Slowly out of line
And drifting closer in your sights

So play it out, I'm wide awake
It's a scene about me
There's something in your way
And now someone is gonna pay
And if you can't get what you want
Well it's all because of me

The Offspring, "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid"

oOoOoOo

Stark Industries, New York
January 22, 2005

"For the last time, Obadiah," Toni says, without looking up from the sheaf of design specs and technical portfolios Pepper has sent her. "SI is not pursuing, entertaining or accepting any new contracts for weapons from anyone. I don't care if Captain America himself walked through the door in all his red, white and blue glory, announced the Red Skull was rampaging through Manhattan, and only a Stark missile could put him down. That's not our business anymore."

Obadiah Stane has not taken Toni's ascension to power with any sort of grace or aplomb, especially when he finally got a good eyeful of just how smart and ruthless and stubborn she really was. "Weapons built your fortune, Toni," he says, leaning forward on her desk by the tips of his fingers. She wonders if he thinks looming intimidatingly over her will work this time, when it's failed the fifty times before. "You're pissing away a solid partnership that's endured for over sixty years. The Stark name was founded on its relationship with the US military, and the men and women in uniform depend on SI technology to keep them alive."

At least he hasn't brought up her father yet. Maybe he's finally learned that Toni does not go all teary and soft when Howard Stark is mentioned. "There are other names in the weapons industry, Obadiah," she says, flicking a hand at the screen. It scrolls over to a very technically-written request for a lab upgrade, and she squints at it, trying to decipher Mbenga's cramped, tiny script. "And Stark Industries will still have an excellent relationship with the military. We have no intentions of risking the lives of soldiers, which is why we provide them with tactical armor, medicines and combat-injury care. I am far more interested in providing security and patching soldiers up than I am blowing their faces off, Stane. And I'm a little tired of having this conversation."

"If your father were alive," he growls, leaning forward a little more with tight shoulders and a dark scowl.

Toni cuts him off before he can work up the usual castigating speech. "Well, he's not," she says. "And he left everything to me. I know it's a little hard for you to accept, but the name on the door is Antonia Stark, CEO. I have business cards and letterheads and a personal secretary who answers the phone with 'Ms. Stark's office'. So I will run this company in the manner I believe is most appropriate. My father believed in a carrot and a stick. I believe in a compassionate heart. No more weapons. End of discussion."

Obadiah pushes back from her desk, straightens his tie, smooths out his jacket. "There will come a day when you might come to regret the decisions you've made," he says, and Toni glances sharply at him. There's nothing in his tone, no promise of violence in his eyes, no smirk, nothing to indicate he's issuing a threat. Toni resists the urge to roll her eyes. Just more of his useless posturing. "What will you do when the enemy is invading your home?"

"Shoot them in the face," she says, turning her attention back to her paperwork. "I may not want to mass-produce weapons for the world at large, Obadiah, but I still own a lot of guns."

"You will regret this," he says again. Again she looks, again sees no threat cue.

"I doubt it. If you wouldn't mind, please see yourself out. I've a lot of work to get through today."

oooooooo

Berlin, Germany
July 6, 2005

The hospital is noisy, crowded and smells like hospitals are wont to do. It's a sting of antiseptic through the nostrils, an underscore of illness, the lingering chill of death. Toni really doesn't want to be here, but Toni's hand is throbbing, and she desperately wants some Vicodin. They only give Vicodin out at hospitals, alas.

The doctor pokes and prods her fingers, and she swears at him violently. He asks her how her injury happened, she retorts that she broke it on some asshole's face. The doctor is unimpressed with her, sends her for x-rays, more walking - pantyhose feet slipping on the floors, because the heel of her right stiletto broke off in goon number three's shoulder and she refuses to walk lopsided - more waiting, more swearing at medical professionals as they maneuver her this way and that to take images.

The worst part is that, no matter where she goes, she has Rhodey and Clint looming over her, one at either shoulder, making sure no one comes close enough to look at her funny, let alone try and grab her again.

Later, her hand is in a cast - fractured wrist, three broken fingers, dislocated thumb, yay - and she has a prescription for serious painkillers, cos fucking ow, and she's letting Clint help her out of her dress back in their hotel room, roll off her absolutely destroyed stockings and wash her makeup off. Rhodey's in the other room of the suite, getting his weapons out, making apologies to the host of the charity auction over the phone. Toni can't talk Rhodey out of sitting vigil all night. She gives up trying, because the Vicodin reduces her need to care about anything.

She's comfortable in bed in one of Clint's t-shirts and clean panties, pillows a virtual cloud of comfort behind her back, wrist propped on another pillow at her side, bottle of water and wonderful wonderful fucking narcotic painkillers, she says, "You're never going to let me pee alone again, are you?"

"I'll close my eyes, cos ew, but no. Not ever again," Clint replies from where he's sprawled face-down on the bed beside her.

ooooooooooo

Western Australia
December 14, 2006

"At some point," Clint says casually, balancing easily with a knee on the windowsill and a foot on the seat, despite the drunken sway of the vehicle, "this will stop happening to us, right?"

Toni swears viciously under her breath, a steady stream of epithets in four languages - none of them English - and pulls the wheel hard to the right as the road takes a sharp curve. "Probably not, darling," she says through gritted teeth. "Now would you be an absolute peach and shoot the fucking cars behind us already?"

There's a rhythm to Clint's marksmanship, the steady whisk of an arrow out of the quiver, the creak of the bowstring, the thwip as the arrow is loosed. "I just wanted a vacation," he says. "A nice anniversary spent away with my girlfriend. Lie on some beaches. Enjoy the sun. Maybe try to ride a kangaroo. See that giant-ass rock that's supposed to be the oldest thing on the planet. Surf. Wrestle a shark. You know, fun shit you do when you're taking it easy."

The left wheel of the Jeep hits an indent in the ground, jolting Toni painfully against the sudden lock of the seat belt. Clint just sways gracefully, his hip almost touching her temple. Toni has a very brief, very enjoyable fantasy about shoving Mr. Perfect Balance right off the side. "How many are back there?" she says. "I don't want to take my eyes off the road to check."

"Two cars, three in one, four in the other. I'm running low on arrows, dear."

"Then stop missing your shots. We don't have time to stop and whittle you up replacements right now."

Clint makes an indignant nose. "I never miss," he says. Thwip. "Three in each," he says smugly. "Even odds. Now, what was I saying?"

"I don't know," Toni mutters, hands strangling the wheel in effigy of his neck.

"Oh, right. Yeah. So. Australia. Great place for a vacation, to celebrate an anniversary. Your schedule's clear, I'm on leave. Weather's all cold and wet and slushy in New York, go somewhere it's summer. Seems perfect. I'd just like to know why, almost the second we set foot on the dirt of a continent where a frightening number of indigenous species have insanely fast ways to kill you-" He pauses, and out of the corner of her eye, Toni can see him aiming, all long, lean lines and coiled muscles, shifting fluidly with the bouncing and dipping of the Jeep. Toni's breath catches a little, because he's pretty goddamn beautiful when he's at full extension. He looses, and behind them, one of the two cars starts belching smoke, its engine whining and grinding in distress. "Why is it goddamn asshole humans that we're running from?"

"We're just that special," Toni says, and ducks as the windshield in front her shatters outwards, the gunshot echoing a second later. "Now, would you mind getting that last car, honeybunch, before one of us ends up with a bullet hole?"

oooooooooo

Topeka, Kansas
May 30, 2007

"I'm beginning to recognize a theme to our attempts at vacationing," Clint says, leaning just as heavily on her as she is on him.

Toni bends nearly double, wheezing and coughing. "We either have the worst luck in the world," she says, hacking something thick and speckled with black from her lungs.

"Or someone's trying to kill you," Clint finishes, then plops carelessly back on his ass, hauling her down to sit beside him with his arm around her shoulder. "This happens every goddamn time, Toni. Vacations, business trips, parties, doesn't seem to matter. No one has this much shit luck."

She nods, throat itching with smoke and ash. "At least they're incompetent," she mumbles, and lolls her head onto his shoulder, wincing as she jars the gash leaking blood into her eye. "They're always incompetent."

"Sooner or later, they'll get lucky," Clint says softly. Toni doesn't look at him, doesn't want to see the look in his eye. Can feel the worry and anger and fear in the arm around her shoulders.

Behind them, the quaint picturesque hunting lodge they'd rented for her birthday, cosy and romantic before it was riddled with bullet holes and broken walls and bloodstains, burns to the ground.

oOoOoOo

Long Island Sound, New York
April 24, 2012

Manhattan disappears behind her as she kicks in the afterburners and breaks the speed limit. Clouds whip past her helm, slapping liquid across the faceplate. There's nothing but water below her, peppered with motorboats and unfurled sails, tourist cruises and private yachts. Muscle memory and long-term behaviour has her dump height for showy speed. She skims the surface, corkscrews through the spray of a cigarette boat, sees a blur of faces and pointing fingers, the wink of the sun flashing off camera lenses and raised smartphones.

A Twitter feed blinks open, scrolling furiously with mentions and direct messages, retweeted photos of her in mid-roll, all streamlined and lethal and shiny. She snarls at JARVIS to kill the feed, kill all distractions, kill all noise, all sound. Feels her vision shift red and silver, narrow down. Heartbeat thudding in her chest, arc reactor bright and flaring. Pain and rage and fear and hate pound through the tight ball under her right collarbone, and she bares her teeth in response, anticipating death and destruction

Faster, faster, faster. Ignore the pressure in her chest, ignore that she can't breathe, ignore spots dancing in her vision. Faster.

She snaps out of it when JARVIS wrenches control away and slams her speed down, slows to something approaching survivable for a human being. Screams at him to give her back control. Hears the unstable shrieking as it bounces off the helm. Hears herself.

Shudders a breath in. Closes her eyes. Breathes out.

Think, Toni. Calm thoughts, calm thoughts.

Back at the office, she knew something was wrong, knew she was too angry, managed to alert JARVIS, tried to reach out for help. Thought she was in control after she kept herself from choking the life out of Carter. Now, rocketing across the Long Island Sound at just under Mach 1, she still knows something's wrong, knows she's passed way beyond too angry, knows with the thinnest thread of restraint she has left that she's going to do something she's going to deeply, deeply regret when this is all over.

Soulbond psychosis, Carter had choked out.

A myth, Toni thinks. A popular plot point in terrible novels written by formulaic writers. Hollywood melodrama with little basis in reality, like guns that never run out of bullets and bad guys who drop unconscious with a single punch and vehicles that explode at the slightest bump in the road. The lazy lawyer's defense, sensationalized by that one famous athlete's televised murder trial, the one who beat his wife's mugger to death.

Except… that's not entirely right. Her Masters of Metaphysics more focused on physical data, measurable brain waves and observable phenomena, efforts to define the soulbond in quantifiable ways, because she's a scientist at heart, not a philosopher. Extrapolations of quantum mechanics and multiverse theory. Hard numbers to point at, theories grounded in proven science. But her coursework, absorbed in a single semester, her masters thesis written in a frenzied week of too little sleep and too much coffee, often verged into the unquantifiable, the nigh-supernatural. Emotional syncing. Psychic links. Transfer of abilities and skills. Psychological effects that were as hard to prove as the existence of God. The rare twists, the unique cases she ultimately disregarded as outliers that only skewed data analysis.

With a sinking feeling, she knows that she's never been in any aspect of her life anything but an outlier.

Shit.

She swallows hard, pushes through the red haze hovering over her thoughts. It's harder than it should be. "J, define soulbond psychosis for me."

"Soulbond psychosis is a rare condition affecting the mental, emotional and physical health of bonded partners," JARVIS says. "Most reported instances of the condition occur when one or more partners are in extreme physical danger or emotional distress. It is most commonly suffered by those whose partners serve in active combat zones, or in dangerous occupations."

She shuts her eyes tight for a moment. "What are the symptoms?"

A text feed pops up on the right side of her HUD, a neat bullet-point list, and she scans it as JARVIS narrates. "The most common signs are increased aggressiveness, uncharacteristic behaviour patterns, anxiety, panic attacks, impulsivity, lowered inhibitions, decreased self-awareness. Rarely, some bonded pairs and triads have also reported recklessness, lowered morality, decreased objectivity, violent impulses, disconnect from empathy, unstable moods, and compulsive thoughts."

Her, her. They're all her. "Shit. Leave it to me to go for broke and take them all. Oh god, I am so fucking fucked. " She's always known that she's one bad day and a shitty cup of coffee away from snapping and conquering the world, tries the best to keep looking forward, keep tying herself to anchors she trusts will never let her float into chaos. She never thought it would happen like this. "Give me options, J."

"Perhaps you should call Agent Coulson, ma'am," JARVIS says quietly. "You exhibited calmer behaviour and more normalized biometric responses almost as soon as he entered the workshop. I believe he is your best option."

Her head is pounding, temples throbbing, skin tight and hot and itchy. "Get him on the line," she says thickly, and the link pops up almost instantly.

"What do you need, Toni?" Coulson asks, and just like before, his voice is soothing and calming.

"There's something else you can do for me," she says. "I'm... Carter might have been right, but I'll cut you if you ever tell her that. I'm not stable right now. Can't… I can't trust myself. I need you to call it for me. I need an anchor. JARVIS will give you temporary overrides."

"... Stark?"

"I'm fucking serious, Coulson. If I go all third person pronouns and booming maniacal laughter, stop me. I will not lower myself to Victor von fucking Doom's standards."

"If you need an anchor, I can patch you through to Hawkeye or Black Widow," he says after a pause.

She just laughs, knows there's an edge of hysteria in it. "Oh, no. No no no. That's lighting a match to the fucking powderkeg. Clint'll get popcorn and make suggestions on how to get more creative with bloodspray. Tash will critique my technique as I'm hauling the guts out of whatever fool gets in my way, tell me how to maximize pain and suffering. You... You're the goddamn eye of the hurricane, Coulson. Nothing breaks you."

"Toni, do you understand what you're even asking me to do? That kind of relationship, even a temporary one, requires a lot of trust."

A frayed nerve snaps. "I need someone to handle me right now, Phil!" she yells, "Because I cannot fucking handle myself! I trust you to call it! You bring my people home to me all the fucking time! Right now? I need you to bring me home to them! "

For a long moment, all she can hear is the scream of the air over her suit, the faint hum of servos and repulsors, and her own harsh panting echoing inside the helmet.

Then his voice is back, a different cadence than she's ever heard before. Commanding and authoritative. "Link me up, JARVIS. Real-time feed to the suit's sensors. Keep that channel open at all times. And I'll take those overrides now, Iron Maiden."

"You got it, boss," she says, feeling the relief wash over raw nerves and violent instincts. "J, give the man what he needs."

"As you wish, ma'am."

oOoOoOo

Bagram AFB, Afghanistan,
March 29, 2008

Toni taps at her StarkPad, wishing she had the time to get around to miniaturizing the holo screens, because as smooth and nigh-instantaneous as the apps are getting, she really hates bending over a haptic lap screen. Even with the stylus, it's slower than she's used to, and she has to restrain herself more. No big gestures and flinging things all over the room, spreading them out in some semblance of order that makes sense to her, if no one else. She has to flip between apps, scroll like a normal person. She knows she's terribly spoiled by her holotechnology, but this is frustrating.

With a sigh, she gives up on the email she's trying to compose and send before the plane lands. It's either that, or risk delivering a deadly, if unintentional, insult to the Wakandan ambassador, and that wouldn't bode well for her hopes of opening negotiations for purchasing some of their vibranium stores. She's already got the Stark name working against her; Howard made no friends there back in the 40s, barging in without asking and carrying off a hunk of their property. The last thing she needs is to make everything twelve times harder by fumbling her grammar because she can't handle the stylus properly.

She flips the cover shut and props her chin on her hand, picking up her scotch with the other hand, and stares out the porthole as the plane begins its final approach. One more meeting, one more presentation, one more schmoozefest with military brass, and she gets to go home and shut down the last weapons factory, sell the surplus components to the government for their next warmongering contractor, and get back to her real business.

Rhodey is right on her ass when she exits the plane, and she scowls at him from under the hand shielding her eyes from the sun. "Problem, Colonel Rhodes?" she snaps.

Rhodey just gives her a bland grin. "Not at all, Ms. Stark," he says. "It's just that Mr. Barton threatened to sink arrows into my testicles if, and I quote, 'you don't stick to her closer than a hemorrhoid, Jimbo'. Mr. Barton seemed quite serious in his threat, and I have to protect my future children."

Toni levels her best glare on him, knowing even as she does so it will skid right off his perfectly pressed service blues and shiny medals. "I hate you," she mutters, but slides her hand through his proffered elbow and slips into step with him.

"You're only cranky because you're in heels," Rhodey says as he escorts her down the walkway towards the waiting cars. "Everything will be okay once you get back into sneakers."

"That may be," she says, side-eyeing him, "but you're still on my shitlist."

Rhodey just gives her another one of those bland smiles, the ones that hide his amusement so well. "Ben & Jerry's," he says. "Freezer of the plane. You'll love me again once we're wheels up and you're spoon-deep in Chocolate Brownie Fudge."

Toni laughs. "You're an asshole," she says fondly. "But yes. I'll love you again then. Only then, and not before. Let's go get this bullshit over with. I want to be home by this time tomorrow."

ooooooooooo

Four Months Later...

Rhodey's got her. She's half-delirious from heat-stroke and dehydration, thin and still racked with the cold she could never properly shake, not with expired meds and filthy water. Pain's a constant ache in her chest, her hands, her legs, her belly, her head. Screams and curses in half a dozen languages still ring in her ears. Her nostrils are full of smoke and fire and wet dank rock, hot metal and battery acid, and the disturbingly delicious smell of roasting human flesh. Skin burning, peeling, cracking, searing away after days in the desert sun.

Ho Yinsen, chest a bloody ruin, stands over Rhodey's shoulder, sadly smiling, whispering live a good life, Antonia, before a frantic-eyed Clint bursts through him and Yinsen dissolves away.

Voices are calling her name, swearing viciously. Hands and fingers and bodies swirling around her. Rhodey's face looms over hers again, fright and relief and hope and worry all storming through his eyes.

Things go blurry. When they clear, Rhodey's still there.

She reaches up with arms that feel like lead, pulls his head down. Their noses touch, and it's only then that she realizes that she's not hallucinating him. She might be hallucinating the steady overhead beat of helicopter rotors, may be hallucinating Clint, cradling her head in his lap and stroking her forehead. But Rhodey is real, smells like jet fuel and smooth cologne, sun and wind and the laundry soap he's been using since college. Rhodey is real.

She works a swollen tongue in a desert-dry mouth, blinking to keep him in focus. "I want…"

Rhodey's hands come to to cup hers on his face. "What, Toni? What is it? What do you want?"

She smiles at him with dry, cracked lips, because he's real, because he's there, because he came for her. "Wheels're up," she croaks. "I want my fucking ice cream now."

And she closes her eyes, allowing herself to drift into the grey dark while Rhodey laughs and cries above her, while Clint smooths her hair with shaking hands.

oOoOoOo

I-95, Connecticut
April 24, 2012

Toni doesn't relinquish control easily, rails and rages against the necessity, mutinies when it's wrested away, tests her limits even when she grudgingly submits to an authority figure. Mostly because authority figures are usually grade-A morons who she wouldn't trust to tie her shoes, let alone command her in battle. The kind of assholes who summoned her before a Congressional hearing, tried to take Iron Maiden away, let Justin Hammer of all fucking people fuck up her designs. That happy occasion, having to fight off a small army of drone suits based on her tech, had done nothing to cure her massive trust issues.

But if there's one thing Toni cannot call Phil Coulson, it's incompetent. If he can keep Clint from killing himself ten times over per mission, if he can win the trust of Natasha, who is arguably the most untrusting and paranoid person on the whole goddamn planet, then he has to be worth something. Toni may be disinclined to trust people as a general rule of thumb, but if Natashabelieves someone is worth respect and loyalty, Toni is no one to question it.

He directs her high, up into the clouds for cover, and she follows without question. Her HUD overlays a map of the terrain below, a blinking red dot tracking the location of the SHIELD vehicle in realtime.

"STRIKE standard escort complement is twelve," Coulson says over the comm. "You will be looking at three vans, four agents per van. They will have EMP tech available. Are you vulnerable?"

She doesn't ask why, she doesn't make a smartass comment, she doesn't dig out a snappy one-liner. All she says is, "I'm shielded. Suit is hardened against disruption."

"Good. That simplifies things. Their other offensives won't pose a problem to the suit. They'll turn off the interstate soon, onto a smaller highway. There should be significantly less traffic." He doesn't say the words less collateral damage, but Toni hears them anyway. "The black site is thirty miles from the turn-off. Give them a lead of fifteen. No more than twenty."

"Understood." It's the longest fifteen minutes of her life as she jigs and zags across the sky, looping back around and keeping herself within range of the slower-moving convoy, staying out of sight above the clouds. Data flows across her HUD, a countdown ticking seconds away, the map overlay showing the dots slowly approaching the green triangle Coulson has marked for her intercept point.

"One minute, Iron Maiden," Coulson finally says, when the dots and triangle are practically kissing on the hub. "JARVIS has calculated the most likely vehicle to house any prisoners is the middle. It's carrying a significantly heavier load, according to his interpretation of how the van's wheels compare to its escorts'. Your priority is to extract the target as soon as possible, with the least possible injury to either of you. Your secondary priority is the capture of Jasper Sitwell, should be be on-scene, or any other senior agent as I identify them. If this isn't possible, attempt to obtain any storage devices or tech the rogue agents are carrying. Do you need me to repeat your objectives?"

Toni's memory is very good. "Get James, get Sitwell or other senior agents, salvage tech and information, in that order. I understand, boss."

"Excellent. And… mark. Targets are at the optimal interception point. You are green. Weapons-free, lethal force authorized."

She's already moving when he says mark, streamlined and streaking towards the ground, but when he says lethal-force, she freezes for a second, gravity keeping her moving downward. "Coulson?"

"Do you trust me, Stark?"

"Yes." Frightening, how fast that word came out of her mouth, no thought necessary.

"You are weapons-free," Coulson repeats. Pauses. "Go express that rage."

She doesn't question it, not a second time. She's heard Clint speak about the sniper's reliance on a higher authority, someone they can trust to make the right call. She never thought she'd experience it, but right now, Coulson is her voice of God. She may be compromised, but he is not. She's free to let the rage and hate and righteous fucking fury boil up to the surface, steamroll over her, released from its stifling cage of artificial calm. Because she doesn't have to make decisions right now, she just has to listen to the decisions he makes for her.

God bless a chain of command.

...Rhodey must never know she ever thought that.

She hits the boot jets a hundred feet up, and her freefall becomes a streaking dive. One, two, three targeting matrices lock onto the vehicles, but her eyes are all for the van in the middle. Fifty feet, thirty feet, fifteen feet…

Toni cuts the jets, kicks herself right way up, and burns her stabilizers hard in the span of a second. She comes to a screeching halt in mid-air, right between vehicle two and three. She flips her hands up, repulsors whining to life, and blows the back doors clean off of van number two.

The van jerks to the right, wheels screeching on the asphalt, and Toni drives her armored fingers into the underside of the roof, hauls herself forward. The van floor creaks in protest under her weight. Its speed drops significantly.

James is on the floor, beat to shit and with torn-up clothes, trussed like a Christmas turkey, painted red-brown with dried blood, and laughing like a loon. There are ropes around his neck, tied to long poles held by two black-clad agents.

Toni blasts them, full strength. Reaches down, snaps the poles, lifts James by the ropes around his chest, tucks him against her side and locks the elbow joint to keep him securely in place. Feels the frantic, maddening itch behind her eyes, the one calling for blood and death, ebb a little.

Agent 1 flies right, crunches into the wall, denting the wall outward with a loud clang. Agent 2 crashes forward right through the space between the bucket seats, arm slapping the head of the driver. The van rocks violently as the driver jerks and flinches instinctively, fights for control of the vehicle.

The fourth man in the back, Toni knows, is Jasper fucking Sitwell. Her vision whites over, teeth clench, time goes blurry and-

"Stark. We need him alive."

Voice of God pulls her back. Forces her back into herself. Her gauntlet is wrapped around the top of Sitwell's skull, so tight the bones shift with the tiniest flex of her fingers. "Right, boss," she says, and releases him.

A beat. "We don't necessarily need him undamaged."

Savage glee rips out of her in a wild cackle. "Right boss," she says in a completely different tone, and picks Sitwell up again, this time by the back of the shirt and pants. A pulse of her jets powers her mad leap out of the van as the driver finishes losing control. If Sitwell's head smacks off the roof on the way out, it's purely by accident. She clears the back a moment before the van flips, hitting the road with its side and rolling with the screeching groan and crunch of abused metal.

She hits the hood of the trailing van with both boots, driving deep dents into the engine block, lets her knees flex, lets the van absorb her momentum. The van bows forward, and its driver's eyes are comically wide behind the wheel. She launches herself sideways, flipping heels over helmet, feeling excitement and glee flicker in her chest. Not hers, James'. She lands on a foot and a knee on the side of the road, drops Sitwell into a heap, and gets busy untying James.

He's not laughing in that worrisome way anymore, but still looks amused. "Hi Toni," he says, as if he's not covered head to toe in blood, listing on his feet, and a little hazy-eyed.

"Hi James," she replies, pulling rope after rope apart and letting them drop to coils on the ground at her feet. She grabs the bar of the heavy cuffs locking his wrists together, and starts squeezing to soften the metal. "You with me?"

"I think so. They stuck me with something that's fuzzing my head. Haven't quite burned through it yet. They also did something to my arm. It's dead."

"Scanning for damage now, ma'am," JARVIS says suddenly, and it's a little jolting to realize how long she's been in the suit without bantering with her co-pilot.

"Check your six, Stark," Coulson says just as suddenly. "You're not done yet."

She swears, spins and drops to a knee for stability, hands up in a firing pose. Van number one is barreling back down the road towards them. Van number two, dented and crunched, belches smoke from its hood, but two of its occupants are crawling out of the wreckage. Van three, now back in the driver's control, brakes hard on the shoulder on the opposite side of the road.

Machine guns bristle from the van three's windows, and Toni throws herself in front of James instinctively, pulling him in and down to shield him with the bulk of the armor. The HUD registers multiple impacts, flashing reminders about structural integrity.

"I know you don't pay attention to the world around you, Toni," James says, "but you're getting shot at."

"Getting hit, too. Must be Tuesday," she replies. "How's your aim?"

"Never suffers. Why?"

Behind his back, with bullets pinging off her armor and more agents with guns spilling out of van one, she breaks the seal on her right gauntlet, pulls it off. "Hand," she says, and unclips the repulsor array from its seating.

He holds his right hand up, and she slides the repulsor right over his fingers, adjusting the fit. A little loose, but serviceable. "Max distance, probably twenty feet," she says, HUD's warnings getting a little more intense with two more guns spitting bullets at them. "It kicks like a drunk mule. Point four seconds between shots, point six delay in firing response off the gauntlet. Squeeze in towards your index finger with your thumb to fire."

"Got it," he says, eyeing the rig with unholy glee. Then his hand shoots forward, over her shoulder, and whines off a blast. There's a scream behind her that ends abruptly. James' arm shifts, fires again, and again. The gunshots abruptly stop.

Toni takes advantage of the lull, stands up, slides the repulsorless gauntlet back on, and lets the faceplate slide back. Whatever he sees in her face makes him blink in surprise. Toni decides she doesn't want to know. "Coulson needs him alive," she says, pointing at the unconscious Sitwell. "That's your job."

James frowns. "Who the hell is Coulson?"

"Right now," Toni says carefully, "he's my handler. Most of the time, he's a friend."

James' head jerks at the word handler, and a mix of surprise and worry washes from him. Then, his face stills, slides to neutrality, slides to something dark and watchful, and he nods once. "Understood. The rest?"

The faceplate snaps down, boots fire. It's not smooth flight, but missing one repulsor won't throw her off too badly. "Mine," she says, hovering in front of him. "We're going work off some aggressions." His mouth curves upwards, she tips him a salute, and blows through the parked van, scattering the half dozen hostiles from their cover. The first agent she punches feels like catharsis. The second is better than therapy. The third, now that one is pure delight, and it only gets more violent and happier from there.

"We're reading activity from the black site, Stark," Coulson says. "Possible reinforcements on the way. I've got extraction heading to you, but it'll be cutting it close."

Toni pauses mid-blast for a moment, then carries on. It's muted, it's not as all-encompassing, but she's definitely still got some anger management therapy to do. "I'll keep myself occupied, boss," she says, eyeing the remaining pair of agents through the faceplate, hot and hungry and needing blood all over again. "There's still plenty to do around here."