Iron Man fic: but only vaulting ambition--[Maya Hansen, PG-13]
--
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls on th'other. . . .
--Macbeth
--
Oscar Wilde once said that an idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Yeah. Maya thinks he pretty much nailed it with that one.
--
She hates life on the helicarrier.
Most days, she can forget about it. Most days she buries herself in her work-in Tony’s work-in the S.H.I.E.L.D. tactical laboratory, only stopping in the small hours of the morning when her back aches and her eyes burn and she collapses, exhausted, into the tiny spartan bedroom allocated to her in the officers’ wing. Her bedroom is next to Tony’s, of course, and it’s locked whenever she’s in it; she is still his kept woman, still a criminal awaiting pardon under the protective arm of the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
But there are days when she can’t forget where she is. Those days are the bad ones, the days where the helicarrier rings with the sound of explosions and gunfire and rocks n the sky, the days where there is empty sky and no ground in sight when she looks out the heavily reinforced windows and the claustrophobia and sheer terror squeeze, vice-like, at her heart.
The bad days, too, are the ones where she throws her instruments down in disgust and stares blankly at the wall for minutes at a time, seething with resentment and fury at Tony. He saved her. She knows that. She knows if it weren’t for him she’d be rotting in prison, would probably be dead right now for her crimes. But it doesn’t make it rankle any less, knowing that he is suppressing her work even while he lies through his teeth and tells her he is encouraging her research, that he is helping her.
Today is one of those days.
--
Maya is in the middle of dissecting a corpse they’d found buried in an iceberg in the north Atlantic when the sirens go off and the whole helicarrier shudders. Breath coming short, Maya carefully puts away her scalpel and covers up the body, and is peeling off her surgical mask when an agent comes to the door.
“Director Stark wants you back in your room, Doctor Hansen,” he says, and usually in a crisis like this there would be someone to walk her back and make sure she’s safe but the agent runs off, gun tucked under his arm, so Maya figures it’s all hands on deck and shows herself out of the lab. She sticks close to the walls; the lights in the corridor are out, so they must be running on backup power, or something-she’s not an engineer, that’s Tony’s job, but at this moment she wishes she were an engineer and knew what was happening so she wouldn’t feel so fucking helpless.
She makes it to her room, and is about to go in when she notices the door to Tony’s suite is ajar.
“Oh, damn,” she says, and goes in his room.
It’s empty, of course. He must have been sleeping when the alarms went, because the blankets on his bed are thrown every which way, a chair knocked over in his haste. Maya briefly considers going through his files, but she knows that Tony isn’t careless and he isn’t stupid and he isn’t likely to store anything of use here, where anyone can get at it, and anyway with a brain like his he hardly needs to keep hardcopies of information lying around.
“God, I need a drink,” Maya says aloud, even though she knows she won’t find one in here. A loud boom echoes from down the hall; Maya strikes down the irrational urge to run and see what’s happening, bones quavering like jelly, and instead kicks off her shoes and climbs into Tony’s bed.
It smells like him, and Maya shuts her eyes tight and puts her hands over her ears and waits for the noise to die down.
It does, eventually, and ten minutes later the door opens. Tony, silhouetted against the hall light, looks weary and frustrated; his uniform is in shreds and there is a streak of soot on his cheek.
Maya blinks tiredly and sits up. Tony tugs off the scorched white gauntlets finger by finger, flexing his stiff hands with an unsettling cracking sound. Maya settles further back into the pillows, unseen; she idly admires the crescent of his boyish dark lashes, how his eyes lower contemplatively as he sheds the ragged remains of his slick blue S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform, and she is considering how deceptively innocent his face looks in thought when the mattress underneath her squeaks and Tony instantly goes tense, blue eyes snapping to her face with inhuman instincts born of Extremis.
Maya spreads her hands, raises an eyebrow.
Tony relaxes. “Jesus Christ, Maya,” he says, and goes back to peeling the uniform off his arm. It lets go of his skin with a pop. “You trying to send me into cardiac arrest?”
“It’s not like I was being sneaky,” she says, gesturing at her bright white lab coat. He rolls his eyes.
--
Back on land for a brief weekend, Maya eats breakfast and sifts through a pile of collected newspapers and gossip rags as the sun comes up over Stark Tower. There is a picture of the two of them in some cheap tabloid as they disembark off the helicarrier; Tony’s arm is around her shoulders, defensively, and the words “convicted mass murderess” jump out at her from the article.
Maya’s spoon rattles in her empty bowl.
--
She wraps her arms around Tony’s neck and clings to him as he kisses his way down her throat, pressing his fingers into the small of her back.
It’s just another way of forgetting, she thinks as she leads him over to his bed.
--
He called her a sociopath once.
That had galled her. But while she’d raged at Tony at the time, told him it wasn’t anything he wouldn’t have done-and still stands by that, the two of them both know it’s true-Maya knows exactly what’s she done with Extremis. Lightly, she touches the puckered scar that arches under her eye. They think she is blinded by science, breathless from the dizzying heights of her own achievement, that she doesn’t feel the weight of her actions. She knows it, and knows the consequences. How could she not, when she sees the fruit of her labours glaring out at her from the mirror every day?
Of course, that doesn’t mean she intends to stop.
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you joined us,” the white-haired man says with a smile, smoothly offering a gloved hand for her to shake.
Maya clasps his hand, and smiles.
--
In her memories it is years ago at some sleazy bar and Tony is polished and aloof and painfully young, dressed in a simple black suit with his dark hair slicked back. “So come on,” Maya says, taking him by the hand. “And loosen your tie.”
He followed her, then. He would follow her anywhere.
Maya drops her suicide note on the floor and climbs into a bathtub filled with water and black with fake blood. I’m sorry, Tony, she thinks, knowing what he’ll look like when they show him the photos. She lays her head back and closes her eyes as the water runs red down her fingers and drips on the note.
She will atone. But she’s not finished, not even close.