Everything Left Unsaid

miss_porcupine

“What can I do?” he asked, because they could skip the opening remarks of that particular conversation and get down to the details.

He hadn’t seen Tony in weeks, hadn’t heard from him in almost as long; Tony had been too preoccupied by business to attend any of the informal Avengers social gatherings and there hadn’t been anything that Iron Man could do that some other SHIELD asset couldn’t. There’d been the occasional email or text from a meeting or a plane flight en route to a meeting, but even those had come at a rate much less frequent than Steve had grown accustomed to. Steve had noticed, of course, but he hadn’t been idle himself and if he’d considered why there hadn’t been random photos of Stark Industries Board of Directors’ nostrils or badly-translated text on soy sauce bottles, he’d just assumed that Tony was too busy to be bored. That Stark Industries was fighting for its future was news covered by the regular papers, too.

“It’s like we’re the wounded shark and everyone can smell the blood in the water,” Pepper began slowly, running an elegant fingertip around the rim of her goblet. “We were the most fearsome creature in the ocean, but we’re not anymore. Now we’re just another wounded animal and now everyone we’ve ever pissed on or pissed off - and by ‘we,’ I mean ‘we’ as the collective first person and not the royal ‘we’ that’s just a polite euphemism for ‘Tony’ - is watching us swim on, looking for an opening to strike out and get back whatever it is they think we took from them or that they feel they deserve. And Trident is swimming right alongside and I don’t know if they’re going to join the feeding frenzy once it starts or just swim right on by to become the new big shark.”