Your Fixed Point.
Sep. 21st, 2008 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnThis is, by thousands of words, the longest thing I have ever written. Also, probably the most retardedly overambitious, but that's life. dkfjgdf. Though, OK. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dafnap made the PRETTIEST COVER EVER HOLY SHIT.
Think of it this way: identity is not a fixed point. Change eye color or cut off a finger, and only the strictest interpreter would say that a different identity, a different person, results.
How much can you change about Tony Stark and still have Tony Stark?
...
"I feel like you're driving me to a court martial. What did I do? I feel like you're going to pull over and snuff me."
Still, nobody says anything. Ice cubes clink inside thirty-five year old blended Scotch. The four of them are in the Funvee; rattling around under the passenger's seat is a Maxim from four months back. The vehicle rounds a turn, and the magazine slides out -- no carpeting on the floor of a Humvee, and Tony toes the magazine open to the centerfold. The girl is shown from the waist up and wearing a bikini. The matching thong hangs from her index finger, and she smiles, very, very sweetly at the camera.
The Maxim is well-used.
"Yeah, that one's a screamer," Tony says. "The December twins, not so much."
Nobody says anything, either, but it's now brutally uncomfortable in the Humvee, not just uncomfortable. Even the airman in the driver's seat, the one with really good bone structure and who is obviously a woman, looks really uncomfortable. Almost a little disappointed. Tony grins and takes a sip of Scotch, and leans back in the seat, pleased.
That's just the way she likes it.
...
Just to clarify: there are two women in the Funvee. One is an airman. The other is Tony Stark, who does not like it when her name is spelled with a "i" or when she is called "Antonia" or anything but who she is.
Tony Stark.
...
So yes, Howard Stark has a daughter instead of a son. Tony Stark is a woman. What results?
The difference is smaller than if she had been, say, born in 1933 instead of 1973, and the change may, in its own way, create a better end. Tony doesn't end up on the cover of Popular Mechanics as a six year old because the readers of that fine magazine are somewhat less interested in seeing a six year old girl who can build V-8's than an six year old boy who can do it. Nevertheless, there is a photo of her standing by that V-8 on the inside. Bill Gates is only a little surprised when a nine year old girl tells him that his implementation is shit. Howard is too self-interested to notice more than occasionally that he has a daughter, and when he does, he is too busy to care.
In fact, the weight of being Howard's heir is reduced by not having been announced as the Future of Stark Industries in at least three articles and one book, a biography of Howard, by the time that Tony is old enough to think about understanding why jets can stay up in the air. MIT's alumni magazine still has her on the cover, and it is entirely to say that Tony grows up more or less under the same conditions -- that is, in a state of benign neglect and household help.
Tony Stark teaches herself Bernoulli's principle much as Tony Stark teaches himself Bernoulli's priniciple.
Tony Stark moves herself into a furnished apartment in Cambridge, much as Tony Stark moves himself into a furnished apartment in Cambridge. Tony Stark makes friends with Jim Rhodes.
Tony Stark goes to Afghanistan.
Tony Stark wakes in a cave with a light inside her chest and cold throughout her body.
...
"Everybody knows how you are with girls," Pepper says to Tony after they go outside.
...
"How is she?"
The line is a little fuzzy. Obadiah and Pepper are on speaker phone. Pepper asked the question, and Jim can hear how worried she is.
"Fine. Dehydrated. Angry. You know Tony. She told me she thinks the thread count on her sheets is actually negative."
Obadiah laughs; he sounds amused. Pepper laughs; she sounds a little shaky, but relieved and she says something to Obadiah that Jim, through the fuzz on the line and the speaker phone and the weird acoustics of Tony's place in Malibu, which is where Obadiah and Pepper are -- Jim can't quite make out the words, but Obadiah turns back to the phone.
"We were worried," Obadiah says. "We were really worried. But she's fine. Do we know what happened?"
Rhodey, at that point, has to tell them about the arc reactor.
...
It's a Blackhawk, so they sit four and four with Tony wedged between Rhodey and a six foot two staff sergeant. The engine and the wind are noisy enough that nobody can hear anything; Tony's mouth and lips are cracked, and she is, in clear daylight, sitting in a context like this, recognizably a small person. In fact, she sits slumped half in the seat, half in Jim's lap. He isn't exactly holding her hand, but he thinks that, for once, she wouldn't object if somebody tried.
For once, the reason why everybody stares at her chest isn't because of the low-cut tank-top.
...
"How long was I gone?"
Gone, Jim notices. Not. Kidnapped. Or. How long did they have me?
"Three months," he says. "A little more than that."
"What do you have to drink? I want something to drink. Jesus, is there anything to drink around here?"
...
Tony at fifteen is skinny, short-haired, with big eyes.
She looks young, and when Jim finds her in the library, sitting in the back and glaring at bookshelves, it actually takes him two and a half minutes to realize that Tony is not, in fact, just a skinny, short-haired boy genius whose voice hasn't broken yet: the professor said only to have a word with the kid of his old buddy. Tony has her sleeves shoved up to the elbow; once Jim explains who sent him, they play Check The Size of My Scientific Accomplishment Dick, and it takes Jim about forty-five additional seconds to realize that he is outclassed and outpedigreed and flat out beat. Still, Jim sticks around after that discovery because his parents raised him with some manners, and this is, for Tony, somehow enough to earn Jim a regular role in her life: they move from having an academic counselor talks to pinball and arcade games. She hasn't seen the Star Wars movies.
They remedy that and talk about scalable software architecture for the Death Star.
"AT-AT's," Tony says. "I refuse to graduate until I see one go walking down Mass Ave."
They drink to that, and Tony does send a ten foot tall scaled replica walking down Mass Ave as her senior hack. Six cop cars show up, and Tony spends three hours in jail until the family lawyers accompany Jim to bail her out, and there she is, sitting in the cell with her head angled back and her shirt ripped from trying to climb over a fence to get away from the police, but she'd been laughing the whole time, which kind of made it difficult, and she was kind of grinning at them now and --
Being a girl didn't make much of a difference in that respect.
Decide for yourself, though, whether this part changes: one night, when Tony is a full seven months short of being sixteen, she leans over during a late night study session for Linear Algebra and, quite casually, offers to suck Rhodey's cock until he sees stars.
...
Jim knows it's time for that part of the post-pickup examination when the male doctor comes out, and the female doctor goes in. Thirty-five seconds later, the yelling starts.
...
That Jim is on the continent, let alone in the chopper that finds Tony, is a matter of sheer, freakish, bizarre, unbelievable luck. He flew out as chaperone to a bunch of Stark engineers going to Afghanistan for field troubleshooting and is, in fact, sitting through an officer-grade tedious motherfucker of a briefing when some bright mind switches in the unmanned aerial vehicle feed.
There's the desert. There's the mountain. There's a column of fire a couple hundred fucking feet high, and Rhodey pulls rank and shoves people out of the way and almost runs over two Army privates on his way to TOC. It's worth it to be in the chopper, though, when the chief warrant officer riding shotgun spots a shape stumbling along the dunes; it's worth it about sixty times over when they touch down, and Rhodey knows it's Tony even before he can make her features out from under the leather thing she has pulled over her shoulders.
Tony saw the choppers go overhead and waved them down. Her feet go out from underneath her.
Jim goes jogging up the sand dune.
"Next time you ride with me," he says.
Tony closes her eyes and smiles.
...
He doesn't know whether it's OK to hug her, which is why his hand comes down for a second, but she doesn't mind. So he does. And she rides back to base with her head on his shoulder and her left knee over his and her eyes fixed on the horizon.
...
Jim comes by Tony's hospital room afterwards.
It's a private room with a window that looks out onto a vehicle depot, and there' is a tiny television on an pivoting arm sticking out from the wall. Swanky digs, all things considered. The flowers in the little plastic vase by her bed are fake, but somebody has brought her a Coke and a cup of ice. The window looks out onto a small courtyard where people can sit with their families. VIP digs, practically.
"Hey," he says. "How was it?"
She hands him the chart, taken from the foot of the bed.
Jim takes it. TB, leishmaniasis, yellow fever, parasites. All negative. No sign of radiation poisoning, which is comforting, given the light that shines through her chest. Pregna --
He looks up, and Tony has her head angled back and is looking at him with the right side of her mouth twisted up: Tony has had an IUD since she was fifteen. She told Jim when she crawled into his lap and tried to convince him to fuck instead of studying for their Fluid Mechanics final, and yeah, Jim kind of hates how he knows that.
...
"Liaison? You -- "
"Come on, Rhodey. Good career exposure. You would not believe how bad Colin Powell wants to suck my dick. Figuratively speaking."
...
"Hey, wanna hang out with your boss?"
"You're not my boss, Tony. You don't sign my checks. I'm still an officer in the United States Ai -- "
...
Tony still isn't giving up the full story about those three months.
Jim doesn't think the missing part is rape: he doesn't have a clear reason for it, though. Call it twenty years of knowing Tony, and he knows, too, that if it happened, she isn't going to want to talk about it with him. Or the rape counselors. Or the debriefers. Or the nurses. Or anybody, really, until she decides that she wants to talk about it. When she does, maybe Obadiah. Probably not Pepper.
In fact, Jim guesses that there is novel, with movie rights attached, that she isn't telling any of them, but he still comes by one night after dinner and sits down on the bed next to her. In fact, she scootches over to make room for him, but hangs onto the remote control. The dinner-on-a-tray sits on the swing-out table; it looks like there was meatloaf and over-cooked peas with a peanut butter cookie, but she scraped the plate clean and licked the fork afterwards. There aren't even crumbs of the cookie left, so Jim sits with her on the bed. They watch the four channels available on the screen smaller than what Tony has in the back of the Rolls, and eventually, Tony puts her head on his shoulder.
In fact, she curls up around him and falls asleep -- she puts her knees in his lap and wraps one arm around his waist, and her head is around the other side of his hip. Jim knows, from looking at her chart, that it's the first time she's slept since they found her in the desert. It's probably the first time Tony has slept well in the three months; the only sound in the room, besides the HVAC, is her deep, steady breathing.
Yeah, Jim stays there all night. He doesn't sleep very much because it's kind of hard to sleep in that position. Instead, he watches TV. Watches the sun come up. Keeps his hand around Tony's shoulder.
Tony sleeps.
And sleeps and sleeps.
...
"That's ridiculous. I don't paint."
"What about your other nickname, the Merchant of Death?"
Tony looks surprised, and then, after a moment, almost looks pleased. A minute and a half after that, she informs Christine Everhart that she'd be glad to lose a few hours of sleep with her. Christine looks surprised, but gets into the car with Tony.
They ride back to the airport in Tony's Rolls, then fly back to Malibu in her Learjet.
Pepper, as expected, shows up in the morning to escort Miss Everhart off the premises.
...
The morning nurse, on the other hand, opens the door, and Tony jerks awake. She doesn't move, no quick movements, but every muscle in her body goes tense. That worries Rhodey almost as much as when the nurse leaves again, and Jim turns to look at Tony. She's studying him, and yeah, for a second, it looks like she's going to apologize for sleeping curled around him all night.
He offers to lend her his phone card that'll let her call home to the States -- Pepper or Obadiah or, hell, George Lucas and the Radio City Rockettes, if she wants -- but Tony shakes her head, pauses for a moment, then nods, having made up her mind.
She'll see them when she gets home.
...
"You might as well, Rhodey. Scientific poll indicates that 78%? of campus already thinks you're doing me blind every time we study in the group room in Barker. I mean, come on. Just let me -- "
...
Tony Stark is five foot two, five foot three. Small. Neatly built, though surprisingly muscled because she makes a point of keeping it on her body. Black hair, big brown eyes, and a pretty, pretty mouth.
One hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet. Less, without clothes.
She hides the eyes behind red sunglasses and, generally, tries to use anger and profanity and brains and money and charisma to make up for the rest of it.
...
Tony picks up the chair she'd been sitting on, pauses for a moment with it in her hands, as if testing how heavy it is.
And then she slams it, impressively hard, against the wall.
"Can I get a real goddamn debriefer in here now? One who's going to ask me about how many of my weapons I saw in that place? Or how the fuck they managed to get stuff so new I didn't think that it was even out in the field yet? Or are you even going to ask what the hell I've got in my chest?
The rape counselor slides her chair back a couple inches, but when it comes time to discuss how Tony actually got out, Tony is, of course, curiously lacking in details. She says something about an improvised bomb in their weapons stockpile, wants to talk about why the United States sucks so much at keeping her weapons out of the hands of the people she designed her stuff to kill, and the three-star general looks over at Rhodey and Rhodey tries to look apologetic.
She knows they stopped looking for her a month into it.
Also, yeah, she's a little pissed that the United States apparently sucks at keeping her weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
So many I probably took them to a strip club. So many that my PA probably sent them a fruit basket.
If people don't like Tony Stark, that is their problem.
...
Jim Rhodes remembers Tony at fifteen, pretty sure that the guy her Advanced EECS prof sent over wants to fuck her and not just, you know, yell at her about not showing her work or not showing up to class and drinking and God knows what else because he's supposed to be getting her grade up from a C- because she didn't put anything down on the test except the right answers, and not be her friend or something. So they might as well just get it out of the way, right?
Jim Rhodes remembers Tony at thirty-five, standing in front of the audience at the Apogee Awards. They don't merit Tony lifting her chin and looking down her nose at them. Instead, she looks at the glass weight in her hand, tells them all to go fuck themselves and their pretty, dressed-up female dates because she is the only woman in the room not there as arm candy, and oh yeah, fuck you, too, because it isn't like she has a couple of these at home already. Oh, except she doesn't.
"It would have been better," Obadiah admits to Jim later. "If we'd just gotten her drunk and left her next to the craps table."
"You mean she was sober?"
Obadiah sighs, and in retrospect, it isn't really surprising that when she gets back in front of a podium in the US, she tells the US military and the Joint Chiefs to go fuck themselves. "Zero accountability," she says. "I saw American men and women get killed by the very weapons that I designed to protect them."
Tony doesn't stand at the podium because Tony Stark, even in heels, tends to be a little short to be seen over podiums that are tall enough for Obadiah Stane to be comfortable at.
...
Jim Rhodes remembers the flight out to Afghanistan. The stewardesses -- in a moment of inspiration, Pepper had once nicknamed them the stripperdesses -- were gone, and it was just him and Tony sitting together on the couch. The lights are still dim, and Tony pours the last of the sake into a champagne glass, puts on some music that Jim doesn't recognize, then starts dancing at the pole by herself, without heels.
The music is a little softer than Tony usually likes, and Jim is a little drunker than he usually lets himself get around her. The drinking is really not even in the equation, though, when he's being honest with himself, and he tries to be. Tony comes walking over with her shirt open and looks Jim in the eye. The Apogees and standing there with his figurative dick in his hand while Tony pissed all over everybody she did business with was, what, thirty hours ago? And she was three hours late to the plane. And MIT was twenty years ago.
Jim closes his eyes, and still holding the champagne glass with sake in it, Tony leans down and kisses him.
They do it once, quick and with Tony straddling him, on the couch, and then, they go to the bedroom in the back and do it, slow and good because it's been twenty years happening. It's the first and second time they ever fuck, and Tony stays awake afterwards. Jim's arm is around her waist; he curls up around her. She watches the sun come up over someplace in Siberia, listens to how the sound of the TS-02's mix with the sound of Jim breathing so close to her, and when Jim comes up after the missile demo, she reminds him that the Humdrumvee is back there.
...
"This is because I'm thirty-six now, isn't it."
"Tony -- "
"It's because I'm old. Because I'm a woman. Because if I were a guy, I wouldn't be old. I'd be George Clooney. You'd drink sake with George fucking Clooney, right?"
...
At Rammstein, Tony tells the orderly where he can stuff the wheelchair, and Jim knows better than to even offer Tony his arm as they're coming down the plane ramp in Los Angeles. It's an Air Force base, so no press, and Pepper has also promised to personally end any photo editor buying a photo of Tony in the first week or so after her return, but Rhodey still stays clear, and Tony walks down the ramp by herself, wobbling just a little, chin tilted up and her shirt buttoned to the throat.
...
"Your eyes are red. A few tears for your long-lost boss?"
"Tears of joy. I hate job hunting."
Tony looks at her for a moment, head tilted back and to the side, evaluating the truth of that statement, then turns and nods at Happy, so that he'll open the door.
...
"Cheeseburger first."
...
"I don't like it when you have plans," Tony says to Pepper, exactly as she would if she were a he, if Pepper weren't at least six inches taller than her even without the heels. And Pepper blinks and explains, coolly, that she's allowed to have plans on her birthday. Tony turns her mouth up, just a little, and tells Pepper to get something on her; Pepper says that she already has and that it was expensive. Very expensive.
A moment passes. Pepper can see Tony measuring the pros and the cons of inquiring as to what Pepper bought with the black Amex.
Tony finally decides against it, so she downs the espresso, and why, yes, she did buy that $20 million Jackson Pollock to make Pepper smile. Also, because she's Tony fucking Stark and doesn't care that Larry Gagosian is ripping her the fuck off. Also, because she likes rubbing people's faces in that fact, but also, quite importantly, because she likes making Pepper smile on her birthday.
Really, Tony didn't build herself personal AI system ten years ahead of everything on the market just to miss out on Outlook Calender.
Even when she knows the smile just means that Pepper thinks her boss is being completely ridiculous -- even then --
...
Tony used to carry -- or have Pepper carry for her -- in her wallet, a photo from graduation day at MIT: in it, Tony stood between Rhodey and Howard. She had graduation cap hair, and she was the shortest person in the picture by a head or so, but she's smiling. When Pepper sees the photo for the first time, she realizes she didn't even know Tony could smile that wide.
Her wallet is missing when Tony wakes up in the cave. She only ever had one copy of that photo.
...
"They stopped looking for me after a month. Would they have stopped looking for me after a month if I was a guy?"
"We thought you were dead, Tony."
"We? We? Because I couldn't possibly have escaped and survived for a month out there. Because if they got me, they couldn't possibly keep me alive for anything. Or if they did, I wouldn't be worth continuing to look for."
"That's not -- "
"Fuck you. And you know, what else? Fuck you. I did a lot of thinking in that cave, and fuck all of this."
...
"You were the only prisoner, Ms. Stark?"
"Yeah, I was. What the hell are you? A colonel?"
"A major. My name is -- "
"Yeah, you said that at the beginning."
"So were you in isolation, Tony?"
"No, I was just the only fucking prisoner. Christ, can you count? One. I have a friend who's a bird colonel, and he can fucking count. You have to learn how to count before they make you one of those, so maybe you should learn. Or buy a dictionary. That's what only means, you stupid son of a bitch."
Sometimes, when Tony doesn't want to give a straight answer, she jokes. Most of the time, she snarls and cusses and gets angry.
The three months she's in the cave, she doesn't joke or bluster or rage at Yinsen.
...
"Did they ask you to do anything?"
"They wanted me to build them a Jericho missile."
"A Jericho missile, Ms. Stark?"
"Yeah, the company I own just sold $750 million dollars worth of them to your company."
There is just a little bit of sarcasm on the second company, and Jim braces for what is undoubtedly coming next.
"Did you build them one?"
A beat, and then the explosion:
"Do you think I'm retarded? Or that I'd commit treason for people who kidnapped me? They yelled at me, and when I still wouldn't do it for some fucking reason, they held my head in a bucket of water a couple times until I said I would, and I found out that they had so much of my stuff that I'm pretty sure that my PA has sent a fruit basket at some point. Or that I've taken them out for a night at Scores. So I told them I would, and when they weren't paying attention, I blew them to kingdom goddamn come because nobody was coming to get -- to get me out."
This time, to let the watchers know that she is done talking, Tony picks her chair up and slams it onto the table, right in front of the debriefer.
...
Tony doesn't say anything when Jim comes into the room, or when he sits down in the armchair by the bed. She doesn't move over on the bed, either, to make room for him; instead, she uses the remote to change the channel on the TV.
"You sure you don't want to call Obie? Or Pepper? You call her now, she'll probably be up. It's only 7 PM over there."
"No. Let me fucking watch -- what the hell is this?"
"Soap opera. I think it's All My Children."
"Fuck."
...
Yinsen is dead, and Tony is actually a little relieved that she doesn't have to explain the marks on her arms and shoulders and legs from putting the exoskeleton on to hammer the helmet for the Mark I. Or the wrenched shoulder. Or. Everybody just assum --
They stand in front of the arc reactor, and Obadiah puts his arm around her. She lets her eyes close for a moment, so that she can just breathe in the smell of Obadiah and his cigar and his cologne and the way it all comes together on him. It's old and familiar; it'd smelled nice when he hugged her right out of the Rolls, but he lit up a cigar after the press conference, and he had a drink before coming to see her, and it's so utterly, wonderfully familiar. The arm around her is familiar. The way he smells is familiar, and when Tony opens her eyes, she sees her father's arc reactor in front of her.
"Your father and me," Obadiah says and gives her shoulder a squeeze. "We were a team."
Tony takes a deep breath and, despite herself, despite some simmering annoyance, wants the moment to last forever.
...
Sometimes, when Tony doesn't want to give a straight answer, she jokes. Sometimes, she offers sex. Most of the time, she snarls and blusters and and cusses.
The three months in the cave, Tony doesn't joke or get angry with Yinsen. She doesn't offer, even once, to fuck him.
...
Pepper comes down when Tony asks and helps replace the arc reactor. Tony has her shirt and bra off, of course, and she doesn't act like Pepper should be worried at all about seeing her female boss lying propped on a table, topless.
...
"I wanna see it," he says.
And Tony leans her head back.
"You sure?"
He makes the gesture with the cigar in his hand.
...
She unbuttons her shirt, and he looks at her for a moment, then looks away. She looks in the same direction, and while she's looking, he steps close and buttons her shirt -- he's had practice at this. He buttons her back up all the way to the throat, and they ride back to her house in Malibu with Pepper talking a mile a minute into her cell phone and both her Blackberries vibrating continuously, and --
"Go home," she says to Pepper when the Rolls pulls into the drive. "Same goes for you, Happy. Come back tomorrow morning."
And when they're gone, Tony pours herself another drink. Nothing but Scotch, not even ice cubes, and downs half of it. Obadiah is still sitting on the couch, wearing his jacket. The cigar is long gone.
Tony sits back down on the couch next to him, right underneath his arm.
"I," she says. "Am going to get drunk."
"Yeah?"
Tony downs a mouthful more of the Scotch. Her eyes are watering a little; she's out of practice. "Yeah. I had my cheeseburger. I'm going to get drunk, then I'm going to get laid."
It's mostly dark in the house still; only the lights that Jarvis turned on were the lights over the couch.
"Tell me when you're drunk enough," Obadiah says.
Tony finishes off the glass, breathes out through her mouth, and then puts the tumbler onto the table. No coaster. Why bother? No ice, and she knows Obadiah is measuring how much her wrist sticks out from the edge of the shirt, how confident she looks. So Tony doesn't lean back when she has finished, and she starts to unbutton the front of her shirt again -- high up, from around the throat, where he had buttoned it. Two buttons later, the top of the arc reactor shows; four buttons later, he can see the whole thing.
"I'm drunk enough," Tony says and climbs into his lap and kisses him.
...
Tony comes once on the couch, rubbing herself against Obadiah's fingers, and she comes again straddling him with his cock in her and both of them in her bed, and when he goes down on her afterwards, Tony has come enough so that she doesn't get off again, at least not as quickly as she normally would. Obadiah uses his mouth and tongue; his beard starts to burn on her thighs, and Tony begs and whimpers and has her legs wrapped around his shoulders and tries to rub herself against his mouth because she's getting close, because she wants to come that fucking badly. She runs her hands over her stomach, around the edge of the arc reactor and begs some more, but doesn't come until Obadiah puts one hand over her stomach and slides the second and third fingers of the other all the way into her, up to the palm, and rocks them back and forth to get them deeper.
Tony comes so hard that she can't stop shaking afterwards.
...
Tony comes so hard that she can't stop shaking, and Obadiah comes up laughing and wipes his fingers on the sheets. She holds her hand up for him to see.
"Some things don't change, do they?" Obadiah says, looking at her hand.
The fingers flutter from the knuckle and won't bend, at least not quite yet, so Tony hooks her elbow around Obadiah and, as she usually does, kisses him until she can't taste herself in his mouth anymore. As she usually does.
...
Pepper suspects. Rhodey has no idea.
...
Maybe Rhodey should know better: the year Tony is sixteen, Obadiah is in Boston to close a deal for a subcontractor with some interesting research into molecular timing devices. He swings by Cambridge afterwards and takes both Tony and Rhodey out for dinner. Tony doesn't have a dress shirt, insists that she doesn't want to wear a dress, so she borrows Rhodey's second best shirt, because he's wearing his best. She rolls up the sleeves and wears it with jeans to the restaurant at the Four Seasons.
Afterwards, when they're underneath the canopy waiting for Obadiah's driver to bring the car around, Tony pauses, licks her lips.
"Hey," she says. "You go back ahead without me. I need to talk to Obadiah."
He looks at her, frowning. It weirds him out a little, he'll admit, that she calls him by his first name, but the Bentley rolls into place at the end of the canopy. It's raining a little, as it tends to do in Boston in the spring at night.
"It's fine," Tony says. "Don't wait up for me. I'll find my way back."
Tony doesn't show up until almost noon the next day and skips all of her afternoon classes because, as she puts it to Rhodey, she's fucking tired, and there's something wrong and not quite right with Obadiah, Rhodey has already decided by the time he's in the Bentley. In the stairway to his dorm room. The next morning, while brushing his teeth and eyeing his reflection in the mirror, and when he sees Tony, still wearing his shirt and looking rumpled and smiling her lazy, self-satisfied smile and waiting outside of lecture hall he sets his jaw.
"Hey," she says, and Rhodey has a pretty good idea that if they were someplace a little less private than a main corridor when classes were changing, she'd back him against the wall and try to put her hand in his jeans pocket and try to grab his dick.
Good thing they're in a hallway. Good thing.
...
Tony swears that she isn't fucking Obadiah: they stayed up and talked shop. The new scramjet had a wing that was the wrong shape. Same general idea as how Rhodey fucked up his Aero project, and Jim is inclined to believe her because when has Tony been even vaguely embarrassed to tell him if she's fucked somebody? She told him when she spent a whole Saturday fucking the brains out of their very married, forty year old Aero professor, after all, and the following Tuesday, said professor calls her a little lady. Patronizes her in front of the lecture.
Jim winces on her behalf, and the look on her face makes him feel more than a little bad for Tony until two weeks later, she tells him, smug as anything, that she fucked the professor in his office. In fact, she tells Jim about the sloppy details even when he tries yelling over her.
She insists that Obadiah has never put a hand on her that way, so yes, Jim slowly comes around to the idea that Obadiah is a good guy.
...
Really, in conclusion, Jim knows that Tony can do whatever she wants, but anybody who fucked her between the ages of -- whenever she started and say, seventeen, and was more than a year or two older than her, is a total asshole.
Decades later, he mentions this to Tony, and she almost falls off the couch laughing.
...
In the summer, Jim stays in Cambridge and works for professors.
In the summer, Tony goes back to New York, works for her father, goes out a lot. She calls every once in a while, but she always wants to talk about ideas and what they're both looking into. To get news, Jim has to go to the library, which subscribes to the New York Post, and read Page Six.
...
In conclusion, Jim concludes that Tony can do whatever she wants, but anybody who fucked her between the ages of -- whenever she started and say, seventeen, and was more than a year or two older than her, is a total asshole, and she almost falls off the couch laughing.
"Even -- " she says, having rolled sideways on the couch and not really doing anything to sit up straight again.
"Even who?"
She's wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans, and the shirt hitches up on one side, and the jeans are loose. Between them, there's a long isoceles triangle of skin starting just about mid-right hip and angling upwards, underneath her belly button, to the top of her left hip. No underwear. No br --
Jim looks away, and Tony has picked up a little bit of grace in the years in between, and she still likes Rhodey, so she changes the subject.
...
"I wanna see it," Obadiah says.
Tony looks him in the eye.
"You sure?"
...
"What do you think you just proved, Tony?"
Obadiah takes the drink off the tray, doesn't look at the waitress bringing it. Tony does, though, and indicates her approval by putting a twenty down on Obadiah's behalf. The girl winks at Tony and leans over to pick it up.
"I'm just a concerned stockholder, Obadiah," Tony says and tilts her chair back.
Behind Tony's left shoulder, a stripper starts to move around a pole -- I guess I'm just used to sailors, the song goes, and Obadiah leans back on the banquette. One of the Board members he'd been buttering up left ten minutes after Tony sat down, and the other two kept their eyes politely averted while Tony got a lap dance from and put, with smoothness born of a lot of practice, C-notes into the g-string of a blonde with hair down to her tailbone. The guys left after the second round of drinks, but Tony looks at Obadiah now, not the brunette in clear heels who has come around to try her luck with the generous lady in the far back booth.
"What was I supposed to do, Obie?" Tony says, dropping the chair back onto all four legs, then leaning forward with her shoulders and arms. She also says it more softly, more gently than might be expected. Maybe it's because of tiredness. The room is dark, and the music isn't quite as loud as might be expected, either.
"My name is on the side of the building."
"Your last name."
"Dad left the company to me."
Her chin comes up, and even in the low lighting, even with the music and the girls, the shift is clear on her face.
Obadiah notes it, takes a little of his drink, and after a moment, meets her eyes, and Tony gets up out of her chair. For the board meeting, she put on a black business suit, a white shirt buttoned up to just above the collarbones, no jewelry except for her MIT ring, and Tony leaves her chair and comes and sits down next to Obadiah in the booth. There is room between them, and Tony never says the words. What do I do? How can I get you to help me? Obadiah doesn't answer, at least not with words. By and by, though, Tony ends up sliding closer and closer. Obadiah puts his arm over her. Tony closes her eyes for a brief moment and tilts her chin up again, and then, quite deliberately puts her hand on his knee.
They watch the girls on stage until the lights turn on at the end of the night, and then, they go out to the Rolls that has been waiting six hours in the rain for them.
...
Part two.
dafnap made the PRETTIEST COVER EVER HOLY SHIT. Think of it this way: identity is not a fixed point. Change eye color or cut off a finger, and only the strictest interpreter would say that a different identity, a different person, results.
How much can you change about Tony Stark and still have Tony Stark?
...
"I feel like you're driving me to a court martial. What did I do? I feel like you're going to pull over and snuff me."
Still, nobody says anything. Ice cubes clink inside thirty-five year old blended Scotch. The four of them are in the Funvee; rattling around under the passenger's seat is a Maxim from four months back. The vehicle rounds a turn, and the magazine slides out -- no carpeting on the floor of a Humvee, and Tony toes the magazine open to the centerfold. The girl is shown from the waist up and wearing a bikini. The matching thong hangs from her index finger, and she smiles, very, very sweetly at the camera.
The Maxim is well-used.
"Yeah, that one's a screamer," Tony says. "The December twins, not so much."
Nobody says anything, either, but it's now brutally uncomfortable in the Humvee, not just uncomfortable. Even the airman in the driver's seat, the one with really good bone structure and who is obviously a woman, looks really uncomfortable. Almost a little disappointed. Tony grins and takes a sip of Scotch, and leans back in the seat, pleased.
That's just the way she likes it.
...
Just to clarify: there are two women in the Funvee. One is an airman. The other is Tony Stark, who does not like it when her name is spelled with a "i" or when she is called "Antonia" or anything but who she is.
Tony Stark.
...
So yes, Howard Stark has a daughter instead of a son. Tony Stark is a woman. What results?
The difference is smaller than if she had been, say, born in 1933 instead of 1973, and the change may, in its own way, create a better end. Tony doesn't end up on the cover of Popular Mechanics as a six year old because the readers of that fine magazine are somewhat less interested in seeing a six year old girl who can build V-8's than an six year old boy who can do it. Nevertheless, there is a photo of her standing by that V-8 on the inside. Bill Gates is only a little surprised when a nine year old girl tells him that his implementation is shit. Howard is too self-interested to notice more than occasionally that he has a daughter, and when he does, he is too busy to care.
In fact, the weight of being Howard's heir is reduced by not having been announced as the Future of Stark Industries in at least three articles and one book, a biography of Howard, by the time that Tony is old enough to think about understanding why jets can stay up in the air. MIT's alumni magazine still has her on the cover, and it is entirely to say that Tony grows up more or less under the same conditions -- that is, in a state of benign neglect and household help.
Tony Stark teaches herself Bernoulli's principle much as Tony Stark teaches himself Bernoulli's priniciple.
Tony Stark moves herself into a furnished apartment in Cambridge, much as Tony Stark moves himself into a furnished apartment in Cambridge. Tony Stark makes friends with Jim Rhodes.
Tony Stark goes to Afghanistan.
Tony Stark wakes in a cave with a light inside her chest and cold throughout her body.
...
"Everybody knows how you are with girls," Pepper says to Tony after they go outside.
...
"How is she?"
The line is a little fuzzy. Obadiah and Pepper are on speaker phone. Pepper asked the question, and Jim can hear how worried she is.
"Fine. Dehydrated. Angry. You know Tony. She told me she thinks the thread count on her sheets is actually negative."
Obadiah laughs; he sounds amused. Pepper laughs; she sounds a little shaky, but relieved and she says something to Obadiah that Jim, through the fuzz on the line and the speaker phone and the weird acoustics of Tony's place in Malibu, which is where Obadiah and Pepper are -- Jim can't quite make out the words, but Obadiah turns back to the phone.
"We were worried," Obadiah says. "We were really worried. But she's fine. Do we know what happened?"
Rhodey, at that point, has to tell them about the arc reactor.
...
It's a Blackhawk, so they sit four and four with Tony wedged between Rhodey and a six foot two staff sergeant. The engine and the wind are noisy enough that nobody can hear anything; Tony's mouth and lips are cracked, and she is, in clear daylight, sitting in a context like this, recognizably a small person. In fact, she sits slumped half in the seat, half in Jim's lap. He isn't exactly holding her hand, but he thinks that, for once, she wouldn't object if somebody tried.
For once, the reason why everybody stares at her chest isn't because of the low-cut tank-top.
...
"How long was I gone?"
Gone, Jim notices. Not. Kidnapped. Or. How long did they have me?
"Three months," he says. "A little more than that."
"What do you have to drink? I want something to drink. Jesus, is there anything to drink around here?"
...
Tony at fifteen is skinny, short-haired, with big eyes.
She looks young, and when Jim finds her in the library, sitting in the back and glaring at bookshelves, it actually takes him two and a half minutes to realize that Tony is not, in fact, just a skinny, short-haired boy genius whose voice hasn't broken yet: the professor said only to have a word with the kid of his old buddy. Tony has her sleeves shoved up to the elbow; once Jim explains who sent him, they play Check The Size of My Scientific Accomplishment Dick, and it takes Jim about forty-five additional seconds to realize that he is outclassed and outpedigreed and flat out beat. Still, Jim sticks around after that discovery because his parents raised him with some manners, and this is, for Tony, somehow enough to earn Jim a regular role in her life: they move from having an academic counselor talks to pinball and arcade games. She hasn't seen the Star Wars movies.
They remedy that and talk about scalable software architecture for the Death Star.
"AT-AT's," Tony says. "I refuse to graduate until I see one go walking down Mass Ave."
They drink to that, and Tony does send a ten foot tall scaled replica walking down Mass Ave as her senior hack. Six cop cars show up, and Tony spends three hours in jail until the family lawyers accompany Jim to bail her out, and there she is, sitting in the cell with her head angled back and her shirt ripped from trying to climb over a fence to get away from the police, but she'd been laughing the whole time, which kind of made it difficult, and she was kind of grinning at them now and --
Being a girl didn't make much of a difference in that respect.
Decide for yourself, though, whether this part changes: one night, when Tony is a full seven months short of being sixteen, she leans over during a late night study session for Linear Algebra and, quite casually, offers to suck Rhodey's cock until he sees stars.
...
Jim knows it's time for that part of the post-pickup examination when the male doctor comes out, and the female doctor goes in. Thirty-five seconds later, the yelling starts.
...
That Jim is on the continent, let alone in the chopper that finds Tony, is a matter of sheer, freakish, bizarre, unbelievable luck. He flew out as chaperone to a bunch of Stark engineers going to Afghanistan for field troubleshooting and is, in fact, sitting through an officer-grade tedious motherfucker of a briefing when some bright mind switches in the unmanned aerial vehicle feed.
There's the desert. There's the mountain. There's a column of fire a couple hundred fucking feet high, and Rhodey pulls rank and shoves people out of the way and almost runs over two Army privates on his way to TOC. It's worth it to be in the chopper, though, when the chief warrant officer riding shotgun spots a shape stumbling along the dunes; it's worth it about sixty times over when they touch down, and Rhodey knows it's Tony even before he can make her features out from under the leather thing she has pulled over her shoulders.
Tony saw the choppers go overhead and waved them down. Her feet go out from underneath her.
Jim goes jogging up the sand dune.
"Next time you ride with me," he says.
Tony closes her eyes and smiles.
...
He doesn't know whether it's OK to hug her, which is why his hand comes down for a second, but she doesn't mind. So he does. And she rides back to base with her head on his shoulder and her left knee over his and her eyes fixed on the horizon.
...
Jim comes by Tony's hospital room afterwards.
It's a private room with a window that looks out onto a vehicle depot, and there' is a tiny television on an pivoting arm sticking out from the wall. Swanky digs, all things considered. The flowers in the little plastic vase by her bed are fake, but somebody has brought her a Coke and a cup of ice. The window looks out onto a small courtyard where people can sit with their families. VIP digs, practically.
"Hey," he says. "How was it?"
She hands him the chart, taken from the foot of the bed.
Jim takes it. TB, leishmaniasis, yellow fever, parasites. All negative. No sign of radiation poisoning, which is comforting, given the light that shines through her chest. Pregna --
He looks up, and Tony has her head angled back and is looking at him with the right side of her mouth twisted up: Tony has had an IUD since she was fifteen. She told Jim when she crawled into his lap and tried to convince him to fuck instead of studying for their Fluid Mechanics final, and yeah, Jim kind of hates how he knows that.
...
"Liaison? You -- "
"Come on, Rhodey. Good career exposure. You would not believe how bad Colin Powell wants to suck my dick. Figuratively speaking."
...
"Hey, wanna hang out with your boss?"
"You're not my boss, Tony. You don't sign my checks. I'm still an officer in the United States Ai -- "
...
Tony still isn't giving up the full story about those three months.
Jim doesn't think the missing part is rape: he doesn't have a clear reason for it, though. Call it twenty years of knowing Tony, and he knows, too, that if it happened, she isn't going to want to talk about it with him. Or the rape counselors. Or the debriefers. Or the nurses. Or anybody, really, until she decides that she wants to talk about it. When she does, maybe Obadiah. Probably not Pepper.
In fact, Jim guesses that there is novel, with movie rights attached, that she isn't telling any of them, but he still comes by one night after dinner and sits down on the bed next to her. In fact, she scootches over to make room for him, but hangs onto the remote control. The dinner-on-a-tray sits on the swing-out table; it looks like there was meatloaf and over-cooked peas with a peanut butter cookie, but she scraped the plate clean and licked the fork afterwards. There aren't even crumbs of the cookie left, so Jim sits with her on the bed. They watch the four channels available on the screen smaller than what Tony has in the back of the Rolls, and eventually, Tony puts her head on his shoulder.
In fact, she curls up around him and falls asleep -- she puts her knees in his lap and wraps one arm around his waist, and her head is around the other side of his hip. Jim knows, from looking at her chart, that it's the first time she's slept since they found her in the desert. It's probably the first time Tony has slept well in the three months; the only sound in the room, besides the HVAC, is her deep, steady breathing.
Yeah, Jim stays there all night. He doesn't sleep very much because it's kind of hard to sleep in that position. Instead, he watches TV. Watches the sun come up. Keeps his hand around Tony's shoulder.
Tony sleeps.
And sleeps and sleeps.
...
"That's ridiculous. I don't paint."
"What about your other nickname, the Merchant of Death?"
Tony looks surprised, and then, after a moment, almost looks pleased. A minute and a half after that, she informs Christine Everhart that she'd be glad to lose a few hours of sleep with her. Christine looks surprised, but gets into the car with Tony.
They ride back to the airport in Tony's Rolls, then fly back to Malibu in her Learjet.
Pepper, as expected, shows up in the morning to escort Miss Everhart off the premises.
...
The morning nurse, on the other hand, opens the door, and Tony jerks awake. She doesn't move, no quick movements, but every muscle in her body goes tense. That worries Rhodey almost as much as when the nurse leaves again, and Jim turns to look at Tony. She's studying him, and yeah, for a second, it looks like she's going to apologize for sleeping curled around him all night.
He offers to lend her his phone card that'll let her call home to the States -- Pepper or Obadiah or, hell, George Lucas and the Radio City Rockettes, if she wants -- but Tony shakes her head, pauses for a moment, then nods, having made up her mind.
She'll see them when she gets home.
...
"You might as well, Rhodey. Scientific poll indicates that 78%? of campus already thinks you're doing me blind every time we study in the group room in Barker. I mean, come on. Just let me -- "
...
Tony Stark is five foot two, five foot three. Small. Neatly built, though surprisingly muscled because she makes a point of keeping it on her body. Black hair, big brown eyes, and a pretty, pretty mouth.
One hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet. Less, without clothes.
She hides the eyes behind red sunglasses and, generally, tries to use anger and profanity and brains and money and charisma to make up for the rest of it.
...
Tony picks up the chair she'd been sitting on, pauses for a moment with it in her hands, as if testing how heavy it is.
And then she slams it, impressively hard, against the wall.
"Can I get a real goddamn debriefer in here now? One who's going to ask me about how many of my weapons I saw in that place? Or how the fuck they managed to get stuff so new I didn't think that it was even out in the field yet? Or are you even going to ask what the hell I've got in my chest?
The rape counselor slides her chair back a couple inches, but when it comes time to discuss how Tony actually got out, Tony is, of course, curiously lacking in details. She says something about an improvised bomb in their weapons stockpile, wants to talk about why the United States sucks so much at keeping her weapons out of the hands of the people she designed her stuff to kill, and the three-star general looks over at Rhodey and Rhodey tries to look apologetic.
She knows they stopped looking for her a month into it.
Also, yeah, she's a little pissed that the United States apparently sucks at keeping her weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
So many I probably took them to a strip club. So many that my PA probably sent them a fruit basket.
If people don't like Tony Stark, that is their problem.
...
Jim Rhodes remembers Tony at fifteen, pretty sure that the guy her Advanced EECS prof sent over wants to fuck her and not just, you know, yell at her about not showing her work or not showing up to class and drinking and God knows what else because he's supposed to be getting her grade up from a C- because she didn't put anything down on the test except the right answers, and not be her friend or something. So they might as well just get it out of the way, right?
Jim Rhodes remembers Tony at thirty-five, standing in front of the audience at the Apogee Awards. They don't merit Tony lifting her chin and looking down her nose at them. Instead, she looks at the glass weight in her hand, tells them all to go fuck themselves and their pretty, dressed-up female dates because she is the only woman in the room not there as arm candy, and oh yeah, fuck you, too, because it isn't like she has a couple of these at home already. Oh, except she doesn't.
"It would have been better," Obadiah admits to Jim later. "If we'd just gotten her drunk and left her next to the craps table."
"You mean she was sober?"
Obadiah sighs, and in retrospect, it isn't really surprising that when she gets back in front of a podium in the US, she tells the US military and the Joint Chiefs to go fuck themselves. "Zero accountability," she says. "I saw American men and women get killed by the very weapons that I designed to protect them."
Tony doesn't stand at the podium because Tony Stark, even in heels, tends to be a little short to be seen over podiums that are tall enough for Obadiah Stane to be comfortable at.
...
Jim Rhodes remembers the flight out to Afghanistan. The stewardesses -- in a moment of inspiration, Pepper had once nicknamed them the stripperdesses -- were gone, and it was just him and Tony sitting together on the couch. The lights are still dim, and Tony pours the last of the sake into a champagne glass, puts on some music that Jim doesn't recognize, then starts dancing at the pole by herself, without heels.
The music is a little softer than Tony usually likes, and Jim is a little drunker than he usually lets himself get around her. The drinking is really not even in the equation, though, when he's being honest with himself, and he tries to be. Tony comes walking over with her shirt open and looks Jim in the eye. The Apogees and standing there with his figurative dick in his hand while Tony pissed all over everybody she did business with was, what, thirty hours ago? And she was three hours late to the plane. And MIT was twenty years ago.
Jim closes his eyes, and still holding the champagne glass with sake in it, Tony leans down and kisses him.
They do it once, quick and with Tony straddling him, on the couch, and then, they go to the bedroom in the back and do it, slow and good because it's been twenty years happening. It's the first and second time they ever fuck, and Tony stays awake afterwards. Jim's arm is around her waist; he curls up around her. She watches the sun come up over someplace in Siberia, listens to how the sound of the TS-02's mix with the sound of Jim breathing so close to her, and when Jim comes up after the missile demo, she reminds him that the Humdrumvee is back there.
...
"This is because I'm thirty-six now, isn't it."
"Tony -- "
"It's because I'm old. Because I'm a woman. Because if I were a guy, I wouldn't be old. I'd be George Clooney. You'd drink sake with George fucking Clooney, right?"
...
At Rammstein, Tony tells the orderly where he can stuff the wheelchair, and Jim knows better than to even offer Tony his arm as they're coming down the plane ramp in Los Angeles. It's an Air Force base, so no press, and Pepper has also promised to personally end any photo editor buying a photo of Tony in the first week or so after her return, but Rhodey still stays clear, and Tony walks down the ramp by herself, wobbling just a little, chin tilted up and her shirt buttoned to the throat.
...
"Your eyes are red. A few tears for your long-lost boss?"
"Tears of joy. I hate job hunting."
Tony looks at her for a moment, head tilted back and to the side, evaluating the truth of that statement, then turns and nods at Happy, so that he'll open the door.
...
"Cheeseburger first."
...
"I don't like it when you have plans," Tony says to Pepper, exactly as she would if she were a he, if Pepper weren't at least six inches taller than her even without the heels. And Pepper blinks and explains, coolly, that she's allowed to have plans on her birthday. Tony turns her mouth up, just a little, and tells Pepper to get something on her; Pepper says that she already has and that it was expensive. Very expensive.
A moment passes. Pepper can see Tony measuring the pros and the cons of inquiring as to what Pepper bought with the black Amex.
Tony finally decides against it, so she downs the espresso, and why, yes, she did buy that $20 million Jackson Pollock to make Pepper smile. Also, because she's Tony fucking Stark and doesn't care that Larry Gagosian is ripping her the fuck off. Also, because she likes rubbing people's faces in that fact, but also, quite importantly, because she likes making Pepper smile on her birthday.
Really, Tony didn't build herself personal AI system ten years ahead of everything on the market just to miss out on Outlook Calender.
Even when she knows the smile just means that Pepper thinks her boss is being completely ridiculous -- even then --
...
Tony used to carry -- or have Pepper carry for her -- in her wallet, a photo from graduation day at MIT: in it, Tony stood between Rhodey and Howard. She had graduation cap hair, and she was the shortest person in the picture by a head or so, but she's smiling. When Pepper sees the photo for the first time, she realizes she didn't even know Tony could smile that wide.
Her wallet is missing when Tony wakes up in the cave. She only ever had one copy of that photo.
...
"They stopped looking for me after a month. Would they have stopped looking for me after a month if I was a guy?"
"We thought you were dead, Tony."
"We? We? Because I couldn't possibly have escaped and survived for a month out there. Because if they got me, they couldn't possibly keep me alive for anything. Or if they did, I wouldn't be worth continuing to look for."
"That's not -- "
"Fuck you. And you know, what else? Fuck you. I did a lot of thinking in that cave, and fuck all of this."
...
"You were the only prisoner, Ms. Stark?"
"Yeah, I was. What the hell are you? A colonel?"
"A major. My name is -- "
"Yeah, you said that at the beginning."
"So were you in isolation, Tony?"
"No, I was just the only fucking prisoner. Christ, can you count? One. I have a friend who's a bird colonel, and he can fucking count. You have to learn how to count before they make you one of those, so maybe you should learn. Or buy a dictionary. That's what only means, you stupid son of a bitch."
Sometimes, when Tony doesn't want to give a straight answer, she jokes. Most of the time, she snarls and cusses and gets angry.
The three months she's in the cave, she doesn't joke or bluster or rage at Yinsen.
...
"Did they ask you to do anything?"
"They wanted me to build them a Jericho missile."
"A Jericho missile, Ms. Stark?"
"Yeah, the company I own just sold $750 million dollars worth of them to your company."
There is just a little bit of sarcasm on the second company, and Jim braces for what is undoubtedly coming next.
"Did you build them one?"
A beat, and then the explosion:
"Do you think I'm retarded? Or that I'd commit treason for people who kidnapped me? They yelled at me, and when I still wouldn't do it for some fucking reason, they held my head in a bucket of water a couple times until I said I would, and I found out that they had so much of my stuff that I'm pretty sure that my PA has sent a fruit basket at some point. Or that I've taken them out for a night at Scores. So I told them I would, and when they weren't paying attention, I blew them to kingdom goddamn come because nobody was coming to get -- to get me out."
This time, to let the watchers know that she is done talking, Tony picks her chair up and slams it onto the table, right in front of the debriefer.
...
Tony doesn't say anything when Jim comes into the room, or when he sits down in the armchair by the bed. She doesn't move over on the bed, either, to make room for him; instead, she uses the remote to change the channel on the TV.
"You sure you don't want to call Obie? Or Pepper? You call her now, she'll probably be up. It's only 7 PM over there."
"No. Let me fucking watch -- what the hell is this?"
"Soap opera. I think it's All My Children."
"Fuck."
...
Yinsen is dead, and Tony is actually a little relieved that she doesn't have to explain the marks on her arms and shoulders and legs from putting the exoskeleton on to hammer the helmet for the Mark I. Or the wrenched shoulder. Or. Everybody just assum --
They stand in front of the arc reactor, and Obadiah puts his arm around her. She lets her eyes close for a moment, so that she can just breathe in the smell of Obadiah and his cigar and his cologne and the way it all comes together on him. It's old and familiar; it'd smelled nice when he hugged her right out of the Rolls, but he lit up a cigar after the press conference, and he had a drink before coming to see her, and it's so utterly, wonderfully familiar. The arm around her is familiar. The way he smells is familiar, and when Tony opens her eyes, she sees her father's arc reactor in front of her.
"Your father and me," Obadiah says and gives her shoulder a squeeze. "We were a team."
Tony takes a deep breath and, despite herself, despite some simmering annoyance, wants the moment to last forever.
...
Sometimes, when Tony doesn't want to give a straight answer, she jokes. Sometimes, she offers sex. Most of the time, she snarls and blusters and and cusses.
The three months in the cave, Tony doesn't joke or get angry with Yinsen. She doesn't offer, even once, to fuck him.
...
Pepper comes down when Tony asks and helps replace the arc reactor. Tony has her shirt and bra off, of course, and she doesn't act like Pepper should be worried at all about seeing her female boss lying propped on a table, topless.
...
"I wanna see it," he says.
And Tony leans her head back.
"You sure?"
He makes the gesture with the cigar in his hand.
...
She unbuttons her shirt, and he looks at her for a moment, then looks away. She looks in the same direction, and while she's looking, he steps close and buttons her shirt -- he's had practice at this. He buttons her back up all the way to the throat, and they ride back to her house in Malibu with Pepper talking a mile a minute into her cell phone and both her Blackberries vibrating continuously, and --
"Go home," she says to Pepper when the Rolls pulls into the drive. "Same goes for you, Happy. Come back tomorrow morning."
And when they're gone, Tony pours herself another drink. Nothing but Scotch, not even ice cubes, and downs half of it. Obadiah is still sitting on the couch, wearing his jacket. The cigar is long gone.
Tony sits back down on the couch next to him, right underneath his arm.
"I," she says. "Am going to get drunk."
"Yeah?"
Tony downs a mouthful more of the Scotch. Her eyes are watering a little; she's out of practice. "Yeah. I had my cheeseburger. I'm going to get drunk, then I'm going to get laid."
It's mostly dark in the house still; only the lights that Jarvis turned on were the lights over the couch.
"Tell me when you're drunk enough," Obadiah says.
Tony finishes off the glass, breathes out through her mouth, and then puts the tumbler onto the table. No coaster. Why bother? No ice, and she knows Obadiah is measuring how much her wrist sticks out from the edge of the shirt, how confident she looks. So Tony doesn't lean back when she has finished, and she starts to unbutton the front of her shirt again -- high up, from around the throat, where he had buttoned it. Two buttons later, the top of the arc reactor shows; four buttons later, he can see the whole thing.
"I'm drunk enough," Tony says and climbs into his lap and kisses him.
...
Tony comes once on the couch, rubbing herself against Obadiah's fingers, and she comes again straddling him with his cock in her and both of them in her bed, and when he goes down on her afterwards, Tony has come enough so that she doesn't get off again, at least not as quickly as she normally would. Obadiah uses his mouth and tongue; his beard starts to burn on her thighs, and Tony begs and whimpers and has her legs wrapped around his shoulders and tries to rub herself against his mouth because she's getting close, because she wants to come that fucking badly. She runs her hands over her stomach, around the edge of the arc reactor and begs some more, but doesn't come until Obadiah puts one hand over her stomach and slides the second and third fingers of the other all the way into her, up to the palm, and rocks them back and forth to get them deeper.
Tony comes so hard that she can't stop shaking afterwards.
...
Tony comes so hard that she can't stop shaking, and Obadiah comes up laughing and wipes his fingers on the sheets. She holds her hand up for him to see.
"Some things don't change, do they?" Obadiah says, looking at her hand.
The fingers flutter from the knuckle and won't bend, at least not quite yet, so Tony hooks her elbow around Obadiah and, as she usually does, kisses him until she can't taste herself in his mouth anymore. As she usually does.
...
Pepper suspects. Rhodey has no idea.
...
Maybe Rhodey should know better: the year Tony is sixteen, Obadiah is in Boston to close a deal for a subcontractor with some interesting research into molecular timing devices. He swings by Cambridge afterwards and takes both Tony and Rhodey out for dinner. Tony doesn't have a dress shirt, insists that she doesn't want to wear a dress, so she borrows Rhodey's second best shirt, because he's wearing his best. She rolls up the sleeves and wears it with jeans to the restaurant at the Four Seasons.
Afterwards, when they're underneath the canopy waiting for Obadiah's driver to bring the car around, Tony pauses, licks her lips.
"Hey," she says. "You go back ahead without me. I need to talk to Obadiah."
He looks at her, frowning. It weirds him out a little, he'll admit, that she calls him by his first name, but the Bentley rolls into place at the end of the canopy. It's raining a little, as it tends to do in Boston in the spring at night.
"It's fine," Tony says. "Don't wait up for me. I'll find my way back."
Tony doesn't show up until almost noon the next day and skips all of her afternoon classes because, as she puts it to Rhodey, she's fucking tired, and there's something wrong and not quite right with Obadiah, Rhodey has already decided by the time he's in the Bentley. In the stairway to his dorm room. The next morning, while brushing his teeth and eyeing his reflection in the mirror, and when he sees Tony, still wearing his shirt and looking rumpled and smiling her lazy, self-satisfied smile and waiting outside of lecture hall he sets his jaw.
"Hey," she says, and Rhodey has a pretty good idea that if they were someplace a little less private than a main corridor when classes were changing, she'd back him against the wall and try to put her hand in his jeans pocket and try to grab his dick.
Good thing they're in a hallway. Good thing.
...
Tony swears that she isn't fucking Obadiah: they stayed up and talked shop. The new scramjet had a wing that was the wrong shape. Same general idea as how Rhodey fucked up his Aero project, and Jim is inclined to believe her because when has Tony been even vaguely embarrassed to tell him if she's fucked somebody? She told him when she spent a whole Saturday fucking the brains out of their very married, forty year old Aero professor, after all, and the following Tuesday, said professor calls her a little lady. Patronizes her in front of the lecture.
Jim winces on her behalf, and the look on her face makes him feel more than a little bad for Tony until two weeks later, she tells him, smug as anything, that she fucked the professor in his office. In fact, she tells Jim about the sloppy details even when he tries yelling over her.
She insists that Obadiah has never put a hand on her that way, so yes, Jim slowly comes around to the idea that Obadiah is a good guy.
...
Really, in conclusion, Jim knows that Tony can do whatever she wants, but anybody who fucked her between the ages of -- whenever she started and say, seventeen, and was more than a year or two older than her, is a total asshole.
Decades later, he mentions this to Tony, and she almost falls off the couch laughing.
...
In the summer, Jim stays in Cambridge and works for professors.
In the summer, Tony goes back to New York, works for her father, goes out a lot. She calls every once in a while, but she always wants to talk about ideas and what they're both looking into. To get news, Jim has to go to the library, which subscribes to the New York Post, and read Page Six.
...
In conclusion, Jim concludes that Tony can do whatever she wants, but anybody who fucked her between the ages of -- whenever she started and say, seventeen, and was more than a year or two older than her, is a total asshole, and she almost falls off the couch laughing.
"Even -- " she says, having rolled sideways on the couch and not really doing anything to sit up straight again.
"Even who?"
She's wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans, and the shirt hitches up on one side, and the jeans are loose. Between them, there's a long isoceles triangle of skin starting just about mid-right hip and angling upwards, underneath her belly button, to the top of her left hip. No underwear. No br --
Jim looks away, and Tony has picked up a little bit of grace in the years in between, and she still likes Rhodey, so she changes the subject.
...
"I wanna see it," Obadiah says.
Tony looks him in the eye.
"You sure?"
...
"What do you think you just proved, Tony?"
Obadiah takes the drink off the tray, doesn't look at the waitress bringing it. Tony does, though, and indicates her approval by putting a twenty down on Obadiah's behalf. The girl winks at Tony and leans over to pick it up.
"I'm just a concerned stockholder, Obadiah," Tony says and tilts her chair back.
Behind Tony's left shoulder, a stripper starts to move around a pole -- I guess I'm just used to sailors, the song goes, and Obadiah leans back on the banquette. One of the Board members he'd been buttering up left ten minutes after Tony sat down, and the other two kept their eyes politely averted while Tony got a lap dance from and put, with smoothness born of a lot of practice, C-notes into the g-string of a blonde with hair down to her tailbone. The guys left after the second round of drinks, but Tony looks at Obadiah now, not the brunette in clear heels who has come around to try her luck with the generous lady in the far back booth.
"What was I supposed to do, Obie?" Tony says, dropping the chair back onto all four legs, then leaning forward with her shoulders and arms. She also says it more softly, more gently than might be expected. Maybe it's because of tiredness. The room is dark, and the music isn't quite as loud as might be expected, either.
"My name is on the side of the building."
"Your last name."
"Dad left the company to me."
Her chin comes up, and even in the low lighting, even with the music and the girls, the shift is clear on her face.
Obadiah notes it, takes a little of his drink, and after a moment, meets her eyes, and Tony gets up out of her chair. For the board meeting, she put on a black business suit, a white shirt buttoned up to just above the collarbones, no jewelry except for her MIT ring, and Tony leaves her chair and comes and sits down next to Obadiah in the booth. There is room between them, and Tony never says the words. What do I do? How can I get you to help me? Obadiah doesn't answer, at least not with words. By and by, though, Tony ends up sliding closer and closer. Obadiah puts his arm over her. Tony closes her eyes for a brief moment and tilts her chin up again, and then, quite deliberately puts her hand on his knee.
They watch the girls on stage until the lights turn on at the end of the night, and then, they go out to the Rolls that has been waiting six hours in the rain for them.
...
Part two.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 10:18 pm (UTC)They watch the girls on stage...
Puts? Puts WHAT? (And shouldn't that be a black business suit rather than a lack business suit?)
Little nitpicks aside, I howled with laughter, awwwwwed in sympathy, and had more than a few "oh shit!" moments. I so love the way you write; you can evoke emotion and imagery with such economy and eloquence of phrase. : )
On to part 2!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 11:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-23 06:04 am (UTC)UM BUT AS I WAS SAYING BEFORE I TRIED TO JUSTIFY WHY I DON'T HAVE A MENTAL LIST OF WHERE THE MISSING WORDS ARE... They exist (or, well, don't exist, which is the problem) and if you care enough (WHICH I SAY BECAUSE I WOULD TOTALLY GO "WHATEVER, IT'S STILL UNDERSTANDABLE, I DON'T CARE") you might wanna beat one of your friends into finding those places.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-23 06:45 am (UTC)Anyawys. Thanks for pointing it out.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-24 12:25 am (UTC)You're welcome!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 11:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 05:25 pm (UTC)*goes to part 2*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-14 03:37 am (UTC)You turned Tony Stark into a fantastic, kickass, original character!
Not that he wasn't before, but the feminist voice inside me went "Yeah...." during a lot of the Iron Man scenes is squeeling and jumping up and down with excitement.
Seriously, this story is fucking badass. I want this Tony Stark in a book/movie/comic, hell, I WANT this Tony Stark! God, you NEED to take this character and write your own story because she deserves her own story. Please?
Oh God, there's a chapter two, must read!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-29 09:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-30 11:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-19 08:05 pm (UTC)It has been almost too much for me. I must take a break before part two.