Kidnapped Tony AU
So it really did end up worse.
Tony’s life was on the right track for a long time. Things were normal for him, even if not always happy. His parents died, he took over the company, and he made good contacts in the military.
Then he turned twenty-four and went to one too many parties. He was drugged, a contact based toxin that knocked him out almost immediately.
Tony Stark was never seen in public ever again.
He was declared dead a year after his abduction in Europe, even though no trace of a body was found. Obadiah Stane pushed for the motion after four months, and the remaining time was needed to process all paperwork and leave the option for Tony to show back up. He, of course, did not, nor did any evidence of life. Thus, by twenty-five, the man named Tony Stark no longer existed to the public at all, mourned as a man who died far too soon at the height of his potential.
But that didn’t mean he was dead.
Most of that first year is a total haze to him, lost to drugs and horror that numbed him to everything going on, but after that, something changed in their approach, and the experiments started. And then they didn’t stop.
By the time he escaped late into his thirties, he didn’t look like he’d really aged at all, his skin had the faint glimmer of metal when sunlight hit his skin where the veins showed, and he’d picked up a couple of languages he hadn’t known going in.
He was still sharp, and smart, and so very clever.
The wonder of knowing something just to know it had been ripped out of him though. The joy of science was so many ashes in his fingers because of over a decade of self-sabotage and refusal to obediently lend his mind to the cause unless his own life was on the line.
Sometimes even when it was.
He knew he was different than when he’d gone in, and that he probably had nowhere to go. Time was broken in there, twisted up and hard to follow in a straight line between procedures, but he knew it was long enough that anything that had once been his was probably long out of reach. It made the world a strange, hostile place when he emerged somewhere in fucking Asia.
It made for a quick and dirty acquisition of a few languages as he kept on the move, handily fucking up anyone who found him from the people who made up his pursuit, all the while trying to figure out how to block or break down the signal of the nanites that probably made up more of his insides than his insides did these days.
But really, he had no idea what to do with himself from there. The world, after all, was a very different place without Tony Stark having been in it.
Anyone who picks this up is welcome to use or designate the unnamed group (it can be HYDRA, AIM, something else entirely, whatever works for you) or have SHIELD come a calling because they located him, or anyone else really.
He’ll keep on the move, and his escape is set around late 2006/early 2007, so anytime after that works for interacting with storline in whatever country you find him in. He starts off in Mongolia.
Due to the physical tampering, in direct light his skin tends to glimmer due to the high concentration of metal in his blood, and he doesn’t look like he’s aged much past the time he went missing.