Chapter Twenty-three
"I just think it's a little much to be asked to sign what is basically an affidavit promising not to help you with your science project," Tony tells his daughter. "Do any of the other students have to do this?"
"Da-aad, none of the other students' dads are world famous science guys!" Ember groans, frowning at him. She sighs, pulling loose the scrunchie holding her long blonde hair in a ponytail. Ember leans over, finger-combing her hair before gathering it up in one fist to reapply the hair holder.
Tony tries not to stare at her when she does this, but it's always a losing battle. She looks just like Leigh, a genetic remnant of an action Em probably doesn't even remember watching. She's got a bunch of them- a particular way of crunching up her nose when she smells something foul, her adorable squeak of a sneeze, even a certain hitch in her breathing while asleep if she's disturbed. At seven and a half, Ember Stark is precocious, articulate, charismatic, and organized. He's so proud of her he could burst, which is why Tony's so frustrated with her second grade teacher. Of all of the students in her Gifted class, Em is the one least likely to need parental help to 'engineer a car out of household objects, capable of sustaining movement over five feet of distance.' She could probably do it in her sleep.
"Your teacher knows you're the daughter of an architect and an engineer, right?"
"She's more interested in the savior and superhero part, but, yeah," Ember tells him matter-of-factly.
"Most people are," he says.
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It's spring break for Em and Easter weekend is approaching, which means that their family of two is heading up to Pennsylvania to the Balci clan's annual festivities. Ember's close with her cousins Susannah and Maizie, who at eight and six have been living with Tony's in-laws Missy and Charlie for the past three years after being adopted as a sibling pair. Em's less fond of Lana and Kent's four year old son Frankie, but that's probably to be expected.
Tony hasn't ever told Lana that he knew she came back from the unSnap pregnant. It's too private a thing to share as a brother-in-law, but he still feels a special kinship to the boy. Leigh's sacrifice was, in some ways, directly and specifically so that he would have a chance at life, after all. Tony thinks that someday, when it hurts a little less (so, never, Rhodey would point out, probably rightly), he might get up the courage to share the email Leigh sent on his birthday so many years ago.
Tony's excited about the weekend for completely different reasons than Ember is. She's looking forward to nearly a week long sleepover at the farmhouse. He's looking at finally using the Quantum Tunnel to find a specific alternate universe.
It's taken eighteen months, much faster than he had expected, really. Still, even though he'd dreaded the turning of this year over into 2028, Tony knows that his device could set him down at any point in the life of the version of Leigh Balci he's hoping to visit. Just because she's 'scheduled' to die in 2028 doesn't mean he can't show up in 2026 in her universe.
He's gone over all of the variables, spending time in between the main project (navigating into alternate universes) searching for the best way to find her once he lands there. It's not statistically likely that every single Leigh Balci in each universe lost all twelve members of her family in the Snap, but Tony knows that the first story about his Leigh had been written by a local reporter who had gone to high school with her. It's possible that the guy will write about her situation no matter how many members of her family turn into dust.
The plan is to arrive in what he hopes is her universe at one of the large libraries in D.C. and search for her, looking for heterochromia. If she has it, he'll search for her current location, after locking in the signature of that particular universe, so he can find it again. If that's not possible, Tony will have Plan B already with him.
Plan B consists of a large packet of various currencies (surely some will make it through without triggering counterfeit warnings in a universe so closely hewn to his), a small amount of clothes to change into until he finds a temporary place to stay, and a second time travel suit complete with Pym Particles, pre-set to bring the person home to his universe. Plan B is a long haul.
First, though, Tony wants to try Plan A. He has a large stash of the vials for his suit lined up, a whole week of time to jump back and forth, and for the first time in nearly five years, a huge reserve of hope for the future.
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Because Plan B exists, Tony spends a stupidly long time trying to decide what to wear. He ends up choosing a mid-range suit, the kind a higher level governmental official might wear, definitely diplomat material. He rolls up the other articles of clothing and sets them in his briefcase, tucks in the cash, and affixes his ARC reactor on his undershirt before buttoning up the dark blue dress shirt. After activating the time travel suit, Tony adjusts the time/space GPS and ensures there are four vials of Pym Particles slotted in.
For probably the twentieth time that day, Tony checks to ensure that the resonant frequency of his own universe has been programmed in. He has three different markers for this universe, for home, and all three of them are written into the code as the default- if Tony's unconscious, if he appears in a crisis situation, FRIDAY is set to auto-hit the button for him, and unerringly, his suit will bring him back home to his house, his daughter, his own special circle of hell. Because if there's only one thing he's learned about meddling with time, it's that there's always a world that's worse.
When he was a child, Tony had been fascinated by black holes. It had been a love/hate relationship. When he had daydreams, they were about figuring out how to harness the energy from a black hole so he could use it to solve all of the problems the world had with fossil fuels. When he had nightmares, they were about being stuck in the event horizon of a black hole, being inexorably sucked close enough to be torn apart by the tidal forces. He feels like that now, but Tony can't decide whether his plans will tear him apart or rescue him from that slow process of being stretched beyond his ability to bear it.
Part of that stretch comes from the email that Stephen Strange sends him every three months without fail.
Beware the hubris of messing with time. The laws of probability should tell you to expect things to go wrong. I shouldn't have to tell you this, Stark, but when things go wrong, they don't always explode or result in half of the universe turning into dust. Sometimes when things go wrong, it's subtle- but no less devastating.
Think about what you're doing.
Usually Tony sees the subject line, which is different every time ('Earth to Stark, Come In, Please.' 'Debating Tricks That Work Best With Extreme Arrogance' even once, 'Use This One Weird Trick To Increase Your Dick Size By 100%! Cheap and Easy!' Tony thinks that that particular one was a concession to the fact that Strange knows he isn't opening the emails) and just sorts it to the special file that holds them. This week, though, he had clicked on the latest one ('Why Does It Matter If Han Shot First?'), read it through, and after he put it into the correct folder, Tony had tapped through each one, making sure there wasn't some sort of sequential secret message. They were all the same, just as he'd thought.
"Well, you did promise to send Pym a postcard every week. This is basically that," Tony says, aloud.
He grabs the briefcase and hits the button to head to what he hopes is an alternate universe.
That first option is a New York City in ruins.
His second and third options look familiar, home-like. In the library of each, he searches for Leigh Balci and finds her. Neither version has heterochromia. In one of them, she calls herself Felicia, and she lost her husband and son in the Snap.
Tony realizes that his theory that he'd be able to jump to alternate universes that are similar to his must be deeply flawed.
Either that, or Leigh Balci is just one of those people whose life is deeply affected by small choices as much as the large ones.
It's late evening when he gets back from the third jump, and as Tony reflexively fills the slots on his suit with more particles, he wonders if he should jump back to test the ability to visit the same universe twice now, when he still has the image of Felicia Roberts seared into his brain. How much worse if he jumps into the universe he's looking for, finds that version of Leigh, and she won't come with him? Without the ability to try again earlier in her timeline, erasing that first attempt, he'll have no hope, after all of this effort. Wouldn't it be better to find that out now? he asks himself tiredly.
"No," Tony says. He goes up to the bank of equipment beside the Tunnel, grabs the frequency switch and spins it. Fuck the idea that it'll be easier to find the 'right' Leigh Balci, the one who's dying, the one whose life he might be able to improve until she fades away, if he turns the dial incrementally slowly. That's obviously not the case, if only four ticks from his universe there's a version of Leigh who had already been married when Thanos snapped his fingers the first time.
He's jealous, Tony realizes. He hates the idea of any Leigh in any universe loving a man who isn't him. It's… not healthy.
Tony hits the button to jump through time again.
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Even though it's ten PM at night in his own universe, Tony lands in the newest version at eleven AM, just like the other three he'd tried. He walks up into the library as he had with the last two and waits for his turn while ostensibly hiding behind his designer sunglasses (he doesn't have so much of an ego that he expects that Tony Stark is Tony Stark in every universe he visits, but the possibility is enough to make him want to deflect attention, that's all) (but he totally is Tony Stark everywhere, he's completely certain of it).
Typing in the name of the journalist from Pennsylvania doesn't take long, and neither does the search of the man's published articles. He had to remind himself three jumps ago that, when Strange had said only one reality won against Thanos, he'd meant it: the two previous realities never got their people back in 2023 or at any other date. So there's no triumphant article written a little less than four years ago here, praising the efforts that brought everyone back from the dead. What there is, though, is an article about a friend who is suffering from untold losses after the 'blip.'
It's the article about Leigh he's been looking for. Including a picture of the woman who lost 'half of her family.'
In the image, Leigh's hair is shoulder-length. He wonders if her hair's even shorter now, from the chemotherapy. Tony leans in; the software doesn't allow him to magnify the color picture.
Her eyes are two different colors. One brown, one a mixture of blue and brown.
He's frozen to the spot.
"Uh, are you okay?"
It's the voice of the library attendant who had taken his (fake) name to use the computer. Because he doesn't have an ID to show (apparently that's a thing, with libraries, who knew? Not this billionaire), they gave him a time limit of ten minutes. That's apparently about as long as he's been sitting, staring at the person he's come to see.
"Yeah, yeah. Did you know that some people can have different colored eyes?" Tony asks, pointing at the picture. He closes it quickly, bringing up a second tab and typing in the word 'heterochromia,' clicking on 'images.' No way does he want this fresh-faced kid to remember a creepy guy wearing sunglasses indoors creeping on a woman who might go missing sometime in the next few weeks.
It wouldn't change anything, but it's just bad form.
"Wow, that's cool," the guy says.
"Yeah, thanks for the loaner," Tony says, tossing him the keycard that unlocked the keyboard for his use. "Had an argument with the wife over it, she locked me out of using the internet, can you believe that?"
"Huh, what a bitch," the kid says. "Bad luck, sorry man."
Tony staggers out into the street with his heart full and his mind empty. He has to find her, yes, but he had prepared everything else, he'd checked all the boxes of the things he'd listed out to do- but he had completely forgotten this.
What will he say to her?
She isn't his, this Leigh. She's quite possibly far more broken than the Leigh he knew, already out of remission from her cancer, with no way to get her family back. Even if Tony could fulfill the one ridiculous dream/nightmare he'd had one night, the one where he hopped from universe to universe teaching the people that remained , gathering up their versions of the Avengers and holding their hands until they'd gathered their universe's stones and brought their people back, it wouldn't be enough to save this Leigh. Because she's going to die.
"What in the actual fuck was I thinking?" he whispers to himself.
Without his Leigh there to guide him, he's gone and built a house without supporting structures. It's bound to collapse, it's practically designed to, but the pattern it will fall down into is one that will be the salvation of a completely different world, one he's spent years sketching out and planning the blueprints to renew. He'd known that the whole time, but now that he's at the hard part, now that he's got the nozzle for the concrete foundation in his hands, he's terrified.
Tony's been walking this whole time. He'd made himself memorize the layout of Washington, D.C.. It's one of the things Tony had done early on, one of the mindless things he'd been able to do while sitting with a preschool-aged Ember, looking up every time she'd called for his approval of the structures she'd built with her blocks. The things she built got bigger and better, more complex, made out of better materials as she'd aged, just like Tony's plans had done.
At home, Tony knows, there's a whole corner of Ember's room where she's constructed a Lego world, entirely of her own design. It's intricate and full of little loving details that her mother would have loved to see.
That thought grounds him as he pauses on a corner and looks around to see where he is.
He's in front of Charriott.
According to the clock attached to a building across the street, it's 11:36 AM. Tony decides to find the nearest coffee shop and fuel up, maybe drop into a corner store and buy a notebook so he can write down some sort of framework of what to say. He spies a quaint little stand-alone building a block away and heads over. When he crosses into the parking lot, a woman carrying a briefcase of her own and holding a large to-go coffee cup walks out of the shop, tripping on something unseen and dropping the briefcase.
Almost immediately, papers spill out, and some of them start to blow away. Tony can hear her swearing under her breath, and he jogs over. She's on her hands and knees, using her body to stop papers from catching the wind.
"I'll grab them," Tony says, and looking around for a safe place, he sets his briefcase down on one of the line of outdoor tables beside the parking area.
He chases after four separate pages, careful not to wrinkle them as he holds them tight to prevent them from restarting their journey. When he comes back to the woman, she's on the sidewalk, moved over so as to be out of the way of the door to the coffee shop. She's got one shoe off, her bare foot resting on a pile of papers inside of the briefcase, and in her hands she has two separate piles. The skirt she's wearing is pooled around her, her hair held back in a lace bandana.
It's Leigh.
As he approaches her with his heart in his throat, Tony sees her frown, then stick her finger in between two pages and settle the next few papers on top of it.
"I think these might help," Tony says, holding up the small stack he's wrangled from the wind.
"Oh my God, thank you so much! I broke the binder clip I was using on these, and like an idiot, I didn't ask to borrow one when I found out the supply room was fresh out. I basically willed this to happen," she says, sighing.
Tony doesn't know any other person who could seem so at home sitting on the ground outside of a place of business.
He hands over the pages. "Do you want me to shut that for you?"
"The clasp broke. I kind of feel like this is safer, but if you'd like to hold it shut, I can stop making a spectacle out of myself, I suppose," she muses.
Tony leans over and puts his hand down flat beside her foot on the pages, and she lifts her leg out of the way. Once the briefcase is closed, he hovers his own foot above it, waiting for her approval. "I can take my shoe off if you're more-"
"Oh, Stars, please don't. I still have half a day of work and I'd like to do it un- mortified, if that's all the same to you. Shoed is fine."
Tony doesn't know whether to feel exhilarated or burst into tears. He's not entirely sure he won't do both. To cover his undoubtedly strange expression in case she looks up to see it, he looks around for her coffee cup and finds it on the ground out of her reach. He has good balance, so Tony keeps his toe on the briefcase of hers and retrieves it.
On the side, where a barista had scribbled it in haste, is the name 'Lee.'
"Leigh, I'm not a doctor, but I prescribe half a cup of this, STAT," he tells her. The pure affection in his voice when using her name is a big fucking problem, but what saves him is that the rest of the sentence had been spoken in amusement, and the two tones of voice are similar. This woman doesn't know him well enough to know the difference.
"You are very right," she says, reaching up for it. With the hand full of papers held away from her body, she latches onto the coffee cup and drinks like her life depends on it. Tony can only watch in captured, terrified delight as her throat works.
This is the BEST Worst Mistake You've Ever Made, you utter besotted idiot, he thinks to himself. He both cannot possibly stop now, and should absolutely run away and save her from having to deal with the wreck that he is rapidly becoming. It's that scene in every single heist movie, where the timer is ticking down and something terrible is about to happen.
"Will you still be here if I run in and get my own coffee, so I can introduce myself in kind?" Tony asks. His inner voice is screaming.
"That depends, are we the type of people who give fake names at coffee shops?" she asks, setting the last page in between two stacks of slightly-wrinkled papers and patting the stack.
He half expects her to pat it twice.
Tony hadn't prepared for this at all.
"What name guarantees that I can see you again?" Tony asks, fixing her with an appreciative look.
Alt Leigh stands, blushing as she nods at him to lift his foot from her briefcase. "Ooh, that was a good line. Maybe too good." She looks at him critically, clearly trying not to smile.
"I promise I'm just clever like that," he says.
"Prove it," she challenges, standing still and giving him a full look-over. The approval in her eyes slays him. "Come back. Same time, same day next week?"
"I will," Tony says, and means it. He'll find a fucking hotel and wait, if FRIDAY says there's even a .01% chance the frequency for this universe isn't locked in.
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He takes two full hours making sure he can come back to this particular universe, sitting at the reflecting pool huddled over his phone, talking to FRIDAY. The last half hour of it is his AI coaching him through the process of being comfortable with coming back and sleeping before jumping back into the Quantum Tunnel.
Tony practically falls into his bed when he gets back home. One of his dreams that night is particularly vivid; he's on a boat on the lake in West Virginia, watching his younger self tend to the five beehive boxes he periodically dreams about, ever since he'd first met Leigh. From the lake's vantage point, Tony can see symbols displayed on the boxes, one for each of the Avengers in the first team, besides himself.
He remembers the first dreams, how he'd struggled to gather the honey, trying with varying degrees of protective clothing until he'd given up and gone out in street clothes and succeeded. Tony doesn't understand what it means to find that the boxes he's seen as symbolic of Leigh's influence on his life now seem to stand for Nat, Bruce, Thor, Clint, and Steve.
He has nothing to do but float on the stationary boat and watch the bees hover and zip around. He wonders if the five boxes stand for the five years he'd told Natasha to let him grieve, actually. There are only about six months left to that time period, unbelievably. It would feel like their conversation about it was only a few months ago, but for the drastic difference in Ember over that period of time.
Tony wishes he could wake up. There's a surreal creepiness to the dream that mounts as every unremarkable second passes. He watches his younger self, notes that he doesn't actually touch the boxes, even though he's able to come close, brush past them, walk between them, with no hostility from the bees.
"Tony!" he calls to his other self, wondering what will happen.
The bees react with instant aggression- but not toward him. They attack his other self, instead. Tony rows his boat up to the edge of the water and calls out, offering a hand, as his younger self battles a swarm of bees around his head. The lakebed is marshy, and the man's feet catch in the mud and hold, keeping him still for the angry, vindictive insects.
Tony looks for some way to save his other self, but each time he gets close enough to hit the bees off with his paddle, the boat rapidly floats backwards. He stares at the beehives, willing there to be some kind of reset button. Every so often he can influence his dreams. What Tony sees instead is that the symbols are not quite right. They're like Dollar Store versions of Avenger emblems, making him wonder if these impostor bees saw the younger Tony as some sort of a threat when he called out and made it obvious there were two of him.
The whole situation is confusing and scary. He's forced to watch his other self get weaker and weaker until the bees leave his slumped, still body. They don't return to their hives, though. They start out over the water toward him.
That's when Tony wakes up, chest heaving, alone and frightened in the dark.
It takes a long time for him to get back to sleep.
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The next morning, Tony forces himself to eat an apple before he sets up to leave, right at eight AM. His outfit is another mid-level suit, with a red shirt this time. When he checks himself in the mirror, everything looks normal. He activates the time suit and punches in 11:15 AM, thinking that it would be more natural for him to walk over from the library, as he'd done when he'd run into her accidentally the first time.
When he gets to the shop, it's just about half past eleven, and he finds the alternate Leigh at the back of the line.
Tony simply queues up behind her and doesn't say anything at first. She seems to have a similar style to his wife's, just with a more severe color palette- her skirt and blouse are a deep purple, with a soft, dark grey sweater over it. It is May 2027 in her universe, a warm day, and he wonders how ill she might be. He'd tried to schedule his visits in a way that wouldn't be in the midst of intensive chemotherapy or radiation, but he'd had to go by research and statistics for her type of cancer, and there are always outliers.
Her hair is shorter than he'd expected, just past her chin. It's strange, but when she turns and sees that he's behind her, Tony decides that it suits her. Truthfully, Leigh Balci is just a lovely woman, no matter how she appears to him.
"You came," she says, smiling. "I figured there was a strong chance you would decide I was just too odd to be believed."
"The odd ones are the best company, I've found."
"Fair enough." She nods in approval, her short hair sliding into her eyes. Tony recognizes his wife in the gesture this woman uses to brush it back.
They sit inside at a small table in the sun, which could confirm his concern about her health, or just be happenstance. Tony asks her what she does for a living.
"You mean you didn't look at the papers you brought back for me?" she says, laughing. "Actually, they probably just read like legalese. I'm an architect."
She talks a little while about her job, and Tony nods, sipping his coffee and enjoying watching her. She's like his Leigh, but also not- her voice doesn't have quite the same joy in it, when talking about what she's working on. It makes sense, because it seems that this version of Charriott has their Leigh Balci working on corporate design.
"All right, you either are very good at faking interest, or you actually understand those obscure terms I've been using," she accuses.
"I'm close with someone who worked as an architect," Tony tells her.
"Is that the truth, 'Anthony?'" she asks him, turning his coffee cup around.
"Yes."
A little alarm goes off in her purse, and Tony feels a chill go over his whole body at the way her face falls. "It's time to head back. Thanks for this," she says, mustering up a smile.
Tony knows there's a conversation he needs to have with himself, one about how he's allowing his plans to possibly color all of the signals he thinks this woman is sending about what her life is like, and how happy or unhappy she might be in it.
"Same time next week?" he asks lightly.
She traces her beautiful, mis-matched eyes over his face, searching for something. Tony can't tell whether she finds it or not, but she nods, a ghost of a smile haunting her mouth. As she walks out, Tony finally catches the thing that had seemed so 'off' about her while they'd stood in line together: she's wearing high heels. Not as high as the ones his wife had worn the night they got engaged, but higher than the Leigh he knows was comfortable with.
Tony wants to head into the restroom and simply zap himself home, but he forces himself to walk twenty minutes in a new direction, finding a disreputable alley and using that as an exit point.
When Tony steps down from the Quantum Tunnel platform he has to go drink a large glass of water to get the ugly taste of bile out of his mouth. Something feels very wrong about the world this version of Leigh lives in, but he can't put his finger on it. Tony goes up to his bedroom and takes off the suit, setting it aside to be washed. He'd only worn it for about an hour, but he wants to off the gunk of that strange universe. He chooses another suit to wear, going for a more expensive one that is comfortable and allows for easy movement.
When he puts his ARC reactor on, it's with a purpose, this time, and when he buttons up the dress shirt overtop of it, he leaves one undone, so he can slip his fingers inside more easily to tap it. In his briefcase, he takes out half the money and all of the changes of clothing. He makes sure that the extra time travel suit is configured for Leigh Balci, rather than putting it on the setting that takes the time to conform to her. Though she's different in many ways, her body seems to be the same, and the time differential might matter, if they might have to hurry.
He also packs her gun.
Tony walks up to the coffee shop at 11:31 PM. It's ostensibly been a week after the last time he'd seen this alternate universe Leigh Balci. She's outside with her coffee already, and her body language is distinctly stressed.
"Hi there," Tony says, sitting down.
"Hey," she says quietly.
"What is it?" he asks, holding her gaze, putting all the meaning he possibly can into the question. She falters but doesn't look down. Her face pales.
"I figured out why you look so familiar," she says. Tony's every instinct is firing off warning signs. "The thing is, you're- well." She looks down, shakes her head in disbelief. "You're dead. You have been for years. If you're that Anthony. Tony. Tony Stark."
"I'm clearly not that Tony Stark, if he's dead," he says, forcing himself to relax, leaning his head back as if just casually scanning his surroundings. He doesn't see anything unusual, but he opens up the briefcase long enough to pull out the headset for FRIDAY, setting it on the table in front of him.
"What is that?" she asks. She doesn't sound afraid of him, but she does sound afraid.
"Enhanced glasses. My eyes are tired," he quips, tossing her a brilliant smile. Her reaction to it is immediate; her cheeks pink a little, and she takes in a little breath, as if she hadn't been prepared for him to turn on his charisma. "So, what did you do when you decided your impromptu coffee buddy is a dead man?"
"At first I thought I was crazy. I thought about being realistic, looked for an explanation. Then I remembered something," she says. Tony angles his head and nods to encourage her, still keeping on the charm. Her lips twitch as if she wants to smile at him, nervous as she is. "May I?" she asks, reaching out her hand toward his face.
Tony's heart swells at the thought of her touching him. He holds back his external reaction, which makes his nod less confident than he would have wanted. Internally, his whole body is a caught breath, frozen in the seconds before the red light turns green, Times Square teeming with revelers waiting for the turn of the clock to the new year.
"Right here," she whispers. This strange, nervous version of the Leigh Balci he loves leans forward, toward him. She traces a gentle finger across a cut he has above one eyebrow. It's tiny, inconsequential, but that's probably the exact problem. It should have healed by now, if he had indeed lived through the three weeks since the first time that they met.
Tony nods.
"You don't have an explanation?" she asks, pulling her hand back. Tony fists the hand resting on the table and claws at his leg with the one underneath, to stop himself from catching her hand in his. So much about her is the same, so much is different. He longs to know whether she's as warm as his Leigh.
"Not one that would satisfy. How long ago did you realize?"
"The day after I saw you last."
"What did you do about it?" he asks, sensing that there's more to her concern, maybe a lot more. To Tony, it feels like her anxiety has less to do with him than maybe it ought to, but again wonders if that's a function of hope, not reality.
"There's a number to call, if you see something… strange," she says, shooting a look at a beat-up car that pulled into a space a full two minutes before. The driver gets out, and Leigh relaxes. It's a teenager in a school uniform.
"A number to call if you see something strange? What the fuck happened here," Tony says, not holding back his derision. He leans back again, scans the area, still doesn't see anything. That doesn't necessarily mean jack shit, though, if this universe is one where the citizens of the United Fucking States have a universal 'something's fucky' number to call. He wonders exactly how different this woman is, for having lived here.
"Why me?" she blurts out, shaking her head. "Are you… you are Tony Stark, aren't you? From, from some other place. A place not like this."
Tony looks at her and puts on the headset. He immediately sees that she could be wearing some sort of a listening device, or her bra could just have really conductive wiring on it. It's a tossup.
"Who's asking, Leigh? You? or you on behalf of the kind of people who would set up a hotline to narc on your fellow comrades?"
She draws herself up, affronted, and he's proud of the look of outrage on her face. This really was the absolute worst idea, Tony thinks, but now none of his actions are about his original plan at all. Now they're about saving her from this unexpected hellhole.
"I'm asking. I hung up. I never said anything."
"Call Branson. Tell him you need the afternoon off. Take a walk with me to your apartment, I want to see something," Tony says.
"H-how do you know-"
"My friend, the architect I was close with? She's you. My you," Tony says, every instinct in his head shouting at him to stop, that he's putting her in danger, that there's no coming back from this moment if this woman decides to reject the offer he wants to put to her. He stands up, holds out a hand.
She rests her hand in his after only a second of hesitation. It's warm.