Forced Second Chances

The day she hugs Tony goodbye in his dorm room she cries herself to sleep, she had heard second-hand how hard it had been for him before he met James Rhodes. She can only hope it’s better this time around with the knowledge that she’d grind the whole school to dust if he asked but with the almost physical wall of green surrounding the place she isn’t very optimistic.

To distract herself she throws herself into work rebuilding her ark reactor.

“Are you really doing this?!” Stane yells over the sounds of her heavy-duty tools, she’d turned it off and drained it into a 3-gigawatt power bank so there was no reason for it to ‘suddenly explode’. Edwin said she was cursed though and, while not logical at all, he was correct so the power bank was still hooked up until she got right into the core just in case the reactor decided it wanted to turn on again. The Tesseract [which she now knows was the space stone] had adored doing that. “You have a board meeting in an hour!”

“Course I do, Obi!” She laughs as she gets through the outer layer, quickly eyeing the power level in the bank to make sure it is the same before she starts the next stretch of her journey into the reactor. Her mouth filled with the taste of sour limes every time she tried to call him Stane and dark green shackles kept her wrists down when she wanted to deck him. She hated this fixed-point bullshit. “And I won’t be late! Promise!”

“Are you… Lana! You’re inside a reactor! Of course, you’re going to be late!”

“It’s just an upgrade!”

“All I can see are your feet! How are you getting out?!”

She shimmies forward and reaches forward, a little more, a little more… “There!” She tugs the connection point out then shimmies out. “See! Done in a flash. You have such little faith in me.” She pouts playfully before slapping his shoulder, leaving an oil handprint which makes him sour, and walking past him to the group of engineers she’d summoned. “Alright boys and girls, she’s all safe for deconstruction. Rebuilding will start tomorrow so let's hop to it!”

“Helana! You can’t be serious, if you do this now there is no way you’ll make the meeting.” Stane complains.

“Of course I will, Obi.” She laughs as she spins back towards him in vindictive glee. “Because we’ll be having the meeting here. At the foot of the future of energy!”

Tony had shrunk her reactor and managed to harness the space stone’s core element as a power source but in doing so he’d had to cut a few things out. Things he’d continued to leave out when he built the bigger version for his tower. She couldn’t wait to see what this baby could do with all the bells and whistles.

She’d really missed working with heavy machinery.

Tony introduces her to Rhodney just after winter break over a video call while she’s in the middle of packing for a mini holiday in New York. She was building another reactor because the board loved them and wanted all of the warehouses to run on them, but she refused to tell them how they were built. Eat your heart out Hydra, you’re not getting anything out of her.

“Mamă, this is my new roommate. James Rhodes.” Tony says awkwardly which is her first sign that this is going to go badly.

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Rhodes.” She says with a pleasant smile as she continues packing. Heels with daggers in the heel, check. Bulletproof winter coat, check. Lipstick taser with enough charge to give Rogers a heart attack, check.

“It’s, ah, terrifying to meet you.” He says with wide eyes as he watches her pull out and put back the six de-boning knives on one of her corsets before she packs it.

“Good. Remember that.” She hums with a slightly brighter smile before her eyes cut back to Tony. “What happened to your old roommate?”

Tony fidgets a little, clearly very unsure about what her reaction is going to be. But he does tell her and every word drowns her world in dense, suffocating, red.

Apparently, there’s this nineteen-year-old harlot called Sunset Bain who paid Tony’s old roommate to drug him, her thirteen-year-old son, so she could rape him to get pregnant. Because she was a gold-digger as well as a child molesting paedophile, which was actually the least damning on the list but still pissed Helana the hell off.

Tony, her precious dragă, realised something was wrong when his roommate had left him with her and his head started getting fuzzy. He yelled for help and fought Bain off when she tried to cover his mouth until James broke down the door to the room after beating the hell out of the roommate, he’d then picked a struggling Tony up and sprinted him to the on-campus nurse.

Tony had been ready to beg James to stay with him because he didn’t feel safe but James had switched his rooming assignment as soon as Tony had said stay, please. On top of that James was still actively pushing Tony to press charges.

“Mamă?” Tony asks as the silence rings around them.

She fights back the waves of crimson that threaten to drown her. Her baby had been hurt, he’d been drugged, scared, and alone until a practical stranger came to save him. Sure, she knew that James would love and cherish Tony until their dying breath but Tony didn’t know that. He must have been terrified.

“JARVIS, nepotul. I want everything you can find on both of them.” She snarls, trying hard to make sure he doesn’t think she was mad at him. Seconds later several streams of information spring to life in front of her. “Thank you.” She says as she gently runs her hand over the closest wall. “Tony, Mr. Rhodes is correct. You need to press charges.”

“But…”

“Antony.” She says sharply, too sharply with the way his jaw clicks shut. She fights the endless red harder so her shoulders loosen. “Do you remember my divorce from your father? Do you know why I did it?”

She can see the tension in his arms making it obvious that he was clenching his fists. “Because he hurt you.” He hisses, clearly still furious about it like the vengeful protector he’d always been.

“No.” She says making him blink. “I’ve been smacked around before, Tony. It wasn’t anything new. I divorced him because he hurt you. I left him because if I didn’t you would have been in danger and I wasn’t going to let you grow up being hurt in the one place you were supposed to feel safest.”

“You did it… for me?”

“I did. It was horrible and embarrassing to have my faults splashed across every newspaper in the world but I needed to protect you.” She says as the red finally settles. “You’re like me, Tony. So like me, it breaks my heart. You’ll let the world hurt you endlessly if you think it will keep people safe.” He swallows and looks away. “You need to press charges, my dragă, because someone doesn’t become that confident during their first time and we both know it won’t stop with you. People like that never stop unless someone stops them.”

“What are you going to do?” He asks after a minute of silence.

“Oh, I’m going to fucking bury them.” She tells him with a shark’s grin. “By the time I’m done, they won’t even have enough to get a court-appointed lawyer. Again, it was lovely to meet you, Mr Rhodes. Please enjoy your full ride education.”

“But I don’t have a…” She cuts the call and then sends her fist through a wall [into one of her cubby holes, she’d never hurt JARVIS].

“Ma’am!” Edwin shouts as he rushes in, yanking her hand out of the wall and tugging her towards the bathroom.

“JARVIS, if you could be a dear and send a copy of that call as well as everything you’ve gathered to my lovely lawyers then get the girls in PR on standby that would be appreciated.” She says as Edwin forces her to sit on the edge of her bathtub so he can dig the chunks of metal out of her hand.

“I will… Father is asking me to be gentle. What should I do?” JARVIS asks, confused and weary.

It makes her soften, he was so helpful and she’d been so used to him in the future that she kept forgetting that he was only a few months old here. “What do you want to do?” She asks him as Edwin works out a particularly deep shard. If her hand was ruined by this Bain bitch Helana was going to make her regret it.

“She hurt father,” JARVIS says slowly like he is testing the words. “She made him scared… I will not be gentle, they are getting everything. Is there a way I can help you ruin them?”

“Just getting everything over should be good for the moment, we need to wait for legal and PR to tell us the best course of action. But I’m sure Eve will be delighted with help spreading this far and wide when the time is right.” She hums.

“I will make my willingness to assist known to Miss Day. Thank you for helping me choose a course of action, bunica.”

“I will always be here to talk, JARVIS.” She promises, smiling a little when the burnt orange of his soul flares under her feet before settling again.

“Helana,” Edwin asks when he’s done patching up her hand.

“Yes, Edwin?” She hums as she takes her hand back, flexing each finger to make doubly sure she’s not broken anything.

“How did you do that?” She sends him a questioning look. “You re-enforced those cubby doors so heavily that, by your own admission, not even a super soldier could break through. How did you, someone who is not a super soldier, punch straight through it and not even break your fingers?”

… Ah.

“Ah.” Well, shit. “So… funny story old friend.”

Helana is in a little café in New York drinking a coffee and reading about Sunset Bain’s life burning down around her when the seat across from her is pulled out.

“I said no.” She hums into her coffee as she continues to read, she has about three hours before she’s scheduled to be at the new warehouse to start construction and she’s planning to spend that time watching Eve [and JARVIS] go absolutely insane.

At this point, Tony wouldn’t even need to press charges for the girl to spend the rest of her, very short life, in jail.

You didn’t get outed for double-crossing this many people and live long after all.

But, as her Mamă used to say. Every little helped.

“Helana.” Peggy sighed like she wasn’t using the monthly money she’d been receiving to play spy then told her it was for Rogers. Not that Helana cared where the money went but it was the principle of it all. “We’re not asking you to go out on missions…”

“Yet.”

“… you’re just the second person that we think could figure it out.” Peggy continues over her like she was a child.

She continues to read the beautifully crafted article before folding the paper and placing it on the table in front of her. Age has taken hold of Peggy, streaks of grey running rivers through her hair, crow's feet softly lingering in the corner of her eyes even though she wasn’t smiling. The skin on her hands is slightly more blemished and she has a frailish air to her. She’s still sure Peggy could beat several grown men to tears, don’t get her wrong, but the last time they met Helana would have guessed over a dozen.

“Fine, I’ll bite. Who’s the first?” She assumed it would be Hank, they’d always got pitted together the most. What with his Pym particles and, well, her everything else.

“Antony,” Peggy says and her world narrows to a point.

“Margret Carter.” She purrs as red seeps into the edges of her vision. “I know you’re smart enough not to play this game with me.”

“Helana…” Peggy starts but she cuts her off with a wide grin filled with teeth.

“Did you not pick up a paper this morning? Don’t worry, you can read mine.”

“I…”

“Go on, old friend. Take a look.” She slides the paper pointedly over the table, the big headline; Police make major arrest in underground weapons trade, Sunset Bain is linked to weapon sales between several rival gangs! is hanging over a high-definition picture of Sunset Bain being dragged into a police van kicking and screaming. “I would rethink the pitch you were trying to sell me there. Pegs, just a little advice between good pals.”

“… Your prior knowledge on the super soldier serum would be an invaluable help to protecting the world from lingering threats,” Peggy says calmly but she spies [haha] the twitch of her eyebrow.

“How kind of you to remember. I’m busy for the rest of the month but I’ll look over your notes after that.” She tells the other woman as she hails a waitress down. “Oh, and I don’t work on Tony’s breaks. Those are family time. Do have fun dealing with Phillips and it was simply charming catching up.” She says with a bright paparazzi grin before paying and heading out. She has a date with a forty-ton Ark Generator and it would be rude to be late.