Here goes:
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Claire was still sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the two folders, when Steve and Bucky returned home from their shopping excursion. Somebody less openhearted than Claire would likely have been surprised by the amount of bags two supersoldiers brought back from a tour of even New York's selection of childcare stores (or any stores), but she was not. Not that she really noted them anyway, sitting in her chair and staring down on the folders on the table.
"Claire?" Bucky carefully asked, making her look up. She looked haunted, he thought. "What on earth happened?" Both supersoldiers, deeply concerned, came and sat down at the table with her. She nodded to the folders, which they looked at un-understandingly. They looked like typical Stark Industries paperwork, they thought. When they said as much to their little sister, in every way which mattered, she just sighed.
"It is a company quarterly update, reserved for management posts," she told them finally, somewhat unhelpfully.
"Is it for Pepper? Or Tony?" Steve tried. She shook her head mutely, staring blankly at it again. The two men exchanged a worried look.
"That is for Tony," she suddenly said, nodding over to the other folder, biting her lip. "It is a takeover. Neither Tony or Pepper gets management updates - he's the owner and she runs the company. They get access to all the information. Pepper literally day to day as she runs SI, and Jarvis updates Tony on everything he needs right away. They both have complete access. This one's for me."
"And why is that a bad thing?" Bucky felt really out of his depth with this one.
"A woman came up with them," Claire continued as if she hadn't heard him, "the type of business secretary I could have never competed with six months ago. I'd made it to my engineering exam, sure, but I had such a long way to go to get anywhere, I could never hope to reach people like that. And today... she looked at me as if I was her superior."
Without looking up at the two men, Claire continued to talk, blurting it out now that she had finally started talking. They listened silently, still deeply concerned, but at least now she wasn't just staring at a couple of folders out of all things in puzzling silence.
"That's not even it. The point is that she was right. She left an overtaking folder with me, and Jarvis authorised her to do so, because I handle all the internal - inside Stark Tower - R&D management, which essentially puts me on an equal footing with the man who runs the external unit out on the airfield - a man who is the manager of about 460 employees.
I belong to the management of Stark Industries, and I hadn't even realised. It just snuck up on me. It all has!" Finally, the two former army men started to understand the shock she was clearly experiencing - they could even relate, more or less - suddenly being thrust into this life, much like they had been, if maybe a little less dramatically so.
"It's not just that, either," Claire was not talking quite as quickly now, but she was still sounding choked up, "just look at this place. I live here. And somehow, that's normal! And now that I see it, I just can't understand how I was so blind for this long. Do you remember that accident Tony had in the workshop when he poured engine oil on my old jacket?" It was clearly a rhetorical question, and neither man had a chance to answer anyway, as she didn't pause. They didn't mind.
"He bought me a new one. Which is fair, but I knew after I first caught a glimpse of the label that it was branded. Of course it was. Tony bought it. Do you know... I googled it. That particular one costs just over 6000 dollars. I knew, and yet, I had no idea. It is not just that one, either; my closet is slowly filling with clothes I never thought I could ever even dream about, and I never thought about it. I..." Claire finally broke down, sobbing into her arms, which were laying upon the table.
Someone with less of an idea about what she was going through, might not have understood why she reacted so strongly, but Bucky and Steve did. Claire was neither sad nor upset, she was just overwhelmed. Silently, they both moved their chairs closer and hugged their favourite little blonde engineer. She clinged to them during the long minutes, as she finally started to calm down.