Unfinished Gems

Iron Maiden - 7

Tony was still more than a little irritated at the fact he was being out on semi-house arrest, so he devoted most of the week to upgrading the new armor he made.

Though he did make an extra set for Jazz, one that would be made once he had a scan of her body measurements. The suit he had in mind would be fitted to one person only and have the AI running most of the 'boring' stuff so the one inside could focus on the important things, like flying.

It also gave him more time to focus on a smaller version of the arc reactor.

However it was when he went to get the medical scan of his daughter that he hit a major roadblock he never expected to find.

While the 'naughty bits' were more or less covered by the bra and female boxers she was wearing, the rest of it wasn't. Dr. Strange had been very thorough when she had to sit through the physical (though he still wondered why she insisted an ex-surgeon with a really weird idea of fashion do the exam) and documented everything.

Which was why Tony was staring in abject disbelief and no small amount of horror at the sheer amount of scarring on her body.

He even included helpful tidbits like the most likely cause of the injuries and roughly how old she would have been at the time. Some of them didn't make sense, like the line of weird divets that went down her back from her right shoulder down to roughly where the kidneys were, or the hole that almost looked like a 'through and through' on her right arm, or the scarring on her left hand that clearly read in almost neat penmanship 'I must not tell lies'.

Tony couldn't look away or pretend he saw nothing. Just reading the 'cause' section along with the 'age' made his blood boil as it was very, very clear his daughter had been abused from early childhood until she left England. He had thought she had merely suffered from general neglect and emotional trauma from the cupboard, and hadn't that been a horrific discovery that the investigator shared...learning Jazz had quite literally lived in a cupboard under the stairs for close to ten full years before finally getting a proper bedroom that the investigator had been appalled to find had no less than six locks on the door and a cat flap of all things, never mind the signs that there had also been bars on the window that had been ripped out at one point.

She was somewhat underweight, showed signs of malnourishment and a few lingering traces of conditions that shouldn't exist these days in civilized countries like scurvy, and there was a look in her eyes that said she had seen hell and survived.

Tony had filed the knowledge that Jazz had a really rough childhood, but it wasn't until he saw the scans that it really sank in just how much of a survivor his daughter was. It was no wonder she was so much more mature than him, or why she was so independent.

For a moment, Tony almost contemplated avoiding the rest. But now that he saw with his own eyes how bad things had been, he couldn't look away.

He read the rest of the document and felt pissed all over again.

Strange had apparently gotten help with this part, because there were signs of several ad-libs and code words that only barely made sense to someone like him.

The thing that alarmed him the most was the fact that Jazz had enough snake anti-venom in her system to quite literally kill several grown men, and there was a notation in her file that because of it she would never be able to donate blood. It was simply too poisonous, and it was a miracle she was even alive, much less fully functional. There was also an odd note in her file that said she had part of a snake's tooth deeply embedded in the same area as the near through and through in her right arm. It was apparently impossible to remove, though there seemed to be no ill effects of it being there.