The Armorer

"I'll follow you to the restaurant," I told them grudgingly. They wheeled around without another word and got in their car. I got into my blue Mercedes CLS coupe. What can I say? I'd really liked my Mercedes SUV. The only drawback was the very limited palette of colors--they'd had like four different types of black and no greens...or anything different, really.

As I pulled out after the sedan, I saw Tony Stark emerge from the gardens and get into his own car.

When I got to Lark, I saw a small selection of vehicles and parked reluctantly off to the side. Part of that was that I'd only had the car a month and didn't want it to get dinged accidentally. Sure, I could fix it easily, but it still would have been damaged. I would know. I took one last deep breath of the leather-scented air and got out, wishing I'd worn something a little nicer. As I walked with Hawkeye and Natasha to the door, Stark's flashy R8 pulled in. We walked over to a long table where Cap, Thor, Scarlet Witch, Vision, a guy who looked like he was still in high school, a guy who looked a lot like Paul Rudd and was so excited his eyes were practically bugging out, and three African-American men, one in an exoskeleton--I guessed that guy was War Machine, a testosterone-soaked name if I ever heard one--were waiting. Cap stood and held a chair for Natasha. King T'Challa walked over to me and extended his hand which I shook automatically. He looked quite solemn, but he winked as he gave me a small velvet pouch. I could feel the metal ingot within and positively itched to examine it, but would have to wait. Tony Stark came in and sat at the head of the table.

I sat between the king and the guy who must be Falcon. Waiters came up and took beverage orders, handed out menus, that sort of thing. Stark opened his mouth after we'd ordered, but King T'Challa smoothly started introducing the people around the table, starting at his right: Scott Lang--"I'm Ant Man," he said, leaning over the table to shake my hand. I had to smile, he was just so excited to be here. Vision was differently colored and pretty freaky to my vision; Scarlet Witch, Natasha and Clint Barton (I'd never asked for his name; he was one of the few Avengers with a secret identity and it made me nervous that I was getting names now), Cap, Stark, Colonel James Rhodes, Peter Parker, Thor, and Samuel Wilson, who also shook my hand. The king finished the introduction by announcing my name.

"Emma? That is a pretty name," Thor said, tucking into one of his appetizers.

"Dude--you stayed in her house and you didn't bother to learn her name?" Falcon asked, dismayed. Thor shrugged a little.

"So what's the problem with your shield?" I asked Cap, remembering what Natasha had said.

"Problem? There's no problem," he assured me. My mouth twitched as Natasha elbowed him.

"Speaking of his shield, how did you make it?" Stark cut in. "Because it's been through a few battles now and there's not a scratch on it. My father couldn't have done it."

I take a bite of my appetizer. "It's what I do," I say simply.

Stark studies me. I stare back, uninterested in games. "So why are you subletting? You have a few hundred million of my dollars in your bank account."

Just like that, I lose my appetite. "Well, they aren't your dollars, actually, they're mine. And I can spend them or not as I please."

Peter Parker leans around Thor (and he's practically laying on the table, Thor's a lot to lean around). "How did you get so much money from Mr Stark?" he asks breathlessly.

My cheeks burn for a moment. "It wouldn't have been nearly that much, but Stark managed to piss off the mediator." I looked at Stark. "If you'd kept your mouth shut instead of antagonizing every single person in that room, you'd have had to pay a lot less." Stark shrugs. This is one of the reasons I don't like him. He never admits he's wrong. He always has to be the center of attention.

"What did you do this time?" Colonel Rhodes says to him, a little wearily.

"I didn't do anything. She used to work for me. She broke the rules and she was fired." He says this crisply, almost nonchalantly, and it pushes me over the edge.

"No." I say this so firmly that everybody looks at me. "I worked for Mr Stark. After he was killed, I was employed by the materials research division of Stark Tech." Stark gets the slap in my words and turns red in fury.

"Wait, what?" Wilson said in bewilderment, looking between us.

"I was hired by Mr Howard Stark," I tell him evenly. Everybody looks at Tony Stark. Everybody knows his dad is a sore spot with him.

"I don't get it," Parker says. Cap sighs.

"Howard Stark was her mentor. She respected him a lot," he explains. I'd be worried that Tony Stark would be stroking out about now from the look of him, but somehow I just don't care.

"So...why are you not working there anymore?" Ant Man asks cautiously.

"In one of the periods of Stark's micromanagement, there was a lab accident. Dickhead in the lab set off a small explosion. A guy from another lab who was crammed into ours spilled waste chemicals on me. Stark claimed we'd broken lab policies and the two of us were fired."

"I gather the mediator saw things differently?"

"Yes. She said that the blanket approval the lab manager had given us for overtime was enough, that there were a lot of safety violations mandated by management, and that the management was a mess. Stark took offense, and that's how I ended up with such a large settlement." I grinned/snarled at Stark. "Because nobody's allowed to criticize Tony Stark."

"That low-level--" he started to say loudly.

"You called her a man-hating bureaucrat, the dregs of her law school class, who had no understanding of what it takes to be successful and no intellectual capacity," I said icily. The table groaned.

"Stark Industries paid for your Masters," he said, changing topics again. "And you worked for me in metals and coatings. How do I know you're not using proprietary knowledge for your own profit?"

"Because nobody in those labs can do what I can," I assured him indifferently. "But perhaps somebody in Division O could."

Stark shut right up. Everybody else looked between us. The servers came out with the entrees.

"What's Division O?" Cap finally asked.

"It's--"

"Shut up," Stark said.

"We used to joke, call it Lab Ohmigod," I said over him. "It's a lab where they either experiment on mutants or try to create mutations. I'm not sure which." I poked my fork in the fish. "But you knew I had a mutation. It was in the documents in the mediation, the doctor's report you insisted on." He didn't say a word.

"You suppressed that report," Hawkeye said flatly. "If the mediator had known she had a mutation because of that, she'd probably own a good chunk of Stark Tech now."

"You son of a bitch," I said. "First you hold off paying the settlement for months so that you could get the interest on it, a power play. Now I find out that you withheld evidence in a legal matter. And you accuse me of theft." I want to hurt him. It's not that I want more money from him, I can't spend what I've got now, but the knowledge he cheated to make himself look better floors me. I'd known my lawyer wasn't as good as Stark's, but now I was realizing just how unequal representation had been. "It's no wonder your father had a low opinion of you." I can tell that hits him right where he lives and I'm meanly glad of it.

"You don't know anything about my father," he hissed.

"I do, actually. He spent a lot of time in the labs with us. He didn't just direct the research projects, he led us. Most of us would have done anything he asked. Even those who weren't completely wowed by him liked him."

"Oh. You were one of his acolytes," he said, sneering.

"Actually, we were The Acolytes," I correct him. "And proud to be. He hand picked us to do research. It wasn't bleeding edge research, because it was out far enough that blood hadn't reached it yet." I smiled a little at the inside joke. He spent more time with us than the rest of the employees. He talked to us. Once he told me that while he loved his wife, he loved the work we were doing more, it was more intellectually engaging. Ouch.

"Were you sleeping with him?"

I rolled my eyes. "Unlike you, Mr Stark knew better than to fuck the employees. But there were a lot of other reasons why it never would have happened. He was married, he was very careful not to abuse his authority, I wouldn't have ever wanted to disturb our relationship as it was. That time, those people, that camaraderie were the highlight of my professional life." Stark's head jerked back like I'd slapped him. I took a deep breath to cover the feeling of loss I still experienced. "As for profit, not only did I not make a profit on the creation of that shield, I didn't earn one red cent from it. In fact, it cost me my forge, my house. I had to leave one step ahead of an angry mob."

"It was a wide spot in the jungle," Stark scoffs.

"It was mine. It was what I needed in order to come to grips with what happened, learn new skills, made some pretty cool things," I snapped. I probably stayed there too long, but it was comfortable, and I had made my place.

"Why did you do it, then?" Hawkeye asks, looking up from a pasta dish.

"It was a challenge," I shrugged. "And it seemed like the right thing to do."

"So what is this mutation?" Lang asked, fascinated. "Or are we allowed to use the M word?"

I smiled a little. His honest enthusiasm was...welcome. Bringing up all these old hurts was like lancing an bad infection and I felt tired and stained by it. I raised my eyebrows briefly and took Falcon's steak knife. I put my hand on the table and with all my strength, I slashed the knife across my skin. Everybody flinched back. I felt it like I'd just smacked the dull side of the knife against my hand. I returned the knife and everybody looked at my hand. Not a drop of blood, and it should have been laid open to the bone. "Impervious to cuts, punctures, burns of all kinds." I looked around. Cap sat back and I knew he wouldn't say anything about the other mutations. "In fact, I went back to Stark Tech once this started to show up. Medical refused to take a look since I'd passed the medical exam after the accident and I no longer worked there." I smiled brightly.

"What would happen if you need surgery?" King T'Challa asked slowly. My smile faded.

"Basically, if they couldn't do it through the GI tract, it's too bad for me," I said simply. "Unfortunately, there's no super healing power that came with it."

"Good to know," Stark said briskly. Right now I loathe him so much.

"Typical," I said, my lip curling. "A quip to cover up as usual."

"Oh?" he said, a new edge to his voice.

"Image is literally everything to you. So you come up with quips to cover up your uncertainty, your inadequacies, your mistakes, your hollow core. Your exterior is so polished--genius, playboy, philanthropist, "superhero"-- it's big and flashy." I looked at the arc reactor in his chest and shook my head. "Even that thing in your chest. Yeah, it's a genius bit of tech, but it's way bigger than it has to be, and you wouldn't be you if you didn't flaunt the flashlight beaming out of your chest. Tell me. If there was a little girl who'd been hurt the same way you were, maybe by an old stockpiled Stark weapon, would you give her an arc reactor of her own to save her life?" He jerked but didn't answer. "No, and I'll tell you why. Because you don't want anybody to get their hands on your stuff. And then you'd feel bad about your selfishness and try to cover up the guilt by throwing money around, getting your name on a hospital wing for children's care even though you wouldn't save that one child. Because you still need to service your ego. Small kind gestures out of sight of the media are not your style. And you're curiously blind. When people came to you with the Sokovia Accords, did you ever say, 'screw you. If we hadn't been there the death toll would have been a lot higher. We fight the supervillains so that more aren't hurt.' With all the resources at your disposal, did you ever look into defensive weapons that don't produce so much damage? I'm betting no, because it's easier just to pay off somebody for a wrecked building or to settle out of court on a wrongful death suit. And because you caved in about the Accords, three of the remaining Acolytes were killed last week in Singapore when the bad guys crashed the lab in search of a chemical agent. There isn't enough of them left to have a burial."

I looked at my lunch, now cold and unappealing. I slid the pouch with the precious vibranium ingot along the table back to T'Challa. "I can't take this," I said, and got up and left.