“Right, right — so you can actually travel between worlds,” Tony said.
Leon said nothing.
“Oh my God.” Tony’s expression shifted to something more genuine.
“The theory of parallel universes.
Not theoretical anymore.
You’ve just rendered an entire branch of speculative physics into an empirical fact.” He pointed.
“When you go, you’re taking me.”
“We’ll see.”
“And when you go to find the kryptonite—” Tony held up a hand before Leon could respond, “—I’m coming.
At minimum.
So that when the kryptonite turns you temporarily human, I can take the opportunity to kick you.” He considered this.
“I’ve been storing up a reasonable backlog.”
“We’ll see,” Leon said again.
Tony seemed to accept this as better than a no.
He’d probably already started planning the itinerary.
“Let’s go inside,” Leon said.
“There are things I’ve been meaning to say since I got back.”
Half an hour later they were at the lab workbench — Tony in his bathrobe, Leon in a dry shirt he’d found somewhere, the lighting low and the coffee Tony had made going largely untouched.
The lightness that had been in the pool conversation had settled into something different.
Tony’s expression had been tracking Leon’s voice for the last few minutes, and it had gone gradually more serious.
“Three things,” Leon said, “that I came back to do.”
He raised three fingers.
“First: Obadiah.” He folded one finger.
“Already handled.
You know the outcome.”
Tony nodded, jaw tight.
“Second: The Ten Rings.” Another finger.
“They took you.
They don’t get to continue operating after that.
I’ll deal with what’s left of them — the parts I didn’t already destroy in Afghanistan.
Starting tomorrow.”
Tony said nothing, but his expression said that he was not going to argue this point.
“Third.” Leon looked at him.
“The truth behind our parents’ death.”
Tony was still for a moment.
Then:
“What truth?” His voice was carefully neutral.
“They died in a car accident.”
“That’s the official account,” Leon said.
“Leon—” Tony paused.
“The investigation was thorough.
Multiple parties confirmed it.
Two people in a vehicle, a collision, a fire.
The baby — you.
There’s no—”
“I know what the investigation found,” Leon said.
“I’m not saying the investigation was dishonest.
I’m saying it may have been looking at a staged scene.”
Tony didn’t answer right away.
He’d wanted someone to say this, Leon thought, watching him.
Not consciously.
Not in a way he’d ever let himself admit.
But that particular stillness — that was the stillness of a man hearing something he has been waiting eighteen years to hear.
Tony had been out when the accident happened.
He’d just finished a massive fight with Howard—the kind of long, freezing argument Howard produced with flawless efficiency.
When it ended, Tony chose to stay away.
Just to let the old man stew for a few days.
He figured he’d head back whenever he felt ready.
He’d been thinking about Howard’s face, still in the argument in his mind, and then a piece of paper had arrived and something that could never be finished was suddenly finished.
Not resolved.
Just stopped.
The anger at himself for that — for the days he’d wasted being childishly far away — had never quite processed.
It had just become part of the structure of who he was: the specific way he never asked for help, never let anyone take care of him, never conceded that anything in his life was beyond his own control.
And somewhere underneath all of it, a question he’d never let himself fully articulate.
If someone did this — if there was someone to blame — then the anger has a target.
Then I can do something with it.
He knew he’d have to be careful.
He knew he couldn’t rush at the first answer that offered him an outlet.
“Why do you think it wasn’t an accident?” he said.
“I survived,” Leon said.
“I shouldn’t have.”
“You were thrown free—”
“The fabric was around my neck.
Twice.
The car was burning.
I had no way to call for help.
I was eleven months old.” Leon looked at him steadily.
“You know what the odds of that outcome are.
I’m the most fragile person in that car, and I’m the one who walks out without a scratch.”
Tony’s expression shifted.
“Maybe—”
“And here’s the thing,” Leon said.
“The culprit doesn’t make mistakes.”
“I’m not saying his name tonight,” Leon continued, “because I’m not ready to move on that yet, and naming him creates a target before I have a foundation under me.
But I’m saying: the person who staged that accident is not someone who leaves accidents to chance.
If the baby was supposed to die, the baby was supposed to die.” He spread his hands.
“So why didn’t the baby die?”
Tony had nothing.
“I didn’t understand it either,” Leon said.
“Not for eighteen years.
I thought I must have been wrong — that the conjecture was too convenient, too much about what I wanted to believe.
Every official source said: car accident.
Why would I trust a feeling in the back of my mind over every official source?”
He looked down at his hands.
“Then the bloodline activated.
And I understood.”
After the super-brain came online, something else had come with it: not memories — the brain at eleven months wasn’t capable of storing retrievable memories, and no amount of processing power could reconstruct what wasn’t encoded — but something adjacent to memory.
Impressions.
Fragments of sensory information laid down in a form the neurons could hold but not organize.
A fire.
The smell of burning metal.
Cold ground.
Nothing complete.
Nothing usable as evidence.
But it had changed the shape of what Leon believed especially with his meta knowladge.
“The Kryptonian bloodline was dormant,” Leon said.
“The blood was there but the abilities weren’t active.
Even so — even dormant — it was something.
A cellular resilience that wasn’t human.
The person who staged that scene assumed they were dealing with an infant.
They weren’t wrong about everything.
But they were wrong about what it would take to kill that specific infant.”
He looked at Tony.
“That’s why I’m alive.
Not chance.
The bloodline did what it was doing before I knew it was doing anything.”
Tony sat with this for a moment.
Then he stood up, slowly, and walked one step away from the workbench and stood there.
“You said you’ve been investigating,” he said.
He didn’t turn around.
“You said you found something.”
“In the past few days.
Super hearing, classified servers, files that were never meant to be in the same room as anything accessible.” Leon’s voice was even.
“I found the thread.
I followed it.”
Tony turned.
“Who.”
“They call themselves Hydra,” Leon said.
The word landed the way it always landed — the weight of history built into it.
“Hydra is gone,” Tony said, immediately, automatically.
“They were dismantled after the war.
Multiple governments confirmed it.
That’s history.”
“Cut off one head,” Leon said.
“Two more grow back.
That’s the whole point of Hydra.
It’s structural, not organizational.
You can’t dismantle it by eliminating leadership.”
Tony was very still.
“There’s an organization,” Leon said.
“You haven’t heard of it, officially, because it operates under a designation that gets buried in the routing of the World Security Council.
They call it S.H.I.E.L.D.
— Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.
Headquarters in New York.
More than ten thousand personnel globally.”
“I’ve never—”
“You wouldn’t have.
That’s deliberate.” Leon leaned forward.
“Their predecessor was the Strategic Scientific Reserve.
Dad was one of the founders.
After the war, during the German recruitment program — Operation Paperclip — they brought in talent from the collapsed Hydra infrastructure.
Scientists, strategists, operational specialists.”
Tony’s jaw was tight.
“Those people never stopped being Hydra,” Leon said.
“They moved inside the structure and they waited.
They’ve been building from inside SHIELD ever since.
By the time I looked at the files, the majority of SHIELD’s operational personnel are Hydra aligned.”
The silence went on for a moment.
“The previous director was Hydra,” Leon continued.
“The current director isn’t, technically.
But the way he operates — the ends-justify-everything philosophy, the willingness to use any method, the complete absence of accountability — he’s not ideologically Hydra, but he’s given them exceptional cover.” He paused.
“Operationally, it may not matter.”
Tony sat back down.
He was moving carefully, the way he moved when he was absorbing something that he wasn’t sure he had the structural capacity to absorb yet.
“Dad was one of the founders,” he said.
“One of the leaders.
Central enough that he’d have seen it eventually — the infiltration, the scope of it.
He’d have been in the way.” Leon held his gaze.
“That’s the motive.”
Tony pressed his fingers flat on the workbench.
“And the whole organization,” he said.
“Most of them Hydra.”