Pepper arrived within the hour, Rhodey trailing in twenty minutes behind her, both of them finding Tony exactly where Jarvis’s summons had implied they would: sitting in the dark, the report still glowing on the wall screen, a glass of scotch untouched on the table beside him.
“You didn’t drink it,” Pepper observed, settling into the chair across from him, more relieved than she let on.
“Didn’t feel like the moment for it.” Tony gestured vaguely at the screen.
“Ninety-nine point nine seven percent.
Apparently statistics finally decided to stop being polite about it.”
Rhodey whistled low, reading the number over Pepper’s shoulder.
“Well.
Congratulations, I guess.
Or condolences.
Not entirely sure which applies here.”
“Neither am I.” Tony rubbed at his eyes, looking, Pepper thought, more tired than she’d seen him in months.
“I keep running the numbers like there’s some version of this where I get to stay uninvolved with a clear conscience.
There isn’t one.
I checked.”
“Good,” Pepper said simply.
“Because there shouldn’t be.”
Tony shot her a look, not quite annoyed, more like a man bracing for a lecture he knew he deserved.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do next,” she continued, before he could work up a defense.
“But I will tell you that stalling now, after going this far, is worse than never having sent that letter in the first place.
Rosalie and that boy know the truth now.
Every day you don’t do anything with it is a day you’re actively choosing silence, not just failing to choose otherwise.”
“What exactly am I supposed to do, Pep?
Fly out there, knock on the door, say ‘hi, I’m your father, sorry about literally everything’?
I don’t have a manual for this.
Howard sure as hell never wrote one, unless you count the home movies he left instead of actually showing up.”
“You don’t need a manual,” Rhodey cut in, settling onto the arm of the couch.
“You need to stop treating this like a PR problem you can strategize your way through and just, I don’t know, be a person about it.
Call the kid.
Not the lawyers, not Jarvis running background checks.
Call him.”
Tony stared at the two of them for a long moment, something vulnerable flickering across his face before he buried it, the way he buried most things, under a thin veneer of deflection.
“What if he hates me?”
The question came out quieter than he intended, and both Pepper and Rhodey seemed to recognize it for what it was, not a rhetorical objection but a genuine fear, one Tony Stark rarely allowed himself to voice out loud.
“Then he hates you,” Pepper said gently.
“And you deal with that, the same way you deal with everything else, by showing up anyway and giving him the chance to change his mind eventually.
But Tony, from what Jarvis has told us, this isn’t some ordinary kid nursing a grudge.
He sounds remarkably level-headed for five years old.
Give him, and yourself, the chance to find out.”
It took Tony another two days to actually work up to it, two days of drafting talking points he kept deleting, of nearly picking up the phone a dozen times and setting it back down.
In the end, it was Jarvis who finally forced the issue.
“Sir, Ms.
Reyes has confirmed Rosalie and Mark are amenable to a phone call this evening, should you wish to proceed.
I took the liberty of arranging it, given your evident difficulty committing to a specific time.”
“I scheduled it because you would have continued not asking yourself for another several weeks, sir.
I judged intervention necessary.”
Tony almost laughed, despite himself.
“You’re getting mouthy in your old age, Jarvis.”
“I prefer ‘appropriately assertive,’ sir.
The call is in ten minutes.”
Which left Tony precisely ten minutes to panic properly, pacing the length of his workshop with a restless energy that hadn’t shown up in his hands like this since the early, uncertain days of the arc reactor project.
In Los Angeles, the phone rang at exactly seven in the evening, and Rosalie, who’d been hovering near it for the better part of an hour under the thin pretense of tidying the living room, snatched it up before the second ring finished.
“Hello?”
“Ms.
Payne.
It’s Tony Stark.”
A pause, brief but heavy, on both ends of the line.
“Mr.
Stark.” Rosalie’s voice carried a careful, measured neutrality that Mark, watching from the kitchen doorway, recognized as considerable effort.
“I appreciate the call.”
“I imagine ‘appreciate’ is doing some generous work in that sentence, given the history, but I’ll take it.” A rough exhale carried down the line, audible even from where Mark stood.
“I got the results.
I wanted to say, first, that I’m sorry.
Not the kind of sorry that fixes six years, I know that’s not how this works.
But I am.”
Rosalie’s grip tightened slightly on the receiver.
“You could have just said that in a letter.”
“Probably.
But some things are worth saying out loud, even badly.” Another pause.
“Is he there?
Mark, I mean.
I’d like to talk to him, if that’s alright with you.”
Rosalie glanced toward the doorway, where Mark had already crossed halfway into the room, some instinct telling him exactly what was being asked.
She held the phone out, one eyebrow raised in silent question, and Mark nodded, taking it with a hand that felt, for once, genuinely uncertain despite everything.
“Hello.”
There was a longer pause on the other end than he expected, long enough that Mark almost wondered if the line had dropped.
“Hey, kid.” Tony’s voice, when it came, carried none of the polished confidence Mark had expected from a lifetime of tabloid coverage and press conference footage.
It sounded, instead, oddly unsure of itself, a man clearly working without a script.
“This is, uh.
This is weird for both of us, I’m guessing.”
“A little,” Mark admitted, deciding honesty was probably the more useful approach than performance, at least for now.
“I’ve had longer to get used to the idea than you have, though.
Mom told me stories about you when I was younger.”
“None of them flattering, I’m guessing.”
“Some of them,” Mark allowed, a small, genuine smile tugging at his mouth despite himself.
“Though I heard you’ve got an AI that thinks pretty highly of me.”
A surprised laugh cracked through the line, sharp and real.
“Jarvis has better things to do than gossip about you to me, allegedly.
Though apparently he’s been keeping tabs since you gave him a run for his money on that CAA business.
That was, for the record, an incredibly reckless thing to do.”
“That’s not the same as it being smart.” But there was no real heat behind it, more amusement than reprimand.
“I’ve read the browser history.
Advanced mathematics, quantum mechanics, cryptography, self-taught, apparently, before you’d even lost your baby teeth.
That’s, I’ll admit, more than a little unnerving to process.”
“I could say the same thing about you and circuit boards at four.”
Another laugh, warmer this time.
“Fair.
Definitely fair.” A pause, and when Tony spoke again, some of the practiced ease had drained back out of his voice, replaced by something more careful.
“Look, kid, I’m not going to pretend I know how this is supposed to go.
I’ve got zero experience being anyone’s father, and frankly the example I grew up with wasn’t exactly a template worth copying.
But I’d like to try, if you’re willing.
Not overnight, not some big dramatic reunion.
Just, I don’t know.
Talking.
Getting to know each other.
However that ends up looking.”
Mark considered the offer, turning it over with the same careful weighing he applied to everything, though this particular calculation resisted easy resolution in a way most problems didn’t.
“I’d like that,” he said finally, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he meant it without reservation.
“Slow is fine.
I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good.” Something in Tony’s voice loosened, audibly, at that.
“Good.
I’ll, uh.
I’ll call again.
Soon, not just whenever guilt gets loud enough to make me pick up the phone.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
“I’d expect nothing less from a kid who apparently out-hacked my own AI.” A beat.
“Goodnight, Mark.”
“Goodnight, Mr.
Stark.”
“Tony’s fine.
Whenever you’re ready for that, anyway.”
The line went quiet, and Mark stood there a moment longer, phone still in hand, processing something that felt strange and unfamiliar, a small, tentative warmth he hadn’t expected and didn’t entirely know what to do with.
Rosalie watched him from across the room, her own expression a complicated mixture of hope and old, half-healed hurt.
“Well?” she asked softly.
“He wants to try,” Mark said, setting the phone down carefully.
“Slowly.
No promises about anything bigger than that yet.”
Rosalie nodded slowly, something in her posture easing for the first time in longer than Mark could easily remember.
“That’s more than I ever thought we’d get,” she admitted.
“I suppose that’s a start.”
*A start,* Mark thought, echoing the word Pepper had used weeks earlier without ever knowing it.
*Funny how that word keeps showing up lately.*
Outside, the last of the evening light faded from the sky over Clyme Street, and somewhere across the country, a billionaire sat alone in his workshop, staring at a phone he’d finally managed to use for something other than business, feeling, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, cautiously, uncertainly, something that might have been the beginning of hope.