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quigonejinnSo, uh, if something where Tony is as emotionally shut down and cold and alienated from Pepper as that cut footage drops, causing August 15th to forever be known as Dubai Day to me, I am kind of obligated to write something totally bizarre.
It's, like. My nature or something.
Pepper gets the phone call at four in the morning. It's Agent Coulson, and she sits bolt upright in bed.
...
Pepper finds Tony sitting in the kitchen, eating breakfast and reading the back of a cereal box. He isn't dressed; he hasn't taken a shower even though he's clearly gone to the gym, and he doesn't show any particular enthusiasm for getting off the stool despite the fact that they had to -- had to -- have called him before they called her Tony swallows, tilts the cereal box backwards to try out the optical illusion.
The act would be a little more convincing if it weren't four thirty five in the morning and pitch black outside. Pepper watches the sun rise while sitting inside a SHIELD helicopter.
...
"We found him in Colorado," Coulson says.
"Stane used to keep a cabin up there. In the mountains, a couple hours from Denver. Is that where you found him?" Tony has his hands in his pockets and rocks back and forth, just a little, on the balls of his feet, and Pepper inches a little closer to the one-way glass.
"He looks -- "
"Like me? Yeah, Pepper, I'd assume that was the point."
And Tony looks at Coulson for a moment; Coulson doesn't say anything, so Tony goes in, Coulson nods at the security camera, and Tony gets buzzed in to sit down across the table from his clone.
...
"What was Obadiah trying to do? Was -- was he planning to kill Tony, and replace him?"
Coulson shakes his head, and there's a expression somewhere between sad and amused. He has his arms crossed over his chest; he glances over at Pepper.
"We doubt it. There were flashcards, but the clone isn't all that smart. "
"Flashcards?" Pepper turns frowning, right as Tony stands up and walks away. Central buzzes him out again, and he comes into the hallway. He's wearing one of the light gray Tom Ford custom designs; inside the cell, the clone stands up. He wears a gray t-shirt and blue sweatpants; the t-shirt has SHIELD on it in blue letters, and the sweatpants have SHIELD running down the side in yellow. The sweatpants are a little long on him. He's barefoot.
Tony -- the Tony in the gray suit -- takes his sunglasses out of his breast pocket
"Well, Mr. Stark?" Coulson says.
"Do I get to decide?"
"After we finish running tests, yes. It'll be about another ten days, probably. Two weeks at the very most."
...
They have lunch in the surprisingly nice SHIELD cafeteria. There's a skylight, and Pepper packed a gourmet picnic basket. She also has fruit salad and Perrier, and Pepper puts Tony's sandwich together for him. Coulson puts together his own and eats fruit salad; Tony talks about the suit, about the ESPY's. About movies that Pepper knows he hasn't seen.
...
Pepper tells herself: the clone has only been alive for five months.
Pepper tells herself: Tony will change his mind.
...
"After we finish running tests, yes," Agent Coulson says. "It'll be about another ten days, probably. Two weeks at the very most."
"In that case." Tony pauses to put his his sunglasses on. "Kill it."
A pause, and Tony turns to Pepper. "What did you pack for lunch?"
...
Pepper tells herself: Tony has just been having a rough time recently. He'll change his mind.
...
Coulson lets Pepper watch while the clone goes through the flashcards, and Pepper doesn't know whether to throw up or cry. They're nicely done, certainly professionally printed, and on one side, there's a full-color photograph. On the other side, in neat sans-serif font, Obadiah had put down the correct answer. As a result, the clone knows, by sight every jet fighter ever built by Stark Industries and most of the helicopters, too, as well as the names and years all the cars that Tony has down in the garage.
"We think Obadiah left the clone alone for extended periods and would leave these with the clone to review."
There are cards for Howard and Maria, certain key members of the board. The one for Rhodey instructs the clone that Jim Rhodes works for him.
"Is there one for me?" Pepper is a little unsure whether she wants to know the answer.
Coulson nods. "It's coming up."
The SHIELD agent inside the cell with the clone -- there are bracelets on both of the clone's wrists because they're measuring electrical voluntary activity while engaged in this activity, and the agent holds up a card with the photo of Pepper from her Stark Industries ID. Pepper makes a nosie because she hates that photo of herself, then takes a sip of the coffee that Phil brought her.
"Who is this, Tony?"
"That's Pepper." The clone leans forward to look at the picture, then looks up at the agent. "She helps me, and I love her."
Pepper chokes even though she hasn't drunk any of the coffee, but the agent puts the card in the pile that the clone has answered correctly.
...
"I know your birthday," the clone blurts out the first time Pepper meets him.
...
The night Tony decided he wanted to go to Dubai, he had Jarvis call her, and she came down into the shop only after checking the bedroom and the art wing to see if the girl was there. When Jarvis calls her now, she comes straight down to the shop: there's no point checking those other places, and it's almost better when Jarvis calls her because the call comes soon after the fact.
...
One night, Tony calls her, and it's almost dawn. She comes down into the shop; he's replaced the glass, installing it himself, so she puts her code into the keypad and comes through the door: he's sitting in the dark with the arc reactor lighting a diffuse area on the far wall. She takes a step forward, and the glass walls, as far as she can tell, are unbroken, but there's something small crunching under her feet.
Tony is sitting in his desk chair, back to her and staring at the wall while he does his drinking.
"What happened?"
"It'll be on TV soon." Tony turns halfway around and looks the other half of the way. He lifts his eyebrows at her, and his voice sounds perfectly pleasant. "I figured you'd probably want to get a head start on the e-mails and press inquiries."
That isn't a beer in his hand, though, and when Pepper gets upstairs and puts the news onto the screen, the early morning news has Tony flying into a burning apartment complex. Half a dozen fire engines, columns of flame, Tony flying because the has its own air circulation and cleaning system, and the makes firefighter. It's good press, lots and lots of good press, lives saved, beautiful photographs, but Tony refuses all interviews and requests because he has to repaint the suit -- the crunching underfoot turns out to be a crystal tumbler that he smashed instead of refilling, and the woman he brought out was dead long, long, before Tony landed in front of the ambulance.
In fact, LAPD's best guess, based on what else they recover, she was the person running the meth lab. The fire burned so hot that her hair body carbonized against Tony's suit.
...
"How do you like the food?" Tony asks the clone.
"It's OK. I like the meatloaf, and the chicken stew isn't bad."
Tony will admit it's weird to see a mirror image that close that doesn't move the same way he does -- the mirror image isn't exact. No facial hair, shorter hair, fewer lines around the eyes. In fact, he looks like Tony at five years ago, early thirties, maybe, but the overall effect still close enough for Tony to want to put his sunglasses back on, but he makes his hand stay still on the desk,
"He give you an arc reactor?"
...
The clone doesn't look exactly like Tony. From what SHIELD can figure out, Obadiah had the aging technique down to around a decade or so, but didn't have more precision than that. Obadiah also had an arc reactor implanted in the clone's chest, lit up from the inside with LED lights. SHIELD removed the lights. Did nothing about the metal plate.
...
The clone misses Obadiah.
...
The clone misses Pepper. About two minutes into meeting her during that first visit, he blurts out that he knows her birthday. It's not on the flashcard for her, but Obadiah mentioned it once, and he's tried to keep track of days while he's visiting here by putting a line down for each time he gets food. On what he believes is the right date, the clone saves her an instant pudding package saved from his dinner the night before, and two days later, when Tony is visiting to do some troubleshooting on SHIELD tech, she goes down. He slides it towards her with the fingertips of both hands.
"Happy birthday," he says.
Pepper looks down at the pudding, then back at the clone.
The clone is, in fact, about two months late.
...
The clone doesn't actually know what his own birthday is.
"Obadiah says that I don't have one."
"He -- what?"
The clone looks at her, not quite understanding why Pepper is so agitated, and the clone adds, "He laughed when he said it, but I don't think it was a joke."
...
The clone misses Obadiah, and the clone misses Pepper. The photographs that SHIELD has of the cabin make it look like a beautiful place, a comfortable place with solar and a diesel generator that the clone explains, with a little diagram, how he worked. Thick roof angled roof, insulated walls, a beautiful view of a blue lake. Like a gem in the side of the mountain. The clone wants to see it again, and he misses it, except he doesn't realize that the word miss can be applied to places and things, as well as people.
...
Pepper wants to explain to the clone that you can't really miss somebody that you don't know, and he doesn't know her, but she's not sure that the clone would understand: even with the flashcards, there's no way that the clone could ever pass for Tony.
...
Pepper tells herself: Tony has just been having a rough time recently. He can't honestly mean it.
...
"If you're going to let Tony have him killed -- why did you guys give him the light in his chest back?"
Coulson looks at her, but Pepper won't look at him: the clone is neatly folding his clothes into stacks, and when he's satisfied, he puts them on the shelf. Tony is upstairs, probably done with the work that SHIELD needs him to do and brought him out to do as repayment for all the auxiliary support they give him, but Pepper makes no move to leave, and Coulson doesn't answer her.
The clone smoothes the clothes down, goes and gets a drink of water from the sink set in the wall, then comes back, and takes the clothes out of the drawer and starts refolding them: the arc reactor is back in his chest, and Pepper decides it has to be because they were running some kind of experiment on him. Maybe they wanted to find out whether he could invent lights. Or if he was afraid of the dark.
She keeps her eyes fixed on the clone, re-folding his clothes, and Coulson knows better than to ask for a third date.
...
"Tony, you can't -- "
"What do you think we should do with him, Pepper? Let SHIELD keep him in a box for the rest of his life? You want to bring him here?"
"They could put him back in the cabin. Up on the mountain. He liked it there, and he got along fi -- "
Tony looks at her, and the side of his mouth twists up. He has a screwdriver in his right hand and a servo from one of the legs in his left hand. Behind the knee, Pepper thinks. Tinkering with the suit and flying in the suit are the only things Tony does these days, so she's starting to recognize the parts.
And Tony says: "How many beds did you see in that cabin, Pepper? One, right? Against the wall."
He pauses to let that sink in, then smiles with that side of his mouth again.
...
Pepper knows, as a matter of fact, independently, that sometimes the clone curls up on the floor with a blanket, next to the bed, and sleeps the night through that way.
...
Tony has started sleeping on the couch in the shop. He's always spent the occasional night down there, but Pepper knows the housekeeping staff hasn't had to change the sheets in his bedroom over a month. There's no need.
...
"You know what he offered to do to me when I went to see him, Pepper? He thought I could get him back to Ob -- to the cabin. Surprised he hasn't offered you -- I don't think Stane ever told him about the difference between boys and girls."
...
"Happy birthday," the clone says, smiling, and pushes the container towards Pepper.
Slowly, a little shakily, she sits down and peels off the lid. They wouldn't let him keep an extra spoon, though, so she has to buzz the guard and ask for one to be brought to her. And then, she eats, and he watches.
...
The clone asks, apparently, for Obadiah. Occasionally, for Tony, more frequently for Pepper or a particular lab researcher who is kinder to him than the others, but mostly for Obadiah. When can he see Obadiah again? Why hasn't Obadiah come to visit him? Obadiah is busy, he knows, but maybe he should go back.
One morning, Pepper is at the Stark Industries offices, cleaning up files and doing a few other things that can't be done remotely. When she comes back, there's a note for her on the shop door.
...
The clone hasn't been outside since the day SHIELD brought him back from the cabin.
...
The land above the bunker is grassland, and by the time Pepper arrives and clears security, the clone is gone out of the cell.
Coulson is waiting. He tells her that they'll ride the elevator up together: Tony has, apparently, the grace to take the clone outside. Also: the grace to do it himself, and Pepper is in time to see Tony drop the gun into waist-high yellow grass. He fired two shots, one through the upper back, the other through the back of the head; she can see the clone, face down and barefoot in the grass, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees a junior agent go rotting past for the gun; the body team is probably coming up shortly.
At least Tony had the grace to do it outside: they're in the grassland under the sky.
Through the sunglasses, Tony looks her in the eye, tilts his chin up, and walks past her.
And Pepper realizes, then and there, standing in the grassland, that Tony wishes somebody would have had the grace to do the same to him.
You don't know how close this fic came to being named The Difference Between Boys and Girls. XD
Written while listening to Fake Empire by the National and Midnight Voyage by Ghostland Observatory. And even more handholding than usual from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jamaillith, who also provided sweet, sweet Tony/Rhodey porns and fluff and Tom Cruise movie marathon stories and fucking on the Cobra hood. And I hate dafnap, too.
And yeah, because I know you weren't wondering, this is an AU of, you know. A Clony No. 4 AU.
It's, like. My nature or something.
Pepper gets the phone call at four in the morning. It's Agent Coulson, and she sits bolt upright in bed.
...
Pepper finds Tony sitting in the kitchen, eating breakfast and reading the back of a cereal box. He isn't dressed; he hasn't taken a shower even though he's clearly gone to the gym, and he doesn't show any particular enthusiasm for getting off the stool despite the fact that they had to -- had to -- have called him before they called her Tony swallows, tilts the cereal box backwards to try out the optical illusion.
The act would be a little more convincing if it weren't four thirty five in the morning and pitch black outside. Pepper watches the sun rise while sitting inside a SHIELD helicopter.
...
"We found him in Colorado," Coulson says.
"Stane used to keep a cabin up there. In the mountains, a couple hours from Denver. Is that where you found him?" Tony has his hands in his pockets and rocks back and forth, just a little, on the balls of his feet, and Pepper inches a little closer to the one-way glass.
"He looks -- "
"Like me? Yeah, Pepper, I'd assume that was the point."
And Tony looks at Coulson for a moment; Coulson doesn't say anything, so Tony goes in, Coulson nods at the security camera, and Tony gets buzzed in to sit down across the table from his clone.
...
"What was Obadiah trying to do? Was -- was he planning to kill Tony, and replace him?"
Coulson shakes his head, and there's a expression somewhere between sad and amused. He has his arms crossed over his chest; he glances over at Pepper.
"We doubt it. There were flashcards, but the clone isn't all that smart. "
"Flashcards?" Pepper turns frowning, right as Tony stands up and walks away. Central buzzes him out again, and he comes into the hallway. He's wearing one of the light gray Tom Ford custom designs; inside the cell, the clone stands up. He wears a gray t-shirt and blue sweatpants; the t-shirt has SHIELD on it in blue letters, and the sweatpants have SHIELD running down the side in yellow. The sweatpants are a little long on him. He's barefoot.
Tony -- the Tony in the gray suit -- takes his sunglasses out of his breast pocket
"Well, Mr. Stark?" Coulson says.
"Do I get to decide?"
"After we finish running tests, yes. It'll be about another ten days, probably. Two weeks at the very most."
...
They have lunch in the surprisingly nice SHIELD cafeteria. There's a skylight, and Pepper packed a gourmet picnic basket. She also has fruit salad and Perrier, and Pepper puts Tony's sandwich together for him. Coulson puts together his own and eats fruit salad; Tony talks about the suit, about the ESPY's. About movies that Pepper knows he hasn't seen.
...
Pepper tells herself: the clone has only been alive for five months.
Pepper tells herself: Tony will change his mind.
...
"After we finish running tests, yes," Agent Coulson says. "It'll be about another ten days, probably. Two weeks at the very most."
"In that case." Tony pauses to put his his sunglasses on. "Kill it."
A pause, and Tony turns to Pepper. "What did you pack for lunch?"
...
Pepper tells herself: Tony has just been having a rough time recently. He'll change his mind.
...
Coulson lets Pepper watch while the clone goes through the flashcards, and Pepper doesn't know whether to throw up or cry. They're nicely done, certainly professionally printed, and on one side, there's a full-color photograph. On the other side, in neat sans-serif font, Obadiah had put down the correct answer. As a result, the clone knows, by sight every jet fighter ever built by Stark Industries and most of the helicopters, too, as well as the names and years all the cars that Tony has down in the garage.
"We think Obadiah left the clone alone for extended periods and would leave these with the clone to review."
There are cards for Howard and Maria, certain key members of the board. The one for Rhodey instructs the clone that Jim Rhodes works for him.
"Is there one for me?" Pepper is a little unsure whether she wants to know the answer.
Coulson nods. "It's coming up."
The SHIELD agent inside the cell with the clone -- there are bracelets on both of the clone's wrists because they're measuring electrical voluntary activity while engaged in this activity, and the agent holds up a card with the photo of Pepper from her Stark Industries ID. Pepper makes a nosie because she hates that photo of herself, then takes a sip of the coffee that Phil brought her.
"Who is this, Tony?"
"That's Pepper." The clone leans forward to look at the picture, then looks up at the agent. "She helps me, and I love her."
Pepper chokes even though she hasn't drunk any of the coffee, but the agent puts the card in the pile that the clone has answered correctly.
...
"I know your birthday," the clone blurts out the first time Pepper meets him.
...
The night Tony decided he wanted to go to Dubai, he had Jarvis call her, and she came down into the shop only after checking the bedroom and the art wing to see if the girl was there. When Jarvis calls her now, she comes straight down to the shop: there's no point checking those other places, and it's almost better when Jarvis calls her because the call comes soon after the fact.
...
One night, Tony calls her, and it's almost dawn. She comes down into the shop; he's replaced the glass, installing it himself, so she puts her code into the keypad and comes through the door: he's sitting in the dark with the arc reactor lighting a diffuse area on the far wall. She takes a step forward, and the glass walls, as far as she can tell, are unbroken, but there's something small crunching under her feet.
Tony is sitting in his desk chair, back to her and staring at the wall while he does his drinking.
"What happened?"
"It'll be on TV soon." Tony turns halfway around and looks the other half of the way. He lifts his eyebrows at her, and his voice sounds perfectly pleasant. "I figured you'd probably want to get a head start on the e-mails and press inquiries."
That isn't a beer in his hand, though, and when Pepper gets upstairs and puts the news onto the screen, the early morning news has Tony flying into a burning apartment complex. Half a dozen fire engines, columns of flame, Tony flying because the has its own air circulation and cleaning system, and the makes firefighter. It's good press, lots and lots of good press, lives saved, beautiful photographs, but Tony refuses all interviews and requests because he has to repaint the suit -- the crunching underfoot turns out to be a crystal tumbler that he smashed instead of refilling, and the woman he brought out was dead long, long, before Tony landed in front of the ambulance.
In fact, LAPD's best guess, based on what else they recover, she was the person running the meth lab. The fire burned so hot that her hair body carbonized against Tony's suit.
...
"How do you like the food?" Tony asks the clone.
"It's OK. I like the meatloaf, and the chicken stew isn't bad."
Tony will admit it's weird to see a mirror image that close that doesn't move the same way he does -- the mirror image isn't exact. No facial hair, shorter hair, fewer lines around the eyes. In fact, he looks like Tony at five years ago, early thirties, maybe, but the overall effect still close enough for Tony to want to put his sunglasses back on, but he makes his hand stay still on the desk,
"He give you an arc reactor?"
...
The clone doesn't look exactly like Tony. From what SHIELD can figure out, Obadiah had the aging technique down to around a decade or so, but didn't have more precision than that. Obadiah also had an arc reactor implanted in the clone's chest, lit up from the inside with LED lights. SHIELD removed the lights. Did nothing about the metal plate.
...
The clone misses Obadiah.
...
The clone misses Pepper. About two minutes into meeting her during that first visit, he blurts out that he knows her birthday. It's not on the flashcard for her, but Obadiah mentioned it once, and he's tried to keep track of days while he's visiting here by putting a line down for each time he gets food. On what he believes is the right date, the clone saves her an instant pudding package saved from his dinner the night before, and two days later, when Tony is visiting to do some troubleshooting on SHIELD tech, she goes down. He slides it towards her with the fingertips of both hands.
"Happy birthday," he says.
Pepper looks down at the pudding, then back at the clone.
The clone is, in fact, about two months late.
...
The clone doesn't actually know what his own birthday is.
"Obadiah says that I don't have one."
"He -- what?"
The clone looks at her, not quite understanding why Pepper is so agitated, and the clone adds, "He laughed when he said it, but I don't think it was a joke."
...
The clone misses Obadiah, and the clone misses Pepper. The photographs that SHIELD has of the cabin make it look like a beautiful place, a comfortable place with solar and a diesel generator that the clone explains, with a little diagram, how he worked. Thick roof angled roof, insulated walls, a beautiful view of a blue lake. Like a gem in the side of the mountain. The clone wants to see it again, and he misses it, except he doesn't realize that the word miss can be applied to places and things, as well as people.
...
Pepper wants to explain to the clone that you can't really miss somebody that you don't know, and he doesn't know her, but she's not sure that the clone would understand: even with the flashcards, there's no way that the clone could ever pass for Tony.
...
Pepper tells herself: Tony has just been having a rough time recently. He can't honestly mean it.
...
"If you're going to let Tony have him killed -- why did you guys give him the light in his chest back?"
Coulson looks at her, but Pepper won't look at him: the clone is neatly folding his clothes into stacks, and when he's satisfied, he puts them on the shelf. Tony is upstairs, probably done with the work that SHIELD needs him to do and brought him out to do as repayment for all the auxiliary support they give him, but Pepper makes no move to leave, and Coulson doesn't answer her.
The clone smoothes the clothes down, goes and gets a drink of water from the sink set in the wall, then comes back, and takes the clothes out of the drawer and starts refolding them: the arc reactor is back in his chest, and Pepper decides it has to be because they were running some kind of experiment on him. Maybe they wanted to find out whether he could invent lights. Or if he was afraid of the dark.
She keeps her eyes fixed on the clone, re-folding his clothes, and Coulson knows better than to ask for a third date.
...
"Tony, you can't -- "
"What do you think we should do with him, Pepper? Let SHIELD keep him in a box for the rest of his life? You want to bring him here?"
"They could put him back in the cabin. Up on the mountain. He liked it there, and he got along fi -- "
Tony looks at her, and the side of his mouth twists up. He has a screwdriver in his right hand and a servo from one of the legs in his left hand. Behind the knee, Pepper thinks. Tinkering with the suit and flying in the suit are the only things Tony does these days, so she's starting to recognize the parts.
And Tony says: "How many beds did you see in that cabin, Pepper? One, right? Against the wall."
He pauses to let that sink in, then smiles with that side of his mouth again.
...
Pepper knows, as a matter of fact, independently, that sometimes the clone curls up on the floor with a blanket, next to the bed, and sleeps the night through that way.
...
Tony has started sleeping on the couch in the shop. He's always spent the occasional night down there, but Pepper knows the housekeeping staff hasn't had to change the sheets in his bedroom over a month. There's no need.
...
"You know what he offered to do to me when I went to see him, Pepper? He thought I could get him back to Ob -- to the cabin. Surprised he hasn't offered you -- I don't think Stane ever told him about the difference between boys and girls."
...
"Happy birthday," the clone says, smiling, and pushes the container towards Pepper.
Slowly, a little shakily, she sits down and peels off the lid. They wouldn't let him keep an extra spoon, though, so she has to buzz the guard and ask for one to be brought to her. And then, she eats, and he watches.
...
The clone asks, apparently, for Obadiah. Occasionally, for Tony, more frequently for Pepper or a particular lab researcher who is kinder to him than the others, but mostly for Obadiah. When can he see Obadiah again? Why hasn't Obadiah come to visit him? Obadiah is busy, he knows, but maybe he should go back.
One morning, Pepper is at the Stark Industries offices, cleaning up files and doing a few other things that can't be done remotely. When she comes back, there's a note for her on the shop door.
...
The clone hasn't been outside since the day SHIELD brought him back from the cabin.
...
The land above the bunker is grassland, and by the time Pepper arrives and clears security, the clone is gone out of the cell.
Coulson is waiting. He tells her that they'll ride the elevator up together: Tony has, apparently, the grace to take the clone outside. Also: the grace to do it himself, and Pepper is in time to see Tony drop the gun into waist-high yellow grass. He fired two shots, one through the upper back, the other through the back of the head; she can see the clone, face down and barefoot in the grass, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees a junior agent go rotting past for the gun; the body team is probably coming up shortly.
At least Tony had the grace to do it outside: they're in the grassland under the sky.
Through the sunglasses, Tony looks her in the eye, tilts his chin up, and walks past her.
And Pepper realizes, then and there, standing in the grassland, that Tony wishes somebody would have had the grace to do the same to him.
You don't know how close this fic came to being named The Difference Between Boys and Girls. XD
Written while listening to Fake Empire by the National and Midnight Voyage by Ghostland Observatory. And even more handholding than usual from
jamaillith, who also provided sweet, sweet Tony/Rhodey porns and fluff and Tom Cruise movie marathon stories and fucking on the Cobra hood. And I hate dafnap, too. And yeah, because I know you weren't wondering, this is an AU of, you know. A Clony No. 4 AU.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 06:55 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXbMO45lPIA
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 06:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 07:15 pm (UTC)wow your head is kind of a scary, scary place
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 07:21 pm (UTC)Tinkering with the suit and flying in the suit is the only thing Tony does these days, so she's starting to recognize the parts.
Oh Tony. SO SHUT OFF. SO MESSED UP. And the last line, holy fuck. Someday we will write that happy fluffy fic wherein Clony gets to go live with Pepper and they have puppies and walks in the park and no one ever, ever gets shot. Ever.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 07:24 pm (UTC)<33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 SANITY SOUL SAVER JAM.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 07:26 pm (UTC)<33333333333333333333333333333333
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 08:06 pm (UTC)Thank you ma'am may I please have another?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-16 10:31 pm (UTC)RHOD.
Christ. I thought this was going to end in bunnies and parks and Pepper and Clony holding hands. I...christ. I hate you.
But seriously, little bits like this:
Pepper tells herself: Tony has just been having a rough time recently. He'll change his mind.
Followed by this:
...there's no way that the clone could ever pass for Tony.
And how it speaks volumes not only of the clone, but of Tony, who hardly seems to pass for himself much these days. Gah. Gah.
That and this:
He pauses to let that sink in, then smiles with that side of his mouth again.
Tony's grim satisfaction at horrifying Pepper. Because that's what he thrills to now. Ow. Ow.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:47 pm (UTC)... and that's an AU that didn't need to pop into my head.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-17 03:31 am (UTC)Damn you ... don't stop.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:48 pm (UTC)Seriously, Christ, Tony. Dubai, man. RDJ is a freaking genius.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-17 03:47 am (UTC)Another excellent story.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:48 pm (UTC)BUT NO, THERE THEY ARE.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-17 04:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-17 04:59 am (UTC)Poor sad everybody ;_;
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:52 pm (UTC)(In all seriousness, I'm glad it works for you. These fics start somewhere deep inside my cracked brain, and I'm never sure whether they make sense to somebody that I haven't been spamming non-stop for days. SO HURRAY.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-19 01:22 am (UTC)Grace. Yeah, that's what it looks like in this universe.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-23 06:56 pm (UTC)No, I doubt he checked. Though sitting there with the clone while he eats his last meal might fit the bill of Fucked for this Tony.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-26 12:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-30 03:41 am (UTC)A couple nits -- I think the word suit is missing in this sentence (added by me in bold):
Half a dozen fire engines, columns of flame, Tony flying because the SUIThas its own air circulation and cleaning system, and the makes firefighter.
(Also, huh? "the makes firefighter"?)
And this sentence seems like the word "body" shouldn't be in it:
The fire burned so hot that her hair body carbonized against Tony's suit.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-31 12:29 am (UTC)(It's a profound lack of caring that leads to their, uh, continued presence, shall we say? I post the fics knowing that they've got 'em and usually weed out a couple in the first few hours, but after that, it takes me a while to be bothered to take the onerous, onerous task of clicking the little pencil icon. Thanks again.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-18 07:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-25 01:01 am (UTC)but that's why you don't usually Do happy endings - cause as you take your AUs and ideas out to their logical conclusions, there wouldn't be a happy ending. it all feels so inevitable and so certain. And I'm sure this one will add to the growing list of Fics Of Yours that linger on evocatively in my brain long after I click onto something else.
uh, that is all to say, this is excellent, thanks for sharing. :-D
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-25 02:46 pm (UTC)