It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm sorry, I can't promise that this will update faster in the future. I'd like to thank my muse for finally letting me work on this again nevertheless.

Sierra: Thank you! You'll find the answers to some of the answers to the questions I am sure you forgot you asked in this chapter.

Perona: I didn't quit. I just took a while.

Processor

Tony had absolutely no idea what he had expected to find when he finished decrypting and deciphering the data he had gotten in the suitcase Peggy had handed him that day. Whatever it had been, this was worse. Way worse.

HYDRA was still alive and kicking. And even worse, right inside of SHIELD as well.

Tony absolutely could not let that continue, but he also knew that he would not be able to handle this alone. (It was one of the things he had learned about the last few years.)

So he planned and prepared with the help of his family. They had resources like little other people had, after all.

(Tony fully intended to hand the evidence over to the government as soon as possible, but he had to make sure to get as much evidence as possible, first.)

But before he got to the part of actually realizing any of that plan, he had to take care of some matters of Public Relations. Stane had just died under 'suspicious circumstances', after all. And since he was CFO of Stark Industries at the time of his death, it was kind of his duty as the CEO to say something about it.

That left Tony with a choice. The choice between exposing the other man's lies or burying them into nothingness, as SHIELD advised. (He had known what he would do before the conference had been announced.)

Tony stood in front of a crowd of journalists, cards from SHIELD with a fake version of the things that happened in his head and absolutely no intention to actually use them.

"If you remember, a few months back, I told you all that I had become part of a system of zero accountability and that I intended to leave this behind me. As I'm sure you know, there has been a close review of Stark Industries' activities during the past few months that has looked into every employee and every action — or at least as close to that as they can get. This review has revealed that the person dealing under the table was much higher up than anyone expected.

"As it turns out, the late Obadiah Stane, a good friend of Howard Stark and the former CFO of this company was responsible for a great percentage of these sales. Despite his death earlier this week, the investigations are still ongoing and we at SI intend to fully cooperate with the United States government and any and all other relevant parties.

"We will continue the internal review as well and do our very best to make a repetition of a crime like this impossible." While they were at it, they would also eradicate things like any tax fraud that may happen as well as replace the people where the allegations of racism, sexual harassment, and other offenses of the same general vein could be found. He meant it when he had said that he was going to turn this company around. (And judging people over things they had no choice over was nothing but irrational.)

"Mr. Stark! Is it true that Mr. Stane died in the conflict with the armored vigilante, Iron Man?" a journalist from the crowd interrupted him. The man was from Fox News, not that that mattered in this particular context. (It mattered quite a lot in most others.)

Tony weighed his options, faster than any human possibly could manage to.

"On his last day on this planet, Mr. Stane tried one more time to end my life. The previous one being paying the Ten Rings to kidnap me earlier this year. As you might be able to guess by the fact that I am standing here, he failed. This escalated into a conflict with the so-called Iron Man — even though the suit is a gold-titanium alloy, really, but I admit that that does not have quite the right ring to it, does it? The rumors that the armor is my creation are true, but I am not the pilot." Except no one had even suggested that, had they? "I mean. I'm not the hero type. Clearly. The truth is…"

He looked around the room one final time.

"The truth is… I am Iron Man."

"Are you insane, man?" Rhodey questioned the second he could pull Tony aside. "Why would you announce this whole vigilante thing to the whole world? It's kind of illegal." Rhodey had told him before that he could not continue this indefinitely.

"I am aware, but I have given it more thought than it appears." That was one of the benefits of being a machine. In the 5.7 seconds he had paused, he had run through more than enough scenarios to decide on a course of action.

"Oh, you have? Then why did you admit to a crime live on TV?"

"To build goodwill," Tony responds. "There's not much I can do like destroying threats to the world we live in that will make people want to protest if certain things were to get discovered."

Rhodey opened his mouth to speak, but Tony wasn't done yet, so he continued before the other man could begin to interject. "To keep true with this whole oversight thing I have got going on. I know that I can't just go around and do whatever I want, because the second I make a mistake, that it's all over. Granted, the goodwill and my PR team will give me more leniency, but that doesn't mean I should use it. There are more reasons, but those are two of the biggest ones."

"That's true. So you'll enter the existing chain of command?" Rhodey definitely sounds proud of him. (File this under: Good_memories_Rhodey)

Tony shook his head. "Not the way you're thinking, probably."

"So what do you mean?"

"I'm not linking this whole thing to the US government. That precedent was set by dear old Cap already and we know that it works decently enough in times of war at least. But the world we live in is different. At least for as long as I'm handling the illegal arms sales, I'll be working in crisis regions and being part of the US military would complicate this whole thing unnecessarily."

Rhodey nodded along at these words. "What do you intend to do, then?"

"I'll try and see what I can work out with the UN." Tony responds. "Which also means that I'm setting an international precedent, so we will have to tread very carefully."

"We?" Rhodey raised an eyebrow, but he was smiling.

"Did you honestly think I wouldn't have you, Pepper, and my entire legal team that's not solely focused on patent law read over it with me? I've already sent a mail to have them work on a very first draft and the timing of that even makes this whole thing look planned."

Rhodey snorted. "I bet they loved that."

"Oh, they did, you know them," Tony assured his brother. (He did have access to the systems of cameras to know this. He mostly didn't look into them for a whole myriad of reasons, but in this instance, he had been too curious.)

"That I do," Rhodey chuckled. He had worked with them often enough due to his position as the intermediary between the US government and SI.

"But that's not the only reason why I said 'we'. I also have a suit for you. It doesn't quite function the same mine does." Tony expanded and retracted his fingers as he gestured to himself. "For obvious reasons, but it's close enough. You don't have to use it either if you don't want to, but it's there."

"Believe me when I say that I want to. Especially given the whole HYDRA thing. Can't wait to bash in a few Nazi heads."

Meanwhile, in the Legal department, Anita Buzdar had managed to get hold of the biggest job of eir career so far.

Drafting the first version of Dr. Stark's proposed contract with the UN would get eir name out there like little else and it was likely that ey would be called in as an expert whenever superhero legislation would become a thing. And that was only a matter of time.

Everyone knew SI's Legal department could kick ass and take names. Otherwise, they wouldn't be lawyers. Or at Stark Industries. But especially not both.

Her assistant, one Natalie Rushman, seemed a little odd for Legal, though. Which wasn't to say that she couldn't kick ass. She could do that, that was obvious from the way she held herself alone. She simply felt more like the people in Security then eir fellow lawyers.

But who was Anita to judge in the end?

Tony was constantly spending at least a part of his thought process on how to further improve his body, his suit, and the connection between them.

He was a futurist, always living one step ahead of the day before, after all. And he had had to deal with his body being old tech once and that was more than enough. (That change had been quite something, honestly. He expected that was how Erskine's serum had made Rogers feel, even if the physical changes were quite different.)

He didn't need to eat or sleep anymore and since the actual processors and such took up less and less space, that enabled him to fit in more and more gadgets and things that might or might not be useful while keeping his weight pretty similar to that of a human.

Additionally, Tony did make an effort to spend more time with his family outside the workshop, as well. Yinsen's influence, probably, since he was the changed variable.

As it turns out, the bots had a previously unknown love for Disney movies. Well, U and Butterfingers did. DUM-E preferred Dreamworks, especially the new How to Train Your Dragon.

JARVIS refused to share his opinion on this particular matter, but the way that Lilo and Stitch was frequently the first suggestion to appear in a supposedly random list kind of gave that away nonetheless. (Tony couldn't fault him.)

But movie nights was far from the only things they did.

Pepper Potts, being the essential goddess she was, started reading in the lab in her downtime. At first just silently, but it did not take long for her to begin reading to the bots, which was something Butterfingers immensely enjoyed.

One day, Yinsen dropped an article on Tony's lap. The article in question was about the tree that owns itself. (Tony will take any precedent he can get.)

Then — before Tony had even had a chance to start reading — he dragged Tony to the latest board game that had caught his fancy and everyone who was around played it. Including the bots.

Tony and Pepper always won when they were playing Monopoly, Happy when they were playing clue, and U was a true expert at scrabble.

Tony got called to court with a demand to hand over the Iron Man suit.

He simply pointed out the production costs, which were in the millions. Not to forget how individual the commands were, tracking things like eye movement and whatnot.

(And also how interconnected Tony and the suit actually were. Tony required no further assistance from JARVIS, while Rhodey's suit very much did.)

The fact that Natalie Rushman (Natasha Romanoff) was a spy was not as well covered up as SHIELD evidently thought.

At first, Tony had just let her closer to him to see what would happen — after all he did need a new PA now that Pepper was being trained as the new CFO — but then he actually started talking with her.

Not just about things of business or philosophy or trying to one-up one another (though Tony really enjoyed switching between languages for every sentence), but eventually about more and more things.

"Sometimes, I'm not really sure who I am or what my place is in this world," Tony commented one evening as they work through the legal documents Mx. Buzdar had drawn up.

Natashalie snorted. "I'll drink to that."

And considering it was Tony's birthday, they actually did.

Ivan Vanko was admittedly not someone that Tony had seen coming. It had taken some digging into Howard's notes to even learn of Anton Vanko and the ways Howard had made him suffer — or he had made himself suffer, depending on whether or not he had actually been a spy or Howard had just made that up.

It was a shame that Tony couldn't persuade him that he was not the same as Howard (maybe Vanko would get along well with Hank Pym, now that he thought about it).

The whole thing with the Hammer drones at the Expo could easily have been avoided. Tony really wasn't sure what he thought about Ivan himself.

(Agent Agent dropped off a bunch of Howard's old stuff at one point during this that enabled him to redesign the ARC reactor more efficiently with a new element that he will still call Badassium in his private usage.)

There was a robot in the desert near Puente Antiguo, New Mexico.

An agent asked if this was one of Stark's.

He heard a denial through his earpiece even though no one had ever called Tony about this.

But really, what exactly had SHIELD expecting when they approached him? Howard knew about the time he had hacked into the Pentagon at thirteen, after all.

Plus, Thor and Loki were not exactly the type of people Tony could just ignore, so a part of him watched them diligently.

Jane Foster's contract was ready to be signed by the end of the week. So was the one of Darcy Lewis. The former included a research grant, the latter was pretty much a scholarship.

And if Tony sometimes dropped by to talk Einstein-Rosen bridges or the newest episode of Doctor Who, well then why was that the business of anyone but those involved? (It stopped being weird pretty quickly, honest.)

Director Nick Fury of SHIELD dropped by in his home again one day when Pepper was at the office with Happy, Rhodey on duty, and Ho — he had recently made Tony switch to the first name — at work.

Because of course.

What he didn't know was that Tony was way ahead of him.

"I see that you're the other person Aunt Peggy trusted. Do you know what she discovered before they gave her Alzheimer's?"

"What are you talking about, Stark?" Fury's voice was calm and even, but that did not fool Tony.

"So you don't. Well, boy, do I have news for you."

By the end of that conversation, Tony was officially hired as a consultant.

There was one thing that Tony did for SHIELD on his own time, without them paying him as much as a cent.

Ruining General Thaddeus Ross's day by buying and demolishing the man's favorite bar paid for itself several times over. That man was a colossal dick.

And that was without mentioning the friendship to one Dr. Elizabeth Ross he gets out of the whole thing.

So worth it.