In order to rise from the ashes, the phoenix first must burn.
Elliott Stark was not important. In a lineage of geniuses and billionaires, she was known only as the illegitimate daughter of the most successful Stark; no more than a footnote...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
▇▇▇▇▇
new york presbyterian. nov 2, 1998
From Maya Hansen.
That was all the note said; from Maya Hansen.
He'd read the words at least a dozen times now. There was no explanation, no information; just those three simple words scribbled in blue ink on the back of a birth certificate. Those words that sent knives into his heart and set it racing, muddling his surroundings and drowning out the voices.
Maya Hansen left her daughter. She left her daughter in the waiting room of New York Presbyterian. She left a four-year-old girl with a birth certificate and a concussion, and walked away. Went completely off the grid.
Tony had so many questions; questions that he knew would never be answered. When? Where? How? And why? Why was he never told that he had a daughter? Why did Maya Hansen bolt? Why was the girl abandoned in the one place she was sure to be found?
The scared girl was discovered, hugging her knees and gripping a wrinkled sheet of paper beneath a medical cart several hours after Maya Hansen made her escape. Security tapes proved the time frame. Tony had been called to the hospital yet another six hours later, at eight o'clock.
When he'd arrived, the young man had been given the news — congratulations, it's a girl — and escorted to her room. With his head already spinning, not yet finished processing the ordeal, he was given what little information the social workers had been able to dig up since she was found.
The sleeping girl's name was Elliott Travis Stark. She had just turned four, not even two months before. She'd been born in the very hospital in which she now slept peacefully. She had a severe concussion, but was otherwise completely unharmed. And as far as doctors had been able to tell, she didn't remember much of anything at all.
"Tony." The words pulled him from his thoughts, and he stopped pacing to glance at James Rhodes — Rhodey, sitting in a hard, plastic seat. "Are you alright?"
No. He wasn't. His entire world had just been tilted on its axis. But all he said was, "Yeah, I'm fine." The sarcasm rang clear in his exhausted voice. He was facing the hardest decision of his life and nearing a total breakdown. He was as far away from 'fine' as possible.
