philanthropistplayboybillionaire:
philanthropistplayboybillionaire:
philanthropistplayboybillionaire:
“Ooooh, very good with the lies there, Mr Stark. Keep telling yourself that and one day it’ll be true again. That little voice in the back of your head that you can’t quite ignore, saying, ‘you’ll never be as good as him’. ‘You’ll never make up for those who died indirectly at your hands’. ‘I should have died so that he could live’.” Her smirk matched his almost exactly. “There are other methods of proof, if you prefer, or we can just talk about something else.”
Tony Stark listened in stunned silence, his face betraying nothing, however. He cleared his throat when the girl finished. “Neat little trick you got there,” he said snarkily. “But there are other, more interesting things, we could be talking about. Like…why are you bothering me with all of this?” She was proving to be a lot more than met the eye. Despite being thrown slightly off kilter by her, very insightful, revelation, his curiosity at her never wavered.
“Hey, you noticed me first, I think. And I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to walk away right now with your curiosity prickling at my spine. Let’s just make this easy: what do you want to know?” Summer arched an eyebrow at the genius inventor, pursing her lips. There were edges to this one, edges she could cut herself on if she wasn’t careful. But what was life without risks?
A dark brow arched back at her. What do I want to know? “There are some, very few, facts about my life that are not open to the public. What I’d like to know…is how the hell you know some of my most private thoughts.” Tony was disgruntled by this. It was little known fact the doubt he held in himself. Granted, not usually, but there were some things in his life that he feared would come true. That he would fail as a hero, as the inheritor of his father’s company…that he would fail Pepper.
“You wanted proof of my empathy. There you are,” Summer spread her hands, “irrefutable proof. Things I have told you about yourself that I should not know. You can call it a lucky guess if it will make you feel better, but that sort of lie never works well. I should know. Aught else?”
The scientist shook his head, as if no longer interested, “Nope. That’ll be all.” His seeming disinterest soon faded, however, as he asked, “How are you even able to do that? I mean, how is it that you became an ‘empath’, as you claim?”
“It’s a mutation. I’m sure you’ve worked with the X-Men before. In short, I was born this way.” Summer gave a twisted smirk. “That’s not all I can do.” Lightly, she projected friendliness at him, then changed it to terror, then dropped the projection altogether in favour of calling a little flame into her cupped hands. “Still curious?”