Chapter Text
When Tony Stark was 17 and newly orphaned, he invented two things in a grief-and-gin-soaked blur of compressed time. First, he finished his father’s last plans for a new missile guidance system while he was mostly sober. Some days afterward, he woke up in the middle of his lab on the upper floor of his Brownstone, surrounded by his bio-chem notes, his AI notes, a book on the philosophy of time, a new-age book of crap about collective memory, and a book with a crackpot theory of how the brain perceives love with a sore wrist and a small, metal rectangle imbedded in his skin.
After spending some time trying to figure out what he had built, he came to the conclusion that he had invented something that, in theory, would predict when he would find love.
His was blank, but on reflection, and with a horrible hangover fighting with the bitterness and loneliness that had blindsided him (it’s not even like he was close to his parents, not like they even really ever liked him) he decided that he just needed more people to have them, because the stupid thing couldn’t work if nobody else had them to gather up the data necessary.
So he did what any hungover, rich, orphaned, underage, technical genius college student would do. He found more alcohol, and built more. Then he went to the nearest bar, and offered a free drink to anybody who wanted to try it out.
Two of them went off that very night, as soon as they had gotten put on.
When Obie showed up to give him the sales numbers on the missile guidance system, and found him programming more of the things, he sheepishly told him about the idea behind it, and said that he was aware it probably wasn’t going to make any money, but that he’d just tinker with it on his own time. He said he wanted to see if the theory was sound. He didn’t say he just didn’t want to be alone. Obie wouldn’t have understood that.
But Obie didn’t laugh at him. He just rubbed his chin in that way he did when his father had said something offhandedly that sounded crazy, but always, always ended up increasing the fortunes of everyone around him. Obie patted Tony on the shoulder and said, “Son, governments pay for war. But if you want to sell to people—you sell them love. And there are more people than there are governments.”
In the first month, the new Stark TiMERs sold over 100,000 units.
His stayed blank, the line of half-formed 0s mocking him.