Chapter Text
When Tony woke up, there was a strange man standing over his bed and staring down at him while holding a large, sharp knife in his hand.
This wasn't the first time something like this had happened. It wasn't even the second.
Stark men are made of iron, was the first thing Tony remembered, which was a stupid thing for his father to say so often because iron was an inferior metal.
Be calm, was the second thing he remembered. During their lessons (drills), Mr. Smith (not his real name, btw) told Tony time and time again that the most important thing he could do when someone was trying to attack him or kidnap him was to be calm. Always, always be calm. Show no fear, no panic, no anger, and never, ever, ever show uncertainty. Tony decided that if he survived this night, he'd give Mr. Smith a million dollars. Or a blow job (because Ty said he needed the practice).
So Tony said, “Cool arm,” instead of screaming like he wanted to.
Tony hadn't realized that the man was moving to slit his throat until the knife abruptly stopped a hair's breath away from his jugular.
“What is that, titanium?” Tony continued, painfully aware of his vulnerable position on his back, as well as the fact that the man was twice his size and probably four times as strong (because yeah, Tony was pretty fit for his age and size from all of his time spent building machines and welding, but this guy was ripped). “Good metal. Well, good enough, I suppose. A carbon alloy would be better. Combined with a bit of graphite, maybe? And that design isn't nearly as efficient as it could be. Let me take a look at it and I could fix it up for you, give it a few tweaks,” Tony offered. Because Mr. Smith told him that the second most important thing he could do in an attack or hostage situation was to figure out what the attacker wants, or something that they wanted, in order to gain leverage or control of the situation. And while Tony knew that in this particular situation the attacker wanted to kill him, Tony hoped that the guy wanted a nice new arm more.
Before the man could reply (could he even speak through that mask?), the door to Tony's dorm room began to open on squeaky hinges. Faster than Tony's eyes could follow, the man with the metal arm (and the knife, Tony belatedly realized) had disappeared beneath Tony's bed and out of sight. The room's light quickly flickered on, and after Tony was finished blinking in the sudden light, he was startled to see the tall form of Obadiah Stane filling the doorway.
“Obi?” Tony asked as he sat up while rubbing at his eyes. The change from staring down a man with a knife to staring down his godfather was sudden and discordant, and it made Tony wonder if he weren't asleep and dreaming after all. Because sure, Obi visited Tony at MIT more often than either of Tony's parents combined, but he never appeared unannounced, and never in the middle of the night.
In response, Obadiah quietly demanded, “Get up, Tony,” his expression stern and grave. Tony, he'd said, not Tones. “There's been an accident. We need to get to the hospital.”
As Tony rushed to pull on some shoes and a coat (he didn't even think of grabbing pants to pull on over his boxers, which he would regret once stepping foot out of the dorm and into the chilly New England night), he didn't tell Obi that there was an assassin hiding under his bed. Although, in hind sight, he probably should have.
A car accident, they said. His parents had been on their way home from a party and his father had been driving drunk. Which was possible. Except, Howard Stark never attended functions without a driver - the man liked to rub his status and money in people's faces in any way he could, even if half of the other people attending the function had drivers in their employ as well. And Tony's mother never drank in public. Only in private. Maria wouldn't have allowed Howard to drive drunk. Which meant something had happened to make Tony's father get behind the wheel of a car after publicly consuming alcohol at a well attended party. And again, just to reiterate, Tony had left someone who was potentially trying to kill him hiding under his bed when he rushed from his dorm room, and that fact didn't exactly lend any credence to the whole accident theory.
By the time Tony and Obi reached the hospital, his parents had already been pronounced dead, and none of those facts would change how it had happened or the fact that it had happened.
The second time Tony saw the man with the metal arm (sans knife this time) was at a party.
Ty had woken him up at 9:00 (in the evening. Tony wasn't usually in bed before 3:00 in the morning, but he hadn't slept at all during the three days before, and upon arriving back at the MIT doom just after 7:00, Tony had crashed. Which was why he was pissed at Ty. Two measly hours of sleep after three days without did not a happy Tony make). The 21-year-old had then proceeded to drag Tony to the first wild frat party they could find, which happened to be in the Harvard dorms only a few minutes drive from the MIT campus, citing that Tony needed to unwind.
What Tony really needed was sleep and a good, long cry. However, Ty was a sociopath, or at least that's what Rhodey said, so the guy didn't understand the concept of mourning, and he needed Tony at the party to make him look good. Because Tony was probably the only person on the entire East Coast capable of distracting people from Ty's poor social skills.
Thus, Tony went to the party (but only because Ty promised to do all of the class work Tony had missed while attending his parent's funeral and helping Obi sort out Stark Industries). He spent an hour or so being a dick to anyone who even mentioned his parents (and he really was a dick considering the fact that most of the people who brought his parents up were trying to offer their condolences), and after the hour was up Tony snuck out to the pool behind the frat house.
The pool itself was empty and covered by a tarp and the patio was dark, so Tony was alone. The alone part was key, because he'd stolen a bottle of cheep vodka from the kitchen, and even though he was at a frat party, it was a Harvard frat party, and these people weren't stupid enough to be caught serving alcohol to an underage Tony Stark. And Tony didn't want to be kicked out of the party until after he'd gotten drunk off his ass and partook in a good bit of grief sex.
The pool area was dark, but Tony easily recognized the tall, looming shadow of the assassin as the man appeared from the shadows beyond the pool. At first, Tony thought the figure was that of a grounds keeper come to ruin Tony's attempt at drowning his sorrows. However, as the figure approached, Tony saw light from the back of the house reflecting off of the shiny metal of the assasin's arm. As the man moved closer and came more into the light, Tony saw the dull red star painted onto the upper bicep of the metal arm and immediately knew what the symbol meant.
“Russian, huh?” Tony asked as the man came to a stop a few feet away from where he was sprawled out on one of the deck chairs near the empty pool.
Tony looked into the round, dark lenses of the man's mask and had to remind himself to stay in check and keep from showing his discomfort at the blank, emotionless gaze which the mask portrayed.
“You have good timing, Darth. If you were any latter and there wouldn't be any vodka left for you,” Tony declared, vaguely waving the nearly empty liquor bottle towards the man so that it's meager contents could be heard sloshing around the bottom.
“You said my arm was inefficient,” the man lowly stated, completely ignoring Tony's half-drunken attempt at banter.
Tony hated being ignored.
And he hadn't said the arm was inefficient. When they last met, Tony said he could make the arm more efficient.
Tony also hated when people misquoted him. Why did he ever bother speaking if people didn't listen to what he had to say?
Usually, being ignored and misquoted would make Tony instantly combative. Just now, however, he figured that simply because he couldn't see the knife didn't mean it wasn't there, so Tony literally swallowed down the insulting word vomit trying to crawl its way out of his esophagus.
“Sure,” he finally managed to agree. “I did say that. I also said that I could fix it up for ya. You, uh... having some problems with it or something?”
“Yes,” the man stated, his shoulders drawing back as if he were about to give a report. “The arm is making me remember. In order to maintain maximum efficiency, it needs to stop.”
Um.
“Right,” Tony slowly drawled as he attempted to process what exactly the guy was saying. “Do you, uh, know how that works?”
“No,” the man firmly replied. “The subject doesn’t need to understand in order to remain functional.”
O...kay.
Tony took a long, deep swig from his pilfered vodka before offering what remained to the man (and Tony was beginning to wonder, was the guy a man at all?). The man took the bottle, but he didn't seem to know what to do with it after his flesh hand was wrapped around the bottle's neck.
“This will not improve the arm's efficiency,” the man eventually told him after inspecting the bottle and it's label for several long moments.
“No, but it will help you relax,” Tony insisted.
“Subject's efficiency decreases by .5% with every 100 ounces of alcohol consumed,” the man recited.
“One hundred ounces?” Tony repeated. “That's like... Twelve and a half cups. Do you drink, like, beer? Because this is 80 proof, and vodka, and... Are you talking about drinking pure alcohol?”
“Yes.”
“Dude, that's... I'm pretty sure drinking that much alcohol kills people.”
When the man responded to this statement by doing and saying absolutely nothing, Tony grabbed the vodka back and took one last swig. “Forget sex,” he said to himself. “Let's go do science.”
“So,” Tony said once they'd broken into one of the advanced medical testing centers on the Harvard campus (and hadn't that been an adventure. Tony could break and enter with the best of them, but the man had done it in a fifth of the time it would have taken Tony, and he had done it while climbing four floors with Tony clinging to his back). Tony only had to look at the guy's arm for five minutes before figuring out that the metal was somehow connected directly to his body and attached to the man's brain, and doing anything with the arm wouldn't be as simple as taking a screwdriver to the thing. Thus, they were running some tests. “Why did you kill my parents?”
It was kind of a stupid question, because his father was one of the greatest weapons developers in the world, and this guy was clearly working for the Soviets. But hey, Tony was fishing for specifics. He doubted the man had anything personal against his parents, and he was certain he hadn't done anything to the man to warrant a knife to the neck while sleeping, so.
“Who?” the man asked, his eyes avidly trained on some of the medical equipment as it beeped away and printed off lines and lines of diagnostic information. And wasn't it creepy that the man looked just as inhuman without the mask as with it?
“Howard and Maria Stark,” Tony answered slowly, because seriously, the “accident” had happened six days ago.
In reply, the man mechanically stated, “Mission 9-5 dash Oscar Kilo Sierra dash 3-7-8. Mission erased.” Except, he said it in Russian, which Tony only understood because If the Soviets take over the world like they want and despite our best efforts, the Starks will survive.
Tony had heard the guy speak enough, and he'd seen enough on the brain scans of the wiring in his brain to understand that “mission erased” was the assassin's way of saying that he didn't remember anything about killing Tony's parents. But at the same time, he was also kind of admitting that yeah, it had totally been him, just as Tony suspected.
Tony sighed, because go figure.
“Look, dude, I'm an engineer, not a doctor,” Tony said while gathering all of the data he'd acquired during their myriad of testing (they'd been in the building for five hours so far). “I don't know what all of this stuff means or how it relates to your arm, but luckily for you I'm a genius. I'd bet half of my stocks in Stark Industries that I'll have this figured out within the month, so...”
Tony speculatively eyed the man, because what he was about to do was really dangerous, and it went against everything that Mr. Smith had ever, ever taught him, and the guy was Russian (or working for the Russians, or controlled by them, or something, because his English was phenomenal, and even thought his diction was mostly perfect, there were brief moments where an accent leaked into his speech patterns. And Tony would bet the other half of his stocks in Stark Industries that it was an accent from Brooklyn), and he'd been sent to kill Tony, and the mess of wires that Tony could see on some of the scans meant the guy was more robot than man, but... Seriously, Tony was curious, and he lived for science and... and... and honestly, all the aforementioned reasons why this was a bad idea were also the reasons that made this interesting and exciting and...
And this guy had killed his parents on command (at the command of some Soviet asshole), and then he'd been commanded to kill Tony, and what better revenge than to make sure it couldn't happen again? What better revenge than to live, and to live using their tech?
“You should stay with me,” Tony declared. “Until we have that arm and your memory issues sorted out. Because I can fix it. I can make it better – more efficient. Right?” Because if Ty had taught Tony anything, it was that he had to take the information he had and use it to make people do what I want. And he wanted this (guy from Brooklyn) technology in his hands, and not Russia's.
The man stared at him for several long, slow moments, his eyes narrowing dangerously. Then, the man nodded.
Tony... hadn't thought this through.
That night when they broke into an Advanced Medical Testing Center on the Harvard campus, Tony thought he had all the information he needed, and he thought he held all the cards. But even though he had somehow tricked the guy into not killing him, he hadn't tricked the guy into trusting him.
When he was six, Mr. Smith and five of his associates had run a week long simulation with Tony on what it would be like to be held captive. They repeated the simulation under varied conditions once a year for longer periods of time until Tony was fourteen, at which point Mr. Smith and several other associates (whom Tony had never met before and who were far better actors than Mr. Smith's other little helpers) had actually stolen Tony from his bed, flown him to an undisclosed location in South America, and had held him there for a month before he finally escaped on his own and managed to get a phone call to his parents.
Living with the assassin was a lot like those simulations. He'd tried to hide the man away in a Boston townhouse on the first day, but that hadn't worked out very well. Tony had dropped the man off at the apartment before classes on Monday. Then, as he was walking to a meeting with his adviser that afternoon, the man had dropped down from a tree, snatched Tony, and hauled ass to Tony's private workshop on the far side of the campus. He did all of this in broad daylight while thousands of students were traveling between classes, and no one had seen anything. Apparently, the man had spent a grand total of two minuets alone in the apartment before some extreme paranoia had kicked in, and he had convinced himself that Tony had booby-trapped the apartment in an attempt to kill him because Tony didn't want to uphold his promise to fix the guy's arm. What followed was two days of Tony trapped in his workshop while the man threatened him and argued with Tony about his progress on his research of the man's arm.
Thus, the guy lived out of Tony's dorm. He slept under Tony's bed, stole food and clothing from Tony's dorm mates, and he followed Tony everywhere. He followed Tony to his classes, to his workshop, to parties, restaurants, meetings with Obadiah, press conferences, everywhere. And no one ever even saw him. At first, Tony didn't, either. But after a few weeks, he started learning the man's tricks, and he figured out where he needed to look in order to catch brief glimpses of the assassin while sitting in class or walking around the campus. Tony had always known the man was strong, and sneaky, but one day he saw the man crawling along the ceiling, using nothing but his own strength to straddle the walls, while people walked directly under him none the wiser.
Tony was used to being watched by people, but it was unsettling how quickly he became used to being really watched by the assassin.
After that first big ordeal where Tony was held in his workshop with a knife to his neck for two days, they worked out a deal where Tony was allowed time to work on his projects for school for most of the day, but he had to make some kind of progress with his research on the man's arm before he could eat or shower or rest at the end of the night. They also came to the understanding that Tony needed to continue behaving normally so that people wouldn't grow suspicious. The assassin was lucky that Tony was well known for disappearing into his workshop for days at a time, otherwise holding him captive there wouldn't have gone so smoothly.
At first, the assassin allowed Tony to keep up the appearance of living a normal, assassin free life. He and Rhodey went to dinner and then to their favorite MIT library to talk shop a couple of nights a week. Ty successfully dragged him out to parties on Friday and Saturday nights. Tony continued to see his friends and have an active sex life, so things were good.
But then, one night, while Tony was putting on his coat and grabbing his bag to go meet Rhodey, the assassin grabbed Tony's arm with his metal hand before Tony could leave his room.
“What's up?” Tony asked when he turned to face the assassin.
The man scowled at him, but Tony had seen the man angry enough times that his overwhelming, threatening demeanor no longer sent Tony into panic attacks (even if the panic attacks were artfully internalized and carefully hidden from the assassin's shrewd scrutiny) every time he saw that scowl. Tony realized that he had become desensitized.
“James Rhodes is not proficient enough of an engineer to be allowed to preform alterations to my arm,” the man informed Tony.
Tony blinked. “Okay, first of all, Rhodey's got some mad skills.”
“He's black,” the man argued, and Tony flinched. The assassin had expressed some racist viewpoints before, but never directly towards Rhodey.
“Second of all,” Tony continued, because no matter how much he wanted to start a fight about the man's opinions on the color of Rhodey's skin, he guy still had Tony's arm in his metal hand, and Tony needed that arm, dammit. “Second of all, I already promised that I would be the only person to touch your arm. Remember? We made that deal while we were holed up in my workshop. Right?”
It took a few moments for the man to remember, but then, slowly, the man nodded.
“Third of all, Rhodey's my friend. We always hang out on Wednesday evenings.”
“Regardless of your sentimental attachment to this man, your first priority is upgrading my arm and fixing the remembering. Yes?” the man snarled back at him.
Tony recognized that the man was crossing the line from angry, to dangerous angry. Dangerous angry meant that that any minute now, that stupid fucking knife would appear in the man's flesh hand as if by magic, and the carefully sharpened point (Tony could hear the man sharpening it at night, while Tony laid on top of the bed and the man was lying under it) would be tilted towards one of Tony's major arteries.
So Tony said, “Yeah, yeah, you're right. First priority is you. Got it. No dinner with Rhodey tonight.”
Satisfied, the man nodded and finally released Tony's arm (his skin would be bruised the next day).
Then, on Friday, Ty burst into Tony's room while Tony was sitting on his bed, clipping his fingernails (he had to keep them short, because it was nearly impossible to clean the oil and grease out from under them after he'd been working in his workshop. Plus, if he kept them long, they often managed to split and crack in very painful ways while he was working). The assassin had already ducked under his bed (Tony had no idea how the man could differentiate between people walking by his door and people walking towards his door, but he never disappeared under the bed unless someone was ten seconds away from barging into Tony's room), and Ty walked in like he owned the place – which he didn't. Tony's grandfather had donated the money to build this particular dorm ages ago.
“Hop to, Stark,” Ty demanded with a smirk that was somehow more arrogant than Tony's own. “Tommy Moore's having a kegger!”
Tony looked up from his nails and opened his mouth to agree (Tommy Moore was always good for a party, because he managed to find the wildest, most depraved people in the city to attend them – people who didn't care that Tony was too young for alcohol or sex), but before the words could leave his mouth, the assassin's metal hand clamped around his ankle like a vice, and Tony found himself saying, “Not tonight, Stone.”
“What's the matter, Stark?” Ty goaded, “Having problems? Afraid you won't be able to get it up?”
Tony responded with a derisive snort. “The only hard on I'll have tonight is for science. I finally came up with an idea for my thesis project.”
Ty backed off immediately. He may have been an inconsiderate dick in most regards, but if there was anything he understood, it was that science came first, always.
“Next week, then,” Ty said as he strutted out of Tony's room.
Tony nodded his agreement, but as the metal hand around his ankle slackened, he knew he wouldn't be doing any partying for a long, long time.
One Friday afternoon, Tony skipped his classes in order to work on some projects for Stark Industries. Obadiah had mailed Tony some of Howard's incomplete schematics because there were huge chunks of information missing from the blue prints which would be required to actually build the devices, and what information there was had been written in Howard's infamous shorthand. The engineers at Stark Industries couldn't make heads or tails of it the schematics or Howard's shorthand. The scientists had done their best at filling in the blanks, but if the plans weren't completed in a timely manner, Stark Industries stood to loose several of its most lucrative government contracts. And after the nosedive SI's stocks had taken when Tony's parents died, SI really couldn't afford to loose any more business.
Tony was glad for the distraction. Working on the math for the schematics and building prototypes for the scientists at SI to reverse engineer was easy and soothing. After fuddling through the assassin's technology for a couple of weeks, Tony longed to work on something simple, and after he had spent a few good hours working on projects for SI, Tony felt like his nerves were somewhat soothed.
While working, he hadn't seen the assassin anywhere in his workshop, but he knew the man was there regardless, watching him, and Tony caught a couple of glimpses of the guy as he was walking back to his dorms that evening.
The assassin had been following him, but he still somehow managed to reach Tony's dorm room before Tony himself, and the man was lounging on top of Tony's bed when he walked into the room.
The man almost looked non-threatening while wearing stolen jeans and an MIT sweater, his hair pulled into a sloppy pony tail and out of his face. Except the man remained completely expressionless even without his mask, and he'd torn the left sleeve off of the sweater so the metal arm was exposed.
"Why do you do that?" Tony asked as he set his bag next to his desk. "Remove the sleeves off of your shirts, I mean."
"Fabric catches in the arm's joints, rips off, and gets caught inside of the subject's arm," the man told him. "Movement is reduced by 20%."
"Ouch," Tony mumbled. "So you never hide your arm?"
The man shook his head.
"But what if someone sees you?"
"No one sees me unless I want them to," he stated.
Tony frowned, because he saw the assassin out of the corner of his eye as the man followed him around campus a dozen times a day. If what the man said was true, then he was doing it on purpose, simply to make Tony paranoid. Tony wanted to tell the guy that he was a jerk, but he had a feeling that saying as much would result in that knife appearing, so Tony kept his mouth shut.
Seriously, if nothing else, living with the the assassin was a monumental lesson in self control.
Tony went into engineering (as opposed to medicine, or, like, culinary school or something) because math was strait forward, and machines were easy (even if they were often complex). He dreaded digging up the information he would need to understand the assassin's body, because humans were messy.
However, after reading two (thick) books about the human brain, its various parts and processes which had been documented, and how the brain worked, Tony was at least interested. He wasn't nearly as put out by the subject matter as he thought he'd be because synapses? Those were electrical signals sent from one brain cell to the next, and how fucking cool was that? Also, after reading those two books, Tony knew enough about memory and the brain, and he recognized enough about the very delicate, very precise placement of a couple of microchips in the man's brain to figure out how memory could be erased.
And that was before even mentioning all the other wires and chips and whatever else was cluttering the assassin's body. Tony guessed that if he were to shave the man's head, his scalp would look like a patchwork quilt. As such, it was no wonder he talked about himself in the third person and called himself the subject instead of giving Tony a name to address his by.
Tony had to teach the guy to eat. Seriously, his right arm was covered in track marks (which had miraculously disappeared after a month of living with Tony in the MIT dorms), and the man claimed the marks were from his nutrient injections when Tony asked about them.
And his programming? Tony had to remind the assassin of their agreement every twelve hours almost on the dot, because the man would simply up and forget about it on a regular basis. According to him, sometimes Mission 95-OKS-378 was erased, sometimes it was abandoned, and sometimes it was incomplete. And Tony had a good idea what incomplete meant for him. Regretfully, waking up to find a man standing over him while holding a knife had become commonplace after only two weeks, and staying calm while internally panicking had become a thing.
The worst, though, was when Tony would ask the man what his name was (three times is a pattern, so he never asked a forth time). The man would turn into a sweating, quivering, angry mess, and he would throw a tantrum and destroy whatever was in hand's reach (the third time Tony asked, he made sure they weren't in the dorm or his workshop, but in the townhouse he'd set up for the man instead). When he was ready to calm down the man would draw a deep, long breath and coolly state, “The subject does not need a name to function.” Which was terrifying.
Then, besides the circuitry which was the man's brain there was his blood work, which had tested “inconclusive.” When Tony had a Harvard grad student take a look at the readings, the woman (very attractive, he thought, and uninterested in children, she said) had stared at the results with raised eyebrows for forty seconds before dismissively telling him, “The samples must have been contaminated.”
He's an alien, Tony decided, even though he had piles of data which proved that the man's physiology was fundamentally human despite all of his internal (and external) computer parts.
On the positive side, Tony's new found knowledge of the human brain and the circuitry which could apparently be installed in the human brain gave him a great idea for his thesis project (and it was about time he came up with something, since he was supposed to be graduating in May. He'd been BSing his advisers and department heads whenever the subject was brought up, and they knew it, too).
So yeah, even though the man had killed his parents, and even though Tony was only alive because he woke up a few seconds before the man could bring down his blade, and even though Tony was kind of being held prisoner in his own dorm room, Tony couldn't say that he regretted meeting the man, taking him in, or agreeing to do something about his arm and his memory.
In December, Tony didn't have anywhere to go, or at least that's what he told people despite receiving invitations to spend the holidays with Rhodey, Ty, and Obi.
It was all the cover he needed to officially move himself and the assassin into the townhouse Tony had originally purchased for the man back in October. Tony decided to remain in the townhouse after break, as well, because hiding a temperamental (forgetful) cyborg assassin in his dorm room was hard. Even if the guy was great at remaining unseen, people still noticed his presence in the dorms. The other students had begun to report that food was going missing from the personal refrigerators they kept inside their locked rooms (Tony forgot to feed himself most days; there was a reason the Starks didn't own any pets, and it wasn't because they didn't like animals), clothes mysteriously went missing from the laundry, and objects moved around rooms while people's backs were turned.
Tony found himself disappointed in his dorm mates – they were intelligent people of science for crying out loud! Why in the world were people talking about the dorm being haunted?!
The (relative) privacy of the townhouse would also give Tony a chance to actually work on (with, he had to keep reminding himself) the assassin and his ever increasing number of issues.
Sure, the assassin was holding Tony prisoner just as much as Tony was bribing him to stay, but the longer Tony spent with the man, the more he recognized that the act of remaining in Boston rather than completing his primary mission and returning to the USSR went against some base programming that the guy was compelled to follow.
Tony realized that the man was fighting that base programming, because after two months of reminding the man that Mission 95-OKS-378 was erased, Tony could tell that fighting was exactly what the man was doing, or he was purposely forgetting, or whatever, and it was only that constant forgetting which was keeping the man from returning to the USSR. And the more the man fought, the more erratic he became. He had begun to verbally argue with himself on a semi daily basis about whether he should stay for the sake of efficiency or leave for the sake of completing his standing orders. The arguments were bizarre, too, because it seriously sounded like the human half of his brain was trying to argue with the electronic half of his brain, and it was kind of physically painful to witness.
Tony soon discovered that he needed to find a way to remove the computer chips from the man's brain. Not all of the chips, of course, because three of them were used to control the metal arm which had been fused to his body. But one of the chips was interfering with the man's memory, and another chip was interfering with his creative capabilities. And Tony said interfering because those two parts of his brain hadn't been damaged or permanently altered in any way. Tony figured that this was because the guy needed some creative capabilities to be efficient at his job, and he needed memory in order to remember what the job even was, or where he was supposed to report to after the job was done.
When Tony explained this to the assassin, the man scowled (it was one of the only genuinely human expression Tony ever saw on the guy's face). “You said you would make my arm more efficient,” he said.
Right.
“To do that, I have to remove those two microchips,” Tony said (lied).
“Then do it,” the man demanded.
Tony frowned at the man. It was very frustrating how the man seemed highly intelligent one moment and in the next, it felt like Tony was talking to an idiot. “I told you. I'm an engineer, not a doctor. If I cut into your skull, I'd probably end up killing you.”
For a moment, Tony thought the man was going to pull out his knife or wrap his metal hand around Tony's neck. But then, he said, “Then give me the instructions to complete the procedure. I'll take them back to the Soviet Union and-”
Crap.
“No! Nope! You know what, Ty's family is involved in some pretty shady business. I bet he can point me to some proper doctors who can help you out and keep their mouths shut! We're going to the townhouse in two days. I'll get you fixed up then, yeah?”
From the way the man nodded, Tony had the feeling that he was now the one being manipulated.
Well, Ty proved himself good for something, at least. Two days after Holiday Break began, the basement of Tony's townhouse was transformed into a makeshift, very illegal operating room, and three highly qualified, very well paid surgeons were prepping the man for surgery.
First, they shaved the man's head (and Tony noted that the assassin's scalp in fact did not look like a patchwork quilt. He didn't have any scaring on his head at all). Then, when the anesthesia didn't initially work at putting the man to sleep, the doctors had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out what dosage of anesthesia the man would need. In the end, they had to use ten times the anesthesia they would have used for any other person, and by the time the surgery actually got underway, they were more concerned that the man would die from the anesthesia than the surgery itself.
It was very unusual, the doctors told Tony. As was the man's blood work, they pointedly added. Tony wasn't too worried about the doctors poking around, though. They had signed iron clad gag orders and were given the minimum amount of information required to safely preform the surgery. Not only that, but they interacted with the man enough while he was conscious to understand that they were undoing someone else's work for a damn good reason, and no part of the man should be replicated or recorded for anyone else to see. The surgeons were very professional about the whole thing, and Tony was relieved that his first true crime was going so smoothly.
At least, it went smoothly until the man woke up and began to recover post microchip removal.
With those two microchips gone, the man suddenly regained his humanity, and it did not go well.
Tony... had not thought this through.
He figured, yeah, once the microchips were removed, the man wouldn't be such a robot. He'd regain his memory, his free will, and his conscience. But it hadn't occurred to Tony that those were all things which made people, well, people. And Tony wasn't good at people. He wasn't good at regular people, and he'd probably be worse at cyborg assassins.
Tony was also very disappointed to learn that while, yeah, a lot of the guy's behaviors were a result of his programming, a lot of that programming was a result of regular, boring, good old fashioned human conditioning.
The paranoia, the hyper-vigilance, the confusion, none of it went away. If anything, it increased tenfold.
Tony thought the man's pre-surgery cold, emotionless, blank stare was bad. But the absolute desolation in the man's eyes post-op was way worse. And when he wasn't desolate, he was scared, or anxious, or filled with more rage than Tony had ever seen in a person. It took weeks for the man to calm down, to stop running away every couple of hours (Tony had to put a tracking device on the guy to make sure he didn't try going back to the USSR), and to stop screaming at the top of his lungs at random intervals (he was scaring the neighbors, and Tony was beginning to feel like the modern equivalent of Edwin Rochester, hiding the crazy away in the attic. He started playing loud music with screaming lyrics in an attempt to cover up the man's presence in the hosue). And at first, the guy never actually spoke. It seemed like he wanted to speak from time to time, but only when he was in the middle of a panic attack, and his mouth never did more than formlessly open and close while it was happening.
Tony didn't know what to do. He wasn't good at normal happy emotions, let alone crazy guy assassin emotions. When Tony made the man more human than computer, he lost his tactical advantage of the situation, and he didn't know what to do or how to proceed.
Luckily, things began to calm down near the end of the Christmas holidays. The man finally registered the townhouse as a safe place (after the surgery and in between attempted escapes, he swept the entire place floor to ceiling five times a day looking for bugs or explosive devices or something), and after almost killing Tony three times, he decided that Tony wasn't a threat, either.
Then, just a few days before Tony would have to start attending class again, the man spoke.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he asked quietly from his place beneath Tony's bed, which is where he spent all of his time when not inspecting the house for traps or explosives or listening devices.
Tony looked up from his computer, where he was writing some code for his thesis project.
The man was on his stomach at the edge of the bed, peering out at Tony from underneath. The bed was a double which was pushed up against the far wall of the bedroom, and the man usually stuffed himself into the corner furthest away from the open, unprotected sides. Usually, when the man was looking out from the edge of the bed as he was now, his posture suggested that he was about to spring forward and attack. However, now he had adopted a purposefully relaxed pose, lying on his stomach with his chin propped up on his flesh hand.
This unfamiliar body language was almost scarier than when he looked like he was about to dart out and start cleaving at Tony's chest with his knife.
Tony played the scared but calm game all the time, and he immediately saw what was really going on. The man didn't remember Tony and he may not remember anything from their past several months together. The man was doing the same thing Mr. Smith had trained Tony to do – he was reacting to an attack or a hostage situation.
“I'm doing this because you killed my parents and tried to kill me on the order of some Soviet asshole, and because you sometimes have a Brooklyn accent. Also, someone was using microchips to control your thoughts and actions. And because before you started having panic attacks on an hourly basis, you were actually a pretty interesting guy to hang out with. So... you're talking now?”
“Who are you? Where am I?” the man replied, and the questions were delivered with the same calm intentness as the first.
“I'm Tony Stark, and you're in Boston Massachusetts. And hey, while we're exchanging information, do you know who you are?”
The man visibly flinched and said, “Subject does not need a name to function.”
The question yielded better results than pre-microchip removal attempts at getting information from the guy, but Tony was disheartened to learn that removing the microchips wouldn't simply make him remember. It was also pretty fucked up that he was still referring to himself as the subject.
Not cool.
“Crap,” Tony muttered as he pushed his chair away from his desk and his computer. He rubbed at his temples as he asked, “So you don't remember anything?”
The man shook his head. “Do you know who I am?”
“Nah. Do you remember how we met, at least?”
Now, the man tilted his head and his brow furrowed as he considered Tony's question (and weren't all of these human emotions on the guy's face simply novel?). “I... killed your parents?” he finally asked, sounding uncertain.
Tony nodded, his spine straightening upon receiving confirmation that removing those damn chips hadn't completely erased the man's memory. “And then you came to my dorm to kill me. But I distracted you, remember? I told you I could make that metal arm of yours more efficient. And you said the arm was making you remember things, and that you wanted for me to fix it.”
And there it was! Recognition flashed briefly across the man's eyes. “Mission 95-OKS-378,” he muttered in Russian.
“Right! That one! Do you remember who it was that gave you that mission?” Tony eagerly pressed.
“Hydra,” the man growled, and Tony's blood ran cold.
“Hey, man, what happened to you?” Rhodey asked whey they ran ran into each other on the first day of the spring semester. “It's like you dropped off the face of the Earth. Stone called me, because you haven't felt like partying. Tony, Tiberius Stone is worried about you.”
Tony shrugged off the older man's concern. “I've been working on a couple of pretty big things. I'm building an artificial intelligence for my thesis project.”
Rhodey whistled. “You never do anything by halves, do you, Stark?”
Tony grinned, “That I do not. And your adoration of my mad skill has me tickled pink-”
Rhodey gave Tony's shoulder a good punch. “Keep it up and I'll have to put you in your place, kid. Are you going to let me see it?”
“Sure,” Tony allowed. “After I have the chassis built. I'm still working on the personality programming and learning functions – nothing too complicated for my first try, just some preliminary programs I can build off of later. I'm thinking of eventually making something to install in the mansion so Jarvis can have some help keeping the house organized. Then, maybe I'll put an AI in my workshop to help with projects, you know?”
Rhodey hummed and nodded as they headed for the coffee shop located in the student union, the older man watching Tony with narrowed eyes as the teenager talked about his project. After allowing Tony to ramble for a few minutes about baseline personality components, Rhodey asked, “What else are you working on?”
Tony blinked at the older man. “What?”
“Stone stole a copy of your class schedule from the administrative offices and showed it to me,” Rhodey informed him. “We noticed that you only need three class credits to graduate, but you're talking an additional 18 hours of undergrad classes over at Harvard. Tony, why the hell are you taking psychology classes?”
“Well how am I supposed to make computers mimic people if I don't understand people?” Tony easily replied despite the sudden rapid beating of his heart (Tony had come a long way in perfecting his poker face and bullshiting capabilities since he'd started spending most of his time with a highly trained assassin who often forgot that he didn't want to kill Tony Stark).
“That's... a surprisingly good idea,” Rhodey replied. Except now, he looked suspicious.
“What?!” Tony cried, suddenly offended. “You act like I've never had a good idea before!”
“You have plenty of good ideas, but they're rarely ever thought out or refined,” Rhodey pointed out.
“Story of my life, Rhodey,” Tony sighed. Because really, what part of stealing an assassin from the Soviets and Hydra was thought out or refined? And what part of removing the microchips from said assassin's brain was a good idea (at least, removing them without doing any research to figure out what kind of help the guy would need for rehabilitation)?
So yeah, things were kind of a mess.
“Did you get a penis enlargement?” was how Ty greeted him when they met outside their adviser's office latter that same afternoon. “Just because it's bigger doesn't mean you'll be any better at using it.”
Because of course Ty would be curious as to why Tony had needed the names of grade-A surgeons who would work privately and quietly, and of course he didn't have the good sense to keep his curiosity to himself.
“The enlargement wasn't for me,” Tony shot back. With a leer, he told the older man, “It was for a friend.”
Ty burst into gleeful laughter, “Someone's already got you acting as their sugar daddy, huh?”
“Fuck off, Stone! It's none of your business!” Tony said hotly. Because if Ty thought he'd figured out Tony's sore spot, he was more likely to leave Tony alone (until the next time they got into a fight, anyways, at which point Ty would use every secret and emotional weakness he knew of to cut Tony down).
And sure enough, at the first sign of Tony's distress, Ty backed off. “Alright, alright. I was only joking around. But I knew something was going on. Your radio silence this past month has been weird. I had to talk to Rhodes, Tony. And you know how much I hate speaking to that common-”
“Yes, Ty, I know,” Tony interrupted before Ty could use any racial slurs against Tony's best friend. Because Tony only had to get through this semester, and if he got into a fight with Ty on their first day back at school, the rest of the term would be one massive battle, and Tony had more important things to worry about than a dick measuring contest with Tiberius Stone.
“As long as you understand,” Ty said smugly. “So there's a party at Christi Hale's place on Friday-”
Tony sighed. Because he really, really wanted to go to a party, get drunk, and have some good old fashioned anonymous sex with a stranger. But, “I can't,” he sighed. “I waited too long to start building my thesis project. I doubt I'll be coming out of my workshop for air too often this semester.”
Because he could not, could not, leave the assassin alone for long periods of time. And Tony didn't trust himself not to get drunk at a party and take strangers to his townhouse for some fun, and no one could know that the man was living with him. Because Hydra, the monsters from his bed-time stories while growing up, apparently existed, and they weren't just some villainous Nazi knockoff group created for the sake of entertainment in comic books and holy crap, what if his father wasn't just a comic book fan, and what if there was actually some shred of truth to all of that Captain America stuff he used to go on about when he had been drinking?!
“So no,” he finished telling Ty.
Ty made a face. “You're a jackass, Stark.”
“Of course I am. Why else would I hang out with you?” Tony shot back.
The man had his own room and his own bed in the townhouse, but he still refused to sleep anywhere except for under Tony's bed. Which, okay, that's where he had been sleeping since October, so whatever.
For the most part, it was fine. Tony kept highly irregular hours, staying up until three or four in the morning most nights and then sleeping for only three or four hours until getting up the next day. He didn't sleep very deeply, though. Mr. Smith had trained him to wake up at the slightest noise when he was only five or six (which had been a nightmare for Tony while growing up in an old mansion with constantly settling foundations and creaky floorboards). The assassin was quiet, though. The only times he woke Tony were if he decided to sharpen his knife or if he decided to try and kill Tony.
Luckily, the assassin had taken to sharpening his knife during the day, and he didn't think about taking Tony's life half as often as he used to. More and more often, it happened that Tony didn't even notice that the man was even in the room.
That's why when some noise woke Tony one evening and he didn't find an assassin standing over him with a knife, he knew that something was up. The tracking device he wore around his left wrist indicated that the assassin was in fact still in Tony's room, and he didn't see the man when his eyes swept the area, so Tony crawled to the edge of his bed and flopped over the side in order to hang upside down and get a good look at the space beneath.
There, he found the man awake and once again sharpening his knife (it had been two weeks since he'd done this while Tony was trying to sleep. Tony hoped it was a sign that the man was starting to like him and was behaving more considerably towards Tony and his sleeping habits).
“That floor looks uncomfortable as fuck,” Tony noticed. And why hadn't he ever noticed that before? “Why don't you sleep on the bed in your room?”
“The mattress is too soft,” the man easily replied. Then, absently, he said, “Hydra didn't give me a bed. Not a real one, anyways, just a cushion on the floor. And during the war, we didn't even have that much. We slept in the dirt most of the time.”
Tony blinked. That was simultaneously the most he had ever heard the other man speak at one time and more information than he'd volunteered in the entire time the two had known each other. “During the war?” Tony asked. “The Vietnam War?” The man had certainly never mentioned anything like that before. And when Tony thought about it, he realized the USSR had supported North Vietnam during the conflict. That might explain how an American got caught up with the Soviet Union and Hydra.
At Tony's question, the man's motions stopped, and he blinked back at Tony. “Huh,” he said. “I was in Vietnam, I think... but no, during the war I was in France and Germany during most of the fighting. Then Russia, then Italy...”
“Are you talking about World War II?” Tony asked blankly. “Dude if you fought in World War II, you'd be, like, fifty-years-old now.”
“Sixty-seven,” the man corrected. “I was born in 1920.”
“No way,” Tony breathed. “How the hell do you only look like you're 25?”
For a few moments, the man was silent and still. Then, he began twitching in a way that Tony knew meant that the man was certainly remembering something, but it was nothing good, and the memories probably weren't making any sense, so he was probably getting frustrated and confused. Tony had watched him go through this so many times that Tony could actually recognize what was happening without actually having to talk to the guy.
“Hey,” Tony said to get the man's attention and pull him out of his own mind. “Let it go,” he demanded, because he was way too tired for this shit right now. “Relax. The fact that you were about to remember anything about yourself is a big deal. Don't rush it. I think it will all come back to you in time, so don't sweat it.”
It took a few moments and some amount of visible effort on the man's part, but eventually he began to calm a little. “Lord,” he muttered, dropping his knife so that he could scrub his hands over his face.
“Look,” Tony said, “I'm starting to get lightheaded hanging over my bed like this, and all of my psycho profs say that talking is one of the best things you can do for this type of stuff. So come up top if you want, and you can, I don't know, vent or something.”
After lying under the bed for a few minutes more and calming himself, the man did as Tony suggested, climbing out from under the bed and into it. Carefully, he moved to slide into the bed next to Tony and underneath the covers. For the next two hours, they laid side by side, the cool metal of the man's arm pressed into Tony's side while Tony listened to the man talk, and talk, and talk.
When he was finished, the man let out a great, heaving sigh. “Your psych professors were right,” he told Tony. “Talking helps.”
By the time the man had talked himself out, it was almost six in the morning, and the man got out of bed in order to begin his day.
Tony stayed in bed for a while more, simply staring up at the ceiling. Because talking may have helped the man, but it had not helped Tony.
The nightmares began after that. The nightmares began for both of them. Because yeah, Tony had always known that there were bad people out there who did bad things (Tony had been hanging out with Tiberius Stone for most of his life, so yeah, he knew), but the things the man had described as having been done to him, the things he remembered doing, was the stuff of monsters.
One night, Tony woke up when the man crawled into his bed, shaking and sobbing. Tony wasn't in the mood for it, because he had three psych midterms the next day, and he'd been up for the last seventy-two hours compiling the work he'd completed on his AI so far so that he could present it to his advisers at MIT and so that he could just graduate and be done with it. However, Tony understood enough of his psychology textbooks, and he'd listened to the man talk often enough to know that whatever he'd dreamt, or remembered, it was bad, and he needed to talk to someone about what was happening inside of his head.
“What's up?” Tony asked. The man was shaking so hard that the entire bed was quivering, and the more alert Tony was, the more uneasy he became.
“I knew him,” the man sobbed.
“Who?” Tony asked.
“Howard. Your father. I knew him. We were – we were friends. He designed the guns I used during the war. My uniform... Lord, he went drinking with us after missions sometimes. We'd... We'd compete to see who could catch the prettiest girl in the bar. I knew him!”
And didn't that story sound familiar. Hadn't Howard mentioned something about competing with his army buddies for the attention of some local women while telling Tony stories about the war?
Shit. He was so too tired for this.
Awkwardly, Tony patted the man's shoulder. “It's not your fault,” he told the man. “It's not.”
Tony didn't think he had said the right thing, though, because the man didn't stop crying for hours.
Tony was lucky to make it through his final semester of school. Between the stress of taking 21 hours of classes, creating revolutionary technology for his undergraduate thesis project, and rehabilitating a man who had been kidnapped, tortured, and brainwashed, Tony was a little worn out.
DUM-E was the easiest part of his semester, and the most soothing. Whenever he became frustrated with his psych homework (and again, how could people make the argument that this stuff was science? It was all just so fucking subjective), Tony took solace in the familiar, soothing, comforting weight of a soldering iron in his hand as he built DUM-E's chassis or the rhythmic tapping of computer keys as he wrote DUM-E's code.
Likewise, when he was awoken up in the middle of the night because of a nightmare, or by the man and his nightmares, or his memories, or whatever, Tony usually ended up spending the rest of the night working on DUM-E in order to sooth his frazzled nerves.
It was a relief to finish his courses. It was a relief to be done with school (for now, anyways. He'd give it a year before he went back for his Masters and Ph.D.). And it was a relief to be getting the man out of the city. After three months of being cooped up in the townhouse, the man had started following Tony to his classes again. Tony hadn't minded. He hadn't felt threatened anymore, and honestly, Tony thought the man needed to get out and stretch his legs, so he hadn't discouraged the man's faux stalking.
“You'll like the mansion,” Tony promised the man as they packed their things. Tony would be loading their things into his car by himself, and then they would be leaving at three in the morning, a time when Tony's neighbors wouldn't be around to notice the strange man accompanying Tony from his house. The streets and highways would be near deserted, and even if they did have to share the road with other drivers, no one would be able to see through the custom tinted windows of Tony's brand new Porsche (a graduation present to himself).
“Why are you so sure I'll like it?” the man asked with a scowl. He'd been scowling ever since Tony had announced that he wanted to get the hell out of Boston.
“Well, Jarvis is there. You won't have to steal food if I forget to go grocery shopping, and he can get you clothes. And he's kind of awesome. You'll like Jarvis ten times more than me. Plus, the mansion is in a remote location, surrounded by Stark land and protected by the best technological security known to man. There won't be a bunch of strangers going in and out, there won't be any noises in the street to surprise you or make you nervous, and... it's just quiet, comfortable, and safe. I'm definitely not saying that we have to stay there forever, but it will be nice to get out of the city for a while.”
The man sighed in irritation, but didn't put up a fight. He didn't seem to understand that the Stark mansion was Tony's real base of operations, and not the townhouse or MIT. Tony's father had paid good money to ensure that Tony had a private lab on the campus, but the campus was still a public, unsecur location, and they'd had to stock the lab with equipment that had already been patented in case anyone tried to break in and steal anything. Therefore, the advanced, experimental equipment the Starks favored using in their homes had been banned from entering Boston. But the workshop at the mansion was tricked out.
Plus, Howard's secure files and vaults were located in the mansion. Tony hadn't been aloud anywhere near the secure vaults when he was young, but two hours before Tony left for MIT when he was fourteen, his father had shown him the vault's locations and he had given Tony their access information while simultaneously giving Tony the Stark men are made of iron speech, the You're a man now, speech, and the All of this will be yours someday, and it will be your responsibility speech.
Tony had never had the chance to poke through the vaults, despite his burning curiosity, but now he'd have the time to give the vaults a good look over. And he'd bet his own left arm that inside of those vaults, he'd find information on his assassin friend and his real identity. He thought he'd also find information on Hydra, and maybe even something about Captain America, if he were in fact a real person, and not just an actor in a costume like everyone believed.
Tony didn't share any of that with the man, though. They still had a long way to go before the man was fully recovered, and he still had urges to return to the Soviet Union and report to Hydra from time to time.
Tony would be researching PTSD during the summer, as well as cult deprogramming. Jarvis could help, Tony thought. The man had seen war. He'd seen World War II, same as the assassin. Plus Jarvis understood emotions and stuff like that. He could help the man. Probably way better than Tony could, even though Tony had actually taken classes on the subject (and he still stood firm that robots were easier than humans any day).
“Why are you so nervous about this?” Tony asked as he secured DUM-E in the large crate he'd be shipped in. Tony would have insisted on transporting the bot himself, but he was kind of in a hurry to get out of Boston, and DUM-E couldn't exactly fit in the back seat of his Porsche. Instead, DUM-E had been insured for more money than most people saw in their lives, and the movers had signed contracts which basically stated that if the robot was so much as scratched, then Tony Stark would own their souls.
“I'm comfortable here,” the man stated. “I know this place is safe.”
“Except, it's not,” Tony pointed out. “One of our neighbors could press their faces against the windows and you'd be spotted.”
The man scoffed, and okay, the man would be able to hear anyone approaching their windows from a mile away, but still.
“What if I regress?” the man asked. “What if I forget who you are and where I am?”
Tony took that question as a personal offense. “Okay, you had a reason to forget me when there was a microchip in your brain zapping your memory every twelve hours, but honestly, do you believe you could ever forget me now?”
Tony was offended again when the man replied, “No, I guess not,” while sounding very displeased about that fact.
Tony rolled his eyes, checked his watch, and finished reassuring DUM-E that they'd see each other soon before securing the lid on the crate.
“It will be fine,” Tony assured the man. “You'll see.”
It took them four hours to drive from Boston to Ithaca, New York, where the Stark family mansion was located. It was supposed to take five and a half hours, but Tony had been breaking traffic laws ever since he was 9-years-old and stealing one of his father's cars for the first time. They left early enough that they arrived at the manor around seven in the morning.
As Tony pulled the car into the circle drive in front of the house, he was delighted to see Jarvis waiting for him on the front steps, despite the early hour. He hadn't seen the man since his parent's funeral, and Tony had missed him.
As Tony rushed up the front steps for a hug (Jarvis was usually too professional for hugs, but he allowed the show of affection when he hadn't seen Tony for long periods of time), the man said, “Welcome home, Tony, and congratulations on your recent success. I've seen your newest invention featured in several popular magazines.”
And yeah, that was kind of a big deal. Tony and his father had published articles in tech mags and scientific journals all the time, but it was always exciting when they were featured in the more widely read publications.
“Hey, Jarvis,” Tony greeted after giving the man a tight hug. “Thanks for holding down the fort while I was gone. Everything going okay?”
“As well as could be expected, sir.”
And there it was – the man's tired frown which Tony had started noticing on the man's face when his parent's had first announced that they would be sending Tony to boarding school. The frown had grown more and more pronounced as the years went by, but now it was almost devastating. Tony felt suddenly guilty for leaving the man in the manor all by himself for so long, and he regretted that he hadn't even thought of inviting the man to Boston with him.
“Tony?” Jarvis asked. “Who's your friend?”
Tony turned to see the man slowly climbing out of the passenger side of Tony's car, and he turned to Jarvis with a chagrined grin.
“Yeah, about that... I don't know. I mean, Hydra sent him to kill me, but I realized that he had a Brooklyn accent sometimes and that he was probably brainwashed, so I had a couple of microchips removed from his brain and now I'm rehabilitating him. He's doing loads better than he was a few months ago, and he's started remembering things from his life before Hydra kidnapped him and brainwashed him, but he still can't remember his name.”
It was a credit to Jarvis' professionalism (and probably an unhealthy amount of desensitization to Stark shenanigans) that Jarvis didn't try to kill the assassin or Tony in the minutes or hours which followed Tony's announcement. But after Tony had received a proper scolding, and after the man had been informed that he would be restricted from entering half of the manor (primarily the workshop and Howard Stark's former office), Jarvis had quickly and efficiently helped Tony and the man settle in.
That night, after Tony was in bed and the man was once again under his bed, the man said, “Okay, you were right. This place isn't so bad. Even your bedroom floor is comfortable. Jarvis is nice, too.”
Smugly, Tony said, “Told you,” before mashing his face into his pillow and sighing at the familiar comfort of his childhood home.
Tony was left speechless by the wealth of information his father had hidden away in the seven different vaults hidden around the manor. He'd always thought that the atomic and hydrogen bombs were the scariest weapons his father had ever worked on, but Tony found blueprints for machines and equations for chemical weapons which sent shivers down his spine. He hadn't known his father was capable of restraint, but the man had kept the most dangerous and destructive of his creations carefully hidden and locked away.
Then, there were piles and piles of records detailing some of Howard Stark's shadier business transactions, and there was an entire filing cabinet full of projects which Howard Stark had declined to work on because the people organizing the projects were such creeps.
And Holy Science, Tony discovered that the only reason his father encouraged Tony to ever hang out with Tiberius Stone was because Howard Stark was privately investigating the business practices of Ty's family, with an end game of shutting Viastone down and utterly ruining the company. Tony was simultaneously relieved, impressed, and pissed. Relieved that his father hadn't really wanted Tony to be friends with Ty, who, again, was a sociopath, impressed because his father had compiled almost enough documentation to shut Viastone down and shut them down hard, and pissed because his father could be such a manipulative jack-off sometimes.
During Tony's research and revelations, Tony was glad that Jarvis was around to entertain Tony's assassin, because when Tony started looking through the vaults, he locked himself in his father's office for almost two weeks strait.
And Tony hadn't even started looking through the vault below the workshop yet!
It was while Tony was looking through the contents of the third vault that he found what he was really looking for – documentation, honest to Einstein documentation of the super soldier serum used on Steven Grant Rodgers in order to create Captain America. The documentation was incomplete, sadly enough, with huge chunks of information missing, but there were before and after photos of the test subject, and the man in the pictures looked an awful lot like the man in the movie reals his father used to watch.
And there was more – documentation on Captain America's part in the war, the Howling Commandos (they were real! All of them were real! How the hell had the lot of them become urban myths and little more than kiddie comic book icons only forty years after the war had ended?!), Hydra, Johann Shmidt, and Hydra's bizarre weapons (and what the hell was Tesseract? Tony saw the word only once, and there was no explanation accompanying it).
It wasn't that Tony hadn't believed the man when he'd said that Hydra had kidnapped him and brainwashed him (Tony saw the microchips to prove it), but at the same time, Hydra had been the fantastical villains in all of Tony's bedtime stories while growing up, and Hydra had been painted as the monsters who lived under naughty little boys' beds. Honestly, he'd hoped the man had been pulling his leg with that one.
But there was the proof, dates and times and missions documented in his father's very own messy, hurried scrawl.
And finally, Tony found the pictures. The pictures of Captain America mid battle, pictures of Johann Shmidt and most of his lieutenants, pictures of some of the people Shmidt's men had preformed human experimentation on –
And then Tony found the pictures of the people who were apart of the SSR. There was a single picture of Dr. Erskine, a handful of a woman Tony recognized as his Aunt Peggy, a dozen pictures of Tony's father and –
Tony frowned. He recognized his father in the group photo, but nobody else. Tony turned the photo over in order to inspect the picture and found words written on the back.
Howard Stark, Peggy Cartter + The Howling Commandos – Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, Jacques Dernier, & James Falsworth.
Tony blinked, then turned the picture over, surprised that he hadn't noticed Dum Dum (because he knew Dum Dum, but hadn't known he'd been a Howling Commando) or Peggy in the picture – but there she was, tucked under a big man's arm and grinning proudly. And now that he looked, he recognized post-serum Steve Rogers, as well. And –
Tony's breath caught. Because he recognized those eyes, and that dimpled chin, and the way his short hair curled a little once it had grown out –
Frantically, Tony flipped the photo over in order to inspect the name neatly written next to Steve Rogers'.
“Bucky Barnes,” Tony breathed.