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Tony Stark is a genius — in fact he's arguably the most intelligent human being on the planet at this point in history, if you're counting things up in terms of pure IQ points. He's a mechanical engineer, a weapons designer, a financier, a practical and theoretical mathematician, and a computer programmer par excellence. He built his first fully autonomous thinking machine at the age of seventeen and he's never looked back since in his headlong rise to fame and glory…
… but, well, we're only talking IQ points, right? In other ways, Tony Stark is a spectacular — well, let's be charitable and call him conspicuously lacking in the common sense the good Lord gave a goose. He tends to drink too much, and always did, even before the palladium poisoning scare. He doesn't eat or sleep as much as he should when the fever of creation is upon him. He skips showers, he shuns human contact, and when the time comes to test whatever-it-is he's been burning the midnight oil to get to the testing phase, he has a distinct tendency to leap straight into said testing phase with both feet — not just because he knows he didn't make any significant mistakes, how could he have, he's Tony Motherfucking Stark, but because the thrill of plunging head-first into the unknown is a rush that tops alcohol, mechanical puzzles and sex — easily — and leaves them all coughing in the dust of Tony's precipitous flight.
Tony doesn't believe in luck, so maybe his regular dicing with Death is a manifestation of his deep-seated self-annihilation complex, or whatever Freudian shit the psych docs are dishing up this week in the tabloids. Fuck 'em: Tony knows his own mind and his own capabilities. He knows that when the repulsors in the palms of his hands and the soles of his boots fire up with a kick of roaring blue power, he's not just riding lightning into the sky: he's riding his own spirit, his essential creative energy made manifest in metal plates and tensile plastic sheathes and silicon circuitry lattices that cover his armoured body like a tapestry of the finest Renaissance embroidery.
He's been called an artist too — mostly of destruction, but hey, there was never a Stark male born who could avoid doing everything with style.
So he thunders toward the stratosphere, mounted on the power of a hundred thunderstorms, and although Tony doesn't believe in God either he knows that he's not alone up here in the blue-black that extends toward true Infinity. On the contrary, he is such a fucking genius that he's done what nobody else in history has ever managed to do: he's built the parts of himself that impersonal evolution and parental nurture didn't see fit to provide. Those parts, amplified to the level of an independent consciousness, course through the circuitry that envelops him and whisper in his ear — Be careful, Sir — Sir, I think you should be aware that — Sir, incoming call from —
"Handle it, JARVIS," he snaps back as he pushes himself just a little bit faster, chasing the smile that illuminates the serene face of the Moon. Around him the Iron Man suit hums with its own swift electric heartbeat, and although JARVIS's silence carries a note of disapproval, that which JARVIS embodies is Tony's to command: always Tony's, and no other's.
Not now, not ever, these wings that spread and sing and shine for him alone.
Cracking the speed of sound beneath the slowly wheeling stars, Tony Stark, the greatest atheist of his age, has no rational reason not to believe in angels.
[THE END]