Stalker in My Walls Ch. 11 (Final)

Tony P.O.V.
Seeing a tiny girl on my chest was actually not the weirdest thing that happened that night. After dressing up as a superhero, being almost killed by Obadiah, and confessing to the world I was Ironman; I think I was ready to face the Liliputian.
When I came back home, I headed straight for my workspace. In there, sitting on the jar as I left it last time, was the tiny chick. I half expected it to be only a dying man’s hallucination, but she was real.
I checked last night in case it was a scam or just a really elaborate android, but now that I saw her again, she seemed real. She was four inches tall, with long curly brown hair. Her tiny face was almost flawless, like of a porcelain doll. Her clothes seemed to be doll like too. I guess when you’re that size; they’re the best fit around.
I studied her again and expected her to do something; like scream or fly. But all she did was stand there looking freaked out. I realized that I was scaring her, so I took a different approach.
“So… hungry?”
She nodded and I handed her a piece of waffle. She snatched it from my fingers and started biting it as if she hadn’t eaten in a while. I remembered that she had been in the jar since last night. Oops.
“Stop staring, it’s getting creepy.” So she could talk.
I still didn´t know what exactly she was, and when I asked her, she was very vague about it but immediately rejected the fairy theory. I mean, where there more like her, was she normal before or what?
I looked back to how I discovered her and she had been near my Arc Reactor. Now that I really thought it over, where had it come from?
When I confronted her about it and she didn’t answer. So I checked the tapes and saw that she had come from the vents with a new Reactor.
She was very cooperative after seeing the video.
I was stunned that she had seen my work and understood it. I mean, she looked like a prepubescent girl but miniaturized. This girl was really intelligent, if not a genius. Had she been normal sized, she could have made a fantastic inventor. I also found out that she had been living in my vents all this years without me realizing it. I made a mental note to update the security system to check if there were any tiny people lying around without me knowing it.
I was in the middle of doing just that when I heard her wanting to get out of the jar. I took her out and she felt weird in my hand. She wasn’t really heavy, more like a doll. Her tiny form was soft and sort of squirmy between my fingers so I set her quickly on the table. She looked so tiny on top of it. Everything seemed huge around her, like something taken out from a Tim Burton’s movie. I was very careful not to work near her, so to not crush her or hurt her badly.
I checked my suit’s design in the screens at the other side of the table and went over it. In my confrontation with Obadiah, my suit could have almost killed me if not by sheer dumb luck. I decided that iff something like that happened again, I was going to be prepared.
“There’s a weak spot in the back.”
Thumbelina (I didn’t know her name yet) was now standing in a corner of the screen scanning the screens above her.
“No there isn’t.”
“Ohm, yes there is.”
She proceeded to make alterations on the Ironman’s suit on screen like a boss. I was about to tell her that no one messes with my work when I saw that she was right.
I decided to test her and put her in my shoulder for convenience and safety issues.
As the night went by, she proved to be able to keep up with me. She was also a worthy opponent when we fought over schematics and the like. At the end, it was getting late (for her) and I tried convincing her into staying in a room rather than in the vents, but she refused. I lifted her up to the vents, and I suddenly had an idea.
“Jarvis, show me the heat patterns inside the mansion.”
After checking them and seeing that the closest match to a tiny body’s heat was in a vent on top of the fridge, I went to take a short nap. I woke up a few hours later and it was morning.
I wanted to check where Max lived, she finally told me her name, but ordered first the smallest thing in the menu (which turned out to be tiny cinnamons), juice and a cup of coffee.
I had to move the fridge first, actually Dummy moved it but whatever, and placed an inside ladder instead. With a screw driver, I took the lid off the opening and stuck my head in. I saw what looked like a lot of miscellaneous crap lying around when a bleary looking Max walked in. She was wearing pajama doll clothes and didn’t look to happy to be awake.
“Hey! You’re awake.”
She crossed her arms and glared. “I was woken up by that infernal sound. And what the hell are you doing in my living room?!”
“This is your living room?” Now that I looked closely, it did look like a living room. There were some corks that made up a sofa, a coin on top a screw and a makeshift kitchen. All put together, it looked like a dollhouse made of scraps.
“Kind of nice if you’re in that sort of thing. Wait, is that my cufflink?”
“I’ll come down in a minute.”
I came down from the ladder and heard the doorbell. I went to get the food from the delivery guy and went to the kitchen. I opened the container with the cinnamons and poured the juice in a glass. When I looked back at the table, Max was on the table eyeing the food with hunger in her eyes.
“It’s for you, you know.”
She turned and went near the pastries. She climbed inside with the cinnamons and began eating them with fervor. She must have a hard time getting food without being caught or squashed. Something inside of me made me want to protect her, want her not to risk her life just to survive.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, don’t go soft with me. Next time, ask for what you need so you don’t have to steal.”
She frowned. “I don’t steal, I borrow.”
“Yeah, well it’s stealing for me.” Even if it didn’t make much of a difference what she took, it did felt like stealing.
She finished the first one when I heard Pepper coming in.
“Tony, Rhodey was asking for the blueprints of your suit and all the details about it and since only you have access to them…”
“Tell him I’ll give them to him some other day. Meanwhile, could you go get me the ohm schematics for the Arc Reactor in the central database?”
“Sure. Remember that you have that conference with the board at three and the meeting with the…”
“I’ll be there, if not tell them I was busy saving cats from trees or something like that.”
“All right, but don’t do anything stupid.”
“Me? Never.”
She walked away and when I turned to look at Max, she was gone. I panicked for a moment, until I saw a pile inside the container stir. I moved so I could look closely to check that it was ax, and sure enough, it was her. I silently questioned her and she sighed.
“I’m not ready to be seen by anyone else, especially a female Bean. They tend to scream and hit.”
“Beans?”
“Yes, as in human beans.”
“It’s human beings.”
“That’s what I said. Beans.”
“No, it’s not ‘beans’, it’s ‘be-ings’.”
“Beans.”
“Beings.”
We spend another half hour like that until she climbed out of the container. She approached the glass of water and turned to stare at me. I was confused for a moment until I realized she couldn’t possible drink from the glass.
“Oh! Oops, here.”
I placed an upside down straw on the glass and handed her the longest edge of it. It looked less like a straw and more like a tube on her hands. She bit the edge and started sucking, but what little juice was pulled from the glass was enough to send her back from the sheer force of it. I was worried that she had drowned on it, but she started coughing and seemed all right. It suddenly downed on me the hilariousness of the situation and I started laughing.
“It’s not funny.”
“Actually it is, therefore I laughed.”
I was about to offer her to fill a bottle cap instead, when she started drinking from the puddle surrounding her. Once she finished, I dropped a napkin on top of her so she could use it as a towel.
“So you have been living on top of my kitchen all this time?”
“Yup.” She said popping the p.
“And you watched everything that happened inside my mansion through the vents? Cause it would be weird if you watched me while I got changed, bathed or…”
“Yeah, I’m not a pervert. I obviously wasn’t watching in those, erm, times; especially what you did in the privacy of your bedroom. Besides, the size difference would make it awkward.”
A thousand different scenarios came to me when she said that but before I could voice one of them; she had walked through the breakfast table and was now facing the ladder that was underneath her home. She then turned and faced me, hands in hips.
“Was there any reason to almost give me a heart attack before? Besides, how did you found me?”
I explained to her how and went over again to check on her living room.
“Hey!” Seriously, didn’t he have any sense of privacy?
“It’s on my property. You sleep in here?”
“No, my room is in the next vent around the corner.”
“Show me.”
I was curious to how the rest of her house would be. I lifted her up the vent again and handed her a tiny model of a Stark camera that was released years ago.
She walked around the corner of the vent until she was out of my view. I heard someone coming to the kitchen and I got down seeing who it was. Oh crap, it was Pepper again. That woman had an uncanny sense of bad timing.
“Tony, I came back because I forgot to tell you… What are you doing?”
“I uh was just checking the ehmmm ventilating system! Yeah, it’s working juuust fine.”
I got down the ladder and turned to face her.
“So how about if you send me what you needed to tell me in a text and we’ll talk about it later?”
“Tony, Rhodey is insisting about the Ironman’s suit and the board is getting impatient with the company’s… What is that?!”
I turned to see Max climbing down of the vent and before I could do anything, Pepper had crossed over and snatched her rather aggressively. I could see Max trembling in the tight grip Pepper had her in and there was fear in her eyes.
“Pepper, please put her down I’ll…”
She wasn’t listening and started staring at her hand that was currently grabbing Max. Pepper was speechless and Max for her part was so still that she looked almost like a doll had it not been for her heavy breathing.
“Whaa… Hoow…”
“Pepper, listen to me. Put her on the table and I’ll explain.”
She seemed to snap back to reality and went over to the table. She started lowering Max to the surface of the table and in the last few inches, she almost dropped her. Max scrambled to her feet and backed away slowly from Pepper. Pepper made to grab her again but Max stopped moving.
“All right, let me start from the beginning.”
I told her everything that had happened since last night and Pepper didn’t say anything while I talked. She seemed surprised when I told her that Max had been living in the vents for some years now but was relieved when she heard that she had been the one to save me from dying when my Arc Reactor was ripped off of me. Max didn’t move at all and remained quiet in all that time. When I finished, she seemed to be digesting.
“Ok… So you’re Max?”
She looked down to ask Max and Max nodded in response.
“Well, I guess this kind of things tend to happen when you’re working with Tony Stark.” She sighed and the tension seemed to lessen a bit.
After that Pepper said she needed to go get some stuff done, but I think it was so she could assimilate it properly. I turned and saw that Max was looking relieved.
“See, it wasn’t so bad.” She glared at me in response.