Of Neuromancy and Iron Wills 8 (Patreon)

“Barton, talk to me,” Fury said as the SHIELD agent walked up, a finger digging sand out of his ear.

“Found the remains of a base, got pictures and some scraps of data that managed to avoid being wiped. Most of the base was in complete and utter ruins, the computers, what wasn’t ripped out, were burned to scrap. Several rooms that looked to be holding cells, most of them with blood patterns consistent with a single execution shot. Remnants of what looked like a lab, found some scraps of some sort of tech, dropped it off with the eggheads downstairs. Main find were some files that survived burning,” Agent Barton concisely answered.

Fury turned, intrigued, only to see a shaking head before he could even ask, “Nothing about what they were doing, some financial reports on local warlords. I checked the database on the way back, all of them were killed over the span of a week after Stark and Gibson were recovered. Someone was cleaning up once they realized their missing guinea pig didn’t die in the desert.”

Fury turned away, a fierce scowl on his face as his mind raced. HYDRA had survived, and was trying to make their own version of the best engineer on Earth. He’d do some digging of his own, keep this close to the chest. One way or another, he was going to find those power hungry motherfuckers and make sure they stayed dead this time.

[hr][/hr]

As the first part of the Mark II’s armored shell was leaving the fabricator, Toni found herself reminiscing. Will was standing behind her, his presence both quiet and supportive. It was… unusual, how easily she worked and collaborated with him. The last time she’d been able to talk to anyone about engineering and not have their eyes glaze over was before her father passed away.

Uncle Obie’s lessons from when she was a girl let her deal with the press and people most of the time, but whenever something engineering related came up her passion and enthusiasm got away from her. It was annoying, the one thing she could talk to other people about without it becoming exhausting was the one thing that almost no one could match her level in.

Toni sighed, checking on the software that would go into the Mark II as her mind worked miles a minute. Will’s reveal of the separate intelligence living in his head was a surprise, to put it mildly, but it did explain why he was able to handle getting his mind enhanced: there was something else in there lessening the neural load. She had figured out that there was something going on, with his frequent pauses and the way his face twisted like Uncle Obie’s lessons on reading people. She’d have to do something for him, those lessons in understanding the other kids in her class were still paying off thirty years later.

“Let’s have a look,” Toni muttered as she stood and walked over to the fabricator before picking up the first piece. The faceplate looked solid, the wiring was tight and compact, the hundreds of laser points to integrate the HUD were firmly fixed.

Will stepped up behind Toni, looking at the faceplate over her from his nearly foot and a half height advantage. A flurry of emotions danced through her, spurred on by the feel of his warmth against her back. A fidgeting, floaty sensation in her stomach, a half hazy recollection of his torso back in Afghanistan (particularly the way beads of sweat traced his developing muscles), a sudden acceleration to her heart rate. More than just his physical appeal, the way his eyes lit up when he started on a new angle in their collaboration, the soft beginnings of a smile as she worked on a stubborn joint or soder. The conclusion was obvious: she was developing the beginnings of romantic feelings for him.

Part of her mind, the part that had grown louder with every breakup and every failed attempt at befriending a new researcher at Start Industries, said it was temporary. That while it was taking longer than normal, sooner or later Will would grow tired of her passion for engineering, that he’d hit a barrier in what he understood and she’d leave him behind, like had always happened, ever since she was in elementary school. She’d find someone she’d think could keep up with her, only for them to stall and gain the same vacant expression everyone else did.

But, part of her that had been growing smaller while the other had grown louder, insisted she keep going. That Will had kept up with her, more than that he had pushed her in a way no one else ever had before, not just for a couple of weeks, but for six months. It was the first time she’d had someone she could call a friend that she could talk about her passion with, the only other friends she’d ever remember having were Happy, Rhodey, and maybe that Pepper girl heading Acquisitions and Marketing.

Pushing aside all the thoughts that had been dancing through her head, Toni set down the faceplate and said, “Fabricator seems to be working to all specs, you spot anything?”

Will reached past her shoulder and picked up the faceplate, his strong yet dexterous fingers examining each surface and wire, before he answered, “Looks good to me, I’ll run a software diagnostics on it before I head in to work tomorrow, but I don’t think there’ll be any problems.”

That was one thing about Will’s… enhancements: he was definitely better than her when it came to software and anything involving the brain or nerves. Those tags he had made that let him and CFU interface with her home computer? It would have taken her months of painstaking research into neurobiology and careful testing, while he was able to put them together in an hour.

That was without the whole issue of Will and HYDRA. Her dad had told her a lot about the insane things they’d done during World War II, as well as working with the one and only boy scout Captain America. She, like everyone else, thought they were wiped out at the end of the war… though once she’d thought about it, it had occurred to her that her dad had never said they were gone, merely beaten, or bested, or some variation thereof. Had he known something? Had some idea that they were still around, just in hiding?

Toni didn’t know, and unless Will could conjure up some technology to contact the dead or travel through time, there was no way for her to ask and find out. She’d had JARVIS do some subtle digging, but he hadn’t found anything as of yet.

All too soon, Toni and Will made their way to bed, they had more work ahead of them and needed sleep.

[hr][/hr]

“You get it?” a man in his fifties, but still solidly built with muscles seemingly unhindered by his age, asked his co conspirator as he soldered wires on a device.

The younger man, in his late forties and bald, simply placed a stack of papers on the work table, along with a modified welding mask, and a half molten boxy approximation of a pistol, all while several men began bringing wooden crates into the workshop.

“Stark had some helpers, a surgeon and some nameless redhead the dumb jihadists found wandering the desert. Together they made a suit of rudimentary power armor and a monster of a pistol,” the younger of the two said.

The first man gave a considering hum, before picking up the welding mask and taking a look inside it. After a few moments, he gave an impressed whistle, “This isn’t the work of the Stark Bitch, too rugged. She and her bastard of a father both liked squeezing too many things into a single package.”

“So the unknown redhead has some talent?”

“At least as much as I do, though I doubt he’s specialized in the same field.”

The younger man rolled his eyes, that almost went without saying, engineers that specialized cryotech was a very, very small community. He was fortunate to have been in a position to hire the older man when Howard Stark fired him out of the blue in 1980, having just gained control of his father’s company after his… unfortunate drunk driving accident. To this day he had no idea why Howard Stark had filed a restraining order on the cryo-focused engineer, but he’d made his company incredibly wealthy with advances in refrigeration and cold storage, so he didn’t care much.

The younger man ran his hand along a barrel shaped device, a small smirk on his face. Soon, once his magic goose had finished examining the armor and gadgets, they'd have more than what they needed for some payback.

[hr][/hr]

“… and the sterilization fields have resulted in a 2.8% increase in Stark Industries’ stock value since last quarter,” a redheaded woman in her late thirties reported.

“Thank you, Miss Potts,” Obadiah Stane said with a smile.

He’d been afraid when Toni had made the decision to freeze weapon contracts, but that boy she’d picked up while in the Middle East was proving to be a golden goose. Even without the weapon contracts going through, the sheer amount of patents that he was putting through in just a few months was letting Stark Industries break into the civilian market to such a level that he still couldn’t believe it.

The trauma plates had already been snatched up by just about every single police station in the country, and his contacts in the military told him that it had done a lot to smooth over the feathers ruffled by Toni’s decision. Weapons were nice, one general told him, but soldiers are a long term investment that they want to keep as long as possible.

As the meeting continued on, Obadiah couldn’t help but think back to when Toni was a little girl, coming in with her mother to see Howard and always complaining that no one at school had even heard of a soldering gun, or something along those lines. In hindsight, that was probably the first clue about her issues regarding interacting with others. The eight years of taking time out of his almost non-existent personal life to teach her what everyone else just naturally understood had been worth it. By the time she went to MIT, no one would even think she was anything but a brilliant young woman with a passion for engineering.

It was both a relief and a shame that her visits as a kid had caught the eye of Dr. Shapanka. A relief because there was no way that Obadiah wanted men like that anywhere in the company, a shame that they lost his brilliance in cold research. Obadiah and Howard had no proof of Dr. Shapanka’s… proclivities, so the best that they could do was have a restraining order filed and inform the security that he was not welcome anywhere on Stark Industries property. Dr. Shapanka had been gone for not even a week when he was snatched up and working at Horgan Enterprises.

Pushing aside thoughts of a man who had been irrelevant for nearly thirty years, Obadiah refocused on the meeting, the topic turning to Gibson’s newest patent: a pair of sunglasses that could connect to a smartphone. Dr. Williams passed out papers describing the various features that were included and as Obadiah read through, he felt his eyebrows rise. If these worked as advertised, then you could use all the options and applications on your smartphone while it was still in your pocket.

Obadiah was a businessman, he wasn't even remotely familiar with the technical aspect, but even he could figure out where this one technology could lead: replacing cell phones entirely.

This invention was what settled it in Obadiah's mind: Toni had something looking out for her. She's kidnapped in the Middle East, and instead of being raped and killed (not necessarily in that order), she finds the one person on the planet with a mind comparable to her own.