The Iron Façade

A/N: I've posted this as a second chapter for those who love the original. This one is the one that is canon for the new version of the story however. A warning not related to this oneshot; the rewrite is not for Team Steve fans especially at first. If you want to talk to me about my opinions, anything else or send fanart for my stories you can do it on my tumblr karmaruelovegoodeverdeen. Link on my profile.

Toni Stark was not a narcissist. When people saw how she acted, that was always their first assumption. Truthfully, though, she was often more negative about herself than she was positive. The narcissism was a façade that she put up to keep people from getting too close. When people got close to her, it wasn't pretty for either of the parties involved. Yet, somehow, people kept sneaking past her walls and inevitably ripped out her heart; both figuratively and occasionally literally (Sunset, Tiberius, Obie, Pepper, Rhodey, Natasha).

She couldn't trust them, not fully.

Toni had divided her life up into two different periods. There was before-Afghanistan Toni, who had made her fair share of bad decisions and had let them affect her far too much, thus leading to a woman who simply didn't care anymore. Toni knew she could never let herself get that detached again. After-Afghanistan Toni still had her flaws of course; all people did. Ultimately, Toni was still a flawed individual with several unusual personality quirks that she saw as a necessity and others just saw as a nuisance.

When Toni had been born, she had been a great disappointment to her father. Why? Because she had been born as a girl. Howard Stark hadn't wanted a daughter, he had wanted a son. However, Maria Stark had been forbidden by the doctors to have another child, due to Toni having caused such a risky pregnancy that had nearly killed her. Howard blamed her for that too. To him everything was her fault. Toni knew that. It always was and always would be.

As she grew older, Toni had begun to show signs of an intelligence equal to – and sure to eclipse – her fathers within time. Her father had absolutely forbidden her mother, Jarvis, Ana and Aunt Peggy from buying her any toys and, while they had managed to sneak a few past him, she still ended up making most of them herself from scraps from her father's lab bin. The first time she had done that, she had only been two years old.

By the time she had been three, Toni had grown tired of the simple mechanisms in her toys and had started working on something bigger – which had ended up being a circuit board made of scraps. She hadn't shown it to her father. It hadn't been any good. Howard had told her that she would never amount to anything and she had truly believed so; despite the other members of her family trying to convince her otherwise. So, she had put the circuit board at the back of her closet and had tried to put it out of her mind, but never really succeeded.

Toni had kept on working on more and more complex versions of that board until, at four, she had cracked the code on her father's laboratory door and had took some proper materials to make her most advanced circuit board yet.

Howard had caught her finishing it and Toni had thought that he was going to hit her for a moment. Once her father had spotted the circuit board, though, it had been promptly confiscated. Toni now suspected that copies of her board had been in the newest computer upgrades her father had designed.

Nonetheless, Howard had finally realised that having a daughter wasn't so bad; as long as she was a genius. And as long as it didn't get out to the public of course. Everyone had to believe that Howard Stark was the only genius of the family. Toni hadn't known that, though – or had probably forgot about it – and had shown the next one to her nursemaid. What happened, you ask? She had suddenly appeared in the news as a child prodigy.

What had followed had been young Toni's first encounter with the press. Howard had shown her off at a conference while doing a convincing job of pretending to be proud of her. It had been so convincing an act that Toni might have had believed it herself, if it hadn't been for the steely glint in Howard's eyes.

It had been at that point that she had first realised that her father had probably been planning on claiming her accomplishments as his own. After all, he didn't believe that a woman could run such a sensitive operation with any degree of competency. That had been obvious by the fact that his loving and opinionated wife had had to fight to get any control over her own life and that of her child. In fact, the only official influence Maria Stark had been allowed to have on Toni's young life had been making sure that she would have grown up to be a 'proper lady.' Maria had done her best to be a good mother outside of those situations, but she had only been able do so much, and only when her husband hadn't been at home.

So, Toni had sat through endless etiquette lessons, learning how to cook, how to dance and how to be a good host. Through it all, though, she had been wishing to go into her father's lab and fix up some of the cars in there. She hadn't want to let her mother down, though. That feeling, however, hadn't stop Toni from sneaking in, anyway. She had just made sure that there had been no way her mother could have taken any of the blame. Toni had been six when her father had first caught her entirely rebuilding an engine to make his car go faster. Howard had shouted at her for it, but later it had become the only car he drove.

Toni hadn't been entirely without family, of course. Her mother had done her best and she had been assisted by the family butler, Jarvis, and his wife Ana. She had also had her Aunt Peggy, who was – and still is – her godmother and childhood role model. Not to mention Peggy's husband, Daniel. The times that she had spent with them, their children and the children of the other Howling Commando descendants, had been some that she had considered the best of her life. She supposed that at one point she had also had Rachael, her nursemaid, as well, but she had been dismissed after leaking news of Toni's intelligence to the press.

From that point on, Toni had hated everyone in the media; they had taken Rachael away from her. That hate followed her throughout the rest of her life, no matter how skilled she became at manipulating them to see what she wanted them to see.

Peggy had played with Toni with her toys until she had got bored of them. Peggy had probably assumed that her parents had bought them for her, instead of realising the extent of Toni's talents, but that hadn't mattered to the little girl. What had mattered was the attention. There had once been talk of Aunt Peggy and Uncle Daniel taking the family back to Peggy's homeland, but Toni's upset reaction, along with that of their kids, had changed their minds in the end. Still, Peggy couldn't be around all the time and she hadn't liked being around Howard much either; what with his constant searching for Captain America. She had often liked to say that the man had been her boyfriend, not Howard's. So, if she had given up, then he should have had as well a long time ago.

Unfortunately, Howard had quickly realised that the best way to target her, had been to threaten to stop her interactions with those people. He would take her mother on sudden holidays that gained him lots of love from the public, but none from Maria, as she would just sit around and call Toni while Howard worked in a different country instead. He had constantly threatened to fire Jarvis to get Toni to cooperate, even though the man had been helpful to him as well.

By far, though, the worst thing he did, was banning her from seeing Aunt Peggy when she did something to upset him. Her father had even lied to Peggy about why the visit had been cancelled to try and make Toni sound bad. Thankfully, Peggy had always made sure to get the real story from Toni on her next visit and it had been clear at the time that she had been building up a very strong sense of outrage against Howard.

Toni had been eight when she saw someone die for the first time. It hadn't been in person, but it hadn't been the blurry pictures they tended to show on the news either. Her father had forced her to design a bomb under threat of him firing Jarvis once again. He had tracked the first one fired and, just as it had been about to hit its target, he had brought up the footage on the screen so Toni could see the 'good work' she had done. Toni had seen it and had ran into the next room to threw up. Howard had then decided that his daughter was even weaker than he had originally thought, to react so violently to terrorists dying. Toni had only known that her invention had killed people. But she had needed Jarvis – and she still does.

It had ended up not truly mattering as, soon after that, Toni had been shipped off to a sophisticated all-girls boarding school.

At the school, Toni had finally blossomed in the science classes, but had also worked hard in all of the classes that weren't a cakewalk for her too. "Science is too easy", she had thought,and so, she had started picking up foreign languages left and right. The school had had plenty of daughters of diplomats attending, who had occasionally reverted to their mother tongue. By learning that way, though, she had ended up learning insults and swear words first. Toni hadn't been friends with them. She hadn't thought that she needed friends at the time.

Toni's science teacher had sent out a recommendation to her father when she had been 13. He had recommended Howard to send her to college earlier. Howard hadn't responded and Toni hadn't become aware of the situation until she had turned 15 and the teacher had made the same recommendation to her personally. She had immediately called her mother, who had enthusiastically given her approval of the idea. Toni had received acceptance letters from colleges from all over the country and had chosen MIT for two reasons. One, Massachusetts was 3,093.9 miles away from California, where her father had been at the time. Two, the college had an excellent program.

The fifteen-year-old hadn't liked college very much. The other students had looked down on her because of her age and then they had grown to resent her genius. Rhodey and Sunset had been the exception. Both had taken a shine to her for some reason.

Rhodey was Toni's first friend and, at the time, she had been fully convinced that he would be her last. They had had their arguments, mostly about Toni's propensity for getting drunk and hitting on older students, who would probably take advantage of her vulnerability. And they would have, if it hadn't been for Rhodey.

"I don't know what's wrong Toni, but stop drinking yourself to death at fifteen. I might even miss you if that happened."

Sunset had been different for several reasons. For a start, she had been the daughter of one of Howard's main competitors and, at first, making friends with her had been Toni's way of spiting her father. Eventually, however, she had come to like the woman for her personality and the fact that she really seemed to like Toni for who she was. Toni had eventually ended up dating her.

Rhodey had never liked Sunset. He had told her countless times that Sunset was using her, but Toni hadn't been able to believe it. That had been until Toni had caught her girlfriend boasting on the phone about how she was close to getting Toni to spill all of Howard's company secrets.

Toni had been devastated by the betrayal and by the thought of what might have happened if Sunset had succeeded. Her father would have not reacted well. Thankfully, she still had had Rhodey, who even had had the grace to not say 'I told you so', even thought he had had every right to do so. The only positive aspect of the situation had been that she had been more aware when Tiberius Stone had tried the same thing on her years later.

While at MIT, Toni had gained her first Bachelor's degree in Engineering and had started a second in Physics to fill her time. She had quickly grown bored of MIT, though, as even its stellar programs had stopped being challenging enough for her. She had been miles ahead of even those who had been in their final year, so, even though she'd been previously hiding most of her talents from the general populace, she had decided to design and build her first AI.

"Hey, Dummy! Okay, maybe you need a few adjustments."

After she had presented Dummy to the board, they had been quite happy to let her graduate only two years after she had arrived. They even awarded her the summa cum laude on her degree. Howard, however, wasn't satisfied with her achieving the highest honour MIT offered at the age where most teens were still finishing high school.

"You should have impressed them enough to take up the highest honour there is, the egregia cum laude."

Shortly after her graduation, Ana Jarvis had a heart attack and had died, devastating her husband and Toni in equal measure.

Shortly after her graduation from MIT, she had lost Jarvis and her mother in a car accident that was apparently caused by a drunk Howard – although Toni had always been somewhat suspicious of that explanation, especially since the car had been the one that Toni had been forced to maintain for years and it could practically drive by itself at that point. She hadn't had to hold back her tears at the funeral, but those tears had been for her mother and Jarvis. Not for Howard. Never would she shed a tear for that man.

Toni had dropped off the grid straight after the funeral and had went to live with Aunt Peggy for a bit. She had absolutely refused to do any public appearances for the company; although, she did agree to send her godfather Obie her smallest ideas for him to put into production. She might have hated her father even after he was gone, but she hadn't want to degrade his work by ruining his company, as all reports said her father had once been a good man. Even her mother must have thought so, or she wouldn't have married him in the first place.

Her Aunt Peggy had been quite happy to have her staying with her and Toni had spent the time bonding with the youngest members of the Howling Commando families, who had all been delighted to have a new playmate. While there, she had finished her Physics Bachelor online and, finding that she felt empty with nothing to do – aside from weapons design, which she had already developed years in advance of what she had been giving to the military at the time – she had gone into a frantic frenzy of work and eventually moved out of Peggy's house just to get more space.

Within a year, Toni had built two more AI's, naming them You and Butterfingers, and had set them to work in helping her in the lab. Just for kicks, she had decided to get another Bachelor's degree in French online; just to do something different. That done, she had then decided to extend her Engineering Bachelor to a Masters.

Finally, at the end of the year, she had created JARVIS – the name was of course in honour of her butler and his wife – her most sophisticated AI of all. He was the only one who she gave the ability to speak English – even if she understood the mechanical language of her other bots just fine, this was more convenient. Toni had also connected him to as many databases as she could hack into without discovering state secrets. Peggy had even personally given her SHIELD access codes to Toni, once she had explained what she had been doing.

By the time the frenzy ended, Toni had been twenty-one and the Engineering Masters had become a PhD, officially making her Doctor Stark. On top of that, she had turned her Bachelors in French and Physics into Masters and had gained another two Bachelor's in Biology and Chemistry. Toni had also turned almost all the appliances in her Malibu house into AI's, including naming her coffee maker after Peggy, which her godmother had found hilarious.

It was at twenty-one when she had officially taken the reins of Stark Industries, relieving Obie of his position of CEO, and consequently getting back into her old partying lifestyle due to all the added stress. Over the following five years, she had only managed to advance one more of her degrees, turning her Chemistry Bachelor into a Masters. Otherwise, she had been too busy sleeping with anyone who would agree to it, trying to find a genuine connection among all the bullshit. It hadn't worked, but she had kept trying, just in case.

Rhodey then showed up again. Apparently, he had gone into the military. Toni hadn't kept tabs on him after MIT. He had picked her up after a long night of drinking and had told her that she needed to get her act together. Just like good old times.

"You're ruining everything your father worked for Toni."

Toni still drank and she still slept with anything that moved – including Rhodey himself at one point. She had knuckled down, though, and had done more than the bare minimum of work that she had been getting away with before. It had been far more than her father had ever been capable of.

People pretended to love her. Toni knew they didn't.

She couldn't trust anybody, not after some of her 'relationships', like Sunset and Tiberius, had taken pieces of her self-confidence away that she could never get back; despite how she acted. That's what it had been; an act. She had just wanted someone that she could trust completely, other than her Aunt and Uncle.

Obie had suggested getting a PA, but all of the candidates, be they male or female, fell for Toni's charms far too quickly and she had fired them. She had then came up with a new vetting system where she periodically made a deliberate mistake in her calculations to test her new PA's, to see if anyone would have the guts to report it to her.

"If they don't spot it, there's no way I want them working for me anyway."

It hadn't happened quickly. In fact, by the time Toni had found someone who met the criteria, she had advanced her educational merits significantly. The Physics Masters had become a second doctorate, she had made her Biology Bachelor a Masters, and had skipped straight over the Bachelor stage in Computer Science and English, turning them both into Masters.

Then, Pepper arrived. Pepper, who had earned her name by pepper spraying the guards that had tried to stop her from getting to Toni to report the 'mistake.' Apparently, she had been fired from Accounting for daring to suggest that Toni Stark could be wrong and had gone on a rant about Toni not being infallible before Toni could even get a word in edgewise. Once Pepper had been done with her rant, Toni had hired the woman on the spot, clearly surprising her.

Toni had done the usual tests, to see if she could seduce Pepper. And she had been bluntly informed that, while she was gorgeous, she wasn't Pepper's type. Toni had been absolutely thrilled by the result. The only downside had been that Pepper had the annoying habit of making her go to meetings that she'd been successfully dodging for years as they were clearly not that important.

As the time before Afghanistan drew to a close, Toni had picked up a Bachelor degree in Spanish and had made the Chemistry masters her third doctorate. People though she had no work ethic, but those people clearly didn't know her daily routine.

Yet, Toni was still arrogant. Toni still slept around constantly. Toni still preferred to drink herself to sleep to overcome the problems of having a high-functioning brain, rather than working herself to sleep. Toni had been briefly suicidal at that point, but she got over it. Well, she claims to have gotten over it.

Then, the day of the weapons presentation had come knocking and Pepper and Rhodey had been both mad at her to a degree. Toni had thought that that would have been the last memory that she would ever have of the pair: them being angry at her. Young Americans had died before her eyes and she had seen death before, but never in person. It had been different somehow. Then, her own weapon blew her up and Toni almost had laughed at the irony, right before she had passed out, thinking that she was dead for sure that time.

When she woke up, she had screamed. Toni had screamed in absolute agony as they had performed a vivisection on her chest for reasons that had not been made clear to her. All that she had known was that it had hurt as they haven't given her anaesthetic. Why would they? She had been in a cave in Afghanistan and, even though she had never been more in pain than ever before, she had been able to work out what that had meant for her. She had been kidnapped before after all – although her Aunt Peggy had been the one to always come running when Howard refused to pay the ransom money for her.

"Don't see why I have to fork out to bring the brat home."

She hadn't known exactly what they had done to her until she had woken up once more and had been told by Yinsen what he had done to save her life. That hadn't stop her from being extremely shaken by the fact that she had had an electromagnet in her body, especially since, judging by the size of it, she had to be missing muscle and her lungs and heart would have to have been shifted to fit it in. It had hurt like hell, but she didn't tell Yinsen that. He had been trying to help her, after all.

Toni had lost none of her legendary abrasive nature while in captivity – "I refuse" –even after the threats and the torture that she had been subjected to. The hot coal being dangerously near Yinsen's mouth had almost bothered her more than the waterboarding. Almost. She had still been very good at pretending, but that time had been for a greater purpose.

After that, Toni had built a miniaturised arc reactor in the cave, once again proving her genius – "If my math is correct, and it always is…". The Iron Man suit had just been further proof of the same. It had been in Afghanistan, during their escape, that Toni directly killed someone for the first time. Witnessing – no. Causing death hadn't made her want to throw up, which had led Toni to think that she had finally lost her humanity.

Rhodey had been the one to find her. Apparently, he had refused to let the military stop looking. Pepper had cried over her; she might have missed her had she been gone for good. Toni finally had friends who cared. It had been a novel idea to her. It had given her the courage to do what she had wanted to for years: shut down the weapons department of Stark Industries.

Everyone had gotten angry at her – "You need some time to get your mind right". Pepper had been the exception, she had just been worried about the drop in the company's stocks. Nobody had seemed particularly impressed by her resolution to help the military with lifesaving inventions instead of ones that kill. There had been an injunction filed against her to lock Toni out of her own company and Toni had never felt more helpless. Obie had kept telling her to lay low, but the Mark III Iron Man suit had been done at that point and she simply couldn't have missed the opportunity to crash her own party. She had met Phil that day. She had known that she would like him, but Toni hadn't known how loyal to SHIELD he was at that point, as even Aunt Peggy had admitted to her that they have major problems.

That night, she went back into SHIELD's information data banks and set up a redirect for everything related to her. Every file would be copied and sent straight to JARVIS, who would file it away for her to check it at the end of each week. She hadn't seen it as necessary before, but it had been clear they had been growing more interested in her at the time. She had thought at that point that she could grow to trust Phil, but she would never trust SHIELD.

Then, all her hopes of one day becoming a more trusting person had been shattered. Obie had taken the arc reactor and had tried murder her. Twice. One of the few people she had ever let in most of the way and he had thrown it in her face.

"You had one last golden egg to give."

Thanks to him, Toni's trust had become even harder to earn, even for those who had previously had it.

Toni had known the palladium would have killed her eventually the moment she had made the arc reactor. She had known that, if none of the other elements on the periodic table worked, she could have synthesized a new one. Yet, at the time, she couldn't help but wonder what the point of her still being alive had been after she had given the world the arc reactor technology and had made a small improvement. It would never make up for the blood on her hands and the red in her ledger.

"This is a town called Gulmira."

"Oh Yinsen…"

Pepper had practically been the CEO of Stark Industries since she had started working with Toni, so promoting her had simply been a matter of officially doing the deed. Even if it hadn't worked out how she had wanted it to – "I am trying to do the job that you were meant to do".She had also trained Rhodey on how to use the suit, but he ended up stealing it once he had decided that she was too irresponsible and she had just known that her hard work would be ending up in the hands of the military. Toni hadn't want the suit to be corrupted and Rhodey had known that, but he hadn't respected her wishes. She didn't trust Rhodey anymore after that.

And then there's Natasha. Toni had known who she was from the beginning of course and resolved to be careful around her. Even so, somehow, the spy had managed to get beyond her walls. Tasha was the first truly close female friend she had ever had. They had drunk together and, shopped together and Toni had even confided in her – "I need freedom like I need air." Tasha had even offered advice in return – "I would do whatever I wanted to do, with whoever I wanted to do it with."Together the pair had baffled politicians and had kept condescending bastards off of each other's back. Toni had known that 'Natalie' had really been Natasha Romanoff all the time. It had still hurt, though, when she became complicit in locking Toni up. Even after she had confessed that that was her greatest fear to the redhead. She didn't trust Natasha anymore.

After the big fight with Ivan Vanko, both Natasha and Rhodey had apologised. Toni had said that she forgave them, and she mostly had. She couldn't, however, forget what they had done. She can't. Not ever. Unless… well even she doesn't know under what conditions she could ever forgive them.

Iron Man? Yes. Toni Stark? No. Toni had known that that hadn't been Natasha's original report. She had both copies stored in her database, but nonetheless found it amusing. Toni Stark was not – and is not – a separate identity from Iron Man. They were and are one single individual. Despite her willingness to hand over the suit to Rhodey, Toni hadn't really thought that Iron Man would've been the same without her driving it.

"The suit and I are one. Look I'm no expert, in prostitution…"

Oh, and "textbook narcissism"? Of course it was textbook. How can you be narcissistic if you still hated yourself?

Then the thing with Loki happened and Toni was suddenly on the team, even though Fury still believed he was manipulating her with his keeping her on the fringes. Pepper had wanted her to go and help and Toni, while reluctant to work with SHIELD, had known how badly things might have went if she hadn't got involved in the situation. She still had had to think about it for a while, however, as it had been a big decision to make. She had even called Aunt Peggy to get her opinion on the situation.

When Toni had met Steve face-to-face, all the memories of her father's neglect of her in favour of the man had come rushing back – "You will never be one tenth of the person that Steve Rogers was. You aren't even worthy of that action figure."She used to hero worship the man when she was little – mainly due to her Aunt's accounts, not her father's – but he had gotten the wrong idea about her and Toni hadn't – and would never – accept biased opinions. Since he thought that she was a spoilt billionaire who wasn't living up to Howard's legacy, that had been what he got.

Meeting Bruce had made Toni think that she had finally found someone that she could trust. She hadn't cared about the Other Guy, as Bruce calls him – "…and I'm a huge fan of how you lose control and turn into a giant green rage-monster".She had tried to make him feel more at ease around the team. All that she had wanted was to give him the confidence to believe in himself, so that, once everything had been done and over with, he would have had the confidence to come and live with her and work with her on her many projects – "It's candy land!"

But Steve had ruined it. Steve always ruins it.

Toni couldn't trust the others; not at that time. She still hadn't forgiven Natasha for taking away her freedom and she hadn't thought that she ever would. Clint had been taken over by Loki, at the time, so she hadn't known him, not the real him, rather than the person who had nearly taken down the Helicarrier and killed them all. They had all been told that the attack had killed Phil and Toni thinks that she had trusted him towards the end. Thor had been – and still was at times – too alien. She couldn't get into his head like she had with Loki, his thoughts were too foreign.

The Hulk out had been Natasha's fault – "Loki's manipulating you.""And you've been doing what exactly?" Toni losing control herself had been Steve's. Blow after blow to her self-confidence had rained down as Steve had dragged out all of her weaknesses and had put them on display – "Take that off what are you?""I know people with none of that worth ten of you.""And you're all about style aren't you.""You better stop pretending to be a hero."– It had gotten so bad that Toni just hadn't been able take it anymore and had locked onto one of Steve's own insecurities and had thrown it straight back at him – "Everything special about you came out of a bottle."

Eventually the team had come together as a cohesive unit. The Battle for Manhattan, however, hadn't been easy. The Chitauri force had continued swooping down leviathans and soldiers, replacing all those the Avengers had managed to defeat. Then the World Security Council had sent in a nuke and it had been Toni's turn to be a hero – "…and I know just where to put it."She had made the sacrifice play, proving them wrong before her death – or so she had thought, before she had woken up again thanks to the Hulk, who had saved her twice, to find out that the battle had been won.

Loki and Thor had departed a couple of days later and Toni had tricked Bruce into becoming ensnared in her labs. The rest of the team had moved in eventually, but Toni still couldn't trust them. Now, though, she can't help but think that someday she might.

Whether she did or didn't all depended on the timeline you chose to look at.