Chapter Text
Tony Stark has never been in any danger of being labeled a “good person.” Genius? Visionary? Prodigy? Sexiest man alive? Hell, even at times self-obsessed? Of course. He’s heard all of that in the last hour alone. A good person is not something Tony Stark will ever be considered, no matter how many lives his technology saves overseas. It’s not because he couldn’t be a hero. Hell, his dad was an asshole and he’s still classified an American war hero by many — not all, as his work on the Manhattan project was controversial — but many. Tony could be a hero, but he’s made the conscious decision not to be.
It started early for him, probably around the time that he was old enough to realize that his father, the great Howard Stark, wasn’t all the papers made him out to be. He was cold, calculating, and lacked any affection for his son. The expectations that Tony would one day take over the company were high. He was expected to study hard and excel in school so that he could grow up and be just like his father. So he did, and in many ways, he was even smarter than his old man. He doubted Howard Stark ever built a circuit board at the age of 4. However, he never felt like he was good enough, and his dad died before Tony ever heard him say he was proud of him.
So Tony rebelled. He knew his dad wasn’t as great as they made him out to be and he wanted to be nothing like him. He stayed out late, drank too much, and took home as many beautiful women as he could. He had no interest in being like his father, the great War Hero who had worked right alongside Captain America himself. Tony ran Stark Industries, sure, he wasn’t stupid. He knew that he was good at what he did and that his crazy spending habits needed to be funded somehow. However, he made sure that for every article written about how Tony was following in his dad’s footsteps, five more would be written about how Playboy Tony Stark was nothing like Howard.
He showed up to black tie events with prominent Senators, drunk off his ass and hit on all the women, single or not. He threw money around like it didn’t matter, dropping close to $100,000 in one single night at a bar. He almost got arrested for turning a hotel lobby into a giant Slip ‘N Slide with champagne instead of water, until it was revealed that he actually owned the hotel and was free to do what he pleased. Tony’s the guy that everyone loves to gossip about because the stories of his antics are legendary and unmatched by even the craziest of Hollywood actors and actresses.
He’s much more likely to end up on the cover of a tabloid than be awarded a medal of honor, but that’s alright with him.
Then something happens that makes Tony realize there are other ways to make sure he’s never compared to his dad… Almost four years to the day of his parents’ death, Tony becomes a father and he realizes that if he doesn’t want to be like his dad, all he has to do is be a responsible parent and make sure that his kid never has to wonder if his father loves him. That he never has to wonder if Tony is proud of him, because he’ll tell him so everyday.
****
“Sir, Miss Collins is here to see you,” JARVIS announces.
“Christine Collins?” Tony asks for clarification, because he hasn’t seen Christine in over a year. If she is on his doorstep, he’ll be surprised, and it is nearly impossible to surprise him.
“Shall I let her in?” JARVIS asks.
Tony doesn’t hesitate in giving his permission. He’s been with his fair share of women in his life, but very few women have captured his attention like she has. He still remembers how he chased after her for weeks, inviting her back to his place during every black tie event they both inevitably ended up at. She’d denied him time after time, until finally she’d given in. The night they spent together, devoting hours to learning each others bodies, was certainly something to write home about. He is a man of science and always will be, but there are no words to describe that night except powerful and magical. Even when he’d tried to describe the experience to Rhodey the next morning, his friend had just laughed and asked him if he’d perhaps he’d had something stronger than just alcohol in his system.
He checks his hair in the reflection of the monitor before heading upstairs to greet his extremely welcome visitor. When he reaches the top of the stairs, he has to pause. Christine is not dressed up in one of the floor length dresses he is used to seeing her in. She’s wearing a green jumpsuit that is hugging every curve in her body and looks to be torn in places, charred in others. She’s wearing a strange metal headpiece and her long blonde hair, usually so artfully curled, is tangled and dirty. There’s a bundle of fabric in her arms, dull and brown, looking odd next to the bright, metallic green of her outfit.
“Isn’t it a little late for Halloween?” he asks, curious what the costume is for. He’s always down for something a little kinky and out of the norm, but he likes to know what he’s playing before starting anything. He’s gotten himself into trouble more than a few times by not finding out the rules before a game… he doesn’t need to be tied up again and left exposed for Happy to find the next day.
“Here,” she moves to hand him the bundle of fabric in her arms, her voice sounding off. “Please,” she says when he doesn’t move.
“I don’t like being handed things.” He looks her up and down, starting to realize that there is dried blood on her skin that doesn’t appear to be costume makeup. Her eyes are duller than he’s ever seen them before, usually such a piercing green, now they look dead.
“This is your son,” she says and in those four words, his life changes forever.
****
Blaine cries a lot his first few days with Tony. There are burns on his arms and legs that he knows have to be painful for the little guy. He isn’t entirely sure how to handle a baby, but the kid’s mother had up and abandoned him without an instruction manual. She’d simply dumped the kid into his arms, handed him a ridiculously short letter, then walked out the door before he could stop her. She hadn’t even kissed Blaine goodbye, which was cold — and this was coming from the man who’d once been accused of replacing his heart with an extra liver so he could drink more.
So, manual or not, Tony does his best to figure out how to be a good father to the kid. He feeds him his bottles, changes his diapers, and in a surge of over-protectiveness, doesn’t put him down for 4 days straight. Whenever Blaine is sleeping, Tony conducts research.
He starts out with a DNA test, needing to be positive before he gets any more attached than he already is. He finds out, with 98% certainty, that Blaine is his son. He also discovers a strange blood disease that he can’t diagnose because there is no scientific reason for the little sparks of electricity that appear in Blaine’s blood. A full body scan reveals that the rest of his tiny little body is completely healthy, functioning just as it should. There is no fever, no obvious infection, no symptoms that raise any red flags. There are simply the burn marks on his body that are slowly healing with time, and the strange electricity in his blood.
He wonders, perhaps, if Blaine might be one of those mutants that he’s heard whispers about. Humans with strange mutations to their genes that give them weird abilities, but he pushes that thought to the back of his mind. He is not going to label the kid, not yet. Especially not when he knows that the government — being the government — will likely take in any kid labeled to have a mutation and perform extensive tests on them. He can’t do that to Blaine.
Tony also researches Christine Collins. He has JARVIS hack into every secure server in the world, looking for a trace of Blaine’s mother, but she’s disappeared completely. The name she’d given him was clearly a fake and the fingerprints he’d lifted off of the letter she’d left with Blaine aren’t in any system. He has no idea who the woman is apart from the fact that she obviously must have been hiding something if she felt the need to lie about her real name. He wonders if the torn clothes and burns on both her and Blaine had anything to do with the reason she’d lied. Christine Collins is a ghost, meaning he also has no good way of finding out any more information on Blaine’s birth records. All he has to go on is the information she’d given him in his letter:
Blaine was born on July 19, 1995. He’s terrified of the dark. And he won’t sleep without the hideously ugly brown cape that she’d used as a baby blanket.
That’s all the information that Tony has about his son. That’s all his mother felt was important to tell him. The rest he will just have to discover in time.
****
It is his eighth day as a father when Tony leaves Blaine at home with Happy to attend a meeting at Stark Industries, one he unfortunately can't put off any longer than he already has. It’s during the meeting that one Ms. Pepper Potts corrects an error in his accounting and he realizes that if he is going to be a father, he can’t do it on his own anymore. He is going to make mistakes, like the accounting error he made after trying to get work done with a baby screaming in his ear. He promotes Pepper on the spot from Assistant to the Director of R&D to Assistant to the CEO. He doesn’t discuss the promotion with anyone else before making the call, but he knows his employees know better than to question it.
Pepper enters their lives that day and helps Tony come up with a schedule that’s manageable so that he can take care of Blaine and still run his company. He absolutely refuses to let Blaine be raised solely by nannies like he was. He’d already been abandoned by his mother, Tony isn’t about to abandon him, too.
****
Blaine’s seven months old the day the couch catches on fire and Pepper convinces him that it must have been a candle, despite the fact that Tony hates the damn things and refuses to have them in his house. Perhaps one of the girls he’s had over had brought one and he didn’t realize it, but that doesn’t account for how he can’t find said candle, or how it had become lit in the first place.
****
On Tony’s birthday, Blaine’s ten months old and Tony swears he sees him levitate above his crib on the baby monitor. Happy laughs at him and tells him to slow down on the drinks, except Tony hasn’t been drinking. He’d given up alcohol the day Blaine came to live with him. Happy tells him that somebody probably spiked the punch, and Tony agrees. It’s the only reasonable explanation because people just don’t have the ability to fly. It’s scientifically impossible.
****
Blaine is one when he falls down the stairs leading to the garage and Tony hears the sickening snap of a bone followed immediately by a blood curdling scream. Blaine’s broken his wrist and it is already starting to bruise and swell by the time Tony can reach him. He doesn't think. He simply throws a screaming Blaine in his car seat and breaks several laws rushing him to the hospital. By the time they get X-rays done, the swelling is gone, along with the tears. The doctor later comes in to tell him that it’s normal for parents to overreact. Blaine doesn’t have so much as a bruise on his body from the fall, though he’d been playing at the top of the stairs when he did. Tony can’t explain it, but he’s too grateful that Blaine’s alright to obsess over it.
He installs baby gates around the house that afternoon, finally admitting to Pepper that he should have done it when she told him to earlier. Regardless of how tacky it makes his house look to have the gates up, Tony is terrified of anything happening again. He knows they can’t always be as lucky as they were today.
****
When Blaine’s two, Tony admits that his son might not be entirely normal. He’s working on the engine of his 1936 Bugatti, waiting for JARVIS to finish some calibrations on his latest prototype — a new kind of land mine — when he looks up to see Blaine walking towards him and about to walk right through the area where he’s spread out the mines.
“Stop!” Tony yells and runs over to grab Blaine before anything horrible can happen, never stopping to wonder how Blaine bypassed all the security he has on the door or why JARVIS never announced his entrance. When his hands reach out to grab Blaine around the waist, they pass right through him and his hands tingle with what feels like static electricity. The image of Blaine before him fades away like smoke and when he looks back to the baby monitor in confusion, Blaine is still sleeping peacefully in his own bedroom, snoring away, graceful as always.
“What the fuck, JARVIS,” Tony yells, trying to catch his breath from the monumental scare he’s just had. Had JARVIS really just created a hologram of his son and for what? To ensure he has a heart attack and dies young?
“It wasn’t me, Sir,” JARVIS says. “Blaine appears to be emitting some sort of energy.”
“What kind of energy?” he asks, peering closer to the screen as if he can see what is happening for himself.
“It doesn’t match anything in the known databases.”
Tony pulls up the readings and examines them closely, trying to remember if he’s seen anything like this before. He has, just not to this extreme level, he’d seen them two years ago when he’d first taken Blaine in. The energy is the same kind of strange electricity that he’d found in Blaine’s blood. He wonders, not for the first time, just where his son came from.
He notices that the room has gone silent and with the instincts only a parent has, he knows that Blaine’s up from his nap, for he no longer hears his light snoring. He waves his hand, clearing the screen, and attempting to clear his mind with it. When he moves to head upstairs, he’s reminded of the land mines he’d been experimenting with earlier.
“Hey, you, Dum-E! Clean this up. There are kids in the house, Jesus,” he orders, trying not to think about what would have happened if Blaine really had found his way into the room. He's always careful to lock the doors to his garage at all times and only allows Blaine to enter when he isn’t working on anything dangerous, but still. All the security features in the world aren’t worth the risk. Not when he has no idea just what his son is capable of doing.
****
After weeks of extensive tests in which Tony can find no scientific reason for Blaine’s apparent astral projection, Tony contacts the leading expert in genetic mutation — what they are calling the X-gene — Professor Charles Xavier. They travel to upstate New York, where Xavier takes one look at Blaine and says, “He’s not one of ours. I can’t tell you what’s going on with him, but I can tell you it’s not the X-gene.”
Tony argues with Xavier and may or may not accuse him of being a fraud. Several choice words are said, mostly on his end, until Blaine’s crying and Tony is getting thrown out by a man wearing some futuristic, Jetson family, shades and his blue, furry friend who does not appreciate being called “Fluffy.” He’s staring at the gates of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, debating the best way to impose revenge, when Blaine’s small arms wrap around his leg. He feels a jolt of electricity run through his body and go straight to his heart, but it makes him feel warm and loved in a way he’s never had before Blaine came into his life.
“What do you say we ditch these losers and get out of here?” he asks, to which Blaine just buries his face into his thigh.
“It’s fine,” he reassures him, knowing how Blaine gets around confrontation. He doesn’t handle it well. “We’ll hop back on the jet and hit up Chicago on the way back. I’m really craving some deep dish pizza and you’d like the Shedd Aquarium.”
“Daddy mad,” Blaine says softly and Tony can still hear how his voice is shaking from crying earlier. “Iss okay.” Blaine kisses his leg to make it better, like Pepper always does for him. Tony, despite himself, smiles.
He picks the kid up and walks back to the car. “Come on, I’m sure there’s a dolphin or something they’ll let us buy.”
A few hours later, Tony finds out that they won’t let him buy a dolphin no matter how much money he throws at them, but if he wants to donate that kind of money, they are more than willing to name an entire wing after him, and Tony’s just narcissistic enough to agree. Blaine takes his time deciding which area of the aquarium he likes best and eventually decides on the sharks, picking the Wild Reef. Within a month, the area is renovated and renamed Stark’s Wild Reef. There’s an entire wall with pictures of him and Blaine visiting the aquarium with a nice write up about all of the philanthropy he does.
It makes the kid smile and earns him a solid week without a single newspaper declaring him the Merchant of Death. There’s even a nice writeup in Time Magazine about their latest work with intelli-crops.
Sometimes, Tony really feels like he’s got this whole fatherhood thing down to a science.
****
The day after he gets back from his conference in Bern, his door opens, right on schedule, and he hears the pitter-patter of four-year-old feet shuffling his way. When he cracks his eyes open, Blaine’s little curly head is right next to his, wearing a big smile on his face. He’s got his hands fisted into the sheets and is doing his best to climb up. Tony grabs him and rolls out of bed, careful to cover up his date so that Blaine doesn’t see anything inappropriate. It’s a practiced move on his end, something he’s spent years perfecting, ever since Blaine was old enough to walk and started coming and waking him up in the morning.
He walks them into the guest room where he grabs a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to throw over his boxers, before heading down the hall to Blaine’s room. They are quiet during the entire morning routine, another practiced move. The last thing Tony needs is for his date from the night before to wake up and see him in his “dad” mode and start thinking he’s boyfriend material. Girls always get attached when they see him with Blaine and he hates it. Blaine hates it.
They brush their teeth in Blaine’s bathroom and get him ready for pre-school, before heading into the kitchen to grab their breakfast. Tony pours a cup of coffee for himself and a bowl of cereal for Blaine, then they both head downstairs to the garage for a little bit. They’ve got another hour before Blaine has to be at school and the glorious thing about the garage is that nobody can bother them down there. Pepper will arrive at some point to get rid of his date. He’s not sure how she does it, but he pays her a lot of money so that he doesn’t have to know.
The entire morning routine is silent. It always is whenever they have company they are trying to avoid so they won’t get stuck having breakfast upstairs with a girl that won’t stop saying how “cute” Blaine is and how “adorable” Tony is with him. Tony loves that Blaine detests those mornings just as much as he does and is willing to remain silent so that they never have to happen, because, quite frankly, the fact that Blaine is able to remain silent for an entire half hour is a miracle. Pepper likes to tell him that Blaine’s inherited the love of hearing his own voice from Tony, but Tony’s pretty sure that’s something that had to come from his mother.
The second the garage door closes and locks behind them, they are free to relax and be themselves once more.
“I miss you when you go do the science talks,” Blaine says, his voice still carrying a bit of a lisp even as he’s started seeing a speech therapist. He carefully takes the cereal out of Tony’s hands and setting it down on the table by the TV so that it won’t spill.
“Well that’s obvious. Pepper’s pretty boring,” Tony jokes. “She’s not nearly as cool as me.”
“No,” he admits, before turning back to the TV and telling JARVIS to play an old episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy. The show had ended last year, but in the Stark house, they refuse to accept defeat. Any show about science, is a show worth saving. He had contemplated buying the rights to the show so that he could produce his own episodes, but in a rare moment of sanity, knew that would be a bit extreme no matter how much money he had. So Tony had just bought all the episodes on VHS for Blaine, and uploaded them to JARVIS’s server so that they could watch any episode they wanted with a simple command. Today, Blaine asks to watch the episode about the solar system. He’s obsessed with space.
“Daddy, will I ever travel space again?” he asks once the episode ends.
“Again?” he laughs. “Have you been making intergalactic trips without me?”
“Yeah,” he says, completely serious and Tony has to wonder if he’s pulling his leg and if so, just when he’d picked that up. He’s about to say something when Blaine adds, “With Mommy.”
It feels like a bucket of ice has just been dropped on him.
“What?” he barely manages to get out, frantically wondering at what point Christine has come back into the picture and when she’d seen Blaine without him knowing about it.
“When I sleep, Mommy comes to get me and we go to space and see her world,” Blaine continues to explain and Tony is so confused about what he’s talking about before he puts two and two together.
First of all, Blaine’s talking about a dream, nothing that happened in real life. His son hasn’t seen his mother, just like he obviously has never been to space. He’s four, of course he’s going to start wondering about his mom and his mind will start thinking up creative reasons about why she’d left him behind. He shouldn’t have gotten so worked up, he’s pretty positive that they will never see Christine again.
“So your mom is an alien,” he laughs, picturing his mother. She certainly looked other worldly in that strange outfit the night she dropped Blaine off, but an alien, she most definitely was not.
“That’s not what she says.” Blaine shakes his head and heads for the door. It’s time for them to head to school.
“And what does she say?” he asks, grabbing his shoes and following after his son.
“She’s a god.”
“A god, huh? Then that makes you what? Jesus?”
“No,” Blaine giggles. “It makes me Blaine,” he says with all the innocence of a four year old.
It’s the last time Blaine ever brings up his mother and Tony completely forgets about this moment until several years down the road when he meets his first Asgardian.
****
Blaine’s five when Tony drops his extensive research on what’s wrong with his son, and instead begins focusing on how he can protect him from the outside world instead.
They were in the kitchen, arguing over something so stupid that Tony can’t even remember what it was. He just remembered yelling at Blaine, who’s little fists were shaking in rage. Blaine had screamed out, “NO!” and when his little hands had been thrown out, two giant holes were blasted into the walls, causing a gas line to begin leaking. Pieces of drywall and wood were all over the kitchen, and Tony was scraped up but free of any serious injury. Blaine stood shielded from it all, a bright blue light surrounding him that slowly faded as his little eyes looked around in confusion. He could smell the gas and grabbed Blaine as quickly as he could and ran out of the house. They made it to the end of the driveway when an explosion went off and the fire started.
The police showed up about the same time as the fire trucks did, and Tony just knew if he told anyone what really happened, that they would ship Blaine off to become a lab rat and he’d never see him again. So Tony lied. He told everyone that he was drinking, slurring his speech as he did so for added effect. He explained he was simply working on a project in the kitchen when he accidentally blasted a hole through the wall. He had to pay off a cop to fake his breathalyzer results, but everyone bought the story and that was the important part.
He was so convincing, that even as Blaine cried to the police officer, “No, it wasn’t Daddy. It was me,” nobody believed him.
He was placed under arrest and when he was at the station for processing, he found out that Blaine had been placed in the care of Child Protective Services while they tried to locate another family member to take care of him. Tony knew that there wasn’t another family member to be found, unless CPS could somehow, in 24 hours, track down a woman he’s spent 5 years looking for.
“Call Pepper Potts,” he said. It didn’t take long to convince social services that he’d be better off with Tony’s assistant than he would be with strangers. She wasn't technically a family member, but she had practically raised him and that was good enough for CPS.
That night should be a blur thanks to all the adrenaline that had been racing through him at the time. Instead, it replays in his mind, crystal clear, over and over, haunting him as he spends two nights in jail before finally being allowed to leave on bail. He’s granted this freedom under the condition that he can’t see Blaine until after his trial. Tony doesn’t like it, but his lawyer tells him if he makes a scene, he’ll make it harder to convince a judge to give back his parental rights.
When Happy drops him off at home, it’s to a house that feels too big, too empty without Blaine and still smells like smoke thanks to the entire north wing being destroyed by the fire. That area of the house is now blocked off with tarps from where Pepper has already called in a construction crew to start repairing the damage. She’d tried to convince him to stay at a hotel, but he’d explained that it was bad enough being away from Blaine, he wanted to at least sleep in his own bed. He didn’t tell her that he plans on spending the next three weeks in Blaine’s bedroom, sitting in front of the TV watching home movies. He’s still got his pride even if he’s lost everything else.
He wonders if it was worth it. The lies he’s told that have now branded him as an incompetent father. However, he knows that no matter what happens, even if he’s never allowed to see Blaine again because of this, it’s a million times better than his son spending the rest of his life in a laboratory while some jackass pokes at him, trying to figure out what makes him tick. So he reminds himself that he’s strong enough to take whatever they can throw at him, so long as Blaine is safe.
He tunes out the news reports that label him a monster. He ignores the protests from angry mothers, demanding Blaine be taken away from him for good. He meets with the court ordered psychiatrist for evaluation, knowing that his lawyer says it’s important to show the judge that he’s mentally capable of taking care of Blaine. He starts attending AA meetings for an alcohol problem he doesn’t have — a problem he hasn’t had since Blaine came into the picture. He does everything he can to show the judge that he should get Blaine back. Even though he knows that Blaine’s perfectly healthy with Pepper and he trusts her to take care of him, he just needs his son at home.
He’s absolutely shattered without him. Everywhere he looks, he’s reminded of Blaine’s presence and it tears at his heart in a way nothing else ever could. He trips over stray Power Rangers and toy trucks and it makes him cry like he hasn’t cried since he was a kid. He passes by a picture of the two of them that Pepper had framed and hung last year. He passes it every day and each time, he can’t breathe. In the picture, he’s teaching Blaine how to re-build Dum-E. He’s working on the robot while Blaine stares at him in pure admiration. Tony wonders how long he can truly live with this heartache.
He’s forced to watch Blaine cry over the monitor when he’s told that he can't see Tony. He has to listen to his son call out for him, knowing he can’t go to him. It feels like he’s drowning, but he has to keep his head above water for Blaine’s sake. It would be so easy to let himself slip into a deep depression and drown out his pain with a lot of sex, alcohol, drugs, and snark, but he can’t. As easy as it would be to go back to being the man he used to be, Blaine’s counting on him to fix this.
He’d never mattered to anybody before Blaine came along. He'd never been that person that somebody looked at and thought, ‘yes, my life would be empty without Tony Stark in it.’ He just wasn’t one of those people that others got emotionally attached to, he’s still not. It’s never concerned him before. He matters to the world in entirely different ways.
He matters in the way that thousands of people pay their rent and feed their family with every government contract he guarantees his company. He matters in the way that his inventions keep soldiers safe overseas so that they can return to that special somebody back home safe and sound. He matters to the scientists, academics and even loyal Page Six readers.
He might not matter to the world in the way that people like Pepper matter — people with hearts of gold who give themselves so openly to others. But Tony Stark matters to the world in other ways. That had always been enough for him. He never needed anyone else before. He still doesn’t need anyone else. Not if they aren’t Blaine. The moment Christine had dropped Blaine off with him, his entire world turned on it’s axis and began revolving around his son. The center of gravity shifted and no matter what Tony was doing, everything always pulled him back to Blaine.
Now his entire life is chasing monsters out from under the bed and cleaning up vomit every time somebody at the office decides to sneak Blaine candy — seriously it’s a weekly offense and nobody seems to read his memos on the matter. Well, that was his entire life. Now he’s not sure if he’ll ever get to see Blaine again.
He wakes up and keeps expecting to see his little fuzzball bundled up under a pile of Ninja Turtles blankets at the foot of his bed, having wandered in at some point during the middle of the night. He tries to distract himself with work, but he’s grown so accustomed to only working when Blaine’s asleep that he can’t concentrate without the sound of Blaine snoring away on the security camera.
“When you think things are bad, when you feel sour and blue, when you start to get mad… you should do what I do!” Tony reads Blaine his bedtime story over the video phone twelve days into their court mandated separation.
“Just tell yourself Duckie, you’re really quite lucky! Some people are much more.. oh ever so much more.. oh muchly much-much more unlucky than you!”
Blaine is lying in bed with his arms wrapped tightly around the stuffed shark he’d gotten in Chicago years ago. He can see how fake Blaine’s smile is; how close he is to tears. He can tell how miserable Blaine is over the fact that he’s only allowed to see his dad through a computer screen, but he’s resolved himself to his fate. It breaks his heart. He’s doing his best to make this as easy on Blaine as possible. He’d tried to give Blaine his space, hoping that if he was out of sight, he’d be out of mind as well. The first four days, he’d called Pepper to check in, but was careful to only do so when Blaine was either asleep or at school. That hadn’t lasted long though, as Pepper told him that Blaine thought it meant Tony didn’t love him anymore. So he’s started calling as much as he can, and while Blaine is still unhappy, Pepper assures him it’s helping.
He does everything he can to ease the transition. He picks out bedtime stories that he hopes will remind Blaine that things aren’t as bad as they could be, stories that tell him to have hope and stay strong. He helps him with his math homework before dinner, staying up late the night before inventing screen share so that he can teach Blaine despite the distance. He calls every morning for just a minute or two to wish him luck at school. It’s not easy on them, but he’s doing the best he can.
Still, Blaine cries almost every day, and today isn’t any exception. Tony gets through most of the book without incident. It isn’t until he’s reading, “Thank goodness for all of the things you are not! Thank goodness you’re not something someone forgot,” that Blaine loses it.
“I want to go home,” Blaine sobs, trying to wipe his tears away with the back of his hand.
“I know, Kid,” he says, desperately wanting to reach out and hold him. “I know this is hard, but it's just 10 more days. If you can be brave for 10 more days, I can go talk to the judge and ask him if you can come home. Can you do that for me?”
Blaine doesn’t answer, but he nods his head and tries to take deep breaths to stop his tears.
“I redecorated your room,” Tony says, trying to cheer him him. “It was going to be a surprise for when you came home, but I installed the AI Smart tech in your room.”
Blaine gives him a shaky smile, hiccuping loudly as he tries to say, “yeah?"
“Yep. Now you can do your work like Daddy does, does that sound cool?”
Blaine simply nods, clearly having exhausted himself.
"Alright, well goodnight, Kid. Try not to drive Pepper too crazy.”
He says his goodbyes and promises to call back in the morning, before he has to leave for school. He ends the call and heads down the hall to Blaine’s bedroom, where he’s been sleeping. He hadn’t been lying when he told Blaine about the new bedroom. He’s been keeping himself busy by making sure the entire house is in tip top shape for when Blaine’s case worker stops by.
While the construction workers are being paid overtime to make sure that all of the work on the north wing is finished within 3 weeks, he’s cleaned out the basement of anything that could be considered dangerous and moved it to his lab at Stark Industries. He’s repainted Blaine’s room to cover up the random dings and gashes in the wall from Blaine playing a little too rough with his toys. He doesn’t want the case worker to read anything into them that’s not true. He figured while he was at it, he might as well replace the floor to ceiling windows that make up the entire South wall of the room with the same AI Smart tech that his bedroom had. It’s probably more than Blaine needs, but he’ll grow into it. For now, it’s enabled him to finally take down the hideous curtains that he hated.
He lays down on the floor where he’s dragged in the mattress from the guest bedroom. He can’t bring himself to sleep in Blaine’s bed, but at least being in his room helps him get to sleep better at night. He pulls a pillow off of his bed and hugs it tightly to his chest, inhaling deeply and willing himself to just survive for 10 more days.
The next morning, after Blaine’s been dropped off at school, Tony and Pepper meet up at Stark Industries under the guise of getting some work done. Tony’s really only going so that he can grill her about how Blaine’s doing. He has no interest in sitting through another boring meeting or signing any paperwork. Though he takes plenty of joy in firing the two girls at the front desk who whisper about what a horrible father he is, thinking he can’t hear them.
“You’re not going to yell at me about HR and unemployment?” he asks once the girls have stormed out the door and made a huge scene.
“I’ve wanted to punch those two every day for the past two weeks, I could care less about paying their unemployment,” she says as they step into the elevator.
“You didn’t sleep last night,” he points out, commenting on the bags under her eyes. She simply glares at him.
“Come on,” he says. “This is me asking how you are. This is me showing interest, I think it’s progress.”
“You want to know how you ask somebody how they are? You don’t point out how shitty they look after they’ve stayed up all night with your son. You say, ‘Good morning, Pepper. You look nice today. How are you?’”
“So you want me to start lying to you?” he asks, genuinely perplexed. He’d grown up with a father who lied out of his ass, making his mother miserable more often than not. He firmly believed the foundation of any working relationship was honesty. It’s the reason why he’s yet to fire Pepper even though she’s much harder on him than any of his previous assistants. She’s the only person who will call him out when he’s being an asshole and he loves that about her as much as he hates it.
She grumbles a few choice words under her breath and shoves a stack full of papers into his hands. “Sign these and don’t forget you’re meeting with Obadiah at 9. I’ve got work to do.”
“No, hey, come on,” Tony calls after her. “Why was Blaine up all night?”
Pepper stops with her back to him and takes a deep breath. He doesn’t have to see her face to know that she’s counting to 10. He can see it in the way her shoulders start to relax when she hits around ‘5,’ how she doesn’t turn around until about ‘3.’ Only opening her eyes to look at him once she’s reached ‘1.’
She leads him into his office and the two of them sit down at the circular table where they usually take their lunch. “Blaine thinks he’s being punished for what happened and that’s why he’s not allowed to see you.”
“You told him that it’s not his fault, right?” Tony asks, his voice hitching slightly.
“I’ve tried, but I don’t really understand what happened,” she says. “You keep telling me that you were drinking when I know for a fact you’ve never had so much as a sip of champagne at New Years anytime Blaine is around, which is pretty much 95% of the time. So I know you’re lying to me, but the stories he’s telling don’t make any sense either.”
“What has he told you?” he asks, holding his breath.
He needs Blaine to stop telling everyone about what happened. He knows that the cops didn’t believe him, but the more times he tells the story, the more likely it is that somebody might start looking too closely at the case and see that something doesn’t quite fit with Tony’s story. For starters, the only equipment in the house even remotely capable of blasting through drywall was locked in the basement where there are walls made out of an adamantium alloy that Tony’s pretty sure even an atomic bomb couldn’t blast through, though he hasn’t been stupid enough to actually conduct any experiments to prove that fact. Not to mention that anyone that’s ever seen Tony with Blaine could testify that he’d never do anything that would even remotely injure his son. If anyone were to start investigating what happened, the story would fall apart quicker than a piece of Hammer tech.
“He said that he was angry because you told him that he couldn’t come with you to your weapons demonstration in New Mexico and that when the two of you started fighting about it, he got so upset that he blew a hole in the wall,” Pepper explains with a roll of her eyes like it’s the craziest thing she’s ever heard. He doesn’t know if he should tell her it’s the truth, even if he hadn’t remembered what it was that had started the argument.
“Pepper,” he says slowly, wanting to make sure that she follows his directions without asking too many questions. “You need to get him to stop telling that story.”
“Why?” she asks, suspiciously.
“Because if the wrong person were to hear it, it would be incredibly bad.”
“Worse than you getting arrested and have CPS take your kid away?” she presses and he can tell that she knows there’s something he isn’t telling her.
“Much worse,” he says. “What’s happened so far is inconvenient and quite frankly just sucks. However, what could happen is dangerous.”
“Tony, just tell me what you did,” she says, losing her patience. “You know I’ve lied to cops for you before and I’ll do it again. Just tell me what’s going on so I can help you.”
“It’s not what I did, Pepper,” he admits, knowing if there’s anyone else in the world he can trust to keep his secret, it’s her.
Her face goes from one of annoyance to confusion, then slowly drops in shock at the realization.
“Oh my god,” she whispers. “He’s telling the truth? How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know, but we really can’t afford for anyone to find out,” he says.
****
It's the day that Tony gets Blaine back… the day that Blaine’s so excited that he accidentally levitates himself onto the roof… that Tony becomes the Tony Stark that everyone knows and loathes. He becomes the crass, cocky, incredibly arrogant man that the press has always made him out to be and he doesn't have an ounce of shame about it. Except, he doesn’t do it because he’s selfish or careless, like everyone says. He does it because he’s smart and calculating. He does it because he can’t afford to be weak anymore, not if he wants to make sure that Blaine not only remains safe, but that he also remains in his care.
He fireproofs every surface of the house as best he can, hoping to prevent anything too dangerous from happening again. He plants several tall trees around the property so that the neighbors can’t spy in and accidentally see anything strange. Then, he starts throwing outrageous parties.
The first girl to see one of Blaine’s astral projections, goes directly to the press and is labeled an addict. The papers determine that he’s one too and that’s all anybody does at the Stark house — get high and hallucinate. CPS comes again to tries and take Blaine away, but when they don’t find any evidence of drugs or abuse, they are forced to leave.
When Blaine wakes up from a nightmare and manages to somehow emit a light bright enough to wake the entire neighborhood, everyone assumes it’s one of Tony’s obnoxious party tricks and tries to have the homeowner’s association kick him out. Except, to do so, they have to take him to court. His neighbors may be rich, but he’s ten times richer and the lawyers shut the entire thing down in a heartbeat.
By the time Blaine’s entering middle school, he’s managed to learn enough control that his powers only come out when he’s extremely scared or angry. He can’t control them in the sense that he can call upon them whenever he wants, but he can suppress them. Tony goes from having fire extinguishers delivered to the house regularly and in bulk, to mostly only needing them when one of his own experiments goes awry. It’s a nice change of pace for them, but Tony keeps up his crazy antics because he never knows when a problem will arise and he wants to be prepared.
“Why do you let them say these horrible things about you?” Blaine asks one day when they are sitting down to dinner. He’s got the latest issue of the Times in front of him and is reading something with a look of pure disgust.
“What did they say this time?”
“The usual,” he says. “They accused you of war profiteering, double dealing, and my personal favorite part which reads, ‘Tony Stark is a selfish, egotistical man who cares more about his profit margins than the millions of innocent women and children his weapons have killed over the years. He’s incapable of taking responsibility for anything, let alone a child. I continue to be surprised that CPS has not taken his son away from him, despite their many attempts.’”
“Not a single mention of our medical advances? That’s a real shame,” Tony says.
“Dad,” Blaine groans. “Don’t you care that these people think you’re an asshole.”
“Better they write about me than you,” he says with a pointed look. He’s tough enough to take their criticisms. He’s been hearing it all of his life. What he couldn’t take is anybody finding out the truth about Blaine.
“You know as well as I do that the only reason CPS ever gets called is because of my actions, not yours,” Blaine says. “Why don’t you ever say something.”
“Listen Kid, the people’s opinions I care about are at this table. It’s me and you, in that exact order.”
Blaine rolls his eyes, knowing that he’s joking. If Tony really didn’t put Blaine ahead of him, then he would never have allowed himself to get arrested no less than five different times, due to him taking the blame for something Blaine had accidentally done.
“I wish I could let things roll of my back as easily as you do,” Blaine mumbles.
“Somebody says two words to you, and you give me their name,” he says. “I’ve got a basement full of new tech I’m just dying to try out on a test subject.”
Yes. It’s twelve years later and he’s still not in any danger of being labeled a “good person” but it can never be said that he doesn’t love his son.
****
It’s May 19th and Tony’s leaving for a weapons demonstration in Afghanistan, but he promises Blaine that he’ll be back in time for his 8th grade graduation on the 25th. Tony promises a lot of things to a lot of people that he never means, but when he promises something to Blaine, it’s real. It’s this broken promise that might just hurt worse than the shrapnel. He’s not sure yet, the verdict’s still out.
The “fun-vee” is anything but; his heart gets hooked up to a car battery; he’s tortured and screamed at in a language he can’t understand; and he’s told he can either make a weapon for a terrorist group or he can die. So, yeah, he can’t quite make it to Blaine’s graduation. From what Pepper will later tell him, neither can Blaine, who’s too devastated to leave his room for an entire month.
When Yensin asks him if he’s going to do anything, his first instinct is to refuse. To tell the ass-clowns no and let them kill him. His company has been making weapons for America since World War II and he’s not about to have Stark-made tech fired on his own fucking country. Not on his watch. Except, he can’t say no, because he’s got a son at home. All he can think about is how Blaine will be left with no one and worry over what will happen to him once Tony’s not around to keep him safe.
Tony Stark cannot die in an Afghan cave.
Those weapons aren’t his legacy, they’re his father’s. He’s simply been keeping it alive because it’s easier than finding another source of income and if he’s being honest, he does believe that the American military is the best military in the world and he’s proud of what he does. But those weapons are not his legacy, Blaine is. That he’s alive, living a good, happy life without fear of persecution is Tony’s legacy.
So he tells Sir Smells-A-Lot and his hairy band of baby-killers that he’ll build the Jericho missile, though he has zero intention of doing so. He lets Yensin believe that he’s doing it as a last stand, as some great show of defiance. He really does it for Blaine, because he’s terrified to think of what might happen to him the next time he has one of his ‘accidents’ and Tony’s not around to take the fall.
He builds himself a suit of armor, escapes, and the only reason he survives any of it is by keeping focused on the future ahead — on Blaine — and doing his best not to look back. When he finally touches down in America again, he knows that he’s never been more grateful than he is to see Blaine waiting there with Pepper and Happy. Blaine rushes up to hug him and the two of them stand there holding one another far longer than would be deemed manly, but nobody judges them. Blaine had spent months thinking he was dead and Tony… well he thought he was going to die in that cave, so neither of them believed they’d ever get the chance see each other again.
While the entire world is scrambling to discuss Tony Stark’s miraculous escape, Blaine couldn’t care less about any of it. He couldn’t care less about what a genius Tony is for being able to escape his kidnappers. He’s couldn’t care less that Tony basically made an arc reactor out of some wire and scraps, though that fact is being kept from the press. He doesn’t care about bottom lines and profit margins, so he doesn’t get upset when Tony pulls out of weapons manufacturing. He isn’t impressed by any of it.
Blaine’s never gotten too caught up in fame, at least, he’s stayed out of as much of it as possible. To Blaine, he’s never been the legendary Tony Stark, he’s always just been Dad. All Blaine cares about is if he’s going to be there when he gets home from school to help with his science project. He’s focused on the fact that he can once again order food for two when he’s calling in for Chinese. He’s ecstatic to be waking up to the sounds of “Back in Black” blasting from downstairs.
Blaine cares about Tony. He loves him, and not in the way that people always scream ‘Tony Stark, I love you!’ Blaine loves him in the way that his life would be empty without him.
And yeah, Tony’s not going to lie. That’s pretty fucking amazing and completely worth escaping for.
There’s a picture of the two of them hanging up in Tony’s garage where only those closest to him could ever see it. It’s from several years ago, right when they’d first gotten Blaine. He was eight months old and sucking on the end of Tony’s finger while the both of them dozed off in the 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa he’d been working on. It’s Tony’s favorite picture of them together and he likes being able to look at it from time to time, especially now, after everything…
When he’s building the Mark II and working out exactly how the flight stabilizers would work, he likes to look at that picture and remember why it is he’s doing this. Why he has to start concerning himself with the problems of the world, because he can’t leave Blaine behind to clean up his mess. He has to go out there and destroy every terrorist group that has his technology. He has to make things right again so that he can be the kind of father Blaine would be proud of. That picture reminds him that he’s not his father, that his son knows he loves him. But more importantly, it reminds him that he can spend his entire life trying to prove that he’s nothing like his father, or he can put down his emotional baggage and start focusing on what’s important in life.
He might not be winning any parenting awards and everyone he talks to might criticize his parenting skills, but he loves Blaine with every cell in his body and he knows at the end of the day, that’s enough for Blaine. It might not be enough for the rest of the world, but it’s enough for them.
So when Tony Stark puts on his new and improved Iron Man suit, it’s not with saving the world in mind — though he certainly does his part. It’s not with his ever growing ego in mind — though, again, he feels pretty good about himself when he realizes he’s actually made a suit he can fly in. No. He puts on the Iron Man suit for Blaine, because —if it wasn’t clear before, it certainly will be now — he’ll do anything to keep his son safe.
****
Six months after Tony comes home and four months after he declares himself Iron Man, something horrible happens and Tony can’t shelter Blaine from the consequences of it, though he desperately tries. Blaine is attacked after a school dance by three kids and almost dies before his powers kick in and kill the kids. Blaine’s so devastated that guilt doesn’t even begin to describe the pain he feels. His physical wounds heal within a day — his body never takes long to recover even when he’s been beaten to within an inch of his life — but his emotional wounds are something Tony can’t heal.
The police try to arrest him for his crimes, but SHIELD steps in to do that themselves. Blaine is taken to an unknown facility and it takes a week for Tony to hack into their systems and discover where he’s being held. He storms the facility and takes on a small army of agents who’d expected him to show up sooner or later. Eventually, Fury steps in and they sit down to discuss their options. Blaine is “clearly dangerous” according to SHIELD and they can’t just let him walk out the door. Tony argues that he’d simply acted under self-defense and since the law allows for that, the only reason SHIELD is holding him is because of his powers. He makes some outlandish comparisons to the civil rights movement and quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. once or twice. Then he compares SHIELD to the Nazi’s and asks him if they plan on rounding up and killing anyone with supernatural powers, which sounds ridiculous now, but will sound less so when, not quite a year from now, the Mutant Registration Act will be passed.
Eventually a deal is struck. Blaine won’t be tried for his crime, but he won’t be allowed to return to school, either. He’ll have to find a new school and he’s required to report to a SHIELD agent for training two hours every day after school in order to learn how to manage his power. Tony doesn’t want SHIELD to have anything to do with his son, but it’s better than the alternative where Blaine’s incarcerated for the rest of his life, so he reluctantly agrees.
In exchange for all of this, Tony agrees to act as a consultant and helps SHIELD by upgrading some of their tech as well as allowing Iron Man to be at their beck and call. Well, not exactly their beck and call. He doesn’t answer their phone calls regularly, and he picks and chooses the missions he accepts based on the ones that interests him, but he does step in whenever something is especially pressing.
From that day forward, Blaine is not simply a boy with some magical gifts. He’s labeled as a national threat and placed under heavy surveillance by several branches of the government. They never say it to Tony’s face, but with some research he discovers that Blaine’s listed in a special SHIELD database titled, “Super Villains.”
He honestly wants to scream in frustration. Between the two of them, Tony is the asshole here. Blaine is the most good and pure thing he’s ever known and while he might have killed three students with his powers, those boys had been about to murder him! How can he be labeled a hero when Blaine’s being called a villain? It doesn’t make any sense, but no matter how much he argues with Fury, nothing he says changes the fact that Blaine may be allowed to walk free, but he’s always going to be met with suspicion from everyone.
The thing that pisses Tony off the most, is that Blaine believes it all. He calls himself a monster and no amount of fatherly talks can convince him that what happened was not his fault. Blaine’s been blaming himself for every bad thing that’s ever happened to them since he was 5 years old and Tony first got arrested on Blaine’s behalf. It’s only made worse now that his powers have caused the death of three kids at his old school, bullies or not.
****
Tony’s not going to lie, he’s started to consider himself a hero. A good samaritan that does his part in making the world a better place. It could be that the papers have stopped writing about his sexual escapades and instead started writing about how he’s single handedly bringing about peace in the Middle East. It could be that little kids have started coming up to him and asking for his autograph, or that people stop him on the street so they can take selfies with him. It could be that he’s pretty much the only name in clean energy. There are comic strips about him in the paper, Iron Man action figures in the toy store, and little kids dressing up like him at Halloween. So yeah, it’s pretty easy to start considering himself a superhero, not unlike the way people used to idolize Captain America back in the day. Tony’s not the man he used to be. He’s better now, changed.
Sure, he’s still a bit arrogant and lives to push at people’s buttons just to see how they’ll react, but he’s not a bad person anymore. He likes to think he’s a pretty awesome person. It doesn’t hurt that now he doesn’t just have Blaine to remind him of that every day, but he’s got Pepper to crawl into bed with every night. She’ll whisper into his skin how proud she is of him and how much he’s changed and he’s started to honestly believe it. Believe that he could be the kind of man that they write history books about.
It’s why he’s so pissed off when Grandpa Rodgers starts questioning everything he does. When he’s working out what makes Bruce tick and wondering if he can teach Blaine the kind of control he’s mastered and the great Capcicle tells him he’s threatening the safety of the ship? When he starts accusing him of ignoring the problem? Yeah, Tony wants to put him back in his place and remind him that he knows what he’s doing. Unlike Steve, who’s only labeled a “hero” because of other people’s genius, he’s smart enough to know that following any SHIELD order blindly is a bad idea. In this moment, he might be on the same side as Fury, but any company that considers people like Blaine or Bruce to be genuine threats while feeding all of their money and resources into projects that basically call the worst of the worst to this planet? Yeah, it’s not a company he’s putting all of his faith in.
When Fossil Smurf says that Tony makes everything about him, it’s not the first time that Tony’s heard this, but it’s the first time that it actually gets to him. Is he a big man in a suit of armor? Yes, and he designed that armor by himself, creating the technology in an Afghan cave with only scraps and a gun pointed at his head. The part of him that makes him a hero? At least he created the technology himself. But sure, let’s take take his suit away. What is he then? He’s always been a genius, playboy, billionaire, but more importantly? Now he’s a philanthropist. His kindness isn’t reserved solely for his son anymore, it extends to anyone in need.
Then this pissant tells him that the only thing he fights for is himself, and he just wants to laugh. Tony might not do the whole self-sacrifice thing that the great Captain America is so famous for, but it’s not because he’s selfish. It’s because he can’t play that card. He can’t let himself die, even if it would be the “noble” thing to do. He has to find a way to always cut the wire instead, because he’s got a son at home that will likely be taken into SHIELD custody permanently the second he’s not around to stop them. This lab rat can call him selfish all he wants, but he’ll never know that all of the things he’s accusing him of? All of the crazy behavior that apparently turns the brown-nosing Steve Rogers off? It’s an act. It’s a piece of theatre that has been carefully constructed over the years.
For when Tony’s busy showboating and calling out ridiculous ship commands, that’s when he slyly puts spyware in place. Nobody bothers telling him not to touch Fury’s computer when he’s got a history of ignoring commands. Everybody laughs it off when he hacks into the CIA mainframe and doesn’t look too closely at the files he manages to get a hold of, because he once did so as a joke in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and anyone watching C-SPAN at the time. They don’t ask about the loud noises they hear coming from his house or the bright lights, because Tony’s the kind of guy who once decided, in the spur of the moment, to race in the Monaco Grand Prix. Everyone has written most of his behavior off as just part of his eccentricity, and nobody realizes that it’s exactly what he wants them to do.
It’s not until he’s nearly died sending a nuke into a wormhole that people start to realize that there might be more to Tony Stark than the self-absorbed, quick-witted, comedian that he shows the world.