NOTE: I have to laugh, because this chapter *feels* like it's seven thousand words long, to me, but it's just over 4500. It's a roller-coaster of emotional intensity!

Chapter Four

Tony stumbles back in utter, mind numbing shock. Nothing about the world around him has changed, but none of it will ever be the same, either.

Leigh, his- his soulmate, is walking away from him.

He starts after her. She must have heard his running steps, because she picks up her pace. Tony's heartbeat roars in his ears. If he doesn't stop her now, she'll make sure he never gets a chance to come near her again. This had to have been building since she lowered the gun, all those weeks ago.

Tony catches up, grabs her in his arms from behind, and in a burst of clarity he knows what he has to do. He needs time, time to persuade her, time to understand.

"FRIDAY, activate bunker protocol!" he says, knowing she's always listening through the receiver he built into his ARC reactor. His AI is silent, but Tony knows what she would be saying, so he adds, "Do it."

Leigh's not struggling, but she's trembling, and Tony holds on with desperation, because if this works, she'll be in real danger if she breaks free of him right now.

He can hear a shout go up among the workers, even over the sounds of the backhoe, and suddenly, a large metal rectangle slams itself into the ground beside them. Leigh's reaction is to scream and shrink back against him, and he turns her unresisting body around, pulling her head against his chest. Three more slabs bury themselves in the soft mud around them, followed by the loud boom sound of the ceiling piece landing exactly as it was meant to. A sizzling hiss echoes in the newly dark space, chased by a red glow. The bunker protocol worked exactly as intended- he and Leigh are now inside a powerfully sturdy box anchored into the ground and self-welded into an impregnable fortress.

The built-in lights flicker on as soon as the red glow from the welds start fading.

Tony opens his arms and backs away from Leigh. He's bought himself the time, but he's probably squandered at least half of it by trapping her inside this thing with him. If she were any other woman, if he didn't have her first voiced Words to him written on his skin, he would never have dared to do this.

For the first time, he realizes she's marked, too. He's spoken to her freely multiple times.

"What?" Leigh finally asks in a frightened gasp, her arms tight around her torso, eyes wide as she looks around her.

Tony's shot through with five kinds of desperation, and he's burning through all of them, chasing hope. "Bunker protocol. Self-building survival space." He shakes his head, looking her right in the eyes. "I didn't know what else to do. Leigh."

She shakes her head, scared and defensive. "Open the door."

He winces. "There's no door."

Leigh stares at him.

"It's designed for last-minute protection. I brought it to set up for an emergency in the future, sometime. Not this, this was…" he scrubs a hand over his face. "It's set to release electromagnetic resistance after forty-eight hours."

"Two days?" she gasps.

Tony backs up and slumps against the wall behind him. All of the walls are covered by a metal sheath to protect the goods and tools buried inside each slab. "There's food, water. Stuff to do other than argue with me," he says, offering her the barest hint of a smile.

"What… what if there was an earthquake-"

"This is West Virginia."

"A flood, what if we had to get out?"

"FRIDAY, you're configured for rescue, right? We aren't set up for death by lahar or something, in here?"

"You're as safe as you can be after what you just did, Boss. Yes, is the answer."

"That's-" Leigh starts to say, looking for the speaker, and he finishes for her.

"My AI assistant, yeah. You're safe." Outrage crosses her face, and he recognizes it, but speaks up right away to refute it. "You don't want to be stuck here, you don't want to talk to me. I get it. But. There was only so long you could put that off."

Immediately, she's defensive again, pulling the thick braid over her shoulder, crossing her arms. Tony widens his eyes expectantly, and Leigh's left hand seeks out her right wrist, messes with it, pulling away a scrap of skin-colored fabric. She holds that arm up beside her face. He sees that there's a square of dirt-ringed adhesive around a single, black inked word in his handwriting. The skin around the word is lighter, as if it never sees the sun.

Tony.

It makes his heart sing, which is ridiculous, it's preposterous, it is everything he's pushed against, everything he thought was bullshit. Thanos's tainted, terrible gift, right there in the flesh in front of him, and he wants her.

"I think if I tried to show you mine, you'd never speak to me again, and we were just making progress on that," Tony says wryly. "They're on my thigh," he explains. Leigh looks down, regret painted across her features, and he's only human, and those words had hurt, so he adds, "Yeah. That was my introduction to the whole concept."

He lets out a breath, turns, and walks a little ways into the other half of the bunker. Another light flickers on. Tony wants to explain just how horrible those words were, how he'd seen them marked on his skin at the worst possible time. That hearing them now hadn't stabbed him quite as much as they did on that day in his shower, but only barely. The time in between has lessened their weight a little, but only because he's lived with them for over a year.

Something about that thought stops him in his tracks. Lived with the words.

Tony spins around. "You planned that out, didn't you? Since how long ago?"

"Can it be warmer in here?" Leigh asks in a small voice.

"Yes."

Tony starts looking at the numbers on the metal sheathing, and finds the right one. He rolls it up sideways to access the packed supplies. The battery powered device has a thermostat, but he frowns and sets it down, looking for a different panel. "One sec, we can-" Tony breaks off and strides across the space to the opposite wall, peeling back its sheathing. The carpet he's looking for was specially designed, with a thermoreflective layer embedded in it that will prevent heat loss through the ground. "Come here?"

"Is that a rug?" Leigh asks.

"Yep, and it'll roll out, if you're not in the way."

She walks over and presses against the wall, and he unfurls the rug. Both of them lean down almost in unison to adjust it. Another minute and the space heater is on and pumping out the heat.

"There are chairs, but-" Tony breaks off.

"But you prefer me to be in the hot seat right now, instead?" Her lips curve into a self-deprecating smile, and she starts fiddling with her braid. He takes these indicators as positive, but only inwardly. Outwardly, Tony is implacable.

"How long ago did you start practicing what you were going to say?"

She holds his gaze bravely. "Months."

"You still mean them?"

Leigh catches fire. There's no other description for the way she shifts from confused and uncomfortable to furious. "Yes I still mean them! You, you-" She throws her hands in the air. "That word on my wrist was the only thing I had left. I stood in a house full of dust, that day, and then there it was. Like a lifeline. Like someone was saying, 'okay, so you've lost them, but this, this is for you. This will make it better!'" Her eyes are bright with unshed tears and anger, and everything she's saying slices him to the bone.

"It's a parlor trick," he whispers. "Worse than a consolation prize. It's bullshit, it- It doesn't mean anything." The familiar words taste like wax in his mouth now, slippery and hard to scrape away.

Leigh fixes him with a look. Tony can't take it, he turns his head.

"You clearly don't believe that," she adds, twisting the knife.

How did he trap her in this enclosed space only for him to be the one exposed?

"Yeah, well, I'm about-" he checks his watch. "Fifteen minutes in, so it's a new thing for me." Tony swings his gaze back to her, feeling the aggression settle into the set of his jaw.

"I've watched the people around me transformed by joy, with their soulmates," she says, slowly unraveling her braid, combing her fingers through the loose, wavy strands as they untwist. "I laid in bed the night you first signed your name to that email and hoped."

"You put the gun down when you saw who it was, that's something."

"I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to do."

"Yes you did." The bitter words spill forth before he can stop them.

Leigh's braid is half unraveled, the cascade of honey-gold hair spread across her chest like a breastplate. Tony thinks it's ironic that this is the first time he's ever seen her dressed like someone else, her unique style stifled by the thick tan overalls and coat.

Suddenly he doesn't want to hear how she crafted those words, the ones that bookended the past year in such opposing ways. Tony goes back to the wall he pulled the rug out of and finds the camp chairs, pulls one out and walks into the middle of the room. He sets the base of the thin package it's crammed into on the rug halfway between them, then shoves the top so it swings over to her, turning and walking away instead of watching her reaction. Then he grabs one for himself, opens it up right there next to the wall, and sits.

Leigh has a choice. She can place her chair wherever she wants, in whichever configuration, and both of them are smart enough to know that what she picks will matter to him. Tony watches her pick it up and loves the cascade of her golden hair that spills down when she leans over. To his surprise, though, she walks straight ahead and leans the chair up against the wall. She then trails her hand along the metal sheath of that wall, moving toward the one opposite him. Leigh touches each pocket and indent, cataloguing what's there, until she apparently finds what she was looking for right in the center.

He watches her read the instructions, then pull out the tripod of tubing. It's a lightweight contraption for hanging wet clothes to dry next to the space heater. Leigh takes off her heavyweight jacket and hangs it on the hook before starting on the metal buckles at her shoulders. Tony can't tear his eyes away, but after his confession to seeing her silhouette camping, he knows she wouldn't be doing this if she weren't comfortable enough. She'd been wearing a white blouse under the jacket, and he catches a glimpse of something yellow as she steps out of the overalls.

Tony wants to laugh when she's done hanging those up. She's wearing some kind of tapestry skirt. It reaches down to her ankles, with enough fabric that she'd been easily able to wear the baggy overalls over it. The skirt's patterned all over like some kind of rich persian rug. It's as if Leigh was a nesting doll hiding all of her beauty under her work clothes, and it's endearing as fuck. Tony's so distracted by this that he doesn't see that she's walking over until she unfolds her camp chair just a few feet away from him.

"A dialogue box popped up just now, asking if you're sure," he jokes.

"I'd hit 'okay,' on it," she says.

"You know what you're doing, you're saying," Tony says, impressed and attracted by her audacity.

"Not at all," she smiles.

The lilting voice of his AI sounds in the space. "Boss, the foreman wants to know if you're all right."

"Definitely. We both just needed a break, that's all. Testing out a new product for Stark Industries. We've caught a weird pathogen from the lake and are quarantining. I hit the wrong button, whoops. Whatever you need to say, FRIDAY, you got it?"

"Got it."

"Tony!" Leigh objects, laughing.

"Say it again," he tells her urgently. The light in her eyes fades a bit, and she slides her legs up underneath her in the chair, a compact, protective posture. "What, too far? It's written on your arm!" he protests, only half kidding.

"You want me to say mine again?" Leigh offers. It's pretty incisive commentary, all things considered, but he has a counter to it.

"Well, with all the time you spent practicing them, I suppose it's only fair."

"You could have figured it out," Leigh says. "You know that, right? Day one, camping."

Tony looks at her like she's crazy, and she reaches out and grabs his hand, places her right wrist on his palm, and closes his fingers around it. He's distracted by the sizzle of contact, willing contact, at that.

"Look at it," she orders him.

He does. Tony smooths his thumb across his name, and then finally, reason breaks through. It's in his handwriting.

She can tell it has hit him. "From that first day, I was writing. Over and over."

"You got lucky. My writing is not always this neat," Tony tells her. She puffs out a frustrated breath, but he presses on, dropping the joking tone. "You think I looked at those awful words more than once?"

"You did."

Tony looks down at her hand in his, his name on her skin, and he wishes so badly that everything would be different, but it's not. She reacts to his expression by pulling her hand back, and he stands up and walks away from her.

"You're right, I did. And you put them there. Not the way most people do, no," he chuckles darkly. "No. Not a surprised response but calculation. You meant to hurt me, after you knew who I was, and what I was to you."

"You said soulmates are a bullshit gift from a tyrant!" Leigh says, angry. "So don't start with the-"

Tony's heart is ratcheted open, and everything spills out of it. "That was before I met this gorgeous woman that wasn't connected to that!" he shouts at her, turning around. "That was before I started thinking about what my life might be like with her in it!"

"What?" Leigh gasps, getting up, clutching the back of the chair.

"You think this is about the Words? Leigh! You were not what I expected when I offered to camp out. I left the property that day with a hell of a crush," Tony tells her truthfully. "After another month of emails I was composing a speech to my best friend about how I'd triumphed over the whole concept of soulmates. I'd found someone by myself, I didn't need Thanos's tainted fucking gift."

Leigh's standing in the corner of the bunker with a hand laid flat on her stomach as if trying to steady herself.

"You spent that time knowing you'd found your soulmate. I spent that time being proud that I'd proved I didn't need one. Which one of us was more wrong?" Tony asks her.

"Neither," she whispers, dragging her chair over to where she's standing. She turns it around and sits, working on her braid, steadily unraveling it. Her hands are trembling.

Tony slides down the wall and just watches her. Neither, she'd said.

They sit in silence for a long time.

"You're thinking so hard I can barely breathe in here, Stark," Leigh finally calls out in a warm, amused voice.

"You have to admit this is quite a situation."

"You, the hero who wants to reject absolutely everything Thanos did, and me, the victim whose family you couldn't save? Yeah, we're an afternoon special waiting to happen," Leigh says. She stands up and leans over a little, shaking her head as the mass of hair she unbraided cascades down, all the way past her hips. After a few passes through it with her fingers, she starts to gather it up.

"Don't," Tony begs, the word torn out of him.

Leigh straightens and leans her head sideways, looking at him. "Why?"

He suspects she won't respond all that favorably to, 'because you look like a wood nymph I'd like to be turned into a frog for the crime of trying to seduce.' He goes for flippant, instead.

"Well, you know what used to be my day job. It's real easy to defeat a hero with hair like that. Totally against regulation. Makes me feel safe when you have it down. It means we're not in danger."

"So, you're saying you like my hair. You like looking at it," Leigh says lightly, sitting down in her now-turned-towards-him-again-thank-god camp chair.

Tony twists his lips sideways, trying to prevent the grin that wants to spill forth. If he liked her before, when she didn't say a word to him, now that she might be flirting, he's a complete goner.

"I mean, it's okay," he manages. "Might be prettier if you tossed, I don't know, three dragonfly pins into it."

"You counted them?" Leigh asks. Her cheeks are pink.

"Yes. I did not count the number of doilies you had at your desk, though, so we're talking, bare minimum of paying attention."

"Because I totally showed you my office."

"It's right next to the bathroom," Tony protests. His cheeks hurt from the effort of not smiling.

"It's not," Leigh says.

"It will be if I pay them to remodel the building," he tells her.

"Suit yourself," she says, her eyes lighting up as she realizes it's somewhat of a pun when said to Iron Man. Leigh leans back in her chair with a smug demeanor he completely recognizes, because it's one of his favorites to use himself. But she leaves her hair down, and that's a big step in the right direction.

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They both get hungry at the same time and raid the walls for lunch supplies. He'd spared no expense for the best of the so-called 'prepper' foods, things that would last for years stored up until needed in an emergency. Tony makes the mistake of letting slip that he stocked the bunker less than two weeks before, so technically, he could have had all manner of foods in there for them, if only he'd known.

When they're done, the table is set up in the middle of the bunker area, their finished meals wait to be added to the deluxe garbage compactor, and Tony's shuffling the deck of cards he'd fished out of the wall.

"So, it's been a few hours," Leigh says in a careful voice from her position across the table from him. "I can't help but think if this were any other situation, you'd have laid out all of the supplies from the walls in this thing and started using them to make an escape plan."

Tony had been wondering and worrying about Leigh's swift acquiescence to their captivity, and now he realizes that she has a broad pragmatic streak. She isn't resigned to their circumstances at all. Incongruously, this pleases him. For most of his life, women have subsumed their wants and desires in an attempt to trade them for proximity to him. It looks like Leigh might have set hers aside to observe how best to persuade him to let her go.

Her choice would even be encouraging if it weren't for the fact that it makes him feel just a bit like a serial killer with a torture bunker.

"The design for this was about external forces, not internal ones," Tony says. He thinks about how impossible it would have been to try to protect all of the New Yorkers who died in the Chitauri attack, back when that was the most incomprehensible and devastating thing that could have happened on Earth. "48 hours to strategize, to survive, to coordinate, without having to worry about fighting something off in the process." Tony leans forward, hoping she'll see the truth in what he's saying.

"How long ago did you design it? You said you stocked it less than two weeks ago."

"Why?"

"Is it possible you rushed this? When have you been in an emergency and chosen to take two days to decide what to do about it?"

Leigh's studiously reasonable tone sets Tony's teeth on edge, as if he has a Pavlovian response to being managed. Unfortunately, she's right.

He's not willing to concede that, though. "I'm in a different place in my life, now. Consultant, not contractor."

"After years of watching footage of Iron Man, I'd buy that argument more if you'd framed this like a pause button for your first instincts," Leigh says thoughtfully, "But you've called it a 'survival' bunker multiple times, now. Survival, not strategy."

"It's a prototype," Tony whispers, but that's dandelion fluff in a hurricane. Leigh's face twists, she looks down, and with a kind of detached horror, Tony wonders what his looks like to make her react like she's done something wrong. Nothing springs to mind, so he just watches the play of her emotions. Finally, she smiles, and it's an upside-down version of what he knows her smile can look like.

"Well. Of all the people in the world, you deserve some extra benefit of the doubt."

Tony's seen that kind of nobility before. He'd always wanted to be the kind of person who engenders it in others, but this is not at all what he'd had in mind.

"I wasn't thinking," he blurts out. "It was selfish."

Now her smile is genuine, but what she says after it cuts just as deeply. "You deserve to be selfish, too." Leigh gets up and tidies away the packages from lunch into the trash compactor, while Tony has a mini crisis.

"But you've called it a 'survival' bunker multiple times, now. Survival, not strategy."

The bunker was one of the first projects Tony had designed in a long time that was prompted by his concerns, not saving the world, saving his city, saving his team, or saving a person very important to him. He hadn't seen its glaring flaws after spending five weeks perfecting it, but Leigh had spotted them in less than a day.

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After he shakes off his Leigh-prompted introspection, they play cards for hours. Leigh is clever, and Tony, who is used to wiping the floor with his opponents, starts to enjoy the surprise of not being able to. He starts to suspect that her suggestion of darning socks for the Avengers if they ever figure out how to reverse the Snap would be a waste of her mind. They've been chatting the whole time, avoiding any hot-button topics, but after a comment about how many partial music albums were released in the past year posthumously, Leigh grows quiet.

After ten minutes of silence, she sets her cards down. "I'm not going to kiss you in here," she says.

"Controversial decision. My polling says that 50% of the bunker disagrees with that stance, " Tony tells her. Her lips twitch but she schools her expression back to a serious one.

"You locked me in here with you-"

"-to get you not to drop off of the face of the Earth, from my perspective. Which I'm still not 100% confident you won't do, I might add," Tony objects.

"...really?" Leigh asks, and her complete surprise makes him realize that he's an asshole, that there could be a whole bunch of physical expectations regarding soulmates and he would have no idea.

"You should know that I have done zero research on the soulmate thing. Twenty minutes after finding out, I told the nurse, 'don't tell me IF I have Words, don't tell me what they are, and keep them off the chart.' I went home after they released me, got drunk, took a shower, found the words, and then proceeded to pretend that the whole phenomenon didn't exist," Tony tells her, all at once, hands gesturing like crazy. "So I don't know any… protocols. Or physical expectations."

Leigh holds up a hand, her face creased with concern. "Rewind a bit," she says. "You were in the hospital?"

Tony doesn't want to do this, but out of anyone on Earth, Leigh deserves not to hear him deflect over this part of his life. "I was on Thanos's planet when he Snapped. When we failed to stop him from taking a component he needed, he left to get the last one, back here. The ship we took to get home was trashed, it stalled out lightyears from Earth. I almost starved to death."

The expression on her face is inscrutable, but her eyes are sober and sad. Finally, Leigh reaches out and touches his arm with the hand marked with his name.

"Thank you for trying."

"Yeah, well after he dropped the moon on my head, it was personal." Tony sighs, looking up and rubbing the space between his eyes. He's getting tired and careless after being up for 18 hours straight with no caffeine. Leigh's hand on his arm squeezes tight, then tighter, and he finally looks at her. Her face is ashen.

"You're not kidding?" she whispers.

Tony realizes what he has to do, and so he takes a deep breath and tries to turn toward her in his chair, but it's a camp chair, and they don't do that. So he stands up and kicks it out of the way, crouching in front of her. Leigh's still staring at him in shock, and she doesn't know the half of it. He takes both of her hands.

"Hey. We failed, but it was close. So close, Leigh." He isn't going to tell her about what Strange did, and how he was wrong to do it. Tony has litigated that in his own head for months, and it still doesn't sit well. "Thanos knew my name. Told me-" Tony can't say it. He shakes his head. "If we could have won, we would have."

Strange's prediction, about the one timeline they came out on top, tantalizes him again, but he shakes it off.

Leigh's brown eyes are fond and warm, now. "All that- that wasn't in the news."

"It doesn't help much, does it?" Tony said.

Leigh smoothes her thumbs across his hands where he's still holding onto her. "It helps me, right now, in this place."

He wants to kiss her, but he wants to keep her afterwards, so Tony swallows hard and tells her, "Good."