Chapter Text
Tony would be the first to admit to an occasional impulsive urge. It has been known to happen, once or twice. A hundred—A thousand times. Whatever is wrong with his mind, whatever connections formed too strong or too weak or not at all, he’s gotten used to his subconscious working through problems and spitting out conclusions with very little rhyme or reason.
When he was little, the speed, unpredictability and accuracy of these conclusions marked him a genius. A prodigy. Useful. After his mother got sick, they meant he had very little time to learn how to shut up. After she got sicker, it meant he had to learn how to keep his crazy on the inside completely. Actions were different. Actions meant counter-actions that typically involve pain, humiliation and loneliness. Actions were dangerous.
All of this is to say that Tony running away from home is both an anomaly and not. He’s thought about it for a good bit. Why wouldn’t he? The only thing keeping him alive in that house was Jarvis, and even he is only staying there because of Tony.
He’ll be fine, he thinks for the thousandth time. Say what you will about stowing away on a freight train but it gives you a lot of time to think. Jarvis will be fine. He’s got plenty of cash—Tony’d checked—and no overarching debts or blackmail that would keep him under Howard’s boot.
Fuck, but it’s cold. He should have—Maybe he could have held out until spring—
And maybe he’d have snapped and slashed Howard’s throat with a whiskey bottle. Being cold is better than being a convicted murderer. No thank you. A bus, then—Except you’re Anthony Edward Stark. Howard won’t be looking more than the minimum law requires of him, but he most definitely won’t be paying any ransom either. Many, many people would look at your scrawny, nerdy self with dollar signs for eyes. Laying low is the name of the game.
He’s liberated enough cash and bought up enough cryptocurrency that he isn’t precisely worried about the immediate future. That said, everybody knows what happens to kids in Gotham who look like money. Hell, everybody knows what happens to kids in Gotham period. If he wants to survive the year, he has to be clever.
The studio he’s going to be living in is in Otisburg, which is an accurate and irritating reflection of his priorities. Upper East- or West side would have been better in terms of crime and much worse in terms of visibility. He’s weighed up his odds as best he could and put his chips on anonymity and chose a part of Otisburg with the largest population of Italian immigrants—While carefully staying well away from Crime Alley, the Narrows or the Bowery. Nobody collects crime stats for Gotham anymore, but there are nursery rhymes about Crime Alley. Outrunning kidnappers won’t do him much good if he gets set on fire by the local fauna just because he was standing in one spot for long enough.
Now that he’s on his way, he takes a moment to feel grateful that he had managed to stick it out with Howard long enough to have had the time to put all this together. Cash is one thing; he could, and did, liberate stuff from the mansion and sell it on various shady websites. There are so many other things that he will need, that he couldn’t have figured out on the fly.
As it is, Tony had years to make the plan as foolproof as he could. Acquiring a fake passport and ID was straightforward, but hacking into the government databases and creating a more or less solid background for himself took almost six months. Six months well spent, because he created one Antonio Fabbri, age nineteen, son of first-gen Italian immigrants, now sadly deceased. Tony—an auto mechanic with a trade-school diploma from Wilmington—is now trying his luck and setting up shop in Gotham, where an elderly relative has died and left him her place.
It’s all as legit as he can make it. The old lady was Italian, and Tony—as Fabbri—bought the apartment from the kid who inherited it. Tony’s diplomas and certificates are, yes, forgeries, but he is in their systems. If it came to it, he’s reasonably certain he could call and request they issue him a new copy and they would do it for a couple of bucks plus shipping. Same is true for his IDs and such; he may be planning to lay low for a few years, but that doesn’t mean he is going to risk being caught with an obvious forgery and arrested.
So. Apartment, check. Cash—okay, for now. Papers—mostly there. No health insurance, which, yikes, but he will get a private plan or something. Tech—Ouch. Leaving his labs and infinite resources is, by far, the hardest sacrifice to make barring Jarvis but it has to be done. DUM-E is still in their infancy and is safely uploaded to several server farms outside of the US. If everything goes right, he will be able to cobble together a powerful enough system to support a project of their complexity in a year or two. As for the rest—he’s been building his tech for years now. Once you know how, you can find most of the things you need in the dumpster. Yeah, it’s quicker and better if you buy the components new, but Tony did always think recycling was both interesting and romantic. So that’s fine, probably.
It’s a good plan, considering it was made by a teenage runaway nutcase who barely so much as stepped outside of his mansion. Mansion? Hah! Never mind the mansion, Tony’s barely spoken to fifteen people in his life and now he is going to be living alone and leading a business and talking to customers and—
Calm down, idiot.
If you’re a shut-in teenager with years to plan your escape and nobody but films, books and reddit to workshop said plans with, it’s inevitable that it will end up a little weird; a mix of hyper-competence and utter lack of sense. For example, even he can admit that having a device to help you keep track of your escape, step by step, is too much. That he spent a month coding it and then another two to make it look like an old Nokia is surely a sin for which he will burn. Alas.
Whatever had possessed him to do it, it’s paying off now, because the little brick phone might be the only thing keeping him together. The display is what you would expect from a Nokia brick, but inside, it’s got a decently powerful processor. From the mansion, it’s with him as he makes it to the train station. There, board a freight train to Bludhaven, then a ferry to Gotham’s Chinatown. Subway to the main train station, then—
He re-checks the app for the millionth time.
Storage locker 416, code 1920. Pick up the apartment key and the last of your paperwork. Good. Almost thirty per cent finished, the phone tells him happily, the little green-and-black screen flashing. Man, but it’s been a long day.
From the train station, take the subway up to Otisburg, try not to get shanked in the train, and slink down Eyre Lane till you get to 196, sixth floor, second apartment to the right.
By the time he’s made it—miraculously, without a single violent encounter—he’s almost blind from exhaustion. He doesn’t even mind the disgusting flat, the smell of rotting food, cat piss and decrepitude. He drags himself to the bed, considers the likelihood of old lady Lewis having died in it, and goes to sleep in it anyways.
You’d think that having a place and no job would mean that Tony has plenty of free time. Hah! Lies and propaganda the old tell the young so that they don’t throw in the towel before puberty. It’s been a week, a full week, and Tony didn’t have time to so much as set up his laptops, much less do anything else. No, all his time is eaten up by chores. The flat is dangerously run-down. The electricity is such a desperate mess of patch jobs, it’s a miracle nobody died using it. The water runs red when he turns the tap on hot for more than a second. There are ants, roaches and worms in the kitchen. All this and Tony still has a bunch of paperwork to file, to register his address and future business and whatever the fuck.
Thank God he has some cash. Otherwise, he’d be making a serious dent in his budget with all the absolutely crucial repairs he needs t do. He’s not even talking about all the cosmetic shit, like getting rid of the bugs and the like. No, he needs to rip out all the electrical wiring in the flat and start from scratch, because the fuse goes off if you turn on the toaster and the kettle at the same time, which is not acceptable. Tony might be a teenage runaway bum but he is a genius and he took all his work with him when he ran. At some point, when he manages to set his life up somehow, he will need a state-of-the-art workstation, with any number of custom-made computers. Spotty electricity can be fixed a little with generators and UPSs, but—
Never mind that. Focus on wiring your flat properly. Step by step and you’ve made it a mile. Or something.
Reconstructing the wiring eats up October, and November goes by in frenzied repairs, because winter is around the corner, and Tony ripped his place to shit. He knows the theory—as in, maths and robotics, which is more or less the same thing—and googles the rest, buying what he can from shops within walking distance and making up the difference by dumpster diving. It’s a life so thoroughly divorced from anything he knows, he kind of starts believing his own cover story. Even the language is different. After the initial meet&greets with the city hall and suchlike, Tony barely speaks a word of English, getting by in Italian and Spanish for most of his daily interactions.
The shopkeepers know all about the still fading marks on his hands and neck and don’t ask where his parents are. When he tells them they’re dead and isn’t as sad about it as he should be, they don’t bat an eye and continue ragging on him for his stained clothes and scrawny figure.
“No good woman will look at you twice if you look like a homeless bum,” says old lady Piccio, from the kiosk on the corner. “Get a proper haircut and go out into the sun. You look like you will drop dead any minute.”
Hah.
“You are the only woman for me,” he jokes, amazed at even this much parental affection. He forgave mama for most of her bullshit when cancer took off, but he can’t claim it would have occurred to her to give her son any advice, even something as surface-level as this. “I am cursed to wander alone and heartbroken, alas—”
“Away! Away with you, you greasy little monkey! Shoo, shoo, and don’t you come back without a clean shirt and a proper pair of trousers, not those pyjamas you young people wear outside—”
It’s nice, he will freely admit. Otisburg is not as bad as he feared. Sure, there’s crime and you don’t go out after dark unless you want to start shit, but it’s possible to live and let live if you’re smart about it. It helps that Tony looks and acts the part of a penniless, struggling immigrant very well. He isn’t working yet—that will take some time—but he is learning a lot and will soon get enough shit under control to focus on all the pests gnawing through the flat. He’s already ripped out the carpets and the boards to get to the wiring—and the plumbing, while he was at it—so now he better get the bugs out while he can.
He survives the decontamination process somehow, probably damaging his liver and lungs quite a bit in the process, but he does finish before December kicks in and he freezes to death. The heating is next, then, and then the oven. And the washing machine. And he needs to put the floor back in. And the window is drafty— For the first time in his life, Tony’s days are full from sunup to sundown. He can honestly say he’s never been happier.
January, somehow, doesn’t slow down, even though Tony only leaves his flat twice a week, when the sun is at its highest and buys enough guns to outlast a siege. Winters are when the locals are at their most desperate, and Tony doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of danger. He already tried out his steel-tipped bat on a neighbour who had PCP dripping out of his eyeballs and had kicked in Tony’s door in the middle of the night. He, admittedly, didn’t have to react quite as badly as he did, but—
But, well. Tony spent a decade being slapped around by an older man and couldn’t do a thing about it. Now that he’s free and running on too little sleep and on the run from everybody, he’s not quite at the stage of proportional reactions when threatened. He doesn’t put two bullets to centre mass, which is most anyone can ask of him. Luca ends up with bruised ribs and a few fewer teeth, and Tony starts getting a nod or two from his other neighbours. Gothamites, Tony is learning, only acknowledge those willing to throw down with everything they’ve got, however little that may be. It doesn’t matter that Tony is a five foot nothing of a teenage runaway. When he was pushed, he pushed back, escalating it without hesitation or remorse. He doesn’t think it earns him respect but it does make him acceptable.
Regardless, the only way to stay alive is to keep out of sight and out of mind and Tony has more than enough to keep him busy. He finally gets the electricity to a point where it won’t fry his laptop and starts catching up. He’s been reading bits and pieces where he can, but nothing is said about Tony Stark missing. If anything, Howard Stark seems to be having the time of his life, throwing Galas and giving interviews, as if to let Tony know he’s better off alone.
Objectively true, if so. Tony can’t say he had a happy childhood, even if he forgets about all the hitting and the alcohol and the insults. After mama died, her sickness stayed, seeped into the bones of the house, always remaining every one of those last, terrible days. Tony would have split either way, except he might have gone to MIT instead of Gotham of all places.
Dear Jarvis,
I am fine. Don’t worry. I would have written earlier, but you know how it is. I can’t say where I am or give you a way to respond, for now. I am working on it. I hope you’re out of that place for good and are living it up. Shepard’s pie for breakfast and angel cake for dinner, remember?
All my love
TS
The work is the only leftover thorn in his paw—except for the million other thorns in all his paws. It will soon become very suspicious if he keeps burning savings. For one thing, it will imply that he might have some savings left for the forward-thinking go-getter. No, Tony has a plan, sort of, and enough cash to finance one last, big, project.
His car repair shop.
In a way, living in Gotham comes with its own unique set of benefits. In comparison to some parts of NYC, the flow of people coming in and out is exponentially higher. Space is simply not as much of a problem; not with how many people are escaping the endless nutty violence, the gangs and the corruption. Not with how many, not to put a too fine point on it, die.
So, there are two warehouses Tony could adapt, one two subway stops away and the other within walking distance. There is also an old ‘shop that looks to be on its last legs, not two blocks away.
Now, Tony, he tells himself. Be reasonable. The warehouses are the clever choice. They’re spacious enough. You’ll have space for your other projects. It won’t be successful, but you don’t need successful. You have enough for a year or two, and by then you can start selling designs and patenting your shit. You don’t—
He buys the shop from the ancient Irish guy called Callaghan, Cal for short, who sells it for a pittance.
“Look, kid,” he hoarses at him, body almost bent into a c, “I just want someone to work it.”
Tony nods, a bit uncomfortable that the man isn’t making as much as he should, but not uncomfortable enough to insist.
“I will work a lot,” he promises, English feeling clumsy in his mouth after only a couple of months. “I love building shit.”
“Tha’ is all I want, boy.”
He doesn’t get any cars in February, but old man Callaghan’s shop has been there for so long, it has a good few loyal customers who are curious to see what’s going on. They leave him trinkets and pay pennies, but he takes all of it. Every day, from eight till five-thirty, he’s at work, like a good, reasonable adult. And there ain’t nothing he can’t fix. It might take a bit, and it probably won’t look very pretty when he’s done, but it will work alright, oftentimes better than it had when it was brand new.
Among the locals—and Tony is already almost a local—trade is an acceptable currency as cash. Especially among those—again, like Tony—who never leave the neighbourhood if they can help it. Most days, he doesn’t earn a single dollar, but Ms Patt gives him a pie for fixing her radio; Ms Mancini trades two dozen eggs for replacing the wiring on her microwave. Ms George gives him her late husband’s clothes when he fixes her boiler and Mr Franklin trades five old laptops for fixing his TV. It’s simple and straightforward and Tony never once felt like this much of a success. He is doing things. He is helping people. Building AI is great and all, and he will absolutely get onto that, but he is a mechanic now and people think he is quite good at what he does.
Sure, there are bad parts. He pays the expected dues to the enforcers and makes sure to have an excellent forgery of a loan he took out, which will explain how he got the cash for the ’shop. He takes a gun to and from work and doesn’t even consider doing something when, inevitably, somebody is screaming outside of his window. He makes sure the door is locked and his gun is near and tries to go back to sleep. Ignorance is bliss and all that, and you only survive Gotham by becoming a little bit of a monster.
An interesting source of profit, if not revenue, are the kids. After about a month, they figured out that Tony is a bit of an idiot, and even more of a hoarder, and he is willing to reverse the order of things, as it were. If they so happen to have found a tablet on the ground or a miraculously factory-wiped phone they picked up on the riverside, then Tony will pay them in what he can. Goods most often, but also favours or money, if they have something he really wants. Like computer parts or information. (Or if they look desperate and even his newfound apathy isn’t quite up to the task of refusing to help a six-year-old who will, then, have to offer something else to somebody else who just might take them up on it.)
It turns out Tony is okay with kids and they are okay with him. He doesn’t speak if he doesn’t have to—that much doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon—and he most definitely doesn’t ask them any questions. Like calls to like. They know he’s a runaway just like them. Unlike most other adults around, Tony has skin in the game. Should he be dumb enough to call the CPS or the cops, they might take him away too.
So, the urchins of Otisburg—and a bit further, because Tony’s shop is not as north-west as he’d like it to be—have more or less pegged him as a useful idiot and are taking as much advantage of that as they dare. Another lucky break is that Tony is low-stakes low-reward enough that only the young and desperate ones need him. As far as everybody knows, what little money he earns, he is using to pay back the loan and eke out a living. So, the kids that come to him tend to be the sort who are happy to have a dry place to rest a bit and, probably, whatever food is available that day.
This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, where he meets Jason Todd, three months into his life as a small business owner.