Howard Stark's father, Howard Sr., was a devoutly religious man, the sort of old country Catholic who thought everything was a sin. It was a sin to be resentful or angry, even if you were being punished. It was a sin to enjoy life too much because there were souls suffering in purgatory. It was a sin to lust, a sin to laugh in church, a sin to take pride in your own accomplishments.

And Howard had a lot of accomplishments.

Those who knew Howard as an adult, even in passing, knew that he lived in constant rebellion against everything his father stood for. He believed in pleasure for pleasure's sake. He surrounded himself with wine, wealth, and women. He gloried in impertinence and narcissism.

Howard's father believed that sex was for the purpose of producing children, so Howard felt a little twinge of oppositional pleasure every time he spilled his seed in his hand or a lover's mouth, or pretty much anywhere besides a vagina. Not that he didn't enjoy straight-up intercourse, but he loved escaping the punishment of children that was supposed to follow the crime of sex.

Howard never wanted children. People asked him why, and he always asked back why they did want the little beasts. Why was reproducing the default? Children were loud, messy, and expensive. They stank and they whined and they made a million little demands and they ended up hating you no matter what you did.

Those who knew Howard a little better knew that some of his father's habits had rubbed off on him. (And they knew better than to ever mention that fact.) There was a scrupulosity about him, nothing religious, per se – Howard had hated the church from a young age; in fact, once he learned sleight-of-hand at the age of thirteen, he never ate another communion wafer. But like his father, Howard was particular and demanding, rigid and severe. Oh, he liked to have fun, sure, but if that fun stepped out of bounds, you saw Howard's other side. He would host wild parties for his staff and punish them for showing up hungover the next day. He was happy to wallow in grease when he was in the garage, but he never sat down to the dinner table unless he was clean. He loved everything about Maria – worshipped her, body and soul – until she broke the cardinal rule.

"I thought made myself clear," he growled, eyebrows twitching the way they did when he was working himself into a good lather. "I thought we discussed this. No kids! No fucking kids! How much plainer could I have made myself?"

Maria straightened and tried to look more imperious than anxious. "You were clear. I never missed a pill. But these things-"

"No," said Howard, taking a step toward her. "These things do not just happen! You did this on purpose! To trap me here!"

Maria had to fight the urge to take a step back. "I did no such thing. And you're not trapped. I'm not getting an abortion, but you don't have to stay. I'll raise the baby myself."

"Oh, and how is that going to look? This is a fucking disaster. Why didn't you take the damn pills?"

"I did!"

The vein in Howard's forehead pulsed and the glass in his hand broke. He looked down at it, at the little streaks of blood that were spreading like latticework, then back at Maria, then back at his hand.

It wasn't until Tony was six years old that Howard heard one of his biomed scientists mention in passing that antibiotics kept the pill from working. Howard thought back to his fight with Maria and to the horrible ear infection she'd had the month before. It was too late for an apology to mean much anyway.

"When you hold your baby for the first time," Howard's mother told him, "you'll be overwhelmed by the love."

Howard peered down at his son's tiny face, but he didn't feel anything. His senses were working just fine, of course. He could feel the weight of the baby – just under six pounds, was that too small? He could see and smell the horrible mess of birth. In fact, he was mentally making an appointment to get himself snipped so he never got involved in this business again.

But there was still this baby, this accident come to life. Maria picked the name and Howard didn't object as long as they didn't make the kid Howard III. So there was this squirming little Anthony Edward with wisps of hair and no teeth and Howard found himself wishing he felt something.

He made himself a promise. Maybe he would feel something as time went on. Maybe he wouldn't. But he would fake it. Howard Stark was good at faking things. He wasn't going to end up treating this kid the way his dad treated him. He was going to smile and be warm and the kid would never know the difference. Howard could pull that off, couldn't he?

Couldn't he?

The bomber needed more shielding, but he needed to keep the weight down. Maybe if Howard found a lighter alloy for the chassis and strengthened it with-

The phone was ringing.

"Hello, Daddy."

Howard sighed. His train of thought was apparently going to be interrupted by the pressing concerns of a four-year-old.

"Is this something important, Tony? Because you know better than to call me at work for-"

"Daddy, when is it going to be Santa Claus?"

"Go ask Jarvis."

"I think Santa Claus will bring me a robot or maybe two robots. I asked Santa for a robot."

"Tony, I'm at work. I have to do my job. Good-"

"You're in the basement. I can hear you." Tony said the last sentence in a nasal sing-song that managed to encapsulate everything Howard hated about children.

Howard rolled his eyes upwards and tried to remember what he had been thinking about before the phone rang. "Tony, Santa Claus only comes if you're good. So go, I don't know, clean your room or something."

"And my robot will have six feet with wheels and six arms and one of them will have a clamp and the next one will have a hammer and the other one will have a soldier iron-"

"Soldering iron, Tony. I'm going back to work now."

"And two of the arms will be a tentacle and a gorilla arm and-"

Howard hung up the phone and tried to focus on engineering.

Howard was sketching chassis redesigns. Was this strut absolutely necessary? He could use less material by moving it toward the nose and shave a pound or two that way. But would that design still hold up under the wind shear? He grabbed a notepad and started doing the math.

Except, he didn't start doing the math, because someone had written on his work papers. In green marker.

PLEES TELL SANAT TO GIVE ME A ROBT WIH LASERS

Lasers was underlined several times.

Howard rolled his eyes and looked back to the corner of his workshop, where a remote-control car lay under a dropcloth. It was the fanciest model on the market and he had been pleased when his assistant picked it out, confident that Tony would actually enjoy it before breaking it. It was a robot, in a technical sense, though clearly not the tentacle-laser monstrosity that Tony was picturing.

Howard was drunk.

Not tipsy. Not buzzed. Drunk.

He couldn't stop remembering that horrible day, helpless on one side of the radio, while on the other side was Captain America and a plane that couldn't stay up.

People died when engineering failed. His work was important. It was worth all his focus, all his effort.

Of course, he wasn't focusing at the moment. He was watching old newsreels and convincing himself that mixing ice into his bourbon counted as cutting down on his drinking.

Howard didn't hear the click of the workshop door opening or the creak of the fifth stair. He didn't really hear much of anything until the sound of glass breaking and Tony protesting that it wasn't his fault drew him out of his reverie.

The bourbon bottle was broken, its contents spreading over Howard's worktable, over the plans he had been drawing for an airplane that could soft-land, even badly damaged, even over icy waters.

Howard stood with some difficulty.

Tony obviously knew he was in trouble. He wasn't supposed to be in the workshop at all, wasn't supposed to touch his father's things, certainly wasn't supposed to spill drinks everywhere. His eyes darted back and forth as if looking for an exit.

"What are you doing down here?" asked Howard, softly. Strange how his voice went soft at times.

"I…I was…I wanted…because maybe if Santa wasn't done with my robot yet if you could tell Santa to make it the kind of robot that talks and it would talk to me and-"

"There is no Santa! It's just some fairy tale they tell stupid children! So they'll feel safe and happy like nothing could ever go wrong! Well, things go wrong and the fairy tales are lies." Howard's voice went strangely still and empty for the last sentence. He walked (stumbled) across the workshop and pulled the dropcloth off of Tony's remote-controlled car. It was bigger than most toys. It could be programmed to follow a certain path. With a few modifications, it could have even responded to environmental stimuli.

Howard tossed the package across the room, so it slid to a stop a few feet away from Tony. "There's your stupid robot. See the price tag? It came from the mall. No elves. No Santa. No fairy tales."

Tony stared up at his father, mouth hanging open. It all made sense and Tony didn't like the conclusion.

The bourbon began to drip off the edges of the worktable.

"Get. Out," said Howard. Said, not yelled, but said with such seriousness, Tony was frozen in place. "Get out! Or I'll take a hammer to the damn car and you won't have any Christmas presents at all!"

Tony turned and fled.

It was a terrible Christmas. Tony made a point of telling everyone he knew that Santa wasn't real, including much of his preschool class – the parents weren't very appreciative. He stayed out of Howard's way, afraid to lose his only present. Before, he had been hopeful that even if his parents were unfair, Santa would balance things out. But there was no Santa, just a father he couldn't predict and a mother whose depressions made her unavailable.

Not to mention no robot. (A remote control car was not a robot, no matter what his father said.)

Tony busied himself disassembling old watches and whatever else Jarvis found for him.

"Take him with you or don't go. Those are your choices." Maria was immovable.

"You don't get to tell me what to do," hissed Howard, recognizing that he was losing this argument.

"You wrecked his Christmas. The least you can do is take him to the North Atlantic with you. He can swim now and he knows boat safety," she added.

"It's not a fucking fishing trip, Maria! We're looking for-"

"I know what you're looking for! And while you're busy going on about what's a fairy tale, you might want to add another one to the list!"

"I know this one! This is the sonar and it has a green screen for hearing stuff in the ocean!"

"Well," said the sailor, "aren't you a clever one? You're going to help your dad look for Captain America, aren't you?"

"Yup," said Tony. He looked fairly ridiculous. He was wearing a life jacket, at the insistence of his mother, but on top of that, he was wearing an extremely uneven cloak he had personally made from an electric blanket doused in waterproofing. He was also wearing aviation goggles. He felt very prepared to be an explorer.

It turned out, however, that being an explorer was boring. He hadn't seen any polar bears and had been devastated to find out that penguins didn't even live in the Arctic. They hadn't swung on any vines or fought with sharks or dodged any poisoned arrows. Being an explorer was apparently mostly about sitting and waiting and writing things down. Tony tried to help with writing things down, but the movement of the sea rendered his beginning penmanship illegible. One of the sailors suggested that Tony could help by untangling some ropes, but that wasn't real exploring.

The food was gross, too.

Tony was getting ready to tell his father that he didn't want to be an explorer anymore and could he please go home now when he saw something off of the side of the boat. The port side of the boat even though there weren't ports anywhere for miles. He pointed his discovery out to one of the sailors.

"Yeah, you found a little mini iceberg, kid. Nice work!"

Tony knew when he was being patronized. Finding ice was not interesting and it was not why people went exploring. He went around to the other side of the boat in search of his father as rain began to fall.

Storms came fast and they mostly went away quickly too, but Tony knew he was supposed to stay indoors when there was a storm. But he was sure he saw something, and not just an iceberg. He saw something interesting. He saw a circle, and he knew that perfect shapes didn't happen in nature, so a circle was something worth exploring, right?

The boat bucked and Tony told himself that he would go inside as soon as he found his dad. He didn't want to lose that circle – if it was moving and the boat was moving they would get far from each other very quickly.

The boat lurched hard to one side and a sailor roughly grabbed Tony's arm. "C'mon kid, you should be below deck."

But Tony knew how to handle that because he had looked at pictures of muscles and bones and he knew that arms were pulling strong but they weren't twisting strong. Tony spun around and the man's grip broke. He sprinted across the bow of the ship, looking back and forth for his father. When did it get so dark?

A huge wave came over the edge of the ship and Tony was glad he was wearing his explorer's cloak. He was at least sort of dry as he slid across the deck with the force of the water. The ship bucked again and Tony was engulfed in water. Now the explorer's cloak was making swimming very hard and it was letting off sparks into the water, which let Tony see in brief flashes, though all he could see was black water.

If Tony could have made his way back to the ship, he would have seen a pillar of black smoke rising from the engine room. He would have seen the sailors desperately trying to empty the flooded power station. He would have seen his father's horror and panic at the realization that Tony was nowhere to be found.

Thanks to his life jacket, Tony was able to get a breath here and there. Not as much as he would like, but enough to stay alive. He wished he had a flashlight.

Tony's body hit something solid and he feared that he had found a shark in the worst possible way.

Howard tore through the space below deck. "Where is he? Oh god, where is? Simmons, when did you last see him?"

He made his way up the stairs, ignoring the engine fire – the sailors could handle that. Tony had been on deck when the rain started. Surely he was smart enough to come in out of the rain. Everyone was always saying how smart Tony was. He must have-

"Stark! Get back inside!"

"No, I have to get-"

"Inside!"

They had ropes and searchlights.

Oh god, Tony was in the water. He wasn't supposed to come on this trip. Howard knew he shouldn't have brought the kid on this trip.

Time was a funny thing. Everything was moving so quickly. If they were going to find Tony, seconds mattered, but in Howard's mind, everyone was moving in slow motion, and suddenly Howard realized how much he wanted to retrieve the child, that he would in fact be devastated if Tony di-

There was a thumping on the starboard hull, first dull, then metallic. Then there was shouting and footsteps and cursing and more thumping.

Howard pushed his way onto the deck to find his soaking wet, ridiculously dressed son. His son, dazed and coughing up water and clinging to a confused, serious-looking man who was the spitting image of Steve Rogers.

Tony wriggled from the man's grasp and padded unevenly (he was missing one boot) to his father, clamping his arms tightly around Howard's leg. He picked me, thought Howard, he picked me over Captain America. Howard Stark held his son tightly. He cradled the boy, suddenly and acutely aware that Tony's rescue was worth more to him than ten Captain Americas.