Annnd we're back with another chapter. I know there isn't much as far as "excitement" yet, but I love building on the relationship between Tony and Tessa! I'm here to toss out that mandatory disclaimer (yet again) that I hold no rights over Marvel and to send you on your way to the reading! Hope you like it! Xoxo-NickyLynn
"No." Tessa said with a fervent shake of her head.
"No? What do you mean no?" Tony asked her, sure she would have eagerly agreed.
"I mean this," she began, tossing her arm out in the direction of the holographic image. "is madness."
Tony let out a sigh. "You said it yourself that one day I would realize I was capable of changing the world. This is how I change it." He told her.
"I meant change it by…by I don't know….solving world hunger." She supplied, tossing her hands up in the air. "Not with whatever this is." She said, motioning once again to the display. Tony had insisted that she come over in the early hours of the morning, eager to show her what he had been working on. As she sat staring at the designs J.A.R.V.I.S had pulled up, she couldn't help but wonder if Tony's time in captivity actually had driven him mad.
"Tessa, this could push Stark Industries into a whole new direction. Hell, it could push the world into a new direction. For the first time in forever I feel like….I feel like I'm meant for this." He told her, and Tessa could hear how serious he was about this by the ferocity he spoke with. "I'm not asking permission. I don't even need your help…..but I'm asking for it anyways, because I would really like for you to have my back on this." He said in finality.
Tessa drew in a deep breath as she crossed her arms. She looked from Tony's imploring face back to the image of the exo-suit. Tony wanted to develop on the type of suit he had used in order to garner his freedom in the desert. He wanted to construct a metal suit capable of going after men like the ones who had taken him. He wanted to create a shell of protection, strong enough to give him superior defense in any situation, but the suits main functions were offensive. Hell, Tony Stark wanted to be a damn vigilante. And that worried Tessa immensely.
"Tony, I made a promise to keep you safe. How the hell do you expect me to do that when you want to take on any man pointing a gun in the wrong direction?" she asked with a shake of her head. "If you do this….mark my words Tony, unbridled strength will only call for challenge. You will paint yourself with a target larger than the world has ever seen." She told him, trying to make him understand just how dangerous of a game he was playing.
"So, we should avoid challenge and submit to the reign of our suppressors because we fear to be shaken out of our comfort zone? I'm sorry, didn't you charge head-first into a war with your brother to fight Nazis?" he asked her then, his voice clipped.
Tessa's jaw tightened as painful memories washed over her. "And look where that's gotten me." She bit out, hoping he could see that her story was just evidence of all the ways things could go horribly wrong when you are just trying to do what you think is right. "Look," she began with a sigh. "I'm not saying no one shouldn't stand against adversary, but why does it have to be you? If anything happens to you-" she began before he cut her off.
"I never asked for your protection, Tess!" he said, voice ringing off the walls around them. A breath of silence passed between them. "I'm not a kid anymore, Tess. And I don't need your protection….I just need your support." He said, his voice dropping back down as he pleaded with her.
Tessa looked at him then, and finally let herself see him as the man he had grown to be. Not the child she had wanted to keep protected from the world. Not the boy who had lost his family. Not the young man who had been stumbling through life. But the man who was capable of taking care of himself and making decisions without her constant guidance. She knew he was going to follow this path with or without her approval, and the only thing she could do was be there by his side as he faced whatever future he chose to walk down.
"Okay." She finally relented with a sigh, running a hand down her face. "I'm with you Tony." She told him, eliciting a wide smile from him. "But you've got to do something for me first." She said.
"Anything." He responded instantly.
"You've got to let me look at that thing in your chest. I can smell burning wires and you can't very well go save the world if you're in the middle of cardiac arrest." She said coming to a stand.
Tony looked down at his chest, before taking in a deep breath, smelling the faint traces of the burning wires for the first time. "That might be a good idea." He said in agreement. "I've been working on a replacement anyways."
So, Tessa got to work setting up the heart monitor she had acquisitioned after finding out about Tony's very prominent heart problem. She attached the leads to the device before instructing Tony to sit down in the reclined chair she was wheeling the monitor over to. Tony dropped down onto the chair before pulling off his shirt. Tessa took the leads into her hand, moving to Tony's side as she began attaching them to the appropriate spots around his torso. She switched the machine on and watched the monitor light up and begin displaying his steady heartbeat. She moved back next to him, drawing in a steadying breath as she stared down at the device. "You ready?" she asked him, looking up to his nervous face.
"Just try not to break my heart, Doc." He said jokingly, though by his increasing heartrate she could tell he was, in fact, not as calm on the inside as he presented on the outside.
"Just try and hold still for me." She said as she got to work. She carefully reached forward and latched her fingers around the rim of the old power unit. She gave it a twist and a gentle tug until she felt it come loose in her hold. She began lifting it out of the metal chamber, a small amount of smoke drifting out of the hole as she began pulling it free. Once it was out enough, she moved it to the side so she could peek underneath it.
Once she looked inside, she could see the issue causing the problem. "There's an exposed wire that came loose from the base of the power cell." She said, looking up at Tony, who was staring up at the ceiling, trying to keep his breathing even. "It's making contact with the cell wall and causing it to short circuit."
"Well, good thing I've got this handy." Tony said, lifting up the new power source. "Can you get it out?"
"Yeah, might want to take a breath." She said as she finished pulling out the old device detaching it from the base with a sharp tug. She turned, setting it on the small table next to her before looking down into the chamber at the unruly wire. She drew in her own breath and held it as she carefully slid her hand inside his chest, cringing when it made contact with the liquid within. "Oh that's gross." She commented as her hand slide deeper into the thick, warm goo.
"That would be the inorganic plasmic discharge from the device." He told her.
"Yeah, well it smells like something crawled into your chest and died." She said as the smell hit her nostrils, causing them to crinkle up. In all her years of medical work, this was by far the strangest thing she had ever performed. She fished around in the plasma until she found the wire, wrapping her fingers around it. She began pulling it up, careful not to let it touch the cell walls, but it stopped mid-way up, getting caught on something. "It's stuck." She told him with a frustrated sigh.
"Just give it a yank, it should come loose." He instructed, his chest rising up and down in deep breaths.
Tessa pried on the wire harder and nearly jumped a foot into the air when the wire came free, but the force of her pulling sent her hand and the wire connecting with the metal wall. Tony let out a yelp as a course of energy was sent through his muscles. The heart monitor let out a series of loud and rapid beeping, the waves of the heart rhythm going erratic. "Oh God I'm sorry!" she told him, her fingers beginning to shake inside the hole.
"It's okay." He said, out of breath. "Just like playing Operation, right?" he joked as Tessa let out a breath and steadied herself again. She continued bringing the wire up and out of his chest, the slime falling from it as she lifted it into the air.
"Okay, now when you pull it out, make sure you don't pull out the…" he began as Tessa finished pulling the wire out, a magnet swinging from the end of it. "Magnet." He finished saying.
The heart monitor began going erratic again as Tessa realized she had made a mistake. "Why wouldn't you tell me that before I started pulling?!" she yelled frantically, realizing she had just pulled out the one thing keeping the pieces of shrapnel from lodging further into his heart.
"Well, I didn't think you would just yank it out." He told her, with wide eyes.
"You told me to yank it out!" she defended, dropping the ruined part on the table next to the old power cell. "Quick, give me the new one!" she told him, reaching down to take the new power cell from his grasp.
Tony handed it over to her and she quickly, but carefully, guided the wires down into his chest. Her fingers brushed against the base of the cell chamber as she searched for the depressions to connect the wires into. "Now, make sure you-" Tony began as she found the spot she was looking for and pressed the end of the wires into the space with a click. Tony let out a startled yelp as the new power connected into the mechanism and powered into life. Tessa finished pressing the new unit into his chest, twisting and locking it into place as she let out a relieved sigh.
"That wasn't so hard." Tony said, letting out a breath of his own. "That was fun, right?"
Tessa looked down at her slick hands and back up to Tony's face. "I think we have drastically different opinions on what constitutes as fun." She told him seriously. Tony started laughing as he took in her concerned face, and Tessa knew he was okay. "I don't ever, ever want to stick my hands back in there." She said, grabbing a towel off of the table and began wiping the gross, smelly goo from her hands.
Tony's laugher subsided as he looked up at her more seriously. "Thank you, Tess. I don't know what I would do without you." He said seriously.
She looked down at him then, casting him a warm smile. "Same, kid. So do me a favor and try to avoid having a heart attack. I'd like you to stick around for a while longer yet." She said, placing her hand over the reactor in his chest.
She dropped her hand as Tony pushed himself up, grabbing hold of the towel in her other hand, using it to wipe up the plasma that had seeped onto his chest. Tessa lifted the old reactor from the table behind her, studying it. "What do you want done with this?" she asked him.
"Destroy it. Incinerate it. Whatever you want." He responded, coming to a stand.
"You don't want to keep it?" she asked him.
"I've been called many things in my life. Nostalgic has never been one of them." He responded as he reached over and grabbed his shirt, pulling it back over his head.
Tessa looked down at the device, rolling it between her fingers. While Tony wasn't one for nostalgia, Tessa couldn't help but feel an attachment to the machinery. What she held in her hands had been his savior when she couldn't be. It had kept him alive and brought him back to her and as she stood there staring at it, she just couldn't bring herself to toss it aside like garbage.
"Come on, we have work to do." Tony called over to her as he made his way back across the workshop, directing her back to the previous train of thought that they had been on before the impromptu heart surgery. And so, they got to work.
They spent the next few weeks designing and building Tony's mechanical suit. They put together the limb prototypes. They worked out the kinks in the connecting mechanisms. They figured out how to relay the thrusters through the metal, without causing too much heat output inside. The mechanical end of things was the easy part. The hard part was trying to figure out the control centers.
The thrusters Tony had wanted to infuse into the feet were a task that took up a great deal of their time and energy. They could relay the power into them, but being able to control the power output of the thrusters themselves was incredibly more difficult. After they had finished putting together the feet of the suit, Tony had put them on and was ready to test them out. Trial and error, as he referred to it. Tessa was hesitant but set up the camera and helped him prepare for the test, none the less.
"Okay, let's do this right." Tony said, walking onto the blast pad they had laid out in the center of the shop.
"You're sure about this?" Tessa asked him, for what felt like the hundredth time.
"Absolutely." Tony said with a wide smile. "Start mark. Half a meter and back and center." He said, stepping into place. He took in a deep breath, looking around the area to make sure things were all set. "Dummy, you're on standby for fire safety." He said to his robotic helping hand that he had made as one of his first creations. "Tessa you're on medical duty." He said, nodding towards her.
"Oh, I'm on I-told-you-so duty." She threw back at him, adjusting the camera to make sure Tony was in center of the frame.
"Alright, activating hand controls." He said as they powered into life. He spread out his feet into a more braced stance and he drew in a few more steadying breaths. "We're gonna start off nice and easy. We're gonna see if ten percent thrust capacity achieves lift." He said, bracing himself. Tessa held her breath as she watched him nervously. "And three…two…one."
Suddenly Tony went flying through the air and he was sent slamming into the concrete ceiling behind him with a loud boom that sent sparks flying out around him. Tessa let out a yelp of surprise as she watched him hit the ceiling before falling to the floor with a loud groan. "Tony!" she yelled, rushing over to him. She ran over and found him laying on his back, looking dazed and confused, but otherwise okay. Dummy then chose that moment to douse Tony in a thick layer of fire depressant. Tessa looked down at Tony's foam-covered body and couldn't stop the laugh that erupted from her chest. She laughed so hard that she ended up doubled-over, holding her side as the muscles constricted in pain.
"Are you alright?" she asked after she had regained a semblance of control over her laughing and had helped him back up to his feet, her face still lit up with an amused grin.
"Don't say it." He told her in annoyance, trying to brush the white foam from his sore body.
Tessa couldn't stop the smirk that drew up her lips. "I told you so." She said anyways.
"Just needs a little fine tuning is all." Tony said, refusing to admit the test had been a failure.
Tessa rolled her eyes at him as she helped wipe a glob of fire depressant off of his forehead. "No, what you need is something to help stabilize the thrust, so you don't slam into the ceiling again." She said in refute.
Tony looked past her, thinking the idea over in his head. "That could work." He said after a moment.
So, that's what they worked on next. They spent the next few days working on incorporating stabilizers into both of the hand mechanisms, giving him balance and control over where the thrust of his feet sent him. Tony drew up the designs and Tessa helped him put them together. They were working on attaching the actual stabilizer to the arm mechanism when Pepper had come down into the workshop to interrupt them. Tony's arm was in the middle of the two parts of the arm chamber, so they knew the specifications they had to work with, as Tessa worked on screwing them into place.
Tony looked up from where he had been fidgeting with the wires of the stabilizer as Pepper unlocked the door using the keypad and walked in. "I've been buzzing you, haven't you been listening?" Pepper asked as she walked up to the pair.
"Yeah, tighten that there." Tony had finished instructing Tessa before looking up at Pepper again. "What's up?" he asked her.
"Obidiah's upstairs." She told Tony with a sigh. "What do you want me to tell him?" she asked.
"Oh, good. I'll be right up." He told her.
"Alright." Tessa said as she finished with her last screw. "All set." She said, stepping back and dropping the tool back down on the table.
Tony lifted his arm up, testing the weight of it. "Feels good." He said, straightening out his arm.
"I thought you were done making weapons." Pepper said, looking over at the device in question.
"I am." Tony said, looking over at her briefly before looking back down at his arm. "This is a flight stabilizer. It's completely harmless." He explained.
"Well, I wouldn't-" Tessa began to say before Tony activated the device and it let out a large burst of power that sent him flying backwards, crashing into the a toolbox and falling to the floor. Pepper let out a scream and covered her ears as Tessa watched Tony inadvertently send himself hurdling through the air again.
"I wasn't expecting that." Tony said from the ground, out of breath.
Tessa looked down at his sprawled out form, surrounded by the tools he had knocked over and smirked. "Do I need to get Dummy on fire stand-by again?" she asked him as he pushed himself back up off the floor.
Dummy, from his spot near Tony, activated upon hearing his name and swung his arm around towards Tony. "Don't you dare." Tony ordered the robot, pointing a warning finger in it's direction.
Tessa helped slip the device off of Tony after he got back up and carefully set it back down on the table. "You go take care of Obidiah and I'll take care of….this." she said, looking over at the mass of tools spread out across the floor.
Tony followed Pepper out of the workshop and Tessa got to work picking up the mess. After about only ten or so minutes, Tony came storming back in as she finished picking up the last of the tools. She lifted a brow at his upset face as she sat herself down at the workbench again. Tony came over, taking the seat across from her, before holding out one of the two large slices of pizza in his hands. "Hungry?" he asked her.
Tessa took the food from his outstretched hand, taking a bite of it as she studied him, while he ate his own slice. "How'd it go with Obidiah?" she asked, knowing it couldn't have been good based on his sour mood.
Tony let out a scoff. "The shareholders are filing an injunction. They're claiming I have P.T.S.D."
Tessa stopped chewing. "You can't be serious." She said in disbelief.
"As the plague. Seems like they're more than a little upset with the revenue loss." He told her as he continued to chew angrily.
"Well, no judge in their right mind is going to grant it." She insisted. "It's not like you've gone off the deep end." She told him.
"Well, everyone else seems to think I have." He said grumpily.
Tessa set the pizza down on the table and brushed off her hands. "Listen to me Anthony Stark." She told him, gaining his undivided attention. "Do you think what you are doing is right?" she asked him.
"Yes." He responded without hesitation.
"And do you have any doubts about your choice to pull Stark Industries from weapons manufacturing? Do you think it was a mistake?" she asked him.
"No." he said, shaking his head. "No, in fact, I've been thinking more clearly than ever. This was the right move to make."
"Then to Hell with what anyone else thinks." She told him forcefully. "Stark Industries is yours. Your company. Your birth-right. Your legancy. What you're doing is right. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. Don't sacrifice your own conscious for their pockets." She told him seriously. "Besides, they're all going to be biting their tongues when they see all the great things you're going to accomplish." She said with a smile, lifting her pizza back up.
The frown on Tony's face slowly drew back up into a grin. "To proving them wrong?" Tony said, holding up the remainder of his slice of food.
Tessa grinned over at him, reaching forward and hit her own slice against his in a mock cheer. "To proving them wrong." She echoed.