Chapter 46

"Tony!" Pepper breathlessly chased Tony across the facility grounds, her heart pounding and tears still tracking down her face.

Tony didn't stop. He strode relentlessly along the footpath and into the largest steel and glass building, his shoulders set in a hard line.

She finally caught him just outside his workshop, grabbing his sleeve. "Tony, please–"

"You heard her, Pepper," he said, and the low tone in his voice made her pause. "There's nothing left."

"I don't think–"

He pulled his arm out of her grip and stepped into his workshop. The door whirred as it locked, and Pepper caught a glimpse of Tony's face before he turned away. Just that glimpse made her stomach plummet. It was the look she'd only seen a few times before: his dark eyes burned, and his face was haunted. Heartbreak.

Pepper stood outside the locked workshop for far too long, the memory of Tony's face burned like a brand behind her eyes. Distantly, she reflected that the only thing that had the power to break Tony Stark so completely was his sister.

Tony went deep into Tinker mode, bypassing his emotions and concentrating on the bright flare of his welding irons, the familiar groan and bend of metal. He went around his workshop fixing, upgrading, and meddling, and hours had passed before he realized he was slowly edging toward an untouched corner in the back.

The corner in question was occupied by a metal bench, draped in canvas. There was a metal box beside the bench. Casual visitors to the workshop – not that there were any of those, lately – wouldn't think twice about it. But he had been uncomfortably aware of the bench and the box for the past two weeks, even when his back was turned.

After another hour of fruitlessly hammering away at metal with a vague idea of what he wanted it to be, he let out a frustrated sigh and whirled to face the bench. He marched up to it and ripped the canvas cover away with a shaking hand.

There lay Maggie's wings: one of them in two pieces, the other whole. He'd put the wings through a decontamination cycle before storing them in his workshop, but he couldn't look at the broken stump of the damaged wing without remembering it strewn on the airport tarmac, glistening with blood.

Tony pushed away the memory and glanced at the metal box beside the bench – he knew it held Cap's shield and the charred remains of Barnes' metal arm, but he had no interest in looking at those right now.

He turned back to the bench and ran a technical eye over the wings. He'd worked on Wilson's wings a few times over the past few years, but these were completely different. He could see how the clean design of them – simple gunmetal grey skeleton with black webbing – integrated with the complex cybernetic machinery.

Tony cleared his throat. "F.R.I.D.A.Y., get me a scan of these."

"Already done, boss."

As the holographic scans started to pop up in the air around him, he cracked his knuckles and cocked his head. He needed to tinker to feel like he had any kind of control left in his life. And these wings were as good a project as any.

The wings were, as expected, fascinating. Tony remembered seeing in the Québec data that the young Wyvern had helped to design them, so he didn't feel quite so dirty when he admired the intricate systems and linkups. Within two hours, he knew the wings inside and out.

And then he realized that something was off about the scans.

From what he could tell, the tiny compartments built into each wing were for aerosol gas containment, maybe for mid-flight dispersion. They weren't obvious to the naked eye, and Tony hadn't looked too closely until he realized there was something inside one of them. It wasn't a gas.

He cracked the compartment open with a precision knife, and carefully pried out three pieces of paper.

The first one that caught his attention was the drawing – it was unmistakably Maggie, wearing safety goggles and concentrating on something out of frame. The graphite lines were careful and considered, but Tony had listened to Pepper talk about art for long enough to know that this wasn't the kind of portrait that one drew just to take down someone's likeness. It wasn't signed, but he had a feeling he'd met the artist.

He set the portrait aside with bated breath, and flipped over the two long, sturdier pieces of paper. The instant he realized what he was looking at his throat constricted, and his hand spasmed oddly where it rested on the bench. He could feel his mind rejecting what he was seeing, so he focused on the numbers at first: two photo booth strips. Six photographs. Two people. And one orange teddy bear. The date stamp at the bottom of each strip read June 2nd 2015. Maggie's birthday last year.

Tony let out a whoosh of breath and gripped the metal bench's edge with white fingers. His eyes were locked on the photos, sliding from one to another with some kind of sickened fascination.

He hadn't realized she could look so happy.

The first two photographs were innocent enough – Maggie frowning at Barnes in confusion, Maggie and Barnes smiling at the camera. But in the last photograph Barnes was – Tony swallowed back a sound that threatened to be a groan – Barnes was kissing her cheek, and Maggie looked… happy. Her eyes were closed. Tony didn't know if anyone had ever taken a picture of him with such a level of trust and contentment on his face.

The second strip of photos made a muscle start jumping in his jaw. In the first two Maggie and Barnes grinned at the camera, their faces mostly obscured by an enormous orange teddy bear. In the third…

Abruptly, Tony gathered up the photos and the portrait, slid them back into the tiny wing compartment, and took three large steps back from the bench. His shoulders were heaving, and the glimpse of his face that he caught in one gleaming surface showed him that he looked absolutely as furious and wretched as he felt.

Maggie's voice, soft and relentless, echoed in his mind: Together we were… we were able to pretend to be people. For a while. It was nice.

Tony sucked in a breath and strode toward the nearest suit assembly station. There was construction happening on the other side of the Facility right now. They didn't need Iron Man to help, but it was either this or he started blowing things up, so they could suck it.

Rhodey and Pepper sat on a couch in the Avengers common room, watching Iron Man help/hinder an increasingly frustrated work crew on the other side of the compound lawns. Pepper had one leg crossed over the other and a cup of steaming tea in her hands, ever professional, but Rhodey could see how spooked she was. She kept twisting her fingers together and biting her lip, and her eyes were red from crying.

Pepper had explained what had gone down in Maggie's holding cell, more or less, and they'd both tried to get in to the workshop to talk to Tony, to no avail. So they hunkered down in the common area and waited for the storm to blow over. They both had more than enough experience with Tony to know that he was far past the point of reason right now. The only things that could capture his attention were made of metal.

Rhodey waited for Pepper to finish sipping her tea before he asked: "What did you think of her?"

She sighed, and her head dropped back onto the couch's headrest. "If I was her," she began in a tired voice, "I don't know where I'd find the strength to get out of bed in the morning." He swallowed, and watched Pepper's eyes fill with tears again. "She's hurting, Rhodey, but she… it's hard to explain, but I think she's trying to protect Tony. She knows she's hurting him, so she pushed him away."

Rhodey glanced out the window just as Iron Man used his gauntlet laser to slice through a steel beam. A woman in a yellow vest slapped her palm against her face. "Well she did a bang up job there," he muttered. "He's worse than before, now."

"I know. I didn't say it made sense." Pepper's lips twitched into a smile. "She is a Stark, after all."

He thought about that. He'd met three Starks in his life time (four if you counted Maria), and had only gotten to know one of them really well. And when it came to the people he cared about, Tony's actions often seemed to defy all logic. Rhodey pinched his nose. "Yeah, she is. What should we do?"

"I don't know. He's not going to listen to us if we tell him to go back. And I don't think Maggie will speak to us if we visit her."

"Why not?"

"Because she knows we're Tony's people." Pepper turned her head, taking in Rhodey with his metal exosuit and his tired eyes. She thought about the woman she'd met in that blank grey room, who tried so hard to keep her emotions hidden but ended up broadcasting her pain and fear just as loudly as her brother did. She didn't think it was an accident that the long-awaited blowup had occurred when Tony introduced Pepper to Maggie. "She doesn't want to hurt him."

Rhodey sighed. "There's no right answer here. They've both made their choices, and they're going to have to live with them. Do you… do you think we should get Maggie moved off the compound?"

Pepper could see how much he really didn't want that, but Rhodey didn't like it when there weren't any options. "Where could she go?" she countered softly. "And do you want to be the one to pull them apart again?"

He sighed frustratedly. "Well it seems like they're doing a good enough job of that on their own."

The next morning, Maggie started to tear her bed apart.

F.R.I.D.A.Y. instantly alerted Tony and put security on standby, but Tony took a look at the footage and since Maggie wasn't hurting herself or trying to escape, he dismissed it. He really didn't want to think about her right now.

He threw himself back into his work. He even went back to the tower in Manhattan for a few hours, to pick up some materials and get some things done in his workshop there. Happy intercepted him for a few seconds, but all he wanted to talk about was security arrangements for the tower perimeter. Tony loved Happy.

F.R.I.D.A.Y. gave Tony updates on Maggie throughout the day, because he'd set up an alert program on the very first day and he couldn't quite make himself deactivate it. Maggie had completely destroyed her bed frame but she'd left the mattress intact, propped against one wall. As the hours passed, the images that F.R.I.D.A.Y. relayed to Tony seemed to show that Maggie was building something out of the torn up bed frame.

He watched her bend metal with her bare hands for a minute or two, before shaking himself and turning back to his work. He hammered out kinks in the suit's coding for hours until he managed to work himself into an exhaustion nap.

When he woke up, cursing as he realized there was an imprint of a wrench on his face, F.R.I.D.A.Y. brought up the footage from Maggie's room to update him on what he'd missed.

Tony blinked at the holographic footage for a second. "Crap."

"Indeed, Boss."

Maggie had built herself a pair of wings. Tony rubbed his eyes and squinted at the footage, and realized that she'd managed to twist and wrench the metal from the bed frame into a sort of statue of wings, smaller than hers and obviously not functional, but clearly recognizable against the backdrop of the forest.

Maggie herself was sitting in front of the window again, but this time her back was pressed against the warped metal wings. The dawn light filtering in from the huge window silhouetted her winged frame, and cast her shadow on the floor.

Tony was still staring at Maggie's image when the lab door slid open. He scrambled to close down the footage, knocking tools to the floor as he did so, until he realized that the intruder in the lab was Vision. At least he'd bothered to use the door.

Vision had been moping for the past few weeks. He'd avoided all company, save for Pepper when she tracked him down to chat. Mostly, he chose to sit alone and brood over the mistake he'd made. Tony had been pissed at the android, sure, but Rhodey seemed inclined to forgive him and… who was he kidding. He'd been so caught up in his imprisoned sister that he hadn't thought twice about Vision.

Vision glanced around the workshop as he entered, taking in the half-started projects and empty coffee cups on every surface. The android was wearing his usual college-professor-clothes, and Tony's eyebrows rose when he noticed that Vision looked… anxious.

"What's up, Data?"

Vision stepped delicately around Dum-E. "Is there anything I can help you with?"

Tony's eyes narrowed. This could be a Rhodey-and-Pepper-laid-trap.

But Vision merely looked discomforted by Tony's silence. He didn't fidget – the android wouldn't do anything so illogical – but his eyes did flicker around the room, as if searching for a good topic of conversation.

Eventually, he sighed. "I am feeling… at odds."

Tony's eyebrow ticked up. "I hear that's going around."

Vision smiled at that, and then his eyes tracked toward the holo-screen footage of Maggie and her contraption. Tony followed his gaze.

After a long moment of silence, Vision approached the workbench. "I have analysed her enhancements," he said.

Sometimes Tony still got a little disconcerted whenever Vision spoke, expecting J.A.R.V.I.S. to relay some data about a project or warn him that he'd been working too long without sleep. But this was Vision, he reminded himself, a far more complex being. And it sounded like he was inviting Tony to speak.

"So have I," he shot back, and with a few quick hand movements brought up a revolving hologram of Maggie's skeleton, that F.R.I.D.A.Y. had compiled upon her arrival to the compound. And she didn't have to explode any MRI machines to do it.

Tony eyed Maggie's skeleton, the Adamantium on her bones. He glanced over his shoulder at the bench in the corner of the workshop, covered once more in canvas. Looking back at the hologram, he remembered seeing the full-body scans in the Québec base and wondering what Maggie had been thinking while she was scanned. He was no closer to an answer.

Vision was eyeing the revolving skeleton. "The enhancements were installed over a period of years," he noted. "It would have been excruciating."

Tony nodded. "She's lucky she survived it all, even with the serum." He huffed. "Dad'd be proud, a super soldier child. Just what he always wanted."

Vision wisely didn't comment.

They stood in silence for a few moments, watching the gentle blue of Maggie's bones revolve before their eyes. The sudden stillness after the hours of work followed by a fitful sleep was uncomfortable, but Tony realized that this might be what his brain needed.

After another few moments, he blurted out: "It was easier when she was the victim."

Vision didn't look away from Maggie's skeleton. "Regardless of what she was made to do, she is a victim." He hesitated, then added: "a survivor."

Tony huffed and pushed an agitated hand through his hair. "I know what they made her do. But when she had the chance to choose, she chose our parents' murderer."

He started pacing, his hair askew and his hands fluttering. Vision waited.

"And what's worse is that I'm furious," Tony growled. "At her, at that asshole Barnes, at Cap, at everything. But I think I'm wrong. About some of it." He grimaced – this was why he was a genius, being wrong felt terrible.

Vision offered him a small smile. "It is my observation that human emotion is rarely rational."

"Gee, thanks doc."

There was another long pause, and Vision turned his attention back to the hologram. Eventually, he spoke: "Secretary Ross will not allow her to leave imprisonment. I am not certain that he wishes to indict her, either. He has been busy with the Raft breakout, but when that dies down…" Vision reached out to the hologram and exploded it, displaying readouts of the data F.R.I.D.A.Y. had collected on Maggie's physiology. "He is currently gathering information about Ms Stark, but I am sure he is hesitant to pursue a criminal case in which memory suppression and brainwashing are factors. And he cannot pin all his troubles on her, to make her a scapegoat."

"Lucky Maggie," Tony said drily. He'd stopped pacing.

Vision nodded, either not picking up on the sarcasm or ignoring it. "He will likely mandate psychological evaluation and long-term imprisonment. Either way, he will have to release her identity to the public. They are demanding answers about the participants in the fight at Leipzig/Halle Airport. The CIA is protecting King T'Challa, and Secretary Ross promised to keep Mr Parker's identity confidential, but…"

"Yeah, I've seen the headlines," Tony answered, with a wave of his hand. "Ross has to throw someone under the bus, especially after the Raft breakout. Probably won't even tell me first, that no-good secret keeper."

"The world will soon know about the Wyvern," Vision stated, his eyes expressive as he turned to Tony. "They will know that Margaret Stark lives."

Tony looked back at the image of his sister pressing her back against a set of false wings, with her eyes closed. "Hold down the fort for me, would you?"

"That metaphor is an odd form of platitude, and also exceedingly vague."

"Great, you're doing fine." He clapped Vision on the shoulder, then strode out of the workshop.

Maggie had half-expected the wings to turn out looking like grotesque reminders of her violent past, but once the metal was bent and twisted how she wanted it, she just felt… relieved. Settled with her back to the cool metal, she felt a familiar sense of ease slip over her – not quite the same as when she wore her actual wings, but close enough. Enough to make her feel less alone.

The doctors hadn't visited in a while – they hadn't needed to – so she wasn't expecting the cell door to open.

But it did, and her eyes snapped open to see Tony in the same clothes as yesterday, marching into the room.

Maggie scrambled away from her makeshift wings and backed up into the farthest corner of the room. With the cool walls bracketing her in, she lowered her center of gravity and eyed her brother, chest heaving.

Tony had stopped moving the instant she started panicking. He raised one eyebrow as he watched her. "I get the sense you're a little anxious." Slowly, he stepped to the side and leaned against the nearest wall.

Maggie took a few long breaths through her nose. "I didn't think you were coming back." She was sure she looked a mess, her hair wild from her frenzied night of building and her expression etched with poorly-concealed dread.

"Yeah… about that." He pushed off the wall and strode toward the makeshift wings, gleaming in the early morning light. He ran his fingers along the top of the twisted, torn metal, skating over the sharp edges. He pinched the supporting pillar. "This is shoddy work. Absolutely flimsy." As if accentuating his point, a small shard of metal at the edge of one of the wings snapped off in his fingers.

Maggie pressed her lips together. "I had a material shortage."

He eyed the ruins of her bed. "I can see that. Why the wings? I've been looking at them, they were torture devices – you felt every joint and sensor tear when Panther Boy broke your wing, didn't you?" He waved a hand, not needing the answer. "You had to plug them into your spine. When the wing tore off it broke your ribs, damaged ligaments in your back, burst blood vessels, affected your spine. So I just… why build them again?"

Maggie shrugged, and looked away. She'd spent a long night mentally preparing for spending the rest of her life in this cell, alone. Maybe even getting moved back to the Raft. Having to engage with another person, particularly her brother… it was taking some adjustment. She tilted her head. "No matter what HYDRA did to me, or made me do…" she sighed, feeling all of Tony's focus centered on her. "They were the one thing I loved having. I loved flying, even if I was killing at the same time. They also kept me safe. And when I was free I kept them with me, kept them working, because I still loved it."

Tony cocked his head. "You're a very honest person, aren't you?"

She couldn't read his face, so she simply shrugged again. "I've got no reason to lie."

"Not even to yourself?" He leaned against the wall opposite her, playing with the piece of snapped-off metal.

"It might be easier if I did, but no." She was pressed into the corner, eyes on the ground. She couldn't reconcile this casually honest Tony with the one who'd looked at her with such rage only yesterday. She didn't understand him at all, but if she had to guess, this sounded like the beginning of a goodbye.

"See here's the thing," Tony said, and his tone made Maggie look up. "I don't hate you." Her eyes widened. "And I realize you're not five years old any more. So, you know… you're wrong. Bet that doesn't happen a lot."

There was a pause as Maggie tried not to show any emotion on her face, but she was too stunned to execute it. Her mouth quivered, once, and then she locked it down. "More often than you'd think," she murmured, and he laughed.

"Yeah, see, I've been thinking about what you said – about all of what you said, actually, and… it's a goddamn mess." Her eyes were steady, watching him. "But I don't hate you. Never have. Well, maybe for like two seconds when you were born, before I actually met you, but that's about it." A small smile quirked the corner of her mouth, before it too vanished.

Tony wasn't done. "Everything that's happened is a goddamn moral minefield, and I'm tired of treading through it. And I'm pretty terrible at, y'know, talking about stuff, just ask Pepper, so I'm trying here, I just…" he sighed, and Maggie abruptly noticed that he looked old. Tired. "I don't hate you, all is forgiven, whatever, I'm working on it. So if you don't mind me getting angry once in a while, or tossing you off a roof or two… can we…" he struggled for the words, gesturing awkwardly.

Maggie shook her head, eyes bright. "What are you asking?"

He let out a frustrated sigh. "Will you just–" he opened his arms. "Be my sister?"

She pressed herself further into the corner. "That's not what you want."

Tony, arms still spread, looked around the room exasperatedly. "Uh, pretty sure it is. C'mon, get on over here. This is like, super rare for me."

Maggie realized she was crying now. "You don't – you're not..." she shook her head.

Tony dropped his arms and walked across the room toward her, wary of how her muscles tensed at every movement. Once they were a few feet apart, he lowered his voice and said: "Look, I've never been any good at it, but… we're a family. I've been through shit, you've been through shit, it's just a big old shit fest. But you're… we're…" seeming to have run out of words, he sighed again, cocking his head as he looked at Maggie. He could see her thinking, her eyes darting to and fro as her hands clenched.

"C'mon, Maggot," he whispered.

Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, the breath was knocked out of his chest as she sprang forward and threw her arms around him. Startled, Tony held his arms aloft while she near-crushed him, her face pressed into his shoulder and her arms shaking. He felt his shirt dampen where her eyes were pressed against it.

"I'm so sorry, Tony," he heard her say into his shoulder.

Slowly, he lowered his arms and wrapped them around her. She was warm under his hands, and when he felt the hard metal beneath her skin he only pulled her closer.

"I'm sorry too," he murmured.

It was probably for the best that they didn't specify what they were apologizing for.

As they clutched each other in the shadow of Maggie's makeshift wings, they both began to realize that this wasn't something that was broken – that having each other was a possibility.