Resilience | ✔

Chapter Twenty-Seven

"Yo, Dad?"

Marley stuck her head into Tony's workshop. Across the room, Tony closed down the holographic computer he was working at. "Yeah, kiddo?"

"Can I try out your suit?"

Tony frowned. "Why?"

"I want to fly," Marley said.

His frown eased. Didn't vanish, but got a lot more relaxed. "I'd say yes, but I don't have any backup suits at the moment, and I don't want you up there by yourself."

Marley felt her shoulders slump. "Okay."

She backed out of his studio and started down the hall. Her solar-powered repulsors were still being synthesized. Turns out when you try to make thread that can absorb light and turn it into energy, it takes a while to turn it into fingerless gloves. Go figure. The production of the thread in of itself was an extremely delicate process. Adding vibranium was a whole nother level. Necessary, though, as her first prototype hadn't withstood her putting the gloves on. The thread was that fragile.

She'd gotten all her work for Green Initiative done yesterday, and the week's worth of work for Bi-Bi Closet the day before. Both while waiting for her solar gloves. She was going to need to figure out how to make production faster. But she couldn't do that without the stats from this batch, so . . . she was bored out of her skull.

She stopped at a window, gazing out at the lawn below. The massive snow they'd gotten Sunday still hadn't melted. This wasn't particularly surprising, given it was a) January and b) two feet of snow.

It had been six months since Marley had escaped from Jackson's kidnapping. Six months since the Avengers had fought and disbanded. Six months since she'd rescued her dad from Siberia.

Relatively speaking, they were doing well. Therapy had started for Marley three days after she and Tony had gotten back to the compound, at both Tony's and Pepper's insistence. Walking in, Marley had been a bit scornful and dismissive—she didn't need therapy. She was perfectly capable of handling this by herself. Walking out, her opinion had been the exact opposite. Vanessa was a miracle worker. She had appointments twice a week, and it was slow going, working through everything. Not just the kidnapping, but all of her childhood traumas.

She'd tried to get Tony to get therapy too, after in August finding him in the throes of the worst panic attack she'd ever seen, but he refused, so she settled for doing her best to talk about coping mechanisms Vanessa gave her. She was pretty sure he'd at least listened, so she considered that a win.

She got nightmares sometimes, but not as often as she thought she would. No, her PTSD—official medical diagnosis, woot woot—manifested itself in different ways. She didn't go into public bathrooms by herself. The first time she had (and the second and third too), she'd had a panic attack. She got skittish in parking garages. She hardly let anyone touch her (exceptions being Tony, Pepper, Peter, and Charlie). She'd learned that one quickly—during one of her first press conferences someone had touched her back to guide her to her chair, and she'd nearly passed out. Knives were a no-go. She couldn't eat anything with peanuts in it. The list went on. Even riding in cars made her antsy. Vanessa said that was because even though nothing traumatic had actually happened to her in a car, a car was linked to the trauma in her head.

Jackson was still at large. Being a cowardly bitch, Marley liked to say. At large implied he was actually doing bad stuff at the moment and the police were always a step behind him, which was not what was happening. He hadn't been seen, heard from. Not even by surveillance tapes from stores or traffic lights. It was like he'd vanished off the face of the earth. Personally Marley hoped he'd gotten mauled by a bear and bled to death in the middle of nowhere, but she knew she wasn't that lucky. She both wanted him to stay gone and wanted him to make a mistake and get noticed so they could just arrest him already. She wasn't living life in fear, per se, but . . . it was wearing her down, bit by bit, knowing that he hadn't yet been caught. Knowing that at any moment he could make a move, and she'd be unprepared no matter what steps she took.