Summary: …in which Tony Stark prefers to harass his PA instead of attending a weapons demonstration and Obadiah Stane has to go instead.
Notes: Various spoilers for Iron Man 1+2, but if you haven't seen those yet you need to get on your shit. Please enjoy and leave comments! Remind me to make a Stan Lee cameo!
PART OF A SERIES: see my profile for the continued AU
*heavily edited 5/20/17*
Warning: glossed-over torture, mention of waterboarding, PTSD, swearing, canon-typical violence
Disclaimer: I don't own anything that Marvel came up with first and they can take my money any time they want.
Chapter One: Obadiah Stane
When Howard and Maria Stark die in an unexpected car crash, Obadiah Stane knows it's complete bullshit.
Howard Stark would not be caught dead—literally—in a car that was not programmed to avoid collisions and designed to protect its occupants from everything up to and possibly including World War III. However, Oby does not mention this at the time. No need for stocks to take a dip when it's already alarmingly clear that everyone is already under-confident in young Tony's ability to step up to the plate and handle the company.
Oby wished he could say their doubts are unnecessary, but unfortunately, Obys has to bribe the damn kid with pizza and lingerie models to get him to sit still long even enough to sign documents and listen to annual reports. Sure, Tony churns out new tech faster than the whole R&D department combined… but it troubles Oby to see no sign of the enthusiasm and verve that Howard brought to his work. Tony's got no drive to push the envelope; he just keeps making the same old weapons bigger and nastier, pulling juvenile stunts and creating PR nightmares in between inventions.
Oby thinks, for the space of a minute, that his parents death is hitting the young man harder than he lets on. Tony and Howard didn't quite get on well, especially in the last few years, but maybe there's some love lost after all…
An explosive conversation with Tony puts that theory immediately to rest.
"Mysterious you say? Oby, you're being paranoid. Dad was drunk as hell and Mom was probably high as fuck on her meds—they probably shut off the autopilot for kicks."
"Tony, I know you and your dad never really—"
"I said leave it alone, okay? God fucking damn, I don't care."
After that Oby doesn't try to engage Tony in anything other than professional matters. Not that Tony listens to him much on that subject either. So Oby focuses on stock prices and acquisitions and interest percentages—money is Obadiah's guilty pleasure, and he spends most of his time focusing on interesting ways to spend and make it.
Soon after their falling out, Tony's conveyor belt of personal assistants—which he hires, beds and then fires—is abruptly halted by Pepper Potts, who is wise enough to resist Tony's flirtation but perhaps not wise enough to tell him to fuck off and hand him a sexual harassment lawsuit. She is driven, competent and persistent and hides a ruthless entrepreneur beneath the mask of a kind, thoughtful, courteous person. Or maybe it's not a mask and Pepper actually manages to be both. At first Oby is just glad that her presence has stopped the leak in the dike of company assets that consisted of Tony's constant settlements against understandably disgruntled former PAs, but very quickly Pepper becomes someone Oby relies on heavily—especially when it comes to Tony-wrangling.
It's Pepper who alerts Oby when Tony begins, for no apparent reason, to show up at the occasional board meeting or have a private conference with one of their stockholders. It's an interesting development coming on the heels of Tony's recent fight with his old friend Col. James Rhodes. It's a trivial thing, according to Rhodes, but Tony is still fuming. Wondering if Tony's new interest in the company is an effort to distract himself from personal problems (and Tony has plenty of them to be running from), Oby broaches the subject as delicately as he can. He can't help but be a little excited, however: Tony's showing interest in his baby—money.
"Finally taking interest in the business side of things, huh? I can help show you the ropes, you know. These things can be a touch hard to navigate sometimes."
"I have six master's degrees. I think I can handle a little high finance."b
"Well, whatcha doing? Trying to fund a new project? I've actually been looking at the arc reactor plans lately—"
"Why don't you go do that, then? I'm kinda busy. Got Miss November waiting in the elevator."
And then, everything changes—or, to be more accurate, goes to completely to hell.
"Tony, why aren't you on the plane to Jerusalem? Pepper can't reach you and you should have left for the weapons demonstration hours ago."
Tony hasn't even come to the phone: Oby's got a blank view of Tony's bedroom ceiling (he hopes it's Tony's bedroom ceiling). There's a sexy-santa bra hanging off the wall light. "Yeah, listen Oby, I can't go. December is here and well, she's twins. You can take care of it, right? And tell Peps that I will answer her calls when she uninstalls her damn AI from my security system. I'm tired of the damn thing making snide comments when I get home late—oh, and she's welcome to join the girls and I for a pre-Christmas party."
"Tony, will you leave that woman alone? You're lucky she doesn't sue you."
"We good then? You got this?"
"No, wait. Tony, dammit, I can't do that presentation. I don't know how half this shit of yours works!"
Tony's face appears briefly in screen, predictably scruffy and debauched. "Sure you do. Press the button, it explodes. Instant Death, just add water. Call me when you get back. Bye."
Tony hangs up, and Oby only makes it to the presentation in time because Pepper and her "damn AI" are both organizing geniuses. The Jericho Missile goes over swimmingly, and Oby is smugly considered the profits Stark Industries will reap from this particular deal whilst trading pleasantries over the phone with Col. Rhodes, who is tied up Stateside. Oby suspects his superiors are giving him a hard time about falling out with Tony. It doesn't matter that after their fight Oby had immediately arrange to liaise with Rhodes himself; everyone thinks that Stark industries sinks or swims by the grace of Tony Stark's genius without realizing that it takes a different kind of genius to keep such a massive organization running smoothly. Rhodes is one of the few people who understand this, and it makes dealing with the military less irritating.
"Well, how's the trip then? Brass treating you right?"
"It's damn hot."
"Maybe you'll sweat off some of that extra blubber, old man."
"Blubber? I'll have you know that this is expensive blubber: 90% French cheese and 10% expensive wine. Besides, if this convoy gets lost in this goddamn desert then I won't be the first person to starve."
Rhodes laughs at that. Six weeks later he isn't laughing.
The Ten Rings is not impressed—apparently they expected Stark.
The beginning is a painful haze in which the terrorists attempt to reap what they can from him. They're careless, too angry perhaps that he's not a genius billionaire weapons inventor to ask the right questions, questions that could've destroyed Stark Industries just as thoroughly as leaked weapon designs: details about money, trade deals, offshore accounts, tax loopholes and stock predictions. Oby is pretty sure he talked, sang like a bird about everything they asked, but they didn't ask the right questions, so Oby is equally sure they didn't actually get anything out of him.
All those thoughts occur to Oby long after the fact, however. After he wakes for the first time with a car battery plugged into his chest and a foreign physicist explaining to him about "the walking death" and how he is an old man and cannot put much strain on this new monster of a heart. After he realizes that his entire life and everything he knows is gone. No more French cheese or fancy wine—his "blubber" evaporates quickly. No more soft sheets. No more Wall Street Journal. No more fresh air. Oby has never in all his life realized that fresh air could be a luxury.
Eventually the waterboarding and the endless interrogation about weapon designs ends and Oby has a chance to actually get to know the man who has been keeping him alive in between times—drying him off and warming him up as best as possible in cold Afghan caves, making him eat and talking to him in soft tones…
"So what do you do, Mr. Stane, other than count money?" asks Yinsen.
If Oby had not come to respect Yinsen tremendously in the short forever that he'd spent in the cave with him, he would've said something flippant about his food-tasting hobby. He wouldn't have thought about the question at all.
"I don't know," he says instead, because as much as manipulating figures and dancing on the high-wire stock exchange thrills him, here, far away from everything money can buy him and sitting across from a man who has never made in his whole life, despite his degrees, even as much money as Oby spends on his wardrobe—here, money has lost its thrill, and Oby knows of nothing else in life that give him the same feeling. "Nothing, I guess."
"So you are a man who has everything, and nothing."
Oby doesn't reply to that because he doesn't have a reply that isn't a lie. Instead he asks: "Why are they keeping me alive still?"
"Well it can't be anything good, I'll tell you that."
The answer comes the next day: Oby breathes in fresh air and blinks in the sunlight at crates and pallets and trucks full of Stark weaponry. They're dealing under the table. Stark Industries is dealing under the table and how to fuck did Oby not even know about this? The terrorists tell him he must negotiate his own release with Stark Industries—CFO of Stark Industries Obadiah Stane in return for a dozen Jericho Missiles.
"…and then they will let you go," Yinsen translates.
"No they won't," Oby says.
"No, they won't."
Yinsen gets sick of Oby's resulting despondency in a surprisingly short time. "You cannot just give up."
"What else am I supposed to do? I'm going to e dead inside the week and you know it."
"Then this a very important week for you, isn't it?"
"There's no use, Yinsen. There's no one coming to rescue me, and I'm useless on my own. I just count money. I'm not an engineer. I don't have shit to bribe them with, not unless they're interested in supply requisitions or cost-reduction strategies…"
Oby trails off there, because he may not be an engineer but he's been over enough of Tony's crazy-ass blueprints in an effort to make them cost-effective enough to actually build that he's got a few of them memorized and the gist of quite a few more. Tony always called him cheap, and Pepper often reminded him that he should delegate number-juggling to an intern, but Oby always enjoyed sinking his fingers into every inch of the company, even the incomprehensible eggheads' blueprints—and there they all are in his head. The Stark semi-intelligent heat seeking missiles, which he forced Tony to tone down from fully-intelligent-and-slightly-uncanny to only semi-intelligent, each stocked with an obscenely efficient and expensive microchip and 0.006 grams of palladium, which is only available on the market in intermittent quantities and very rare. The Tank-Breakers which Oby vetoed the superfluous third propulsion packs on, but still have two apiece that could lift five hundred pounds each for up to thirty seconds. The huge and unwieldy arc-reactor, a money sucking energy source that would be market gold if it used less palladium…
"Yinsen, I hope you're a better mechanic than I am."
"That's not hard. You're not a mechanic at all. Why?"
"Because we're going to build something."
It's tricky, bluffing the terrorists, but Yinsen is able to make the Oby sound intelligent enough in translation that the terrorists agree to let Oby build them a "bigger, better" Jericho Missile than Tony Stark has ever made. Oby would give an arm for Pepper's programming skills or Tony's engineering genius, but Yinsen is patient and determined and Oby himself has a miserly creativity that helps them make up for inadequate resources and his imperfect memory of the necessary designs. Oby learns more about engineering than he ever wanted to and still Yinsen has to do basically everything. They argue about who will actually end up using the suit, before Yinsen finally cheats by just going ahead and welding the parts in Oby's much larger measurements.
In the end, they run out of time. Oby's stuck, horrified, as Yinsen rus out into the tunnels to buy time for his uploading defensive system. The armor works—Instant Death, just add arc-reactor—but it doesn't work well enough to save Yinsen. Oby kills everyone and torches the place and barely makes it out himself without becoming a cinder. The armor does not so much fly as fall, but Oby has other things on his mind than how he and Yin—how the armor could have been improved. He wanders the desert in no particular direction, thinking about the man's last request:
"Don't waste your life."
More to come!
Notes on the freaky headcanons:
So the sense of Oby I got from the film was that he is greedy and cunning, but not a mechanic at heart like Tony. [Notice how, at the end of the film, Tony wins because he actually tested his suit for problems like freezing and Oby didn't.] Tony, on the other hand, is selfish and shallow until his experience in Afghanistan.
In order to switch their roles, I headcanoned Oby as greedy still, but in the same way that Tony is selfish-as a sort of wall against the world that is torn down by Yinsen/Afghanistan. I amplified his intelligence a little but kept him very focused on business and strategy and analysis rather than science and mechanics, which is going to make for a very interesting kind of Iron Man. Tony didn't take much prodding to become a villain, especially without Afghanistan. I just amplified his worst qualities.
Also, I gave Jarvis to Pepper, who will take a level in badass in this AU [not that she doesn't in the films!] because the idea of her being a computer scientist is awesome, and frankly, evil!Tony w/Jarvis is scary.
