An Engineer's Quest
By Rey

Author's notes: I hope that we all safe and the pandemic quickly dies down. Keep safe, folks. And if you've got spare good thoughts and prayers for me, regardless of your religion or if you have a religion to follow at all, please send them forth for me? It's unnerving, to suffer from my reoccurring stomach ulcer and a flu when the sympthoms, combined like this, are rather similar to the source of this pandemic… - Rey

Author's note (2): There are 2 more chapters to go, but as of now I've got only 1 more pre-written chapters left. Hopefully I can finish the last chapter soon.

10. The Interesting Reunion

Working opposite SHIELD makes going home rather an adventure. But Tony won't be Anthony Edward Stark, genius, billionaire, hopefully ex-playboy, philanthropist, and Iron Man" if he baulks against adventures of any kind, will he?

He just wishes that he weren't sharing this particular adventure with one of his closest and only friends, his new science bro, and a half-dead-looking little-kid version of Loptr, while he himself is still thrown aback and torn about what has just happened.

And while he needs to go back to his tower ASAP without SHIELD sniffing what's so important to go back to that place for, too.

After all, however dickish the mum might be, he still owes the said mum his part of the bargain, and the mum still owes him a good, truthful explanation about what they made him unknowingly do to their own child.

Not wanting to involve Stark International in this endeavour, he gets them away from Germany via a series of borrowed-without-permission cars. Then they go across Italy by hitchhiking on passing trucks after a sufficient disguise, courtesy of Brucey. The trip is topped up by a long, long ride in his personal submarine, which has been waiting in readiness under one of his safehouses in Venice.

While he abhors being underwater for any length of time, because of any reason, by any means, after his totally involuntary stint in the caves of Afghanistan.

It's fortunate for the SHIELD fugitives that JARVIS has total control of the submarine, knows where to go and what to do, and can obscure their trip from prying electronic eyes. It's wholely unfortunate for the mum, though, Tony thinks, because the petrifying anxiety he feels all along the underwater trip just fuels his fury towards them even more.

But then, once they are parked deep under Stark Tower in a water tunnel leading from the sea, J suddenly says, in an urgent tone that breaks Tony out of his haze of fury and fear, "Sir, neither I, nor Dum-E, nor You, nor Butterfingers, and nor your Iron Man helpers, have been able to revive Miss Laufey."

"Have been able? Revive?" the beleaguered man stutters, squawking. His fury forgotten and his fear spiking into dread, he rushes out of the watery trap people call a submarine and up to his penthouse.

And there, he finds the skinny giant of a mum lying sprawled on the carpeting on the living-room, face down, unmoving, with some deep purplish red liquid leaking sluggishly out of their visible ear.

Stupidly, the only thing that he can say – or scream, repeatedly, rather – is, "MOM!" And the thing that he does next, instead of assessing the possible damage, is to frantically shake the skinny frame, in the childish hope of waking them up this way.

He doesn't stop, until a weak, claw-stiff hand tries to drag him down, and a pair of skin-and-bone arms envelop him in a loose, shaky embrace.

And, lying on his living-room floor amidst pools of alien blood marring his carpet, soon joined by a noodle-limp little kid, Anthony Edward Stark breaks down for the first time since he was nineteen and heard about the death of his mum – his first mum.