Bug Bites

Chapter | Twenty-One

Tony Stark was frustrated, he has been for the past few weeks. No matter what he did or who he tracked, there was no leads on Marinette, her location or even Lucas. The man had to be an evil genius, it was all that Tony could come up with. It seemed like Lucas was using a very heavily encrypted system if he was making moves. yet Tony couldn't really say because he hasn't had any movement on Lucas- not even within his company. He had someone standing in for him and making all the moves as the face of the company. 

Smart. He was smart and he knew it and it was pissing Tony off. He tried to sleep but found it hard to not knowing where the teenaged guardian was. Tony knew Stephen was worried too, especially since he couldn't really make out Marinette's futures. The sorcerer supreme admitted to him that yes he has the ability to see the different outcomes of the future, given the time stone he had, but since Marinette was taken something happened where he couldn't predict the future with her in it. Like somehow she blocked him. 

Tony just couldn't let go, not even a little bit when Pepper had come into his office one night to ask him to come to bed. He knew how it felt to lose both parents at the same time, how that greif can turn you into someone you weren't until you were ready to deal with the emotions. He knew that Marinette was emotionally vulnerable, impressionable and who the hell really knows what Lucas was capable of. Tony just knew he couldn't stop looking, but he had no where left to look.

"You look horrible." Steve says, leaning against the door to Tony's lab. "Have you even ate, or slept?"

Tony looked at him, "She's somewhere out there and god knows what they are doing to her."

Steve understood the worry, she was just a kid. A very important and powerful one at that, but she was still a kid nothing less. She didn't deserve half the things that had been thrown her way, but that's life. Life isn't fair to anyone, and some of them were just less lucky to be on the shorter end of the stick. The Avengers dedicate themselves to saving people and hero's work, and Steve knew that Marinette  was like them in that way. She heart heart, like Peter.

"We'll find her Tony. She's is just off the grid right now, but people always come back from being off the grid." Steve reminds him, "He won't kill her, not when he had so many opportunities to do so-"

"He won't kill her." Tony cut him off, his brown eyes serious, "But he wanted to break her. He got close to her. He had to watch her from even before she left Paris, Natasha and Clint have proof of that. Then when she came here to New York on her internship, he was right there. He saw an opening, got close to her learned about her and took it away. He wanted to break her and that is always worse than death."

Steve knew Tony cared about Marinette, but it was until now he realized how much he did. Steve could understand why, it was because Tony saw his younger self in Marinette, and it was the same reason he had took to Peter. Steve doubt Tony even realized how much he cared for these kids. 

"Peter.. I've never seen the kid so down and trying to keep it together." Tony continued, "His Aunt, May, she asked me to keep an eye on him. I guess sometimes at night when he thinks she's asleep, he'll sneak out and wander the city. Sometimes he'll end up at Marinette's old apartment trying to see if there were any clues left behind we might have missed."

"He loves her." Steve gave a sad smile, remembering his own first love and the pain he now that she was gone. Peggy had  been an amazing woman, and Steve sometimes wished that he had that chance to be with her, but fate had different plans for both him and Bucky. "We just need to watch him and keep him busy. I think that Adrien kid already caught on to that, half the time he has Peter in the lab teaching him different things about quantum physics."

Tony nodded at that, knowing that yes Adrien Agreste was extremely smarter than he lead on and wanted to know more about quantum physics. Peter had made a friend out of the other teenager, but even then Tony knew they were all distracting themselves. They were all worried and trying to figure our what the next step was.