Warnings: alcohol abuse, drug abuse, sexual assault of a minor, suicidal ideation.

That felt a little...excessive. But please heed the warnings.

Thanks to my beta irite, for getting me thinking about what a teenage Tony would be like.

Tony started drinking when he was twelve years old.

Mostly because he could.

And, if he was willing to be honest with himself, because he thought it might piss Howard off.

It didn't, because Howard didn't notice. Neither did Tony's mother, for that matter. And neither of them noticed the steadily-declining levels in the liquor bottles. At least, if they did, neither of them mentioned it to him.

That would have involved talking to him. Which was something they tried to do as little as possible.

You'd think that a drunk twelve-year-old would be kind of hard to overlook. Let alone a consistently drunk twelve-year-old. But that didn't prove to be the case. At least, it didn't prove to be the case at chez Stark.

The first thing Tony tried was his dad's scotch, and that was a mistake. From the way Howard drank it like it was water, Tony assumed it tasted pretty good. This was an incorrect hypothesis. It actually tasted more like...having his mouth scoured out with, Christ, he couldn't even tell. It was just gross.

He tried just about everything in his dad's collection, and most of it was (to his twelve-year-old palate) disgusting. Until he made his way down to the puckers, anyway. Those were pretty tasty. So was the Cointreau.

Eventually, he made his way up to the 70 and 80 proof drinks, but it took a while. And a lot of gagging.

Even at twelve, being drunk offered a lot of benefits. For example, it made it a lot harder for Tony to give a shit that he only saw his parents for about eight minutes a day. And that those eight minutes were usually used to castigate him for whatever things he'd fucked up since they'd last spoken. It also made the fact that he was eons smarter than everyone around him easier to bear. Now, when his most mediocre and pathetic efforts were rewarded with lavish praise and congratulations, it didn't make him want to either puke or punch someone.

So there was that.

Sure, there were some issues. Tony's first hangover was epic. But he figured out soon enough how to stop that from happening, and then he was good to go.

The possibility of being a twelve-year-old alcoholic never crossed his mind.

Tony lost his virginity when he was fourteen years old.

He'd just been accepted at MIT, after suffering through twelve years of tutors and special classes, and for once his parents had decided they gave a shit about him for five minutes, so they'd decided to have a party.

Not that it was much of a party. They didn't invite any of Tony's friends, for example. Of course, Tony didn't have any friends, so maybe that was a moot point.

Still, even though it was a boring-ass affair attended entirely by acquaintances of Tony's parents, it wasn't entirely without merit. There was booze, and he was able to get pretty smashed without anyone taking note. As it turned out, the party wasn't so much for him as it was for people to congratulate Howard and Maria on their genius progeny, so Tony just grabbed a bottle of vodka and retreated to the patio.

No one missed him.

So he settled down in a swing and nursed his bottle, rocking back and forth and looking up at the sky, naming all the constellations he could remember.

People wandered by in clumps, enjoying the cool spring evening, and the occasional couple giggled past. None of them paid him any mind, this awkward, out-of-place kid at a grown ups' party.

Until someone did.

"Hi, Tony," came a voice from somewhere on his left.

Tony turned his head and attempted to fix his bleary gaze on the speaker.

Oh. Samantha. One of his dad's secretaries. A fairly recent hire, if Tony remembered correctly. She was twenty-four or twenty-five, and pretty hot, in that California-blonde kind of way, all tanned long legs and white teeth. Hey—he was fourteen, he noticed these things. "Hey Samantha," he returned, a prominent slur on the 's'.

She grinned at him in the twinkling patio lights. "Aren't you a little young for that stuff?"

Tony grimaced. It figured that the first person to notice him would work directly for his dad. "Uh, could you not, uh, mention this—"

She sat down next to him, placing a hand on his knee. She breathed in his ear, "Your secret's safe with me, Tony, don't worry."

Her close proximity was making him uncomfortable, to say nothing of how her hand was creeping up his thigh. Tony wiggled away from her and stood, swaying. "Uh. Maybe I should go to bed." He gestured with his half-empty bottle. "Kinda had a lot to drink."

And he was starting to feel sick.

She stood up, too, grabbing his hand. "Sure. Let me help you, Tony."

God, he wished she'd stop touching him. He pulled away. "No, I think I can—"

He was cut off abruptly when she pressed her mouth to his. Tony was so surprised that he just stood there, letting her explore his mouth with her tongue for almost five seconds before he reacted violently, pushing her away. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Angrily, wiping her mouth, she retorted, "What the fuck is wrong with you? You're so smart, but you can't figure out what to do with a woman?" She paused, then added viciously, "Unless you're not into women. Probably just into engines, you weird little shit."

Tony was completely baffled by what was happening. He was drunk, and she was insulting him, and he was confused. Beyond confused. Why would she want to kiss him?

But she did. And that was a good thing. Right? Tony's social development had thus far been so stunted that no one else had ever wanted to kiss him, but he thought it was generally considered a good thing when a hot woman wanted to kiss you. And he wasn't a 'weird little shit,' damn it. He was normal.

So he apologized, "Sorry, Samantha. You just surprised me."

Demeanor abruptly changing, she took his hand again, rubbing a small circle on his wrist with her thumb. "Want to go up to your room?"

Tony did, desperately. He just wanted to go to bed, go to sleep, pass out, anything to stop the way his head was spinning.

Well, she took him to bed. But she didn't let him sleep. And they did significantly more than just kiss.

And as...weird, and gross, and sick and used as he felt afterwards...he just told himself that was normal. It was his first time, after all, and he didn't know what to expect.

Maybe that's how it was supposed to be.

The possibility of being a victim of sexual assault never crossed his mind.

Tony started doing cocaine when he was fifteen.

It was, after all, the 1980s. And he was a rich white boy. Cocaine was what rich white boys in the '80s did.

At MIT, it wasn't hard to come by. MIT was full of rich white boys. The fact that he was only fifteen years old didn't really seem to dissuade people from selling it to him. And sure, Howard had hired a babysitter of sorts (at Maria's insistence) to look after Tony while he was in college, but the guy was old and liked his beer a little too much. He was almost ridiculously easy to lose, just give him a six pack and he'd be asleep in an hour.

Tony was, for the first time in his life, popular at MIT. This probably had something to do with his general willingness to let people copy his engineering homework, or maybe his tendency to supply frat parties with top-shelf liquor. Either way, he got invited to a lot of parties.

It was at one of these that he tried coke for the first time.

It was not a one-time thing. Soon it was an every-weekend thing. Then an every day thing.

He was out of control.

But for the first time in his life, he was not entirely alone. One of Tony's friends, Rhodey, was slightly better at keeping up with him than Howard's assigned babysitter, and he stuck close to Tony, watching out for him. Quietly. The first time he tried to comment on the inappropriateness of Tony's actions, Tony had decided to quit speaking to him for a week...most of which he'd spent on a bender.

After that, Rhodey kept his mouth shut. But Tony still couldn't shake him.

Rhodey was great at making sure Tony got home, was almost always there, and so Tony tolerated the disapproving glares and lectures. Sometimes, he'd even get Rhodey drunk or high enough that he'd quit fucking glaring and loosen up. And if this was what friendship—real friendship—was like, Tony could stand the lectures.

It wasn't like Rhodey could actually follow through on any of his threats anyway.

Tony knew that nothing could stop him. Let alone one guy who was four years his senior and still too fucking stupid to leave him alone.

Why the fuck would he want to change anything, anyway?

After all, his drug use didn't get in the way of his studies. With his IQ, not much could. And MIT was a lot like the rest of his life, where his barest minimum of effort was leaps and bounds ahead of the next person's best effort, so he remained at the top of all his classes.

The possibility of being a drug addict never crossed his mind.

Tony crashed his first car when he was seventeen.

He was about to graduate, top of his class. He had decided the best way to celebrate was to go for a joyride with a couple of his closest 'friends' (not Rhodey, for once, he had to study) to a massive party outside the city.

Part of Tony knew that he shouldn't be driving. He was drunk. And stoned. And he had a car that easily did 120 mph. But he sure as hell wasn't going to let anyone else drive his car and besides, he was Tony Fucking Stark. He could do whatever he damn well wanted. Who would stop him? 'Cause it sure as hell wasn't going to be his parents, or his friends, or any other goddamn person.

The speed limit on the freeway was definitely not 100 mph. It was probably more like 55 mph. Or maybe 70. Definitely not 100. Added to the fact it was raining, and dark, he probably should have been going more like...40. But he was Tony Stark, and he could (as the last five years of his life had definitively shown) do whatever he damn well wanted.

Which included driving 100 mph on a dark, rainy road.

To his credit, he slowed down to 80 for the curve. But that wasn't enough. The car went flying off the road.

His passengers were screaming, but Tony was too out of it to do much more than grip the wheel a bit more tightly than he had been.

When the car smashed into a stand of trees and crumpled, Tony was miraculously uninjured. Well, it wasn't much of a miracle—drunk drivers are hardly ever injured in their crashes. The alcohol makes them pliant.

Most of his passengers, though, were not so lucky.

One was very unlucky.

Still, it's amazing what deep pockets can do, and Howard was able to make the whole thing go away. What's a dead college student, one way or another?

Afterwards, Tony had to sit through an epic lecture. But that was all. Howard even replaced the car.

So the possibility of changing anything never crossed Tony's mind.

Tony spent his first night in the hospital when he was eighteen.

It was after his second car crash.

This time, he'd been alone. He hadn't really heard from any of the 'friends' he'd made in college since graduation. The only one he had heard from was Rhodey, and he was busy in the military, climbing the ranks. He called every once in a while—to make sure Tony was still alive, it seemed like—and he'd even visited once or twice. But Tony figured that Rhodey had too much on his plate to deal with him for more than a day or two.

Tony knew it was wrong to expect that much out of anybody, and it wasn't like he was going to ask for Rhodey to come see him.

So he was alone. And that was fine by him.

He didn't need anyone.

Formally, Tony was working for Stark Industries, in R&D. But that was mostly a formality. Tony did not 'work.' He occasionally threw out a design or an idea, but for the most part, he spent his time drinking and doing blow, sleeping around, and generally doing everything in his power to get Howard to fire him.

It wasn't working. Either Howard just didn't care, or Tony's 'supervisor' made up phony positive reports to tell his dad. Which Howard probably didn't give a shit about either.

So Tony decided that he was going to blow off work entirely and head out of town. In fact, he was going to drive across the country, or maybe even down through Mexico. He was done with his shit life, was ready to do something new.

He didn't make it very far.

Hazard of drinking while driving, probably.

This time when he ran his car off the road, he wasn't as lucky as he'd been the first time. Luck only goes so far, and he'd been pushing it for a while.

He woke up for a few minutes in the ambulance, and the paramedics assured him that he was going to be okay. The throbbing pain in his arm and chest begged to differ, though, and Tony let unconsciousness take him again.

When he woke up in the hospital, he was alone. His arm was in a cast the approximate size of Mount Everest, his ribs were killing him, and his head felt like it was splitting open.

Soon enough, a doctor came in to give him a rundown of the damage. It wasn't so bad: broken arm, two cracked ribs, possible concussion. Oh, and the toxicology screen had shown both alcohol and cocaine in his system at the time of admittance.

That was an issue.

But being a Stark definitely had its advantages, and even though Howard wasn't there this time, Tony was able to make this unfortunate little problem go away all by himself.

The possibility that he might actually someday have to face up to the consequences of his actions never crossed his mind.

Tony spent his first (and only) night in the psych ward when he was twenty.

His parents had died a couple of days ago, and he'd been coping.

Until he hadn't been.

He wasn't sure for how many days he'd stayed awake. Or how much he'd had to drink. He'd stopped keeping track about the time Rhodey (who was still around, and Tony didn't know why the fuck that was) had called and said that he couldn't get leave to come to the funeral but he was so sorry for Tony's loss. Rhodey had always taken a slightly more optimistic view of his parents than Tony, and therefore he didn't get it.

So Tony wasn't keeping track of how much booze he was sucking down. But he'd probably had a lot, if the empty bottles scattered around were any indication.

Tony didn't know what else to do with himself. He'd dedicated so much of his life to pissing Howard off and now he was gone, so what the fuck was Tony supposed to do now?

Obadiah had come over earlier with some paperwork about the company—which Tony couldn't run until he was 21—and he'd left it on the glass-topped coffee table in front of where Tony was sprawled on a couch when it became apparent that Tony wasn't really in any condition to deal with it.

Some time after he'd left—Tony didn't know how long—Tony sat up and glared at the stack of files.

No matter what he did, he was going to be tied down to this. His dad's legacy. God, he could just never get away from Howard, could he? Nothing he ever did was fucking good enough.

Rage, fueled in no small part by the alcohol and coke in his system, suddenly rushed through Tony, and without thinking, he drove his fist into the top of the coffee table.

Well, for the all money the damn thing had to have cost, its construction wasn't worth shit, and the glass shattered under his hand, cutting deeply into his knuckles and wrist.

There was a lot of blood.

He watched it, for a while, pumping out of his arm in time with his heartbeat. It occurred to him that this could be it. This could be the end. And wouldn't it just be kind of fitting? The end of the Stark clan. It might even be better this way, if he just died before he could fuck anything else up.

That's all he'd been doing since he was twelve years old, wasn't it?

And left to his own devices, he probably would have died that night. But one of the housekeepers wandered in, reporting to work at 5:00 AM sharp, and she found him, staring avidly at his bleeding arm. She called an ambulance.

They took him to the hospital, this time to the floor with the locked doors.

Tony told the shrink, after he'd had his blood transfusion and his stitches, that of course it had been an accident. A shittily-engineered table. He hadn't been trying to kill himself, he'd just been caught up in the moment, had done something stupid, yeah, but not intentionally harmful.

They didn't really have a choice but to believe him.

He got out after twenty-four hours. The possibility that he should have stayed there longer never crossed his mind.

Tony went to rehab three months before his twenty-first birthday.

It had only been a couple of months since the coffee-table incident, and in the time since then, he'd only gotten worse.

He couldn't actually remember the last time he'd been sober. He barely left the house, choosing instead to tinker away at various projects in his lab and pretend that his twenty-first birthday (and his inheritance of the company) wasn't looming over him.

In the end, it was Obadiah who got Tony's ass in gear.

He came by at the start of February and bluntly told Tony, "You don't have to run the company." Then he looked more closely at him and added, "In the state you're in, I don't think you can." He paused again and finished, "I really think you shouldn't."

Bleary-eyed, Tony looked up from his programming. "What?"

"Look at you, Tony. You can't handle the responsibility."

Tony looked down at himself. He hadn't changed his clothes in two days, and he hadn't shaved in five or six. He was currently consuming a bottle of whiskey for breakfast.

"You're right," Tony agreed. It had never occurred to him to not run the company. Was that even a possibility?

"No one wants you to do anything you can't," Obie said.

"Who would..." Tony cleared his throat and tried again, "Who would run the company? If I don't?"

"Well," Obie hedged, "I guess I'd keep running it."

Tony considered that. He considered it long and hard. He considered it after Obie had left him to his whiskey and his computer program.

It was tempting. So tempting. He could just shrug this off, shove the company onto someone who wanted it. His dad had trusted Obie, so he'd probably do a good job with things.

Really, it's what Howard would have wanted. He sure as shit wouldn't have wanted Tony running things. He'd made his thoughts on his son pretty clear from the get-go.

Howard would have hated having Tony in charge of the company.

And that's what did it. That's what helped Tony make up his mind.

Having him run things would piss Howard off. So Tony was going to run things. He was going to do it if it killed him.

Which...in his current state...it might.

He had to get his shit together.

Tony made the call that day. It was all very hush-hush, very private. The kind of money he had, he could make that happen.

He made a second phone call, too, to the only person in world Tony suspected might actually give a fuck. And Rhodey's enthusiasm for the choice Tony was making almost made up for his own complete lack of enthusiasm, for his own indifference.

He spent almost three months in the facility. Three miserable months. But when he came out, he was clean for the first time in almost nine years.

That wouldn't last—he couldn't resist the siren call of good scotch forever—but when he turned twenty-one, he was sober and ready to become the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 Company ever.

To spite his father. Same reason he'd been doing all this shit for his whole life.

The possibility that he might someday end up actually liking running Stark Industries never crossed his mind.

Thanks for reading! Please review; they make my heart soar and swoop.

Which is admittedly a bit uncomfortable.

Seriously, though, some parts of this were hard to write, so let me know what you thought.