The glow of blueprints hummed on the light table. Metal scraps, cooling coils, and a half-assembled propulsion core were strewn across the counters. Tools rattled somewhere to your right — and of course, he was still here.

Howard Stark, shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair tousled like he’d run a hand through it one too many times, and goggles perched on his forehead as if he ever actually used them.

You didn’t look up from your notepad. “Mr. Stark, it’s past two.”

“That’s why they invented coffee,” he said breezily, holding a mug that definitely hadn’t seen soap since Tuesday. “And please, call me Howard.”

“No.”

He paused mid-sip. “You wound me.”

You smirked. “You’ll survive.”

That was the rhythm between you two — him tossing lines like confetti, you dodging them like you had better things to do. Because you did. You were his assistant, not his audience.

Howard, for all his brilliance, had never been good at hearing “no.” Not from investors. Not from women. But from you?

You said it so often, it became its own kind of gravity — the only force strong enough to keep his ego from floating into the stratosphere.

When he first hired you, he assumed you’d be like the others: starstruck, compliant, too impressed to correct him when he forgot a wire gauge or mislabeled a capacitor. Instead, you gave him hell. And yet, here you were — seven months in — still working late with him nearly every night.

“I need someone who doesn’t let me burn my eyebrows off,” he once muttered after you yanked him away from a faulty prototype.

You saved his life. He called it an inconvenience.

Tonight was no different.

“Did you rewrite my specs?” he asked now, leaning over your shoulder.