When Toni was seven, her soulmarks manifested: a red star edged in silver under her right collar bone, and a white star edged in blue under her left collar bone. Mama told her never to show them to anyone, because the Starks have enemies, and those enemies could use the soulmarks against her. She didn't see how. They were only stupid stars that didn't do anything but feel cold.

By the time she's fifteen, she learns more about the marks, and the men they signify. Red Star wanders in and out of her life without seeming to remember her from one encounter to the next, and she's pretty sure White Star was lost decades ago. Soulmates, she decides, are useless flights of fantasy, because hers certainly aren't the supportive life partners all the stories say they're supposed to be.

But she's a grown-ass woman now, and it doesn't really matter if she wants them or not. It really doesn't matter if she's a loose cannon, and one is with SHIELD and the other with HYDRA.

They're hers and she's theirs.

And she really doesn't like it when people take her stuff.

oOoOoOo

The Vasyugan Mire, Siberia
2012

Despite all of JARVIS's mother-henning and disapproving silences, Toni thinks her new stealth tech's test is going well. So far, the suit isn't showing up on radar or sonar, radio doesn't seem to be picking up any frequencies, and even naked-eye observation has to be particularly sharp in order to spot the shimmer giving away her outline. All in all, she's quite satisfied with how it's holding up.

Especially since she's testing the tech in Russia. Without letting the Russians know. Or anyone else, for that matter. She's pretty sure that no one would appreciate what she's doing, so she never bothered asking.Better forgiveness than permission has been her personal motto for a long, long time.

Something she didn't know, though? Russia stinks.

Toni needs to check the armor's filters, because she is positive she should not be getting this sickening wash of rotten eggs and septic tanks up her nose. The faceplate is down, so it should be a sealed environment. No way for the stench to get inside. She's halfway to convinced it's all in her head, because she hates swamps. But this stink, it's a persistent phantom, crawling up her nostrils and setting up camp in her sinuses, sending scouts to fetch water from her tear ducts and shooing the kids down her throat to jump on her gag reflex.

She's pretty sure it's worse than the smell when she opens the mini-fridge in her workshop, which holds leftover Chinese so old it's due to gain self-awareness any day now.

"J, do me a favor and run a diagnostic on the filtration system, will you?" she asks, keeping one eye on the HUD's co-ordinate display and one eye on the actual landscape. She wants to retch but, as she found out on the night of that infamous birthday party last year, throwing up inside the helmet means she's going to have to fabricate a new helmet, or she'll be smelling puke for weeks no matter how thoroughly she scrubs it.

"Ma'am, if I may suggest, returning to your workshop would be the optimal route, as the diagnostic software in the Tower's mainframe is far superior to the basic suite installed on the suit." JARVIS is exceedingly polite and even sounds like he's doing his very best to be the most helpful, but Toni coded and compiled and brought him to life. She knows his tricks better than anyone.

"Nice try, JARVIS," she says, trying not to grin and failing spectacularly. "But the suit's capabilities are more than enough to figure out if there's a glitch somewhere. Now, be a good boy for Mommy, and tell her why her armor smells like a toilet threw up on a compost heap."

There's a scroll of information as the program executes. "Running diagnostics now," JARVIS says, "though my preliminary guess is the fact that you're currently flying above the world's largest peat bog in the middle of the local summer."

"Don't be a smartass, J. Nobody likes a smartass." Toni knows JARVIS knows she's lying. She wouldn't have programmed him with sass and snark if she didn't like it.

"Only attempting to be thorough, ma'am. Diagnostic complete. Filtration system operating at 99.99% efficiency."

"Ninety-nine, ninety-nine?" She frowns, and absently swerves out of the way to let an island with trees shoot past her. "Where's the point oh-one?"

"It appears as though there was a malfunction in one of the lateral vent panels, ma'am, resulting in an improper seal which allowed a minute amount of unfiltered air to enter the armor. That error has now been corrected. The scrubbers should clear any lingering trace momentarily."

"Make a note of it, and run the data against the coding of the other suits," she says. "I want to know if it's a one-off, or if it's something I'm going to have to worry about when I'm somewhere even more hostile than Swamp-Ass, Siberia. Like the bottom of the ocean. See if you can track down the cause of the error so I can eradicate it."

There's a slight hesitation, no more than a nanosecond. Anyone else would miss it. Not Toni. She's hyperaware of every time JARVIS pauses, stutters, or skips. "Yes, ma'am."

Her turn to hesitate, suspicion flaring hot and squinty-eyed in her chest. "JARVIS," she says slowly, "if you cracked my seals to punish me with that godawful smell because I didn't listen to you and test the stealth tech in the lab before I took it into the field, I swear to Turing I will break your code into itty bitty pieces and use you as the StarkPhone's answer to Siri."

"I'm sure I wouldn't know what you're talking about, ma'am," comes JARVIS's mild-toned reply. "Approaching the designated co-ordinates, estimated arrival at Zima Station in approximately two minutes."

"Well, how conveniently that happened. Don't think you're safe. We're continuing this conversation later."

"Of course, ma'am."

oOoOoOo

Manhattan, 1984

Toni's memory is excellent, she never fails to recall a single thing. Even the things she might like to forget, like the look on Daddy's face that day just after her fourth birthday and he catches her in his workshop building her very first, fully-functional circuit board (nascent pride drowned under irritation and impatience warring with something dark and frightening that she would only later learn is deep, ugly, jealous rage).

He tells her that little girls shouldn't play with electronics, because girls are stupid and can't do engineering, because girls have to have babies and look after their husbands. She runs away from him, crying, and taking solace in her Mama's lap, Mama's fingers in her hair, and Mama's soft voice calling her cara and passerottaand promising she is brilliant and telling her not to listen to her father, who is only a man, after all, and a very silly man at that.

She overhears a conversation weeks later, Uncle Obie congratulating Daddy on streamlining the circuitry on the new warheads, they just made a bundle of cash with the new military tech, and how did he solve the problems with enhancing the connectivity speed, since he said it couldn't be done?

Toni has never been stupid. Her brain makes the leap effortlessly, and she knows that her father has stolen from her, has claimed her design as his own, rides the accolades and reaps the praise as if he earned it all himself. Toni learns her first lesson in ruthlessness that day, and learns for the first time what betrayal tastes like. At the tender age of four, she knows what it feels like to know that trust is foolhardy.

She promises herself as Mama dries her tears that she will never forget it.

oOoOoOo

Siberia

It's abrupt, the shift. She throws a mental switch, changes gear, drops into another track. One instant, she's the careless, carefree billionaire in tech no one in their right mind would ever think she's qualified to own, let alone operate. The next, she is focused, tactically-aware and crunching environmental profiles, attack vectors and threat probabilities as fast as she registers them, with the same tech an extension of her body and will. Her mouth might still run free and wild, but her mind is all business. "Any indication they've taken notice?"

"No, ma'am," JARVIS replies, and data scrolls across the edge of the HUD. Toni watches it for half a second; topographical data and government records on utilities in the area, JARVIS's crunching the best angle of attack to shut down any hope those inside the base have of reaching outside assistance. Toni approves. "I am inside their systems. Deploying cyberwarfare suite and EMI packages. ...Communications capabilities are nullified, ma'am. They are unaware of my presence in their system."

"That was easy," Toni says, knowing as it comes out of her mouth that she's just jinxed herself.

"One can only hope it stays that way." And if she hasn't jinxed herself, JARVIS just did it for her. Oh well. It's more fun this way anyway. "Shall I queue up your usual entrance music, ma'am?"

Toni eases up with the boot repulsors as the squat, ugly, abandoned-looking outpost appears, reducing thrust until she's directly in front of the rusty door, and hovers in midair for a moment. There are two guards stationed in sight. One patrols the top, the other stands beside the door. "Nah. Not really in the mood for AC/DC right now. I'm feeling…" She grins as something flutters in her chest, wide and manic, and starts to laugh. She can sense it now, that strained, weak and faint pulse that sits to the right of her arc reactor, marked by a star as red as blood. It's steady and it's strong. It's waking up and singing electric melodies. This is it. End of the line. "I'm feeling ridiculously thematic. Give me some Iron Maiden. You know the one."

"Very good, ma'am."

Toni subvocalizes the command to disengage the stealth plating on her suit, cuts the ports in her boots, and engages the external speakers, opening chords of "Wrathchild" blasting at top volume. She drops in front of the guard, holding the fist-down pose for a moment.

"Hi there!" Toni chirps as she straightens up, and the warm-up whine of her repulsor ports underscore the guitars as they cut dead. "I'm Iron Maiden. You may have heard of me. You have something that belongs to me. And I'm here to take it back."

oOoOoOo

Manhattan, 1988

Toni is supposed to be learning etiquette, posture and appropriate presentation with Mrs. Jarvis while Mama entertains Howard's business guests, but Toni is running for the garden as if running for her life. She hates dresses and she hates making sure her shoulders are back and she hates having her hair brushed and she hates the thick creams and powders she's supposed to know how to use on her face. It feels sluggish and wrong on her skin, and wearing makeup makes her feel like her face is going to crack. The only makeup she can stand to wear is the stick of concealer her mother taught her to use to cover the soulmarks below her collarbones after they manifested six months ago.

("It's unusual for a child so young to have them, cara mia," Mama says, stroking her hair as she curls into a ball and cries in her lap, skin raw and sore from the frozen burn of the marks searing through. Mama has strong, gentle hands today, soothing the marks with a lotion that smells like aloe and tingles with analgesic relief. "Our family has enemies that will think to use them against you. I will teach you how to hide them,passerotta. Never let anyone see them. No one must know but you and I, capisci? Not even your father. One day, you'll understand why."

"Si, Mama," Toni says quietly, letting her mother's fingers stroke through her hair and dry her eyes. She doesn't understand how two stupid stars that are cold, like an ice cube on her skin that never melts – a white star edged in blue on her left, in the soft place between her shoulder and her collar bone, a red star edged in silver in the same place on her right – are a weakness for enemies to exploit, but she trusts Mama. One day, she'll understand.)

She tries to go to her lessons and tolerate the stifling clothing and the choking makeup and the pointless instructions on how to make small talk. She tries, because the last time she threw a tantrum and refused to go, Howard got a look on his face, cold and still like he gets when he's talking to Uncle Obie about business, and told her calmly that if she didn't attend her ladyship lessons, he would have to fire Mrs. Jarvis. And Mrs. Jarvis won't be able to find another job, because Howard won't give her any recommendations since she can't actually do her job if Toni doesn't let her.

"Natasha Antonia Stark!" The voice is distant, searching. Tony hunches her shoulders but scurries deeper into the garden. Mrs. Jarvis is looking for her, but… just… not today.

Toni feels terrible about it, but she can't sit still in a chair and learn what fork is for what dish – she already knows to start from the outside and work her way in as the courses come – and she can't slip on her uncomfortable high heels and learn how to balance on them, not today. Not today, when her skin is crawling and her fingers are itching and her brain can't settle on a single train of thought for more than a few seconds. Schematics and designs are star-bursting on her eyelids, orderly blue lines spilling out in patterned, complex shapes, unfurling like Mrs. Jarvis's roses do in the sun, one petal at a time.

She can't do anything until she can purge them from her thoughts. And that means she needs her retreat, her tree branches with its shield of leaves and twigs, with its cache of paper and colored pencils, and a few hours of quiet to spill them onto clean white pages.

She has her own workshop in the house, but she doesn't use it for anything but rudimentary devices, copies of Howard's tech. Her sketchbooks are filled with innovations and groundbreaking theories. She has theoretically miniaturized the first arc reactor, the big one in the reception area of the Stark Industries building, the one Howard is so proud of. Making it smaller, more portable, is a feat that has frustrated him since long before Toni was born. Toni's smarter than Howard, though. It only took her a week to figure out what he was missing. Toni knows Howard can put her work to use, and Toni wants to make the world a better place, but more than that, Toni craves the recognition and credit. And Toni has learned the hard way that she cannot trust Howard at all.

She hides her sketchbooks and her loose, wild scribbles in a waterproof bag in the hollow of a tree, twenty feet off the ground. It's a sturdy tree, and she's a sure climber. She ignores the faint, distant calls of her full name, and pulls herself up one branch at a time until she's hidden in the branches and pulling her designs out of their protective satchel.

She isn't up there very long – or maybe she's been up there for hours, she doesn't know. She loses track of time easily when she's absorbed in circuit diagrams and sketches of sleek housing components – when an itch starts on the right side of her chest. She absently scratches it, then goes back to drawing the delicate whorl of microcircuits intended to revolutionize the personal computing market.

The itching suddenly spikes in intensity, and it feels like a swarm of angry bees buzzing just under her skin. Tony gasps and jerks, clawing at her chest, ripping aside the neck of her tee-shirt and scratching at the red star that has never been anything but cold but is now angry and electric and throbbing. A spasm of her knee jolts her book, and she instinctively snatches at it, trying to snag it before it falls. It slips through her fingers. She wobbles, overcorrects, screams as she slides right off the branch and is falling head-down towards the ground, thirty feet below.

Her only thought is, if I die with this itch, it's gonna suck so much.

Incredibly, the only thing she hits is a pair of arms, one metal and one flesh, suddenly there to catch her. Stupidly, she blinks up at the very tall man in the black leather tactical suit. She can only see the top of his face, because he has something covering his nose and mouth, and his eyes are painted with greasepaint. She has no idea where he came from or what he's doing here, but she's never really been happier to see anyone in her life because he caught her, and that means she isn't splattered across the grass and dirt.

They stare at each other for a long moment, her eyes wide, his inscrutable. Toni's breath hitches in her chest. Her heart pounds with a solid, painless thump, and warmth spreads up her neck. The itching vanishes as if it never was.

"Hi," she blurts dumbly, because she has to say something. "I'm Toni."

The man doesn't look like he understands what just happened. His eyes are baffled, uncertain. Swiftly, he sets her on her feet and takes a step back, eyes still boring into hers. Then, he turns to disappear into the bushes again. Toni's too shocked, too shocky, to say or do anything to stop him. He's fast as well as silent, but not swift enough to stop Toni from catching a glimpse of the design on his metal arm. A star. A red star. On a silver arm.

Toni presses a hand to her chest, mouth a perfectly round O of surprise. She's not stupid. Her brain makes the leap, intuits the connection. Under her fingertips, the red star, which has always been a spot of chill in her skin she can't shake, is warm and alive.

oOoOoOo

Siberia

The guard's eyes are as round as dinner plates, flicking between her and somewhere behind her. Toni can take a pretty educated guess at what's murdering the hamster on his wheel: where the hell did she come from? How the hell did she hide? Can Iron Maiden teleport now?

No, she can't. But that would be pretty freaking awesome.

She waits, because she's halfway to feeling sorry for him and it just feels like poor sportsmanship to blast him into next week without giving him a sporting chance. She waits for longer than she thought she would have to, and is frankly feeling a bit bad for whatever Hydra agent recruited this guuy, because he probably should have acted by now.

Finally, she sighs. "This is pathetic, you know. You could at least try to fight back."

The guard starts, and the rifle in his hand whips up. His head tilts towards the right, where he has a radio attached to the shoulder of his uniform, and his mouth is forming the first syllable of a warning.

Toni's repulsors are faster; clik-whreee, and the guard crunches satisfactorily into the wall with a pained oofof deflated lungs. His head cracks against the concrete, and he slumps to the ground, out cold before he hits the dirt.

A bullet whines off the forearm of her armor, scratching the paint and digging a furrow in the dirt. Toni makes an unimpressed noise and looks up The HUD tracks the target – the second guard, no doubt alerted to her presence by the utter ineptitude of the first guard. The targeting system calculates her angles, his cover. He's speaking into his radio, voice high but steady, rattling off something that sounds like a warning in maybe Turkish. The rifle cracks again, and a bullet buries itself in the ground between her boots.

She tsks, extending her arm upwards, repulsor port warm against her palm. "Hydra needs to institute some sort of basic firearms training," she says, and shoots him square in the face. "You guys are worse than stormtroopers, seriously." The guard flies back, out of sight, and Toni charges both palm ports again.

The door explodes inwards, dented and warped by the repulsor impacts, and Toni steps inside the secret Hydra base, energy equalling a million pots of coffee surging in her bloodstream. "And now I spend my time looking all around for a man that's nowhere to be found," she sings along with the music playing on the internal speakers. The pulse above her right breast beats in time to the rhythm. She's no Bruce Dickinson, but she's got heart and gusto and absolutely no sense of shame. "Until I find him, I'm never gonna stop searching. Gonna find my man, gonna travel aro-oooound."

oOoOoOo

MIT, Cambridge MA, 1995

"Soulmates," Toni announces, throwing herself at Rhodey's couch and sprawling over as much space as she can manage, "are bullshit."

To Rhodey's credit, he doesn't bat an eye at her dramatic declaration. He doesn't even look up from his computer. "So you've said," he says absently, fingers dancing on the keys. "I've yet to see supporting evidence, though. Don't you call yourself a scientist? Also, I think you're drunk."

Toni closes her eyes and sinks further into the couch with a pleased little sigh. "Yes, I have said," she says, "and you don't pay attention or you would understand that there is a veritable mountain of evidence to support my theory. Also, I am a scientist and no, I'm actually not drunk tonight."

Rhodey scoffs. "It's Friday. You mean to tell me that you've magically discovered responsibility and aren't off charming lonely nerds with valid IDs into pouring booze down your throat?" He makes another derisive noise. "You forget who you're talking to, Toni."

She cracks open an eye, stares unimpressed at him until he looks up, then shuts her eye and thumps her head against the back of the couch again. "You, huggy-bear, are not one to talk about responsibility. You are supposed to be studying, because you've got a midterm on Monday, 30% of your grade, isn't it? But you're actually playing EverQuest. Tsk, tsk."

The silence feels awkward and pointed, and Toni grins when she hears the telltale whirr of Rhodey's fans as they start to power down a moment later.

"I really don't know why I bother hanging around with you," Rhodey grumbles.

"Because Howard is paying you to keep an eye on me," Toni says lazily, tracking Rhodey's movements with her ears. She can tell he's coming to the couch, but she whines in protest when he manhandles her from one of the cushions.

"I really need a raise then." Rhodey drops an arm over her shoulders, and she curls automatically into his side. "Hazard pay, maybe. You're a pain in the ass."

She chuckles, leans up and kisses his cheek, then hunches back down where it's warm. "You say the sweetest things, Rhodey."

"One of the many services I'm paid to offer." His hand rubs her upper arm, soothing and warm. "Wanna talk about why your panties are in a bunch about soulmates this time?"

Toni screws up her face, nose wrinkled and forehead furrowed. "I sat in on a metaphysics class while I was waiting for my neuroengineering thesis advisor to finish up with that Hammer jackass," she says. "They were talking about soulmates and soulmarks, and how fucking happy you should be if you end up with marks. That it means your souls are connected beyond the bounds of time and space, and…" She waggles her hand vaguely in the air. "… you know, metaphysical strings and quantum magic and fate equations. And I just want to know who decided that metaphysics was a valid science because it just seems like a whole lotta happy horseshit and magic sky fairies to me."

Rhodey doesn't say anything for a long moment, and his hand stills. Finally, he says, "Don't you have soulmarks, Toni?"

"None of your business," she snaps, then instantly regrets it. "You know I do," she says in a more reasonable tone. "Why do you think I developed the nano mask?" She stops, blinks, tries to cover herself. "Uh, I mean, why do you think Selwyn from Berkeley developed the nano mask?"

Rhodey gives her a slow, one-arm squeeze. "Selwyn from Berkeley developed the nano mask so Toni Stark didn't have the patent and design stolen by her father," he says gently. "I still don't know why you'd want to hide your marks." She side-eyes him. He shakes his head and grins. "C'mon, Tones. I may not be a child prodigy with an intellect approaching Einstein's…"

"Surpassing, actually," she says snidely.

"—but c'mon, dude. Give me some credit here. I am still an engineering student. You think I can't recognize schematics and prototypes when you leave them lying around in the kitchen?"

"Shut up," she mutters without any real heat. "It's Selwyn from Berkeley. I was consulting."

"Sure, whatever you say, Toni." His hand smooths down her arm again. "I'm not buying that metaphysics is what turned you off from underage drinking, though. Hell, I'm starting to think it's your fourth major. Wanna tell me what really happened?"

Toni turns her face into his side, her forehead pressing against his ribs. "No," she says, voice muffled in his shirt. "It's stupid. I'm probably just PMSing. You know how crazy emotional chicks get when their period is about to start."

"Seriously? I buy your tampons, Toni," Rhodey says evenly. "Talking about your menstrual cycle isn't going to scare me off."

She snarls in frustration and hauls herself off the couch, wants to stop herself from pacing like a caged lion but can't. "God, what the hell did I ever do to deserve you? Jesus, Rhodey. Periods are like, supposed to be a magic button girls get to press when they want guys to shut up and stop talking. Fuck women's lib. It ruins everything."

"Yes," Rhodey drawls wryly. "Damn that ability to vote and go to college and work in traditionally male-dominated industries like…" He snaps his fingers, like he's trying to jog his memory. "Tell me, what womanly, gentle fields are you studying again, Tones? Engineering? Physics? Computer science?"

"I hate you," she says, pacing furiously.

"That's a shame. If you didn't hate me, I'd tell you that there's a pint of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer for you."

She stops dead, perks up. "Chocolate Fudge Brownie?" she says hopefully.

"Maybe." Rhodey's grin is easy and smart-assed. "Do you still hate me?"

"Not if you have Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Cross my heart." She skips into the kitchen, digs through the freezer until she finds the tub hidden in the back, behind a bag of frozen peas, of all things, and grabs a spoon out of the drying rack.

When she gets back to the living room Rhodey's still sitting on the couch, uncommonly still and serious. There's a thoughtful, cautious, assessing expression on his face that Toni isn't sure she likes. It's, in fact, making her anxious, nervous flutters gnawing at her stomach.

"What?" she barks, hand white-knuckling on the spoon. "You're freaking me out. What is it?"

Rhodey frowns, clears his throat, swallows, clears his throat again and looks uncomfortable. "Look," he says. "I'm only gonna ask this once, and then we'll never speak of it again, alright? I just wanna know if the reason you don't want to talk about what's clearly upsetting you is because…" He grimaces. "Am I one of your marks?"

She stares at him blankly for a long moment as her brain tries to process that information. "What? No. What?" Her brain catches up, and her stomach twists, and she's pretty sure the shock has her face in a rictus of grossness. Oh god, can the floor just fucking open up and swallow her whole? "Oh god, no. No. Ew. Ew! Jesus, Rhodey, why would you ask that!"

She's babbling and waving her hands like a lunatic, and she really hopes she's not insulting him with all the gagging and protesting. "I mean, I'm sure you'll make someone a very happy soulmate someday, but oh god, gross. No, I am one hundred percent sure you are free and clear of any marks I may or may not be concealing on my person. Fuck, you're my best friend! You're like my brother, for chrissake!"

"Oh, thank Christ and all the saints," Rhodey says with real, palpable relief, sinking back against the couch and scrubbing his face with both hands. "I love you, Tones, I do, but the thought of being your soulmate scares the piss out of me."

"Totally valid," she says honestly, and plops back down on the couch. She peels the lid off the container and flings it across the room before shoving the spoon in. "Jesus, now I really need the ice cream. Why the hell would you even ask something like that?"

Rhodey shrugs, a little helplessly. "I dunno," he says. "I just thought it might by why you're so goddamn weird about talking to me about this kinda stuff, stuff that obviously bothers you. Like, maybe you thought it was me, and you didn't want to tell me or something."

"No. Definitely no." She shovels a giant ball of ice cream in her mouth, chews and swallows. "And if it's all the same to you, I'd just like to skip straight to the 'let's never bring this up ever again' part you mentioned."

"Perfect," Rhodey says. "What were we talking about?"

"Selwyn," she says, licking the spoon clean before digging it back into the pint. "From Berkeley."

Much later, after Toni's helped Rhodey study for that test and they've watched half a dozen unfunny sitcoms on TV and Toni's stretching sleepily out on the couch under the afghan Rhodey's mother knitted for him to use as a throw, she feels Rhodey's hand brush over her hair.

"You can talk to me," he says softly. "I'm not going to run back to your father to tattle. He might expect me to do that, but fuck him, Toni. You're my best friend, as weird and crabby and big a pain in my ass as you are. He doesn't get shit from me unless you want him to."

Toni stills, staring at the hand pressed into the couch in front of her nose. She stays that way for a long, long time, wrestling with what she knows are gigantic trust issues, arguing with the ghost of her mother saying that she is to never tell anyone what marks she carries. Fighting with herself, because as much as she says soulmates are bullshit, she desperately wants to believe in the stories, but can't because she knows that she's never going to have any of the fairy tale.

Rhodey finally sighs faintly and starts moving away. "Good night, Toni."

"Okay," she whispers, so quietly that she thinks maybe Rhodey didn't hear her, but then he stops and she knows he did. "But not right now. I can't. I'm not ready."

"I understand," Rhodey says, and Toni thinks that the warm, soft tone means that he's telling the truth. "You know where I am when you are. G'night, Toni."

"G'night, Rhodey." She quells the guilt and tries to feel like she didn't just lie. It's a lost cause, because she's pretty sure she's never going to be ready. Because she's done her research and she has a pretty solid idea of what the white star edged in blue is supposed to mean.

There are hundreds of self-help books about soulmates, but she's pretty sure not one of them covers carrying the ice-cold marks of a semi-mythical superhuman her father's in love with who drowned during World War II, and a tall ghost with black hair and greasepaint that may or may not have been a figment of her imagination.

oOoOoOo

Siberia

"How big is this goddamn base anyway?" Toni grumbles an hour later, snapping off another pair of repulsor blasts at another featureless grey door and finding yet another staircase leading down, down, down. She grips the rail and peers over the edge, lifting the faceplate with two fingers so she can listen with her own ears. For once, there's nothing but silence and the too-loud drip of water, but the star is beating a steady cadence, a predatory, patient cadence.

"Thirty three floors, thirty-two of them underground, ma'am." If JARVIS is getting tired of answering every time Toni complains – approximately once every thirty three seconds, she thinks, one for each floor of this stupidly complex and unnecessarily huge base – he has the courtesy to pretend like he's patient. "Would you like me to overlay a map to your HUD, ma'am?"

"Nah." She scratches her nose and slams down the faceplate again with a sigh. "Alright, which batch of idiots should we take out next, J? Floor number twenty six, or lucky number floor twenty seven?"

"There is another weapons depot stored on twenty-six," JARVIS says after a moment. "Which, I might add, you would know if you had an overlay map on the HUD to consult."

"I'm going to sell you to Bill Gates," Toni promises, then groans in protest when JARVIS displays the map anyway. "You never do what I tell you to do, J. Dammit, I programmed you better than this."

If JARVIS had eyeballs, this would be the perfect moment for an innocent flutter of the lashes. Toni suspects he's doing the cyber-equivalent. Blinking an emoji, maybe? Something to look into at a later date, anyway.

"You may have been intoxicated, ma'am, though I am unable to definitively state one way or the other as I have no records concerning the time before I came online. Shall I prepare a search algorithm to see if there is any pertinent data, possibly involving nudity and public fountains, located on Youtube?"

Toni growls. "Gates is too good for you. You're going straight to Google, you hear me? Let's see how you enjoy being a cluster server for captcha processing. It was one time."

"It was one time in the Trevi Fountain. And, if I may… Google did not invent captchas," JARVIS replies, maddeningly calm, and there's one of those fractional pauses, the ones that make Toni grind her teeth. "But you can Google who did."

"I'm going to donate you to a community college as soon as we get back stateside, JARVIS," Toni mutters, moving along the stairs and down a deserted hallway until finding the door to the armory closed. She peers through the narrow window, seeing crates and ammo cans, some labeled STARK INDUSTRIES, some labeled HAMMERTECH. Toni is insulted on principle. Under no circumstances should HammerTech be allowed in the same room as her stuff. It's just déclassé. "Maybe even a child care center. Busy Bee or Honey Bear or Little Flowers on Penguins. Something saccharine like that. You can entertain snot-nosed brats for the rest of forever, mi capisci? Set a reminder for me so I don't forget to donate you. Also, see if anything in there can be remote-detonated, will you? Seriously, I hate it when people steal my shit."

"Of course, ma'am. Would you like that filed under 'Empty Threats' or 'Plans for the Robot Apocalypse'? The inventory manifest for the armory lists several Stark smart bombs that have been stored within."

She tenses, her mind flashing to Afghanistan and cluster bombs and dark holes in the world. She debates breaking down the door to check with her own eyeballs. "Jericho?"

"Strix, generation circa 2004. I have accessed their onboard targeting and guidance systems. Shall I patch them into your suit, ma'am?"

"May as well." She closes her eyes, allowing herself a sigh of relief. Strix is an older model, still deadly but packing nowhere near the firepower of the Jericho model. Small miracles. She'll take it.

"And the filing, ma'am? Threat, or Plot?"

She shrugs. "Live a little. Go for both."

Something warns her. The scrape of a boot sole on the concrete behind her. A whisper of cloth on skin. A hiss of breath quietly released. The sudden, sharp flare of static in the red star. In the reflection of the glass, there's a murky shape blurring towards her, tall and hazy and dark, except for on the left, which is a bright gleam grey with a smear of scarlet.

She spins, dropping to a knee and hands coming up defensively. It's the only thing that saves her head from being knocked off her shoulders.