Echoes

Bang!

Bang bang bang!

Tony waited for a response on the other side of the worn motel door but there was nothing. He heard a click, the shutting of a lamp inside the room so he knew someone was there. Again, he knocked and waited for someone to say anything or open the door. No one did.

Having that heart to heart with Pepper had been just what Tony needed to sort his through his confused thoughts. The guilt he'd felt after having left Scarlett so sick in her kitchen had been enormous but Pepper had assured him that Scarlett was a smart and capable person and if she had assured him she needed to see a doctor that was precisely what she had done. Tony hadn't been in the wrong to leave, even if he had felt it so. Pepper had continued to say that it was actually surprisingly respectful given Tony's usual lack of restraint.

Their situation was complex, it had been from the beginning, and so were the emotions Tony was now muddling through. It was normal to be confused!

For the first time in as long as Tony could remember, probably since before he'd been taken prisoner in Afghanistan, he felt like he had the old Pepper Potts back. It had never occurred to him just how long he'd been struggling with the stress of that ordeal, not until Scarlett had brought it to light. Seeing as he couldn't comprehend his own struggles, there was no way he could possibly understand how Pepper also struggled with it, how his friends had all struggled to see him going through it.

Tony understood that now. It didn't mean he was going to do much about it, but he could see it and for once many of the questions he had were answered. Why people acted so concerned about his every action, why Pepper hated that he was Iron Man. Much of it had to do with the reminder of what he'd gone through. Tony had always thought about the situation in such a selfish way. He was the one who had been taken captive!

That simply just wasn't how the world worked. It was a rippling effect of a stone cast into the proverbial pond of life. Tony had been thrown into the damn lake and the ripples of that ordeal were still settling and they might be for the rest of his life. However, those ripples didn't seem so insurmountable now that he knew about them. For the first time ever, Tony had felt comfortable even discussing it with Pepper who actually listened.

It was amazing what removing the romantic aspect of their relationship had done for them. That pressure to make the other happy had disappeared. Pepper, after listening to what Tony already knew about Scarlett and her situation, had suggested taking drastic action which had also surprised Tony quite a bit.

Pepper suggested reaching out to the reporter who had approached Scarlett outside of the hospital that day, who had written the articles regarding her health. After all, she was the only reporter who seemed to have any ounce of truth to her stories discussing the woman so far. Tony couldn't help but think Pepper still felt a bit of bitterness there for Scarlett deep down but he guessed that wasn't something that would so quickly fade. He never expected them to be friends, that would just be plain awkward.

This was how Tony had wound up outside the door of a motel off of the highway, banging on the door of the reporter who had checked in weeks prior.

"I know you're in there!" Tony shouted through the door when no one answered. He'd tried contacting her by telephone, by email, but had gotten no response. Hell, Tony had even spoken to her boss on the east coast and had gotten a message saying she was unavailable to speak with him, despite how their paper would love to get his word on the matter. "I'm not leaving!"

In fact, Dianne Hendricks hadn't checked in with her boss in about a week which was disconcerting to all at the office. Tony banged on the door again and finally the light flickered back on and the door swung open just enough so that Dianne could peer through the chain with worried brown eyes.

"Leave me alone!" Dianne looked exhausted, her short dark hair half standing up in back as though she had been leaning against it in the same spot for quite awhile. "I never meant for Miss Damien to end up arrested like that, okay? Just leave me be!"

"That's not why I'm here!" Tony placed his hand on the door to keep her from slamming it just as she tried to. Dianne blinked her eyes closed, pinched the bridge of her nose and looked back up at him.

"Then what? What could I possibly do for you, Mr. Stark?" Dianne was exasperated but while she was still on her guard seemed suddenly more curious about his intentions.

"You've been writing about her for a long time now." Tony started hesitantly, pulling his hand away from the door. He'd never wanted to appear threatening, but he'd realized in an instant that banging on her door for a half an hour and forcing her to keep the thing open after she finally answered was probably pretty intimidating. "I need to know what you know."

"I don't think that's a good idea, Mr. Stark." Dianne sighed and once he'd backed up she removed the security chain on the door and kept it open just wide enough that she could look through it comfortably. Behind her, Tony could see that her hotel bed was covered in files, paperwork, photographs and an old outdated laptop.

"Come on, I know you've got good sources. You're the only reporter who ever has any semblance of honesty when it comes to Refuge and Scarlett. You're the only one who really connected the dots with S.H.I.E.L.D." He smiled charmingly, hoping more and more that she would open the door, let him in, and they could finally talk. Tony was getting answers whether or not he would get them from Scarlett.

"I'm sorry Mr. Stark but…"

"Please!" In frustration he slammed his hand against the door frame and Dianne stepped back in awe. "I need to know! Scarlett won't tell me!" Taking a deep breath Tony placed his hand to his forehead and stepped away from the door. "I have to know what I'm up against here because she's scared to say it out loud. I need to know if she's sick and if she's sick just how sick she is. There has to be something I can do to help her. Before you go all feminist rant on me about her not needing saving, just… it's not like that. I don't think she needs a hero, but I think she needs help. I think she doesn't have to be so damn alone and I want to help her. I need to help her." Tony couldn't believe he said all of that as quickly as he did and honestly he wasn't sure if Dianne would even understand half of what he said but it seemed to get to her.

She opened the door a little wider and smiled at him. Tony Stark wasn't known for this type of behavior, or maybe it was right up his alley. Passionate, does what he wants, speaks without thinking of the consequences. Maybe this was a side of Tony Stark that the media had been waiting to reappear for years.

"Okay."

"Okay?" Tony narrowed his eyes suspiciously. He hadn't actually expected her to give in so easily. Honestly, he'd been thinking about pulling out his checkbook to see if he could buy her information but maybe that wouldn't be necessary. "Just okay?"

"I'll help." Dianne opened the door the remainder of the way and gestured inside her motel room, allowing him access. "I didn't realize that you loved her. I thought it was just a fling."

Tony's eyes widened and he froze in front of the open door.

That was not what he'd said! He hadn't said he'd loved her, had he? Had he thought about how he loved her? He wasn't even sure he'd used that word about anything that wasn't food in a very long time. He went to speak, opened his mouth to correct her but no words came out.

"Are you coming in or what?" Dianne waved toward the door. "You're letting bugs in."

"Uh, wait, what?" Tony blinked finally and then exhaled deeply before meandering inside the motel room and closing the door behind him. He curled his lip in disgust and then cleared his throat. This was definitely the cheapest motel room Tony had ever set foot in. "I didn't say that, you know."

"Sure. You didn't have to." Dianne waved him off and didn't think anything else of it but Tony was still trying to wrap his mind around the concept. He was denying it now, of course. Love wasn't like that. Love came with time. There was no such thing as love at first sight, that was mistaken for lust of course! He knew that.

But it wasn't like they had just met. It had been quite a long time now and it wasn't like he hadn't been attracted to Scarlett from the get go. Was this that though? Was this feeling love? Could it be why he felt so damn horrible and practically sick all the time? The thought of losing her made him physically ill. That was something he hadn't experienced outside of the anxiety that had plagued him for so long.

Maybe he was in love.

Oh boy, what a weird day it had been for Tony Stark.

"Sit down, make yourself at home."

"Yeah, that would take a lot more than sitting down." Tony joked but pulled up a chair careful not to touch the underside of the table.

"Sorry, I have to stick to a pretty tight budget. The paper I work for is pretty limited."

"Yeah, so I've read. Don't worry this is… fine. Fine." Tony nodded and cleared his throat but his smile was forced and his discomfort read easily on his face. Still, he tried.

"Sorry about ignoring you too." Dianne winced but then smiled a little. "I thought you were pissed because I had her arrested or something. I tried to get them to let her go, honestly. I was just worried."

"Yeah, I know that. I can tell by the way you write that you have a pretty high opinion of Scarlett."

"I do. She threw me a bone when no one else would, really. I know that I've been writing about her nonstop for awhile but… someone should be." Dianne's eyes sparkled. "There are so many lies out there, so much speculation in the tabloids I figured that someone should be publishing an ounce of the truth. As limited as the truth is."

"So what is the truth, then?" Tony leaned forward curiously. The odds were that Dianne had less information than he suspected, but it was the only lead he had. She had been well informed on most of the stories addressing Scarlett's mishaps in the months past, but what were the odds she had more information than she was publishing?

"I don’t know how helpful any of this is going to be Mr. Stark."

"Tony, just call me Tony. I hate the whole mister thing unless it's foreplay and even then it has to be the right mood…" Tony smirked and Dianne rolled her eyes.

"Fine, Tony. So, I have to ask you to promise something before I start."

"What's that?"

"That you're not going to tell anyone else about any of this." She looked to him seriously, hand over a file folder in front of her. Tony cocked an eyebrow curiously but figured she was just protecting her story so he shrugged.

"I might tell Scarlett at some point, and… well probably Pepper and Rhodey. Okay, I'm bad at secrets so I'll probably tell everyone I know."

"I meant news outlets. That kind of thing. I don't want anyone else spreading this stuff around."

"All right, that I can agree to." Tony nodded resolutely and she exhaled deeply and rotated her shoulders to try and ease out the tension in them.

"There's a man. I thought he was just some… engineer. At first glance that's what he appeared to be. To be honest I thought he was a dead end and ignored him for a really long time. Then I brought him to Miss Damien and she told me to back off."

"A man?" Tony immediately grimaced. He couldn't be jealous, he didn't know anything yet. Still, there he was, insides seething at the idea of some other guy being involved.

"Scott. Scott Aaronson, very generic name. I thought it was an alias at first but no he's just some guy from the mid-west with a very boring name. By all accounts he's dead."

"So why is he important then?"

"He was an engineer for a really long time for several smaller companies in Africa. Wanted to make a difference or something. That's what I could garner or what his past coworkers said about him. Apparently Scarlett worked there too but under a different name, or at least that's what I guessed. When interviewed I couldn't find anyone who recognized her. The closest I came was to a drunk and disorderly charge against a woman who vaguely looked like Scarlett but apparently had an accent. I couldn't publish any of that with such limited resources anyway."

"All speculation."

"Right. I decided to follow Scott's career because Scarlett's is nonexistent. She's hard to track down and honestly, file wise, she didn't exist until last year. There are a few drunk and disorderly criminal records with her name on them in places like Germany but no time was ever served and all charges were eventually dropped. But that's it. So Scott… he sounded like a good guy by all accounts."

"And yet you don't sound convinced." Tony wasn't convinced either. By the way Dianne was talking he had a very bad feeling about this Scott character.

"He was hired by this company. By all accounts the Medical Engineering Development Corporation, or MedCo for short was a legitimate company hoping to develop cheaper medical devices such as CT machines, x-ray machines, and the like. A little further digging and I found that they are not at all that. It was a shell for what they truly did. MedCo is actually a terror organization committed to the idea of superiority through biology."

"Shit." Tony wiped his hand over his mouth.

"Their commitment to remaining a seemingly charitable organization has faltered in the last year severely. They've sort of gone off the map actually and the timing is remarkable."

"Scarlett must have come into the limelight around the same time."

"Exactly. But I don't think she had any kind of dealings with them. In fact I think it was the opposite. From what I can tell Scott was receiving money from MedCo for a very long time. That must have meant he was doing something for them. I don't know his connection to Scarlett and I don't really know what he was doing with MedCo but in my job I've learned that coincidences are very rare."

"May I?" Tony pointed to the folder in front of her and Dianne nodded and handed it to him.

"That's everything I have on Scott. He's supposedly dead but there was a passport issued for someone with the same name months ago. Then he fell off the map. There's no signs of him since. There are traces of MedCo here and there but every time I find anything it's gone the next day or I'm stopped by something beyond my control." Dianne sighed as she watched Tony flip through the pages and pages of content she'd collected. There were old photographs of Scott, a dorky looking man, thin, tall, but with sparkling blue eyes and messy blond hair. He wore glasses and Tony immediately thought he was definitely not Scarlett's type.

Scott couldn't look more different from Tony if he tried! Then again, he had those same playful eyes that Nathan had. Maybe Tony was the anomaly and not the other way around. He couldn't over think it. At least he had more information than he'd come in with even if he also now had irrational jealousy for someone who he wasn't even sure had a romantic connection with Scarlett.

"So what does any of this have to do with Scarlett?"

"She's hiding from MedCo. I've figured out that much." Dianne nodded resolutely.

"How?"

"There have been… incidences that you've probably noticed in the papers. Her passing out and going to the hospital? That was an incident. I checked where it reportedly happened and found nothing. However, I found that Scarlett's car was charged with a parking ticket a garage near the wharf in Boston that night. Once there I found signs of a struggle. I found a broken needle. I found a badge and inside it was this… crown looking thing." Dianne tilted the folder Tony held toward her and dug through the pile of papers and pointed to the badge that she still had in her possession. "That symbol doesn't belong to MedCo it belongs to another terror organization called the Crown. They were very active in Russia awhile back, but we didn't really hear much about it in the media here."

"Another terror organization?" Tony hoped that this didn't mean that at some point Scarlett had been in bed with one of these organizations. He'd like to think that she was overall a woman with good intentions, even if her past was littered with chaos. Tony knew he was no saint, so who was he to judge?

"You see, the Crown disappeared and then MedCo was founded. I think the mind behind the Crown found a new partner and they expanded their operation. Work in Russia was too difficult so they moved to Africa where they pretended to do good for a very long time until they disappeared as well. So in short…"

"MedCo is the one that put Scarlett in the hospital that night. They're after her." Tony shook his head in disbelief. Of all the things he'd thought he'd figure out that day this wasn't on the list.

"There's more you should probably know that doesn't get into the paper either, more she's hiding." Dianne whispered as Tony flipped through the files and he closed the folder in his lap. "She has regular meetings with S.H.I.E.L.D."

"That I knew from first glance, actually."

"Going to sound a little creepy but it comes with the job. I researched the agents who come in on the same days as her and who I see talking to her and I narrowed it down to see who she was actually meeting with. They were doctors who worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. I saw their credentials and while they are officially listed at as agents they are also most definitely doctors. One of them is strictly a medical doctor but he hasn't been present at the last few meetings."

Tony didn't respond and that was partially because he already knew something was very wrong with Scarlett. Dianne had reported that she thought there was an underlying medical condition before in her paper but Tony had never read her words as grave as they sounded coming from her lips.

"I think she's undergoing some serious medical treatments. I have no idea what they could be though. It's not cancer treatment because she has none of the symptoms of someone undergoing something like that but… it's not good either. She's lost weight, color, energy. Whatever it is she's being treated for it's being handled by S.H.I.E.L.D. and kept very quiet. You can see it on her after her visits to S.H.I.E.L.D. It's all very obvious when you put it together. At first I thought it was just a good story, one that I had come up with on my own but I know that there's truth to it now."

"What could it be?"

"That's just it, I have no idea. I can't get my hands on her medical files or her blood work. Honestly, I've tried and all that's available to anyone is… well it's not the stuff S.H.I.E.L.D. is handling." Diane nodded resolutely. "I thought there might be more about it in Refuge's files but I can't get into those at all."

"So if you know so much about Scarlett and her past then why haven't I seen half of this in any of your articles? This is quite the story and you would make your little paper a hell of a ton of money." Tony tapped the folder in his lap.

"What do you mean?" Dianne furrowed her brow.

"You're not cashing in on any of this."

"Look, there's more to it. There was this attack in India and it had MedCo written all over it. It was the same day that Scarlett was reported to have been admitted to the hospital. Then I found this small article about these founders of this textile company in London. Mr. and Mrs. Hurst. They were killed and I'm sure it was by a man named Erick Reno who works or worked for MedCo. He was reported dead a few weeks ago."

"And?"

"I think Scarlett knew them. I don't know how she knew them but I flew here to tell her that they were dead and she played it off really well. I mean, remarkably well but she told me she knew Erick Reno and to pursue him. That's how I found this, all of this. The connection to MedCo, to the Crown, to Scott. I had information on Scott before, I saw his name on a file she carried but… I never would have uncovered it if Scarlett hadn't given me that missing link."

"You think she wanted you to know?"

"I do." Dianne nodded. "I thought we had a strange connection and maybe it's because she always gave me a story and threw me a bone."

"Maybe because you were the only one who asked her questions that weren't so superficial."

"Maybe." Dianne smiled weakly and then closed her eyes. "You see, Mr. Stark… I mean Tony. This isn't just a story anymore. There is a trail of bodies behind Scarlett now and she's in some serious trouble. Someone is killing people she knew and cared about to get to her. This whole thing with S.H.I.E.L.D.? With Refuge? It's a front. They know that MedCo, or whatever name they're using now, isn't going to want the media attention that Scarlett has. I just don't know how long that's going to remain true."

"That's one hell of a claim." Tony whispered but the sincerity in Dianne Hendrick's voice was remarkable and he was inclined to believe her. Why would she lie? If any of this was true Dianne would make a small fortune and great leaps in the world of journalism!

"This is a woman's life, Tony. Not a story, not at all."

Tony smiled a little. He had never once heard those words come from a reporter.

"I don't want to get famous. I never did. I'm a damn good writer, a damn good reporter, Tony and if I wanted to be working for the New York Times or sitting on Sixty Minutes I would be. All I've ever wanted is to bring people the truth that they deserve."

"A long forgotten art in today's media."

"I have learned through this story that not all truths are meant to be shared. I struggled with that with Miss Damien for a long time. She is so damn interesting and so damn smart and I have been cheering Refuge on from the get go but the more I did the more frightening the truth really became. Some things don't need to be known, not necessarily kept secret but… I don't think the world has the right to this story. I don't even think I do. Not until she's safe that is."

"You really believe that? You could get fired for this. If your boss knew you had all of this information and that you were choosing not to publish it…"

"I don't care. That's a risk I am more than willing to take. I just want justice now. I want to help if I can. Refuge is changing the world. I don't think Scarlett was always a good person but who of us always is? I don't think she was ever involved with MedCo, with the Crown. Morality is what defines us and I know that she means well with whatever she does even when she… can be a real bitch."

"That's… that's true." Tony chuckled but his face fell very quickly. The gravity of this situation was much stronger than he had anticipated. Part of him had known that the truth would be terrible but he hadn't ever anticipated it would be quite this terrible.

"That's why I don't report on this Tony. I want to help."

Leaning forward in his chair, hands on his knees he scrutinized Dianne Hendricks. She really had done everything in her power to help thus far, from what Tony could tell. Her stories about Scarlett had toned down in the weeks prior and while they had still been true, from what he could tell, they didn't report any of this. From what Tony could see in the file, she had this information now for quite awhile now.

At any time Dianne Hendricks could have published the story of her life and Scarlett's would have been turned upside down.

But she hadn't.

Dianne Hendricks was a good, smart, noble woman.

Tony leaned back in his chair and nodded his head.

"What do you say we joins forces and we can do just that? Get justice."

"I… I… what?" Dianne was puzzled and it showed on her face. Her jaw dropped. "I'd need Refuge files and better S.H.I.E.L.D. information to get any further and it's a road block and a half, let me tell you."

"Fly back to Boston and go from there. I can help you get into those files." Tony assured, as if this was nothing. "I'll pay for your ticket, you won't have to worry. Just pack your things and go, don't stress about finances. Give me your information and I'll give you the money you need."

"What am I supposed to look for?"

"I need you to find out what's wrong with her. Health wise. I'll handle MedCo." Tony nodded resolutely.

"Okay." Dianne leaned back in her chair, stared vacantly for a moment and then exhaled. "All right, okay. Let's do it. It would be an honor to work with you Tony." Standing up and smoothing out the bottom of her ruffled shirt she then extended her hand for Tony to shake.

"Thank you." Tony shook her hand and then clasped it with his other one. "You have no idea how much this helps me."