Chapter 18
A Way Out

Their set-up wasn't bad. The building was built well and deep in the jungle I might add. There was a helipad, which meant that there wasn't much in the way of driving around here. The building had concrete and steel fortification, and a security system that was quite advanced, but little can be done about a well placed bomb on a roof.

The hole we blew was huge, and there wasn't a damn thing that could be done about it.

We knew the alarm system would go off immediately, so we were ready. We dropped men down inside, and from the radio signals we had the majority of the place taken within 8 minutes. My crews reported massive amounts of suits, all with trademark holes and some even differentiated. These people never learned. Or did no one pay attention to what had happened in Afghanistan? If my intelligence was correct, these men worked for Stane originally, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten plans for the images I had sent to me from helmet cameras. The suits looked very similar, but much smaller. They knew they needed the reactor, just like Stane had. How did they not expect to run into more trouble than just Stark's own personal brand of mouthing?

The compound was a pretty big building, so when it took some time for Natasha to tell me they had found Stark, I wasn't surprised. But what we couldn't find was anyone of any worth – anyone that wasn't little more than a piece of a security team that didn't know the difference between their own mother and the scientists that had paid them.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

That alarm going off was better than I thought. Instead of two grunt guards breaking down the metal door and scaring myself and my child half to death, it was men in Shield suits and one very tightly dressed Russian.

"Oh, Jesus Christ Natalie." I heaved a sigh of relief, and Emily was more than happy to go to her other caretaker and start jabbering in Russian while she sobbed. She was working on calming the child when she noticed my particular problem.

"Where is your reactor?"

"If I knew the answer to that, would I be hooked up to a car battery?"

Okay, currently would be the best time for me to be a jackass, but that had to be a stupid to her in retrospect.

I grabbed it up and stood just as another explosion went off near our room, making all of us duck down. They all started for the door, but I stayed. I had one last thing I had to do.

"Natalie, please tell me you have some sort of explosive." I yelled over the din of fire and gun shots.

She grabbed some small pieces off of her belt and threw them at me. They looked like tiny pieces of metal, but I knew she wouldn't be throwing me any scrap. She nodded and then ran out into the hall while still holding Emily who was yelling for me to follow. But I had to do this. There was no way the suit was going to be functional enough for me to use, and I had no reactor. There couldn't be any bit of it left for someone to find that may live on past this raid.

I tried to drag all the pieces together in one big clump in a corner of the room. It was already starting to get hot and smoky, even in my sequestered room on the other side of the building from most of the explosions and shots.

Long after they had run off and gone, I set the buttons on those little disks, grabbed my battery, and ran out the door. I was losing a suit and the neoprene under it, but those were replaceable. Emily and I were not.

I ran down a hallway, past where I had seen Emily that first time, through a set of steel double doors into a large warehouse type area that had been their lab, or at least so it looked. There were open doors where shield men were running towards choppers, and out I went into the dark night. It wasn't so dark with the fire behind me. I heard the noise before I felt the explosion in what had been my half of the building. The frosted glass I had used to see the time of the day shattered loudly and fire plumed out of it in dark stacks. When I turned to look, I heard a yell from a small voice. Emily was running towards me, sobbing crying in all of the mess. She had managed to get away from Natalie again.

I didn't realize what was going on as I ran to her. It was so noisy that when she fell, I didn't think anything of it. I thought she had tripped. It wasn't until I got to her and I saw blood that I knew she hadn't just fallen. Then came the shot that caught my shoulder, but only grazed it. What it had done was catch one of the wires attached to my port. The searing pain I felt in my chest I had felt more than once – but it was ten times worse. My child was sobbing at my feet and screaming in pain while I was having an outright heart attack.

I didn't hear Fury call for the men to fire into the bushes. I didn't hear the men screaming when they were shot and killed hidden in the foliage. I could only feel the utter pain I felt, and try to hold Emily's wound with my hand. It was deep in her thigh. She was bleeding all over the clothes she had gone to school in. Natasha appeared out of nowhere and tried to pull her away, but she was clinging so tightly to my pants and screaming. She didn't want to let me go. I didn't want to let her go. Medics came to her and they finally pried her away and took her off to another chopper. I was the last man to be loaded onto the back one. The last thing I remember was Natalie trying to reconnect the severed wire. Then finally all the loud noise went away for a little while.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

At some point in time, I fell asleep. I don't remember falling asleep, but I did. Sitting on the couch in my pajamas, watching movies and trying to convince myself that everything would be alright, I fell asleep.

Jarvis' voice jarred me awake and hard.

"Miss Potts, Director Fury is calling. He has stated that Mister Stark and the little miss are at the hospital on LAAF."

I was up and awake faster than I realized. I didn't notice how quickly I had gotten up and put on shoes until I was walking into the emergency room on base.

Natalie was standing there, bloodied but not at all bothered looking. She seemed the same as usual, except for her change in wardrobe.

"Natalie, what-"

"Come with me, shh." She grabbed my arm quickly and pulled me back through doors that said do not enter. I could hear the screaming crying there.

Beyond a wall of glass was little Emily, screaming crying with blood coming out of her leg. The doctors were trying to touch it, but she wouldn't let them. I was in that room instantly, kneeling down and kissing her, coddling her, trying to calm her down. She was still yelling, but she calmed down some seeing me. I had to wipe her nose and cooed to her to get the doctors anywhere close to feeling on her leg.

"And you are, miss?"

"I'm her adoptive mother. What's wrong?"

"She has a broken femur from a gunshot wound. The bullet has been removed and the bandage secured, but she may need surgery for the bone to heal properly. I need you to sign consent forms for x-rays, blood tests, and narcotics to make her more comfortable."

"Absolutely. Whatever is necessary."

I got through the paperwork (and the needles, which she didn't at all like) and soon enough she was sleeping decently. It was too early in the morning for her to be screaming so. She would have surgery in the morning, they said. They needed to insert a rod in her leg for her bone to heal correctly.

I had forgotten in all of the hullabaloo about the man that attached myself and that small girl.

"Where's Tony? Natalie, where's Tony?"

"Heavily sedated and in a bed. He needed to be hydrated, and his cables were severed momentarily. We had to reconnect him and taking care of him would not have happened if he was awake and knew of Emily's situation."

"I can understand that completely. He would have killed himself to make sure she was alright. Can I at least see him? Please."

"Yes, but he'll be asleep. We don't plan on waking him until the morning when Emily is in surgery."

I nodded, and she quietly led me to another part of the hospital. It said cardiac patients, and that only made me chuckle a little bit inside. They had to reconnect his heart after all.

He was laying there on the bed, looking pale and beaten as he slept. There was just enough room in the darkness and on the other side of the battery cables for me to crawl in next to him and find my comfortable spot on his chest. After all that had happened to me that day, and the problems with Emily, I needed rest. I needed to smell him, and for him and I to wake up together the next day. I would be the best person for him to hear about Emily from. And I just wanted to hear his voice first thing in the morning.