Chapter Text

When Toni Stark woke up, her first thought was that she really needed to drink less. Not knowing where or, indeed, when you woke up was all very well in your twenties, but she had just turned forty, and that wasn’t really a good look on her. Her second thought was that this was an extraordinarily unusual place to wake up, even by her standards. For one thing, it seemed to be either a cave, or a cave-themed hotel room with an unusual commitment to realism with regards to moss. For another, there seemed to be quite a lot of guns strewn around.

Her third thought was that while she was prone to having blackouts she at least usually remembered starting drinking, and her last memory was having a bunch of Stark Industries’s latest exploding behind her like so many fireworks, which was (Toni was unashamed to admit) pretty fucking badass.

Her fourth thought, and indeed her fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth thoughts, were that she couldn’t feel her legs.

“You’re awake,” said a man. “Good.” He had a bald head, a neatly trimmed beard, and the general air of being an Oxford professor about to comment on a fine point of Seneca, which was somewhat incongruous given the AK-47 he was sitting next to.

Toni would have normally answered that with a witticism. However, given the circumstances, Toni felt that her lack of creativity would be forgiven. “What the fuck happened to my fucking legs?”

“Dr. Stark, I have had quite a lot of time to think about how to break this to you,” the man said, “and to be honest I haven’t figured out anything better than honesty. During the demonstration of your latest products, you were kidnapped by the Ten Rings terrorist organization; in the process, they hit you with various bits of shrapnel. I saved your life, but it shattered your spine and is lodged dangerously near your heart, giving you perhaps two weeks to live.”

Toni considered this.

“So what you’re saying,” Toni said, “is that the bad news is that I’m crippled, and the good news is that I’m not going to have to be crippled for very long.”

The man inclined his head, as if to say “you said it, not me.”

“They don’t really spend a lot of time on bedside manner in terrorist med school, do they?”

“You’re joking, that’s good,” the man said. “You’ll need all your faculties when they return.”

Toni wanted to swing off the bed, to pace back and forth while she processed this. (That wasn’t true. What she wanted was to lock herself in her workshop back in New York, working until she collapsed from exhaustion on the floor, and only emerge when she’d made at least two discoveries that would revolutionize physics. But pacing was better than nothing.) But she couldn’t (and, she thought in a quick flash as quickly repressed, she would never be able to do so again). So instead Toni closed her eyes.

If she had just found out that she was kidnapped by the Ten Rings, or just found out that she would be crippled for the rest of her life, or just found out that she had two weeks to live, then Toni would have made a scene. For that matter, if there had been thirty minutes between each of those discoveries, Toni felt, she probably could have made a decent effort. But finding out three life-ruining facts, in the space of a sentence, left her with only a sense of calm, a grim determination.

It occurred to her briefly that the man might be lying. It certainly seemed like this was the sort of cave terrorists would hide out in-- but then (Toni thought) her previous experience was action movies and weapons demonstrations, hardly making her an expert. But on the other hand she was clearly kidnapped, and she clearly could not walk, and that was enough to go on. She could figure out whether he was lying about everything else later.

Toni had read about the five stages of grief, and she thought they were bullshit. There wasn’t much point to Denial-- either a thing was true or it wasn’t-- and Toni had never been a big fan of Bargaining. She didn’t suck up to people, instead preferring to sufficiently awesome that they had to suck up to her.

Instead, Toni practiced the Toni Stark Stages of Grief, which were as follows:

Five seconds of regret. Jokes Drinking. Trying To Get JARVIS And/Or Pepper And/Or Obie To Fix The Thing. Engineering.

Drinking was probably not possible-- she’d vaguely heard that Muslims weren’t big fans of alcohol, and anyway Toni could hear the voice of Pepper inside her head saying “I can cover for you at the Stark Foundation gala. I can cover for you at shareholder meetings. But being kidnapped by terrorists is not something you can do wasted!” And both JARVIS and Obie were half a world away.

But, fortunately, no matter what happened, she still had Jokes. So she shoved away her grief into the tiny locked corner of her mind where there lived thoughts like “my father was never proud of me” and “I miss my parents” and “when I die, the only people who are going to care are those who are paid to do so”, and opened her eyes.

“I’m Dr. Yinsen,” the man said.

“Toni.”

“I know, Dr. Stark,” he said. “I’m a big fan of your work. I wish I could have made your acquaintance under more favorable circumstances.”

“I have terrorist fans now?” Toni said. “You really appreciate the construction of the missiles I blow you to smithereens with?”

Snark aside, Toni had to admit that, all things considered, this was a fairly likeable kidnapper. At least he remembered her doctorate. There was many a society lady in New York City you couldn’t say as much about.

“Unfortunately,” Yinsen said, “I am as much a captive as you are.”

“That sounds like exactly what the good cop says before pressing me for information about confidential Stark Industries tech,” Toni said. “Well, not cop. Terrorist? Is there such a thing as a good terrorist? Man, I’d say that would get me on a watchlist, but given that I’m already inside a terrorist cave that seems to be a little bit late--”

What Yinsen was about to say in response was lost to history, as Toni suddenly heard voices-- presumably from another room that she wasn’t in a position to see. While Toni didn’t understand their language, the tone was unmistakable to anyone who’d spent five minutes around a soldier: being tired after a long day’s work; the desire for a warm fire and a warm bed.

“They’re here,” Yinsen said unnecessarily.

A man dressed in camo entered the room. He glanced at Toni, obviously awake and alive, and his eyes widened. He exchanged a handful of sharp words with Yinsen, who did seem to understand the language, then rushed away.

“He’s getting Raza,” Yinsen said.

“Who the fuck is Ra--” Toni began, before she was cut off by having a piece of paper shoved unceremoniously in front of her face.

Toni had only been disabled for five minutes, but she was already beginning to hate it.

“Look, I would love to help,” Toni said. “But I can’t actually read that.”

“What?” Yinsen said. “It’s in English.”

Toni squinted. It seemed plausible. There were lots of straight-up-and-down lines. Arabic probably involved more curves. “Doesn’t help much. If you give me two hours and some Tylenol I can probably get the gist of it.”

“You can’t read,” Yinsen said.

“Severe dyslexia,” Toni said. “About the worst my doctor had ever seen. ...Look, you’re a fan of my work, didn’t you ever wonder why I only program in HoLISP? Why I wrote JARVIS?”

“...You invented a hologram-based programming language and an artificial intelligence because it was easier than learning to read?”

“Technically,” Toni said, “technically, the programming language was my dad.”

Yinsen was interrupted by a flurry of words from the lead terrorist. Yinsen responded briefly. The terrorist stormed off. The quiet murmur of voices in the other room became much louder.

“Raza is yelling at his men for kidnapping a retard,” Yinsen said. “Um, no offense.”

“No worries, I get from my competitors all the time,” Toni said. “Usually about an hour before I bankrupt their company. Raza is the guy who looks like two caterpillars died on his face?”

“The very same,” Yinsen said. “Now one of his men is accusing you of faking.”

Boots stomping on the floor; Caterpillar Eyebrow Guy entered the room again and shouted at Toni. Yinsen translated, “he doesn’t care what is wrong with you. You know how to build weapons. He has lost many of his best people to Stark weapons, and wants them himself. He will give you all the parts he can find, and you will build them for him. You will begin with a Jericho missile.”

“Um, why?” Toni said. “I’m going to die in two weeks. I’m not going to spend my last two weeks building weapons for terrorists.”

Yinsen and Caterpillar Eyebrows briefly exchanged words. Yinsen said, “Well, at the moment you get to be alive for two weeks, and if he shoots a bullet between your eyes, you’re going to die right now.”

“Persuasive argument,” Toni said.

Yinsen translated that-- it seemed to take much longer in his version and be significantly more apologetic-- and, apparently satisfied, Caterpillar Eyebrows snapped out a last order and left.

“He wants me to move you to my house,” Yinsen said. “He is afraid that, since you’re pretending not to know how to read, you may also be pretending to not know Arabic. They will move camp immediately.”

“I have to say, this is a refreshing change,” Toni said. “Usually people underestimate me. So, uh, how is this going to work? Does Afghanistan have wheelchairs?”

--

Afghanistan did not have wheelchairs.

Toni had to hand it to the Ten Rings. She was pretty sure she would be nowhere near this professional about carrying a representative of the Great Satan piggyback when all you wanted to do was crawl into your nice warm bed and dream of 72 virgins. But the man Toni had started to think of as “her terrorist” stared straight ahead with a dignified expression on his face, walked smoothly and without bouncing her around, and was careful to make sure her hold was secure. While she had not been kidnapped before, she still felt like this was above-average kidnapping service. 10/10, Would Not Want To Be Kidnapped Again, But Am Less Upset About It Than I Would Be Otherwise.

Yinsen jogged alongside her. In spite of the setting, the company, and the enormous toolbox he was carrying, he somehow managed to look like an academic going on his daily constitutional.

“So what’s your story?” Toni asked. “You’re not a terrorist, who are you?”

“Surgeon,” he said. “Studied at Cambridge. Made a mistake of taking my family to visit my hometown in Afghanistan while the Ten Rings were looking for a doctor.”

“Damn,” Toni said. “I could have sworn you were from Oxford. --Wait. Ho Yinsen?”

“Yes,” the man said.

“The Ho Yinsen?” Toni said. “Pioneer in robosurgery?”

“The very same.”

“Jesus Christ.” Toni shook her head. “Everyone thought you were dead.”

“Unfortunately not the case,” Yinsen said.

“I’m sorry I called you a terrorist,” Toni said. “Of any sort. Good or bad.”

“It was an understandable mistake,” Yinsen said. “I, too, would no doubt call people terrorists after I had been kidnapped-- although I didn’t have any non-terrorists around to test it on at the time.”

“I wish I could get JARVIS to meet you,” Toni said. “You’re the whole reason he can touch things, you know that? --Oh, god, you were kidnapped four years ago, you have no idea the strides we’ve made.”

“I look forward to picking your brains over the next two weeks,” Yinsen said. “Mountains are not known for their easy access to academic journals.”

Toni’s mind raced, trying to figure out what to say first. They had only two weeks, and she had to tell him everything! She could probably think about it while she was knocking out the first two Jericho missiles-- wait. Why was she assuming that she would build Raza missiles? Toni’s opinion of the Ten Rings was hardly positive to begin with, and being kidnapped had somewhat soured her disposition. Besides, they called her a retard. No one got away with calling her a retard.

Well, Raza could kill her. And if she were dead it would be a bit difficult to tell Yinsen about robotics. But if there was one thing Toni had learned over the years, it was that you should never assume there was only one kind of machine you could build to solve a problem.

“How is he planning to tell if I’m building a Jericho missile?” Toni asked. “I mean, I can build him an arsenal in two weeks, but it’s easy enough to incorporate subtle flaws into the machinery that he won’t see until after I’m safely dead.”

“That operation did not go remotely as Raza had hoped,” Yinsen said. “He didn’t want you dead, he wanted you a prisoner. This is him trying to make the best of this enormous mess. If you had woken up a week earlier, you would have gotten to see the corpses of the people who failed him.” His mouth was flat. “Speaking as a medical man, it was somewhat gruesome.”

Toni revised up her estimate of the terrorist’s professionalism. If she had to carry around someone who was indirectly responsible for the death of one of her comrades, she would definitely have accidentally hit them against a rock.

“Lucky for Raza,” Toni said, “I’m not actually going to die.”

She hadn’t thought the sentence until she said it, but once she did, it was obviously true. This was not how Toni Stark dies.

“You’re going to stop the shrapnel from entering your heart?” Yinsen said. “How?”

“Not sure yet,” Toni said. “But bodies are just machines made of meat. It’s an engineering problem. And there’s no such thing as something I can’t build.”

Toni had to admit it, she was excited. Admittedly, she wouldn’t have chosen to be kidnapped, or crippled, or only have two weeks to live. But for far too long, her life had been, well, somewhat routine. Revolutionize an industry. Build something that blows up and kills people. Build something that blows up bigger and kills more people. Get drunk. Fuck a male model. Fight with Pepper or Obie. Order Chinese. Ignore a tabloid blaring “ATTENTION-STARVED TONI STARK HITS BOTTOM”. Revolutionize another industry. It got boring.

But this… this was a real problem, with real stakes. Something that affected more than Stark Industries’s stock prices. If she didn’t fix it, people would die-- as opposed to the normal state of affairs, where people would die if she did.

Now that was something to wake up in the morning for. She could barely wait to get started.

“What’s he going to do with me if I don’t die?” Toni asked.

“You’d be like me. A prisoner,” Yinsen said. “I’ve stitched together the Ten Rings for four years.”

“You didn’t escape?”

Yinsen shrugged. “I tried once.”

“How’d that go?”

“I have three children.”

“I… don’t see how that’s related.”

“I used to have four.”

“Oh.”

Yinsen had gotten an A in his stiff upper lip classes at Cambridge. “He does not wish to kill me. I have useful skills. We are both lucky to be in such a position. His other soldiers have no such protection.”

On one hand, Toni was in a much better position than Yinsen to make an escape attempt. She had no children, except of the silicon variety, and those were a bit difficult to shoot in the head. He could torture her, perhaps, but he couldn’t cause that much damage; he wanted her brain and her hands preserved. She briefly wondered how Raza would have kept her from escaping if she hadn’t been crippled (armed guard?), but right now it looked like he was going to trust to the fact that she couldn’t walk unaided and was stuck between a bunch of mountains and a desert.

On the other hand, nothing was stopping Raza from killing more of Yinsen’s children if Toni escaped. And Toni liked Yinsen. JARVIS would be sad if he never got to meet him. And Yinsen remembered her doctorate.

There was nothing else for it. She would, of course, escape; she would escape the first time she tried it; and she would bring Yinsen and his family with her; and hopefully she would cause the deaths of Raza and his men, if for no other reason than that her terrorist deserved the most peaceful death the Geneva Conventions could give him.

It was nice to know the outline of the problem.

When they arrived at the villages, Toni immediately had vivid fantasies of real estate development. The houses were rectangular, with flat roofs and square glassless windows cut into the walls, and were made of clay; they looked as if the villagers had invented the concept of mud in 3000 BC and, satisfied, taken the next five thousand years off. It was personally offensive to Toni as an engineer.

Step five, she thought: found Architects Without Borders.

As they approached, Toni heard upset voices. She braced herself; angry terrorists did not seem very conductive to any part of her new plan. But neither Yinsen nor; and when they turned the corner to see the people, they weren’t dressed in camo and none of them had guns. In fact, one of them looked somewhat like Toni’s grandma. Toni wasn’t exactly an antiterrorism expert, but she was pretty sure terrorists didn’t come in grandma.

“What’s wrong?” Toni asked.

“One of the family’s cell phones got water on it,” Yinsen said. “They’re herders; texting each other allows them to keep track of the animals. They can’t afford a new one, and without enough cell phones the family will go hungry.”

Toni felt a sudden rush of homesickness. A cell phone. The first piece of technology she’d seen since she got in this godforsaken country that wasn’t specifically designed for killing people. If it was a StarkPhone, she would hug them. Ugh, who was she kidding, she would hug them even if it turned out to be a fucking HammerPhone.

But none of those feelings showed in the cocky grin on her face. “Oh, that’s all?” Toni said. “I can fix that.”