NOTE: this chapter is pretty heavy. It's also the end of Part II, with Part II in Leigh's PoV coming next chapter.
Chapter Nine
They're just starting dessert when Tony has to excuse himself for his phone call to Tokyo. When he gets into his office, though, there's a message apologizing for the inconvenience. The teleconference software is down in various places worldwide, including Tokyo. Tony sends off a message with his regrets and a link to Chuck's work phone for rescheduling.
He walks back into the penthouse slowly and quietly, using the elevator that goes directly to the back hallway. Tony wants to listen to Rhodey and Leigh planning his demise, so he can thwart them and seem like a complete genius. Because he's seen the two of them together. They're plotters.
He cozies up to the secondary dining room door, which is cracked already.
"-really, really like him," Leigh is saying. "Which is why I'm actually glad he had that thing, because I want to talk to you."
"My pricing scheme for dirt on Tony is a bit higher than the tabloids, I gotta warn you," Rhodey tells her. Tony smiles in his hidden room at that.
"I don't want dirt, I assure you," Leigh says. "I want to know if more of his teammates survived than just Captain America. I know Rogers works with the orphans' association, I've seen it on the news. I can tell that mentioning the Avengers is painful for Tony, and if I knew more about the scope of that injury, I could avoid making it worse, I think."
Rhodey is quiet, and Tony wonders if he's picturing Tony's flame-out, that awful day after he'd got back.
"Of the original team, all six."
Leigh's voice is breathy in her shock. "What?"
"Excuse my bluntness, but if you could lose your whole family, why are you so surprised by that?"
Tony winces, but he can't see Leigh, so he can't judge whether Rhodes' harsh tone is warranted or not.
"No, I just- from his reaction, I thought sure they were all gone."
"They are, as far as he's concerned," Rhodey says.
Tony supposes that this is what he gets for eavesdropping. He takes a hand and rubs it along the scar in his chest, wishing he could soothe the emotional ache that easily.
"It seems pretty obvious that he hasn't dealt with the loss of his team, no matter what shape that took," Leigh's saying now, her quiet tone sounding like a function of how shaken she still is. "Which is totally fair. I think he's spent that time coping with the personal stuff, which-" she hisses in sympathy, like just picturing what Tony went through is like touching a hot stove. "But it's hard to want to let someone you care about walk around with an open wound like that. I don't want to make it worse, but God, Rhodey, if there's a chance I can make it better?"
"Last time I tried that, he didn't talk to me for three months straight."
Tony purses his lips. Rhodey's right, but what had caused Tony to pull back from their friendship wasn't just the fight about the team. What Rhodey had told him was that, far from only wanting him for the funding he could provide, Steve and Nat in particular had come to him so often asking for money because when they came to him for anything else, he lashed out. He can still hear some of that argument in his head.
"Well, shit, Tony, what did you expect? You might be able to throw all that history in the trash, but they aren't the same kind of fucked up as you are. If you won't be there for them when their hearts are hurting, they'll settle for coming to you when their wallets are. When you love someone, you take what you can get!"
Tony had been so angry he'd shoved over a vase Pepper had kept back from the sale of his art collection, right through a glass wall. Then, he'd accused Rhodey of taking what he could get, suit-wise, only staying Tony's friend to have access to the tech.
Rhodey had walked out without another word. Their reconciliation had taken humility from Tony and grace from Rhodes.
"-a kind of a trump card, when it comes to that," Leigh is saying.
"Is that- Leigh, do not tell me the first thing Tony said to you was his name. Please."
Leigh's laughing. "It was kind of an introduction!" she protests. "Besides, I had a gun on him at the time."
"I am no longer surprised that he locked you in that bunker with him." Tony recognizes his friend's laugh. It's the 'oh shit' one, the one that almost got the two of them kicked out of a USAF event.
"Oh, that was months later, actually," Leigh says.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you're perfect for him," Rhodey says, coughing. "It's a shame he'll miss seeing my reaction, too. He's been tight-lipped about the mark, now I can see why."
"Oh, that's easily fixed. FRIDAY, can you make a video clip of this conversation, including only the part from the point where I say that I have a 'trump card, and ending right here?'"
"Video created, Miss Balci."
"Any chance you'll delete the rest of the conversation?"
Tony straightens up from his slouch against the wall beside the door he's listening at. He supposes it makes sense; if she's trying not to hurt him with mentions of his team, hearing her ask his best friend about them the second he leaves her alone is not conducive to that.
"The best I can do is encrypt it under a password you set, and place it in an obscure folder. Mr. Stark does not permit surveillance to be deleted, in case something valuable is lost."
"All right, thank you. Can I input that password later tonight, back at my apartment? Will you prevent access until then?"
Despite himself, Tony smiles. She's smart.
"That is an acceptable compromise."
"What's that about?" Rhodey asks her.
"I'm about to say something I'd never in a million years say to Tony, and I don't want him to ever even get a hint that I'd say it," Leigh says. She sounds serious as hell. The hair on the back of Tony's neck stands up.
"If it's something you don't want me to tell him-"
Rhodey sounds unhappy, using his command voice, but Leigh cuts him off. "Colonel, I think you'll understand why I said that in a minute." There's a few seconds of silence, and Tony listens as hard as he can. He thinks he hears a sigh.
"Well?" Rhodey asks, his voice still fairly hard.
"Sorry, was gathering my thoughts. Here's the thing: I'm the last person on the planet with the right to judge how someone's dealing with the Snap. I didn't appreciate the 'Who Suffered the Most' Olympics the press tried to stick me with last year. But the people I lost are gone," Leigh says, her voice shaking a little bit.
Tony can picture her face, her brown eyes large and full of emotion. He wants to walk away from this. She's right, he doesn't want to hear it. Shouldn't hear it. But he can't- he doesn't want to miss this, the deep, hidden core of what she thinks about the Snap and his role in it. This is more penance, he thinks, and she's worth it, as hard as he thinks this is about to be. In a twisting, vindictive way, he's grateful that it's hard on her too. As awful as the thought is, somehow it's easier to stomach this if when wielding the knife against him, she cuts herself a little.
"They're gone, Rhodey. I can't ever get them back. But there are people out there that lost Tony, and he's still alive. There are people out there that Tony lost, and they're still alive. Do you know what I would do if I found a way to talk to the family I lost, even if I could never see or touch them again? The coals I would walk over?"
Tony's hand aches where it's gripping the metal light fixture beside the door.
"Losing them hurt him, I can tell. I don't want to be the kind of person who drags a loved one kicking and screaming to somewhere they don't want to go," Leigh says. Tony can hear the tears in her voice, even as he stands there processing 'loved one.' "But from where I'm standing, Tony's already been dragged. He's already somewhere he didn't want to be. I just want to get him back home."
"And if you lose him on the way?" Rhodey asks, his voice a low rasp.
"It comes back to that open wound thing. I mean, shit, he's Tony Stark, he lived for years with an actual open wound in his chest, didn't he? He's used to it," she chuckles darkly. "He avoided the surgery to remove that shrapnel for years, didn't he, living with the hole in his chest instead? But in the end, he got the surgery."
"Fuck," Rhodey says, uncharacteristically.
Tony's right there with him. Leigh's view of him as someone with a festering wound is more accurate than she realizes. Those first few months, he'd often felt like he was radioactive, spewing toxic bullshit with every word and action. He'd reveled in it, because people left him the fuck alone, but now he's still alone, because he was thorough.
"Right?" Leigh sniffles, and Tony hears the sound of someone blowing their nose. He's not close to tears, but his hand aches. Tony looks over at the fixture he'd been crushing and sees that it's deformed, despite being made of metal. He wonders how much energy he sank into it in an effort not to break, himself.
"Rogers is living upstate, volunteering at the orphan foundation. He travels around a lot, not just to facilitate stuff for the foundation, but to collect data from the various observatories, hoping there'll be something we can use," Rhodey says, clearing his throat. "Romanoff lives at the complex, coordinating, and searching for Barton."
"Was he off world when it happened too?" Leigh asks.
Tony almost walks in. He almost walks out. He's not ready for this, he's not ready to hear it again, he's not ready for the effect it's going to have on Leigh.
"Fuck, fuck," Tony whispers, but it's too late.
"He lost his whole family too, Leigh. Didn't take it well. Last time I spoke with Nat she told me she suspects he's taken it on himself to be a vigilante in South America. There have been a lot of deaths among the cartels down there."
"He had a family?" Leigh asks in a small voice.
"Not only did he have a family, but he was living with them off-grid. We didn't call him in for the fight."
"Oh my God," she whimpers. "The only thing worse than trying really hard and failing and losing everything would be… oh, my God."
"Thor lives with what's left of his people in a town called New Asgard, in Norway. Doesn't sound like he's taking it very well, either."
Tony hadn't known that last part. He rests his head on the doorframe, trying to picture what the golden, joyful god would be like as wrecked by what happened as Tony is. Thor at least got to kill Thanos, not that it had done any good. Tony had been too filled to the brim with vitriol to hear the recaps of what happened on Earth, too furious at himself to explain what had happened on Titan. He wonders if there was something that happened to Thor in his interactions with Thanos, something similar to what he'd gone through.
"The happiest out of all of them is probably Banner. He doesn't have to try to Hulk out anymore, holed up in his lab. Not sure he ought to be alone, though," Rhodey says. Tony knows Bruce's instincts well, knows that he's probably deeply miserable despite having basically what he'd always wanted- the ability to do his research in peace. He remembers how Bruce thrived among the team, an introvert glad to be able to step back and let the extraverts like Tony burn brightly while he supported in the background.
"Why do I suddenly feel like I've gained six open wounds to heal, instead of just one?" Leigh laughs weakly.
Tony pushes himself violently away from the door and stares at it, not seeing the wood but the woman beyond.
He hasn't known Leigh for long, but he does suspect that she has the most conviction out of anyone he's ever met. She'll throw herself at the palaces of pain they've all constructed, and when the impact breaks parts of herself off, she'll see that as worth it. It's already too late. Leigh's like a vaccine injected into the broken body of the Avengers, and the immune response she's about to prompt is inevitable. The only way to stop her would be to lock her away, and he's already fired that gun. It can't be reloaded.
And he can't tell her he knows.
Tony can still hear them talking, but he's got both hands on the back of the desk chair in the small side room, trying to breathe in and out enough to calm down.
"FRIDAY, I think that's enough. Lock that conversation away, would you? Temporary password… Ananke."
Tony grabs a pen from the desk, scribbles it on his fingertip to start the ink flowing, then unbuttons his shirt sleeve to write down the password.
"Greek god of -?" Rhodey asks Leigh.
"Necessity, inevitability. Mother of the Fates," she says. Then, she lets out a shaky laugh. "Maybe it's good that's encrypted. I can pretend I never said any of it."
"A hard job can be the most rewarding," Rhodey tells her.
"I'll make sure you're the one I bitch to about this, then."
"Thought you were going to give that password later, though." Shut up, Rhodey, Tony says. He wants to watch the video, to see her facial expressions, her mannerisms. He wants to be a pain voyeur, and fuck, isn't that maybe one of his worst incarnations?
"Forgetting and leaving it unsecured is worse. I can change it later."
"So, you said you held Tony at gunpoint- was it loaded?"
"Of course," Leigh says, sounding relieved that the iceberg she's balancing on has collided with more solid ground. "The time it takes to load your weapon after you already needed to use it is probably the most easily understood illustration of regret there is."
"That sounds like experience talking, there," Rhodey says. Tony thinks his friend must have seen something in Leigh's face that's lost to him, with the wooden door between them.
"That's another classified conversation, there," she laughs. It's a brittle, false laugh. Tony checks his watch and sees that twenty nerve-wracking minutes have passed, and decides to step out and join them for this one.
"Sorry about that," he says as he opens the side door. He slides into his chair and looks at their desserts before looking down at the one at his place. "Is the rest for me?"
"Oh, we were distracted, going in-depth on the soulmate thing. Have you ever thanked this woman for not shooting you after your one-word introduction saddled her with your name for all eternity?" Rhodey asks. The ease at which he covers over the emotional conversation Tony knows took place in his absence is a bit discomfiting.
"Thanks for not killing me softly with your gun," Tony says to Leigh.
"Reserving judgment on the 'your song' part, are you?"
Tony sees that Rhodey's getting up for more to drink, so he leans in and whispers, "More like 'touch,' actually."
"I've got it on good authority that there are multiple deaths to be found along that path, and none of them fatal," Leigh says playfully.
"Might need to do research," Tony tells her, holding his expression to a thoughtful one. When Rhodey sits back down, Tony injects himself into their pre-existing conversation by asking Leigh, "So, ever have to shoot at someone?" Rhodey sighs, and Tony looks over, confused. "What?"
"Think about the kinds of answers that question might get, man." Rhodey shakes his head at Tony in full 'disappointed officer' mode.
"No, it's fine. Yes, I've had to shoot at a person. No, I didn't kill him."
Tony shoots his eyebrows up in the unasked question, and Leigh looks down at her lap. He watches as she schools her expression along a spectrum from nervous to steely.
"You watched some of the specials they did on me? Or read an article or two?"
Or a hundred, yeah, Tony doesn't say aloud. Instead, he nods.
"They always do this human interest stuff. It's annoying that they add the same… modifiers, I guess you could call them, even when the core of the story is human interest."
"Not sure I'm following?" Rhodey says.
"So you've got the standard news story, right, eleven year old graduates high school, or something, and they modify it by pointing out his mom died when he was five, or he's got six rescue rabbits in a cage in his back yard." Leigh sighs. "But my story was already about the rescue rabbits, right? Young woman loses whole family in the Snap. But that's not enough, so they added their filler. Young woman loses whole family in the Snap, even though she lives on a farm in Pennsylvania without internet access. With only one phone line. After inheriting a decent fortune from her dead parents, and as the beneficiary of at least six grown adults' life insurance."
"Shit," Rhodey says, fully getting it now.
"Yeah," Leigh says. "I was kind of wrecked by grief at the time, so I didn't really think it all through, not that I might have gotten any say over how vulnerable a picture they were painting of me."
"He's in prison now, right?" Tony asks. He hates the picture she's painting of a grief-stricken Leigh having to actually shoot someone who came to take advantage of her terrible situation.
"How much havoc will you wreak if I tell you no?" Leigh asks him. Her tone is fragile glass coated in vibranium, vulnerable as all fuck, but poised to retaliate.
Tony settles into the righteous anger, lets it sink into his joints, oily and insidious. "He's in prison now, right?" he repeats.
"My one-legged assailant is collecting disability from his parents' basement, Tony," Leigh says evenly.
"How did any of this happen without so much as a news story?" Rhodey asks, incredulous. Tony gestures with his head toward his friend, also demanding an answer.
"It made the news, just without all of the context," Leigh says, taking a sip of her water with a hand that shakes. Her lips twist wryly when she notices just how much, and she uses both hands to put the glass back down. "Remember when Representative Ada Casca's son was arrested?"
Tony shakes his head.
"Republican from Ohio? Something about a home invasion gone wrong," Rhodey says.
Leigh spreads her hands out. "The thing about slashing tires and cutting the only phone line when you show up to rob someone is, if you get shot in the thigh and she has to go get help, it takes a long time."
"Good," Tony says.
"How in the hell did you manage to keep it quiet?" Rhodey asks.
"Small towns," Leigh says, laughing. "It's a real shame, too. This would have been a better story for those vultures than the one they originally told."
Tony doesn't mind the image of the thief lying somewhere in Leigh's lonely farmhouse bleeding out. It actually kind of scares him how okay he is with it, considering she had to shoot the guy, probably after feeling a great deal of fear. But, Leigh doesn't look afraid right now. She looks joyful, like she'd triumphed over that fear and gets to tell that story, not the one where she was terrified and had to push herself.
"How far did you have to go for help?" Tony asks.
"Three miles to the nearest neighbor."
"How long did it take?" Rhodey asks.
Leigh grins. "Not as long as you'd think. I took a horse."
"Somewhere out there a journalist just felt like someone walked over their grave," Tony laughs.
"Yeah, it was just a ridiculous combination of luck and circumstance," Leigh says, sighing. "My neighbor was the dispatcher. She called the police chief and the paramedics, which in our town is a married couple. They didn't end up needing their sirens because it was 3 AM. By the time he was LifeFlighted out of the local hospital, the story of where he'd been shot had been garbled. He crossed state lines to attack me, and thanks to a Pennsylvania state law that protects victims of certain crimes, it wasn't legal to release my name. I don't think that would have held up in court, honestly, because I shot him, and he lost his leg, but… small towns."
"And Representative Casca buried everything that made it out of Pennsylvania, I assume," Rhodey says. Leigh nods. "Wait," his friend suddenly says, as if what she said had finally registered. "A horse?"
Leigh laughs.
8888888888
Rhodey leaves after another half hour of much more pleasant conversation, and Leigh and Tony settle themselves onto the couch. Tony offers her a drink, and she accepts, tells him she'll have whatever he pours. He pours her a whiskey, because he'd like to taste it on her later, see what kind of an intoxicating mixed drink that would make.
He says, "If I'd known what happened to you, I wouldn't have locked you in a bunker with me."
Leigh fortifies her determined expression with a too-large sip of whiskey, and when she's done wiping her eyes, she tells him, "It's only the decent people who would change their actions but for the context they didn't have."
It means more, somehow, to have someone like Leigh tell him he's a good person, more than the number of prestigious people who have told him he's not. "Can I ask you some questions about what happened at the farmhouse?" he asks.
"Sure," she says. He can see the alcohol working on her already in the loose way she agrees without taking much time to consider the question.
"Who else knows?"
"Branson."
"Were you already working for him?"
"Yeah, doing the prelim things, about to transition into designing my own stuff. I was actually in between apartments, taking some time to find a good place in D.C. after my roommate got married. I'd collaborated on projects, that kind of thing." She takes another sip, smaller this time, almost miniscule. It goes down more easily, so he doesn't tease her. "After the Snap, not having internet access seemed like a blessing."
"I could see that. How long after, was it?"
"Three weeks."
It hits him that he'd gotten back to Earth on the twenty-second day after, had fought with Steve on the twenty-third. Leigh had been attacked the same day Tony had been rescued.
"Can I ask a shitty question?"
"Pardon me, but do you usually ask that, first?" Leigh teases.
"It's a function of this thing we have," Tony says, waving his hand. "This counts as politeness."
She leans back, loose-limbed and lovely. One of the loops on the bow on her dress is very small, threatening its collapse. "Go ahead."
"You seem more okay about it than I would have expected." Tony waits for her to be defensive, waits for her to be angry, but he's curious as hell, and she's at least tipsy, so he has a chance at not ruining things.
Leigh looks up at the ceiling, then out at the cityscape. "My dad taught me how to shoot. I wasn't actually that keen, only one of the five of us. My mom told me to do it anyway, that it was mean of me to stop him from having the full set, but it probably wouldn't have actively harmed our relationship or anything." Leigh holds up her glass, seems to look through it, out the window. "I asked him once why it was so important, if I should be scared about his insistence, if there were so many people who could wish me harm that I had to know how to hit them with a bullet to protect myself."
Tony watches her as she winds up to the answer, circling the thing she's about to say like it would hurt too much to say it outright. He thinks he's going to regret it when she gets there, but it's too late now. There's another thing he hadn't considered, that it would be a father story, a loving, protective father story.
"He told me it wasn't about the bad guys, but about him. That he wasn't always going to be able to be there. That I was growing up, and I'd move out and away, maybe, and it made him feel good to know that he'd equipped me in more ways than one. Good habits, you know?" she asks Tony, rhetorically. Leigh takes another sip, too big, but she handles it, this time. "When I told him I was moving out, I thought he was going to be upset, but he told me he'd taught me how to shoot and balance a checkbook, and that was enough."
Leigh finishes the glass, and it's way too much, and her eyes water again, and it hits him: it was on purpose. These tears hide the other ones.
"Dad was big on, I guess you could call it second chances, but that's a bit more 'moral of the story' than it felt, at the time. He was about learning from mistakes, about- yes! Course correction," she says, finally finding the right phrase. Leigh grins. "He liked it when we screwed up and fixed it, told us it built character. I didn't leave the gun loaded."
A sharp, horrible stab of fear strikes Tony.
"It wasn't in the gun safe," Leigh continues, leaning her head back, definitely more tipsy than not, too open, Tony thinks, too ready to trust that he's able to handle this story like she handled the whiskey. "It was by the side of the bed, next to the bullets. When he broke in, I'd already heard him outside swearing. I think he cut himself slashing the tires. Honestly, the course correction thing, Dad would have been so proud. The gun jammed at first, but I cleared it."
Leigh says this conversationally, like she's not building a terrifying scaffold for the lesson her father had taught her, the blueprints twisted and terrifying to watch unroll.
"So by the time I shot him, he was way closer than I expected. I was aiming for his chest, but he was trying to hit me with something, and so my aim was shit. He went straight down, and all I could think was, I'd done just what my father taught me to do, and I didn't even end up with the trauma of having killed someone."
Tony thinks of the people he's killed. The first few in awful, miserable ways, by fire, by explosion. He thinks about the course correction he made by changing the company, how he took what Yinsen had asked of him and done his level best.
"Was it comforting right away, or is this hindsight?" Tony asks, reaching out his arm along the back of the couch, offering to tuck it under her neck, if she's willing. Instead, she scoots closer and rests her head on his shoulder.
"I don't remember. You know how they say when you get really badly injured, your body doesn't send pain signals, 'cause you can see or know how bad it is, and your brain decides it doesn't need that kind of distraction?"
Tony knows. He makes an agreement noise, nodding.
"I think my brain decided I didn't need to remember how scared I was, after the fact. It's nice, actually. I didn't have a trial to deal with, so I didn't need to defend the way it seems not to be the worst thing that ever happened to me, you know? That's one of the reasons I didn't push for that. Casca offered not to sue, and I took the deal."
Tony wants to hate every single thing about what Leigh's just said, but her ridiculous pragmatism has worked out so impossibly well that he has no grounds for complaint.
"If you ever change your mind about retribution, please make me the first call," Tony says, using a lot of effort to make his tone sound flippant, uncaring. He's going to spend most of the evening looking into the guy, and then the rest of the night making damned sure that the well-adjusted way Leigh seems to be able to talk about this isn't some kind of frightening front for actual mental damage she's not dealing with.
"It's a deal," she says quietly. Tony looks down at her, surprised. "What?" she asks, leaning her head back on his shoulder so she can see his face. She's got makeup on, so no freckles, but the trade-off is that her eyes are luminous, in Tony's humble opinion. He almost rolls his eyes at himself- he's all soft hearted over this Pennsylvania farm girl, with her brown eyes and blonde hair and green dress. He hadn't bothered to look up any of the articles written while they had been in his bunker, but he bets they're horrendous, all about how he'll ruin her doe-eyed innocence and she'll ruin his hard-nosed business sense.
"You're half drunk," Tony tells her. "That's the only way you'd ever contemplate letting me fuck that guy's life up."
"It's fucked up plenty," Leigh assures him. She sounds different when she swears tipsy. He likes it. "The internet is really bad in Toledo."
"You are a lightweight."
"Excuse you," Leigh says indignantly. "You're the one with thick fingers pouring me that stuff."
Tony loses it laughing. "What!?"
Leigh, who he'd dislodged from his shoulder when he leaned over laughing so hard, still looks indignant. "Isn't that how you measure it?"
Tony's still gone. "No it's by eye, they just call it- are you serious?" He turns and pins her with a look. Her eyes are joyous, even after all the miserable things he'd overheard her say, with and without her knowledge.
"You going to make fun of me for not being sophisticated?" Leigh asks, and Tony's absolutely certain that this would be a vulnerable, meaningful question if she hadn't drunk his whiskey.
"You are one of the most sophisticated women I've ever known, I think," Tony says, and he means it. She's principled, professional, passionate. Fuck the world's idea of 'sophisticated,' which is really snobbery, when it comes down to it, magazine fancy, not actual sophistication. Leigh's complicated, like the wiring on his suit, something he wouldn't trust a layman to be able to look at and identify properly.
"Thank you, I think," Leigh says, bemused. "And you-" she stops, reaches out, and holds him still, first by his shoulders, then his face, her hands warm, so warm, like she always is. How Tony ever compared Leigh to the moon, he'll never know, but he was wrong. She's a meteor burning across his surface, fiery and bright. "You're Iron Man," Leigh says, and she says it like it's so profound, like it's meaningful, that Tony hooks an arm under her far arm and hefts her up.
"Bed, for you. You're completely sloshed."
"I am so not, but whatever," Leigh says, good-naturedly.
She leans against him in the elevator, and he smells her hair the whole way down, because he's not a saint and never pretended to be one. When they get to her floor, he walks her to her door, and she stops him.
"I'm only tipsy, and you didn't let me finish," she says. Her voice is low and gentle. Leigh leans back on the door and looks at him, toying with the bow at her waist. "You were forged in flames. Losing your parents as a kid, getting the company so young, dealing with that jerk trying to manipulate you into things before he showed his true colors. I've read all the articles, you know," she tells him, her voice rough with disgust for Obie even without knowing he was the reason for Afghanistan. "Three months in the furnace, and when you came back you skimmed all the slag off, didn't you? No more weapons manufacturing. You dropped off of the tabloids, for a while, too. You changed. And every time things got tough, you skimmed more off. You're Iron Man, always making yourself better, more refined, stronger."
Tony kind of feels flayed bare, right now, and the only thing he likes about it is the admiration in Leigh's eyes.
"I maybe skimmed off too much, last time," he finally says. "Good night."
"Night," Leigh tells him softly, and FRIDAY's always listening, so she unlocks the door.
Tony almost takes the stairs back to his rooms. He feels exposed, not just because of her frankly generous assessment of him, but also because of what she'd told Rhodey she's planning to do. When he adds her revelation about being attacked, Tony feels a bit like he's flying out of his skin, holding too much in to be comfortable.
Leigh's open wound analogy fits too well. It's easier for Tony to focus on what she went through, how he's got a long night ahead of him full of research to make sure he can protect her if the guy ever changes his mind about going after her. Tony wants to make sure she's actually fine, not just clinging to a promise of her father's that she feels like she fulfilled, because if that punk comes at her and the illusion crumbles, it's going to hurt worse now than it would have if she'd dealt with it properly. He doesn't want her to go through that.
"Oh. Oh shit," Tony says out loud. The conclusion he's come to is both obvious and daunting.
He doesn't want Leigh to walk around with an open wound either.
He'd go through a lot of things he'd really rather not experience to make sure she doesn't have to.
Leigh's about ten times more dedicated to doing the right thing than he'll ever be in twenty lifetimes.
She's going to try to bring him back to his team. She's going to make him want to.
"Shit."
Knowing about it ahead of time doesn't make him any better prepared.