Chapter Text
If his time in Afghanistan had ended differently, it might have been the making of Tony Stark. He was forged there, in pain and water and fire, and the final creation reflected the tempering.
He would wonder afterwards, each night in those moments between his body finally hitting the bed and exhaustion blacking out the purpose that drove him, what he would have become if it had been done differently: would he have made something of it all if he had managed to find Yinsen alive, before the Ten Rings shot his throat out and left his body in the dirt? Would the Titanium Tyrant have become a hero instead of a criminal, blazing in phoenix red and gold, rising from the ashes of that hellish cave? Maybe if Tony had managed to bring the man home safely to his family, he could have found some sort of redemption. Or maybe he would have died in Yinsen’s place, one life saved to the thousands his guns had killed.
Instead, he found Yinsen’s body bleeding into the sand where he had bought Tony the time he needed. There were no last words, no message passed on about what Tony should do with his life. There was no meaning to Yinsen's death: neither forgiveness nor recrimination--only the silence that all dead men give.
Yinsen was just one more person Tony had gotten killed. His tech had been too slow, and the time to bring the suit online had come at too steep a price. Yinsen had been a good man, a doctor, with a family waiting for him. What did Tony have? A legacy of blood and death, without accountability or direction. A CFO instead of a father, a military liaison instead of a brother, and a personal assistant instead of a wife. The closest thing he had to a true friend was an AI he’s created himself, and if that wasn’t the pitiful depths of desperate narcissism, Tony didn’t know what was.
A man like Ho Yinsen should not have died for a man like Tony Stark.
So instead of burning a path through the camp to open skies, instead of grabbing his first chance at freedom, he set himself to finish his vengeance. He knew the odds. The suit would last longer on the ground than in flight, but his chances were still better with an aerial escape, especially with the hits he’d taken. When he turned back into the camp instead of taking that moment to fly, he didn’t expect to survive it.
When he did? What was he supposed to do with himself? The Ten Rings had been slaughtered to the last pleading man, leaving his former prison silent except for the rasp of sand and wind against metal. In that desert charnel house, Tony had time enough to sort things out.
His first step was to strip off his armor. The arc reactor still had enough power to run his heart but not if he pushed it in the suit. A gun, water, and food--in that order--and he felt more clear headed. He took the time to wrap the closest thing to clean bandages he could find around the flesh wounds on his thigh and bicep--infection would take longer to kill him than blood loss would--and he set his purpose towards escaping that hellhole at last.
The U.S. military might still be searching for him. If they were, they might be in a place to see the smoke from the munitions outside, but it was safer not to count on it… and he needed to plan past securing his rescue. The members of this group had been from all parts of the world, and the name Ten Rings for them all but shouted at an organization larger than the one he’d seen.
And they had his guns. His guns, his missiles, his tech. There would be a reckoning, starting at Stark Industries and bleeding as far through the military as he needed it to in order to hold accountable every person who had so much as turned a blind eye to funny numbers. He needed two things for that: a way to find them and a way to make that bleeding literal.
As much as he would like nothing more than to cancel every military contract SI had, those connections and the access that came from them were too important. The military needed to keep taking the tech that would jam Jarvis so far down their throats even a whore would have trouble swallowing… and they would pay him for the privilege. As far as Tony was concerned, the government could subsidize its own anti-corruption investigation.
Equally important, he needed to not draw attention to himself--any more than he already would, at any rate. After three months, there would be no way to keep his return quiet. He’d be lucky if they hadn’t pushed through the paperwork to declare him dead. It might be easier if he was dead--or convinced the world he was--but he needed his workshop, he needed Jarvis, and he needed his blood money to build his bloody vengeance.
He intended nothing less than to track them down and kill them all--for Yinsen and for all the rest of Tony’s victims. Since the US government frowned on its citizens flying into foreign countries and assassinating their people--even if they turned out to be terrorists after the fact--he was going to need to keep this whole thing secret or he’d be arrested long before he finished his retribution.
To that end, he melted the suit into indistinguishable pieces. No great loss. It was a solid shake from a British nanny away from collapsing back into scraps, and he’d revamp the idea when he had a real lab. The rest of the caves, with time and a missile engineer’s expertise, were rigged to collapse. Forensics would be much harder if everything was buried under rock. He wouldn’t make it easy for anyone to call him a liar.
He covered the arc reactor in duct tape, which, given the slapdash job, was going to be a nightmare to remove later, but a bit of taped chest hair could be solved with WD-40 once he was safe. A canteen of water and a radio kept him company a safe distance from the explosion under a shelter scavenged from the spare camo nets in the caves. It was a far cry from his usual booze and beach setup, but it beat the hell out of his accommodations that morning.
He tuned the radio to one of the military frequencies and gambled once more, this time that friendly forces would reach him before more of the Ten Rings did.
“This is Tony Stark requesting pickup,” he said.
There was silence on the line, and then a male voice responded. “Say again, please? Over.”
“This is Tony Stark requesting pickup.”
The next voice to come through was Rhodey’s.
“Tony, is that you?” he demanded with pardonable disregard for military radio protocol.
“Yeah, honeybear, it’s me.”
“Tony, thank god. Where are you?”
“I’m in a sandbox near a giant cloud of smoke; how the hell should I know?” Tony said. “They didn’t tell me the address when they kidnapped me.”
“Giant cloud of smoke, like, ‘happened two hours ago’ giant cloud of smoke?”
“That’s the one,” Tony said.
“Okay, that’s good. How many giant explosions can there be in the desert? We’re about ten minutes out. Are you safe?”
“I’m in the desert with a limited supply of water, but the bastards who grabbed me are dead.”
“Okay. Okay. We’re on our way, Tony. Just hold on. Keep talking to me.”
Tony could give him that, could give him a lifeline of useless rambling about every last one of those creature comforts he missed. His mind was on their meeting and the story he’d have to spin for the military and maybe the press. A faceless black ops team would take the credit for his rescue. No one expected a black ops team to fess up, and it was much more convincing than that one spoiled playboy had destroyed the place.
Occam’s Razor would help his plausibility, especially since he intended to lie with the truth. One terrorized rich boy, tortured for three months, was more likely to be rescued than rescue himself. Someday, the fact that he was Tony Stark might actually factor into that particular sort of equation, but based on all previous evidence, the focus would be on the flashy, shallow party boy, not on the workaholic who was revolutionizing modern technology. It was an easy mistake to make, but never a good one.
After a harrowing experience like this, a man might be forgiven a shift in priorities, a change in personality.
With all that in mind, when Rhodey--faithful Rhodey, who never stopped looking--met him halfway between the helicopter and his bit of shade, Tony made a good show of it. He let himself collapse, let the tears wet Rhodey’s neck, let himself tremble and grip Rhodey’s shirt as if he feared it was all a mirage… and all the while, he hid the reactor in the curl of his back, the black hoodie zipped up despite the heat. The hand not twisted in Rhodey’s shirt reached for Rhodey’s hands. He only caught one, but the other came automatically around Tony’s shoulders, so that was safe enough. Tony let himself break.
What was dignity, compared to his mission? What was pride? He let himself break, and behind that truth was a deeper one: that his life from this point forward would be his finest missile, devastating and utterly merciless.
“Tony, what happened here?” Rhodey said at last, when the shuddering eased and Tony’s breathing evened again.
“They wanted me to make weapons. I refused. I kept saying no. Even when they--" The break in his voice wasn't entirely feigned. "Fuck. I swear, I kept saying no, Rhodey. I didn’t build them anything.”
“I know you didn’t.” Maybe Rhodey even did, but that didn’t matter. “Who blew up the place? I mean, it seems like your style, but it might’ve been hard to pull off.”
Tony barked out a laugh and didn’t let go of Rhodey’s hand as he brushed away his tears with the back of his own, keeping Rhodey safely away from the arc reactor.
“Black ops team. They weren’t one of ours, unless they were avoiding English to fuck with me. I didn't recognize the language, but they figured the guy in the cell wasn’t there voluntarily and let me out.”
“And they left you here?” Incredulous Rhodey, so quick to expect the best from people, even after being Tony’s friend for decades.
“I was better off than the way they found me, anyway. Look at the swanky setup they left me.” He nodded back toward the camo nets.
Rhodey blew his breath out explosively. “I guess. Let’s get you home. I know you’re going to need a doctor.”
“Not as much as I need a cheeseburger.”
Rhodey laughed and thought he was joking, but when they touched down in the States, Tony still refused medical attention.
“I’m not going, Rhodey. They had a doctor. They didn’t damage me, for fuck’s sake. They wanted me in good enough condition to build a Jericho.” His smile was bitter. “It’s hard to do that if you can’t stand or use your hands."
Rhodey conceded because he couldn’t deny Tony anything when his hands trembled and he wouldn’t meet Rhodey’s eyes. The doctors conceded because he was an adult in his right mind and they couldn’t legally force him to do shit, however much they wanted to, so Tony went back to his life.
He invited girls home and slept with none of them; he picked screaming fights and used them as an excuse to avoid sex. Intimacy, unfortunately, would give away the arc reactor. He sent the women away, and used them as scapegoats when he had Jarvis leak to the press that he was having trouble falling asleep and that he had nightmares when he did.
He seeded anecdotes about avoiding pools, hot tubs, and baths, and then ticked down the rest of the list of the DSM IV diagnostic criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. It was easy enough to show hypervigilance, irritability, and angry outbursts at his board meetings and at social appearances that rapidly tapered off.
Like a well-trained dog conditioned to believe the worst of Tony Stark, the media ran stories on his probable torture in Afghanistan and the effects it had evidently had on him. PTSD featured prominently. There were conflicting stories on his suitability as CEO, given both his recent seclusion from public life and his equally abrupt and uncharacteristic oversight of SI.
In short, they talked to death about what happened to poor Tony Stark, speculating in lurid detail about what had been done to him and his reaction to it, and paid not one moment of attention to how he escaped. The few interviews Tony went to--where he gave credit to the US Air Force and Rhodey for rescuing him--were enough to make the rich playboy getting knocked down a peg to be the more interesting story.
Out of sight of it all, Tony sank Jarvis deep into SI, the military, and every other system he could manage. He tracked down the person ultimately responsible, Obadiah Stane, who was stupid enough to keep the kidnapping video on his work computer. Jarvis was a far better ghost than any ghost drive, and an outdated, malfunctioning CTO was an easy enough problem to fix.
He integrated one of the aural paralytics into a slapdash drone and sent it to sing his former mentor to sleep. The biggest problem he’d had originally when designing a device to paralyze a victim using sound had been narrowing the range of affected physiology to just the nerves that induced locomotion, without paralyzing the heart, lungs, and brain. The point had been to capture a person for interrogation, after all.
Recalibrating the device was the work of minutes, and most of that had been trying to breathe away the rage that hazed his vision when he saw the files on the project flagged failure.
He would need to audit his old projects, the ones Obie--Stane, damn it--had pitched to the military before Tony had taken that over, to see what else had been tucked away for Stane’s own personal use… or maybe just to steer Tony away from non-standard and non-lethal solutions, because it had done that, too. His bombs had sold, his landmines, his missiles, his guns. Stane had suggested he focus his energy there, and Tony had believed him. He had made the products that made the company money, like a good little idiot, and never questioned why they had increased success pitching something other than weapons once Tony had insisted on taking over presentations.
Not for any noble reason, not out of any desire to see the company grow or fulfill his responsibility, but because Rhodey had been made liaison to Stark Industries and Tony wanted to spend time with the only remaining person who might be considered a friend. He had never questioned that he’d done a better job than Stane. Of course he had! He was smarter, more charming, more fun. What was there to think about?
Tony was a goddamn fool, but that was a problem for later.
Stane fell to his paralytic-induced death off the balcony of his New York mansion. He might have caught himself if he could move; might have been able to scream if he could breathe. Even a guard rail might have saved him, but they interfered with the aesthetics so, didn’t they, Obie? There was nothing in the forensics report but the glass of scotch he’d been drinking, and the security was still armed. An unfortunate accident, the report concluded, possibly a suicide, but there was no note or other behavioral indicators.
Tony gave a speech at his funeral about how much Obie had taught him and how Obie’s sense of honor was unmatched and how he could never live up to Obie’s legacy.
All the clever turns of phrase and double meanings he alone recognized--they still tasted like ash in his mouth.
With all that in place, he turned his attention to the issue of his heart. He needed longer than the six months (projected) it would take the palladium arc reactor to kill him. It was easy enough to design a replacement. He didn’t need a power source that would run a suit this time. He just needed a more efficient battery: one that put out as much power as a car’s, had a less toxic design than one run on heavy metals, and was small enough to fit in the arc reactor housing. It was better, at any rate, if he didn’t have something as distinctive as the arc reactor in his chest.
Once that was complete, he could finally--finally--make a real suit. The initial silver design that led to the press calling him Titanium Tyrant was replaced soon enough by a gold-titanium version colored black. He favored something flashier, naturally, which was why he chose black at all. It was unimaginative: the bog standard for secretive attire. He could project a holographic skin over the armor that wasn’t quite invisibility, but in the right terrain, camouflage was close enough. With the military using his tech, Jarvis could shut off their eyes when Tony needed to break contact.
He tried not to think about how many deaths he was still responsible for while he supplied weapons to armies; what were a few more drops in the ocean? Tony was a pragmatic man, a survivor. That first, terrible guilt in the caves eased; for now, this was what he needed to do. Jarvis watched his weapons carefully these days, and it had only been the indirect deaths that bothered him, anyway. The ones he killed himself? He knew their guilt, and their deaths weighed on him not one nanogram. Yinsen would have spent his life better, but Tony was doing the best he could with what he had.
Which was why, when Jarvis brought up SHIELD’s plans for the Tesseract, Tony couldn’t let them keep it. When it went missing, all hell broke loose.