“If it were him,” Leon said, dropping into a particular register — not quite Tony’s voice, but the shape of it, the specific cadence — “he’d say something like: Pepper, I have many habits.
Nostalgia is not one of them.
Do whatever you want with the thing — throw it at a wall, burn it, donate it to someone who’ll appreciate the metaphor.
I genuinely don’t care.”
Pepper’s composure lasted approximately two seconds before it didn’t.
She laughed the way she tried not to — short and involuntary, one hand coming up too late to cover it.
“That’s exactly what he’d say,” she managed.
“Down to the tone.” She looked at the arc reactor in her hands, still smiling.
“Where is he?”
“Sleeping.
He hadn’t slept in days, so I helped him along.” A small pause.
“Manually.”
Pepper’s face softened instantly, morphing from corporate anger to pure maternal panic.
“Leon, you did exactly the right thing.
Is he in the bedroom?”
“Second floor.”
“I’m going right now.” She was already moving, the reactor held carefully against her chest.
She paused at the lab door.
“You also need to sleep.
Look at yourself.”
“After I finish setting up.” He waved her off.
“Go.”
She gave him the look — the one that meant I believe you slightly less than I would like to — and disappeared into the corridor, her heels quick on the stairs.
Leon let out a long, careful breath.
“Resolved.”
“Master Leon,” JARVIS said, his voice carrying the careful precision of a machine touching an unstable surface, “was that entirely—which is to say, Mr.
Stark didn’t strictly authorize—”
“Jarvis.” Leon turned back to the workbench.
“If Tony had handled this himself, he would have given Pepper the arc reactor with some version of that exact speech.
Probably less poetic, more irritable.
You can run the simulation.”
A brief pause.
“Based on Mr.
Stark’s documented behavioral patterns,” JARVIS said, “the simulation produces a result 83% similar to your improvisation.”
“Right.
I beautified the process by seventeen percent.” Leon picked up his stylus.
“Pepper is happy.
Tony is happy without knowing why.
I have more uninterrupted hours to work.
This is what a good outcome looks like.”
“Mr.
Stark will likely be grateful when he learns of your involvement,” JARVIS observed.
“He’d better be.” Leon pulled up the first design file.
“Okay.
No more interruptions.
Let’s build something.”
Tony woke up at two in the afternoon feeling, obscurely, that something was different about the world.
Pepper had brought him coffee before he’d asked for it and called him sweet, which she almost never did, and had looked at him with the specific kind of softness that meant something had happened that Tony hadn’t caught up with yet.
JARVIS had asked him three times, unprompted, how he was feeling.
And Leon — the treacherous, weaselly, deeply ungrateful—
“He locked me out of my own lab,” Tony said, to no one.
Leon had apparently reprogrammed it.
He had, as far as Tony could tell, taken over the entire facility and sealed himself inside it like a very smug hermit crab in a stolen shell.
He can’t do it, Tony told himself, clinging to the idea with total, desperate confidence.
He knows he’s out of his depth.
He’s stalling by reading design notes, just waiting out the clock and hoping I forget the bet.
He allowed this interpretation to sharpen into motivation and walked down to the garage.
“U.
Let’s talk about what we’re going to do to—” He stopped.
The garage was empty of robotic arms.
All of them.
Every arm that had been mounted and operational in this facility — U, DUM-E, the smaller precision units — were gone.
The brackets where they’d been attached still held the mounting hardware.
The hardware was there.
The arms were not.
Tony stood in the center of his empty garage for a long moment.
He didn’t, Tony thought.
He absolutely did.
“I can’t believe it,” Tony said, at normal volume, to the empty space.
“He’s taken every single one.”
He went back upstairs.
He knocked on the lab door.
He said, through the door, “Leon.
Return my arms.
I need them to build the armor.
You have superpowers and you don’t need them, so this is pure spite.”
A pause from inside.
“I’m using them,” Leon’s voice said.
“You’re using all of them.”
“Yes.”
Tony pressed his forehead very briefly to the door, collected himself, and went back upstairs.
It was a beautiful day on the West Coast.
From the Stark estate, the Pacific stretched out in every direction, the light breaking across the water in long refractions that made the sea look like it was made of something more valuable than itself.
Sailboats moved in the middle distance.
The whole scene had the quality of a painting someone had commissioned to illustrate the concept of contentment.
Inside the mansion, the atmosphere was considerably more tactical.
Tony had eventually, via negotiation that required him to concede nothing he would admit to aloud, recovered U and DUM-E and completed the final integration work on the Mark II.
The suit was standing in the garage now, silver and new and extraordinary — the product of three days of Tony Stark working at the intersection of necessity and pride, which was historically where he did his best work.
He was sitting with it at the back of the garage, in a wide-brimmed hat he’d pulled low over his face, waiting.
From the garage entrance, light came in at an angle that cut the space cleanly in half: bright at the entrance, dark at the interior.
Two separate worlds, divided by a line on the floor.
Leon came in from outside.
The sun was behind him as he crossed the threshold.
He walked into the light-to-dark gradient without breaking stride, the ends of his hair catching the brightness for a moment before the shade took over — a frame of gold around someone who had, in the past three days, not slept, eaten a great deal, and apparently used the time well.
“I’m here,” Leon said.
Tony tilted the hat up slightly, examining him from underneath the brim with the concentrated attention he gave to engineering problems he was confident he’d already solved.
“I’ve been waiting,” Tony said.
“You’re going to lose.
You shouldn’t have come.”
Extreme Ways — the Moby track, the driving electronic urgency of it, the specific kind of music that suggested pursuit and inevitability and people running across rooftops with very high stakes — arrived at full volume from the speaker system, bouncing off concrete walls with an enthusiasm that the space enthusiastically amplified.
Tony was out of his chair before his brain had caught up with his legs.
He stood at his full height, heart rate meaningfully elevated, hat knocked sideways.
“JARVIS,” he said, when his voice was available again, “what is that.”
“Extreme Ways by Moby, Mr.
Stark.
The theme song from The Bourne Supremacy.
Master Leon requested it be queued at this moment.”
Tony looked at Leon.
Leon looked back with the composure and had planned this.
“This is an armor competition,” Tony said.
“It’s not a gunfight.
It’s not an espionage thriller.
I’m not Jason Bourne.
Why is there chase music.”
“Because,” Leon said, “you’re going to feel like you’re running from something very soon, and I wanted to give you appropriate atmosphere to process that.”
“If talking made you a winner,” Tony said, “the underground rap scene would run this country.”
“He’s bragging before he can see my armor,” Leon observed, to the room at large.
“Interesting behavior from someone who insisted he couldn’t lose.”
Tony looked pointedly around the garage.
There was no armor visible apart from the Mark II.
“Speaking of armor,” Tony said.
He opened his hands in a gesture of magnanimous inquiry.
“I don’t see yours.
I see you.
Standing there, in those pants, with no apparent armor.” He tilted his head.
“Leon.
As your older brother and the person who has always encouraged you to be honest with yourself and others — it’s all right if the project was harder than you anticipated.
I understand.
I will accept your apology and we can move forward as a family.”
“You’ll see it shortly.”
“Why not now?”
“International practice,” Leon said.
“Ladies first.”
The temperature of Tony’s expression dropped by several degrees.
“I’m sorry,” Tony said, very evenly, “I don’t recall teaching you to address a gentleman in that particular way.”
“You taught me ladies first at my graduation speech,” Leon said.
“You pulled me aside before I went on, and you said, and I’m quoting directly here: Leon, remember, ladies always go first.
And so I’ve been going first for the past year, and now you’re going first, and you’re welcome for the consistent application of your own lesson.”
Tony stared at him.
“That was an entirely different context.”
“It was educational instruction about social convention.
The context was the convention, not the ceremony.”
“You are using a year-old piece of advice about public speaking to call me—” Tony stopped.
Pressed three fingers to his temple.
“You cannot say this again.
It’s rude.”
Leon nodded seriously.
“Of course.
I’ll only say it to you.”
Tony turned around.