[Fateverse Side Story: BB Bundle] The Blossom to the Branch
i'm not particularly settled on the title. i still feel it's lacking something. *shrug*
warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. evil!Tony. some background rule 63/het. organized crime. threats of violence. language: pg-13 (for f***, s***, and g**damn).
pairing: Lester/Aki (Bullseye/Daken), implied Steve/Tony, Steve/Pete, and Steve/Clint.
timeline: later in the same day as 115.
disclaimer: marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.
notes: 1) the title is a reference to a Buddhist proverb: Once fallen, the blossom cannot return to the branch. 2) this is a 'good guys are bad, bad guys are good' AU. Tony's still rich and manages to stay out of trouble by dint of paying a lot of reporters and investigators a lot of money to say he's not Iron Man. 3) "gaijin" is a fairly rude word for "foreigner"; it literally means "outside person," and is used almost exclusively to refer to Westerners. the polite way of calling someone a foreigner is "gaikokujin," "person from an outside country." 4) Go is a Chinese strategy game involving the placement of black and white beads on a large grid to gain control of 'territory.' 5) "oyasumi nasai" is the polite form of "good night." it literally means "please rest," and can be said at any time of day. 6) koi are an Asian breed of carp (goldfish are from the same family), and are a common feature in Japanese tattooing. 7) traditional Japanese tattooing is done by hand, and is a painful and laborious process. and a tattoo generally isn't 'extensive' by traditional standards unless it covers at least the entire front or back of the torso; a sleeve or half of the back wouldn't be considered extensive, especially for yakuza. 8) siddham is a form of sanskrit that was used to convey religious teachings along the Silk Road. 9) Aki totally stole her dad's line, lol.
The Blossom to the Branch
Akiko was just pulling her shirt on after a quick shower when her phone rang.
“Avengers work temporarily finished, mommy work resumes,” she muttered.
On the other end of the line, Lester was incoherent. Hysterical.
God, how Aki hates incoherent hysteria…
“When in all your years of superheroing has panic ever helped anyone?” she asked (loudly, so that he could hear over his histrionics).
Two degrees calmer, Lester wasn’t much more helpful. He just kept going on and on about ‘he’s gone’ and ‘I only looked away for a second.’
So Aki sighed and said, “Michael is a child, Lester. They wander. Now, do me a favor and use your brain-you know, the twinkly crystal ball in your coat pocket?”
And then she got something truly informative. ~“Sprite says she can’t get a solid lock on him.”~
Intriguing. Annoying.
“Well, it can’t have been more than two hours; she can see that far back. Ask her if he was with someone.”
She fixed her collar while she waited for her husband to relay the question and its answer.
Steve Rogers BB115-Epsilon.
Aki punched the mirror.
Now she’s sitting on the couch while Mac watches QVC. Every few seconds, she unlocks her phone and hesitates with her thumb over a forbidden speed-dial number.
“Shouldn’t you be home by now?” Mac asks her when the woman on the screen moves on from hand painted dragon statuettes to glass unicorns.
Sprite won’t touch Rogers-it’d fuck with the consolidation of their timeline. She refuses to locate the bastard. And if Norman had any clue how to get his hands on America’s most wanted supervillain, he’d have gift-wrapped Rogers by now and been sitting pretty in the White House.
“Hellooo?” Mac calls, leaning forward.
Aki hits the speed-dial.
The receptionist has a porn-star voice, smooth and pretty and a little bit breathy. She even speaks English, and she doesn’t lose her cool when Aki says to ‘tell that fucking gaijin crook his daughter is on the phone.’
~“Akiko.”~
“Your little friends took my son.”
~“You have a son?”~
She snarls. “Don’t sound so surprised; I know your people are watching like hawks. You probably have half of Norman’s staff in your pocket.”
~“The only friends I have are wizened little Japanese men who play Go and possibly smoke more than they should.”~
“Fucking matter of semantics.”
~“This from the woman who places such importance on the subtle distinction between lawless vigilante and morally ambiguous hero.”~
It takes every ounce of self-control she possesses to keep from crushing her phone in her grip. Her father has always known how to rile her-pointing out their similarities with irrefutable logic, keeping quite calm because he has people he pays to get angry for him. “Then what exactly is your relationship to the Captain and his band of meta-human terrorists?” Aki bites out. “Business associates? Comrades? Former teammates?”
~“The first and the last. Never truly the second.”~
Aki draws a cleansing breath. “He took my son.”
~“And?”~
“And I want him back.”
~“Steven is an eminently reasonable man, under the right circumstances. Try talking it out.”~
Her blood runs cold. She grits her teeth so hard her jaw creaks. “You bastard. You’re in on it. Where is Michael? Have you got him?”
~“Consider my advice, Akiko. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s quite late here. Oyasumi nasai.”~
“Fuck you.”
When she hangs up, she punches the coffee table. It snaps rather extravagantly, sending the remotes flying (Mac catches them with a few tentacles).
Mac eyes her warily, fanged mouth making awkward little hesitant frowns. “Sssso,” he hisses, fidgeting with his popcorn bowl. “The Captain took Mikey?”
“Michael,” Aki growls in correction. “His name is Michael.”
“Right. Um. Should we asssk Norman to-”
“Norman couldn’t find Rogers with a map, a GPS, and a series of glowing neon signs.” Slowly, she stands up. “I’ve got it under control. Tell Norman I’ll be taking some time off work. If you say anything else about the situation, I’ll come back and force-feed you your legs.”
Mac just sits there and cuddles his popcorn. “Right,” he says again.
Akiko carefully puts her Avengers communicator on the splintered remains of the coffee table and heads for the door.
She seethes on the cab ride to Stark Industries. She shoves the fare at the cabbie, who cowers.
As she walks through the front door of the big, glass-walled building, the receptionist glances at her with a vague smile, looks down at something on the desk, and looks back up with a broader smile. “Welcome, Mrs. Graves. Mr. Stark’s been expecting you. Fifty-third floor.”
Express elevator. Her ears pop.
A redhead meets her at the elevator and gestures. “This way, Mrs. Graves.”
This high up in the building, there is no rat-warren of cubicles. The floor is made up of a broad central corridor with conference rooms and executive offices on either side. Ahead, a nameplate beside an antique mahogany door bears the inscription ‘TONY STARK, CEO.’
Ginger (or whatever the hell her name is) knocks on the door. “Mrs. Graves is here, sir,” she calls out.
“Excellent. Let her in, Potts.”
‘Potts’ smiles and holds the door for Akiko.
It turns out that Tony Stark is just like every other asinine self-aggrandized white executive-he sits behind a huge desk and has impressive matched collections of books he’s probably never read lining the walls. The place smells of wood and leather, and there’s an expensive liquor cabinet in one corner (she makes note of it in case she needs to smash something).
“Mrs. Graves,” he says brightly. “So good of you to visit. It really is a pleasure to finally meet you off the battlefield.”
“Cram it up your ass,” she replies. “Give me my son and I won’t snap you in half. Yet.”
“Right to business. That was always one of your father’s best traits-”
“Mention my father again and I’ll be forced to fling that lovely oak liquor cabinet and its crystal decanter right out the goddamn window.”
He grins somewhat indulgently. Again, typical rich white bastard. “That would be a terrible shame, since the decanter is a Tiffany original. Michael-not-Mikey-or-Mommy-gets-mad is safe, provided you work for us instead of the Avengers.”
“Fuck that,” Aki sneers. “My ovaries are particularly healthy. I can always make another.”
“I wonder if your husband also considers your children so easily replaced.”
Jabbing at the real soft spot. Canny prick.
Aside from the insult of having something of hers stolen, the problem here is that Lester is very attached to their children, and Aki is very attached to Lester not sobbing like a teenage girl.
“It’s funny, really,” Stark goes on, sitting back in his chair and steepling his fingers. “In almost six years as one of the most prominent Avengers, we never even came close to cracking your husband’s secret identity. You’ve been an Avenger for-what, half that?”
“Lester doesn’t have any tattoos.”
“True. And if you were a little more careful with your own welfare, your costume would certainly have covered your tattoo. Out of curiosity, what is it? A dragon? Koi? Must be pretty extensive, to show up on your hand and again at the shoulder.”
It’s a half-finished traditional Japanese tattoo, the work of about ten years when she was living with her father. A black dragon curls from her heart over her shoulder and down her left arm, and an incomplete framework of clouds fills the left side of her back down to a sakura tree on her hip. If she’d ever gotten it finished, there would’ve been a siddham scripture in the clouds. Under most circumstances, the only visible part of the tattoo is the tip of the dragon’s tail, on the back of her hand.
“A dragon,” she says shortly. “And it’s not extensive by Japanese standards.”
“Interesting.”
“Cut the bullshit. Spell it out, Stark-what exactly are your terms?”
“Three terms. First, you stop working for the Avengers.”
“Already done.”
“Good. Second, you don’t interfere with our operations. Third, you complete certain assignments we might have for you-nothing too contrary to your heroic-outlaw-protector-of-the-innocent idiom, I assure you.”
“And in return?”
“Your son is kept safe, well-fed, and appropriately tutored. You receive proof of life in the form of a half-hour secure streaming video conversation once a week. If you like, you can even bring your husband along.”
Slowly, she leans forward and plants her palms on his desk, stares him down with the insolent predator-stare she learned from her father. “All right. But if you ever harm my son, ask me to do something you know I will refuse, or otherwise give me cause to suspect you’ve broken our deal in any way, I’ll cut off both your hands and leave you for your precious Captain to find. After that, I’ll break Spider-Man’s legs. Then I’ll cut the tendons in Hawkeye’s wrists. When Rogers comes to find me, I’ll be waiting with a fucking picnic lunch, and by the time I’m done with him, he’ll wish he’d never heard of me. I am the goddamn best there is at what I do, and what I do isn’t very fucking nice.”
Stark isn’t so smug now. He still wears a trace of a smile, but it’s a grim and nervous thing. “How very true,” he says. Then he passes her some kind of communicator, a sleek little thing that would probably make Norman writhe with inferiority. “Keep this on you at all times. Steve’s an impatient man, so I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you fail to answer.”
“I already told you what’ll happen,” she replies, pocketing the device. “And if any of your teammates come near my home or my daughter, they’ll be returned to you in a dozen medium-sized FedEx boxes.”
.End.
merianmoriarty has my formal permission to pimp my fics on various comms (if/when i ever abandon deviantART, i'll go ahead and join the comms myself and take care of getting things posted in the right places). no one has permission to re-post this ANYWHERE, but feel free to share or link.
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