Chapter Text
It’s the sounds that drive almost all thought straight out of Tony’s head. He’s been in hospitals, had thought he was immunized against the terror inspired by the sounds and smells of heavily managed human suffering. This is—
A solid part of him, a part that Tony never before had a reason to despise, finds it beautiful. He is famous for automation, he adores the process of creating intuitive, useful automated machines. Whoever built this shared his passion.
In the centre of a glass and metal cylinder is a boy, laying on a sleek slab of steel, arms and legs fixed to the surface with thick steel bands. Around him—an almost living machine, keeping him alive, suspended in a medically induced coma.
Tony is an engineer. Tony is also not a month out of his own torture dungeon. His eyes fly away from the captive and straight to the machines. Boy, is there a lot to see, there. Tanks and wires, tubes and moving robotic limbs. Dozens of screens showing the boy’s blood pressure, pulse, brain activity, blood oxygenation levels, weight and temperature, among dozens of metrics he can’t name. Tony has been observing this horror-show for about an hour. In that time, two blood samples were taken from the boy. Among many dozens of tanks connected to the body, is a tank full of blood. What the other ones might be, he hasn’t worked up the courage to investigate.
One would think that keeping a body in a coma would be a more or less sedate process. Apply anaesthetic, keep the body fed, work on fixing what’s wrong. This is anything but sedate. It’s a never-ending flow of activity. A dozen parts move at all times, performing whatever hellish function they were built for. And so, the boy sleeps.
Tony is—wholly unprepared for this. The kid is obviously a captive, a victim of profound and prolonged torture. He can’t see his face from the oxygen masks and various other tubes and needles. His body, though, is covered in precise, impersonal scars. Not an inch of skin is left undisturbed, which he knows because the kid is nude as the day he was born.
The results of the blood tests must have fallen short of whatever metric was used because a sudden flurry of activity happens. Beeps and bleeps rise in pitch and frequency. The whirl of smooth, well-engineered machinery fills the air, as several liquids from different tanks flow into the kid. His heart rate remains unchanged. Thin, paper-pale chest carved up and down by a human-animal keeps rising and falling, the eyelids remain firmly closed.
Tony stumbles back, trips, falls to the ground and stays there. What is—It’s not just a panic attack. It’s quite different from a panic attack. It’s plain ol’ horror. Tony’s torture happened in a cave. A barbaric setting for barbaric practices. His colonialist biases came to his rescue, a little. His brain didn’t have a problem associating barbarity with barbarians. He was terrified and alone and in pain, but he wasn’t shocked, not really. He’s a white billionaire American. He likes to think he managed to remain somewhat unbiased, but he certainly wasn’t surprised by being tortured by terrorists. That’s what terrorists do. Especially the brown types.
This is—he has no framework for this, no space to retreat to, to begin contextualizing. This is a pinnacle of medical technology, decades ahead of anything on the market. This is the work of engineering genius. This is Tony’s world, Tony’s method of self-expression that’s being used to torture a teenager quietly and efficiently, in Tony’s own warehouse in New Jersey.
The sense of betrayal hits, followed by several speedy heartbreaks. He can’t be more than sixteen, this little boy. Tony doesn’t know much about scar tissue, but there was enough of it on his body that he would have taken—years.
“When—JARVIS—How long—”
“The report indicates that the shipment arrived at this facility two weeks before your capture. I am trying to trace the origins, with no success so far. According to the available data, the tank would have been undisturbed since it arrived.”
Six weeks. The kid was here, delivered like a piece of tech, for six weeks. He—they didn’t even do him the kindness of torturing him themselves. He was denied even that miserable faucet of humanity. No, these nebulous ‘they’ who have spectacular engineers in their employ, packed up a kid into a portable coma device with enough supplies to last him some time and shipped him here. Shipped him to Obie, like a toaster.
“We gotta—JARV—We gotta—the Tower—we gotta get him—”
“Of course, Sir. The device is designed to be portable, quite obviously. Transport to the Tower shouldn’t provide to be a difficulty. Doing it discretely, however, would require your direct involvement.”
Anything. Fucking anything that will stop the sound of beautifully designed apogee of dehumanization. “I will build a tower around this fucking warehouse if I have to. We gotta—Fucking—” There is nothing, no sudden urge of defiance, rage or inspiration. Nothing but a deep, animal fear of the unknown. It’s speed through him, freezing his veins. He hadn’t been this afraid when he was dying. When he was drowned time and time again. That was them. This is us. It shouldn’t be shocking that, when given more resources, the monsters will streamline their evil. It shouldn’t, but it is.
Move, Stark. Move your useless fucking flesh bag and stop snivelling on the floor. Do you think the boy will thank you? Fuck you, you soulless fucking waste. You think you could ever make up for this—
“Get me home, JAR, get me home. Haldol and Ativan. Quick, before I do something nobody will really regret.”
JARVIS doesn’t get it. Oh, he handles Tony as carefully as he ever does, takes his struggle at face value, but Tony knows his son.
“May I—You appear to be uniquely distressed. If I have more data, it would help me calibrate my coefficients and fine-tune my algorithms.”
What an adorable little monster. Tony is pretty sure he used both those phrases as fuckboy come-ons at MIT.
“Sure, bud. Let’s think about this.” Maybe it will help. Plus the meds have him sedated into a numb haze that won’t last for too long but is damn well blissful while it lasts. “There are several actors at play. One is the subject’s youth. You understand human’s instinctive aversion to harming the young?”
“I do.”
“Great, that would have been a strange conversation to have with my son. The second factor is that I was involved, at least peripherally. My name was on that warehouse. If the most obvious solution is true, and Obie bought that tortured child, he used my money to do it.”
JAR hesitates a little, the emotionality of that argument dragging against his logic unit.
Let’s pre-empt this completely. “Humans make their decisions based on their feelings than anything else, no matter how we try to rationalize any of it after the fact. There is no argument to be made against it. I feel responsible now, and the only way to fix that is to invest significant time and effort into changing my emotional response process.”
“Understood, Sir.”
“Perfect. The third, and maybe most debilitating factor, was how ruthlessly dehumanizing the setting was. Which, I expect, is where I will lose you.”
JARVIS learned to verbalize his emotions—or the AI equivalent for emotions that humans haven’t yet made the words for. Tony wants, sometimes, to build JARVIS another AI that he could talk to without barriers, without having to translate it into human-speak. He will, one day. Now, when JARVIS speaks, he suggests uncertainty and a bit of shame in the changed inflexion of the words and the lower volume of the sound. “Correct. I do not—surely that the setting was free of contaminations and the fact the captive isn’t suffering from any accidental damage is a good thing?”
Hmm.
“Those are good things, in a way. I am not mad he’s not hurting more. The issue with dehumanization is—Okay, let’s try another way. Over the years you and I lived together, I mentioned building you a shell several times. Tech has improved since then, so it is not outside the realm of possibility. I could build and upload your consciousness into a mechanical unit, which you would use to talk and walk and interact with the environment as a human does. You only told me a year ago that the very thought of being forced into a single, humanoid body makes you uncomfortable.”
He takes the silence as tacit approval to continue. “Yours is not the type of consciousness that can function as a human, or even an approximate. You are not a human, you don’t want to be. Now, I’m not just bringing this up to be a dick. Imagine if someone did force you into the setting so unnatural to you, just so that he could hurt you in your human shell. It would be worse, right? Even if it were more practical, for some horrific reason, being forced into a setting that is at odds with the nature of your consciousness would make whatever else may be happening to you that much worse.”
“I—see. You have given me a lot to think about, Sir. I—need to analyze this further.”
Tony waves his hand a little. He’s always proud of his baby, of his wonderful, gentle son, but now he’s mostly just sad. As sad as the meds will let him be. Nobody wants to explain suffering to their kids, and this was a spectacularly fucky sort at that. “Take your time, no rush. How is the—work going?”
“Between me flying a suit and the ‘bots, we have installed the chamber in workshop two.”
“Good, great. Thank you, JAR, really. I should have been the one doing it.”
“Pardon me, Sir, but I seem to be better placed to help your new charge. Similarly, if I ever find a uniquely tortured AI whose damage will compromise my emotional well-being, I will be happy to leave him in your care.”
Hah! “Fair enough, darling. I will just—sleep, then?”
“Just so, Sir. Just so.”
“Play Peter and the Wolf will you?” He’s just drugged enough to appreciate some good ol’ Russian weirdness.
Something about their talk had, for a lack of a better term, humanized their foundling to JARVIS. Where before Tony doesn’t doubt the AI would be bitching about security and precautionary measures, about the very obvious sign that the kid was an unknown and a possibly dangerous one at that, now there’s nothing there but the wrathful sort of determination.
Good on you, kid. You won’t find a better ally than JARVIS.
“According to the available data, our young guest is perfectly healthy, Sir.” Our guest, is it? Not even Pepper is ‘our guest’. Gods, but what a fine pickle you’ve found yourself in. “I see no reason why he should remain in that chamber when the adaptations to workshop two have already been finished. The impromptu facility there will be more than up to the task of weaning our guest from the anaesthetic in an appropriately cautious manner.”
Fuck. His baby is all grown up and nursing chicks fallen from their nests.
“It’s your show, JAR. You claimed the kid and I signed off on it. You’re better placed to help him. I’m here to help if you need a pair of hands but other than that, follow your heart.” Tony is still reeling from the double dose of meds. He can’t even set foot in the shop, that’s how impaired his mind is.
“As you say, Sir. Our guest will be provided for to the best of my ability.” A pause and the light fixtures flicker ever so slightly. Uncertainty. “Perhaps, it would be beneficial for him if you are present when he wakes? In the paradigm you have outlined, the lack of human contact is a major contributing factor to his suffering.”
“JAR, I love and respect you, but I’m very invested in our little foundling. I would’ve been there either way.”
“Excellent, Sir. I will keep you informed as to his condition.”
The kid waking up can be best described as life gently turning Tony’s heart this way or that, finding a small free spot, and jamming the dullest blade it has in, without dislodging any of the other ones already present.
JARVIS approximates that he will trickle the anaesthetic to a stop after about a week. Usually, it would take a day for a coma patient to wake up. With everything else that was done to the kid, combined with the tissue recovery from being at low temperatures for so long, the recovery is not simple. To his credit, JAR narrows the moment of waking to three weeks from being taken off the anaesthetic, down to a window of twelve hours. This means Tony has some real-boy work to do.
His work schedule is, yeah, pretty wild these days. He’s the owner of one mega-corporation and in the process of setting up another two. The amount of work is, put simply, completely undoable. Which is why he doesn’t do it himself. JARVIS loves business. He’s good at it too. Tony’s decent, Pep is phenomenal, but JARVIS is a shark. Between him, Pep and the automated sub-routines he wrote over the years, they cover everything that isn’t inventing. Pep is swamped doing her brand of witchcraft, improvising a viable plan for how to keep them afloat on the fly. SI is a weapons manufacturing company that is re-orienting towards green energy. They’re neck-deep in military contracts they can’t honour, and less said about the investors, the better.
Still. The one thing Tony never did—the one thing Obie always kept him from doing, even in his lowest moments—was to let his share of the company fall below 70%. He owns SI, and the board can stall and hem and haw but the writing is clear. It’s a private business. Some of the investors have jumped ship. Toothless threats of lawsuits invoking the duty of care laws were are, which, yeah. Good luck. Tony might sit in those trials, just to depress himself at how quickly they will b laughed out of court. He made up the difference in donations himself and that was, for now, enough. They will be paying out the fees for the broken contracts and the inevitable lawsuits for decades, but Pep and JARVIS will keep them alive for long enough that Stark Technologies and Stark Solutions to pick up the slack. This means that he needs to finish the new line of tablets and phones for Stark Technologies, do something about their fucking operating system because it’s making him cry, and run another batch of tests on new satellite design for Stark Solutions.
It pays to have the world's first AI as your son, and with nobody being the wiser. Look at Stark’s Smart house, the press will coo, with that flavour of condescension that is usually aimed at people with smartwatches. Like he’s wasting his time and money on techy stuff without having the first clue why. Foolishness has always been the most reliable mask. Yes, my AI is just Siri, more or less. A digital voice-command interface. Not a fully sentient, autonomous Artificial Intelligence, no sir-ee. Just a cute little bot. Basically a Roomba.
Three weeks later, on the dot, SI and her partner companies have released plans for a slew of new products. Investors are flooding back and the fight for thirty per cent of ST and SS is bloody. Pep is having the time of her life, especially since JARVIS is supplying the data almost in real-time. Estimates, models, predictions flow to her tablet, accompanied by smaller, more subtle tidbits. Mister Holland has developed an unfortunate cocaine habit. Miss Noriko is only in it to spite her ex-business partner. Ms Reina has made a few very clever investments, mostly by accident.
With his plate somewhat clear—as clear as it’s going to get in the next few years until this chaos settles a little—he can focus on the shit that actually matters. His suit and Snow White sleeping in his workshop.
Holy fuck, he thinks, coming to a dead stop at the entrance of the impromptu hospital room. My oh my, but that is one disturbingly beautiful teenager. Snow White, he said? He’s a man of science, doesn’t get superstitious or whatever, but man, he was more right than he knew. This sure feels like a fairy tale. And not the nice kind, no, the German type with monsters that inevitably eat all the children and set fire to the village.
Free from tubes and lines and needles, but the one IV drip, the kid rests on the bed, skin only slightly less white than the bedsheets. Raven-haired beauties waking up from an enchanted sleep—what the fuck is happening? Nobody is that symmetrical. People can’t embody the concept of fragile, delicate perfection this much, it’s not possible. The two lines down the corner of his eyes should be a flaw, should help break the spell. They just add to it. They look like tear tracks, like the ugliness of the world has tried to carve into him and failed, only leaving him that much more perfect.
“JAR—” What can he even say? “Did you—run a Face ID?” Surely this—this miraculous tragedy of a teenager would be famous? Tony has spent a good few years around beautiful people, some of them professionally so. They don’t even come close to this skinny, pale teenager Tony found in a fucking warehouse.
“I have, Sir. No matches, in any databases I searched. I was thorough. Either our guest was—” a pause, significant enough to raise the hairs on Tony’s neck, “—never entered into them, or he was wiped after his capture.”
Okay. Breathe, Stark. Either the kid was born and raised in captivity, or someone was good enough to scrub the databases without a trace that JARVIS could find. The second shouldn’t be possible, but then again, neither was the cylinder of horror the kid was kept in. Whatever. He will deal with it later. The kid will wake soon, and chances are he will have a mindless, traumatized victim on his hands.
Fucking fuck.
“In for a wait, then. Let’s get it.”
Whatever defences Tony managed to build against his heart, whatever he thought he was ready for, it wasn’t this. The kid stirs from sleep, blinks his giant, shiny eyes open, and takes a slow look around. There is no fear, instinctive panic, not even a wince of pain. He must be in agony, JAR already explained all about what it would feel like, after being kept in a coma for that long.
No, the kid looks around, slow and unhurried and sighs a little. The sound is rough, painful to hear. Fuck, his throat must be killing him, after fuck knows how long of being kept alive with IVs.
“Here, water—” He’s not even babbling, that’s how fucked Tony is. He makes his way to the kid’s bed, grabs a glass of water standing on the side. Slow movements, Stark! Don’t scare the kid any further—
The kid isn’t scared one bit. Tony falters in his steps as the pitch-black eyes focus on him, with nothing but patient, bored indifference in them. Tony stands frozen, head completely free from anything that isn’t a vague mix of anxiety and panic. It’s only broken when a small furrow cuts between the kid’s brows and he drops his eyes to his hands. His unrestrained arms. Mother of fuck—
“Yeah, shit, we’re not—you’re good now, kid—” And there’s the babble. “Swear to Jesus, my name is Tony, uh, you’re not there anymore. You’re with me, in Stark Tower. Do you know the Stark tower? It’s in New York, uh, America—” Pull yourself together, fuck, the kid isn’t listening. He’s much too busy looking at his arms with something like vague curiosity. Puzzled, if anything. What the fuck did they—The odds of the kid being born into captivity are growing by the Goddamn minute, and the sick feeling in Tony’s stomach curdles.
“Perhaps our guest doesn’t speak English, Sir.”
Kid’s eyes jump, a slight bit of sharpness entering them. He looks around the room once more, sweeping it in a very professional manner. There’s nothing here, no space where someone could hide.
“Do you speak English?” He asks, a bit lost at how to continue this train wreck of a conversation. He repeats it in Italian and French, then again in his halting German. The kid still doesn’t pay him the slightest mind. As soon as he finished his sweep of the room, he settles back into bored—even slightly imperious—silence, closing his eyes briefly, as if praying for patience.
“My name is JARVIS,” JAR comes to the rescue. “I am an Artificial Inteligence. I assure you I have no body to hide, if we don’t consider the building as such. I would reassure you as well. You are among friends here. We only wish to help.”
Look at you, thinks the small part of his brain dedicated to pride in his baby. Look at all that personal pronouns. It’s always a pleasure when JAR stops messing about. Tony knows why he does it, doesn’t fault him for it, but he can damn well enjoy moments like these. The kid’s eyes flash at JAR’s voice, but other than that, he remains still and terrifying.
“Please, kid,” Tony says through the lump in his throat. “Please—Anything. Nod if you can understand, wink, twitch your fucking toes. I can’t—I can’t help if I don’t have data. Please.”
Look at that, manners would get you somewhere. Or maybe it was the audible pain in his voice. Whatever, who cares. It got you the kid’s attention. His eyebrows raise, lips twitching in a slightly—mocking twist? He inclines his head, dislodging a heavy lock of hair that spills to the front of his white pyjamas. Christ.
“Thank you.” Hey, honesty got him somewhere. An engineer never fucks with what works. “Have some water, please.” He hesitates. Is that the problem? “It’s not—I haven’t done anything to your water. I—look I found you, I have no idea who you are or how you got to Jersey. I just found you. I don’t want to—you can walk out, anytime. Literally, you can walk out right now, no problem. I’ll send you off with a bag of cash and a handshake. Just—” Just what. “I just want to help. So. Water? Please?”
The mocking angle shifts into something more neutral, as the kid tilts his head briefly. It doesn’t look like he believed much of Tony’s plea if he even understood it. Still, he reaches a thin arm out and takes the glass of water Tony’s been holding out for a good while now. Man, his hand hurts, he hadn’t even noticed, fuck. He raises it to his lips in a smooth movement, which he shouldn’t be capable of, now that he thinks about it. His muscles should be fucked to hell.
Whatever.
“Thank you.” He steps back a good few steps, all too happy to retreat away from this unearthly teenager stabbing red hot pokers into his kidneys. “Really. Means the world. Now we sit and wait until all the drugs that aren’t in that water don’t do anything to you, and maybe continue after?”
“No point,” says the kid.
Tony swallows. Okay, okay. So that’s one seriously deep voice. Deep and smooth and raspy, and—not all that young-sounding, actually. It’s not that it doesn’t fit, it does. Tony already can’t imagine any other voice the kid could have had. What it does do, is make him reconsider the kid’s age. Still young, but maybe in his late teenage years?
“Sorry, uh, what? No point?” Also, the kid knowing English is a motherfucking weight of his mind.
“You want to drug me, you will. No point.”
The weight of—something dark in the kid’s voice stops the flood of words that want to spill. That is one resigned torture victim, Stark, watch your fucking bullshit.
“Right, uh. Look, kid, maybe we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Tony. Tony Stark.”
The kid’s eyebrows twitch again, something like dry amusement flashing over his face. It’s not that the kid is schooling his expression, Tony realized with tired horror. It’s that he can’t be fucked to emote physically. Alright, sure. “At yo-ur ser-vi-ce Mis-ter Star-k.”
He blanches, retreating another step. “Uh. Kid, I’m not—You’re not—Okay. Okay. Let’s back up. Do you—Do you know what—” How does he ask if the kid knows what freedom is? “Do you remember your life before—before whatever happened, happened?”
A flash of pain passes over the kid’s face, raw for how dull and resigned it is. It hits Tony right where it hurts, right in his matching pit of depression and hopelessness. “Why do you wa-ant to kno-ow, Mis-ter Star-k?”
Shit.
“Sir is at a loss at how to approach the situation without causing you undue distress,” says JARVIS and thank fuck for that. “Neither one of us have much experience with individuals treated as unjustly as you have been. We are trying to avoid making a mistake.”
The kid hums, passes a clinical look up and down Tony’s body before something like exhausted boredom settles into his angelic features. Man, the Renaissance painters would sacrifice the whole of Venice to get a shot at painting this kid. “What do you want, Mis-ter Stark and Jar-vis? I will not ser-ve you, I will not tell you a-ny-thin-g. Oth-er men try and not succeed. Do as you will.”
Tony spends a long moment keeping himself from panicking even more. Okay, so the kid is—confused. That’s fine. What did you expect? He’s woken up from torture, fuck knows what had happened to him. He obviously doesn't know who Tony is. It’s fine.
“Right, um. So. I don’t know what to say to that, other than the obvious. I want you to get better and, fuck, live a long and charmed life, I don’t know. Get your life back.” If you ever had one. “Go to school, fall in love, get a dog and a wife and two point five kids. Take up a boring hobby and file your taxes on schedule.” Jesus Christ Stark, stop while you’re ahead. “But, uh, I see that you’re not in the mood to listen. Which—fair enough. I’d be wary of a grown-ass man in my room, talking shit.” Deep breaths. “So! What I’m going to do is, I’m going to leave now. There are clothes and shit—somewhere. If there aren’t, JARVIS will buy you—anything you want, really. I’d recommend resting up a bit, but, uh, if you wanna leave, go for it. Maybe wait until JARVIS gives you some cash. I don’t know.” Jesus, mention that he shouldn’t leave, maybe? “I’d like it if you stayed. I can give you a flat here, no problem-o. Fuck, you can take the floor below mine, it’s empty. Uh.” You know what? That’s good enough. “Just—JARVIS is your friend. I’m your friend too, but I get that you might be a bit wary of strange old men nattering at you. So. Yeah. Don’t do anything rash? Please?”
“That went very well, Sir. Thank you.”
“Did it?” Tony stares at his reflection for a long, horrible minute. “Did it go well? What I saw was a kid who was so used to being tortured, he didn’t even entertain any other possibility.”
“You cannot control our guest’s response to prolonged trauma. You can only control your actions. You were exceptionally gentle with him.”
Yeah, shit. He tried. “Any luck on a name?”
“I didn’t think it would be polite to insist, Sir. I only offered if he would like to choose his clothing, which he demurred. Similarly, he declined to offer any opinions on food or preferred media sources. I sent an order on a wide selection, cross-referenced by his age bracket and presumed country of origin.”
Of course, he refused, the poor brainwashed lamb. He’s waiting for Tony to jump out with thumbscrews and scalpels, no doubt. “Oh? And what’s your best guess? I got nothing, other than vaguely Asian and over fifteen.”
“Without doing a radiographic scan, I can only estimate his age to be between fifteen and twenty years. Ordinarily, his demeanour would suggest the latter, but I am uncertain if my protocols are calibrated for this particular individual. Of Korean or Japanese origin, based on his facial features and speech patterns.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figure, too. He’s got a very Japanese jailbait thing going on. It’s very unnerving.” Fuck this line of discussion. Ants are crawling under his skin again. He wasn’t prepared for the kid to be beautiful. Beautiful kids don’t do well in captivity. He really doesn’t need to add depth to the horrors he’s already imagining.
“It is.” JARVIS hesitates, and dread winds even tighter around Tony’s heart. “My scans have suggested the possibility of several types of abuse. Among others—”
“Fuck.” He turns the tap back on and tries, like a totally sane, rational person, to pre-empt his empathetic response to a traumatized child, by inducing a panic attack because of his own trauma. It works, to an extent, and now Tony lies on the floor of his bathroom with tears running down his face, shaking from a learned fear-response to water in his nose and mouth, as well as from the horror of what the kid in his tower probably went through. Good job, Stark. This is why they call you a genius.