Disclaimer: I've said it already. I don't own Iron Man. I don't own XYLØ. Nadda. Nothing. Bubkiss. However I have tossed the two together like a salad. Wish I'd bought bacon and croutons.

Chapter 10: Reunion

XYLØ- Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

"Yeah. You've checked me out, Trapper John. Thanks." Tony brushed off the two young medical personnel that were far too interested in his arc reactor. He caught a few hushed whispers about it being 'like hers,' and then 'no, different.' Tony wondered, with a vague sort of dread, what the hell that was about. "Rhodey," he called, feeling even more anxious to get moving.

"You cleared?" Rhodey asked, walking across the hanger.

Tony hopped gingerly off the table. "Yup."

Reaching him, Rhodey slung an arm around his waist. The Colonel guided him toward a wheelchair but Tony veered away. He didn't want to be pushed around in the thing like an invalid. He heard his companion give a sigh, then felt the arm wrap more securely around his torso. "Brass wants to debrief."

"After. I want to see Angela," Tony side-eyed his friend. "You've been deliberately avoiding." And, Tony thought, he wanted that last image he had of her replaced with something better. He didn't want to remember the horror in her eyes, or the split second after when he saw her feet leave the ground.

"Alright," Rhodey sighed. "We'll head to her lab. That's where she spends most of her time, day or night," he groused.

Together the two of them navigated out of the hanger and around to a jeep. Tony was glad it wasn't another humvee. He didn't know how he'd react to that. A short drive later they parked behind a building across from the medical center.

They entered the low brick complex, descending a level below ground. Tony wrinkled his nose at the artificial lighting and closed in feeling so soon after the cave. Knowing his goal was in sight was the only thing that pushed him forward.

At the end of the hall Rhodey reached out and knocked on the metal door in front of them. From inside they heard the sound of a rolling chair on concrete, then steps pacing toward the door. When it opened, Tony tried to keep his expression clear.

His first thought was that Angela's green eyes looked too large in her face. For a fraction of a second her attention switched from Rhodey to himself without understanding, then the recognition kicked in. She sucked in a great lung full of air, her shoulders and head bowing forward as if she'd been kicked in the chest. Surprise stretched her features and she took two quick steps towards him. A dainty hand cupped the back of his shoulder as she gently pressed the side of her chest to his. With Rhodey on one side, and the sling on the other, he couldn't hug her back. He actually regretted the inability.

"I'm so glad you're alive," she whispered. Her breath stirred the hair by his ear and Tony let his eyes fall closed at the relief in her tone.

She pulled back and turned to Rhodey, blinking rapidly and holding herself stiffly. "Have you called Pepper yet?" Rhodey nodded and Angela smothered a grin. "Did she cry?"

Tony noticed the flush on her own cheeks and how her eyes seemed shiny. He glanced down.

The Colonel just smiled enigmatically. Angela blew a breath out at his reticence. "Fine. Don't tell me, Jim. I'll call her later."

Tony thought that her voice sounded different. Though it was possible that he was just remembering it differently. It took his brain a second to stop being distracted by the banter and really process what he was seeing. When he did, his knees went weak.

"Whoa," Rhodey yelped, shifting his grip. "Let's get you set down."

"Oh," Angela jolted. She back peddled quickly and gestured to a worn green couch along the wall.

Rhodey slid Tony down into the cushions until he was sitting upright. Tony didn't really notice the move. All his attention tunneled in on the wires snaking from Angela's chest. A chill rolled up the back of his neck.

Above him Rhodey and Angela had a conversation regarding Rhodey's need to be somewhere for a quick meeting. Angela assured the man she had his number and could handle things before the discussion was slowly drowned out by a low buzzing in Tony's ears. He shook his head, feeling like he had water in his ears. He couldn't get a good breath of air.

There was no denying what he was seeing. Angela had something in her chest, though it was partially obscured by the pale olive button up she had on. The wires trailed between two of the buttons and his eyes followed them down to her right hand. A corner of his mind already knew what would be in that hand.

When his gaze landed on the battery, his mouth dried up and he swallowed convulsively. A phantom of remembered pain unfolded within him. Tony could feel himself shaking as he remembered the rough gauze against his fingertips, the sudden solid impact of a metal rim against his digits. That was from Yinsen. But Yinsen was in the cave. Angela was never in the cave. How had it happened?

Reaching an unsteady hand forward he tugged free two of the buttons on her shirt. Tony ignored her indignant grunt. "Let me see." The words slipped out between numb lips.

Angela shifted, then stilled as he brushed aside the lapels of the button up with his knuckles. Beneath was a low cut, grey tank top with the wide, metal curve of an electromagnet peeking over the top of it. Feeling as if he'd been socked in the stomach, Tony sucked in a measured breath.

From the top of his vision he saw Angela jerk her head to the side before she gently shoved his hand away. She sat down next to him, but didn't bother buttoning her shirt back up. Tony looked up from her chest. A grim pinched expression had settled on her face. "Did he tell you?" She wondered.

'Rhodey,' Tony thought dimly. He hadn't noticed the Colonel leave the room, but they were alone now. "He told me there were complications."

"Yeah." And the word sounded sour to Tony's ears. "I come with attachments now," she clipped.

"An electromagnet, for the shrapnel," he murmured.

She gave him a short twitch of a nod. Her face stayed in that grim look, but as her eyes traveled to his own chest they went curious. He caught her glance and shifted. It wasn't time for her to ask questions about him yet.

"What happened?" He wondered.

Angela raised a dark, haughty brow, and stared at him in silence. With a peevish expression, Tony elaborated, "After that."

She pursed her lips. "Jim got me here." Her gaze trailed briefly around the room. "I woke up from surgery about three months ago. It was only about two days after the attack. He got me here quick." She tilted her head. "Better equipment." The last phrase had a bitter tinge to it.

In a peripheral way, he was grateful that her surgery had been in a clean hospital with anesthetic instead of a filthy cave. "I'm guessing the equipment didn't make a difference," he ventured.

"No." She shook her head. "The doctors told me I had about forty eight hours left to live or I could opt to have another surgery that would kill me quicker." And her voice was rougher, Tony noticed. He wondered if it was from physical damage or something else. "They couldn't get all the shrapnel out, you know," she continued. "So they wanted to go in again." Angela shrugged her shoulders in a way that came off as both dismissive and angry.

Tony felt his head bob lightly. He did know. He also knew her retelling was distilled to the highest degree. It left out the pain, terror, and desperation. It avoided mentioning the point when you knew you were beaten, helpless, and realized that the time before you actually stopped breathing was just your preview of hell.

"I had the choice of die, or die, so I made a third option." She gestured a hand towards her chest. "You have no idea how many times I got called crazy." Weary amusement wove around her words and touched the corner of her lips. "It seemed like a simple engineering problem to me. What do you do when you want moving metal to stay put and you can't physically touch it?" He watched her give another little one shouldered shrug as she finished her explanation.

As he processed her line of thinking Tony felt his head clear. His own lips curled into a faint smirk. "Diabolical thinking," he muttered, remembering the reference letter he'd gotten from her professor at Georgia Tech all those years before. It was the one that made up his mind about hiring her. The day he'd met her had just solidified his decision.

Across from him, her face scrunched up in distaste. "I don't know if I like that phrase anymore." Her words held an echo of hollowness.

He decided to put that comment aside for now. "How'd you convince them to let you put that in your chest?"

She dropped her gaze and her smile went a bit devious, which only reinforced Tony's opinion of her. "I bullied a lot of people." She hesitated for a moment before admitting, "Including Pepper." Angela glanced up at him. "I never thought I'd be so grateful that she's had to deal with you on a daily basis." He blinked at the implied insult. "Sorry," she offered sheepishly.

He shook his head and grinned. The woman tried her hardest, but she'd never managed one hundred percent professionalism with him. He didn't mind. It just let him know that her interactions with him were genuine. That was something rare in Tony's world.

She sucked on her cheek a little. "I may have terrorized the chief of medicine and the base commander with SI lawyers." His eyebrows raised and he watched her bite her lip. "Pepper may have made the Venice penthouse into an operating theater to threaten the base with if they kept saying no."

Tony absorbed what she'd just told him and started chuckling. It hurt, but it was good. Angela carefully crossed her arms, mindful of where the wires connected he knew. "Dr. Yuen did the prosthesis implantation. I built the magnet."

Tony raked his eyes over the brunette in wonder. When it came to her goals she could be frighteningly forceful.

"I had to sign my weight in liability release forms," she continued. "Then the base commander stuck in a final proviso that if it worked, the army could keep the design."

Tony winced in sympathy. He knew that if he wasn't her boss he wouldn't get his twitchy fingers on any of her designs. Being cut from the same cloth, he could understand that. To agree to give up not only a design, but something so private… Tony shuddered at the thought. She must have been desperate.

"The base commander didn't know not to argue intellectual property with an SI lawyer," she placated.

A soft snort escaped him. When his fit of humor passed he asked, "Why are you still here and not back home?"

Angela's jaw tightened and she shot an evil eye at the battery at her feet. "I have a tether I need to get rid of."

Tony let his attention fall briefly to the squat, black, presence resting on the floor. He remembered resenting it too. There was always the overshadowing fear of knowing if he moved wrong he would disconnect and start to die. Showers were out for her as well, he realized wryly. "That's not very efficient," he remarked, and only realized after it came out how insensitive it sounded.

Angela smiled and it actually touched her eyes. "It is good to see you."

Tony had a moment to be glad the woman hadn't taken his words personally. She was good about that. There was still something tight about her face though.

"I'm working on it." She gestured with a hand around the lab. "Attempting to, anyway. Three months, no love."

"Why here?" He asked again. "Why not at SI?" That confused him.

Angela had leeway with her lab at SI. She would have had to source materials herself, but the equipment was hers to use. Any private project was available for SI to pick up with a split in profits between inventor and company. It was a deal he signed off on with a handful of trusted employees to encourage innovation. With something so personal, he never would've demanded anything from her. She had to know that.

"I'm on medical leave." She waved a hand. "Access to a lab has been problematic. The military wrote me up a deal to use this place and became somewhat accommodating once my original venture didn't end up with me dying."

Tony frowned at the news that she was effectively locked out of SI labs. "The military rope you in to giving up whatever you come up with to fix this problem too?" A part of him wondered if, given enough time, she'd work up a similar design to his.

Angela nodded. "If I do it using their lab, yes. I split rights." She gave him a self depreciating smile. "In the beginning they held all the cards and time was limited. I'm not inventing anything if I'm dead. Now?" She tilted her chin with a defiant expression. "I can't really live my life like this." She gestured toward the cables and battery. "I have to fix it. I'll admit there have been a few avenues I'm uncomfortable exploring while under the military's thumb. Especially now."

Tony's jaw hardened. Something was shifting slowly inside him, like the stirring of a great beast. "So you're their indentured servant while you're trying to save your life?" His eyes crinkled in regret when he heard how harsh that sounded.

"Not trying to save my life exactly," she pointed out. "I'm just trying to make my situation a little less precarious." A cheerless grimace settled on her face. "Do you see another choice I had at the time?"

He could tell that she was honestly asking him his opinion. Angela never asked, she knew. From the moment he'd met her she'd been one of the most confident people he'd ever known. It made him unreasonably angry to see the woman so unsure.

The whole situation was too similar for him. It was far too close to the water and the fear that the people holding him would figure out what he was doing before he could finish.

He'd questioned and rethought his decisions repeatedly in that cave. The terror that if he made one wrong move he would die at their whim, or live on a tether in their prison churning out bombs, had nearly knocked the feet from under him dozens of times. He still wondered if he'd miscalculated, and if that was why Yinsen…Tony broke himself from his train of thought with effort.

When he came back to the little basement lab, and the woman in front of him, he could feel himself sweating. She was looking at him with a hard facial expression he couldn't make out. What came out of her mouth was not anything he expected though.

"I'm sorry," she said softly.

That was enough to snap him fully out of his memories. "What?" Whatever she was apologizing for she was being genuine. Tony didn't think he'd ever heard the woman apologize and mean it before.

She winced and whispered, "I designed that bomb." At her words, her expression suddenly made sense; she was disgusted with herself. "Targeted fragmenting missiles with barbs that are still lethal days later? A creeping death?" She swiped a hand down her face, and it was such a hard gesture as to be almost physically punishing. "Let's just say I've heard some opinions about it."

"From who?" He demanded, suddenly hot. The urge to bury whatever ass had been talking out of turn swept through him. He wanted to tell her that she hadn't done anything wrong; she was just doing her job. In the end he couldn't find the words to elaborate.

"No one of consequence," she dismissed. "But my skin has been thinner lately. Especially because I think he may have been right." He noticed that behind all of her expressions was something new. Whatever it was made a wounded part of Tony yowl in commiseration.

"I thought I was designing things that were protecting people. To find out that they've been used by terrorist, that I had such a large blind spot…" She paused and Tony could see her jaw muscles tense. "It's changed my world view a bit," she admitted.

He drew in a steadying breath and found himself admitting, "Yeah. Me too." Because what she said was exactly how he was feeling. He blinked at the realization that Angela knew precisely how violating it was to find something you created used against its purpose. He recognized then the other thing his brain had noticed when she opened the door, she looked diminished somehow. Tony wondered if he did too.

Her body posture didn't relax at his admission and her next words explained why. "I have to ask, do you blame me?"

"No." It was all he could force out in response. It was the only clear thing he could pull out of his jumble of thoughts. "Why would I blame you?"

He found himself the recipient of the focused stare he'd seen her often direct at schematics. Her expression cleared and then she shrugged. "Replay a memory enough times and your mind starts adding things," she said cryptically. "I'm solely responsible for the Reaper's design. You got hit by it. I thought there might be some anger."

She blinked a few times and then leaned back to really look at him. "You did get hit by it, didn't you? I could swear I saw you pulling at your shirt on the ground. You were closer than I was."

Tony felt his mouth pull tight, because they needed to have that conversation and both of them were still pretty raw.

"I've already figured out that it didn't detonate properly, which is good for us," she drawled and waved her left hand.

He noticed almost all her gestures came from her left hand now. Tony knew why too. She must have read something on his face because she hurried to continue.

"Forget I asked. You don't need to discuss it with me," she assured him. "I've been holed up by myself in a lab long enough to have lost some filtering between my brain and mouth."

There was a world of loneliness in that statement. She had to be really unbalanced to be talking like she was. He watched her rub a hand under her eyes in a tired gesture. Tony felt something squeeze in his chest. He was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the arc reactor.

Her rambling was the best segue he was going to get. As far as he saw it they were in the same boat. He wouldn't be able to live with himself if he left this woman bumping around some army lab. Especially while he held the key to the solution of her problem. "This," he cautioned seriously, "Stays between us."

She frowned but answered easily, "Of course." He knew she didn't understand exactly what she was agreeing to yet.

"When we get back to the States, I'll help you," he vowed. He would too. He owed her. Beyond that, he'd known her for fifteen years. He didn't want to imagine his life without her…being her.

Angela's eyes softened and she gave him a lopsided smile. Fond bemusement, his brain identified. It was the same expression she gave him when he showed up late for meetings, or poked at one of her projects without announcing himself.

"It's so very good to see you again," she repeated, and Tony realized she must have genuinely missed him. He wondered if he'd been on her mind as often as she'd been on his.

As he started to unbutton his own shirt the look on her face faded to confusion. When he knew the light in his chest started to peek out, he saw her jaw slacken.

"My God," she breathed. The sound was part realization and part hope. Tony knew how ruthless hope could be.

He pushed his shirt open and showed her the miniature arc reactor keeping him alive. "I woke up in the cave like you are now." Tony forced the statement out and her eyes snapped back to his. "It's a miniature arc reactor. I built it there."

It was the most he could say about that place yet. Yinsen's ghost still lingered over his shoulder. He didn't want to talk about it, but she needed to understand what he was showing her.

She reached out a hand to touch the arc, but only hovered and then withdrew. It seemed she knew he wouldn't welcome the contact. Tony wondered if she knew that because of people reaching out to touch hers.

"It works," he continued, and he couldn't stop reminding himself of that fact. Tony tried for a sliver of his old savoir faire. "You're coming home with me, Panda. We'll get you kitted out with your own rave light."

She huffed out a breath and then titled her head back and gave out a series of gusty, almost soundless laughs. It was the closest Tony had ever heard laughter sound to sobs. When she got herself back under control and wiped some moisture from her eyes, she finally explained.

"About a month and a half after you went missing, Jim asked me if I thought you were still alive. I told him I had made my electromagnet in a hospital, but you could make one in the dark, half dead." She grinned at him. "It seems you have exceeded my expectations, Mr. Stark. Well done," she congratulated roughly.

He tilted his chin vainly and grinned at her. The motion felt creaky. "Do I get a gold star?"

She chuffed out a laugh that sounded marginally more human. "I'll do you one better, first meal stateside is on me," she drawled out.

"Are you asking me out?" He teased, trying out normality again.

She snorted. "I'm offering to feed you. There's a difference."

"There is?" When she looked over at him, he raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, you poor man." She shook her head, gathering herself. "You must be so confused all the time."

For the first time since the attack on the convoy, Tony felt like he was back on solid ground. He pointed a finger at her, "Sass, Panda."

She shrugged her shoulders unapologetically.

Patting his free hand on his knee he asked, "What do you say we hop a flight out of here with Rhodey?"

"Oh God, yes," she practically moaned. He blinked at her. "I can be packed in less than ten minutes."

Tony frowned. "I feel like this trip has spoiled Italy for you," he quipped, getting up. He waited for her to stand. "Anything in here you need?"

She hummed and trotted over to the work bench to scoop up a notebook. "No sense giving them something for free."

Tony nodded in agreement. He was still a bit sore over her treatment by the military.

"And yes," she continued, surprising him by wrapping her left arm around his waist and taking some of his weight. "This trip has ruined Italy for me."

"You just haven't seen the good parts," he assured, relaxing slightly into her hold.

"I got tired of the wine," she complained.

When they made it to the door, Tony was careful not to cause Angela's right side to knock into the frame. She noticed and gave him that fond look again.

"I am so looking forward to getting back to the states," she admitted.

The two of them leaned against each other and shuffled down the hall. "Me too," Tony agreed. "Cheeseburgers," he mumbled.

Angela snorted a laugh and it finally sounded half alive. "I knew you'd be a cheap date."

…...

Notes: Finally got the two back together. *throws small party*