Chapter Text
The chill of the night seemed to get into his soul. Howard was tired. So fucking tired of everything.
He raised the glass to his lips and took another sip of his bourbon, letting the alcohol warm him up a little. He considered going inside to get a coat, but ultimately couldn’t be bothered. These days he couldn’t muster much energy for anything. There was nothing but work and headaches in his life, and he hated it.
Sometimes he wondered how he’d gotten to this point. How he’d gone from the somewhat optimistic and enthusiastic young man he had once been to this bitter old fool. He’d had hopes and dreams, he’d had faith. Now… It seemed like everything was one step forward and three steps back. The SI motto of old, “better living through technology”, had fallen by the wayside as more and more of the company was dedicated to weapons and military technology. It wasn’t that he didn’t think such things were important, but there were other things. Things that wouldn’t make him dream of blood and death.
Christ, there was so much blood on his hands…
So absorbed was he in his morose thoughts that Howard startled when the door to the balcony opened and a disheveled Maria grabbed his arm.
“What? What’s wrong?” Howard asked. Maria was not the sort to panic, so this had to be something serious. And he could only think of one thing that would make her this frantic. “Tony?” His voice shook with fear.
“Jarvis called. The house was broken into. Tony’s gone.”
“Gone,” Howard repeated, unable to process the information. Oh god.
“Howard, we need to go,” she urged.
Shaking his head to try to get his brain to restart, Howard followed his wife into the bedroom and hastily began dressing as Maria did the same.
“Did Jarvis call the police?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. And Peggy Carter. He said they were on their way.”
“But Tony is… he’s gone. He’s missing.”
“Yes, that’s what he said.”
Missing was good. Missing wasn’t dead. Missing meant a kidnapping. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, and Howard comforted himself with the thought that Tony was more valuable to whoever had taken him alive than dead. Also, Tony wasn’t an idiot. The last time he’d been kidnapped, he’d managed to get himself out without any help, and he’d been only 13.
As soon as he was relatively decent, he told Maria to finish getting their things while he settled their departure with the hotel and arranged a cab to drive them to the airstrip. He also asked for some strong coffee to counter a bit of the alcohol he’d had. Thank god he hadn’t drank all that much, so he was still able to fly. It would have been a nightmare to have to arrange quick transportation otherwise.
It still took far too long in Howard’s estimation for them to arrive back in New York. He and Maria had barely said ten words to each other since leaving the hotel. There was nothing to say really, not until they had more information. He couldn’t help the feeling of dread spreading through him, though. The timing was too suspicious.
Speculating without data wasn’t going to get him anywhere, though, so he tried to focus on the flight. At least he had something else to direct his attention to; Maria had no such escape. How she didn’t crumble with nerves, Howard didn’t know.
Please let Tony be all right, he prayed, though to whom he couldn’t say. Anyone who would listen would be good enough, he thought. Just let him be all right.
Once the plane had touched down, they quickly got out, not even bothering to retrieve their suitcases. They could get someone else to come get them later. What mattered was getting home as fast as possible.
They saw the flashing lights from a distance. When the taxi pulled into the driveway of the mansion, several cops came over immediately to keep the car from going further. Howard shoved several bills at the cab driver and got out, Maria on his heels.
“I want to speak to whoever is in charge here,” Howards told the uniformed cop.
“Sir, you can’t–”
“I’m Howard Stark. This is my house, and I understand my son is missing. So I want to talk to whoever is in charge. Now.”
That lit a fire under the young officer’s ass, and he quickly got the detective on scene to come talk to Howard and Maria.
“Mr Stark,” the man said. “I’m detective Lipton.”
“Where’s my son? What’s being done to find him?” Howard said, not in the mood to be nice.
“We’re still trying to piece together what happened. It appears that the security cameras were disabled and the alarm was tampered with.”
Fuck, Howard thought. That was not good. His security was state of the art, he’d designed it himself. If someone was able to bypass it, that meant they were well prepared and well equipped.
“I need to check it.” Howard started moving, Maria and the detective following him.
“Do you know of anyone who might have a grudge against you, Mr Stark?” Lipton asked.
Howard snorted. “I can name a couple of dozen off the top of my head. I’m a wealthy business man, detective, grudges come with the territory.” But most of those wouldn’t stoop to kidnapping his son – at least, he hoped not.
“Has anyone made any threats against you or your family?”
Howard thought of the dozens of letters he had on his safe, all promising death and ruin for him and his family. Usually he didn’t take those seriously; sometimes people just wanted to vent, and thought anonymous letters were the way to do it. Now, though… could one of those people have actually decided to act?
Or was it something else? Something to do with SHIELD, perhaps. Again he was reminded of the prototype serum he had delivered to the Pentagon earlier today. But if that was what they were after, it didn’t make any sense to kidnap Tony after he’d handed the serum over.
“I’ll give you a list. But I want to check my security first.”
They found Jarvis talking to Peggy in the entrance hall, while police officers took pictures and dusted the house for fingerprints.
“Sir! Ma’am.” Jarvis looked somewhat disheveled, which was highly unusual.
“Howard, we need to talk,” Peggy said, but Howard kept his gaze on Jarvis. He needed information first.
“What happened?”
Jarvis twitched, hands wringing in a nervous gesture Howard had rarely seen. “After lunch, I went out. I had some errands to run. Master Tony was working in his bedroom. When I came back late afternoon… I didn’t immediately see anything wrong, because I entered through the kitchen. It was only when I went into the foyer that I saw the mess. I ran straight for his room, but young Sir wasn’t there. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find any trace of him, so I called the police, Ms Carter and you.”
“Did you check the vault?” Howard asked. “Was something missing?”
“It was locked, no sign of it being tampered with. I didn’t go inside.” Jarvis looked down. “I found… I found some blood.”
“Where? How much?” Maria was on edge, Howard knew. She was keeping it together for now, but sooner or later she was going to lose it. Howard was pretty sure he would too.
“We’ve sent the blood for analysis, Mrs Stark,” Lipton asked. “It could be your son’s, or it could be from the kidnapper. Do you keep any weapons in the house, Mr Stark?”
Howard snorted again. “I’m a weapons manufacturer, detective, so yes, I do.”
“Can your son use a gun?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’d like you to check if all your weapons are accounted for.”
Still ignoring a rather impatient Peggy, Howard led the group to his study, where he found that the two guns he had were still there, locked in their respective drawers. He also checked his safe, and reported that nothing had been taken. If the vault seemed untouched, it was likely that everything was still there too, though Howard would have to check later (he didn’t want anyone nosing around in there). It was looking more likely that this had really been a kidnapping rather than a robbery.
Next Howard went to his workshop, from where he could access all security for the house. It took him a bit of time to restart the system – it had definitely been sabotaged – and see what the cameras might have picked up. The outside cameras had been disabled, as Lipton had already told him, so there was nothing there. The cameras near the front door and the kitchen door had also been destroyed, and the alarm disabled, though Howard wasn’t sure how just yet. He would have to run a full diagnostic later, go over every inch of his system to check for breaches and weaknesses.
There were, however, cameras inside the house, which fed into a different system, so they were fine. After a few minutes of looking through the images, he hit the jackpot. A man dressed all in black could be clearly seen entering the house and heading straight for the workshop. And that was when he ran into Tony, who seemed to be just walking about the house.
Tony’s eyes widened when he saw the intruder, and dodged just in time as the man simply pulled a gun out of a side holster and shot at him.
“Oh, my god!” Maria cried, hands going to her mouth.
Howard was frozen for a moment, then scrambled to find more footage when Tony and the unknown man moved out of the frame.
There wasn’t much more he could get, unfortunately, since the inner cameras only covered a small portion of the house, but it seemed clear that the intruder hadn’t planned on kidnapping Tony. It was still unclear what his plan had been, though. Robbery, perhaps. It was possible that Tony’s presence had interrupted him before he could get whatever he had been after.
“What happened to Tony? Where is he?” Maria’s voice was strained and trembling slightly.
No one had an answer for that.
Howard could only shake his head, impotent fury and fear churning in his stomach.
This bastard had shot at his son, had chased him around and… Had he found Tony? If so, where was the body? (No, don’t think about that. Tony was a smart kid, he knew the house and the neighborhood, he could have gotten away. He had to.)
“Can you get us a copy of the tape, Mr Stark?” Lipton asked. “We’ll see if we can identify the attacker.”
Howard pulled up the images again, searching for a clear view of the man’s face. It wasn’t easy, with the mask that obscured half of it. There was something familiar about him, Howard thought, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. Maybe it was someone he had pissed off; there was certainly no shortage of those.
“Howard, we really need to talk,” Peggy said again, jaw clenched tight.
“In a moment,” he replied, still working on getting a better shot of the criminal.
“There,” Maria said, pointing at the screen. Howard paused the video and went back, and there it was. The mask was still in the way, but the upper half of the man’s face – especially his eyes – was clearly visible.
“Fuck,” Howard breathed, unable to believe his eyes.
“Do you know this man, Mr Stark?” Lipton’s shrewd gaze was locked on Howard.
“I don’t… No. I mean, it can’t be.”
“Who is it, Howard?” Maria gripped the back of Howard’s chair.
He probably wouldn’t have even thought about it, except Howard had been looking at old pictures of the Howling Commandos a few weeks ago, after Morita’s funeral. One more old friend gone, Howard had thought. He’d been feeling maudlin enough to dig through the pictures he’d kept from the days of the war.
It wasn’t a time he liked to think about now, even though, in a terrible way, it had perhaps been one of the best times in his life. At least then Howard had known he was doing good (before the goddam bomb, of course). It had been a time of fear and worry, yet also an exhilarating one. He had been young and optimistic despite everything, and life hadn’t yet kicked him in the teeth quite so often.
“Howard!” Maria’s voice brought him back to the present, and he turned to Peggy.
“It looks like Barnes,” he said, and she startled, leaning over his shoulder to look at the screen more closely.
“Impossible. He died 50 years ago.”
His body had never been found, though; it had been lost in the Alps. There was a slim possibility that he could have survived, but… he looked like he hadn’t aged a day, and that was impossible.
Lipton frowned. “Who is that?”
“A friend,” Howard said. “Killed in the war – or so we thought.”
“Well, he certainly doesn’t look like he was in a war 50 years ago. He looks 30 tops.”
Howard nodded, unable to contradict that statement. “Yeah, I know. It’s just… Weird, I guess.” He shook his head. “We can find out more about him later. Right now I want to know what he did to Tony.”
“I assure, Mr Stark, we’re going to do everything we can to get your son back safely,” Lipton said. “With your permission, we’re going to tap your phone, in case someone calls for a ransom.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And if you could get us a list of possible suspects, that would be helpful.”
Howard nodded, and shared a helpless look with his wife.
He got to work.
*****
Howard collapsed into his chair with a heavy sigh. He hated that there was nothing more he could do to find his son. Even though he knew he shouldn’t, he poured himself a generous shot of whisky and cursed himself for being so weak. Useless, that was what he was. His son was missing, possibly dead, and he was here, drinking. As if that would make anything better.
The police was still in the house to monitor the phone, though the chances of a ransom call were slim, in Howard’s opinion. As much as he didn’t want to think about it, there was a high probability that Tony was dead. Assassination might not have been the goal, but the attacker obviously hadn’t wanted to leave a witness.
Fuck.
The door opened with no warning, and Peggy strode inside as if she owned the place.
Once, many years ago, Howard would have said he and Peggy were close. Howard didn’t have many friends, so he had cherished those few that he had – and he had counted Peggy as one of them. However, over the years, they had drifted apart more and more. Howard wasn’t sure how it had started or why, but over time he had begun to feel uncomfortable around Peggy. Or, more accurately, around SHIELD. The organization that he had helped build had changed, and he wasn’t sure he liked those changes. He had never been directly involved with the day-to-day running of it – he’d left that to Peggy and Phillips – his focus had been on technology. After Phillips had died, Peggy had taken over completely, and Howard saw less and less of her. It seemed that the only time she came to see him was when she needed something – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she only came to demand something. He’d made allowances because he knew she had to be under a lot of stress, but it grated. Howard had a great deal on his plate too, between the company, the constant requirements for his time and expertise from the army and SHIELD, and his family. None of that seemed to matter to Peggy, though. She sometimes acted as if he did nothing all day, as if he should be at her beck and call at all times.
So he had begun to distance himself from her and from SHIELD. He had realized in the last few years that something had to give or he would lose his shit completely (he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already, sometimes), and SHIELD was the thing he had chosen to let go of. Not only because it wasn’t his official job, but also (and more importantly) because he didn’t quite trust them anymore. Not since Janet Pym had been killed, and Hank had gone off the rails blaming everyone. While a lot of what the man had said had just been the grief talking, some of it had made Howard think that maybe there could be something there. Too many missions had been compromised in ways that were… suspicious. Hank had accused Howard of trying to steal his research, and while Howard hadn’t done it, he didn’t doubt that someone had. And Peggy hadn’t seemed concerned at all. She had dismissed Hank as overtly paranoid, and essentially told Howard to shut up when he had raised his concerns about a possible mole in the agency.
And now… there was just something off about Peggy’s demeanor. She had never really been the emotional type, but he would have expected her to show a little care for Tony – and for Howard himself. Perhaps all those years at SHIELD had slowly eroded her capacity for empathy. Howard would be the first to admit that he was not great with people beyond a superficial level, yet this… indifference… was grating. And, if he was being honest, it hurt. Tony was a child, and his well-being should have been Peggy’s priority, no matter how pissed she might be with Howard now. Howard was sure he would have been nicer to Peggy if it was one of her kids missing.
“What happened to the serum?” were the first words out of her mouth.
Not ‘how are you?’, not ‘we’re going to find your son’, not ‘let me know if there’s anything I can do to help’. No, it was… straight to business, as if his son’s blood wasn’t all over the living room.
“I delivered it,” he said through gritted teeth. “If you want to know more you’ll have to check with the Pentagon.” They probably should do that anyway. One more thing in his list of things to do. And one more thing that wasn’t likely to help him find his son.
“You should have given it straight to me,” she replied with that annoyed expression Howard had come to loathe.
“That’s not what we agreed,” he said, doing his best to keep a level head and not get into a screaming match with her. As satisfying as the thought might be, it wouldn’t do anything to actually help.
God, he was so tired of all of this.
Howard had never thought the serum was a good idea, but both SHIELD and the military refused to see the potential dangers of it. They were determined to create an army of super soldiers to fight… he didn’t even know who. The Commies? One hardly needed a super soldier for that, for crying out loud. The only reason Howard had agreed to keep working on it was because the serum had other uses, such as medical applications. Sure, a lot of diseases had been either cured or controlled since the war, yet there were plenty of others that were still devastating. Ana Jarvis had died of cancer a few years ago. Despite the best doctors money could buy, none of the treatments had been effective. Perhaps the serum might offer some hope in that.
“Damn it, Howard.”
Howard didn’t even know what she was complaining about now, and he realized that he’d had more than enough.
“If you’re not going to help find Tony, then you can leave, Peggy,” he told her, voice hard. “I don’t have time for whatever you’re going to accuse me of now.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” she replied with an eye roll, as if he was the crazy one. “I just want to make sure the serum won’t fall into the wrong hands.”
Howard gripped his glass hard and fought the urge to throw it at the wall – or at Peggy.
“I don’t give a fuck about the serum right now, Peggy. My only concern is my son,” he hissed. “I don’t know what happened to you, but right now I also don’t give a fuck about that. Get the hell out of my house and don’t come back. I’m resigning from SHIELD effective immediately. I want nothing to do with you or any of it anymore.”
If Tony had been killed because of the fucking serum… Fuck, Howard didn’t know what he was going to do. He just knew he needed to get away from it. He needed it all to stop.
He needed his son back. Please, god, let him be all right, he prayed again. While his parents had been religious, Howard had never given much credence to god or faith and considered himself agnostic. But if praying gave him his son back, he could become a believer.
Fuck. Whatever it took.
“Howard,” Peggy began, a mixture of anger and pity in her expression.
“Get the hell out!” he shouted, standing up to get in her face. She could wipe the floor with him and he knew it, but he didn’t care right now. “Out!”
She clenched her jaw and nodded tightly. “All right. I know you’re worried. We can talk when you’re more rational. Once Tony is back home safely.”
Howard didn’t bother to repeat that he had resigned, so he would not be speaking to her again at all. Peggy tended to ignore the things she didn’t like, and Howard was just too tired to get into a fight at the moment. At least she had acknowledged Tony at last. That was something.
He accompanied her to the door to make sure she was really gone, then called Jarvis.
“Peggy isn’t welcome in this house anymore,” he said. “I don’t care what she says, she is not to come in again. Is that understood?”
“Has something happened?” Jarvis asked. He had a good relationship with Peggy, for the most part, though they had also drifted apart lately.
“I don’t trust SHIELD and I don’t trust Peggy. I don’t want them in the house.”
Jarvis nodded tightly, though he was clearly unhappy. “Do you think they had something to do with what happened to Master Tony?” Jarvis might like Peggy, but Tony would always be his priority.
“I don’t know, but it’s possible. Even if they didn’t, though, it’s only a matter of time before whatever crap they’re doing spills over to me and my family. It’s not worth it.”
“Very good, Sir.”
“Where’s Maria?”
“I convinced her to go upstairs and get some rest.”
Howard nodded. “Good. That’s good.”
“Perhaps you should go and join her, Sir. There’s nothing more we can do now. I’m sure the police is doing their best.”
It was on the tip of Howard’s tongue to argue, but… well, Jarvis was right. He had given the police all the information he had. Unless some new fact came to light, Howard had nothing with which to even begin to track Tony down. Maybe he could build some kind of tracker the kid could carry with him all the time; something discreet that potential kidnappers would overlook. It would made it easier to find Tony if he was ever kidnapped again.
“Sir?” Jarvis’s voice startled him, derailing the plans he was already making in his head. “You need to lay down and rest,” he pleaded. “I’ll wake you up in a couple of hours. Or if something happens.”
“Okay.” He wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep with this dread hanging over his head, though. Still, he went up to his bedroom, and was surprised to find Maria lying on his bed. For the past year, they had been keeping separate bedrooms.
He knew their marriage was on shaky terms at the moment, which was one of the reasons Maria had insisted on a vacation.
“Hey,” he said softly. She wasn’t sleeping, just staring off into space.
“We’re going to get him back, aren’t we?” she asked, a slight tremor in her voice. This was not the first time they had been through this, yet it never got better.
He wanted to tell her yes, of course. He wanted to believe that Tony would be fine, yet the words refused to come.
“Come here,” she said, and he did.
They didn’t talk anymore, because there wasn’t much to say, just clung to each other silently.
Please let him be okay.