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The Forge	By : IndigoMiko Category: Marvel Verse Movies > Iron Man (all) > Iron Man (all) Views: 1688 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Iron Man, X-Men, Avengers, or any other Marvel verse property. I also don't make any money from writing this. All I do is wile away my free time kicking things around inside my head. It's a mess up there.

Chapter List
- 11
- 12
- 13
Disclaimer: I do not own Iron Man, or Incubus, or Beautiful Minds. Blah, blah, branding irons away please.
Chapter 12: Beautiful Minds
“We all have a sickness that cleverly attaches and multiplies, no matter how we try. We all have someone that digs at us, at least we dig each other.” Dig by Incubus
Tony turned to look at Pepper and Happy. He still needed to hear Happy’s impression of what happened. The man had proven he caught details Tony himself missed. “Happy?”
“She saved my life,” he said, and Tony knew that meant his bodyguard’s mind was made up about Four as well.
Pepper started to say something and Happy cut in. “No Pepper.” He turned to the woman. “I know you’re worried about her being around Tony, but this was not her fault.” He waved a hand. “Sure, they were after her this time, but these are bad people. The boss would have run up against them eventually anyway. He’s made his decision. You’ve got to let this go.”
The red head sniffed and started to cry. Tony grimaced. He hated it when Pepper cried. “It’s just. When is this all going to stop?” She choked out. “First he’s kidnapped, then Obadiah, and then Hammer and Vanko. Now this? I keep thinking this is the one that’s going to kill him. I can’t stop thinking about it Happy!”
Tony got to his feet and crossed the room. He sat down next to Pepper and hugged her. It was startling to find out that the way she folded into his embrace was familiar, but not as comfortable as it used to be.
He knew she worried about him, he just didn’t know what he could do about it. He wouldn’t give up being Iron Man for anything. It was the best thing about him; the gateway to all the good he‘d done in the past two years. “I’m sorry, Pep.” Tony felt like a bastard when he said it, because he knew an apology was the only thing he could give her.
“He’s Iron Man, Pepper.” Happy said quietly. “It’s not going to stop,”
Pepper pulled out of his arms and rummaged in her purse for a tissue to wipe her face. “Well I can’t take it,” she whispered. “I can‘t take waiting on the other end of the phone to know whether he‘s alive or dead.” He saw her eyes fall on Four. “I can‘t take him constantly throwing his life away for some stranger.” She drew in a shaky breath and stood.
Tony watched her gather her purse and knew, that for all the times she‘d put up with his behavior, him being Iron Man was the thing that was going to end their friendship.
“I’m sorry, Tony. I’ll email you in the morning. I just need some space.” With that Pepper turned and walked out the door. She really was good at that, he thought.
………………………………......................................................................
Four stayed in the living room long enough to hear Happy’s side of the story. Before she took the half bottle of rum up to bed with her she handed him the dart gun she’d brought back and told him to call SHIELD. Romanoff would be out in the morning and JARVIS was monitoring Four for alcohol poisoning.
The gun itself was a simple thing, cheap and easily made. It was multi-shot, with a clip of six darts and a full capacity of seven. Tony thought it was overkill to have a dozen guys each armed with a weapon that wouldn‘t even puncture the car. Why not just shoot a gas canister from a distance?
There were no makers marks, no single identifying manufactured part. He had JARVIS searching down the pieces and tracing supply lines. The AI had narrowed it down to twenty eight possible manufacturing centers and was still working on it.
On a hunch Tony had swiped her phone. They were tracking her somehow. Once he’d synced it up JARVIS had found that it had been hacked. So that was one mystery solved. Tony would hand her an unhackable Stark phone in the morning, if she was up for it. Apple was crap anyway.
Four had killed six of the people in the riverbed. Happy had killed three. The other three had taken cyanide from a spot hidden in their teeth. They had been too injured to run away. That they were willing to die instead of being captured said all kinds of bad things.
It seemed they had gotten off lucky with video footage. Tony found and deleted only one shaky video of Four getting out of the car. You couldn’t tell who she was in it, but Tony didn’t want anything from that fight on the web.
Afterwards, he sat staring at Four’s side of the garage, the news articles and SHIELD report about Sprung Heel on the screens behind him. The news articles had, indeed, said that the town was destroyed by mutant extremists. They ran for a bit, and then petered off into sporadic updates until finally dying out. No one was ever caught. The SHIELD report had been more in depth.
What a horror show. The town had boasted seven hundred and twenty three residents. Of them thirty two had been killed and one hundred and nine injured. The structure of the town itself was completely destroyed. The roads were melted in places. SHIELD deduced there was at least one fire user, a feral (based on scratch marks both on people and buildings,) one that could cause explosions, and at least one that was super strong. Tony couldn’t help but think about Four running ahead of all that. Running for her life.
Then there was the mass grave on the South East side of town. Forty two bodies in there. Men, women, and kids as young as thirteen. That’s where Four would have ended up if not for the stupid guard.
Dum-E trundled by him. Tony watched the bot pick up a screw from Four’s drop cloth.
“JARVIS?”
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“The pieces I had fabricated under project Four, are they finished?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Let‘s start testing.”
……………………………….........................................................................
Agent Romanoff was very pretty. It was the first thing Forge noticed of course. The second was the woman was carrying more weapons than Forge could imagine fit on one person. She couldn’t see half of them, but she could sense them.
“Mr. Stark. Miss. Maddix,” the red head greeted folding herself into one of the lounge chairs on the patio.
Forge and Tony were sitting in the other two, in a two versus one configuration. She figured she could call him Tony for today. He was making a visual show of being on her side after all.
Tony was in full billionaire playboy mode. Sunglasses and muscle shirt on, his arc reactor glowing through the fabric, as he held an alcoholic drink at an inappropriate time of morning. Forge wondered if he’d gotten any sleep after Pepper Potts’ dramatic exit. She expected not.
She herself had spent the night drunk as hell, thinking about the handful of times her Uncle Wall had talked about the war. He had once said that he’d felt bad that he’d had to kill, but not guilty. When she was younger Forge didn’t understand the difference. She thought she might understand it a little better now.
When the sun had finally come up Forge realized she mostly felt angry. She didn’t ask for what had happened to her. She had just wanted to be left alone to work in her garage in peace. Looking at the woman across from her in the full on leather cat suit, Forge started to come to terms with the idea she may never be left alone. It kind of freaked her out.
Of course Forge was also hung over. She had a glass of water on the table in front of her, but Malibu in the middle of August, even at ten in the morning, was stupid hot.
For a few minutes they all stared at each other. Tony smirked behind his drink, Romanoff had dead eyes, and Forge fidgeted the with metal cuff on her wrist. Okay. She’d had enough of this tension shit for the weekend.
When she leaned forward Romanoff tensed. Well fuck you very much lady. “I take it Agent Fischer is actually fake Agent Fischer, and isn’t with SHIELD at all?” She wanted that confirmed before she moved forward.
A few more seconds of silence passed, and if the woman didn’t start talking Forge was going to think she was broken, and demand another.
“He’s not one of us, no.”
Well didn’t that sound all hive mind-y. Forge distracted herself before she started thinking of SHIELD as the collective and made a Star Trek reference.
“Or affiliated?” Men in black were always twisty talkers weren’t they?
“Or affiliated.”
“He made threats to me in your agency’s name. Bad PR. That give you an incentive to hunt him down?” She knew she was being intentionally shitty again. Whatever. She’d had a hard day.
Apparently Tony was letting her take the reigns on this. She was hung over and didn’t want them. She was considering demoting him back to Stark when Romanoff moved.
Forge tensed all the way to her toes when the woman reached to her side. The area looked bare of weapons but housed what Forge were pretty sure were throwing knives. Sharp eyes scanned across Forge’s form and she could see the Agent taking note of her posture.
A grey folder appeared from between her hip and the chair, and Forge relaxed marginally. Apparently, Tony had taken a cue from Forge too, because he had shifted forward in his seat. Romanoff laid the grey folder on the table between them and flicked it open.
A picture of fake agent was the first thing Forge saw. The flash of rage she felt was intense.
“The man’s name is Geoff Rimzowski, a low level enforcer for a gang in New Jersey. He was being paid to pretend to be a SHIELD agent and to make sure he got your attention. We picked him up yesterday.” The redhead laid out coolly.
“Paid by who?” Tony asked.
“Wait,” Forge held up a hand. “Why was he supposed to get my attention?” Why not just bag her in the alley behind her shop and be done with it?
Romanoff was assessing her with those eyes again. “Two reasons we think. One to keep you from actually going to SHIELD. We were monitoring you with the intent to evaluate and contact.”
“That’s not creepy,” Forge muttered.
“The other, you have a pattern of behavior when being confronted. We think the goal was to scare you into running.”
“To make it easier to catch her where no one would notice she was missing and report it, because SHIELD would have noticed.” Tony nodded his head. “Except I swooped in to save the day.” He turned to Forge and grinned, “You’re welcome.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re a real hero Captain C.“ Forge rolled her eyes. “So, paid for by whom? The FOKUS group?”
“How do you know about FOKUS?” Romanoff folded her hands in her lap.
Forge glanced over at Tony and saw him shrug. “It’s your story,” he said. “I’ve had JARVIS digging and there are no records connecting you to them anywhere on the web. What you tell people about it is what they know,” he assured.
She licked her lips before looking back over at the agent. “I had unsavory dealings with them in ‘96. The tech I saw yesterday was spot on for something from them.”
Romanoff‘s face gave nothing away. “It‘s not FOKUS. They were a local outfit providing services to larger groups. Perhaps they sold designs for their weapons to one of them,” she shrugged. “FOKUS was destroyed in ’96 and has never been reconstituted.” The agent studied Forge’s face again. “We‘re still looking in to who paid Rimzowski. The group went to ground when their kidnap attempt on your failed yesterday. Whoever they are, they’re large and have a lot of funds. They threw a dozen operatives with inadequate weaponry at you and didn’t seem to care they were going to die.”
Forge frowned at that and argued, “But killing isn’t my MO. I’ve always incapacitated before. Wounded, never killed. How could they have known I was going to go full metal jacket on them?” After a beat she added, “Alternately they could be a very small outfit and I killed all the guns so the brains went to hide.”
“They would have to have some good brains to know enough about SHIELD to impersonate them,” Tony commented. “Also you didn’t kill all of them. The one’s too wounded to escape killed themselves.”
Forge jerked her head around to look at Tony. That was news to her. “What the hell are these people in to that they’re willing to die instead of be caught?” Tony shrugged. Apparently he didn’t know either. Well, wasn’t that peachy?
The Agent across from her was now looking at her very closely. Forge didn‘t like it. “You have a good head on you.”
Forge snorted, “Believe me this is an anomaly. I usually don‘t think before I do.”
“Not true,” Tony cut in. “You think in a fight, which is hard to do. You evaluate the variables in your situation and choose the level of force that would give you, and anyone around you, the best odds of survival.” He tipped his head down and looked over his sunglasses at her. “And the way you let me approach you,” he shook his head. “You set up a meeting on your terms, then added safe guards and escape routes.”
“When you say it like that it does sound super calculated. I was really just looking to hide in your basement for a few months.” Forge shuffled on the seat.
Agent Pretty jumped in then. “Stark is more vulnerable to you than you are to him, and he has the firepower and clout to put a hell of a wall between you and outside forces. We think that‘s why they went after you yesterday.” She glanced at Tony. “Stark has been keeping you close. Yesterday you were alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” Forge shot back. “Happy was in the car.”
Romanoff sent her a level look. “Collateral damage.”
So they really would have killed Happy. For the first time since the meeting started Forge actually glared at the Agent. “Fuck. That.”
“Regardless of your feelings on the matter they wouldn’t have considered him an impediment. You changing your behavior however, has kept you one step ahead of them.” The agent noted.
Forge rolled her jaw. “I spent five years building up my business. I’ve done the duck and split routine enough. I‘m tired of running. Somebody else always finds me anyway.” From the corner of her eye she saw Tony turn his face toward her.
“How‘s your hand to hand?”
“Like combat?” Forge knew her voice rose at that. Agent Pretty nodded. “Shitty,” Forge replied.
“So to sum up,” Tony broke in. “You caught the fake agent, but have no idea if the group paying him was extremely dangerous or just inept, and you seem like you’re trying to poach.” He actually waggled the finger of the hand holding his drink at the woman. “Uh, uh, Four here is under contract.”
“We’re following leads. The identities of the men at the bridge we’re scrubbed. No fingerprints, no digital trail, no money trail. That takes organization not often found in smaller syndicates. We know they started targeting her after the Expo so it‘s safe to say they didn‘t know she existed before then.” Romanoff stood smoothly and placed a card on the table. “Her contract runs to the beginning of October. If we have nothing by then Fury is asking you to extend it. Keep her in house, so to speak.”
“I have a life back in New York,” Forge protested. “I can’t hang out here forever.”
“How long will you have that life if you go back before we finish this?” Agent Pretty wasn’t pulling punches.
Forge clenched her jaw and frowned. “Less time than it takes for me to get off the plane,” she admitted grudgingly.
“See,” and the way she said it made Forge want to scare the woman by using all the weapons on her body to drop her ass back into her seat. “You make good decisions. When you‘re ready for a instructor in hand to hand combat,” she nodded to the card, “Call.”
Romanoff starting walking away, not looking back when Tony called. “Give Fury my love!”
“Your sense of humor, Captain C,” Forge scoffed. “Some day you’ll quip at the wrong time and get shot.”
“You didn’t like her either. Your game face, Four. You’ve really got to work on that.”
“I felt like a bug,” Forge griped.
Tony nodded, “She does that.”
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The Forge