Written on request for my sister—happy birthday!
First off, this is totally, ridiculously AU.
Second, I took some liberties with their backstories. I wanted to go into a bit of the how and why, maybe a bit of character examining… and mainly, I just wanted to see if I could make this work.
Third, this is short, just under 6k words (it's already written). There are so many ways this storyline could go… I prefer to leave it up to you to decide what happens after all of these ends come together.
Finally, disclaimer: None of this is mine, and any reference to real people/places was accidental. Any reference to other fandoms was on purpose, and just for completeness, I don't own anything there either.
Somewhere in the Middle (1/5)
Tony doesn't remember much about his early schooling. He remembers the teachers expecting him to sit-still-be-quiet-pay-attention, though, with that awful disappointment gleaming at him around every corner. He remembers being shoved into a new class when another teacher tired of his "childishness," just one more in the long line of people who saw the Stark name and saw the intelligence, but never the boy beneath. During Those Days that stink of rotting caves and cold and a heavy weight attached to his heart with too delicate wires, he even remembers the other students; demanding assistance and money and favors in the name of friendship.
Perhaps he should have built Dummy, his precious, oldest bot sooner, instead of during his sophomore year at MIT: 16 years old and acutely aware that his parents were never coming back from the business trip to DC. Mother and her ever-present books and her infrequent but warm hugs—vanished, in the same crash that took Howa-father. Now his only defense against his father's business partner was gone (not that the drunken mess did much against Obadiah, who should have been removed from Stark Industries' board the first time he tried to take over). Ingratiating himself to the board by presenting them his newest innovation, a primitive form of AI (Just A Marginally Evolved System), Tony bought himself enough time to finish his education and set his parents' affairs in order. Installing JAMES in his childhood home to keep watch and sort through the mess of scanned notes and journals, Tony moved across the country to make a new start in Malibu.
And then, things got crazy.
Tony doesn't remember meeting Rhodey, because at the time his blood alcohol content had been pushing insanity percent and there may or may not have been a penguin squawking at him from the passenger seat of his car, that was either upside down or in the water. Er, maybe both—although, the whole thing may have been a hallucination, because he had lost track of what combination of pollutants he was consuming at the second party he crashed into. He kind of remembers the second meeting, mainly because of the splitting headache of a hangover and the unhelpful yelling. The third meeting went much better, because even though Tony was hung over as hell, he was pitching his big shiny weapons to Rhodey. Rhodey, who must be part squirrel, because have you seen the man's collection of shiny weapons?
On the other hand, Tony definitely remembers meeting Pepper, because he kidnapped her when she was on a date. At least, she was probably on a date, because she had on this dress and her legs might have been a mile long. Also, she might have mentioned it when she was braining him with a chair because they were mistaken for thieves and locked in a storage closet while the cops were called. Tony claims she should be glad he posted bail, got everything sorted out, and offered her a job. Pepper laughs, unless Tony is trying to get out of trouble, then she reminds him that driving past security to an "employees only" section of a large research facility and flipping them off for trying to stop him, even when it is HIS company, is not an appropriate course of action. (Eventually, she finds out why he decided to kidnap her from the admittedly boring date with Reed. Years later when Tony is required to work with Mr. Fantastic in a world-saving capacity, she is delighted to find out it was something-something-but he beat me! It was a science project!-something-whine.)
As much as Tony tries to forget, JARVIS will always remind him of the ridiculous situations of their first day together. Watching that campy old Batman series while he programmed, Tony came up with the brilliant idea to give his new AI the attitude of a proper British butler. This, combined with his sarcasm and a misplaced important line of code made JARVIS as devious as he was loyal from the moment he came online and scared the piss out of Tony, who had squealed like a toddler after (subconsciously, perhaps) hitting the final initialization keys when sleeping at his desk. As it was, Tony scoured the code for days trying to find the bug that had JARVIS using recorded audio of Miss Potts at her most terrifying as his first voice, but the small tweaks that fixed the problem didn't seem like they would have caused it in the first place. Without evidence, Tony was forced to assume that he made a mistake, while his AI mentally (circuitly?) gave a diabolical laugh and continued to be helpful, irritating, and generally awesome.
Unfortunately, the crazy took a turn for awful, and the debacle with Stane led to the restructuring of Stark Industries and created a rift between Tony and Rhodey, while the antics of Iron Man drove Pepper off the edge of frustration once a week.
It is understandable, then, that Tony was reluctant to tell anyone about the palladium poisoning from the arc reactor. He had hoped that allowing Rhodey to take a suit, or trying to convince Pepper to go away, or just his general destructive behavior would be enough clues so they could figure it out without him having to actually say it… But they didn't, so he didn't, and that was why Tony Stark was sitting on the floor of his parents' house, digging through the boxes containing his father's work. JAMES' mechanical voice, a far cry from the nearly human tones of JARVIS, was a soft hum of security and home in the background noise of his brain, lulling him to a temporary peace, until a very interesting piece of information appeared in his father's journals, only a few weeks before his first birthday.
Tony Stark had a twin brother, and he was out there somewhere instead of with Tony, where he belonged.