“Do you have any family?” asks Yinsen
“No one”
“So you are a man who has everything. And nothing?”
Tony stops his work for a split second.
“What about you? Anyone waiting for you?”
In a cave in Afghanistan, Athena Stark is a regret.
“Here it is, a very dry vodka martini with five olives, because more seemed excessive”
“Thank you, I didn’t actually expect you to come back” Pepper watches behind Tony’s back “Not with how serious that Suit seems”
Tony smiles “What can I say, Afghanistan made me reorder my priorities”
“Wooing a girl is more important than a serious looking almost certainly federal agent?” asks the redhead with raised eyebrows.
Whisky like eyes look at her “You are”
That night, Athena Stark becomes a future
“I am Iron Man”
The journalists stand up, questions overlapping each other.
In the adjacent room Pepper sighs, hand rising to pinch the bridge of her nose, still unaware of the bunch of cells assembling near her stomach.
At that moment Athena Stark is an unknown variable.
“I’m pregnant"
Tony’s face splits with a grin, pure joy coating his face.
Nervously, he asks “What are you going to do?”
Athena Stark just became a reality.
“It’s a girl”
Tony looks down at the bundle now in his arms.
Two sets of almost identical dark eyes meet.
Mere seconds after her birth, Athena is a Stark.
“DAD!”
The shout resonates through the busy room, everyone stopping what they are doing.
Loki merely raises an eyebrow as without missing a beat Tony turns and catches the girl running towards him, Happy panting behind her.
Beside the rubble Christine Everart signals to the photographer beside her to take the shot.
At age 5 Athena Stark makes her first public appearance.
Athena listens as FRIDAY calls her mother, panicking after losing contact with her father.
On the (long) ride to the hospital medical facility she stays silent, dark eyes watching as her mother fidgets in her seat and lets her eyes get increasingly redder.
When the car pulls up to the government facility those same dark eyes track the cameras and the people around them.
It’s not until she sees her father that she shows any outward sign of emotion.
Vision watches as the unusually silent teen clenches her fists and narrows her eyes.
Athena Stark is 13 when her entire world almost crumbles for the fourth time and she decides it’s one time too many.