A/N: This chapter and the next are a little shorter, sorry! I promise they're worth it ;) And I'll most likely update midweek again.
Stark Mansion, Malibu
Maggie thundered down the stone stairs to the workshop, taking them three at a time.
She'd driven straight here from the airport, after an exhausting flight back home. She'd managed to change and patch herself up a bit on the flight, but she was still in sore need of a shower and a sleep.
She realized halfway down the stairs that the plate glass walls at the bottom had been completely smashed, so she didn't bother with the door, instead hopping through the frame. She first spotted the gleaming red and gold armor, partially disassembled amongst the yellow assembly robots. She glanced around, cheeks flushed, and then noticed Tony sitting in the workspace on a stool, his hands between his knees, looking cowed. He didn't look injured at all, though.
"You did it!" Maggie exclaimed, her boots crunching in the smashed glass on the floor. Tony looked up, eyes wide. "You really did it!" She hurried over to the disassembled suit, admiring the new design and the paintjob. "Did the targeting array work? And the onboard weapons system? And the sustained flight - you went to the Middle East and back with full power? And-" she turned, and realized that Tony was frantically gesturing for her to shut up, cutting his hand across his throat.
Maggie shut her mouth, then turned and spotted Pepper leaning against the wall by the door, her arms crossed and a deep scowl on her face. Maggie swallowed.
"You helped him do this?" Pepper asked, gesturing at the suit.
Maggie glanced at Tony, and he shrugged guiltily. She looked back at Pepper. "I… yeah, I did."
"He could have got himself killed!" Pepper exclaimed. "Look at that armor!"
Maggie looked, and realized what she'd missed: bullet holes. They weren't through-and-throughs, just circular indentations. Her stomach swooped and she turned back to Tony. "Gulmira?" she asked.
He nodded, a glint in his eye.
Maggie wanted to crow and celebrate, and also to double check that Tony was okay, but she forced herself to take a sobering breath and turn back to Pepper. Guess the cat's out of the bag.
But Pepper was eyeing Maggie sharply now. "And what happened to you? Where have you been?"
Maggie paused. She knew she had a darkening bruise on her jaw, and a bandage around her upper arm where one of the bullets had opened a shallow slice in her arm. Her back ached from the sixteen trips across the ravine, too, but she'd been mostly able to hide that.
She went with a casual shrug. "Rough night out. I don't know what it is about being a Stark that makes people challenge me to drinking contests, but… they never win."
Tony snorted, but Maggie kept her eyes on Pepper. Pepper didn't break eye contact with her, and silence stretched between them for a few moments. Maggie could feel Pepper's worry crackling in the air, stretched toward Tony and Maggie and the bullet-ridden armor at the center of the workshop. Maggie didn't know what Pepper had been imagining they were up to these past months, but she probably didn't expect this.
Eventually, Pepper let out a sigh. "Fine." She turned, stepped gingerly through the pile of glass littering the floor, and left up the stairs.
For a moment, Tony and Maggie stewed in guilty silence. But then Dum-E beeped lowly, and they both looked over at him. He held a gold metal face plate in his claw.
Maggie let out a breath, then walked over to take the face plate from him. She turned it over in her hands, admiring the design. She looked up and met Tony's eyes. "Tell me everything."
He told her everything. The Firefighter's Benefit, Obie's ominous declaration, the takeover of Gulmira. How Tony had put on the Mark III armor, flown to Gulmira, liberated the town and then completely destroyed the Ten Rings weapons depot. Maggie couldn't help but smile at his retelling. Between her and Tony's efforts, the Ten Rings had had a bad day. She was sure there were still bases out there, but they'd be scrambling for months after losing that many men, weapons, and resources. And though she should be concerned about the fact that Tony had been shot at by missiles and Air Force F-22s, she was ecastatic that he'd made it through with barely a bruise.
The armor had more than exceeded their hopes.
"Is Rhodey mad about the F-22?" Maggie asked. They both sat on stools in the workspace, drinking coffee that was actually hot, for once.
Tony shrugged. "Not as mad as I expected. He knows I'm up to something now, but he said he wants to stay out of it."
"Might be for the best," Maggie murmured. "Don't really want the Air Force getting their hands on this." She nodded at the suit, and then winced when her bruised jaw twinged.
Tony frowned. "You okay?" his eyes flicked over her, but Maggie waved a hand before he could notice more aches and pains.
"I'm fine," she reassured him. "I'm proud of you. What you did in Gulmira…" she blew out a breath. "It's going to change so many people's lives. Don't forget that."
His gaze dropped, and his brow knotted into a frown. "But Maggie, those weapons they had… those shipments were recent. They had the Jericho missile. Our weapons are still being sold to terrorists."
A chill went through her. "I know." If the Stark weapons at the base in Tajikistan hadn't been proof enough, she'd also been going through the data she stole and found enough information to realize that the Ten Rings still had a steady supply of Stark weapons, despite the board takeover.
Tony's eyes widened. "You know?"
"Yes," she said. "I've been trying to figure out how they're getting them, but… I'm on the outs with the company, same as you. I've been…" she shook her head. She couldn't tell him. Still, despite all he'd done in Gulmira, she couldn't tell him. She met his eyes. "We need to stop this."
He held her gaze, and Maggie realized that there was a burning anger in his eyes to match hers. She wasn't alone in this: Tony felt exactly the same way she did. It made her want to cry.
Tony drew in a breath. "We need to figure out how they're getting them. I don't know if Obie actually knows anything about it, or if he just doesn't care. Or if he just thinks I'm crazy. And we need to figure out where the weapons are going. Destroy them all."
Maggie pressed her lips together, wondering how much to give away. She'd uncovered a lead from her stolen data while going through it on the plane back: a name. She didn't have the whole picture, but the data had shown one of the avenues through which the Ten Rings got their weapons. There was a weapons buyer in the US Army, a General Rowes, who had been in contact with the Ten Rings. Maggie knew him - he'd been at her weapons presentation the day she decided to leave Stark Industries. Maggie suspected that the General was signing off on weapons shipments that never actually reached the Army, in exchange for a cut from the Ten Rings. It was just a hunch based on a few mentions of his name, but it was a lead.
She let out a breath. "I might… I can…"
But Tony was shaking his head. "Maggie, I want you to keep out of this. Whatever's going on, it's too dangerous - the Ten Rings, whoever else is involved. And you can't get into SI right now without people asking questions, so I want you to stay safe. Head to your apartment and lay low for a few days."
Maggie's eyes flashed. "Tony, this is as much my problem to fix as it is yours-"
"No," he said. "You saw the problems in the company years before I did, and you weren't even running it. It took me being imprisoned in a cave for three months to have a change of heart." His eyes darkened. "Thank you for helping me with the armor, and for being here, but this… this is on me."
Her fists curled. "Tony. This is our legacy. I knew that things had to change because I knew how it felt to be… to be hurt. Torn apart." Tony's eyes shadowed. "But I ran away." Guilt crashed over Maggie, and she closed her eyes. "Let me stay and fix this."
He leaned over and gripped her shoulder. "Just… please stay safe for me, Maggie. I can't see you hurt again."
The gesture reminded Maggie so much of Obie's paternalism disguised as protection that she shook his hand off. She opened her eyes and looked into his face. We are too much alike, you and I, she wanted to say. But instead she stood up, drew in a breath, and walked out of the workshop.
"Where are you going?" Tony called after her.
She didn't reply.
Afghanistan
Obadiah Stane and Raza Hamidmi Al-Wazar exchanged barbs in the bitter night air of the desert, surrounded by soldiers. Raza gestured to his burned face.
"Compliments of Tony Stark."
"Well if you'd killed him when you were supposed to, you'd still have a face," Obadiah smiled. He cocked his head. "And I stopped your pathetic attempt at a ransom request from reaching Ms Stark." He set his hands on his hips and sighed, his breath coming out as a cloud of condensation. "She'd have paid anything to get her brother back, and it seemed cruel - especially when neither you or I intended for him to return alive." His eyebrows rose, thinking of the spoiled billionaire currently sitting in his mansion basement in LA. "And yet."
"You paid us trinkets to kill a prince," Raza hissed.
Obie's attempt at good humour fell off his face. "Show me the weapon."
Twelve hours later, Obadiah sat sipping whiskey on a private jet soaring back to America. He eyed the pieces of metal armor that had been stacked on the seats across from him.
He thought of Raza's pitiful attempts at scheming. And you dream of Stark's throne, he had said. As if Obadiah wanted to take what Tony had. No - Obadiah would take what he had, and make it better. Step away from Tony's qualms and hesitations. He'd turn Tony's kingdom into an empire.
He let out a long, slow breath, and sipped his whiskey.
Soon, he thought, there'll be no need for Starks at all.
Tony didn't share his plans with Maggie. He holed himself up in his workshop, tinkering, so Maggie let him be.
And she didn't share her plans with him. She worked methodically through the data she'd stolen from the Tajikistan base, and did some tinkering of her own at one of the Stark Industries workspaces, after hours. While she was there she thought about trying to get up to the executive wing again, but there were still too many eyes, and the thought made her feel strangely guilty.
A couple of days in, the same receptionist told Maggie that she was no longer allowed to use the engineering spaces either.
"I'm really sorry, Ms Stark," she said, scarlet-faced. "But the board has said that until they can figure out your employment status, and since there's confidential projects being constructed in there-"
"It's fine," Maggie sighed, feeling as if everything was slipping away from her, like the tide going out to sea. "I was finished anyway."
So she retreated to her apartment like Tony had asked her to, delving into terabytes of data. She tipped back into her shadow world and was alarmed at what she found - two days ago, there'd been a flare of activity among the Ten Rings. After several hours of trying to parse the conflicting reports, all Maggie knew was that there had been some kind of takeover. Another base in the Afghanistan desert had been completely annihilated, and the rest of the organisation was scrambling. A new player had hit the scene, and seemed to be consolidating power in the area.
She'd been right about her hunch about General Rowes. After the flare up of activity, Rowes had reached out to his Ten Rings contacts and set up a weapons exchange. In the US. Maggie had cracked his encrypted message and gotten the time and location: two days from now, at a smuggler's runway deep in the Mojave Desert. Can't send through usual means, there are too many eyes, the message read. Maggie's brow creased. Eyes like hers? Though she supposed what with her and Tony smashing Ten Rings secure bases in Afghanistan, their confidence had to be shaken.
With the message decrypted, Maggie had sat on her balcony as the sun went down, thinking it over. The powers out in the world were shifting in response to Tony's bold introduction as the bulletproof metal man. General Rowes was planning to offload a frightening amount of Stark weapons which his Ten Rings contacts would take back to the Middle East and… Maggie tried to fill in the gaps. Probably reassert their power in the area. Retake Gulmira, and the other areas where they got rich off oil fields and power brokering and slave labor. Whoever was hoping to take over the Ten Rings - maybe Rowes - wanted a power base there.
At the expense of people like Aisha, and the women Maggie had rescued from that base in Tajikistan.
Staring out at the burning orange horizon, Maggie made her decision. She'd be at that weapons drop. She'd put a stop to it, and question the culprits. Rowes hadn't confirmed whether he'd be there or not, and if he was, Maggie might have the main seller of Stark weapons and the aspiring head of the Ten Rings in her grip. But doubts niggled at the back of her mind. Rowes... didn't seem like the mastermind behind the mirror. He hadn't been careful enough with his communications, too direct and too brash. And yet somehow not assertive enough. Maybe he wasn't alone. Maybe he had an ally.
For a moment, Maggie contemplated sharing what she'd learned. But who could she share it with? Not Tony - he wanted to protect her from all this, and she wanted to protect him. She supposed it was a matter of who could get rid of the danger first. And besides, Tony wasn't exactly quiet. Maggie's next steps had to be careful - intercept the weapons drop, and squeeze every ounce of information about the Stark weapons leak she could out of the culprits. Tony and his armor were better suited for… well, she'd seen the pictures of what he'd done in Gulmira.
Maggie fully intended to involve the authorities, but only once she figured out who was involved. If an Army General was involved in selling Stark Industries weapons, who knew who else could be implicated?
It would be nice to share the burden.
But the Wyvern worked alone.
Maggie got to her feet and drew in a deep breath. Whatever Rowes's involvement, Maggie would be at that weapons drop. So she had better start preparing.
Beneath the Arc Reactor at Stark Industries, SI's best engineers pieced together parts of a metal suit of armor.
November 24, 2009
Stark Mansion, Malibu
Once more, Tony asked Pepper to come down to his workshop. When she appeared in the doorway he could see her trepidation. She hadn't been down here since the night she'd caught him in the armor, and they'd hardly spoken since.
Her eyes flickered toward him, and then to the armor - just the top half was propped up in his workspace, the wires bared as he calibrated the cybernetic synapses.
"Where's Maggie?" Pepper asked, her voice soft.
Tony's brow pinched. "I wanted to keep her safe, and she just… well, she's not here." He shook his head and pulled his hands free of the armor. Pepper's eyes were still on it. "You busy? You mind if I send you on an errand?"
He gave Pepper her task: hack into the mainframe via his own computer at SI, to retrieve all the recent shipping manifests. He handed over the lock chip and kept his instructions low and steady. He didn't want to put Pepper at risk either, but this was a low risk task. Corporate crime, sure, but it wasn't a battlefield. And Pepper was the only one he trusted with access to his office right now. Tony had been banned since the press conference, and a few weeks later Obie had told Tony off for being a bad influence on Maggie and hinted that because of him, Maggie wouldn't be allowed into the SI executive wing.
Pepper listened to his instructions with a solemn, dark-eyed expression, and then began to question him. Tony couldn't take the shaky concern in her voice, so he turned away and opened up a set of digital blueprints.
"Tony…" she sighed. "You know that I would help you with anything, but… I cannot help you if you're going to start all of this again."
"There is nothing except this. There is no art opening, no benefit, there is nothing to sign." He turned, trying to keep his voice from rising. "There is the next mission, and nothing else."
"Is that so?" she asked, her voice impossibly soft. "Well then, I quit." She tossed the lock stick back on his workbench and turned to leave.
Tony felt as if something had been carved out of his chest, deeper than the arc reactor. "You stood by my side all these years while I reaped the benefits of destruction," he murmured. Pepper turned, her eyes burning. "And now that I'm trying to protect the people that I put in harm's way, you're going to walk out?"
"You're going to kill yourself, Tony," she hissed. "I'm not going to be a part of it."
Tony ground his jaw, then took a seat again. If Pepper didn't understand, if she didn't see… he didn't know what he'd do. He looked down and changed tacks. Honesty. It had to be honesty. "I shouldn't be alive." He swallowed past the blockage in his throat. "Unless it was for a reason." He took a long breath and turned to meet her gaze. Her eyes were wide. "I'm not crazy, Pepper. I just finally know… what I have to do." For a long moment they stared at each other. "And I know in my heart" - his voice cracked on the word - "that it's right."
That's it. That's all I have.
Pepper exhaled, her gaze heavy. And then she walked back. She picked up the lock stick, examined it. Then she met his eyes again.
"You're all I have too, you know." She turned without another word and walked for the stairs. Tony watched her go.
Maggie roared up route 40 on her motorbike, a satchel on the back. She kept her eyes fixed ahead, to where she could see the forest and hills turning into the sprawling sand and scrub of the desert. Her hands clenched on the handlebars.
Stark Industries, California
Phil Coulson sat in the comfortable leather chairs of the Stark Industries lobby, his hands clasped in his lap and a pleasant smile fixed to his face. He'd thought after finally pinning Stark and his PA down for an appointment that he would get the answers SHIELD had been waiting for, but it appeared he'd been stood up. But then he glanced to his right and saw a harried-looking Pepper Potts hurrying down the stairs.
"Ms Potts?" he called. She practically flinched. "We had an appointment." He couldn't quite read the look in her eyes, but she didn't stop walking. "Did you forget about our appointment?"
"Nope, right now," she said firmly, her pace brisk. "Come with me." She had something clenched in her fist, gripping so tight that her knuckles were white.
"Right now?" He got up.
"We're going to have it right now, come with me." He didn't miss the fear in her voice this time, and he fell into step beside her. "Yeah, walk with me."
"Okay." On edge now, Phil's eyes darted around the room. He followed Ms Potts's gaze up to the next floor, where he spotted Obadiah Stane leaning against the banister, looking down at them with a fixed, grim gaze.
"I'm going to give you the meeting of your life," Ms Potts breathed. "Your office."
Obadiah Stane burst into Sector 16, the division he'd set up in the Arc Reactor building, and screamed at the lead engineer when he told him that the technology to miniaturize the arc reactor didn't exist.
"Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave!" he roared, towering over the wide-eyed man. "With a box of scraps!"
He could feel the engineer shaking. "Well I'm sorry," the man said, lowly. "I'm not Tony Stark."
The Mojave Desert, California
Maggie reached the edge of the desert just as dusk fell, leeching away the warm orange sunset and the lingering heat. She hid her bike a few feet off the road, and pulled out the items in her satchel. Working quickly, she got dressed in the increasing darkness, pulling on a close-fitting dark flight suit, her wing pack and gloves, and a new cowl that she had designed the last few days. When she was finished, she touched a button on the side of her cowl.
Two glowing red eyes illuminated the darkness.
SHIELD Headquarters, Los Angeles
Sitting in Phil Coulson's office. Pepper called Tony for about the seventh time. She'd been trying to get a hold of him all through her frantic explanations to Agent Coulson while they went through the data recovered from the SI computer, and her calls kept ringing out. This wasn't unusual for Tony, but today it made her heart feel like it was shriveling in her chest.
When this phone call connected she gasped. "Tony?" Agent Coulson, sitting on the other side of the desk, looked up.
There was no answer, just a strange buzzing over the line.
"Tony, are you there?" She glanced at Coulson and shook her head. "Hello?"
The call disconnected, leaving her with a dial tone. Something hot and prickly washed over Pepper and she made eye contact with Agent Coulson.
"He picked up, but… didn't say anything." Her lips pressed together. "I'm going to call Rhodey to go get him to check on Tony."
Coulson's mouth narrowed, but other than that his expression didn't change. "Alright. But based on what you've showed us" - he gestured to the computer where they had loaded the contents of the lockstick Pepper had brought with her - "We need to head over to this Section 16 and shut it down."
Stark Mansion, Malibu
Tony lay frozen, his heart thundering uselessly, as Obie cut his arc reactor out of his chest. His eyes were fixed wide open, unblinking, and his whole body ached from the sensation of every muscle locking in place. He could do nothing but stare at Obie's horrifically calm face.
Tony had learned back at the benefit that Obie had turned on him, but he didn't realize it was like this. Obie had ordered the hit on him in Afghanistan, Obie had been selling their weapons to violent men. He didn't recognize the smiling monster practically kneeling on his chest.
Well no, he did recognize him. He knew the small smile on Obie's face, and his low, calm voice. It was his business face.
The high-pitched noise of slicing metal filled his ears. Tony wanted to shout but he couldn't move. He could hardly breathe. He felt the arc reactor disconnect from his chest and he managed a strangled groan. It slid out of him, glowing white, and Tony practically saw his life bleed out with it.
Obie's eyes gleamed in the white glow. "Oh, Tony," he murmured, admiring the reactor. He sat down beside Tony, arm around his shoulders. "This is your ninth symphony. What a masterpiece. Look at that." He held the reactor up to Tony's face and Tony burned with rage. He'd never really been one for hatred, but this… sitting rigid and frozen as his heart beat wildly and his breath wheezed in his chest as the man he'd trusted all his life breathed words of betrayal… if Tony could move, he didn't know what he'd do.
My whole life, Obie has been there. Tony recalled Obie laughing with his father, slapping him on the back. Obie kissing his mother on the cheek. Obie the five-year-old Maggie in the hospital with a bouquet of sunflowers.
"This is your legacy," Obie murmured in Tony's ear, holding up the reactor, and the hatred guttered. He felt shame. Shame that he'd believed the lie, and let something far more powerful than a missile fall into the wrong hands.
"A new generation of weapons with this at its heart." Tony stared into the glowing arc reactor. "Weapons that will help steer the world back on course, put the balance of power in our hands." Obie began to pull away. "The right hands."
Tony fought his frozen muscles, hopelessly. All those people, all the ones I was trying to protect. Pepper. Maggie.
Obie laughed under his breath. "I wish you could see my prototype. It's not as… well, not as conservative as yours."
Tony felt a bone-deep shudder, and his eyes gleamed. The armor. He's taken that, too.
Obie sighed as he packed the reactor in a briefcase. "Too bad you had to involve Pepper in this. I would have preferred that she lived." He closed the briefcase and stood to leave, but then paused. "I hope you haven't involved your sister, either. After it was clear she'd be of no use I thought I might as well let her go." He sighed. "Well, either she'll come around to my way of thinking, or she'll end up…" he looked down at Tony, slumped on the couch, with a curled lip. "Just like you." He cocked his head. "I think all she ever wanted was to end up like you."
Tony stared, eyes white and wild, his chest empty, and could not move.
Obie turned and strode out without looking back.
On his way out of the mansion, Obadiah made a call to the private security force he'd hired at the beginning of this mess.
"Sir?" they answered.
"Pick up Margaret Stark from her apartment in Los Angeles," Obadiah instructed, sliding into the drivers seat of his car. "Bring her to me."
"Right away, sir."
Obadiah hung up. Either she'll be my ticket to running the company, or she's in my way. His hands clenched on the steering wheel. And I don't tolerate things getting in my way any more.
Mojave Desert, California
Maggie's phone buzzed in her jacket pocket.
She ignored it, as she had the ten other times it had buzzed, because she was busy flying. She soared over the desert in darkness, the stars clear and bright overhead and the land a hazy mass of sand and scrub below. The air temperature had plummeted once night fell, and she was glad for the extra layers she'd decided to wear.
She wore black from head to toe, save for the pair of goggles she'd built: they glowed red, slitted in a permanent glare. They were more than a scary statement, however. She'd built a HUD into the goggles, inspired by Tony, so she could see her current altitude, speed, the air temperature, and her coordinates.
She was getting close to the coordinates from the encrypted message, so she switched over to thermographic vision to scan for heat signatures. The desert became an undulating wave of blue and black, with dull orange pockets of heat left over from the warmth of the sun.
Her phone buzzed again, and the caller ID popped up in the top right of her HUD: Pepper Potts. Maggie sighed and ignored it again. She checked her coordinates and banked slightly to the left, feeling the wind pressure shift against her wings.
Then a text message appeared in the top right of her HUD, from Pepper:
OBADIAH PAID FOR TONY TO BE KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN.
Maggie faltered in the air. She had to look away to adjust her wings, but when she glanced back the text message still glowed there, damning.
Obie.
With a twitch of her fingers she scanned through her recent calls: lots from Rhodey and Pepper, but none from Tony. She instantly hit his number, and the ringtone sounded in her ears.
"Come on, Tony," she muttered, coasting through the air with her heart in her mouth. Dread slid down her spine like molasses.
The call went to voicemail. Maggie tried again, and when that call also went to voicemail fear spiked into her heart.
On the edge of her vision she spotted a flare of yellow. She looked up, switching out of thermographic vision, and spotted lights about a mile away: she couldn't make out any details but the lights were white, electric.
In the same moment, Pepper's face popped up at the corner of her HUD again as her phone rang. This time, she picked up.
"Pepper?" she breathed, angling towards the lights.
"Maggie?" Pepper sounded flustered. "Where-"
A blazing light erupted from the desert right beneath Maggie. She didn't have time to dodge, and the light swallowed her whole with a crackle of static. The call cut out, Maggie's HUD died, and a moment later her wings failed and she fell out the sky.
Los Angeles, California
Pepper stared at her phone in mounting panic. She turned to Agent Coulson. They sat in the back seat of a dark sedan which careened through the streets of LA. "She picked up, but then hung right up as well, and now I can't raise her. Neither she or Tony are answering, I don't-"
"You said Colonel Rhodes is going to the mansion to look for Mr Stark?" Coulson cut her off.
"Yes, I-"
"We're working on tracing Ms Stark now," Coulson said calmly, "but in the meantime we need to concentrate on Mr Stane. Will you be able to let us into this Sector 16 in Stark Industries?"
Pepper took a deep breath, then swallowed her fear. There was nothing she could do for Tony or Maggie right now. She had to hope they were being their usual non-phone-answering selves. "Yes."
Reviews
DBZfan45: Last chapter was certainly action-packed, as was this one (and so will the next one be). Hope you enjoyed! X
The1975Love: I'm so glad you enjoyed the last chapter! She's had her first Big Mission. Hopefully you enjoyed the fallout in this chapter ;)
MyCelestialFury: Haha we need a bit of wholesomeness every now and then! Because I enjoy the angst a little too much. Pleased you enjoyed the action! I know people were hoping for them to cross paths, but I've got a plan for Maggie's secret Wyverning ;) We'll see when (if!) Tony finds out!