The Basic AU
In which Tony is slightly less rich.
The thing about being Tony Stark is that Tony will always be smart. He’ll always be the kind of guy who likes to work with his hands.
It just happens in a world where the super soldier sort of situation just didn’t exist that Tony grew up with parents that were a little less focused on trying to meet that kind of standard. It meant that Howard was around a little more, taught Tony a bit more about how to build and a little less about business, and that his mom kept him home a little longer.
They were still a well-off family, it was true, but there was a bit less oomph to it, a little less that screamed ‘I’m into things that will fuck over your life’ and a little more just being successful. His parents were younger when they had him, and that helped too. Sort of. It meant that they had a little more energy to deal with the wild child he was due to boredom.
It all resulted in him going to schools closer to home, mostly, and him heading to college at 16 instead of 15, with much more frequent voyages back to see the parents. He was nineteen when he graduated, needing less to prove himself at breakneck speed and more taking the time to actually soak in the college atmosphere.
By the time he was twenty-two, he’d set up his garage, using the money his parents gave him to do it and not too proud to admit that it might have fallen on its face without that. Getting customers for a new business, he’d quickly found, was actually tricky.
He looked into other things too, of course, he knew he had a windfall of epic proportions coming his way eventually, but he wanted to live his life this way, working with his hands, taking care of peoples’ cars and tinkering with interesting projects like AI tech. He was twenty-six by the time JARVIS, a much smaller, but no less amazing for it, project was realized, confined to his home computer network at first until he sorted out all the bits and bobs that would let the program have something a little more free-will.
He kept it a secret though, on the down low with his other tinker projects, because frankly, he wasn’t sure the world would be cool with something like that, rich parents or not. He never mentioned he came from money to people, and honestly, he liked it that way. People never tried to get close to him for his parents’ money like they had when he was a kid, and his reputation was entirely his own in business circles. He had staff who worked at his garage when he was busy, and who were continually amazed by the things he came up with and showed off that he never tried to sell to a market.
No matter the advice he sometimes got about that.
And then came the car accident, just shy of his thirtieth birthday. The worst part was that he wasn’t even in a car. He was walking to work, the same path that he’d used since he’d bought the two properties. One his nice house, and the other several blocks away being his nice garage. The driver hadn’t seen him, and he’d been hit hard enough by the truck that the next thing he remembered was the doctors telling him that his motor functions and muscle strength in his chest and arms would never be good enough for him to get back to work.
Tony, of course, had told them fuck you very much, used some of the money his parents continually set aside from him even as they, in their old age, had run off to warmer climes, and found the best physio clinic he could locate and went there.
He made friends, met amazing people who were worse off than him, missing limbs, paralyzed, horrible things, and used that to remind himself that it could have been worse. It took nearly three years for him to do more than oversee in his shop again, but he was incredibly proud of the day he could finally fix a car on his own again.
From there, well, Tony just started to pay a bit more attention and maybe never walked to work again. His motorcycle had never seen so much use as it had after he was finally back home to stay.
And if he maybe started to market some of his trinkets after that, well, fair was fair. He wasn’t going to die and not share them with the damn world. That was just stupid.