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darsynia · 1 year

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Trust Fall | Ch 6 нарны гэрэл

ARC reactor image by Eury Escodero

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Summary: Tony/OC, 'terrorists made us fall in love;' IM1 timeline. In this chapter, Tony realizes that a situation where he's practically required to kiss this woman to keep her alive is a blessing and a curse-- because he really, really likes it. so much kissing omg

Length: 5,170

I’m shy as hell about saying this but if anyone wants to be tagged or ask me to write something please do! Tags: @starryeyes2000 @raith-way @arrthurpendragon

Excerpt:

“Tony,” he says. She opens her eyes and looks at him, confused. “My name,” he explains. “I like to be on a first-name basis with a woman I’ve shared kisses with.”

He’s trying to charm her, and that is honestly pissing her off. She’s not here to be enticing, she’s trying to stay alive! Inside her somewhere, the place that keeps trying to get her to relive the way he’d traced her lip with his tongue the day before, a voice calls her a liar.

She suspects she’s going to get a lot of practice ignoring that voice.

“Shared, is it? I don’t recall there being much sharing. Taking, maybe,�� Emory says. Only after the word ‘taking’ leaves her lips does she really examine its use, and her eyes fly up to Stark’s in a kind of horrified curiosity.

He’s grinning.

“Interesting choice of words.”

She’s committed now, so as usual when cornered, Emory stands her ground. “It’s true.”

Very carefully, Stark lifts the paper he’d been lining up on top of his palladium contraption, setting it on top of the stack of pages instead. Then he stands up, leaning his palm down on the table to angle his weight sideways. He tips his head the other way and regards her thoughtfully.

“You’re right. I’ve been greedy.”

Chapter Six: нарны гэрэл

After an hour of avoiding the book by practicing her scales at a low hum (so as not to disturb Stark’s intense focus), Emory pulls the blanket back off of her head to find that Yinsen is already walking over. He crouches down, speaking in a low whisper.

“I am concerned that if you and Stark do not interact today, your safety will be at risk. I have spoken to him multiple times, but he is engrossed.”

She sighs. “Can’t you try again? I could come up with a pretty comprehensive list of things I’d rather do than walk over and interrupt Tony Stark so I can tell him to-- Well. You know.”

“I do not think it will take much persuasion if that is your worry,” Yinsen says. His steady gaze doesn’t reveal his thoughts, but what he’s said is enough.

“Okay,” she says, biting her lip.

“Cleaning the dishes will be a loud, solitary activity during which I will be unlikely to hear anything,” he says, standing up.

“Absolutely do not imply that we need privacy. That’s-- Just don’t.”

All Yinsen does is chuckle very softly, and walk away.

That leaves Emory with the task of walking over to a very busy Tony Stark and trying to persuade him to kiss her so she can stay alive. Her life has become so much more strange than she ever expected.

Stark has the pencil in his mouth and is resting one of his pages on top of the circular metal tray he’d placed the cast palladium into. She waits nearby for about two minutes (she counts 106 seconds before he looks up, and she’d started counting pretty soon after stopping beside the table) before he notices she’s there.

“Hey. What’s up, J Rabbit?”

He doesn’t even turn to look at her.

“That’s a new one for me, but that’s probably because she’s really tall, there, Stark. Glad to know you see me as just boobs and hair though, I guess?”

“Hmm?” he says.

Emory almost laughs. He’s created the perfect situation for her to actually do the thing Yinsen told her she should do. Because if he’s not listening very intently, if he’s so caught up in his project, he probably won’t even be phased.

“I need you to kiss me for Yinsen’s quota of ‘Emory Shouldn’t Die If We Can Avoid It,’” she says.

He looks over at her with interest. “Emory, that’s your name?”

All of his attention is suddenly on her. Whoops.

“Yep,” she says briskly. “So if you could--”

“Emory Autumn,” he says.

He looks like he’s savoring the way the words taste, and the fact that he’s been so busy all day with something he clearly cares about but is willing to pause for this is really affecting her. Emory closes her eyes tight, trying to reset her sense of what’s important at the moment.

“Tony,” he says. She opens her eyes and looks at him, confused. “My name,” he explains. “I like to be on a first-name basis with a woman I’ve shared kisses with.”

She suspects she’s going to get a lot of practice ignoring that voice.

“Shared, is it? I don’t recall there being much sharing. Taking, maybe,” Emory says. Only after the word ‘taking’ leaves her lips does she really examine its use, and her eyes fly up to Stark’s in a kind of horrified curiosity.

He’s grinning.

“Interesting choice of words.”

She’s committed now, so as usual when cornered, Emory stands her ground. “It’s true.”

“You’re right. I’ve been greedy.”

Oh holy fucking hell, Emory thinks in her own head, looking down at the floor in complete desperation. It’s as if his words have left his lips to connect to some sort of conduit in her gut that has been overloaded with electricity. Greedy, God. She could get behind greedy, not that she ever intends to let him know that.

“What’s wrong?” he murmurs.

“Nothing. I’m--” she lifts her eyes to his chest, wishing she were brave enough to shift them higher. “The rabbit sparring with the fox. Wholly without the experience or the vocabulary to hold my own.”

“No one flirted with you at any of Rory’s parties? At events?” He’s coming closer, and she really is the rabbit, now. Emory’s paralyzed, knowing she has to stay still and let him flip all of her switches, even if he only needed to tap on a single lamp with the brush of a finger. She’s always been activated by touch. There has to be a way she can fake callouses for just long enough to fool him.

“Don’t you want to get back to your work?”

“I needed a brain break,” Stark says, coming closer still. He reaches over and shifts the battery as if to show her he’s committed to his course of action.

“What kind of break would you call this?” Emory asks impulsively, finally meeting his eyes.

“Nice,” he says. “I stand corrected.” He shifts his gaze to the far distance as if thinking. “They really did name her after you, didn’t they? Rory Fall, Emory Autumn. How are you not suing them for likeness rights, at this point?”

“Mr. Stark--”

He reaches out and stops her with a heavy thumb against her lips. It directly reminds her of what he’d done the day before, which is why she stays still and stares at him instead of slapping his hand away or backing up.

Well, that and she kind of needs this so they don’t come back and kill her.

That’s the only reason.

“Tony,” he corrects.

All Emory can do is make a skeptical face. He’d said she should use his given name because they’d shared kisses, after all. And they hadn’t. As she’d said.

He doesn’t have the reputation of being a genius for nothing.

“You really do work in the recording industry. You’re giving me snarky eyes because you think you’ve found a loophole, aren’t you? Think I can’t make you kiss me back? I can.”

Yep, all the switches.

She feels the blush grow up her neck and across her cheeks, with a completely different heat spreading downward. In self-defense, Emory grabs his hand and moves it away from her mouth, but Stark twists it in her grip, shifting to hold her wrist. He then uses that new hold to pull her close.

He’s infuriating as well as sexy, because the more she obviously resists him, the more persuasive he’ll be, which is exactly what they both know she won’t be able to handle.

“You are in dire need of someone to puncture your ego,” she bristles.

Stark leans over, laying his lips against her ear. “Do it with your tongue.”

Emory’s response to this is to reach out and rest her hand on his battery, pressing down on the corner that’s extending over the edge of the table. The weight of the thing starts to shift. She’s absolutely not strong enough to get it to fall before he'd stop her, but it’s not stable, either.

“Power play, eh?” he asks. “If you’re going to fuck with my wiring, sweetheart, do it at the source.” Stark closes his hand around hers and to her complete surprise, he drags it underneath his shirt. The intimacy of it is shocking, but so is the place he forces her fingers to slide against. The metal of the electromagnet housing isn’t conductive, but every other place he's compelling her to touch is. She’s slowly attuning to his charge, and it’s exhilarating.

His warm hand shifts hers sideways and flattens it out on his pectoral muscle. Emory shakes her head, overwhelmed, and that’s when he dips his head down and captures her lips with his. Instead of rough, this is persuasive, which is much more drugging and insidious. Stark’s got her touching him in a way that implies a deep intimacy they’re nowhere near actually sharing, but her traitorous body doesn’t understand that. Despite herself Emory leans toward him when he breaches her initial resistance and sucks her lower lip into his mouth.

He breaks the kiss for a second and she tries to pull back.

“No, no,” he says. “I just need--” and suddenly the hand he’d been using to hold hers to his chest slips out from under his shirt and he’s lifting her up onto the table directly beside her. Stark’s got a hand on her hips and the other resting on the table, supporting him as he leans into her.

“You don’t-- This is--” she protests, but before she can vocalize ‘too much,’ he tips his head as if he’s about to kiss her, but doesn’t.

“They can’t see at this angle, I don’t think,” he whispers. Stark’s lips are a breath away, and she’s still got her hand on his bare chest under his shirt like a lover.

“You don’t have to be an overachiever at everything,” Emory mutters, pulling her hand down and away from him. It’s difficult, with how close their bodies are to each other.

“I didn’t succeed yet, so no,” he whispers in her ear.

He means she hasn’t kissed him back. Emory’s actually relieved, because it feels to her like he’s replaced the air in her lungs and the blood in her veins with the wanting of him, and if he can’t tell that’s happening, she’s grateful.

She’s still the prey to his predator, but she knows some tricks, at least.

“There’s always next time,” she promises.

Stark draws back to look at her, his brown eyes searching hers. He nods.

Tony has to force himself to back up so Emory can get down. He doesn’t offer to help her slide down because if he touches her again, he’ll bury his hands in her hair and do just what he’d promised to do in the first place: compel her to kiss him back.

Things are getting way out of hand, he knows, but being denied something he wants always has made him dogged about getting it, and he wants her. She feels it too, whether or not it’s as strong (if there was any chance it was, they could escape this goddamned cave just with the force of energy they’d be capable of giving off, he’s entirely sure). That’s good, and not just in a selfish way, either. Tony doesn’t want to be the person he implied to the terrorist he was. He doesn’t want to use her, he wants to please her, wants her to please him in return. He’s rocketed past ‘cute girl at the party, ask Hogan if she’d be willing to drop by the hotel’ territory straight into ‘pull cute girl away from dance floor against darkened hallway and see how loud they can be before they get caught’ -land.

He walks back over to his chair and grips the back of it, pretending to look at his papers until Emory goes back to her cot. What he needs to do is come. It’s been forever, and he needs steady hands for the welding he’s going to do tomorrow. But Tony Stark is not a sexual exhibitionist, not among people who don’t want to watch. He’ll have to wait till evening, and be discreet. It probably won’t take long, not after he made the monumentally stupid decision to put her hand on his chest.

He can kind of still feel it there. That’s directly related to the need he thought about earlier, if he’s honest. Tony’s always been a heat sink for sexual thoughts the longer it’s been since he’d had an orgasm. Right now? He could probably melt what’s left of the palladium just by holding it in his hands.

Channel the energy, he reminds himself. The suit he’s designing is something out of a comic book, something out of a sci-fi novel. Something out of his most inventive daydreams. Tomorrow he’ll start making it a reality, with his father’s long-time dream of a miniaturized ARC reactor the first item in the agenda.

Tony lines up the pages he’s been sketching on all day and presses them together with a quick swipe of his hand.

It’s bulky, but its beauty doesn’t lie in the lines of metal he’s realistically represented here. This is Mark I. Its purpose is to get Tony back home where he can design its sibling, using the technology he aches to lay his hands on again.

Tony groans inwardly. Even his metaphors in his own mind are about tactile gratification. He’s the most predictable man on the planet.

Soldering goes well the next day, but his hands ache by the afternoon. The precision Tony needs is going to require that he take the second part of the day off and finish in the morning, instead of what he’d been hoping, which was to finish by nighttime. Hooking the reactor up to power will undoubtedly make the lights dim as it takes in the power the first time, and Tony doesn’t want to do that while there will be eyes on their video feed. It also means he needs to get everything to do with Emory taken care of long before evening that night, so no one will get the idea that there will be something to watch after hours.

It’s a perfect reason to establish that whatever they’re up to, it should happen earlier in the day (training the goons observing them that there isn’t anything to see once it’s night), but it’s mostly a rationalization.

True rationalizations are the best kind, anyway.

“Hey, Chenoweth, can you come here?” he calls out to her, standing beside the worktable. His soldering project is at the other end, protected by a box and a few other objects that ought to prevent it from shifting or being knocked over. Tony sets the heavy battery down on the table, away from where he’s cleared things away.

Emory comes over after putting her bookmark in, but her body language is closed-off and defensive. He supposes calling her a known petite Broadway star instead of her name might have done it.

“Sit.” He pats the table. She looks dubious. “Plan is, you sit, I scoot in close, keep my hands out of sight. They can fill in the blanks.” Tony smiles at her, knowing she’s not immune to his charm, as much as she pretends not to be. Hardly any woman is. “Just throw your head back in ecstasy every so often, and you’re off the hook.”

“Fine,” she says, taking his proffered hand to help herself up. “Why am I not surprised that the plan involves stroking your ego?”

He leans over and is impressed by the way she automatically leans toward him and tips her head sideways as if they really were kissing. “Don’t say ‘stroke’ unless you’re going to,” he says.

Emory throws her head back to laugh. Tony has to hand it to her, the expression on her face could easily be misinterpreted. He pays more attention to her when she lifts her hand and rests it on his neck.

“Spread your legs a little, scoot back,” he tells her. His voice is a bit deeper than he had wanted to reveal; he’s turned on by this, who wouldn’t be? But she doesn’t really need to know that. When Emory does scoot back, Tony rests his palm on the small inverted vee of table visible, his fingers curled around the edge of the table. Emory presses her lips together and nods a tiny bit when she realizes why. It could look like he was, well. Stroking.

“So what are you building, or are you still keeping that from us?” she asks.

“An energy source,” Tony says. His hand is getting warm. It’s distracting. “To replace the battery.”

Emory slides her own hand from his neck to the front of his shirt, pulling the fabric out and then gripping it, as if she’s holding on in the throes of passion. It’s effective.

“That’s why it’s round. You’re going to replace the whole thing, aren’t you?”

He leans over and pretends to kiss the top of her head. “Exactly,” he says. Without meaning to, Tony runs his nose along her hair. He steadies his other hand on the table beside her hip. “The design’s kind of inherited. My father built a building-sized one years ago. It powers my factory.”

“I hope he gets to see what you’ve done, when this is all done,” she says, moving her hand to squeeze his upper arm encouragingly.

“I hope not. If there’s going to be a zombie apocalypse, I think we’re safer in here,” Tony says, mentally biting down the residual pain that always springs up when he acknowledges his parents’ deaths. Her hand on his arm freezes for a second, before she removes it.

“I’m sorry,” Emory whispers. She looks like she feels guilty; she hugs her arms to her chest and closes her legs on his hand before gasping and moving them back the way they were.

Tony lifts his hand and holds it up to prove he’s not adversely affected by the move. The truth is he hadn’t thought about how his father might have felt about what he’s doing. Pride was something Howard Stark didn’t seem to glean from outward sources, particularly not from his son. Growing up, Tony had been confused by the way the other boys at school would talk happily about their fathers. Sure, he built machines with his dad sometimes, but unlike the friendly games of catch he’d hear about, the instructions on how to change the oil in the family car, and the like, Tony’s build sessions were full of admonishment and frustration on his father’s part. After a while, they’d ceased entirely.

“Don’t be sorry. He’d probably be more interested in my brain as a Zombie than he ever was when he was alive,” Tony says. He means it as a joke, but the truth of the statement sinks into his skin like radiation, against his will, with no defense available. He supports himself on the table with his fists on either side of her hips, looking down at the fabric of his black pinstriped suit pants she’s wearing.

“Oh, Tony,” Emory says, resting her right hand lightly, gently, on his left one.

He’d secretly wanted to hear her say his name. Tony had been hoping to hear it in a gasp, a broken moan, a way he didn’t have a right to want, in a context that should be abhorrent to him. He’s unaccountably angry with himself for being so very disappointed, and with her for once again setting herself aside for someone else’s comfort. He’s mostly been a pleasure-seeking asshole to her, and yet she sounds completely sincere in her sympathy. It’s not right.

“Stop that right now,” he says, his voice harsh and rough. Tony waits for her to look at him, but she’s frozen, eyes downcast, her hand snatched back. “Look at me.”

Emory shakes her head. “I won’t use it again,” she says in a frightened whisper.

Tony feels like the absolute worst person on the planet. She thought he was angry at her use of his name? He grabs her chin to lift her head, trying to be gentle even though he’s upset with her and himself at the same time.

“That wasn’t it,” he says, willing her to meet his gaze. She’s shut her eyes. “Emory.” Tony can see that she’s closing herself off, and he won’t allow it.

Tantalizingly, he knows how to get her to open back up. “Goddamnit,” he says before leaning down and kissing her, thumb stroking against her neck, lips as gentle and persuasive as he can.

She grabs his hand as if to pull it away, and he pushes in closer, cups her face with the other hand, doubles down on making her respond.

“I was trying not to-- but you drive me crazy,” he says between kisses. At that, Emory’s whole body seems to yield to him, her grip on his hand softening as she slides it up his arm and into his hair. Tony remembers her saying she’d kiss him back next time, meaning this time, and that ramps up his desire to conflagration levels. With a rough hand he pushes her knees apart to press his hips close, fingers scrabbling against the smooth fabric that she fills out so nicely with her curves.

He’d enjoyed kissing her when she was merely acquiescing but now that she’s participating, Tony’s gone. She’s pure electricity, everywhere she touches him. Her small fingers drag energy through his hair as her mouth opens to his, her tongue teasing his and retreating, drawing him deeper. As in everything, this unexpected, lovely woman is generous to a fault. Tony knows he would have-- probably did-- overlook her in a crowd of women, and he’s not the only one. More fool he.

Emory’s brand of radiation is even more powerful than the guilt and grief from earlier, rewriting the guilt in his DNA and replacing it with pleasure. Just like before, he’s powerless, and Tony wonders if she can even comprehend how effortlessly she’s managed to consume his thoughts. With great effort, he ends the kiss, holding her face between her hands again.

He’s got her attention now, and she has to hear him.

“You are your priority, from now on. Do you hear me?” Her grey eyes confused, she tries to shake her head or pull back, but Tony holds her still. “Who are you, without someone to support?”

He lets go. Looking flustered, she scoots back away from him, up onto the table, rather than push him away.

“There, that,” Tony points out, moving farther forward. Now she is sitting on the table with no way to back up, as there is a stack of missile carapaces behind her. “How will you get down?”

“Why are you--”

“Because I haven’t seen you do a damned thing for yourself this whole time!”

“Stark!” Yinsen says, coming over.

“Tell her she doesn’t just exist to make things easier for everyone else,” Tony says, his anger rising as he thinks about the years she’s probably spent kowtowing to Rory Fall. Yinsen picks up his battery and rests a hand on his arm, and Tony allows himself to be moved away from the table.

“I get it,” Emory says after she gets down. “It’s inconvenient for you, is that it? That I care about--”

“Caring isn’t the problem. Selflessness to the point of subsumption is. Who are you? Do you know? Tell me about yourself, but leave out all the parts where you’re the caretaker for someone else,” Tony practically shouts at her.

“Why does it even matter to you? Why should you care?”

He grabs the battery from Yinsen and marches over to her and towers over her on purpose, filling her entire view with his body, forcing her to look at him. “Tell me why I shouldn’t care.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Emory protests, glaring up at him. “You’re-- you’re you. A billionaire. Why would you ever care what some random woman does?”

“You’re not random anymore, Kitten. You’re someone I have to figure out how to save. And I can’t do that if you’re not going to value yourself.” Tony points at the doors. “If they came in here with a posse of people and told you to pick someone to die, what would you do?”

She rolls her eyes. “Is this a comparison thing? You’d choose someone other than yourself, so everyone should? Yinsen has a family. You have a company to run. The choice is clear.”

“It’s not. You’re young. You--”

“Your logic goes against conventional morality and you know it!” she screams at him.

“So argue that. Not that you aren’t worth saving because you have a messed-up sense of your actual value! That’s my point.”

Emory sidesteps him and stomps her way to her cot, every step punctuated by a huge amount of angry effort. “I didn’t sign up for a fucking Ted Talk on selfishness,” she says over her shoulder.

“If you’d learned something other than selfLESSness you wouldn’t be so screwed up now!” he calls after her.

“Explain to me how you are both so angry?” Yinsen asks Tony. “Preferably before you throw your battery?”

Tony looks down to see that he’s got both hands on either end of the thing, his fingertips curling in as if he wishes he could crush it.

“I sexually harassed her in the hum-vee,” Tony says, his voice rough with frustration. “I basically told the terrorists I wanted them to keep her alive so I could fuck her. She has zero reason to comfort me.”

Yinsen flinches at his language. “Your agreement with them saved her life. You are angry with her for showing you compassion?”

“No!” Tony protests. He thinks a little. “Maybe.”

“Your bargain benefits you more than you anticipated, and your guilt is leading you to be defensive.” Yinsen’s words are blunt. “That’s personal growth, for you. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable.” He takes Tony’s battery and starts walking, forcing Tony to keep up. When Yinsen stops, it’s at their supply of beans. “You measure a third of a cup per person. Go on.”

“You’re teaching me how to make food?”

“You think it should be the girl you just said does too much for others?”

It’s as much of a verbal slap as Tony’s ever been given, and Yinsen didn’t even use anger or profanity.

Tony does what he is told.

Emory actually takes her blanket and pillow and goes to sit behind a pile of empty missile cases. She doesn’t want to see Stark’s stupid face and his stupid hands and his stupid arms that she keeps staring at without meaning to.

The man has absolutely no right to lecture her on her behavior! Of all the people in the world to object to her tendency to put others first! She punches the pillow. It hurts more than a western pillow might have, because of what it’s made of, and her knuckles start aching right away. She’s glad.

It wasn’t fair that he knew that the way to get her to listen to him is to kiss her. It shouldn’t work, but he’s good at it, and the few seconds of kissing him back still has her body thrumming with sexual energy in a way she wishes she could satisfy without him knowing about it. There’s essentially zero privacy in the cave, though, and if anyone in the solar system doesn’t need to know that she’s touching herself because of him, it’s Stark.

Emory lets out a silent groan of deep frustration. She’s lonely, and talking to him just that little bit had been great. At least until he’d decided to moralize at her. Yinsen’s conversation is too convicting for her-- he always seems to have some insight that makes her feel like she’d behaved poorly or has a lesson to learn. Stark didn’t seem that way, but then she’d mentioned his father, which she absolutely should have remembered had died many years before. Shit, Emory thinks. Twenty-five years at least.

She crosses her arms. Feeling bad about that was completely justified, in her mind. It was in no way ‘subsuming’ herself, or whatever his stupid argument was. If her memory is correct, Stark had lost his parents at 17, the same age she was when hers started their divorce. She’d had to make do with a new school and new friends, but he’d had a whole company to consider, and all of his father’s property and assets. It had probably been pretty traumatic. It was no wonder he has lived such a hedonistic lifestyle.

Basically, Stark’s parents had died and he’d indulged himself, gone overboard with it. And his argument is, what? That at some point in her past, she’d done the opposite? Gone overboard with her friend, had become the exact wrong kind of indispensable, to her own detriment?

There is a ring of truth to the sentiment, much as Emory hates to admit it.

“Ughhhh,” she groans, pulling the pillow onto her knees, covering it with her blanket, and dropping her head onto it.

“Food,” Yinsen calls.

“Not hungry!” Emory responds.

She’s worked her way through Rent’s ‘Take Me or Leave Me’ and Wicked’s ‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished’ and is searching through her mental musical theater archives again when she sees a man’s shoes walk up into her space. Emory lifts her head to see Stark holding two bowls.

“I don’t--”

“Well I do, and I won’t unless you do, so eat it,” he says, holding out the bowl.

“I thought I’m supposed to think of myself first? If that still holds, my not wanting to eat anything should trump your attempt to guilt me into it by denying yourself, shouldn’t it?” Emory points out.

Stark sets her bowl next to her and sinks down to sit on the floor against the wall opposite her little shelter made up of rocket parts. “That’s clever. I am hungry though, so I’m happy to be persuaded.” He lifts up his spoon, then puts it back in. “Except, I don’t believe you. I think you’re hungry, you’re just too mad to eat. I’ve been there.”

“I just think it’s rich, pun intended, for you of all people to tell me I need to be more selfish.”

“Why?” Stark asks, brows furrowed. “I’m one of the most selfish people in the world. I would know.”

Emory slides her legs down and puts her hands back to support herself. “Have you tried, like, not being so selfish?” she asks, putting on a Valley Girl accent.

“Uh, yeahhhhh,” Stark says, fully committing to the bit. He points to her bowl.

She tries not to smile at him, but it’s a losing battle. Somewhere inside her, sparklers are going off, lighting up all the reasons she could really, really like this man.

“We’re at an impasse, though,” Emory says, lifting a brow.

“Oh?”

“One of us fails at the task, no matter what. If I eat, I’m sacrificing my needs for yours. If you eat, you’re being selfish.”

“Yeah, but one of the options means we both get to eat, so it’s the superior one. Eat up.”

“Fine,” she concedes.

In the next chapter, Tony creates the ARC reactor, and Emory offers him something heartfelt, despite her situation.