I Wish My Cats Were This Cool

I wish my cats were this cool

(Barely) Controlled Chaos #7

Now we're getting somewhere... angst ahead.

Warnings for part 7:  Alcohol, drunkeness, character death

February 1991, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tony had been at MIT for four months before he was invited to one of the infamous college parties he’d heard so much about.  It was Rhodey who invited him, and it was Rhodey who held him up at the end of the night after he’d had too much to drink and couldn’t make his legs move the way he wanted them to.  Sure, he was underage, but so was everyone else, and he’d wanted to see just what his parents found in the bottom of the bottle.  It turned out that he enjoyed the buzz, and he’d drunk more than he thought, leading to his first (and still only, really) friend half-carrying him back to his dorm and propping him against the wall while he opened the door.  Lillipup was sat on the end of Tony’s bed, a disapproving glare levelled towards both boys, but Tony had merely patted him happily on top of the head (the nurse he’d finally taken the puppy to had confirmed that he was male as she gave Tony some antibiotics for the too-skinny Pokémon) and collapsed face-down into his pillow.  He woke the next morning to a disgruntled dog, and when bacon rashers weren’t enough to buy his way back into Lillipup’s good books, he asked the Pokémon if he wanted to go to the lab with him.  Technically, untrained Pokémon weren’t meant to be in the robotics lab (neither were untrained people), but as most of the grad students thought Tony could do no wrong, at least so far as engineering and computer programming went, he figured he’d get away with it.  Also, Lillipup was very cute; that could only help.

So, Tony and Lillipup both skipped Tony’s classes (again) and headed for the robotics lab, where the bright lights made his head hurt until one of the older students took pity on him and gave him a list of hangover cures and a glass of water.  Tony thanked her sincerely, grateful when his headache eased.

When police appeared in the lab three hours later, everyone assumed they were there about the party.  They asked to speak to Tony in private, which only cemented the belief.

They weren’t there about the party.

***

Three days later, Tony was stood in a cemetery, watching as dirt covered his parents’ coffins.  His long coat, intended as protection from the February chills, lay open against his chest, flapping in the light breeze.  Lillipup sat silent at his feet, resting his head against Tony’s ankle in support.  Everyone else had left half an hour ago, but Tony couldn’t move; he hadn’t cried at all over their deaths, hadn’t really felt anything except numb.  There was no love lost between him and his father, and his mother was less maternal than he would have liked, but they were his parents, surely he should feel something?  Something other than the blankness that he had been walking around in since the police had taken him to one side and told him that his parents had been killed in a drink-driving incident.  They omitted the fact that Howard had been the one driving drunk, but Tony had guessed that much anyway.

There wasn’t much to say after that.  Obadiah Stane – his father’s best friend and now Tony’s guardian – had cried as he gave a speech to the assembled gawkers (some, Tony was sure, where only there to see for themselves that Howard really was dead; his father had made a lot of enemies in the business world).  Jarvis had stood by Tony’s side through the whole thing, one hand on the young man’s shoulder, squeezing every now and then in a motion meant to reassure, though which of them the gesture was aimed at Tony wasn’t sure.  Tony himself hadn’t said anything; he’d barely blinked as the coffins were lowered into the ground and people began to leave, throwing sympathetic glances his direction.  Obie had offered to take Tony home, but Jarvis had said that he’d see to the young Stark’s health, and when Tony had shown no preference either way Obie had given in.

Tony spent two more days at the Stark mansion before returning to MIT.  He kept Jarvis in his employ, more because he couldn’t bear to let the man go than because he wanted to keep the house tidy – he couldn’t care less what state his parents’ home was in.  Jarvis was family, even if he was paid to stay that way.

The following year, Jarvis was diagnosed with cancer and died barely a month later.  Tony spent three hours sobbing into Lillipup’s fur.

(Barely) Controlled Chaos # 18

Posts on time.  Automatic update is a wonderful thing ;)

Warnings for this part: drunkeness, graphic kissing and groping, but nothing over a PG-13.

September 1997, Stark Industries Main office, New York

Tony was drunk.  He’d gone out with Rhodey, as promised, and the two had spent three hours reminiscing about more and more obscure details from MIT as the number of drinks increased, then Rhodey had waxed lyrical for an hour about his travels, which ultimately led back to the reason Tony was on his tenth drink of the night, even when he knew he’d have to put up with Herdier’s Disappointed Face the next day; the dog hated when Tony got drunk.  Ditto just crawled on him and transformed into a blanket if Tony had had enough to pass out somewhere that wasn’t his bed.  It didn’t happen often, but every time it was a toss-up which was more painful; the inevitable hangover or Herdier’s refusal to look at him until he apologised.  He never promised not to do it again though.  Tony may be a master at lying (growing up in the press does that to a person), but he never lied to his Pokémon.  He would not alienate the best friends he had because his mouth ran away with him, and beside that they wouldn’t believe him anyway, which made it kind of pointless.

Ok, so maybe Tony was very drunk.  He didn’t usually go off on tangents quite that random when he was sober.  But, in his defence, Rhodey was joining the military, and Tony was trying his best not to imagine his best friend on the wrong end of a gun – that always looked like Stark Industries weapons in Tony’s head and he really needed to change the design now, because that was going to haunt him – and the alcohol helped drive the horrifying thoughts from his mind.

The girls helped too.  Tony, by virtue of being Howard fucking Stark’s son, was immediately recognisable to pretty much everybody, and Rhodey was handsome enough to turn heads; the two of them combined were quite enough to have several girls join them, two draping themselves over Rhodey’s lap and another three sitting between the men, one (Tony thought her name was Eleonora, but there were two brunettes in the group surrounding him and they were both wearing green, so he wasn’t sure) slowly climbing astride Tony as she nibbled her way along his collarbone.  He pulled her up into a sloppy, drunken kiss as she finally straddled his lap, and she moaned into his mouth.  The other brunette leaned in against their sides and licked a line down Tony’s pulse and up the other girl’s, joining them in an uncoordinated three-way kiss that was more a collision of mouths than anything else.

This was definitely helpful.  He was going to call it therapy, and justify it as such to Pepper when she found out and got mad at him for risking his company’s reputation.

Besides, Rhodey was having just as good a time with the other three – two redheads and a blonde – and he was supposed to be the good influence.  So, really, this was all Rhodey’s fault.  Tony grinned and tried to refine the kiss to something that wouldn’t leave bruises around his jawline.  It ended up with the girls kissing on his lap while he watched, and he was totally ok with that.  He was moving this party someplace else though, and now, because otherwise he was going to get kicked out of yet another club, and he actually liked this place.

He dragged his attention from the orgy on his lap for a moment to lean over and punch Rhodey in the upper arm.  The older man flinched and pulled back from his groupies, sending Tony a look that said the interruption had better be important.  Tony leaned over and talked loudly into the other man’s ear to be heard over the music and the girls.

“I’m taking the girls to a hotel or something now; see you back at my apartment in the morning.”

Rhodey nodded, grinning, and pulled Tony’s head forwards, pressing a kiss to his forehead.

“Have a good time.”

“You too, honeybear!”

And with an exaggerated wink, Tony pushed at the girls on his lap until they stood, then threw an arm around each of their waists and led them to the door.  The bouncers raised their eyebrows at him, shot each other amused glances, and waved them off, one calling a “good night, Mr Stark!” at his back, which made Tony laugh and pull the girls in closer to his side as he tried to guide them down the street in the direction of a hotel that he knew.  They made it around one corner before stumbling into a small alleyway between buildings with arms and hands and lips everywhere, and ok, they weren’t going to make it to the hotel.  That was ok. 

That was so ok.

(Barely) Controlled Chaos # 13

A timely update!  The last one, probably, because I'm away this weekend, but I'll post again on Thursday possibly, then it's gonna be either Sunday or Monday.

Warnings for this part: other than swearing, none in particular

August 1997, Stark Industries Main Office, New York

“Mr Stark?”

Tony looked up at the voice.  He was half-heartedly glancing through the third fucking ream of paperwork his good-for-nothing secretary had dumped on his desk ten minutes before, just prior to screaming that nothing was worth putting up with his bullshit and quitting.  The woman knew how to make an exit, he’d give her that.  Pity she didn’t know anything about filing; the first two piles he’d looked at had been nothing to do with him; they were for Marketing and Accounts respectively.    Tony had no idea who’d hired her – he certainly hadn’t, and he was quite glad that she’d gone – but they’d done a shit job.  Hell, he hated paperwork with a passion that had once led Ditto to turn itself into a paper shredder, and he had managed to do a better job in the last few minutes; the woman was not getting any kind of recommendation from him.

Not that Tony thought she’d take one if he offered.  She had made her opinion of him quite clear before she stormed out of his office.  Well, him and Ditto.  Mostly Ditto.  The blob freaked her out, usually on purpose.  That was her problem so far as Tony was concerned, and one of the big reasons he was glad to see the back of her.

As he’d threatened when he was seventeen, the first thing he’d changed when he inherited Stark Industries three months ago was the ‘no Pokémon allowed’ rule.  Obie had not been happy, and neither had his neurotic secretary (whose name he had never bothered to learn – she had shrieked the first time she saw Ditto, so he had dubbed her ‘Screamer’ and ignored all her attempts to correct the nickname), but everyone else had loved the change, and the upswing in productivity – after a week or so of the novelty wearing off – had silenced any objections on Obie’s part.

So yes, Screamer was gone, and she had left him with a headache from staying up four nights in a row working on crap that he had very little interest in and the shrill pitch of her voice as she yelled at him, and a pile of paperwork that was taller than he was.  Even Herdier had been pissed at her, and that took some doing.  The dog put up with Tony and Ditto every day; annoying him to the point where he showed it visibly was a feat and a half.

So Tony was understandably thankful for the interruption/rescue from the ridiculous amount of paper on his desk.  He leaned sideways to see around the largest pile, and couldn’t help the smirk that crossed his lips as he saw the owner of the voice.  It was a woman of about his own age, certainly no older than his own twenty-one years, and she was very pretty.  Her hair was fire-red, swinging down her back to her waist, and framing her slim shape nicely.  She was an inch or so taller than him, if he had to guess from his seated position, mostly because her legs were about six miles long and revealed quite nicely from the knee down by a modest skirt that was far too long for his liking.  Also, there was a small grey Pokémon peering from behind her knees, which instantly gained her points.

Tony smiled at her, pushing his exhaustion back as he did so.  He needed to sleep soon, but he could fake his way through whatever she wanted before collapsing and dealing with this shit when he woke up.

“I am.  Who are you?”

“Virginia Potts, sir.  From Accounting.”

Tony made a mental note to look her up on the company files later – when he wasn’t close to passing out from lack of sleep, he was going to hit on her until she swooned.

She stepped fully inside the office and eyed the desk with distaste, the Pokémon at her side doing the same thing.  It had a white tail that was wrapped about its neck like a fur scarf – it was a very well-groomed, elegant looking thing, like the woman it was with.  Tony had no idea what it was, but he was going to find out; it was rare these days for him to see a Pokémon that he didn’t know the species of.  Walking forwards, she gingerly placed her own – small, thank god – pile of papers on the tiny clear space remaining on his desk.

“I wanted to talk to you about a problem I found with some of your numbers.”

That woke Tony up.  His appreciative leer turned into a scowl as he totally abandoned the prior paperwork (not that he’d been paying it much attention in the first place) to study the file in front of him.

“Impossible.  I don’t make mistakes with math.”

“Third page, fifteenth line from the top,” she reeled off.  Tony frowned at the pages as he flipped through and found the so-called ‘error’.  He read the line, blinked, then read it again.  And then a third time.  He sighed loudly.

“Fuck.”

“Told you,” Potts said, not sounding as smug as he would have thought – not many people corrected Tony Stark, it was usually the other way around – and he looked up to find her elbow-deep in the papers on his desk, her Pokémon sitting by her side passing her piles and taking ones she filtered out from the much larger selection to her left.  He cleared his throat, wondering what she was doing.

“I’m pretty sure at least some of those are private.”

Not that he cared, but the statement made her blush, and yep, he was right, she looked good like that.

“Sorry sir,” she said, sounding embarrassed.  “I shouldn’t have touched it.”

“I don’t actually care,” he said, waving one hand carelessly and taking a pen from Herdier with the other to correct his error.  “Screamer dumped it all on here and left; I don’t know what most of it is.”

Potts smiled, a tiny quirk of lips on one side.  “Most of it isn’t for you.”

(Barely) Controlled Chaos # 19

Follows on from last part, so read that first.

Warnings for this part: violence, attempted mugging, weaponry, drunkeness

September 1997, Stark Industries Main office, New York

Tony pulled the girls against a wall, taking the hard surface against his own back while they writhed against his front, and grinned into their mouths.  Three hands grabbed against his stomach, sliding under his shirt, and another pulled at his hair.  He moaned at the sensation.

That was when the cold click of a gun being cocked ruined Tony’s night.

All three of them stopped moving instantly, the hands against his skin freezing in place, nails digging into his ribcage as the fingers formed an involuntary fist.  The barrel of the gun poked between the girl’s heads, pointed at Tony’s nose.  One of the brunettes squeaked in fear.  Tony wasn’t sure if he wished they would scream or not; it would draw attention from the two fucking huge bouncers just up the road, but it also might startle the guy on the other end of the gun, and Tony did not want that.  He liked his face the way it was, it didn’t need a hole between his eyes.

The man pushed one of the girls away from Tony, further into the alleyway, and she fell against the brick wall with a small cry.  Tony bit his lip as the gun pressed flush against his forehead, lifting his hands away from the other girl to show that he was unarmed.  The gun pressed harder against him, and he froze.

“Whoa, easy…”

“Shut up,” the gunman ordered, voice low in what was probably an attempt to not draw attention from the bouncers.  He used his free hand to pull the other girl towards him; she screamed, but he snapped the gun under her chin, and she muffled the noise quickly.  He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pressed his free hand across her lips.  “Not a sound, bitch.”

She nodded, and the gun returned to its previous position.  Tony pressed closer against the wall, which was currently the only thing holding him upright.  Alcohol plus far too much adrenaline was making his knees shake, and also appeared to have gotten his fight-or-flight response stuck on ‘oh-shit-this-is-bad’.

Muffled whimpers from the two girls, and the tear tracks running down their faces told Tony that they were in the same position.  At least it wasn’t just him.

The gunman was talking again.  Tony tried to pay attention, uncrossing his eyes from their focus on the end of the gun and looking at the man beyond.  It was dark, and Tony was very drunk and scared, so he made out dark hair and pale skin, but that was about it.  Damnit.  He hated being fuzzy on details.  He forced his eyes to focus, and saw the man’s mouth moving.

Right, he was talking.  What was he saying?

“…money, now!”

Of course.  He was Howard fucking Stark’s son; everybody and their dog knew who he was, and they all knew he was a billionaire.  He really should have expected this.  Thinking about it, he was kind of surprised he hadn’t been mugged before.

“Now!”

Tony flinched, then winced as the movement knocked his skull against the wall.  He reached down to his jeans pocket, trying to remember which one his wallet was in, when the little light filtering into the alley from the main road suddenly cut off.  The gunman turned his attention in that direction, and the gun lowered an inch.  Tony sucked in a breath and shot his gaze sideways.  He couldn’t see properly – there was a gun blocking a lot of his view – but he thought he recognised the blurry shape as one of the bouncers from the nightclub.  He really hoped it was, and that this wasn’t some kind of backup for the mugger.

“Want to back up there?” the newcomer asked, tone light, and Tony knew that voice; it was the bouncer who’d wished him a good night.  His knees folded in relief, and he slid to the floor, the wall no longer adequate enough to keep him upright.  He was a little busy being relieved and staring at the floor to follow exactly what happened next, but a high-pitched scream caught his attention, and he looked up to see the bouncer supporting the girl that had been held hostage with one arm while holding the gunman against the wall with the other.  The gun was on the floor by Tony’s feet.  The girl to his right burst into noisy tears; Tony felt quite like joining her, but wasn’t quite drunk enough to give in to the impulse.

Another bouncer joined their rescuer, taking the gunman off his hands, and the first bouncer sat the girl he was holding on the floor next to Tony so he could call the police.  She curled against his side and cried into his shoulder, the other girl crawling up against his other side and burying her head in his lap, tears soaking into his jeans.  Tony sighed and let his head fall back against the wall, closing his eyes as the adrenaline flushed from his system, leaving him exhausted.

(Barely) Controlled Chaos #12

Again with the delay... Work sucks.

Follows on from last part.

Warnings for this part: Randomness, if that counts, but nothing else particularly.

April 1996, Clifftop House, Malibu

Malibu was awesome.  There was no other word for it.

The sun was shining, there was a private beach literally on his doorstep, and Tony had the pleasure of witnessing Ditto turn itself into a clump of seaweed the first time it ventured into the ocean and got startled by a passing fish.  He had to grab the Pokémon before it floated off and got lost, but the chagrin on its pink blobby face when it transformed back was enough to have Tony almost doubled over laughing.  The Pokémon had maintained a respectful distance between itself and the sea ever since, and Tony had taken to threatening it with dried seaweed when it took its jokes a step too far, which led to the blob adopting a haughty pose that was frankly hilarious.  Herdier put up with this with little more than an eye-roll, letting the raucous duo have their fun.

Unlike Ditto, Herdier loved the sea, and Tony had taken to joining his dog for a swim every day for half an hour or so in the morning.  The water was freezing cold, but it woke him up, especially if he hadn’t been to sleep the night before and was in need of more stimulation than caffeine alone could provide.  That happened more often than either of his Pokémon was happy with, and when Ditto started giving Tony disapproving looks, he knew he was pushing it too far; the blob spent most of its time enabling his insomnia.

It was part of his deal with Obie.  Tony could have his free reign and live on the other side of the country, but he had to pull his weight with the company – specifically, with R&D, since that was the only department he’d shown any real enthusiasm towards in all of Obie’s prodding about Stark Industries.  Tony heard ‘go live in Malibu’ and fled before his mentor could change his mind.

He had spent three days moving his parents crap out of the house – there were a few sets of clothing and one framed picture of his mother and father on their wedding day, which he had put carefully out of the way in the bedroom he’d nominated his so that Ditto wouldn’t break it in one of his fits of exuberance.  He spent the rest of the month redecorating; he knocked down three walls, turning the upstairs into three huge rooms and opening the ground floor up to let all of that glorious California sun into every nook the window-wall could illuminate.  Which, by the time he was finished with it, was most of the floor.  He made sure not to get rid of anything structurally important – he was an engineer, and by no estimation an idiot – and then he turned his attention to the basement.  His father had made it into a garage, but as much as Tony loved cars, he had no plans to keep it that way.  Well, maybe some of it.  The far wall, perhaps, by the ramp that connected the basement to the outside world.  Yeah, that could be the garage.  The rest of the space Tony transformed into an engineer’s heaven.

There were computers – of his own design, a prototype that was not viable for mass production, but that served him quite well – several steel tables with every tool he could conceive of ever needing spread out over them, a large open area for tinkering with bigger projects, a forge; hell, he’d even included a small, secluded firing range for testing the designs he came up with, soundproofed in respect to Herdier’s dislike for guns.  He hadn’t used it yet – he was busy learning his new home and was yet to produce the new-and-improved prototypes Obie had asked him to throw together to show off to the R&D guys (there were still 6 days before the deadline he’d been presented with, he had plenty of time).  He had, however, christened the workshop by producing another ‘bot.

In this new home, with so much space and so few people filling it, Dummy was at a loss; the bot wasn’t used to so much quiet and had started to glitch, trying to make jobs where there were none.  Tony figured that some company would be good for him (Dummy was totally a him, no matter what faces Obie pulled when Tony said so), so had spent the last week building another robot arm.  He kept the design similar, tweaking the claw slightly to compensate for the ticklish joint that Tony didn’t have the heart to fix in Dummy, and altering the AI to incorporate the things he’d learned since his first foray into AI technology.  It was half-improvement on the old design, and half-prototype for making Dummy more stable – he needed to fix the loop the bot got into when faced with a dilemma he didn’t know how to solve, and making an upgrade was a good way to figure it out.

The arm was finished and the AI installed two days later.  Tony was exhausted; he’d been up three nights in a row getting it done, but the bot’s first whirr as it came to life and Dummy’s response – which Tony could only think of as a Happy Dance – was worth it.  Ditto also loved the bot, mostly because it became clear two minutes after uploading the code that Tony had miscalculated his adjustments to the claw.  The bot wasn’t ticklish, so it had worked in that respect, but no matter how he adjusted the wiring, he could not get the robot to grip anything properly.  Dummy didn’t care, and Herdier reacted with a flinch the first time a wrench hit the floor, but ignored it from then on.  Ditto, however, delighted in giving it things to hold, just to see how long it took before it dropped them.  Tony wondered briefly whether he could put the Pokémon off by draping the new bot with seaweed, then gave up and named it Butterfingers.

They were all a little dysfunctional; why should the newest addition to the family be any different?