Tony sits back in his office after getting Lee's email about the site visit and lets out a long, slow breath. Planning is one thing, but it looks like they are about to transition to really building this thing Tony has allowed himself to look forward to for over a year, now. It's exciting.
Now all that remains is for Lee not to be upset when he finds out that Tony is Tony Stark. Tony's in a strange situation here, because he hasn't done anything like the research Lee likely has about the Snap. He didn't have to. What kind of mangling of the truth has the world press done? What is Lee's impression of 'Billionaire Superhero Tony Stark?'
He asks Rhodey, or rather tries to, but he is unavailable for the first time in forever. Tony wants to feel happy for him, but he can't help but think his friend has accepted the yoke of something that will force him into some terrible catch he's not expecting. Thanos's 'gift' is tainted. It has to be.
After renting a pickup at the airport, he enjoys the thirty-minute drive of paved roads before he gets to the dirt ones and has to roll his windows up. He's got a baseball cap, jeans, sneakers, and a Metallica shirt on, but his ARC reactor will stay in his truck. He still isn't at the place where he could leave it at home, but this hollowed-out world isn't ever going to earn his trust enough to do without it completely.
He parks beside the pickup that's already there, a bright red beauty of a truck. It has Pennsylvania plates on it, so he's pretty sure it's Lee's. Tony gets out and looks around. He can't see Lee, but the property is decently sized, and a lot of the area next to the lake has clusters of bushes that obscure his view. It's a warm day, and Tony walks up to the lake, testing the mud around it with the tip of his sneaker. That's when he sees it- a footprint. It looks pretty small, and Tony wonders if someone's kid from a neighboring plat went walkabout.
The view along the shore is pretty clear to the left, so Tony starts to walk around toward the right, keeping his eye out for any kids as he looks for Lee. When he comes up on the bushes, Tony slows down, hoping maybe he'll catch the kid. He peeks through the branches and just stares.
There isn't a kid walking around barefoot on the lake's shore.
It's a woman.
She's wearing a cheerful-looking sundress, light green scattered with yellow and white flowers. He can't help but notice it shows off a lot of leg, but what's really noteworthy about her is the mass of honey blonde hair piled on top of her head. It's a masterpiece of messy twists and flyaways, like a wig in a fantasy movie.
She isn't facing him but he already thinks she's beautiful. Tony watches her, feeling like a voyeur in the aforementioned fantasy movie, hoping she'll turn around. He sees that she's got a messenger bag on one shoulder, an incongruously sturdy leather thing, completely at odds with the flower child image she's got going.
He backs off and takes stock of what to do. It's possible that Lee has a girlfriend that he's brought along last-minute. It's also possible, given the beauty of the lake, that this woman has come from a neighboring property for a walk. He hadn't put up 'no trespassing' signs, not yet, though he knows he'll want to do that soon.
Tony's got a Satellite uplink for his phone, so he backtracks a good twenty or thirty feet more and calls up Charriotte in lieu of calling Lee, whose number he doesn't have.
"Good afternoon, this is Marissa from Charriotte Design speaking, how may I direct your call?"
"Yes, hello," Tony says. "I'm meant to be on-site with Lee Balci today, and I just want to make sure there aren't any crossed wires, that kind of thing." He phrases it like this on purpose. On the off chance there was a concern Lee brought up at work, this woman might assume that's what he is referring to, and mention it.
"Lee wasn't in this morning, and the schedule implies she's off the rest of this week- I'm sorry, can I put you on hold?"
It's not a video call, but Tony stares at the phone in his hand. She?
"Sir?" the tinny voice calls out. "Sir?"
"I'm here," Tony says, clearing his throat because the words don't sound quite right.
"Can you confirm that you are the client from Stark Industries? I have Lee on the other line and she's concerned about a strange man on the property, says he hasn't approached her."
As if to reinforce what the secretary just said, Tony hears the sound of a gun cocking. He looks over his shoulder, careful not to make a sudden move, and the woman he'd been staring at is standing on this side of the bushes, pointing a gun directly at his head.
He was right.
She's gorgeous.
Tony already had his hand up by his face, and he slowly shifts its position to gesture to himself. He turns so his face is fully visible- he is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, after all.
"Tony," he says to the woman, identifying himself.
Her reaction is everything he had feared it might be. Her face pales and the gun (which she'd been pointing at him with expert precision, meaning she knows how to shoot it, which he really shouldn't find attractive) lowers to first his chest, then the ground. Lee makes the gun safe and tucks it away in her bag, all the while looking utterly shaken. She pulls something else out and backs away.
"Sir!" the voice on the phone demands.
"Yes, hi, I was making contact with Lee," Tony tells the woman. "I think we're good here, thanks for the help." He's just about to hang up when he hears the secretary ask him to wait.
Feet away, he sees that the woman in the sundress is speaking quietly on the phone, one hand to her throat. Her body language is closed down; arms crossed, shoulders tight, legs close together. He wonders if he's just lost a contract and a friend just by virtue of being Tony Stark.
"Mr. Stark?" the voice on the phone calls out. He lifts it and turns so he doesn't see Lee's reaction to whatever bad news he's about to hear. "Lee didn't get a chance to let you know ahead of time about this, but she's recovering from laryngitis. Wants to know if you're okay with written communication, and says she's extremely sorry for the inconvenience."
Tony shoots a look over at Lee, who is now tapping out something on her phone, her conversation with the secretary apparently over. It's not a StarkPhone, which is rare nowadays. That unfortunately tracks with her reaction to recognizing him, though.
"That's fine," Tony hears himself agreeing, his eyes on Lee. She reacts, closing her eyes in relief, and it slices at him a little bit, this unexpected woman who was worried he wouldn't trust her if she couldn't speak. It's a relief too, in a way, because if that's what she was worried about, then she clearly didn't demand an end to the contract. He refocuses on his own phone conversation. Laryngitis, she'd said. "I've had that a couple of times. It's fine. Thanks," he says, and ends the call. Tony and Lee look at each other for a moment, and then he smiles, holding up his finger. "I've got- I brought you something. I'll be right back."
Tony turns and starts jogging toward the pickups. His mind and body had been calibrated for Camping Bros. This woman's struck him in a way he wasn't expecting, with her long legs and thick golden hair. Tony's completely off-kilter; he's got to correct for this, and fast. He gives himself exactly three seconds to rest his forehead on the sun-warmed metal of the car before hauling the door open and fishing out the StarkPad he'd brought as a gift to Lee Balci.
Tony almost drops it when he turns around and she's standing there. It's his first full view of her face, and yes, he had been completely right. She's lovely, with big brown eyes and a dusting of freckles. He tells himself he is not allowed to stare, so Tony holds out the device apologetically, thumbing the power button as he does so.
"You don't get to unbox it, but that's because I hacked it to put a bunch of things you don't usually get on one of these. This case is a special design, holds a stylus," he tells her. She's still barefoot, and her feet are dirty, and it's charming, and Tony senses that he might be in trouble, here.
She walks around to her pickup, and he follows her. He's parked on the other side, so there's space for her to open the driver's door wide and climb up so she can sit and set up the tablet. It's not one of the transparent ones, because those are really pricey and Tony hadn't wanted his new friend Lee to think he was buying him off.
He's really, really glad he made that call right now.
Instead of taking advantage of the way the truck's cab height gives him a great view of her legs, Tony goes over to get the rest of his stuff from the vehicle. Once there, though, he realizes something. He didn't know she was a woman, but she did, and she was comfortable with camping out anyway. That says something about her confidence and her level of trust for him, but it isn't set in stone now that she knows he's Tony Stark. So, he leaves his bag where it is, and comes back with just his own StarkPad.
When she sees him, she smiles, and Tony bites his lip from the inside. Then, she holds up her tablet.
I'm Leigh Balci. Nice to meet you, Tony Stark
"Do you want me to write mine out, too?" he asks, gesturing to what's in his hand. Leigh shakes her head. He looks up at her and says, "So which one of us got the bigger shock, do you think?"
Her smile widens, and she points to him.
"I'll buy that," he agrees.
Leigh makes a twirling motion with one finger pointed down. Tony shakes his head, confused. She narrows her eyes a bit at him, and starts writing with the stylus.
Turn around.
I have to get down.
Tony suddenly realizes what she means, and he pops a thumbs up and walks away, feeling stupid for not realizing her issue sooner. The Tony Stark of five years ago might have lifted up his own StarkPad and used its black mirror to watch her get down in that dress, but he likes Lee- Leigh, now -and he values her friendship more than that.
"Do you want me to find a hotel?" he calls out. "I offer so you don't have to feel obligated, but I'd like to proceed as planned." He hears a ripping sound, but it doesn't quite sound right, as if she's unzipping something that pings every time it breaks apart a tine. Tony grabs his bag and shoulders it, then walks around the pickup- to find that Leigh's now wearing a white shirt edged with lace, and a pair of jean shorts covered with flower patches. He stands there for a moment, confused and increasingly aware that he should not stare at this woman if he ever wants her to trust him.
Leigh takes pity on him.
Snaps.
She holds up the dress, which looks as if it had been unsnapped from neck to hem.
"I'll uh, carry some of this, then," Tony says, needing to cover his face, because he's not going to picture that, not going to picture that, yep, he's picturing it. "Lead on, I'll trust your expertise."
Tony does help with the tents, even though he's sorely tempted to act like his old self and sit down to watch her put them up. In the back of his mind, he keeps asking himself if she knew who he was, if that was why she brought an unsnappable dress to a campsite with him. Eventually, though, Tony starts thinking with his head again, and they get the campsite set up. As he watches her putter around putting the final touches on things, Tony realizes that he's judging her by his metric, not by hers. She's brought a hummingbird feeder to clip to her tent, for God's sake.
It's not naiveté, either. Leigh Balci seems sincere as hell, she's just somehow also the living embodiment of cottagecore, and not because she's trying to impress anybody. Tony knows. Women who want to impress him wear Iron Man swimsuits under their work clothes if he's going to be in the area. They lift their tops to show him tattoos of his face or his ARC reactor on their breasts. They think he likes flashy sex kittens, and he does, but nowhere near as much as he used to. It was easier to be a completionist when he was trying to have as much fun as he could before responsibility hit him in the face.
While Tony has a mini crisis about what he finds attractive anymore, Leigh single handedly drags a huge cooler full of ice and food to the site.
"Okay," Tony chuckles, impressed. He gets up from his camp chair and points at the unlit fire. "You mind?"
She collapses into her own chair and waves him ahead. He lights the fire with a repulsor, something he's done before to a more appreciative audience, but that's cool. He can already tell that cooking on an open fire is more complicated than it looks, so he cheats and gets his headset, asking FRIDAY about temperatures and the like. While he's doing that, Leigh putters around near the cooler. He's just about ready to find out what to cook when she touches his arm, and he jumps.
"Sorry. Turns out people don't get that close to me, anymore."
She offers him a sad sort of smile for that, but then gestures to the folding table she's pulled out of somewhere. It's got a meal's worth of things to cook, and that's how Tony ends up making food alongside a woman he didn't even know existed, less than three hours after meeting her. It's delicious. She's one of those people who know a few obscure spices that change everything.
Tony's pretty sure she's just one of those people that changes everything.
Leigh turns in early. She writes that she's still recovering from her illness, gesturing to her throat. Tony watches her duck into her tent, pulling pins out of her hair as she goes. He half hopes the mass of hair will fall while she's still in sight, but has no luck.
That night, he thinks about Pepper.
It makes sense, in an odd way. This is the first time he's been so strongly attracted to anyone since, and Pepper had been his first really long-term committed relationship where he had felt safe and free to be himself. He spends some time just comparing the two women, as if knowing Leigh from her emails and spending a couple of hours with her is any basis of comparison with a woman he'd lived around and relied on for years before he even truly knew her.
They're alike, in strange ways. Both incredibly feminine, he feels, even though Pepper Potts was feminine in a way that models aspire to, all power suits and perfect makeup and killer heels. Leigh is much softer, so soft that he can't even imagine what she'd do if she had to creep into an ARC reactor room full of broken glass and sabotage it.
Tony spends time thinking about how they're alike and how they're different and how much he really misses Pepper even though it doesn't make him ache the same way anymore. Then he realizes that he's objectified his new friend in a really disturbing way, a shameful way, a presumptuous way. Embarrassment flames up in his gut not unlike the Extremis test subjects, all hot and uncontrollable and maybe related to a huge, irrevocable mistake.
Leigh Balci drew a gun on him and put it away when she realized who exactly he was, not the other way around. She doesn't deserve this from him.
Tony resolves to stop thinking of her as if she's some sort of moon to Pepper's sun. He tells himself he'll be different in the morning. He orders himself to.
8888888888
He wakes up to the smell of coffee.
Tony checks with FRIDAY and finds out it's 7:30 AM. He peeks out the front flap of his tent and sees a sign that Leigh's left him on the side of one of the food packages from the day before.
Sleep in if you want.
Coffee'll be warm when you wake up.
He risks a look around the camp for her and spots her standing beside her tent with a coffee mug, eyes closed, head tipped up toward the sun. Her hair is in a long, fat braid resting over one shoulder, and she's wearing a white blouse and a cornflower blue skirt full of gathers that her toes barely peep out of.
Tony crawls back into his sleeping bag. He's utterly screwed.
For one truly ridiculous second, he contemplates putting on the ARC reactor, tapping on the nanosuit, and claiming there's a work emergency before flying away.
8888888888
Tony comes out after twenty minutes of self-recrimination. Leigh's got some clever contraption that lets her pull aside some separators and shake it, and boom! pancake mix without the mess. He teases her about pancake art, and she retreats to the cooler for a few minutes while he makes some pancakes of his own. When she comes back, it's with a cup of mix she'd squirted out and dyed with mashed blueberries. Then, she proceeds to make a pancake that passably looks like his arc reactor, a triangle of blueberry mash and regular pancake. Once flipped, though, it's horrifying, and they both laugh and try to encourage the other to eat it with hand gestures.
It goes in the fire, and Tony's heart is full of a warm, pleased feeling he hasn't enjoyed in a really long time.
It's with that feeling heating him up from the inside that he and Leigh walk around to figure out where the best place for his house would be. Tony's brought battery-powered projectors that he places at strategic points to create a blue wall of holographic light. They mark the boundaries of his favorite location and Leigh writes out that they'll have to do some other preliminary work, but it's a solid start. She's obviously pleased.
"Do you want me to cook again?" he asks when it comes up to dinner time. Leigh shakes her head.
I'll do it, but, chat?
"Absolutely," Tony says. There were sandwiches for lunch, and her pancake setup hadn't been super close to the flames. As she arranges pans and the cast-iron skillet for dinner, though, Tony winces as he sees her skirt come close to catching fire multiple times. "You're a fire hazard," he tells her. "Might want to change out of the skirt."
Leigh looks down, stepping back quickly in alarm. She sets her hands on her hips and frowns, before grabbing her tablet.
Thanks, it's my favorite
"It's pretty," Tony says. "I'll give you some privacy." He gets up and heads toward the lake. They're in a valley, and the sun sets differently here, the light cut in half much earlier than he would have expected. So when he turns around to look at how far he's walked, Tony's shocked by the fact that he can see Leigh's silhouette in her tent, backlit by their large fire. Leigh leans over right as he turns around, and her skirt falls to the floor of her tent, leaving the shape of her bare legs visible.
His heart pounds. She can't see him; the tent's walls aren't thick, but it's the same model as his, opaque except for the shadows of nearby things. He's far away, and it's only the unique situation of the half-light and the fire that means he can see her at all. Still, Tony turns away. The image is indelible, he'll probably never be able to shake it: the warm (everything is warm around her, he's come to realize) orange of the tent combined with the firelight, and the shadow of her curves, unexpected and devastating.
Tony kicks a rock into the lake and tells fate or his libido or something that it's past time to settle the fuck down. If he's not careful, the last few days are going to be written on his memory banks as something very different than he intended. He walks and walks some more, trying to walk the tingle of attraction away. By the time he angles back around to their tents, he can smell a fully cooked steak and realizes he's been unfair to Leigh in a different way.
Because his body just won't accept the rules he's been trying to enforce, Tony comes clean, hoping her knowledge of what he'd seen would make him feel ashamed enough to stop thinking of her that way.
"Hey, I didn't mean to ditch you. I looked back and caught a glimpse of you changing in silhouette, purely by accident. Decided to take a walk, as penance." He doesn't look at her face, doesn't want to see her expression. "That smells amazing, I'm ready to admit I would not have done as well with those steaks."
Tony sits down and waits for her response, forgetting that it'll be visual. He hears the swipe of her stylus against glass, and looks over to see her smirking in the firelight.
I think you didn't want to make dinner, and that's your excuse
"It wasn't, but I'll be glad to adopt your version of events," he says. "Better that than an article in the weekend newspapers, 'Exclusive: Tony Stark's Empire Collapses Under Steak Allegations.'"
He had been so sure she would laugh, but Leigh's expression falls. She bites her lip, presses her eyes closed for a brief moment, and when she opens them, she's a ghost of the person she had been, seconds before. All Tony can think of is that he's just reminded her who he is, which in turn reminded her of what he'd failed to save.
"Can I get your food? Stay right there." He pops up and starts looking for plates, only to find that she'd already set two up. "Okay, I can hand it to you."
Tony turns around slowly, convinced she'll be gone, but she's getting up to come over. He hands her one of the plates, the one that has the most appetizing steak on it from what he can tell under the cellophane she'd wrapped them both in. With her other hand, Leigh makes the hand gesture for 'thank you.'
"You're welcome," he murmurs, looking over at her. "As long as you're not Italian. That's a whole different gesture."
Leigh laughs, and he's relieved. Still, the specter of her reaction sits with them now, and Tony understands that it's something that won't be soothed so easily.
That Leigh's the one with the olive branch after their mostly silent dinner isn't surprising, but Tony feels convicted by it, a little. She's brought the makings for S'mores. As they roast their marshmallows, he regales her with the tales of the contraptions he designed as a kid to try to perfectly heat the marshmallows and chocolate without burning his fingers. Each year, they got more involved, of course, and she laughs until she clutches her throat in pain as he describes their epic failures in great detail.
He doesn't tell her that he'd always wanted to show them to his father, but he was never available. Or that he found out his nanny actually hated S'mores after all the years of eating them with gusto because she had wanted him to feel accomplished and loved. That's not what the stories are about, right now.
Finally, after licking her fingers clean, Leigh grabs the tablet.
Out of the whole family I was always the worst at these
Tony winces, understands immediately.
Practice doesn't always make perfect!
"I get it. I was always shit at knitting."
Leigh mimes throwing the tablet at him, but sets it aside to start clearing away the plates. She'd pinned her long braid up that morning and it's been slowly slipping out of its confinement all day. Tony feels a powerful urge to tug on it and recognizes very well what the full spectrum of that urge means. It scares the hell out of him.
"Let me guess- you're a champion knitter," he says, for once sitting back to watch her instead of helping. "You probably knitted those leggings. Thread almost too tiny to see, two hundred fifty stitches an inch, admit it."
Leigh turns and looks at him, her face lit up with amusement, braid about to let go, and opens her mouth to say something. As Tony watches, she catches herself, her eyes going wide, and she turns away as if she's almost done something shameful. The force from turning her head so quickly puts paid to the last pin, and her braid spirals free. She starts writing something on the tablet that he can't see, and sets it on her chair face-down. Then, to the sounds of the singing cicadas and the crackling fire, Leigh finishes putting the dishes in their containers, and heads to her tent.
He'd sat and let her do what she needed to do, but now Tony snatches her tablet to flip it over.
Don't ask, please.
Goodnight.
Tony reminds himself that anyone with even a rudimentary amount of knowledge will know that the Avengers and their associates were the ones who fought Thanos and failed to stop him. And Iron Man is one of the most prominent among their number. He can't skip ahead, she needs to actually get used to him. If he wants this woman's friendship, if he wants this woman's anything, he can't forget that.
And he does. Oh, he does.