Stark Tower, several floors below the penthouse, Tony Stark’s private workshop hummed with the low mechanical churn of half a dozen projects in various states of disassembly.
Rhodey leaned against a workbench that wasn’t his, arms crossed, watching his best friend stare at a monitor that, as far as he could tell, wasn’t displaying schematics, weapons specs, or anything remotely related to the prototype repulsor gauntlet scattered in pieces across the table between them.
“Tony.”
No response.
“Tony.” Rhodey pushed off the bench and walked over, glancing at the screen properly for the first time.
It was a browser history log, Jarvis’s neat, itemized breakdown of some kid’s internet activity, timestamps running back weeks.
“What exactly am I looking at?”
“Nothing.” Tony closed the window a beat too quickly, the kind of reflexive guilt Rhodey had learned to read like a second language over fifteen years of friendship.
“Didn’t look like nothing.”
“It’s a project Jarvis is running.
Background stuff.”
“Uh-huh.” Rhodey folded his arms again, settling in with the patient stubbornness of a man who’d pulled Tony out of worse rabbit holes than this one.
“Jarvis, pull that back up.”
“Rhodey—”
“Certainly,” Jarvis said, with what Tony could have sworn was a note of relief, and the window reopened.
Rhodey scanned it properly this time.
Advanced mathematics.
Cryptography.
A shareware game listing under something called Lumen Games.
A name, buried a few lines down: *Mark.* Age five, according to a date of birth Rhodey didn’t need Jarvis to flag as suspiciously close to a hotel receipt from years back that he vaguely remembered Tony drunkenly mentioning once and never bringing up again.
“Tony.” Rhodey’s voice went flat.
“Is this the kid.
The one from that tabloid thing, back before I even made colonel.”
Tony didn’t answer right away, which was, in itself, an answer.
“You told me that was nothing.
Some woman trying to shake you down.”
“It was nothing.” Tony finally turned from the bench, pulling off his safety goggles with more force than necessary.
“It’s still nothing.
Jarvis ran some numbers a while back, came up with a probability, big deal, probability isn’t proof, and I’ve got better things to spend my attention on than chasing down a kid I’ve never met based on a percentage.”
“Then why,” Rhodey said, gesturing at the screen, “do you apparently have Jarvis keeping tabs on his internet history?”
“Because he’s not an ordinary kid, Rhodey, that’s why.
Five years old and he’s teaching himself quantum mechanics off pirated textbook scans.
Built himself a functioning AI on consumer hardware. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
Hacked CAA’s entire security infrastructure well enough that it took Jarvis actual effort to beat him.” Tony threw the goggles down on the bench, more agitated than he seemed to want to admit.
“You know how rare that is?
I’ve met maybe four people in my life who could’ve pulled that off before they hit puberty, and three of them work for me now.”
“So you’re saying he’s smart.”
“I’m saying he might be the smartest person on the planet under the age of ten, and I happen to have a statistically significant reason to think he’s got my blood in him, and instead of doing anything about that, I’ve got Jarvis quietly logging his homework assignments like some kind of—” Tony cut himself off, visibly annoyed at his own rising volume.
Rhodey let the silence sit for a moment, giving his friend room to hear himself.
“Some kind of father who’s too scared to actually talk to his kid,” Rhodey finished for him, gently enough that it didn’t land like an accusation, though it clearly still landed.
“I’m not his father.
Not officially.
Not in any way that matters.”
“Eighty-three percent probability is a pretty specific number for something that doesn’t matter.”
Tony didn’t have a comeback for that one.
Pepper found them twenty minutes later, drawn down by Jarvis’s discreet suggestion that her presence might be “constructive,” a word choice that told her everything she needed to know about the state of the conversation she was walking into.
“Somebody want to fill me in?” She set a stack of contracts she’d been chasing signatures on down on the least cluttered surface she could find, which still took some searching.
“Tony’s been stalking a five-year-old,” Rhodey said, deadpan, before Tony could spin it into something more palatable.
“I have not been *stalking*—” Tony started, and then, catching Pepper’s raised eyebrow, sighed and gave up on the defense entirely.
“There’s a possibility I have a son.
Jarvis found him a while back.
I told Jarvis to drop it.”
“And did he?”
“…Not entirely.”
Pepper’s expression shifted through several stages, surprise, calculation, and finally something quieter, more careful, the look she got when she was deciding how much of her actual opinion Tony could handle hearing in one sitting.
“Tony, how long have you known?”
“Months.”
“And in those months, have you done anything besides have Jarvis watch him from a distance like some kind of surveillance project?”
“I sent him legal protection when SHIELD’s people got a little too close to finding him.
That counts for something.”
“That counts as damage control, not parenting.” Pepper pulled out a chair and sat, folding her hands, settling in for what was clearly going to be a longer conversation than either of them had planned on having in the workshop.
“Tony, I’ve known you for years now. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
I’ve watched you avoid every single conversation that gets within ten feet of the word ‘family.’ I understand why.
Howard was—” she chose the word carefully, “—difficult.
I understand not wanting to repeat that.”
“Then you understand why I’m not exactly rushing to sign up for the position.”
“I understand why you’re scared.” Pepper’s voice softened, though it lost none of its directness.
“But Tony, the way you avoid it isn’t actually protecting anyone.
If this kid really is yours, and he’s out there right now building AI programs and hacking into CAA’s servers at five years old with nobody around who understands what that actually means, you not being scared enough to reach out isn’t keeping him safe.
It’s just keeping *you* comfortable.”
Tony opened his mouth, something sharp already forming, and then visibly stopped himself, the words dying somewhere behind his teeth.
Rhodey watched the exchange with the particular quiet of a man who’d seen Pepper land hits on Tony that nobody else in the world could manage, precisely because she never did it out of malice.
“I don’t even know what I’d say to him,” Tony admitted finally, quieter than either of them had heard him in a while.
“What, I just show up?
‘Hey, kid, I’m your absentee billionaire father, sorry about the fifty grand and vanishing act, want to catch a slice of pizza sometime?’ That’s not exactly a great opening line.”
“You don’t have to have the perfect opening line.” Pepper reached over, resting a hand briefly on his arm.
“You have to decide whether you’re going to keep hiding behind a probability score, or actually find out the truth and deal with whatever that means.
Whatever you decide, Tony, decide it on purpose.
Don’t just let Jarvis quietly keep tabs forever because making an actual choice terrifies you more than the not knowing does.”
Tony was quiet for a long moment, staring at the closed monitor, at the ghost of the browser history still burned faintly behind his eyes.
“Jarvis,” he said finally, voice rougher than he probably intended, “keep the surveillance passive.
No contact.
Not yet.”
“Understood, sir,” Jarvis replied, and if an AI could sound like it was holding its tongue on a follow-up question, Jarvis managed it admirably.
“But,” Tony added, glancing at Pepper, then at Rhodey, “start pulling together a real DNA comparison.
Something Coulson’s people can’t stumble onto by accident.
If I’m going to actually deal with this, I want to know for certain, not eighty-three percent certain.”
Pepper allowed herself a small, satisfied smile, the kind that suggested she’d known exactly where the conversation would land the whole time and had simply been waiting for Tony to arrive there himself.
“That’s a start,” she said.
“Don’t get used to it,” Tony muttered, already reaching for his goggles again, retreating back toward the safety of machinery and metal, the language he trusted far more than the one this conversation had required.
“One step at a time.”
But Rhodey caught the look on his face as he turned back to the workbench, something unguarded flickering there before Tony buried it back under his usual bravado, and thought, not for the first time, that his oldest friend was a far more complicated man than the magazines ever gave him credit for.
Outside, three thousand miles west, a five-year-old boy lay in a sunlit backyard, entirely unaware that somewhere in a Manhattan skyscraper, the first quiet gears of a father’s slow, reluctant reckoning had just begun to turn.