Bruised (Irondad)

19

Sometimes, life is two steps ahead of you. 

You can spend every waking hour of your life chasing and chasing the truth and trying your very hardest to understand what's happening. It doesn't matter how much blood, sweat and tears you pour into your attempts, because earth is about to hit you with something else. As soon as you collect your bearings, as soon as you find your feet, life will fly along with another piece of information and your head will be spinning even faster than before. It's relentless, it's exponential, but there's a point where every crappy puzzle piece slots itself into place in a spectacular finale which usually involves your life being at risk.

And then it makes sense.

Tony Stark knows this. He's experienced this all through his life, increasingly so in recent years. Nobody becomes a superhero after being kidnapped and held hostage in a cave by a long-time family friend without experiencing shortcomings. It's unrealistic. 

But it doesn't matter how many times you've experienced it, how clever you think you've become, how fast you believe that you can run. Life will always, always, find a way to shock you, to turn around and bite you in the ass. 

He hadn't been expecting Lilla to get pregnant. He hadn't expected Pepper to bring the news that she didn't want Gianna anymore. He hadn't expected her to be a twin. He hadn't been expecting himself to take them in, for her to get poisoned, to be selectively mute, to speak Russian, to be incredible at skating, to be involved with some dodgy guys and for them to hold the team hostage and then for Gianna to go all badass and pretend to die and then pull a massive Houdini and to grow wings and-

Point proven. Life will always have something that just hasn't quite hit you yet.

Tony's pretty certain he just experienced the finale.

Geo was right, his sister just overexerted herself and crashed. Other than some insanely low blood-sugar levels and malnutrition, Bruce couldn't find anything concerning from the multitude of tests he carried out. It did explain her lack of weight gain since moving in, the doctor predicted that her metabolism could rival Steve, that her body was only just keeping itself going through pure determination.

There are still questions, ones which Tony intends on finding answers to. He doesn't like not understanding things, being kept out of the loop, especially by five year olds. It's not a good feeling, especially when the world has proclaimed you a genius and it's practically your branding.

Gianna is being kept in the med wing until she wakes up, closely monitored by Bruce and a team that he trusts. He wants to make sure that she's not sustained any lasting damage and ask her a few questions as well as explaining her new eating plan. He's conscious that unless they get her malnutrition under control, it could spiral into something much more difficult to manage. 

As if things weren't complicated enough already.

He settles himself in his office, a room he barely uses on account of the fact that he's no longer the ceo of Stark and he prefers to utilise his time with activities other than responding to countless emails from dusty old men who are still riled about the weapons industry, demanding that the billionaire restarts manufacturing of military equipment as he's doing a disservice to America and to his dad and to the board of directors and so on and so forth. It just doesn't do anything to add sparkle to his day.

For that reason, he has to blow the accumulating dust from his keyboard and empty the bin before he can get anything done. Despite the organised chaos of his lab, Tony Stark refuses to work in dirt.

He doesn't say anything when Natasha slips in, simply sending her a curt nod of acknowledgement as she wheels over a chair and plops herself into it, watching as he skips through layers of code and pathetically constructed firewalls that may as well not be there at all. He's fully aware that the assassin has a hunch about Gianna's background, he saw recognition flash in her eyes when the child pulled her stunt, but knows better than to ask. Natasha is sly like that, sometimes she wants you to work it out for yourself before she reveals what she knows. If confronted, she'll merely state that she's keeping everyone on their toes, making sure they don't get lazy. It drives Steve insane, everyone else is either used to it, or understands Natasha enough to let it slide.

Cracking the government's 'security' used to be a hobby of Tony's, in the days in which he wanted a distraction from the exhaustion tugging at his skin, or the craving for substances which he could technically acquire, but would hate himself for consuming in the days that followed. Consequently, it's only a few minutes before he finds himself on the inside of a familiar code.

But the Earth is never on Tony Stark's side.

No matter how hard he searches, how many variations of "Gianna Grace Bell" he manages to twist into the search bar, he cannot find anything that would indicate any kind of foul-play in the kid's early life. Even her mother's track record is clear.

Natasha, of course, is steps ahead of him.

"Whatever it was happened in Russia, she's fluent which means that something happened that was traumatic enough for the memory to burn itself into a three year old's brain".

There's something else, something she isn't saying, as though she's worried about the reaction it might elicit. Tony isn't sure what scares him more, the notion that the truth might be something he doesn't want to hear, or the idea that Natasha doesn't like the truth any more than he's going to. The stone-cold assassin may not be as stone-cold as many believe, but she is a general voice of reason, smarter than the subconscious brain that causes havoc in distasteful situations. She always has her head on.

Unless..

"Nat", Tony spins on his chair to face the spider, his eyes weary with sleepless nights and general stress that's been tugging at him for weeks. There's an air of honesty and desperation that Natasha hasn't seen on him in a while. It twists her stomach a little. "I really need to know what you aren't telling me, if not for my sake then for the kids which I'm trying to raise but seem to be failing because I literally cannot for the life of me work out what's going on".

He drags a hand down his face, if it were made of clay then he'd resemble something of a caricature right now, days of pulling at his skin and rubbing his eyes leaving their mark. Natasha doesn't like expressing or responding to emotions, it makes her generally uncomfortable. However, there's something about a flashy and typically flippant billionaire philanthropist practically melting right in front of her that helps her to reject her natural (not natural, enforced) instinct and utter the words that she doesn't want to.

"I think you should check the Hydra database".