Author: AngelSelene

Pairings: Various, including but not limited to: 1x2, 3x4, 5xS, 1xOFC, 2xOMC, Tony/Steve, Vision/Wanda. Don't like, don't read. No bashing, please.

Warnings: Gray and grayer morality. Morally gray characters. Mental health issues/PTSD. Likely some graphic violence. Maybe some graphic sex (haven't decided there yet). I won't be responsible for anyone who disregards my warnings and are offended. Oh yeah, and language, always have bad language. Slow burn.

Setting: MCU-post Civil War—Any movies taking place after Civil War in the MCU are liable to be completely disregarded. Not Frozen Teardrop compliant. No idea what they were thinking with that one, but nothing, not a thing, from it will apply here. I did have to kick the AC timeline back a 100 years to make these fit. Stick with me—it did work.

Concept inspired by Thai_Tea_Addict's Wolves and Lambs, which is a GW/HP crossover with Lupin as Duo's father. It's amazing. Go read it.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own these characters; I'm taking and abusing them for my own strange entertainment. Storyline's mine, if it resembles anything else, I don't know of it. OC's are mine.

—

In 1910, with high hopes, humans leave Earth to begin a new life in the space colonies. In the wake of World War II, the Earth Sphere Alliance, in the name of Justice and Peace, began taking control of the colonies.

In the year After Colony 95, to counter the Alliance's tyranny, rebel colonists brought new arsenals to the Earth disguised as shooting stars. The mission was called Operation Meteor. Its discovery and the appearance of gundanium-plated mobile suits knowns as Gundams on Earth mark the beginning of what will be called the Eve Wars.

Selling munitions during the First Eve War propelled Stark Industries into riches on par with the colonial Winner family. Tony Stark's escape from captivity and cessation of munitions manufacturing in the post-Eve War world caused controversy and nearly toppled one of the largest corporations in the world. The support and innovation provided for cleanup and rebuilding after the failed Libra drop allowed the company to stabilize, particularly after Tony Stark revealed himself as Iron Man. The Preventers Agency formed in the wake of the war as a paramilitary anti-terror organization, answering to the United Earth Sphere Council.

The Mariemaia Incident, also known as the Second Eve War, would be overshadowed in people's minds less than a year later when the existence of extraterrestrial life in our universe was confirmed at the Battle of New York. With this new information, the Gundams and the relative brevity of the Eve Wars—regardless of their casualties—have been all but forgotten by those who did not fight or did not lose someone to them.

AC 101

Tony Stark's resources were—put mildly—considerable. So when he'd been looking for someone for a month and finding absolutely nothing, it was time to try something new, which was why he was sitting in Director Anne Une's office in Brussels, having shown up without an appointment and blustered his way in.

She did not look pleased, but Tony knew way scarier women. Besides, Tony wasn't pleased. He didn't like Une—hadn't liked her since their last meeting. He thought she was far too young and too inexperienced to be leading an experimental organization like the Preventers, but even he grudgingly had to admit she seemed to be doing a good job. Mostly he didn't like her because she headed the organization that was ostensibly replacing SHIELD.

She didn't seem to like him much either, judging by her glare.

"To what do I owe this invasion?" she asked, glare icy, and, okay, maybe she was up there with some of the scariest women Tony knew. Maybe the mug on her desk that said "World's Best Boss" with "boss" crossed out and "Evil Overlord" printed below it was not entirely a joke.

"I need your help."

"If this is about the pilots again—"

"No, this one is personal," Tony interrupted. "Not that I don't still appreciate their help with the, uh, Sokovia incident, and that I wouldn't still love to know who they are, but…" He had pulled out his phone and quickly navigated as he spoke. "Duo Maxwell—he was an agent of yours," he said, projecting the image up so it was the size of a standard eight-by-ten. "I need to find him."

He watched her face carefully but after a flicker of surprise, she had shut her reaction down hard. Still, she recognized Duo, at least. It was a starting point. Tony had hacked Preventers files—a surprisingly difficult task that had taken weeks from outside, whoever built their security was good—he dug through every line of Duo's personnel file, and it gave the picture of a reliable, if somewhat unorthodox, agent; not all that surprising from a kid who'd been a colonial rebel before finding his way to Preventers. Duo's file was thin on background details, but he'd joined at sixteen, and the file had noted that he was a legal adult under the Old Souls Statute.

Tony, personally, disagreed with the whole premise of the Old Souls Statute. The Eve Wars had been fought disproportionately by under-twenty soldiers, and OZ had actively recruited as young as fourteen, putting kids into combat as young as sixteen. The Old Souls Statute conceded that those young vets weren't really kids anymore, and allowed them to enter the workforce as legal adults. In order to qualify for the Statute, service and testimony to active duty had to be filed formally. Duo had been a colonial rebel, which was odd in and of itself—not because the colonies didn't recruit from similar demographics, but because there just wasn't a lot of leadership that could legitimately testify to service.

Second-in-Command of Preventers, Sally Po had been Duo's reference. She'd been an Alliance doctor turned rebel and had gone on to be second only to Une in power in the Preventers. Her testimony was pretty much unassailable. It had given Tony hope that Une might know him too.

"Why do you need to find Maxwell?" Une asked, but everything about her demeanor told him he was walking on thin ice.

"Because he's my son." He pulled an envelope out of his jacket pocket and tossed it onto her desk. Une glanced down at it but didn't immediately reach for it. She probably didn't need to. He was sure she'd seen plenty of Family Reunification Act envelopes over the years.

He couldn't help feeling a little smug about clearly blindsiding Anne Une. Tony didn't think many surprised her. She picked up the envelope, looking down at it to regather herself. She was good, but Tony already knew that. If he had looked away for a few seconds, he may have missed her reaction entirely.

She fingered the envelope for a moment but didn't bother opening it, despite the implied invitation. Instead she handed it back to Tony, ignoring the projected image of Duo from Tony's phone. "As Mr. Maxwell left the organization over a year ago, I'm afraid I don't know how much help I can be."

"I found his old apartment, and his old roommate," Tony said. "But there wasn't any forwarding address, and his roommate, er..."

If anything, Une's face became even blanker. Tony knew that Heero Yuy had been a Preventer only because he'd hacked their personnel files. If he hadn't known that, he wouldn't have guessed from meeting the guy, and even though Une probably suspected he had hacked her files, she didn't know, and he wasn't going to give her that ammunition.

"I assume the roommate was not any help," she said.

She was going to play dumb. That was irritating. "No. Didn't even remember Duo. His girlfriend was very defensive too." Understatement. Oliviana Fitzhugh-Stroh wasn't quite in Tony's stratosphere of obscene wealth and influence, but her family had deep ties to both the Alliance and OZ, and they'd come out of the Eve Wars basically unscathed by some minor miracle. She had been fiercely protective of Yuy and not afraid to cut Tony off when he tried to get to Yuy's past.

"Apparently Yuy was one of yours too?"

"He was," she said shortly. "I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to discuss."

For someone else, there may have been a massive law suit against the Preventers for whatever accident had caused Heero Yuy's amnesia, but Fitzhugh-Stroh hadn't come into the picture until after and apparently felt no need to push for legal action. Yuy's lost memories didn't seem like a detriment in his day-to-day life. If anything, he had been strangely at peace with missing almost all of his personal history from before two years ago. He'd been polite but firm about the fact that he had no idea who Duo was and sorry that he couldn't help Tony.

Yuy had lived with Duo for almost three years and didn't remember him. Duo had quit the Preventers nine months after Yuy's accident—wherever the files were on that, they were buried where Tony hadn't been able to find or they were kept off the servers—and when he did, he'd apparently dropped entirely off the grid.

Roommate and partner for at least two years while at Preventers. Since they lived together before they'd been partnered, there was a good chance they'd been friends before being partnered. Yuy had also been an adult under Old Souls, confirmed by Sally Po as well, which Tony took to mean their history probably went back to the war.

God, but they'd had to have been young. Neither Duo nor Yuy had official records predating their joining of the Preventers, which meant they were both probably colonial orphans who joined the rebellion. It did make trying to trace Duo's history absolutely maddening. He simply didn't exist before Preventers—at least not on paper. Honestly, if he hadn't been with Preventers, his DNA probably would never have made it into the FRA database to get matched with Tony's.

It had only been a month since Tony had found out that Duo existed, but in that month, the idea that he could have easily never known at all, that Duo could have died without him ever knowing, twisted up his stomach. He hadn't even met Duo, never talked to him, and the idea that he might never get to was unthinkable.

Which was why he was in Une's office. He'd gleaned everything he could from Duo's official file, from the limited amount he'd been able to track his history before he'd gone dark. Now he needed someone who knew his son to help him. Yuy would have been ideal—he not only had been Duo's partner and roommate; he'd been listed as Duo's next-of-kin. Even knowing Preventers strict non-fraternization policy, Tony suspected there may have been more than just friendship between the two, but Yuy's amnesia made him a massive dead end.

Duo hadn't ever had any other official employment, so this was the next best place Tony could go.

Tony sighed—he could play the silent game with Une all day at this rate. Time to lay some cards on the table. "Look, I'm not here to criticize or berate. I just want to find my son. He's gone off the grid and could be anywhere. Even all of my resources are pretty much useless if I can't narrow down the area to look to smaller than 'maybe Europe.' Is he likely to have stayed in the area?"

It was miserable, but "maybe Europe" really had been as close as Tony had been able to get. He couldn't even trace Duo's movements as a Preventer since he would have usually traveled more-or-less under the radar on Preventers transportation. He was sure there was a detailed breakdown of where he'd been, when, and why somewhere, but it wasn't in the digital files. It wasn't in anyone's digital files. Preventers ascribed to the idea that paper was more secure than tech. Given that it had foiled Tony, he couldn't actually dispute the tactic.

"I honestly don't know," she said, clasping her hands together on the desk.

"Can you tell me why he quit?"

"Some new vets joined right after the Eve Wars, especially young ones who didn't fit into civilian life but weren't really adults. Many have moved on since getting their feet and heads on straight," she said with a shrug. "Perhaps Maxwell was one of them."

Tony glared. She knew Duo. He knew she did. And he didn't think it was in passing, the way that her answer implied. She'd known who Duo was the minute he said Duo's name. She was pointedly looking at Tony and refusing to look at Duo's projected image. The refusal to look at Duo was too deliberate, too personal, as if it pained her to look at him. "Can't you look up the reason in your system? Or don't you keep track of why people leave?" he asked.

"I could, but even if I did, I wouldn't be under any obligation to disclose it to you," she said, standing. "I'm afraid I cannot help you, Mr. Stark."

"Just like you couldn't help with the Gundam pilots." He couldn't resist the jibe.

"I refuse to retread already worn ground," she said, moving to the door, clearly inviting Tony to leave.

"Damn it," Tony snapped, jumping to his feet. "This is my son. My son, do you understand? My son who fought in a war and has gone totally dark and probably doesn't even know I exist, and he could be dead for all we know!"

Une looked at him for a moment, so cool he wanted to pull her hair just to see her reaction. When she spoke, it wasn't what Tony expected. "If you're that concerned for him, why haven't you submitted a missing person's report?"

Tony gaped. He opened his mouth, tried to speak, closed it, then tried again. "I'm Tony Stark. I'm Iron Man. I don't know which of those is actually worse right now! I don't know how you make a random vet going missing a big enough deal to get the coverage to actually find him without tying him back to me. I don't want to put a big fucking target on his back before he even gets to meet me!"

"At least you have that much sense," she said, her eyes softening just a tiny bit. "I'm sorry that I can't help you," she said. "I don't know where Maxwell is. He's a legal adult by any measure, and unless I suspect they're a threat, I have no reason to keep track of former agents. I don't even know where to tell you to look. All I can tell you is that if he were dead, we would know."

"That's it? That's all you've got?" he snapped, angry and feeling very justified to be so. "Does he have any other friends I can contact? Can I talk to Sally Po?"

"You are welcome to speak to Sally if you wish," she said, and to his surprise, left the door and went back around her desk. She picked up her phone, dialed an internal extension, and said, "Sally—do you have a minute to come to my office?" A pause. "Yes, please. Thank you." She hung up.

"Just like that?"

"Between asking her to come up and you harassing her outside of work, I'd rather deal with this now."

Or she'd rather run interference. Tony kind of wished he'd kept his mouth shut, but too late now.

They sat in stony silence for a couple minutes before there was a brisk knock. Sally Po entered without waiting to be called. She looked a lot different than he expected—Tony had found pictures of her at press junkets and she had black hair and eyes in those, befitting her Chinese heritage. The woman who entered had the same Asian features, but light blue eyes and dirty wheat-colored hair. It was a little jarring. She'd been young too—older than Une at 23 when she helped begin the Preventers, but that still made her a bare 27. Une had been 20 at the end of the Eve Wars. They were making Tony feel ancient.

Po opened her mouth, saw Tony, recognized him, and hesitated before saying, "You asked for me?"

"Please come in and shut the door."

She did as bid, coming to stand next to Tony. Her gaze wandered between Tony and Une, and even Tony could read the blatant question on her face.

"Tony Stark, this is Sally Po, Agent Water. Sally, Mr. Stark has some questions about Duo Maxwell."

The change to Po's body language was startling. Before, she'd been professional but relaxed, curious. At the mention of Duo's name, she winced and tensed, mouth twisting downward in concern. The frown brought out lines that made her look older than she was. Before she said anything, though, she glanced at Une. "Has something happened to Maxwell?" she asked.

"Not that we're aware of," Une said, calming her visibly. "Mr. Stark is simply looking for him."

"He's my son," Tony said, unwilling to play this game.

Po stared, and he could see the wheels turning in her head as she decided how to take that news. Finally, she winced, closing her eyes and rubbing her temples. "That makes so much sense, it's absolutely terrifying." Tony filed that quip away to better examine later. She looked back up, and said, "I'd ask if you were sure, but you wouldn't be here if you weren't. So, how can I help?"

"I can't find him. Do you have any idea where to look? Any other friends that he might have contacted?"

Po was shaking her head before he finished asking his questions. "I think Wufei is the only one who has even talked to him in the last year," she admitted.

"Wufei?" Tony prompted.

"Chang Wufei. He saw him in New York, oh... last fall? As far as I know, none of his friends have seen or spoken to him since."

New York? Could Duo have really been in his city, under his nose, all this time? "Could he still be there?"

She shrugged. "It's possible."

"How was he? Was he okay?"

Po put up her hands to stall his questions. "Wufei is on an off-planet right now, but if you really want, I can have him give you a call when he's free. He could answer your questions better than I can."

"Did he say anything about how he was?"

She sighed. "You should speak to Wufei."

Tony nagged, cajoled, pleaded, and wheedled, stopping just shy of threatening, but nothing more was forthcoming from Po. Tony left with Chang's number.

—

Chang was spectacularly unhelpful.

—

A/N:

I thought long and hard to figure out how to get Tony in Afghanistan caves during the First Eve War while keeping Cap's history where it is-I could have moved the whole AC timeline to start way earlier than it does in our history or move Cap's story way later. I ended up splitting the difference by cutting 100 years out of the timeline to make it work, but I hope you'll all bear with me since any scenario like this was going to require some serious suspension of disbelief to make these worlds fit if I wasn't just going to yank from one dimension into another.

The style of the introduction was inspired by the introduction to most GW episodes, and I even took some of the wording straight from the subtitled version, so if it sounds a little familiar, that's why.

On Une's name. I'm a devout subtitle snob, and in the sub, at least "Lady" is treated as a title rather than a name. I can't think of any fic I've read (and I've read a lot) that treats Lady as Une's first name. Anne has been the most common given name I remember seeing, and it's what I'm going with.