We had eleven minutes before the press conference, which Pepper used with the ruthless efficiency of someone who'd once turned a canceled flight into a three-city PR tour on the strength of pure spite and a laptop.
"Sit," she said, steering me into a side office off the lobby, already pulling a folder from her bag like a magician producing a rabbit. "Final pass. You're not going to remember all of this, but some of it will surface at the right moment if we drill it now."
"I remember everything," I said. "It's kind of my whole thing."
"Humor me. It's not about memory, it's about instinct — knowing which true thing to say without having to think about it first." She flipped the folder open. "If they ask about your abilities, you deflect to 'documented, verified, not up for discussion' and let Tony fill in specifics if he wants to. If they ask about your feelings toward Tony, you tell the truth, but the small version, not the whole version. Nobody in that room deserves the whole version. That's not theirs to have."
"And if they ask something that actually catches me off guard?"
"Then you look human for a second, and that's fine. Better than fine, honestly — it reminds them you're sixteen and not a press release with a haircut." She closed the folder, studying me for a beat longer than necessary. "You're going to be good at this. I can already tell. It worries me a little, how good you're going to be at this."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation." But she smiled when she said it, and squeezed my shoulder once on her way to the door. "Come on. Let's go feed you to the wolves."
STARK INDUSTRIES — MAIN LOBBY — 11:28 AM
The press conference was staged in the main lobby, all soaring ceilings and the Stark Industries logo mounted behind the podium like a coat of arms. Twenty-odd reporters sat in neat rows, cameras primed, notebooks flipped open, radiating the low hum of predators who'd already decided what story they wanted and were just waiting for someone to hand it to them.
I recognized a few faces from a life I technically hadn't lived yet — younger versions of names I'd have known from a hundred late-night documentary binges, all of them looking hungrier and considerably less cynical than history would eventually make them. It was a strange kind of vertigo, standing in a room full of people who thought they were watching the beginning of something, when I already knew, with a certainty none of them could touch, exactly how big that something was going to get.
Pepper did one final pass on my appearance — straightened my tie, smoothed a piece of hair that had apparently developed opinions of its own — and gave me a nod that was somehow both encouraging and a direct order.
"Remember. Short answers, real emotion, don't take the bait." She smiled, quick and warm. "You've got this."
"What if I don't?"
"Then you don't, and people forgive a sixteen-year-old for being nervous at his first press conference." Her smile widened. "Just be yourself. That's the whole assignment."
Tony was already at the podium, completely at home under the lights in the way only a man who genuinely believed the room existed to look at him could be.
"Morning," he said, and the room fell quiet like someone had hit mute. "Thanks for coming. As most of you already know, this week I found out I have a son. Anthony Castellanos Junior — Ace — who's been living in Boston his whole life until now. His mother, Elena Castellanos, passed away recently. Cancer. She and I dated, briefly, back at MIT, and she made the call to raise him alone without telling me. I wish she hadn't had to make that call by herself. I respect why she did."
He waved me forward. I crossed to the podium, painfully aware of every lens tracking the movement, every eye in the room cataloging me the way I usually catalog other people.
"This is Ace," Tony continued. "Sixteen. Brilliant. Unfortunately, stuck with me for a father. He's staying with me in Malibu while we figure out the logistics — school, guardianship, all the paperwork that comes with a family showing up overnight."
He looked at me, and for a second the performance dropped away entirely. Just Tony. Just my dad.
"I'm proud to introduce him."
I stepped up to the mic. The prepared statement I'd memorized suddenly felt small in a way it hadn't in the mirror that morning.
"Thank you all for coming," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected. "This week's been the hardest of my life. It's also been the start of something I never saw coming. I'm grateful to have found my father. Grateful for the support we've gotten. And I'm looking forward to learning about the Stark legacy — both the company, and the family."
I paused, scanning the room. Some sympathetic faces. Some already composing headlines behind their eyes.
"I hope you'll give us some room to figure this out. And I know my mom would be proud to see me standing here. Thank you."
Short. Honest. Done.
The questions hit before I'd finished exhaling. Tony pointed to a woman in the front row.
"Ace, how does it feel, finding out Tony Stark is your father?"
"Overwhelming," I said. "Good overwhelming, mostly. I went from a normal kid in Boston to Tony Stark's son inside of a week. That's — that's a lot of overwhelming for one calendar page."
A ripple of laughter. Small mercies.
Next question, male reporter, second row: "What are your plans regarding Stark Industries?"
"Right now, learning. I toured R&D this morning — saw some genuinely incredible work. Maybe someday I'll work here for real. But I'm sixteen. I've got a diploma to finish first."
"Will you attend MIT, like your father?"
"Possibly. I like engineering, I like computer science, so it tracks. But that's years away — ask me again once I've survived my SATs."
A reporter near the back, older, kinder-looking than most of the room, raised her hand next. "Ace, what was your mother like?"
The question landed differently than the others — quieter, less angled for a headline. I let myself actually answer it instead of managing it.
"She was a doctor. Boston General, internal medicine. She worked long hours and still made time to help me build my first computer when I was nine, mostly by handing me a soldering iron and saying 'don't burn the apartment down' and then trusting me not to." A few soft laughs, genuine ones. "She was funny in a dry way most people didn't catch right away. She loved AC/DC, which never made sense to me until I got older. And she never once made me feel like I was too much — too smart, too weird, too anything. She just kept up." My throat tightened, unplanned. "I miss her every day. That part hasn't changed just because everything else has."
The room went quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when a joke would be the wrong thing to say next. Tony's hand found my shoulder again, brief and steady.
Then came the TMZ reporter, front-loaded posture, the specific lean of someone who'd come to swing.
"Some people are saying your mother waited until she was dying to file the paternity claim purely for financial reasons. How do you respond to allegations that this is about money?"
I felt Tony go rigid beside me, ready to step in, and I spoke first.
"My mother was a remarkable woman who made hard decisions she believed were right, and I'm not going to explain her choices to people who never met her." I held the reporter's eyes, steady. "Next question."
The dignified shutdown landed exactly the way Pepper had promised. The TMZ guy actually looked chastened, and a couple of other reporters gave the smallest, most involuntary nods of approval.
"Ace, any interest in following your father's footsteps as Iron Man?"
There it was. The dangerous one. I kept my answer flat and careful.
"I'm proud of my father for protecting people the way he chooses to. How he does that is his call. Right now I'm focused on the tech, on learning from him. What I do with any of that, down the line — we'll see."
"Follow-up," the same reporter called before Tony could point elsewhere. "Would you want that? Someday?"
I considered lying. Decided against it, mostly because I was fairly sure my face would give me away before my mouth caught up. "I don't know yet. Honestly? A week ago I didn't know my dad, let alone what it means to be Iron Man's kid. Ask me something I've actually had time to think about."
That got a real laugh from the room, the first one that felt less like theater and more like people actually liking me, which was a strange, warm feeling I hadn't expected to get from twenty strangers with cameras.
"Tony, how has fatherhood changed your priorities?"
Tony took that one, easy. "Made me think about legacy differently. Not just the company — what kind of world I'm handing off. Ace is smart, genuinely, alarmingly smart, and I want him to have the room to use that for something good. Which means Stark Industries has to actually be a force for good, not just a very profitable one."
"Is it true Ace has genetic enhancements tied to a government super-soldier program?"
Tony and I traded a glance. We'd both known this one was coming.
"Ace's mother's family carries some interesting history," Tony confirmed. "1940s-era genetic research — cognitive enhancement instead of physical, unlike Rogers. It's documented, verified, stable. My son is exceptionally smart. He's not a science experiment, and he's not a threat. He's my kid."
"Are there security concerns? Could someone target him because of what he can do?"
"Security concerns are why we have security," Tony said, and the temperature dropped a few degrees. "Ace is protected. Anyone who tries to exploit or hurt my son is going to regret it. Extensively."
The edge in his voice landed like a dropped plate. A couple of reporters actually leaned back an inch.
A few more questions — hobbies (computers, martial arts, both true, both incomplete), my relationship with Tony (developing, positive, also true, also incomplete), plans for the future (uncertain but optimistic, the world's most honest non-answer). I kept everything short and personable, the way Pepper had drilled into me over a very intense hour the day before.
Finally, Pepper stepped forward, tablet in hand, the picture of gracious finality. "That's all the time we have this morning. Thank you all for coming — Stark Industries will release a full statement later today."
Reporters shouted follow-ups anyway, because that's what reporters do, but security was already ushering them toward the doors with the practiced firmness of people who did this every single week. Tony's hand landed on my shoulder, steering me away from the podium.
"You did great," he said, low, just for me. "Really great. That TMZ shutdown was surgical."
"I wanted to say something much less polite."
"I know. Not saying it took actual discipline." He guided me toward a private elevator. "Now for the part I've genuinely been dreading since we decided on this. Howard's office."
We stepped inside. Tony pressed the button for the sub-basement — archives — and the doors slid shut on the noise of the lobby.
Where Howard Stark's legacy was waiting.
And, if I was right about the thing I couldn't say out loud, where we'd find the answer that would keep Tony alive.
---
STARK INDUSTRIES — ARCHIVES — 12:17 PM
The sub-basement was climate-controlled and unnervingly quiet, rows of filing cabinets stretching off into the kind of shadow that made you lower your voice without meaning to. Everything was arranged with the obsessive precision of a man whose paranoia had, apparently, extended all the way down to his record-keeping.
"This way," Tony said, walking past decades of corporate history like he was trying to outpace a memory. "Howard's office is preserved exactly the way he left it. The board wanted to turn it into some kind of shrine. I vetoed it. It's storage now. That's all it gets to be."
We reached a door marked H. STARK — PRIVATE. Tony's hand stopped on the handle.
"Haven't been in here since he died," he said, quiet. "Twenty years of finding creative reasons to avoid this specific hallway."
"We can do this another time."
"No." He exhaled through his nose. "You were right. If Howard left anything worth having, it's behind this door." He turned the handle and pushed it open.
The office was a time capsule — 1970s furniture, papers yellowed to the color of weak tea, a half-finished glass of something amber still sitting on a coaster like Howard might wander back in any minute to finish it. The air smelled like dust and old paper and something else, something almost electric, the ghost of a man who'd never once stopped thinking.
The walls were covered — blueprints, photographs, equations scrawled in a cramped, urgent hand. Howard Stark's mind, pinned to plaster.
Tony moved through the room slowly, taking it in, and I watched something complicated cross his face — grief, resentment, curiosity, anger, all knotted together so tightly there wasn't a clean line between any of them.
"He was obsessed," Tony said, gesturing at the walls. "Look at this. Arc reactor concepts. Shield composition analysis. Theoretical physics that was decades ahead of anything published." He stopped in front of a photo of Howard and a very young Steve Rogers, both grinning, both alive in a way that felt strange to look at now. "He spent more hours thinking about Steve than he ever spent thinking about me."
I didn't have anything to say to that. Sixteen years with Mom hadn't prepared me for this particular flavor of grief — the kind that comes from a parent who was right there, physically, and still somehow absent the whole time.
I thought about Mom's box, still sitting on my desk two floors up — photographs and ticket stubs and a dried rose pressed flat between wax paper, a whole relationship compressed into a shoebox because that was all the space it had ever been allowed to take up. Howard's office was the opposite. Sprawling. Loud. A man who'd had every resource in the world to be present and had spent it all on being brilliant instead. Two different kinds of absence, wearing two very different outfits.
I didn't say any of that out loud. Some things you just carry.
So I focused on the job. Finding the element.
My eyes swept the walls, hunting for anything relevant among the blueprints and theory sketches — most of it beyond even my patience, dense equations that would've taken a normal person a decade to untangle. Even with everything Stan had handed me, some of Howard's notation was its own private language, a man thinking so far ahead of his contemporaries that he'd apparently stopped bothering to make himself legible to anyone else.
I catalogued as I went, half out of habit and half because it gave my hands something to do besides fidget. A blueprint for an early repulsor variant, scrapped, three different failed attempts at reactor shielding stacked in a folder marked simply NO in Howard's cramped handwriting. A sealed envelope addressed to nobody, which I very deliberately did not open, because some things belonged to Tony alone to decide about, and I already knew enough about being handed a dead parent's unfinished business to respect the weight of it.
Tony drifted through the room behind me, picking things up and setting them down again like he couldn't quite commit to touching any of it for more than a few seconds. I caught him pause in front of a drafting table, fingers hovering an inch above a half-finished sketch of what might have been an early arc reactor housing, before he pulled his hand back like the paper had gotten hot.
"You okay?" I asked.
"Fantastic," he said, in the specific tone that meant the opposite. "Just realizing my father designed better shielding at fifty than I managed at thirty-eight, and he did it with a slide rule and a grudge. Bit of an ego hit, is all."
"He also poisoned himself trying to weaponize everything he touched and left you to clean up the emotional wreckage alone," I offered. "So. Different scoreboards."
That got an actual laugh out of him, short and surprised. "You're going to be terrifyingly good at therapy someday. Or terrifyingly good at avoiding it entirely. Jury's still out."
"Family trait, probably."
And then I saw it.
Tucked on a shelf in the corner, half-buried behind a stack of filing boxes: a model. The 1974 Stark Expo, painstakingly recreated in miniature, tiny buildings and pathways arranged around a central pavilion like a snow globe nobody had ever bothered to shake.
"Tony." I pointed. "What's that?"
He followed my finger. "The Expo model. Howard was obsessed with it — thought it represented the future, or something equally dramatic." He crossed the room and lifted it carefully, cradling it like it might bite him. "He kept it in his main office for years. No idea why it ended up down here."
I let my technomantic sense reach toward it, and felt — not technology, exactly. Something underneath technology. Structure. Pattern. Design with a second, hidden layer humming beneath the obvious one.
"Look at it closely," I said. "Really look at the layout."
Tony set it on the desk, turning it under the light. "It's just the Expo grounds. Central pavilion, buildings arranged in a —" He stopped cold.
His fingers traced the layout, and I watched recognition break across his face in real time, like a wave finally reaching shore.
"The spacing," he said slowly. "The proportions. The way these pavilions ring the center —" He pulled his phone out, called up a periodic table with shaking hands. "This isn't an Expo layout. This is a *structural diagram*."
"An atomic structure," I said. "The buildings are protons and neutrons. The walkways are electron orbital paths."
Tony was already running calculations under his breath, mind sprinting somewhere I couldn't quite follow even with everything Stan had given me. "If this is accurate — if Howard actually encoded a real elemental structure into a scale model of a World's Fair —" He looked up, eyes bright with something that hadn't been there ten minutes ago. "He was handing me the blueprint for a new element. One that doesn't exist anywhere on the chart. One that could replace palladium."
"Can you synthesize it?"
"Not here. I'd need a particle accelerator, specialized equipment, my own workshop." He held the model like it was made of glass and hope in equal parts. "But yes. If this is what I think it is, I can build an element nobody's ever named. One that won't be quietly killing me while it keeps me alive."
He looked at the model, then at Howard's photograph on the wall, still grinning at a version of the world that no longer existed.
"Twenty years," Tony said quietly. "He left this for me twenty years ago, and I was too busy being angry to see it."
"You're seeing it now," I said. "That's the part that counts."
Tony packed the model into a protective case he found in the bottom drawer of Howard's desk, hands careful in a way I hadn't seen from him yet — no showmanship, no jokes, just a man handling something fragile that mattered more than he wanted to admit out loud. Then he stood in the middle of the office one more time, looking at all his father's unfinished thinking pinned to the walls.
"I'm still angry at him," he said. "For the missed birthdays. For caring more about his work than his kid. For being a brilliant, absent asshole who never figured out how to actually say anything that mattered." He paused, jaw tight. "But he left me this. Even if he couldn't say it while he was alive — he wanted me to survive."
I thought about all the versions of Howard Stark I'd absorbed in my old life — the cold genius from the documentaries, the tragic figure from the flashbacks, the man reduced to a handful of scenes because the story had never really been about him. None of that had prepared me for standing in the actual room where he'd spent his actual life, surrounded by actual proof that his mind had never once stopped running, even when nobody was around to see it. There was something almost unbearably sad about that — genius with nowhere to go, love with no working translation.
"He loved you," I said quietly. "He just never learned the language for it."
"Yeah." Tony's voice had gone rough around the edges. "I'm not making that mistake with you, Ace. Whatever else I screw up — and I will screw plenty up, statistically — I'm going to make sure you always know I'm proud of you. That I love you. That you matter more than anything I'm building in that workshop."
Something in my chest tightened, sharp and warm at once.
"I know," I said. "You already do."
We stood there for a second, father and son, surrounded by one man's unfinished legacy and the early blueprints of another.
Then Tony's phone buzzed — Pepper, probably, checking if the archive deep-dive had turned into an accidental hostage situation.
"Come on." Tony headed for the door, case tucked carefully under one arm. "Let's go home. I've got a brand-new element to synthesize and a son who apparently needs a crash course in particle physics."
"You're actually going to build it? From Howard's design?"
"*We're* going to build it," he corrected, already moving. "You found the pattern, Ace. You saw what I couldn't see standing two feet from it for twenty years. This one's ours."
He paused at the door, glancing back once at Howard's office, at the walls full of a dead man's half-finished thoughts.
"Thanks, Dad," he said quietly. "For finally giving me something I could actually use."
Then we left, the Expo model secured under his arm like something newly precious, and the answer to a slow-motion poisoning finally, improbably, within reach.
---
STARK MANSION — WORKSHOP — THURSDAY, 10:47 PM
We'd gotten home hours earlier, but Tony had vanished into the workshop almost immediately, dragging the Expo model, JARVIS, and what I estimated to be six full pots of coffee down with him. I'd tried to help. Twice. By the third optimization suggestion, Tony had informed me — with genuine, if slightly manic, affection — that he needed to "let his brain chew on it alone for a while," so I'd retreated upstairs to work on the Apex designs, which at this point were less a project and more a running argument I was having with the laws of physics.
Now, closing in on midnight, my phone buzzed.
**Tony: Get down here. I need your eyes on something.**
I grabbed my laptop and headed down, finding him buried in a sea of holographic displays — atomic structures rotating slowly in the air, energy calculations scrolling faster than I could read them, what looked disturbingly like particle accelerator simulations running in the background like ambient noise.
"I've got the element mapped," he said, no hello, no preamble, the specific single-minded focus of a man who'd forgotten entirely that greetings were a social convention. "Look at this. Howard encoded it perfectly. The Expo model translates to a previously undocumented element — atomic structure well past anything on the standard chart, a stable isotope theoretically producing triple the output of palladium with none of the toxicity."
He pulled up the structure — a beautiful, almost unnervingly symmetrical arrangement of protons, neutrons, electrons, the kind of thing that looked designed rather than discovered, like somebody had built it on purpose instead of stumbling into it.
"Can you synthesize it?" I asked.
"Yes. I need to build a particle accelerator to make it happen, which means gutting a chunk of the workshop." He pulled up architectural schematics of the mansion, already marking sections for demolition like a man redecorating with dynamite. "I can repurpose the testing chamber, run a laser array to generate the necessary energy, and if my math holds —" he ran a quick simulation, watching the numbers settle — "I get a viable sample in about eighteen hours once the equipment's built."
"How long to build the equipment?"
"Three days. Maybe four. Need to source some specialized components, fabricate custom containment vessels, and pray to whatever god handles applied physics that I didn't drop a decimal point somewhere in the last four hours."
He looked exhausted and completely lit up at the same time, the specific expression of someone finally solving a problem that had actually mattered for months.
"I'll help," I said. "Whatever you need."
"I need you to double-check my atomic math. Make sure I haven't missed something that turns this from a clean-energy breakthrough into a very small, very personal explosion." He transferred the data to my laptop with a flick of his fingers. "Also I need someone to talk me through it, because if I mess this up, I'm stuck with palladium poisoning and the knowledge that I had the cure sitting in my own hands and blew it."
I pulled up the calculations, letting my enhanced cognition sink into the math — energy levels, electron configurations, stability projections, all of it clicking into place with the satisfying precision of a lock finding its key. Howard had done the theoretical legwork flawlessly, decades before anyone had the tools to actually build what he'd only been able to sketch.
I ran it three separate ways just to be sure — forward from first principles, backward from the desired output, and sideways through a stress model checking for any hidden failure state Howard might have missed in an era before anyone had computers capable of catching it for him. Every path came back clean. Whatever else Howard Stark had failed to give his son, he'd apparently poured everything he had into getting this one thing exactly right.
"It's solid," I said, after several minutes of genuinely intensive analysis. "Stable, non-radioactive, sustained output with no meaningful degradation curve. You can build this."
"*We* can build this," Tony corrected, again, like it was a reflex now. "You're not just fact-checking me, Ace. You're part of it. When that reactor comes online, it's because we figured it out together."
"And then you'll let me have one? For Apex?"
He smiled, tired and genuine both. "And then we'll *carefully consider* whether a sixteen-year-old should have unrestricted access to a compact fusion reactor for his giant murder robot."
"It's not a robot. It's a combat platform."
"Semantics." But he'd already pulled up the Apex designs on a second screen, cross-referencing power requirements against the new element's projected output like he couldn't help himself. "Though if this works — and it's going to work — your mecha runs continuously for months without a recharge. Maybe years, if we optimize the efficiency curve right."
We worked through the night, Tony sketching the particle accelerator layout while I ran simulations and stress-tested his math from six different angles. JARVIS handled logistics in the background — ordering components, scheduling a construction crew to gut part of the workshop, and periodically reminding both of us, with increasing dryness, that sleep remained a biological requirement neither of us had legally opted out of.
"Sir, it's 3:47 AM," JARVIS said eventually. "Perhaps you and Ace should rest. The calculations will still be here in the morning."
"Five more minutes," Tony said, in the tone of a man who had never once meant that sentence.
"You said that two hours ago, sir."
"And I meant it then too."
"For the record, Ace, I've been employing this exact strategy on your father since roughly 2003. Historically it has failed every single time. I persist purely out of professional stubbornness."
"That's oddly inspiring," I said.
"I do try to model good behavior for the household, given that I appear to be the only one currently practicing any."
"I can hear you both," Tony said, not looking up from the hologram.
"We're aware, sir," JARVIS said. "That was rather the point."
I smiled despite myself, saving my work and stretching until something in my spine popped. My enhanced body didn't crave sleep the way a normal person's did, but I could still feel the day's weight settling into my shoulders.
"I'm going to bed," I announced. "You should too."
"I will. Soon. Just need to finish this power coupling design and —"
"Tony." I used the voice Mom used to pull out when I was pushing myself too hard — firm, but soft around the edges. "Sleep. The element will still be here tomorrow."
He looked at me, and something complicated moved across his face.
"You sound like her," he said quietly. "Elena. She used to do exactly that. Tell me when I was being an idiot about taking care of myself."
"Somebody has to carry the tradition forward."
He laughed, tired but real. "Yeah. Okay. Five more minutes, then actual bed, I promise."
"Fifteen," I negotiated. "But then real sleep. Not 'moving to a different project' sleep."
"Deal."
I headed for the stairs, then paused at the workshop door.
"Tony?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks. For letting me be part of this. The element, the tour, all of it. It means more than I probably know how to say."
He looked at me across the workshop, surrounded by holograms and half-finished sketches and the general glow of a genius mid-breakthrough.
"You're my son, Ace. This is your legacy too. Everything I build, everything I figure out — someday it's yours. Might as well start learning the family trade now."
I nodded and headed up to my room, but his words followed me the whole way.
*Your legacy.*
I thought about the Nexus frame waiting half-finished in my files. The secure messaging protocol I hadn't shown him yet, the one that could change how people talked to each other in a world about to get a lot more dangerous. The threats I knew were coming, one by one, like a slow-motion avalanche only I could see the outline of — Vanko, Loki, Ultron, and somewhere much further off, something colder and far worse than either of them.
My legacy wasn't going to be inheriting Tony's empire.
It was going to be building something that stood beside it. Something that made the universe a little safer for the people I'd already, somehow, in less than a week, started to care about more than I meant to.
I sat on the edge of my bed for a long moment before opening the laptop again, just letting the day settle — the boardroom, the reporters, the smell of Howard's untouched whiskey, the weight of Tony's hand on my shoulder saying *you did great* like he meant it more than anything he'd said all day. Four days ago I'd been a stranger to all of it. Four days, and already it felt less like a life I'd wandered into and more like one I was actively building, brick by stubborn brick, alongside a man who kept surprising me by being better than the internet had ever given him credit for.
Somewhere below me, I could hear the faint hum of the workshop through the floor — Tony, still up despite every promise, chasing one more calculation before he let himself sleep. Some things, apparently, didn't change no matter which universe you dropped a Stark into.
I pulled out my laptop and reopened the Apex designs one more time, adding notes based on the new element's projected output. That kind of power meant thicker armor, more weapons systems, faster deployment.
Seven seconds from teenager to juggernaut.
Four months until proof-of-concept.
Twelve months until full deployment.
And somewhere out there, enemies I hadn't met yet were making their own plans, with absolutely no idea that Tony Stark's son was quietly becoming a problem they'd eventually have to reckon with.
*Make it a story worth telling,* Stan had said.
I was working on it.
One design at a time.
One piece of armor at a time.
One step closer to being ready.
---
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