Deep Cover, Chapter 3

Something was poking him. Tony shifted blearily, then raised himself to one elbow, only to immediately regret the movement when both his head and his stomach violently protested the movement. "J, lights," he called, and the AI charitably cut the brightness down to 40%, reducing the headache from sheer agony to the equivalent of a rather rigorous game of ping-pong in his skull.

Wait. Where the hell was he? Howard hadn't let him install JARVIS anywhere but his own room and the lab, both of which he normally wouldn't be sleeping in unless there was no other option. Tony cautiously let his eyes side open again, to see the familiar layout of his bunker lab around him, every surface covered with projects and the floor littered with empty bottles. Well, damn. He wasn't exactly the type to drink alone, but his back was aching in a way that was definitely a product of sleeping on his broken-down thrifted couch rather than more...fun activities, and it wasn't like he would be taking any starlets or models into his private sanctum anyway. So what had happened? And that was when everything came rushing back.

He was halfway to an anxiety attack when something (DumE, apparently) poked him again, something almost like worry in the tilt of the bot's hand, and while it wasn't enough to derail the panic completely, it certainly helped.

"DumE, Daddy's fine," he managed, giving the bot a shaky smile. "Just...just give me a minute here."

DumE backed up on his treads, hand tilting inquiringly, and, evidently alerted by the movement, U and Butterfingers (yes, his names were stellar thank you) zoomed over. U promptly shoved something in his lap. He pushed it out of the way, already trying to get up. He had to solve this! He could baby the bots later! U shoved whatever it was back into his lap again.

"U, sweetheart, I'm kind of busy right now, give me a minute."

U shoved the object back into his lap again. He picked it up, glancing at it, and...oh. It was a bottle of aspirin. Apparently his bots knew him better than he did.

"Thanks, U," he managed, unscrewing the cap. Butterfingers promptly rolled over, holding a plastic water bottle in both claws so that he wouldn't drop it, as he'd never had the kind of coordination that the other bots did. Tony dry-swallowed the pills and chased them with a swig of water, then leaned over so that he could rub the bots' struts with trembling hands.

He gave himself a few minutes to play with the bots and let the aspirin kick in before he finally managed to focus again.

"Morning, Jarvis." It was not, couldn't be, a good morning, but that was close enough for now. "Can I get a briefing?"

"Greetings Sir," JARVIS replied. "I would hope that you slept well, but the likelihood of that is less than 2%, so I simply wish that you will feel better soon, Sir. It is approximately 10:17 in the morning, the weather is mostly clear, and you have 47 missed calls and 119 unread messages. You also have several meetings and conferences to attend, and there is the matter of the company, and the funerals, and your patrimony."

Tony huffed out a long breath, then forced himself to get up. He could grieve on his own time; now he had to get to work.

"Right. What's first on the docket?"

"You have a press conference at 11:00, Sir, and unless you have already prepared a statement, you might want to do that, as I do not have great faith in your scriptwriter, and considering past data, your off-the-cuff performance is likely to result in a stock drop."

"You're not wrong. Wait, did you say 11:30 or 11:00?"

"11:00 a.m., Sir."

"Shit. That's in 43 minutes."

"Yes it is, Sir. A good start might be to get dressed in something suitable; your driver will be here in less than half an hour."

"I'm screwed, aren't I."

"I wouldn't got that far, Sir. You may want to pick up the pace, however."

Normally Tony might have made some crack about being maligned by his own creation, but he definitely wasn't feeling it this morning. "Yeah. Thanks, J."

"Always, Sir."

Tony was not actually late, but it was very close for a minute or so there. His car skidded into the parking lot a mere fifteen minutes before showtime, and he barely had enough time for Linda, the Stark family makeup artist (his makeup artist, he reminded himself dismally, as he was the only Stark left), to make the bruises under his eyes go away and (somehow) manage to make him look amazing despite him still feeling like warmed-over crap. He'd definitely have to give her a raise. He made it onto stage in record time and with a watered-down version of his usual press smile, and managed some bullshit about grief and legacy and how Howard Stark had been a great inventor and a loving father (ha!) and Maria Stark had been a philanthropist and an a pianist and a mother as well as the wife of a great man, and how despite the blow that was his parents death he had full confidence in his father's COO Obadiah Stane to show him the ropes and help him make his father's company and legacy even greater.

It was all fake. The press would never know or care that his mother had liked to paint, or that his father had cared more for an obsolete science experiment than his own son- well, actually, they would care about the latter, but only inasmuch as they could make bank on the exposes they'd write. Tony was so goddamned tired of the fake condolences! None of these people knew his parents; how dare they!

It was finally over, and Obie came over to clap him on the shoulder and tell him that he was proud of him for holding up, but Tony couldn't bear the stinging sympathy, and wormed his way out of Obie's somewhat stiff attempt at a hug and headed out with the excuse of a meeting with the SI board. To be fair, he did have a meeting. The entire rest of the day was meetings, in fact, meetings and paperwork and trying to talk to people who gushed condolences and hung on his every word so that they could ingratiate themselves with the new Stark heir, and just general shit which he'd been trying to avoid for years by going back to college for post grad over and over (ok, arguably three doctorates had been a little excessive, but he was Tony fucking Stark, and anyone questioning it underestimated both his own thirst for knowledge and his desire to avoid bureaucratic stuff like this).

By the time he got home it was completely dark (except for the light pollution) and all he wanted to do was curl himself up into a blanket burrito, but he'd put off trying to do any more investigation into his parents' murder all day, and he had to figure this out.

With JARVIS's help, it didn't take long to make an algorithm that would dig for any information, no matter where he had to pull it from or how encrypted it was. It really shouldn't have surprised him that the first real information came straight from the SHIELD database.

He'd always been suspicious of SHIELD, no matter what Howard had said. Just because his father had helped found it didn't mean it was still above board after 46 years, if it had ever been completely above board. It was a quasi-legal alphabet soup organization with a classified budget which still hadn't been declassified (he would know, as he'd hacked into the Pentagon on a dare when he was fourteen and, since then used to hack into various government databases every year on the anniversary, to see if he still had his chops) and it had its fingers in so many pies it'd probably caused mass food poisoning at one point. Not to mention that there was evidence that it had probably helped overthrow the governments of various other countries, not all of which needed to be taken out. Well, if he'd been suspicious before, that was just a drop in the bucket compared to now. Apparently Aunt Peggy, still Director despite her age (and probably the only reason SHIELD hadn't devolved into a terrorist organization) had tried to get Howard to retreat to a safehouse with Tony and his mother, and had practically threatened him at his refusal, saying that it would be his own fault if something happened to his family. Tony also learned that Howard had synthesized some sort of compound whose name was redacted even in the classified and double-encrypted files, and he was supposed to have taken seventeen bottles of whatever the substance was to DC the night of the "accident". Which meant that there was just another possible reason for the murders. A bit more hacking revealed that said substance was apparently a knock-off super soldier serum- what the hell? Howard had been carting that goddamn stuff around with his wife in the car, what the fuck! He had to have known that there was a possibility of an attack, especially with Director Carter herself trying to warn him.

And that was when he found the video. It was more heavily encrypted than anything else Tony had hacked yet, but he was a damn genius, with an artificial intelligence on his side, and it only took an hour to crack it.

"Sir, you may not want to watch this alone," JARVIS began, freezing the screen before anything had even happened, but Tony muted him and forcibly turned it back on, led by some sort of grim, dismal curiosity. It was not hard to imagine the content, after all.

It was a snowy road, in the evening, and Tony watched in grim horror as a dark shape raced up behind his father's favored Cadillac Eldorado and overtook it, slashing the front tire as it went and then skidding in the snowy gravel with a screech of tires, turning around to approach the car, which had spun out, swerving off-road and smashing into a tree with a sickening crunch. Howard crawled from the car, eyes glazed and desperate, and begged the spectre to "help...my...wife...help my wife," then deliriously mumbled something that Tony couldn't catch. The masked figure punched his face in, instead, and Tony had to look away, dimly aware of the figure shoving his father back into the car. The assassin then strangled his mother to death while he tried desperately to ignore the flickering screen and the desperate choking noises. Then he beat in the trunk of the car, removed a briefcase, and shot out the nearby surveillance camera before presumably fucking off to rendezvous with whoever was paying him to get the serum.

Tony was going to throw up. Actually, no, he was going to throw up, and then he was going to find and murder whoever thought they could kill his parents and get away with it.

"Jarvis?"

"Sir," JARVIS tried to soothe. "Take a deep breath. Do you want me to call Colonel Rhodes?"

"N-no. Rhodey doesn't need to get caught up in all this. No, I need you to find whoever that was, yesterday."

It took another four hours even to find a hint of an answer. Facial recognition turned up nothing, most of the SHIELD data was tangential, talking about the murder of the elder Starks in terms of collateral, and there was pretty much nothing else, while although Tony did discover the existence of several SHIELD assassins, none of them matched the size and build of the one in the video. In the end, it was the metal arm that proved a breakthrough. Tony (against JARVIS's recommendation) had been obsessively watching and rewatching the video (he'd already been traumatized by it anyway, maybe another viewing would give him some clues) when he noticed the light flashing dully on the assassin's literal prosthetic arm. A few more searches, this time specifically searching only for known assassins with metal arms, turned up only one name. The Winter Soldier. Or, as some decades-old files called him, "The Fist of Hydra".

Well, fuck.

So apparently Hydra was still around, even if Captain America was supposed to have destroyed them right before he put that plane full of bombs down in the ocean and ended WW2. Fucking typical, apparently his father's precious golden boy couldn't even kill Hydra right, and yet somehow Howard still cared more about him than his own so- no. Tony's not going there tonight. He had enough of a pile of shit to dig through without adding his own insecurities on top of that, and it might just be a one-off, a Hydra operative with a chip on his shoulder going off on anyone tangentially related to taking down his comrades before. (Although, if that was the case, was Tony next on the list?)

Spoiler alert, it was not a one-off. Apparently not only was Hydra still extent, they had their creepy-ass tentacles in almost every part of the government, and the only reason they hadn't seriously infiltrated SHIELD is...probably because they knew Director Peggy Carter would kick their asses no matter how old she is. Even bigger fuck. This wasn't just a lone operative or even a small terrorist cell that he could report to the police or the FBI or to SHIELD; this was Hydra, the creepy cult slash offshoot of the Third Reich which had been honestly more of a threat than the plain old Nazis, since they were Nazi cultists with access to weapons that literally dissolved people into dust. This was too big for one person, even Tony Stark himself, to even think about handling.

Right?

Tony stewed in between the meetings and paperwork required to take over his company, and during the will readings, and even during the funerals themselves. He scribbled coded shorthand notes to himself during branch inspections and meetings with clients, explaining it away with the airy "inspiration strikes whenever" attitude that only rich white inventors with a history of being eccentric can pull off. He almost lost a tentative merger with a branch of Fujikawa Industries because he was busy plotting, and he had several military contracts which probably would have failed if he had not explained away his inattention by claiming bereavement. He mechanized the entirety of Stark Manor, and put so many security measures in place that it would probably be about ten times easier to break into Fort Knox than to get in without permission, and he finally did what he had wanted to (and begged Howard to let him) do ever since he had made JARVIS and hooked the AI up so that he could run the mansion. He also, of course, put plenty of analogue measures in place (in case he was hacked- he had full confidence in his own firewalls and cybersecurity, as he coded it, after all, but he was up against freaking Hydra). In the end, it probably could have withstood an actual nuke, not that he would have wanted to test that. He drew up plans for a new mansion in Malibu and an enormous tower in Manhattan, both in case he needed bases, and built them, then bought up and stocked multiple safehouses everywhere there was a branch of SI (and some where there weren't, just for variety).

After that, he didn't have so much time for thinking. It turned out running an actual fortune 500 company was a lot of work, even more than he'd anticipated (and he'd been trained for this his whole life; it wasn't like he was going in blind. He had to give speeches, for one thing, and he was not exactly a great orator, but he was passable, and like hell was he going to hire a speechwriter; he didn't want anyone putting words into his mouth. And there was so many things he wanted to design and pitch to the Board, and so many things he had to design, like weapons, because SI was still the biggest name in the warmongering business and the stock would go down if the Board didn't have their precious Stark weapons branded and patented and the current R&D team was so underfunded one would be hard-pressed to buy takeout with their entire budget (which also had to be remedied).

It was not long before he also started to get suspicious of Stark Industries itself. He was going over the accounts one day in an attempt to escape his Hydra problem in a slightly more healthy way than drinking, since he'd been trying to stay dry since that bender the day after his parents' death, and he'd run across a number of shipments which had all been sent out to an abandoned SI warehouse over a period of three years, all of which named nonsensically or referencing products that SI hadn't produced for decades.

Something was going on, and it seemed like he had corruption in SI to take on before he even thought about trying to tackle Hydra. Suddenly he couldn't trust anyone, except for JARVIS and Rhodey.

Stark Industries was mostly still producing weapons, at the time, so Tony contrived to attach trackers to a few batches of several different kinds of products, and waited. Wonder of wonders, while all of the phones and most of the weapons went where they were supposed to go, a substantial portion of the weapons (mostly bombs or military-grade shells and guns) somehow ended up being marked "defective" and then being shipped off to said warehouse. Not only was the percentage substantially greater than the percentages of defective weaponry in the past, it was also only out of the most dangerous weapons that SI made, the kind of things that were only available to the US Military (and select allies, on a good day).

The simplest solution at the time seemed to be shutting down weapons manufacturing entirely, but after thinking it over Tony realized that that kind of PR bombshell was probably just what would get him shut out of his own company, so instead he ramped up production of products that were not weapons (Starkphones and prosthetics and so on) and then, in a dramatic press conference (he couldn't help himself- he had to get his fun somehow) he revealed that, due to fraud within SI, he would be temporarily suspending weapon production and contracts, though, of course, all personnel would be kept on and he would still be producing other products, as well as non-offensive gear like body armor. Naturally, stock dropped thirty points and Obie was not pleased, but it seemed to work. That was before Obie, his COO and quasi-uncle, tried to kill him and make it look like an accident, of course.

That whole debacle started with a sonic paralyzer and ended with Tony in a hospital bed and Obadiah Stane in prison for life, but it was while Tony was still recovering in bed (and forbidden by Rhodey to use his Starkpad anymore, since "You need to rest, not work, Tones!") that he finally concocted his plan to take down Hydra.