Chapter Twenty-six
In May, Tony, Fianna, and Ember start watching movies on Friday and Saturday nights, on the couch in the rec room. Fianna makes fantastic popcorn from scratch.
In June, they make S'mores by the fire near the lake so often Tony buys a really high-end firepit, and Fianna goes on strike for a whole week because it's so expensive. He and Ember have to lure her out by both promising to eat all their vegetables.
In July, Ember is scheduled to spend two weeks at the Balci farmhouse, and Tony will spend one of those weeks at Rhodey's. Fianna promises them both that she'll be happy alone at the lake house for that week.
Tony fully expects a confused call from his in-laws asking to explain something that Ember's said about Fianna, so much so that he checks his phone almost every hour for the first few days.
"What do you think is going to happen? Is one of your in-laws pregnant and about to pop, or something?" Rhodey asks him.
"Got babies on the brain?" Tony asks, in turn.
"Just making them," his friend says, grinning.
"Congrats in advance, on both the trying and the succeeding," Tony grins back.
Rhodey looks at him, sits back on the couch and sighs, angling his head a little.
"What?" Tony says.
"You're eating better, or something. More relaxed- Tony?"
Fuck. "Don't."
"Do you? Have someone?"
"No."
"I think you do."
"I'll tell you what I have," Tony says, feeling reckless. "I don't have a girlfriend. I have a friend. I have no intention of making babies with her. I have a friend who cooks for me sometimes. It's nothing. Movie nights with Ember. A female role model. Fuck off."
"You are awfully defensive for someone trying to persuade me there's nothing to defend yourself for."
"You think I don't worry about what it looks like to my own stupid lonely heart?" Tony says, hoping if he pushes hard enough into 'Feel Bad For the Widower' it'll get Rhodey to fuck off. "I'm handling it. Besides," he reminds himself aloud. "She's out of remission. Cancer. Shit, she's probably been hiding symptoms from me. There's no way she isn't."
It's as if mentioning it knocks the rust off of his memories about the cancer in the place where he'd hidden that information away in his mind.
"You sure it's still lonely?" Rhodey asks, after Tony's sat there ramping up in worry about Fianna's medical condition for a minute or two.
"Rhodes, go knock up your wife and leave me out of it."
He feels around for his phone, and the reckless, impulsive mood has him dialing the number of the phone he got Fianna.
When she answers, she sounds concerned.
"What happened?"
"Are you having symptoms from the cancer?"
There's a long silence, and then she says, "What?"
"I repressed it. Locked it away. Along with the rest of the things I found out when we first met. Except those things can't hurt you anymore and this can. So, are you?"
"Tony, it's 10 at night on a Wednesday."
"That's a yes, then. I should come home early and drive you into a clinic! What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking that I'm a grown adult woman who is in contact with a gentleman named Nick Fury, who has provided me with a perfectly qualified doctor with whom I make telemedicine calls. Which is none of your fucking business. Have a good evening, Tony."
With that, Fianna hangs up.
"Did she break up with you for asking?" Rhodey asks, all amusement gone from his face.
"It's not that kind of friendship."
Tony feels like shit. Fianna's perfectly right, her health is absolutely none of his business. None of the things he can think of to do from a distance will help at all, either. Nearly all of them cost money, which she'd hate for him to spend on trying to make amends.
Suddenly the last thing he wants to do is be visiting his friend's house while the two of them are thinking about expanding their family. He's intruding. He wants to be home, he wants to mope in his own bed, wants to know Fianna is safely sleeping in the bed one room over. He wants to know she's not in pain, that if she is, she's handling it, that she's not ignoring it, pushing through some symptom that could turn deadly if she'd just noticed it earlier.
The next morning he's surly and sarcastic, and by lunchtime, Rhodey's pulling him aside.
"Go, man. Fix it."
"There's nothing to fix. I'm not kidding, we're not involved."
"Seems like you're going to turn around and find out you've been involved for months and neither of you realized it, but that's just, like, my opinion, Man."
"You really are a dad if you're actually quoting The Dude at me," Tony laughs. "I'll go find a hotel or something."
Rhodey looks at him. "She lives with you?"
Fuck.
It doesn't take long to gather his things. Rhodey doesn't have to follow him around and ask more questions for Tony to feel like he's being interrogated. There's no way to convince his best friend that everything to know has already been ferreted out.
"See you, tell Leshia I'm sorry I had to go." Tony says, hopping in the rental, and rolling down the window.
"What's her name?" Rhodey asks pleasantly.
He grins. "Nunya."
"Tell her she's doing great work. You look happier than I've seen you in years."
Tony rolls up the window without answering with anything more than a single held up middle finger, but the damage has clearly been done.
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He'd taken an actual taxi from the house to the airport, unwilling to leave one of his cars at long-term parking. What he should do is fly up to Pennsylvania and impose on his in-laws, but he just wants peace and quiet, so Tony does that, but the billionaire way. He takes a taxi from the airport to an REI because it's what's open, buys some camping supplies, has the driver drop him off a mile from his house at sunset, and walks home.
Tony sets up the tent at the far edge of the property, in a place not visible from the house. It's a three person tent, because the one person tent is more like an Ember-sized tent, or maybe a person who isn't used to any fucking personal space -sized tent.
Because he's awesome, the wi-fi reaches out this far.
He'd pitched his camp on Thursday night, and on Saturday morning, Tony wakes up to the smell of coffee.
He's completely certain he's either hallucinating or daydreaming, right up to the point where he unzips the tent and sees a stool with an open, steaming thermos on it, and a note.
You are entirely ridiculous.
Come home.
He scrambles for his phone inside the tent and sends Fianna a message.
How long have you known?
She leaves him on 'read.'
It's his property, so he leaves the campsite still set up, grabs the thermos, and marches up to the house. It's unlocked.
She's not in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the rec room, his office, Ember's room, or the bathroom. Tony tries the door to her bedroom before knocking, only to find that it's locked. He knocks, belatedly, knowing that the action he just took to try to barge in has probably done him no favors.
As expected, she doesn't say anything, and doesn't answer the door.
He's petulant enough to knock for longer, but he knows her. She's at least as stubborn as he is.
After standing outside the door listening intently for five whole minutes, Tony goes into his bedroom and pulls open the adjoining door.
Fianna is sitting on the bed she let him buy for her, cross legged, hugging a pillow. She looks completely shocked to find that he's found a way in.
The problem is, he doesn't have any idea what to say.
"Thanks for the coffee."
"I didn't know there was a second door," Fianna says, still wide-eyed.
"This used to be a nursery. There's no lock on your side, only mine. Otherwise-"
"Otherwise your enterprising daughter would have locked both doors and wreaked havoc while you pried the hinges off?" She offers him a wry smile. "Middle kid of five, remember?"
"The medical stuff-" Tony blurts out, stopping only because Fianna holds up a hand.
"It's bad, not as bad as it could be, I'm not in pain, just tired sometimes. And it's still none of your business."
"Are you going to sic Fury on me?" he asks, wondering how much of an undercurrent of discomfort he's been missing from her. For months, Tony's shut nearly all of his emotions down around Fianna, seeing it as the only way to prevent himself from getting attached to the ways she is just like Leigh. It was probably the right decision, too, considering how he has reacted in the past few days after turning them all back on out of concern for her health.
"Do you mean, am I going to tell him you put me in a room with an unlockable, adjoining door that leads to your bedroom?" Fianna asks archly, clearly in complete control over whether Tony spends the next ten years in some sort of dungeon of Fury's devising.
"Please do not."
"Then go. Sleep. Thank you for showing me some more progress towards the thing I asked you to do that first week."
He backs up so that he's standing in the doorway to his bedroom. "You think all of that shows you I'm not broken?" Tony's beyond dubious.
"Yes, actually. Good night, Tony."
She gets up and walks toward the door, which opens into her bedroom, meaning she can push him completely out, if he lets her.
"Fine. Good night," he says, letting the door shut. Because it's one hell of a last word on the subject, Tony throws the deadbolt for the door on his side.
Her trill of laughter banks a small fire in his gut that doesn't putter out for hours.
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Ember isn't coming home until next Monday, almost nine days after Fianna's coffee offering.
Tony holes himself up in his office and attempts to shut his emotions back down the way they have been for the past few months. For days he tries to lose himself in one project or another, only to find himself pausing in the middle of some schematic, thinking back to whether there had been pain on Fianna's face as they carried S'mores supplies back into the house late one night, and she tripped on something. He remembers that she's fallen asleep for the past few movie nights, and wonders if that's just a function of the movies or a symptom. Her appetite has decreased, but is that because she doesn't like the fresh foods available in the summer as much as what they ate during spring?
She's taken to making crock pot meals or leaving out materials to make sandwiches, so Tony's eaten most of his meals alone for days on end. At ten in the morning on the sixth day, he decides to confront her. Not accepting proper treatment is a sign of depression, and depression might mean she's not recognizing the extent of the advance of her cancer, or dismissing it. He… he doesn't want anything to happen to her at all, but the second worst thing is for any of it to happen earlier than expected.
He steps out into the hall and hears a recognizable phrase in a recognizable voice.
It's Leigh's holographic message to Ember, being played in Ember's room- but Ember's in Pennsylvania.
He walks over to Em's room to find Fianna kneeling on the floor, watching the hologram. Because of where it's kept in the room, he can see her in profile. Her expression is best described as wounded, her body language tense, nearly pretzeled. Tony steps inside, visible in her peripheral vision, because Fianna turns her head, sees him, and scrambles over to turn off the recording.
"Shit."
"What-" Tony starts to say, but Fianna interrupts him, still crouched on the floor, almost as if she's begging him to not be angry.
"For five days you never came out of your office until past lunch- I…"
"So for five days you've come in here and watched- Why?" He's baffled. She looks like she hasn't slept for any of the five nights in between; her hair is in a messy, matted ponytail, her shirt is inside-out (and might actually be his shirt, he recognizes the AC/DC logo), and she's wearing fuzzy red pajama pants.
Fianna looks over at the square holographic projector he'd built for Ember, her expression a little haunted. "She and I are so alike, I mean, of course we are. We enjoy a lot of the same things, have even made a lot of the same choices." She shakes her head. "She's so healthy, so happy, so vital, and less than two days later, she's gone. I guess I'm just trying to understand."
Tony wants to defend Leigh, because it sounds an awful lot like Fianna's calling her ungrateful, but she's erratic today, mercurial. In an instant, she goes from a lump of unhappy confusion, to a blaze of outrage.
"She has everything, anything anyone could want, at that moment. I just don't understand! How could she make that choice?" Fianna stands up and backs away from him, shaking her head. "I'm the same person, almost, and I couldn't." She meets his eyes, an unreadable expression in her own. "I couldn't," she repeats, all the fire gone from her voice. "What kind of a person does that make me?" Fianna's whispering, now. Miserable. "I couldn't give up that life. If I had you, I couldn't give you up. Not for anything."
Fianna runs from the room, pushing him out of the way as a consequence of where he's standing in relation to the door. He can hear her frantic feet on the stairs, hears the front door open, never hears it close. He's rooted in place. What she said echoes in his head, and he has to strip the words apart from each other to define their individual meanings before he can let them fall back into the confession he's pretty certain they were.
It's one thing for him to fight an attraction to her. That's almost a given. On her side, though?
"I'd probably have a crush on me if I had rescued myself from that damned place," he says aloud.
It sounds hollow. A rationalization, and a shitty one at that, once again removing her agency as a grown woman. He'd showed up in her completely separate, autonomous universe without asking her if she needed him to fuck her life all up. Once he'd done so, he'd stolen her away, just like Ember had said. A reasonable woman would be angry with him. A reasonable woman would have asked Nick Fury for a goddamned extraction by now. A reasonable woman wouldn't stand in his daughter's bedroom and confess she has feelings for him, feelings she's struggling to understand by watching his dead wife's suicide note.
"Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist, but I can't buy myself a normal life for any amount of money," he mutters.
Tony puts the hologram back on, wanting to fast forward it so that Ember doesn't find out that the adults in the house have been messing with it. He watches her brown eyes fill with shining tears that she manages to hold back with her iron will.
Five years have nearly passed, four of which he'd spent searching for a way to send this version of his wife back to her version of himself. All the while knowing that he's no longer that man. All the while knowing that success would mean losing a second version of Leigh Balci- and during none of those four years did he ever really pause to think of how that would feel. That he would have a kinship with the woman he'd persuade to do it.
Only now does Tony realize that he could have just as easily found a healthy version of Leigh, a practical carbon copy, and grown old with her, for that matter, asking her to come with him to Vormir and jump only when it became clear that their lives had reached their twilight. Hell, he could jump, after instructing her to give the stone to her alternate self. After all, as Tony had told Ember, he knows exactly where his Leigh is in every place she exists in time. Those moments are immutable, except for maybe the very last few.
To save his wife for a version of himself he'll never be again, Tony never needed to find Fianna, a woman with a rapidly expiring lease on life. But now that he has, he doesn't want to picture what would have happened if he didn't.
He sinks down to a kneel, just Fianna had. Leigh does look vital. She's practically sparkling with energy, and she looks so young. Tony shakes his head. He used to watch this and feel like if only he could find a way to breathe life into this hologram, she could step free of it and into his arms where she belonged. But this woman will never be his again, he realizes. Leigh Stark is a person from his past.
Even if he could bring himself to ask Fianna to cheat the last weeks, days, hours, and minutes of her life to snatch the Soul stone away before this woman sacrifices herself, he'll never reap the benefits of it. It had been a good plan, but the hubris required to perpetrate it is just not the person he is, anymore.
Tony reaches out his hand and traces it along the edge of her hairline. He gestures, and the hologram pauses.
"I love you," he says to her. "I'm sorry that fighting your sacrifice for so long made it hurt so much more." He closes his eyes. "I just wanted more time," Tony whispers.
Without opening his eyes, he gestures for it to continue playing. With the sound of her voice singing Em's lullaby following him out of the room, he goes into his office and shuts the door.
For the rest of the day, he blasts metal music so loud there's no way Fianna can't hear it from wherever she's walking. He'll pay whatever fine the neighbors rustle up for him, if he has to.
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Ember's due back in two days, and Fianna's avoiding him like the plague.
Tony takes those two days and rebuilds the secret entrance to the Quantum Tunnel. He'd installed Fury's shielding, but the basement still looks like there's a passageway leading to a brick wall, which basically screams 'secret room.' He has an email notification set up for vintage/old board games, and that Saturday morning he gets a hit. It's a big lot of boxes with partial game pieces, sold by a game store that suggests the buyer should use them for an art wall or something. He uses the suit to fly out to grab the stuff, taking an Uber back to the house.
Fianna had taken a shower while he was gone. The smell is soothing. It feels like home, in a way that makes his insides twist up when he thinks about it too much. He ruthlessly suppresses any temptation to wonder things he shouldn't, like whether she thinks of him, while in there. Or what she wears for the walk from the bathroom to her bedroom. They're new thoughts, but they don't feel as new as he would have expected. It's as if he'd been applying some kind of filter on those thoughts, hiding them from conscious understanding.
Tony builds his fake bookcase door with meticulous, desperate focus, because every time his hands still, the filter drops, and intrusive, delicious, unexpected, heady thoughts present themselves. Apparently, this viral attraction to Fianna that has been multiplying undetected in his system has reached critical mass, and his immune system is helpless against the onslaught.
Not even making the trigger for opening the door hinge on a game based on time travel is distracting enough, though he does open the box to examine the rules before he glues it into place. If it looks interesting enough, he might get it for Ember, as a joke.
There's a stack of cards, and he flips one up. Out of Time, it says. Tony doesn't know anything about the rules of the game, but the description on the card hits a little too close to home for him.
Play this card on an opponent, and their Protagonist will immediately age up to Elderly, limiting them to one more move before having to choose a new Protagonist.
I just wanted more time, Tony had said, to the hologram of his wife.
He puts the card back and glues the box together, unwilling to read about the gameplay anymore. Fianna's one bad card away from having a single move left, too.
Tony starts working on the wires for the door, but the music blasting from his phone isn't quite enough. He heads upstairs for a bluetooth speaker, because he hasn't wired the basement for sound like the rest of the house. As he jogs around the corner from the basement stairs toward the ones to the second floor, he sees Fianna, her hair down and damp, carrying a sandwich and a thermos toward the front door. She sees him too, bites her lip, leans her head down, and power walks out onto the porch.
The look on her face makes him feel guilty. Tony recognizes longing when he can see it.
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That night, the night before he goes to pick up his daughter from her time with his in-laws, Tony's body burns away yet another filter.
No, he tells himself, when he wakes up with an erection after a dream featuring Fianna. Not for you.
These thoughts are easier said than done, for his lonely body and his lonely heart, though. Especially when he suspects she'd be willing.
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"Why are you fighting?"
Tony sighs. "Em, we're not fighting. Being an adult is hard. It's even harder when you're not in your own universe."
"I don't think being an adult is hard at all," she says, crossing her arms.
"That's because we have more money than God."
"That's not possible, you know. But you should stop fighting. She looks sad, Dad. That's not okay. You should fix it."
Tony didn't know Fianna looked sad, because in the week since Ember came back, he hasn't seen her for more than two minutes at a stretch.
He was never a man that enjoyed the chase when a woman was 'playing hard to get.' That is definitely not what Fianna is doing, but the effect could be argued to be the same, and this time? It's working. She's on his mind all the time, and he's rapidly losing plausible deniability. There's only so much you can think about a person during a set period of time and still deflect it toward 'just worrying about her health.'
He tells Ember, "I don't think she wants my help this time, Em. I don't blame her."
Ember sighs and flounces upstairs. On the way, he thinks he can hear her saying, "It's your fault she never answers the door at night anymore," but he's not sure.
If his daughter is knocking on Fianna's door instead of his, at night, Tony thinks that probably ought to be addressed. First, though, he wants to talk to Fianna about it. He's keenly aware that Ember misses a mother figure in her life enough to manifest that desire in Lego form, but she's also sensitive to others when she's close to them. If he asks Em about it first, she might get an inadvertent message to leave Fianna alone completely, and then Fianna will be even more isolated, and so will Ember.
Fianna is a night owl, he knows, so he knocks on her main door at 10 PM, softly, so as not to wake Em with the sound of the knocks. There's no response. He tries again, a little louder, but, nothing.
Tony goes into his bedroom, unlocks the deadbolt separating his room from Fianna's, and knocks on that door, to no avail.
"I really need to talk to you. I'm going to come in."
He waits a good minute and a half to give her time to cover up if she's not dressed, and walks in.
The room is empty.
Tony immediately figures out where she is, and he's impressed at her audacity.
Fianna's at his fucking campsite, he's certain of it. She's probably been sleeping and staying out there for over a week.
He's wearing cloth sleep pants and a black wife beater, but he doesn't change, doesn't put on shoes, either. Tony just heads out into the sweltering night to where he'd left the tent set up. His custom-built LED flashlight made of Damascus steel has a 'moonlight' mode that doesn't cast a bright beam but does illuminate his path just enough not to warn her that he's coming.
When Tony catches sight of the tent, he sees that it's lit up inside. He thinks he should have turned off the fucking wi-fi booster first, to make her wonder if it stopped working or if he knows.
Tony turns his flashlight on turbo when he gets close enough.
"Gig's up, Laura Ingalls," he calls out. "Pack it up, come back home."
The flashlight's getting pretty hot in his hand. He turns it off. She undoes the zipper, lets the center cloth fall in, but Fianna doesn't step out.
"I'm not a vampire, you know. I could come in there."
Fianna climbs out. Her movements are jerky with irritation. She's dressed in tiny shorts and a tank top without a bra. It is pretty hot out here, probably hotter in the tent, because the insect population in the summer out here is unreal. She looks disgruntled and adorable, and there's no way around the fact that he wants her.
"I can't believe you love the mosquitos more than me," he says absently, smacking one on his arm. He's been living with the knowledge of his own feelings for over a week, and it's seeping out everywhere, apparently.
"Oh, fuck you, you actually know that's not true," Fianna hurls at him, aiming her flashlight right at his face. It's a Maglite, and he barely has to shield his eyes. "I'm trying, okay?"
Tony puts both hands up. "Wait, what? That was- Fianna. I was joking."
"Well, I'm not. So go back into the house and let me get some sleep." She looks at him and freezes in place, angling her flashlight from his face down across his chest down to his bare feet and back. Fianna swears under her breath and climbs back into her tent. He can feel a heat that has nothing to do with the temperature of the night around them.
"I could pry up the tent pegs and drag you back," Tony tells her.
"Do it during daylight so I can watch!" she leans out of the gap in the tent and requests through gritted teeth.
He's tempted. "This isn't over, woman," he promises.
Her response is to zip the door back up and turn out the light.
The only reason Tony goes back to the house is because he knows that Ember's been knocking on her door in the night, and she'll be genuinely scared if she knocks on both doors and gets no response.
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Tony has every intention of heading out to the campsite first thing in his Iron Man suit and taking up the tent to pack it somewhere she can't find. What happens instead is a knock on the door.
It's Lacey Balci.
"Your daughter told on you. Where is she?"
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"I'm not sure I really believed it until right now. That kid has quite an imagination," Lacey says.
Fianna is standing on the porch wrapped in a blanket that happens to cover the fact that her hair isn't as long as Leigh's was. Her eyes are brimming with tears. "Lace?"
"In the flesh," her sister says, throwing her arms out. The two women hug for a long time, their heads so close that Lacey's black hair falls in with Fianna's blonde.
In retrospect, Tony realizes he should never have expected his daughter not to meddle in Fianna's life. She's actually done the exact right thing, somehow smoothing over the rough edges of his fuck-up with childlike innocence by picking the exact right person to break the ice. Lacey came to see for herself, it seems, instead of calling him and asking what the hell was up. And she's been rewarded with probably the greatest unexpected present she could have imagined.
Fianna does some smoothing herself, pretending that she'd just spent the night in the tent for fun. It's actually brilliant of her, because now Tony can't just go dismantle the damned thing, since that would look like a strange, insensitive act.
Lacey's brought a bag to stay for a few days. Tony sets her up on the Rec Room couch, because Fianna's room is a bit small for two grown women.
"Ember's probably going to end up challenging Fianna to a cage match for your attention, you realize," Tony warns Lacey.
Lacey's face scrunches up in a delighted expression. "Honestly Fianna is the cutest name. Especially since she's always loved it, to the point of trying to name one of the barn owls that every year without fail. Mom would never let her."
"I suppose a whole duplicate human is better than a wild animal, so there's a chance that Miriam won't assign baking penance," Tony muses.
Lacey laughs. She looks over at the door to see if anyone is standing within earshot. "Em suggested she had a really rough life in her original universe. Not sure how you could have known that when you showed up there, though?"
It's one of the nicest 'do I have to kick your ass' comments he's ever heard.
"I did not go over there to replace your sister. Initially I was looking for closure." It's the truth, of sorts. "As soon as I saw the life she was forced to lead, it became a rescue mission. She's- it's not my place, Lacey, but she's ill. This doesn't have the kind of fairy tale ending Ember might be hoping for. I have fucked up many things in my life, and this whole situation might count among the top three."
"Second chances never rest easy," Lacey observes.
Balci women are generous to a fault, it seems.
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The three ladies spend the whole day together. By the time Ember goes to bed, Lacey is yawning and calling herself names for being so sleepy so early. She turns in at 9:30.
Tony's putting his watch away in his room in preparation for bed when he hears Fianna complaining under her breath in the room next door.
"Why is this open?" she asks from the doorway, finishing the process of putting her hair up into a caught ponytail.
"Ember said something about you not answering the door when she knocks at night. The door being open was me finding out why that was."
"And it's still open because?"
"I slept with it open."
Fianna shuts the door with herself on his side of it, and reaches up to trip the deadbolt. "Good night, Tony," she says with quiet dignity.
"You don't have to do that," he blurts out.
She freezes in the act of opening his bedroom door. "I'm not your soulmate, Tony Stark."
"I know. Your first words to me were nowhere near as hurtful."
It feels like a catalyst moment, where her response could mean a multi-million dollar construction project has the authority to be built, or scrapped. Fianna can sense it too, he thinks.
"I don't even remember what they were."
"I do."
She shakes her head in disbelief, then turns her back on him, opening his main door and slipping through into the hallway. Tony lets her think she's won, listens to her going into her room. He waits a full five minutes before he walks back over to unlock the deadbolt.
Seconds later, Fianna's throwing the adjoining door open. She's got fire in her eyes, her hands balled into fists. "Damnit, Tony! What are we? Are we friends?"
"Sure," he says, unwilling to scare her away with conjecture.
"Friends respect each other's boundaries."
He hadn't meant to get angry, but her rationale sends him soaring into outrage. "That's bullshit, and you know it. Friends don't let each other make toxic decisions. Friends don't ignore each other when they know they're lonely or sad. They don't leave their friends without basic necessities. If I find out you're sleeping in that tent again, so help me I'll chain you to my bed."
He means it, not necessarily sexually, but as a deterrent. Fianna takes it as gunpowder to her open flame, though.
"Don't youdare use how I feel about you against me, you smug, insensitive bastard!" she hisses at him, stalking over, raising a hand as if to slap his face.
Tony catches her wrist and yanks her closer. "Believe me, it would be self-flagellation."
He wants to kiss her. He would have, if it had been any other situation, but he respects the kind of determination it took to sleep in a tent for a week to avoid him. So Tony lets what he wants show on his face, and gentles the hold on her wrist.
Fianna is at first incredulous. He brushes a light but obvious caress with his thumb across her pulse point and then opens his hand to let her go. Her unusual, beautiful eyes search his for a few seconds, and her body weight drifts toward him before she snaps herself back to reality. Tony can see it happen, the point at which Fianna remembers the kind of world she grew up in, the way that upbringing twists her hopes into shapes that never fulfill.
"Even if you weren't just trying to make me feel better, aren't we the same, in the dark? I could never be sure you were with me," she says.
The words sound calculated, like a Hail Mary pass thrown directly to the opposing team, preventing the winning goal.
"The woman in my dreams these days has eyes that don't quite match. Hair that reaches just there," Tony whispers, reaching over and holding a measuring hand to her shoulders. "If you need to sleep further away, I'll hire you to design an addition onto the house, Fianna."
As he'd expected, Fianna seizes onto the expenditure of his money, not his heart. "You don't need to do that, it would cost-"
"The structure's already there. You'd just be making it visible."
She backs away from him, and a look of wistful amusement crosses her face. "Sabrina," she says, smiling crookedly.
Tony shakes his head, lost. He doesn't miss, however, that she has already stopped arguing.
"A line from the movie. It's one of my favorites, the remake with Julia Ormond is lovely. 'I don't know how to believe you,' Sabrina tells Linus. And I don't. Know how to believe you. About any of this," Fianna says.
"Do you want to believe me?"
Her eyes drift closed. Fianna's hair is up and she's wearing something Leigh might have thrown on in a pinch. There's nothing about what Fianna looks like right now that denotes the difference between the two women. But Tony sees her, not Leigh. He thinks he has for a while, now.
"Yes, Stars help me, I do."