Chapter 45: Obadiah: FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!
Two hours earlier.
Stark Industries. Obadiah Stane's private office.
Three knocks on the door.
A pause. No answer from inside. Pepper eased the door open carefully and put her head through the gap.
The room was empty.
She moved in quickly, crossed to the desk, and plugged a USB drive into Stane's computer.
This was what she had actually come for.
The screen flickered. Files began pulling up, one after another.
Within moments, a video had been automatically extracted and was playing on the screen.
Pepper leaned forward and watched.
What she was looking at was footage of Tony's capture. The Ten Rings. The ambush. The beginning of everything.
She ran through it carefully.
The conclusion she arrived at was not one she had been prepared to arrive at.
Stane arranged this. Stane had Tony attacked.
She had watched this man play the role of mentor and surrogate father in Tony's life for as long as she had worked here. The idea that he was the one who had sent Tony to die in a desert had not existed in her mind five minutes ago.
The video kept playing.
She was fully absorbed in the screen when a familiar voice came from the doorway behind her.
She flinched hard.
"Ms. Potts?"
Stane was standing in the entrance, his gaze moving over her with the unhurried precision of a man taking inventory.
Pepper pulled herself together. She closed the retrieval program with the hand closest to the keyboard and moved the newspaper on the desk over the USB drive. She produced a smile from somewhere and turned to face him.
She was an assistant who had just been found alone in a board member's private office. Best case, that read as unauthorized access to internal documents. Worst case, corporate espionage. She understood exactly how the situation looked.
What she did not let show was what she now knew about the man standing in the door.
Stane, for his part, was doing his own calculations.
The computer held not only the Ten Rings footage but the complete files on the Iron Monger project. If she had accessed either of those, the entire plan was compromised.
The obvious solution presented itself: close the door, deal with the problem, remove the risk entirely.
He rejected it.
At his core, Stane was a businessman who ran cost-benefit calculations on everything, including this. The decision to arrange Tony's death had been a careful one. Tony was heading to a war zone. If he died there, it would read as a casualty of circumstance. Nothing traced back. Clean.
Killing Pepper Potts in his own office, because he was worried she might have seen something, was not a clean calculation. The exposure that followed would be immediate and catastrophic. Whatever she had on that drive was nothing compared to what a murder investigation would uncover.
So he let the thought go and walked to the drinks cabinet.
He poured two glasses of whiskey, brought one to her, and met her eyes.
Both of them smiled at exactly the same moment.
Both of them meant it exactly as much as the other.
For the next several minutes, two people who were both running at maximum internal anxiety performed the most unremarkable possible professional small talk, each watching the other for any sign that the performance was slipping, neither finding one.
When enough time had passed, Pepper judged the scene complete and stood to leave.
She was careful, on her way up, to pick up the newspaper. The USB drive had been moved into her bag well before that.
Almost there. Almost out the door.
Please don't call me back. Please don't call me back.
"Ms. Potts."
She stopped.
"Is that today's newspaper?"
She turned with a composed smile. "It is."
"Could I take a look?" He was watching her hands.
She handed it over.
He looked at it. He looked at her hands. Nothing there.
Pepper gave him a small nod and walked out.
She kept her pace even until she reached the corner.
Then she ran.
At almost the same moment, Stane was back at the desk.
The screen showed two words.
Download Complete.
He moved.
He was fast. It wasn't fast enough.
From the second-floor railing, he watched Pepper's figure disappear through the building's exit. The warmth that lived in his face in professional contexts had left it entirely. What remained was something considerably colder.
The doors of the District 16 research facility flew open.
Stane came through them at a speed that sent several researchers scrambling backward. He crossed the floor toward the group clustered helplessly around the large arc reactor and stopped in front of them, and the energy coming off him was the kind that silenced a room faster than a raised voice.
Useless.
Every single one of them.
If they had done what he needed, he would not be in this situation.
The lead researcher, William, appeared to read something in Stane's expression before a word had been said. He started explaining before he was asked.
"Mr. Stane. We've been working on your specifications. But we've run into some difficulties with the miniaturization process..."
"Difficulties."
"Yes. The level of miniaturization required for a functioning suit is simply beyond what we can achieve with our current resources and methods..."
William was still talking when Stane grabbed him by the collar and pulled him directly in front of the large arc reactor.
"William." His voice was very low. "Look at what's in front of you."
"You told me this was impossible. It is sitting right here. All I am asking you to do is make it smaller. I am not asking you to invent it from nothing."
"Sir, we've genuinely done everything we can." William's voice had acquired a tremor that he was not managing to suppress. "What you're asking for... honestly, it's not something we can achieve..."
That word landed on something in Stane that had already been too close to the edge.
"Tony Stark built one in a cave. Out of spare parts and whatever was lying around."
"I am giving you the best materials money can find. The full technical support of this facility. And you are standing here telling me you cannot do what a man did in a cave."
William's answer, when it came, was quiet.
"I'm sorry, sir. But I'm not Tony Stark."
And that was simply the truth of it.
William could score a hundred on any exam he was given. That was not the same thing as having what Tony Stark had. You could spend years in school getting perfect marks and still not be the person who could build a functional arc reactor from cave debris. The gap between technical competence and genius wasn't a matter of effort. It existed whether you worked hard or not.
The equivalent, for anyone who needed it spelled out, would be a manager walking up to a developer and demanding a fully functional competitor to TikTok, built from scratch, in one week. And when it wasn't done, asking whether they had really tried hard enough.
If I could do that, William thought, I wouldn't still be working here.
Stane stood there for a moment, his hand raising and lowering several times.
Then all of it came out at once.
"FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!"
"Useless! The whole lot of you!"
"Get out! Everyone get OUT!!"
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