INFERNO │ Marvel

1.6 heavy is the head

"What do we do about the company, Tony?" Amelia asked her brother. She held both her hands in front of her, flames dancing between her fingertips. "We can't let Obadiah go on with this."

"We won't," Tony said as Pepper descended the stairs to the workshop. "Hey. You busy? You mind if I send you on an errand?"

"What kind of errand?" Pepper inquired.

"I need you to go to my office. You're going to hack into the mainframe and you're going to retrieve all the recent shipping manifests." Tony placed a small device in her hand. "This is a lock chip. This'll get you in. It's probably under Executive Files. If not, they put it on a ghost drive, in which case you need to look for the lowest numeric heading."

"And what do you plan to do with this information if I bring it back here?"

"Same drill, I'm guessing," Amelia sighed, catching on pretty quick. "They've been dealing under the table, and we're going to stop them. We're going to find those damn weapons and destroy them."

"Tony, you know that I would help you with anything, but I cannot help you if you're going to start all of this again," Pepper said. "Finding out Amelia turned herself into a superhuman that can shoot fire was bad enough, and now you're walking around in a deadly metal suit. Both of you are putting targets on your backs."

"There is nothing except this!" Tony said, his back turned to the both of them. "There's no art opening, there's no benefit, there's nothing to sign. There is the next mission and nothing else."

"Is that so?" Pepper questioned him, throwing the lock chip on the table. "Well, then, I quit."

"Pepper-" Amelia started as her friend walked away, but Tony cut her off.

"You stood by my side all these years while I reaped the benefits of destruction. And now that I'm trying to protect the people that I put in harm's way, you're going to walk out?"

"You're going to kill yourself, Tony. You're both going to kill yourselves," Pepper scolded them. "I'm not going to be a part of it."

"I shouldn't be alive unless it was for a reason. I'm not crazy, Pepper. I just finally know what I have to do. And I know in my heart that it's right."

"And you, Amelia?" her friend asked.

"This is the life we were given, Pepper. One where we're supposed to be heroes. It's the Stark legacy. We thought we were doing that when we were making weapons, just like dad did, and we have caused nothing but death. We need to do this the right way now. You have to trust us."

Pepper looked between the siblings. "You're all I have too, you know?"

With that, she walked back up the stairs, lock chip in her hand.

"You know this could get messy, Ames," Tony said to her. "It's us who will have to deal with the fallout of this."

"Heavy is the head that wears the crown, right?" she replied. "We were bound to face the consequences of our actions one day, Tony. We have to take it as it comes. But we'll do it together. We'll fix this."

-

Amelia stared at the sea as she sat on the sofa in the mansion living space, sipping on a coffee. It calmed her to look at the endless ocean.

The phone rang across from her. "You can answer that," she told Tony as he went to search for it under the piles of blankets and cushions. She could just hear Pepper's voice calling for Tony when a sharp pain hit her head and she fell back against the sofa. She couldn't move, couldn't speak, could barely breathe, yet her thoughts were going a billion miles an hour as the sharp ringing moved from one side of her to the other, where Tony had just sat down. She couldn't even turn her head to look at him, but she suspected he was in a similar state. There was only one person she knew with access to the kind of tech they had just been hit with.