Archive of Our Own

Insight

Tony Stark would be the first to admit he could be, and often was, arrogant. Generally speaking, it was warranted, though he would occasionally be wrong and overestimate either himself or the person he was dealing with. And, it must be said, his tolerance for avoidable stupidity was nonexistent, which usually came across as either ego or the aforementioned arrogance. The end result there, naturally, was that everyone involved got annoyed and/or their feelings were hurt, making cooperation difficult. And despite certain well-documented occasions — well, to be honest, his entire life — for his own sanity, he tried to assume at first that people were at least moderately good at their jobs (Justin Hammer did not count), especially when they were spies and law enforcement professionals.

In other words, Tony Stark was the walking embodiment of ‘the triumph of hope over experience’.

So when he and JARVIS infiltrated SHIELD during the Battle of New York, he found himself a smidge disappointed that nobody noticed. Nor was their presence clocked at any point during the next year, which was . . . slightly concerning. He was the best at what he did, yes, and he and JARVIS were unbeatable, but still: not a single person in SHIELD noticed anything was off?

Then he discovered HYDRA and actually sat there and stared at his computer for a solid twenty minutes, jaw working and coffee going cold as he processed both the arrogance and the massive, incredible, completely avoidable stupidity he was looking at. Not to mention the irritation at his vast overestimation of SHIELD’s overall competence.

And HYRDA’s, come to think of it. Being a century-old (at least) Super Secret Evil Organization who had infiltrated — well, everything, it seemed, and wasn’t that more than a little concerning? — one would think they would show at least a modicum of well-protected paranoia. But once they’d breached the primary firewall and Tony had exercised his puzzle-solving skills in breaking the encryption (which was really disappointing; it only took him five hours, two pots of coffee, and a forty minute break to design a new self-encrypting USB), JARVIS was able to wander around their files and create holes at his leisure. Also, doors, windows, tunnels, and an underground basement that made Tony smile with pride when he saw it.

(the thing about Tony Stark was this: yes, he knew how good he was and yes, he occasionally overestimated himself. But after Afghanistan, he was far more likely to sell himself short in a self-driven attempt to keep his ego from getting ridiculous. He had no desire to become Justin Hammer. Or Nick Fury. Or that viper Romanova. So while he knew that other hackers would have taken at least a week to breach the initial security and they would likely have been noticed two days in, if not caught, it was a remote thought. He was simply being pragmatic, because he could and would do it faster and more efficiently and also, since he was Tony Stark, he had a lot of protection most other people couldn’t dream of. The fact was, he shouldn’t have been able to do it either.

And he was the only one who didn’t realize that)

What with Tony actually having a job — you know, something small and unimportant, like being the owner, CTO, and head of R&D of Stark Industries — it took him a few weeks after his discovery of HYDRA to thoroughly sort through the information of the field agents, the scientists and techies, and those in positions of power, as well as separate the rot of HYDRA from the filth of SHIELD. Once he was satisfied he had a good grasp on the basics and a pretty solid understanding of the finer details, he took another week to decide how best to handle the situation. While he was mulling over his options, JARVIS, being the brilliant, wonderful AI that he was, decided to follow a hunch: he traced the connections and known associates of the names he already had and discovered another massive trove of high-level HYDRA operatives lurking in positions of power across the globe.

Literally.

Government, business, law enforcement, entertainment . . . the slimy little bastards were everywhere.

Tony soon found himself with a bigger dilemma: what to do about them? Handling the American problem was going to be a migraine by itself, and while he was powerful both in politics and business, he wasn’t in law enforcement and he wasn’t a government official (thank the heavens above he’d been smart enough to avoid that trap), which meant he had no authority to actually do anything with the criminal network he was steadily unearthing.

Added to that was the problem of burning out the rot at the roots to prevent reinfection, or at least make it stupidly difficult and thus, not worth the effort it would take.

Tempting though it was to just expose the entire bunch, he had learned well from the clusterfuck that was Stane and the corruption he’d spread throughout not just SI, but the military and more than a few government officials, so he knew that a full-on reveal would the stupidest thing in the world. If nothing else, the unshielded (ha!) public knowledge of just how much corruption there was, not to mention who some of those corrupted people were, would topple more than one government and destabilize dozens of societies.

In other words, a Dramatic Unmasking and Reveal would risk starting WWIII and definitely cause an actual global catastrophe.

Plus, SHIELD as an entity was apparently despised by the entirety of America’s intelligence network and the chatter he heard overseas was the same. Operating in secrecy was one thing; SHIELD was completely off any and all grids and, from what anyone could find, answered to no one.

It made people nervous and intelligence agencies did not like being nervous.

That discovery explained a lot, really, and Tony felt better about his response to their heavy-handed tactics during the Palladium Poisoning Incident. Not that he should have tolerated it at all, but at least he knew why he’d never heard of them — and why they’d been so comfortable with things like corporate espionage, assault, medical malpractice, death threats, and the slew of other illegal acts they’d committed along the way.

Armed with that hard-won knowledge, Tony aimed his sights at something reasonable: he decided to let someone else handle HYDRA. He had JARVIS cross-reference crimes and activities that couldn’t be tied to said Evil Organization and then sent a few names at a time, complete with dossiers and a list of the aforementioned non-HYDRA-related (and hopefully provable, because duh) crimes, and let the various alphabet agencies of the world do their jobs.

If he happened to let it slip that his information had been discovered due to SHIELD’s sloppy security . . . he heard no complaints.

More importantly, he got no pushback and not even a hint of any kind of ‘cease and desist’ notice.

If he heard more than a few evil cackles echoing across his various and sundry email correspondences regarding the dismantling of a spy agency so shady and suspect that even the Russians and the Chinese were giving it the side-eye, well . . .

And so it was that over the course of sixteen or so months, more than two hundred HYDRA agents in and outside of SHIELD were quietly and subtly investigated, starting with the powerful, influential positions. Most of them were subsequently arrested, charged, and tried. And the vast majority of those either went to prison or were executed. Those few who escaped prison and death were watched so closely, it verged on ‘creepy’. And at no time was their affiliation with HYDRA exposed.

Tony did have to wonder about that, given people’s general proclivity for gossip and their same inability to keep their mouths shut, but hey: not his circus, not his monkeys. He was more than happy with being the pipeline and once he and JARVIS got a system set up and a rhythm established, he was able to leave the bulk of the work to his AI, only getting involved when something truly delicate or potentially destructive came up.

Like Project Insight.

Tony raged for days about the sheer hubris of both HYDRA and SHIELD — because there it was, in black and white: proof that Fury was well aware of Insight and had, in fact, made a few of his own contributions — before dedicating himself to collating that list and then sending it to the various alphabet agencies as well, to issue any warnings and alerts they safely could.

Then that little tiny incident involving the Mandarin — the irony almost killed him, both literally and metaphorically, not least of which was learning that the VP hadn’t been a high-ranking member of HYDRA until he was elected, which was why he’d plummeted so spectacularly through the cracks — went down, followed by recovery from a serious, long-overdue surgery, one that left him incommunicado for two months. During that time, in which not a peep was heard from anyone associated with SHIELD (not even Fury trying to get himself added to Tony’s will ‘just in case’), JARVIS continued to feed names to the appropriate agencies and kept filtering through SHIELD’s data, because their hands weren’t even a little clean; if he’d had skin, it would have crawled at some of his discoveries.

So it was that JARVIS found the Winter Soldier.

And his identity.

And his mission list.

And a cache of video recordings, each one confirmation of an assassination.

Being a creation completely loyal to Tony Stark, he processed this information quickly, then gave careful consideration to his next move.

He summoned Happy Hogan.

It took only a few sentences to explain his discoveries, followed by an hour of Happy raging, cursing, killing the unfortunate Peace Lily on the small end table, and finally breaking down over the knowledge of what this would mean to Tony.

And what it would do to him.

It was a well-known fact — oh, no, it was a well-known lie — that Howard Stark had killed himself and his wife by driving drunk. That’s what the official autopsy had said, Obadiah Stane had said it, Peggy Carter had said it, and since it was an open secret that Howard was an alcoholic, albeit high-functioning, nobody had questioned it.

Tony hadn’t hated his father, justified though it would have been, but he did deeply resent him, and he’d loved his mother even more. Naturally, he’d despised Howard for killing his mom by something as stupid and selfish as driving drunk.

The problem was this: even though Tony’s thoughts and reactions were perfectly logical and reasonable — they had, in fact, been carefully cultivated by Stane and Peggy Carter — his deep-seeded guilt complex (also cultivated by Stane) would make him shoulder the full blame for believing what the entire world had told him what happened, starting with two people he’d been raised from birth to trust, a supposition backed by seventeen years of anecdotal evidence. There was no reason on earth for Tony to have thought otherwise, but he would still feel guilty for both assuming the worst and hating his father for something he hadn’t done.

Happy understood that and so did JARVIS.

Which was why he’d asked Tony’s bodyguard to come instead of his girlfriend or best friend.

“Sir needs someone who will let him rage and scream and melt down and hit someone or something without judgment,” he told Happy, who blinked in surprise that quickly morphed to understanding, tinged with both regret and resentment. He liked Rhodes and thought the world of Pepper, but he couldn’t deny that neither of them would be good for Tony’s emotional health if they were there when he was told. They both jumped straight to ‘manage Man-Child Tony’ when he got too worked up about something, a reaction that wasn’t warranted nearly as often as it happened, and they would try to get him to calm down and think rationally right off the bat, because Pepper hated anything that was messy and out of her control, and Rhodes had the military mindset of ‘walk it off’.

And they both had the ‘Tony is overreacting again’ mentality set to default.

It pissed Happy off but he rarely spoke up, because he was in a very awkward position. But the fact that JARVIS had called him . . . well. They both knew the truth and right now, that was the most important thing: that Tony had someone he could trust completely with him when he was told. Happy would gladly let his boss, his friend, throw punches at him while he screamed and sobbed and cursed and probably plotted world domination before realizing that would involve way too much paperwork. And when he’d exhausted himself, he knew he could collapse against Happy and just sob, and his friend would hold him without a word. No soothing platitudes and no ‘you need to man up’ pressure.

No judgment.

And that was exactly what happened.

Happy watched the video twice to desensitize himself and thus, be mostly ready to handle Tony’s reaction. As much as they both wished otherwise, there was no way to stop Tony from watching the recording. Sure, JARVIS could hide it for a while, and he would have done so if he thought it would be beneficial to his creator, but that would require hiding the rest of the cache and once Tony emerged from his haze of grief, he would go hunting for information about the Winter Soldier. If he found the recordings and learned that JARVIS (and Happy) had known and kept it from him . . .

JARVIS had no wish to be erased from existence, and neither did Happy.

It was as bad as they both feared, but they’d prepared well for it and Tony was able to vent his rage-fueled, guilt-fed grief in a safe environment, with the two people he trusted unconditionally. He drifted off to sleep four or so hours after watching the video and destroying the boxing ring and most of the room itself, hands bruised and bloody, voice hoarse, and slumped trustingly against Happy in the mostly-undamaged corner. His bodyguard and friend silently, protectively, held him and fobbed Pepper and Rhodes off with the excuse that Tony was stumped on a project and needed to punch something for a while, while JARVIS turned his full attention to hunting the Winter Soldier down.

He was infuriatingly unsuccessful, though it made sense: the man had been working as the Fist of HYDRA for going on 50 years and had rarely been seen, never mind captured.

Or unsuccessful.

So it stood to reason that HYDRA kept him hidden when he wasn’t on an active mission.

Still, JARVIS was able to get a comprehensive list of their bases and bunkers and started running patterns and connections, attempting to narrow the possibilities down and make Sir’s hunt less frustrating. Sir would find the Winter Soldier, but they would all prefer it happen sooner rather than later and as easily as possible.

Stumbling across Alexander Pierce’s connection to the assassin was an unexpected Godsend, though it didn’t actually lead to Barnes. On top of that, JARVIS knew that actually getting enough information and evidence to prosecute the man would be problematic. Sir would succeed there as well, but it wasn’t going to be easy.

But then, very little for Tony Stark was truly easy and he rarely minded having to work for something.

And this would kill two birds with one stone, as the saying went: Sir could personally take down a high-ranking HYDRA official and find the man who had murdered his parents while expunging a little more of his anger.

Tony — or rather Happy — didn’t tell Pepper or Rhodes about the assassination until the former had solidified a plan to trap Pierce and get the information he so desperately needed, which resulted in a spate of hurt feelings and an unprecedented amount of whining.

And, of course, the blame game.

Happy Hogan shut them down so hard, one of Rhodes’ teeth cracked and so did both of Pepper’s Louboutin heels.

“You know, for grown-ass adults who are leaders in the military and the high-end, cutthroat business worlds, you’re a pair of bratty kids,” he snapped, bodily getting between them and Tony’s lab door. He was there, unable to hear but also determinedly ignoring them as he worked on a new SI project. He wanted the Winter Soldier badly, but not at the expense of everyone else. And he knew that letting himself focus solely on the assassin would only hurt him. He was almost to the point of truly letting himself understand that the man had been the weapon, and an unwilling weapon at that, but he was a long way from being able to consider the whole situation equitably and he knew it. So he let JARVIS handle the search for Barnes and did his best to ignore HYDRA’s existence unless his specific brand of expertise was required.

“Excuse me?” Rhodes demanded, his face full of affronted dignity that Pepper mirrored. Happy was unmoved.

“You heard me. Your best friend and your boyfriend just learned that he’s been lied to for three decades, by people he should have been able to trust, and instead of wondering why nobody told you first, you’re insulted. Well, tough. I’m not letting you take your hurt feelings and bruised egos out on Tony again, so I suggest you go hide in an office somewhere and really think about the reason JARVIS asked me to come alone instead of all of us. And don’t come back until you either understand or can at least act like a damn adult. He doesn’t deserve your scorn and he sure as hell doesn’t deserve your know-it-all condescension and the blame game you like to play,” he growled, eyes flashing with a protective anger that shut Pepper and Rhodes up more effectively than any gag.

Stunned speechless and still bristling with hurt feelings and insulted pride, the pair did indeed retreat to Rhodes’ SI office, where they proceeded to rant about Tony’s incessant need to keep everything to himself instead of trusting the people who loved him.

JARVIS tolerated that for an hour before he wordlessly lowered the giant projector screen Rhodes often utilized as part of his liaison duties and played a montage of his and Pepper’s greatest fuck-ups when it came to Tony Stark. Seeing his snide, hateful comment about needing to change Tony’s diaper on the plane to Afghanistan had him fending off a jaw-breaking slap from Pepper. Seeing his patronizing dismissal of Tony’s attempt to explain in more detail his reasoning for shutting down SI’s weapons department made him let an enraged Pepper hit him (she did actually give his jaw a hairline fracture).

Seeing her willful blindness regarding Romanova’s infiltration pissed him off to the point of hitting the wall because she so obviously expected Tony to behave like a braindead teenager lusting over a pretty girl, despite the fact that he’d never once let his dick make his business decisions, and thus completely disregarding the blaring red flags of 1) naked pictures on a CV for a tech company, 2) information so patently false, she’d actually said it out loud and still ignored it, and 3) her ability to take down Happy, who was a very well-trained bodyguard, with one move, and a highly specialized move at that. Pepper had ignored all of that in favor of talking down to and treating Tony like the aforementioned manchild who thought only with his dick.

Then, of course, was their mutual obliviousness to his increasingly erratic behavior — giving Pepper the position of CEO not just out of nowhere but also with none of the usual steps in between, for example, and endangering civilians in a drunken stupor while provoking Rhodes into a fight so stupid, even kindergartner kids would be disgusted — which shut them both up fast and hard. Because they could (and did) say ‘in hindsight, it was so obvious’ all they wanted, but the truth was undeniable: it was obvious at the time. They just hadn’t wanted to notice, because that would mean accepting that something was genuinely, seriously wrong  and they were both way too used to treating everything Tony did as a tantrum or childish, impulsive, or just plain stupid, attention-seeking behavior.

Watching repeated instances of Tony doing everything but setting off a signal flare in a bid for help or support or even just basic attention had Pepper crying into Rhodes’ handkerchief three minutes in. Rhodes joined her ten minutes later, because there were a lot of them.

Too many.

And even they couldn’t find it in themselves to ask why Tony hadn’t just said something.

Everyone knew exactly how they would have responded. And Tony hadn’t had the emotional or mental ability to deal with being accused of acting out for attention. He was too busy dealing with dying from the very thing that was keeping him alive.

Seeing her make the same damned mistake not even three months earlier, when Tony’s untreated PTSD accidentally endangered her, made Rhodes give her a darkly accusing look, one she couldn’t even begin to defend herself against. Yes, she’d been well within her rights to be frightened by waking up to an Iron Man suit hovering two feet above her, but her furious disregard for Tony’s obvious distress had been a really shitty move on her part, and now that she’d seen it firsthand, she couldn’t deny it. Tony badly needed therapy but couldn’t risk it, something she (and Rhodes and JARVIS and Happy and the entire mental health field) knew all-too-well, because, shockingly, he’d been betrayed there too, but she hadn’t made any effort herself to help him, or encourage him to really talk. The fact that he was bad at clearly communicating or expressing anything truly personal didn’t help, but the few times he had tried to open up, he was inevitably dismissed as being childish or exaggerating or just wanting her attention because he felt neglected.

With Rhodes being out on near-constant deployment as War Machine (and frequently being a condescending, judgmental ass when he was there) and Happy being both Tony’s employee and working primarily for Pepper by then, all Tony had in terms of actual people was Pepper.

And it — he — was too much effort.

Realizing that broke her.

It broke Rhodes, too.

JARVIS refused to feel guilt or remorse for his vindictive satisfaction. Yes, Sir had created or exacerbated many of his own problems, but having an actual support system would have helped immensely in curbing those habits. Instead, he’d ended up with ‘when it’s convenient and/or beneficial to me’ friends (to be fair, that attitude had been strongly encouraged by both Stane and a lot of the military brass), which had ultimately put them all in this situation: Tony didn’t, couldn’t, trust them with his private pain, because he knew they’d treat it as a joke or a tantrum or a childish display for attention.

It took Pepper three days to come to terms with her own attitude and behavior. It took three more, and two sessions with her brand-new therapist (one so thoroughly vetted, JARVIS knew the specifics of the man’s gastrointestinal problems), before she was able to muster the courage to go to Tony.

Knowing him as she did, she didn’t try to apologize. He couldn’t accept it yet, would in fact deflect it and spin it into a joke about his ego, and that wouldn’t help anyone right now. Instead, she curled up on his lab sofa, tugged his head into her lap, and tenderly stroked his hair while he told her about the happy memories he had of his mother.

Seeing and feeling how good it was, how beneficial for both of them, to treat Tony as the adult he was, was another painful revelation for Pepper, but this was a pain she welcomed. It would take a lot more than this to make things right between them and Tony was going to have to get professional help as well (which he would; he wasn’t foolish enough to try talking to Banner, but Christine Palmer had a few contacts in that field and one of them ended up working out), but for the first time, she could truly see a future for them.

It took Rhodes two weeks to go through the same process, minus the shrink, and four more days before he mustered the courage to go to Tony. He did apologize, because his relationship with his genius, fragile best friend was different, and this time, Tony accepted it without question or deflection or comment. Then Rhodes settled in to help him finalize his plans for Alexander Pierce, because Tony was his little brother and nobody hurt him like this and got away with it, only for his leave request to be denied and instead be sent on a top secret mission to Jordan the next day by a general who was still mad that Tony had stopped making weapons six years earlier.

When that general ended up with pictures of his ongoing affair with his daughter’s softball coach plastered across the internet, Rhodes just grinned viciously and sent JARVIS a ‘thank you’ text, then completed his mission as fast as he could so he could go home and help Tony the way he should have been doing all along.

It said much about their lives that none of them were surprised when HYDRA saved them the trouble of setting up an ambush for Pierce by sending the Winter Soldier to assassinate Nick Fury, which somehow resulted in Steve Rogers being accused of treason and going on the run, Romanova at his side.

It said more about their lives when none of them were surprised at the complete lack of contact, specifically Tony, to help them root out HYDRA. Romanova refused to ‘feed his ego’, Rogers refused to let anyone else be ‘the hero’, and Fury would die (ha!) before letting Tony Stark get a foothold in SHIELD’s business.

How or why they’d all forgotten he’d done that very thing during Loki’s invasion was a mystery for the ages, but it was a gift Tony gladly accepted and had already taken full advantage of.

It was what allowed him to follow the Black Widow’s woefully inept, failed attempts at hacking and track her and Rogers to a hidden base at Camp Lehigh, where he watched through a remotely-activated, hidden camera as a bastardized AI of Armin Zola (well, why not? He’d just been waiting for a rogue AI to disassemble; it wasn’t like he had anything else to do. Also, just how stupid were these people? Who in their right mind would bring an actual horde of Nazi scientists to America, illegally give them a clean slate, and let them do the bulk of building a secret intelligence agency?) bragged about HYDRA being alive and well. Also, so was Bucky Barnes. Don’t believe me, Rogers? Here, watch this video of him murdering your friend Howard Stark and his wife.

Then the base exploded, leaving Tony staring at static while he processed everything he’d just learned before activating every camera and recording device in SHIELD’s properties in DC, lest he miss something else that he would invariably have to fix or rescue from a level of short-sidedness even Justin Hammer couldn’t aspire to.

Seriously: Tony had met smarter rocks and thrown away pieces of paper who were better strategists.

Rogers, meanwhile, continued to fail handling the situation himself. This time, he almost had a panic attack at the suggestion that maybe, possibly, he could think about considering contacting Tony Stark. You know, the man whose main shtick was computers, hacking, and engineering? And had also designed and helped build the helicarriers?

In his lab, Tony sighed heavily and collapsed on his couch, nursing a migraine, while JARVIS downloaded what he could from the Lehigh servers and they both cursed Steve Rogers’ very existence.

By then, the pair had succeeded in whittling the HYDRA presence in SHIELD down to the WSC (they had the names, but taking them down outside of HYDRA was proving difficult), a dozen high-ranking agents, and a few handfuls of standard field agents. But since Romanova couldn’t hack her way through an Apple firewall, never mind HYDRA’s protections, and Rogers couldn’t spell ‘encryption’ or ‘firewall’ without a dictionary, they collectively decided that SHIELD was HYDRA and the only solution was to burn it all down.

By uploading the entirety of the organization’s files.

On the open Internet.

Unencrypted.

Tony would admit it without shame: he cried for a few minutes in agony at the sheer ignorant stupidity the pair was displaying. After all, HYDRA’s presence in SHIELD had been reduced to almost nothing, which a simple data check would have shown her. But because she lacked both Tony’s basic skills and his ability to think past the nose on his face, her personality refused to allow her to consider that someone had already figured things out and her overblown sense of self-importance kept her from reaching out to anyone else, so she remained blissfully ignorant of this. Tony, after processing the ‘plan’ her enormous, ‘this can’t be real’ ego had come up with, offered a single, furious “FUCK!!!” to the world at large, temporarily locked the database down, then grabbed his desk phone and set up the country’s third-biggest conference call.

“This is Stark,” he snapped the second the final person had answered the phone. “Romanova and Rogers discovered HYDRA’s existence in SHIELD and in their infinite wisdom decided that dumping the entire fucking agency’s info — agents, personal information, missions, espionage, infiltration, plans, you name it — on the internet is the only way to stop them. Decrypted and without even a password protection for any of it.”

The resulting silence was full of stunned disbelief, but to everyone’s credit, they recovered quickly and rallied even faster.

“Can you stop it?” Hendon, a solid NSA agent, demanded.

“Yeah, I’m working on it now, but honestly, we’ve almost weeded HYDRA out of SHIELD. So if we just let her drop the remaining people’s info, you can be standing by to arrest them on charges of being an enemy combatant. That’s the only way we’re going to get Pierce or the rest of the WSC, you said, and the mid- and low-level grunts shouldn’t be able to cause any major damage before you round them up.”

This silence was considering and thoughtful before it was broken by a cacophony of questions being fired back and forth between the various agencies and Tony, who answered as best he could but otherwise stayed out of the rapid-fire strategizing. Then Charles Levy, FBI, cut through the noise with arguably the most important question: “How much time can you give us to get in place?”

“Hmm . . . I can set a trigger delay of maybe an hour after she uploads the files,” Tony slowly replied, working through the logistics as he talked. “Any longer than that and she’ll get suspicious and she’s arrogant enough to do something so stupid even I can’t predict it.”

“Well, it’s not great,” Preston Carmine, CIA, groused. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing. Do we have the li—oh. Yes. As always, Stark, your efficiency is appreciated. And in this case, it’s a lifesaver.”

Several murmurs of agreement followed this statement and Tony blushed, thankful nobody but JARVIS could see him. There wasn’t anything else he could do for the alphabet soup, so they all said terse goodbyes and disconnected, leaving Tony to pound his head against his desk, still unable to fathom the depths of the idiocy that had gone into Romanova’s decision.

While Tony was dealing with government intelligence, JARVIS rolled his electronic eyes at the woman’s ego-driven stupidity and got to work. The first thing he did was block the access codes and permissions of everyone but himself and Tony, so the arrogant, thoughtless honeypot assassin didn’t start World War III as revenge for SHIELD making her look foolish. It took him ten minutes to sort out the last of the HYDRA grunts from the legitimate SHIELD agents — and only the agents; none of the secrets, operations, or plans, which were already being handled by the appropriate people — and send that data to the various agencies who were dismantling HYDRA. Fifteen minutes later, Sir set the time lock and then JARVIS allowed Romanova to access, decrypt, and upload her nonexistent vengeance.

And if he made sure her files were included in that upload, along with Rogers’, well, he was Tony Stark’s son.

Natasha Romanova had betrayed and hurt his father — deliberately, maliciously, and cruelly. And then told him he should be grateful for it.

Of course he did.

Meanwhile, Tony had been notified that Rogers, Romanova, and some random man he’d never seen or heard of had stolen a highly classified, mothballed SI-military project and, along with Maria Hill (which meant Fury, because there was no way that asshole was dead), decided that crashing not one, but three, helicarriers in the Potomac was a great way to physically stop both Project Insight and HYDRA.

Because every agent aboard those specific carriers that particular day was HYDRA and Insight was stored only on those three physical aircraft.

This was the greatest tactical mind of the century?!

Thankfully for everyone, Tony had designed and helped build them, so it was the work of three keystrokes and some creative cursing to let Rogers initiate the takeoff sequence and let them get in the air to avoid suspicion before reversing it and slowly grounding them, locking the system to everyone but him to prevent a reversal, override, or any other commands, and sealing all the doors so nobody could run for it until the feds had arrived to assist and arrest as needed.

The Winter Soldier’s presence took him by surprise, as he hadn’t been watching the cameras or really listening until he’d grounded his aircraft and Rogers started ranting and raving about . . . something. It was really incoherent. Watching him get punched in the mouth by HYRDA’s favorite assassin was hilarious, Tony had to admit, but what happened next made him see red.

Literally.

Because Rogers refused to fight. He kept calling for Bucky and begging him to remember little Stevie, completely ignoring all the people in the room who were in serious danger of being killed in the crossfire.

And then he fucking threw his shield out the window and stood there, daring the most dangerous assassin in a century to kill him.

Had Tony been present, he would have killed the asshole himself. Instead, he was forced to watch in impotent fury as Rogers — wearing a uniform Tony could have sworn was in the Smithsonian — allowed the Winter Soldier to beat him up and then escape, crying for ‘Bucky!’ the entire time before the Soldier threw him out the broken window and dumped his sorry, useless ass in the freezing waters of the Potomac.

Fortunately, JARVIS was immune to the human fallacy of being unable to function from the sheer force of such raw emotions, so while he too was furious with Rogers, he was able to track Barnes to a small safehouse Tony had noted several months earlier but flagged as ‘minor’ and put on the backburner, to be investigated when the major players and operations had been taken down and stopped.

Once the AI confirmed that Barnes would stay put for at least a day so he could heal and potentially try to escape his captors for good, he studied Sir for several minutes in silence, then made the executive decision to request that Colonel Rhodes be the one to apprehend Barnes and get him to a secure SI safehouse while Sir decided what to do with him — or rather, while Sir calmed down enough to allow the appropriate authorities to take custody.

Fueled by Rhodes’ rock-solid determination to do right by Tony this time, the operation went perfectly. Barnes surrendered without a fight and within two hours was being evaluated by trusted, vetted doctors, with UN-approved security standing guard.

Meanwhile, Tony watched Romanova sneak back in to the files she thought she’d kept out of the main upload, pull up the Winter Soldier’s records, and print everything out.

Then he watched her hand that file to Steve Rogers.

Four days later, as the last of the clean-up of SHIELDRA was going on, Tony had yet to hear so much as a peep from either of his erstwhile teammates.

He did, however, get the unmitigated pleasure of watching from the galley as Romanova told Congress that she was too important to arrest because even though she’d actively tried to commit treason and start World War III, she was the only person who could adequately defend the world against the very threats she’d released or created.

The look on her face when a supremely unimpressed House Speaker informed her that actually, it was Tony Stark and the country's legitimate intelligence agencies who had stopped HYDRA, not her or Rogers, was so amazing that Tony took several pictures. He had one framed and hung on his lab wall, and another served as his computer lock screen for several months.

They didn’t actually arrest her since she wasn’t able to execute her plan, but intent matters, especially when espionage, sabotage, and subversion as a potential foreign agent are concerned. Unfortunately, that same sticky issue of ‘foreign agent’ made it difficult to really deal with her. Because she wasn’t a US citizen, they couldn’t execute her or just throw her in prison and melt the key down — but even there, the risk of her creating or subverting an information leak was just too high. They didn’t dare send her back to Russia, either; she possessed entirely too much dangerous knowledge to even think about risking that, especially given how vindictive she’d proven herself to be.

Showcasing American ingenuity at its finest, the final crafted solution was both elegant in its simplicity and a supremely ideal punishment.

Having her work visa put on final probation and her passport suspended for five years offended her so deeply, she stuttered something unintelligible but so clearly uncomplimentary while brandishing her fists and promptly got slapped with a contempt charge and spent a week in jail. Her reaction to being housed in a halfway house for the next three years and permitted only the freedom of those very limited grounds unless outside forces legally allowed her to leave — and being forced to do menial chores to help maintain the place — cost her another three days in jail. Being fitted with an ankle monitoring bracelet and assigned a rotating team of handlers, from agencies all over the world, also for the next three years, actually silenced the Black Widow for the time in her life.

She was so speechless with fury that she didn’t even try to fight the officers who came to lock her in her mobile prison cell — courtesy of SI, of course . . . but not Tony. It was neon pink and acid yellow, big and clunky instead of sleek, and held none of his usual signature styles, as it was designed to call attention to itself and embarrass the hell out of the person wearing it.

Tony laughed himself sick and felt not a single twinge of guilt, because that was the best punishment anyone could inflict on that forked-tongue viper: being treated like a child who’d broken a vase to get revenge on the broken window and was then promptly dismissed in favor of more important things, like painting the front door.

And when, after ten days in her personal version of hell and with the full permission of her primary prison handler, he allowed her to finally come to the Tower to complain at him that her life was an acid bath before demanding that he first get over his ego and then use it as a magic wand to get her out — without mentioning a word of her knowledge of his parents’ assassination — he looked her in the eye and took great pleasure in truthfully telling her he’d had nothing to do with it, it was all the United States government, and no, he wasn’t going to hack it. The feds would know it was him in a heartbeat, since Romanova had no other friends or allies to ask, and like hell was Tony throwing himself in prison because she, a grown woman, refused to accept the consequences of her dumbass, selfish, not-thought-out-even-a-little, actions.

And then he alerted her waiting handlers that she’d violated her perimeter restrictions, which added another six months to her house arrest, because she hadn’t asked permission first. She’d just ignored the rules and boundaries and sauntered into his Tower like she belonged there.

Waving cheerfully at her and calling, “Thanks for the memories!” from the front entrance to the Tower while she was shoved into the back of a common cop car, hands cuffed and ankles shackled, was the perfect end to that day and became one of his most cherished memories.

It wasn’t even eclipsed when her trial for covering up her knowledge of the multiple assassinations both ordered and successfully carried out by HYDRA ended with her being found guilty by a unanimous jury and unceremoniously (also, literally, which was one of the funniest things Tony had seen in his entire life) tossed in the legal, water-borne, international floating Alcatraz prison, which was the brainchild of Victor von Doom and Romania’s Vladimir Drakuul. She would die there more than forty years later without ever seeing land again.

Steve Rogers didn’t bother coming to the hearing, which pissed the government off even more, but it was flat odds on whether he thought his moronic idea to make three massive aircraft destroy each other while in midair over the nation’s capital had actually worked (since he’d let himself get pancaked out the window and was unconscious for the rather anti-climactic finale) or he no longer cared about ‘destroying HYDRA’ because now that his Bucky was alive, nothing else mattered but finding him.

The US as an entity was frothing at the mouth to throw Rogers in a hole so deep, even the sun he thought shone out of his ass wouldn’t make a dent in the darkness, but at Tony’s strong request (read: bitter, implacable, understandable demand), they decided to wait him out. He’d proven that he was unable to function for long in this century, at least on his own: he had no supplies, no money, and no marketable skills, so he couldn’t get a job outside of SHIELD; he knew little about modern technology; he was avoiding his apartment; and neither he nor Sam Wilson had gone to the latter’s house, so he was also homeless. And outside of Romanova and Fury, he was apparently friendless.

Tony bet Pepper and Rhodes $1000 that Rogers, probably with Romanova in tow and maybe Barton as well, would show up at the Tower within a month to ask Tony to be their sugar daddy.

They wisely refused on account of it being a sucker’s bet.

(as it happened, Rogers came alone. After easily foiling the Spider’s three escape attempts — one of the agents actually yawned as he caught her — and then watching her meeting with Tony, the decision to deny her any further chances to weasel (creepy-crawl?) out of her punishment, especially when given access to a loose cannon like Rogers, was unanimous, and an electric shock was added to the monitoring bracelet. After all, they had better things to do. The Director of the DEA had a serious hangnail!)

While they waited for the final showdown, JARVIS helped clean up the last of the HYDRA members and connections he’d been able to locate while Tony split his attention between SI, planning in earnest for the invasion he’d seen during the Battle of New York, and sorting through the pile of Howard’s stuff that SHIELD had failed to return to him the first time.

If he occasionally took an hour to pull up the camera in the 12x12 room in a halfway house that Romanova had been confined to for her house arrest (and shared with a recovering heroin addict) to watch her impotent misery at seeing the complete lack of HYDRA mentioned anywhere in the news because America’s intelligence agencies, in partnership with their overseas counterparts, had already handled the problem . . . so what? If he maliciously enjoyed her disbelieving rage at the total absence of any mention of her . . . who asked you? If he muted her outraged cursing to play ‘make up my own dialogue’ when she realized that not a single person from SHIELD was going to make even a token attempt to contact her, much less get her out . . . what’s your point?

If he cackled like a loon when she was finally forced to admit that not only did the world at large not know her name, but her absence hadn’t made society collapse or even caused a small dip in the Dow Jones market, the complete opposite of what happened when he disappeared in Afghanistan . . .

Duh. Of course he did.

Rogers was tracked down fairly quickly, since neither stealth nor subtlety were concepts he was familiar with, but they let him roam aimlessly all over Brooklyn (and if they enjoyed his ineptitude, nobody could blame them), just under close supervision that he never once noticed, continuing his established, though surprising, pattern of being absurdly oblivious to his surroundings. Catching him would be so easy, the agents developed a drinking game for all the stupid mistakes that even people committing their first crime knew better than to make.

(the agents’ amusement quickly turned to sheer affront at the man’s complete and total lack of any kind of survival knowledge — and he’d been in the middle of nowhere more than once while he was with the Howlies. He should not have been so helpless. Once Sam Wilson took off, Rogers couldn’t figure out how to spend a semi-comfortable night with mild temperatures in Actual Nature and he had very little money, so he was forced to use porch stoops and bus shelters — and even then, much to the annoyance of the NYPD (who obediently, but resentfully, followed Stark’s directive as well), he never learned how to read a bus schedule or differentiate between an empty or sparsely populated building and an active one. It was insulting on every level, especially given the man’s penchant for bragging about his vast experience in war, battle, survival, and leadership)

Of course, they were curious as to why they were allowing the traitor to roam free, but after the third not-so-subtle question, their collective supervisors held a collective briefing and, after having them sign three NDAs and then swearing them to secrecy with death as the penalty for violation, told them the naked truth.

Tony Stark wanted to know how long it would take Rogers to freely come clean about his knowledge of Howard and Maria Stark’s assassination.

That knowledge made sense of several of Rogers’ more inexplicable decisions: he was trying to track down Barnes.

With no plan. No resources. No backup. No allies. And not a clue how to navigate the modern world.

Meanwhile, realizing how ill-prepared Rogers was for modern life had actually alarmed Sam Wilson enough that he abandoned his hero once he finally used his brain instead of Captain America’s. Unfortunately for him, he went straight home instead of to any authorities, or even Tony, and was promptly arrested by the Air Force and charged with breaking and entering, theft, and breach of multiple NDAs, among other things. His dishonorable discharge and subsequent imprisonment merited a single four-minute news segment, sandwiched between Sports and the Economy, and within a month, nobody remembered his name or his role in what almost happened.

Three weeks after Romanova’s memorable Congressional hearing and three days before Rogers gave up and stomped his petulant way to Stark Tower, glowering in a way that was doubtless meant to look regal and commanding but in reality just made him look constipated, a friend of Tony’s in the NSA, on a joint assignment with the Russian equivalent of the NSA, called him to say that they’d accidentally found an underground HYDRA base, killed several higher-ups as well as a set of crazy twins ranting that Tony Stark had personally ruined their lives, and discovered Loki’s Scepter.

Did he want it?

He didn’t even sniffle in despair this time; he just sighed, wondered when his life had become a cosmic game show, and said sure, why not. Then JARVIS started going back over the data they’d compiled on the scepter back in 2012 and working on ways to either contain it and hide its distinctive signature from detection, or simply destroy it and call it solved.

Admittedly, his first thought was to get in touch with Thor, but the curse of an eidetic memory was that you remembered everything you paid more than three or four seconds of attention to in excruciating detail once you made an effort . . . also, JARVIS had recorded everything.

And Thor was, quite frankly, an immature, arrogant douchebag that Tony wouldn’t trust to take care of a stuffed goldfish, let alone an object of unimaginable destructive power.

Because his life was now a cosmic joke, maybe an hour after he’d taken possession of the damned ugly piece of alien technology and mapped out the basic blueprints for what had a good chance of being a working containment field, an orangey-golden-glowy-circle-thing opened in his private lab with neither preamble nor a polite request for entry, and one Wong — Librarian, Sorcerer, and Massive Beyoncé Fan — found himself knocked on his all-knowing butt courtesy of a repulsor wielded by a seriously irritated Tony Stark.

They stared at each other for a few minutes, neither one wanting to break what quickly became a really awkward silence, before Wong sighed and carefully sat up, waving a hand to close the portal. Tony tracked him the entire time, eyes cold and hand unwavering. He didn’t like killing people, but he was done with being ambushed in his private spaces.

“Forgive the intrusion,” said Wong as he slowly got to his feet. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

That statement was so stupid, Tony just stared at him. His disbelief was loud and Wong at least had the decency to look abashed.

“Fair enough,” he conceded. “I didn’t think that through. Please accept my apologies.”

Tony was not appeased.

“No,” he snapped. “But you’re here, so either try to kill me so I can stop you and get back to my day, or tell me what you want in less than 40 seconds. Time starts now.”

Three startled blinks were Wong’s only visible reaction, but he’d come instead of Stephen for a reason (or, you know, all the reasons).

“Of course. My name is Wong and I’m a sorcerer of the Order of Kamar-Taj. I’ve come to take the Mind Stone off your hands so it can be kept safe from any potential misuse.”

Tony blinked.

JARVIS blinked.

“Umm . . . say again,” he finally managed to say, his voice strangled with disbelieving exhaustion.

Or was it the other way around?

Either way, he was one absurd statement away from just throwing his hands up, bellowing ‘fuck it!’ in every language he spoke, and putting the thing under the most focused beam of his particle accelerator until it exploded.

Oh, hey, IDEA.

He gave Wong credit for not rolling his eyes, and a few more points for repeating himself without the slightest change in his tone or inflection.

Didn’t make the sentence any less absurd, mind, but still: credit where credit was due.

“No,” he said again, even more flatly this time, because he was just done. He was so done he didn’t even want to drink. He just wanted to build a Zero Room and disappear for a few days to rid his brain and nervous system of the trauma that was Dealing With Stupid People. “One: I’ve never heard of you and the last cult who came out of the woodwork was SHIELD with a large side of HYDRA. Two: you couldn’t be bothered to poke your noses out and help during the 2012 invasion — or any of the other alien excursions down here, actually — and you didn’t offer to help afterwards, which is really shitty on general principal, given you’re a bunch of magicians. And three: you can’t guarantee its safety and somebody out there is coming here to get it. That means it needs to be destroyed and — well, frankly, if you want something blown up, I’m the man to call.”

It was Wong’s turn to blink, which he did with admirable aplomb. Under other circumstances, Tony might even have liked the guy.

“I cannot allow that,” he finally said, looking so faintly alarmed, it was impressive. Tony would bet half his fortune that 99.87% of the population would never have seen it.

Sucked to be Wong today.

He shrugged carelessly. “Eh. Good for you. I don’t care. It was entrusted to me. There’s already been one alien incursion trying to get it and they failed. That means they’re coming back. Getting it off the planet solves the immediate problem, but Thor isn’t here. And even if he was, if whoever’s behind this invasion gets it, God only knows what they’ll do with it. And since that damned Tesseract has one of these Stones as well, I’m gonna guess there’s a set, and your little order has one too. It’s the only reason you could know I had this one an hour after I took possession of the scepter. How am I doing so far?” he asked with the acidic politeness that had made genocidal dictators pause and not only reconsider their next words, but actually not say them.

Wong was not immune to this and was wise enough to simply nod in silent confirmation of Tony’s assessment of the situation.

He nodded back and stood up, feeling his eyes ice over as he stared the other man down, channeling all the power he wielded as Tony Stark: Merchant of Death.

“I’m not going to ask you to destroy yours, but that’s as lenient as I’m prepared to be. Power-hungry dictators are always hungry for more power and just because people are trying really damn hard to pretend that I didn’t see the giant armada headed our way doesn’t change the fact. The most sensible solution is to eliminate their chance to complete the set and destroy the universe, because that’s what meglomaniacs do.”

He stopped and leaned forward a smidge. Juuuuust enough that his breath brushed Wong’s nose.

“That’s a risk I refuse to take,” he said very, very softly. The sorcerer swallowed. “And since I very much doubt there’s some secondary dimension that can hold the damn thing for long, your version of ‘keeping it safe’ is long-term temporary at best. When your defenses fail, we’re all fucked. So I’m going to destroy this Mind Stone, then drink a glass or two bottles of scotch in its honor. You don’t get a vote — and if you so much as twitch a pinky or widen your eyes to use magic and take it anyway, my AI will frag you before you can finish the thought.”

Wong blinked again, but wisely said nothing.

It was so nice to be in the presence of a reasonable stranger. Tony had forgotten how that felt.

For the record, it felt great.

So he offered an olive branch.

“When I’ve got the method of destruction narrowed down and as successful as I can guarantee without actually using it on the stone, you and only you are welcome to witness it. That way, you can go back to your little club and assure them that I didn’t keep it for myself or sell it on eBay. This isn’t a negotiation,” he added sharply when the other man took a breath in what was clearly a prelude to an objection. “This is the only offer you’re getting. Whether or not you’re here to see it, I’m destroying the stone. The end. Take it or leave it.”

Not being stupid, nor too stubborn to be reasonable, Wong gave him a single curt nod and without a word opened his freaky portal-thing and stepped through it with a lackluster swish of his sorcerer’s garb.

After staring at the empty space for a solid seven or so minutes, Tony blew out a deep breath and looked at the ceiling, his face wordlessly beseeching.

“Yes, Sir, that just happened. Yes, I’m researching Kamar-Taj now. Yes, I’ll let you know once I’ve found something substantial. Yes, it should be possible to modify the particle accelerator to the correct frequency to weaken the stone and permit its destruction.”

Nonplussed, Tony chewed his lower lip for a few seconds, then shrugged. If JARVIS said he had it, then he had it. Which was great; that was three fewer headaches he had to deal with.

Which meant . . . hell’s bells, he actually had some free time. And Pepper should be getting done with work . . .  right about now, actually.

Date night!

He might or might not have babbled something to that effect as he bolted for the elevator, leaving two puzzled bots and a deeply amused AI in his wake, but that was okay. Sir was finally in a position where he could put down the weight of the world and a little eccentricity was good for the soul.

That being said, JARVIS made a note and set two alarms so he didn’t interrupt Sir and Miss Potts tonight for anything less than the actual impending end of the world.

He did not need or want any further lessons in sexual education, thank you.

Three days later, Steve Rogers finally made his way to the Tower. To the shock of everyone waiting for him, he was polite to the front desk and asked if he could speak to Tony. A vindictive Pepper snarked that he must not know that Romanova had been arrested and detained, which had Rhodes and Happy both choking on their popcorn.

Tony just sighed.

Not that she was wrong, but still: when and how had he been elected as The Person To Deal With Deliberately Stupid People?

And could he demand a recall vote?

While he was hating his life, Pepper had greeted Rogers with a chilly civility that should have given the man the willies. Instead, he gave her the same condescending look that Obadiah Stane liked to send her way, a look that morphed to confusion when Rhodes, Happy, and Tony all winced and subtly shifted away from one of the Top 5 most powerful women in the world — and that included heads of state, world leaders, and royalty.

“I’m glad to see you, Pepper, but I don’t understand why you’re here. I need to talk to Tony,” Rogers said, making the other three men noticeably cringe this time and, in Rhodes and Happy’s case, actually push their chairs away from the table.

Pepper’s smile was frigid, which Rogers saw but clearly didn’t understand, and in what seemed to be an established pattern of behavior, he ignored it in favor of blundering his way through . . . and achieved the impossible: he robbed Pepper Potts of the ability to speak.

“I’ve been waiting for you to reach out, Tony, but I can’t wait any more,” he began, giving Tony a beseeching look better suited to a puppy. Or maybe a ferret. “Nat and Sam and I found out that HYDRA infiltrated SHIELD so we exposed all their secrets, but now the Avengers need to assemble so we can find any HYDRA people who escaped.”

Rhodes actually choked on his water.

Happy came thiiiiis close to wheezing himself into an asthma attack . . . and he didn’t have asthma.

JARVIS had to use his own overrides to keep from dropping his favorite heavy-artillery gun into the room and turning the insolent man into Swiss cheese.

Pepper didn’t blink.

Tony burst out laughing.

He really didn’t know what else to do, because killing Rogers would be so incredibly satisfying, it defied description. It would also cause him no end of trouble with the entirety of the United States government and that was a migraine he refused to give himself. He had to admire the sheer audacity of the man, but rage was heating his blood at that entitled insouciance and he was genuinely afraid that one more word would cause a stroke.

Fortunately for everyone but Rogers, Pepper recovered first.

“I beg your pardon,” she said in a voice thick with the same saccharine contempt that made Thaddeus Ross behave. “I know you didn’t just say what I think you said.”

This earned her — or rather, Tony — four blinks of such genuine bewilderment that she actually leaned away from the man, lest she catch his idiocy.

“Yeah,” he replied earnestly — and without once looking at her. It seemed that he’d deemed Pepper something like a secretary and therefore unimportant. Rhodes and Happy made a quick, silent bet with each other on whether she would actually castrate him or just stab him in the groin with her 4-inch spiked heel. “We found out that HYDRA was hiding inside SHIELD so we destroyed them both and I found out my best friend Bucky is still alive. But he’s confused. He’s beaten HYDRA’s programming and remembers me, but I lost track of him after we made the helicarriers destroy each other and I haven’t been able to find him. But I know you can help bring Bucky home.”

He was so painfully sincere during this mini-soliloquy that Pepper’s jaw dropped open. Tony was rendered speechless this time.

It took several minutes, but the stunned, stilted silence finally made Rogers uncomfortable enough to shift in his seat before apparently deciding that Tony wasn’t going to comply and giving him an expression loaded with disappointment, expectation, and demand. “Tony, you need to help me,” he explained, leaning forward after straightening his shoulders, so that even then, he was still taller than his quarry. “Bucky is confused and doesn’t know it’s safe to come to me and now that HYDRA’s gone, I can fix him. But Nat can’t help because she burned all her covers and had to go underground so I need you and the rest of the team to start a real search.”

Tony blinked once, then held up an imperious hand, wordlessly keeping anyone else from exploding at the sheer audacity of the man.

“Right,” he said quietly, eyes unreadable and voice perfectly, unnaturally, even.

Rhodes sucked in a deep, deep breath. Happy put a hand on his gun. Pepper slipped her shoes off and picked up the left one.

“Tell me, Steve, how exactly did you destroy HYDRA? So I can figure out the best way to track Barnes,” he said so smoothly that Rogers didn’t suspect a thing. In fact, his enthusiasm spiked higher as he eagerly obliged.

“Well, Nat put all of their files and secrets on the Internet so that everybody can see who and what they are. Now they can’t hide. And Sam and I stopped Project Insight by making their big planes destroy each other before they could launch their missiles and kill the people they think are a threat.”

Silence.

Tony actually felt his IQ drop at least 46 points and he twitched, unable to censor his body’s instinctive reaction to that much bullshit. He still did better than his friends, who were collectively rendered mute from rage-induced disbelief.

The worst part? Despite the fact that he didn’t really know Steve Rogers as a person, that asinine statement didn’t surprise him one iota. Watching and listening to his decisions and actions and overall attitude during this entire clusterfuck, plus the three weeks he’d spent wandering Brooklyn like a lost hobo, complete with grungy hair and considerably fewer street smarts, had told him a great deal about Rogers.

So no, hearing his ‘plan’ to find his good buddy Barnes wasn’t a surprise.

It was a migraine, absolutely.

But that’s why he’d brought an Imitrex injection to this meeting.

However, interestingly enough, Rogers hadn’t mentioned money. Whether that was because he just hadn’t thought about it or was trying to butter Tony up first was an open question, and one that Tony didn’t care about, particularly since he had much bigger computers to build.

“Hmm. That’s interesting,” he began after unclenching his jaw enough to actually talk instead of snarl. “Out of curiosity, why didn’t you call me to begin with? You know, since computers are kinda my thing.”

Baby blue eyes met his with such open guilelessness that even Pepper was impressed, because it was obvious to the experienced quartet that Rogers was lying through his teeth when he answered. “We didn’t know who to trust. Anyone could have been HYDRA and we couldn’t risk them finding out that we knew they were there.”

Rhodes’ contemptuous snort clearly startled Rogers and his mouth pulled into a frown as he turned to the other man.

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” the colonel snapped, eyes dark with anger. “First of all, if — as you said — HYDRA didn’t know that you’d learned about them, why would they have bothered to bug Tony’s phones, especially on the off-chance that you in particular would discover them and instantly call Tony? Hell, even as a preventative measure, that makes no sense, because anyone with a brain knows that he would have found something like that in less than a day and it would have aroused his suspicions and made him go looking. So actually, HYDRA trying to covertly keep tabs on Tony’s communications would have exposed them and they knew it.”

The stunned expression this logical rebuttal generated shouldn’t have been as funny as it was and it took Happy and Pepper considerable control to keep from laughing.

Tony . . . not so much.

“Rhodes.”

That single word, quiet but commanding, made him nod sharply and sit back, allowing Tony to take control of the conversation again.

Not that he was wrong, not even a little bit, but the scathing lecture Rogers so desperately deserved would be much better served coming from the various and sundry heads of the alphabet soup intelligence agencies.

And the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And the Secretary of Defense.

And President Ellis.

As powerful as he was, Tony had neither the reason nor the authority to intervene in this beyond finding out just how much integrity Steve Rogers actually had.

“He isn’t wrong,” he told Rogers in that gentle tone of voice that made those same dictators that Wong had discovered an unexpected solidarity with say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to him. “But I suppose you don’t know enough about the world to know that. So: you want me to help you find HYDRA, specifically your pal Bucky Barnes. I’m intrigued. What other interesting information did you stumble across in HYDRA’s files? Any juicy secrets you want to share?”

It was the only chance Rogers would get, though he would never realize that.

Instead, that deceptively innocent question made his body language change completely as he produced a smile that the average person would be (and had been) completely fooled by.

Unfortunately for him, the people he was talking to were not average.

And, in Tony and Pepper’s cases, they were a hell of a lot more experienced than Rogers in the fine art of being ‘dancing monkeys’, as he so bitterly liked to describe it, even though his talents in that area could rival Tony’s had he chosen to develop them.

They instantly recognized the man who had convinced so many people that he had actually punched Adolf Hitler in the face.

“I’m sorry, no,” Rogers told Tony with clear, steady eyes and matching voice. He was radiating innocent sincerity, mingled with just a touch of regret. “We just found out how corrupt SHIELD really was.”

Wow.

It had been years since someone had lied so blatantly to Tony’s face. When he’d met Natasha Romanova, in fact.

. . . which, in retrospect, explained a few things about Rogers’ foolish choices.

Still: he had just blown any chance he had for leniency.

Or mercy.

Showing the control that not many people actually thought he possessed, Tony just nodded, allowing Pepper to take his hand and squeeze while Happy paced forward until he was standing by the wall between Steve and Tony. He wasn’t actually blocking his boss and friend from the super soldier, but it would only take two steps for him to get there.

Rhodes sneered and got to his feet. His eyes were blazing with rage but his body was taut with restrained fury and absolute authority rang in his voice as he said, “You are despicable, Rogers. All you had to do was say ‘yes’ and you would have seen the outside of a prison cell before you died. We know that HYDRA assassinated Howard and Maria, see, and it’s highly likely that the Winter Soldier did it. So do you — and you have the balls to sit there, look their son straight in the eyes, and lie about it because your buddy Barnes was the weapon.”

He was cut off by Rogers lunging to his feet, eyes suddenly wild with fear. He took a grand total of one and a half steps in Tony’s direction before his whole body seized and he crashed in a heap of twitching muscles on the carpeted floor. A completely unruffled Happy pocketed the Sonic Taser and knelt down to secure the man’s wrists with the restraints Tony had built just for him.

The man in question never moved.

His unwavering gaze didn’t leave Rogers as he convulsed and groaned and thrashed through the unpleasant effects of being tased and when hazy blue eyes finally met his, he smiled.

The air suddenly got heavy and foreboding, like the sky just before a tornado.

“You know, when I discovered HYDRA inside SHIELD almost two years ago, it was a surprise,” Tony said conversationally, lips twisting with bitter humor at the raw astonishment that clouded Rogers’ features. “Then I discovered Project Insight and cursed Nick Fury with pitting edema of the dick for his arrogant stupidity. And then I started filtering HYDRA out from SHIELD and sent the info to the various intelligence agencies best suited to handle it. By the time you and that viper Romanova concocted your no-brain plan, the only HYDRA agents left in SHIELD were the WSC and fewer than twenty low-level agents. And since I got wind of your stupidity right from the beginning, I got them, too. Those same agencies were also able to locate and warn the people on HYDRA’s little kill list because we were subtle and did it a little at a time. And neither of you noticed because you seem to be incapable of looking past the nose on your face. Hell, you didn’t even realize that those helicarriers didn’t fire on each other — because you were too busy letting Barnes use you for a punching bag while crying his name and begging him to come back to you.”

The amount of disgust dripping from his words nearly caused a tidal wave.

“I mean, seriously, Rogers, what the hell? I’ve watched better soap operas. And it didn’t work, because life isn’t a soap opera, and just goes to show that you’re a child playing dress-up in his daddy’s clothes. Why Fury thought unleashing you on the public was a good idea is a mystery for the ages, but whatever. JARVIS and I stopped you idiots from murdering several thousand people and have helped clean up HYDRA all over the world.”

Astonishment melted to outrage when understanding dawned on Rogers, but Tony ignored his affronted, frightened face and kept talking with an utter lack of concern that nobody could blame him for.

Well. Almost nobody.

“Because I got there years before the idea was even a gleam in Fury’s eye, I tracked you and thwarted you every dumbass step of the way. I was in that underground base too and watched as Zola told you and the failed honeypot spy about my parents. I watched her deliberately keep Barnes’ files out of her dumbass plan to dump all of SHIELD’s files online, and I saw her hand that same file to you.”

He slowly rose from his chair, went to where Rogers was still crumpled on the floor, and crouched down so he could look the liar straight in the eyes.

“And I just watched you lie to my face about it. You probably told yourself that I would hunt Barnes down and kill him if I knew, because that’s exactly what you would do. Fortunately for Barnes, I’m not you. We found him two days after I stopped you from destroying DC and brought him in, and he’s being evaluated for treatment as we speak.”

The second he understood, Rogers started thrashing wildly again in his desperation to get up, yelling an incoherent mixture of threats and pleas. He got so violent in his efforts that Happy made Tony move back a few feet just in case and Rhodes drew his own weapon. Tony complied but his eyes never left Rogers, even when Pepper pressed herself to his side in silent support.

After three or so minutes of fruitless struggles, the super soldier collapsed on his back, panting from his exertion and pinning Tony with a look that was both enraged and beseeching.

“Don’t hurt him,” he ordered, while somehow sounding making it sound like a request. Against their wills, they were impressed at the ability. “He’s innocent. Bucky didn’t do it.”

“I know that,” Tony replied calmly, silencing the other man. “I was a weapons developer for decades, Rogers. Do you really think I can’t recognize a gun when I see one? Barnes is fine and being treated. If you had even the slightest ounce of decency or respect for me as a person, you could have talked to him, maybe even seen him. But you knew and when given the perfect opportunity, you lied to my face . . . smiling the entire time. And covering up a murder is the same as committing one. So not only will you never see James Barnes again, you’ll be lucky to get out of prison before you die.”

This time, Rogers curled into himself with despondency as that brutal truth sank in, slowly destroying his world. A soft sob escaped his lips, though no tears fell.

Tony was entirely unmoved.

“You know, it’s interesting,” he mused, making Rhodes swallow hard at the sudden contemplative tone to his voice. “Project Insight was supposed to be a list of people that HYDRA thought were a direct danger to them and their goals. And yet, your name is on there and you would have been their greatest asset if you had succeeded with your plan. Looks like the evil organization isn’t nearly as insightful as they thought they were.”

That twin insult made Happy suck in a harsh breath while Pepper smiled with pride (and arousal; her man was sexy when he was decimating his enemies) and Rhodes smirked.

Once again, Rogers was thunderstruck.

“Ah, well. As fun as this meeting has been, I have circuit boards to solder. Happy, will you let the feds know that the trash is bagged up and ready to go?”

That was finally too much for Pepper, though she managed to keep herself constrained to chortling, as she grabbed her heels with her free hand before pulling an equally amused Tony with her to the door while Rhodes and Happy hauled a furious Steve Rogers to his feet. When he started shouting again, this time about illegal and internment and something about proving he was right to keep quiet, Happy rolled his eyes and stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth, which resulted in some entertaining spluttering. Just outside the door, Tony glanced back and added, “Oh, will you grab my recycling, Platypus? There are so many things I can do with a patriotic dinner plate.”

A wicked grin was his answer . . . and still more incoherent, outraged, muffled shouting.

It was immediately followed by the sound of electricity being released and the resultant thump was highly satisfying, especially since the muffled shouts never stopped.

The sounds and the last remnants of anger faded behind Tony and Pepper as they headed home, satisfied that they would soon put the whole matter to rest.

All they had to do now was live.

(Four miles and two continents away, the Time Stone flared silver and the timeline shivered, causing a minor earthquake and scaring the hair off of several acolytes as the deadly course it was careening down shifted and curved in a new direction, one that was still very fraught with danger. But this time, it also had hope and success and, ultimately, triumph, driven by the unwavering determination of the man who would defy Death itself to save his world.

The true Project Insight had finally begun.)

~~~
fin