Gonna try to get this Iron Man thing finished during insomnia hours
🕑 Added 2015-01-09 09:43:36 +0000 UTC
The moment she saw the lab, Pepper gasped. She’d learned a long time to process the lab as part of Tony; it helped her live with the chronic untidiness that was anathema to her. To Pepper, over the years this had come to be a sign of health. An expression of emotional security that Tony couldn’t speak aloud through a layer of sarcasm that had grown over him like a callus.
Feeling safe, secure, sane, gave him the freedom to tinker to his heart’s content. He fiddled with projects until he was happy with them, marching to no one’s beat but his own. There were things left unfinished since his grade school days. But there was a method to the madness, a bit of structure she imposed for him. Nothing too dangerous, nothing truly out of control. Though to all appearances his lab had the wildness of a jungle, in reality it was something more like a national park. Free-range, but contained. A safety net underneath. Safe for Tony to visit, binge on, and then come up for air.
Now, Pepper didn’t know what it was. The Mandarin had left it in a better state than this. The tiles had been ripped up, through more of the room than not, leaving a chasm right through the middle of it. The crawlspace was filled with the pipes of a waterworks and the cables of a server room, most bearing duct tape. Planks bridged the gaps at strategic points. The door to the Armory was open, but most of the armor was blocked from view by the projects Tony had been working on. Shoved in there like clutter under a rug, along with many of his robots. So many that the door couldn’t fully close. More wiring hung from the ceiling, jury-rigged together into something like a spider’s web. And a number of generators—or something—spritzed the room with light, almost strobing, neoning the lab with multiple colors.
“Oh,” Maria said, noting Pepper’s reaction. “Is it not always like this?”
“No.”
“Because I pictured it like this. Is this better or worse?”
“Worse. Very worse.” Pepper had caught sight of the crowning horror in this haunted house. Ultron’s head—one of them anyway—was piled atop Tony’s work desk like a paperweight for all the scribbles and formulas he had made: a mountain of them. Even depowered, it reminded Pepper less of a face, or even of a skull, than of some great insect. Laying eggs. Starting an infestation.
