Chapter 2
Tony Stark is many things. Genius (obviously), inventor, billionaire, not to mention the guy who makes a profit off world peace. Oh, also he’s Iron Man, de-facto leader of the Avengers while Steve figures out the situation with his long-haired brainwashed dead but not dead friend who tried to kill him, and incredibly good looking. What Tony is not, however, is good at comforting people.
It had been a normal enough morning for him.
He woke up with a hangover on his floor of StarkTower, listened to his wife complain about his drinking habits while she shoved slightly burnt toast in his face, muttering something about having to fly to Japan.
Hangover aside, he truly does love Pepper. Enough that he woke up at an ungodly hour to walk her down to her waiting car to take her to the airport. She kissed him farewell and left, leaving Tony feeling slightly less hungover than before but as equally tired.
He decides to cut through the lobby of the building. He and the other members of the Avengers preferred to use a side entrance, a little more private and out of the public eye. But hey, what’s the point of owning the entire building if it means he can’t walk through the lobby occasionally. Besides, it being so stupidly early means there’s only a few people around. Tours don’t start until ten in the morning, and most employees don’t even start until nine.
Tony is walks through the lobby, almost to the elevator when he hears a commotion coming from the front doors. He turns around. A pretty-looking blonde woman with the biggest grey eyes he’s ever seen is screaming bloody murder. Tony’s heart rate goes up slightly. If there’s another he is, it’s overly paranoid about someone screaming in his lobby.
As most people should be.
He walks over just in time to see the woman vomit onto the floor. He crinkles his nose. He is thinking she must be a random drunk coming in off the street from a night of partying too hard, but his eyes glance over the shiny StarkLabs ID badge around her neck, dipping into the vomit slightly. Okay, one of his employees screaming bloody murder.
Speaking of blood.
He gets closer, seeing blood pooling onto the floor from the back of her head. She looks absolutely terrified. Once again, Tony isn’t that great at this sort of thing, but he’s got to calm her down before something else happens.
There’s a uniformed security guard next to her, talking on the radio to someone. Tony ignores him in favor of placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder. It takes almost thirty seconds before the woman quiets her screaming enough to look up at Tony.
“Who are you,” he says, not unkindly “And why are you bleeding in my lobby?”
The woman takes deep, frantic breaths in an attempt to calm herself down. She must clear her throat a few times.
“Go get her some water. And some paper towels, too.” Tony tells the security guard. The man nods and leaves the woman with Tony. For once, Tony is glad it’s so early in the morning. He can only imagine the kind of panic this would have brought if this lady had come into the lobby during the lunch hour.
The aforementioned woman takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“Dr. Gwen Stacy, R&D.” she manages to get out. She picks up her badge to show Tony, who nods at it, not really trying to hold it. You know, vomit and blood and all. She lets it drop back down. Her left pupil is larger than her right, he notices. If there’s one thing Tony knows from his years as Iron Man, it’s the signs of a concussion.
“They stole-, I mean they were,” she takes a deep, shaking breath. Tony frowns. Did she get mugged outside the tower?
The security guard comes back with a bottle of water and stack of paper napkins. It must have been the only thing he could find. Tony opens the bottle of water and passes it to Dr. Stacy’s trembling hands. Tony folds the napkins in half to form a pseudo-type of gauze pad. The scientist puts the water bottle down after taking a sip. Tony passes the napkins to her, and she places them on the back of her head. She hisses slightly at the sudden pressure.
“Try again.” Tony says.
“I’m doing research on an atomic-level tracing and monitoring device. It was almost enough to develop a proposal but-,” she adjusts the napkins on her head, trying to get a better grip “We decided that it was too risky to develop fully. Someone found out-,”
“We?” Tony interrupts. He scans the lobby. Nope, there’s only one bleeding scientist in his lobby.
“Peter Parker, sir. He’s an intern who was helping me out.”
Tony frowns. He’s not the most hands-on boss when it come to StarkLabs, but he does know a thing or too about the hiring on interns. They were important people after all, investments in the future of the company. He personally looked over their resumes. If he was going to pay for their education, he needed to make sure they were the right kind of people. More importantly, he knew the last R&D intern had graduated, did his contract time and was now working under Reed Richards doing research on the Negative Zone.
“We don’t have any R&D interns.”
Dr. Stacy swallows nervously.
“Ah, he’s actually, uh, he delivers mail.”
Tony’s eyes feel like they’re about to pop out his head.
“You’re telling me you let the kid who delivers the mail in the office work on a potentially dangerous project that resulted in you getting bonked over the head?”
Dr. Stacey looks like kid who’s been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. She clears her throat awkwardly.
“He’s really smart? He doesn’t have a great, um, home life.”
Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. “We will be discussing this with human resources later. What’s your point?”
Dr. Stacey takes the olive branch and continues with her story.
“Yesterday we were both offered a substantial job opportunity at Oscorp. I told them I’d think about it, but Peter called me and said that they mentioned the project by name and threatened him when he declined.”
Stark’s head was spinning, the gears moving so fast he swore he smelled smoke. He knew Norman Osborn a little too intimately through their business connections. He’d rather go toe-to-toe with a starving lion than have any more interactions than he had to with that slimeball.
“We got spooked and destroyed the research last night. We thought that was it, but then we got attacked a block from here just a few minutes ago.”
“Where’s the kid?” Tony asks. Gwen gives a shiver, tears threating to form in the corner of her eyes and spill onto the already ruined tile of the lobby.
“I don’t know. They hit me over the head. Peter was screaming for me to run, and he got hit from behind-,” her voice starts to waiver, and a horrible sound chokes in her throat.
“Go do a check around the building,” he tells the security guard. “Make sure there’s no suspicious characters roaming around.” The security guard nods and jogs off.
He looks at Dr. Stacy, who is now sitting on her knees.
“Can you stand?”
She gives a weak nod, but Tony puts his hands under her arms anyway and helps her stand up. She’s leans on him slightly as he leads her to the elevator.
“FRIDAY, call Helen Cho to the med bay.” He says to the air.
Gwen’s eyes widen. She had heard about Tony Stark’s personal AI system, but she hadn’t even so much as been in the room with the guy before. A tinny woman’s voice comes through the speakers.
“Helen Cho has been informed, Boss.”
“What street were you on?’ he asks Gwen as the doors open. They’ve reached the medbay in what feels like record time. Tony helps Gwen to a chair to wait for Dr. Cho.
“The alley on third and main.”
Tony pulls his phone out of his pocket just as the elevator opens with a ‘ding’ behind them. He passes a glance over his shoulder. It’s Helen Cho. She’s lacking her normal shift-style smock she wears most days. Instead, she’s wearing an old t-shirt and a worn pair of jeans. She’s got a pair of glasses on, which Tony didn’t even know she needed.
She’s blinking sleep out of her eyes as she looks at the scene; Gwen sitting on the chair, blood drying on the back of her head and a stack of napkins pressed to her skull.
“What’s happened?” she asks.
“Goldie here got hit on the head,” Tony says casually, turning his attention back to his phone.
Gwen scowls from her seat. “Gwen.” She mutters. “I think it was the end of a gun. Maybe ten minutes ago, max.”
“She’s got a concussion.” Tony adds helpfully. Helen sighs, probably having been expecting a life-or-death situation and not a concussed scientist.
“Let us check you out.” She tells Gwen. She places a firm hand on the woman’s shoulder and helps her stand, leading her toward the med bay doors and out of Tony’s line of sight. Not that he was paying attention anymore. Again, not good at comforting people. But hacking into surveillance cameras? That he could do.
He pulls it up on his phone, flips it over and projects a single framed grainy video in front of him. He scrolls back around ten minutes ago and hits play.
There’s no sound and the quality is fuzzy at best. He can make out Gwen and the kid walking down the alley when a hazy figure steps up behind them and hits Gwen over the head with the end of what looks like a gun. The woman drops to the floor, dazed. The kid barely has enough time to turn around when someone appears behind him and wraps their arms around him.
Tony will give credit where credit is due, the kid is a fighter. He trashes in the grip so hard he’s making the other man sway to keep his grip tight. The man in black puts a hand over the kid’s face, but he keeps thrashing, leaning back until the man lifts him off the ground. The man yanks his hand away from the kid’s face, he must have bitten him or something. He’s causing such a ruckus, the man who clocked Gwen over the head runs up and lands a solid right hook across the kid’s jaw. It clearly dazes him, but he keeps fighting. His shoe flies off his feet and hits the guy who punched him square face.
The attackers are busy with the kid, so busy they don’t notice Gwen getting her bearings and starting to crawl to the street toward safety. The kid, meanwhile, get another hard sock across the face from the guy who got hit with the shoe. This time it does the job, and the kid goes limp, heading rolling down to his chest.
The attackers notice that Gwen is gone. One of them starts for the street but changes his mind at the last second and goes back to where his colleague is holding the kid tight against his chest. They spear to speak to one another. The first guy pulls a phone out of his pocket, talking to someone. The guy holding the kid slings him over his shoulder like he’s a sack of potatoes. They head in the opposite direction of the street that Gwen escaped by.
“FRIDAY is there footage on the other side of the alley?” he asks into the air.
“Sorry Boss,” the AI says, sounding almost apologetic. “That’s the only security camera in the alley and leading up to the other side of the street.”
“Damn it.” Tony utters. There’s no telling how they managed to get the kid out of there. His best guess is by a car or van, but there are literally hundred of thousands of vehicles in New York City. Without any clear idea of make or model type, it’s a dead end.
Things are very clearly not good. Tony thinks for a half second about reporting this to the police, but he decides against it. It’s his employee who’s sitting in the med bay and it’s their research that led to it. He makes a mental note to talk to Dr. Stacy about what exactly they were working on when Helen was finished with her. Gwen had mentioned a job offer from Oscorp, and Tony was willing to bet his arc reactor that it wasn’t a coincidence that just the morning after both employees rejected the offer that they were attacked.
“FRIDAY, do me a favor and turn the coffee pot on,” Tony says. “And call Norman Osborn’s secretary. I need to set up a meeting.”
“On it, Boss.”