Leon had made it to the bottom of the stairs before he paused.
Tony stayed motionless in his chair, struck by the quiet realization that his dark suspicions were completely true.
His fighting spirit would return eventually.
Still, Leon felt that leaving the moment unaddressed would let it harden into something useless.
He turned around.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “the learning speed isn’t the same thing as creativity.”
Tony looked at him.
“What you built is a product of comprehensive mastery plus original thinking — every design decision is the best available application of the relevant knowledge, arrived at through your specific way of working through problems.” Leon came back to stand by the workbench.
“What I did last night was copy that.
Precisely and completely.
But the ideas were yours.
The innovations were yours.
I used your roadmap.”
“So what you’re saying,” Tony said slowly, “is that you downloaded my work.”
“I absorbed your work.
There’s a difference — I understand it now, not just memorized it.
But yes.
The architecture was yours.” He tilted his head.
“The super brain is extraordinary in processing and integration.
Innovation still requires talent, which is a different thing.
I have some of that.
I don’t know yet how it compares to yours.”
A beat.
“Also, in some DC continuity, a significant portion of Superman’s mental processing is dedicated to regulating his own powers — holding the strength in check, managing the sensory inputs.
A meaningful computational overhead.” Leon raised his index finger and thumb a centimeter apart.
“In my case, that overhead is very small.
I haven’t worked out why yet.
But it means the capacity is almost entirely available for other things.”
He looked at Tony with an expression that was the exact amount of challenging.
“So.
Your knowledge, my ideas, whatever innovation I’ve managed to develop in years of living with you.
Against your knowledge and your ideas and your three days.” He stepped back.
“Let’s find out which of those combinations produces better work.”
Tony stood.
The dark circles were still there.
The half-night in the chair had not helped.
But the look in his eyes had resolved from uncertain into something that was specifically Tony Stark facing a professional challenge he intended to win.
“A plagiarist,” he said, “has never surpassed the original.
Documented historical fact.
My masterpiece will not be the first exception.”
“The wisdom of mortals,” Leon said, and walked back to the stairs.
“See you soon, Tony.”
Behind him, he heard the sound of a stool being pulled up to the workbench.
Good.
He came back forty minutes later.
Tony was locked into his recalibration work, having entirely converted the competitive tension into raw, productive energy.
He didn’t even glance toward the door when Leon stepped into the workshop.
“Oh, by the way,” Leon said.
“You’ve been awake for over twenty hours and your fine motor control just slipped on that connector twice.
You need to sleep.”
“I’m fine,” Tony said, not looking up.
“You’re not fine.
“Rest for four hours.
You’ll work better after.”
“Leon, I am literally in the middle of—”
Leon placed two fingers against the side of Tony’s neck, found the right spot, and applied exactly the right pressure for exactly the right duration.
Tony went still mid-sentence.
The tool in his hand hit the workbench and rolled.
His head tilted forward.
Cheating, was Tony’s last coherent thought, somewhere in the long grey slide toward unconsciousness.
This is completely unsportsmanlike and I’m going to—
The thought dissolved.
“There we go,” Leon said.
He picked Tony up — not gently exactly, but competently — carried him upstairs, and deposited him on his bed with care.
“Look at that,” he said.
“Sleeping like a baby.”
“Master Leon,” JARVIS said, from the bedroom speaker, “Mr.
Stark may take issue with this approach when he wakes up.”
“He can take issue with being well-rested and at full mental capacity.
I’ll deal with the complaint then.” Leon straightened Tony’s position slightly.
“He’ll work better for it.”
He went back downstairs to the lab, switched on the power supplies at Tony’s workbench, and stood for a moment in the quiet of it.
“JARVIS.
Am I going to win this?”
“You seem confident,” JARVIS said, which was not an answer.
“I am.
Here’s why.” Leon pulled up a blank design file.
“Early-stage armor improvements are primarily functional — adding capabilities, refining interfaces, extending performance envelopes.
They don’t require breakthrough technology.
They require good ideas applied to existing foundations.”
And he had the ideas.
Not just the forty-odd suits from the MCU films — Tony’s full arc from cave prototype to nanoparticle systems, each iteration addressing the limitations of the one before it.
But also the comic continuity he’d read in his previous life: armor variants that the films had never adapted, design approaches that had been explored in print but never made it to screen.
A roadmap that covered multiple decades of innovation by a version of Tony Stark who had the luxury of time.
In his past life, those had been fantasy.
Here, they were a blueprint.
Tony would arrive at each of those designs eventually, following his own creative path.
Leon just knew where the path led.
Poor Tony, he thought, with genuine affection.
Always going to be one lap behind now.
He moved U and DUM-E into position and started drafting the first specs.
“Okay, U — put Tony’s arc reactor on the secure shelf for now.
I don’t want it getting mixed up with the working components.”
“Master Leon.” JARVIS’s tone had the specific note it used when it was about to relay something Leon wouldn’t find convenient.
“What?”
“Miss Potts has arrived.
She’s asking for you.”
“Tell her I’ll be available in three days.”
A pause.
“She’s already downstairs.”
Leon set down his stylus.
“Tell her Tony is upstairs, getting some well-earned rest—”
“I would suggest,” JARVIS said, gently, “that this particular conversation might benefit from a human presence.”
The door at the end of the lab — the transparent partition separating the workshop from the corridor — opened.
Pepper stood on the other side of the glass, locking onto her target with absolute intent.
She smacked her palm against the glass in a decidedly hostile greeting, punched in the door code, and marched right in.
“Good morning, Pepper,” Leon said.
“You didn’t come to the company yesterday, Leon.”
He had, in fact, completely forgotten about the company.
“Joe’s on-site,” he offered, desperately trying to sound like the voice of reason.
“He’s actually been running the whole show incredibly well—”
“Joe being there does not mean you can simply not show up at your own company.” She reached him, looked at him properly — the hair, the clothes, the unmistakable evidence of a sleepless night spent doing something mechanical — and her expression shifted from accusatory to suspicious.
“What have you been doing?
Your hair is—” she reached up and straightened it without asking.
“Oh God, Leon.
Did Tony—did he bring someone here and you—”
The implication was clear.
The temperature in her eyes had dropped several degrees.
“No,” Leon said, with considerable speed.
“No, nothing like that, Pepper, I promise you, that has never happened and is not going to happen.
My hair looks like this because I spent the last eighteen hours helping Tony build a flight propulsion system, which is a completely different activity.”
The temperature climbed back up, somewhat.
“You were supposed to be getting him out of the lab.”
“That was my original intention, yes.” He paused, editing the narrative slightly.
“He was very persuasive.
The project required my participation.”
Pepper looked at him with the expression she reserved for situations where she knew she was being managed and was deciding whether to accept it or not.
Leon’s eye fell on the arc reactor sitting on the secure shelf where U had just placed it.
He had an idea.
He took three steps, picked up the reactor — the first one, the cave-built prototype, the Mark I — and turned back.
“Tony wanted me to give you something,” he said.
Pepper’s expression adjusted from exasperated to curious.
“What?”
Leon held out the reactor.
“He built this in a cave, under duress, with whatever components he could salvage,” Leon said.
“It’s a cold fusion arc reactor — the world’s first small-scale implementation of the design.
It was what kept him alive in there.” He placed it in her hands before she could decide whether to take it.
“When he got back and had it replaced with the upgraded version, he said he wanted you to have it.”
Pepper looked at the arc reactor.
Looked at Leon.
“He’s been working toward making Stark Industries something different,” Leon continued, which was true.
“Something that actually benefits the world instead of—” he gestured vaguely at the concept of weapons.
“This is the technology he wants to build the future around.
And the first one belongs to you.”
He kept his expression neutral.
“You know how he is,” Leon said.
“He could live to a hundred and thirty and still not find a comfortable way to say the things he actually means.
So he asked me to give it to you, because he—” he tilted his head, “—because he couldn’t.”
Pepper hadn’t spoken for a while.
Her hands were cupped around the arc reactor carefully, like something that might break.
Her mouth had done something that wasn’t quite smiling and wasn’t quite the precursor to crying, but was in the territory between the two.
“He,” she started.
Stopped.
“He really wanted you to have it,” Leon confirmed.
She looked at the reactor for a long moment.
A faint blue pulse in her hands.
“He really gave this to me?” she said, very quietly.
“He did,” Leon said, which was — in the way that mattered most — entirely true.
Pepper covered her mouth with one hand and said nothing at all.