Sleepless Monsters
Prompt: Sleep
Summary: Prompted: Sleep – Tony Stark has never been able to sleep easily.
By: Astarael Darkrah Black
Author's Note: So I had a burst of inspiration for this one shot from esama on tumblr/AO3. To my continuing readers I haven't abandoned any of my other stories. I have actually written and rewritten the next chapters to all of my fics at least twice but nothing I have written satisfied me. I will try to get up the next chapters soon but no promises. Um so this is a prompted one-shot and won't be continued.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize.
Tony Stark has never been able to sleep easily, his brain has always raced with new ideas and improvements to old ones for as long as he could remember. Without fail the only way for him to sleep has either been to drive himself into the ground with exhaustion or to be drugged into it. It made him into a difficult child, and even worse as an adult.
Pepper and Obi think that he drinks, parties, and works to excess because he is still rebelling against his father. He has never bothered to correct them. If he doesn't get these things out of his head Tony will begin to rock and pace, and if things get bad enough he will let out wordless screams as the idea in his head and the world around him becomes too much.
And then, Afganistan, and things are trapped in his head even more. His captors think that he has been driven mad, or possessed by some sort of demon. The doctor Yinsin tells him in between his manic fits of creation. He couldn't have told them no, he wouldn't work for them. Not when they were willing to give him materials to work with and an outlet for the things in his head. They get annoyed when the first thing he makes is a simple children's toy and when he tells them that no, he won't make the Jericho, but something even better but he starts creating and they can tell that whatever he is making in between his fits of creation, is a weapon.
Yinsin tries to get Tony to sleep at first, before he sees the consequences, and then he simply pushes Tony towards medicine as a way of dealing with what his weapons had been used for. Using Tony's genius and his own medical knowledge to teach Tony what he needs to know and watching the fireworks afterward. By the time the suit is ready to power up the pair have made several dozens of medical advances that will never see the light of day if they fail to escape. Both Tony and the blueprints went into the suit.
Yinsin died and Rhodey found Tony wandering the desert carrying a bag full of innovations worth billions of dollars. When he returns home and in a press conference ends Stark Corporations weapons development, he has plans of medicine and energy production ready to replace it and says so with diagrams written on the napkins from his meal. The media wonders what could have happened to him to have made such a war monger want to change to helping people instead of going after the bastards who had hurt him, but that was it.
When Obi betrays him, in a way, Tony isn't really surprised. Obi had been acting more and more irrational even as Stark Industries stock had risen, he had continued focusing on the need for newer and more powerful weapons, saying that this change of focus would destroy the company. Tony supposed that that was why Obi had pushed him towards weapons building for as long as he could remember, he had a hard time understanding people but he began to think that Obi had never wanted him to come out of the lab.
One night when nothing is helping Tony to sleep he tears through his father's files, not really looking for anything in particular. But then he finds the original patent for the arc reactor. His father's name is not the only one on it. Tony has never heard of this man, Anton Vanko, but his name is on the original patent but not the one that is kept where everyone can see it, Tony finds when he searches it out. His father had stolen all of the credit for a technology that he had only had a part in the creation of. It may have been his father's crime but after what had happened in Afghanistan, he refused to allow it to go unnoticed and uncorrected.
While Tony is scouring the globe looking for Anton Vanko he is contacted by a man called Nick Fury. Who after he appears in Tony's living room tries to convince to Tony to stop looking for Anton, the man his father had betrayed. Fury tells Tony that his father had only cast Anton off after he had found that Anton had only been in it for the profit. Tony wonders what Fury thought his father was doing it for, as he escorted the man politely to the door, thanking him for the advice.
When Tony finally finds Anton and his son Ivan the man is only days from death's door, only still alive because of what Tony had brought out of the desert. Tony tries to help, getting in contact with the best experts in the field. Paying for any treatments the man needed and all the time begging Anton to know if there was anything he could do to try and make up for his father's crime. Tony's father, Howard Stark, may have been the one to commit the crime but Tony refused to continue to perpetuate it. Anton Vanko eventually dies in his hospital bed, in more comfort than he had had in years.
After the funeral Ivan Vanko, Anton's son speaks to Tony about their fathers and what Anton had been too proud to ask for. Ivan wants his father's name back on the patents for everything Anton had worked on with Tony's father. Tony readily agrees to this and Ivan's request to come work on the new Arc Reactors. A month later Ivan and his bird are living in Tony's house working on their own projects. Pepper is a little exasperated but able to keep up with the second genius living in the house. At the opening of the new Stark Tech Expo, Ivan Vanko is there standing next to Tony Stark, his father's greatest achievement once again in the names of both the men involved in its creation.
And when the Norse God Loki invades he is captured with his threat ended before he even gets out of Germany, due to the anti-mind control properties of electricity created by the element Ivan and Tony discovered together after finding out that Tony was dieing from palladium poisoning.