Heroic Histrionics

Yes, I have one of these. I’ve had one of these for months but I never got around to slapping down an AU post about it. Clearly, today is that day. I’m feeling the AU vibe.

Tony Stark was not born on Earth. No, he was created on Gallifrey as a she and swiftly abandoned her name for the title of The Mechanic after growing up on stories of the Doctor during the war, which was the only thing she’d ever known of the world. It didn’t exactly endear her to what she was being taught, and the fact that her teachers were constantly trying to curb her back toward studies that would benefit the war didn’t help either. She wanted to explore the universe, and travel, and do things that weren’t staying on the planet to constantly fight and possibly die over and over again for a war that had begun long before she’d ever existed.

So, she waited, patient as she all the knowledge of the greater universe as she could under the increasingly sharp eye being kept on her because of how much she exhausted her teachers by her drive to learn things that were not currently useful to be learned. Ultimately, it was a slip in this attention that led to her bolting the moment she was left unattended long enough at age 87, not quite even considered an adult at all, with one of the war TARDISes and fled to the Earth that tended to feature often in any stories she’d ever heard about the Doctor.

She’d be safe there, if only because of the Time Lord’s perseverance in keeping the planet intact. Of course, she couldn’t stay what she was, but she’d known that, planned for that, and spent time studying her options.

It led her to the Starks, ultimately, and she used herself as an intermediary of sorts to set up several things for a swift adoption, taking care that they would treat a child brought into their care as their own. From there, she almost entirely took apart her TARDIS, tucking pieces here and there, carefully hidden and protected, undetectable, with the chameleon arch being the last thing to go.

She triggered off her first regeneration before using it, focusing hard on the Stark couple, on how to be convincing as theirs so no one ever questioned it, not even her, and how to get as much distance from her current self as possible to better hide.

This was how Tony Stark was created as a four-year-old, holding a watch that turned into the lone bit of superstition he ever seemed to believe in as he wandered memoryless straight into the arms of the adults that had been waiting for the child that they had been told would be meeting them there. The Starks hadn’t anticipated, in spite of the young woman’s assurances, that the child would look enough like them to be convincing, and even blood tests proved that they were the parents.

In the years that followed, the watch became Tony’s ever-present charm, supposedly filled with luck that opening it would lose, and it was something rarely seen or known about because as he grew up it just existed in his radius, important but not important enough. His parents didn’t tell him how they came to have him, because he clearly didn’t know, didn’t remember what brought him to them, and they were just happy to finally manage to have a child when it came down to it.

Maria had been declared unable over a decade previous, so ultimately, he’d been a blessing to the couple. They’d planned to tell him of his adopted status after he was old enough, but they died before that time ever came, leaving him in the dark about his heritage. Especially given that no amount of bloodwork would ever prove he was anything but theirs.

That didn’t mean some things didn’t shine through, of course, and Tony completely without thought ended up storing most of the consciousness of his TARDIS in Dum-E, with bits and pieces being given out to his other AIs without him really realizing it.

And for the most part, everything else in Tony’s life stayed the same, for better or worse. Until, of course, someone bothered to question the watch hard enough and finally got him to open it.