NOTE: been just really enjoying writing this, and so if that means chapters come fast, that's great! I have been experiencing a worrisome eye condition, however, and so depending on how my appointment goes with that on Monday, chapters may slow until I can, you know, see properly again without pain. Just a warning!
Story-wise, sexual content warning, and I hope you enjoy Tony's PA as much as I do!
Chapter Seven
Tony's ruse works. No press is waiting at the entrance to the garage. He pulls his new Roadster into its designated parking spot, hops out, and gets to the door just in time to help Leigh. She looks around at the cars parked around the Tesla as she follows him to the elevator. Suddenly, she stops.
"Tony?"
"Yeah?" he says, tapping in the code for the elevator.
"All of the license plates say Stark."
"Yeah, of course they do," he says. The elevator opens with a ding, but she's still standing in the middle of the garage. "Leigh?"
"I have a feeling some of these cars cost more than houses I've designed," she whispers.
"FRIDAY, hold the doors, will you?" Tony says quietly. He makes his way over to Leigh, notes the way she's standing, almost forlorn, a sort of stricken look on her face. "I have a really fancy coffeemaker?" he dangles.
"I'm thinking that's probably a given," Leigh says. She allows him to guide her over to the elevator. "I'll stick to my own, for tonight, if that's all right with you."
"Miss Balci's apartment, please, FRIDAY," Tony says. Maybe it's the close quarters, maybe it's because Leigh already knows his AI, but she seems to relax. After a ding, the doors reveal a wide open space, lit by a wall of windows that span two floors. He turns right, leads her to the first door. "Multiple avenues of entry: you can ask FRIDAY to let you in, set up a PIN for this access screen here, or we can set it up for your palm print."
"You mean you haven't had her scan the FBI database for my biometrics yet?" Leigh asks, her eyebrows shooting up.
"FRIDAY, can you unlock the door for Veronica Mars, here?" Tony says, stuffing both of his hands into his pockets. "Before you disappear, though- do you like pizza? There's this one place, kind of a ritual, if I've been away-"
He cuts himself off, because Leigh winces and steps close to him, her voice quiet but impassioned. "Tony, I'll be honest here. I'm an introvert. I've just spent a lot of time not alone, and I need to just… be, for a while."
Tony considers playing it off, acting like he was going to offer to send the pizza to her rooms, but he doesn't. "That's fine," he says, gesturing at the door. "Go, juice up."
"Thanks," she says, one corner of her mouth twisting up in an apologetic smile. Leigh rests a hand on the doorknob, takes a deep breath, and goes inside.
Tony should walk away now. Leigh's made clear she wants to be alone, she's just had to make huge adjustments to nearly all of her life and work routines, and there are undoubtedly things that his guys didn't quite get right about her apartment setup (for one thing, it's almost certainly at least twice the size of the last one).
He toes the floor, strains to listen in case he can hear anything, and lets out a breath. Rhodey had been right. It has been a long time, over six months, since Tony has spent any significant portion of time with someone, much less two days' worth. He's so used to keeping his own company now that Tony's actually kind of surprised the time passed without much in the way of-
Leigh's door flings open and she skids out, catching sight of him immediately.
"How on Earth did you get it so-" she stops, obviously happy, emotional about it. "Everything's perfect. Thank you."
"You're welcome. Least I could do," Tony says, but he's pleased. This unexpected reaction is apparently what had glued him to the floor out in this hallway, what made him wait, even though she'd told him she needed to be alone.
Leigh gets a determined look on her face, and she starts towards him, only to falter after three steps. "Thank you," she repeats. She starts to turn, and Tony calls out to her, impulsive and greedy.
"You should do it."
Leigh spins back to face him, a surprised laugh starting the word "What?"
"Whatever that was." He gestures, vaguely.
Leigh regards him for a few seconds, then starts toward him again, that look of bashful determination back on her face. When she's close enough to touch, Leigh sets her 'Tony' hand on his chest but doesn't slow down, letting her momentum slide it up onto his neck. Tony is completely on board with this, resting his hands on her hips gently, remembering the way she'd seemed so delicate on the helicopter.
But this Leigh is fierce, not fragile. "Thank you," she breathes, sinking her fingers into his hair, pulling him into a confident kiss. She pushes herself up into his mouth, joyful, warm, and willing. Tony only needs a second to adjust, and then he's there too, one hand under her braid at her neck, the other rough at her hip. It's not a chaste kiss, but it's not dirty, either. It's a 'start of something' kiss, learning, enjoying, wanting. It's like Leigh's studying him, her fingers buried in his hair, lips joining with his, clinging, adjusting to him, every time just right.
Tony's grateful he doesn't have any actual powers, because he is sure they'd be manifesting as something embarrassingly revealing if he did. He is completely wrecked for this woman, he'll admit it to himself. He coaxes her mouth open and shifts his body closer, drags her to him, flush with his hips but still not close enough. At the first sweet brush of her tongue to his, though, she starts to pull back.
It's a generous retreat, as she unwinds from him. Leigh's fingernails scrape along his scalp as she slides her hand back away, but the hint of suction on his lower lip when Leigh gentles the kiss floods him with pure need. Tony actually puts his hands behind his back once she steps back, allowing her to see something amusing in his internal struggle not to want to stop.
"I wanted to know what that was like, when I wasn't scared." Leigh says, her brown eyes amused but heated, as if her shyness is only barely just overcoming her baser desires. Tony knows where he stands on that sliding scale. "And thank you, for the apartment."
"You're welcome," he tells her. He didn't mean it to sound so much like an invitation, but he can tell that she can also hear those undertones, because she bites her lip. "See you," Tony says, and walks away toward the elevator. He doesn't turn around to see if she's still standing there because his self-control is still set for billionaire and she was very clear about wanting to be alone.
The elevator doors close and he allows himself to let out a loud breath. "Penthouse."
Tony heads straight for the shower, because it's been a while and because he's tense and horny and a jumble of a thousand conflicting impulses. He fools himself into thinking he'll scrub and jump back out, nothing else. Ever since losing Pepper, Tony has hated the aftermath of jerking off in the shower (but of course enjoys everything else about it), because when he steps out he's alone, and Pepper can't give him shit about indulging himself like that, because she's gone.
Pepper had once thought masturbation was indicative of some kind of relationship flaw, Tony had discovered- and she'd very loyally never told him which of her few previous exes had prompted that particular determination. Loyal to Tony, not the ex, because by then, Tony had the suit and Pepper had the company and she wasn't going to let him jeopardize either by impulsively blowing some jerk's house up.
Once she'd understood that his choice to touch himself had nothing to do with her and everything to do with how much Tony both loves pleasure and needs that release sometimes, they'd teased each other. Somehow she always knew when he'd done it, in that last year before he lost her. It was a thing, their thing, something she could mock chastise him for with code words, keeping a straight face right in the middle of a board meeting. Sometimes he'd have to pretend there was something very important about the papers in front of him until he could get up without broadcasting how hard he was as a result.
Once she was gone, he couldn't stand the yawning emptiness that stood in place of that ritual.
Tony starts washing himself and his mind courses through a dozen different thoughts, always catching on a particular one. Leigh's hair. Tony swears under his breath. Her hair had been in a braid all day, both times he'd gotten to kiss her. Tony's goal-oriented when it comes to sex, dogged about it, and he has goals when it comes to her hair. Multiple ones. At least one of them involves her being comfortable and trusting enough for him to get to take handfuls of it, wrapped around his hands, even, while kissing her. Another (that he has hidden down deep, because it's assuming a hell of a lot for such a new relationship that doesn't even qualify as a relationship yet) involves being buried inside her, his head bent over her shoulder, face sunk in the golden strands.
These are the opposite of the kinds of thoughts he is supposed to be having, though. Tony cycles through projects in his lab, pausing on the bunker. He wonders whether he should 'fix' it, or whether Leigh was right about its insuitability. He can't bring himself to regret the time they spent in there, though, despite how much more intense everything had been, including the intrusive thoughts about the Snap and Thanos and his life Before. Kissing Leigh once they'd gotten out had been every bit the sensual experience he'd hoped it would be when he'd thought about it in the bunker.
"Get it together," Tony tells himself. He's hard now, a combination of his vivid sexual fantasy and the very real memory of her unexpectedly kissing him, touching him without prompting . Leigh's constantly surprising; Tony's spent a good portion of the day wired with an undercurrent of curiosity, wondering what small thing she'll do to delight him. It's, again, different from Pepper, who he had mostly figured out except for all the delicious ways he absolutely had not, the intimate ways that she'd opened up to him once they were more to each other.
He leans back against the tile, slams his head a bit on it, trying to knock his thoughts back onto their axis. Tony suspects that the reason he keeps thinking about Pepper in the same mental breath as Leigh is that his heart is rearranging itself, and it's not a clean process.
Touching himself right now would be the worst idea. He'll probably regret it, not just because of the ghosts of the past, but because there's no way in hell he won't be thinking about Leigh as he does it. Tony doesn't subscribe to the taboo of those kinds of fantasies, but he's aware of the way they can intrude on real life.
At this point he's been dithering so long that his mind will file this memory into the same folder as jerking off anyway, so Tony gives in, lets his hand drift down to rub a stripe of anticipation on his thigh. It's close but not anywhere near enough, just like when he'd been holding Leigh against him with no friction, less than twenty minutes ago. Tony's poised to grip himself and thinks back to the moment when she stroked her tongue against his, taking his cock in hand at the very second he relives it. The pleasure reinforces the memory. Next, he allows himself to picture his hand riding up from her hip underneath the blouse to find that her bra is made of lace.
He swirls his thumb over the head of his cock right as he pictures thumbing her nipple for the first time through the fabric. In his mind's eye, Leigh pulls away from their kiss as she sucks in a breath. He strips her blouse off in the fantasy, right there in the open area beside the elevator. Leigh buries her face in his chest and he tugs her into an alcove, he knows exactly which one. As he pumps himself with exactly the right pressure and grip, Tony pictures himself resting her up against the wall. He leans beside her, dragging down the lace with his teeth at the same time as his hand dips down past the waistband of her skirt and panties.
Tony's panting, hand moving faster now. He turns to brace himself against the wall of the shower with his free hand, so the hot water pummels his back. In his fantasy, he breathes hot on her nipple, but lifts his head to see the look on her face when he slides his fingers between her folds to find that she's wet for him.
The desire-soaked look he imagines on Leigh's face as she feels him touch her so intimately for the first time sets Tony off, unexpectedly. He groans, hips jerking as he comes hard, chasing the pleasure. Tony selfishly holds onto the picture he's created of her: mouth open, face flushed, eyes wide, pupils blown. He yearns to make it a reality.
"Fuck," he shudders out, dipping his head down between both hands on the wall.
Tony stands there for a good ten minutes before he turns off the water and gets out. He doesn't regret a damned thing.
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By ten AM the next morning, Tony's loading up the video of his PA stopping by Leigh's apartment. He tells himself it's not creepy, he just needs to know how she's taking everything without him there to observe. It's scientific.
At the beginning of the video FRIDAY has compiled for Tony, his PA Chuck Fisher taps the Star Trek-esque annunciator on the panel outside Leigh's apartment. Leigh comes to the door, and immediately Tony is gripped by a brief, irrational jealousy. Her hair is down. It's clean, she'd taken a shower of her own, and the heavy ends of her honey-gold hair are curling thickly. Tony pictures fitting his fist between the curls, then lifting that hand to smell the spicy scent of whatever shampoo she uses.
"Hello, Miss Balci? I'm Charles Fisher, Mr. Stark's personal assistant. I wanted to speak with you about some things you'll want to know about the tower and your office, if you have the time?" Chuck's wearing one of his more expensive suits, which Tony finds amusing. It's navy blue, not black (which totally sets off the young man's blue eyes, Tony has teased him about it before) and has a bit more of a sophisticated cut. It also looks like he had his hair cut recently. Tony chuckles. Chuck hasn't had much work that involves other people lately, and his excitement kind of shows.
"Fisher, I recognize that. Thanks for stepping in, with the apartment stuff," she says.
"Glad to," Chuck tells her, his lips turning up into a bit of a surprised smile.
"Now's fine, if you'd like to come in?" Leigh asks graciously. She steps back in the doorway and gestures for Chuck to precede her. Once inside, she pulls out a chair for him at the square breakfast nook table. "Would you like something to drink? It seems that someone, probably you, actually, has already stocked my fridge with some things. I'd hate for some of it to go to waste."
Chuck looks a little dazed, which Tony appreciates. It seems like Leigh just has that effect on people. "You're right. I'd take some apple juice?"
Her smile is warm. "Absolutely. It's just through here. I can hear you, if you'd like to start."
The two of them are both polite and genuine people, and it almost makes Tony's teeth hurt to listen to Chuck go over the security protocols for the tower, the non public entrances and their codes, and the like. It goes on for fifteen minutes, the two of them polite-ing around each other, until finally, Chuck says something that prompts something interesting from Leigh.
"Oh, by the way, I've been informed by my boss that if you end up seeing the view from the top level without him, he'll fire me."
Leigh draws herself up indignantly in her seat across from him. "How much do you make a year, Mr. Fisher?" She'd been calling him Charles on and off for a while, so this has Tony leaning forward to examine the interaction.
"It's a lot," Chuck admits.
"I have quite an inheritance, you know," Leigh tells him seriously.
"Please don't waste it on me, Miss Balci," Chuck says, aiming a crooked smile at her. Then, he changes the subject to the computer system that Leigh has access to because of living in the tower.
A few minutes later, Leigh catches Tony's attention with a request.
"Some of my clients are private people, and my work isn't always easily contained as just what happens in the office. Can we set up some kind of encryption for my internet usage, considering there's an AI integrated throughout all of the systems in the tower?"
Tony can see Chuck considering this. "I think we can arrange that, yes. It might trigger a legal document to ensure we cover our bases from our end, if that's not too uncomfortable for you." Chuck's pulling out all the stops. Tony's seen Fisher be a hardass before, is fairly certain he was one just the day before with Leigh's landlord, actually, but today, he's a teddy bear.
"Whatever I need to sign I'd like Charriotte's legal team to take a glance at, but yes, that's fine," Leigh says shrewdly.
"I can respect that, Miss Balci."
Leigh frowns. "Do you think you could call me Leigh? Something about the formality feels forced, after everything you and Tony have done for me already."
Tony winces at this assessment. He has ripped away her hopes of a burly carpenter soulmate, failed to save her family from the vagaries of probability during the Snap, and his very celebrity has caused her to lose her job and her apartment. Depending on the parking laws in D.C., it's possible he's cost her up to $1,000 in towing fees, too. Tony makes a note to tell Chuck to check up on that.
On the screen, Leigh's making a disappointed face, and Chuck is apologizing.
"-revisit that in a few weeks? I'm the 'too soon' meme right now, after hearing Mr. Stark speak about his architect more than once."
Tony rests his elbow on the desk and covers his mouth with a few fingers, waiting for her reaction to that. Because of where the camera is, he has a full face view. Leigh looks down, almost shy for a few seconds, a tiny smile haunting her mouth.
She says, "Well, now I don't want to know how that translates to not wanting to use my first name," and Tony laughs and laughs, because Chuck looks positively mortified. If she hadn't spent less than 24 hours in his tower so far Tony would have wondered if she knew he was watching, and said that just to catch him by surprise.
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On the second day after they left the bunker, Chuck tells Tony that Leigh's set up a standing order at a local grocery store.
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Early in the morning of the fourth day after they left the bunker, Tony sets up caution tape on the top floor and makes Chuck pick up actual 'CAUTION: WORK AREA' metal signage to prevent her from sneaking up there to take a look around. He's certain he'll hear something from her, email, text (Chuck had given her Tony's number. The real one, the one no one gets to have), phone call, a visit, but by that evening, there's been nothing.
Tony realizes that Leigh doesn't mind waiting for something good. Something she's been promised. Something she doesn't have to work for.
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At 5:56 PM on the fifth day after they left the bunker, Tony has the pizza he'd told her about on that first day sent to her apartment, with a note he'd written taped to the top of the box.
He has FRIDAY bring up the live feed of the delivery, because Tony hasn't seen her in days, and he's any number of synonyms for ridiculous, even while he's trying to respect her request for some time to herself.
Leigh answers the door still dressed for work. Her hair is up in its Austen-esque concoction, and she's wearing an actual form-fitting miniskirt this time, in a rich gold color. It's the shirt she's wearing with it that's fanciful, made entirely of white, soft-looking geometric lace that drapes over the gold camisole she's wearing underneath it. The overall effect is that of a honeycomb, reminding Tony of the dreams he'd had before she'd spoken his Words.
He considers buying her a bee brooch and paying Chuck to sneak into her apartment to pin it on the shirt, once it's back in her closet.
The pizza delivery girl is very young and very peppy. She hands over the pizza, declines Leigh's offer to rustle up a tip, and heads off, leaving Leigh standing there, bemused. The tape with Tony's note on it has twisted, leaving the note face down, so he gives himself permission to watch her take the box into her apartment, even though it's probably a violation of her privacy. Tony tells himself it's just this once, and sits forward in his desk chair to watch as Leigh sets the box down on the table.
She flips over the paper, leans in. Tony curses the position of the camera, as she's faced away from it, but then she reaches out her hand and runs her fingers across his name. Seeing this is somehow painfully intimate, and Tony closes his eyes, even though he feels an odd sense of relief and an even deeper burgeoning joy.
"FRIDAY, cut the feed."
"If you say so, Boss."
Tony understands why FRIDAY finds his reaction illogical, but despite loving what he's seen, he knows he shouldn't have been in a position to see it in the first place.
"In fact, restrict my access to videos in her apartment, FRIDAY," Tony says impulsively, pursing his lips against the resistance he feels somewhere deep inside him.
"Restricted."
Tony leans back in his chair, fiddling with the Stark Industries pen he'd picked up to distract himself with. "Set a random password, one of the days of the week, rotating daily. One wrong guess locks out the feed for 24 hours," he adds, knowing himself too well.
"Done."
"Add a protocol that informs Miss Balci if I succeed in accessing the feed more than three times," Tony says, rubbing his chest against the way his heart is protesting the latest addition. If he doesn't screw things up, she won't be staying at that particular apartment long enough for him to guess correctly that many times anyway.
"Overkill complete, Boss."
"That's enough out of you," Tony says.
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On the eighth day since they got out of the bunker, at 12 AM, Tony installs a digital whiteboard outside Leigh's apartment door. He's checked the surveillance feeds every day and knows she goes to work at the lab, has gone out into the city once to get coffee in the morning (and the place she went to was terrible, she would have known better if she would have remembered she actually knows someone who lives in the tower and asked him about it), and has otherwise spent all of her time in her apartment.
The whiteboard is his concession to the fact that he shouldn't hound her about why she's been possibly avoiding him, even though he wants to hound her. So, he hasn't allowed himself to send emails (they would be needy, selfish ones anyway, not a good look when persuading) or call (it's honestly a concession to how much he likes her as a person that he hasn't required that she swap to a StarkPhone. He could get her one so tricked out she'd sleep with him out of sheer gratitude (he knows that's not true but maybe pictured it happening, once).), but this he can do.
The whiteboard is basically a huge touchscreen with an operating system that shows a half and half display, half blank message board space you can draw on with the stylus, half calendar set to a single-day list. You can be a heathen and write straight on the board wherever you like, or you can tap a few options like 'sticky note' or 'appointment entry' and take advantage of the graphics. So, because he's not hounding her, Tony starts with a sticky note in red (it looks great on the white surface, almost like it's real, drop shadows and everything) saying Tony says hi, BTW.
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On the ninth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck and Tony are in Tony's SI office when Chuck gets a call. He smiles, nods, smiles some more, and then says 'I'll let him know.'
"That could not have been a client," Tony says, looking away from the device he is about to yank apart, because he's too lazy to grab the safety glasses.
"It wasn't. It was Miss Balci asking me to tell you she says hello, and that your computer interface is a wonder of technology which is wasted on the wall outside her apartment." Chuck's expression tells Tony he knows that Tony won't like hearing this, and that he's looking forward to the fallout.
Chuck is a little shit sometimes, but Tony really likes him.
"It's a whiteboard," Tony says, kind of stunned. 'Hello' is not a Leigh word. 'Hello' is a client word, a 'distant politeness' word. Leigh would say 'hey' or 'hi' or 'oh my god, what are you doing?' She wouldn't say 'Hello' to Tony. "I listened to you answer that call. You didn't correct her."
"It seemed like the material point wasn't what the device is, but that she isn't interested in using it," Chuck says.
Tony swings by to check it, after dark, because again, not hounding.
The whiteboard is unchanged from the night before. He taps to open the next day's events, and adds 'Thank Tony for whiteboard' at 12:00 PM. Leigh's smart, she should catch that this means she could stop by his office (Chuck told her where it was, Tony checked) and they could have lunch together.
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On the tenth day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck gets another call, at 3:00 PM. He walks over to the window of the factory office he and Tony are visiting, and Tony can't hear anything. When Chuck comes back, though, it's with a smile too broad to be anything but trouble.
"Leigh says thank you for the whiteboard, but it's a massive waste of good tech and money to leave it languishing outside her apartment unused."
"The solution to that is to use it," Tony says, frustrated. She hadn't called, emailed, texted, or dropped by at noon. "And, it's 'Leigh' now?"
"She asked," Chuck shrugs.
Tony hacks into the whiteboard that night, adding a recurring event to every day that month, 'use whiteboard,' as well as another sticky note, in metallic gold this time because he can, that has an arrow pointing to the note saying Tony says hi, BTW. Underneath the arrow, in an obnoxious medieval script, it says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
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On the eleventh day since they got out of the bunker, Chuck gets a call right before the end of work, during which he is unnaturally smiley and polite.
"Give me the phone," Tony tells him.
Chuck shakes his head and covers the bottom of his StarkPhone as if covering the receiver of an old-style telephone, something Tony finds hilarious every time he does it. Tony's devices come with microphones that are way more intuitive than that, but Chuck is old school. "Stay strong," Chuck says to Tony in a stage whisper.
Tony is convinced it's Leigh on the other end, and who knows what she'll assume his PA means by such a statement. "Phone. Now."
"I will, thanks," Chuck says, and hangs up.
"I'm going to put you on a Performance Plan," Tony points to Chuck. "That was direct insubordination."
"My contract actually states that I am to take actions to protect your reputation, both personal and professional," Chuck retorts.
"And this is relevant because…"
"You're hounding her." Tony glares at his PA, mind rushing to fill out seven bullet points of refutation before they're interrupted by Chuck coming over and sitting on the chair beside the desk Tony's leaning on. "She sent over stuff about the lake house and said she's been really busy with a new client who specifically asked for her. The whiteboard makes her uncomfortable, she says she's worried that everyone who walks out of the elevator can look over, get curious, and read her business."
Tony hadn't thought of it that way at all. The tower was mostly empty in the summer, a function of the worldwide adjustment of population and the new uses he'd put to the subsequent lack of demand for the space. No one had any reason to be on that floor anyway- it was the same floor the Avengers had lived on when it was still Avengers tower. He hasn't let anyone live there or have business there since the Snap. Leigh wouldn't have any way of knowing these things, though.
"I'll come up with something," Tony tells Chuck.
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On the twelfth day since they got out of the bunker, Tony doesn't do anything with the whiteboard to foster a false sense of calm. He doesn't even check it.
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On the thirteenth day since they got out of the bunker, Tony heads over to Leigh's floor when he knows she's at work. FRIDAY won't show him her itinerary, as per some of the 'not hounding' rules he'd set up, but she does let him know Leigh's on a conference call.
He takes down the whiteboard, uses his master override to get into her apartment, and mounts it on the wall beside the door, inside. When he boots it back up to make sure it's working properly, he at first thinks that she's wiped it On closer inspection, though, it turns out she deleted his messages, and put up one of her own.
Your heart is in the right place, Tony, but this is too much. Sorry I've been so busy.
He wonders if 'too much' isn't just referring to the assumed price, but that's just bleak, because he hasn't spoken to her or seen her at all in nearly two weeks, so if that is too much, he's basically screwed.
Tony stands there in Leigh's apartment and thinks, thinks some more, and finally sits down on the floor (so as not to disturb anything), sets up a different interface for the whiteboard, and then installs it, wiping everything from before. Her note is the only thing Leigh's done, besides move and minimize his notes. He appreciates that, so he preserves them and leaves them on the new improved version.
The last thing he does is download one of the really high-res images of the house in Pennsylvania, from one of the articles focused on her the year before.
When Tony lets himself back out of Leigh's apartment, she has a whiteboard-sized picture frame that can be tapped to reveal an itinerary synced with the Apple app she uses at work and personally (Tony nearly chewed off his own fingers to do it, but he senses that he has left a sore spot outside her apartment for nearly a week, and this is his penance). There's a smaller section for notes, and Tony leaves one there with usage instructions, mostly on how to upload and display different pictures. He also leaves a message on a honeycomb patterned sticky note.
I hope this is better. Hi, BTW. ~Tony
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On the two week anniversary of Tony and Leigh leaving the bunker, Chuck gets a phone call. His poker face is utter shit.
"Yes, I've heard of them. We've actually been trying to- Yes. Really? Wow."
Tony snaps his fingers, holding his hand out for the phone. Chuck turns his back on him.
"That's- Yes, guaranteed. Yes. I'll tell- actually, are you sure you don't want to tell him yourself? He's right-" Chuck laughs. "Okay. Yeah, I get it. Bye, then."
"I could give you a written warning. In your file," Tony tells Chuck. "What did she say?"
"I think there's actually a file FRIDAY keeps with all the bullshit complaints you have about me. I can't remember the filename, though." Tony raises his eyebrows, and Chuck holds up a hand. "Okay, okay. You're not going to believe this, though."
Tony presses his lips together skeptically, crosses his arms, and pops his hip. "Hit me."
"You remember Demetre Eusebios?"
"Hephaistos Systems, yeah. Guy won't give us the time of day, we could double their profits if he'd get off his ass," Tony says.
"Turns out his sister hired Charriotte as the architect for their new house in the Hamptons, and Eusebios called the office to talk to them about their association with you."
"Do not tell me I've lost Leigh her job, Chuck."
Tony's searching Chuck's face for the signs of trouble, but doesn't see anything but excitement. Tony hasn't spent much time caring about the Bible in his life, but he knows what a Pharisee is, and Demetre Eusebios is one. Guy is one of the most performatively pious people on the planet, and his sole reason for buying what Tony believes are inferior products from their competitors is because he doesn't like Tony's 'lifestyle.' Which is particularly stupid, because the things Eusebios doesn't approve of are at least five years behind him. He's been practically a monk in comparison, since the Snap.
"More like she got you one," Chuck tells him. "The guy called her, and instead of telling him to fuck right off, she got us their contract. She wants you to know that ought to cover the cost of the whiteboard, and you're welcome."
"I'm gonna need a minute," Tony says, falling into his chair. He doesn't even see when Chuck leaves, he's too busy trying to comprehend the depth of Leigh's sheer fucking audacity. He loves her. It's not even like she took the time to plan it all out, either! She just saw the opportunity, took it, and rubbed it in his face with the confidence of a medieval ruler.
He wonders what she said, wonders if it's about the soulmark, wonders how it is that she doesn't seem to miss him the same way he misses her.