pepper to go through the order of the steps more than one time. She made most of the steps… She… It's been hours! It can't… She couldn't have triggered the alarms after that many hours! She has to be alive!

"Tony, we have to go," Maya began pulling the inventor by his left hand with her towards the laboratory exit Nick Fury had just gone through. "Tony, snap out of it! We're under attack!"

"W-what?" his thoughts and feelings were with Pepper; his current predicament was almost inconsequential to him. His mind was racing, listing and categorizing what he needed to do next. He needed to find a way to get in touch with Pepper, a way to at least see the present status of the Makluan Temple. Perhaps the computers in Maya's lab could be used to hack the satellites? Perhaps the Stark 1 satellite had also been reactivated along with the systems at the temple and he could use it to communicate with his redhead? Perhaps it was just a false alarm; a ruse, something that Pepper had deliberately done to distract S.H.I.E.L.D. and bust him out of the prison he was currently in.

"Tony? TONY! Are you even listening? We're under attack!" Maya repeated in a frustrated voice, utterly unaware of the excruciating deliberation taking place inside Tony's brain. "Don't you hear all the alarms? The island is probably being bombed! We need to go to level B30, right now."

B30? Bombed? Island?

More details of the location were revealed.

Tony shook his head again, unsure about how to interpret the new information. In the span of half a second, it was now even more possible that it was Pepper who was targeting the location as a means to get him back to the outside world. Had Pepper been able to get more than just one favor out of the Mandarin? Was Gene part of this crazy idea? Was Pepper plotting to get Tony back by any means possible? And, more importantly, assuming she was still alive: had she discovered something so shocking that she had been left with no choice but to take extreme measures such as these?

Dammit! I need more information!

"TONY! HURRY!"

Jumping back to reality, and with a half-assed plan in mind, he finally decided to pull his hand from Maya's, if just to buy him some time. He stopped dead in his tracks, which caused her to halt as well and for him to realize they had traveled quite the distance in such a short time. He then walked around her to stand before the confused brunette and extended his arms to the sides to block her path.

"What the FUCK is going on?"

"There's no time to explain, Tony," Maya replied with a stomp of her right foot, walked around him and under his still extended left arm and then resumed her quickened pace, urging him to follow her with an insistent wave of her hands. "We have to hurry up before B30 is closed."

"Closed? Why would it close? I don't understand what's happening!"

"I'll explain later, OK? I promise. Now come on, Tony!"

The woman grabbed his hand again, this time tighter than before, and together they began to jog towards the nearest emergency exit that would lead them to the stairs. The red, blinking lights and loud sirens failed to dissipate, and the pleasant female voice that had once before asked the residents of the facility to descend to Level 30 as quickly as possible was now simply counting down the seconds before said level was sealed until further notice.

"We have less than two minutes left to make it there and we're ten levels away. We need to run!"

"Down ten flights of stairs?" Tony asked, his eyes briefly looking over his shoulder to see how far away from the lab they were.

"Yes."

"Can't we take the elevator?"

Maya shook her head. "They're sealed now, just like the emergency doors will be once we cross them or if we don't hurry up and go through them in the next thirty seconds. There's no coming back to the hall anymore once we go through the doors."

"So, anyone who is left on this side of the door is screwed?"

"Pretty much," Maya said before their run turned into a full sprint when she finally saw an emergency door, Tony still trailing behind her.

"What about Pepper?" he dared to ask even though he was aware that the ginger could very well be permanently down for the count, but refusing to believe this was the case until he saw it with his own eyes. "Who's gonna go get her?"

"She'll be there, don't worry," Maya assured him, still under the belief that Gene Khan was keeping an eye on her former friend. "Basement 30 is the safest level in this place, so everyone here has to be moved there in case of an emergency or a lockdown. She's probably already there."

"You sure about that?" the inventor asked, gaging how much knowledge regarding Pepper's actual whereabouts had spread, if any or at all.

"Yes, and she's probably wondering where the hell you are," Maya responded as they both stopped in front of the emergency exit she had previously spotted and she began using the keypad on the side of the door to input the override code. The paging system reminded them both that time was of the essence, yet Maya hesitated to continue putting in the override code for a second. Tony eyed her with wonder, fearing she had somehow figured out what he planned to do, but when her eyes appeared to be briefly lost in an invisible horizon, Tony inwardly sighed in relief.

"He wasn't supposed to start yet," Maya stated more to herself than to Tony as the door finally unlocked and Tony pushed it open. In spite of the loud noises and flickering lights, the scientist heard her words loud and clear, as well identified her tone of escalating culpability.

"Start, what?" Tony asked as he used his free hand to press her lower back to lead her inside the emergency stairwell hall, but he remained standing by the exit.

"Taking over," Maya retorted once she had crossed the threshold and her eyes stared over and down the rail to see other people rushing down the stairs.

"Taking over what?"

"Everything," she inhaled shakily and then turned around in place to face him. "And if your lab really exploded, that can only mean that –"

"Pepper's gone," Tony said unexpectedly, causing Maya's eyes to narrow for an instant, momentarily perplexed as to why Tony was suddenly stating these words.

"What?"

"She's not here," he said and took an inconspicuous small step back from her. "She went to the Makluan Temple, with Gene. They left hours ago."

"What? No! That's… that's impossible. Gene was told not to take her out!"

"By who?"

"Fury! It was a direct order!"

Tony snickered at the response and shook his head. "Gene, he… as powerful as he is, he has the same weakness as me."

"Weakness? What weakness?"

Tony briefly closed his eyes, took another step back, and then smiled sympathetically at the confounded brunette.

"Pepper," he finally replied. "It's the one thing he and I truly have in common: we'd do anything for her."

And before Maya could piece together what the inventor had meant and what he was about to do, the emergency exit slammed in her face, leaving the angry woman fiercely pounding her fists against the metal contraption to no avail as a loud boom that shook the entire underground building made everything go dark.

xxxXXXxxx

Maya Hansen walked slowly towards the main chamber of the castle she had called home for several months now, wondering if the feeling in her chest was what death-row inmates felt on their way to the execution room. She had not wanted to be here in the first place, let alone be part of this large scheme for world domination and for imposing revenge onto Tony Stark, but as crappy news reporters and lazy writers liked to say: one thing had led to another, and now here she was.

She stood outside the large, heavy wooden doors, knocked three times to announce her arrival, and when she did not hear him tell her to let him be, she knew he was ready to see her, so she let herself in. He was anxious, of this much she was sure, that the news she brought with herself was exactly what he wanted to hear. It was not news she wanted him to know or relay to him, but after your mother is killed due to your poor involvement in a madman's crusade, there was little you could do to back out of what you had already agreed to do – what you had already done.

"Lord Doom: thank you for receiving me," she said in a timid voice, crestfallen and down on one knee. She knew the pose should have made her feel like a medieval knight, presenting his honorable homecoming to his kingdom and ruler, but this was far from being a fairytale or a mutually beneficial pact.

"Do not bother with the pleasantries. Doom's time is limited. State your business and return to your quarters to continue your work."

"Yes, my Lord," Maya replied even though the respect she showed the man was neither felt nor earned. Only Killian was allowed to call him 'Doctor,' perhaps due to the fact that they both shared the title. But from the moment she had set foot in his realm, Maya had been instructed to refer to him as 'Lord,' since she was nothing more than a lowly peasant who was yet to prove her knowledge and value to the world.

"I've come to confirm that the rumors are true: Tony Stark and Pepper Potts have a son."

"It is of no surprise to me," Doom stated. "The Erwin girl failed to fulfill the bounty… just like all the others before her.

"Indeed," Maya agreed with a nod, not wanting to remember yet again that she was responsible for Tony's behavior that day he had encountered the deranged woman, just as Tony's son was being born. "I've also confirmed their new living location. They're hosted in what used to be Hammer Multinational, in its penthouse."

"A structure with poor security measures."

"Tony's taking care of that."

Doom scoffed. "He's but a child. His technological advancements are insignificant to Doom."

"And yet you want him for his Extremis," Maya said before she could hold back her tongue. "You can't replicate what he's got."

Before she could continue her statements of truth, Doom leapt from his throne, charged towards her and held her by her neck, squeezing it as hard as was needed to restrain her breathing, yet not strong enough to kill her. She felt some of the blood vessels in her eyes pop with the pressure around her windpipe, and while she tried to scratch herself out of his grip, nothing she did had an impact on Doom's grasp.

"He was lucky; a mere amateur. He did not plan to obtain that ability! Tony Stark's advantages are minimal at best! And you," he squeezed a tad tighter, "you will be reminded of your place."

And for weeks after that incident, after briefly forgetting that Doom held her life in his hands and then being reminded of such by being tortured for days, Maya Hansen wore a metal shock collar around her neck that even Aldrich Killian was allowed to play around with.

xxxXXXxxx

"Scanners… trouble… no trace…"

"Buried… rubble…"

"Gone…"

The multitude of overlapping voices and sounds overwhelmed his senses, and it did not help much either that even though he could somewhat feel the computers nearby, it was not at a level he could have benefited from. He was having a difficult time reading them, interacting with them, but he could do so enough to know that the attack had stopped – at least for now.

"Pepper," he uttered louder than his ears could register, and a moment after he had asked for his wife and had begun patting around himself, he felt a pair of arms surround him, help him up and straighten his head.

"Tony… coming to…"

The sentences spoken near him sounded broken, almost nonsensical, but he could infer the rest of the words his ears refused to hear. He was not certain why he was struggling to find his balance and focusing his eyesight, or why his skin tingled as if his entire body had gone numb, but he was at least encouraged by the notion that the words coming out of him were clear as day.

"Pepper," he said again and blinked multiple times. "Where… is she…" he added, expecting to hear that somehow his redhead had made it back even though he had never made it to Maya Hansen's lab after he had closed the emergency door on her.

"We don't know," the person holding him responded, his gruff voice beginning to sound vaguely familiar to the inventor. "I looked everywhere for her, but I couldn't find her in the building. Not her or Gene Khan."

Tony felt his hopes dissipating at a rapid pace at knowing that if Gene had not been able to get them back by now, the chances that they had survived were almost nil.

"She left… hours ago," Tony stated. "With Gene… the temple… she's there…"

All of a sudden, and after Tony's confession, the voices around him simply stopped, and all that Tony could hear was the beeping of the machines in the room. He felt some of his strength return to him, and after he patted his thanks to what he assumed was the Good Samaritan's shoulder, he pulled away from whoever had been supporting his weight. He began rubbing his eyes as he continued to speak and stand up from the floor, completely unaware that every soul in the room was staring at him.

"She went there… to reboot the servers…" he cleared his throat, slowly becoming more and more aware of his surroundings and more and more in control of his own body. "The computers, they needed direct input of our biometrics… we couldn't reboot anything from here."

Tony missed the moment that the panicked look on Nick Fury's face rapidly spread to everyone in the emergency control room. Nick Fury closed his eye and shook his head, feeling the weight of the failure he had allowed to take place almost crush him to dust. He should have known better than to leave Gene Khan alone with the ginger. He should have known better than to think that Gene would not let his feelings for the redhead cloud his head.

"I-I have to go get her…" Tony said once he was finally able to focus his vision and realized where he was and who was with him. "I have to go or Doom… Doom will…"

"You can't, Tony," the voice of the man that had assisted him just seconds ago, said to him. "The power is out. We're running on damaged backup generators. We can barely keep the oxygen flow working, let alone open the doors or get out."

The scientist slowly turned around to face the owner of the voice that had just relayed the first wave of grim news to him, and his jaw almost dropped at whom he saw standing before him.

"Parks? Arthur Parks?"

The Living Laser nodded and smiled.

"Sorry about the hangover," Arthur said with a slight shrug. "Being converted into energy, even temporarily, and traveling through the power lines is very uncomfortable for someone who's not like me."

"W-What?"

"Power lines," Black Widow said as she closed in towards Tony, who only now noticed that Maya Hansen was passed out on the floor and was being tended to by Hawkeye. "When the power went out, all the doors were locked shut. Arthur began going through the electric sockets all over the building, bringing here everyone and anyone who got trapped. If it wasn't for him, most of us wouldn't be here right now."

The scientist returned his gaze to the man he had for such a long time remembered with remorse at recognizing he had been unable to return him to normal, and he then hung his head in deep thought. He had never been able to fix the Living Laser, and he had loathed himself for that, but he now somewhat realized why life had not allowed him the chance to do so. Arthur Parks was who he needed to be: power on-the-go – and had he not been who he was, the blue-eyed inventor would perhaps not be alive at the moment.

"Thank you," Tony said earnestly, and not only for himself, but also for Arthur's attempts to locate his redhead even though she was nowhere in the structure to be found. "Thank you for that, Arthur. But now I have to –"

Tony's words were interrupted by a sight that caught his attention once he turned around to face Fury and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. – a sight that led his eyes to look past the men and women before him to the wall of screens at the end of the surveillance room. A sight that made him feel as if he had been punched in the gut.

"No," the blue-eyed boy exhaled before he rushed towards the screens. "NO!"

The images were quickly rotating; alternatingly displaying different locations around the world – cities and continents alike. Yet, a common theme was palpable in all of the feeds regardless of their position on the globe: chaos, destruction and death.

From his hometown to the other side of the Earth, major cities had been bombarded in a clear attempt to incapacitate them and cut communication between them. Images of people injured, crying, running down the streets, bleeding and screaming the names of their loved ones, was all he could see. He could not believe the amount of devastation that had taken place in such a short amount of time. He could not make his brain accept what his eyes were seeing unravel right in front of him.

My family, my friends…all those innocent people… Tony thought as he placed his hands on the dashboard of the machines. His range of Extremis was limited for now until he was able to fully unlock it, but the closer he was to a computer, the more control he felt he could have on it. His palms pressed against the switchboard, his eyes closed in concentration, and seconds later the screens finally shifted to showing the landmarks that were dear to him. He almost did not open his eyes again, fearing and already knowing what he would see, but the reality was that curling into a ball and denying the truth was not going to make it go away.

No, Tony thought as his now opened eyes filled with tears.

Stark Tower, Stark Solutions, the Rhodes' former home… everything was gone. Flattened. Wiped out of existence. Nothing but rubble was left, and he was more than sure that those majestic skyscrapers were now the tomb for anyone who had been caught inside.

"Buried… rubble… gone…"

The words he had heard minutes ago, when he had just woken up, now made perfect sense to him; too much sense, in fact. But none of the sense in the world, none of the experience he had picked up from years of the vigilante life, prepared him for the state of the last location he pulled up from the satellite imagery.

"Pepper," his broken voice was painful for almost everyone watching his soul tear apart at seeing the Makluan Temple take over every single inch of all forty, stacked and consecutive widescreens on the wall. Seeing the lab on one screen had not been enough, so he blew up the looping video recording to be split amongst them all, and with all the clarity of the high-tech found in this underground facility, he was able to see the last few moments before his second home had ceased to exist…

…and had more than likely taken the love of his life along with it.

"NOOO!"

The recording was only three seconds in duration, but for Tony, it was three seconds too long. The first frame showed the temple, standing in all its glory, completely defenseless against the missiles that could be barely seen in the corner of the image. The second frame showed the explosion of it, a cloud of dust, ashes and fire being all that took up the screen; and the third frame, the one that that made him clench his eyes and emit a painful-sounding, guttural noise, showed the miles-wide crater that had once hosted the base of operations for Iron Man.

And just when Nick thought things could not get any worse, just when he thought they had hit the lowest level of hell, all the screens went black, one by one. The lights then turned off, the servers shut down, and Maria Hill's voice stating that the satellites had been lost was all the heads-up he needed to realize that Doom's war, what he and S.H.I.E.L.D. had tried for years to prevent, had finally begun.

xxxXXXxxx

"Tony, stop blaming yourself," Pepper sternly ordered him. "Stop wasting time. We need to get our act together and fight back."

"How?" Tony asked, his eyes still and staring at the images of their son playing on the projector's screen. "We've got nothing, Pepper. They won't let us use this lab or any lab around here. They know better than to let us near any tech… and with Maya and Gene monitoring us…"

"Exactly," the redhead said with a curt nod. "If they don't know we're near a lab, there's nothing they can do about it, right? And Maya doesn't know as much about our lab as she thinks she does, otherwise, she would've realized it can't be restarted from over here."

"What are you saying?"

"That Gene owes us a fucking favor," she said as she took a step back from her husband and walked around the table of bird samples to pick the less inconspicuously placed one. "And I know exactly what it's gonna be."

Tony opened his mouth to ask what crazy idea was crossing her mind, but when he saw her grab a feather sample, put it inside a small plastic bag and then shoved the bag inside her blouse, in her bra, his eyes widened even more.

"You're joking."

"No," she shook her head. "I'm as serious as I can ever be."

"So…"

"So, this is the plan: I'll tell them I'm tired and that I'm going back to our room to rest. You're gonna tell them that you're going to start rebooting the servers while I nap."

"Which we can't do from here."

"Exactly. Just tell them that it'll take a while so that they're distracted with you doing that. Meanwhile, I'll have Gene teleport us to the temple. I'll reboot the systems, analyze this sample, and then use it to find out where Maya has been, and hopefully that'll tell us where Jimmy is being kept. Plus, we'll also have our tech to go get him, so we can blow this joint!"

Tony stared at her face, noting how confident she appeared to be with her plan, and he wanted more than anything than to share her enthusiasm. This was not the first or last time that she would come up with a plan when had nothing to offer, and this would not be the first time or last either that she would put herself in a situation he would rather her not be in. Nevertheless, if there was something that time had proven to him, over and over again, was that his redhead deserved and had earned the right to be treated as the hero he used to be.

"Are you sure about this, Pep?" he asked her while he rounded the table and stood before her. "Do you think he'll agree to it?"

"He'd better" she replied with a smile and a shake of her right fist. "I'll make him agree to it. It's the least he can do for us."

Tony exhaled sharply, aimed his head towards the ceiling with closed eyes, and when he finally looked back down to stare at her, he reluctantly nodded his head in agreement with her idea.

"Fine, but you better take care of yourself, Pep. I didn't just get you back to lose you again."

"Same to you," she poked his chest. "I didn't put up with your ass for years, just so that Maya Hansen can steal you back."

"Ugh," Tony sounded disgusted by the insinuation. "I'd rather take my chances with Rhona Erwin first, before I take Maya back. And Rhona's dead!"

Pepper chuckled despite how morbid Tony's comment had been, shook her head at him and then stood on her tiptoes to kiss the inventor on the lips.

"I love you, Tony. I'll be back before you know it. And once I do, we're gonna kick some ass."

"I know. And we'll get through this, Pep. We'll get our son back."

Pepper smiled at him once more and before the rattling of the doors turned into their opening, Tony hugged her one more time, fervently kissed the junction of her neck and left shoulder and then whispered to her how much he loved her.

"Be safe, babe."

All she did was wink and nod.

xxxXXXxxx

The scientist was not sure how long it had been since the blackout had started as he had lost track of reality a while ago. Even though only a few seconds had gone by, to Tony it felt as if the world had suddenly stopped. After the room had gone dark, he had fallen to his knees, held his weight against the dashboard that was now useless, and had closed his eyes so that his mind could replay the last few moments he had spent with his wife, and there he still was. Just as the footage of the absolute destruction of the Makluan Temple, her words and her face looped continuously inside his head, causing even more pain and even more feelings of misery that he believed he without a doubt deserved.

This can't be happening, he told himself for the millionth time. She has to be alive! She… she has to have survived that!

He was not sure how or why the ginger would be entitled to survive what had managed to practically extinguish most of the major cities on Earth, but in his denial and shock, his logical side was having a difficult time speaking louder than his broken heart.

Because I love her, that's why. Because I need her. I have to go find her. I have to do something! I have to do something right now!

"Stark! For fuck's sake, get it together! We need you sober!"

Fury's words sounded fairly distant to Tony, but apparently not distant enough to not interrupt his mental quarrel with himself. He gulped down the knot in his throat, blinked away some of the tears that continued to form at thinking about his possibly departed wife, and before Fury decided to shake his shoulder one more time, the inventor looked up to glare at the one-eyed man.

"Get out of my way," Tony ordered, stood up from the floor, and pushed the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. to the side.

"'Bout time! We need your brain," Fury replied and handed Tony a screwdriver that the inventor refused to grab and simply stared at it in disdain. "We got the lights back on, but Parks can only keep them going for a few minutes. We need you to fix whatever caused the power failure so that we can get back online."

"With a screwdriver? Really?" Tony scoffed and continued walking past Fury to the circuit box by the corner of the room. "You think I'm a fucking amateur, wanting to get electrocuted by putting a screwdriver inside a socket? Or do you think I'm a failed mechanic?"

"I think you're an inventor who can play electrician," Fury shook the tool towards a retreating Tony, "so invent some goddamned light!"

"Shut up: I'm thinking," Tony responded and opened the circuit box. He quickly assessed the status of the breakers, and after determining that they were not the cause of the blackout and that he probably would need to get to the source of electric current himself, he turned around to stare at a now recovering Maya Hansen.

"Turn it on," Tony ordered and walked over to where Maya lay on the floor. "Turn it on. Now."

"What's he talking about?" Hawkeye inquired with knitted brows, yet no one dared to take a guess as to what the blue-eyed boy had meant to say. Luckily for Tony, not everyone had to speculate.

"Tony, if we fully turn Extremis on in you, Doom will know you're alive," Maya tried to reason with her former fiancée while Hawkeye helped her stand up. "He'll know where we are."

"So, what?" Tony narrowed his eyes and folded his arms over his chest in a defiant pose. "He must know I'm alive already, if he bombed the temple. All thanks to you, by the way. You told him where the temple was."

"He would've found out anyway," Maya defended herself. "He visited your penthouse a million times. He kept an eye on you. All the time."

"What?" Tony's livid tone of voice could have slit open her throat. "He came to my home?"

Realizing that she had said more than she should have done at this point in time, but also knowing that there was no taking it back, she was left with no option but to use facts to make Tony understand the gravity of the situation at hand.

"He's the one who attacked Pepper. He's the one that broke into your house when she was alone that night. Both nights. Many nights, actually. But most especially, the nights when Pepper was alone – and the night your son escaped his crib."

Tony's arms slowly fell to his sides and his hands clenched into angry fists, a quick yet almost crippling memory returning to him.

He waited again for any indication of the intruder's unrelenting presence as the storm's rage outside persevered and the ROI continued to switch views of the spectrum. His calculating mind repeated the scene again and again, trying his best to remember which view the ROI had been on that had allowed him to see the shadowy figure behind them. He knew it had occurred at the end of one five-second interval and the beginning of the next but for the life of him he could not recall which view was listed on the tiny screen of the ROI.

Or at least not until he saw it once more.

Just as before, it caught him by surprise, and before he could read the name of the spectrum view at hand, the ROI flew away from his face and broke into a dozen pieces on the hard ground. Instinctively, Tony's right hand aimed towards the lab and in a second an armored gauntlet covered his entire right arm. He aimed it towards the last place he had seen the figure and for the first time in months the armored hero nature fully kicked into gear.

"Who are you?" He yelled and held his son closer to him with his left arm. "Show yourself! How did you get in here?"

"Doom was in my home, around my kid AND my wife? He-he… he was the one who almost broke Pepper's back?!"

Maya opened her mouth to retort, but she almost immediately realized that Tony's questions were rhetorical. There was more to explain to him – more that he needed to know, but for now all she really wanted him to recognize was that Doom had the upper hand.

"Please, Tony," Maya walked over to him. "Please, help us. We can still save your son. We can still fix this. The world hasn't ended. Not yet."

"For me it has," Tony stared away from her face to look at the still black screens, as if the video of the Makluan Temple was still playing, nonstop. Pepper's illness. The jet exploding. The weeks in a coma. The revelation of their son still being alive. The plan to find out what S.H.I.E.L.D. was keeping from them. It all seemed to have happened both so slowly and so fast.

"She's…" he gulped, finally dawning on him that his hope that she had escaped was futile. "She's gone. I can't do this alone now. Not like this. I need her."

Maya hung her head and closed her eyes; bottomless shame and guilt at long last catching up to her. From all the times she had ever wished that Pepper was not near Tony, not around for him to love, this was not one of the ways she had wanted it: by her disappearing from the map.

"I'm sorry…" she uttered in a soft voice. "About Pepper… about everything… but… we still have to do something. You can't just give up now. She'd want you to save him. She'd want you to save your son."

"And she'd want me to kill you, too," he deadpanned with a cynical snicker. "Should I do that, as well?"

"When it's over…" she said without missing a beat, her eyes directly on his unforgiving ones. "When your son is back, and when you're ready… you can take my life. I deserve it."

Tony open his mouth to reply – to assure the brunette that he wholeheartedly agreed with her statement and that he would unquestionably carry out said deed, but before he could get a word out; before he could spit out his venomous anger towards her, a giant ball of light appeared behind him and it made everyone stop in their tracks.

xxxXXXxxx

"Boom."

"PEPPER!"

The mention of her name in such a desperate tone made her turn away from the computer screens to face Gene standing behind her, a look of pure fear plastered all over his face as his left hand grabbed onto her right one.

"It's him, Pepper! He's found us!"

"Perimeter breach," the AI suddenly said, causing both Gene and Pepper to freeze where they stood and for the next five seconds to move in slow motion. They both looked up towards the ceiling as if the AI would understand by their gesture that they wanted her to continue speaking, and to their luck, it did.

"Target lock detected. Estimating potential damage: damage absolute. Starting Clean Slate protocol."

"Shit!" Gene heard the redhead hiss under her breath and, a blink of an eye later, she was running away from him and towards the opposite side of the temple.

"Pepper! Where are you going? We need to get out of here!"

"Not yet!" Pepper replied before she stood in front of the back wall and began trying to pull loose a brick from its place.

"Pepper!" Gene began running toward her, his rings already showing and his armor starting to appear. "Grab on to me!"

"Come on," Pepper mumbled while she struggled to pull the brick off the wall to grab the USB drive hidden behind it, Gene's words not getting through to her. "Piece of crap! Come off already… YES! I got it!"

"NO!"

Gene's warning word came too late, she realized, when she turned around to face him, extended her arm towards him, but instead ended up being pushed back by the explosion inside the lab.

xxxXXXxxx

The brightness was short-lived but extreme, and the painful-sounding thud that followed the dissipating flash of light left behind two figures lying on the ground: Gene Khan and Pepper Potts.

"No. Way," Hawkeye blurted. "Holy shit! It's them! They made it!"

Silent yet quickly, the blue-eyed scientist was the first one on his knees on the floor, his hands moving hesitatingly over the barely visible redhead that was currently pinioned under a passed out Gene. The brief second it had taken for the duo to appear out of thin air had been enough for the Mandarin, still in full armor, to land over Pepper, knock the air out of her and make her hit the back of her head against the concrete floor. A nanosecond later, the armor was gone and the status of Gene's intense injuries became open for everyone to see.

"Gene…" Pepper's strained voice being hardly audible under the weight of Gene Khan's body, alarmed them all. "Help h-him…"

"Pepper," Tony whispered and tentatively ran his hand over the top of her head – which was barely visible under Gene – only for it to immediately be stained with blood. "Oh, shit! Oh, shit! It's… it's me: Tony. Baby, please, just... Honey… Pep, just… talk to me."

Another agonizing groan was all the response the redhead gave the inventor.

"Oh, no," Maria Hill whispered when she saw the quickly pooling blood by Tony's knees. "We need a medic here, now!"

"Get Parks back here!" Nick Fury ordered and joined the group in the middle of the room. "And someone get the flashlights and the first aid kit!"

"Don't move them yet," Maya said, now standing on the other side of where Tony's form still shook in uncertainty. His eyes traveled up and down both bodies, taking in the obviously large amount of physical damage they sported, and he felt as if it was his own blood that was rushing out of his body and onto the ground. His worry, he realized with grudging surprise, was not only for Pepper, but also for Gene.

"The blood!" Tony said and had to hold back the temptation to move them and locate the wound that was causing copious damage. "There's so. Much. Blood!"

"Arthur, get in the scanner," Maya said and, an instant later, the Living Laser – regardless of how drained he felt, powered on the portable x-ray machine Maya held in her hands. The brunette made two complete passes of the machine on Gene's body, making sure she got every part of him, and after the machine cleared him of any broken bones, she kneeled down before them.

"Get him off her."

Tony wasted no time in doing just that, but he also had the decency of unquestioningly doing so cautiously and with the respect he knew Gene merited. Even if the two men would never again see eye-to-eye, and even if the woes from the past would never allow them to be the friends they had been once before, they had a mutual understanding that when it came to extreme situations that threatened what they strived to protect and loved, a mutually-beneficial partnership was all but mandatory for them.

"Hang in there, Gene," Tony stated as he pulled back the Mandarin alter-ego's body from Pepper with ease, forgetting for an instant the grudge they both felt for one another. "I still have a bone to pick with you. Don't you dare die on me."

"We're gonna need to suture his wounds, fast," Maria stated when she began to examine his injuries. "There's a large piece of glass sticking out of his abdomen."

"Is he gonna make it?" Tony asked when he stared down at his shirt and arms and realized with distress that he was covered in Gene's blood. "We don't know how long he's been bleeding."

"We're gonna need to do a transfusion," Maria retorted, her hands quick at work cleaning up and categorizing the lacerations on Gene's body. "Widow, find out what type of blood he has and match it with anyone in here."

"She's clear of broken bones, too," Maya then said and Tony exhaled in relief. He crawled back to where Pepper still lay on the floor, and now that he had the all-clear to move her, he began inspecting her lesions as carefully as he had done so the night before despite the limited field of vision the blackout was causing.

"Pep? Pepper, open your eyes. You're safe. You both made it. I…" he gulped. "I knew you'd make it."

Pepper opened one eye and then grumbled in annoyance when the flashlight Tony was aiming towards her, shone right in her face.

"Sorry!" he quickly apologized but did not stop his search.

She closed her eyes again, cleared her throat and took deep breaths. She gave Tony enough time to finish his probing, knowing he would not listen to anything she had to say until he was certain she was – for the most part – alright, and by the time the room stopped spinning and her lungs stopped burning from the sudden and forced release of oxygen within them, she opened her eyes and once again spoke.

"Tony, is Gene… is he…" her head shifted slightly to her left to see the medical team diligently working on him.

"They're helping him," he said immediately and gently shifted her view from Gene by lightly pulling her face back to him, lifted and placed her head on his lap and then held her right hand in his. "He's gonna be alright. You know he's too stubborn to die like this."

"I should've listened to him," her eyes quickly glistened at the weight of her words, so she closed them shut. "We should've stayed. Or we should've left the temple sooner. I… it's Doom, Tony. Doctor Doom has Jimmy! Doom is behind all of this!"

"I know," Tony nodded and then gently – almost apologetically so – kissed the back of the hand he was still holding, suddenly feeling a crippling load of remorse and guilt hit him from within at remembering that he was yet to inform Pepper of the probable fate of their family and friends. She had just come back from almost being blown to pieces, and she was injured, evidently tired, dirty and perhaps still shaken up from what she and Gene had had to endure, but the fact remained that she had to be told what Doom had accomplished.

"Maya, she told me," Tony continued, attempting to somehow ease her into learning the terrible news. "He's started a war, Pepper. A world war. He targeted –"

"The temple," she interrupted and opened her eyes to stare at Tony. "Everything's gone."

"I know. I saw. I thought that you…"

He could not bring himself to even say the words, even if she was right here, alive and with him, fearing that the mere insinuation of what he thought had happened to her would somehow instantly change the outcome of the blast and she would vanish from his arms.

"It was… a close call," she whispered to him and squeezed his hand to comfort him, not seeing any point in denying what they both knew could have occurred. "Gene saved me."

Feeling empowered now that she was back with him, Pepper pushed herself up from his lap. Tony promptly understood what her goal was and he assisted her in sitting up before she hugged him with all her might, glad to be with him again and not caring they were both dirtying and bloodying up the other's clothes. Tony responded to her embrace with one of his own, and for seconds all he focused on was on the heat of her body carrying on to his and the rising and lowering of her chest against his own.

Nonetheless, he knew that he had to tell her what he saw before the satellite reception had been lost. She had every right to know what he was almost certain had taken place outside. He had to tell her what had become of their home and the homes of their loved ones, and what the implications of that destruction meant for their lives.

Then again, perhaps this was not the best time to do so, seeing as she had barely made it out with her life from one of the Doom-incited attacks, but he was also aware that there would never be a good time or place to tell anybody that there was an enormous possibility that everyone they had once known and cared about were more than likely dead, killed by the same madman that had taken their son. He had no option but to move forward with it – telling her the truth, just as they had agreed to do with each other, a long time ago.

"There's more, Pep," he whispered to her and increased the grip around her body, anticipating her reaction to the news. "There's so much more that he did just now. He targeted more than just the Makluan Temple. A lot more."

He felt her body tense at this, and he heard her inhale deeply, as if suddenly realizing what he was trying to say.

"A world war," she repeated his words, closed her eyes and, with that, Tony knew she understood. "You-you mean that he… that he…"

"All of it," Tony closed his eyes as well, dug his face in her neck and exhaled sharply, almost painfully. "Every single place. All of them. I don't know if any of them were in the buildings. I couldn't tell. I'm sorry, Pep. I'm so sorry."

He held some of her sudden deadweight when he heard her whimper and hold back a sob. Even though tears were trailing down his face as well, he did not let her hear him cry and he kept the juddering of his shoulders to a minimum. He rubbed her back up and down with his palms, told her as best as he could without words that he was there for her, and waited patiently for several minutes until her voice returned to her. It was ridiculous to mourn without absolute cause, they both knew, but it was even more ridiculous to cave in now before the real battle was to start.

"I got it, Tony," she whispered after a sniffle. "I brought it back with me."

Tony noticed her abrupt adjustment in demeanor just by the change in her tone of voice, so he pulled back to stare at her face and searched her eyes for a response. She surreptitiously looked behind him and then around them, noticing that no one was particularly paying attention to them at the moment. She then stared back at Tony again, slowly pulled her left arm from around him and stealthily opened her left hand in between their chests. Tony looked down in between their bodies to see the contents of her hand, and when he acknowledged the item with a nod, she closed her hand again and then deposited the portable drive inside her bra.

"It's all that's left, and it's not updated. But it should be enough," she said in a soft voice.

"Enough for revenge," Tony whispered back, his eyes on her hazel orbs. "Enough to bring him down."

"And enough to get our son back," Pepper added, her eyes on his electric blue ones that she loved so much. And in the apparent calm she seemed to have at the moment despite the news of their fallen loved ones, her ears listened to what everyone was saying or were trying not to say, her heart beat rapidly at the notion of being in Tony's arms once more, and her mind plotted the many ways Victor von Doom was going to learn what it meant to harm the people she loved.

Everyone is going to pay. Every single one.

xxxXXXxxx

The suits of armor stored above them began exploding, one by one, causing the entire relic of a temple to shake and start to disintegrate to nothing but dust. The computers and servers hummed for the last time before they were short-circuited. The AI announced the successful progression of protocol Clean Slate and, a second later, a missile flew right in, separated Gene and Pepper with the power of its flight, and then dug itself deep underground.

Debris fell on them from every direction, bruising them and cutting their skin, and the moment before the missile exploded from the ground up, Gene barely had time to use one of his rings to pull back Pepper towards him, enclosing debris within them both, and then only just barely teleported out of the lab before it all turned to ash.

xxxXXXxxx

Pepper sat on the edge of the small bed where Tony laid, his eyes closed and his breathing even, dozed off some time after the IV line attached to the crux of his right elbow had been inserted in him. She ran her left hand over his face and through his hair, both of which were still dusty and bloodied. There had been no rest for him until now since yesterday, and after she and Gene had returned and he had worked with the Living Laser to get the entire B30 level back online, Gene had been ready for the blood transfusion he had needed. Maya had confirmed that Gene and Tony had the same blood type, and that Gene's half-alien genetic material would be expected to flush out any Extremis virus side-effects of the inventor's blood, so Tony had all but taken off his gory shirt and had offered his arm to the brunette.

It turned out that the room that Parks had left Tony and Maya in was not the only one for that floor. There were at least thirty other similar looking rooms throughout the basement, some larger and some smaller, but all connected to a main hall in the center area of the floor. The rooms included medical facilities, showers and bathrooms stalls, a small gym, a couple of fully-stocked kitchens and dining areas, a large weapons repository, and bedrooms filled with stacked bunk beds. The room Arthur had brought the inventor and the botanist to via the electrical sockets was the command center, and he had done so because every other room had already been filled with the other guests of the underground structure – and because Nick Fury had not wanted Tony to know who else was already on site.

Pepper's eyes shifted from staring at her husband to gazing at Gene, lying on the bed next to Tony's, and the guilt returned to her all over again. It did not matter how strong she knew Gene was, or how immortal he always claimed to be. When it came down to facing one of Doctor Doom's plans or antics, nothing one ever knew to be true about themselves made a difference at all. If Doom wanted you dead, you would be dead. The only questions to ask in such a situation were: how long would it take, and how painful would it be.

Despite this fact of life, she knew that he was going to be alright. She knew they were both going to be OK, but she was not sure if their other family members and friends were. The thing she hated more than seeing the people she cared about get hurt was to be the cause of it all. Gene had wanted to stay to watch over her, and then he had wanted them both to leave, and she had scoffed and shrugged him off, twice, and now he had been unconscious for several hours, with no sign of waking up any time soon.

"The rings will take over soon, and finish healing him," Maya's words announced her presence in the medical room before she began removing the IV line from Tony's arm. "He just needed a little boost and the transfusion was just that."

Pepper remained silent, watching Maya as she cleaned and covered Tony's arm with a bandage, returned it to rest on the bed, and then focused her attention on tending to Gene.

"You should both go get cleaned up," Maya said, her back to the redhead. "In about half an hour, you'll get all the answers you've been waiting for."

Pepper was taken aback by the statement but made sure her face remained as stoic as it could be.

"I'd say it's about fucking time, but that's something Tony would say," Pepper casually replied, and Maya simply shrugged.

"It wasn't my call to make, Pepper. Nothing of this was. It's never been my choice. Just like you, I didn't know I was a part of something greater until it hit me right in the face. And by then, all I could do was take it in stride."

Pepper narrowed her eyes at that, intrigued by the possible meaning of her statement, but bit her tongue to keep herself from asking what the true intent of her words had been. She was still more than just pissed off at the girl she had once felt guilty about betraying by sleeping with Tony on the same night of their supposed rushed wedding. At this point, Pepper would rather cut off her own tongue before she gave the woman any indication that she needed her help in any form.

"Where can we clean up? Or is that super-secret information, too?"

"There are some showers over there," Maya pointed to a corner of the medical room. "Spare clean clothes are in the cabinets."

Pepper glanced in the direction Maya was pointing, and before the need to bust open her little dark brown head took over her senses, the redhead gently shook her husband by his shoulders, hoping to get him to regain consciousness.

"Tony? Tony, it's done. Gene's gonna be fine. Tony, wake up."

Tony moaned lightly and his eyes blinked slowly a couple of times to allow them to adjust to the bright light above him. For a moment, he forgot where he was and what he was doing, but when his turned head stared at Maya's back and he then saw the IV line and other medical equipment surrounding him, his brain reconnected with the real world.

"Is that all he needs?" Tony pushed himself up by resting his upper body on his bent elbows and then gave a brief saluting nod to his wife. "Is he going to wake up soon?"

"I estimate that in a couple of hours or so," Maya replied. "But it can also be a few minutes, for all I know. It's hard to tell with him because of his Makluan composition. He's more difficult to predict than your Extremis."

"When will you know for sure that he'll be alright?" Tony inquired and slowly sat on the edge of the bed Pepper had just vacated, giving his body enough time to adjust for the reduced quantity of plasma in his veins.

"When he wakes up," Maya retorted, her back still to them even though she was not doing much doctoring on Gene at this point. "Like I just told your wife, you should go clean up and get ready for Fury's meeting at 1900 hours, sharp."

Pepper and Tony exchanged an apprehensive glance before the inventor stood up from the bed and Pepper surrounded the back of his waist with her left arm. He threw his right arm over her shoulders to help support his wobbly weight, and after his right hand linked with her right one, with slow steps they walked towards the shower room, not once looking back to stare at the shaking brunette, who felt as if the world was about to end. She already knew what Tony and Pepper were about to learn about themselves, and the moment she had most dreaded ever since Aldrich had tricked her into joining his and Doom's cause had finally arrived.

I'm sorry, Pepper. I'm sorry Tony, the brunette thought with closed eyes, knowing that there were not enough words in the entire universe to profusely and completely apologize for her actions. That there would also never be enough tears to shed for what she had done, and on top of it all: no way to turn back now.

xxxXXXxxx

She opened her eyes when she felt something humid graze her face. At first, she thought it might have been her tears, but when she opened her eyes to the absolute darkness surrounding her, she knew that what had woken her up was the least of her concerns. Then, hitting her like an anvil in freefall, Pepper remembered where she had last been… and wondered where she now was.

Am I dead? Oh, crap! Did I die?! Tony's gonna kill me if I did!

The irony of her worries made her scoff derisively, realizing how anger would be the last feeling Tony would experience if the temple exploding had indeed ended her life. The only anger he would ever feel would be towards himself, at letting her carry out her little plan that was perhaps doomed before it had gotten the chance to start.

"Doomed," Pepper said bitterly. "Doctor Doom."

It all came crashing back to her, the feelings of loathing she quickly harbored towards the cruel man that had taken her son away. Technically, it had been Maya who had carried out the deed, but it had been the Doctor himself who had planned it all out, set out the bounty for them, and had made years of their lives be the uncertain torture they had been.

If I'm not dead, I'll make him pay for it. For all of it!

Pepper thoughts of unbound revenge, however, were halted when she remembered she had not been the only one in the temple. She had brought a friend of hers, someone she considered one of her closest friends at that – despite the physical distance that was almost always present between them – and when she tried to move her body to look for him, she became shaken at realizing she was not on the ground.

I'm floating? Why… how… I'm floating?

Yes, she had to be dead.

She struggled to find some sort of balance, and as she did so, she felt relieved to somehow see that Gene was also floating nearby. She moved her arms as if she were swimming so she could reach him, and before she knew it she was levitating inches from him. His armor was shining brightly, and so were his rings, but for some odd reason, he was not moving or saying anything at all.

"Gene?" the redhead shook his armored face. "Gene, can you hear me?"

And when her hand reached down to grab his and her fingers brushed the rings, she felt an electric shock run through into her soul, leaving her unconscious for an unknown amount of time.

xxxXXXxxx

A few minutes had been the better estimate, and moments before the meeting was to start, Gene had woken up. It had not taken him long to clean up and find his bearings thanks to the power of the rings in full force, but mostly it had been due to his determination to right the wrongs he had been a witness of.

S.H.I.E.L.D. should have known better than to incur in his wrath, to use him as a tool for their fucked up greater purpose. The Mandarin now realized that not only had he been played like a harp; he had also become an unknowing partner in what he knew S.H.I.E.L.D. was yet to fully fathom they had unleashed onto the world.

As he currently walked towards B30's meeting room location, he had to keep a lid on the anger that was boiling within him, wanting to be let out in unspeakable ways upon the structure and on almost everyone inside of it. He should have known better than to trust Nick Fury and his group of secret agents, despite what he had been told was in the best interest of the world. He should have trusted his instincts and he should have warned Pepper of the danger that had befallen her, just like he had wanted to do so in the first place.

He should have never blindly followed the likes of someone who spied for a living.

He should have never allowed himself to put the life of the woman he loved in jeopardy.

Then again, he should have never allowed himself to fall in love with Pepper in the first place.

Even after all these years, and after knowing she was forever beyond his reach, his heart still yearned for her.

His fists were shaking in full blown rage, and he all but slammed open the double-doors to the room, startling everyone inside. His eyes scanned the small room from corner to corner, searching for the one face he wanted to find, and before he demanded to see the currently absent man with the eye patch, he was lightly pushed back by a warm body pressed against his.

"Gene, you're awake!" Pepper's muffled voice against his chest made his fury dissipate somewhat. Then, her giddiness coupled with her hopeful hazel eyes now staring up at him, made the Mandarin have to push back his ire for now. "I'm so happy I didn't kill you!"

"Pepper, please, don't be absurd," Gene's brow furrowed and even though he knew he should have pushed her away from him so as to not further call attention to themselves, he instead sighed, rolled his eyes, relented to her pleading eyes and then hugged her back. "It's OK. I'm alright. It was nothing."

"That's what everyone says," she gave him a half smile. "But they weren't there when it happened."

Gene's eyes found Tony's attentive ones, standing a few feet behind the redhead, and after a rather quick and silent exchange of thank you's, don't mention it's and fuck you too I still hate you's, the scientist and the half-Makluan settled their scores for the time being.

"Are you alright?" Gene asked as his eyes shifted from staring at Tony to staring at Pepper's shorter form. "Did you get hurt?"

"I'll survive," her smile was full now, "thanks to you. And I'm sorry for not listening to you."

The ginger added another hug and a kiss to his cheek to her statements before she took a step back and then returned to where Tony stood. Gene's eyes shifted left and right, and knowing better than before than to be standing close to the perpetrators of the mess they were now in, he opted to sit near the redhead and the blue-eyed boy, although not too close as to impose on their quick public display of affection.

I guess it'll have to wait, Gene thought of his bone to pick with Nick Fury, sensing that, in a few minutes, he was going to have a lot more reasons to beat the man to a pulp – and maybe even Tony Stark would gladly join him in the task, too.

Everyone in the room was silent for a moment, and despite only Pepper, Tony, Maria, Maya and Gene being there, it felt inhumanly stuffed. There were so many unresolved issues between all of them, so many loose ends that needed to be dealt with, that it was almost impossible to breathe. The air was thick with feelings of betrayal, deceit and lies, and the atmosphere only worsened to the point of becoming unbearable when Nick Fury walked inside. Although, when it was evident that he was being followed by none other than Howard Stark, the sensation in the air changed yet again.

"Dad?" Tony's eyes bugged open, and when Pepper turned around in place to see what her husband was having a difficult time believing, her eyes became as big with incredulity as his.

"Howard?" Pepper also asked, and before she could make her legs move to run towards her father-in-law, another familiar face appeared behind the elder Stark.

"Trish!"

And the line of unexpected guests did not stop there.

One by one, the people who Pepper and Tony had feared dead walked inside: Virgil, Diane, Jarvis, Bambi, Roberta, David, the entire Hogan family and then Rhodey himself.

"Dad!"

"Patricia!"

"Sweetie!"

"Kids!"

"Dudes!"

All uttered a word of surprise, of reinstated hope and affection. All of them ran towards the couple and met them halfway. Everyone hugged and cried and held one another with joy. Everyone kissed and thanked the heavens for being there.

Everyone, but James Rhodes.

The agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. stood still by the door, his hands fisted on his sides, and his eyes narrowed at the scene. It was not as if he was not glad to see his friends, to finally see them alive and well, but this reunion only served to remind him that his employer had lied to them all – including him. Nick Fury had allowed all of them to believe they were dead, way beyond their reach, and had let them bury them and mourn them. They had not been told of the ploy to fake their deaths until two weeks ago – when they had been forced to leave their homes and everything they owned, only to be all but imprisoned in Muir Island's underground mutant research complex, without having a say.

"Rhodes," Gene's curt salutation was met with an indifferent look from Rhodey. Rhodey then looked him up and down with distaste before he returned his attention to Nick Fury, silently telling him he was not off the hook yet. The moment he had finally seen the kind of man Fury truly was, had been the moment Rhodey had lost all respect for his leader. And once all of this was dealt with, once his friends and family were able to return to their normal lives devoid of worrying about being shot in the back by AIM, Doctor Doom, or any other enemy of them, Rhodey planned to quit the institution he had grown to despise as much as Tony and Pepper did.

Tony and Pepper: his brother from another mother and his sister from another mister, both of which were now staring directly at him.

"Rhodey?" Pepper said hesitantly, her hands cupped on her chest.

"Rhodey," Tony's uttering of his name was more a statement than a question, and without further ado, both he and the redhead all but ran to their friend.

Rhodey swallowed hard and let his legs take him to the eager ginger and inventor, and soon enough the three of them held each other as if their lives depended on it. There were no words said; just tears shed and bone-breaking embraces exchanged. It physically hurt Rhodey, nonetheless, how happy he was to be in their company again, and not one soul in this room would ever fathom the burden he had felt since learning of the explosion of their jet. He had let them out of his sight for mere weeks, and they had been taken against their will and presumed dead. He had failed to protect and watch over them, just as they had always made sure they did for him.

He believed that he almost did not deserve to be standing near them right now. He believed he deserved to be friendless until the end of his days.

"I'm so happy you're here, Rhodey," Pepper said, her hands wiping away tears from his face and hers. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

"And I thought I'd never see the day you didn't ask a million questions upon arrival," he teased her before he hugged her tightly, this time just her, and he kissed the side of her face. "I'm just kidding, Pepper. I missed you, too. So much."

The redhead chuckled in happiness at his words, and when Pepper and Rhodey finally separated, the two childhood friends stared at one another, but did not move. They had had no trouble hugging when Pepper had been in the midst of it, but now that it was just the two of them, Rhodey felt even more ashamed for not being there when they needed him. Unfortunately for him, Tony could see the guilt emanating from him, and after a quick shake of the head on the inventor's part, Tony ended up initiating an embrace that Rhodey tentatively returned.

"It's not your fault, man," Tony whispered to his friend. "You didn't know what Fury was capable of. You didn't know what he'd do to get his way."

"I should've known," Rhodey replied. "I fucking work for the man. I really should've known."

"It doesn't matter," Tony said as he pulled back and left his hands on Rhodey's shoulders. "What matters is that we all made it and that we're here now. What matters now is that my son is alive, Rhodey. We need to get him back. I need your help to get him back. We need to stop Doom."

Rhodey scoffed. "I was already going to help you, T, even if you didn't ask or didn't let me."

"We're all going to, Anthony," Howard began, hating to interrupt the tender moment between his son and his friend, but also knowing that there had been enough putting off. His eyes then landed on the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., the man he held solely responsible for the tears, sweat and blood everyone had already spilled, and in a tone that Tony had never ever heard coming from his father, the CEO of Stark International finished his thought: "We're going to stop Doctor Doom from taking over the world, as soon as Nick tells us the truth, for once."

xxxXXXxxx

With everyone still present and scattered throughout the meeting room, Nick Fury prepared to give the explanations at long last. He had been mentally preparing himself for this moment for years, but now that it was finally here, even the battle-hardened S.H.I.E.L.D. director felt anxiety. It was like he was back in school, about to read an essay out loud to the rest of the overly critical class.

Everyone was looking at him as he stood in front of the room next to a large screen where he and Maya would be projecting images to go along with their explanations. He noticed Rhodey standing at attention while in his superior's presence, but a look of pure contempt coated his face. As such, Fury felt a measure of shame for a moment.

"At ease, Rhodes," Fury said to his underling. "You are here as a friend of the Starks, not as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." At hearing this, Rhodey visibly relaxed and took a more casual stance, glad that he did not have to follow decorum and openly show respect to a man that he no longer had any respect for.

"The first thing I think we should be informed of, Nick," Howard Stark began on behalf of the group, "is how Doctor Doom even came back. Tony, Gene and I all witnessed him being pulled out of our reality, years ago."

Fury nodded and pulled a small remote out of his pocket, activating the screen behind him, which showed a view of a craggy, snowy mountainscape.

"After the arrival of the Makluan ship over Manhattan," Fury began, "Earth's atmosphere was host to several extra-dimensional phenomena for several weeks. Most were small and unnoticeable, but a few were large enough for something to have come through. In one case, something did. What you are about to see was captured by a S.H.I.E.L.D. spy-cam positioned in the mountains of Latveria, twelve days after the Makluan invasion was thwarted."

Fury clicked a button on the remote, and the image on the screen subtly changed to show wind blowing away snow from the tips of the mountains, like a fine mist. After a moment, a flash of light in the clear sky caused everyone watching the screen to blink a few times, and then a hole opened in the sky, like a great wound being ripped into flesh.

With awe and horror on each face, the viewers witnessed a long, dark shape fall from within the hole and crash onto the mountainside, thrashing wildly and kicking up great clouds of snow and rocky debris as smoke curled from its elongated form. The portal it had fallen from closed again after a few seconds, but the great creature, resembling a giant centipede at least a hundred fifty feet long, remained on the frozen ground.

Gene Khan and the two Stark men felt shivers run down their spine as they remembered the last time they had beheld the evil entity known as Yogthulu. The beast was a nightmarish monstrosity from beyond the cosmos Earth was part of. But despite its terrible nature, everyone watching the clip could see that something was very wrong with the creature.

After a final tremor ran along its multi-limbed form, the alien centipede finally stopped thrashing altogether, and its body settled into the snow. Smoke continued to curl from its body for nearly thirty seconds, before a massive explosion erupted from the approximate middle of the creature's length. The corpse was blasted in two separate directions as a cloud of extremely dark smoke engulfed the area where the explosion had come from.

After a few seconds, a small figure flew up out of the smoke, hanging in the air directly above the toxic cloud. Sunlight glinted off of metal, and arcs of green-tinged electricity shot out of it in all directions. After hovering in the air for a few more seconds, the small, human-sized figure zoomed off, out of the frame of the screen, which then went black as the clip ended.

Everyone who had been told the story of what had happened during the battle for the ninth Makluan ring in Latveria knew what they had just witnessed: Doctor Doom had finally triumphed over Yogthulu and returned to Earth.

Tony did the math in his head, then looked to Pepper, who was staring right back at him, an expression of both sympathy and guilt on her face as she knew what her husband was thinking.

Twelve days after the Makluan were beaten. Twelve days. Pepper was already gone by then. Abducted. I… we all thought she had gone to California with Loretta at that time. I was too busy moping around, missing her, feeling sorry for myself. I wasn't paying attention to what was going on in the outside world. Doom returned to Earth right under my nose and I completely missed it!

Pepper squeezed his hand, telling him without words to not blame himself for any of this, while also fighting her own feelings of blame toward herself. It was because of her that Tony had not realized that the most dangerous enemy he had ever faced had come back, and begun plotting a slow, personal downfall of the young inventor that would tear his entire world apart. Literally.

"I believe that answers your question, Howard," Fury stated with a deadpan tone. "Now, before any other questions are asked, I think some background information is needed to clear some things up."

After the more perturbing than reassuring explanation, Nick finally gave Maya Hansen the all-clear to bring their guests up to speed. The heroes' friends and families had been kept in the dark for weeks, up until they had been brought to the island. Even now, after having been confined to their quarters for the past fifteen days, no one had relayed to them the details of why they were here – of why Doom wanted all of them dead – and of why Tony and Pepper's lives were hanging by a thread.

"Ronnie Hartford," Maya began without further ado, black and white images of a man projecting on the screen behind her, "was born in 1915. He was a brilliant scientist with a promising career in neurobiology, inspired by a neurological illness he had been born with. He attended Harvard University in 1933, but he died of his incurable disease in 1935."

Maya pressed a button on the small pointer remote he had in her hands, and the screen changed to show the image of another man. "Damien Grant, graduate student at Yale University in 1941, took on Hartford's work and continued his research. He made great leaps in the understanding of how the brain interacts with the body to heal itself, and he was even up for a Nobel Prize for it, but the joining of the U.S. in World War II halted his research. He died in a car crash, months later."

Tony and Pepper eyed each other, wordlessly exchanging the question that was on everyone's mind.

What is all this, and why are we listening to it?

Although Fury noticed the dwindling of their patience, he encouraged Maya to continue relaying the information in the way they had planned.

"In 1965, Greg Clark, a professor at MIT, discovered that the connection between the central nervous system and the ability to regenerate damaged parts of the body lied in a dormant part of the human brain. Digging up the work started by Hartford and furthered by Grant, Professor Clark devoted the next ten years of his life to searching for a way to awaken the potential of this area of the brain in hopes he could find the cure to all illnesses – to all conditions – including lost limbs and deficiencies in brain development. However, Professor Clark's lab burned to the ground, with him inside, in what was later claimed to be arson. His research was forever lost," Maya eyed Maria Hill. "Or so it was thought until someone put it back together to continue its development."

"In 1980," Maria began and took over the rotation of images on the projector, "S.H.I.E.L.D. sent out an invitation to scientists of all fields, asking them use Clark's research to recreate the Super Soldier serum that had created Captain America. At this point, S.H.I.E.L.D. had no idea that Steve Rogers was alive, buried in the Arctic Circle. The intent was simply to recover the serum's composition – to be able to bring it back to life, so that it could later be –"

"Weaponized," Tony said, eyes glaring at Nick and his arms crossed over his chest. "You wanted to recreate it to use it as a weapon."

"Says the man who used it to fix his heart so that he could continue being a weapon," Nick deadpanned.

"Anyway," Maya continued, hoping her interruption would attenuate any argument that could have escalated between Tony and Nick. "Unbeknownst to S.H.I.E.L.D., and at around the same time, a geneticist and long-time biomolecular engineer had been toying with his own version of the serum. For years, he'd been attempting to create a virus capable of mutating the internal composition of a human to battle anything that threatened the safety of the individual. The idea was that the virus could form a symbiotic relationship with the host, forcing them to work together to boost the immune system and team-up to keep the host body free of sickness, and even reverse the effects of damage already done. This scientist had been testing the several iterations of the virus on himself, for many, many years, and the virus appeared to work perfectly on him, but only for a couple of decades at a time."

Maya pressed a button on the remote, and several versions of Extremis strands appeared on screen.

"The virus, as successful as each new dose was for him, however, was incomplete. It wasn't even stable, and it only worked on him for certain periods of time. He'd been trying for years to find the perfect combination to flawlessly merge it with a human being, bond it at such a subatomic level and in their DNA that no one would be able to tell the difference between a regular human and an infected one. He tried and tried, and failed and failed: the bond just didn't last long and it always ended up killing the host. Then, one day, he decided to take his experiment to the next level, and he decided to let nature do what he had failed to do."

For some unknown reason, a chill ran down Tony's spine. He was not a geneticist, or even a biologist, but as a scientist and a researcher, he had an idea of where Maya's conversation was leading them to.

"Extremis," Maya said as she showed the genetic sequence of the virus on the screen. "That was the name he gave it – at least in his mind, for a while. At least while he used his own natural reproductive abilities in an effort to create specimens that were just like him."

"You mean," Pepper shook her head. "You mean this guy started… he… he started…"

"Having kids," Maya nodded and shrugged. "Or at least trying. The women he quietly impregnated didn't come to term."

"Quietly? Did… did he rape them?" Rhodey asked, his head shaking in disbelief.

"No," Maya replied. "He just didn't tell them what he was, or about Extremis, or what he did. He just… slept with them, and then watched them have a miscarriage that led to their deaths, gathering data as he moved from host to host."

"And nobody got suspicious?" Tony asked. "I mean… didn't anyone ask why these women were dying left and right?"

"He was clever. He never gave his real name. He never looked the same. And he never chose specimens that lived closed by."

"Specimens?" Pepper spat in anger. "Don't you mean: the WOMEN he KILLED?"

"To him they weren't," Maya responded. "And this is his story. Not mine."

Although at some point, it did become mine,the brunette thought.

"Anyway," she continued after no one else interrupted her and before her thoughts got the best of her composure. "When young women continued to die, he tried older ones, women who had already given birth, believing that they were more capable of coming to term. He was wrong."

"So he continued to kill them, too?" Howard asked, repulsed by the atrocities he had to hear to get to the bottom of it all. "Just as if they were cattle and not human beings?!"

"He stopped, for a while," Maya said, her eyes fixated on Howard Stark. "He met a woman he thought would be the perfect match, and he courted her for a long time while conducting experiments on her. The woman wasn't interested in him at all, though, and she then met someone else. A man that she eventually married. A man that later on became the employer of this madman. A man that hired this scientist to work for him at his lab, impressed by how much knowledge of neuroscience and robotics this man had."

"Aldrich," Howard mumbled and everyone stared at him. "Aldrich Killian experimented on Maria?"

Maya bit down her bottom lip before her head hung, knowing her silence was all the answer he needed for that. Both Tony and Howard found a place to sit down, and both of their wives held them tightly from the side. This was something neither of them had expected – the shock of finding out the common woman in their lives had been so close to the man that had taken Tony's son: a man that had been hiding in plain sight for years, working for them and saying hi to them in the halls.

"That wasn't all," Maya continued. "From what he learned from experimenting on Maria Stark, he was finally able to father a child. He branded this child Specimen 1, as it was the first one to survive the pregnancy and birth. He analyzed Specimen 1 at birth, and after feeling excited with the possibility of using the baby's DNA to create a perfect Extremis virus, he was disappointed to see that the specimen had no traceable strands of Extremis, so he changed the name to Specimen 0. He believed that the baby had survived because Extremis had not been passed along to it, and thus he labeled Specimen 0 as a failure. To prevent his research from coming out, though, he killed the woman who had given birth to his baby, just as he had killed all the other women that had come close to discovering who he was. Just as he later killed Maria Stark when she, by accident, found out about what he did."

Tony felt the world around him spin uncontrollably, and for a moment he feared he was going to throw up. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs that Maya was wrong, that she had no idea what she was talking about. Yet, the circumstances of his mother's death had always been sketchy at best. She had been a very healthy woman, and one day she had just suffered a fatal stroke, right smack in the middle of SI, and nothing the paramedics had done had been able to revive her failed brain and heart.

If it had not been for Pepper's arms around him and her whispering words in his ear, he was not certain he would have made it past Maya's last statement just now.

Howard, however, was a different story. He stood up from the chair he was in, turned around to face the wall and covered his eyes with his right hand. His left hand was still being held by Trish, but he was nowhere near calmed enough by his wife's attempts at soothing him. He felt guilty at being so distant with her at this moment, but he had no idea how he was expected to process something like this amidst the chaos that already plagued his son.

"Specimen 0," Maya continued, "went in his books as a massive fiasco, so he continued to test on himself and in a lab rather than on other people. He took advantage of his position at Stark International and worked nonstop to find the answer he was looking for. One day, he got the invitation from S.H.I.E.L.D., asking him to look into the Super Soldier serum, and he gladly accepted. He gave S.H.I.E.L.D. an untreated form of Extremis, and partnered up with them to find the perfect bond. Agent Mallen was another failure, but then Tony Stark came along."

Maya pulled up an image of the exact sequence Tony had used to create his version of Extremis next to an image of the raw form of the virus strand. "Tony's strand of Extremis is unique. Unable to be replicated, for some unknown reason, no matter how hard we've tried. Extremis seems to affect people in different ways, all rather unpredictably so. And in some cases, it also tends to remain inactive until the host needs it to survive."

"Jimmy," Pepper covered her mouth with her hands for a moment. "He had Extremis, all this time. But it was dormant, it was… it was…"

"It was never dormant in James, but it was untraceable. It's embedded in his brain, just like Aldrich had always wanted it to be. It's only evident in his DNA when the virus wants it to be. It's completely undetectable otherwise. Extremis and James are one. There's no shutting it down. No stopping it. Just like it became the case with Specimen 0 once the dormancy ended. All of this was unknown to Killian for many years until he came across the specimen again, a few years ago. Specimen 0 had to struggle a lot to have Extremis awaken, and it still turns on and off. But, in James, it's as natural as breathing to him."

"So, when you… when you tried to kill my son," Pepper sighed, "Extremis kept him alive."

"Yes," Maya replied. She then swapped images yet again, and this time it showed Tony's Extremis strand compared to a DNA strand the inventor had never seen before, and that to him it looked like normal genetic material.

"The unexpected activation of Specimen 0's strand was the key that unlocked all of this. Specimen 0 grew up," the second image on the screen lit up, "with no noticeable side-effects at all, living life as normally as one could expect, plus or minus some unexpected perks. And, as fate would have it, Specimen 0 met the carrier of a unique Extremis strand," On the screen, one of the strands of Extremis then lit up as well, "a strand that was not intended to be – a strand that had been the result of a lot of desperation and pure luck: a strand that cannot be replicated. Before learning that Specimen 0 really did have Extremis after all, Aldrich had named this new carrier as Specimen 1"

Maya gave them all a moment to process this information before she continued to speak.

"Specimen 0 was the result of Killian's meddling and years of faulty experiments. Specimen 1 was created outside of Aldrich's lab and control. Specimen 0-1, however," a third DNA strand image appeared on the screen, right below the other two strands, and connecting arrows joined said strands to the third one, "was the perfect amalgamation of Extremis and a human being. It was the result of the bond between 0 and 1. This is the strand both Aldrich and Doctor Doom had been searching for, albeit for different reasons and the one they have been unable to create in lab. He, Specimen 0-1, is the one they have both been waiting for."

Pepper opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Her hazel orbs searched Maya's and both women locked eyes. The ginger's mouth was dry and her entire body was shaky, and before she could find the courage to ask what was in everyone's mind, Tony beat them to the punch.

"What…" he held Pepper's left hand. "What are you trying to say?"

Maya pressed a button on the remote and the slide changed to showing the images of all the men she had spoken about, all on one screen. "That Ronnie Hartford, Damien Grant, Greg Clark and Aldrich Killian, are one and the same!"

She changed to the next slide, and images of the reported obituaries of the scientists appeared. "That they're the SAME man," she pointed to the screen with her left index finger, her eyes on the redhead at all times, "faking his death when Extremis failed him, re-dosing himself and then continuing the work of his previous life! Over and over and over again! With different names and in different places, but it was always him!"

The next slide showed a recent picture of baby James being carried by Aldrich himself. "That Killian found in Specimen 0-1 the cure to his disease. That because of Aldrich Killian's and James Howard Stark's similar DNA composition, Aldrich is now more powerful, dangerous and deranged than he has ever been!"

"W-wait," Rhodey tripped over his words. "You don't… you're not saying that… that…"

"Yes. I'm saying that Jill Hayes is the name of the woman who gave birth to Specimen 0. I'm saying that Jill Hayes's daughter is right here, standing before us. And that… that…"

Maya paused for a moment to take in a deep breath; most of her energy already spent, and readied for what was to come. "And that Aldrich Killian," she placed her palm on her chest, "my stepfather," she then pointed towards the ginger, "is Pepper's biological father. Pepper is Specimen 0. She's Aldrich Killian's only surviving child."

Pepper's mouth hung and she stood still as a rock, almost forgetting how to breathe. Unintelligible sounds that were meant to be anger-filled words escaped her, and no matter how much she gulped and licked her lips, her typically responsive tongue had turned to lead and refused to work. She made an effort to make her thoughts known in the clearest and loudest of ways, but her brain and her mouth refused to work in tandem. In the end, after she felt the eyes of everyone, including her husband's, stare at her with shock, from her mouth surfaced the only word that at the moment made any sense to her.

"No."

The first articulation of the word sounded like a whisper, a soft plea, as if someone had just asked her if the sum of one and one equaled three.

"No."

The second voicing of the same word was short but louder, and with an intonation that one would use as if a child had tried to stick their fingers into the electric sockets, only to be seen by a caring adult.

"NO."

The third time was not the charm, and even if her voice had been raised, her emotions were yet to be conveyed in a way that left her satisfied. It was not all she wanted to say, and it was not the tone she wanted to use, but the questions and responses that were pushing and shoving to come out of her were so overpowering that only the one word kept coming out instead.

"No. NO. NO! NO!"

"Yes," Maya said, tears now barely at bay, the passion in which she had stated her previous words still very much alive. "YES, Pepper! You are Specimen 0! You are the daughter of Aldrich Killian! And yes: you have Extremis in you! That's how you survived the visit to the Antarctic! That's why James has it in him, too! That's why Tony couldn't stay away from you! Because his version and your version of the virus can never be apart! You are the reason why Doom will take over the world! Because you exist, because you didn't die before birth, like you were supposed to! You're the reason why everything has gone to hell! You're the reason why everyone here is going to lose everything and everyone they care about! You're the reason why my mother is as dead as yours!"

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Tony spat, stood in front of Pepper, and pointed a finger towards the brunette. "That's enough out of you! I'm sick of this! I'm sick of listening to this bullshit! Pepper's fine! Pepper is NOT who you say she is!"

"But she is," Black Widow said as soon as she entered the room and stood by the door, Clint Barton standing right next to her, shoulder to shoulder.

"Miss Hansen is not our only source of information in Latveria. One of our own has been infiltrating Doom for years," Fury revealed, motioning with his head toward the pair.

"One of your – what?" Tony was flabbergasted, and Pepper was still unable to stop shaking uncontrollably and put together coherent words. "Who? You?" he pointed towards Natasha, but she shook her head.

"Not me, Stark. All the credit goes to my protégé."

"Protégé? You mean… a student? You've been teaching someone your skills as a spy?" Tony asked, frowning with uncertainty.

Black Widow nodded at his statement. She then stepped away from Hawkeye, who also stepped back from Natasha, revealing the third person standing right behind them, who in turn stepped forward into view of everyone in the room. The newcomer was wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform and looked very uncomfortable about being in the room, and with good reason, considering the reaction to their reveal.

Every pair of eyes widened, every jaw dropped, every pair of lungs took in a sharp gasp of air. While the older members of the group were understandably shocked by this development, the five youngest occupants of the room were completely astonished and dumbfounded. Happy Hogan found himself speechless for the first time in his life. Rhodey was utterly thrown for a loop that he had never been made aware that he was essentially coworkers with Fury's latest spy. Gene Khan was filled with more rage than ever at the secrets General Fury had been keeping from him.

Tony and Pepper squeezed each other's hands even tighter, their breaths hitched in their throats at the completely unexpected development. They could not even look at each other, could not take their eyes off of the uniformed agent standing before them who had been secretly gathering information on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D. in order to help the two of them get through the ordeal ahead.

Every voice in the room was stunned into absolute silence, and every pair of eyes gazed in astounded wonder…

…upon the nervous and anxious-looking form of Whitney Stane.

---

A/N: Just so you guys know, what you have just read has always been the plan. Ever since I sat down and typed the first line of the Prologue to The Last Month, we have been building towards these last two chapters. Now you know how high I've lifted the anvil, waiting for just this moment to finally drop it.

And hey, fun little thing here for you: my hubby, Teen Tyrant, actually took the themes of these last few chapters and worked it into the lyrics for the song Firework by Katy Perry. Just something to get stuck in your head, like it happened to me ;)

Boom, boom, boom!
The Intruder's really Doom, Doom, Doom!
He's standing right there next to you, you, you!
But you can't tell 'cause he's see-through, through, through!
You're reading the Last Chroooo-nicle!
So great it's like a miiiii-racle!
Make's you wanna go "Aw, aw, aw!"
'Cause Pepperony's all "Aw, aw, aw!"
And that's why I married him!