Author's Notes: This fic comes with a built in soundtrack, based off the songs that inspire this madness. This idea more or less comes from reading the comic book AU line with evil!Tony and listening to music late at night. Hopefully it's still decent regardless. This chapter contains a mix of present and past tense that won't be present in other chapters, and again I'm hoping it's not too jarring or confusing to read. Give it a shot and see what you think. Comments, ideas and thoughts welcome.
I'm not sure if I need a spoiler warning on this or not, as while there will be characters and elements from season two mixed in, everything is very different due to the shift in Tony's behavior and the lack of the Mandarin's presence. Still, I'll post warnings in the AN section if I feel a chapter would ruin an episode of season two for the readers. As with the bulk of my fics, the first chapter is also significantly smaller than the following ones. Sorry. That said, warnings.
Warnings for this fic include murder, violence, torture, discussion of the above three and superheroes, character death, alcohol abuse, and possibly messed up Pepperony. I'm unsure about that last bit at this stage of planning.
Now we know for sure they're telling lies when they say, "No one gets hurt, remember nobody dies," you know it's hard to believe anything that they say. You know the world is wrong, the world is wrong. - Metal Heart by Garbage
He committed murder and his stomach hasn't been quite right since. He's missed some sleep.
That's more or less it; there's no other side effects so far.
Tony Stark had a very low tolerance for filthy liars. He had a very pronounced set of berserk buttons, things that made him react without hesitation in sheer anger. After having his own father turn out to be a lying false prophet of pacifism when actually having an extensive history dealing and creating weapons, lying took on an almost deadly sin level of importance in Tony's mind. He could take the villainy, things going wrong, being out numbered and outgunned, his friends being in danger and his suit threatening to fail. That was just a Monday for him. What sent him over the edge was the fact that Gene had lied.
He's sitting in study hall now, sipping a chai tea latte and feeling that sort of deep, heavy weight that comes with major life decisions settle over his shoulders.
Somehow it had made sense at the time. It wasn't particularly premeditated or well thought out, though. He was just so tired of being used. He tried so hard to make all the right decisions, be optimistic, give people chances, take people's word at face value and all those things he'd been fed by his father. Tony Stark does not swear, drink, do drugs, engage in petty shallow high school relationships or use his money to buy people off and act like a jerk. He has tried to maintain standards of behavior higher than that. The Iron Man suit could very easily be used for mass murder if he were so inclined. Instead he'd tried to save the world. And of course no good deed went unpunished. His reward for all his hard work is neverending pain and crisis after crisis, and he finally had a moment where he simply couldn't take it anymore.
Something in him had snapped when he saw Gene transform into the Mandarin. Some voice in him, a determined, white hot burst of energy, said no, he wasn't going to be used again. No one was going to hurt his family again. He was through being the moral white knight superhero. Idealism was a nice idea that didn't work in reality. Gene had no idea what kind of lines he was crossing. Threaten Tony, fine. Threaten Pepper, Rhodey, or Howard Stark, and be prepared to feel the full wrath of Anthony Edward Stark. He took a lot of things in stride - surrendering his company to Stane until he was eighteen, having only four close friends if he stretched his definition of the term, tolerating hours of being trapped in a school where he learned nothing - but he found his metaphorical line in the sand at being betrayed. Tony didn't believe in paying evil unto evil, he just knew that he couldn't take any more loss.
He isn't sure if he meant to kill him or not. The reaction, the blast, was instinctive and ill-thought out, poorly aimed and not very well done. A police investigation, if there had been one, would've called it self-defense or manslaughter rather than homicide. It's sort of a non-issue at this point, though. Nothing can bring Temugin Khan back. Nothing can undo the damage that's been done by this lapse in judgment. Pepper has not spoken to him in a week, and when she looks at him her clay colored eyes are filled with fear. Gene Khan nearly killed her and she mourns him. Tony saved her and she's afraid of him. The world does not make sense. Not that it has since the plane crash, but now it's managing to make even less sense than it already did. Rhodey has yet to fully absorb the shock; Tony's stomach churns violently at the thought of the black boy's reaction when he eventually has one. Rhodey is like the brother he never had. Tony doesn't want to lose him.
Unfortunately, some actions are irreversible. And Tony is fairly unrepentant about the incident. He's not the Punisher. He doesn't run around torturing people for their percieved crimes and racking up a body count. In one single dire situation, he took the shot he needed to take to get everyone out of it alive. He wasn't cruel. Gene didn't suffer. The energy blast forced a bleed out in under a minute, during which Gene did not appear to be registering the pain of an open wound. His body went into shock in a matter of seconds. It was brief, unsatisfying, devoid of vengance or anger. Tony took a necessary action. There was no hatred or thoughts of making the man who killed his father suffer. There was only survivalism and the prevailing thought that he was sick of being used.
Tony doesn't like being lied to. He doesn't like having his acts of kindness come back to bite him. He'd gone out of his way to help Gene and spend time with him, treat him as a friend, and in return the Chinese boy had tried to kill them all for the sake of power. For five Makluan Rings, he would have destroyed them like they were insects under his boot. Tony isn't sure why that cut him as deeply as it did. Maybe it was because Gene had begun to be like family. Maybe there was just a limit to how many things could go wrong in one lifetime before Tony broke. Maybe he was never as good and pure of a hero as he thought.
It's all over now. None of it matters in the end. He regrets hurting Pepper. He doesn't regret blasting Gene after ripping those pretty Rings off his hand. Something had to give. Tony understands his father now, the man Howard Stark used to be, the one who dealt in SHIELD and NSA technology. He had to do something to keep from being used and abused by a world that simply did not care about heroics or what was right or wrong. Rhodey may think Tony has crossed the thin line between villain and hero. What he doesn't realize is it's not a line, it's a valley filled with shadows and death, and Tony is wandering somewhere in it, trying to figure out which way to turn.
He's had trouble staying asleep with his thoughts racing, replaying his life since the crash before his mind, picking up the retroactive warnings signs attached to Gene. He never should have let Gene get this close to him. Now he knows better. It will take a lot more than a friendly smile and a trip to Greenland to get into Tony's heart from now on. Every night he relives all the little inconsistancies he should have seen and re-evaluates the odds of his father being alive. But body or not, the blood at the crash site was equivalent to twice what a human being could lose and live. As nice as it would've been for Gene to be telling the truth, he had just been trying to find a new knife to stick Tony in the back with.
The only way to survive was to strike first. And if doing that means he's no longer a hero, well, he never called himself one in the first place. He's Iron Man. He set out to help people, not to be an icon of virtue. Maybe it's sociopathic to be so incredibly okay with this. He's okay with the title of sociopath if it means the people he loves are alive and safe. In the end, the world is not about villains or heroes, it's about survival. To live life with other, loftier goals had only bred disappointment and anger. That anger has shifted inside him and is no longer burning. Instead it is freezing, cold, mechanical, a functional portion of the complex dysfunctional being that is Tony Stark.
His heart is made of metal, and he doesn't mean the arc reactor.