Kapitel 56: Chapter 56
October 4th, 2016
Avengers Facility, Upstate New York
One morning, Maggie lay on the couch in her room, her chin on her chest as she scrolled through global news on her Stark Tablet. She had her headphones in, listening to her iPod. It was a bright day outside, and from time to time she looked up from the tablet to admire the fall colors in the forest.
As she scrolled absently through headlines about politics, economics, and human interest stories, one word jumped out at her: HYDRA.
She hit the article without really thinking about it, so she didn't register the full headline until the page loaded: "Our Mom Was On A HYDRA Kill List". Maggie's heartbeat picked up, and she sat up properly. It turned out it wasn't actually an article, but a link to a clip of a news program.
It began with a newsreader at her desk in a studio, eyeing the camera grimly. "Six years ago, the family of Chicago mother of two Karina Weston woke up to a knock on the door." A photo of the woman appeared beside the newsreader, and Maggie frantically scanned her face – she didn't recognize her, but that might not mean much. She looked nice, with warm green eyes and a frizz of dark hair. The newsreader continued: "Mr Weston opened the door to a police officer, who had the unfortunate duty of informing them that Mrs Weston had been killed in a traffic accident earlier that morning. For years, her family grieved for her. But after the fall of the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D. in January 2014, they found out that her death was no accident."
Maggie felt her stomach sinking with every word. The clip changed to footage of the dead woman's family: two adult children – a brother and a sister – who had her green eyes, and their balding, sad-eyed father.
"I'm an International Relations major," explained the sister, "so I was going through some webpages about the information dump for a research project when I saw mom's name on a list. I couldn't believe it, I had to read it about three more times before I realized what I was seeing. I googled the other names on the list, and they'd all died in other 'accidents' around about the same time mom did."
Maggie clutched the tablet in a white-knuckled grip as she watched the rest of the story. The family explained how they'd gotten in contact with the families of the other people on the list, but they couldn't find a connection between their loved ones other than that most of them lived in the same geographical area. After two years of research, and asking law enforcement for answers, they still didn't know why their mother had been targeted or who killed her. They did manage to get an autopsy, however, and found that Karina Weston had actually been shot – a detail that never made it into the initial police and autopsy reports. The other victims had also been shot. The family described their frustration with law enforcement and the government, who were slow to give out information on HYDRA and its victims.
Toward the end, Karina Weston's son said "And the government has had access to some of HYDRA's most infamous assassins – the Wyvern and the Winter Soldier – at one point or another, but there's been no information released about what they've done. They could have killed mom, and even though one of them's in government custody right now we might never know." A minute later the video ended, with the newsreader grimly telling the audience "This program has reached out to the State Department, the Joint Terrorist Task Force, the FBI, the Avengers, and the Sokovia Accords Committee for comment, but we are yet to receive a reply."
The minute the video ended, Maggie let out a gusting breath and got to work. She researched Karina Weston's case, looking through the list with her name on it in the HYDRA information dump, and working out exact dates and locations. After another five minutes of frantic research she realized that she'd been in Germany at the time of Mrs Weston's murder. She closed her eyes and let out a breath, fingers shaking.
"Are you alright, Ms Stark?" F.R.I.D.A.Y. asked, no doubt picking up on Maggie's physical reaction to the video.
"I'm..." she took a breath. "I'm not alright, F.R.I.D.A.Y. I need your help with something."
"As you wish."
The Wyvern might not have killed Karina Weston, but the video still chilled Maggie to her core. There were people in the world right now wondering if she had killed their loved ones. Some of them were probably right.
With F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s help, Maggie went digging. She found that there were people all over the world who'd looked through the information dump and found that HYDRA had had some impact on their lives; whether it was a dead loved one, a disabling injury, a job loss, a bankrupted company, or a war started in their home country. HYDRA's crimes ranged from great to small, the world over. Maggie found an article from 2014 titled HYDRA Could Have Changed Your Life, And You Wouldn't Know It.
There was a global conversation happening about the impacts of HYDRA's manipulation and violence, that had started in 2014 and still continued today. The discourse was categorized by confusion, and frustration – confusion because despite the information dump, there were so many unanswered questions, and frustration because governments and agencies the world over maintained secrecy about what they knew.
And Maggie started to recognize faces. Some of them she remembered surveilling, working in the shadows of their life for HYDRA's ends. Some of them, she killed.
On the list of people that Karina Weston had been on, Maggie recognized a name. Ahmed Khouri. She'd killed him in 2010, a clean shot to the head after landing on the bonnet of his moving car. Maggie froze at the sudden recall and then closed her eyes, forcing herself to live in the memory.
A headache bloomed behind her eyes, and she winced at the ghost-sensation of the Memory Suppression Chair's sparking plates, but she forced herself to search for a reason for Khouri's death. After twenty minutes of gritting her teeth at the pain she had to admit she didn't have an answer. No one had explained why that man had to die. They'd just told her to kill him, and she had.
But that wasn't good enough. She opened her eyes and flexed her fingers. "F.R.I.D.A.Y., you're about to help me do something illegal."
"Ms Stark, I will remind you that I am not–"
"Nope, I think your creator would agree with me on this one. I need you to help me hack into some government agencies."
It took them two hours to find a connection between the people on the kill list. That was an unthinkably long time for a skilled electronic tracker and an A.I., but a laughably short time compared to the years that the families of the people on that list had been searching for an answer.
"Damn it," Maggie said, once they had their answer. Those people hadn't died because they were secretly employed by S.H.I.E.L.D., or some other intelligence agency. They hadn't died because they'd sold out to HYDRA and then betrayed them. They'd died because they'd been present in a café one rainy day in Chicago, where two HYDRA generals met and had a verbal argument. The generals weren't sure if anyone had overheard them, but that had been enough for HYDRA to decide that the potential witnesses needed to die.
Maggie squeezed her eyes shut. "Damn it."
She felt sick. Not just because of her role in such a needless tragedy – she'd been aware of her crimes for a long time now. But she hadn't known that there were people out there like the Westons, desperately searching for information and getting stonewalled at every turn.
And Maggie had a lot of the information they needed. The government had it by now as well, or they had the capability to find out, but as far as Maggie could see, for whatever reason they weren't doing anything about it. Her stomach lurched as she realized that it could be possible that they just didn't have the resources to deal with the mess HYDRA had left: hundreds of victims all over the world, all at once.
"Ms Stark," F.R.I.D.A.Y. cut in, "Secretary Ross has just arrived at the facility with investigators from the Pentagon."
"Oh, god." Maggie buried her face in her hands and groaned. She felt heavy after her morning of research, every inch of her dragging down toward the floor. Her stomach churned, and her every nerve felt shredded. She wanted to sleep for years, or scream, or just… sit and wallow in her thoughts.
"Shall I tell them you're not well enough to be interviewed?" F.R.I.D.A.Y. asked diplomatically.
Maggie peeled her hands away from her face and looked up at the ceiling. "I don't think they'd care."
"I think you might be right there, Ms Stark."
She groaned again and got to her feet, feeling as if she was standing up with the weight of each innocent victim on her shoulders. Her knees shook. She straightened her shoulders and composed her face, waiting for her cell door to slide open.
The interview was – predictably – exhausting, harrowing, and brought up dozens of traumatic memories. Maggie kept herself sane by running calculations for myoelectric prostheses in her head, but then the investigators would ask a clarifying question and she'd be right back in the memories of blood and screams, drowning in them.
As the interview started to wrap up, Maggie folded her hands in her lap and looked each one of the investigators in the eye. There were three of them, two women and a man, in nearly identical suits. They were more efficient than other investigators she'd met with, but she wasn't sure if efficiency was what she really wanted.
"Is there something else you'd like to say, Ms Stark?" said the man asked, noticing the uncertainty in her face.
She nodded, pursing her lips and looking down at her hands as she composed her thoughts. "All this information I've just given you…" she said, then looked up at them. "Are you going to release it to the public?"
The woman on the left spoke up. "Are you concerned about what details of your confession will become public? Do you want a lawyer?"
Maggie fought back a scowl. "No, this isn't about… I'm just wondering what you plan to do with the information."
The woman shared a glance with her colleagues, then met Maggie's eye again. "I don't foresee this information becoming public anytime soon, no."
Maggie frowned. "Then why bother asking me questions at all? The things I did impacted real people's lives, don't they deserve to know about it?"
The woman on the right raised an eyebrow. "This isn't a matter of individuals, Ms Stark, this is a matter of determining HYDRA's scope of influence throughout our government and its branches, and maintaining national security."
Maggie sat back in her seat, face blank. "Oh." She wanted to argue the point, but she could see from the determined faces of the investigators before her that she wouldn't have any chance of swaying them. They were just doing their jobs, after all. She knew that, but she couldn't help the way her body went cold at their talk of organisations, instead of people. They sounded chillingly like HYDRA.
"Do you have any other questions?" asked the man drily.
She shook her head.
"Then we're done here," he said. "Thank you for your cooperation, we may come back for a follow-up interview." The three of them got to their feet and left the meeting room without giving her a second glance.
She put her head in her hands. "What are you doing, Maggie," she sighed. She'd thought she was finally doing good by cooperating with the endless rotation of investigators, but now she wasn't so sure. They'd made their priorities very clear.
After a long moment of battling with all that she'd done, and wondering what she ought to do from here, she gathered up enough strength to stand and head for the door. Only to stop at the sound of raised voices in the hallway outside. She hesitated in the doorway.
"- if they're not hurting anyone or using their enhancements to fight crime, then we shouldn't have to go looking for them," the first voice argued, and Maggie's eyebrows shot up when she realized it was Tony. "People deserve to be left in peace."
"That's not an option anymore," came a growl. Secretary Ross. "There are people out there capable of leveling cities, we don't have the luxury of letting them sit around as they wait to work up the balls to actually do it. I'm not here to debate ethics with you, I'm here to requisition a worldwide identification and tracking system for enhanced individuals. You'll have a generous budget and resources – scanners, satellites, medical records, whatever you need just ask for it."
Maggie's stomach lurched so hard that she had to press her hand to her abdomen.
"Ross, you've gotta admit this sounds just like what S.H.I.E.L.D. was doing with Project Insight: identifying targets before they became a threat. Cap saw that for what it was, a threat to all humanity, extremely capable of being misused, and he shut it down."
"And look where his relaxed attitude toward defying government agencies ended up-"
"I'm sorry, are you saying he should have let HYDRA murder us all?"
"I said I'm not here for a debate, Stark. I need this done, and you're the technology developer for the Avengers, and hence the Accords Committee. Do your job."
"Look," Tony replied, his tone lower. "I agree with the Accords, and I signed them. But they didn't say anything about me developing tech on demand, so I'm going to have to pass on this. Thanks but no thanks."
Maggie let out a silent breath, nodding unconsciously. There was a dangerous pause.
When Ross spoke again, his voice was low and deceptively reasonable. "Stark, I've played ball with you. I've let you run the Avengers basically the way you used to. I've given you freedom about which missions you choose, and backed you up when the team heads into foreign countries. Hell, I've let you keep your sister under the loosest definition of imprisonment, and let you seek private psychiatric evaluation for her. I even overlooked that little outing to Manhattan – yes, I know about that. But if you stop supporting the Accords Committee, then I've got no reason to be so generous."
Maggie's eyes shot open, but she was frozen in place, stuck listening to Ross's words past the heartbeat pounding in her ears.
There was another pause before Tony spoke. "You've been vague about it in the past, Mr Secretary, but why don't we be completely clear now – you're threatening my sister so I'll make this tech for you?" His voice was light in his usual casual manner, but Maggie could hear the hard bite of iron in his words.
Ross sounded dismissive: "We both know she deserves a lot worse than what she's currently getting-"
"She was controlled, Ross!" Tony said heatedly. "She didn't want to kill anyone-"
"Brainwashing's a hard sell in court, I'm afraid," Ross said. "Look, right now she's fine where she is – I know she hasn't got a shot of escaping, and we're getting the information we need from her. But there are people in the government, in law enforcement, and in the public who think she deserves serious consequences for her crimes. Right now I'm protecting her from that." Maggie heard a muffled clap, and realized that Ross must have just put his hand on Tony's shoulder. She bristled, but she was still frozen in place. "But I'm not doing it out of the goodness of my heart, Stark. I need that tech."
There was another pause. Tony's next words were soft, almost a whisper: "So you are threatening her."
"Call it what you want," Ross replied. "I've got to head back to Washington, call me when you make up your mind about the tracking system. Maybe I'll put you on hold."
Something about the menacing dismissiveness in his voice sent heat flooding through Maggie's limbs, and she stormed out of the doorway, her face twisted with rage. But Ross was already gone. Tony stood by himself at the end of the wide corridor, eyes hidden behind his orange glasses as he stared down at the floor. His shoulders heaved as if he'd just run a race, but his face was etched with lines of exhaustion.
Maggie's rage swirled and ebbed at the hopelessness in his expression, but it didn't go away.
"He can't make you do that," she said, and Tony's head jerked up. He spotted her standing just outside the doorway, and sighed.
"Maggie. You shouldn't have heard that-"
"No," she interrupted, her hands balling into fists as she strode down the corridor toward him. "I don't care what happens to me, you can't let him force you to do anything you don't want to." She took a sharp breath and realized that angry tears were prickling her eyes.
Tony just shrugged helplessly. "There's not a lot I can do."
"Tell him no," she urged, now a few feet away.
"I can't let you go back to the Raft," he said, gesturing at her. "I've thought about this over and over. I even thought about letting you escape, hiding you with Steve, wherever he is. But they'd find you, one day, and the punishment would be worse. I'd get blamed too, and the Avengers – and Peter – need me where I am." He reached up and pinched his nose. "I can't do much to protect you, Maggie, but I'll do what I can."
She shook her head. "This isn't right."
"No shit!" he said, hands flying apart as if to encompass the whole situation. He gave her a pointed look. "What do you want me to do, Maggie?"
"Don't let him manipulate you! Don't worry about me, I'll be-"
"That's not an option," he shot back, glaring at her. But then he sighed, and his anger melted away. "Look, I've… I've had this debate a hundred times with myself, it never goes anywhere. Don't ask me to abandon you, because I can't do it." He shrugged, and shot her a what can you do look. "I just can't. So trust me to do what I have to, Maggie, please."
And suddenly he went blurry, because Maggie was really crying now, tears clouding her vision and spilling down her cheeks. She swiped at her eyes, but the tears didn't stop. Tony sighed and came over to wrap her in his arms.
How did I get so lucky, to be so loved?
She hiccuped. "All those people…"
"I know," he said grimly, rubbing her back. "I know. I'll try to find a way to get around it. Don't worry about it."
"Don't tell me what to do," she mumbled into his shoulder, and he chuckled, but his heart wasn't in it.
There wasn't much else they could say. Maggie couldn't quite seem to stop crying, as irritating as it was, because she felt completely overwhelmed by her morning of horrific research, followed by the disheartening interview and the knowledge that she really was her brother's greatest weakness.
They ended up walking to the common room together, and by the time they got there Maggie had managed to get control over her tear ducts. Vision sat on one of the couches, his face grim – he must have tapped into the security feeds.
Tony had an arm around Maggie's shoulders, and he squeezed her into his side. "I've got to make some calls, Martingale, will you be alright here with Vision?"
She nodded, then frowned. "Did you really just nickname me after a probability theory?"
"Probably," he replied with a quick grin, then squeezed her once more before letting go and leaving the room.
Maggie sighed, and turned to Vision. "I don't care what we do, Vis, but I need to do something."
They ended up playing chess. Maggie felt too emotionally drained to do something active, and Vision was still teaching her to play. She'd gotten a lot better, but playing against Vision was quite literally like trying to beat a computer, and she was yet to win a game. Normally she was hyper-focused, thinking tens of moves ahead in an effort to beat him, but her heart wasn't in it today. Still, it was nice to be doing something with her mind and her hands.
After her third loss, Maggie sighed and dropped her face into her hands.
Vision eyed her for a moment, his eyes concerned, and said: "I think I will… make you some hot chocolate."
"Thank you," she mumbled through her fingers.
He retreated to the kitchen, leaving her alone with her thoughts. Maggie didn't like the darkness, so she pulled her hands away from her face and stared blankly at the chessboard. Her brain could handle a lot, but the influx of information and emotion from today was overwhelming – the hundreds of heartbroken, frustrated people just searching for answers, the people who'd died for visiting a coffee shop at the wrong time, the hard-faced investigators who'd said this isn't a matter of individuals, Ross's menacing manipulations and Tony's defeated shrug.
Maggie didn't know what was right, here. Like the investigators had said, this wasn't just a matter of the people she met and spoke to – this was a situation that stretched across countries, governments, hundreds and thousands and millions of people. She was imprisoned in a facility that literally dealt with the fate of the world. Her brother shaped generations, and Ross and the Accords made decisions about the population of the world and how they were to be protected.
It was too much to comprehend. She didn't know how the others did it. Her eyes tracked over the chessboard, the dark and light intermeshed squares, but she wasn't really seeing it.
It's all politics. She frowned at the thought, then realized it was something Pepper said a lot when it came to the Accords and Ross's manipulations. She'd said it just last week, after another of Ross's press conferences when he'd said "we're still gathering information".
It's all politics. Maggie had never been political. She'd never had enough choices to be political. HYDRA had had their schemes, and she'd been the weapon they used to carry them out.
She ran her eye over the chessboard, thinking of how Pepper had explained it. Politics is just game, for most people. It's a game they play every day.
Maggie's eyes focused on the game in front of her. If the politics of her situation were a game, it was a complicated chess game, where there weren't defined sides and no one knew what the rules were or when they were winning.
Sighing at the fact that she was resorting to board games to try to make sense of the vast world around her, Maggie reached out and picked up her felled King. Tony was the King here, she was sure of that – without him there was no Avengers, no family, no nothing. But he was limited. The King was the most important piece on the board, but he could only move one square at a time. Pepper was his Queen, Maggie reflected with a small smile as she set down the King; flying across the board, protecting him, with lots of power and room to move.
So what did that make Maggie? Her eyes immediately fixed on a pawn, small and round and limited. She picked it up, rolled it over in her fingers. Was this what she was? Was she fooling herself that she had any control over this situation at all? She was imprisoned, and though the terms of her imprisonment were certainly nice, they came at the cost of being a literal pawn in Ross's game. If she continued along this path then Tony lost his free will, just as surely as she'd lost hers under HYDRA. Hundreds of people would never know why their loved ones had died. Not only that, but Ross would have the identity of every enhanced person in the world – and who knew what he'd do with that information.
Maggie scowled and put down the pawn.
What am I doing? She groaned, mind still reeling with faces and names and her utter helplessness, but then her eyes caught on an odd shape amongst the other pieces on the table before her. It was one of her knights, lying on its side at the edge of the board. Maggie remembered what Vision had said, when he was first teaching her: Only a pawn or a knight can initiate the first move of the game.
She reached out and ran her fingers over the horse-head shape of the knight, following the thought: the knight isn't the most powerful piece, but it makes moves that no one else can. Moves that no one else sees coming.
Her eyes darted back and forth, thoughts crystallizing, and her fingers closed around the piece.
Vision walked into the room with a steaming mug in his hands. "Here's your hot chocolate, Maggie. Are you feeling alright?"
Maggie stared at the opposite wall, the knight clutched in her hand and her thoughts suddenly clear.
"Maggie?" Vision came closer, frowning down at her.
She looked up. "Hey." Her voice sounded loud in her ears. "Thanks for that. Do you mind if I take it to my room?"
"Certainly," he agreed, handing the mug over as she stood up. He didn't see the chess piece in her hand. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," she assured him, already heading for the door. "There's something I have to do."
The first thing Maggie did was hide her plans from F.R.I.D.A.Y. – the A.I. might have been willing to help her this morning, but she wouldn't be on board with what Maggie was intending to do now. She'd worked with the A.I. for weeks now, studying her all the while, so Maggie knew how to hide things from her.
After approximately one minute, F.R.I.D.A.Y. spoke: "Ms Stark, it appears I no longer have access to your Stark tablet-"
"Relax, F.R.I.D.A.Y.," Maggie replied nonchalantly. "I'm just messing with it." She'd learned how to lie on a polygraph when she was nine years old, and this wasn't even really a lie. F.R.I.D.A.Y. seemed to accept the explanation, and left her alone.
Maggie worked well into the night, pitting her HYDRA-learned skills against firewalls, artificial intelligences and cyber security in multiple organisations. She did research as well, preparing herself for what was to come.
She'd more or less finished at about 4 in the morning, but she didn't even try to go to bed – there was no way she could sleep after having laid her plan.
So she sat with her back to her false wings, watching the dark forest outside her window and waiting for the sun to creep over the horizon.
October 5th, 2016
A few hours later, Tony was striding through a mostly-empty foyer on his way to Selvig's lab when he was accosted by Pepper.
"What the hell, Tony?" She demanded, cornering him by a tasteful potted plant. She put her hands on her hips and shot him a pointed look, eyebrows raised.
He blinked. "I'm sure I deserve this, but would you mind maybe, um… clarifying what it is I've done?"
She sighed and glanced up at the ceiling, searching for strength, and at that moment a young-sounding voice spoke out from the other end of the foyer: "Um, Mr Stark, is this a bad time?" Tony glanced over Pepper's shoulder at Peter, who was standing by Happy's side with his backpack in his hands. "I kinda broke Droney. But I can…" his eyes flicked to Pepper's irritated body language and Tony's wide-eyed confusion. "I can come back, never mind." He spun on his heel and went to walk away, but Happy blocked him.
"I drove him all the way here, boss, do you have a spare minute?" He steered the kid across the foyer.
Tony looked back at Pepper. "I don't know, do I?" Her scowl deepened. "What's… happening?"
"You called a press conference without running it by me first?" she finally prompted, gesturing at the door to the press briefing room. "You know I can't run interference on whatever crazy thing you say if you don't give me a little warning!"
Happy and Peter both looked from Pepper to Tony, wide eyed.
Tony held up his hands. "Though that does sound like something I would do, I didn't call a press conference. At least none that I remember. F.R.I.D.A.Y., did I give you sleep-orders again? I told you not to pay attention to those."
"The request didn't go through me, boss," F.R.I.D.A.Y. replied. Happy and Peter turned to Pepper.
Pepper dropped her hands. "Oh." She blinked. "Then why are there dozens of reporters in the briefing room right now, but I don't have anything on the books?"
Tony shrugged. "Beats me."
"No, seriously Tony, the only person who could arrange a press conference here of all places without me knowing is you, and that's because you're the only one who knows how to electronically bypass all the press protocols."
At that moment a door on the far side of the foyer opened. Tony, Pepper, Happy, and Peter looked up, and their eyes widened in near-identical expressions of surprise when Maggie walked in. She shut the door behind her and looked up, and her face hardened as she saw the four of them gathered at the other end of the foyer. She took a steadying breath, and walked forward.
Maggie looked different. Normally she walked around in jeans and t-shirts – comfortable clothes – but she'd gone for an entirely different wardrobe today. She wore a deep red blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt, and her expensive-looking black pumps clicked on the floor with each step she took. Her dark hair was twisted into a chignon at the back of her head. She strode toward them with determination clear in her expression, looking as though she belonged in this ultra-modern, professional space.
As she drew closer, Pepper realized that the clothes looked familiar.
Tony frowned. "Maggot, what are you doing? You better clear out, there's a bunch of reporters here."
Maggie set her shoulders and kept walking. "I know."
That took a few seconds to sink in. Then, all at once, Pepper said "What?"; Peter glanced around at the adults and asked "Wait, what's going on?"; and Happy, ever the security expert, frowned and asked "How did you get out of your cell?"
Maggie didn't respond and she didn't stop. She came right up to them and then walked past, her gaze now fixed on the door to the briefing room.
Tony's stomach plummeted. He ran after her, dodged around her and threw up his hands. "What are you doing?" he asked, eyes wide and his breath coming fast. He had a terrible feeling about this, and the look of hardened resolve in Maggie's eyes didn't reassure him one bit. He grabbed her arms to hold her in place, the expensive fabric of her blouse sliding under his fingers.
She met his eyes. "I'm doing this, Tony," she said. "I need you to trust me."
He held her gaze for a few long moments, his heart pounding. He wasn't sure what was happening, but it felt like the protective bubble he'd built around Maggie was about to burst from within. And yet he couldn't deny the look in her eyes.
His fingers tightened on her arms, but then he let her go. She shot him a small smile, then strode toward the briefing room door, swung it open without a moment's hesitation, and walked inside. The sound of muted discussion and snapping cameras rose in volume, but it washed over Tony as unintelligible data. He stared after his sister as the door closed behind her, a look of blank shock on his face.
Pepper appeared by his side, murmured "Tony, stay out here," then slipped into the room after Maggie.
"Mr Stark?" Tony flinched at the sound of a young voice much closer than he'd expected, but he couldn't look away from the briefing room door. He felt a hand on his elbow.
"C'mon, Mr Stark, I think you'd better sit down."
He let himself be steered toward the nearest seat and sank onto it. He was dimly aware of himself asking F.R.I.D.A.Y. to give him a live feed from inside the briefing room.
Maggie hadn't planned for anyone to see her before she appeared in the briefing room, so having to walk past not just Tony, but Pepper, Happy, and Peter, had been a shock. Guilt and uncertainty swirled in her gut as she closed the door behind her, senses alert to the way every eye in the room swung to her.
That encounter had been the only surprise, however – it had been difficult, but she'd been able to break out of her cell, slip through the facility toward Pepper and Tony's room to steal (borrow) Pepper's clothes, and then make her way to the briefing room. She supposed that meant she could escape for good if she felt like it, but right now that was the last thing she wanted.
She shook away the thoughts and focused, striding toward the podium set up at the front of the room. The briefing room was nice, filled with light and with a burnished metal Avengers logo behind the podium. She didn't meet anyone's eye just yet but her every sense was trained on the reporters in the crowd. It was clear that at least some of them recognised her from her mugshot, if the sudden outbreak of gasps and whispers was anything to go by.
She found herself standing behind the podium, and finally looked up at the crowd.
Crap, that's a lot of people. She'd sent an invitation to every media group on Pepper's usual press conference list, but seeing them on a list and seeing all their faces staring back at her was another thing. The hum of conversation and frantic whispers died down as they gave her their full attention.
A ripple of nerves ran through her. She'd never spoken in public before – she did some research last night about public speaking, but she knew better than most that research alone didn't always cut it. She swallowed and ran her hands along the podium to steady herself.
She caught a flash of movement to her left, and realised that Pepper had followed her into the room and now stood against the wall beside the podium, her anxious eyes fixed on Maggie. The message in her eyes was clear – if you need me to take control of this, say the word. Maggie nodded at her, then looked out at the crowd.
She took a long, slow breath in and out, and began.
"My name is Maggie Stark," she said, her voice carrying across the now-silent room. "And I'm here to put an end to twenty five years of silence."
Wöchentlicher Energiestatus
-- Power-
Rangliste 
-- Power-
Stein