Theme 3 - Red
Title: Steps
Author: ZionAngel
Theme: 3 - Red
Rating: K
Length: 538 words
Summary: In this journey, she takes two steps forward and one step back.
She’s been fighting through hell to maintain herself and her sanity. She has blessed her uncanny inner strength many times in the last three days, and more than ever today. That strength is the only thing that has allowed her to begin pulling herself forward, slowly killing off what would otherwise be an unbearable and debilitating shroud of fear. Mantras, perfected after many years of facing her own problems and Tony’s, run through her head over and over on a continuous loop. They are slowly beginning to do her some good.
She’s beginning to genuinely believe that things will get better than they are now. She’s holding steadfastly to the hope that Tony will quickly grow bored with this suit and move on, as he has so often done when he has finally created something new and perfected it, or that he will stop doing it for some other reason (she knows better than to think that he would stop for her), or that, if nothing else, he’ll be more cautious about it in the future (and not crash into planes).
In a further attempt to regain some sense of normalcy, she heads down to the workshop at 1:00, carrying a cup of coffee and her planner.
She finds him working on the suit - repairing, she assumes. When she sees this, she can deal with the fact that she’s going to have to live with the third possibility for now.
She hands him his coffee, and while he takes long sips, she goes over a very short list of things she needs to tell him. She actually manages to stay quite calm, with only a small sliver of anxiety running through her head, and that dissipates by the time she finishes the first item on the list. She reminds herself that this is an improvement, and a step in the right direction, and she holds on to that thought.
When she finishes her list, she adds one more item. She doesn’t like it, but it is very pertinent and needs to be dealt with. “What are you going to do about Stane?” She only made the mistake of using the name Obadiah once, and she had learned quickly.
He sets the coffee mug down, and turns back to the table. “I don’t know.”
She accepts that answer. She turns and heads back toward the stairs so that they can both return to their respective tasks. She pauses in the doorway, the three wall panes still missing, but the shards swept away. She turns back to study him, just for a moment, before she leaves. He’s working on a large piece on the table, carefully and thoughtfully manipulating the pieces to fit his designs. Her gaze drifts away, moving to the helmet, torso and arms that hang from the ceiling in a circle of computers and machines.
She studies this piece, still scratched and dented. The color of the paint is easier to see now, and she hadn’t really noticed that it was largely red before.
And then her mind links the crimson of the suit with the crimson of his blood, and in a sudden wave of fear, she nearly runs.
Two steps forward, one step back.