Chapter 43 – Just One Dance

A/n: Here we go the continuation of the party scene :) Thank you all for your reviews :D You're all awesome

XxxBellaBellaxxX: I'm hoping Toni is just generally awesome but I agree angry Toni is better :D Glad you liked it.

nessa11997: You're welcome :)

Post U Later: Even in canon I think if Tony and Phil had spent more time together so Phil saw the Tony underneath they would have gotten along as they were already beginning to circa Avengers. So Toni just sped up that process :D

paisley15: Me too, mainly because it proves they're passionate about something. Enjoy the scene :)

Booklover2526: I've already left several clues as to what happens in this chapter in IF and earlier on in this story.

ReenReen: I'm glad you are looking forward to the chapter so much although the skipping is kind of strange. Glad you liked it :D

LaNaturalBreezeOf-Books: Yay for not being lazy! If I was lazy you'd never get these chapters :) I've never driven in a car in stilettos but I have worn them so I can imagine how hard it would be. Can walk in them just fine though

Frostfire613: This may seem kind of blunt but here is my response. This story is AU but not wildly so I'm trying to maintain as many aspects of the original movies as I can which means Toni/Piper however Toni is not the exact same person as Tony so she reacted differently in the second scene you reviewed.

ReadPaxJoy: She's Toni, she does that :D And stilettos are sore so Toni deserves kudos for pulling them off I think. Until next time :)

Phil sighed clearly not wanting to get into the real reason he was there when it was the first time Toni had been seen in weeks and it was at an event where she was supposed to be enjoying herself, "Listen, I know this must be a trying time for you. But we need to debrief you."

"That debrief ended up being about a lot more than I ever thought it would," Phil commented, "what you see is never quite what you get with you right Toni!"

"With me it's in for a penny, in for a pound almost every day," Toni stated simply, "that's the motto I mould my life on. Everyone expects some of the stuff I do but they never know exactly what else I'm going to do to go with it."

"I think they get a little more than a pound for every penny with you," Natasha pointed out.

"Not really," Toni said, "but my perception of how much information is only a small amount of information is very different from anyone else's and I fully acknowledge that. I just think that other people's lives must be very boring because of that fact."

"There are still a lot of unanswered questions," Phil continued as Toni spotted Piper on the dance floor dressed up in an obviously expensive suit, "and time can be a factor with these things."

"Only in cases when the details were clearly going to become less clear over time as the vic-subject," here Natasha fumbled over her words trying not to call Toni a victim and get the patented Toni glare, "forgets them. I think that's a non-issue in Toni's case Phil."

"I didn't know that at the time," Phil pointed out, "you're getting too caught up in the movie again. This was the first time I'd ever met Toni in person instead of just someone affiliated with her and I usually didn't put too much faith in their accounts seeing as all of them seemed to contradict each other in some way. Hence they couldn't be considered viable opinions in my information gathering even if a few of the things they said turned out to be true in the end."

"He does have a point Nat," Clint said hesitantly sure that he was going to get slapped again for the comment but she seemed to accept that he was speaking the truth and didn't think it was worth a response which would only further validate his point.

"Let's just put something on the books," Phil was still speaking to Toni as Piper noticed the pair and gestured that Toni should come over to speak to him instead. Toni mouthed, 'what?' at him wondering why he wanted her to come over and talk to him at an event.

"I thought you were ignoring me for a moment before I noticed that Piper was in the crowd," Phil informed Toni.

"I'm sorry about that but it was really strange for Piper to approach me at an event. Usually we tried to avoid being overly friendly in public unless it was at a press conference where we had to be seen discussing things. If the board knew just how much my PA was confronting me and calling me out on not really doing my job they would have gone public with it and many important businessmen we needed deals with at the time would have demanded that he be fired. That would have pleased the board of course because they preferred the typical secretaries that they tried to foist off on me before I pulled the math trick on them and agreed that Piper could be my PA."

"You don't exactly need to apologise for Piper," Phil said uncomfortably, "you don't control his actions." It was another thing that he noticed Toni quite often did and that was blame herself for the actions of others as if she could control them and had failed at it. Natasha had informed him when Clint and Toni had gone off during their break (apparently to test some sort of new training facility in the basement judging from their conversation when they came back into the room) that one of Toni's first reactions to finding out that he was 'dead' was to say that he was stupid for not waiting for someone else to be there before confronting Loki. Knowing Toni better than most he could accurately guess that what she really meant by that statement was probably that he should have waited for her and she should have made him see that before the battle begun so he wouldn't have ended up 'dead.' It was ridiculous but Toni always assumed responsibility for people's mistakes when there was no need for her to.

"How about the 24th at 7:00pm at Stark Industries?" Phil proposed and Toni turned away from the still beckoning Piper for a minute to talk to him again, "I'm not sure what I have on my schedule to be honest although I think it's pretty clear right now. Mind you the company is being difficult right now about my new direction."

"Understatement," Steve muttered knowing that it certainly was one.

"Stark Industries might not be the best place to have that meeting," Toni continued, "tell you what my PA keeps beckoning me to come over so I will talk to him and either one of us will call you and set up a more definite meeting time. I'll do my very best to make it at the promised time although I do occasionally get surprise projects that need to be dealt with immediately."

"It is surprising meeting Toni and finding out she's very different from all the reports on her I can guess," Bruce said knowingly. He had been so secluded in Calcutta that he had only read of Toni's supposed exploits after he had met the women herself and decided that the papers and magazines that could actually quote Toni directly were either obviously out of context. Either that or they were extremely old from back before Toni had changed her views on her lifestyle. There had been a couple of exclusives given to business magazines about the new tech she was building that were eventually sold to the other papers and magazines too when they offered Toni a high enough price or more shares in their paper so she could stop them from printing the false facts about her as she gained the controlling interest. In fact those were generally the only reports around nowadays that were solely about Toni and not about her work with the Avengers under the misnomer that was Iron Man.

Toni wandered over to where Piper stood and told him, "You look great now why were you calling me over?"

"You too," Piper said nonchalantly, "what are you doing here?"

"Specifically I am trying to get you to find out what I'm doing on the 24th at 7pm because Agent Coulson wants to meet me then," Toni said completely ignoring the fact that she knew what Piper had really been asking her.

"As usual Lady Toni you seem to be avoiding the real question," Thor laughed recognising the tactic as Lady Toni was quite fond of it and he had seen her use it on reporters many times. It had been a little too close to Loki's old tactics at first, the similarities smarting and making him want to stay away from the young woman who had helped save Midgard but in the end he had seen that she was not exactly the same person as Loki despite the fact that their experiences were startlingly similar. Loki had let his experiences in life and his perceived wrongs twist his views and make him into the man who Thor barely recognised as his brother. Of course he still hoped that one day Loki would be redeemed and he would start working for the benefit of the people of Asgard and Midgard again. But the Allfather wasn't keen on the idea of letting Loki prove himself and Thor was not keen to argue with him on the matter again after the last time. It had not ended well.

"Are you by yourself?" Piper inquired which Toni answered with a blunt, "yes. I seem to remember buying you that suit about three or so months ago for your birthday."

"That was the day before you disappeared wasn't it," Bruce realised.

"Yeah," Toni said sadly, "I was planning on giving him my present to him when I got back from Afghanistan the next day but obviously I didn't come back for another three months so he obviously found it in the closet I was storing it in and read on the tag that it was my birthday present to him and decided that he would have it anyway."

"It was probably to remember you by," Clint reasoned having a feeling from the earlier interactions of the pair that Piper had at least had a crush on her even back then because their banter was a little too flirtatious for it to be anything else. It was a bit like the banter he sometimes exchanged with Toni himself however so he might have been reading too much into it because he still barely knew Toni and he knew Piper even less so he probably couldn't tell what either of them considered flirting. Because when he exchanged barbs with Toni he wasn't attempting to flirt with her it just sort of happened and it made her laugh which was always a good thing in his mind.

"Yeah, I found it about a month into…" Piper trailed off here obviously going by some unspoken agreement in the building that they weren't going to talk about Afghanistan, "anyway you have good taste. This suit is very nice and it's also comfortable."

"Of course I have good taste," Toni scoffed, "I hang out with the people who design those suits on a regular basis and give them suggestions as to how I would improve their work. Mostly on their dress lines of course because they all want my opinion so they can put a 'Toni Stark Approved,' sticker in the catalogue and send me a free version in the hopes that I will wear it to my next benefit and get everyone buying it. I have more dresses from that sort of thing than I know what to do with."

"So that's where all the dresses in my size that are exactly my style came from," Natasha realised, "they were already in my closet when I moved in and I've never worn them because I thought you had just forgotten to take them out of the closet because I did move in on very short notice."

"I had a whole floor set out for you," Toni pointed out incredulously, "and you thought that everything in your style in the closet was simply a coincidence. Those are for you because some of them are not my style whereas they are yours and suit you better anyway, I have far too many dresses as I already said and we happen to be the same dress size and it's far more convenient to give them to you than go through the nightmare that is selling them on. Seeing as even if I repeatedly say I never wore them people go a long way to buy something that Toni Stark owned and possibly wore."

"Seeing as you're now over here, you want to dance?" Piper asked looking over Toni's shoulder to the place where Phil was still standing.

"Piper, that's not a good idea," Toni protested.

"You were thinking about his reputation instead of the fact that you wanted to dance with him," Steve realised privately thinking that this was very noble of Toni because obviously if Piper had become her only long term relationship then she definitely had feelings for him at some point which probably had to be long standing for Toni to pluck up the courage to ask out someone who worked for her. He had figured out that this was something Toni inherently disapproved of as she had proved when talking about the fact that her relationship with Piper had been kept secret from the tabloids for his sake even though she wanted to publicise it and admit that she was with him.

"Come on, just one dance," Piper told her and he grabbed her hand pulling her onto the dance floor. Toni didn't offer up much resistance probably partially because she didn't want to make a scene and partially because she actually wanted to dance with Piper and was just protesting in an attempt to save his reputation.

"This is not going to end well," Natasha predicted.

A/n: Okay, I am well aware that this chapter is really short but the problem is the whole reason I started this story in the first place was that I was so sick that I ended up in hospital and I had time to come up with a rough plan for plotlines which at this stage has mostly been trashed and replaced with a better one. But today I had to go back to hospital briefly and I barely managed to type this out when I came back and I wanted to get it up for you so I broke it off at the first natural point I could find. So my apologies for an under 3K chapter which hasn't happened since Chapter 13 but I did the best I could.