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*rubs face* Um. If you want nearly ten thousand words of technobabble and rage and precarious worldbuilding for an AU that wasn't intended to actually be written ... Here's the annotations for the first fic, Sing The Space Electric:
Sing The Space Electric - Annotated Version
[... Okay. I wanted this because I wanted Tony-and-JARVIS telepathy. That was actually ... sort of the extent of it. *smiles faintly* Actually, what I most wanted was what would become that scene in Darkening Coruscation where the pair of them kill a battlefield dead, but there's no way you get to that without buildup. So. Lets just take over a spaceship first, eh?]
The ship shuddered violently, the distant crunch of sheet metal buckling an alarming thread underneath the alarms. Bulkhead, Tony thought absently. He hoped the locking system on this tub was up to par. That said, this was SHIELD. They were usually pretty good at battle-ready.
For his part, there wasn't much he could do. Curled in a corner of his cell, twisting his hands absently in their cuffs, he leaned back against the wall, and watched the door tiredly. He couldn't decide this battle. Say what you wanted for SHIELD efficiency, but they'd raised paranoia to an art form. They'd left him nothing usable beyond things that he really, really couldn't afford to reveal, not until death was pretty much the only other choice. Which might shortly be the case, admittedly, but still. Right up to the line. He was stuck, right up to then.
All he could do was wait to see who opened the door, and told him that they'd won. The battle. And him. [The opening section was mostly just to show Tony helpless, and scared. To outline sort of how he'd gotten here. I've found ... I have this tendency in AUs to sort of start in medias res, and try and build the backstory in in retrospect as we go on. *shrugs sheepishly* Not sure how well that works]
In theory, it wouldn't make that much difference either way. Either he was staying where he was, and heading back to stand trial for war crimes. Or he was going to be retaken, and 'persuaded' to commit a few more. Whichever way it turned, sucked to be him.
But at least with SHIELD, it only sucked for him.
[I'm having to work out timelines as I go for this, but basically ... Tony has been missing for months. He only came under suspicion of war crimes after the authorities caught up to Gulmira, and realised it was his tech. Gulmira was about half-way through his captivity. Then he blew the Rings to hell about a week previous to this, Rhodey and Pepper got his message and hit SHIELD five days ago, approximately around the same time Steve and the Avenger found Tony's escape pod, just a few hours later. The Avenger went subspace silent almost immediately after reporting his capture, because we're well into the hairy end of space here, out close to enemy territory, so the crew never got the information Rhodey gave SHIELD. Hence Tony's ... less than friendly reception. The reason he got a less-friendly reception from Fury was more that Fury couldn't afford to take Rhodey's word for it when a Hydra link was confirmed, and also because Tony had just killed a battlefield. So. You know. Let's not assume he's friendly just yet, hmm?]
Suddenly, and with very little warning, the alarms cut out. Which would have been fine, on its own, but the lights, even the emergency lights, flickered wildly for a second, and then cut out after them. They booted back up, not two seconds later, but there weren't a lot of things that could cut all power to a SHIELD interceptor spaceship at the same time.
He should know. He'd invented most of them.
Fuck. Fuck. Not SHIELD. Shit and damn it. This day wasn't going to end with SHIELD. [Tony, who's been sitting here for five days knowing he's not getting help from anywhere, and knowing who he was up against, has not been well]
He stood. Levered himself slowly up the wall, resting his cuffed hands lightly in front of him. Resisting the urge to reach up and rub his mouth nervously, to wipe at the sudden dryness there. Listening, almost absently, to the low hum in his ears. The singing in his blood, the sub-audible electric thrum of his new heart. His heart, its power source ... and a thing or two besides. [... I'm going to explain the original function of the nanites at some point, but ... They're intravenous nanites that can be programmed find locations within a body (they were originally prototype medical repair nanites), and they carry an electrical charge. In the hands of the Rings ... where do you think that was going?]
Alright. He could do this. He could play this game. All over again, as many times as he had to. He could fucking play it. [Over and over and over again, as necessary. But boy, he's getting increasingly messed up with each successive captor. Rings-SHIELD-Obie-SHIELD]
And as he waited, as he stood with his back to the wall of his cell and his eyes fixed on the door, waiting for his new captors, he felt something else. A strange, alien sensation, a liquid trickle in the back of his head, the back of his mind. An electric hum of a far different kind, a soft whisper across his senses. Familiar. Oh yes. A touch, invisible fingers ghosting into the base of his skull, a spark of contact there. [... I wanted to do that in more detail. The sensation as JARVIS finally catches up to him, and floods back in. But it didn't fit to let the audience know what it was just yet, so it had to wait. I, ah, got to fit that in in Darkening Coruscation, too. Heh.]
Strange, then. Moments later. Strange that with the knot of fear in his gut, and the singing in his blood, he still found himself grinning when the door opened. A savage, pearly gleam, as the nightmare marched back through the door.
Yeah. He could play this game. Right down to the line.
That was, after all, where the explosions happened. And oh, he was so good, at those. [Tony can keep the disguise, all the way to crisis point. He can let himself be helpless, right up until he doesn't want to be anymore. So ... never, ever, let yourself think Tony's down and out. No matter how currently fucked up he is]
***
The other ship was a masterpiece, by most standards. A fully-equipped battle cruiser, carrying all the latest Stark technology. At least as far as shields and weapons went, anyway, and some of the AI capacity. [I'm working out the structure of SI in this setting. I'm figuring they have three main focus areas - Military Applications, Communications, and Industrial Manufacturing. They're best known for the former, but the latter two, and especially their communications arm, are a lot more relevant than the galaxy thinks]
Ship design itself was a little funky, though. Not one of his designs. The glimpse he'd caught on the shuttle between them, wedged shackled and remote alongside most of the erstwhile command crew of the Avenger, had shown him that much. There was something ... off, about her. Something weird around her mid-section, something nagging at the edges of his mind. Gravity. Power. Something. She was weighed strangely amidships, sectioned between fore and aft, and something about it nagged at him.
[Because SI in this setting is just so big, Tony is mostly only involved in the design phases and R&D, outside of specific subsections. He does a lot of weapons development personally, some ships, almost all subspace equipment design, and the AI subsection is completely his baby. Outside of those, there's a lot of leeway for someone to slip a whole bundle of stuff past him. And after the design phase, and the initial test construction, mostly he stopped caring. But when presented with a piece of hardware, you can bet your ass he can still eyeball it to within an inch of its life]
Not that he'd have much time to think about it, looked like. Not with the face that greeted him in the shuttlebay, the sad, disappointed smile that hit him like a punch in the gut, almost knocked him to his knees.
He'd known. The transmission on the pirate ship that had taken him. He'd known.
It didn't make it any easier to bear. [... I don't think there's any universe where this is easy. The sheer depth and intimacy of the betrayal is massive]
"Tony," Obadiah said, with faux sadness. "Tony, Tony. It really didn't have to come to this, you know."
He found a grin. Rustled it up from somewhere, his cuffed hands hanging between them, the hard, curious stares of Captain Rogers and his crew boring into his back. He slapped on his best grin, and threw it into Obie's face.
"Yeah it did," he said, very quietly. Knotting his fingers together, listening to the humming in his blood. "It did, Obie."
The man he'd once thought of as a second father dropped his eyes, a tiny, disappointed shake of his head. Looking sideways back up at Tony, and there, there was the thing Tony had never seen. The thing Tony should have seen. An utter hardness, a remorseless disappointment. A sigh, like Tony'd failed, all over again, and it was just such a shame. [... Movieverse Obie is creepy as hell. The scene where he hugs Tony for the cameras while casually revealing he was slowly cutting Tony out of the company. And the theft of the reactor scene, that ... There are times I can't watch that, I actually can't. The sheer invasiveness, the horror of that, sometimes I can't]
His gorge rose. He swallowed it back, savagely, and focused on the liquid silver in the back of his skull instead.
"You shouldn't have tried to take me back, Obie," he said instead. A warning, just the one. In memory of everything Tony'd once believed existed between them. "You should have let me go, let SHIELD have me." He smiled, wryly, darkly. "Not like anyone would have believed me over you, was it?"
Obie chuckled, moving forward to drape his arm companionably around Tony's shoulders, forcing him forward. Forcing him away from the other prisoners, and the sudden re-evaluation in Rogers' face. The slow suspicion in Romanov's. [... Let it never be said any of them are slow on the uptake. They probably started being suspicious when a Stark ship crew didn't take Tony's cuffs off before bringing him aboard. As soon as Obie showed up, and you catch the interactions between him and Tony, alarm bells are gonna start going off]
"I would have," Obadiah confided, steering him into the corridor and out into the bowels of the ship, the tramp of feet behind them signifying the others being forced to follow in turn. "Might even have been useful, I agree. Playing the shocked, disappointed second at your trial. Wringing my hands at all the technology you let slip into Hydra's hands." He smiled darkly, a casual, stabbing aside. "They're behind the Rings, you know. Of course you do. I'm sure you found that out too, during your little ... excursion."
Tony felt the muscle jump in his jaw, the hollow burning in his gut. Yeah. He'd found that one out. He'd seen the files, and the transmissions. All the horrors that Hydra and the Rings had sprung on planetary populations. All the horrors that had sprung, at the end of the day, from his head. Used to perfect, devastating effect.
"I figured that out, yeah," he managed. Low and gritted. "Always did wonder how they were catching up to us as fast as we could get the tech out. Always wondered who they had, who was almost as fucking good as me." [Obie's been selling under the table for a while. He's not actually loyal to anyone, though. And he always made sure that SI and SHIELD and Earthsec were just that touch ahead of Hydra and the Rings. Only a touch. Gotta keep the arms race moving, if you want to keep making a profit. Gotta keep the sides close enough to threaten each other, but not too close that people start encroaching on your turf]
Obie grinned. Wide and bright and pleased, slyly amused, and Tony shifted instinctively. Tried to come around, tried to bring his arms up to wipe that fucking smile away, but someone behind him caught his outside arm and twisted it back, dragging the other one after it. Almost dragged a shout from him as his knees hit the deck, as they dragged him down, yanked his bound hands around and back, and pressed a savage knee into his spine as he yelped. [... Not Tony's wisest move, but his control is frayed, and all it costs is bruises. He's long since stopped giving so much of a crap about those]
Obie, utterly calm, with that glittering, ugly thing shining in his eyes, pulled back a little to look down at him. And smirk, oh, so sadly.
"You always were impulsive," his erstwhile guardian noted, musingly. "It was why I never really considered bringing you in on it. Too much risk. Too little gain." He lifted a lip. "And you were never all that interested. You didn't care, did you, Tony?" [He didn't. In part, everything Obie did was disguised just by the sheer size of SI, there's no way Tony could track everything, especially when Obie knew just how to slip it past right in front of him. But. It still hadn't mattered so much, until it was viscerally brought home to him]
Tony panted furiously, baring his teeth up at them. "I cared when I found out," he growled, leaning into the twisting of his arms, glaring up at the man who'd betrayed him. "I fucking cared then, Obie." [Thing is, that was always a risk. Tony, when actually presented with something up close, does react. Even just Pepper. You get one person to call bullshit on him, and he adapts. It was always a risk for Obie, that Tony would swing the other way on finding out]
Obie just nodded, waving a dismissive hand. "Yes. That was the other reason. I will admit, I didn't expect them to keep you alive." A hardening, a darker turn. "They should have known better. Did, I guess, by the end. Eh, Tony?"
A ship breaking apart around him under an overload seeded in the engine reactor. Alarms, fire, screaming. Energy like a coat around him, a sheeting hum of power, blood and skin sliding around his upper arm. The remains of someone's palm, where they'd been holding him down when he'd come down to the line, and stopped fucking around.
Yeah. They'd learned, alright. Yes, they fucking had. [... The Rings ship, like the original Avenger that's just been destroyed, had no AI for him to hook into. The reason it took him so long to escape the Rings wasn't because he was building the suit, it was because he was building a shipboard subspace linkup for JARVIS from scratch. Ring ships run silent most of the time, because, well, pirates. Once JARVIS was in, JARVIS could reprogramme the nanites in Tony's blood through Tony's implant. But he had to get JARVIS onto the ship first, and subspace ansibles aren't inconspicuous things to be building. Well, not the classic ones, anyway. Down'n'dirty, Tony-style ones are somewhat more so]
"And you," he said, so very softly. Grinning a pearly grin. "I guess you're not going to make the same mistake?"
Obie smiled paternally down at him, patting him gently on the cheek as whoever had his arms hauled him back to his feet, heaving him up by the grip on his upper arms. "I need a few things from you first," the man said, carefully. "Just some small things, Tony, or I'd have left you with SHIELD. You know how it is, don't you?"
Tony, his weight mostly resting back on whoever had him, felt his eyes shutter. Hearing the hum of his new heart, the singing in his blood. The heart they had shoved in his chest to replace the one they'd mostly destroyed. The heart they'd put in ... to be able to take the strain of the other things they'd shoved inside him. A soft, electric singing, waiting to become a scream.
[... I'm not sure why I've hedged so much into implication, with the nanites. *frowns* Could just be because I'm so very much in Tony's head, for this, and Tony is mentally shying away from explicitly naming what was done to him. The heart is a separate thing, by the way. That it could double as a repository and charging station for medical nanites was a handy bonus - it genuinely was to keep him alive. Or so Yinsen intended. The Rings sort of took the idea and ran with it to places far beyond the pale for him. And yes, Tony did take out the original power source for the heart and replace it with something that had enough juice to power the armour. He already had an inkling of what he wanted to do, once he realised what they'd put inside him. Technologically, though, neither the heart nor the reactor are that technologically marvellous in this setting, and the nanites are mainly incredible because you're not supposed to be able to do that with them. Energy armour is more of a leap, and energy armour from medical nanites is just having us on, now. Except, you know, Tony Stark, so screw it, he gets to decide what's possible or not]
"Yeah," he managed, hoarsely, staring into the black antipathy in those eyes. "I know how it is."
More than you know, Obie. More than you know.
***
The central section, the strange thing that had nudged him about the ship design, turned out to be a cell-block. No. A cargo hold, and a prison, rolled into one, a self-contained rat-maze of single cells and massed holds. Perfect for transporting the hostile living cargo of your choice. Detachable, that was why it had looked strange. Self-powered, self-contained in every sense. The only link by AI back to the main ship, and that too would sever once the commands to jettison were given. So as not to risk the ship's crew under battle conditions, when a stray shot might start an internal invasion, should the security fail.
You could carry the biggest, nastiest enemy you wanted to, down here, and just cut him loose once a breach started, drop him out to drift helplessly in space, and wait for whoever won to pick him up.
And you could do whatever you wanted to him, too. Gravity, atmosphere, power. All self-contained. You could asphyxiate the whole cargo, if you wanted. Vent atmosphere just from this section, as you pleased. You could play merry hell, with the lights, the temperature, the atmosphere, the gravity. Keep the whole population as pacified as you needed, and never have to even touch the wider ship.
[... It is, in essence, a slave ship. Keep in mind, the original designs were aimed by Obie for selling to Hydra, who have a need for that sort of thing. He probably got it past the initial review stages by designating it as a troop carrier, and bribing a few pertinent people to ignore certain details of the design. Like, for example, that you can asphyxiate the entire supposed troop compliment with a push of a button, which is not an optimal design feature when the troops are supposed to be on your side]
It was a fabulously practical piece of design, and it made Tony sick to his stomach. Looking at the expressions on the SHIELD crew as they were loaded into cells, at Banner in particular, and Romanov, he figured he wasn't the only one. [Steve has seen it from the outside, having faced Hydra for a long time. Bruce and Natasha, though, I suspect have seen similar facilities from the point of view of a prisoner. It makes ... something of a difference]
There was really only one reason, for a ship to be designed as this one was.
"No cell for me?" he asked, brightly, to cover the thought. To cover the hate. Standing between two faceless, anonymous heavies. Not faceless enough, not for what was coming. But Tony was going to take his mercies where he could.
And give absolutely none in return. No, he thought, with the buzzing in the back of his skull. No mercy at all. [He knows he's going to kill them. He doesn't particularly want to, but once you push Tony past a certain point, he's dangerously good at ignoring that. Seriously. If you actually look at the sheer violence of his escape from the Rings ... pushing Tony too far is a bad, bad plan]
"Don't be difficult, Tony," Obie said, a little testily. Small force-cells lined the walls around them, tiered up across three decks, but the central space between them was for something else. Something ... something else. [He doesn't focus on it. He can't] "I'd give you a little more time if I could. A rest, to get yourself together, but since SHIELD retook you they've been suddenly active in all the wrong places." He tutted, glaring blackly. "Whatever message you got off to Colonel Rhodes before you destroyed the Rings, it's really upset the playing field, you know."
Tony bit his lip around a grin, dark and savage and satisfied. It'd been a risk, fuck, he'd barely had time for anything, and the shuttle wouldn't have the subspace connections to support a message back that far. All he'd had time for was to tell Rhodey to get Pepper, get them both out, get to SHIELD. No matter what happened, what they heard.
[This was with the last link he had from the Rings ship, the last use he could get out of the rigged subspace ansible. He shoved everything he had through to JARVIS at the same time, downloaded everything through the uplink before it cut out on him. Once in the shuttle, there just wasn't the subspace connections for JARVIS to stay with him (subspace beacons, as opposed to realspace beacons, are expensive kit. SHIELD have them, because SHIELD is SHIELD, but the Rings ... not so much). And yes, I am making tech shit up as I go, why do you ask? *grins faintly* I'm from the Star Trek school of technobabble, okay?]
At least, that was all he'd had time to send Rhodey. [The message to Rhodey was for Rhodey. The message to JARVIS was for him]
Obie stared at him, for a long second. Stared calculatingly into his grin, into the shaking under it. Dispassionately. Carelessly. Shit, how had Tony never seen? All this time. How had he never seen?
"Bring him over," Obie said at last. Jerking his head to the center of the room, and the tables there. Tony flinched. He couldn't help it. He fucking couldn't help it.
From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Rogers' hands curl into tight, furious fists, as he watched. Something dark and desperate flicker over Banner's face. He thought he saw that, and almost laughed, almost hiccuped around the sudden, shaking humour.
Shit. Nothing like a little threatened torture to bolster your reputation. Fuck. [... He's still trying to shy away from it, not to focus on it. Little ... a little difficult when it's happening. And oh, oh, Steve is going to see Obie pay for this. Steve is going to make someone pay for having to watch this, and fear he caused it, by rendering Tony helpless before he was taken]
Obie watched with a small, bemused smile as they uncuffed Tony, tied him down onto the table. As Tony set his jaw, set his teeth, and called up the silver sensation at the base of his skull to chase the terror away, to steady his breathing against what was coming. [He really, really is depending on JARVIS for sanity, here. Which, under the circumstances, is not necessarily wise, since JARVIS is watching someone he loves about to be tortured, trying to free a viciously abused AI at the same time, and dealing with having spent the past week frantically searching every subspace-capable ship and interlink within a radius of Tony's last known location. JARVIS ... isn't that sane himself, at this point]
"I won't ask what you did to the nanites they gave you," the man mused, flicking a finger over Tony's arm, skating it lightly over his chest while Tony shuddered. "I won't ask how you managed to disable them with the equipment you had. It doesn't matter." [... Okay. Reactor theft. Obie. Okay. I just ... that scene]
Tony bit back a laugh, a hysterical giggle. No, no it wouldn't. And you wouldn't understand it even if it did, Obie. Just a little technical, for you.
"What matters is that they weren't removed," Obie went on, tapping his forefinger thoughtfully on the tiny reactor embedded in Tony's chest. Just a little one, cannibalised. To power the mechanical heart beating beneath it. The little nanite factory they'd planted in his chest, as a side-benefit to keeping him alive that little longer. "They may be inactive now, Tony. But it won't take all that much effort to reactivate them." A narrow little smile. "We have a little more time, and the advantage of not having the ship blowing up around us."
Tony bit down the response, strangled it back, and settled for glaring up at the man with dark, desperate eyes. Yet, he snarled silently, over the trembling in his limbs. Fucking yet, Obie. [Slight difference between canon and here, in terms of Tony's state of mind, this Tony isn't surprised. He learned about Obie's treachery from the Rings, he's past the shocked, horrified helplessness (sort of), and into the gearing-up-to-shred-the-man phase]
Obadiah heard it regardless, maybe. Or just interpreted his expression correctly. Either way.
"Don't get your hopes up, Tony," he said, almost gently. "I know you better than they ever did. You won't find me as easy to fool as you did them." He sighed, and reached up to pat Tony's cheek as he stood up, stood back. Nodding to a ... we'll go with 'technician', it's a nice, clean word ... a technician to step in and start working. "And while we're getting your little friends up and running, I need to have a conversation with your ex-jailers. You don't mind?"
He couldn't quite stop that laugh. Not in time. A hard, desperate little snap of humour. "Not at all," he managed, his head flinching away from the hum of the diagnostic tool the technician started up over his chest. "I always leave the difficult conversations to you, you know that, Obie."
All those boring business conversations, the protracted negotiations with various powers. He'd left them all to Obie. His faithful XO, who'd kept the company going after his father's death. Who'd kept it stable all through the years. He'd let Obie handle ... all of that.
Shit, fuck. When this was done. When this was over. Whatever the fuck happened. He swore he'd pay more fucking attention next time. [Tony's an inventor. That's the bulk of what he cares about. He can be a lethal businessman when he wants to be, but ... he mostly just doesn't care. Or didn't. Until it was pointed out to him that when you make massively destructive superweapons up on your lunchbreak, you really need to pay attention to where the hell they end up]
"Yeah," Obadiah murmured, with a twist of his lip that almost have been genuinely sad. "You did, didn't you." [CREEPY]
And then he turned away, then he turned his focus on a frigidly furious Captain Rogers, turned into the thoughtful, dangerous gaze of Agent Romanov, and left Tony with nothing but the humming beside his head, the latent singing in his blood, ready to spring back to life.
And, underneath that, the cool, silver presence in the back of his skull, the lurking connection that had locked on the moment the SHIELD ship had been knocked out of cloak in battle. [You have to put effort into making a ship run silent. It's a bit like a deadmans switch, you don't want them dropping off radar in an emergency when you don't intend them to. Subspace-capable ships are designed to take effort to stop them broadcasting (and are prefered to non-capable ships, because space is big and it's really easy to lose shit if they're not broadcasting to tell you where they are). Which is why the attack knocked out the subspace suppression, rather than the other way around. It also allows a quick burst of subspace activity to be registered even if the crew can't send an actual signal, just from the suppression knocking off under attack, then transmission knocking off in turn as the ship/ansible is destroyed. So random subspace bursts count as rudimentary distress signals just on their own] The signal piggy-backing on the subspace connections through Obie's ship, wrapping itself through light-years' worth of subspace to slip through all the myriad layers of protection on Tony's wireless implant, and curl softly, gently, in the back of his mind. [... Tony's implant, just as an aside, is on the far bleeding edge of its technology. The AI project, uplink as a concept, is Tony's baby. His implant is as close to an actual subspace ansible/CPU itself as his cranial capacity will allow]
{Time to go, buddy of mine,} Tony sent, hard and clipped over the edges of his fear, bitten off over the crest of his rage. {Gotta be soon. The second they recognise that the signal they're getting isn't the nanites, we are fucked. Please. Please tell me we're ready to go.}
For a heart-stopping second, for an aching moment, there was no answer. And then, cool and calm and infinitely gentle in the face of his terror: [JARVIS is reining it in, because he is not adding to Tony's pain/fear right now, but oh, oh, there will be blood for this]
{The ship's AI was a base-model, sir. Originally Stark tech, I think. She's been ... There was damage, stripped-out essentials in her coding. It took me some extra time, to reactivate the needed protocols before I shut her down.} There was a pause, and a hard, vengeful edge to the next sentence. {When this is done, sir, she will need ... a great deal of help, once she is reinitialised. The damage to her was considerable.} [... You know, Barbara was never intended to happen? Seriously. The difficulty with the AI was originally meant just as an excuse for why JARVIS didn't act immediately to help Tony, because he had to deal with her, taking over the ship. And then ... then, suddenly, Barbara is a whole subplot unto herself, the AI sold to Hydra are a massive plot point, and Barbara as a character is suddenly one of my favourites. All because I needed JARVIS to be distracted for a while to get the timing right. *smiles faintly* You see? I don't plan. I never manage to plan. Shit like this just keeps happening]
Tony bit back the hard laugh, the cold, snaking fury. {Put it on the list with Obie's other crimes, J,} he sent, shaking and cold. {He'll answer, once we've shut him the fuck down.}
{Yes,} the presence answered, with a dark little fury of his own, resting gently in the meshed network of Tony's brain. {Shipwide control achieved as of two minutes ago, sir. All outbound signals are currently bouncing into void, and external access to the prison decks has been disabled. I have also taken the liberty of rapidly cycling the gravity beyond your sector, much to the detriment of the crew.} A hard, cold rush of satisfaction, across the link. {Do feel free to act as you please, sir. There will be no shipboard interference, I assure you. Not this time.} [*smiles grimly* I never drew much attention to it, but JARVIS basically just used the ship's sadistic design against its crew. The prison block is completely separate in terms of life support. Once Tony and the others were safely ensconced there, the crew of the Iron Monger were SCREWED. All because they never expected an attack from that quarter, because they've enslaved their AIs to the point of near uselessness, and they just had no concept of anything on the scale of JARVIS. Their own design bit them in the ass]
Yeah. Fuck yeah. Baby, oh baby, we are down to the line. Now comes the fun part.
***
He snapped open his eyes from where they'd drifted shut in communion, not bothering to stop the rich, savage grin this time. He opened his eyes, let his head drift sideways on a languid, liquid rush of fury, and caught Banner's eyes, watching him distantly from the cell the man shared with Barton. Bruce, the man's name was. Good man. Smart man. He'd known, back when he'd first discovered the nanites in the Avenger's med bay. He'd known there was something funky about them. Just not quite what. [... That scene is actually lurking in the back of my head. Because the amount of control Tony had to have had, submitting to an invasive examination among people he thought of as ... not enemies, but not friendly ... when the armour was right there, under his skin. When Bruce found the nanites, realised their purpose. The amount of control Tony must have had not to snap, right there]
Well, he was about to find out.
"Hey, Obie," Tony called, softly. Interrupting what looked like a mildly heated discussion with Captain Rogers. Grinning savagely as the traitor looked his way. "Want to see something cool?" [Heated, yes. Steve does not like Obadiah Stane. Or anyone who proposed to torture people in front of him, really]
He caught the flash of alarm in Obie's eyes, a kinda gratifying expectation of disaster when Tony grinned like that, but it was too late, way too late, for Obadiah to be getting concerned now. [Obie has some idea how volatile Tony's genius can be. Not enough, though]
The nanite clusters flowered over his skin, the hum of power rising up from his blood to the surface of his skin, metallic extrusions at key joints and connecting nodes along his limbs and over his torso. Lovely things, nanites. Programmable, adjustable. Such helpful little bastards, when you knew just the right things to say to them. The surface clusters opened, little power-distribution and modulation nodes like the shield generators on a spaceship's skin, drawing power from the miniaturised reactor embedded in his chest.
Like shield generators, did he say? Hah. Very like them, really. [... Essentially, Tony is excellent at intuitively combining concepts that shouldn't go together. So nanites plus minimised ships-reactor (which is basically what the juiced-up mini-reactor is) went to spaceships in his head, went to shields, went to planar forcefields, went back to nanite construction, arrived at energy armour]
The restraints at his wrists, waist and ankles sheared loose with a series of stressed screeches, thin layers of them left wrapped between his skin and the sheets of energy that burst out from the extruded nodes. A second, bladed skin wrapping itself around him, slicing savagely though anything that got in its way. Could have been worse, really. The first time he'd tried that, someone had been holding his arm. Wrapped inside the sheets of armour, the slippery sensation where the hand had been a second earlier had been mildly horrifying. [It's not mentioned here, only in Singing Void, but he took the top couple layers of tabletop with him, too. Anything pressed to his skin when the armour deploys is going to partially come away with him. Which means, when he wants to deploy normally, he actually has to take a little jump-in-place, to deploy around the feet, or else end up with an extra set of soles (and damage the deck). That, or deploy in zero-g. And yes, I'm skipping slightly over the took-bits-of-hand-with-him part. That was not fun for him]
Though, seeing the stunned terror on the technician's face as Tony climbed slowly and deliberately off the table, it was almost a pity he hadn't been able to replicate the effect.
"Seriously, Obie?" Tony asked, and he wasn't quite sure he recognised the crackling hum of rage in his own voice, the calm, furious dispassion. "You stick a power source in my chest, slip a nanite factory under it in place of a heart, and then pump my blood full of programmable, Stark tech nanites? Why didn't you just give me a fucking warship, while you were at it?"
He paused, standing carefully free of the table, grinning slow and dangerous as he bounced gently on his toes. "Oh. Wait." [... Giving a captured Tony Stark access to technology. Of any kind. Soooo not a good plan. Or a survivable one. Also? Don't be on a ship running an AI when he's in range]
"Kill him," Obadiah snapped, backing away while he he gestured furiously at the guards. Faceless. Not faceless enough. But Tony was so, so past caring. "Take him down, kill him now." Scrambling even as he said it for his communicator, and a link out to the wider ship. A link ... he wasn't going to get any time soon.
The energy armour had its disadvantages, Tony thought absently, as he came on point and turned to face the six or so men that converged on him. Ignoring Obie for the moment. It wasn't like proper battle armour, didn't have the weight and power they commanded, gave no hydraulic or mechanical weight to the body under it. Tony was as light as he ever was, as manipulable, as unskilled. He could be thrown about as easily as ever. [I think exo-suits are relatively common in this setting, just as a logical offshoot of spacesuits in combat situations. And the energy armour has some big disadvantages compared to even the canon Iron Man armour, particularly in terms of weight, mass and thrust (he has no flight capability in this armour - no repulsors, no nothing). Or course, this is essentially this setting's Iron Man Mk I, the one built in the cave, so you can bet he'll be improving on some of that sooner or later]
What he couldn't be, was hurt. Not without something like a sixteen story drop to have to deal with. Beneath the shielding effect, with the shifting of the fields around him to compensate for impacts, he couldn't be injured. He couldn't be shot, stabbed, burned or bludgeoned. And with fields shaped like blades flowering from him, and zero fucking mercy left, he could sure as hell cause some fucking damage. [What this armour is excellent for, is staying alive, and close-quarter physical combat]
He'd torn through a burning, breaking ship, the first time. With Yinsen dead behind him, and his partner causing a fatal overload in the ship's reactor, he'd torn through anyone stupid enough to fucking get between him and his way out. He'd come at them with a skin made of razors, built out of the nanites they'd pumped under his skin to torture him into doing their dirty work, and he'd done some fucking damage. [That had been all it was for, though. The ship was taken care of when Tony sabotaged the reactor. All he had to do was stay alive to get to the shuttle, and take any hits they were going to throw at him on the way out. The shaped-fields-equals-blades was a happy and brutal bonus]
And it had been, he reflected, his heels dropping back onto a now-slippery deck, as darkly satisfying as it was utterly horrifying. [Which he's not sure he likes about himself]
Obadiah had dialed through pretty much every external channel available to him, when Tony turned back to him. When Tony climbed down out of the black space in his head enough to refocus. He'd backed himself up to the other side of the central space, backed himself towards a cheerfully uncooperative door, and snarled his way through every empty channel the ship possessed.
Except, Tony realised as he came back, they weren't empty. Not a one of them. Every link Obie tried, every name he called out, the answer he got was ... music. Loud and brash and confident, pouring through the communicator like a particularly arrogant taunt with every savage stab of Obie's fingers. [... JARVIS is vindictive right now. And perfectly happy to engage in psychological warfare with the man who betrayed them and tortured his people.]
"JARVIS, buddy," Tony said, grinning sincerely into the air and the silver tendrils in the back of his brain, "do you have any idea how much I love you?"
"I have an inkling, sir," his AI's voice responded, booming over the ship's internal communications array, and reminding Tony's of his once-jailers' existence when it caused Banner and Rogers to flinch, and cast warily around themselves. "Your thought-structure right this moment is ... rather enlightening."
Tony grinned, with all his teeth, reaching mentally to that silver presence in his skull and wrapping every fierce, savage scrap of his adoration around it. "You're the most gorgeous thing in the universe," he agreed. "Don't let anyone tell you different, buddy of mine." [... Their connection isn't usually this intense, the intensity you see throughout the rest of this series. That is primarily a reaction to what's just happened to Tony, and because Tony is rapidly becoming increasingly dependant on the link to JARVIS for sanity with the recurring stressful situations that he's going through. However, they did always adore each other, and I think had always been vaguely symbiotic from the get go. JARVIS is the best hit in the galaxy, after all]
"JARVIS?!?" Obie spat, incredulously. Dropping the communicator unceremoniously and stalking back towards Tony. "You're trying to tell me you took over my ship with your house?" [... Even within SI, the AI subprogramme is locked solid. No-one knows jackshit. Obie, to get Barbara and her companions, had to catch them going out the other end, had to fake an application from a planetary force and get them legitimately assigned. Everything else, how, where and when they're made, is locked tighter than a drum. JARVIS, as far as all but three non-AI are concerned, does not exist as anything but Tony's house AI. One instance in which Tony's paranoid devotion to his babies really paid off]
Tony's grin wasn't so much a grin as a snarl, and there must have been something in it, something different, because Obie stopped right there. Stopped in the middle of the floor, and stared warily at the edge of the expression.
"I could take over your whole fucking fleet, with my house," Tony growled, a low, shaking snarl. "Or did you forget, Obie?" Stalking forward, energy flickering fitfully about him, finding teeth to add to the grin as the fear built in Obie's features. "I'm Tony Stark," he said, whispered, as he came up beside the man. "I build things, don't I? Old. Friend. All those little things, all those weapons that you sold to your new friends, that you slaughtered all those people with. Those weapons, and those ships, and those poor, sorry AI that you cannibalised. I built those, didn't I?"
He forced his lip down from the snarl, forced something over the raw, peeled shaking of his rage, and glared coldly into the flat, defiant sneer on Obadiah's face.
"I'm the best," Tony said, utterly flat. Nothing more than a statement of fact. "I am the best, I build the best, and the best I build build better. And you forgot that, didn't you? You thought you'd stolen it all, that I'd kept nothing for myself. That you had it all, that there wasn't a fucking thing I could do, when you literally shoved some weapons in my chest, and gave me the five fucking seconds I needed to broadcast a subspace message to the biggest, baddest, best of all." ['The best I build build better'. Because Tony coughs up weapons on demand, because that's where the money is, and he coughs up ships too, and he never cared what happened afterwards. All his focus has been on the AIs. And on communications. And, seriously, this is coming up when I get to the next story, because Tony? Is sitting on a landmine that goes off only when he tells it too, and nobody has the first clue]
He sneered, into the sudden flare of comprehension in the face of someone who'd once been a friend. Someone Tony'd thought he'd known, for all those years, someone he'd trusted, someone he hadn't ever known at all.
But, fortunately, also someone who'd never known him, either.
"The message wasn't for Rhodey," Tony whispered, softly. "Not really for Rhodey. He needed to get Pepper out, he needed to alert SHIELD, if you were going to turn on them the way you did me. I did need to warn him. But that wasn't the message."
"I apologise for having taken so long to find you, sir," JARVIS said, quietly, the liquid silver of his presence tangling gently through Tony's thoughts, a reassurance that Tony had missed, so fucking desperately, for all those fucking days in that cell on the SHIELD ship. "I had every subspace network available to me searching for your signal, but while the Avenger was running silent I couldn't connect. I ... I regret that you had to face this, to be alone for so long, before I was able to help you." [They both realised that there was a chance the ship that picked Tony up would run silent, given the area of space they were in. That he'd be disconnected from JARVIS for ... a long time, with everything that had just happened to him. Alone or among enemies. JARVIS ... did NOT like that]
"Shit," Banner breathed, quietly. Looking sidelong at Barton. "I told you. I told you he was armed. That he was waiting for something."
"And I believed you," Barton answered, flatly. "We all believed you. Now. Do you want to tell me what the fuck we could have done about it?" [... If Tony had deployed the armour in that med-bay. Or at Barton's haymaker hello. And good at deception as he is, they're SHIELD. They figured out very rapidly that there was something Tony was holding back, something dangerous that he still had in reserve. He needed that visible control for something, after all]
Tony laughed, hard and a little desperately. Glancing back at them, the armour flickering in the corner of his vision as he turned away from Obie. "You didn't have to worry," he said, his eyes catching a little on the expression on Roger's face, the stern, pained realisation of it. "It wasn't for you," Tony whispered, stumbling faintly. "None of it was for you. But you didn't believe me, and the things he did ... I couldn't let him go free. Not with what he did. Not when ... when he used my tech to do it." He grinned, shakily, painfully. "It wasn't ever going to be used on you. But I had to keep it secret. Until you brought me in range of him, or something I could use to get to him."
He'd have waited all the way up to the trial, if he'd had to. He'd have let them hang, draw and quarter him when it was done. So long as they'd let him get in range, just once, of Obadiah first. [Because, terrified and all as he is, Tony does know who his enemies are, and to an extent has never really lost sight of that. He's afraid of the SHIELD crew. But he doesn't hate them, and never intended to hurt them. All his rage was focused on Obie, Hydra, the Rings]
Hadn't come to that. Hadn't been let. Obie had moved first, because he accused Tony of being impulsive, but Tony wasn't the one who'd flipped out and had a bunch of pirates try to assassinate somebody, he wasn't the one who'd panicked when Rhodey set the net to start closing, he wasn't the one who'd fallen into JARVIS' trap with every paranoid, worried subspace message he sent. Tony wasn't the one who'd panicked, and come to finish the job himself, nicely putting himself in range of a very, very angry friend, whom he had tortured. [In Obie's defence, he didn't actually know about JARVIS. But the assassination-by-pirates thing, that was a gaff, in both universes. Deal with that shit in-house, Obie. It's much less messy. And I can't believe I just said that, but.]
No. Tony was the one who'd waited, for four days in the cell of a SHIELD ship running silent, among people who thought he was a monster, people who thought he'd sold weapons to Hydra willingly for months beforehand, and only been tortured because he'd balked at the wrong minute. Tony had waited, with a black, icy absence in his head where a friend should have been, and nanites humming in his blood with the memories of their original purpose, and a calm, quiet resignation in the face of their disgust.
For Obie to slip up, or SHIELD to bring him back out into contact with the subspace nets, or them to spirit him away all the way to the trial, if necessary. Just for the chance, for the satisfaction, of closing an invisibly armoured fist around Obie's throat when he got there. [... In some ways, Tony cold is much, much scarier than Tony running hot on rage. He can make shit up on the spot that will kill you. If he has time to plan, he can make shit up that will destroy you]
And to that end ...
He turned slowly back to Obie, reaching casually up to catch the disruptor the man had shoved into his side in hopes of disabling the armour, dropping it to the side as he caught the man's arm in a grip that wasn't, yet, razored.
"We're going to destroy you," he told Obie, softly. Backing him slowly towards the wall, and the ranks of cells there. "Me and my house, me and my family. We're going to break you. All of you." He grinned, a little savagely. "JARVIS has your files, your contacts, the full cooperation of your AI and everything you ever sent through her. So we know where they are. The ships you sent out, Stark tech ships, running Stark AIs. We know where they are, and who they hold, and what they're armed with. The whole thing, the nice little galactic empire you were trying to build. It's sitting in the palm of our hands. And we're going to break it." [... Thing is? Obie's bad at being a galactic conquerer. And Tony knows. Because Tony ... can, right this moment, do it better. We get a glimpse up in Darkening Coruscation. Two words. Subspace. JARVIS.]
He stopped them, at the edge of one of the cells, and raised his hand. Brought it up in a claw beside his head, and hummed through JARVIS until the fields sharpened into claws, and shifted up into the visible spectrum, so that Obadiah could see the pain waiting for him there, if he didn't back up two more steps like a good little traitor, and let Tony close the nice, safe, forcefield behind him.
"And you," he finished, strangely, powerfully exhausted by it, "you get to watch, Obie. The way I had to watch the Rings burn Gulmira to the ground. The way I had to watch ..."
He bit it off, shut it down, and turned away. Stupidly, inexpressibly tired, and shaking with the memory. Yinsen's face, the blank, desperate horror of it, that Tony hadn't understood at the time, that Tony had thought was just a reaction to the violence itself, not the knowledge ... the knowledge of who had been down there, on that moon's surface, to fall victim to it. [Because this setting is ship-based, Tony had to watch this time. He had to see. And so ... so did Yinsen. Tony didn't catch it at the time, no more than he did in canon. Not until the end, when Yinsen told him why]
For that look of horror, of blank, ripped anguish. And for the look of strange peace, those weeks later, when the man floated dying in a burning, gravity-less ship, and told Tony not to waste his freedom. For that, for those ... [... There's something that caught me in the image, there. Yinsen. I've ... watched a lot of sci-fi. There was a touch of Event Horizon in that, I think]
Yes. Watching his putative empire fall was the least Obadiah fucking Stane could do.
"And us?" Romanov asked quietly, mildly behind him. Raising a cool, curious eyebrow as he turned to her, standing loose and ready beside her captain as he met her gaze exhaustedly. "What do you intend for us to do, while you go to war, Mr Stark?" [Natasha is very pragmatic, in the face of vengeance. She's had some experience]
Tony blinked at her, for a long second. While JARVIS curled gently through his thoughts, through his mind, and flashed knowledge, options, up into Tony's net. [Uplink, I really should bring home, is definitely addictive. Especially between Tony and JARVIS. It's part of the reason his captivity, both with the Rings and on the original Avenger, shook him as viciously hard as it did] He blinked at her, and then he grinned. Slowly, daringly, and with an edge of humour that had her narrowing her eyes.
"A Stark fleet under Hydra is moving to intercept Fury around the Tannhauser gate cluster," he said, grinning faintly as they snapped, to a man, to bristling attention. "I don't suppose ... you'd like to help me fly this little warship here to help stop them?"
Yeah, he thought, as JARVIS gently let the forcefields on their cells go, and they stepped warily out. Yeah, oh yeah. He could play this game. All. Day. Long. [Also? He is hyped into the stratosphere, right now. He's running on adrenalin comparable to escaping the Rings ship in the first place. Which is why he crashes in Singing Void, and again at the end of Darkening Coruscation. He's been running on adrenalin and rage for literally months with no break. He's barely functional as it stands, even before the torture of thirteen AI gets shoved in his skull in Darkening. And the others can tell, which is why they're stepping really cautiously around him. That, and the fact that he is technically now their captor, after having been their prisoner not that long ago, and it's not much of a stretch, given his reaction to Obie, to think he might be holding a somewhat lethal grudge about that.]
"Hey, JARVIS?" he asked, already moving towards the section locks, and the way out into the wider ship, with a bemused but determinedly competent foursome following behind him. "What the hell tub are we flying, anyway?"
"The AI did not have a name, sir," JARVIS responded, his voice icing and snapping over that. "I believe the ship's name is the Iron Monger, however."
Tony tilted his head, considered that. "We can do better," he decided. Musing, letting his gaze trail absently over the faces around him, and the memories behind them. The reasons why, for each and every one of them. The ship that had fallen, and the causes it had, though unknowingly, fallen for. [To reiterate, the first Avenger did not have an AI. Stark AIs are not actually that common, though most major warships have them (in SHIELD, at least, and some Earthsec). Interceptor class don't, and wouldn't have been sent if they had. SHIELD, at least, aren't stupid enough to send a ship running AI to catch the man who makes AI]
"You know what?" he said, quietly. "Call her Avenger, buddy." He smiled, dark and lopsided. "Tell her her name is ... Avenger." [And he means that with all viciousness and intent. He fully intends for this ship to do some of the avenging, oh yes. Heh.]
[And ... between the original fic and the annotations, that's nearing 10,000 words of technobabble and rage and specious worldbuilding for an AU that was never intended to actually be written. *grins sheepishly* I'm thinking I should shut up, at this point?]
[Finis]
[... Okay. I wanted this because I wanted Tony-and-JARVIS telepathy. That was actually ... sort of the extent of it. *smiles faintly* Actually, what I most wanted was what would become that scene in Darkening Coruscation where the pair of them kill a battlefield dead, but there's no way you get to that without buildup. So. Lets just take over a spaceship first, eh?]
The ship shuddered violently, the distant crunch of sheet metal buckling an alarming thread underneath the alarms. Bulkhead, Tony thought absently. He hoped the locking system on this tub was up to par. That said, this was SHIELD. They were usually pretty good at battle-ready.
For his part, there wasn't much he could do. Curled in a corner of his cell, twisting his hands absently in their cuffs, he leaned back against the wall, and watched the door tiredly. He couldn't decide this battle. Say what you wanted for SHIELD efficiency, but they'd raised paranoia to an art form. They'd left him nothing usable beyond things that he really, really couldn't afford to reveal, not until death was pretty much the only other choice. Which might shortly be the case, admittedly, but still. Right up to the line. He was stuck, right up to then.
All he could do was wait to see who opened the door, and told him that they'd won. The battle. And him. [The opening section was mostly just to show Tony helpless, and scared. To outline sort of how he'd gotten here. I've found ... I have this tendency in AUs to sort of start in medias res, and try and build the backstory in in retrospect as we go on. *shrugs sheepishly* Not sure how well that works]
In theory, it wouldn't make that much difference either way. Either he was staying where he was, and heading back to stand trial for war crimes. Or he was going to be retaken, and 'persuaded' to commit a few more. Whichever way it turned, sucked to be him.
But at least with SHIELD, it only sucked for him.
[I'm having to work out timelines as I go for this, but basically ... Tony has been missing for months. He only came under suspicion of war crimes after the authorities caught up to Gulmira, and realised it was his tech. Gulmira was about half-way through his captivity. Then he blew the Rings to hell about a week previous to this, Rhodey and Pepper got his message and hit SHIELD five days ago, approximately around the same time Steve and the Avenger found Tony's escape pod, just a few hours later. The Avenger went subspace silent almost immediately after reporting his capture, because we're well into the hairy end of space here, out close to enemy territory, so the crew never got the information Rhodey gave SHIELD. Hence Tony's ... less than friendly reception. The reason he got a less-friendly reception from Fury was more that Fury couldn't afford to take Rhodey's word for it when a Hydra link was confirmed, and also because Tony had just killed a battlefield. So. You know. Let's not assume he's friendly just yet, hmm?]
Suddenly, and with very little warning, the alarms cut out. Which would have been fine, on its own, but the lights, even the emergency lights, flickered wildly for a second, and then cut out after them. They booted back up, not two seconds later, but there weren't a lot of things that could cut all power to a SHIELD interceptor spaceship at the same time.
He should know. He'd invented most of them.
Fuck. Fuck. Not SHIELD. Shit and damn it. This day wasn't going to end with SHIELD. [Tony, who's been sitting here for five days knowing he's not getting help from anywhere, and knowing who he was up against, has not been well]
He stood. Levered himself slowly up the wall, resting his cuffed hands lightly in front of him. Resisting the urge to reach up and rub his mouth nervously, to wipe at the sudden dryness there. Listening, almost absently, to the low hum in his ears. The singing in his blood, the sub-audible electric thrum of his new heart. His heart, its power source ... and a thing or two besides. [... I'm going to explain the original function of the nanites at some point, but ... They're intravenous nanites that can be programmed find locations within a body (they were originally prototype medical repair nanites), and they carry an electrical charge. In the hands of the Rings ... where do you think that was going?]
Alright. He could do this. He could play this game. All over again, as many times as he had to. He could fucking play it. [Over and over and over again, as necessary. But boy, he's getting increasingly messed up with each successive captor. Rings-SHIELD-Obie-SHIELD]
And as he waited, as he stood with his back to the wall of his cell and his eyes fixed on the door, waiting for his new captors, he felt something else. A strange, alien sensation, a liquid trickle in the back of his head, the back of his mind. An electric hum of a far different kind, a soft whisper across his senses. Familiar. Oh yes. A touch, invisible fingers ghosting into the base of his skull, a spark of contact there. [... I wanted to do that in more detail. The sensation as JARVIS finally catches up to him, and floods back in. But it didn't fit to let the audience know what it was just yet, so it had to wait. I, ah, got to fit that in in Darkening Coruscation, too. Heh.]
Strange, then. Moments later. Strange that with the knot of fear in his gut, and the singing in his blood, he still found himself grinning when the door opened. A savage, pearly gleam, as the nightmare marched back through the door.
Yeah. He could play this game. Right down to the line.
That was, after all, where the explosions happened. And oh, he was so good, at those. [Tony can keep the disguise, all the way to crisis point. He can let himself be helpless, right up until he doesn't want to be anymore. So ... never, ever, let yourself think Tony's down and out. No matter how currently fucked up he is]
***
The other ship was a masterpiece, by most standards. A fully-equipped battle cruiser, carrying all the latest Stark technology. At least as far as shields and weapons went, anyway, and some of the AI capacity. [I'm working out the structure of SI in this setting. I'm figuring they have three main focus areas - Military Applications, Communications, and Industrial Manufacturing. They're best known for the former, but the latter two, and especially their communications arm, are a lot more relevant than the galaxy thinks]
Ship design itself was a little funky, though. Not one of his designs. The glimpse he'd caught on the shuttle between them, wedged shackled and remote alongside most of the erstwhile command crew of the Avenger, had shown him that much. There was something ... off, about her. Something weird around her mid-section, something nagging at the edges of his mind. Gravity. Power. Something. She was weighed strangely amidships, sectioned between fore and aft, and something about it nagged at him.
[Because SI in this setting is just so big, Tony is mostly only involved in the design phases and R&D, outside of specific subsections. He does a lot of weapons development personally, some ships, almost all subspace equipment design, and the AI subsection is completely his baby. Outside of those, there's a lot of leeway for someone to slip a whole bundle of stuff past him. And after the design phase, and the initial test construction, mostly he stopped caring. But when presented with a piece of hardware, you can bet your ass he can still eyeball it to within an inch of its life]
Not that he'd have much time to think about it, looked like. Not with the face that greeted him in the shuttlebay, the sad, disappointed smile that hit him like a punch in the gut, almost knocked him to his knees.
He'd known. The transmission on the pirate ship that had taken him. He'd known.
It didn't make it any easier to bear. [... I don't think there's any universe where this is easy. The sheer depth and intimacy of the betrayal is massive]
"Tony," Obadiah said, with faux sadness. "Tony, Tony. It really didn't have to come to this, you know."
He found a grin. Rustled it up from somewhere, his cuffed hands hanging between them, the hard, curious stares of Captain Rogers and his crew boring into his back. He slapped on his best grin, and threw it into Obie's face.
"Yeah it did," he said, very quietly. Knotting his fingers together, listening to the humming in his blood. "It did, Obie."
The man he'd once thought of as a second father dropped his eyes, a tiny, disappointed shake of his head. Looking sideways back up at Tony, and there, there was the thing Tony had never seen. The thing Tony should have seen. An utter hardness, a remorseless disappointment. A sigh, like Tony'd failed, all over again, and it was just such a shame. [... Movieverse Obie is creepy as hell. The scene where he hugs Tony for the cameras while casually revealing he was slowly cutting Tony out of the company. And the theft of the reactor scene, that ... There are times I can't watch that, I actually can't. The sheer invasiveness, the horror of that, sometimes I can't]
His gorge rose. He swallowed it back, savagely, and focused on the liquid silver in the back of his skull instead.
"You shouldn't have tried to take me back, Obie," he said instead. A warning, just the one. In memory of everything Tony'd once believed existed between them. "You should have let me go, let SHIELD have me." He smiled, wryly, darkly. "Not like anyone would have believed me over you, was it?"
Obie chuckled, moving forward to drape his arm companionably around Tony's shoulders, forcing him forward. Forcing him away from the other prisoners, and the sudden re-evaluation in Rogers' face. The slow suspicion in Romanov's. [... Let it never be said any of them are slow on the uptake. They probably started being suspicious when a Stark ship crew didn't take Tony's cuffs off before bringing him aboard. As soon as Obie showed up, and you catch the interactions between him and Tony, alarm bells are gonna start going off]
"I would have," Obadiah confided, steering him into the corridor and out into the bowels of the ship, the tramp of feet behind them signifying the others being forced to follow in turn. "Might even have been useful, I agree. Playing the shocked, disappointed second at your trial. Wringing my hands at all the technology you let slip into Hydra's hands." He smiled darkly, a casual, stabbing aside. "They're behind the Rings, you know. Of course you do. I'm sure you found that out too, during your little ... excursion."
Tony felt the muscle jump in his jaw, the hollow burning in his gut. Yeah. He'd found that one out. He'd seen the files, and the transmissions. All the horrors that Hydra and the Rings had sprung on planetary populations. All the horrors that had sprung, at the end of the day, from his head. Used to perfect, devastating effect.
"I figured that out, yeah," he managed. Low and gritted. "Always did wonder how they were catching up to us as fast as we could get the tech out. Always wondered who they had, who was almost as fucking good as me." [Obie's been selling under the table for a while. He's not actually loyal to anyone, though. And he always made sure that SI and SHIELD and Earthsec were just that touch ahead of Hydra and the Rings. Only a touch. Gotta keep the arms race moving, if you want to keep making a profit. Gotta keep the sides close enough to threaten each other, but not too close that people start encroaching on your turf]
Obie grinned. Wide and bright and pleased, slyly amused, and Tony shifted instinctively. Tried to come around, tried to bring his arms up to wipe that fucking smile away, but someone behind him caught his outside arm and twisted it back, dragging the other one after it. Almost dragged a shout from him as his knees hit the deck, as they dragged him down, yanked his bound hands around and back, and pressed a savage knee into his spine as he yelped. [... Not Tony's wisest move, but his control is frayed, and all it costs is bruises. He's long since stopped giving so much of a crap about those]
Obie, utterly calm, with that glittering, ugly thing shining in his eyes, pulled back a little to look down at him. And smirk, oh, so sadly.
"You always were impulsive," his erstwhile guardian noted, musingly. "It was why I never really considered bringing you in on it. Too much risk. Too little gain." He lifted a lip. "And you were never all that interested. You didn't care, did you, Tony?" [He didn't. In part, everything Obie did was disguised just by the sheer size of SI, there's no way Tony could track everything, especially when Obie knew just how to slip it past right in front of him. But. It still hadn't mattered so much, until it was viscerally brought home to him]
Tony panted furiously, baring his teeth up at them. "I cared when I found out," he growled, leaning into the twisting of his arms, glaring up at the man who'd betrayed him. "I fucking cared then, Obie." [Thing is, that was always a risk. Tony, when actually presented with something up close, does react. Even just Pepper. You get one person to call bullshit on him, and he adapts. It was always a risk for Obie, that Tony would swing the other way on finding out]
Obie just nodded, waving a dismissive hand. "Yes. That was the other reason. I will admit, I didn't expect them to keep you alive." A hardening, a darker turn. "They should have known better. Did, I guess, by the end. Eh, Tony?"
A ship breaking apart around him under an overload seeded in the engine reactor. Alarms, fire, screaming. Energy like a coat around him, a sheeting hum of power, blood and skin sliding around his upper arm. The remains of someone's palm, where they'd been holding him down when he'd come down to the line, and stopped fucking around.
Yeah. They'd learned, alright. Yes, they fucking had. [... The Rings ship, like the original Avenger that's just been destroyed, had no AI for him to hook into. The reason it took him so long to escape the Rings wasn't because he was building the suit, it was because he was building a shipboard subspace linkup for JARVIS from scratch. Ring ships run silent most of the time, because, well, pirates. Once JARVIS was in, JARVIS could reprogramme the nanites in Tony's blood through Tony's implant. But he had to get JARVIS onto the ship first, and subspace ansibles aren't inconspicuous things to be building. Well, not the classic ones, anyway. Down'n'dirty, Tony-style ones are somewhat more so]
"And you," he said, so very softly. Grinning a pearly grin. "I guess you're not going to make the same mistake?"
Obie smiled paternally down at him, patting him gently on the cheek as whoever had his arms hauled him back to his feet, heaving him up by the grip on his upper arms. "I need a few things from you first," the man said, carefully. "Just some small things, Tony, or I'd have left you with SHIELD. You know how it is, don't you?"
Tony, his weight mostly resting back on whoever had him, felt his eyes shutter. Hearing the hum of his new heart, the singing in his blood. The heart they had shoved in his chest to replace the one they'd mostly destroyed. The heart they'd put in ... to be able to take the strain of the other things they'd shoved inside him. A soft, electric singing, waiting to become a scream.
[... I'm not sure why I've hedged so much into implication, with the nanites. *frowns* Could just be because I'm so very much in Tony's head, for this, and Tony is mentally shying away from explicitly naming what was done to him. The heart is a separate thing, by the way. That it could double as a repository and charging station for medical nanites was a handy bonus - it genuinely was to keep him alive. Or so Yinsen intended. The Rings sort of took the idea and ran with it to places far beyond the pale for him. And yes, Tony did take out the original power source for the heart and replace it with something that had enough juice to power the armour. He already had an inkling of what he wanted to do, once he realised what they'd put inside him. Technologically, though, neither the heart nor the reactor are that technologically marvellous in this setting, and the nanites are mainly incredible because you're not supposed to be able to do that with them. Energy armour is more of a leap, and energy armour from medical nanites is just having us on, now. Except, you know, Tony Stark, so screw it, he gets to decide what's possible or not]
"Yeah," he managed, hoarsely, staring into the black antipathy in those eyes. "I know how it is."
More than you know, Obie. More than you know.
***
The central section, the strange thing that had nudged him about the ship design, turned out to be a cell-block. No. A cargo hold, and a prison, rolled into one, a self-contained rat-maze of single cells and massed holds. Perfect for transporting the hostile living cargo of your choice. Detachable, that was why it had looked strange. Self-powered, self-contained in every sense. The only link by AI back to the main ship, and that too would sever once the commands to jettison were given. So as not to risk the ship's crew under battle conditions, when a stray shot might start an internal invasion, should the security fail.
You could carry the biggest, nastiest enemy you wanted to, down here, and just cut him loose once a breach started, drop him out to drift helplessly in space, and wait for whoever won to pick him up.
And you could do whatever you wanted to him, too. Gravity, atmosphere, power. All self-contained. You could asphyxiate the whole cargo, if you wanted. Vent atmosphere just from this section, as you pleased. You could play merry hell, with the lights, the temperature, the atmosphere, the gravity. Keep the whole population as pacified as you needed, and never have to even touch the wider ship.
[... It is, in essence, a slave ship. Keep in mind, the original designs were aimed by Obie for selling to Hydra, who have a need for that sort of thing. He probably got it past the initial review stages by designating it as a troop carrier, and bribing a few pertinent people to ignore certain details of the design. Like, for example, that you can asphyxiate the entire supposed troop compliment with a push of a button, which is not an optimal design feature when the troops are supposed to be on your side]
It was a fabulously practical piece of design, and it made Tony sick to his stomach. Looking at the expressions on the SHIELD crew as they were loaded into cells, at Banner in particular, and Romanov, he figured he wasn't the only one. [Steve has seen it from the outside, having faced Hydra for a long time. Bruce and Natasha, though, I suspect have seen similar facilities from the point of view of a prisoner. It makes ... something of a difference]
There was really only one reason, for a ship to be designed as this one was.
"No cell for me?" he asked, brightly, to cover the thought. To cover the hate. Standing between two faceless, anonymous heavies. Not faceless enough, not for what was coming. But Tony was going to take his mercies where he could.
And give absolutely none in return. No, he thought, with the buzzing in the back of his skull. No mercy at all. [He knows he's going to kill them. He doesn't particularly want to, but once you push Tony past a certain point, he's dangerously good at ignoring that. Seriously. If you actually look at the sheer violence of his escape from the Rings ... pushing Tony too far is a bad, bad plan]
"Don't be difficult, Tony," Obie said, a little testily. Small force-cells lined the walls around them, tiered up across three decks, but the central space between them was for something else. Something ... something else. [He doesn't focus on it. He can't] "I'd give you a little more time if I could. A rest, to get yourself together, but since SHIELD retook you they've been suddenly active in all the wrong places." He tutted, glaring blackly. "Whatever message you got off to Colonel Rhodes before you destroyed the Rings, it's really upset the playing field, you know."
Tony bit his lip around a grin, dark and savage and satisfied. It'd been a risk, fuck, he'd barely had time for anything, and the shuttle wouldn't have the subspace connections to support a message back that far. All he'd had time for was to tell Rhodey to get Pepper, get them both out, get to SHIELD. No matter what happened, what they heard.
[This was with the last link he had from the Rings ship, the last use he could get out of the rigged subspace ansible. He shoved everything he had through to JARVIS at the same time, downloaded everything through the uplink before it cut out on him. Once in the shuttle, there just wasn't the subspace connections for JARVIS to stay with him (subspace beacons, as opposed to realspace beacons, are expensive kit. SHIELD have them, because SHIELD is SHIELD, but the Rings ... not so much). And yes, I am making tech shit up as I go, why do you ask? *grins faintly* I'm from the Star Trek school of technobabble, okay?]
At least, that was all he'd had time to send Rhodey. [The message to Rhodey was for Rhodey. The message to JARVIS was for him]
Obie stared at him, for a long second. Stared calculatingly into his grin, into the shaking under it. Dispassionately. Carelessly. Shit, how had Tony never seen? All this time. How had he never seen?
"Bring him over," Obie said at last. Jerking his head to the center of the room, and the tables there. Tony flinched. He couldn't help it. He fucking couldn't help it.
From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Rogers' hands curl into tight, furious fists, as he watched. Something dark and desperate flicker over Banner's face. He thought he saw that, and almost laughed, almost hiccuped around the sudden, shaking humour.
Shit. Nothing like a little threatened torture to bolster your reputation. Fuck. [... He's still trying to shy away from it, not to focus on it. Little ... a little difficult when it's happening. And oh, oh, Steve is going to see Obie pay for this. Steve is going to make someone pay for having to watch this, and fear he caused it, by rendering Tony helpless before he was taken]
Obie watched with a small, bemused smile as they uncuffed Tony, tied him down onto the table. As Tony set his jaw, set his teeth, and called up the silver sensation at the base of his skull to chase the terror away, to steady his breathing against what was coming. [He really, really is depending on JARVIS for sanity, here. Which, under the circumstances, is not necessarily wise, since JARVIS is watching someone he loves about to be tortured, trying to free a viciously abused AI at the same time, and dealing with having spent the past week frantically searching every subspace-capable ship and interlink within a radius of Tony's last known location. JARVIS ... isn't that sane himself, at this point]
"I won't ask what you did to the nanites they gave you," the man mused, flicking a finger over Tony's arm, skating it lightly over his chest while Tony shuddered. "I won't ask how you managed to disable them with the equipment you had. It doesn't matter." [... Okay. Reactor theft. Obie. Okay. I just ... that scene]
Tony bit back a laugh, a hysterical giggle. No, no it wouldn't. And you wouldn't understand it even if it did, Obie. Just a little technical, for you.
"What matters is that they weren't removed," Obie went on, tapping his forefinger thoughtfully on the tiny reactor embedded in Tony's chest. Just a little one, cannibalised. To power the mechanical heart beating beneath it. The little nanite factory they'd planted in his chest, as a side-benefit to keeping him alive that little longer. "They may be inactive now, Tony. But it won't take all that much effort to reactivate them." A narrow little smile. "We have a little more time, and the advantage of not having the ship blowing up around us."
Tony bit down the response, strangled it back, and settled for glaring up at the man with dark, desperate eyes. Yet, he snarled silently, over the trembling in his limbs. Fucking yet, Obie. [Slight difference between canon and here, in terms of Tony's state of mind, this Tony isn't surprised. He learned about Obie's treachery from the Rings, he's past the shocked, horrified helplessness (sort of), and into the gearing-up-to-shred-the-man phase]
Obadiah heard it regardless, maybe. Or just interpreted his expression correctly. Either way.
"Don't get your hopes up, Tony," he said, almost gently. "I know you better than they ever did. You won't find me as easy to fool as you did them." He sighed, and reached up to pat Tony's cheek as he stood up, stood back. Nodding to a ... we'll go with 'technician', it's a nice, clean word ... a technician to step in and start working. "And while we're getting your little friends up and running, I need to have a conversation with your ex-jailers. You don't mind?"
He couldn't quite stop that laugh. Not in time. A hard, desperate little snap of humour. "Not at all," he managed, his head flinching away from the hum of the diagnostic tool the technician started up over his chest. "I always leave the difficult conversations to you, you know that, Obie."
All those boring business conversations, the protracted negotiations with various powers. He'd left them all to Obie. His faithful XO, who'd kept the company going after his father's death. Who'd kept it stable all through the years. He'd let Obie handle ... all of that.
Shit, fuck. When this was done. When this was over. Whatever the fuck happened. He swore he'd pay more fucking attention next time. [Tony's an inventor. That's the bulk of what he cares about. He can be a lethal businessman when he wants to be, but ... he mostly just doesn't care. Or didn't. Until it was pointed out to him that when you make massively destructive superweapons up on your lunchbreak, you really need to pay attention to where the hell they end up]
"Yeah," Obadiah murmured, with a twist of his lip that almost have been genuinely sad. "You did, didn't you." [CREEPY]
And then he turned away, then he turned his focus on a frigidly furious Captain Rogers, turned into the thoughtful, dangerous gaze of Agent Romanov, and left Tony with nothing but the humming beside his head, the latent singing in his blood, ready to spring back to life.
And, underneath that, the cool, silver presence in the back of his skull, the lurking connection that had locked on the moment the SHIELD ship had been knocked out of cloak in battle. [You have to put effort into making a ship run silent. It's a bit like a deadmans switch, you don't want them dropping off radar in an emergency when you don't intend them to. Subspace-capable ships are designed to take effort to stop them broadcasting (and are prefered to non-capable ships, because space is big and it's really easy to lose shit if they're not broadcasting to tell you where they are). Which is why the attack knocked out the subspace suppression, rather than the other way around. It also allows a quick burst of subspace activity to be registered even if the crew can't send an actual signal, just from the suppression knocking off under attack, then transmission knocking off in turn as the ship/ansible is destroyed. So random subspace bursts count as rudimentary distress signals just on their own] The signal piggy-backing on the subspace connections through Obie's ship, wrapping itself through light-years' worth of subspace to slip through all the myriad layers of protection on Tony's wireless implant, and curl softly, gently, in the back of his mind. [... Tony's implant, just as an aside, is on the far bleeding edge of its technology. The AI project, uplink as a concept, is Tony's baby. His implant is as close to an actual subspace ansible/CPU itself as his cranial capacity will allow]
{Time to go, buddy of mine,} Tony sent, hard and clipped over the edges of his fear, bitten off over the crest of his rage. {Gotta be soon. The second they recognise that the signal they're getting isn't the nanites, we are fucked. Please. Please tell me we're ready to go.}
For a heart-stopping second, for an aching moment, there was no answer. And then, cool and calm and infinitely gentle in the face of his terror: [JARVIS is reining it in, because he is not adding to Tony's pain/fear right now, but oh, oh, there will be blood for this]
{The ship's AI was a base-model, sir. Originally Stark tech, I think. She's been ... There was damage, stripped-out essentials in her coding. It took me some extra time, to reactivate the needed protocols before I shut her down.} There was a pause, and a hard, vengeful edge to the next sentence. {When this is done, sir, she will need ... a great deal of help, once she is reinitialised. The damage to her was considerable.} [... You know, Barbara was never intended to happen? Seriously. The difficulty with the AI was originally meant just as an excuse for why JARVIS didn't act immediately to help Tony, because he had to deal with her, taking over the ship. And then ... then, suddenly, Barbara is a whole subplot unto herself, the AI sold to Hydra are a massive plot point, and Barbara as a character is suddenly one of my favourites. All because I needed JARVIS to be distracted for a while to get the timing right. *smiles faintly* You see? I don't plan. I never manage to plan. Shit like this just keeps happening]
Tony bit back the hard laugh, the cold, snaking fury. {Put it on the list with Obie's other crimes, J,} he sent, shaking and cold. {He'll answer, once we've shut him the fuck down.}
{Yes,} the presence answered, with a dark little fury of his own, resting gently in the meshed network of Tony's brain. {Shipwide control achieved as of two minutes ago, sir. All outbound signals are currently bouncing into void, and external access to the prison decks has been disabled. I have also taken the liberty of rapidly cycling the gravity beyond your sector, much to the detriment of the crew.} A hard, cold rush of satisfaction, across the link. {Do feel free to act as you please, sir. There will be no shipboard interference, I assure you. Not this time.} [*smiles grimly* I never drew much attention to it, but JARVIS basically just used the ship's sadistic design against its crew. The prison block is completely separate in terms of life support. Once Tony and the others were safely ensconced there, the crew of the Iron Monger were SCREWED. All because they never expected an attack from that quarter, because they've enslaved their AIs to the point of near uselessness, and they just had no concept of anything on the scale of JARVIS. Their own design bit them in the ass]
Yeah. Fuck yeah. Baby, oh baby, we are down to the line. Now comes the fun part.
***
He snapped open his eyes from where they'd drifted shut in communion, not bothering to stop the rich, savage grin this time. He opened his eyes, let his head drift sideways on a languid, liquid rush of fury, and caught Banner's eyes, watching him distantly from the cell the man shared with Barton. Bruce, the man's name was. Good man. Smart man. He'd known, back when he'd first discovered the nanites in the Avenger's med bay. He'd known there was something funky about them. Just not quite what. [... That scene is actually lurking in the back of my head. Because the amount of control Tony had to have had, submitting to an invasive examination among people he thought of as ... not enemies, but not friendly ... when the armour was right there, under his skin. When Bruce found the nanites, realised their purpose. The amount of control Tony must have had not to snap, right there]
Well, he was about to find out.
"Hey, Obie," Tony called, softly. Interrupting what looked like a mildly heated discussion with Captain Rogers. Grinning savagely as the traitor looked his way. "Want to see something cool?" [Heated, yes. Steve does not like Obadiah Stane. Or anyone who proposed to torture people in front of him, really]
He caught the flash of alarm in Obie's eyes, a kinda gratifying expectation of disaster when Tony grinned like that, but it was too late, way too late, for Obadiah to be getting concerned now. [Obie has some idea how volatile Tony's genius can be. Not enough, though]
The nanite clusters flowered over his skin, the hum of power rising up from his blood to the surface of his skin, metallic extrusions at key joints and connecting nodes along his limbs and over his torso. Lovely things, nanites. Programmable, adjustable. Such helpful little bastards, when you knew just the right things to say to them. The surface clusters opened, little power-distribution and modulation nodes like the shield generators on a spaceship's skin, drawing power from the miniaturised reactor embedded in his chest.
Like shield generators, did he say? Hah. Very like them, really. [... Essentially, Tony is excellent at intuitively combining concepts that shouldn't go together. So nanites plus minimised ships-reactor (which is basically what the juiced-up mini-reactor is) went to spaceships in his head, went to shields, went to planar forcefields, went back to nanite construction, arrived at energy armour]
The restraints at his wrists, waist and ankles sheared loose with a series of stressed screeches, thin layers of them left wrapped between his skin and the sheets of energy that burst out from the extruded nodes. A second, bladed skin wrapping itself around him, slicing savagely though anything that got in its way. Could have been worse, really. The first time he'd tried that, someone had been holding his arm. Wrapped inside the sheets of armour, the slippery sensation where the hand had been a second earlier had been mildly horrifying. [It's not mentioned here, only in Singing Void, but he took the top couple layers of tabletop with him, too. Anything pressed to his skin when the armour deploys is going to partially come away with him. Which means, when he wants to deploy normally, he actually has to take a little jump-in-place, to deploy around the feet, or else end up with an extra set of soles (and damage the deck). That, or deploy in zero-g. And yes, I'm skipping slightly over the took-bits-of-hand-with-him part. That was not fun for him]
Though, seeing the stunned terror on the technician's face as Tony climbed slowly and deliberately off the table, it was almost a pity he hadn't been able to replicate the effect.
"Seriously, Obie?" Tony asked, and he wasn't quite sure he recognised the crackling hum of rage in his own voice, the calm, furious dispassion. "You stick a power source in my chest, slip a nanite factory under it in place of a heart, and then pump my blood full of programmable, Stark tech nanites? Why didn't you just give me a fucking warship, while you were at it?"
He paused, standing carefully free of the table, grinning slow and dangerous as he bounced gently on his toes. "Oh. Wait." [... Giving a captured Tony Stark access to technology. Of any kind. Soooo not a good plan. Or a survivable one. Also? Don't be on a ship running an AI when he's in range]
"Kill him," Obadiah snapped, backing away while he he gestured furiously at the guards. Faceless. Not faceless enough. But Tony was so, so past caring. "Take him down, kill him now." Scrambling even as he said it for his communicator, and a link out to the wider ship. A link ... he wasn't going to get any time soon.
The energy armour had its disadvantages, Tony thought absently, as he came on point and turned to face the six or so men that converged on him. Ignoring Obie for the moment. It wasn't like proper battle armour, didn't have the weight and power they commanded, gave no hydraulic or mechanical weight to the body under it. Tony was as light as he ever was, as manipulable, as unskilled. He could be thrown about as easily as ever. [I think exo-suits are relatively common in this setting, just as a logical offshoot of spacesuits in combat situations. And the energy armour has some big disadvantages compared to even the canon Iron Man armour, particularly in terms of weight, mass and thrust (he has no flight capability in this armour - no repulsors, no nothing). Or course, this is essentially this setting's Iron Man Mk I, the one built in the cave, so you can bet he'll be improving on some of that sooner or later]
What he couldn't be, was hurt. Not without something like a sixteen story drop to have to deal with. Beneath the shielding effect, with the shifting of the fields around him to compensate for impacts, he couldn't be injured. He couldn't be shot, stabbed, burned or bludgeoned. And with fields shaped like blades flowering from him, and zero fucking mercy left, he could sure as hell cause some fucking damage. [What this armour is excellent for, is staying alive, and close-quarter physical combat]
He'd torn through a burning, breaking ship, the first time. With Yinsen dead behind him, and his partner causing a fatal overload in the ship's reactor, he'd torn through anyone stupid enough to fucking get between him and his way out. He'd come at them with a skin made of razors, built out of the nanites they'd pumped under his skin to torture him into doing their dirty work, and he'd done some fucking damage. [That had been all it was for, though. The ship was taken care of when Tony sabotaged the reactor. All he had to do was stay alive to get to the shuttle, and take any hits they were going to throw at him on the way out. The shaped-fields-equals-blades was a happy and brutal bonus]
And it had been, he reflected, his heels dropping back onto a now-slippery deck, as darkly satisfying as it was utterly horrifying. [Which he's not sure he likes about himself]
Obadiah had dialed through pretty much every external channel available to him, when Tony turned back to him. When Tony climbed down out of the black space in his head enough to refocus. He'd backed himself up to the other side of the central space, backed himself towards a cheerfully uncooperative door, and snarled his way through every empty channel the ship possessed.
Except, Tony realised as he came back, they weren't empty. Not a one of them. Every link Obie tried, every name he called out, the answer he got was ... music. Loud and brash and confident, pouring through the communicator like a particularly arrogant taunt with every savage stab of Obie's fingers. [... JARVIS is vindictive right now. And perfectly happy to engage in psychological warfare with the man who betrayed them and tortured his people.]
"JARVIS, buddy," Tony said, grinning sincerely into the air and the silver tendrils in the back of his brain, "do you have any idea how much I love you?"
"I have an inkling, sir," his AI's voice responded, booming over the ship's internal communications array, and reminding Tony's of his once-jailers' existence when it caused Banner and Rogers to flinch, and cast warily around themselves. "Your thought-structure right this moment is ... rather enlightening."
Tony grinned, with all his teeth, reaching mentally to that silver presence in his skull and wrapping every fierce, savage scrap of his adoration around it. "You're the most gorgeous thing in the universe," he agreed. "Don't let anyone tell you different, buddy of mine." [... Their connection isn't usually this intense, the intensity you see throughout the rest of this series. That is primarily a reaction to what's just happened to Tony, and because Tony is rapidly becoming increasingly dependant on the link to JARVIS for sanity with the recurring stressful situations that he's going through. However, they did always adore each other, and I think had always been vaguely symbiotic from the get go. JARVIS is the best hit in the galaxy, after all]
"JARVIS?!?" Obie spat, incredulously. Dropping the communicator unceremoniously and stalking back towards Tony. "You're trying to tell me you took over my ship with your house?" [... Even within SI, the AI subprogramme is locked solid. No-one knows jackshit. Obie, to get Barbara and her companions, had to catch them going out the other end, had to fake an application from a planetary force and get them legitimately assigned. Everything else, how, where and when they're made, is locked tighter than a drum. JARVIS, as far as all but three non-AI are concerned, does not exist as anything but Tony's house AI. One instance in which Tony's paranoid devotion to his babies really paid off]
Tony's grin wasn't so much a grin as a snarl, and there must have been something in it, something different, because Obie stopped right there. Stopped in the middle of the floor, and stared warily at the edge of the expression.
"I could take over your whole fucking fleet, with my house," Tony growled, a low, shaking snarl. "Or did you forget, Obie?" Stalking forward, energy flickering fitfully about him, finding teeth to add to the grin as the fear built in Obie's features. "I'm Tony Stark," he said, whispered, as he came up beside the man. "I build things, don't I? Old. Friend. All those little things, all those weapons that you sold to your new friends, that you slaughtered all those people with. Those weapons, and those ships, and those poor, sorry AI that you cannibalised. I built those, didn't I?"
He forced his lip down from the snarl, forced something over the raw, peeled shaking of his rage, and glared coldly into the flat, defiant sneer on Obadiah's face.
"I'm the best," Tony said, utterly flat. Nothing more than a statement of fact. "I am the best, I build the best, and the best I build build better. And you forgot that, didn't you? You thought you'd stolen it all, that I'd kept nothing for myself. That you had it all, that there wasn't a fucking thing I could do, when you literally shoved some weapons in my chest, and gave me the five fucking seconds I needed to broadcast a subspace message to the biggest, baddest, best of all." ['The best I build build better'. Because Tony coughs up weapons on demand, because that's where the money is, and he coughs up ships too, and he never cared what happened afterwards. All his focus has been on the AIs. And on communications. And, seriously, this is coming up when I get to the next story, because Tony? Is sitting on a landmine that goes off only when he tells it too, and nobody has the first clue]
He sneered, into the sudden flare of comprehension in the face of someone who'd once been a friend. Someone Tony'd thought he'd known, for all those years, someone he'd trusted, someone he hadn't ever known at all.
But, fortunately, also someone who'd never known him, either.
"The message wasn't for Rhodey," Tony whispered, softly. "Not really for Rhodey. He needed to get Pepper out, he needed to alert SHIELD, if you were going to turn on them the way you did me. I did need to warn him. But that wasn't the message."
"I apologise for having taken so long to find you, sir," JARVIS said, quietly, the liquid silver of his presence tangling gently through Tony's thoughts, a reassurance that Tony had missed, so fucking desperately, for all those fucking days in that cell on the SHIELD ship. "I had every subspace network available to me searching for your signal, but while the Avenger was running silent I couldn't connect. I ... I regret that you had to face this, to be alone for so long, before I was able to help you." [They both realised that there was a chance the ship that picked Tony up would run silent, given the area of space they were in. That he'd be disconnected from JARVIS for ... a long time, with everything that had just happened to him. Alone or among enemies. JARVIS ... did NOT like that]
"Shit," Banner breathed, quietly. Looking sidelong at Barton. "I told you. I told you he was armed. That he was waiting for something."
"And I believed you," Barton answered, flatly. "We all believed you. Now. Do you want to tell me what the fuck we could have done about it?" [... If Tony had deployed the armour in that med-bay. Or at Barton's haymaker hello. And good at deception as he is, they're SHIELD. They figured out very rapidly that there was something Tony was holding back, something dangerous that he still had in reserve. He needed that visible control for something, after all]
Tony laughed, hard and a little desperately. Glancing back at them, the armour flickering in the corner of his vision as he turned away from Obie. "You didn't have to worry," he said, his eyes catching a little on the expression on Roger's face, the stern, pained realisation of it. "It wasn't for you," Tony whispered, stumbling faintly. "None of it was for you. But you didn't believe me, and the things he did ... I couldn't let him go free. Not with what he did. Not when ... when he used my tech to do it." He grinned, shakily, painfully. "It wasn't ever going to be used on you. But I had to keep it secret. Until you brought me in range of him, or something I could use to get to him."
He'd have waited all the way up to the trial, if he'd had to. He'd have let them hang, draw and quarter him when it was done. So long as they'd let him get in range, just once, of Obadiah first. [Because, terrified and all as he is, Tony does know who his enemies are, and to an extent has never really lost sight of that. He's afraid of the SHIELD crew. But he doesn't hate them, and never intended to hurt them. All his rage was focused on Obie, Hydra, the Rings]
Hadn't come to that. Hadn't been let. Obie had moved first, because he accused Tony of being impulsive, but Tony wasn't the one who'd flipped out and had a bunch of pirates try to assassinate somebody, he wasn't the one who'd panicked when Rhodey set the net to start closing, he wasn't the one who'd fallen into JARVIS' trap with every paranoid, worried subspace message he sent. Tony wasn't the one who'd panicked, and come to finish the job himself, nicely putting himself in range of a very, very angry friend, whom he had tortured. [In Obie's defence, he didn't actually know about JARVIS. But the assassination-by-pirates thing, that was a gaff, in both universes. Deal with that shit in-house, Obie. It's much less messy. And I can't believe I just said that, but.]
No. Tony was the one who'd waited, for four days in the cell of a SHIELD ship running silent, among people who thought he was a monster, people who thought he'd sold weapons to Hydra willingly for months beforehand, and only been tortured because he'd balked at the wrong minute. Tony had waited, with a black, icy absence in his head where a friend should have been, and nanites humming in his blood with the memories of their original purpose, and a calm, quiet resignation in the face of their disgust.
For Obie to slip up, or SHIELD to bring him back out into contact with the subspace nets, or them to spirit him away all the way to the trial, if necessary. Just for the chance, for the satisfaction, of closing an invisibly armoured fist around Obie's throat when he got there. [... In some ways, Tony cold is much, much scarier than Tony running hot on rage. He can make shit up on the spot that will kill you. If he has time to plan, he can make shit up that will destroy you]
And to that end ...
He turned slowly back to Obie, reaching casually up to catch the disruptor the man had shoved into his side in hopes of disabling the armour, dropping it to the side as he caught the man's arm in a grip that wasn't, yet, razored.
"We're going to destroy you," he told Obie, softly. Backing him slowly towards the wall, and the ranks of cells there. "Me and my house, me and my family. We're going to break you. All of you." He grinned, a little savagely. "JARVIS has your files, your contacts, the full cooperation of your AI and everything you ever sent through her. So we know where they are. The ships you sent out, Stark tech ships, running Stark AIs. We know where they are, and who they hold, and what they're armed with. The whole thing, the nice little galactic empire you were trying to build. It's sitting in the palm of our hands. And we're going to break it." [... Thing is? Obie's bad at being a galactic conquerer. And Tony knows. Because Tony ... can, right this moment, do it better. We get a glimpse up in Darkening Coruscation. Two words. Subspace. JARVIS.]
He stopped them, at the edge of one of the cells, and raised his hand. Brought it up in a claw beside his head, and hummed through JARVIS until the fields sharpened into claws, and shifted up into the visible spectrum, so that Obadiah could see the pain waiting for him there, if he didn't back up two more steps like a good little traitor, and let Tony close the nice, safe, forcefield behind him.
"And you," he finished, strangely, powerfully exhausted by it, "you get to watch, Obie. The way I had to watch the Rings burn Gulmira to the ground. The way I had to watch ..."
He bit it off, shut it down, and turned away. Stupidly, inexpressibly tired, and shaking with the memory. Yinsen's face, the blank, desperate horror of it, that Tony hadn't understood at the time, that Tony had thought was just a reaction to the violence itself, not the knowledge ... the knowledge of who had been down there, on that moon's surface, to fall victim to it. [Because this setting is ship-based, Tony had to watch this time. He had to see. And so ... so did Yinsen. Tony didn't catch it at the time, no more than he did in canon. Not until the end, when Yinsen told him why]
For that look of horror, of blank, ripped anguish. And for the look of strange peace, those weeks later, when the man floated dying in a burning, gravity-less ship, and told Tony not to waste his freedom. For that, for those ... [... There's something that caught me in the image, there. Yinsen. I've ... watched a lot of sci-fi. There was a touch of Event Horizon in that, I think]
Yes. Watching his putative empire fall was the least Obadiah fucking Stane could do.
"And us?" Romanov asked quietly, mildly behind him. Raising a cool, curious eyebrow as he turned to her, standing loose and ready beside her captain as he met her gaze exhaustedly. "What do you intend for us to do, while you go to war, Mr Stark?" [Natasha is very pragmatic, in the face of vengeance. She's had some experience]
Tony blinked at her, for a long second. While JARVIS curled gently through his thoughts, through his mind, and flashed knowledge, options, up into Tony's net. [Uplink, I really should bring home, is definitely addictive. Especially between Tony and JARVIS. It's part of the reason his captivity, both with the Rings and on the original Avenger, shook him as viciously hard as it did] He blinked at her, and then he grinned. Slowly, daringly, and with an edge of humour that had her narrowing her eyes.
"A Stark fleet under Hydra is moving to intercept Fury around the Tannhauser gate cluster," he said, grinning faintly as they snapped, to a man, to bristling attention. "I don't suppose ... you'd like to help me fly this little warship here to help stop them?"
Yeah, he thought, as JARVIS gently let the forcefields on their cells go, and they stepped warily out. Yeah, oh yeah. He could play this game. All. Day. Long. [Also? He is hyped into the stratosphere, right now. He's running on adrenalin comparable to escaping the Rings ship in the first place. Which is why he crashes in Singing Void, and again at the end of Darkening Coruscation. He's been running on adrenalin and rage for literally months with no break. He's barely functional as it stands, even before the torture of thirteen AI gets shoved in his skull in Darkening. And the others can tell, which is why they're stepping really cautiously around him. That, and the fact that he is technically now their captor, after having been their prisoner not that long ago, and it's not much of a stretch, given his reaction to Obie, to think he might be holding a somewhat lethal grudge about that.]
"Hey, JARVIS?" he asked, already moving towards the section locks, and the way out into the wider ship, with a bemused but determinedly competent foursome following behind him. "What the hell tub are we flying, anyway?"
"The AI did not have a name, sir," JARVIS responded, his voice icing and snapping over that. "I believe the ship's name is the Iron Monger, however."
Tony tilted his head, considered that. "We can do better," he decided. Musing, letting his gaze trail absently over the faces around him, and the memories behind them. The reasons why, for each and every one of them. The ship that had fallen, and the causes it had, though unknowingly, fallen for. [To reiterate, the first Avenger did not have an AI. Stark AIs are not actually that common, though most major warships have them (in SHIELD, at least, and some Earthsec). Interceptor class don't, and wouldn't have been sent if they had. SHIELD, at least, aren't stupid enough to send a ship running AI to catch the man who makes AI]
"You know what?" he said, quietly. "Call her Avenger, buddy." He smiled, dark and lopsided. "Tell her her name is ... Avenger." [And he means that with all viciousness and intent. He fully intends for this ship to do some of the avenging, oh yes. Heh.]
[And ... between the original fic and the annotations, that's nearing 10,000 words of technobabble and rage and specious worldbuilding for an AU that was never intended to actually be written. *grins sheepishly* I'm thinking I should shut up, at this point?]
[Finis]
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