Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Tony approaches debate in much the same way that other men might go about demolishing a building. He starts with broad strokes of hyperbole, going for maximum damage, and then pinpoints individual weaknesses. Destroy structural integrity and ultimately anything will collapse.

If he knew his daughter just a little better than he does, he might even be winning the argument.

But they've circled this territory too many times, and her dad's never known how to undermine his own ideals. His greatest weakness in any fight with his daughter is how similar they are. "You're rash, impulsive, and hard-headed," he says, and Beca's pretty sure those are compliments. "But you're small. You're weak, and a small wind could knock you over."

Okay, slightly less flattering. "Well, thanks."

"I'm doing this," he says; "to save you from yourself." Which Beca is pretty sure is the closest that Tony Stark's pride will allow him to come to saying: I surrender.

She accepts his defeat with a lot of dignity and grace, barely smirking.

*

But this isn't how it starts. This isn't the beginning.

*

She is five years old and prodding Mr. Banner with a taser snatched from Mrs. Barton's purse. Lunch does not go as planned that day.

She's nine, visiting Central Park with her mom, and some woman she doesn't know is yelling. "Children no older than you," she's saying. "Don't you know what your daddy's done?"

And also, this time aimed at her mother, "You're raising the child of a monster."

Beca's pretty sure that she needs medication. (Especially after mom hits her before the security team arrives.)

She's twelve the first time she sees video of one of her father's bombs going off and knows for certain that it's his. Everybody knows, it's all over the news, and all the people with cameras outside their house are even louder than usual. Angrier.

The world is a really angry place, at least on the ground.

The sky's pretty great, though.

*

"Ms. Stark?"

There's a male voice coming from the other end of the lab, lost somewhere in the clutter. "Rebecca Stark," it says again, getting louder.

Oh, right. His name is Peter something. Beca vaguely remembers him contacting her last week about an interview -- scheduled for approximately now, seems like. Oops.

"Yeah," she calls back, still busy typing away, making calculations in the back of her mind.

There's a moment of silence, and then his voice comes again, a little more strained as he says, "Are you-- Where are you?"

Beca smirks and spins her chair around, rolling a few feet to wave at him from around the remains of a dismantled satellite. "Back here, dude."

They're in Beca's own personal lab -- acquired at age twelve when she gained access to top secret S.H.I.E.L.D. documents by breaking into her father's research facilities (for the fifteenth time) on a dare -- and unlike her dad's approach to constructing a work environment, Beca has built her own space keeping really specific ideas about human behavior in mind.

Tony Stark almost never has other people in mind -- except in terms of like "will this impress everyone and make them love me more, yes or no" -- but Beca's approach is pretty much exactly the opposite. The general frustration with other people is something they both share, but Beca has found a way to treat people like any other engineering problem. You can anticipate and direct responses, like with any rat in a maze.

That's why she's arranged for a smell not all that unlike heated motor oil to be pumped through the filtration system into the lab. It's totally artificial, safe and environmentally friendly, but it immediately sets newcomers on edge. They don't expect any room in the opulent Stark Tower to smell like a motor pool, apparently.

Even the clutter is pretty artfully crafted. It obscures Beca's work bench from the door and leaves several obstacles scattered along the way so that any visitor is almost guaranteed to make their arrival known through a series of clangs and stumbles. If Beca doesn't bother to look up at the feeds from any one of the ten cameras set up around the room and surrounding hallways for a prolonged stretch of time, she still knows when someone's arrived.

Sometimes she gets in the zone, she gets distracted. It's nice to have options. (That one she did get from dad.)

"Rebecca Stark," says the man once he finally makes it to her desk, beaming and offering her his hand.

Though honestly, it might be more accurate to call him a boy. He looks barely old enough to have graduated with a degree in journalism (might even still be in college), and for just a moment Beca considers testing his grasp of journalistic ethics. Just for fun.

"Beca. Just Beca." She gives him a tense smile instead of taking the offered hand, and it drops back to his side lamely.

"Oh," he says, sounding both confused and disappointed. "Your father said you prefer Rebecca."

"Oh, wow." Beca smirks. "What else did Anthony tell you?"

"Sorry?" The reporter blinks and fumbles with his phone, setting it to record. "Oh." Well good, at least he caught on without her having to explain.

She's fourteen and has already learned that other people are mostly inconvenient pests that don't really get maybe 90% of the things that come out of Beca's mouth, whether it's science or sarcasm.

But interviews can be useful in their own way. She crafts her image and message about as deliberately as she arranges her work room.

The guy (or kid) is nervous now. He's eager to make amends, to improve her impression of him, and that's good. It means he'll be easy to push the way she wants him to go. Not even really a push; just a nudge.

Directed properly, other people can really make themselves useful.

*

Beca is eight years old the first time she breaks into her father's lab. Obviously she's been there before, but only under his strict supervision.

Which by the way, is total crap. Tony Stark can talk a big game about safety concerns, but Beca's pretty sure that it's almost all for her mom's benefit. Considering he flies around with ancient gods fighting giants or whatever, it's hard to buy his lectures on proper use of safety goggles.

Point is, Beca was never allowed to see the cool stuff with dad around, so a break in becomes pretty necessary.

It takes the security team twenty minutes to catch her, which is unacceptable. She'll never have time to explore everything she wants to see in half hour increments. That'd take a lifetime, and security might even improve by that point. Help is obviously required, and so she enlists the twins.

The Barton twins are like the definition of convenient. Grab a dictionary; their picture's probably there. (Just the one picture, since they're basically a two-for-one kind of deal.) They project innocent and unassuming, and for some reason Beca's mom is convinced that Chloe's a saint. (Maybe it's some kind of redhead conspiracy thing.)

The point is that they make good decoys.

Sometimes she even lets them in on the actual plan. For example, Chloe is bendy in a way that's useful for getting through vents when Beca's small size isn't enough for the job. Jesse is perceptive, if sometimes a little clumsy in coming up with his own lies on the spot. (Chloe's good with that, she's got his back.) They make a good duo, but the three of them as a team are fantastic.

With their help, Beca manages to catalogue most of the contents of her dad's facility inside Stark Tower. Jesse even helps her string a ransom note from the ceiling, blackmailing her father in exchange for a data disk. (Turns out he can remotely wipe it, so she makes duplicates in the future.) This is all a learning process. It's informative, but maybe a little bit fun too.

Teamwork turns out to not be such a bad thing, so long as you assemble your own team.

*

Beca is thirteen when she flirts briefly with the idea of public school. The experiment lasts little more than a month.

She can't even remember now what point she was trying to make, but it's something to do with her dad throwing money at her education and thinking his daughter's too good for what the normal children of New York City are receiving. Like she's special just for being born a Stark.

Turns out he's not the only one who thinks this way, since everybody at Beca's new school assumes she must really think she's something special too. Like she's a real asshole just for being born.

They hate her, the clothes she wears, her piercings and smirk. They snicker at the security team that she begs to please leave her a block from the building, but who insist on leading her all the way to the front door and picking her up at the end of every day.

They hate everything that makes her a Stark, especially her family itself. The one none of these assholes have ever met.

"Hey," some dirtbag in a shitty sweater hisses at her in Biology. "Hey, Stark."

She sends him a quick glance, then looks back to the front.

"I saw your dad on the news. Who's that hot chick he was with?" He laughs. "It wasn't your mom."

Beca thinks about processes of decomposition and decay. She pictures the few neurons that exist in the kid's head firing (misfiring), and the arteries at the base of his brain hemorrhaging. "You're right." She smirks without bothering to look back. "Pretty sure it was yours."

*

Being a girl (being so small) comes in handy for the first time in her life. They only shoulder her against a few lockers, mutter and hiss viciously under their breath, but actual physical contact never goes further than that. If she were Tony Stark's son, she's pretty sure they'd just kick her ass.

But the verbal assaults are oddly effective. They find all the cracks and weak spots her father doesn't even know are there, and hammer hard.

If her dad wants to start winning in fights with his daughter, he could probably take some tips from the malcontents in Mrs. Babbage's third period Trigonometry.

"You think you're hot shit just cause your dad blew up some orphanages twenty years ago?"

"What do Chloe Barton's tits look like? Don't tell me you don't know."

"How many models did your dad nail before he settled for his secretary?"

*

Beca doesn't leave school voluntarily.

She's suspended for assaulting another student -- big, twice her size, but pretty fucking surprised when she jumps out of her seat and clocks him.

Her dad comes to collect her, and she's waiting on the front steps, paper towel pressed to her bleeding nose. He looks impressed.

"Don't tell mom," she mumbles, vowels swollen almost as much as the left side of her face.

"I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but I'm pretty sure she'll be able to tell."

*

She doesn't make any new friends in public school.

In fact, Beca's never made any friends that she wasn't introduced to by her parents first.

Probably for the best. It's hard enough keeping the ones she's got.

*

They're mad at her again for something, and it must be pretty big since even Chloe can barely look at her. (It's always Jesse who starts sulking first -- usually with little reason, honestly -- but once Chloe joins in Beca knows she's officially screwed.) It must be something she said. It's always something she said -- usually a joke they take the wrong way.

The twins take a lot of things personally, as if they haven't known Beca for her entire life. Like they don't know they're two of the only people (on a pretty narrow fucking list) that she bothers to try with because she cares about the real them and not just a message.

You'd think they'd at least appreciate the effort. This shit is harder than the book on molecular epidemiology she's been studying in her spare time.

"Russia?" she offers, going for a gamble.

(Bad idea, probably. Her dad is the gambler, and her luck has always qualified as sporadic.)

No answer, which maybe is to be expected. She should offer some context first. "Your mom's from Russia originally, right?" Beca hesitates, and then, off Chloe's look; "Or … the Soviet Union? I mean, I'm not totally clear on the difference, but."

Beca might be a super genius when it comes to tech and engineering, but certain things still escape her full comprehension. Like geography, or conversations longer than thirty minutes that don't end in someone shouting.

"Yeah," Jesse says, looking suspicious.

"Well, so I've got a plane." Technically, her dad has a plane, but sometimes Beca doesn't make those distinctions since really he has like five and he doesn't need all of them at once, now does he? "So we could go to Russia." She glances between them. "If you think that'd be cool."

It's evident really quickly that Jesse does not think so. "Fuck you, Beca."

"Oh." Like, really uncool apparently. "Okay."

"Is that how you think this works?"

"How… what works?"

"Exactly."

Completely at a loss, Beca turns to Chloe for backup -- and it's obviously going to be slow in coming. She still looks pissed -- though maybe a bit confused by Jesse too, so at least there's that -- and all she says is, "We don't want to go to Russia, Beca."

"Yeah, no, I--" Beca shoots a glance at Jesse's death glare. "I definitely got that."

Dealing with twins is really convenient except when it's the worst thing on the planet, which is any time they gang up on her with an attack of feelings. It's not like Beca is a robot -- all jokes about the metal suit aside -- but that doesn't mean she runs around dumping her emotions on other people like a toxic overflow.

Jesse's the worst at containing his shit, but whatever he's got must be contagious because he tends to put Chloe on edge too.

Add in Aubrey, and Beca's totally finished.

That is, on days when Aubrey bothers to hang out with them at all. (Which, thank imaginary god, isn't all that often.)

*

Aubrey Rogers is one of Beca's least favorite people, but that's only on the list of people she considers worth talking to at all, which is actually a pretty short list of fairly exclusive company. Aubrey probably should be flattered. (Should, but won't be. Her lack of perspective is one of the many things that Beca finds pretty intolerable about Aubrey.) It's not that she's a bad person exactly. If anything, her innate and almost excessive goodness is a big part of the problem.

Her intolerance for any imperfection or moral grey in others is a constant source of frustration, and there's no one she seems to find more fault with than Beca.

Aubrey has a lot of problems with Beca's methodology, philosophy, and hell probably even her hair. They just don't really see eye-to-eye, which probably makes sense when her dad occupies most of his time spent around the Starks for as long as Beca can remember rolling his eyes at both father and daughter. (Sure, he's Steve Rogers, so he does it in a really well-meaning and affectionate way, but still. Eye rolling.) The flair for dramatic disappointment must be hereditary.

So of course she takes it upon herself to improve the rest of them through constant lectures and rebuffs. It's basically Aubrey's number one hobby to tell Beca that she's clearly wrong about something (usually involving people, almost never science). It's challenging, because conversations with Aubrey are like falling into a wormhole comprised of thin-lips and frown lines.

Or sometimes Aubrey brings up the evil of the Nazis -- a topic they're all pretty much in agreement on, with no real need for discussion or debate -- and it almost makes you feel sorry for the kind of home life she must have. Like everybody thinks their parents don't get them, but Aubrey's dad is literally straight out of the past. It would almost be enough to make Beca feel bad for her if every other conversation with Aubrey didn't make her want to stick her head inside a nuclear reactor.

Which she could do. She's stolen her dad's security code access to at least one test site.

*

They start constructing the suit together just a few weeks shy of Beca's fifteenth birthday. It's nice -- the first time in years they've worked for so long together in the lab on a single project -- and neither raises their voice except to cheer whenever mom brings dinner.

"How's it coming?" she asks, trying to hide the disapproval from her voice.

If Tony notices, it doesn't show in his smile. "Kid's a genius. Wonder where she gets it from."

Her mom leans in to kiss Beca's cheek and the closeness almost makes her blush, eyes flicking back down to the transistor in her hands. "Whatever," she mumbles, mouth quirking. Her mother's mouth is gentle and cool against her forehead, and her dad's hand is warm on her knee.

It's nice.

*

They design an arc reactor core meant to work outside Beca's organic system. Her dad already has a few models in place, but they improve upon his original designs together.

Over the next few months, she occupies the majority of her time trying to improve it further. The goal is to one day surpass the efficiency of even her father's core -- which is tasked with simultaneously energizing the suit and repelling the shards of metal encroaching on his heart. Pulling double duty ought to make it less effective.

This should be cake, but time isn't on her side.

He's had a fifteen year head start, but within the first fifteen days she improves response time by 200% across all systems. With enough time, she should easily surpass him.

But she won't have the time.

Beca's luck is sporadic at best, and fifteen turns out to be a not so lucky number.