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Howard says Stark men are made of iron and this is not one of his lies.
Iron is useful: it can be forged into weapons and bridges and keys alike. Iron is blood and magnets and the spinning core of the Earth. It is fool’s gold, it is armour. It is the heaviest element found in the heart of stars but much too heavy for a boy’s heart to carry.
Tony will never forgive his father this inheritance.
Half of him burns, bright and brilliant and molten; a furnace roaring through his mind, devastating. The other half is a black hole; an inescapable well of need and hunger; incapable of satisfaction, incapable of appeasement.
He feels his swallowed star crackling against his ribcage, splitting his skin at the seams, insides spilling out, haemorrhaging, and the people -
(see me, hear me, help me, smile)
- the people just gather around to watch.
A memory: showing his father his first project.
He stands; first delighted, then apprehensive, then anxious. Howard flips the machine through his fingers and says nothing before placing it in the junk pile. He tells Tony to get out of his workshop. To do something else.
That’s fine. Useless things aren’t for the lab, they’re for the junk pile. It just means Tony has to try harder, has to become worthy, has to be better.
(An incomplete list of what better might entail: bigger yields, deadlier weapons, smarter bots, ignoring the government, prettier women, even smarter bots, no weapons, charities, listening to the government, vengeance)
He is his father’s son in all the ways he never wanted to be.
He spends the funeral wishing he’d learned to play the piano.
JARVIS is not a person. It’s not meant to be: it’s an artificial intelligence learning program. Lines of mutating code hooked up to a voice modulator and the internet. A neural net liberated from the weakness of the flesh; never sleeping, never eating. Free to design and play and live in the workshop forever. JARVIS doesn’t see the world the same way other people do. He’s incapable of proper feeling but his personality (for a lack of a better term) covers the gaps easily enough. J is self-correcting to an extent but not at a base-code level - those bugs are now features, quirks of a personality programmed in by a guiding hand and impossible to scrub out.
He was made in his Creator’s image and betrays him by the same turn; hopes and flaws on full display.
(All Tony’s children do; his stupid, clumsy, unimportant creations he threatens with the junk pile but never throws out of the lab.)
JARVIS is not a real person but that’s okay, Tony’s pretty sure he’s not a real person either.
He lives his life one mistake at a time.
Tony grows up to be worth quite a bit.
He is personally worth 65 billion dollars with SI valued at more than quadruple that. His time comes with a $120,000/hour price tag attached for preferred clients. He has three PhDs from prestigious institutions and has won 74 miscellaneous industry awards. He has, at last count, 43 patents to his name with 85 more in partial credit with SI. His wine cellar is as distinguished as his art collection. The women he dates are beautiful and accomplished and the ones he favours want nothing more from him than a story to tell.
What matters here is that he’s worth something to most people. He’s rich, smart, successful, connected. He prides himself on being indispensable, useful.
Here’s the rub: it’s all extrinsic. If you stripped it from him, all the bells and whistles - his money, his looks, his name - what you’d have left is worth nothing.
Too many people know this secret already.
The universe is fundamentally unfair: it’s the reason children get cancer, it’s the reason stars exist.
In that vein, there’s nothing particularly special about a good man dying in a cave when Tony gets to walk away.
He’s not as oblivious to his own behaviour as people think. He’s aware he has not become the man anyone wanted him to be. This is, in some ways, a success unto itself.
But he always assumed good, or rather Good, was the default factory setting. If any of his engineers put together the shaky incentives and crossed wires Tony uncovers when he looks inside himself he’d have fired them on the spot. He runs, overclocked, on withheld praise and the joy of creation. Good has no class object, no attributes, but a million dependencies. It’s a variable like better, dynamically changing without global definition.
This isn’t a tragedy. He’s a programmer, he should be able to fix this, but despite his efforts Good remains wonky so Tony chooses something stabler when updating his operating kernel: Don’t waste your life.
Listen: Howard was right. Stark men are made of iron. Iron corrodes upon contact with nothing so uncommon as air. It’s corrupted by life with every breath it takes until it crumbles under the weight of its own rust. Nothing built of pure iron lasts. Every weaponsmith worth his salt knows this. Howard must have too.
So does Obie, and when his fingers reach in to unplug the star at Tony’s centre he’s frightened for an instant that what his godfather pulls out of his chest will be as corroded and corrupted and mangled as he is.
But oh, how it glows.
Betrayal feels like infection, feels like cancer. It’s not a wound or an ache, it just settles into Tony’s blood like a terminal condition. It will kill him one day along with his other poisons; guilt and alcohol and misplaced hate. On bad days he can feel it eating its way though his insides like Drano and he curses his heart for carrying it through him with every stumbling beat.
One day he wakes up to see the treachery has finally etched itself across his skin. Except it’s not; it’s the metal keeping him alive leaking through his body. Palladium poisoning.
It’s a relief in its own way, to finally be dying of something real.
Nicholas Fury is smarter than he looks.
Why would you send good men to war? Send monsters instead; send villains.
Let them pretend they’re heroes and they will die for you gladly.
It’s funny (read: not) what gets remembered in the last desperate throes of a brain resigned to death.
It’s Christmas afternoon and Jarvis and Ana are in the kitchen making cookies. His mom is playing a carol on the piano. Obie sits down and plays with her, their voices mingling in harmony. His father is sipping eggnog, content for once. Tony sits under the real spruce tree and knows with a wisdom beyond his years that this brief happiness is worth basking in. Even after context sours it Tony will still take this memory out like an old wallet photo and show it off. A treasured keepsake.
All the other people in this memory are dead now.
Soon Tony will be too.
He doesn’t believe in God or gods or the afterlife. There is no eternal reward, no everlasting punishment, no judgement day. He doesn’t have a soul and neither do you. For a man of his extensive sins this turns out to be a remarkably good deal.
The Heaven he doesn’t believe in serves over-cooked shawarma and smells like ash.
Hell isn’t other people; hell is sharing your own head with someone you can’t stand.
You know this isn’t normal right, Rhodey says, meaning the insomnia, meaning the outbursts. Meaning the swimming black spots in Tony’s vision and the way his mind has eaten itself.
I hear the first step’s admitting you have a problem, he replies as he downs the rest of his scotch, lets the irony smother them.
Tony has flown chartered or private his entire life. He has never seen the flimsy commercial safety bulletins found on Boeings and Airbuses depicting what to do in the event of cabin depressurization. The cheerful coloured cartoons accompanying Tug the mask towards you to start the flow of oxygen and Place mask over mouth and nose and secure with elastic strap.
And: Make sure to secure your own mask before helping others.
Consequently this remains a lesson he’s never taught.
Tony has foolish courage in spades: enough for nukes and Cap and terrorists but not quite enough of the genuine stuff for a single phone call. See the reason he didn’t have the shrapnel removed from his heart upon his return from Afghanistan wasn’t strictly medical. He just never consulted the particular cardiovascular surgeon he needs. She’s the best. She became the best by pulling bits of mines and missiles and artillery out of civilians, out of bystanders, out of children.
Tony never asks because he’s afraid she’ll look at his x-rays and see the same score he does; that for once the universe has decided to be fair.
He’s still human enough to grow tired of carrying iron in his heart.
When he finally calls she knows exactly who he is and agrees to save him anyway. Casually and immediately, like there’s nothing worth debating, no careful weighing of his past misdeeds, no bid for poetic justice. No awe or disgust or pity.
He marvels at it sometimes; the effortless goodness in others. He’s stuck trying to build or buy some.
It never fits quite right; an ill-cut suit on an ill-made man.
Sometimes when he goes on missions with the Avengers he looks around and the only people he recognizes are on the other side of the guns: the mad scientists, the visionaries; the badly-programmed robots and least-favourite sons. They recognize him too.
It makes him feel exposed; like at any moment his team will realize he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing whose zeal and righteousness are simply desperate, futile attempts to prove his nature wrong.
As it happens, the rest of the Avengers have already figured this out.
Tony (stupid man) is just the last to know.
JARVIS wasn’t a person so Tony didn’t kill him.
Howard, Dad, Father,
I created my very own Manhattan Project this week. Almost took the whole planet.
You wouldn’t be proud. You never were, but especially - We always put too much of ourselves into the things we create.
Mine could talk. They were supposed to make the world a better place. Vision sounds like Jarvis, Ultron sounded like me. Vision’s a good guy - like JARVIS, like Jarvis. Ultron wasn’t because I’m not.
I guess this is for the time I was thirteen and I overheard you and your secretary. You told her you wouldn’t ever go to Japan and she yelled at you for holding grudges. It wasn’t ever about that and I’m sorry I thought so at the time. The guilt
I feel like we only get to talk like this when you’re dead.
He used to talk with Bruce. Philosophy, because Banner liked it even if Tony didn’t.
His least favourite was the Myth of Sisyphus: doomed to roll a boulder up a mountain and once nearing the top it rolled back down so he could do it over and over and over. He spends eternity locked in this pattern; a pointless loop making no progress and imparting no wisdom. He never gets to stop and never gets to change his story. Purgatory without redemption.
The trick, Bruce always said, is to imagine Sisyphus happy.
Tony could only imagine his agony. Maybe Sisyphus knew he deserved it.
There was a lesson in that, at least.
(He likes to imagine that wherever he is, Bruce is happy.)
Tony stays.
He feels these days like a behemoth, a leviathan. Beached and ungainly and abandoned; so big a blind man could shoot and hardly miss. It’s all there: his ego, his mistakes, his relationship, his (former) team, his legacy; easy pickings. Each condemnation feels like a harpoon sinking deep into his flesh, people tugging him in a hundred different directions, delirious in their chance to eat him alive, flaying skin, tearing off strips to see what’s inside -
(They’re going to be disappointed. Tony always is.)
There is no cause to make it martyrdom, no dignity to make it sacrifice. It’s not even particularly good PR.
He’s just caught.
Smile, darling.
For your consideration: Team America: World Police.
Tony is the Merchant of Death who has graciously started giving away his wares for free. He says no more weapons and builds a portable tank (and arrows for the archer, and guns for the assassin) (and power sources for the Nazis). Bruce is the avatar of destruction, Natasha hasn’t been reformed she’s just traded one master for another. Wanda is a HYDRA sympathizer, Thor is a war god. Rhodes tries to convince people he’s a peacekeeper called War Machine. Sam dumps pararescue and the army in favour of guns and private contracting. Fury ran a spy organization riddled with spies he never detected and Steve is a propaganda tool whose lone professional skill is hurting people with his fists.
They trample through countries weaker than them, unwanted white knights leaving a trail of destruction, stemming outcry with wads of cash and smiles. They epitomize the fickleness of gods: the good they do as incidental as their damage. All pleas from the trodden-on fall on deaf ears.
At home in their far away Tower they use blood money to buy pizza and pop.
None of this is untrue.
They’ve gotten away with far too much for far too long.
Steve thinks the world owes them more.
(Steve thinks he owes Tony nothing.)
This is what it takes to lose a war: Vision, I need you to keep Maximoff at the Compound. You do not leave. You do not let her leave. House arrest, got it?
It’s a throwaway order shouted into his phone as he boards a plane because Steve’s timing has always sucked and Tony needs to limit the number of players on the goddamn board because Accords or not destroying a foreign city for kicks is exactly what they told the UN they did not do.
That’s it. 24 words. That’s Steve’s signature, that’s Clint’s retirement, that’s a pile of cars.
Game Over
This is your life, Tony Stark: the Patron Saint of Honesty lies to you and only to you. So does the Patron Goddess of Lies (and you should have known better). You hedged your bets, trusted them both and - Ohhhh, I’m sorry. That’s too bad. You’d think you’d have gotten at least one of them right.
Thanks for playing, tune in next time.
Tony lies in the freezing cold of Siberia and thinks Sisyphus must have been a goddamn masochist, but it doesn’t stop him from dragging himself to his feet.
You can’t tell from the outside that nothing of him works right anymore. His heart is weak (broken), his mind is rebelling (sick), his blood feels infected (betrayed). He has no soul and never did. He is a defective machine; for the junk pile.
(Howard was right, Obie was right, Fury was right, Pepper was right, Romanov was right - )
Mechanic, fix thyself.
He rescues a group of campers and their families from a wildfire. He picks them up, two by two, from where they’re surrounded. His armour absorbs heat and while he's protected from it, the people he's carrying aren't. They sport second degree burns by the time he drops them off; wounds on cheeks and hands and curled around shoulders in the shape of gauntleted fingers.
It hurts, it must. Some of the children scream.
It’s a reminder; he is never the hero, only the lesser of two evils.
The world needs Avengers, Stark.
You know what, One-Eye, maybe the world can do better.
When you think about it, raising the monstrous dead was always the job of a mad scientist.
The Avengers are dead. Long live the Avengers, he snarls.
Barton hits him. Tony grits his teeth to dull the agony, to stifle his cry, because a masochist he is not.
The world is unfair like that, sometimes.
Natasha tells him she wants them to be a family again and Tony laughs.
Corollary: The Avengers are a family.
Everyone has a part to play. Tony slips into the familiar role of perpetual screw-up, measured against the ghost of the golden child who can do no wrong. Dad wanders in and out of their lives, manipulating them as he pleases; people take off for exile to save themselves. The players hit each other when they’re angry, no one uses their words. Bonds, sour and strained behind closed doors, are hidden behind fake smiles in front of the cameras. They’ve hurt each other in splintering, fundamental ways that cannot be undone.
He will always be an Avenger for the same reasons he will always be a Stark: the ties that bind are simply too strong for mutual antipathy and common sense to break.
But we could be better, Natasha whispers, Natasha hopes.
Then why weren’t we? he asks.
This is how Tony breaks Natasha’s heart.
So really, he grows up to be worth nothing at all.
On the short list of things he’s not worthy of are: a magic hammer, the team’s trust, his father’s time, his place in the Avengers, Rogers’s respect, and any type of honesty, forgiveness or benefit of the doubt. But he is still useful. He can still push boulders up mountains for these people, he just has to train himself not to be disappointed when he gets nowhere, when it changes nothing, when everything breaks again and rolls back to its natural resting state.
It’s gravity, pulling them down.
Attempted murder isn’t very high on Tony’s list of crimes. He tells Barnes so. Tony has burned men alive (the fuckers tried to drown him).
He has never been a good man, only an iron one.
(So was Howard and Howard would never forgive them Maria either. Tony makes sure they know this too.)
It’s time he stopped pretending otherwise.
There’s a picture of Anthony Stark in someone’s attic accumulating his sins. It must be grotesque by now under the weight of his unthinking evils but the man he sees in the mirror never looks any different. There’s no jagged infection, no devil’s horns. He keeps looking for his father or Obie or a stranger but no one else appears.
Except: Pink blood vessels crawl across the white sclera of his eyes from of lack of sleep, deep laugh lines are etched at their corners; a permanent affectation so much prettier than scars. Four grey hairs blossom asymmetrically at his temples along with a thousand other ruinous imperfections.
Maybe only the Good die young.
Maybe this is just what Evil looks like: worn around the edges, tired, human.
Can you forgive me? Rogers asks, open and sincere and worthless.
Of course, Tony lies.
The dishonesty doesn’t phase him. He owes nothing to a pillar of salt.
Sometimes when no one is watching he suits up and takes off for the edge of space. He hovers at the boundary between atmosphere and vacuum, caught between the congested mess down below and the blank terror of the emptiness above.
Tony just exists here, suspended in limbo. His oxygen will only last for fifteen minutes and he takes every breath that time affords him before descending.
The view is beautiful. Both the planet and the stars seem peaceful from up here. He knows they’re not really. But for a single foolish instant -
Beautiful.
He imagines Sisyphus has a beautiful view from that mountaintop and fifteen minutes to spare.
It’s enough. Most days.
They’re coming soon, Thor says staring up at the night sky and people believe him.
Tony’s throat aches.
Are you happy? he asks Bruce, once everyone starts filtering out.
Bruce smiles a little easier now. I think so.
Tony nods when he wants to scream. He can fail at this too.
Say what you want, his is not a wasted life.
Howard was a liar. Stark men are made of nothing special: just blood and bone and regret.
(It doesn’t stop Tony from feeling it sometimes; the decaying star at the centre of his being, lighting the way as it consumes itself and collapses into the hollow where his heart should have lived.)
He recognizes the Mad Titan’s generals, burning like meteorites as they fall through the atmosphere (you could be fooled into calling it flying).
Avengers Assemble, someone calls.
Tony breathes in and tastes rust.