Chapter 322: Mark V
The lobby of Stark Tower did not so much empty as explode outward.
Happy Hogan threw himself into the gap between Tony and the press corps with everything he had, but one man couldn't hold back a hundred journalists all simultaneously realizing they had just witnessed one of the biggest stories of the decade. The room was bedlam — flashbulbs, shouted questions, the crash of a camera stand going over, bodies pushing in every direction.
"Mr. Stark, how do we know this isn't a deflection strategy?" Eddie Brock had fought his way to the front again, arm extended, recorder thrust forward. "How do we know this isn't just a way to avoid answering the real questions?"
Tony didn't answer him. He looked out over the churning crowd, raised one hand, and said quietly, "JARVIS."
"Sir."
The floor panels beneath Tony's feet slid apart with a hydraulic hiss. Eight mechanical arms rose from the space below, moving with precise, unhurried efficiency. Segment by segment, the red and gold plates of the Mark IV locked into place — shoulders, chest, gauntlets, legs — each piece snapping home with a sharp metallic report. Cameras went off in continuous bursts. The journalists who had been shouting questions went briefly, completely silent.
The full suit assembled in under fifteen seconds. Tony flexed one gauntlet, looked down at the press pool with the faceplate still open, and smiled.
"Good luck, gentlemen."
The faceplate sealed. Tony Stark lifted off the lobby floor, skimmed over the heads of the crowd at arm's length, and shot out through the building's upper windows into a cloudless sky. He was gone before the echo of his repulsors had faded.
The lobby erupted again, but differently this time. Half the journalists ran out after him. The other half surrounded Pepper Potts, who stood at the podium with the expression of someone recalculating an enormous number of things simultaneously.
Eddie Brock had been at the front of the surge toward Tony. Now, as the crowd pushed past him toward the exit, he found himself at the back of it. He didn't mind. He flipped through the shots on his camera and studied them carefully, scrolling frame by frame through the assembly sequence.
"Nobody got closer than I did. These are firsthand documentation." He scrolled to the final image — Tony's face just before the mask closed. "And when I eventually get that same shot of Batman, I'll have my name back."
He was laughing to himself as he walked out of the lobby. He didn't notice the two figures in suits standing a few feet away, watching him pass.
Batman and Happy Hogan stood side by side as the crowd thinned around them. Once Tony had suited up, Happy's crowd control duties had effectively ended — these were journalists, not admirers, and their interest was in what Tony had said and done, not in getting close to him physically. Half were already on their phones filing copy. The other half were following the vapor trail Tony had left in the sky.
Happy looked sideways at the young man next to him.
"Peter. You know who the saddest person in this building is right now?"
Batman maintained the Peter Parker register — relaxed, slightly amused, no indication that he'd spent the previous night fighting the Hulk with the Batmobile strapped to his forearms.
"Pepper? Or please don't tell me it's you."
"It's absolutely me," Happy said with genuine anguish. "He just gave it away. People would come up to me and ask — 'Happy, is there any chance you're actually the mysterious Iron Man? Tony's secret bodyguard?' And I'd have to very solemnly tell them that was classified information."
Batman looked Happy up and down, taking in the considerable profile that the suit jacket was working hard to contain.
"Happy, I'd guess the number of people who asked you that was fairly limited."
Happy was completely unbothered by this observation. His expression shifted into something more conspiratorial.
"All right, flip side — you know who's happiest right now?"
"Every model Tony has ever shared a dinner with."
Both men considered this for a moment. Happy nodded slowly, with the gravity of someone acknowledging a profound truth.
---
Two hours later, the top floor of Stark Tower was covered in schematics.
The dining table had disappeared under overlapping sheets of technical drawings. Tools were scattered across every clear surface. JARVIS was running calculations on a secondary display in the corner. Tony Stark stood in the middle of it in his shirtsleeves, already deep in the problem, the press conference functionally forgotten.
He knew how it had looked from outside — decisive, confident, the ultimate power move. He also knew what it had exposed.
The Mark IV had serious limitations, and the dinosaur engagement had made all of them visible. Two anti-armor missiles and a full-power chest repulsor beam were his most effective offensive options. Beyond those, his strike capability dropped off sharply. The suit had no redundancy — one system failure meant full mission abort with no backup available. And it couldn't be deployed independently. Every time he suited up, he needed the mechanical arm assembly, which meant being inside a Stark facility, which meant the armor was tactically useless anywhere else.
He'd been thinking about the next iteration before last night. Now it was the only thing on his mind.
Mark V: portable, self-contained, deployable anywhere. The challenge was compressing the full armor capability into something a human being could actually carry. The weight distribution alone was a significant engineering problem. The power cell miniaturization was another.
He was working through the chest plate assembly tolerances when Pepper walked in carrying a coffee. She set it next to him without comment.
He looked up.
Her expression was the specific one she used when she was choosing words with extraordinary care.
"Walk me through it," she said. "From the moment you stepped up to that podium to the moment you said what you said. Every second. What was actually going through your head?"
Tony leaned back slightly and let out a slow breath.
"Pepper. Relax. We saved a significant amount in PR costs today."
Pepper Potts did not visibly lose her composure. She was too well-trained for that. But the register of her voice climbed one full step.
"Tony. You put a target on everyone in this building. The board is going to want my head tomorrow morning. The NYPD has already called. S.H.I.E.L.D. has called more times than that."
Tony picked up the coffee and took a careful sip, watching her over the rim.
"Pepper. Think about the alternative." He set the cup down. "You've been around me long enough. When I'm suited up and when I'm not — I'm not the same person. The voice changes. The way I move changes. The whole affect changes. You, of all people, can't have been comfortable with that indefinitely."
Pepper said nothing.
"And everything Iron Man has done — the Baxter Building, the helicopter, the structural damage during the dinosaur fight — I needed to stand there, with my face and my name, and own it. Not hide behind a corporate statement and a bodyguard story that nobody was going to believe past this week anyway." He paused. "This is what accountability looks like, Pepper. It's not pretty, but it's mine."
Pepper's expression was working through several things at once. The anger was still there but it had moved to the background, and what was in front of it now was something more complicated.
She'd noticed, she realized, without consciously cataloguing it: the drinking had changed. For months it had been constant — not every social occasion, not just evenings, but most of the day, every day, in a way that had quietly alarmed everyone around him. Now Tony was standing in front of her holding a coffee she'd brought him, surrounded by engineering schematics, and there was no glass anywhere in reach.
She exhaled.
"Fine. But next time — the next time you decide to detonate a press conference — you tell me first. Or tell Peter. Someone."
"Absolutely," Tony said.
A silence settled between them, softer than the one before it.
Tony set the coffee down. Pepper looked at him. The distance between them closed gradually, the way it sometimes did when the argument had run its course and left something else in its place, and then they were kissing.
"I feel like I'm watching two seals fight over a grape."
They broke apart. Pepper's composure, which had survived a full press conference under hostile questioning, did not survive this. She took a step sideways and found something on the far wall to look at. Tony touched his mouth with one knuckle and attempted to look like a man who had not just been caught.
"James," he said.
Colonel James Rhodes stood near the elevator with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who had seen too many things to be easily surprised but was making an exception.
"You could have knocked," Tony said.
"The elevator doors were open," Rhodes said. "You could have not done that."
He uncrossed his arms and walked in, which was when the weight of the visit became apparent. Rhodes didn't make unannounced trips to New York in the middle of the week without a reason. He was in uniform, which meant this was official.
He'd been the liaison between Stark Industries and the Department of Defense for years. The moment Tony Stark's face had appeared on every television screen in America confirmed as Iron Man, the calls would have started. Rhodes would have been on a plane within the hour.
He was here because the United States military had seen what the Mark IV could do, and they wanted one.