INFERNO │ Marvel

4.1 trauma

It took a while for Tony Stark to begin showing signs of post-traumatic stress, but when he did, Amelia was the first to notice. She had felt it too, although she didn't express it in the same way.

After the battle of New York, Amelia had felt something akin to an emotional void. She had shut herself off from the world, refusing to look at the news, answer any calls from her friends or give an honest response when her brother asked her if she was ok. In truth, she didn't know the answer herself.

What was ironic was that when she asked him the same question, he was quick to shut down too. Despite their closeness, the siblings no longer shared their darkest secrets with each other: they were suffering. And with her brother suffering seemingly worse things than her, Amelia felt she had nowhere to turn with her own grievances.

It was hard to pinpoint what those grievances were. Watching her brother almost die (again), for one. Being the person who instructed Natasha to close the portal behind him made it worse. Having to defeat an entire army of aliens with just six other people, superheroes or not. Those people had the potential to be her new friends, but she had simply shut them out. Steve Rogers, clearly adapting to the modern world, had been persistent with his monthly calls, that she either didn't answer or hardly spoke on. She felt awful, but couldn't bring herself to talk.

So maybe Amelia was feeling something: grief, paranoia, guilt, a general sense of despair. She was beginning to understand why Pepper always got mad at her and Tony's incessant need to create newer and better suits. It made them heroes, but it also made them targets. Still, they kept building and preparing for the next fight.

"Ow!" Tony yelled once more after he implanted yet another device into his arm that would allow him to call upon the Mark 42 suit. Amelia was sat in her own corner of the workshop, tinkering on her own project. While Tony made suit after suit after suit, she had worked on just one. She had a lot fewer contraptions to mess with, meaning it was easier to not get it wrong and have to scrap the whole thing.

She hadn't changed much about her suit from the one she used in New York, which was now stored in Stark Tower should the city ever be invaded by aliens again. Mostly, it was now for protection. In the new version at their home in Malibu, she had made it more heat-resistant, removed her bladed wrists and replaced them with small pea-sized devices that worked in a similar fashion to her previous 'Hades' invention, sticking to the enemy and when ignited by her powers causing them to go up in flames. Each wrist was equipped with a dozen. One major change she had made was bright orange panels on the front of her suit which were a power source, feeding on her fire and making her suit self-sustaining when she was inside it, giving her constant access to JARVIS and his systems that allowed her aim accuracy and such. It also just made the suit look cool as all hell.

"Sir, please may I request just a few hours to calibrate..." JARVIS requested as Tony finished up with injecting his devices.

"No," he denied. "Forty-eight! Micro-repeater implanting sequence complete."

"As you wish, sir. I've also prepared a safety briefing for you to entirely ignore," JARVIS said.

"Which I will. Right, let's do this," Tony replied, standing from his spot and heading for the elevated platform in the centre of the room. "Look alive, Ames. You're awfully quiet over there."

Amelia looked up from the suit arm that was laid across her worktop. Tony was moving two pointed fingers between his own eyes and hers, indicating for her to watch him. She huffed, only mildly amused, quickly finishing up with her tinkering and pressing the button on the front of the suit to fold it back down into a backpack. She then moved over to the wall where she had a small reinforced and indestructible safe that she kept her suit in. Tony had a whole underground area where he stored his own, but she was more discreet. The only people able to open the safe were her and JARVIS, and only him upon her request.