Saving Grace

Forty Two

Grace sits at the side of the stage at a presentation at MIT, nearly a year after Ultron was defeated. A curtain covers her for the most part, and everyone backstage has been instructed to stay far away from where she is. She convinced Tony to bring her — nearly got him to let her sit in the actual crowd — but she's still not sure if she even wants to be here.

It beats sitting alone at home, so there's that.

On the stage is a very realistic projection of a living room she's never been in, and two people are in it, one a woman she's never met, the other the person she's mad at right now.

The woman she's never met is playing a piano and singing. "Try to remember the kind of September, when grass was green..." She's beautiful, and Grace's heart, which has been so hard lately, softens at her voice.

A third person, a man she's never met, walks in from an unseen room and pulls a blanket off the lump on the couch — the lump being the person she's mad at right now. He sits up, a Santa hat on his head.

"Wake up, dear, and say goodbye to your father," the woman at the piano says as she continues to play.

"Who's the homeless person on the couch?" the man asks.

The boy, a naive, skinny kid of twenty one, stands. "This is why I love coming home for Christmas — right before you leave town."

"Be nice, dear," the woman — Grace's middle name — says to the man, "he's been studying abroad."

"Really, which broad?" the man asks, pulling the hat off the boy's head. "What's her name?"

"Candice," the boy replies.

"Do me a favor? Try not to burn the house down before Monday," the man says.

"Okay, so it's Monday. That is good to know. I will plan my toga party accordingly. Where you going?"

Maria smiles. "Your father's flying us to the Bahamas for a little getaway."

"We might have to make a quick stop," the man says.

"At the Pentagon. Right?" the boy asks. He leans down to his mother. "Don't worry, you're gonna love the holiday menu at the commissary."

Maria stops playing the piano as the man says, "You know, they say sarcasm is a metric for potential. If that's true, you'll be a great man some day. I'll get the bags."

He walks out, and Maria stands. "He does miss you when you're not here. And, frankly, you're going to miss us. Because this is the last time we're all going to be together. You know what's about to happen. Say something. If you don't, you'll regret it."

And when Howard walks back in, Tony looks at him and says, "I love you, Dad." Then, he looks at Maria. "And I know you did the best you could."

Maria kisses his cheek as Tony — the real Tony, the older one — walks into the room. The younger Tony watches his parents as they leave.

"That's how I wished it happened," the real Tony says. "Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing, or BARF — man, I gotta work on that acronym — an extremely costly method of hijacking the hippocampus to clear... traumatic memories." He stops and blows out a candle that's sitting on the piano, causing the room — the projection — to start to disappear. He continues. "It doesn't change the fact that they never made it to the airport, or all the things I did to avoid processing my grief." He takes off his glasses as the projection fades, leaving only the framework it was projected on. "Plus, 611 million dollars for my little therapeutic experiment? No one in their right mind would've ever funded it.