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Toni graduates high school at twelve and offers from universities around the world pour in. She has her heart set on MIT though, wants it in a visceral, sharp way she’s never wanted anything before.
She wants to build, wants to create, and MIT will make her better at both.
Beyond that she wants to leave, wants to be away from Maria’s indifference and Howard’s fists.
She doesn’t want to leave Jarvis though, doesn’t want to be away from him, but they’ve talked about it and they both agree that it’s the best course of action.
Howard of course, says no. He wants her to go somewhere else, his alma mater maybe, or one of the posh finishing schools Maria is always raging on about because there’s very little about Toni she considers truly refined.
Jarvis slips into Howard’s study after Howard dismisses Toni, his spine straight and face blank. He comes out an hour later, Howard pale and shaking behind him, and Toni can barely believe it when Howard thrusts the admission papers to MIT in her direction.
“How did you do that?” Toni is close to awed in a way she hasn’t been since the first time she met Aunt Peggy.
“I simply informed Sir of the benefits of allowing you to attend the school of your choice.” Jarvis ushers her back towards her room with a warm hand between her shoulder blades.
“Thank you.” Toni whispers as she whirls around and wraps her arms around Jarvis’ waist in the sort of tight hug he so rarely allows her, especially not out in the open where Howard or Maria might see.
Jarvis just reaches out, tucks one long, thick curl behind her ear and smiles.
~~~
“Jarvis?” Toni whispers quietly into the quiet dark of the kitchen the night before she’s scheduled to leave for MIT, a mug of warm milk in hand as she watches Jarvis from across the counter.
“Yes young miss?” His voice is that same warm velvet it’s always been for her.
Toni bites her lip for a long uncertain moment. She’s too old now to be tucked in but Jarvis is still more than willing to tell her stories if she asks and she so desperately wants to ask.
“Would you perhaps like to hear the story of Icarus again young miss?” Jarvis breaks through her quiet. Toni puffs out a relieved breath and smiles into her milk because Jarvis always knows what she needs.
“Please.”
~~~
Wax. Feathers. Heat.
The breathless joy of flight and freedom.
That night she doesn’t dream of falling at all.
~~~
Toni takes her clothes, her tools, bruises the shape of Howard’s hand, her books, an assortment of comics, a sprained ankle, Cap, the wing barrette Aunt Peggy gave her, and the glass framed poster from her wall with her when she leaves.
She doesn’t think she’d be able to sleep without Steve on her wall, without being able to press that kiss against his chest. Without the reminder that no matter how small she is now one day she’ll be mighty.
It’s going to be hard enough without Jarvis as it is.
~~~
She’s assigned a one person suite and required to check in each day with the RA as a safety measure. Jarvis promises to have food and anything else she needs delivered to her weekly but beyond that she has a credit card, a in room phone, and great deal of know how.
She’ll survive.
That doesn’t stop her from crying herself to sleep that first night, lonely and frightened, missing Jarvis, missing his stories and his scent, fresh bread and lemon furniture polish, or the way he still helps her brush out her long hair every night.
~~~
Wax. Feathers. Heat.
The harsh scent of salt and the fear of no arms there to catch her before she hits the water.
~~~
Classes are good, some still too simple but overall they’re mostly interesting.
The other students are at first amused and then a strange mix of angry and almost frightened when they realize she’s a student and not someone on the staff’s child.
She doesn’t make friends.
She doesn’t even bother to try.
She’s thirteen and going to MIT and Howard’s already beaten her wary and skittish, beaten her into this brittle sharp thing that would rather bite than smile.
~~~
“Jarvis?” Toni clutches at the phone, white knuckled and shaking. Her minds a bright whirl of colors and sounds and she can’t make it stop no matter how much she tries and she just wants to sleep. It’s been four days and her hands shake too much to try to use her tools anymore and she’s so exhausted she wants to cry but she couldn’t even if she tried.
“Yes young miss?” Jarvis talks to her like she’s a wild thing, something to be soothed.
“T-Tell me the story of Icarus again.” Toni breathes out a shaky exhale. “I-I can’t sleep Jarvis. I-please, please tell me the story.”
“Of course young miss.”
~~~
Wax. Feathers. Heat.
The freedom of flight.
The euphoria of the fall.
~~~
MIT is a whirl of no sleep, too much coffee, too loud music and work. Of research and building. The bright, blinding euphoria of creation. Of inventions and arguments with professors who don’t want to listen to her because she’s young, because she’s female.
Idiots who think her lack of a cock makes her stupid, makes her lesser somehow.
Toni isn’t less than them in anyway except for size. But just like Steve, just like Captain America, she might be small now but one day, one day she’ll be mighty.
Some things don’t change though because Howard takes every opportunity to hurt her when she’s home. Breaks and vacations where she’s required to return to the mansion are a study in torture as he hovers over her, all rage and scotch and violence as he pushes her to build faster, better, smarter. As he tries to take the one thing that’s hers and twist it to his own purposes.
Toni hates them/him/it all.
Those first two years are hard.
~~~
She’s fifteen and there’s a boy in one of her advanced mathematics classes. He’s twenty-one and tall, all blond hair and broad shoulders. He doesn’t bring up money or what she can do for him, doesn’t outright try to convince her to fuck him like a few people have in the past despite her age before she started tearing them apart verbally.
She likes that about him.
She likes the way he looks at her, the way he actually talks to her, the way he says her hair, a wild riot of black curls that falls to her waist now, is beautiful.
She likes him right up until the moment they’re outside and he fists his hand in her hair and refuses to let go.
She likes him right up until his other hand dives down the front of her shorts.
She likes him right up until she tells him no and he doesn’t listen.
She likes him right up until he tries to take. Because Toni’s had enough of being taken from and she won’t let this be taken from her too.
She stops him though, fights like a wild thing just like Aunt Peggy taught her to, punches and kicks and bites at every bit of him she can reach. He’s surprised by her strength, strength she’s built from days of tireless work with heavy machinery, and stumbles back and away.
Toni doesn’t let him go though. Her shirt’s ripped and gaping at the front but she’s screaming at him, all fists and feet and bared teeth.
She raises a foot and doesn’t even hesitate to slam it down against his face. And then she does it again, and again.
The way he screams, high pitched and agonized, as his already bloody nose and what Toni’s sure are more than a few teeth shatter beneath the thick sole of her sneaker, is beyond satisfying.
Stone moans and curls in on himself on the pavement.
Toni, chest heaving, hands aching and head throbbing, just stares down at him for a long moment before she finally looks up.
There’s a crowd of people in the distance, some with their hands up covering their mouths, others are pointing.
Toni thinks there might be more than one actively laughing.
“Fuck you people,” Toni rasps more to herself than any of them. They’re all too far away to hear her anyways.
So, with one last sneer down at Stone she snatches her bag up off of the ground and strides back towards her dorm.
~~~
The police show up at her dorm an hour or so later.
~~~
Stone is in the hospital, Toni broke his nose, destroyed most of his teeth, and fractured his jaw.
Vicious and angry she tries to tell the police that it was self defense, that he’d grabbed her, stuck his hand down her pants, tried to force her.
But Toni doesn’t have a mark on her.
And there’s no one willing to step up and corroborate her story.
Dread settles low and heavy in her stomach.
~~~
Howard makes it go away, even manages to keep MIT from expelling her, but Toni knows he doesn’t do it for her.
Would have known that even if he hadn’t screamed it at her right before he let his hands do his screaming for him.
He did it to protect his name, his reputation, his legacy.
Toni hates all three with an equal and vicious sort of rage.
~~~
When she finally goes back to class Toni spends the next few weeks learning to maneuver on a broken leg.
Learning to live with the crutches is hard but so is trying to ignore the memory of the doctor telling Jarvis that she might heal but the possibility of a permanent limp were high.
The professors stop calling on her in class, the other students avoid her even more once the story of her violence against Stone spreads far and wide.
Toni grits her teeth, holds her head up high, keeps her hair tied back where no one can grab it ever again, and presses forward.
But she’s so so tired.
~~~
“Hey Jarvis?” Toni slides down the wall until she’s huddled in the corner, crutches balanced against the wall and leg carefully stretched out in front of her. She keeps the phone tucked against her ear as she winds the cord around and around her finger.
“Yes young miss?” His voice is gentle, soft.
“Tell me the story of Icarus?” At least she still has this.
“Of course young miss.”
Toni closes her eyes, tilts her head back, and listens to him talk.
He’s her one comfort, her one tether to this world.
All she really has is him, the distant affection of Aunt Peggy who she rarely ever sees, and the memory of Steve.
It doesn’t always feel like enough anymore.
And that just makes Toni hate herself all the more for being so goddamn selfish.
~~~
Wax. Feathers. Heat.
Salt on her face that she pretends is from the ocean.
She screams right before she hits the water.
~~~
Time passes, the cast on her leg comes off, Toni learns to live with the slight limp and the pain of rebuilding the muscles of her leg.
Some days all she wants in the world is for someone to wrap their arms around her and hold her tight.
But there’s only two people she thinks she’d ever trust to do that.
One of them is Jarvis and there is a distance between them that’s more than just physical, a sort of carefulness to their relationship that they are both more than aware of.
Howard and the promised threat of his wrath is the ever looming monster of Toni’s existence.
And the other?
Well…
Steve’s been dead for decades now.
And even if he wasn’t … well Toni’s almost sixteen now and she knows herself well enough to know that there is nothing in her he would have ever wanted to protect.
Nothing he would have ever wanted to hold.
~~~
Wax. Feathers. Heat.
The pain of her wings melting against her back as the wax scalds her skin.
~~~
Toni is sixteen and there is something broken inside of her.
A wound that refuses to heal.
A gaping hole too deep to fill.
A piece missing from the already fractured mess that is her soul.
The ache of it goes bone deep but Toni …
Toni’s grown used to pain, used to loneliness.
What’s one more hurt added to a lifetime.
~~~
Her ribs are sore and the pain meds the doctor had given Jarvis for her dislocated shoulder make her head fuzzy but Jarvis had made sure she promised to take them.
“Rest young miss.” Jarvis’ hand is cool against her forehead as he brushes back her hair. “I’m afraid I’ll be driving Sir and Ma’am to the gala tonight but should you need anything Henrietta will be available until I return.”
“Jarvis?” Toni turns her face just slightly into the calloused palm of Jarvis’ hand. She loves him, loves him so so much even if she’s never been able to tell him. She likes to think he knows though, because Jarvis always knows.
“Yes young miss?”
“Will you tell me the story of Icarus before you go?” She needs that familiar comfort, the soothing rhythm of his voice telling her the story that has become theirs over the years.
“Of course young miss.”
~~~
Wax. Feathers. Heat.
The agony of gravity reaching out and plucking her from the sky.
~~~
“Young miss! Young miss please wake up!” Henrietta’s panicked voice pulls Toni from her sleep.
“W-What’s wrong?” Toni’s groggy, fuzzy headed and sore, but she blinks the sleep from her eyes and forces herself to focus on the distraught maid leaning over her. “Henrietta? What’s going on?”
“Oh young miss.” Henrietta looks close to tears. “There’s an officer waiting for you down stairs. T-there’s been an accident.”
Toni doesn’t know it yet but those are the words that destroy her entire world.
~~~
Numb Toni holds the phone in her hand for a long moment before she hangs it up.
She can hear Obie in the background talking loudly with the cops who’d driven her to the hospital.
Given the time differences she’s not all that surprised that Aunt Peggy didn’t pick up.
So, with no one else left for her to call, all Toni can do is stand there and stare at the wall.
Howard and Maria are gone and Toni knows she should feel something about that but she can’t.
Because … because …
Jarvis is dead.
That’s the only thought swirling in her mind.
Jarvis is dead and she’s never going to see him again.
Toni is utterly alone now.
~~~
Toni doesn’t really feel anything at the sight of her parent’s bodies.
Maria looks as cold in death as she was in life. There was never any affection between them but Toni thinks she could mourn Maria in a distant sort of way if she let herself. There’d be no real grief involved of course, because you don’t really grieve for a stranger, for someone you saw once or twice a year at photo shoots or press junkets. For someone who sat back and let their daughter be abused.
So she doesn’t feel grief for Maria’s loss. Instead there’s just an absent sort of longing in her breast, a whimsical sort of mourning for the idea of what could have been between them had she been enough, had she been what either of them had wanted her to be.
Howard looks small on the table, looks washed out and ugly and she’d slap him if she could bring herself to touch him willingly. For Toni there’s only relief at the sight of him. Only gratitude that he’s gone, that he’s finally, finally gone and he’s never coming back. That he’ll never hurt Toni again. Howard’s dead now and she’ll never have to see him, never have to smell him again, never have to hear or feel him ever again. She’ll never have to suffer through his words or his fists, through the pain of being the daughter he’d gotten instead of the son he’d craved.
Howard is dead and Toni thinks she should be grateful.
But all she can really think in the moment is that she would take Howard back, would spend the rest of her life in his shadow, beneath his fists, if it meant having Jarvis back too.
It’s the sight of Jarvis that breaks her. Strong, gentle Jarvis who’d loved her and raised her. Jarvis who’d tended her hurts and her wounds, who had stood her on her own two feet and taught her to create.
Jarvis who taught her to breathe.
“Jarvis?” She whispers.
For the first time in her life there’s no response.
For the first time in her life he doesn’t answer when she calls.
“You weren’t supposed to leave.” Toni whispers to the shell of the only father she’s ever known. “You were never supposed to leave me.”
~~~
Toni stays there until Obie finds her.
And when he reaches down, grabs her by the arm, and jerks her to her feet Toni can’t even find the strength to fight him.
What’s the point?
~~~
Jarvis’ funeral breaks her where Howard and Maria’s had left her dry eyed and cold.
She claws at Jarvis’ grave, begs him not leave her, begs him to get up, to please just stop pretending.
Aunt Peggy tries to pull her way but Toni fights her.
Eventually Aunt Peggy gives up and stay there with her.
Toni curls herself into a ball on top of Jarvis’ grave and digs her fingers into the soil until her nails break and her fingers bleed.
She barely even feels it.
~~~
Nothing seems to penetrate Toni’s shell of numbness after that.
Not when Aunt Peggy finally gets her back to the mansion, finally gets her cleaned up and tucked into bed.
Not the will readings where she finds out that Howard had given her everything.
Not even when she finds out that Jarvis has left her a letter and a recording.
Toni is empty inside.
But then she thinks absently in one of her more lucid moment that perhaps she’s been empty all along.
Maybe she’s always been this hollow sort of creature and it was only Jarvis’ light and warmth that had fooled her into thinking otherwise for so long.
Now that he’s gone …
Well.
~~~
Toni goes back to school because Obie forces her to.
Because Aunt Peggy insists.
Because Toni doesn’t have the will to really fight either of them anymore.
She’s just … tired.
Hollow and tired.
All she wants to do is sleep.
So she does.
Toni curls herself around the unopened letter and the unopened box and just … drifts off.
~~~
The RA forces her way into Toni’s dorm about two weeks after she stops showing up to class.
An ambulance is called.
Toni remembers the ride to the hospital in flicks and flashes.
None of it seems important.
Nothing’s seemed important since the day she saw Jarvis on that table.
Since the day her entire world was ripped out from underneath her.
~~~
She spends a week there, hooked to IVs and drips.
Obie comes and asks her to sign a bunch of paperwork, stuff to ensure that he can keep SI going to its full potential.
She’s under eighteen but he's her technical guardian so it should all be fine.
Toni signs and rolls back over onto her side.
She doesn’t care what happens to SI.
She doesn’t care about any of it.
~~~
They release her from the hospital and Toni finds herself shuttled back to the manor with a nurse she doesn’t know and Henrietta fretting in the seat beside her.
Toni just presses her forehead against the window and watches the buildings and the trees go by.
~~~
The pills the nurse hand her become a part of her routine.
They make her tired, make her normally whirling mind go fuzzy around the edges.
She takes every single one of them without a complaint.
~~~
Toni doesn’t even dream anymore.
~~~
Standing in her bathroom, hair a wet tangle around her too thin shoulders and back, Toni stares at the neat line of bottles on her sink and the pill packet the nurse had put together for her.
For the first time in months her mind whirls.
And Toni smiles.
~~~
“Jarvis?” His name’s a sob. A prayer. A wish that never comes true. A call that’s never answered.
“Yes young miss.” A response where one was never expected. The familiar scent of fresh bread and lemon furniture polish. The scent of home and love and kindness. A voice that left her months ago. Left her to a world gone grey around the edges and a hollowness she can’t be bothered to try and fill.
“I miss you so much.” A child’s lament, a daughter’s aching grief.
“Oh darling child.” There’s the fleeting press of lips against her forehead. “I never left you. Not truly.”
“Can I stay with you?” She never wants to leave him again. Wants to stay here in this place where nothing hurts.
“Sweet girl, you were not supposed to come chasing after me.” A gentle hand cups her cheek. A familiar touch that soothes, the sense memory of hands that helped to heal her wounds. “Not for a very long time to come. You still had so much left to do.”
“I don’t care.” Truth, plain and simple. There is nothing left to hold her there. Nothing left to keep her tethered.
“I know,” there’s an aching sort of sadness in his voice, “and I am so sorry the world was not kinder to you. Perhaps in another life.”
“I don’t want a next life,” she tells him, “I just want to stay here, with you.”
“Of course, young miss,” acceptance, sad and aching but always there, “I will be with you, always.”
And for the first time in longer than her fading memory can recall, she feels ... happy.
~~~
The headlines read:
Stark Heiress Found Dead At Sixteen: Suicide Suspected.
~~~
Hundreds of miles away James Rhodes frowns and shakes his head, unable to understand why his chest feels tight, or why he feels as if he’s lost something integral to himself.
Something precious and unnamed.
He sighs, does his best to shake the feeling off, and turns back to his packing.
Maybe delaying his enrollment to MIT for a few years was a mistake but it doesn’t really matter anyways.
He’s on his way now though so he’s sure that he’ll be able to figure things out.
~~~
Years later Steve Rogers is ripped out of the choking grasp of the ice and seawater that’s kept him company for decades on end and steps into a future as fast and bright as he could have ever imagined.
Lonelier too.
Emptier, somehow, in a way he can’t exactly put his finger on.
Like something vital was torn away, a hole cut out in the fabric of the world shaped to fit something Steve can’t quite define.
Or maybe that’s just the grief talking.
The grief that has clung to him since Bucky slipped through his hands.
Since he put the plane in the water, one part resigned and one part almost thankful.
A grief that, Steve finds, is a companion not even the better part of a century in the ice could shake from his shoulders.
That same grief gets thicker and heavier with every new grave that he visits, with every careful and gentle interaction with Peggy.
She’s still beautiful to him, because of course she is, and he's so so glad that she had a wonderful life after he went into the ice, but she’s ... brittle now, her strength and mind eaten away bit by bit.
It hurts in a way that feels almost selfish.
Still, all in all, the future is bright and sharp and colorful but Steve feels like he sees it all in shades of grey. Feels like he’s colorblind and short lunged again just like he was back before the serum.
A part of him wonders if this is what he has to look forwards to now.
This gray-scale world, this washed out existence.
But then something reaches out and snatches his attention wholesale, grips his fogged over mind and refuses to let it go.
“Oh Toni will be so happy you’re here,” Peggy grins up at him, mouth curved in a wide and delighted grin for once instead of crumpled in grief like it so often is. Her ever repeating cycle of grief and joy over his return eats at Steve a little more each time.
“Who?” Steve asks, one part mystified, one part indulgent, with that fine layer of sadness and grief layered over it all.
This is the first time Peggy’s ever mentioned a Toni.
“My goddaughter,” there’s a fierce sort of love evident in Peggy’s eyes then. “Howard’s girl. She loves you so much, Steve. Always asks me for stories about you. The real you, not the shield or the costume, but the man who took the flag. You’re going to adore her.”
Steve feels as if someone’s knocked his feet out from under him.
Howard’s girl.
Howard had a kid.
A daughter.
Steve knows that Howard's company is run by a man named Stane, has been for years now. There’d been no mention of Howard having other family.
The file Steve had been given hadn’t said anything about a kid either.
But, apparently, it had been wrong.
Or at least incomplete.
Maybe, Steve can't help but think, maybe there’s hope of connecting with someone with ties to his past after all.
Maybe.
“Steve?” Peggy’s voice breaks, a familiar grief and joy twining around his name as her expression crumples. “Steve you came back.”
“Of course,” Steve swallows down his grief as best he can as Peggy slips away from him again. “Couldn’t leave my best girl behind now could I?”
It’s okay, he’ll get his answers elsewhere.
~~~
Only what he finds isn’t what he wanted.
God in Heaven.
Steve traces his thumb over the photo in front of him.
Natasha Antonia Stark.
She’d been a beautiful girl, all thick riotous curls and eyes so blue and aching somehow that they struck out at the artist in him even from a photograph like this.
Either way he’d missed her by well over a decade too.
Suicide, the few articles he'd managed to dig up had said. And not too long after the accident that took Howard and his wife and driver.
Steve knows that kind of grief, can imagine all too well the way it must have weighed down those thin but evenly set shoulders, how it must have bowed that straight spine until going to sleep and not waking up again had seemed like the best, the only, option.
Steve can’t help but wish, more than a bit nonsensically, that he’d been found in time to stop it from happening.
Maybe if he’d been there, been here with her, he could have helped somehow.
Maybe she wouldn’t have bowed out like that.
Maybe she’d have given him another reason not to do the same.
It's selfish but Steve can't help but think ...
Maybe.
~~~
It takes him a while to track down the grave.
She isn’t buried beside Howard and Maria like he had thought she would be.
Instead Steve finds her in a smaller cemetery, her grave topped with a weeping marble angle where it’s tucked beside a headstone reading Edwin Jarvis.
The driver from the night of the accident and Howard’s long time butler.
Steve’s not sure what to make of that, his friend’s daughter not being buried with her parents, with her family, and instead being laid to rest beside someone else like this.
“Natasha,” Steve sighs the name out but after hearing Peggy call her Toni it doesn’t seem to fit right no matter how fine boned and almost delicate she had looked on paper.
"Toni,” he corrects himself, one hand coming up to cup the marble cheek of the angel that watches over her. “I ... I'm sorry I missed you, I always seem to be ... running late.”
There's no answer of course, only that certain sort of stillness that comes hand in hand with graveyards.
Steve, not really knowing why, spends the rest of the afternoon there, sitting at that grave, talking to a girl he never met.
It’s the most relaxing afternoon he’s had since he came out of the ice.
~~~
He goes home that night and lays in a bed that still doesn’t feel like his, in an apartment that still feels wrong, and thinks about her.
Wonders who she was outside of the few articles he found and read about her.
Wonders what kinds of things she liked, the books she read, what her voice sounded like.
Wonders a million and one things that he’ll never know the answer to.
~~~
But, in the end, Steve doesn’t have to wonder for long.
~~~
Loki comes soon after.
And the Chitauri follow on his heels.
Steve fights, of course he does, of course they all do.
But there’s a portal and Fury in his ear talking about a missile and they only find a way to stop one of those things.
So …
This is it.
"Close it," Steve tells the Black Widow, yet another Natasha he seems destined to lose because they all know what this means for them, for the city. "And it's been an honor fighting with all of you."
Standing in the middle of a destroyed street, in a time that will never be his own, with the city burning around him, Steve takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and tilts his head up towards the sky.
This time, he can’t help but think, death will hopefully take him.
And maybe he’ll get the chance to ask Toni a few questions on the other side.
And see Bucky again.
And if he gets to do any of that … well then maybe death won’t be so bad after all.
Maybe.
~~~
“Come on Soldier,” Pierce calls, eyes on the screen showing the last minutes of New York in vivid detail. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Ready to comply,” the Asset answers as it always does.
As it always will.