Two weeks after Tony’s conversation with Pepper and Rhodey, Jarvis’s discreet DNA comparison was still, technically, incomplete.
Not for lack of data on Tony’s end, that part had been trivial, a strand of hair from an old jacket, sequenced and ready within a day.
The holdup was the other half of the equation, and Tony had discovered, somewhat to his own irritation, that quietly obtaining a five-year-old’s genetic material without anyone noticing was a rather more delicate problem than any weapons contract he’d ever negotiated.
“I’m not sending a black-ops team to swab a kindergartner’s cheek, Jarvis.
There’s a limit.”
“I would never suggest such a thing, sir.
However, I have identified an alternative.
Mark’s most recent medical checkup, required for his entertainment work permit renewal, is scheduled at Cedar West Pediatrics in eleven days.
Records from that visit would include a standard blood panel.”
“And you can just, what, pull that from their servers?”
“With appropriate discretion, yes.”
Tony drummed his fingers against the workbench, weighing it.
Hacking a pediatrician’s office to steal a sample felt, even by his own fairly elastic standards, like crossing a line he hadn’t fully decided he wanted to cross.
Pepper’s voice echoed unhelpfully in the back of his head: *decide it on purpose.*
“No,” he said finally.
“If I’m doing this, I’m not doing it by breaking into some kid’s doctor’s office like I’m running from Fury myself.
Find another way.
Something that doesn’t feel like I’m robbing a five-year-old blind before I’ve even met him.”
“Understood, sir.
May I make a suggestion?”
“Go ahead.”
“You could simply ask.”
Tony gave the ceiling, which was as close to Jarvis’s physical presence as the room offered, a long, flat look.
“Ask a woman I ghosted six years ago and her genius toddler for a DNA sample, out of the blue, with no context.
That’s your suggestion.”
“I would recommend providing context, sir.
But yes, in essence.”
It took Tony another four days to actually act on it, four days of drafting and discarding approaches in his head that ranged from absurdly formal legal correspondence to, at his lowest point at two in the morning with a glass of scotch he probably shouldn’t have poured, seriously considering just showing up unannounced.
In the end, he settled on something in between.
A letter, handwritten rather than typed, because Pepper had once told him handwriting read as more sincere and he’d never found a reason to doubt her instincts on things like this.
Short.
No excuses for the past, because he genuinely didn’t have any that would hold up to scrutiny, and Rosalie deserved better than a billionaire’s attempt to talk his way out of six years of silence.
*Ms.
Payne,*
*This isn’t an easy letter to write, and I imagine it’s an even harder one to receive after this long.
I won’t waste your time with excuses.
I’d like to request a paternity test, handled privately and entirely on your terms, no press, no lawyers unless you want them there.
If you’re willing, my assistant will reach out to arrange the details however works best for you and your son.*
*— T.S.*
He read it over four times, decided it was as good as it was going to get without another two hours of second-guessing, and had Jarvis arrange delivery through a private courier rather than anything traceable to Stark Industries directly.
No lawyers, no legal department, nothing that would spook Rosalie the way Grayson Taylor’s visit clearly had, all those years ago.
The letter arrived on Clyme Street on a Thursday afternoon, hand-delivered by a courier who asked for Rosalie by name and required a signature.
Mark, home from a small commercial callback and halfway through a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table, watched his mother’s face shift through an entire spectrum of emotion as she read it, standing frozen in the doorway with the envelope still in one hand.
“Mom?”
“It’s…” Rosalie sat down slowly across from him, setting the letter on the table between them like it might bite.
“It’s from him.
Tony Stark.
He wants a paternity test.”
Mark’s spoon stopped halfway to his mouth.
*So.
Jarvis’s little dinner table probability calculation finally worked its way through the man’s conscience.* He’d wondered, distantly, whether that conversation months ago would ever amount to anything beyond passive surveillance.
Apparently it had, eventually, though it had taken its time getting there.
“How do you feel about that?” he asked carefully, setting his own spoon down, giving his mother his full attention.
He already had thoughts of his own, plenty of them, but this decision belonged to Rosalie as much as it belonged to him, maybe more.
She was the one who’d spent six years being dismissed, threatened by lawyers, and quietly grieving a fantasy of the life she’d once imagined for herself.
Rosalie read the letter again, slower this time, her thumb tracing over the handwriting like she was checking it for sincerity she could actually trust.
“I don’t know,” she admitted finally.
“Part of me wants to burn it.
After everything, the legal threats, the years of silence, now he just decides to ask, out of nowhere, like it’s that simple.” Her jaw tightened.
“But…”
“But?”
“But it doesn’t threaten anything.
It doesn’t demand anything.
He says it’s on our terms.” She looked up at Mark, searching his face for something.
“Sweetheart, this is about you as much as it’s about me.
Maybe more.
What do you want?”
Mark considered his answer carefully.
He’d had years to think about this exact moment, running through a dozen different versions of how it might unfold, but somehow none of his careful planning made the actual question any easier to answer honestly.
Part of him, the calculating part that had built an underground game business and outmaneuvered a government surveillance program, understood the tactical value immediately.
A confirmed connection to Tony Stark would open doors no amount of self-built genius ever could on its own, resources, protection, a name that made people think twice before pushing too hard.
But another part of him, smaller, quieter, the part that had spent five years genuinely loving Rosalie as his mother and had, somewhere in the process, started thinking of Daphne as something like family too, felt a different kind of pull entirely.
Curiosity, maybe.
“I want to know too,” he said finally, honestly.
“Not because of the money, or because I need him for anything.
I’ve got Lumen Games doing fine on its own.” A small, wry smile.
“I just…
want to know.
And if he actually means what he wrote, that it’s on our terms, no lawyers, no threats, then I don’t think it costs us anything to find out.”
Rosalie studied him for a long moment, the particular searching look she still gave him sometimes, the one that seemed to wonder just how much of an ordinary child was actually looking back at her.
Then she nodded, slowly, some of the tension easing from her shoulders.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.
But if he tries anything, if there’s even a hint of another lawyer showing up at our door—”
“Then I’ll handle it,” Mark said, and meant it in ways his mother couldn’t fully appreciate.
“I promise, Mom.
Nobody pushes us around.
Not anymore.”
Rosalie managed a small, tired smile at that, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand.
“When did my baby get so grown up?”
*Longer ago than you know,* Mark thought, squeezing back.
“I had a good teacher,” he said instead, which wasn’t exactly a lie.
That night, once Rosalie had gone to bed, Mark sat at his computer, staring at a blank message window, Alice’s interface waiting patiently beside it.
“Alice, draft a response.
Professional, brief, addressed to whoever Tony’s assistant is.
Tell them we accept, and that we’d prefer the testing handled through a neutral third-party clinic, not anything connected to Stark Industries directly.”
“Drafting now.” A pause.
“May I ask how you’re feeling about this, Mark?”
He considered the question longer than he expected to.
“Cautiously curious,” he admitted finally.
“I’ve spent six years building a life that doesn’t depend on him.
I don’t need Tony Stark to be my father to be okay.
But I won’t pretend some part of me isn’t curious what he’s actually like, underneath all the tabloid noise and the legend.”
“A reasonable position,” Alice said.
“For what it’s worth, based on everything Jarvis inadvertently revealed during your prior encounter, he does not strike me as an entirely uncaring man.
Merely a complicated one.”
Mark huffed a small, quiet laugh.
“Aren’t we all.”
Outside, the California night sat calm and quiet over Clyme Street, and somewhere across the country, a billionaire lay awake in a Manhattan penthouse, staring at his own ceiling, wondering if he’d finally done something right, or simply opened a door he had no idea how to walk through.