Kidnapped Howard AU
Opportunistic Assholes: HYDRA
In 1958, Howard Stark was declared dead on arrival due to severe burns caused by a house fire in his New York residence. It hit the newspapers, the radio, everywhere within days, and there were a lot of people who mourned the man in the years that followed. There were, of course, those who were vindictively happy as well, but those people were another matter.
All of this, of course, was unfortunate, but ultimately not that big of a problem in the greater scheme of things if not for one little problem. Howard Stark wasn’t dead. In fact, the body that arrived at the hospital wasn’t even his, though he was injured in that same fire. HYDRA, however, carefully covered it up, taking advantage of Peggy Carter visiting her mother back in England in the woman’s twilight years.
It was a lapse that would cost the world, and because of his value with his abilities and knowledge intact, it took a handful of years, not to mention considerable applications of specific drugs and conditioning, to bring Howard Stark around enough it was safe to actually let him do anything. It was only after this period that they set him loose on the serum project with all the tools toward that end at his disposal, giving him full access to what he needed to get a loose replication. There was a lot of thinking it was a victory when it seemed to work on Howard.
At least, right up until their control got shaky again but a handful of years later because of it, and the man ‘accidentally’ burned his notes during one of his bouts of displeasure with the company he was keeping. It was after this that the woman who would become Howard’s wife and the mother of his child was brought around as one of several educated combat agents who was to keep an eye on him after that. She was pretty, smart, and had a sharp sense of humor. Her name was Dottie Underwood, in some circles.
She also knew how to play a man, and used that to her advantage to woo Howard and get him back under control. Only after that additional control was finally in place was he put in contact with the Winter Soldier for the first time, to let him take over for the aging physician who had control before. Of course, this move meant being removed from the United States facilities entirely to Russia, and given the Cold War still in effect, this was no small feat.
Still, this was the circumstance Tony was born into when he finally came along. More specifically, that Anton Eduard Stark was born to. A compound in Russia, a serum modified father who didn’t seem to age anymore, a mother who was keeping his father under a tight least using every tool at her disposal, and the Winter Soldier not all that far away.
He was three the first time he remembered meeting the Soldier, having been declared intelligent and careful enough that he wouldn’t get in the way while his father was working or touch anything he shouldn’t. Nobody accounted for the child actually deciding he liked the Soldier and climbing up to curl into the bewildered man’s lap to take a nap while his arm was being fussed with.
When he’s older, he suspects that the move probably freaked out the agents more than his father, but from that day forward, Tony had no particular caution when he was allowed around the man, asking him questions, leaning on him, and even a few times hiding behind him when new unsettling people came around. After a time, it just became an accepted fact of life, and little traditions like the boy offering the man food treats after he’d been wiped and given orders, or being the first to offer his hand for human contact became the norm.
By the time he was six he was aware of the fact that the man wouldn’t remember him when he was worked on, but he never hurt him even when he didn’t know who he was, so it was ultimately fine. By the time he was ten, he knew all the triggers and had gotten a good long look at the book that had everything about his project and code words, memorizing it because the information seemed useful. He also by then had a very thorough knowledge about how everything concerning the Soldier worked, from biology, to his arm, to his chair.
He’d asked, more than once, about that chair, about why it had to be done that way. The answers he’d gotten had only made him admire the Winter Soldier more that he was such a Patriot that he’d go that far to be the best soldier he could be. That didn’t mean he didn’t think it sucked, because it totally sucked, a lot, and he never liked being in the room when it happened.
He was twelve when his mom was killed on one of her missions and never came back to the compound where Tony had spent his life learning and rattling around agents, and scientists as the lone child in the area.
He was thirteen when his dad shoved him into the Winter Soldier’s arms and told them to leave, to go as far as they could and not come back. He was thirteen the last time he ever saw his dad like that, and saw the regret on the man’s face as he looked from one of them to the other before he started opening the way for them to go.
He was thirteen the first time he ever saw the sky in person, and it freaked him out, but it was also beautiful, the reds and oranges of dawn the first thing to meet his gaze even as he clung to the Soldier’s arm and did his level best to keep up with the man’s pace. It wasn’t long before the man decided he wasn’t quick enough and picked him up, but all that did was let Tony know that everything about this situation was really really wrong, because they were being chased.
And his dad nowhere to be seen.
From there, one young Tony Stark, raised by HYDRA with Russian as his primary language since English was less commonly spoken, started the most complicated game of hide and seek of his life with the Winter Soldier as the only person on his team.
Next time there was a shift in the players, it was when they were tracked down by Kondot'yer, the Soldier of Fortune, who had been used as recompense for the act of releasing both the Winter Soldier and his son to the world. Howard Stark, after all, by then had the serum too, so someone had to take up the slack.
Suffice to say that fixing that was a whole other nightmare for them to tackle.