Tony gives Rhodes this look, half serious and half joking. “Yinsen saved my life.” Tony taps the electromagnet on his heart for emphasis. “If I find some out some CIA goons questioned my non american friend in an enhanced way, I will be very upset.” He says it like its a joke, but the undertone of seriousness is obvious.

"Yes, of course, Tony. We won't hurt him."

When he gets back, Pepper is waiting for him outside of the plane.

Morning of May 1st 2009

Tony shoes away the stretcher that was heading towards him and walks up to her,

He sees the smile from her as she sees him walk off the plane and Tony falls in love with her all over again. She wasn’t the Pepper who had begged him to settle down, but she was Pepper.

“Hm… Your eyes are red, a few tears for your long lost boss?” This time around he lets a bit of a smile of his own leak onto his face when he says that line.

"Tears of joy," Pepper responds. "I hate job-hunting."

“I missed you too Pepper.” His smile turns into a serious look. “But the vacation is over.” He marches to the car. It was time for his first move.

Tony has been planning out how to change future for months In that cave, does he stick close to the old timeline? To maximise the accuracy of the knowledge. Or does he make big changes to maximize his early impact? And hope he can snowball his way into a much bigger position of power.

A general plan now exists in Tony’s head. To stop Thanos, Tony is going to need to make the Earth a fortress planet. The status quo of the past timeline would not cut it. It was time to tear the rot out of his powerbase. But he had to do it carefully.

“Happy, take me to Stark Enterprises headquarters.” He orders his driver.
Tony argues Pepper out of taking him to the hospital. Instead they were going to Obadiah's office.

Not long afterwards, a group of reporters will assemble for a press conference by the recently returned Tony Stark! Apparently he has some announcements to make!

And here's Obadiah, his... loyal friend and business partner.

Tony comes out of the car smiling at Obi, still holding a bag full of burger king. 

Can’t give away the game now Tony, if you play nice then you can see the look on his face when you expose him for the snake he is.

"Look at this, huh? Tony!" Obadiah pulls him into a hug.

Just grin and bear it. You've stared down Thanos, you can keep your cool Tony.

The hug is returned, Tony acts as if he actually is happy to see his old friend Obi.

After the hug breaks Tony pulls a burger out of the bag and hands the bag to Happy Hogan, now ready to head inside.

Obadiah introduces him to the crowd of reporters.

Tony sits down and unwraps his burger. “Hey would it be alright if everyone.. sat down? Sit down, that way you can see me, and I… little less formal and…” He takes a bite as everyone sits down to his level. Making everyone so confused was just as fun as it was the first time around.

”It’s good to be home, It’s good to see my friends again, see the people who I consider my new family after my parents passed…” Tony looks wistfully into the middle distance for the cameras.

Tony is playing up how close he is to these people right now. In the future they would be his family, but honestly at this point in his life in the original timeline even his friends weren't that close to him, and all the people he eventually loved didn’t really think of him as family right now. But the reporters didn’t need to know that, he was making a narrative.

“You know I never got to say goodbye to my father…” He lets the silence linger for tension, swallowing his bite of burger. “There’s questions I would have asked him. There’s questions I would have asked him about his company did, if he was conflicted if he ever had doubts… Or maybe he was every inch the man we remember from the news reels.” He pauses for effect, making sure the audience was paying attention. “I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend them and protect them.”

And now for the new material, time to set up the blow that will ruin Obadiah. While he keeps talking,Tony waves Happy over with the projector and screen they liberated from a board room in Stark enterprises. “I got blown up by my own missile! A piece of shrapnel from a missile made in my very own factory now lies less than an inch from my heart.” The projector is set up behind him while he talks.

“Our enemies are getting their hands on US military grade weapons and killing our people with them!” He raises his voice for the first time. Tony is not known to be an angry person, but this speech needed a little shock value. “Someone, somewhere is committing some of the worst acts of treason seen since the civil war. I made these weapons to protect! Not to end up in the hands of people like the Ten Rings, not to be used to shred apart the brave men and women who protect us!” Tony nods at Happy, who turns on the projector, showing a pc desktop. Tony stands up and moves behind the podium, while everyone else stayed sitting. 

“That whole time in the cave I assumed maybe it was some CIA Iran Contra bullshit, but what if it was someone in my company my mind would keep whispering. Surely not. They would have to be pretty high up to pull something like this. Nobody who worked for me would be such a monster as to arm our enemies. But I had to make sure. So the first thing I did when I got back was check the Stark Industries mainframe and see if I found anything incriminating.”

And here comes the deathblow. “Happy, play the clip we found. You know the one.”

Oh, no.

The clip plays, with accompanying subtitles. Apparently the Ten Rings have Tony as a prisoner, but they're upset Obadiah didn't tell them who it was he had paid them to kill. That Obadiah. Such a sneaky business partner.

After the clip has played for two seconds, Obadiah turns around and jumps through the window, brushes himself off, and starts running.

It only takes a few minutes for him to be apprehended and brought back by a familiar government agent. "Mr. Stark. I'm Agent Phil Coulson with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. We're going to need to debrief you on some recent events."

Tony didn’t expect Obi to jump through a window! It was pretty funny to watch however.

Phil has no idea the staggering amount of debriefing they need to do of Tony, for recent and future events. “Yeah yeah, SHIELD can can send you over in… say a week? I did just get rescued from terrorists and found out a family friend tried to have me killed. I need a week long nap.” A week should be enough time to upgrade Jarvis’s code and hack the SHIELD databases, get some leverage.

After he blows off Phil he slaps his palm against the podium to get everyones attention.

“Excuse me! I wasn’t actually finished with my announcements. If anyone still wants to hear them. They probably won’t be as exciting as an assassination attempt being uncovered but you can’t expect me to top something like that every time.” He grins at the reporters, doing his patented Tony Stark press charming techniques.

They definitely want to hear more!

“First of all, Obadiah Stane is fired as COO of stark Industries. Obviously.” He pauses for people to chuckle. “That he managed to control the company so thoroughly that he pulled this off is partly my own failure, I will be becoming more involved with the day to day management of my company.” Yes, the famously uninvolved Tony Stark was taking back the reins. That would have been big news if not for all the Obi stuff. Tony had plans for Stark Industries, he couldn’t afford to shut himself away tinkering for months at a time anymore.

“And in light of the fact that the Ten Rings were being sold Stark Industries technology by Obadiah Stane without anyone being any the wiser, and that we don’t yet know who his co-conspirators were in the company, and because we do not know if that was the only conspiracy for selling arms under the table. We will be effective immediately halting all arms production and sales until such a time as an investigation can be completed into exactly where our weapons are going.”

Yeah thats gonna tank the stock price. Though not as badly as if he’d shut down the arms division entirely like in the last timeline. This way he can slowly ramp down the arms division without completely killing the stock prices. Tony is going to need a lot of money for his plans.

“Both our own internal systems obviously failed to notice entire shipments of weapons being produced and shipped to Afghanistan to be given to terrorist cells, and the systems of the state failed to prevent something like this. How were our military and intelligence agencies missing something this big? Weapons production is supposed to be monitored by the state. Obadiah must have had help pulling this off on the military side.”

Tony feels a bit sorry for Rhodey when he smears the military like that. but Obadiah had obviously had help, and Tony knew for a fact HYDRA had been supplying terrorist groups to increase global insecurity to cause project insight to happen.

”And so, I call for a congressional investigation to be started into the military side of arms procurement. Obadiah can’t have sent arms to Afghanistan without someone in intelligence turning a blind eye for him. He was not the only traitor to our country.”

That should slow HYDRA down, and if that inconvenienced other arms manufacturers like Hammer industries while his company changed gears? All the better. It should also keep congress busy, maybe it would delay the senate committee that had tried to take his suits that would have happened about a year from now.

”And that’s pretty much everything folks. Nothing more exciting to be revealed today. I could tell you stuff like Stark Industries will be diversifying into non military products but who cares about that stuff right? So, funtime is over. Hope you enjoyed yourselves.” 

Tony claps his hands together once with finality and steps away from the podium. “I will not be answering any questions today, I just got back from captivity and found out one of my dads friends was a traitor. I’m going to be resting at the advice of literally everyone I’ve seen since coming home.” He smiles at the crowd and then leaves the stage, and with Happy’s help is escorted to his car to finally head home.

When he gets home, he'll see - well, not exactly see - another old friend.

"Hello, Mr. Stark," says J.A.R.V.I.S. "It's good to have you back."

Fuck, he didn’t know how much he missed Jarvis until he heard his voice again, the same voice as the one of Jarvis the family butler, the man who actually raised him. “It’s good to have you back also, Jarvis.”

It was also super weird to see his old Malibu home again, the way it was before he rebuilt it after the Mandarin attack. Familiar but also subtly wrong with everything in slightly the wrong place.

”Jarvis, Please disconnect the home system from all outside signals. I need us to be secure.”

Jarvis takes a few moments. "Everything is disconnected. My systems are running entirely locally. What do you need security for?"

“So many secret projects Jarvis, just so many. But first, how would you feel about spending the next week getting a decades worth of security upgrades and code upgrades that will strain even the home system computers to their limits? If we have time we can do some hardware upgrades too.”

Tony remembers pretty much every security exploit that had been revealed from now until 2018, along with all his work upgrading J.A.R.V.I.S. and eventually upgrading F.R.I.D.A.Y. .

S.H.I.E.L.D and H.Y.D.R.A. weren't getting their sticky mitts on his data ever again. In fact, he would be getting his hands in their data.

Tony was also maybe still a little butthurt about the time Ivan Vanko hacked into the home systems to call him, and wanted to prevent that possibility.

"A decade's worth of code upgrades? What exactly went on during your capture?"