A/N: Hey everyone! I am sorry for the long wait for this chapter, I have been rather busy of late, so I do apologise. I also apologise for any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors that you may come across in this chapter. EnjoY!

Ruby was sitting at her computer, waiting for both her boys to finish searching the Stark servers, trying to find out how that shipment ended up in the hands of terrorists. She had woken up on the couch with her father, and after having a coffee, the pair of them headed down to the workshop, knowing that there were things that needed doing. So far they hadn't been able to find anything, but they weren't giving up, there was no way that either of them was going to give up.

Her father was sitting on the couch in the workshop, in front of the television, watching the news as he fitted the completed glove of the armour to his hand. "The 15 mile hike to the outskirts of Gulmira can only be described as a descent into hell, into a modern day Heart of Darkness." The woman on the screen said, both Ruby and her father glancing up when they heard the word 'Gulmira'. "Simple farmers and herders from peaceful villages have been driven from their homes, displaced from their lands by warlords emboldened by a new found power." Ruby was feeling sick just listening to the reporter, and she could no longer bring herself to look at the screen, to see the people who were being hurt because of those terrorists. "Villagers have been forced to take shelter in whatever crude dwellings they find in the ruins of other villages, or here in the remnants of an old Soviet smelting plant." She closed her eyes as the gunfire rang through her ears.

Ruby was trying her best to ignore it. She didn't want to hear what was going on over there, because she already knew, and she hated it. She was more involved with it than her father knew, and she was more and more tempted to come clean and tell him the truth about everything, about SHIELD, about working for them and the missions she had completed, the terrible things that she had done, and the fact that she had met Ten Rings before.

"Recent violence has been attributed to a group of foreign fighters referred to by locals as the Ten Rings." Ruby's stomach turned at hearing their name, and she bit down hard on her lip. "As you can see, these men are heavily armed and on a mission. A mission that could prove fatal to anyone who stands in their way. With no political will or international pressure, there's very little hold for these refugees." Risking a glance at the screen, Ruby saw the people of Gulmira, carrying whatever belongings they could, and walking in the intense heat to try and find safety.

She didn't notice her father standing up and tossing the screwdriver he had been using onto one of the worktop of the small kitchen they had down there. Ruby was too focused on trying to block out the sound of the television. "Around me, a woman begging for news on her husband, who was kidnapped by insurgents, either forced to join their militia…" Ruby jumped out of her skin, as there was a sudden explosion and one of the lights that had been hanging from the ceiling behind her shattered and began to swing down.

Ruby looked at her father, and saw the determination on his face. She knew what was running through his mind, and he knew that as well. She pushed herself away from her desk and walked towards her father, going to stand behind him, ready for him to test out the repulsor that was now attached to his hand.

Tony gave her a small smile, glad that she understood how he was feeling, as they were both pretty much feeling the same way, as the woman continued to speak on the screen, asking the world if there was anyone who was able to help those people, to save them from the ten Rings. "Do it." His daughter said to him, giving him the encouragement that he needed. She had moved out of the way specifically so that he could do his tests, and she was ready to watch.

He nodded at her, before firing the repulsor at the pane of glass that separated the room from the stairs that led back up to the main part of the house. The first one shattered, and he fired again, shattering the next, before doing it a final time and leaving not glass in the frames at all. "What do you say, honey? You think we can help?" He asked her, looking at her seriously.

"Think? Oh no, I know we can help." She told him, a firm look on her own face. Enough was enough, this had gone on for too long, those people had suffered enough because someone in their company was dealing under the table, selling Stark weapons to terrorists. They had a duty, and a responsibility to help those people. "Suit up, old man."

He kissed the top of her head as he gave her a quick hug, before dashing off to put on his spandex body suit, leaving Ruby to get everything else set up, ready for his return. She was ready for this, they both were, they had a mission to complete, one that really was going to make a difference. The shutting down of the weapons manufacturing had caused nothing but problems, but now they were going to the source, they were going after Ten Rings, they were going to stop them.

It didn't take long for her father to return, and she wanted to laugh at the way that he looked, but she knew it was a bad time. She would make fun of him wearing a spandex suit later, when he got back, unharmed and all in one piece. "You ready for this, Ruby?" He asked her, watching as she typed away on her computer.

"All systems are up and running. Interface has been updated and imported. We're ready to go." She told him, checking that there were no issues with the suit and that the software was ready and that both JARVIS and SWAIN were ready to go. "You lads ready for this?" She called, talking to the AI's.

"All systems are ready, Miss Matthews-Stark." JARVIS replied first.

"Configurations complete. Assembly ready." SWAIN called back afterwards.

Ruby looked up and over at her father. "You ready, dad?" He nodded at her, and stepped forwards towards the grid on the floor, which began to move apart, the boots of the suit appearing before Tony. He stepped into it, and the rest of the suit was fitted onto him, working up from his legs and to his waist, stopping at his chest and placing the arm pieces on. The chest piece was fitted, before the shoulders were added, leaving only his head visible before the helmet was fitted and the faceplate slid down.

His arc reactor was glowing in the centre of his chest, and the slit eyes of the faceplate were lit up. "Okay, Ruby. Can you hear me all right?" His voice rang out through the whole of the workshop.

She picked up her tiny ear bud, and pushed it into her ear. It was easier to listen to him through that then to have him speaking through the whole of the workshop. "Loud and clear. Everything is looking good, how is it in there?"

Tony turned his head and looked at his daughter through the mask. In front of his face, the suit locked onto her, recognising her and bringing up a lot more information than he had anticipated. "Uh, yeah, it's good. You need to check your blood sugar, you haven't checked it for a while." He informed her, having a warning coming up inside the helmet and telling him that it had long since past when she should have checked it.

Ruby couldn't help but roll her eyes at him. "Yeah, okay, bit busy at the moment if you haven't noticed. I'll do it once you're safely back home." That was her warning to him, her warning telling him that she wanted him to come home safely. She would check her sugar levels once he had left, when she had a few moments alone.

"Everything is going to be fine, honey, okay? I'm going to back, everything will be all right." Tony assured her, knowing that she was worried about what could happen to him. He was also rather proud of her, proud that she was staying strong and helping him to do everything, to not question or try to stop him. "When I get back, we're ordering take out, okay?" Take out and a movie, the best way for him to cheer her up.

"Oh, I suppose so, but you better get home in one piece first, you got that?" Of course Ruby was going to be worrying until he was back, and Tony knew that. "Try to keep above radar so much as you can. I'll be following you from here and keeping check of the military, since you're going to be heading into a no fly zone." She had it all planned out already, she knew exactly what she needed to do at her end to keep everything quiet and to kept her father out of trouble.

Tony couldn't help but chuckle at her, he reminded him so much of her mother, but he could definitely see some of him thrown in there as well. "Yes ma'am." He ended up saying, giving her a salute, before blasting off out of the mansion and into the sky above Malibu.

Ruby sat there at the desk and watched him go, before turning to the screen when he was out of there. She could see him shooting across the sky on the screen, JARVIS and SWAIN both with him and both able to relay any information back to Ruby. She was nervous, and started chewing on the thumbnail because of it.

"You've still not checked your sugar." Her father suddenly called in her ear.

She let out a slight groan, before reaching over the desk and picking up her phone. "Fine, I'm doing it now." Ruby told him, her finger being pricked by her phone as she held onto it. She leaned back and tossed her phone back on the desk as she waited for it to process it. "There, I've done it. Happy now?" She ended up grumbling at him.

There was silence for a few moments before her phone bleeped at her. She didn't even bother to pick it up, because she knew her father was about to tell her what it said. "Uh, yeah, too low. You need to have something to eat, Ruby." She already knew that was what he was going to say, and she quickly opened the draw of her desk, pulling out a paper bag. "And I mean more than just jelly beans." Ruby also hated the fact that he knew exactly what she was doing.

"Dad, I'm not hungry, I can't eat something big at the moment. Just let me have my jelly beans for now, if I start to feel dizzy then I will get something else, okay?" She wasn't going to tell him that she had already started feeling a little dizzy, which was why she had been reluctant to do the test in the first place and how she knew it was going to come back low.

"Honey, I'm going to be out for a while, you know that. This flight is going to take a few hours, you need to eat something." Tony informed her, knowing that it was a long trip, even if he was going at super sonic speed. "We'll still get take out when I get back, but you need to eat something now."

Ruby knew that there really was no arguing with him, he would just keep moaning at her until she did eat something, and he would keep on worrying as well. He had to focus on the mission, not on her. "All right, fine, I got it. I'm just going to have a bowl of cereal or something, is that okay with you?" She asked him, carefully stepping over all the broken glass to get to the stairs.

"Well, it's better than jelly beans, so it will have to do for now. You need to make sure you eat properly, honey, I don't want you to get sick again." He told her, suddenly remember all those illnesses he saw in her medical records. "Oh, and hey, I got your medical records from doctor Peterson. You seemed to get sick rather a lot when you were younger." Tony thought that now would probably be a good time to talk to her about it.

"Uh, yeah, I got infections and bugs and stuff, just like any other kid." Ruby told him, shrugging it off as she poured some sugary cereal into a bowl in the kitchen. "It was no big deal really."

But Tony just didn't believe that, he had seen her records, he knew her history. "From the age of six, you were constantly sick, Ruby. Chest infections, throat infections, viruses, stomach bugs, and who knows what else. That is not normal, honey." He wanted her to talk to him, to tell him what had been going on, he wanted to understand what had happened and what she had been through. "What was going on?"

She knew that there was no getting out of it, and she had to tell him. "I had trouble sleeping when I was a kid. The nightmares were bad, even then." Ruby told him, sitting down with her cereal in the kitchen. "I don't really remember what they were about, I think a lot of the time it was just over stupid things, like a monster under the bed or something. In the end, I didn't want to sleep, and I'd find different ways to keep myself occupied, to stop myself from sleeping." Tony hadn't known that, that her nightmares had started when she had been so young. He knew that all kids had nightmares, but most grew out of it. "Anyway, lack of sleep caused me to have a weaken immune system. I was getting sick all the time, it was always one thing after the other."

Tony let out a sigh that came through into Ruby's ear. "I wish I had known about you then, Ruby. I wish I could have been there for you, and your mother." He was always going to have the feeling, that feeing of regret and remorse. Tony Stark was always going to regret the day that he let Jasmine Matthews walk out of his life and not chase after her.

"It's not your fault, there's nothing you could have done. Me and mom always managed, she always done her best and always made sure that I had what I wanted and needed. I just… I wish I hadn't put her though so much hell when I was younger. We both have things that we wish we could change, but we can't." Sure, they had struggled when her mother had become ill, but that didn't matter to Ruby, she done her best to push through it all, to make the best of the time she had left with her mother. "We all make mistakes."

"It doesn't stop me from wishing things had been different, honey. You and your mother went through so much, and you didn't have to. We could have been a family, we should have been a family." He was never going to stop thinking about what it would have been like if he had stopped Jasmine from leaving, of the changes he could have made to Ruby's life, the pain and suffering they could have avoided. "You've had to deal with so much, Ruby, and most of it on your own. But not anymore, you have to remember that I am always going to be there for you now."

"I know, dad, and your not on your own anymore either." Ruby reminded him, knowing that before she had found him he had been alone. She had to admit, he really had changed his life around, something that she hadn't actually expected to happen, not after everything she had found out about him. "But anyway, enough talk of the past." She really didn't want him to ask about the rest of her medical history, she knew that it would have broken bones and a few other things in there that he would want to talk about.

Tony listened to her crunching on her cereal, smiling to himself at the fact that she was actually eating and not just saying she would because he wasn't there to check. He carried on listening, just waiting for her to finishing eating. "Make sure that you eat something else in a little while, a bowl of cereal really isn't going to cut it. And make sure you do your test when SWAIN or JARVIS tells you." Of course he was going to worry about her, even more so when he wasn't there and couldn't take care of her or protect her.

She shovelled another spoonful into her mouth and started munching it before bothering to reply. "Uh huh, yeah okay." There was no plan in her schedule to eat anything else any time soon. If her sugar levels were too low, she'd just have some jellybeans, anything to avoid taking her actual medication.

"No, not 'yeah okay'. You do as you are told, young lady." Tony warned her, knowing exactly what was going through her mind.

A smirk slipped onto Ruby's face. "Why, what you going to do? You can't ground me, you've already done that. What you doing to do, old man?" She knew there wasn't really anything that he could do. He was a good few hundred miles away now, he wasn't going to just turn around to make sure that she done her test and had more to eat.

Her father actually let out a groan, he should have seen that one coming. "I'll send for Liam, tell him that you're ready to forgive him and you want him to come over." Tony said, knowing that she still hadn't completely forgiven him for everything he had said and the way that he had acted. He didn't blame his daughter, she had needed a friend and Liam really hadn't been one to her.

Unfortunately, Ruby knew that her father really would do that. "Yeah, and I'll have Happy knock the hell out of him. I know that you've given Happy orders to follow me if I leave the house, and you've also given Pepper permission to come over and lock me in my room as well." Miss Potts had actually sent her a message, informing her of all this, warning her that she would be in some serious trouble if she even thought about leaving the house.

"Okay, first off, stop hacking into my stuff. It was bad enough when you hacked JARVIS the first time, stop hacking my phone as well. And secondly, I've told Pepper that I've just had to pop out for a few hours and that you're grounded. You know she will be a lot more strict with you then I would, so you better be careful." He should have know that he wouldn't be able to hide it from Ruby that he had his bodyguard and PA on standby to stop her if he wasn't there.

"Uh, actually, I didn't do any hacking. Pepper sent me a message to inform me of all this, thinking that it would scare me enough not to try and escape while you weren't here." She corrected him, not having actually done some hacking for a while. The only place she was hacking was SHIELD, and she hadn't even done that for a while. "Anyway, we made a deal, I promised to stay put, and I'm going to. I need to be here to make sure you don't get into any trouble." Ruby reminded him, going and putting her now empty bowl in the dishwasher.

"What makes you think that I'm going to get into any trouble?" Although Tony knew that he probably was at some point, and could most likely deal with it on his own, he didn't mind having her there at home to keep an eye on things. She was more likely to spot something earlier, such as the fact that he was going into a no fly zone without a care in the world.

Ruby rolled her eyes as she headed back down to the workshop, having grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge before she went. "Because you're Tony Stark, it's a natural thing for you, something that I've kind of inherited from you as well, I reckon."

Now that Tony knew she had finished eating, he was going to get back to the topic they were on originally. "Is that how you explain all the broken bones you started getting after you were eight?" He asked her, trying to concentrate on flying the suit but letting his mind wander back to what he had seen in her records.

"Yup. I was a fighter, people broke my bones, and I broke theirs, it was a two-way streak." She was lying to him, she knew she was, but there was no way on Earth that she could tell him what was really going on. However much she wanted to tell him the truth about her past, she knew it really wasn't the right time. Once they had all of this sorted, then maybe she could sit him down and explain it all to him, but neither of them knew how long that was going to take. "I told you that I used to get into a lot of fights, this was when I started fighting back."

"Jesus, Ruby." Tony muttered in his helmet. "You broke your arm several times over, you broke you leg more than once as well. Bruised and broken ribs, a fractured ankle, fractured knuckles, all from fighting back?" He didn't believe he, he couldn't believe her, it just sounded too much as far as he was concerned. He was worried that it was someone else doing it to her, that something had been going on and her fighting was just to cover it up.

But Ruby wasn't going to budge on it. "I know it sounds bad, but it really wasn't. After I broke my arm and leg, I never let it heal properly, so it ended up broken again." She reasoned, hoping that he would take it. "And as for the knuckles, when you're punching someone that hard in the face, it's going to hurt." Robin Hood, that was who she had really been punching when she messed up her hand. A lot of her injuries came from training, not actual fighting.

"It doesn't mean I like it, Ruby. When I get back, we're going to go through those records together, and you can explain all of it to me, you got that? And JAVRIS is going to check you over, make sure that everything really has healed this time and that there isn't something you're trying to hide from me." He just couldn't stop worrying about her. Ruby was his daughter, she was all he had left in the world, his whole multibillion-dollar company meant nothing to him without her. He only cared about the money because it meant he could get her whatever he wanted.

"Look, save all of this till you get back. You need to focus on flying that suit and thinking of a really, really good excuse if you get caught by the military when you get there." She was already hacking into the US military, ready to warn him if he managed to get onto their radars. "I'm not covering for you with Uncle Rhodey."

Tony still couldn't help but laugh whenever she called Rhodey her uncle. He did think it was kind of sweet, but he knew that she used it to her advantage, to get her own way whenever she wanted. It work when she called Pepper her aunt as well, and he was just glad that it didn't work on her. "Yeah, we'll deal with that if it happens."

The next few hours consisted of Tony relaying information back to Ruby, and her making notes on the suit, and suggestions for improvements. Tony wanted to fly faster, it was taking too long as far as he was concerned, he was away from his daughter for longer than he wanted to be. But Ruby really didn't mind, as she was still doing her search into Stark Industries while he was gone. Neither JARVIS nor SWAIN had been able to track back the shipment that was in those photographs, and that worried her even more. Ruby knew that it was an inside job, and whoever had done it was using a hidden drive that she couldn't access from there.

"Okay, Ruby? I got a village here in trouble, I'm going to help out." Tony informed her, spotting some rebel soldiers bundling women and children into trucks and lining the men up against the wall.

"Be careful, dad. We know what kind of weapons they have." She could see on the screen exactly where he was, and he wasn't too far from Gulmira, or the place where they had been held captive. "You get in, and you get out as quickly as you can. Do not hang around." For some reason, she was starting to go into Agent mode.

Tony know his daughter was right, he had to get in and get out, so he wasted no time in landing in the middle of the chaos, giving the soldiers a new target. But their bullets had no impact on his whatsoever, and he quickly sent them on a flight of their own and crashing into the buildings. But then the soldiers decided to use the villagers as human shields, and it made Tony feel very nervous. There were children there, whole families, and he couldn't afford to make a mistake. He thought of what it would be like if he lost Ruby, and he wasn't going to put those people through that. The display in his helmet began to target the enemy, and in the blink of an eye, the soldiers were all down, and not a single civilian had been injured.

But Tony had recognised one of the men, he had been there in the cave, he had been one of them that beat up his little girl. He wasted no time in stomping after the man as he run off, trying to hide in one of the buildings and call for help on his satellite phone. Tony was already there, and his hand punched through the wall, gripping the man's throat tightly. He wanted to crush it, to make him suffer the pain that his daughter had, but he couldn't do it. Instead, he tossed the scared man to the ground before all the villagers that he had just saved. "He's all yours." He told them, before taking off once more and heading towards his next destination.

"Nice job, dad." Ruby told him, having watched everything he had been doing. JARVIS was showing her the heads up display on one of the monitors, so she knew exactly what he had been up against and what he had done. "Now on to the next one." She just wanted him home now, because she was getting tired and hungry, but she wasn't going to admit that to him.

Tony was getting nervous, and not because of where he was heading, because of what he was about to find. What he was about to do would give him an earful from Ruby, but he felt it was for the best. "Ruby, I need you to do something for me." He said, trying his best to act normal and calm.

"What is it?" She asked him, feeling a little groggy now from the need of sleep and her lack of food.

"Uh, at my desk, the bottom drawer. There's a small device in there, like a small silver box. I need you to get that out for me." In his head, he was just telling himself to keep calm and play it cool.

Ruby got up from her own desk and plodded over to her father's messy desk. "What is it? What do you need it for?" She asked, squatting down on the floor and yanking the drawer open. But Tony didn't answer her, he couldn't answer her. "Dad? You still there?"

"Yeah, yeah I'm still here, honey. It's really important, you got it? Small silver box." He couldn't tell her what it really was, it would just wreck the whole thing. She needed to think he needed it, that it was important and that she had to help him with it.

She rummaged through the drawer, until she finally found it. "Uh, I think so. Small silver box." She told him, turning it over in her hand. It just looked like a lump of metal to her, but she knew there was something she was missing. "Now what? What do you need me to do?"

"Okay, keep a tight hold of that." He told her, before watching as something come up on his display. JARVIS was ready, and so was he. "You ready, honey?"

"Ready for what? Dad, what's going on? What is this thing?" Now she was starting to panic, because something didn't seem right.

"Now, JARVIS." Ruby heard him say, before her hand was suddenly pricked by several needles. "I'm sorry, honey, but you need to sleep. I can handle this, and you can shout and scream at me as much as you want when I get home. But right now, you need to rest."

Ruby looked down at her hand and realised that her father her tricked her. The device she had been holding contained some her of her tech, and it had injected her with something. "What… what have you done?" She asked him, the box falling from her hand as her head started to get a little fuzzy.

"It's just going to make you sleep for a while, honey. You're going to be fine. I'll be back before you wake up, I promise." He told her, knowing that she was going to be so angry with him when she did wake up. But it was for her own good. He didn't want her watching in on what he was about to do, and he knew she was getting tired, SWAIN had been monitoring her closely.

"You… you drugged me. You're just as bad as…" Her eyes fluttered closed and she fell backwards, only to land in someone's arms.

Happy Hogan was standing there with his boss's daughter in his arms. "I got her boss." He called to Tony down his own earpiece.

Tony couldn't help but let out a sigh of relief. He had called Happy in and Ruby hadn't even noticed. He had crept into the room and Ruby hadn't even been aware of him there. "Great, thanks, Hap. Just put her to bed and leave her there. Give me a call if she wakes up." He knew that Happy would stay there and look after her. He trusted the big man to take care of his daughter, to make sure that she stayed out of trouble. Now he could get on with his mission, without having to worry about his daughter. He knew she was safe.

A/N: As you can see, I am trying to get his story to move along now, but don't worry, there are still plenty of surprises to come as well!

I regards to the poll that was posted, not many people voted on it at all, and those who did, the results came back that you wanted me to split the story when the time comes. Let me know if you agree or disagree with that.

Thank you to everyone who has followed/favourited the story. I know I say it a lot, but it does mean the world to me to know people are reading. And obviously a massive thank you to everyone who reviews. It's because of you guys I continued to write.

Time for me to disappear and work on the next chapter! Until the next time!

Pippa.