I'm pretty sure I'll never know him.
Tony's hand strikes out so fast and hard that the mute button on the dash cracks under his force. And then, silence. No more conversation from the couple up in the apartment, no more noise about Tony's absent parenting. Just tense, tense silence as Bruce and Darcy turn their gaze from the frequency interpreter on the dashboard to the father in the driver's seat. What they find when they look is nothing short of shell-shock. Staring straight ahead, jaw so tense it may never pry apart again, and hands squeezing the steering wheel until his entire hands are white, Tony stews in the silence. And though neither Bruce or Darcy can hear it, his daughter's voice is dancing in his head, dizzying refrains like the songs of children in Horror movies. Darcy releases a long bellyful of air that she has holding in suspense before leaning back against her seat and turning her eyes up toward the roof of the car.
"This is fucked up," she drawls, adjusting her glasses on her nose as a headache begins to radiate behind her eyes.
But Bruce does not remove his gaze from his friend. No one would have seen the pain lurking behind Tony's blank gaze, but for all that Bruce complains about Tony's lack of parenting instinct or skill, he can see that hearing those words from his daughter hurt Tony in a way he wasn't sure he could be hurt. Inside Tony, something just broke. Tentatively, Bruce reaches out a hand to touch Tony's shoulder, to shake him alive again, if only so the man will allow the emotions locked inside his chest to see the light of the outside world.
"Tony? Tony, are you-"
But no sooner does Bruce's hand touch Tony's t-shirted shoulder does the other man snap out of his reverie. All traces of blank expression disappearing and returning to the self he was before he got in this car for this exploit, Tony pushes the ignition button and adjusts the radio dial to some cheesy, late-night slow jams station that under normal circumstances he would not be caught dead listening to. Before he drives off from his place on the curb, he points to each of his driving companions in turn.
"You guys want pizza? Pizza? Pizza?" He asks, pointing to each of them until they give some nod or subtle hint of assent, "Great. Let's go get pizza."
It will never cease to shock Bruce that Tony can so deftly hide his emotions. In one moment, he's trapped in his mind, struggling to hear the misery he caused his own daughter. And the next, he's back to the behavior that he has always exhibited. His ability to duck and weave in and out of reality is astounding and something that Bruce has always both envied and despised. Unsure of how to proceed, how to force Tony to grapple with the emotions he is so clearly trying and succeeding to repress, Bruce simply sits back in the passenger seat, crossing his arms over his chest in frustration, choosing, instead, to deal with his own feelings on the overheard conversation from Lee's apartment. Of course, he knew that Lee was unhappy, knew that she hadn't had a particularly easy childhood. Her mother made no secret of the fact that Tony Stark was her father, so it couldn't have been easy to be so keenly ignored her entire life by a man with the world on a string. And no matter what Tony has told Bruce in private, Bruce simply doesn't believe that Tony would have so blatantly ignored the evidence that the little MIT early admissions student was his own daughter. Bruce believes that Tony was in fearful denial, that he managed to convince himself that the young woman who J.A.R.V.I.S. kept bringing to his attention wasn't his daughter because he was trapped in terror at the prospect of fatherhood. After all, Tony would never have wanted to turn out like his father. It is the hand of that fear that Lee suffers from now. Tony would not have asked for his opinion on the subject, and Bruce would not offer his, but if the world spun different, then Bruce might tell Tony that if he had a daughter, he would have done everything differently. If Bruce had a daughter like Lee, a daughter who practically raised herself all on her own, he would never let her suffer like Tony has.
It's selfishness the likes that Bruce wouldn't have believed a human being capable of if he wasn't seeing it with his own eyes.
From the back seat, as they drive to Tony's favorite pizza joint, Darcy offers her unsolicited, unfiltered opinion. Or rather, an observation that really needs no stating but that comes from her lips anyway.
"You guys don't have a great relationship, do you?" She says, obviously, the uncomfortable killing her.
Darcy's never done well with the quiet, nor has she ever done well with thinking before she speaks. Tony looks back at her in the rearview mirror, speaking in a cordial, tight tone that Darcy has come to expect from the older man when he's struggling to bite back annoyance.
"Darcy, your ass will be walking back to the Tower if you don't stop talking," he snaps, turning the next block, desperately trying to put as much distance between him and his daughter's apartment.
The woman in question shrugs, burrowing herself deeper into her sweatshirt as she stares out of the window at the city passing her by.
"Just trying to make conversation," she grumbles.
And then, again, quiet. On the never-ending odyssey to this mystical pizzeria that Tony is taking them to, there is no speaking, no more conversation. Just the music of the radio singing in long, languorous tones about love and losing it. When they get out of the old Chevy, leaving it parked on the street because Tony couldn't give two shits if the shitty S.H.I.E.L.D. unmarked car got stolen, Tony feels relief mostly that he doesn't have to listen to that damn radio anymore. As they walk up the sidewalk toward the underground restaurant that smells like real wood and fresh mozzarella, Bruce walks in tight on his friend, walking closely at his side and inclining his head so that Darcy will not hear them.
"Are you alright?" He whispers, trying to give Tony a measure of privacy.
But Tony doesn't want to talk about it. His retort is breathless and tense, shaking his head once in defiant protest.
"You're not that kind of doctor, Bruce."
The next morning, Bruce wakes to a number appearing on his caller I.D. that rattles his bones. The fear of God shakes within him as he tries to think of a reason why Lee would be calling him, except to say that she found the bug and hates them all and is going to burn everyone in the operation. His mind travels down a million different rabbit holes of angry possibilities from that are each more absurd and less believable than the last in that split second between picking up the receiver and putting it to his ear.
"Hello?" He asks, still a little groggy, having woken to the sound of the phone ringing.
His entire body tenses as he tries with all of his might to remain calm and cool, to not give away to this young woman that he did anything wrong when he completely betrayed her trust by listening in on her date with Peter Parker last night and when he allowed her father and a complete stranger to do the same.
"Hey, Bruce?" She asks.
In the background, he can hear music blaring and the sound of frantic pencil work on a drafting board, the sure signs that Lee is working hard on some project that no one at S.H.I.E.L.D. will approve of. Her voice is distracted, a million miles away, and Bruce wonders how she's awake at six in the morning on a Saturday when she only went to bed around three.
"Yeah?" He responds, not releasing the fear in his body, though cautious optimism tells him that he may just be in the clear.
If Bruce had asked his question about her sleep habits, he would know that she didn't go to sleep at all, but rather watched Peter sleep until the guilt drove her out of bed and into her walk-in closet, where she proceeded to struggle her way through a panic attack alone- another terrible trait she inherited from her father, that propensity toward panic attacks- and then grabbed her drafting materials. Her mind was working a million miles ahead of her, ideas flying at her faster than she could write them down. And since she knows the sort of sleeper that Peter is, she figures that she has at least another solid four hours before she has to slip into bed and pretend that she was there the whole time. As she scribbles down a few equations, trying to balance a few things that she thinks need recalibration, she asks another question, lowering her tone though Peter is fast asleep and not likely to wake any time soon.
"You think you could help me rig the lower level security systems so I can work on Tony's suit late at night?"
Bruce's tone is dry and he attempts to speak out all of the complications of this request that she's just blatantly made of him.
"You want me to help you sneak into one of the highest guarded security agencies in the world so you can tinker with a project that I know your Dad has strictly forbade you from working on?" He asks.
"Yes," Lee replies without hesitation.
Thinking back to the night before, thinking of everything that Tony said and did, thinking of everything Lee said and did... Bruce can only shrug and nod. Lee needs something in her life. It might as well be this.
"Sure. I'm in. When do we start?"
Bruce is better than his word, not only getting her in, but outfitting the security systems with rigged video feed, displaying on the security monitors pre-recorded video of an empty room from midnight until six in the morning. He also took the time to help smuggle her tools and drafting plans into the basement, but that wasn't particularly hard for him. No S.H.I.E.L.D. agent ever wants to cross the Hulk, particularly not when he's carrying potentially dangerous power tools. Oblivious to her father's feelings and knowledge of her feelings towards him, Lee's life continues without much of a whisper of his interference. She receives daily phone calls from Fury to check her progress, and her response is always the same, "You'll have him by the deadline." Every day, she spends her time with Peter, whether at school or at her apartment, on the New York City streets or having dinner with Aunt May, and every evening she sneaks out of her apartment and makes the travel to Avengers Tower, where she hurls herself in through the basement auxiliary laundry shoot before creeping toward storage unit 417-A, where she works and naps in alternating and uneven increments until it's time for her to change clothes- a stash of which she now keeps in the closet where the suit was once stored- and go to school.
She's working on the suit day in and day out, until they're three days away from Task Master's invasion, and the suit is almost ready. It's mostly finishing electrical work that she's tampering with now, and that leaves her hands occasionally singed and twitchy, but beyond that, it's nearly finished. It's two in the morning and she's halfway finished re-adjusting the chest unibeam. Her phone is lodged in between her shoulder and her ear, and the log on her phone says that she's been talking to Peter like this for six minutes and thirty six-no, thirty eight seconds, now-seconds. Under much protest from her.
"Peter, I'm gonna see you in-" she checks her watch with a chuckle, looking down as she tries to adjust a piece without making noise audible on the phone, "Six hours. Go to sleep."
It's a cheerful chide, a small assault on both of their poor sleep habits and their poor habits in general. But Peter doesn't care, he simply doesn't care. Talking to her is the closet thing to normalcy that he has felt since that fateful day that he discovered his father's algorithm. These talks, no matter how small and inconsequential they may seem to anyone else, even Lee, they mean the world to him.
"What're you doing right now?" He asks.
Lee looks around the massacre of a room, where pieces of her father's old suit lay like scrap parts in a graveyard. Her drafts and sketches and revised blueprints have been balled up and discarded and put up in haphazard patterns on the wall with sticky tack and bubble gum. And in one hand, she's holding the Iron Man helmet and a particularly large energy analyzer in the other as her phone is tucked into the crook of her neck, just barely holding it into place. She shrugs and tries to keep her voice casual.
"Oh, you know," she says, her voice reaching an abnormally high pitch, a dead giveaway that she's lying, though Peter doesn't know that secret of hers just yet, "I'm just getting some work done. You?"
Peter's eventful evening involved almost getting shot six or seven times and having to wrestle a baseball bat from and eight year-old kid who was trying to chase him down the street and beat him with it. Peter brushes off Lee's question, strolling down the street with his backpack slung over his shoulder as though what he does is something that happens everyday.
"Just dropped three guys off at the precinct on Lafayette."
Lee rolls her eyes and allows a joke to roll off of her lips, thinking of the call she got around midnight when Peter said he wasn't going to "swing by" (his terrible choice of pun, not hers) and see her because of a disturbance near Tompkins Square Park that he needed to go and sort out. Putting down the helmet and the energy analyzer, Lee leans back against the nearest wall and places the back of her head against it, leaning back like some love-sick school girl, which maybe she is.
"Y'know, if I had a nickel for every time my boyfriend said he ditched me because he had to go be Spider-Man-" She teases.
But Peter cuts her off, knowing for certain how much money she would have.
"You'd have exactly forty-five cents," he retorts.
"Way to drive the logic train through my perfectly good joke," Lee sighs.
Three bar hoppers are standing outside, smoking cigarettes as they watch Peter walk down the sidewalk opposite them, and they wonder what business any kind of asshole has to be smiling about like that at two a.m. on a Wednesday. He doesn't care what they are saying about him- quite loudly, as he can hear them from across the street- he feels like his feet aren't even touching the ground as he walks.
"I'm good at that," he says.
Lee pushes off the wall upon which she's leaning and goes to look at one of the blueprints she has hanging on the wall of the original suit, comparing it visually to the new version that she's building.
"Go to bed, Peter," she scolds.
His voice rises light-heartedly, teasing as he surveys the buildings around him.
"I'm walking home. I can't very well just go to bed here," he says, defending himself.
"Then walk home faster," she quips.
Peter thinks of the fast way home, of flying through the skies easily, protesting against gravity like it was nothing more than a sterile joke.
"If I went the fast way, I couldn't talk to you," he says, softening.
That catches Lee's breath a little.
"You walked home just to get to talk to me for a few minutes?" She asks.
But she can hear the smile in Peter's tone.
"I'm a romantic," he says, smugly.
The breath that caught in Lee's throat turns normal again and she pulls out a pencil, adding a few more notes to her latest drafting papers.
"That would be sweet if we hadn't just seen each other a few hours ago."
It is then that Peter turns solemn and serious, a little nervous, even, as if he is confessing his true feelings for her rather than the weight of his fear for her.
"I just worry about you. The streets have been a little… Tougher than usual. And you live alone, and-" He rambles.
But, without giving anything away, Lee can assure him that she's as safe as can be. After all, she's in S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, in a secure storage facility underground. She's about as safe as it gets at this moment. Of course, she managed to break in, but that was essentially an inside job at its core, and she cannot be expected to count that against the security of this building.
"I can promise you, I've never been safer than I am in this moment," she reassures him.
Peter, of course, though, thinks she is in her apartment, not knowing any better.
"Your crappy apartment locks don't stand a chance against an overexcited labrador, much less a practiced criminal. You really should change those, by the way," he reminds her.
Lee picks the helmet up once more and presses it to her nose so she's looking directly at it, its cool metal chilling her down her spine. Smirking, she stares it down. Peter loved to make fun of her cream-colored pajamas, and so she hurls that back at him now.
"Well, like you said last time you were over, my pajamas blend into the walls, so at least I have a functional disguise should anyone try and kidnap me."
Peter shakes his head.
"Now, you're just being a jerk."
Lee pulls the phone away from her ear and calls into it:
"Goodnight, Peter."
He protests through a laugh.
"But I'm not home yet."
She simply repeats herself, not able to keep the smile off of her face.
"Goodnight, Peter."
He sighs and shakes his head.
"Fine. Goodnight, Lee."
Hanging up the phone, Lee places it at her side, exchanging it for the small audio remote control that she placed on the makeshift work desk that she created for herself by toppling over a steel storage crate. Pressing play, she returns to her angst-ridden work music, the only kind she can actually listen to when she's trying to work.
Sometimes I try to do things and it just doesn't work out the way I wanted to.
I get real frustrated and I try hard to do it and I take my time and it doesn't work out the way I wanted to.
Nodding her head along to the beat, Lee returns to her tinkering, picking up a tiny screwdriver and tightening a loose bolt in one of the elbow joints. Furrowing her brow, she tries to bite back the smile that just seems to keep crawling back on her face as Peter's words call themselves back up in her mind. She's focused and sturdy, focusing her mind until all she sees is the red and gold suit coming together beneath her hands.
"This looks like you're breaking the rules."
She's focused and sturdy, that is, until the sound of a feminine voice breaks her. Jumping straight out of her skin, Lee drops the elbow joint and the screwdriver, turning with rampaging heart to the door.
"Holy shit-" She cries.
The figure in the doorway looks at the other woman with a raised eyebrow and a vaguely superior expression. Introducing herself, she looks around the small storage unit, which looks like a scientific workshop vomited all over it.
"Darcy Lewis. You're Lee McCarthy, right?"
Lee raises an eyebrow, bending to pick up the equipment she dropped.
"News travels fast?"
Darcy shakes her head and taps her temple.
"Nah. You're name's on like seven dossiers that I've had to read. I've gotta mind like a steel trap," Darcy smirks.
Lee's words are a warning, a plea to not tell anyone.
"I'm not supposed to be down here."
Crossing the small room and picking up the Iron Man helmet herself, Darcy nods sincerely. After listening to this girl talk about her life, she felt like maybe she could use someone to talk to, so close to the end of her deadline.
"Your secret's safe with me."
At a loss for what else to say, Lee points to the helmet, which Darcy is currently planting a big kiss on, leaving her red lipstick stain behind.
"I'm just trying to get this thing fixed. Well, fixed by way of basically gutting the whole thing and starting almost from scratch," Lee settles.
Darcy's eyebrow raises as she looks at the other young woman.
"But your dad isn't gonna need it," Darcy replies.
Lee's voice is tense as she frantically tries to sort out some papers she left in a disordered pile on the floor.
"It's a plan B. You should always have a plan B."
Plan B. S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't have create secondary plans. That's when it dawns on Darcy, falling upon her like a god landing on her from space. Shit. Lee is doing this so Tony can fight in against Task Master, so Peter doesn't have to. She's going to sacrifice her father so that Peter can live normally, so that he doesn't have to become an Avenger. That's why she's been spending so much time down here in the bowels of the freezing cold storage units. She's trying to salvage this mission by taking Peter out of the equation entirely.
"You aren't going to turn Peter Parker over to them, are you?" Darcy asks, complete and total disbelief written all across her face.
Lee feigns offense and confusion.
"What're you talking about?" She asks.
"You aren't gonna complete your mission. You're gonna get your dad to use the suit and-" Darcy replies, trying to piece it together.
The fear of being caught, the fear of being betrayed fills Lee's bone and she cannot control the near shout that comes out of her.
"Don't talk so loud," Lee barks.
That hangs in the air, and it's as good as a confession. Looking down at the floor in sudden embarrassment, Lee swallows hard, knowing that she just gave herself away. Well, she gave away her half-baked plan that she hadn't even settled on going through with. Darcy lets out a low whistle and shoves her hands into her back pockets. Of all the things she expected Tony's daughter to do, this was not one of them.
"Shit. You really like this Parker guy, huh?" She questions.
Lee isn't going to admit it out loud. She leans against her makeshift desk and attempts to answer as diplomatically as she possibly can.
"At some point, we have to learn to make our own decisions. I'm just trying to make the best one I can," she replies.
Darcy's answer is immediate, something she knows that she shouldn't really be saying to Lee, a girl she hardly knows, but she has difficulty filtering out what she should and shouldn't say to anyone, something that has always been one of her greatest faults.
"Why don't you let Peter make his own decision?" Darcy asks.
The words come out of Lee before she even realizes that it's the truth hidden in her heart.
"Because I don't want to lose him," she says.
Darcy examines what she knows of Lee's character and of the situation. They've planted Lee right in the middle of a game that she has no way of winning. Shaking her head sadly, Darcy shrugs.
"Seems to me like you're gonna lose him either way," Darcy says.
But Lee knows the answer to that question, one that she's asked herself time and time again these last few months.
"At least this way he won't lose himself to a cause he doesn't believe in," she says, resigned to her fate.
And, at least this way, she has a few days to say goodbye.
"But-" Darcy tries to cut in.
Lee holds her hands out in surrender, feeling defeated before she's even begun. She hasn't officially decided to trade Peter for her father, but she wants the option of it at least. If she refuses to bring Peter to S.H.I.E.L.D, or if she tells Peter in advance that she's lied and he walks out on the plan, then she will be able to force Tony to fight, and this new suit will give him the ability to do so.
It isn't a decision she knows she can make. But it's a decision she wants the option to make.
"I still haven't made the choice, Darcy. Nothing's...I just haven't decided yet," she stumbles over her own thoughts.
Clucking her tongue once and heading for the door, Darcy says:
"Well, good luck. With whatever you end up doing with this pile of junk."
Lee furrows her brow.
"Do you mean the suit or my life?"
Darcy calls over her shoulder:
"Not gonna lie to you, Lee. I was talking about both."
happy 4th of July, if you celebrate! Please review!