Chapter One
Moments of the Past
The five year old genius screwed the last piece into place and moved back to observe what she made with a smile.
For a month now she had been programming and building this thing and finally it was finished. She grabbed the robot dog and raced out of her room down to her older brother's open door. She knocked, pocking her head in to see him hunched over his desk in the corner, books and empty bottles littering it.
"What?" He asked without looking to see who was interrupting him.
"Tony! Look what I made!" Marian crowed holding the robot dog as if in offering to show it off to her brother.
"Uh huh, that's great, Mari. Go along and play," he said not even looking over at what had brought his sister to his room. Tony didn't realize it but he was acting just like how their dad had acted towards Tony when Tony had been eager to share his first inventions: indifferent, distracted, no interest whatsoever.
"But, Tony! You didn't even look!" Marian said with a small pang of loneliness shooting through her body. She was the youngest but hardly received any attention from her brother, let alone her parents. And its not like she had any friends either. All the children her age were too immature and intimidated by her intelligence and maturity to befriend her, it also didn't help that Marian skipped grades just like her brother and father before her.
Tony whipped around towards her with a snarl. "Go away, Marian! Can't you see that I am actually working on something important unlike you! If you were even remotely intelligent, you would have seen that!" He said harshly. "Go away!"
Marian felt her heart break as Tony lunged forward and ripped the robot dog out of her hands before throwing it on the ground breaking it. Marian gasped as her actual first invention was ruined by her older brother who had promised to always protect and be there for her.
She knew that he had been drinking and that's why he was acting like this but it still was no excuse. Marian stared wide-eyed at her brother as he laughed meanly.
"Wasn't a very good invention if it can't handle a little bump." Then he stumbled over to his bed and collapsed onto it, the alcohol finally catching up to him and causing him to fall asleep.
Marian felt tears begin slide down her face before she turned and left closing and locking her bedroom door behind her. She crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head as she nursed her broken heart.
Her brother had changed since returning from college. He was turning more and more into their father - a mean drunk who cared for no one and had no care of what he said. Even when he wasn't drunk Tony had begun to turn slightly colder towards her, showing little to no interest in what she said.
Marian's eyes fell closed, her cheeks still wet from her tears and silently vowed that from now on she would keep her things to herself. She would never let anyone, even her family, hurt what she created again.
The next morning Tony sat up on his bed with a yawn, stretching his arms his head pounding from the overindulgence of drinking he had imbibed in last night. He struggled to his feet and began to stumble towards the bathroom where a bottle of painkillers would be waiting for him.
He had barely made it across the room when his foot hit something cool and hard. Confused, he looked down to see little pieces of metal, wiring, and a few electrical boards scattered on the floor, the pieces vaguely looking like they had been put together for a robot - robot dog maybe.
That's when it hit him.
"Oh what did I do?" Tony whispered to himself as what he had done to his sister - his precious baby sister - finally sunk in. He fell to his knees besides the destroyed robot, seeing that although he had destroyed it, he could still see the level of care that had gone into every detail and piece. He sighed running his hand through his hair. He could vaguely recall the heartbroken and devastated look on Marian's face after he belittled her and destroyed her robot. He couldn't believe that he could actually hurt her like that - sober or drunk. He should know better! He should know better than to act like their dad!
Tony had promised himself and Marian that he would never treat her like their dad treated Tony and later Marian but he broke the promise, not just once, but multiple times since he had come back from college.
Steeling himself, Tony gathered every piece of the robot and took it over to his second desk, pushing his own projects to the side and got to work fixing what he had broken. Tony could only hope that he hadn't ruined everything between them.
It would be too bad that even though Tony presented the robot to Marian back in working condition the next day, that he would forget this incident by the time he came back from college the next year and the cycle would repeat.
Although the situations were never the same and Marian never trusted her brother or father with her projects, both of their words cut deep and sometimes words cut deeper than anything else.
It would be many years in the future that Marian and Tony were actually able to have a deep sibling bond.
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Marian walked across the stage of her high school graduation with a huge grin on her face. She was turning eleven and would be starting college in a few months time - a whole two years younger than her father and brother! She silently gloated about that fact in her mind whenever her father or brother indicated that she was the stupid one. Just because she didn't flaunt her intelligence didn't mean that she didn't have Stark level brain power.
"Congratulations, Miss Stark." The Superintendent said with a smile as he shook her hand and handed her the diploma.
"Thank you, sir."
And that was it. No one from her family had come except Jarvis who was going to give her a lift back home. Tony was out with friends in Fiji and her parents were in Paris this week so she would be home alone again for the foreseeable future.
Which she was actually fine with as that gave her time to draw up ideas for projects and maybe even produce one or two before her family's return.
"Good job, Miss Stark," Jarvis said with a kind smile as he held the back door open for her. She shot him a small smile.
"Thank you, Jarvis."
"Home, Miss?"
"Yes, please."
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Tony felt like he blinked and suddenly his little sister wasn't so little anymore. She turned seventeen, er, sometime this year, he thought, suddenly not knowing if her birthday had passed yet or not before he got his mind to focus again.
Tony looked over towards his sister that the Stark function they were required to attend for some reason or another and saw how grown up she looked. And he knew he was not the only one to notice, he could see sons of rival businessmen eyeing her up, working up the courage to talk to her. Tony stiffened as he tried to recall the last conversation he had had with Marian and kept drawing a blank.
Just then he could see the chasm that was between Marian and the rest of the family, he couldn't even recall what college she was going to, when she graduated high school, if she was even still in college. Heck, he couldn't even remember if they had celebrated her birthday this year or even the last time he had gotten her a gift.
Tony's eyes met her's through the growing crowd and saw no warmth in her's towards him, no sisterly love that used to emanate from every pore. Now there was an icy, cold mask that freezes Tony to the core even with the whole room separating them.
Tony felt something shrivel and die inside him knowing that he was the cause of that as well as their parents. He had failed as a big brother and he didn't know what he could do to bring that warmth and love back in.
He never really got the chance to start to really fix things between them however, because two weeks later, Howard and Maria Stark crashed their car and died leaving the two younger Starks behind.
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"Marian!" Tony shouted when he stumbled into the Stark home with an equally drunk girl hanging off of his arm. "Go to your room! I don't want to see or hear a peep from you for the rest of the night!"
The girl in his arms giggled and kissed his neck.
Marian watched on disgusted knowing that Tony was too drunk to even realize that Marian had two duffle bags packed and ready for her too leave.
"You know, Tony, I only stuck around in the hope that maybe losing mom and dad might bring us closer together but it has only driven us apart. Your wh*res and drinking have gotten out of control. I know you are in mourning well so am I! You are not the only one to have lost them!"
Tony pulled away from the girl and strode forward until he was a couple steps away from her.
"You think you are so much better than me, don't you? Smarter?" He asked softly, almost tenderly but Marian knew that whatever he was going to say next was going to cut through her as his next words would be aimed to deal the most damage. "Did you really think that wherever you went to college you were able to get in by yourself? No, Dad told me he paid them to let you in to get you out of his hair and out of the press spotlight. You were and are such a disappointment to the Stark name that I wouldn't be surprised if you weren't actually a Stark to begin with. You couldn't even pass your easiest class without dad paying the teacher off! Now do as you're told and leave like the unwanted b*stard that you are!"
Somewhere in the back of his drunk and pained filled mind there were alarm bells ringing - the older brother that Marian had seen hints of through the years and would have emerged sooner if their parents hadn't died. The protector. But he was too drunk to care. He merely grinned as Marian's eyes glittered with tears before reaching back to the girl, grabbing her hand and tugging her towards his room.
"Mind the noise, we're about to get a little loud!"
Marian watched as he left knowing that this would be the last time that they would see each other for a long time. She moved to the door and grabbed her bags opening it just in time to see her pseudo brother Rhodey and her godfather a General of the United States Armed Forces waiting for her.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Rhodey asked. He knew that she wanted to join the army but had asked not to know anymore as Marian wanted to change her name to lessen the chance of anyone - her brother, Obi Stane, others - from finding her. Rhodey knew he wouldn't be able to lie to his best friend if asked point blank if he knew anything so asked to know very little.
"Yes, I'm sure. Uncle John?"
"Let's go, kiddo."
She got in the car as Rhodey entered the Stark home, closing the door behind her and Uncle John settling beside her in the back of the chauffeur driven car.
He put the partition up between the front and back.
"Is everything changed then?"
"It is. The Dean of Harvard sent me your degrees under your official name and you've been enlisted, you'll be reporting to duty in a month's time. Your official name change record is only on a thumb drive in a safe that only I know the combination to in my office at the Pentagon. No one, not even your brother, will be able to discover your new name and trace your whereabouts, Mari-, I mean, Anna."
She sent him a small smile at the slip up.
At the age of fifteen when she was about to graduate with her master degrees', she had called her godfather to talk to him about a couple things. One of which would be after she finished university with her masters and doctorates, she wanted to enlist in the military as she felt like that would be the last place anyone would look for her. She also wanted to change her name but wanted no record of her doing so. She also wanted her degrees to be under her name change as well.
Her godfather had smiled at her and said he would take care of everything.
He was the only one that she could trust over the years so she agreed. He didn't let her down. Her Uncle John came through on his promise and she couldn't be more grateful. Anna was lucky to have him in her corner.
Tony woke up with a dry mouth, a pounding headache, and a warm body laying next to him.
He turned his head to see that of the woman that he had picked up at the bar last night. He groaned and stumbled to his feet, shuffling out to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.
"Morning. Rough night?" Rhodey asked, surprising Tony and causing him to jerk his head over to see his best friend sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.
"God, Rhodey. What are you doing here?" He grumbled.
"Mari let me in." Tony stiffened at the mention of his sister and turned his head towards his friend, feeling dread begin to creep along his spine. He knew something had happened last night, that he and his sister had words but couldn't for the life of him remember what was said.
"Okay, and? Where is the little rugrat?"
Rhodey shot him a look. "Not so little anymore. She just eighteen three days ago, Tones."
Tony sat down heavily in a kitchen chair across from him, his mind racing, suddenly recalling everything he had been thinking at the Stark event they had been at two weeks before their parents had died.
Oh, he had messed up. Big time.
"Where is she? I'll surprise her with a trip to Barcelona or something and tell her that was the plan from the get-go." Tony looked towards the doorway as if Marian would magically appear.
Rhodey met his eyes sadly.
"What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"She's gone, Tony."
"Gone? What do you mean, gone?"
"I mean she let me in, handed me this letter for you, grabbed her bags, and left. Didn't look like she would be coming back anytime soon or ever."
Tony began to feel panic stirring. Had whatever was said last night been too much? Had he finally pushed his little sister away, possibly for good?
Tony slowly took the letter from Rhodey, not even noticing when he was left alone.
He slowly opened the letter, reading the smooth pen strokes that his sister had utilized to write it.
Tony,
I have to say what's on my mind, something that's been on it for a long time. Whenever we try to fix it, life keeps getting in the way. It's so hard to say but I have to do what's best for me, you'll be okay. I've got to move on and be who I am. I just don't belong here, I hope you understand. We might find a place in this world someday but at least for now, I've gotta go my own way. I don't want to leave it all behind as not all of it was bad but I must in order to move on. You and dad have given me enough emotional damage to last a life time. It's time for me go my own way.
I love you, I always will. You're my big brother although you don't act like it. Someday I'll return but won't be anytime soon.
Your sister,
Marian Stark
