Work Text:
Among the reparations for plotting to murder her when Jupiter claimed her Title, Titus Abrasax had been forced to sign over the planet Tellutia to her. A significant portion of Balem Abrasax’s estate was also transferred to Jupiter, as a recompense for the late First Primary of the House of Abrasax kidnapping her family, attacking her and nearly killing the entire crew of the Aegis cruiser.
In short, Jupiter Jones owned the titles to six rich, beautiful, diverse planets, a gene-splicing laboratory on Saturn and a number of other small industries that Balem had purchased as part of his larger business interests.
In her office on-board the Aegis cruiser the Tigris, she buried her face in her hands and closed her tired, gritty eyes.
“I told you,” said Caine waspishly behind her.
The Tellutian’s were explorers and astrologers with a wicked sense of humour and penchant for gleaming metallic tattoos. They were exactly Jupiter’s sort of people. They had also recently discovered their position as farmed produce in the larger universe, thanks to a nefarious plot that Jupiter couldn’t quite pin on the new First Primary, Kalique Abrasax.
At least, not yet.
“If there was a way to control that cunning, manipulative bitch without causing a frikkin’ civil war, Caine, I would have thought of it by now!” she growled, lifting her face from her hands. “She’s not broke like Titus; I can’t neatly employ her and lock her in a metaphorical prison of corporate bullshit. She’s also not totally mental like Balem, which means she’s not going to conveniently get herself blown up!”
Her Royal Guard stood propped lazily in the doorframe, dressed down for the evening. His Nirvana t-shirt and ripped jeans hung wonderfully on his muscular frame. Caine had discovered grunge music while on Earth, much to the detriment of Jupiter’s fragile sanity. He cocked a pale brow at her, then grinned as her gaze lingered hungrily where the jeans hung low on his hips and the t-shirt pulled tight across his shoulders.
She shook herself and glared. “You know exactly what that look does to me, and I have shit to do,” she snapped at him hotly.
He smirked, eyes darkening. A thrill hurried through Jupiter.
A gentle chime announced an incoming message from the bridge. “Your Majesty? Your alerts flagged a news bulletin from Earth. Keywords Iron Man, Stark and catastrophic,” announced the smooth tones of the lovely cyborg, Gemma.
Jupiter stared at the speaker. Across the room, Caine had straightened. Their eyes met.
“Hold that thought,” she informed him, and stabbed the intercom. “Change course and take me to Stark Tower, please. I’m coming up.”
Half a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label was hanging from Tony Stark’s fingers. He reclined on the floor of his penthouse suite and wished oblivion would come faster. The first couple of times he heard the insistent tapping, he dismissed it as some figment of his drunken mind. Maybe the warning thump in his head telling him that the hangover was going to be more brutal than anything he could possibly imagine. He didn’t care. He couldn’t care less, about anything that wasn’t Pepper falling through the air screaming, the flaming orange lines moving under her skin, the sky filling up with exploding Iron Man suits.
The ringing in his ears hadn’t stopped yet. It buzzed, annoyingly faraway and vaguely like a pissed off female voice, saying:
“Tony-frikkin’-Stark, would you open this goddamn door!”
He shook himself and fell off the side of the couch. The bottle of whiskey fell to the carpet and brown liquid spewed out. Outside his window, holding the edge of the frame while her feet gliding back and forth like she was treading water, was the Legitimate Reoccurrence, Her Majesty Jupiter Jones.
“JARVIS!! Jarvis, ‘m drunk, is there a hot girl floating outshide my window?” Tony bellowed, dragging himself to his feet. Then he remembered he had muted Jarvis back when he stopped drinking the Johnny Walker out of a glass with ice. The AI had started talking about alcohol poisoning. “Oh. Oh, yeah…” he struggled for a moment. “Override th-that. That gag thing-order. Override.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Jarvis chimed, and Tony was sure the AI was speaking far louder than he needed to. “As I have been trying to inform you, Her Majesty Jupiter Jones is requesting entrance to Stark Tower.”
“I can shee-see, I see that. There,” Tony muttered. Stumbling, he managed to get to his landing platform entrance and open it.
Jupiter skated along the thin air and had to go under the catwalk, back-flipping up against gravity dragging her down. She landed with a clunk on solid ground and stuck her hands on her hips, surveying Tony as he stared at her, swaying.
He pointed a finger at her that wavered as his vision went double, then triple, then blurred. “You-whad’yew’want?” he demanded. “Whad’r’yew’doing; what are you doing here?”
She squinted. “I wanted to go home, drink vodka with my Mom and have some truly spectacular sex with my boyfriend. Instead, I’m here. You want to tell me why that is?” Her tone was far less abrasive than her voice.
Toxic replies swarmed in Tony’s mouth. He wanted to scream and swear and rip this tiny woman’s perfect ponytail off her stupid, regal head. Instead, he slouched against the wall and realised he was crying. Mortified, he hid his face in his hands.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay. Come on, come with me,” Jupiter pulled him to his feet.
He pushed her off and fell backwards, slamming into his work table. Holograms leapt to life; the outside of the Avenger’s Tower, force and pressure equations as he tried to figure out how to design living quarters that could withstand Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner, a shooting range for Barton, a discreet dance studio for Natasha, a dozen building permits that had been denied. Tony turned around so he could stare at them. He could feel Jupiter’s gaze, prickling the back of his neck.
“Stark. I need you to come with me, okay?” she said gently, and took his hand.
He stared at his hand in hers and shook his head. “No. No, can’t, gotta-I gotta….” He trailed off, staring at the holograms. They flicked and shut down.
“Gotta help Pepper,” he said finally, remembering at last what he had been working on when he spiraled into the depths of a bottle of whiskey. Across the room, the coffee table was littered with papers, a couple of StarkPads and a calculator.
“If you tell me what happened yesterday, Stark, I think we can help each other. But first; you need to be sober,” said Jupiter, briskly. She looked up at the roof. “Hey, ah, talking building thing? Where’s the bathroom?”
“Second door on the left, Your Majesty, though I am not sure how much success you will have. Mr Stark has been drinking steadily for several hours. That is not his first bottle.”
Jupiter grimaced and led Tony to the bathroom. She perched him on the edge of the vanity.
“If yer plannin’ on taking advantage of me, ‘m drunk an’ flatterered, but I have a-a-a thing-girl. Woman. Lady. I have a Pepper. I think I have a Pepper. She’s got stuff in her. Bad…because of me, because I was a dick,” Tony informed her.
Jupiter was searching through her pockets, but paused at that. She stared at him.
He stared back at her, wide-eyed and vacant. He blinked heavily. “Am. I am a dick,” he said at last.
“Jesus,” she swore softly. She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and showed him a shiny silver canister, about the size of a fountain pen. “Open your mouth; I’m going to give you something to help with this overly honest, weepy Tony Stark.”
“Sir, I would not advise- I do not recognise the chemical signature of the properties within this device, Sir,” announced Jarvis loudly, sounding about as close to alarmed as he could get.
Tony took the canister from Jupiter’s hand and turned it over a couple of times, fumbling. He shook his head and squinted at it. “Wha’s’it?” he muttered.
She took it back before he could drop it. “Little something Titus Abrasax cooked up. He showed up drunk at work one too many times and came up with this in a week when I told him I’d fire him if he did it again. A week,” she added to clarify, then paused. “Remind me to never let you meet Titus, come to think of it.”
Holding Tony’s gaze, she held it up between them. “I need you to trust me, Stark. Not because I’m the Princess, or because I want to help you, but because we both love this planet and it is my mission to help you protect it. Or, failing that? To avenge it,” she told him.
Without dropping her gaze, Tony obediently opened his mouth. She sprayed the liquid gas onto his tongue and stood back. Tony shuddered, blinked a couple of times and was abruptly stone-cold sober. He stared at her, then looked at his hands and patted himself down.
“Jesus-tap-dancing-Christ. I’m…” a strange look made his eyes cross.
“You’re going to throw up,” Jupiter informed him dryly, the end of her sentence cut off by Tony lurched to the toilet and doing just that. She filled him a glass of water and handed it to him when he was done retching.
“Jesus Christ,” he repeated himself, wiping his face and blowing his nose. Shakily, he took the glass from her gratefully, swigged and spat.
“God, you’re a mess, Stark,” said Jupiter and smiled at his glare. “It’s kind of nice, actually. Like the first time I saw Natasha with bed-hair.”
Tony choked on his next mouthful of water. “Natasha Romanoff?!”
Jupiter shrugged, kicked the bathroom door open. “She likes vodka too,” she said, like that explained it, and led the way out.
“So,” she began once they were situated, holding mugs of coffee blacker than midnight. “Tell me about Pepper.”
He did.
Jupiter tapped her fingers on her coffee mug and sighed. “I wasn’t on Earth this week. Wanna know why? Don’t care, I’m going to tell you. I own another planet, called Tellutia. This week somebody, probably someone I know, sent an army of really, really nasty Splices to that planet, with no other orders than to raise hell. The Tellutian’s are a lot like Terses, like us. They were starting to look up at the sky and realise that they weren’t the only ones out there, when an army came out of the sky and murdered thousands. Millions. We know exactly how that feels, Stark; to have that innocence, that hope, taken away like that. But the Tellutian’s didn’t have the Avengers. They didn’t have an Iron Man, or a Captain America or a Thor: a face they knew from the news and stories and legends. They had me,” her voice broke and she stood up and walked away, leaving Tony on the couch staring after her. Slowly, she turned back to face him. There was exhaustion in her shoulders, hanging darkly under her eyes and the shiny lines of her unwashed hair.
Inexplicitly, Tony looked at Jupiter and knew her as viscerally as he knew himself.
“This planet is just entering what they call it’s ‘Genetic Age’. What that means, basically, is our population, as a whole, has advanced enough to begin developing technology that can defend itself against them if they come here and try to harvest. The last time we even got close was in World War II, but we both know what happened then.” Jupiter shook her head, staring out the window. “It isn’t supposed to happen like this. I can’t tell you how many planet histories I have read, the stories of a thousand other populations that were harvested by Balem and Kalique when they came into their Genetic Ages. None of them were like Earth.”
“By your tone, I’m guessing that ‘special’ and ‘unique’ aren’t as great as they’ve cracked up to be, huh?” Tony commented drolly.
Jupiter shook her head again. “Uh, no. I don’t think so. This place, this planet? Gods. The Hulk. The Red Skull and the Tesseract. We are a crossroads of massive trials, like no other planet ever. For some reason, we have gotten stuck in the crossfire of all these huge, divine events. Like a civil war of the Abrasax and the sibling squabbles of Norse gods and the goddamn ego-driven mania of a thing like the Red Skull.”
“What are you trying to say, here, Your Majesty?” drawled Tony, standing up.
Jupiter bristled at the way he let her title drip off his tongue and forced herself to stand down. “I am saying, you goddamn little shit, that there are enough awful things gunning for this planet. I cannot fight threats from within as well. And you are a threat. You are a thing with the same power to change the entire course of history as Thor and Loki and Balem-fucking-Abrasax!”
A shiver went down Tony’s spine, part terror and part pride. The scathing voice of Steve Rogers echoed back to him; “Big man in a suit of armor. Take that away and what are you?”
A thing with the same terrible, history-altering powers as beings millennia old, according to the sovereign of all Earth. These words hung over him like Damocles’ sword.
“So what are we supposed to do about it?” Tony demanded, giving into the spike of fear in his gut.
Jupiter blessed him with a wary, tired half-smile. “You, Tony Stark do what you do best: you come up with a way of fixing the problem. You’re a mechanic, you’re Iron Man; you’re Tony-freaking-Stark. Just…just stop trying to change the world. World’s changing enough.”
With those words, she was gone.