Joey McCoy is a total daddy's girl. (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} imanursenota__) wrote,@ 2015-06-20 11:16:00 |
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A little girl, aged five, is sitting alone in her bedroom, wrapping gauze around the leg of a large teddy bear. Her dark hair is a little longer than her shoulders and hangs in wild, untamed curls. She appears to be completely engrossed in what she's doing. In the background, a man and a woman are yelling at one another, but the words are muffled through her bedroom door.
She gets to her feet when she finishes and her expression is one of excitement. The little girl picks up the the bear, gently cradling it as she makes her way to the bedroom door, throwing it open and meaning to show her parents how well she's done patching up its imaginary injuries. The shouting match has become intelligible.
"She's my kid, too, Jocelyn! You can't just take her, you can't have everything!"
"The hell I can't! You call yourself a father, Leonard? You're never here! What's Joanna's favorite snack when she gets up from her nap? What's her favorite television show? How many yards of goddamn gauze does she go through in a day trying to be just like the father she doesn't even know?! Just get out. Just go. Go off to Starfleet, that's just great, because—"
"Well, you sure as hell aren't lifting a finger to put food on the table, Joce, I don't see you paying any fucking bills."
"Oh that's great. That's right, Leonard, because one of us has to raise our daughter. So you go off to the Academy and I'll just stay here being the bad guy who sent away her hero, huh? That's fantastic!"
The little girl closes the door, deflated, and goes back to her bed, where she sits down and starts to rock the teddy bear, whispering to it to soothe it, as if it's the teddy bear who was emotionally effected by hearing her parents fight...again.
She's sixteen and it's her birthday today. The long dark hair has gotten longer and more under control; she looks like herself, now that she's older, and she's sitting in front of a wall staring at it like she's waiting for something. It's because she is.
A moment later, the wall lights up with a display of an incoming video call. It's just one more in a long line of birthdays her father has missed and had to call instead.
With a sigh, she answers the call and her father's face appears on the screen. "Happy birthday, JoJo," he greets.
She gives a small smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "Thanks, Daddy."
"You get anything good?"
"Nope," she says, and finally the smirk on her face matches the look in her eyes. "Everything sucked."
He laughs. "Oh yeah? Maybe I should just return the hover, then?"
Joey laughs, too, rolling her eyes. "I mean, I guess I'll keep it."
"You guess, huh? Oh okay. ...I miss you, baby," he says and the tone changes a little.
Joey's smile fades and she nods. "I miss you, too. ...when are you coming home?"
He looks down, frowning. "Still next summer."
Her lips press together and she nods. Not the answer she wanted, but the one she was expecting, anyway.
There's noise on her father's end of the call and it distracts him visibly. When the noises die down, he sighs. "I have to go."
"Yeah, I figured." She sounds resigned.
"I'm sorry. I love you."
"Love you, too, Dad."
The display on the wall fades away and she sighs.
"Hey!" He calls out to her although she has obviously seen him, not like a mechanical war suit is hard to spot, even in a place like this. "Listen, it's not my Vegas night and I have no idea how I got here but is there a power source, maybe a car battery or something that I can- you don't work here." He finished lamely as he sees the way she's dressed. Shirt. Pants. Way too much cloth for a Vegas casino girl. "Do you know what's going on here?
The call catches Joey off guard and she screams, whirling to face the sound. She cuts the sound off on her own by clapping both of her hands over her mouth tightly, glad that she'd just finished shoving the electronics into her hoodie's pocket. The metal statue she'd barely given a second glance hadn't been a statue at all, as it turned out. There was a man in there.
Trembling a little as he moves toward her, Joey takes a few steps back and stares at him, wide-eyed. He's starting to ask her questions, though, and he seems to deflate when he realizes that she isn't an employee. "I'm seventeen..." she replies dumbly to his observation, her tone airy and confused as she lowers her hands from her mouth again. What the hell is the point of that suit? It looks awfully cumbersome, if you ask her.
The man asks whether she knows what's going on and Joey shakes her head a little, willing herself not to cry, because something's wrong. Something's really wrong. Whoever he is, he's dressed in metal and, in spite of the fact that he's very clearly an adult, he doesn't appear to have any idea what was going on, either, considering his question. "Uh uh, no...no..." she replies slowly, chancing a glance over her shoulder at the blacked out windows and door. She'd always heard they did that in casinos so that people would lose track of time and spend more money. She hadn't actually thought it was true until now. She looks back at the man in the metal suit. "...what are you wearing?" she asks, caught between confused and appalled.
Tony Stark is standing behind Joey in the dingy hallway of the Hilton on the Las Vegas strip and he's got his hands over hers which are wrapped around the gun he's teaching her to shoot.
He lets go and Joey nods.
"Go on, then. Try it."
She takes a deep breath and her finger starts to squeeze the trigger before the screen goes black.