(MCU) Forged Reality: Chapter 12 - Talks of the past

Chapter 12 - Talks of the past

Summary: When the past refuses to stay buried, one story changes everything.

The past forty-eight hours were... confusing to Tony. Since Nat was born, Laura spent the last two days in the medical bay under the careful watch of Helen.

Unfortunately, it meant Tony had to visit the medical bay itself, and without an immediate crisis in her hands, Helen managed to get a good look at him and immediately went on a spiral that ended up with Tony on the examination table himself with Helen researching the effects of Extremis on his body.

She told him it would take her some time to fully analyze all the samples she took, and she would update him once she had results.

But even outside of that, what was really awkward was hosting the Maximoff twins in the tower.

The two still wanted their answers, and considering the Bartons took a liking to them and asked them to stay for the weekend as well, they didn't have much choice but to accept.

Tony would have liked to avoid them as much as possible; Lila, on the other hand, seemed to have her own plans and just kept pulling the two into each activity—from watching movies, to meals and visits to the medical wing.

On one side, Tony would like to be his usual bombastic self around the kids, but with the Maximoffs' presence, he felt it would be a bad idea to act like that and draw attention to himself while everything seemed calm.

Of course, to their credit, neither Pietro nor his sister looked to have any similar issues; after the initial surprise, they integrated themselves into the group quite easily, so it looked like Tony was the only one unfamiliar with the situation.

Right now, all of them were sitting in Tony's living room. Tony on an armchair across from the others. Lila and Cooper were sitting between the Maximoff twins on the big sofa, while Clint and Laura sat on the smaller one, with the baby carefully cradled in his mother's arms.

Clint kept glancing at his phone. He was trying to reach Natasha for the past two days with little success. When Pietro found out about it, he informed them that Rogers took his group on some mission he said they didn't need to know anything about yet.

When Tony heard it, he frowned; he didn't remember any authorization to leave the country going through any channel, and that worried him more than anything.

It was a headache Tony didn't want to deal with. He couldn't wait for the accords to be official.

Tony realized he couldn't keep dragging this conversation any longer, and with a sigh said while glancing toward Laura, "I think it will be for the best if you and the kids went to do something else, L."

Before the woman could even respond, the kids immediately jumped in protest. Cooper was first, claiming, "I'm a man now; I can handle everything!"

While Lila's protests were more along the lines of, "I want to know more about Uncle Tony!"

Tony rubbed the bridge of his nose in frustration as he said as calmly as possible, "Look, this story isn't exactly PG rated; there is a lot of... adult theme in there, and not the scandalous type."

Laura raised her hand, stopping Tony's protest and insisting, "I will allow them to stay and listen for now." Then she turned to her kids with a firm look. "But if I tell you to use those headphones Tony gave you, you will do it until I tell you otherwise, are we clear?"

Immediately three voices spoke as one, "Yes, Ma'am."

There was silence for a long moment as Tony looked around at all the eyes that were on him now; the most intense ones seemed to be those of Ms. Maximoff and Laura.

With a deep breath, Tony began, "I guess we should start during December 1991."

Clint frowned, "When you were 17? Wait, why is that date familiar?"

Tony leaned back and looked up at the ceiling; he wanted to try and hide the tears that were trying to form in his eyes as he said with forced calm to his voice, "Because that's the day my father decided to get on the wheel drunk and kill himself and my mom in an accident."

There were a few gasps of shock around the room. He heard Laura's soft voice calling out, "Tony..."

But Tony immediately cut her off, waving his hand and kept talking, "The point is that after that day, Howard's COO Obadiah Stane took control over the company, at least until I finished studying for my first doctorate."

"Wait a minute, you have a PhD?" Clint asked in a surprised tone.

Tony looked down from the ceiling toward him with a raised eyebrow and corrected the bow user, "Three of them actually. What did you think I did in MIT for years?"

Clint leaned back, scratching his chin while speaking, "Huh, never thought about that. Then technically you are Doctor Stark."

The kids began to bounce on the sofa screaming, "So cool!"

Tony just sighed and pushed on, "When I came back to the company at 21, it was... different. Stane kept trying to push me away, told me to focus on the R&D and leave the day-to-day business to him. In the beginning, I wanted to do my best and tried to push my way into board meetings and so on; I was even good at it, if I dare say so myself." Tony added the last part a little arrogantly.

Clint chuckled and said sincerely, "Anyone who saw you deal with SHIELD wouldn't be surprised."

Tony gave the archer a quick smirk before his face turned grim again as he went on to the next part, "When Stane caught on, he began pushing me to self-destruct..." Tony heard a gasp coming from the seat where the female Maximoff was; he ignored it and went on, "Drugs, women, drinking, and so on. Later I found out that he did it to both push me away from the company and to discredit me in the public eye."

"But why?" was a question asked by Pietro.

Tony tried to act as casually as possible by shrugging while saying, "Keep me away so he could start selling under the table, that if I figure out what was going on and try to rat him out, no one would believe the drunk playboy who wants complete control over the money of his company."

Laura looked at him with such a sad look as she said with a voice filled with pain, "Oh, Tony..."

Lila suddenly was standing in front of Tony with a firm look that could match her mother's and asked in a surprisingly intimidating voice, "You are not doing these bad things anymore, are you, Uncle Tony?"

Tony gulped and tried to back away as much as he could while sitting on the armchair; he immediately began stuttering, "N..No, I...I know b...better n...now."

Lila seemed to scrutinize him for a moment before nodding firmly and going back to seat next to Wanda.

Tony shook his head and went back to the story, "Well, I guess we are fast-forwarding to 2008. Stane kept pushing me to build a new weapon, one that would awe the army into a new contract... after a while, I created it. But apparently, it wasn't enough; Stane insisted that the best way to sell the weapon would be a personal demonstration on site."

He looked back toward the ceiling as he spoke about the next part, "At that time, I just wanted to escape a little; I wanted some freedom from myself, from Stane's constant watch, so I agreed easily." Tony then closed his eyes, trying to push the memory that was surfacing away. "Everything went smoothly in the beginning, until the ride back. In the middle of the road, a charge went off, and the terrorists began to attack the van... the soldiers... they tried to protect me and... and they died because of it. I knew staying in the van was as good as asking for death, so I tried to run away. I got behind a boulder and tried to call Stane or Rhodey, but that was when the Stark bomb landed right in front of me."

"You too... Just like us." Tony's eyes snapped to the voice that said it and found Wanda staring at him with wide eyes and tears pooling in her eyes.

Tony didn't feel comfortable with that level of sympathy from her and tried to joke the entire thing off, hoping it would release some of the tension inside of him, so with a dry chuckle he tried, "Yep, that bomb literally had my name on it."

"Tony!" Laura gasped, scandalized before she began scolding him, "That's nothing to joke about."

Clint cleared his throat, drawing his wife's attention to him; with a small smile, he said, "We should let him have it, honey. And on the subject, I think what comes next will be more R-rated."

Laura let out a deep sigh and looked at the children, "Kids, headphones please."

Lila and Cooper pouted, but nonetheless kept their promise and complied while putting their headphones on. Those headphones are a special compromise Tony achieved with Laura during one of his visits.

The main idea is that when those are on, Friday is the one narrating whatever Tony is saying to the kids, while keeping out the traumatizing details and replacing them with a broader explanation. So, the kids will stay in the loop without hearing things they shouldn't.

With everything else in place, Tony tried to swallow the bile rising in his throat and began speaking again, "When the bomb went off, I felt a pain in my chest, but I was wearing a protective vest, so I tried to reach out and find the pieces I thought were stuck in my chest; instead, the last thing I saw before passing out was the crimson color spreading over my chest. The next thing I remember was waking up on a medical table with the feeling of someone digging in my chest..."

Tony noticed the four adults flinching at the description, and Tony actually felt the same way, but instead he acted as if he didn't see it and pressed on, "There is another flash of me tied to a chair in front of a camera, which I only later learned was a message to Stane that he didn't pay the terrorists enough for them to kill someone like me."

Tony had to pause again when he heard Clint murmuring about assassination plans against some bald dead man.

Tony glanced wryly at the former SHIELD agent before choosing to just move past it and keep telling the story, "When I was fully awake, I was panicking. I was in a cell, hooked up to a rusty car battery. There was another man there, and he told me about the shrapnel of the bomb he took out of my chest and the ones that were too close to my heart, so he had to insert an electromagnet into my chest and use the car battery for energy supply."

Pietro looked at him with large eyes and asked, "Did... did it hurt?"

Before Tony could reply, his sister reached over the kids' heads and punched the silver-haired shoulder while saying loudly, "You think?! He had a magnet buried into his chest, and that was after the bomb damaged his heart!"

"A lot of people would say it wouldn't be possible to damage what doesn't exist," Tony tried to bail Pietro out with a joke, which worked partly. The fire was sure off Pietro as now all six people in the room were glaring daggers at him.

Tony cleared his throat and began speaking again before someone would try to open the subject, "Anyway, by the time he finished explaining everything to me, one of the terrorist group came inside our cell; he took me to a tour around their base. That was the first time I saw it... My weapons, the ones I created to protect American soldiers from people like that, were in the hands of monsters." Tony barely noticed how his voice still carried the anger he felt that day he found out.

"You really didn't know," It was the whispering voice of Pietro.

Tony wasn't sure how to react, so he chose to keep talking instead, "After he showed me everything, he offered me a deal. If I built the missile I demonstrated, he would set me and my cellmate, Yinsen, free."

Tony was about to continue but was cut off by Laura, who spoke in a reassuringly soft voice, "No one will blame you for taking the deal, Tony; it's the reasonable thing to do."

Tony was surprised by the comment, and even more so when both Maximoff twins nodded in agreement. Tony tilted his head and confusingly said, "I refused."

The words barely left his lips before Clint was on his feet shouting, "Are you insane?! People like that don't take no for an answer; they would..."

Clint's voice trailed off, not wanting to say the words, so Tony finished for him, "Torture me. Waterboarding specifically."

Tony has no idea what the kids were hearing right now, but even they gasped in horror.

There was a long moment of silence as even he didn't know how to proceed from that. But a whisper of "Why?" broke the silence.

Tony turned toward Ms. Maximoff with a tilted head and asked, "What?"

Her green eyes stared straight into his as she shouted, "WHY?!"