In the other story Toni would have lived by very simple sentences. Nobody could stop her, no matter how self-destructive she got. Rogers shouted the hardest but if Rhodey (who was there for everything) couldn't get her to calm down how was the legend meant to?
It goes like this, Howard had a mantra, to get Toni to be better, build better. And she thought that if she did it well enough, Howard would love her. It was Howard who told her that Starks have iron in their backbone, and told Toni to gain some. It was Jarvis who, in the moments he had spare would tell her it didn't matter, humans weren't infallible, which Toni saw as a challenge, she couldn't be perfect for Howard but nobody else was either. She had to be better. In the quiet moments when Maria was actually listening to her, when her child was seen, she would hold Toni and tell her no matter what Howard or anyone else did, she didn't have to be made of concrete. "You need to look strong," she would tell the child and it was repeated like a mantra over time.
College is not difficult and she manages to skip most of her classes knowing she can do the work alone at home. It’s when she leaves the house she’s pestered.
"Why has nobody ever heard of you until now?" people ask.
"Howard wanted me to get through school undisturbed," she tells them.
She’s older than everyone at the university and she knows all too deeply that she’s here for appearances. After all, what was the point in starting a second life if she would have to hide in the shadows?
All her friends are busy with their normal proper lives and she feels like she isn’t putting enough into her image, her personality. She’s got nothing important going on, no one to pester. Just Dummy and phone calls from people she does her best to not alienate as a young superpowered version of the woman she was the previous years.
What do teenagers do? So she tries to enjoy her time away from the company, SHIELD, the seriousness. The parties, the drinking and the flirting help for a little while but Toni wouldn’t be herself without a cause. She has no idea what’s to come next, no visions to scare herself over. Nobody to talk cryptically to. The only thing left is to leave moderation.
There’s someone holding her hair back while she leans over a toilet during some party or another, reasonably she wouldn’t be certain who it is but there’s been someone she’s waited for at this point and she knows there’s a different James sitting behind her.
Rhodey gets a phone call the next day and he’s sure he didn’t give her his last name or phone number she reasons that he must’ve been more drunk than he realised and he doesn’t have a better solution as to how she managed to ring him.
The next tragedy happens just before her second year. She calls Rhodey when Harry dies, she's crying and trying to explain how her first friend just died of a heart attack, Rhodey does his best to comfort her. Her drunken rampage is well known and documented.
She goes back to school and doesn't leave Rhodes's side. She assigns him more nicknames. Sour-patch, Honey Bear, Cupcake she coos and she feels better than she has in a long time. He takes them all in stride, slinging an arm around her shoulders and smiling. He encourages her advancement of AI unlike those that are scared (Peggy), Jeez, one of her own won't become Skynet until someone gives them a very good reason.
He wants to join the air force and Toni gives him 100% of her support.
"Just come back Platypus, yeah?" she asks him. She tells him a little about SHIELD, about what she wants to do with the company, no weapons if she has anything to do about it, tells him about missions (dumbed down) and Captain America, she tells him her dad told her. She doesn’t know when she’ll tell him the truth but she’s sure hes not at his full potential for it yet.
When Toni has gathered enough of what she believes to be circumstantial evidence against SHIELD operations she tries to talk to Howard, Peggy, anyone about her suspicions of SHIELD being infiltrated. There’s no one to back her. They all try the 'Miss Stark...' card and she grows more frustrated, she collects evidence and she listens to her instincts, what she knows and it all leads to Pierce. She waits for solid evidence before acting.
Howard doesn’t have anything better to do it seems and agrees to conduct his own experiment.
Toni graduates a year later with three master's degrees and an extra friend. U as the final project wows everyone at the presentation. She takes the position she held as Carbonell, head of R&D supposedly twenty years old. Every paper prints stories comparing her to her 'aunt' and nobody makes the connection. After all, Toni wears blue contacts and she's much younger, why would they notice? To the majority of the world this is impossible.
1991 started great with Happy's 18th, a great party held at the mansion, she was glad to find she and him were as close as ever. The gaping hole where Harry once was still eats at her but she's glad they're not dwelling, moping. Happy knows his dad didn't want to be saved and they pick up as friends less than older parental figures relationship. He finds it strange how much she knows that he hasn't told her but he's so young and his mother covers for Toni so no serious information is ever uncovered.
In October Toni sees Howard's death. They're all fuzzy, a sniper, a mugger, poison, every kind of way to be killed but what's solid is his funeral, Obadiah who stays away from R&D because of her hatred (she doesn’t think he knows why) standing by her while they read the will.
Toni gets the chef with the poison arrested before he cooks the food, cyanide on his person more than enough evidence. She phones Rhodey, he's worried but proud. He's off training somewhere but doesn't mind a little of her influence just so they can talk rather than write. Toni much prefers the telephone, it’s far more personal than post she thinks, he love for technology as apparent as ever.
There's a sniper that fails because Toni has Howard wear a bullet proof vest every time he leaves the house for a week.
Someone puts a knife in Howard's back when he walks down the street, Toni didn't know until he was in hospital and awake a day later.
He is taken by a car crash, after ten weeks of dodging assassination attempts the car crash works again, while Howard's at a gala with Maria, Toni stayed at work, someone cuts his breaks. Edwin driving, they swerve down a back road and they don't come out alive. Someone from Hydra must have been tailing them as when Toni gets to the scene the breaks are fixed and the whole thing is labelled a tragic accident, even within SHIELD. She’s supposed to have a high functioning role within the organisation so why does nobody listen to her?
She is devastated. Rhodey holds her back from the fire as much as possible and Janet so kindly organises the funeral. The poor woman, Toni enjoyed her company so much when she was her older self. So many people are gone now, it’s so difficult to see when she could’ve been gone before this, before so many people she loved were lost.
Toni stages a take-over (even telling Rhodey), having just come out of MIT she becomes the CEO of Stark Industries quickly and efficiently, her team of scarily competent lawyers laying waste to any who oppose the solid concrete of Howard's will. Toni has the qualifications and power to hold the position. Many people strike up complaints about her being a woman but she bulldozes right through them, dragging them down or out.
It's funny how she uses herself as an example for females hard work ethic, at least she thinks so. Peggy Carter publicly supports her and some of her own quotes from the 60's are pulled out of the bag for extra incompetent people at press conferences.
She sets up separate R&D departments of tech, weaponry is very small and she makes sure to watch the manufacturing and shipment orders like a hawk. Everything works great and she prides herself on how smoothly run her ship is, success feels good and while it came from the death of her brothers and friends it feels good to have a mission again.
With everyone from the mansion dead, Toni truly feels that it's time to move on. She sees white walls and a view of the ocean so clearly. Buying a cliff and a beach in Malibu is a piece of cake. She designs everything herself and triple checks the people who work for her, completing some electrical training for show so she has fewer complaints to do all the electronics for the basement herself (and anything else she wants to add).
She sets her house to maximum security and works on bio-metric scanners and advanced fingerprint identification. She wants to get a satellite in orbit and she wants her company bigger.
She doesn’t have much time off but she takes a break to visit Happy, deciding with things settled she could tell him her secret. Unsurprisingly he doesn’t take it well and it takes a lot of storytelling and displaying her extremis based powers for him to even start to believe. As a tribute to how much she trusts him and he knows his dad was involved with some strange stuff, he trust that she was in fact his ‘deceased’ aunt. She hopes that he’ll come to trust more in the future.
She gasps awake at night and runs to the struggling workshop where Dummy hands her poisoned coffee when she has the realization. While she's only just got the acceptance from the board to become CEO, now she actually does make all the decisions. And who was it that fought so hard against her? Who saw who she looked like and was terrified. Obadiah, the very top of her shit list.
And she remembers how much she relied on the old man. In every universe that her parents didn't quite fit into, Tony would hang onto the guidance that the acting CEO of SI offered. The work hard and leave the rest to me bullcrap.
Knowing of his betrayal for those days after Afghanistan, that horrible, terrible gala is just another thing that keeps her awake at night in the story. She could have been a shark, she could have attacked and fought to get him to tell her the truth. The highway fight may never have happened, Pepper may never have been in danger.
But one of the reasons she knows she's so hard on him here is because every single other time she's been weak to him.
Obadiah is pushed out of the system pettily but quickly. She sues and makes sure she takes all his assets. And so what if to get half the board to side with her there was the promise of money to be made. And she doesn't even care that lots of her evidence against him was faked (but she covered her tracks well) and she revelled in the fact that he glared all the way out of the building as she had security escort him out. Obadiah looks at her like he knows who she is and she can't fault him, he's a smart one ( in all the wrong ways) but she religiously wears blue contacts and he knows that he'll be ripped to pieces if he mentioned it.
Breaks often involve visiting Happy, who loves to see her. She meets some of his friends and she's introduced only as his friend. No mention of SI, harry or anything else weird and unbelievable about their relationship he could have mentioned.
These days Rhodey’s too busy to have much time for her, he rises in the military all on his own and he promises he’s going to aim to be the connection to Stark Industries.
She settles in but doesn't know what to do with herself but work. She dresses scandalously and wears sunglasses when she goes to meetings and she shouts over the chaos of R&D when she's around their labs. She drinks too much coffee while on the run for the perfect learning AI. Butterfingers, her little girl is created and then she gives herself a break from development. She sets her sights on SHIELD.
Metal rings under the skin in her arm and it helps her tell herself she's powerful. Even without all the people who once backed her. All the world who don't know how much she's contributed to the world. People say she rides on her aunt's success. Antonia Stark does nothing but displays all the previous Antonia Stark has done.
Hatred over being a Stark rings deep in her bones but she follows from her brother's legacy and grieves for him in a way she never thought she would, that she didn’t in the story of her dreams.
She goes through their records four times on computers and three with extremis, she has every relevant detail about the extraction of HYDRA and every one of the most loyal agents. She hates the Director and it's time to use her power to be rid of him.
Peggy thinks she should take a step back from SHIELD, it was never her baby, it was something she supported the rest of them with. Toni has to tell her she’s wrong. SHIELD has to be used for its intended purpose, not as a way for Hydra to wiggle back into society.
She finds Fury randomly in medical. He's just had shrapnel to most of his body but most noticeably his eye, condemned to wear an eye patch to cover the ugly scar he sits and broods in his hospital bed. Being the person he is, he's still working, helping with instructions and reading reports. He's almost perfect and she knows him intricately from all her visions serve her.
"Fury, how would you like a promotion?" is how she decides to introduce herself, holding another confidentiality agreement like the highest people in SHIELD all have been put through. She trusts not him, never, but the decision she has put onto him, she doesn't wear contacts or glasses, he sees her eyes and they're bright. Glowing even enough to be seen in the overly bright medical lights.
He signs the strictest contracts over what he can and cannot do to SHIELD and the current director easily backs down into a computer role. After all, for those who know, Antonia's word is what goes. She loves it, it isn't arrogance if she's worked this hard for it.
There's a null in what she can build and it's almost 1993, there's nothing that really needs improving. She's got the arc reactor running and that's all she’s wanted for some time now. She's got the R&D department looking for ways to make an SI version of everything from plumbing to what she wants to use her satellite for. She briefly thinks of another space mission but dismisses it for now, she knows the time for that is much later. 2008 maybe.
It only took a year to change everything from Howard, to grieve and move on and she misses him, truly she does, but only on the worst days does she let it overtake her. And those days Edwin, Harry, James, they take the spotlight. Pictures run though her head, so many version of what happened, how she knew them but it’s the real pictures she treasures most. They gave so much to her and she will remember always.
She's been overseeing the building of her new mansion, seaside house and she hasn't pitched moving to the board yet, she’s not sure how t phrase it so that California is better for business tan New York.
They've finished the underground lab she wanted. Her enormous workshop and she's excited to start. Her bots have moved in and her search to advance them continues. Maybe she needs a butler? The bots are useful but something that can go everywhere, that's what she needs. Code is the first part and by far the hardest.
Calling Rhodey always makes her happy. He's pleased with how building is going and he promises to be back for a bit before the house is finished she hopes he’s not lying to pacify how needy she is. It's the best he can do and it's enough for now. Yet Toni gets a bit lonely with all of the two friends who still talk to her back home being too busy for visits to her and her being far too busy to visit them. Peggy, Janet and Rachael all have families to run and Toni really can't stray from SI for long enough to satisfy her need to see people who know her truly.
Happy says he's bored. He’s finding it hard to get a job he enjoys and he’s not quite certain what to do with his life. She has to promise Rachel her son will be safe under her employ but not much convincing is needed. After all Toni always kept her husband safe.
"It's really hectic here, " She promises. And it is, there's experiments, press, board meeting every day. Plus all the travel, to and from HQ to hotels and the mansion, down to Miami and everything else.
Happy enjoys it, he works out and looks intimidating, pretty much what he did at the shop he worked at before but now he scares high up officials and sees SHIELD HQ and walks quickly after his supposed 23-year-old boss (74-year-old father's best friend).
Exciting is what he calls it when he trails after her into SI headquarters and everyone at R&D has something new to explain to him. He won't ever remember, he tells her but she knows he enjoys it.
The fastest cars on the market are just a bonus.