Pepper sat in the leather seat of the private jet with a file open on her lap, feeling that the last four hours had started conspiring against her personally.
The men around her had introduced themselves as agents, kept their jackets on, and spoke with the clipped caution of people who believed too much detail made life untidy. She was worried about Tony. He was not answering her calls. Which might be because he was in his workshop again. Still, she wanted to warn him about the armour Stane had built and about her attempt to seize it, and she did not have the luxury of interrogating every badge in the room while the company rotted from the top down.
Pepper tried Tony again.
No answer.
She lowered the handset and looked out through the oval window at the clouds sliding past below. Around an hour was left before they reached California.
The senior man opposite her noticed the movement.
"No contact yet?"
Pepper shook her head.
"Not yet."
He gave a neutral nod that was meant to look reassuring and only made her like him less.
"We'll be on the ground soon."
Pepper closed the file.
"Then let's hope soon is good enough."
--
At Tony's Malibu house, Obadiah Stane stood with a glass in hand.
Tony had been talking about the board. Their audacity and irrelevant doubts. Their unhappiness with his press conference and his habit of blowing holes through the company's old habits with public statements and private obsession.
Stane had nodded in all the right places.
He had even made the right sounds.
This would be the last time he put on the old mentor routine. It was amazing how far men could go with a sympathetic expression and a decision already made.
Tony sat on the big sofa, one hand near the arc reactor in his chest without realising it, the other reaching for the phone as it began to vibrate.
Pepper.
He looked down at the name.
Stane moved.
The earplugs were already in. He had put them in while crossing to the bar with a muttered excuse about refilling the drink. The sonic paralysing device sat ready in his palm by the time he came round the back of the sofa.
Tony had just started to turn when the sharp buzzing burst hit beside his ear.
His body locked.
The phone slipped from his fingers and hit the floor.
He stayed upright for half a second longer, then dropped back into the cushions, conscious but unable to command anything below his eyes.
Stane stood over him and exhaled slowly through his nose.
"There we are."
Tony's eyes tracked him with violent clarity.
Stane crouched, set the drink aside, and studied him with the disappointment of a man forced to dismantle his own investment.
"Breathe. You can still do that. I'd suggest treasuring it."
He held up the device lightly.
"The government made a mistake by not taking these little toys. Their loss, really. It's elegant in a nasty little way."
Tony tried to speak and managed only the smallest strain of sound.
Stane came around the sofa and lowered himself into Tony's line of sight.
"You know what the real tragedy is?" He gave a small, humourless smile. "You had the whole kingdom handed to you, Tony. Everything, the company, the name, the future, and the brains to deserve it. All you had to do was not tear the machine apart in public because you suddenly found a conscience in a cave."
Stane looked down at the arc reactor glowing through the shirt.
"That," he said quietly, "is the last golden egg. The rest of you has become expensive scenery."
He took out the extraction tool.
Tony's eyes widened, and Stane almost pitied him for the length of a breath.
Almost.
"Easy," he murmured. "It'll be over quickly."
He opened Tony's shirt, pressed the device in place, and began the work.
-
Floating near the mansion under invisibility, Lucius had reached the most irritating stage of anticipation.
Boredom.
Pepper's message had arrived hours ago. He had dressed for the occasion in one of the new tailored suits Coulson's diplomacy had bought him after Natasha ruined the first one. Navy blue, with a beige waistcoat and clean Italian lines, expensive cloth, and enough quiet quality to remind him that extortion occasionally produced useful side effects.
Then he had waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
He floated while Stane and Tony were having one drink after another.
"The bald traitor is catastrophically inefficient," he muttered. "Two out of ten. I'd complain to management if I weren't part of it."
He started to rise and get down while waiting.
"Why would you chat up your intended victim this much?"
No one answered, so he did it himself.
"Exactly."
The whole Pizzazotti operation had taken minutes, with quick work and clean execution.
"You do not wine and dine your people you are about to murder. You do not brood at them or take breaks to hear yourself talk. You are not trying to fuck them, so hurry and get on with it."
He went still.
Then his expression changed.
There, finally.
Through the reach of his telepathy, he caught the spike in Stane's intent, the ugly bright little knot of triumph, and then the clean shift in Tony's condition when the reactor came out.
Lucius nearly applauded.
"At last."
He waited another minute. If he arrived too early, it would not be dramatic enough. Too late, and Tony would be in a medically inconvenient position.
Then he teleported to the road below the Malibu estate and broke into a run the moment his shoes hit the ground.
By the time he reached the front door, he was pounding on it with convincing urgency.
"JARVIS!"
Inside, the system already knew exactly who it was.
Tony lay slumped on the sofa with the paralysis fading by degrees and the cold hollow absence in his chest turning every second into a worse argument with his own body.
JARVIS opened the door.
Lucius came in fast, crossed the room, and took in the scene at once. Tony was on the sofa, shirt ripped where the reactor was, and Stane was gone.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a Light Healing Potion as if it had been waiting in the inner pocket all along.
"Oh no," he said with all the performance the moment deserved. "Tony, your chest. Where is the reactor?"
Tony's eyes rolled towards him with strained disbelief.
Lucius uncorked the vial and held it to his mouth.
"Drink."
Tony swallowed what he could. The potion went down, and some colour returned almost at once.
Lucius produced a second vial and fed it to him.
"Again."
Tony's fingers were starting to obey him now. He drank and dragged in a harder breath.
"It was Stane." The words came out weak. "My old reactor is in New York, in Pepper's office."
Lucius stopped dead.
"Why the fuck is it in New York?"
Tony swallowed and tried for dignity while flat on a sofa and half dying.
"Pepper was going to leave it here. It reminded me of the cave. I didn't want it around. So I told her to take it."
Lucius's eye twitched.
"All this drama," he muttered, "and the damn thing isn't even here."
Tony let his head sink back.
"At most, I've got minutes." He looked at Lucius with the tired solemnity of a man preparing to die in a mansion he technically owned. "It was nice knowing you, Lucius."
"Do me a favour," Lucius snapped. "Shut your mouth and close your eyes."
Tony barely had time to register the hand on his shoulder before the room vanished.
They reappeared in Stark Tower hard enough to make Tony suck in a shocked breath.
Pepper's office was empty.
The old arc reactor sat on her desk inside the circular display frame.
PROOF THAT TONY STARK HAS A HEART.
Lucius looked at it and sighed.
"How sentimental."
Tony, pale and half propped against the desk by telekinetic support, managed the faintest grimace.
"Yeah."
Lucius levitated the old reactor into place. He had no intention of inserting his hand into another man's chest, or any other orifice for that matter. Some boundaries existed because civilisation had to start somewhere. He would not do it even for a bombshell. Fisting was wrong.
Metal clicked against mountings. The arc reactor seated. The connection took. The light came on.
Tony sucked in a full breath and stayed with it.
A second later, Lucius's hand was back on his shoulder, and the office dissolved around them.
They returned to Malibu.
Tony landed back on the sofa with the old reactor glowing in his chest and enough life in him now to look offended instead of terminal.
Lucius stepped back, took out the Nokia, and held it up.
"Now we begin again. I received Pepper's message." He showed Tony the screen. "I rushed here after that."
Tony looked at the phone. Then at Lucius. Then at the room around them.
"Fruit wizard," he said flatly, "you can teleport."
Lucius drew himself up in theatrical offence.
"Do you think I travel through teleportation for leisure, you smart aleck? It drains absurd amounts of my stamina." He stabbed a finger at Tony's chest. "Look at this. Save a fellow's life, and the first thing he offers me is wit."
There were no genuinely ruffled feathers anywhere in him, but Tony did not need to know that.
Tony raised both hands a little.
"All right. Thank you. That should have been first." He sat up slowly, testing the strength coming back into his body. "Now we've got a bigger problem."
Lucius clicked his tongue.
"Oh? You mean 'you' have a bigger problem." He folded his arms. "I don't recall Stane coming after my chastity. He didn't screw me, now did he?"
Tony's face soured at once.
"First of all, he did not screw me in any form or shape. It was a tool."
Lucius nodded gravely.
"So is a dildo. The distinction matters less when someone has already had something inserted in you, Tony."
Tony stared at him.
For one second, the room held perfect silence.
Then Tony looked away with the hollow, exhausted stare of a man who had nearly been murdered, had his heart battery stolen, been teleported across the country twice, and still found himself losing ground in an argument about a bald old bitch and the meaning of 'screwing'.
"You are an unbelievable person."
"I know, thank you." Lucius's smile came back.