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The lights were turned out at DiNozzo industries. That was the way Tony liked it. He did his best work in the dark.
Right now, he was working on a new kind of missile for the upcoming show and tell with the Navy to prove that he was still the best man to work on their weapons. It was a lucrative business which kept him in more cars and fancy clothes than he knew what to do with.
Of course, there were drawbacks to being so well known. He hadn't expected one of them to be being kidnapped right out from under the Navy's nose in Afghanistan as he was demonstrating his new missile, however. Needless to say he found his new accommodations quite lacking.
He liked the dark, but he drew the line at working in an actual cave. His captors seemed disinclined to discuss his opinions on the matter, however. In fact, he'd been lucky they'd thought about keeping him alive at all after the explosion they’d created as a distraction to steal him from the Navy.
Of course, their surgery left much to be desired and he was working on a replacement power source to keep the fragments away from his heart that wouldn't be so difficult to use. He knew the only reason he was alive was because the captors wanted him to build them a missile. He wasn’t about to do so.
He knew that as soon as he did, he would be worthless to them and they would kill him. He’d been working with Yinsen to figure out some way to escape. They didn’t have much that could be used to help.
Pretty much the only tools they had were the ones provided to build the missile. Tony couldn’t actually understand his captors. Yinsen played translator, having been captured by the same people a while ago, however, Tony had a feeling that Yinsen was on his side not his captors.
He couldn’t explain that feeling, but he just knew he had to take Yinsen with him when he escaped. He still had no clue how he was going to escape, but he was a genius. He would figure it out.
His captors weren’t impressed with delays and used his own weapons against him. “His own weapons”, Tony hissed to himself.
He had never thought about the consequences of making weapons before. This abduction was making him look at things in a different light. He didn’t think he’d be able to continue making weapons once he got out of here.
It took some time, but finally he figured out what he could do to escape while still make it look like he was working on the missile they wanted him to build. He built himself a suit, made out of metal, but he called himself Iron Man. It sounded better.
It wasn’t his best work, but malnourished, dehydrated, he’d done what he could. He’d demanded more materials in the way of firepower claiming that he wanted to give them a greater chance of blowing themselves up when they used it. He didn’t know why, but they gave him the materials.
Without the extra firepower there was no way he would have been able to take Yinsen. As it was, it would be a push, but it was doable. His captors had been getting more and more aggressive demanding the missile now and Tony knew this was his only chance to escape with Yinsen.
He looked at Yinsen as the captors left and he nodded. Tony stepped into the suit and Yinsen made sure it was secure. He then punched in the initiation sequence before stepping close to Tony.
Tony wrapped his arms around Yinsen just in time for the suit to practically explode. They watched the captors come running, but it did no good as they were already too high for them to catch. That didn’t stop them from trying, however.
Tony was just glad that the bullets and other weapons they used to try to hit them impacted against the suit and not Yinsen. Of course, it wasn’t truly flight worthy and they crashed into a sand dune. Tony just hoped that it was far enough away from the cave that it would take their captors a while to find them and rescue would find them first.
Or at least that’s what he hoped when Yinsen undid the armor and woke him, so that he could help him get out of it. Of course, the Navy had long given up hope of finding DiNozzo. The only people still looking were his frat brothers who knew just how much of a stubborn ass he could be and that he wouldn’t just die no matter what they did to him.
They had a helicopter and were able to get Tony, Yinsen, and the Iron Man suit on board it. Tony breathed a sigh of relief that he was going home. He would set Yinsen up with a lab at DiNozzo Industries in thanks and would immediately stop all production of weapons.
He just couldn’t support the kind of stuff happening in the world anymore. He knew it would piss off Senior who had been happy that Tony’s weapons and ideas had made the company so successful, but he didn’t care. He’d had controlling interest since his first invention thanks to his frat brothers.
He really had no idea how to thank his frat brothers. They continued to be awesome and be there for him, but they had their own jobs and weren’t interested in working for him. He tried to shower them in gifts, but they didn’t really want them.
It drove Tony crazy. The best he’d been able to figure out to do was to have a spring break trip that they all got together on. He’d have to make it extra special, this year, somehow.
Needless to say Senior did not take the news that they were pulling out of the weapon business well, at all. He tried to order Tony to make more weapons, but that was futile. Tony wasn’t going to do so.
Senior then tried to disown him. Tony practically laughed in his face. “If I’m disowned then you’d better get out of here. Every piece of this property is owned by me and I have controlling majority in the company too, so don’t think you can stay there either.”
The blood drained from Senior’s face. “Wait. Tony. You can’t cut me off.”
“Watch me.” Tony glared. He didn’t know what burr was up his father’s butt, but he wasn’t going to deal with it. If the man didn’t care that his only son had been tortured, he didn’t deserve any of the things that Tony had let slide in regards to him.
Tony knew that hitting Senior in the pocketbook is what would hurt him the worst, so that’s what he did. Senior tried to take him to court over it. It wasn’t even worth Tony’s time to show up.
One of his frat brothers who was employed with Tony as a lawyer easily took care of it for him. Tony didn’t know what happened to Senior, after that. He mostly didn’t care either.
This trip had shown him that Senior truly didn’t care for him. It hurt, but all he could do was move on. He’d hoped that things would settle down, but of course that wasn’t the case.
The public was in an uproar over his decision to stop selling weapons and if that wasn’t bad enough some SHIELD agent was trying to poke his nose into everything. What was his name? Smith? Smythe? Cole?
Eh. Tony couldn’t remember and he didn’t really care. He had more pressing things to deal with. Mainly, the fact that he was dying from palladium poisoning due to the shrapnel near his heart and the battery used to keep the shrapnel away from his heart.
He turned into a recluse, but still people wouldn’t leave him alone. He started working on something to solve the problem, but he was hitting a dead end. It wasn’t until the damn SHIELD agent gave him some notes of his grandfather’s from Captain America times that he realized what he was missing.
Finally, he was able to make the arc reactor and get back to his normal life. He still refused to make weapons, but phones, tablets, and many other electronic gadgets that weren’t weapon based started to come out of his labs and his stock prices started to rise again. That should have been the end of it, except someone forgot to tell Loki that.
Tony had considered not participating. He generally wasn’t a save the world kind of guy, but he’d had no choice once the aliens started attacking. SHIELD had dug up Captain America and the Hulk from somewhere and two of their best agents, Hawkeye, and the Black Widow had also joined the fight.
Of course, none of them knew each other from Adam and they were more fighting against the same enemy than fighting together. Loki’s brother, Tim McGeeson, the God of thunder was also fighting on their side. It did little to stop Loki, however.
Tony did his best to avoid Loki. He didn’t know what was going on with the guy, but his blue eyes bothered him. They were startlingly blue. The same blue as the tesseract that SHIELD had been playing with and yet they had a woebegone look to them.
Tony didn’t know what that look meant or what the color of the eyes mattered, but he knew there was something wrong. When Loki showed up at his house to talk to him and just stared him down, Tony finally saw it.
The hint of fire that was being squashed by whatever was driving him to lead this attack. Gibbs was fighting something too. Tony should have recognized the guilt hidden in the woebegone eyes.
He’d worn it enough times himself. After finding out how his weapons were being used and doing his best to retrieve them from the bad guys, only for someone else innocent to die at the hands of his weapons, he’d been wracked with guilt multiple times. Tony decided right then and there that he would help Gibbs escape whatever he was fighting.
First, though, they had to get rid of the aliens. Tony figured out how to close the portal with the help from Abby Sciuto, who Tim McGeeson seemed to take a liking to. Once they got it closed the aliens just dropped dead like their strings were cut.
Loki collapsed as well. Tony had Loki put in one of his secure labs. He needed to get to the bottom of this Gibbs guy and what was going on.
Tim didn’t like it. He wanted to take Loki home with him, but Tony knew something was wrong and he wasn’t about to let an innocent man get hurt because he didn’t do something. SHIELD wanted Loki as well, but Tony just pointed out that they’d already lost the guy once.
The “Avengers” separated and went their own ways, after that. They weren’t really a team despite Nick Fury’s best attempts to make them one. Tony spent a lot of time with Gibbs.
The guy had a quick wit, though, he was also quite the bastard. His personality had completely changed from before the battle. His eyes had changed colors as well.
They now matched the blue of Tony’s arc reactor instead of the tesseract. Of course, they would still flash the blue of the tesseract at times, so Tony knew they weren’t out of the woods, yet, but he couldn’t help falling in love with the man behind the mask. He wasn’t so different from Tony having been alone and singled out for being different most of his life.
Of course, the war on Earth kind of put a damper on things, but Tony was pretty sure that was the tesseract talking or whoever controlled it. When he finally figured out how to break the hold on Gibbs entirely, it was a joyous occasion in the tower. Tony couldn’t help kissing Gibbs as he stared into the arc reactor eyes that thanked him without words for saving him from a hell he hadn’t been able to escape himself.
Tony wanted the full details at some point. He knew it had something to do with one of Gibbs’ exes from comments the guy had made while they tried to figure out how he was sometimes being controlled. He didn’t know why, however.
Clearly, this Diane woman was someone to watch out for though. Tony just hoped that she would leave them alone now that Gibbs was free from her control entirely. He really didn’t understand how someone who seemed content to work with wood had fallen into the clutches of a power hungry woman like her.
Still Diane’s loss was his gain. Tony set Gibbs up with a lab where he could do whatever he wanted with wood or anything else. The two of them grew closer together and were able to put the bad period behind them.
They both had their bad memories from that time that they didn’t want to talk about. They respected that in each other, but that didn’t stop them from making new memories together. Tony couldn’t say his life was perfect, but there was definitely someone in it now that had been missing before.