InsaneJournal

Who: Tony Stark and Ianto Jones
What: A job interview
When: Backdated to Tuesday
Where: Stark Industries, Columbus Circle
Warnings: None

"Mr. Stark, I have to ask that--"

"Would you please shut up so that I can show you--"

"Sir, I'm sorry, but we have this set up just so, and I'm going to have to insist that you stop--"

It was instances like this that convinced so many of Tony's staff that he needed a personal assistant of sorts. Someone that would do a better job of chaining him to the desk in his office far, far away from the research and development department in the basement of the Stark Industries building. Every employee of SI knew that there were countless meetings Tony could have been attending that would have tended to running the business of the billion dollar company. But Tony Stark never made it a secret that he was more at home down in R&D, doing the jobs of the scientists he'd personally hired and at times doing them better than they had the capability to do. Whether he was butting in on the work of scientists or holed up in his own corner, working on the arc reactor in his chest, it was well known that if Tony had disappeared during the work day he was likely in the basement.

Tony grabbed the chalkboard eraser and started destroying a week's work of equations, wiping them away into a cloud of dust while the man in the white lab coat standing behind him moaned into his hands. "There's a simpler way to balance out the equation," Tony said, picking up a piece of white chalk. He started scribbling over the board; his mind easily correcting every flaw he'd seen in the other man's work. It went on and on as he wrote out two lines of balanced equations.

"Mr. Stark?"

The voice that interrupted his thoughts was tentative and feminine. A skinny secretary in a green dress stood in the doorway. She looked afraid to enter, and who could blame her what with the constant hissing and beeping, glowing lights, and mechanisms strewn throughout the room.

The scientist looked towards the ceiling. "Oh, thank God."

Tony looked over his shoulder. "Florence." He prided himself on being able to remember the names of the women he'd seen naked.

"Mr. Stark," she said again, still looking unwilling to enter the room. "Your one thirty is here."

He was already staring back at the board, adding an omega sign for reasons only he could understand. "I have a one thirty?"

"For a personal assistant and secretary, yes sir." Maybe you would know that if you had a personal assistant. "Ianto Jones?"

He grunted at first, just because he was so engrossed in the project at hand. But finally, after finishing off another part of the equation he nodded to Florence. "You can send him down. I'll see him here."

Florence gave his mad-scientist appearance a once over. He wasn't wearing a jacket, his shirt was wrinkled, and the glow of the arc reactor in his chest shown through brightly showing his old injury off to the world. God only knew where his tie was and his hair hadn't been parted and slicked since about nine o'clock that morning. There was chalk dust on his pants and his shoes hadn't been shined. "So you're going to scare him off before you get the chance to hire him..." the secretary mumbled underneath her breath before turning on her heel and heading back up to the main floor.