Note: Looks like we'll need five chapters after all, who isn't shocked? OKAY PUT YOUR HANDS DOWN, SHEESH.
Sorry for the delay, I'm Tony-sexual and Anthony Bridgerton is too glorious for words.
Chapter Four: Gravity
"And here, I thought you were different," Tony tells her, sighing up at the ceiling to hide the huge, teasing grin he wants to display instead. "Do you have any idea how many stalkers I get? So many that Happy might as well carry peanut butter and cream cheese. That was a celery joke, by the way. STALKers." He's too tired to care about how bad a joke that was. "But most of them haven't been personally wronged by me, so that's something. Then again, a surprising number of things are my fault, when you get down to it. Mine or my father's, which, let me tell you-"
"I can't believe I'm saying this, but stop talking!" Alix groans.
Tony looks over to see that she's facepalming, Picard-style. Her interruption is so unexpected, he unintentionally obeys her. That fits the chaos which has taken over his life since she showed up, so he stays silent, just to see what she'll do.
Nothing. She does nothing. The elevator dings at her floor (it's probably Not Great that he remembers that, speaking of stalking, but whatever), but the doors don't open.
"JARVIS, you're a good bro," Alix says, lowering her hand.
"I'll take that as a compliment. Shall I continue up to the penthouse, sir?"
"Sure," Tony says, narrowing his eyes at Alix. "Is the 'stalker' thing meant to show why it's bad to bring up past trauma? If so, very clever. If not- JARVIS, scan for weapons?"
"No physical weapons detected."
Alix breaks out into a smile that transforms her understated prettiness into outright beauty. "Is that a compliment about my wit? JARVIS, I'm touched!"
"J, if you respond with, 'hi Touched, I'm JARVIS' I will deactivate you and struggle to cope out of spite," Tony warns. He wants to say something like, 'touching is my job,' but that's definitely sexual harrassment in the workplace, so he presses his lips together to remind himself to use discretion. Across from him, Alix lets out a full-bodied laugh.
"Don't take this the wrong way, Stark, but you need a bed, STAT. I appreciate the effort, though."
Outwardly, Tony favors her with his highest watt smile, but inwardly, he's congratulating himself. This woman is whip-smart, gives as good as she gets (boy, he hopes that's interdisciplinary), and probably most important of all: she tells him when she's had enough. Too many people let Tony cross all of their invisible boundaries and then think negatively of him for it.
Now, all he has to do is alienate her less than he charms her.
The elevator dings and the doors open. "All right, Iron Man, go put some roots down in that mattress of yours," Alix says. "No less than three friends of mine from different departments called me this afternoon worried about you. We can talk about why it was me they'd call about it some other time, okay?"
"Wait, so you were stalking me so you could… make sure I got some sleep?" He is pretty sure she said something more important than that part, but the brain cells which can figure that out happen to be magnets with opposing poles today.
"It was a plant joke, Stark. You made one yourself! You're wiped."
She really has turned him upside down and shaken all his higher brain functions out onto the elevator floor.
"Promise me you won't quit till I get another chance to talk to you?" he asks, pushing off of the wall and lurching toward the doors. Her silence makes him look back at her. She looks confused.
"I'm not going to quit. I might have considered upping my caffeine intake and therapy appointments, though," she says, wincing as if she'd said too much.
"That second one," Tony says, resting a hand on the doors to steady himself and keep them open. He needs to yawn again, but his shredded dignity wouldn't survive it. "If that's related to the HYDRA thing, I- I'm sorry. Stark Industries has benefited from hiring former SHIELD employees. Might have made it easier for me to forget all the negative parts."
Her brows are still furrowed, so he decides to tell her the thing he'd realized the day before.
"You know, if you really look at that symbol- not, not that you'd want to, obviously, it bothered you a lot, even though I hadn't meant-" The clever, short description he'd envisioned is fraying apart like a compromised elevator cable, and Tony can't figure out how to stop, so he keeps going. "Anyway, the eight tentacles thing-" He waves his hand to dismiss his previous words, then realizes it could look like he's dismissing her reaction to the 'dead hydra' trinket. "Shit. I'm not-"
Alix interrupts him, eyes wide, tone amused. "Gladys told me you pull all-nighters all the time. They let you run a company like this?"
"I'm not attracted to the company! The company doesn't scramble my brain cells when I randomly think about it throughout the day!" Tony protests, gesturing wildly. Then his brain catches up with what he'd just said, and he lets his arms fall to his sides. "See?"
Alix's cheeks are dusted pink. She backs up, one hand flat against the wall of the elevator behind her, her expression best described as happy but stunned. "You don't hit on the company, you're saying?"
It's an admirable attempt at snark from someone Tony suspects isn't often off-balance.
"I'd really like to see what it takes to make you speechless," he blurts out, narrowing his eyes at her.
Alix blushes crimson. Excellent.
She points past him. "Not on the clock, boss. Go sleep. I like my job."
"Okay, I'll head out the airlock, President Roslin, but this conversation isn't over."
He doesn't move, and she raises her eyebrows. Tony backs up and stops past the threshold of the door.
"Keep going! Head on the pillow. I can and will check up on you, you know. JARVIS likes me."
"Pushy," he complains, but complies, backing up instead of turning to walk away so he can still see her- but this desire is immediately thwarted by the elevator doors closing. The only elevator music that accompanies JARVIS's punitive action is Alix Hathaway's laughter.
Tony could thwart both of them, but instead he heads into his bedroom and strips off his sweaty clothes. He doesn't want the sheets to smell bad just in case he's not the only person in the near future who would mind.
That this thought doesn't keep him awake at all is a testament to how sincerely wiped (her word, he likes it, he likes her, he's gone on her and she probably knows it, shit, yay, shit) he is.
88888888
He wakes up at the crack of 10 AM the next day, which is Saturday.
The first thing he does is roll over and reach for his phone, which is displaying a text from Alix Hathaway. When he picks it up, though, the screen goes blank.
"Do you feel rested, sir?"
"Do you want to be reinstalled? Lay off the parental bullshit and let me read my message!" Tony groans.
"But of course."
Tony doesn't even favor the ceiling with a glare. Instead, he lifts the phone and unlocks it to see the first part of Alix's message.
Don't yell at JARVIS, he's just doing what he was politely asked to do!
He feels seen. It's… not awful.
Okay, so… I want to ask you if you'd like to have coffee or lunch or something, but I'll level with you: not only is my apartment not Billionaire-worthy, it's also PR you probably don't need. So I'm gonna have to invite myself over to your place if you say yes. Factor that in.
Tony wakes up all the way on reading that. Alix Hathaway is no shrinking violet, but he'd gotten the sense that when she let herself rebel, it was always with logic and self-preservation. Texting the CEO to invite yourself over is neither of those things. It's exciting to think he's got her breaking her own rules. If Tony had any, he'd probably be breaking them just thinking about her.
He throws himself out of bed and into the bathroom, reasoning that he ought to feel more like a person before he sends a response. It's a good instinct, because the first thing he types and erases is, 'Yes. Come over and make out with me?' The second thing he types is, 'Ask JARVIS if you're allowed to stay past curfew? I think I 'like' like you.'
Tony hits 'send' instead of backspace like an idiot, not that she'll believe him if he fesses up.
He's putting on one of his watches with the phone resting on the dresser where he can see it when the message goes from 'delivered' to 'read.' It stays like that for at least two minutes.
Tony forces himself to turn his phone off and pocket it to head down to one of his labs. When he pulls the device back out, Alix has sent him three texts in succession:
a screenshot of the word 'read' underneath his message
the ghost screaming emoji, and
a screenshot of her calendar app with the event 'playdate with Iron Man' marked down starting at 12:15 PM and extending for the rest of the day
The event is highlighted red, but not the default red. She had to have used a color picker to get the 'hot rod' tint right, which has JARVIS's digital fingerprints all over it. It's almost too perfect, like she'd studied him for over a year and knows exactly what sort of snarky, sassy shit will make him crazy for her- but Tony has his AI, he's got the ability to call his suit even under duress, and just for his own peace of mind, he swaps to the watch that has the gauntlet and flashbang built into it.
For the next two hours, he buries himself in a design problem that has been plaguing R&D for the past week. He's almost got it solved by noon, so Tony runs one more model and takes an elevator to the garage. Rhodey had bought him a Hawaiian shirt covered with Iron Man heads hidden in bright gold palm fronds that Tony thinks Alix will find hilarious. More than that, it'll hopefully emphasize how not-CEO he is today. He strips off the t-shirt he was wearing over a long-sleeved gray undershirt and puts the gift on. There's no mirror, but he knows what he looks like.
"Your guest has arrived."
"Thanks, J." Tony hops into the elevator, drumming his fingers on the shiny wall as it rises. Once there, he strides out of the elevator to find Alix Hathaway wearing distressed jeans and a loose, flowy peasant blouse that suits her, even though he'd never have pictured her wearing it. It's very 'don't let him make assumptions on a first date' attire, and when he meets her eyes after his perusal of her outfit, she raises her eyebrows.
"Wait, was I alone in here for a while? I could have done anything!" she asks, looking around at the various high-tech devices he has lying around. Only then does she see his shirt, really see it enough to react to it, which cracks Tony up. Does this woman's 'hierarchy of Stark' place her concern about his residence security higher than his appearance? "Wow," she says. "Bananas and Iron Man Helmets. That's… certainly a look."
"JARVIS wouldn't have let you mess with anything. And, they're palm fronds. We've gotta get you out of the Northeast one of these days."
"I'd consider signing a compensated NDA about that shirt, if you're offering funding for such a venture," Alix jokes. She rubs at the loose fabric on her upper arms, clearly nervous.
"Do you need me to up the thermostat? I can make you some coffee," Tony offers, walking backwards toward the kitchen area with a jerk of his head for her to follow.
"Coffee, yes. I forgot whatever else you said," she grins. At his gesture toward it, Alix hops onto one of the fixed stools in front of the kitchen island. He starts the coffee and leans onto the island across from her, noting that there's a metallic glint mostly covered by the vee of her white blouse. Underneath, she's got a red (he approves) camisole with a lacy scooped neckline, much higher than the plunging one of her peasant shirt. It's the second time he's seen something around or attached to her neck area, and Tony nods at it.
"So, are you wearing a wire?" His tone is casual, body language studiously so.
Alix frowns in surprise and looks down before bursting into rueful laughter. "God, that didn't even occur to me! The neckline is too low on this one, so I pin it shut. I do that with a bunch of my shirts, actually." She puts one hand on either side of her overshirt's neckline and lifts it, turning it inside-out. It's high enough for Tony to see that the camisole she's wearing is actually more of a tube top, and he's very interested, but tries to focus.
There's a large safety pin holding a few inches of the shirt closed.
"I gotta say, you could have gotten away showing me an actual surveillance wire instead of a safety pin if that tank top you're wearing was any shorter," Tony confesses.
"Shit, I forgot about that!" Alix says, dropping her hands. A second later, she facepalms. "Jesus, how 'PTA meeting' of me! I never should have pretended I was sophisticated enough for-"
Tony had already started around the island when she'd covered her face. There's something unexpectedly attractive about a woman more concerned with her own well-being than impressing him. She's real, someone with her own issues that she's not willing to subsume just because he's who he is.
Alix had been turning as if she's about to hop down from the stool as she spoke, and he waits there for her, a couple of inches away once she's on her feet.
"Hi," he says when she's startled enough to stop her self-deprecating sentence. They're so close that her floaty white shirt is brushing against his goofy one. Tony searches for something that might put her more at ease. "Don't run away? It's just a culture clash, and I get it. I'm me and you're you. You wanna go hang out in one of the empty apartments instead? Might be less intimidating."
"You really are a billionaire, aren't you?" Alix says after a little sigh. He must look confused, because she explains, "You offered to go to a secondary location to reassure me, right? An empty secondary location." Behind them, the coffee machine makes a noise. Tony points behind him, and she laughs. "Go."
"Okay, but for the record, this billionaire doesn't have to trick you into a secondary location. I could just hire goons," he teased. "But I get it. We can stay here."
"Good. For the record," she mirrors shakily as he prepares two cups. "I don't have to wear a wire."
Tony had gotten fancy in his prep work earlier and had even put the good creamer in a little ceramic fancy-ass dispenser, which he is retrieving when she says this. It's exactly the way he'd expect Alix Hathaway to admit she's spying on him, and as a result, he nearly drops the damned thing.
Then, it dawns on him.
He turns around. "That was a boob joke, wasn't it? You set me up."
"I figured, if Tony Stark is more worried about me recording him than thinking of breasts, I probably ought to know that," she says. "Is this about me saying Maria's name? We have a kind of, I dunno, support group of SHIELD survivors. It doesn't have a name yet because we come up with a new stupider one every time we meet, which is once a month." He sets the coffee in front of her on a tray with two kinds of sugar, fancy silver spoons, and the slightly damp creamer thing. She picks up the coffee, smells it, and eschews the rest of the supplies, sipping with an appreciative 'too hot, but I love it anyway' wince. "We'd met that week."
"Did she encourage you to talk to me, or…"
"Mmm," Alix says, the sound echoing off of the inside of her mug. "Nope. She had told me to get cracking on aversion therapy. The kind where you expose yourself to the thing that gives you distress."
He decides to go for it. "Please tell me you're averse to me, because A, I like a challenge, and B, I'd love to participate in an excessive amount of therapy for it."
"You are irrepressible, aren't you?" she laughs, but the fist she'd rested on the table loosens, and one of the creases in her forehead smoothes out. "No, it's the symbol, and she was right. I didn't do it, and I owe her a penance. Don't!" she holds up a finger right as Tony opens his mouth to suggest something.
"Okay, I won't, but in exchange you have to tell me some of the bad names you came up with for that group," he says, draining his cup.
"Oh, god, okay. I think you earned it," she sighs. "Let's see. One week was 'HydRants,' with a capital H and a capital R, because we rant about the bullshit we should have seen coming and the bullshit we had no idea about. The week after that we were HYDRA Aunts, and all roleplayed like we were old ladies whose husbands had joined HYDRA back in the 40's and we missed the good old days when it was just about science. Husbands-" she leans over and glares at him. "-because, of course, ladies back then weren't scientists. We were dancing girls hired to make Howard Stark and Steve Rogers look good."
"I give him shit about those girls in the reels at least once a week, Scout's Honor," Tony tells her gravely.
"I actually believe that," Alix says, shoving the cup toward him. "You know, I'm thinking back on those names and they're all variations of HYDRA, nothing about SHIELD, even though that's the part we actually miss. Fuck, that's dark."
Tony can see her body language start to curl back up, but he's got a better perspective on the outside. "No, see, that's what is perfect about the new name every time. You're evolving. Pick a SHIELD-centric name for next month. Explain why. I bet that'll lift everyone's spirits."
Alix is frozen still, looking at him with shock and no small amount of hope creeping out at all the edges; her eyes shine like they're prickling with tears, one side of her lip is turned up.
As wonderful as that is, Tony doesn't want to be her therapist. It's time to shift the mood. "So walk in there next time and say something like, 'I think we shield change our focus away from HYDRA, it aegis me to keep focusing on those guys.'"
"Oh, god, no! No puns!" Alix groans, eyes wide even though she's now smiling.
Tony is warming to his subject. He straightens, gesturing in her direction as he walks. "You should tell them, 'We need tower -k toward things that build us up, not buckler knees!'"
He's beside her now, and she's laughing and covering her ears. He likes this feeling, that he gets to joke about this heavy stuff that they've all been touched by, and not feel like he's being disrespectful to others who aren't at that place yet. Pepper, for all her stellar people skills, had struggled with that, and it had left him looking to his suits for solace.
How strange that he's realizing this here, now, when his heart is finally open to a different kind of arcing power.
Tony opens his mouth to make another SHIELD pun, this time about wearing protection, but before he gets any of the words out, Alix reaches out with both hands and grabs his collar, hauling him in for a silencing kiss.