Shadowplay | Tony Stark

THIRTY THREE - A FAMILY

"Pick up. Pick up for the love of God, pick up."

Mila was anxiously whispering to herself as she held her phone to her ear, Joss's knuckles white while he gripped the steering wheel of the car flying down the road at a speed way over the limit.

After managing to swallow the sickness that had consumed her head and heart while Logan had been speaking to her, Mila managed to find a few minutes of composure to tell her mother she needed to head back to Florida straight away before grabbing Joss' arm the second he came back from the ice cream parlour and dragging him in the direction of his car without saying a word.

"What's going on, Mila? Would you just tell me, please?" Joss begged, stealing glances at her in the passenger seat as he continued to drive out of the town towards her home.

Mila said nothing, chewing silently on her lip as the ringing continued in her ear, making her mind slowly turn to static.

"Hey honey, little busy. What's up?"

Tony cleared his throat down the line and Mila instantly knew something was wrong. There was a muffled sound of typing on a keyboard in the background and periodic deep sighs of frustration from him, mumblings of obscenities passing through his lips.

"Where's Tristan? Is he OK? Are you OK?"

The panic in Mila's voice made Tony stop dead in his tracks. He'd had his own disaster that afternoon and had tried his best to balance caring for a toddler and protecting the world, though struggling until Tristan went down for a nap.

"He's sleeping upstairs. Why? What's wrong?"

"Go check on him, r-right now. We're almost home, just tell me he's safe."

Tony wasted no time in doing as he was told, heading straight upstairs and down the hallway towards Tristan's room. He gently pushed open the door and let out a sigh of relief when he saw the boy still sleeping soundly in his bed, Rocket tucked beneath his chin like always.

"He's fine, I'm looking at him right now. Honey, you have to listen to me, the-"

"I saw Logan. He knows everything a-and I don't know what he's planning on doing but I know he'll do anything to hurt me, use anything, including my son."

As Tony stood in the doorway processing what Mila had just told him, his eyes fell to the arc reactor that was collecting dust on the shelf above Tristan's bed. There was still a faint blue glow to the light, one that reminded him of the first time he'd looked into the child's eyes.

He didn't have to heart to tell Mila that earlier that day the Tesseract had been stolen from SHIELD, and he wasn't sure that she'd fully understand what that meant even if he did tell her. She was frantic as she spoke and while Tony had seen her afraid in the past, he had never been able to hear a pure state of panic like that through just her voice before.

While Tony had usually been good at keeping his cool under pressure, the look of peace and purity on Tristan's face while he slept made Tony's heart beat far faster than any human's ever should, a racing sickness burning through his veins that made his mind spiral out of control, sensing for the first time what it was like to feel love and to fear like a parent did.

The phone call ended when the signal dropped out as Joss drove himself and Mila through a valley, and although they were only a handful of minutes away from home, there was no edge taken off any nerves.

"You saw Logan?" Joss said, "Where? What did he say? What the hell happened, Mila?"

She turned to her friend with wide eyes that held a thin glaze of water across them, a clear combination of hurt and worry etched onto her face that would've broken even the toughest of hearts.