damned_institute | Day 36: Waiting Room, Lobby 2

A visitor. The prospect wasn't one that Tony found completely comforting. In all likelihood it would be just another part of the strange charade being put on as the asylum's daytime face, someone who would claim to know him in "real life", and insist he wasn't who he thought he was. In short, an irritation and a waste of time. Still, he couldn't completely quash the hope that it might be someone he actually knew. Someone who might actually give him some assistance in getting out of the madhouse before it actually did drive him mad. The nurse who ushered him in was unhelpful in that regard; she hadn't given him the name of this visitor before leaving him to cool his heels in the lobby.

He waited with his customary patience, which was to say almost none at all, bandaged arm tucked against his abdomen and the fingers of his free hand drumming irritably on his thigh. His gaze dragged over the other patients assembled without resting long on any one in particular, before coming to a stop on the periodicals rack. He contemplated flipping through the magazines for a second or two, though he wondered if there was a single issue there younger than he was, but dismissed that notion immediately. They didn't look like they would be engrossing.

Which just left waiting.

Phoebe wasn't entirely sure how to handle this visit. She was here in part because she was worried about William and wanted to see him, but she was also here as his assisstant. Professional, or more familiar? Would he even want her to be familiar like she usually was, now that he was in here? Would he blame her? Would he want to see her at all? She'd been put in a lot of awkward positions as William Sandia's assisstant, but this situation was still pretty impressively high on the list of unpleasant moments. Taking a deep breath, Phoebe composed herself as much as possible--she tried not to think about the other people in the room, some of them possibly dangerous--and followed the nurse to where William was waiting.

He was injured, but he still looked a lot better than he had last time she'd seen him. Of course, last time Phoebe had seen William he was face-down in a puddle of vomit and not breathing. Giving him CPR had been both the most frightening and most digusting experience of her life. It had also been the incident that the board used to have William committed. "You're looking better, Mr. Sandia." Professional it was, at least as long as the nurse was still present.

Tony straightened as he saw her, the complex cascade of relief, concern and wariness intermingled cracking the bored, slightly impatient mask he tried to maintain. He studied her intently, dark eyes just a little too wide for the remnants of nonchalance to sit comfortably, and ignored the nurse save to peripherally note her presence as a deterrent to speaking freely.

And then she spoke. Right face, right body, right voice. Wrong name. Tony blinked, puzzlement surfacing briefly before being wiped away by the re-emergence of that unaffected mask, made a lie only by the tightness at the corners of his eyes and mouth, faint lines of tension made readable by long familiarity. He hoped that the nurse's presence made her cautious, that Pepper hadn't somehow been sucked into this charade.

"Yeah, well. The lighting's better in here. Fewer flashbulbs, less glare..." He cocked an eyebrow, mouth twisting into that faintly wry smirk he always wore when he was being deliberately irritating rather than facing something uncomfortable head-on. "We should've adopted institutional decor a long time ago. What do you think? Up for redecorating?"

Well, it could have gone worse, as far as Phoebe was concerned. William definitely wasn't entirely happy to see her, but he wasn't ready to toss her out in a rage, either--he was suspicious, but hadn't decided yet how much to blame her. When things seemed to be going relatively smoothly, the nurse moved off out of earshot. She stayed within view, though, presumably 'just in case'. "Institutional lighting may be helping you, but I don't think it's doing anything for my complexion." Not that she ever looked anything other than vaguely haggard lately--it wasn't easy keeping or doing a job as the assisstant to someone who wasn't even there.

Letting out a tense breath, Phoebe pulled her document case onto her lap and opened it--they wouldn't have let her bring in anything relating to the company of course, but there were still things she could bring. "The R & D department sent you a card." She handed that over first, lips quirking into a sad smile. "The well-wishes are sincere but kind of confused. The official story is 'rehab'." That was the easiest part. It would break the ice, anyway.

Tony's gaze tracked the nurse as she withdrew enough to grant the illusion of privacy without risking granting the reality. "And here I thought you were just looking down because you missed me." He grinned slightly as he looked back at Pepper, though there was no glint of matching humor in his eyes. "Pining away. But if it's just the lighting, how's tropical? The Caribbean, maybe. Call it a business trip."

He gave the card a cursory once-over, enough to know that he recognized none of the names signed to it. That wasn't of itself suspicious; he'd never had a facility with names, and whether or not he remembered a person usually depended entirely on whether or not they interested him. "Just R&D? I'm hurt. You'd think HR could muster up an 'and stay out' card, after all these years." He gave her a searching look, seeking signs of duplicity that, for once, would have been a comforting thing. After a few seconds, he snorted quietly. "I guess rehab makes a better story than asylum. How did you track me down so quickly, anyway? I'm impressed."

Phoebe had to laugh. William had to know perfectly well that he couldn't send anyone anywhere, not right now. His personal accounts were frozen, to keep them out of the hands of those who would use them--she'd been able to accomplish that much--and the company's funds were totally denied him now. But William was still William. "If I went on vacation I'd probably come back to find they'd made a coat closet of my office." They'd been trying but with William being gone only "temporarily," they hadn't yet found the right excuse.

And of course, he asked the question she had been hoping to put off, because it would lead to all sorts of bad news for him. But Phoebe's boss was nothing if not smart--not necessarily smart in the useful ways, like knowing how to keep himself out of trouble, but damn smart nonetheless. "I did what you told me to do, if it came to this." It might only have been part of his paranoid delusions at the time, but William's little contingency plans had at least proved useful after he was sent here. "There was a hidden drive on the company server." And a lot of unpleasant information in it.

Tony waved his good hand in airy dismissal. "They wouldn't dare," he replied. "They'd be afraid I'd annexe the board room as soon as I got back." He stopped, cocking his head to one side and furrowing his brow as though in thought, though the wry grin still tugging at the corners of his mouth suggested that he already knew the answer even as he asked, "Wait, didn't I do that once already?" He sat back with a look of smug satisfaction that still rang a little false, though not overtly so.

It evaporated entirely at her answer. Tony straightened, features rearranging into an expression of intense focus he rarely wore outside of his lab. Only his pet projects ever were given so much attention "The ghost drive. So there was more on there...than..." He trailed off as recollection sunk in. He'd sent her to find it, yes, but there had been no 'if' involved in the directive. It was just one more thing amiss, and he studied her as though the answers were written somewhere in the familiar features of her face. Answers aside from the obvious, which made him feel a little sick to contemplate. "What did you find?"

The board was afraid of William, and that was a big part of the problem, as Phoebe saw it. Geniuses were useful as long as they were reasonably well-behaved and didn't draw too much attention to themselves. William was now a liability, but one with a lot of knowledge of the company's projects. Not to mention stock options.

"I'm no accountant, but I know what two sets of books means. Someone's siphoning money. Beyond that, there were some designs and documents that were too technical for me. I just downloaded everything and put the stick drive you gave me in a safety deposit box. You need to get better and get out of here, William, because there's not much more I can do." If they were setting William up for something, he needed to be there to fight it.

The last trickle of hope faded away at that. For a few seconds, Tony's expression was bleak and hard, cold fury blazing in his eyes. And then it all fell away, replaced by bland stoicism that denied the strange, hollow ache growing in the pit of his stomach. It was a lie, all of it. Oh, he wouldn't have put embezzlement past the board; compared to what they, or some subset of they, had actually done, it would have been practically moral. And he'd seen the fruit of secret designs and documents, had in fact nearly been killed by it. No, all of that he could almost have accepted, had he not been secure enough in his own identity. Almost.

But Pepper Potts, not an accountant? She had come to his attention all those years ago when she'd burst into his office in a fit of moral outrage because she had been the only one to spot an error in his numbers, and because they'd been his numbers, no one had believed her. He was sure, in the vague way he often was with facts assimilated but not paid much attention to, that she had a degree in it.

This woman was good. She was convincing, and terrifyingly so. Maybe she was even convinced. But she wasn't Pepper.

"You know, it's funny," he replied, in a manner that would have been casual but for the faint, hollow note to his voice. "They haven't actually told me why I'm here. No concrete diagnosis. It makes 'better' a little fluid..."

If William had voiced his concerns, Phoebe would have countered that there were accounting mistakes and then there was tracking an embezzler through ghost drives and hidden files, while being illegally in the system to begin with. It was as much the hacking as the accounting that was the problem, not to mention time constraints--if she got caught in the system, or with the stick drive on her, it could be all over. But since William didn't say anything, Phoebe was left to assume that his anger was mainly directed at the embezzler in question. Still, she'd hoped actually for more outrage and less depression.

It was the depression that had frightened her most, while William was going through his breakdown--everything else she could handle, even if it was unpleasant, but she just didn't know how to counter the kind of hopeless despair that seized William sometimes. That hollow tone in his voice... it wasn't as bad as some of his really deep depressions had gotten, but it was still something she hadn't wanted to hear. "I doubt they even know how to diagnose you. 'Thinks too much about some things and not enough about others' isn't any kind of mental illness I've ever heard of, and doctors like their neat, convenient labels. You've got to snap out of this, William!"

"They're doctors," Tony replied dismissively. "They invent words for things. Usually consisting of too many syllables in butchered latin, which ensures they get a chance to explain what everyone already knows. It's like some kind of fetish." He gave her another long, searching look, though his expression remained walled off. "You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

Phoebe really couldn't blame him for not trusting her. If she hadn't called 911... but there was only so much CPR could do for a drug overdose, and William had driven away all the doctors who might have stayed quiet with his paranoia and rages and unwillingness to follow their reccomendations. Still, it hurt a little bit to see William looking at her like that.

Everything clever she might have said vanished from Phoebe's mind, and she could only be entirely honest. "I think that for a while there you were trying very hard to destroy yourself. If this place has gotten you detoxed, at least that much good has come of it." But how much of his strange behaviour had been due to the drugs and the booze? Phoebe was clinging to the hope that most of it had been--that he truly hadn't been living in some fantasy world like the doctors the board hired were claiming.

That hurt. Not a lot, but some, and Tony was surprised to realize it. He swallowed back an angry retort, though the tightness at the corners of his mouth and eyes showed the reaction well enough, or at least the strain of it. Then, in one of those strange shifts in demeanor to which he was occasionally prone, he ducked his head, uttering a quiet snort of laughter at some private joke. Deja vu, he thought. It was the wrong conversation, but it was so very, very familiar.

He looked up, exhaling sharply. It was not quite a sigh, though it did come close. "Why are you here? I mean, really, why? It can't just be to bring a card and some...some bad news I can't actually do anything about from here. What were you hoping for?"

Good question. Phoebe had to wonder if she was just torturing herself for no reason. But... "I had to see for myself. How you were doing. What this place was like." The board was too canny to put William anywhere that had obvious violations she could report to the authorities, of course, but she'd still needed to see it. Lips quirking into a half-smile, Phoebe added wryly, "And anyway, you're helpless without me, so I figured I'd see how you were managing."

"I think I can manage on my own for a day or two," Tony returned, with a wry smile of his own. Both words and expression were all but automatic, old patterns asserting themselves in a desperate grasp for this one small sliver of familiarity in a sea of alien insanity. Even knowing that this was wrong, that the pieces didn't even begin to line up, would not line up unless he was willing to consider as a possibility the absolutely ludicrous idea that his entire life was a lie, it was all too easy to follow the old, familiar steps. He hated it.

His smile turned slightly jagged, anger bleeding around the edges before he could rein it in. "So, what do you think now that you've had a look?" he asked, still sounding wryly amused, though there was a faint edge to that as well. He lifted his bandaged arm away from his body, just a little, rotating it at the elbow in demonstration. He wasn't quite able to suppress a wince; even that much pulled on the damaged tissue. He wasn't sure what, if anything, she'd been told, but it was the best he could do. Somehow, he didn't think babbling about monsters, however real they might be, would do anything to grant him an appearance of sound mind.

"It's not as dismal as I'd hoped." Phoebe trusted William to know what she meant by that--that she'd wanted to be able to make a stink about the conditions William was being kept in. "And more dismal than I'd like." If she couldn't get him out, she at least wanted to know he was safe in the meantime, but that arm... Phoebe looked down at her hands, clutched tightly in her lap. Was there nothing at all she could do?

Tony uttered one short, bleak bark of laughter. "Well, they're not really going to take you on a tour and show you torture rooms. Doctor Torquemada probably has Sundays off." He ran his good hand absently through his hair, rumpling it. It didn't look at all artful; it just made him look tired. "Look, I don't know if this will do any good. But get me my lawyer in here. Mine, not the one on the company's dime. There are some...things I want to go over. It might help." And there might be porcine aviators doing loop-de-loops the next time he stepped outside. Despite the determined mask he put on, the sense of frustrated futility was all but choking him.

He needed out. He needed a drink.

"I'll do my best. But the next chance is in another week." And who knew what the board would manage to do in that time. If William could get out before then, that would be ideal. But he'd have to convince the doctors that he was better, and Phoebe wasn't sure William was going to be able to do that... or even willing to try.

A week. It sounded like forever. Even though he didn't really intend to stake anything on the chance that some part of this sham might be real, it sounded like forever. Tony grimaced, and replied wryly, "By which point I might have actually seen one of the doctors here. He can use the time to set things in rolling, start to work overturning whatever scraped-together motion landed me in here. And drop a hint to Coulson about sniffing around the board. Let them sweat a little."

He thought better of the last words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Did she know about the aggravating agent? Was he supposed to, in this strange, fictional life someone had dreamt up? He wasn't even sure if it mattered if he tipped his hand, if she knew as well as he that William Sandia was nothing more than fiction. The hell with it, he decided. He couldn't be expected to play along if he didn't even know the game.

The name she didn't recognise made Phoebe's heart sink, just a little, but she tried not to let it show on her face. One weird name didn't meant William was living some kind of screwed-up fantasy life like the board said. It didn't. And William had never been that great at remembering things that didn't have anything to do with his current pet project. "I'll get it done." It didn't matter. She'd do what she could, like always. He was her boss, and her... he was her boss. She'd get it done.

Day 36: Waiting Room, Lobby 2

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