June 15, 2009 – Hayes Residence, New York
Eileen left for work soon after, Winky apparating her directly to A.I.M. headquarters in Miami before returning a moment later with a soft pop.
If Tony ever looked closely at how things worked in the Hayes household - the fact that Eileen commuted to Florida daily and returned to New York each evening without ever booking a flight - he would realize something was deeply unusual.
But Tony was a good friend. He never pried into matters that weren't offered freely. And so he remained blissfully unaware of the magical world existing just beneath the surface of his reality.
With Winky watching over the children, Arthur retreated to his study. Tony's situation still hovered in his mind, refusing to settle.
The complications ran deeper than simple overconfidence.
For one, Tony's relentless assault on Ten Rings bases was dangerous in ways Tony couldn't possibly understand.
The Ten Rings weren't just a random terrorist cell—they were connected to the Mandarin. To Xu Wenwu and his actual Ten Rings. By any logical measure, Wenwu should have retaliated already. A warlord of his caliber wouldn't tolerate an unknown armored figure systematically dismantling operations that bore his organization's name.
But no retaliation came.
Why hasn't he acted? Arthur mused.
Then the answer clicked into place.
Right now, Wenwu should still be mourning Ying Li, his wife and training his son.
That explained the silence. The Ten Rings were effectively running on autopilot, their true leader withdrawn from the world.
Lucky timing, Arthur thought. For Tony, at least.
If the real Mandarin were active, Iron Man's career would have ended last week in a smoking crater. The mystical Ten Rings weren't mere jewelry—they were weapons of unimaginable power, wielded by a man with a thousand years of combat experience. Tony, for all his genius, wouldn't last a minute.
But that wasn't the only problem on the horizon.
There was another, quieter danger ticking away beneath Tony's chest.
The Palladium poisoning.
"Eve," Arthur said to the empty room. "Based on Tony's current flight hours and combat output, run a projection on his palladium core consumption."
"Calculating," the AI responded smoothly. A moment passed. "Based on the energy requirements for trans-continental hypersonic flight and repeated weapons deployment, Mr. Stark is burning through reactor cores at an accelerated rate. Consequently, the palladium toxicity in his blood is likely rising forty percent faster than your original timeline estimates."
Arthur closed his eyes.
It was a ticking clock. In canon, Tony had nearly a year to enjoy his fame, to grow complacent, to slowly notice the symptoms creeping up on him.
But here?
Tony was flying halfway across the world every few days. Engaging in sustained combat. Pushing the reactor harder than ever.
The events of Iron Man 2—the poisoning, the desperation, the spiral—were going to hit him much sooner than expected.
And the supposed villain of that story? Ivan Vanko?
Arthur drummed his fingers on the desk.
In the original timeline, Tony's dramatic "I am Iron Man" press conference had been broadcast around the world. It had made him a celebrity.
It had also reached a dying man in Russia. A man who watched his supposedly stolen invention being paraded before the cameras and tasked his son with revenge.
But here, there had been no such announcement. No global broadcast. No viral moment.
Tony Stark was still officially just a traumatized billionaire recovering in private. The mysterious armored figure was just that—mysterious.
Which meant Anton and Ivan Vanko knew nothing.
There would be no Whiplash. One more villain removed from the board.
Arthur should have felt relieved. Fewer villains meant a safer world.
Instead, he felt a flicker of something uncomfortably close to frustration.
Tony was going to have it easy. Too easy. No supervillains to fight.
Obadiah Stane was gone. Ivan Vanko would be a no-show. And with Killian successfully integrated into A.I.M., that particular monster would never be born either.
With the Tesseract locked away safely, perhaps even the events of the Avengers would never come to pass.
Piece by piece, the world's dangers were dissolving—and with them, the crucibles that forged heroes.
It was a paradox. Arthur wanted to be happy that he had made the world safer, that he had ensured Tony would be safe. But without a villain to push him, Tony would never have the opportunity to grow. To become the man he was meant to be at the end.
He almost wished Stane would come back. He almost wished for the drama of the original timeline—the betrayal revealed, the highway battle, the final confrontation on the rooftop of Stark Industries. It would have been spectacular to witness. And he very badly wanted to see the iconic "I am Iron Man" moment delivered the way it was meant to be delivered.
Arthur rubbed his face with both hands.
"Stop it," he muttered. "This isn't a movie anymore. These are real people. You don't get to wish for disasters just so you can watch from the sidelines."
He leaned back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Maybe he was worrying too much.
The universe had a way of creating its own balancing forces. He'd told Eileen exactly that that morning. He'd seen it play out in Harry's life—events stubbornly bending back toward certain outcomes despite his best efforts.
Maybe it would be the same here.
Arthur had no idea how right he was.
—
Moscow, Russia
The rain in Moscow was cold, smelling of rust and old diesel. It hammered against the corrugated metal roof of the derelict warehouse, drowning out the distant sirens of the city.
Inside, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and grinding metal.
Obadiah Stane stood in the shadows of the catwalk, looking down at the workshop floor below.
He looked nothing like the titan of industry who had graced the cover of Forbes and charmed Senate committees with practiced ease. His bespoke Italian suits were gone, replaced by a heavy, grease-stained woolen coat. His head was shaved as always, but rough white stubble covered his jaw, and his eyes—usually cold and calculating—now burned with a feverish, desperate intensity.
He was a fugitive. A wanted man. His assets were frozen, his reputation incinerated by the godson he had protected for over twenty years.
Tony Stark.
The name was a curse in his mind. A poison.
Stane had watched the news. He had seen the blurry footage of the red and gold machine tearing through the Middle East, leaving burning terrorist camps in its wake. He had recognized the technology immediately. The impossible power output.
It was the miniaturized Arc Reactor. Tony had actually done it—shrunk the technology down to something portable, wearable, weaponizable.
"He thinks he's untouchable," Stane muttered, his voice like gravel scraping stone. "He thinks he's the only one allowed to play with the big toys."
He turned his gaze to the center of the warehouse floor.
An old man sat in a wheelchair, wrapped in moth-eaten blankets. A tank of oxygen stood beside him, a plastic tube running to his nose. His breathing was shallow, labored—the wet rattle of lungs that had spent too many years in Soviet prisons and too many nights in freezing apartments.
Anton Vanko.
It had taken Stane considerable effort to find this man. Every favor he had left in the global underworld. Every contact who still owed him from the old days, before the fall.
Anton Vanko, Howard Stark's old partner. The man who had helped design the original Arc Reactor, only to be deported and erased from history. Stane didn't know why Howard had done it. Some dispute over credit, some falling out that had been scrubbed from the records. He didn't particularly care. What mattered was that Anton Vanko understood the technology at a fundamental level.
Stane had found him rotting in a Soviet-era apartment block, consumed by bitterness and poverty, waiting to die.
He had offered him something better than death. He had offered him revenge—and a future for his son.
"Is it done?" Stane asked, his voice echoing in the cavernous space.
The old man coughed—a wet, hacking sound that seemed to tear at his lungs. He gestured with a trembling hand toward the workbench.
There, sitting in a cradle of steel clamps, was a circle of glowing blue light.
It wasn't as refined as Tony's. The housing was cruder, the components visible through gaps in the casing. It buzzed louder, the light harsher, flickering with barely contained instability. It looked angry.
But the energy output readings on the monitor beside it were off the charts.
Stane descended the metal stairs slowly, his eyes fixed on the light. He reached out, feeling the hum of raw power vibrating against his palm.
"Magnificent," he whispered.
He looked down at Anton. "You delivered."
"The technology..." Anton wheezed, his Russian accent thick and labored. "It is... Vanko legacy. Not Stark. I deserved the credit. The recognition. Howard took everything."
"Yes, yes. Legacy." Stane waved a hand dismissively, his eyes never leaving the reactor.
"My son..."
"Ivan. Yes." Stane pulled a phone from his coat pocket and showed the screen to the dying man. "Ten million dollars. Transferred to a secure account in his name. Untraceable. He'll never have to scrape for scraps again. He can drink himself to death or build his own empire. I don't care which."
Anton Vanko stared at the screen for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly, slumping back in his wheelchair. Tears pricked at his rheumy eyes as he looked at the reactor—his life's work, finally realized. Not for the glory of science. Not for recognition. But as payment to secure his son's future.
It was enough.
"Now," Stane said, turning to the men waiting in the shadows. "Mount it."
Three engineers hurried forward. They lifted the reactor with reinforced gloves—carefully, reverently—and carried it toward the massive shape looming in the darkness at the back of the warehouse.
It stood ten feet tall.
It wasn't sleek like Tony's suit. It wasn't designed for aerodynamics or elegance. There was no gold, no hot-rod red, no artistic flourishes.
It was a brute.
A walking bunker of thick, gray steel. Hydraulic pistons the size of tree trunks powered the limbs. A rotary cannon was mounted on one arm, a cluster of missile tubes on the other. The helmet was a featureless slab of metal, save for two dark eye slits that seemed to drink in the light.
The design was familiar—an evolution of the Mark I armor Tony had built in that Afghan cave.
Stane smiled, a shark-like baring of teeth. Getting the designs had been almost disappointingly easy.
Before his arrest, his teams had gathered every scrap of intel related to Tony's escape, trying to understand how he had survived. Buried inside that data was a footnote about Tony's fellow prisoner, Dr. Yinsen—how the man had walked out of captivity with a battered laptop and a handful of files.
Yinsen had taken them home, tucked them away like mementos from another life, never suspecting anyone would come looking.
Stane had gambled that the files would be valuable. He had gambled correctly.
His people copied everything without Yinsen ever realizing he'd been compromised. And there it was—blueprints, sketches, fragments of calculations. Enough to reconstruct Tony's crude cave-built armor and understand how to improve it.
Stane hadn't wasted a second.
Using Tony's designs as a skeleton, he rebuilt the suit from the ground up. Then he upgraded it with Russian military hardware—weapons systems meant for tanks and gunships, armor plating rated to withstand anti-materiel rounds, servos powerful enough to flip a car with one hand.
The Iron Monger.
The engineers positioned the reactor at the chest cavity. Cables as thick as a man's wrist connected to ports along the spine. Coolant lines hissed as they pressurized.
"Slotting now," one of the engineers announced, backing away.
The reactor clicked into place.
CLANG.
Connections locked. Systems initialized. A low whine began to build, rising in pitch until it became a scream. The warehouse lights flickered—once, twice—then died completely as the suit drew power, sucking the electrical grid dry.
For a moment, there was only darkness and the sound of rain.
Then the eyes of the helmet flared white.
The chest piece blazed with blinding blue brilliance, casting harsh shadows across the warehouse floor.
Stane threw his head back and laughed. It was a loud, ugly sound that echoed off the metal walls, drowning out the storm.
"Tony!" Stane shouted at the ceiling, his voice thick with venomous triumph. "You built a suit to save the world? How touching. How naive."
He walked toward the open cockpit of the monster, running his hand along the cold steel of its leg. The metal hummed beneath his palm, alive with power.
"I built one to rule it."
Stane climbed the gantry and stepped into the pilot's harness. Actuators whirred as restraints locked around his arms and legs. Neural interface pads pressed against his temples.
The heavy chest plates began to close around him, sealing him inside.
As the final piece locked into place—as darkness enveloped him and the HUD flickered to life—Stane felt a surge of power unlike anything he had ever known. It coursed through him like electricity, like fire, like destiny.
He was coming back.
He was coming for his company. For his legacy. For everything that had been stolen from him.
And he was going to crush Tony Stark with his bare hands.