What You Want To See
Unstable.
That’s what Stark had called him.
What was he supposed to do, sit there and just take it? Let somebody rebrand and repurpose something he had been working on long before he even had this job? Let go of the pet project that had followed him all the way from his first years of university, into grad school, and eventually through internship and a proper paid position at Stark Industries? Hell no.
Maybe he flipped out.
Just a smidge.
“Is this why you wanted access to my research?”
“No.”
“Then what? You called me in two weeks ago under, under the guise of taking a damn interest in your employee’s work. Then I get a phone-call at noon yesterday, while you were in the bloody building might I add, telling me that I was going with you to MIT for the presentation. Did you, or did you not, do that.”
“I did.”
“And tell me, explain to me, what barf-tech is.”
“You know what it means. It’s an acronym, Beck. It stands for binarily-”
“I know what it stands for. Explain. The tech. To me.”
Stark hadn’t answered him. Tony Stark, a man of so many words he never knew when to shut up, didn’t have an answer. Just stood there, staring at him, one hand in his pocket like he had all the right in the world to do that. His expression was almost bored. Tired of the conversation the moment it had started. Like he heard the words come out of Quentin’s mouth and had immediately checked out.
And the worst part?
The worst part was that he wouldn’t even have been mad, had he known. Using the tech for therapy? Loathe as he was to admit it, it was one of his noted applications. It was brilliant, especially for exposure. What better way for patients to work through their trauma than to re-experience it first hand, but where they could still be removed from the scenario? Where at any time they could escape it, like it had been a dream? Like it had never even happened?
The worst part was that he had done all that work, programmed and reprogrammed and rewrote pages and pages of code in order to get it right, and he had watched it be presented by someone else.
He wasn’t naive. He knew in this sort of business that employers and CEOs thought they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. And they thought they could get away with it because they did.
Unstable.
He stared down at the shattered remains of what might have been a crystal tumblr, scattered over the floor of Stark’s office, the word reverberating around in his head, cutting him open until he was nothing more than ribbons and smoke and what could barely pass for a human being, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how it had gotten that way.
Did he break it?
Did Stark?
It must have been him.
Broken glass like a physical manifestation of what’s left of his career.
Unstable.
Goddamn. That word was like a kiss of death.
He felt like he was going to shake right out of his skin, standing there, looking at Stark. It didn’t matter, did it? What he thought. Whether or not Stark had appropriated his tech or not, whether or not Stark had just used his status as owner of Stark Industries to showcase an employee’s technology, never mind that he never notified said employee.
It was over.
What did he look like, standing there? Angry, probably. Distressed, more than likely. Unstable.
He needed air.
He needed air and a plan, because he had just broke what was likely a very expensive possession of his former boss’s the moment he had been fired and he was never going to work in tech again, was he? He would be a laughingstock. He could never work anywhere again, not in this field. Everyone would know what a failure he was. Or what they assumed he was. He couldn’t even talk about the tech he had helped bring into the world because it was now the sole intellectual property of--
He was going to be sick.
When had he left Stark’s office?
Blink.
He could see his hands, at least. Clutching at a box of paperwork that he had mindlessly put together. Cleared off his desk and left it a clean, blank slate that held such a disturbing finality to it that he could feel a self-deprecating laugh bubble up in his throat, catching in his mouth because he couldn’t unhinge his damn jaw.
He couldn’t even look at his coworkers. He could feel eyes on him as he methodically packed up the rest of his things, refused point-blank to fly off the rails and yell at them. They hadn’t done anything. Weren’t doing anything more than looking, dammit. But what was it that they saw?
He was going to stay put together until he got back to his apartment, even if it killed him.
Memory keys and pens shuffled around in a drawer as he slid it open. Most of them were project keys, and they could stay in this desk and be forgotten, collecting dust for all he cared. There was only one that he needed.
A small thing, but it probably held more data than all the work he had ever done for Stark in the years he had worked in this eye-sore of an office building. It had never even been plugged into a work computer, only his own, running code in the early hours of the morning when he had been stuck on a project and he had screened it well away from security cameras.
The panic that had been slowly crushing his lungs subsided as his hand closed around it, the small key no bigger than his pinkie finger. He held it in his hand, glazed eyes reading the small tag that was attached to it: a single, stylized eye.
“People only see what they want to see, Beck. They need something to believe in. They need to believe in this.”
That’s what Stark had told him. What he’d said right before he told Quentin that he was bad for the industry image, that he was unstable.
“Nowadays, they’ll believe anything.” The words barely passed his lips, hardly even constituting a whisper, as his fist closed around the thumbdrive, knuckles white.
