Ambition and History.
Started as sort of a pair to Dust is Gonna Settle by gabby_silang. We were trying to write about 1940s Maria and Howard getting together? Except she did such a wretchedly amazing job I was reduced to handwaving and section breaks.
Thanks, as usual, to the Hivemind for handholding and ego buffing.
"Oh, Mrs. Stark. She was a character." the woman sighs, then smiles and looks at Christine. "Which publication did you say you were with, sweetie? Women's Wear Daily? Vogue?"
Christine makes herself wait a beat, counts to five. "Vanity Fair. Ma'm."
...
It's a shit assignment, and Christine knows it. She was supposed to be putting together an investigative piece about the truth behind Stark Industries and Tony Stark, but he disappeared, and she didn't flirt back with the short little toad of a features editor. And Tony Stark was either dead or being held by terrorists, which meant that it was clearly inappropriate to continue any sort of investigation into the ways in which he, or his company, were genocidal assholes. Instead, she had a plateful of fascinating research about Julia Roberts's dude ranch. And Sandra Bullock's personal chef. And some guy who wrote a book about being the second runner up in the third annual contest to be a porn star's boyfriend.
"He figured it would be right up your alley," the intern to the short little toad says, and five minutes later, Christine gets an e-mail asking her to come in and talk about the September article. Women in Washington.
Christine is asked to help on the Maria Stark angle. Lots of pictures. That's what they have in mind.
As a "fuck you for not being into me," it's not exactly subtle.
...
There are plenty of pictures of Maria Stark. She has the same taste for publicity that her son and husband did, just in different publications. Not the Washington Post, but Women's Wear Daily. And Vogue. And the Best Dressed Lists. From 1979, there's a photograph of her in some kind of silver dress that looks like the scales of a fish. She has a champagne glass in her left hand, and standing on chair next to her is seven year old Tony in black tie, hands in pockets, looking back at the camera with the same expression as he had on the cover of Forbes, fourteen years later. Chin up, eyes half-open. It's a strange expression to see on the face of a seven year old boy who is, apparently, his mother's escort to something formal enough for her to be wearing a cool million or two in diamonds around her neck.
Howard is nowhere in sight.
Christine sends that to the reporter who's writing the article. She gets back a badly punctuated Blackberry e-mail saying that he's really looking for 'phtoos taken in washington dc in mid nienties.'
Three minutes and twenty-five seconds later, he gets back an e-mail informing him that Maria Stark was dead by the second week of December 1991. Christine feels bad about being so snippy in the e-mail until half an hour later, when she gets an e-mail back asking if she'll do the research on Maria Stark, then. He has his hands full with Cokie Roberts. Cokie Roberts?
...
"Ms. Everhart, I can't talk about that. I signed a nondisclosure agreement."
...
"I'm very sorry, Christine, but we can't talk about that. The Stark family uses a very comprehensive nondisclosure agreement."
...
"Please leave. Now."
...
On the fourth day, while waiting for Renee Zellweger's brain dead assistant to call her back, Christine gets a call from an unlisted number on her cell phone. She frowns down, debates whether to pick up for about ten seconds, decides that the likelihood of it actually being somebody she does know is very low, so she does. "Christine Everhart," she says.
"Obadiah Stane here." The voice is rich, balanced. A man, definitely older; she knows the name belongs to the CFO of Stark Industries, but it takes Christine a moment to put a face together with the title and the voice. Big man. Bald. Facial hair. Who ran to him?
"I hear you're writing an article on Maria," he says. "From the people you've found, I'm guessing you already know I'm an family friend. Maria and I are old friends, and I'm running things for Tony while he's away. What can I do to help?"
It turns out that he doesn't have time to meet with her, but he'll have his people box up photos of Maria that he's got lying around. Two days, eight hours later, Christine has two large shoeboxes packed with black and white grip-and-greets, but also candids, family photos, that she would have given her molars for when she was writing the Tony Stark article.
...
"I'm sorry, Miss, but I can't answer any questions about that. I signed a -- "
"Wait. Wait. You were were her college roommate. They made you sign a nondisclosure agreement?"
"Stark Industries has been very generous to my family through the years, Miss Everhart. I have a grandson who works there now, in fact. Goodbye."
...
Most of the photos are standard grip-and-greet results. It looks like Maria tagged along to a remarkable number of White House visits and Stark Industries press junkets, so there are plenty of photos with Howard and Obadiah flanking some dignitary and Maria standing next to Howard and smiling.
With the help of the public photos and by dating the White House visits according to what famous staffers or Presidents appearing in them, Christine builds a timeline of what Maria Stark looked like in 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957. 1958. The year she married Howard Stark. The year Stark Industries went public. The year Tony was born. That year, in fact, there's a four month gap in the press junket photos that Maria appears in. Probably excluded from either traveling or being included in the photos once she started looking visibly pregnant.
...
Christine eventually finds somebody who is willing to give her background about the Stark family. She isn't willing to appear in the article -- not because she has any kind of loyalty to the Starks, and the kind of money she'd forfeit by breaching the nondisclosure agreement isn't important to her anymore, but she doesn't want to get her husband into trouble.
"Maria didn't keep the same nanny for more than five or six months usually. I lasted for nine, mostly because she was traveling around Europe for half of it."
In the photos that Christine has, the girl is long-legged and blond. She's still long-legged and blond now, and the furniture that's the backdrop is eerily similar. The Upper East Side stays the Upper East Side, Christine guesses, but now, the girl isn't standing around in the background with a tote full of snacks and a change of clothes for Tony.
"How did you find me?" the woman asks.
Christine explains: in one of the photos Obadiah gave her, something shot on a New England beach, the girl stands in the background, holding a tote. In the foreground, while Tony has a serious conversation with his father. Tony is young enough to still have curly hair and be picked up by his father; Howard's trousers are rolled up to the knee because he has, apparently, been walking with Tony in the surf. Maria wears a white dress that blows in the wind, and she has a small, small smile.
In the background, the girl wears a Vassar sweatshirt against the wind. That's how Christine found her. She'd worked out that the Starks vacationed in Martha's Vineyard only until the Hampton house was finished in 1980. Christine worked backward from there, pulling Vassar yearbook photos progressively from 1980, 1979, 1978. She hit the jackpot with 1976.
"Why did Mrs. Stark fire you after nine months?"
"She thought I was fucking Howard. I think that's why she fired most of the nannies."
Christine studies the woman, who apparently, moved from the background tot he foreground of Martha's Vineyard vacation photos by m arrying the husband of one of the families she'd been nannying for. Stole him away from his shrew of a wife, the woman told Christine within the first ten minutes of the meeting.
"I wasn't, but I swear she was fucking his best friend. I can't remember his name. Oliver? Owen? Something weird." The woman hands the photograph back to Christine.
"Obadiah," Christine supplies and takes the photograph.
She asks the girl whether Obadiah was the one on the beach taking the photos that day, and after thinking about it, the girl confirms. Yes. Obadiah. Every once in a while, he'd go on vacation with the Starks.
In fact, he probably went on vacation with Howard more often than Maria did. That was another way in which that family had been totally fucked, she tells Christine. Totally, totally fucked.
...
"Mr. Stane, this is Christine Everhart from Vanity Fair. You sent me some photos a while back of Maria Stark. I'd like to have lunch with you to talk about the photos. My phone number is -- "
...
"Mr. Stane, this is Christine Everhart from Vanity Fair. A month ago, you sent me two boxes of photographs of Maria Stark. I'm calling again because I'd like to have lunch with you to talk about the photos. My phone number is -- "
...
At the bottom of the second box, there's a photograph where Maria and Howard are part of a crowd. No Obadiah in it, and if Christine has her timeline constructed right, Howard hadn't even met Obadiah at this point. From the clothes, it was probably taken during the second World War or shortly afterwards, and one day, in the middle of waiting on hold for Renee Zellweger's new brain dead assistant, Christine realizes, with a start, that must have been taken during the Second World War: that's the Los Alamos in the background. That's Oppenheimer sitting on the edge of things, a little distracted by something in the sky. A little more research pulls up the names of the other men in the photograph. Robert Serber. Victor Weiskopf.
In the middle of them, there's a dark-haired man with familiar cheekbones and shoulders. Howard Stark. Sitting next to a man that Christine can't identify from cruising Wikipedia, but she figures out who he is from his daughter, sitting to the side by the picnic basket. She's the only girl in the whole photograph, but she has the shape of her father's face. She's skinny, dark haired and dark eyed. Tony has her mouth and her way of tilting his chin up to look at the camera -- he had it in the photograph of him at a black tie party at seven, he had it on the cover of Forbes, and his mother uses it now.
Tony has his grandfather's hands.
...
Maria had been sixteen in 1945. The official storyline has Maria meeting Howard when she was nineteen and a sophomore at Columbia. They married six months later. Christine believed it until she saw the photograph: Howard is looking at Maria, not the camera, and there's a smile in the corners of his mouth.
...
"Mr. Stane, this is Christine Everhart from Vanity Fai -- "
"Ms. Everhart, this is Andy, Mr. Stane's personal assistant. What can I do to help you?"
...
The Stark lawyers got to Maria's college roommate, but Christine goes back to college archives. Yearbooks only have seniors, but the summer crop of interns has arrived, and Christine puts two of the brighter ones on the task of combing through every article in the Columbia Spectator from 1947 and 1948, looking for mentions of Maria's name. They're so grateful to be doing something besides transcription that she feels a little bad about it.
A week and $30 worth of guilt-prompted trips to Starbucks for them later, one of them comes up with something for Christine: a quote from Maria in an article about a new Columbia engineering hire. She says she's looking forward to taking classes with him. The student reporter can't help sliding in something snide about how she's the only girl in any of her classes. He implies that the only reason she's interested in it is because her father worked on the Manhattan Project. Or because the boys are all single.
Christine suspects the reporter doesn't remember, but she flags down the professor's name and is about to go look for him, in the hopes he's not dead or senile and might remember an undergraduate from close to fifty years prior or know a grad student who would, when the other intern yells and throws up his arms in victory. He has a name, a photograph.
"He lives in Norristown, Pennsylvania," the intern says, grinning. "Not only is he still alive, but here's his home phone. Retired UPenn professor of fluid mechanics. Google is beautiful, right?"
Christine hands him her Starbucks Card and tells him, solemnly, to go forth and get caffienated.
...
"Mr. Andrews?" Christine says, ducking down a little to look through the screen door into the house. It's getting late into spring, and out here in the suburbs, there's so much greenery around that it makes the soles of her feet itch. "Are you home?"
...
The photo found by the intern is from the the inaugural meetin of the Young Engineers Club, and front and center is a a photo of Maria, wearing a light-colored dress, with an engineering model in her hands. The very-much-not-Howard-Starks boy in the photograph looks more enamored of Maria than the model; they built it together, and when Christine asks him about it, fifty years later, he remembers. In the photo, he's blond and thin with slanting shoulders. In front of Christine, he's thickset with a paunch. His hair is gone, and he talks like the university professor he spent forty years being.
Yes, it was a for a prize competition that the the University had been running. They'd been honorable mentions. Yes, he and Maria dated briefly. No, he didn't think that she'd been dating Howard then -- she knew Howard. She mentioned him occasionally, a friend of her father's who was in New York City these days. Once in a while, she'd be dropped off at the library, where they had a study date, by a driver and a car that she said belonged to Howard.
But no, she and Howard hadn't been dating. Maria had been dating him, Joe, hadn't she?
...
"I wasn't," the woman had said. "But I swear she was fucking his best friend. I can't remember his name. Oliver? Owen? Something weird."
...
As far as Christine has been able to tell, Tony has only ever told the press two stories about his mother. One, the standard for whenever someone asks him about his mother's legacy or influence, is about being young and sitting in the kitchen at the house on Fifth Avenue. His mother had just come back from Brooke Astor's birthday party; she skipped dinner to be sewn into her ballgown. She was still wearing the ballgown, but had taken a seam-ripper to the side of it after the party was over and was eating now. Tony came down from bed to sit with her; he wore pajamas. She asked if he would like some ice cream, and he indicated that he would, so she asked the housekeeper, who they had gotten out of bed to fix Mrs. Stark her dinner, to bring them some ice cream. And some Dom Perignon that Howard had been saving.
"Dom Perignon and ice cream and Brooke Astor," went the reporters of the sort that asked that questions. "How glamorous."
The other story, Tony only told once, the year after he came back from traveling in Europe and Asia: he was a little older than in the story about Brooke Astor's birthday party. It was when they were vacationing in Martha's Vineyard even though he house in the Hamptons was finished. Again, it took place in the kitchen. Tony and his mother were eating breakfast at the table -- he are cereal and milk and fruit made for him by the housekeeper. Maria smoked. Howard had been up since six and was working in the study; at eight, Obadiah came to join him, and the two of them were shut up in there. Every once in a while, it was possible to hear one of them laugh. When Howard hung up the phone with vigor, it was also possible to hear that.
At the house they had in Martha's Vineyard, the eat-in kitchen faced onto the beach, and after a while, Howard and Obadiah came walking along the beach, past the house. Howard had his shoes and socks in his hand and his trousers rolled. He still wore his tie, though. Obadiah ahd taken his shoes and socks off, too, and hadn't worn a tie that morning, but still had his jacket. They walked along where the beach met the water, talking to each other. Tony looked at his mother.
"There's beach access from the study," she said, and they went back to watching his father walk with Obadiah. At one point, Howard laughed and put his hand on Obadiah's shoulder.
The reporter hadn't known what to make of it, and Tony, regretting having told it once, never told that story again. Christine reads an article about high-powered men who avoid spending time with their children because they're not good at it.
...
Christine comes across one piece of the story by accident. She's at Barneys in New York, having finally secured an interview with a certain star who was making $15 million a movie, but said star is having a fat day, as her personal assistant calls it, and will not come out of the dressing room to be interviewed. It goes on, for hours, and she won't let Christine into the dressing room because she is feeling fat, and Christine is at her wits' end. It's the personal shopping area, and after about the second hour, Christine strikes up a conversation with one of the gentlemen who had been helping said star select her summer outfits. He had been a long-time shopper at Barney's, and the conversation wanders around to other famous people he's helped. It's getting close to 8PM at night; the rest of the store is starting to close down, but the star won't be coaxed out, and the guy and Christine are both getting tired.
At some point, Christine mentions that she'd been working on a piece on Tony Stark before he went missing in Afghanistan. The man smiles and nods.
"Yes, Mrs. Stark used to come here twice a year for two big blowouts. Spring and fall, you know. A character. But a real lady."
And then he tells a story about how, when he was younger, he helped Mrs. Stark with some of her spring shopping. Tony needed clothes, so he came along with his nanny. His mother took one of the dressing rooms; he ran around the floor and tried out the escalators and asked questions about the HVAC. His nanny gave him crackers and juice, and he eventually curls up to sleep in one of the armchairs designated for people who are waiting. His nanny is almost asleep, too. The narrator of the story, the personal shopper, gets called away to solve a small emergency. He returns just as a man in a very nice business suit is coming out of Mrs. Stark's dressing room. Nice grey suit, pale blue shirt with a pastel yellow tie. Probably Hermes before they went mainstream, and the man picks his way through the bags of things that have been rung up and bought and sits down, carefully, on the leather couch. He nods at the nanny; the nanny nods back at him. He holds his arms out, and the nanny, clearly familiar, brings Tony to him.
Tony doesn't wake when picked up by his nanny, nor does he wake when he's settled down in the new place. He curls up in the same way and, in fact, with his eyes still closed, lets out a happy, contented sigh at having his head against somebody's chest. He tucks an arm behind the man, and the shopper is just about to offer Mr. Stark a drink, if he'd like one, when Mrs. Stark calls out from the dressing room.
"So do I look better in the blue or the green?"
"Either way, Howard is going to have to sell a lot of airplane parts to buy either of them for you."
"He makes them. You sell them. Isn't that the deal?"
A few minutes later, a personal assistant comes up from the menswear department with a dozen ties for Obadiah Stane to look over.
...
There's a photograph in the box of Maria and Howard. Before Tony was born, Christine guesses. It's a black-and-white at some kind of nightclub or lounge, back when there they were popular. Howard is in a business suit, but the tie has been loosened, and he has an arm stretched along the back of the banquette over Obadiah's shoulders. They're both smiling. Howard looks more drunk than Obadiah, who is on Howard's left and the photographer's right. On Howard's right and the photographer's left, Maria is tucked against Howard's shoulder and almost falling into his lap. She's young, with very short black hair, and she's wearing all white with a white fur stole. Fox, maybe? Or mink. She looks brilliantly happy to be there.
...
"I'm sorry, Ms. Everhart, but Obadiah is so busy these days. He really doesn't have time, even for a short meeting."
...
"I'm sorry, Ms. Everhart, but I'm not at liberty to give you Obadiah's personal e-mail address. You're more than welcome to contact him through his corporate account -- "
...
Christine drives down to Norristown once more, and the guy isn't nearly as defensive this time. Maybe he's having a better day. Maybe he's having a worse day. This time, he invites her out onto the deck, and they drink lemonade out there and look at the late tulips. His wife is down in Florida, and the man is almost eighty years old now. Yes, he had been in love with Maria. Yes, it had been more than just brief dating. Yes, he had suspicions that she was dating Howard Stark at that time, too, but what was he going to do? He had been in love, and Maria was brilliant. A genius. She had been a better engineer than he was, and maybe that's why she ended up with Howard and not him. Maria had been ambitious -- growing up in Los Alamos, maybe, with her physicist father and no mother and all those older guys.
Ambition.
"Why are you looking into this now?" the guy asks her. He sets his glass of lemonade down. "She's been dead for sixteen, seventeen years. And now her son is dead too. You're a smart girl. What're you doing looking into this?"
Christine has a couple of responses that she usually uses. For example, just because Tony Stark is dead doesn't mean Stark Industries and his designs are going to stop killing people. Or that they're the most famous American non-political dynasty of the past fifty years, but after the guy has been so honest with her, she doesn't know if she can lie. Or if she even knows why she's chasing this story so hard when it'll probably never see the light of day. She has enough for five 2000 word pieces about Maria Stark and how she never, ever spent any time in Washington DC if she could help it. The townhouse off Dupont Circle was strictly Howard's province.
The guy's wife collects wind chimes and hangs them outside the outside. A wind blows through the trees; Christine listens to the wind chimes, has another sip of lemonade, and the guy sighs and leans back in his chair. It's May.
"Maria was a better engineer than I was. She had this way of seeing things, of grasping detail. And she was good at ideas, too. She read this paper once about the brain, and that night, all she wanted to talk about was her idea of using sound, intense sound, to disrupt neural pathways. It makes sense she married a weapons developer and not me."
When Christine gets back to New York City the next day, she finds Obadiah Stane sitting at her desk, looking over her collection of personal photographs and travel knickknacks. One of the interns is gesticulating madly and silently behind him.
"Where would you like to eat lunch, Christine?"
...
Howard meets Obadiah at a circuitry conference in Boston in 1967. Obadiah is, at that point, a junior-level executive in GE's aerospace program. Obadiah joins Stark Industries full-time in 1971.
Tony was born in 1972.
Howard and Maria were married in 1948.
The evidence against it is this: Tony doesn't look like Obadiah. Obadiah doesn't act like a grieving father. Maria was, at some point, sufficiently in love with her husband to drop out of college to marry him.
...
Christine picks a corner deli near the office. There's a second floor seating area that's close to deserted, and the food isn't so good, but the acoustics are. Also, she's not going to concede a thing to Obadiah by picking an expensive restaurant: sandwiches from the counter. He gets corned beef. She gets pastrami. He tells her that there are no good delis in the entirety of Los Angeles. Also, about a pizza place that he used to go to with Howard; the place closed down, but the recipe moved to another pizzeria, and when Tony came out to New York for board meetings, they'd always go there afterwards or order up to the hotel. Now, the pizzeria is gone. Now, Tony is gone. Christine wishes she had her tape recorder while they're standing in line, waiting to get their sandwiches and waiting to pay, but as soon as they get upstairs, she puts it on the table.
"We're on the record," she says.
Obadiah has just taken his first bite of corned beef sandwich -- he's tucked his tie inside his shirt -- and he looks up, amused.
...
There's a photograph of Tony on a horse. Christine doesn't recognize the background, but he's looking over his shoulder and laughing. Maria rests her hand on the saddle; a groom holds the bridle of the horse. It's a strange shot because there isn't anything else to suggest any of the Starks have ever been within ten feet of a horse, but there they are, apparently on a horse farm, and Tony looks thrilled, and Maria seems amused. Maria is wearing riding breeches and boots, and there isn't a nanny in sight.
Christine then gets her hands on a copy of the presentation from the Apogee Awards, she realizes that Obadiah must have given this to the Apogee Awards organizers to use. Tony or Obadiah or the organizers cropped everything out but Tony, at seven, delighted at the world.
...
Obadiah repeats to her the standard stories, checks to make sure she knows the story that Tony tells about his mother, and he tells her a new story about Tony: it's a year and a half after Tony's parents' die, and Obadiah is in West Berlin as a tagalong to the NATO conference being held. After the day's work, it's time for dinner, and Obadiah takes out -- well, he's not going to name any names, especially not in this environment, but they're in a private room at a nice restaurant. There is drinking. And the smoking of cigars. A few of them leave to go to the men's room, and suddenly, a skinny kid in jeans shows up and flops into the seat next to Obadiah. He'd somehow gotten past the pair of security guards posted at the door.
"So, Obie, you ever get the fuselage problem on the MARV's fixed?" he says without bothering to introduce himself. It's twenty year old Tony, skinny, wearing jeans and a t-shirt that's seen better days, and all the gentlemen in uniform and very, very expensive suits stare at him. One of them opens his mouth to ask Obadiah who this young man is, but Tony tilts his chair back on two legs, tucks his hands into his pockets, proceeds to deliver a fifteen minute virtuoso monologue on the engine and design limitations of the AH-64 Apache Longbows, even as redesigned, and why Stark Industries could do it better for three-quarters of the price.
"But I'm telling you gentlemen things you already know. All I know is what I saw at the Air Base today, and gentlemen, if you ever have to send Longbows against any kind of modern armored division where the enemy knows they're coming, I can assure you. They do not have the stopping power that you are looking for in a situation like that. What's the point of having a weapon that you have to fire twice, with the potential for loss of American life each time, when you can get it from us, cheaper, better, and once?" Tony says, then drops the chair back onto four legs. He stands up, nods at Obadiah, and strolls out, whistling something that Obadiah can only assume is some kind of approximation at a tune. He hasn't heard from Tony in four months, and from the looks of it, Tony hasn't had a bath in about that long.
Yes, Maria had been at Los Alamos. Yes, she'd been studying to become an engineer. Yes, she'd told Howard about the idea for the application of intense sound to targeted neural pathways, but they hadn't had the technology to generate sound like that. Stark engineers had only come up with a solution for the size - power problem a couple years ago, and the military rejected the product that resulted.
...
Obadiah Stane tells the story of Tony schooling the CEO of McDonnell Douglas about his own attack helicopter, and he sounds like a proud parent when he does it, but there's an odd note in his voice. Christine watches his face while he talks: no, Tony doesn't look like him. The length of the face is different. The nose. The eyes.
How did Obadiah know she'd gone home with Tony that night? He'd mentioned it, smiling, early into the first half of eating his sandwich. Had Obadiah and Tony been that close?
Christine asks questions about Howard, too. Obadiah wants to focus on Tony: he talks about Tony in the present tense.
...
The early lunch crowd is gone, and so is the late lunch crowd. Sunlight makes the walls of the deli look strangely yellow, and Stane is in the middle of telling a story that Christine has heard before when a phone call comes. Obadiah had been watching his calls come in and silencing them as they came, but he looks down at the number, then looks over at her, looks back down at the phone, and says, "I have to take this."
So he gets his phone and walks off towards the other side of the deli. They're still ont he second floor; there's no one there, and Christine hears him say, "No, slow down, Pepper. I can't understand you. What happened? What did they find?"
A few more minutes pass. Obadiah mostly listens. He says something reassuring that Christine can't quite make out, and then he comes back over, but doesn't sit back down. All the light in the room is from the windows at the front of the store; there is no light source up on the second floor, and it throws Stane's face into shadow. He's a tall man.
"I have to go," he says. "They just found Tony in the desert. Looks like you've got your cover article again."
Later, when Christine is looking into the convenient plane crash, she remembers Obadiah standing there: with the light in his face, she couldn't make out whether he had been smiling, but of all things, he did not sound like a father, and he did not sound surprised.
...
The nanny who had gone to Vassar tells Christine one last story: the year the Starks finish building their house in the Hamptons, they have a lawn party to celebrate. It's a formal affair with big hats and tents and ice sculptures and pyrotechnics, equal parts Howard and Maria. They both love attention, and she, the nanny, has been given strict instructions not to bring Tony out in his miniature grey suit until he's called for. The call comes through; she brings Tony out to his mother, and when she gets tired of him, the nanny takes Tony again.
He eventually wriggles free and runs, not to his parents, but to Obadiah. Tony is three years old, but already learned that neither of his parents is going to pick him up at a party. He stands by Obadiah's knee and sticks his arms up straight in the air. Obadiah absentmindedly picks Tony up and carries him for around for forty-five minutes.
Christine asked to confirm Obadiah this story. He laughed and asked who told it to her.
...
"Tony got it from both sides of the family, you know."
...
"No, Maria never talked about Los Alamos. She left that up to Howard. They were making history, you know."
...
Christine asked questions about Howard, too, but Obadiah wanted to focus on Tony: he spoke of Tony in the present tense. Christine pressed him on it, and he said something about hope being a creature with wings.
"Like an Apache Longbow?"
Obadiah laughed. The call from Pepper lit up his phone about ten minutes after that.
...
Six weeks after the tail of Obadiah's Gulfjet washes up onto a private beach in the Caicos and two weeks after that inane article about hostesses of Washington gets published, Christine gets a phone call from the assistant to the assistant to Tony Stark. Mr. Stark is getting together Mr. Stane's effects, please, and will you please return the photos, please? It's so impersonal that Christine is surprised when Pepper Potts herself turns up on Christine's doorstep in Red Hook to collect them. It's a Saturday afternoon; Christine is wearing shorts and a Brown t-shirt, and out of the window, she sees a Bentley idling by the curb. Two hipsters on the other side of the street point and mutter to each other; the back windows are tinted, and it's not the Rolls she went home in after that night because Tony Stark probably keeps luxury limousines on both coasts. Sitting up in the untinted front is the guy who drove her home after that night at Tony's. Christine has no doubt about who's sitting in the back.
Christine puts the boxes in Pepper's hands.
"Is it OK if I keep one?"
Pepper frowns. She's wearing black leather heels and a black one-piece dress despite the fact that it's about a hundred degrees on New York blacktop. "I'm sorry, Ms. Everhart, but I'm really going to have to insist -- "
"He didn't want them after his mother died. That's how Obadiah got them, and I bet he's either going to have these destroyed or have you put them in storage and never look at them. I promise I'm not going to do anything with the one I'm keeping, Pepper. I'll sign something if you don't believe me."
Pepper is still frowning, and Christine asks, "You want to see it?" She reaches around the corner, picks it up off the hall table, and shows it to Pepper.
Pepper looks at it, and it's hard to see what she thinks, but she puts it in the box. "I'll ask him."
Christine watches Pepper wobble down the uneven front steps with two boxes. Halfway down the front steps, the chauffeur comes jogging out to help her with the boxes. The back door never opens, nor does the window roll down.
...
When Christine goes into the office on Monday, there's a courier package waiting for her. No sender address, but once Christine gets the package open, she can guess who sent it. She goes in to interview Tony a week later, and he looks wary, uncertain. He regrets sending her those photos, Christine guesses, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat when she sits down. The arc reactor is just barely visible through his collared shirt, and Christine is pretty sure that she now knows more about his personal history than anybody else alive. Does he remember asking Obadiah to pick him up on that lawn in East Hampton? What about falling asleep against Obadiah at Barneys, or that his mother was the one who had been a child prodigy, building a working calculator in her father's backyard at eight and, at fifteen, telling Howard Stark how to fix his car? It was amazing what you could find with a little motivation.
Half the people who knew the Starks when they were alive thought that Obadiah was Tony's father.
"Ground rules, Ms. Everhart," Pepper says while Tony fidgets in his seat. "You're not -- "
Christine cuts her off.
"Mr. Stark, I want to know why America should trust a weapons maker who says he's going to stop making weapons, then invents a mobile suit of armor that can fire anti-tank missiles from its shoulders and out-fly Stark Industries-built, state-of-the-art F-22's in a head-to-head dogfight."
Pepper looks surprised. Christine guesses that Pepper didn't know about that last, either.
...
In addition to the photo of Maria and Howard and Obadiah sitting together in the lounge that she'd asked for, Tony Stark sends the one where he's on the horse, and his mother stands next to him. Tony looks delighted; she looks amused. It's uncanny how Tony looks more like whichever parent he's standing next to at the moment; it's even more uncanny how he's only ever in a photograph with one of them at a time.
Christine asked for the photo of Maria and Howard and Obadiah, but the second photo is the one that she buys a cheap frame at the Dollar Store for and keeps on her mantle. Like a scalp nailed to the wall, one of her writer friends says in the course of a long, boozy party, but Christine imagines that the black of the frame brings out hidden shapes: whenever she looks at that photograph, Christine swears she can see the mountains of Los Alamos, ambition and history and dreaming like shadows behind Maria and her son.
I'm prettttty sure that the bit about the paralyzer being Maria's invention is stolen from gabby_silang. Enough of the rest of this fic is.
And why, yes, you didn't ask, but Andy, Obadiah's personal assistant in this is, in my head, the same Andy as that creepy fucking fic about Obadiah. He actually started brain-life in this fic? And when jamaillith were spamming each other about Wrong that fateful Sunday, I ended up slapping the name Andy in because it somehow fit.
Thanks, as usual, to the Hivemind for handholding and ego buffing.
"Oh, Mrs. Stark. She was a character." the woman sighs, then smiles and looks at Christine. "Which publication did you say you were with, sweetie? Women's Wear Daily? Vogue?"
Christine makes herself wait a beat, counts to five. "Vanity Fair. Ma'm."
...
It's a shit assignment, and Christine knows it. She was supposed to be putting together an investigative piece about the truth behind Stark Industries and Tony Stark, but he disappeared, and she didn't flirt back with the short little toad of a features editor. And Tony Stark was either dead or being held by terrorists, which meant that it was clearly inappropriate to continue any sort of investigation into the ways in which he, or his company, were genocidal assholes. Instead, she had a plateful of fascinating research about Julia Roberts's dude ranch. And Sandra Bullock's personal chef. And some guy who wrote a book about being the second runner up in the third annual contest to be a porn star's boyfriend.
"He figured it would be right up your alley," the intern to the short little toad says, and five minutes later, Christine gets an e-mail asking her to come in and talk about the September article. Women in Washington.
Christine is asked to help on the Maria Stark angle. Lots of pictures. That's what they have in mind.
As a "fuck you for not being into me," it's not exactly subtle.
...
There are plenty of pictures of Maria Stark. She has the same taste for publicity that her son and husband did, just in different publications. Not the Washington Post, but Women's Wear Daily. And Vogue. And the Best Dressed Lists. From 1979, there's a photograph of her in some kind of silver dress that looks like the scales of a fish. She has a champagne glass in her left hand, and standing on chair next to her is seven year old Tony in black tie, hands in pockets, looking back at the camera with the same expression as he had on the cover of Forbes, fourteen years later. Chin up, eyes half-open. It's a strange expression to see on the face of a seven year old boy who is, apparently, his mother's escort to something formal enough for her to be wearing a cool million or two in diamonds around her neck.
Howard is nowhere in sight.
Christine sends that to the reporter who's writing the article. She gets back a badly punctuated Blackberry e-mail saying that he's really looking for 'phtoos taken in washington dc in mid nienties.'
Three minutes and twenty-five seconds later, he gets back an e-mail informing him that Maria Stark was dead by the second week of December 1991. Christine feels bad about being so snippy in the e-mail until half an hour later, when she gets an e-mail back asking if she'll do the research on Maria Stark, then. He has his hands full with Cokie Roberts. Cokie Roberts?
...
"Ms. Everhart, I can't talk about that. I signed a nondisclosure agreement."
...
"I'm very sorry, Christine, but we can't talk about that. The Stark family uses a very comprehensive nondisclosure agreement."
...
"Please leave. Now."
...
On the fourth day, while waiting for Renee Zellweger's brain dead assistant to call her back, Christine gets a call from an unlisted number on her cell phone. She frowns down, debates whether to pick up for about ten seconds, decides that the likelihood of it actually being somebody she does know is very low, so she does. "Christine Everhart," she says.
"Obadiah Stane here." The voice is rich, balanced. A man, definitely older; she knows the name belongs to the CFO of Stark Industries, but it takes Christine a moment to put a face together with the title and the voice. Big man. Bald. Facial hair. Who ran to him?
"I hear you're writing an article on Maria," he says. "From the people you've found, I'm guessing you already know I'm an family friend. Maria and I are old friends, and I'm running things for Tony while he's away. What can I do to help?"
It turns out that he doesn't have time to meet with her, but he'll have his people box up photos of Maria that he's got lying around. Two days, eight hours later, Christine has two large shoeboxes packed with black and white grip-and-greets, but also candids, family photos, that she would have given her molars for when she was writing the Tony Stark article.
...
"I'm sorry, Miss, but I can't answer any questions about that. I signed a -- "
"Wait. Wait. You were were her college roommate. They made you sign a nondisclosure agreement?"
"Stark Industries has been very generous to my family through the years, Miss Everhart. I have a grandson who works there now, in fact. Goodbye."
...
Most of the photos are standard grip-and-greet results. It looks like Maria tagged along to a remarkable number of White House visits and Stark Industries press junkets, so there are plenty of photos with Howard and Obadiah flanking some dignitary and Maria standing next to Howard and smiling.
With the help of the public photos and by dating the White House visits according to what famous staffers or Presidents appearing in them, Christine builds a timeline of what Maria Stark looked like in 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957. 1958. The year she married Howard Stark. The year Stark Industries went public. The year Tony was born. That year, in fact, there's a four month gap in the press junket photos that Maria appears in. Probably excluded from either traveling or being included in the photos once she started looking visibly pregnant.
...
Christine eventually finds somebody who is willing to give her background about the Stark family. She isn't willing to appear in the article -- not because she has any kind of loyalty to the Starks, and the kind of money she'd forfeit by breaching the nondisclosure agreement isn't important to her anymore, but she doesn't want to get her husband into trouble.
"Maria didn't keep the same nanny for more than five or six months usually. I lasted for nine, mostly because she was traveling around Europe for half of it."
In the photos that Christine has, the girl is long-legged and blond. She's still long-legged and blond now, and the furniture that's the backdrop is eerily similar. The Upper East Side stays the Upper East Side, Christine guesses, but now, the girl isn't standing around in the background with a tote full of snacks and a change of clothes for Tony.
"How did you find me?" the woman asks.
Christine explains: in one of the photos Obadiah gave her, something shot on a New England beach, the girl stands in the background, holding a tote. In the foreground, while Tony has a serious conversation with his father. Tony is young enough to still have curly hair and be picked up by his father; Howard's trousers are rolled up to the knee because he has, apparently, been walking with Tony in the surf. Maria wears a white dress that blows in the wind, and she has a small, small smile.
In the background, the girl wears a Vassar sweatshirt against the wind. That's how Christine found her. She'd worked out that the Starks vacationed in Martha's Vineyard only until the Hampton house was finished in 1980. Christine worked backward from there, pulling Vassar yearbook photos progressively from 1980, 1979, 1978. She hit the jackpot with 1976.
"Why did Mrs. Stark fire you after nine months?"
"She thought I was fucking Howard. I think that's why she fired most of the nannies."
Christine studies the woman, who apparently, moved from the background tot he foreground of Martha's Vineyard vacation photos by m arrying the husband of one of the families she'd been nannying for. Stole him away from his shrew of a wife, the woman told Christine within the first ten minutes of the meeting.
"I wasn't, but I swear she was fucking his best friend. I can't remember his name. Oliver? Owen? Something weird." The woman hands the photograph back to Christine.
"Obadiah," Christine supplies and takes the photograph.
She asks the girl whether Obadiah was the one on the beach taking the photos that day, and after thinking about it, the girl confirms. Yes. Obadiah. Every once in a while, he'd go on vacation with the Starks.
In fact, he probably went on vacation with Howard more often than Maria did. That was another way in which that family had been totally fucked, she tells Christine. Totally, totally fucked.
...
"Mr. Stane, this is Christine Everhart from Vanity Fair. You sent me some photos a while back of Maria Stark. I'd like to have lunch with you to talk about the photos. My phone number is -- "
...
"Mr. Stane, this is Christine Everhart from Vanity Fair. A month ago, you sent me two boxes of photographs of Maria Stark. I'm calling again because I'd like to have lunch with you to talk about the photos. My phone number is -- "
...
At the bottom of the second box, there's a photograph where Maria and Howard are part of a crowd. No Obadiah in it, and if Christine has her timeline constructed right, Howard hadn't even met Obadiah at this point. From the clothes, it was probably taken during the second World War or shortly afterwards, and one day, in the middle of waiting on hold for Renee Zellweger's new brain dead assistant, Christine realizes, with a start, that must have been taken during the Second World War: that's the Los Alamos in the background. That's Oppenheimer sitting on the edge of things, a little distracted by something in the sky. A little more research pulls up the names of the other men in the photograph. Robert Serber. Victor Weiskopf.
In the middle of them, there's a dark-haired man with familiar cheekbones and shoulders. Howard Stark. Sitting next to a man that Christine can't identify from cruising Wikipedia, but she figures out who he is from his daughter, sitting to the side by the picnic basket. She's the only girl in the whole photograph, but she has the shape of her father's face. She's skinny, dark haired and dark eyed. Tony has her mouth and her way of tilting his chin up to look at the camera -- he had it in the photograph of him at a black tie party at seven, he had it on the cover of Forbes, and his mother uses it now.
Tony has his grandfather's hands.
...
Maria had been sixteen in 1945. The official storyline has Maria meeting Howard when she was nineteen and a sophomore at Columbia. They married six months later. Christine believed it until she saw the photograph: Howard is looking at Maria, not the camera, and there's a smile in the corners of his mouth.
...
"Mr. Stane, this is Christine Everhart from Vanity Fai -- "
"Ms. Everhart, this is Andy, Mr. Stane's personal assistant. What can I do to help you?"
...
The Stark lawyers got to Maria's college roommate, but Christine goes back to college archives. Yearbooks only have seniors, but the summer crop of interns has arrived, and Christine puts two of the brighter ones on the task of combing through every article in the Columbia Spectator from 1947 and 1948, looking for mentions of Maria's name. They're so grateful to be doing something besides transcription that she feels a little bad about it.
A week and $30 worth of guilt-prompted trips to Starbucks for them later, one of them comes up with something for Christine: a quote from Maria in an article about a new Columbia engineering hire. She says she's looking forward to taking classes with him. The student reporter can't help sliding in something snide about how she's the only girl in any of her classes. He implies that the only reason she's interested in it is because her father worked on the Manhattan Project. Or because the boys are all single.
Christine suspects the reporter doesn't remember, but she flags down the professor's name and is about to go look for him, in the hopes he's not dead or senile and might remember an undergraduate from close to fifty years prior or know a grad student who would, when the other intern yells and throws up his arms in victory. He has a name, a photograph.
"He lives in Norristown, Pennsylvania," the intern says, grinning. "Not only is he still alive, but here's his home phone. Retired UPenn professor of fluid mechanics. Google is beautiful, right?"
Christine hands him her Starbucks Card and tells him, solemnly, to go forth and get caffienated.
...
"Mr. Andrews?" Christine says, ducking down a little to look through the screen door into the house. It's getting late into spring, and out here in the suburbs, there's so much greenery around that it makes the soles of her feet itch. "Are you home?"
...
The photo found by the intern is from the the inaugural meetin of the Young Engineers Club, and front and center is a a photo of Maria, wearing a light-colored dress, with an engineering model in her hands. The very-much-not-Howard-Starks boy in the photograph looks more enamored of Maria than the model; they built it together, and when Christine asks him about it, fifty years later, he remembers. In the photo, he's blond and thin with slanting shoulders. In front of Christine, he's thickset with a paunch. His hair is gone, and he talks like the university professor he spent forty years being.
Yes, it was a for a prize competition that the the University had been running. They'd been honorable mentions. Yes, he and Maria dated briefly. No, he didn't think that she'd been dating Howard then -- she knew Howard. She mentioned him occasionally, a friend of her father's who was in New York City these days. Once in a while, she'd be dropped off at the library, where they had a study date, by a driver and a car that she said belonged to Howard.
But no, she and Howard hadn't been dating. Maria had been dating him, Joe, hadn't she?
...
"I wasn't," the woman had said. "But I swear she was fucking his best friend. I can't remember his name. Oliver? Owen? Something weird."
...
As far as Christine has been able to tell, Tony has only ever told the press two stories about his mother. One, the standard for whenever someone asks him about his mother's legacy or influence, is about being young and sitting in the kitchen at the house on Fifth Avenue. His mother had just come back from Brooke Astor's birthday party; she skipped dinner to be sewn into her ballgown. She was still wearing the ballgown, but had taken a seam-ripper to the side of it after the party was over and was eating now. Tony came down from bed to sit with her; he wore pajamas. She asked if he would like some ice cream, and he indicated that he would, so she asked the housekeeper, who they had gotten out of bed to fix Mrs. Stark her dinner, to bring them some ice cream. And some Dom Perignon that Howard had been saving.
"Dom Perignon and ice cream and Brooke Astor," went the reporters of the sort that asked that questions. "How glamorous."
The other story, Tony only told once, the year after he came back from traveling in Europe and Asia: he was a little older than in the story about Brooke Astor's birthday party. It was when they were vacationing in Martha's Vineyard even though he house in the Hamptons was finished. Again, it took place in the kitchen. Tony and his mother were eating breakfast at the table -- he are cereal and milk and fruit made for him by the housekeeper. Maria smoked. Howard had been up since six and was working in the study; at eight, Obadiah came to join him, and the two of them were shut up in there. Every once in a while, it was possible to hear one of them laugh. When Howard hung up the phone with vigor, it was also possible to hear that.
At the house they had in Martha's Vineyard, the eat-in kitchen faced onto the beach, and after a while, Howard and Obadiah came walking along the beach, past the house. Howard had his shoes and socks in his hand and his trousers rolled. He still wore his tie, though. Obadiah ahd taken his shoes and socks off, too, and hadn't worn a tie that morning, but still had his jacket. They walked along where the beach met the water, talking to each other. Tony looked at his mother.
"There's beach access from the study," she said, and they went back to watching his father walk with Obadiah. At one point, Howard laughed and put his hand on Obadiah's shoulder.
The reporter hadn't known what to make of it, and Tony, regretting having told it once, never told that story again. Christine reads an article about high-powered men who avoid spending time with their children because they're not good at it.
...
Christine comes across one piece of the story by accident. She's at Barneys in New York, having finally secured an interview with a certain star who was making $15 million a movie, but said star is having a fat day, as her personal assistant calls it, and will not come out of the dressing room to be interviewed. It goes on, for hours, and she won't let Christine into the dressing room because she is feeling fat, and Christine is at her wits' end. It's the personal shopping area, and after about the second hour, Christine strikes up a conversation with one of the gentlemen who had been helping said star select her summer outfits. He had been a long-time shopper at Barney's, and the conversation wanders around to other famous people he's helped. It's getting close to 8PM at night; the rest of the store is starting to close down, but the star won't be coaxed out, and the guy and Christine are both getting tired.
At some point, Christine mentions that she'd been working on a piece on Tony Stark before he went missing in Afghanistan. The man smiles and nods.
"Yes, Mrs. Stark used to come here twice a year for two big blowouts. Spring and fall, you know. A character. But a real lady."
And then he tells a story about how, when he was younger, he helped Mrs. Stark with some of her spring shopping. Tony needed clothes, so he came along with his nanny. His mother took one of the dressing rooms; he ran around the floor and tried out the escalators and asked questions about the HVAC. His nanny gave him crackers and juice, and he eventually curls up to sleep in one of the armchairs designated for people who are waiting. His nanny is almost asleep, too. The narrator of the story, the personal shopper, gets called away to solve a small emergency. He returns just as a man in a very nice business suit is coming out of Mrs. Stark's dressing room. Nice grey suit, pale blue shirt with a pastel yellow tie. Probably Hermes before they went mainstream, and the man picks his way through the bags of things that have been rung up and bought and sits down, carefully, on the leather couch. He nods at the nanny; the nanny nods back at him. He holds his arms out, and the nanny, clearly familiar, brings Tony to him.
Tony doesn't wake when picked up by his nanny, nor does he wake when he's settled down in the new place. He curls up in the same way and, in fact, with his eyes still closed, lets out a happy, contented sigh at having his head against somebody's chest. He tucks an arm behind the man, and the shopper is just about to offer Mr. Stark a drink, if he'd like one, when Mrs. Stark calls out from the dressing room.
"So do I look better in the blue or the green?"
"Either way, Howard is going to have to sell a lot of airplane parts to buy either of them for you."
"He makes them. You sell them. Isn't that the deal?"
A few minutes later, a personal assistant comes up from the menswear department with a dozen ties for Obadiah Stane to look over.
...
There's a photograph in the box of Maria and Howard. Before Tony was born, Christine guesses. It's a black-and-white at some kind of nightclub or lounge, back when there they were popular. Howard is in a business suit, but the tie has been loosened, and he has an arm stretched along the back of the banquette over Obadiah's shoulders. They're both smiling. Howard looks more drunk than Obadiah, who is on Howard's left and the photographer's right. On Howard's right and the photographer's left, Maria is tucked against Howard's shoulder and almost falling into his lap. She's young, with very short black hair, and she's wearing all white with a white fur stole. Fox, maybe? Or mink. She looks brilliantly happy to be there.
...
"I'm sorry, Ms. Everhart, but Obadiah is so busy these days. He really doesn't have time, even for a short meeting."
...
"I'm sorry, Ms. Everhart, but I'm not at liberty to give you Obadiah's personal e-mail address. You're more than welcome to contact him through his corporate account -- "
...
Christine drives down to Norristown once more, and the guy isn't nearly as defensive this time. Maybe he's having a better day. Maybe he's having a worse day. This time, he invites her out onto the deck, and they drink lemonade out there and look at the late tulips. His wife is down in Florida, and the man is almost eighty years old now. Yes, he had been in love with Maria. Yes, it had been more than just brief dating. Yes, he had suspicions that she was dating Howard Stark at that time, too, but what was he going to do? He had been in love, and Maria was brilliant. A genius. She had been a better engineer than he was, and maybe that's why she ended up with Howard and not him. Maria had been ambitious -- growing up in Los Alamos, maybe, with her physicist father and no mother and all those older guys.
Ambition.
"Why are you looking into this now?" the guy asks her. He sets his glass of lemonade down. "She's been dead for sixteen, seventeen years. And now her son is dead too. You're a smart girl. What're you doing looking into this?"
Christine has a couple of responses that she usually uses. For example, just because Tony Stark is dead doesn't mean Stark Industries and his designs are going to stop killing people. Or that they're the most famous American non-political dynasty of the past fifty years, but after the guy has been so honest with her, she doesn't know if she can lie. Or if she even knows why she's chasing this story so hard when it'll probably never see the light of day. She has enough for five 2000 word pieces about Maria Stark and how she never, ever spent any time in Washington DC if she could help it. The townhouse off Dupont Circle was strictly Howard's province.
The guy's wife collects wind chimes and hangs them outside the outside. A wind blows through the trees; Christine listens to the wind chimes, has another sip of lemonade, and the guy sighs and leans back in his chair. It's May.
"Maria was a better engineer than I was. She had this way of seeing things, of grasping detail. And she was good at ideas, too. She read this paper once about the brain, and that night, all she wanted to talk about was her idea of using sound, intense sound, to disrupt neural pathways. It makes sense she married a weapons developer and not me."
When Christine gets back to New York City the next day, she finds Obadiah Stane sitting at her desk, looking over her collection of personal photographs and travel knickknacks. One of the interns is gesticulating madly and silently behind him.
"Where would you like to eat lunch, Christine?"
...
Howard meets Obadiah at a circuitry conference in Boston in 1967. Obadiah is, at that point, a junior-level executive in GE's aerospace program. Obadiah joins Stark Industries full-time in 1971.
Tony was born in 1972.
Howard and Maria were married in 1948.
The evidence against it is this: Tony doesn't look like Obadiah. Obadiah doesn't act like a grieving father. Maria was, at some point, sufficiently in love with her husband to drop out of college to marry him.
...
Christine picks a corner deli near the office. There's a second floor seating area that's close to deserted, and the food isn't so good, but the acoustics are. Also, she's not going to concede a thing to Obadiah by picking an expensive restaurant: sandwiches from the counter. He gets corned beef. She gets pastrami. He tells her that there are no good delis in the entirety of Los Angeles. Also, about a pizza place that he used to go to with Howard; the place closed down, but the recipe moved to another pizzeria, and when Tony came out to New York for board meetings, they'd always go there afterwards or order up to the hotel. Now, the pizzeria is gone. Now, Tony is gone. Christine wishes she had her tape recorder while they're standing in line, waiting to get their sandwiches and waiting to pay, but as soon as they get upstairs, she puts it on the table.
"We're on the record," she says.
Obadiah has just taken his first bite of corned beef sandwich -- he's tucked his tie inside his shirt -- and he looks up, amused.
...
There's a photograph of Tony on a horse. Christine doesn't recognize the background, but he's looking over his shoulder and laughing. Maria rests her hand on the saddle; a groom holds the bridle of the horse. It's a strange shot because there isn't anything else to suggest any of the Starks have ever been within ten feet of a horse, but there they are, apparently on a horse farm, and Tony looks thrilled, and Maria seems amused. Maria is wearing riding breeches and boots, and there isn't a nanny in sight.
Christine then gets her hands on a copy of the presentation from the Apogee Awards, she realizes that Obadiah must have given this to the Apogee Awards organizers to use. Tony or Obadiah or the organizers cropped everything out but Tony, at seven, delighted at the world.
...
Obadiah repeats to her the standard stories, checks to make sure she knows the story that Tony tells about his mother, and he tells her a new story about Tony: it's a year and a half after Tony's parents' die, and Obadiah is in West Berlin as a tagalong to the NATO conference being held. After the day's work, it's time for dinner, and Obadiah takes out -- well, he's not going to name any names, especially not in this environment, but they're in a private room at a nice restaurant. There is drinking. And the smoking of cigars. A few of them leave to go to the men's room, and suddenly, a skinny kid in jeans shows up and flops into the seat next to Obadiah. He'd somehow gotten past the pair of security guards posted at the door.
"So, Obie, you ever get the fuselage problem on the MARV's fixed?" he says without bothering to introduce himself. It's twenty year old Tony, skinny, wearing jeans and a t-shirt that's seen better days, and all the gentlemen in uniform and very, very expensive suits stare at him. One of them opens his mouth to ask Obadiah who this young man is, but Tony tilts his chair back on two legs, tucks his hands into his pockets, proceeds to deliver a fifteen minute virtuoso monologue on the engine and design limitations of the AH-64 Apache Longbows, even as redesigned, and why Stark Industries could do it better for three-quarters of the price.
"But I'm telling you gentlemen things you already know. All I know is what I saw at the Air Base today, and gentlemen, if you ever have to send Longbows against any kind of modern armored division where the enemy knows they're coming, I can assure you. They do not have the stopping power that you are looking for in a situation like that. What's the point of having a weapon that you have to fire twice, with the potential for loss of American life each time, when you can get it from us, cheaper, better, and once?" Tony says, then drops the chair back onto four legs. He stands up, nods at Obadiah, and strolls out, whistling something that Obadiah can only assume is some kind of approximation at a tune. He hasn't heard from Tony in four months, and from the looks of it, Tony hasn't had a bath in about that long.
Yes, Maria had been at Los Alamos. Yes, she'd been studying to become an engineer. Yes, she'd told Howard about the idea for the application of intense sound to targeted neural pathways, but they hadn't had the technology to generate sound like that. Stark engineers had only come up with a solution for the size - power problem a couple years ago, and the military rejected the product that resulted.
...
Obadiah Stane tells the story of Tony schooling the CEO of McDonnell Douglas about his own attack helicopter, and he sounds like a proud parent when he does it, but there's an odd note in his voice. Christine watches his face while he talks: no, Tony doesn't look like him. The length of the face is different. The nose. The eyes.
How did Obadiah know she'd gone home with Tony that night? He'd mentioned it, smiling, early into the first half of eating his sandwich. Had Obadiah and Tony been that close?
Christine asks questions about Howard, too. Obadiah wants to focus on Tony: he talks about Tony in the present tense.
...
The early lunch crowd is gone, and so is the late lunch crowd. Sunlight makes the walls of the deli look strangely yellow, and Stane is in the middle of telling a story that Christine has heard before when a phone call comes. Obadiah had been watching his calls come in and silencing them as they came, but he looks down at the number, then looks over at her, looks back down at the phone, and says, "I have to take this."
So he gets his phone and walks off towards the other side of the deli. They're still ont he second floor; there's no one there, and Christine hears him say, "No, slow down, Pepper. I can't understand you. What happened? What did they find?"
A few more minutes pass. Obadiah mostly listens. He says something reassuring that Christine can't quite make out, and then he comes back over, but doesn't sit back down. All the light in the room is from the windows at the front of the store; there is no light source up on the second floor, and it throws Stane's face into shadow. He's a tall man.
"I have to go," he says. "They just found Tony in the desert. Looks like you've got your cover article again."
Later, when Christine is looking into the convenient plane crash, she remembers Obadiah standing there: with the light in his face, she couldn't make out whether he had been smiling, but of all things, he did not sound like a father, and he did not sound surprised.
...
The nanny who had gone to Vassar tells Christine one last story: the year the Starks finish building their house in the Hamptons, they have a lawn party to celebrate. It's a formal affair with big hats and tents and ice sculptures and pyrotechnics, equal parts Howard and Maria. They both love attention, and she, the nanny, has been given strict instructions not to bring Tony out in his miniature grey suit until he's called for. The call comes through; she brings Tony out to his mother, and when she gets tired of him, the nanny takes Tony again.
He eventually wriggles free and runs, not to his parents, but to Obadiah. Tony is three years old, but already learned that neither of his parents is going to pick him up at a party. He stands by Obadiah's knee and sticks his arms up straight in the air. Obadiah absentmindedly picks Tony up and carries him for around for forty-five minutes.
Christine asked to confirm Obadiah this story. He laughed and asked who told it to her.
...
"Tony got it from both sides of the family, you know."
...
"No, Maria never talked about Los Alamos. She left that up to Howard. They were making history, you know."
...
Christine asked questions about Howard, too, but Obadiah wanted to focus on Tony: he spoke of Tony in the present tense. Christine pressed him on it, and he said something about hope being a creature with wings.
"Like an Apache Longbow?"
Obadiah laughed. The call from Pepper lit up his phone about ten minutes after that.
...
Six weeks after the tail of Obadiah's Gulfjet washes up onto a private beach in the Caicos and two weeks after that inane article about hostesses of Washington gets published, Christine gets a phone call from the assistant to the assistant to Tony Stark. Mr. Stark is getting together Mr. Stane's effects, please, and will you please return the photos, please? It's so impersonal that Christine is surprised when Pepper Potts herself turns up on Christine's doorstep in Red Hook to collect them. It's a Saturday afternoon; Christine is wearing shorts and a Brown t-shirt, and out of the window, she sees a Bentley idling by the curb. Two hipsters on the other side of the street point and mutter to each other; the back windows are tinted, and it's not the Rolls she went home in after that night because Tony Stark probably keeps luxury limousines on both coasts. Sitting up in the untinted front is the guy who drove her home after that night at Tony's. Christine has no doubt about who's sitting in the back.
Christine puts the boxes in Pepper's hands.
"Is it OK if I keep one?"
Pepper frowns. She's wearing black leather heels and a black one-piece dress despite the fact that it's about a hundred degrees on New York blacktop. "I'm sorry, Ms. Everhart, but I'm really going to have to insist -- "
"He didn't want them after his mother died. That's how Obadiah got them, and I bet he's either going to have these destroyed or have you put them in storage and never look at them. I promise I'm not going to do anything with the one I'm keeping, Pepper. I'll sign something if you don't believe me."
Pepper is still frowning, and Christine asks, "You want to see it?" She reaches around the corner, picks it up off the hall table, and shows it to Pepper.
Pepper looks at it, and it's hard to see what she thinks, but she puts it in the box. "I'll ask him."
Christine watches Pepper wobble down the uneven front steps with two boxes. Halfway down the front steps, the chauffeur comes jogging out to help her with the boxes. The back door never opens, nor does the window roll down.
...
When Christine goes into the office on Monday, there's a courier package waiting for her. No sender address, but once Christine gets the package open, she can guess who sent it. She goes in to interview Tony a week later, and he looks wary, uncertain. He regrets sending her those photos, Christine guesses, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat when she sits down. The arc reactor is just barely visible through his collared shirt, and Christine is pretty sure that she now knows more about his personal history than anybody else alive. Does he remember asking Obadiah to pick him up on that lawn in East Hampton? What about falling asleep against Obadiah at Barneys, or that his mother was the one who had been a child prodigy, building a working calculator in her father's backyard at eight and, at fifteen, telling Howard Stark how to fix his car? It was amazing what you could find with a little motivation.
Half the people who knew the Starks when they were alive thought that Obadiah was Tony's father.
"Ground rules, Ms. Everhart," Pepper says while Tony fidgets in his seat. "You're not -- "
Christine cuts her off.
"Mr. Stark, I want to know why America should trust a weapons maker who says he's going to stop making weapons, then invents a mobile suit of armor that can fire anti-tank missiles from its shoulders and out-fly Stark Industries-built, state-of-the-art F-22's in a head-to-head dogfight."
Pepper looks surprised. Christine guesses that Pepper didn't know about that last, either.
...
In addition to the photo of Maria and Howard and Obadiah sitting together in the lounge that she'd asked for, Tony Stark sends the one where he's on the horse, and his mother stands next to him. Tony looks delighted; she looks amused. It's uncanny how Tony looks more like whichever parent he's standing next to at the moment; it's even more uncanny how he's only ever in a photograph with one of them at a time.
Christine asked for the photo of Maria and Howard and Obadiah, but the second photo is the one that she buys a cheap frame at the Dollar Store for and keeps on her mantle. Like a scalp nailed to the wall, one of her writer friends says in the course of a long, boozy party, but Christine imagines that the black of the frame brings out hidden shapes: whenever she looks at that photograph, Christine swears she can see the mountains of Los Alamos, ambition and history and dreaming like shadows behind Maria and her son.
I'm prettttty sure that the bit about the paralyzer being Maria's invention is stolen from gabby_silang. Enough of the rest of this fic is.
And why, yes, you didn't ask, but Andy, Obadiah's personal assistant in this is, in my head, the same Andy as that creepy fucking fic about Obadiah. He actually started brain-life in this fic? And when jamaillith were spamming each other about Wrong that fateful Sunday, I ended up slapping the name Andy in because it somehow fit.