After this, I'm going to try and sum up Iron man 2 in a few paragraphs, so bear with me.
Tony called Rhodey and asked him to come over to watch Erika.
He didn't want her knowing yet, so Rhodey stayed with Erika while Tony called a medical team to his house.
After just a few short minutes of examining Lorna, the medical examiner pulled off his gloved and sighed. One look from him, and Tony already knew before they said anything.
She was gone.
They took Lorna—they took her body with them to do an autopsy, and Erika came running into the room just in time to see her mother being put in a large black bag and carried away. Tony had to pick her up and hold her so she wouldn't go running after them. When they were gone, Tony sat Erika down and did his best to explain what was going on.
Erika didn't take the news well—and what child would. She started crying and screaming, yelling how that wasn't true, and that she wanted her Momma right now.
Tony tried to calm her down but she wasn't having any of that, and when she couldn't follow her Momma she started crying even harder.
Tony held her and did his best not to cry.
They had the funeral shortly after, and Tony didn't recognize half the people at the service. When people he didn't recognize gave him their condolences, he accepted them with a small nod and held onto Erika just a little tighter. He took Erika up to the closed casket so she could lay a black rose on its lid, and they watched together as the casket was lowered into the ground.
Tony didn't even cry at his parents' funeral, but he cried now. He cried and held his daughter close—held onto the only thing he had left of Lorna.
After that cloudy day, looking at Erika hurt. She had the same green eyes as her mother, and every time he looked at her he saw her mother. It hurt so much he started drinking again (Lorna had gotten him to sober up, for a while) to numb the pain. He hired a PA to take care of all his personal matters, and he left the company in Obie's hands. Several months after Lorna's death, Tony went to a party and came back with a stranger, too drunk to even consider that maybe having sex with a stranger where your three year old daughter could easily walk in was a bad idea. He did it again the next night, and the night after that.
Lorna's death left part of him empty and he tried filling that emptiness with booze and sex—it never worked, but after a while it just became habit.
After one night, when he was about to fuck someone on his couch, they were interrupted by a scared looking Erika, clad in footie pajamas and holding a teddy bear. Tony took her back to bed, and after that he made sure to always move things up to the bedroom; Erika never went into his room without knocking.
As Erika got older, Tony would swear up and down that Erika was trying to get the women he brought back to leave. After learning karate, she started kicking them in the shins. After learning how to play the violin, she asked for an electric one and hooked it up to his AI. She started making all this terrifying artwork that really seemed to unsettle the women he brought him.
Tony had always felt like he didn't exactly understand his daughter, but he'd never felt more like that then when she came stomping into his office, yelling about Stark Industries and animal testing. She was so upset, but instead of talking to her he yelled at her and had her thrown out of the building.
'I hate you! I wish you had died instead of Mom!'
Those twelve words struck a nerve, and for the rest of the day he heard them over and over. When he went home later that night to find her missing, he'd been scared out of his mind. He was worried that she'd been taken, or had gotten into an accident somewhere.
When the police department called, he'd never been more relieved.
He'd also been pissed.
Things with Erika were rough after that. They didn't get along at all, and after that day she started calling him Tony instead of Dad. Seeing these changes hurt and he started drinking more. She seemed to hate him, and it looked like that would never change.
Then Afghanistan happened, and everything bad about their relationship didn't matter anymore. All the fights, all the arguments, none of it mattered—Tony was alive, and he'd been able to go back to his family.
He'd been so scared when Obadiah shot at her the night he took Tony's reactor, and he'd been relieved to see that she was okay (He'd insisted she wore a sling, even though she said it didn't hurt).
After the Iron Man incident, Tony thought things would be alright, and they were—for a time, anyway.
A/N: yay for recaps.