Iron Deception (An Avengers FanFiction)

Chapter 4 - Toni Stark

Toni's Point of View

From: Genius Extraordinaire

To: Super-Agent P to the C

Sent:

Subject: I won't take it personally that you find Fury more interesting than me

Condition - I get to be me

Toni stared at the screen of her tonEE-Pad - good thing she wasn't looking to sell it or she would have to think up a snazzier name. Personally she thought the tonEE-Pad was a really good name which was why the device was staying hers. And only hers.

The sent e-mail was mocking her. What had she been thinking? She didn't really know. The condition had come to her in a flash when she had been speaking to Phil and she had already typed and sent the e-mail before she had hung up the phone.

But now that she was thinking about it she felt so stupid, so childish with her request. What were the chances of any of the 'team' taking her seriously and treating her as an equal member of the Avengers if she walked in as she was now? Toni Stark, teen genius. They would laugh her out of the building without wearing Anthony Stark, playboy and genius. As it stood Tony Stark wasn't loved by everyone and she wouldn't be surprised if he…she(damn it, she didn't know how to talk about herself anymore)had the prejudice of more than a few people to deal with.

Brilliant. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn't.

But I know how to deal as Anthony Stark. I don't know how to be Toni in public...not really.

"JARVIS,"

Her voice filled the silence of her lab. She looked around it. She wasn't sure she liked it. It was too shiny and new. Her lab back home was filled with half-finished projects, scratches and there was still some rubble from her sudden need to remodel last year - she had nursed a torn muscle in her shoulder for weeks after that, but boy had it been fun.

"Yes, Miss,"

"Retrieve the e-mail I just sent to Phil and replace the message with, 'No conditions need to be met'"

"Very well Miss"

"And JARVIS," she turned back to her tonEE-Pad and turned it on its side, bringing up the schematics of an Iron Man suit "begin running diagnostics on the Mark 7,"

"Diagnostic running,"

"Thanks J," she replied, feeling more tired in this one moment than she ever had in her life. She flicked the schematics to the side and brought up another image, with a few hand swivels she 'threw' the image from the screen of the Pad and into the centre of the room.

She kicked herself from the table, the wheelie chair skittering across the room to stop inches before her head distorted the image. She stood, pushed the chair back to the desk and began circling the image before heading to a cabinet standing quit innocently by the soldering bench and racked through it, pulling out spools of wire and cable, along with a roll of insulation.

She opened more drawers, pushing things aside in agitation, unable to locate what she was looking for. Another thing she hated about this new lab. She couldn't find anything!

"JARVIS," she called, her head in the deep bottom drawer, "We did bring the box of bits didn't we? I can't find it!"

She never went anywhere without the box. It was filled with...well...bits. Pieces from all sorts of things that on their own wouldn't be too helpful but it kept her amused to fiddle with them and make random stuff or sometimes there was a final piece to a current project hiding away in it.