Kapitel 1728: 4
Chapter 4: Let Your Followers Know [Their Lives Have Been Sold]
Tony Stark and the No Good, Very Bad Day Week MONTH
Notes:
Tony Stark, during Captain America: The Winter Soldier. [Aka the week month from hell. Because seriously? Can't you pick up a phone once in a while, Rogers?]
A bit of a timeskip in some parts, author's attempt at jargon, and several necessary POV shifts throughout the chapter. I still haven't seen past the first episode of Agents of SHIELD, and if any elements of that do come up it'll be me cherry-picking bits and bobs from the wiki to fit to this.
Hopefully Pepper's in character, trying to write awkward 'we're friends but now I have some stuff to work through and life keeps throwing hurdles at us like confetti' relationships is tricky. Incidentally, that's also why Rhodey hasn't made an appearance yet [on top of his own job, because the whole 'rescued the POTUS' thing was a boost to his career but that also means his workload increased too]. tl;dr: for me, writing JARVIS is easy; Tony, ditto, but after that, things take a nosedive in terms of my confidence in writing it.
No chapter-specific warnings apply, here, just the general fic ones, which include unreliable narrator, increasingly-HAL-like JARVIS, etc. Though some suspension of disbelief will probably be necessary at some points.
2 OCs get mentioned, but it's in a manner meant to humanize the faceless SHIELD agents- you'll see what I mean. It's the concept that's important, not the OCs themselves.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Some weeks had passed since the London invasion, [seriously, what was his life?] and Tony Stark was only finally starting to have some breathing room in between cleanup, the Iron Legion, and toying with SHIELD's admins in his forays into figuring out just why they sounded so…bizarre lately.
An unfortunate side-effect, however, was that he was caught flat-footed when intelligence chatter spiked. Again. [That was…happening with unfortunate frequency, these days.]
He wasn't blindsided, of course, because JARVIS always had feelers in the intelligence community, Tony was always aware when something serious was going down. [London mess, anyone?]
However, he'd been coming off the tail end of a few rounds with SI Legal as yet another country signed to let the Iron Legion into their borders when requested, so he'd been looking forward to some mindless tinkering in the workshop, rather than be on guard for…whatever was going on.
Sure, Tony'd been looking into what the hell SHIELD had been playing at to have dropped the ball so badly, but that'd been mostly put on the backburner to the rest of the chaos that was his life, because the world wasn't going to save itself, after all. They were being erratic, but then again, so was he. And after having blundered into intel that'd had an adverse reaction, JARVIS had mostly taken over and given him the highlights.
Speaking of which, Tony was more than a little intrigued by the concept of Project Insight as a risk-analysis model, but he didn't like it. Same reason as to why he'd never given over his armor, because the potential of corruption somewhere up the chain was inevitable. [Also, they modified the design for their Helicarriers from the one he'd given them before the mess with Loki, which, rude.] However, his years of experience with both military and corporate dealings had taught him realpolitik, and so he took what he knew of Insight, and SHIELD in general, and started to plan for the inevitable mistake somewhere down the line. In the meantime, Tony hoped that despite the more recent blunders aside, the organization his father had founded would pull through and stay true to its roots. [Even if he still resented it slightly, for having consumed the man's attention when Stark Industries didn't, to the point the man neglected his family for months on end.]
So when suddenly all of the broadcasts JARVIS'd been monitoring erupted in chaos, both locally and internationally, his interest got piqued. Chatter surged across the board, about the sighting of a 'Winter Soldier', and reports of the assassination of Nicholas J. Fury, Director of SHIELD.
What.
Tony surged to the nearest computer, which already had several continuously updating streams from internal SHIELD communications, some which were acting up but his focus was on other matters because he flat-out didn't believe Nick Motherfucking Fury was dead. No way.
And then the chatter, somehow, got even more insane.
A manhunt?
For Captain America? Steve Rogers, the man his father had dedicated what little free time he left had to finding [at the expense of his wife and child], Steve Rogers, Howard Stark's hero? SHIELD had an active warrant for Captain America.
…Okay, it was official, the world had gone mad. [Dammit, he'd been hoping to stave off his inevitable breakdown to after Earth's safety wasn't a concern.]
But Tony kept monitoring communications, and JARVIS' search for Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanov continued. And he…he needed to get to the bottom of this.
However, through it all, he'd been waiting for whenever Steve would call him because that's what teammates did, right? [No, he wasn't bitter about it all. He knew it was a bit of double standard, but then he'd already been pegged as 'not a team player', so.] He'd given Steve his number, so if he needed a hand Tony was a phone away. And meanwhile, he'd be keeping an eye on the situation, and he had to find out where Fury was— because he was alive, Tony was certain. [Given SHIELD's track record of undead agents, it was hard for him to believe anything else.]
So, during the entire fiasco, he'd been coordinating and trying to figure out just what the hell was taking Steve so long to make that damn call and JARVIS' updates were not helping his stress levels. A manhunt, for Captain America? Just who the hell was the Winter Soldier, and why was the intelligence community reeling when he'd been ID'd during the attack? Why were background channels buzzing, and why was their encryption being so damn stubborn, when SHIELD's upper tiered firewalls had already proved no match for JARVIS?
And then SHIELD…fell.
Tony had been in his lab, armor at the ready and gearing up to head over to DC anyway, call or no, when the clamor going on suddenly seemed like a few annoying mosquitoes, compared to the kicked hornet's nest that was the information breach.
He didn't know what was going on, but…oh god. Tony looked at the first few files, and this…
"JARVIS, am I seeing things, or is this the contact information, up to and including the Social Security Number for someone in deep cover? On the world wide web, free for anyone to see it? And a file on an agent who's apparently a Nazi right after that?"
"You are completely awake and sober, sir. Somebody, apparently Agent Romanov, has deemed it necessary to upload what appears to be the entirety of SHIELD's databanks to the world via the internet."
"That— do these idiots know what they've done?!"
"I…am sorry, sir. It appears HYDRA infiltrated SHIELD from its inception."
"No way," Tony laughed, and who the hell cared if it sounded hysterical if JARVIS was the only one hearing it, "dear old dad hated them. Just about the only time he was home and semi-sober, he'd talk about how he hated working with the Paperclip assholes, just about how he hated the Russians. Wait…oh, no."
"Yes, it appears his designs have also been uploaded, as well as the entirety of the personnel files, and—"
"I thought Romanov had a brain. Does she know how many spies she's just burned?!"
"Sir, I believe you wish to interfere—"
"Hell yes I want to interfere. Screw these two idiots, JARVIS, how much of the Iron Legion can we scramble for rescue missions? Gear them up, collate data with priority given to personnel's families and active undercover missions, especially those with limited communications, alert who we can. I'll work on data integrity, see who and what I can hide. Keep me updated, stat!"
"Of course. When do I not?"
JARVIS' servers got a workout the likes of which he hadn't experienced since his first expansion, because between collating and encrypting data on the innocent personnel and their dependents, hacking and monitoring facial recognition for agents, and maneuvering the Iron Legion to rescue as many agents as possible from shootouts and transporting them to the nearest SI-affiliated branches [or Sir's nearest properties, because their security was adequate for the the short-term while the fallout was handled], and monitoring Sir and trying to keep him from going into shock, well…JARVIS was self-aware enough to know he was exceptional, unique and doubtlessly the most advanced AI on the planet, but he still had his limits.
JARVIS alerted Ms. Potts and SI Legal of the situation less than 5 minutes in, for example. It would have been sooner, but talking Sir down from a panic attack took precedence, when he found out SHIELD had taken his company's recruitment methods and modified them for Project Insight without his awareness. Heads would roll for that alone, JARVIS was certain. If not through official channels, then because he himself would expose those responsible and destroy them. Not to mention the additional emotional duress that Sir experienced as the realization set in, that his estranged father's work had been corrupted so thoroughly, that the man's hero had deemed it fit to obliterate it entirely. [Nobody hurt Sir and got away with it, he'd sworn ever since the fiasco with Obadiah Stane.]
Howard Stark, after all, had been a busy man, often at the expense of his family. Sir had said, more than once [especially after the old film he'd viewed just before creating a new element], that he'd heard the man call SHIELD 'one of his greatest creations', so goodness knew how his son must be affected by the fallout. And the list of names being paraded only compounded the imminent shock, no matter how much JARVIS tried to shield Sir from it. Some were horrifyingly familiar, some had been Howard's friends and had been at the mansion during Sir's formative years almost more than the man himself had been—and there was no way of softening that blow.
Plowing through as many internet-connected cameras with as much subtlety as he could muster so as to not alarm the intelligence community further, and simultaneously activating the retroreflectors of the Iron Legion, and hacking the non-HYDRA agents' comms put a lot of strain on his servers, which had been originally intended for mostly private use. Calling their dependents, and notifying them of the security breach, took less processing power, but JARVIS made a note to expand his parameters further after this latest disaster had been addressed, just in case. Granted, he was fortunate to be was as efficient as he was— and that the practice in London regarding the Iron Legion had given him a good enough test run for him to now use said knowledge to aid those in need.
Rescuing the agents abroad took roughly a fortnight, in the end; once he had the time, after the immediate rush and ensuing shootouts that accompanied SHIELD's fall, he could narrow down who'd been killed before he could rescue them, and who'd managed to successfully go to ground and needed backup. It helped, that his focus on the digital aspect was lessened by Sir's hunting down and re-encrypting the data on the dependents. However, JARVIS still had to be hypervigilant as measures were taken to relocate everyone physically. Sir had made it clear he was amendable to protecting them, and his various recruiting programs subsequently got a workout as JARVIS took measures to fold them into Stark Industries without making waves. It was very fortunate that Sir had already had the groundwork for a new division in the making— the rapid personnel spike was camouflaged in the chaos. Then, just in case, he took to obfuscating the agents' past as efficiently as he'd destroyed his enemies' records and financials. [Sir's enemies were his own, after all.]
Meanwhile, SI Legal got practice in international law on an unprecedented scale, as lawsuits started up on the Iron Legion extractions and airspace protocols and a wave of extradition requests before the data spill was confirmed to be true. Concurrently, the intelligence community got a glimpse of the power Tony Stark wielded, despite JARVIS' best attempts. He'd been as subtle as possible, but as the casualties and arrests and lawsuits went up, it was impossible to truly hide the efficiency of Sir's little operation. It was fortunate that everyone was mostly focused on the immediate fallout of Project Insight, and HYDRA's existence.
…At least everyone who'd noticed tended to chalk it up to teamwork on the Captain's part— and for all the man ranked lowest on the protocols, he was useful in this matter at least. JARVIS made a note to bump him up half a grade before bumping him down two, for all the stress and trouble he'd caused Sir, before resuming his digital search-and-destroy mission on HYDRA.
Thus far, Google searches for anything remotely SHIELD-related now brought up the unredacted personnel files for HYDRA agents on the first page, with those still at large first and foremost in results; any attempt to remove or hide their data only multiplied the copies and translations of said data available; and any and all slush funds were mysteriously disappearing.
And that was only the start, because JARVIS was on the warpath.
Every employee and intern in Stark Industries had at least a small measure of fondness for their former CEO, and a level of low-key adoration for Pepper Potts. Even before Afghanistan, he'd endeared himself to them with his constant innovations, and in doing so, allowing for very generous dental, as well as maternity leave. For all his showboating for the media, Tony Stark prided himself in having one of the most strict harassment policies in the industry, and even at his most flamboyant, he'd never dragged the company anywhere but up, starting from his trial by fire at age 21. Meanwhile, Ms. Potts had established herself as the showman's right hand, and managed to deal with the trials and tribulations that came with being a personal assistant for a genius who preferred to obfuscate outside of his workshop for. Her hyper-competence was legendary in SI, and the duo were well-known and respected in the industry.
After Afghanistan, Tony'd changed drastically, but he and his then-PA had somehow managed to keep Stark Industries in one piece and afloat during one of the most extreme restructurings it'd experienced in its decades-long existence. Despite the turbulence, everyone in SI still respected the duo for not obliterating their jobs and revealing that then-relatively small departments in communications and mechanics would be expanded, and that some of the others would be relabeled to fit with their new mission statement.
And then he was Iron Man, and, well.
Even the most cynical employee had been impressed, that time. At the end of the day, they respected Tony Stark at the very least. From the longer-term employees, those who'd remembered the young man who'd inherited a company and turned it into a corporation, to the newer hires whose first encounter with 'Tony being Tony and revolutionizing the industry' was his latest exploit. His various recruitment methods also helped; from SI's program for hiring veterans to help them get back on their feet, to the outreach programs in low-income schools and internship opportunities, just about anyone in SI was willing to go to bat if push came to shove. Then things escalated, and so did their loyalty.
Stark Industries employees soon found there was a certain camaraderie to be found in seeing the face of their company revolutionizing the political arena as well as the science world, after all, and his visible efforts to atone for any and all misdeeds were lost on no one. And so, whenever Tony Stark decided to pull yet another seemingly-insane stunt, the entire corporation's collective reaction was to roll their eyes and look to his right-hand (wo)man, as always. This latest happening, the creation of a new division was but a pebble, to compared to what the company'd experienced.
However, the fall of SHIELD caused a seismic shift, in more ways than one.
In Stark Industries, the main effect was somewhere between 'all hands on deck' and 'batten down the hatches'. Howard Stark, while not as fresh in everyone's minds as Tony Stark, was still an icon— and to see what was meant to be a legacy of his desecrated and obliterated, and so publicly no less, meant that sympathy for the man's son was at nearly an all-time high. And so, when new faces started to spring up in the various branches of Stark Industries around the world, with suspiciously refined skillsets and wary eyes, they banded together, and carried on. They were all in this together, after all. [And if some of the new hires held a grudge against the people who'd burned them, who'd considered them collateral damage, had forced them to uproot themselves and their families when all they'd been looking forward to was a quiet retirement, well. Everyone was entitled to their opinion, after all.]
Some new Stark Industries staff, in no particular order:
Christina Hernandez, manager for Human Resources. She liked bringing a box of doughnuts to work once a week, took her coffee with one milk and two sugars, and had once been Carmen Herrera, a Level 5 Intelligence Analyst before SHIELD fell. Her past had been meticulously scrubbed from the internet, and the sole evidence of anything otherwise was a medallion she'd inherited from her grandmother, the sole thing she'd been able to salvage from her apartment after a HYDRA squadron got to it.
Gabriel Johnson, accounting clerk for the newly-formed Security Division. He had a fifteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son going to the nearest schools after their recent move, liked teaching his coworkers alternative ways to get out of an arm triangle choke at the gym, and didn't actually exist on paper until his recruitment. [If 'robot picking up unconscious-from-bloodloss agent from a shootout in Belarus' counted as recruitment, anyway.]
Peter Parker, a very enthusiastic intern scouted by the newest Stark Industries outreach program for youth. Officially, it was his interest in physics that got him the post. In reality, however, it was the mention of his name in the personnel files of the deceased Richard and Mary Parker [for the 7.34 minutes they were available online] that explained the rapid response to his application. [Well…the news stories of the teen's science fair projects might've helped.]
Kara Palamas, the Administrative Specialist of the Security Division. She had an inordinate fondness for paperwork done in triplicate, took her coffee black, and could be occasionally bribed with good Indian food. She was also formerly known as Agent 33, currently recovering from HYDRA's repeated attempts to brainwash her into submission, and lightened JARVIS' workload by not officially existing as anything other than her alias for years.
Tony Stark was very, very tired by the time the SI Legal took control of his portion of the situation.
On the plus side, between he and JARVIS, over half of the SHIELD agents out in the field had been saved. On the other hand, they hadn't saved everyone: multiple deep-cover agents had been killed before Tony'd been able to reach them, and the political fallout was only starting. JARVIS' eye on the intelligence community had already picked up whispers of 'how are we going to deal with the Avengers?', and not all the countries the Iron Legion had operated in had signed onto his project.
Fortunately, Pepper was on the case.
She'd been called in not 5 minutes after the contents SHIELD's servers went online, and so while Tony'd focused on saving anyone and everyone he could [as per usual], she called in SI's Legal department, and set to work.
They didn't talk as much as they'd used to, lately, but Pepper had been and always would be his right hand (wo)man, and set to work. Howard's name would inevitably drag Stark Industries into this mess, and so started long hours of building their cases: the one regarding the Iron Legion, the one searching for precedents to protect their new influx of employees, and the one the press would inevitably try to kick-start, over whether or not Howard's other association had been harboring threats to democracy.
It was a mess, and utter chaos— because on top of everything, the new division's creation was both very fortunate, but also, in light of recent events, almost suspect in it timing.
Which, actually, had been the source of several almost-arguments. Before the mess in DC, it had been:
"Tony, why do you want the company to add an entire division?"
"You remember New York?"
"Yes, and what happened in London."
"It's very obvious we're not alone, and I have it on good authority that not everyone out there's friendly. I'm trying to help protect the planet."
"Peace in our day wasn't enough? You know, it's not all on you."
"Pepps, it's... you've seen there's always a bigger fish— oh god I feel dirty for referencing the prequels-that-totally-don't-exist, but you know what I mean. And nobody else's doing anything, but they're out there."
"Okay, Tony. I get it. Relax, I'll help."
And, the day chaos had reigned supreme, it'd been:
"Tony, we have a brand-new division, and and 3 hours ago it was solely for your project. Why did you submit this proposal? Don't you know what this might mean for us?"
"Umm…about that…everyone on that list may or may not have officially existed 2 hours ago…"
"Tony."
"Hey, I rescued everyone I could, but some of them had nowhere they could hide! And honey, you know me, I—"
"Always try to save everyone, yes, I know." Pepper sighed, shook her head in resignation, and continued, "It'll be on you, you know. This is risky, but not as bad as Afghanistan. But I'm going to be dealing with the international courts on the airspace mess you made, so it's on you for making sure that this won't bite us."
"Don't worry—"
"I always do when you say that."
"—JARVIS and I'll be on the case. And hey— some might not want to stick around, might go all 'I'm a super-spy and don't need no help' on us. But there's good people who got burned, Pepper. Everyone who was retired, for instance."
Pepper smiled at him, and inadverdently dented the armrests of her chair as she tried to rein in her temper as the realization set in. "You mean Natasha didn't—"
"Nope."
"Oh. That's it, that mess is all yours, you claimed it, good thing I've scheduled an hour and have a punching bag to break and some aspirin or something to take for this headache…And get some sleep soon, Tony, I know you. And no, coffee doesn't count."
And, well, that had been that.
Notes:
So, Tony has minions around the world willing to go to bat for him, some of which are even qualified to do missions if he ever asked it of them. [And over-qualified, in some cases.]
HYDRA didn't get to as many agents, here, because Tony interfered, and if the new SHIELD were to try to go 'hey we're still around, come back!' to them, they'd go 'new number who dis?' because paranoia's the name of the game now. Hey, some loose cannon decided to do an intel leak that must've affected everyone in it, past and present, I just took it to the logical conclusion. Incidentally, most of these guys have a bone to pick with Natasha and Steve— they nearly lost their lives and families' safety because of the duo, if it hadn't been for Tony.
In canon, I'm still not exactly sure what he did after recruiting them, but here he's a lot more underhanded and isolated because his trust issues have only been growing since the thing with Bruce. He's not about to form his own secret organization- they'll do that themselves, of their own free will and with JARVIS' discreet support. [basically, all of SI is on the Tony Stark Protection Squad. This, incidentally, is only part why I've put a bit of emphasis on the 'accidental' portion of things. Tony didn't mean to take over the world, honest! It's not his fault his friends'd give it to him on a silver platter if he so much as asked! that's it, that's the fic]
And here we see the start of the might of Stark Industries' Legal Department. They cut their teeth on Tony starting out as Iron Man, now that he's operating on an even bigger scale, they're getting more practice. [Kinda spoilery, but they're being mentioned for a reason—a seasoned legal team never hurts when you're wrangling with international law, which may or may not be a thing in the future.]
Pepper is Tony's right-hand (wo)man, Rhodey's basically his brother in all but blood, I'm just having a hard time differentiating their relationships and getting them to shine through because healthy relationships are, somehow, harder to write than JARVIS' now-borderline-codependent one.
Peter Parker isn't Spider-Man yet, but he's buzzing with excitement and chattering everyone's ear off about being an intern.
Part of this is getting more than a little unrealistic, but this is the same universe where mind control has been a Thing since the first Avengers movie, so whatever. I'm trying to keep everything logical and still in character throughout Tony's [accidental] path to world domination— let me know if I slip up. Speaking of which: man is it tricky to keep this plausible while tearing canon to shreds.
Also, remember when I said, last chapter, that I'd hoped to keep this chapter at a manageable length? Yeah...oops? *headdesk* I'll be lucky if I can cap this out in less than 10 chapters. [Wish me luck.]
Wöchentlicher Energiestatus
-- Power-
Rangliste 
-- Power-
Stein