Four hours later, she watches Tony from over the top of her laptop screen. She's attempting to work on her story but the words are still avoiding her. In an attempt to draw some inspiration she's been watching Tony but he hasn't been doing much but drinking. He's on his third glass of scotch and has yet to look away from the window. It gives her some inspiration.
He couldn't seem to see past the ghosts that seemed to be in his constant company. Tony Stark was a haunted man, tormented by things left unsaid, undone. It could be seen in his every action, from the way he breathed to the way he donated over half his monthly earnings back to charities that he founded to curb the destruction he seemed to always leave behind in his wake. The ghosts could be seen in the bottoms of empty glasses of scotch, in the bottoms of the bottles that piled around him. They could be seen in the way he drew out a blueprint, how he always took extra care to lay out every detail, in the way that his ideas kept getting more and more advanced all in the name of increasing the safety of those around him. The presence of ghosts was obvious, but their identities were anonymous. On occasion, that anonymity faded and was revealed by looking into the eyes of the man they haunted. When he had found his way into his third glass of scotch, well before noon on a Wednesday afternoon, I happened to see some of these ghosts. A past self, self-absorbed and oblivious to the desolation his presence and very name left, a friend: left crippled and bruised for life, a young silver-haired boy- lost before he had the chance to do any good, millions of bodies- piled high for all to see what pretending to be a superhero really means. A mother, murdered before his eyes years after her death. A child crying reaching out for him, his mother buried alive under a pile of rubble. The abyss of the unknown coming forward for him to view, threatening to consume everything he knows. They fill the plane around us, and for a moment I share their weight and it is crushing. I want to scream, I want to tear my hair out, I want to shred myself to pieces so they will leave me alone. And then in a flash, they are gone as he looks away from me and back to the skies.
That flight took us to a place filled with even more ghosts. The ghost of a child, who had once held Tony's heart. Harley Keener, you may have heard of him if you're from Tennessee or from the MIT community. He was in the papers a few months before Tony's own death, just weeks before my time with him. Harley Keener was the missing boy genius, but he's not missing anymore. For those who don't know about him, he went missing months before the article I mentioned appeared. The reason he made the papers again was due to the fact that they finally found his body.
Harley had been the high profile victim of a terrorist attack. A domestic grown terrorist organization attacked MIT in 2017. They blew up a single classroom. Most of the victims of the attack survived, only one student was initially accounted for as dead. That student perished along with two faculty members due to the school held a service, but no one could ignore that there was still one student that should be honored. Harley Keener had been known to be in that room, but as they dug through the rubble for his body it was never found. He was considered a missing person, and the world searched for him.
The police had suspected that Harley had been the cause of the attack. They believed that the terrorist operation wanted to use him for his knowledge. Harley had been doing some deep research into cell regeneration, a continuation of Tony's own work from after the fall of the Mandarin. Harley was the primary researcher on the project and he had multiple grant and fellowship offers. When he went missing it became a top priority of the FBI to find Harley before it was too late, either for him or the rest of the world. Thousands searched, but they found nothing. There was no trace of Harley Keener. The case became cold. Two years after he disappeared everyone gave up. An honorary service was held in his name. It was five years before the case could finally be closed but it was not a victory. By accident, a group of construction workers found Harley's body when they went to break ground on a new building.
You're probably wondering, so what? What does Harley Keener have to do with Tony? For you to understand I first have to set the scene.
When Tony first took me to the house in the middle of nowhere, I didn't understand how it could connect to him. The house was little more than a shack. It leaned hard to one side and looked as if one stiff wind would send it collapsing. The roof bowed under its own weight, the windows were boarded and the driveway had begun to turn into a field. Off to the side of the main building was a shed. While the house looked like it was easy to get inside, the shed door was chained by shut by thick cables. A large padlock sealed the shed off from the world. The structure seemed better off than the house. It stood straight and looked like someone had recently put a fresh coat of paint on it. The shack really was in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town is almost twenty minutes away, the closest other relics of civilization is an old gas station with a pay phone still present out front. Tony, however, has no interest in the house when we arrive, instead, we head to the shed where he produces a key to the lock. He opens the door, it screeches on its hinges. We step inside and he turns on a light, the crackle of electricity the only sound. Tony walks over to a couch in the middle of the room and sits down. The shed is the house of a workshop, filled with old tools and projects.
"Harley lived here, in that house." He motions toward it. "I crashed in on his family once, after the Mandarin had blown up my place. One of my suits flew me about two miles away from here before it crashed. It was the middle of winter around Christmas time, so there was snow everywhere and it was cold. I needed a way to get out the cold, so I broke in here." He then pointed toward the back of the shop where there is a workbench that has been long abandoned. "Then a boy about ten years old attempted to attack me with a spud gun. My suit was not operational but still recognizable, the boy decided I wasn't a threat, so I fixed his potato gun. What resulted was me teaching him how to fix my suit, and him teaching me how to fix myself."
After their time together, in which Harley saved Tony's life more than once. Tony taught Harley how to build, how to think practically and how to turn ordinary things into extraordinary objects. And then Tony left, seemingly forgetting about the ten-year-old boy. He never mentioned him to a sole, but suddenly the boy's mother had a job where she wasn't working so much she didn't notice her son was keeping a stranger in the shed. Harley's middle and high school's science programs were suddenly funded. He was the recipient of many scholarships and was entered into contests, his fees waived under an anonymous name. Harley got into MIT on his own merit, but Tony financed his education. To Tony, Harley was like a son and losing him so tragically was the worst experience of his life.
"Did they ever find who did it?" She asks him placing a sympathetic hand on his shoulder from her place up on the back of the couch.
"Eventually." Tony sighs, looking around at the abandoned workshop. "But it was already too late, he wouldn't help them. So, by the time we found them Harley was long gone."
"Does his family…?"
"Know? About me or about what happened to him in the end? Yes to both. They live in a much nicer apartment in NYC. His mother works for my company, his sister is attending NYU. They stay in one of my buildings, I look after them."
"So why?" She motions to the door.
"I like to come here when I can't stand being anywhere else. It reminds me of him, of everything he taught me. I was mentally ill when I met him, and somehow he was the only therapy that ever worked for me."
"Did you think of him as a son?" She cautious not wanting to pry too much.
Her question brings a small smile to Tony's face. "Yeah, I did." He says shaking his head at all the memories. "And I think I was his father figure, god knows his own wasn't much good."
She pulls out her camera and snaps some photos of the small area, she then goes out to the car to wait with Happy. She waits for nearly an hour before Tony emerges and locks up. His eyes are slightly red and he makes no attempt to hide that coming here is hard for him. Yet, he still has a small smile on his face as he climbs into the car. Harley would have wanted this, he would have wanted to be remembered.