Author's Note: I'm torn between Gene/Whitney and Rhodey/Whitney. Writing both would get very complicated very quickly, but I'm having a hard time choosing. Thoughts, my readers?

Also I changed the summary because since Gene and Tony's roles are switched, this means he thinks Howard is dead right now. Oh, the angst.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues. – Rene Descartes

Murder. It's only one word, but it can change everything so permanently that you will never be the same so long as you live. – Dexter Morgan, from a fanfic for Showtime's Dexter

No matter how many times Gene told his mother not to, she took great relish in calling him Timmy.

It came from a nickname Happy Hogan had bestowed on the Mongolian boy back in kindergarten. More accurately, the bigger (and dumber, Gene would like to add) boy couldn't say Temugin correctly, so he called him Timmy Gene. Imagine the boy's horror when his mother endorsed the nickname fully and began working it into every possible conversation. She thought it was adorable. Gene thought it was humiliating, especially when she said it in front of his classmates. Although he was fairly good at maintaining a bored neutral expression in the throes of any emotion, nothing made him turn red faster than that nickname. Not from bullies – oh, he'd have been bullied into oblivion if that were true. His mother just seemed to have a strange power over him. If she wanted something done she simply had to give him a pleading look with her rose-quartz eyes, and if she wanted to punish him she knew all his most hated foods to give him for dinner. If she wanted to embarrass him, Timmy was a great way to do it in under three syllables.

"It could be worse," Rhodey had noted once. "After all, she could've named you something hard to pronounce. Well, harder."

"You and Tony don't have any problem saying Temugin."

"We have freakishly smart parents," Rhodey had shot back with a smile. "And being nerds helps."

Not that Gene would ever call Rhodey a nerd next to Tony. Anthony Stark was, in Gene's words, the patron saint of all nerds. He had long ago decided on homeschooling. More honestly he was too smart for even the most advanced schools to handle. Gene couldn't help but feel awed by his adopted brother. He'd never met anyone smarter and secretly held the opinion that Tony was even more brilliant than Howard was. Tony could build machines out of spare parts that outdid Gene's best attempts any day of the week; it was his gift. He was incredible when it came to technology and was by all accounts just like Howard at that age. Not that Gene was jealous of him, or at least, not that he'd ever admit he was jealous of Tony.

Gene was told by his mother that he took after his biological father. He barely remembered the man, and had spent countless nights plagued by nightmares of the young man's death. Temugin remembered that much, the blood and pain left by the gunshot wound. He remembered dark gray eyes and a soft voice whispering that it would be okay. It wasn't, not until they'd met Howard and life had gotten stabilized once more. But Gene's father left a legacy of kindness and good acts behind him. He had been the kind of man who'd take in many a poor and down on their luck neighbor, neighbor being meant in the Mongolian sense of the word rather than the American one. If you were human, you were his concern. Gene thought that his biological father would've gotten along quite well with his step father.

Howard. Gene had been scared of him at first, when he was small and didn't understand what was happening. He hadn't liked the foreigner with his thickly accented Mongolian and soft voice. He much preferred following David Rhodes around. He was convinced David could protect them from all the bad people who were chasing them, because David was big and tough. It was only a month after they'd moved to the US when Gene slowly began to comprehend the situation on a child's level. Howard had been the one who really saved them. The evil men who'd tried to hurt them wouldn't be able to follow them out of the country. Not for a ring with powers most of them didn't believe in. Howard had taken them to a place with lots of strange food and way too many people, but it was safe and the man loved Narangerel. Temugin knew it even before Howard did. They looked at each other like married people. And nobody who had lovey-dovey eyes like that could be bad. The Chinese man who had tried to kill his mother had eyes that were empty and cruel. Temugin had known he was bad at a glance. Howard, though, could be trusted. Nobody did all this for someone he didn't care about.

This brings us full circle to Timmy, the world's worst nickname. Gene winced internally as he heard Howard calling him to breakfast. Breakfast at the Stark household was just plain weird. Either Narangerel would wake up early and there would be a full on buffet of Western breakfast foods or she'd sleep in and Howard would have what he and Tony referred to as 'the best breakfast ever'. This was code for scrambled eggs slathered in ketchup, mashed potatoes and gravy and chocolate chip waffles with bacon bits on top. All of this was mixed together and consumed with two forks each. Gene never could quite understand how either of them stomached it. The very thought of eating all of this on the same plate made his stomach twist inside him. Thankfully he was not alone in his dislike of scrambled eggs and mashed potato mixed together; he could always count on there being some toast in the house that he could make and eat inbetween getting dressed and packed. Narangerel knew her son well enough to keep an emergency breakfast backup plan - bread, in other words - in the house. Today's selection was blackberry or strawberry jam. Oh, the joys of being rich, he thought to himself as he recalled two kids swearing the Starks ate roast pheasant every morning.

"Timmy, that's not a healthy breakfast," Howard noted with due concern.

"Says the man who's eating high salt content ketchup on top of full-cholesterol eggs," Gene shot back, rolling his eyes. "Didn't Mom's lecture the last time you ate this stuff sink in at all?"

Tony snorted into his drink, which, Gene noticed, was an orange soda. Oh, so healthy. "A little indulgence once in a while isn't gonna kill us."

"Then a little non-indulgence once in a while won't kill me." Gene looked at his father with a smirk. "If you're worried, why don't you go play the harp for a bit and calm down?"

Tony burst out into laughter and promptly choked on his drink. The brothers had found in the attic of the house pictures of their father circa high school. He was in the orchestra… as a solo harp player. The year after that saw him master the rain stick, an instrument that was, if anything, even fruitier than the harp. Howard turned red and stared at his eggs as if they had brought this upon him. Truthfully it wasn't even that Tony and Gene found the harp to be inherently funny. It was Howard's terrified reaction to them threatening to tell other people. Some CEOs had bribery and murder in their past. Some had sick and twisted fetishes. Howard Stark had the harp and the even more shameful rain stick. No man's rich enough to buy back his past, Gene thought as he started to exit the room, only to be stopped by Howard.

"Gene, I need you to come with me on a business trip."

Gene shot his father a look that suggested he'd just lapsed into an unintelligible foreign tongue. "Take Tony. He's the smart one, not to mention the one who's not in school."

"Well, yes, but…" Howard sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. He and Tony did it without ever realizing how similar it made them look. "I just don't want you to go your whole life without ever getting a close up look at work. You're at that age where you're going to pick a career soon, and I want to know that you considered all your options carefully. And-"

"Alright, alright." Gene rolled his eyes and pulled out his cell phone. "I'm just going to tell Rhodes I won't be there today and then we can go get our nerd on. Hopefully Tony won't invent anything too world changing while we're gone. I'd hate to miss the second coming of the Super Toaster."

"Blow up a kitchen one time and you never live it down," the brunette boy protested loudly as his father chuckled. "Oh, yeah, if I talk about the harp you get mad, but you two just can't let the toaster go, can you? Look, we rebuilt the lab and the police dropped the charges-"

"Only because most of the evidence was vaporized or coated in butter," Gene muttered as he texted his friend. "Heck, we couldn't even find any remains of Super Toaster Mark One itself in the chaos. How long did it take for the dust cloud to clear again? Wasn't it three days?"

"It was two and you know it!" Tony shot back, and Howard held up his hands for peace.

"Please, you two, I don't need this at eight in the morning. Tony, finish your breakfast. Gene, you're with me." Howard took his adopted son by the arm before the sixteen year olds could bicker any further with each other. "I swear, you two enjoy fighting. It's like you both get high off of pettiness or something."

"A harp player would know a lot about getting high, huh? Since that's the only non-gay reason to play it, I mean."

Howard turned tomato-colored as they made their way to the elevator, Tony and Gene's dual snickering echoing in the halls.

"Tony's invention is going to save lives," Howard was saying as Gene gazed out the window, looking bored. The white man paused, sighing. "You didn't catch a word of that, did you?"

In truth, yes, yes he had. He'd caught the entire long spiel on how Tony was great and inventors were awesome. For about the hundredth time in his life Gene was reminded that he was not and never could be Howard's real son. He wasn't an inventor and a genius like Tony. He wasn't smart like Tony nor was he capable of creating an exosuit, whatever that was. Howard hadn't explained it very well other than to gush about the power it had to rescue people and save lives. Suddenly making the honor roll felt like it was no accomplishment at all. Gene was forever standing in the shadow of his sibling, who was better than he could ever be without ever trying. And some part of him wanted to scream in frustration that he couldn't be held to Tony's standards and he had no interest in inventing and he was doing his best, damn it. But he knew better than to say that. It would hurt Howard's feelings and Gene wasn't a confrontational person. He was more of the quiet yet snarky type, as Rhodes would say. It was better just to fake boredom and obliviousness. This was how he got through a lot of life, actually.

"I heard something about suits," Gene volunteered helpfully, causing Howard to roll his eyes. "Look, Dad, this is Tony's thing. He'd flip if he could see all this new stuff you've been working on. He's the one who should be here; he'd be in heaven if he saw the new lab you're opening."

"But he wouldn't quite appreciate this," Howard smiled softly, pulling out – Gene did a double take – a Makluan Ring. Gene let out an audible gasp. "I've been doing some research, and the legends your mother had heard about your family seem to be true. There are really five Rings. The technology inside them is astounding."

"It's magic," Gene corrected.

"Not you too," Howard muttered, then shook his head. "Whatever they are, they only work in the presence of you and your mother. And she doesn't want me studying them because she's convinced that they're magical."

"They are. Which means studying them is going to be fundamentally impossible because magic likes to screw over the laws of physics and science pretty thoroughly, then set common sense on fire on its way out. Trying to understand it in science terminology would take a lot of translating magical terms into phrases you can understand. I'm not saying I'm not going to help you out, but this is going to be really hard if not outright impossible," Gene explained. He paused. "Didn't my mother explain the Rings to you?"

"Well… she explained more in a 'you're committing a grave sacrilege against the forces of magic' kind of way," Howard explained, shifting in his seat uneasily.

"Oh, you are. But any sane god is probably pretty fond of you at this point, considering your inventions have stopped wars and saved the entire country of Wakanda." Gene thought back to what his mother had taught him. "The intent of the person studying magic matters. You're the kind of guy who'd use the teleportation ability to rescue people in collapsed mines or something like that. So I think it'll be okay unless you try to use this stuff to hurt people."

Just then, there was a loud thud from the front of the plane, causing both men to turn and stare. Shakily, the pilot called back for Howard to come forward. Gene felt his heart catch in his throat at the idea that there could be something truly wrong, but his father smiled like it was nothing, handed him the Ring he'd discovered recently and walked toward the front cabin. Sliding the Ring onto his hand beside the other, original one his mother had given him, Gene thought he felt them both glow faintly and hum at each other. He'd never been able to see much point in being the Mandarin when that would just make the Tong come after his family. Still, it was his duty to keep the super powered objects on him at all times. He looked up, in the direction his father had gone, and bit his lip. He thought he heard voices, one more than there should be, in the cockpit up ahead.

And then there was some kind of explosion.

Everything didn't go black like in the movies, but Gene vaguely recalled that at this altitude he wasn't going to be able to stay conscious for very long. No time to recall the exact length he had to work with, he had to save his father. He couldn't see anything with the wind rushing past him so quickly, couldn't even hear the plane explode. He felt it, waves of heat and shrapnel falling from the sky. Gene thought he might've screamed as some of it pierced him like white hot knives. He felt the Rings on his hand glow with magic. Then he was on the ground, the impact dulled by teleportation but still painful through the black armor now engulfing him. Unthinking and a hair's breadth away from consciousness, he desperately told the Rings to get him home. Then everything was engulfed in the white energy of teleportation, and he fell again. He thought he heard familiar voices, and someone calling his name. Unfortunately, this time it was fading to black, and all he could do was shake as the armor withdrew into the Rings, leaving him sprawled on the living room floor.

"Narangerel Stark is still missing, authorities in the United States say. The Mongolian woman was last seen outside her home gardening-"

"-blood stains at the crash site match Howard Stark's, according to the official FBI investigation. He is presumed dead-"

"-recently been named the new head of Stark International-"

Gene flipped through the channels, trying to find something. Some clue, there had to be some reason for this. There had to be something he was missing. He was descended from generations of warriors and strategists, why couldn't he figure this out? The only logical theory he could come up with was Stane being behind this. That meant someone who had been Howard's friend for nearly twenty years had stabbed him in the back and that didn't make sense. There were dozens of less public, more accidental ways he could've done it. Besides, if it was Stane then that meant that no one could be trusted, not even the people closest to him, and Gene wasn't ready to face that idea just yet. This should not be happening, Gene thought for the hundredth time that month. This should not be happening.

"Hey man," Rhodey said softly, pushing open the door to their room. He'd gladly said he'd room with either Stark boy, given the circumstances. Tony had become so moody and angry after what happened that he'd opted for the spare room, where he could often be heard cursing or kicking things in frustration. "I got you something to eat. You've been at this for a while."

"Not hungry," the Asian boy replied, not glancing up. His hair had grown significantly in the two months since his parents had been taken from him, and he hadn't bothered to cut it or bathe in a while. He had never been a big eater, and in the wake of this recent trauma he was doing good to get a meal in per day. "Busy."

Rhodey sighed, grabbing the remote from him and turning off the TV. "You need to eat, Gene. I know you and Tony have both been through a lot lately, but that doesn't mean you should let yourselves go like this. Do you think your dad would've wanted you to starve yourself to death?"

Silently, the adopted Stark sibling took the tray of food from his friend, looking remarkably downtrodden. He and Tony had both gotten that look permanently attached to their faces after Stane had been declared the new head of their father's company. Tony was utterly furious; Gene was crestfallen. Both were more or less withdrawing from the world in their own way. Rhodey felt more and more worried with every passing day. On the bright side, though, soon Gene would be well enough to start attending school again, which meant he'd no longer be sulking around the house hunting down conspiracy theories on the internet about what happened to his parents. Tony had already begun (despite his protests) going to Tomorrow Academy with Rhodey, where he'd managed to form a very weird friendship with some girl he thought was cute. Gene hadn't really been listening, wondering to himself how someone who'd just lost his father and the only real mother he'd ever had could just go about his day like everything was normal. Some part of the Mongolian boy simply felt that nothing right now mattered very much. Mundane things like eating and making friends seemed a million miles removed from his life.

He'd had a teleportation device and he hadn't been able to save his own father. He had the most powerful magical artifact on the planet and he hadn't been able to think clearly enough to save the person who'd saved his life. Howard had taken them in and raised Gene and in the end the Mongolian boy had let him down. He was a failure. He didn't even taste the food he forced himself to eat, not meeting Rhodey's eyes as they sat in silence. Rhodey had always been closest to Tony. That didn't mean he didn't care about Gene or that he wasn't worried. Gene could see it on the black boy's face. Gene wished he could just tell Rhodey everything, how he hadn't even thought about Howard and how sick to his stomach he was at the thought of what a horrible person he was. Selfish, he thought, the word he was looking for was selfish. No one else had even crossed his mind in the chaos.

He felt Rhodey's hand on his shoulder, and was startled out of his train of thought. "It'll be okay, man," Rhodey said softly. "Look, if you ever wanna talk, I'm right here, okay? Don't just shut down on me. I can't help you or Tony if you both get all secretive on me."

"I don't have any secrets, just nightmares," Gene shot back dryly, with a hint of his normal snarky tone back in his voice. "But thanks, Rhodes. For everything."

And somehow, he managed something close to a smile for the first time in what seemed like forever.

Tony was livid about Stane's promotion.

Gene was lost in thought, headphones on so as to avoid talking to anyone on the way to school. He'd been doing that a lot lately, Rhodey had noticed. If he retreated behind music no one would ask him how he was doing or if he was okay. Tony barely noticed. He was furious with this turn of events. Obadiah Stane was a dirty businessman, an abusive father and a jerk. He'd probably either wreck the company or make it into something Howard had never wanted: a weapons company. Rhodey listened with the knowledge that Tony was probably right eating away at his optimism more and more with every moment. Gene acted like he was in his own little world. He wasn't himself since it had all gone done. Rhodey missed the insults and constant snarky commentary more than he's thought he would. At least he'd gotten both the inventor brother and the depressed one to bathe before going to school; both of them were apt to go to school in the same clothes twice in a row with unwashed hair if he let them, even if nagging them earned him the nickname Mom.

"Tony! Rhodey!" A redhead with bright beige-gray eyes called out to them. "You'll never guess what I got off of my dad's computer this morning!"

The Mongolian boy pulled off his headphones out of respect for the school's no MP3 player policy and caught the last half of that sentence. This must've been the girl Tony was friends with. He vaguely recalled Rhodey telling him that he'd met her in eighth grade during the Tomorrow Academy entrance exams. Her hair was atomic orange like the hair dye of the same name, but natural, as much of a paradox as that was. Gene wondered how anyone could manage to be so perky at this hour of the day and if she was a coffee drinker. That would explain the excited look on her face and the bounce in her step as she ran over to them.

"Tony! I found out something your father-" She paused, catching sight of Gene. "What's he doing here?" she asked bluntly, addressing Tony and Rhodey instead of Gene directly. "Isn't this private stuff? You know, family only?"

"Gene Stark, thanks for asking, and it's nice to meet you too," he shot back, tone dark and sarcastic. "And why, yes, thank you for implying I shouldn't be told about my missing and possibly murdered parents. I really appreciate the statement that I'm not a member of my own family just because some spiky haired butch girl in men's boots says so."

"Why you-" she paused mid sentence. "Oh, whoops, I didn't realize you were… I'm sorry, I thought… you two don't look anything alike… Um, this is awkward." She regained an angry glint in her eyes. "But that's no excuse for making fun of my outfit and calling me butch!"

"And being butch is no excuse for wearing that outfit, so we're even," the Asian retorted coldly, eyeing her with disdain. "So are you going to tell us what you found out, or do I still not count as family despite living under Howard's roof for fourteen years?"

"Gene, I know you've never had impeccable social skills, but lay off her," Rhodey said with noticeable exasperation in his voice. "Good lord, you've been such a jerk ever since the accident-"

"It wasn't an accident!" Tony, Gene and the girl all snapped at once. They gave each other surprised looks, Gene raising his eyebrows while Tony's eyes narrowed considerably and the redhead blinked.

"Well, at least we agree on something," the fire-headed girl smiled warmly at Gene. "Sorry for being a little insensitive. It's the moccachino talking, I swear. And I've been up all night working on getting past my dad's new encryption codes to get at the data, so I'm a little off. But it's totally worth it! I got one of the best leads we've had since the accident!" She was practically squealing with excitement. "We're gonna crack this soon, I just know it!"

Her optimism was practically tangible. Gene felt awed and a little frightened of this incredibly energetic creature. If the looks on Rhodey and Tony's faces were any indication this was just how she was, coffee or not, and he wondered if maybe, just maybe, she might really be able to help. Something akin to cautious hope sparked within him. It was best not to put too much stock in any given theory in case it fell through, yet she had FBI insider information and a smile like the sun. Some part of him he'd thought had died in the crash said that yes, maybe this could be work out. He held out a hand to her, smile gentlemanly like his mother had taught him.

"We got off on the wrong foot. I'm Temugin Khan, aka Gene. And you are?"

She hugged him cheerfully. "Pepper Potts, and welcome to Team Heroes!" She practically cheered.

He glanced over at his amused friend and sibling and sighed heavily. This just might be his ticket to unraveling the mystery of what happened, if this didn't kill him first. His patience was already wearing thin, it was unreasonably hot for early October, and a girl with more energy than a truckload of Pixie Sticks was his only hope. He could feel himself getting exhausted already.

This is going to be a long day…