quigonejinn (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quigonejinn) wrote2008-11-09 11:58 pm
quigonejinn) wrote2008-11-09 11:58 pm
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IT IS STILL LAST WEEK IN CST, OK? I HAVE MET MY SELF-IMPOSED SUPER-EASY OBLIGATION.
Jim moved out years before Afghanistan.
...
Begin this way: suppose that in a number of universes, Tony stays at MIT for an extra semester after she turns seventeen. There is no reason to stay. In fact, thanks to having knocked around the back halls of Columbia since being, at the precocious age of eight, expelled from Manhattan's last private school with a talented and gifted program, Tony has had the credits to graduate since spring of '90. Maybe before that, if she'd wanted to. Things like this are flexible when the engineering library is not only named after your father, but you, yourself, happen to be a once-in-a-century, possibly once-in-a-civilization, genius.
Instead, she knocks around the back halls of MIT. She does a little consulting work for her father, does some drinking. In the course of the extra semester, she only pulls one hack, and it is, admittedly, a minor one. Only two cop cars show up, two. Jim points out practically makes her really-really-senior prank a downgrade from the really-senior year one, but anything would be a downgrade from an AT-AT going down Mass Avenue, and yeah, at the bottom of his heart, Jim has a vague idea why Tony has stayed in Cambridge, but he doesn't want to talk about it. Tony certainly isn't going to talk about it, either.
One drunk, lazy New England fall afternoon during the extra semester, in a certain subset of those universes, Tony climbs into Jim's lap and starts to kiss him.
Most universes, Jim shoves her off his lap. Tony rolls her eyes, points out that she isn't fifteen anymore. Jim ignores her until he feels guilty because yes, he knows that she stayed on because some tiny small part of her brain that actually works on things that don't involve math and notation has decided that he's the only person she can really count on to car --
At least one universe, though, Tony points that she isn't fifteen anymore. It has, in fact, been years she has been fifteen, and it flashes across Jim's brain that Tony does, indeed, have a point. She isn't fifteen anymore. She hasn't been fifteen for at least two years. He doesn't say it out loud, but the thought passes over his face. He isn't good at hiding things like this, and Tony grins. She fists his shirt in both hands.
"Of course I have a point. I always have a point, and my math is always right," she says, and before he can start compiling a list of all the times where she hasn't had a point, because her math has never been wrong as far as he can remember, Tony goes back to kissing him, long and slow.
The problem set falls from Jim's hand.
...
"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."
...
Jim moved out years before Afghanistan. The kids went with him.
...
Suppose that, as expected, Jim finishes his degree and goes to fly planes, but he doesn't go overseas until after the car crash.
Suppose that Jim is actually there with Tony when she puts her parents into the ground.
After all that, do you think Tony would let go of Jim Rhodes? She already stayed an extra semester at MIT for him. By the time Tony turns thirty, in fact, she has a couple of anniversaries under her belt and a two year old daughter who squeals at the sight of fighter jets overhead: the story here is about Tony as a married woman. It's an easier story, in ways, because Tony doesn't spend two years in Europe, personally investigating the edges of synthetic chemistry and blowing-through-your-trust-fund. She doesn't have to fight the directors quite so hard to prove that she is responsible and adult; she starts on the Board at nineteen, in a nominal position, but they appreciate that despite her terrible grieving, she is taking steps to learn about the company and not just taking over, at twenty-one, when her rights kick in.
When she takes a runner to Europe six months later, exhausted and terrified, she calls Jim three nights in, from a hotel in Berlin.
He tells her to take as long as she wants. She stays on the line an extra minute or so, just to listen to him breathe, and comes home two days later.
In short: Tony is never quite so lonely. Tony never has to fight the Board quite as hard; Tony never has to cling quite so strongly to the idea that her father was a hero despite -- no, because he built bombs.
...
"Of course I have a point. I always have a point, and my math is always right," Tony says, and before he can start compiling a list of all the times where she hasn't had a point, because her math has never been wrong as far as he can remember, Tony goes back to kissing him, long and slow and, for Tony, surprisingly sweet. She has her hands on either side of his face, and when Jim finally brings his hand up and touches her back, between the shoulder blades, she pauses and goes still, except for her breathing, which, for a moment, goes a little shaky. She takes her hands away from Jim's face, and they are connected, therefore, only by her mouth over his.
They sit like that for a moment. Tony doesn't do more than breathe.
She has, maybe, been waiting for this for a long time.
Twenty years later, Tony is in the Funvee with three other people.
"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."
Nobody says anything. Ice cubes clink inside thirty-five year old blended Scotch. Tony follows this crowd-pleaser by toeing the Maxim open to the centerfield and makes a comment indicating, in no uncertain terms, that she fucked the centerfold long and good and thorough. She does not neglect to indicate, too, that she fucked the December twins.
Tony smiles. That is, in fact, the way that she likes it. This Tony is never quite so lonely. She never has to fight the Board in quite the same way, and she never has to build her identity, her self-worth, on a few personal memories and a pile of newsreels.
In short: Tony has far fewer reasons to be an asshole in this universe.
In short: it doesn't mean she is any less of one. Tony is, in fact, quite possibly even more of one; Jim leaves years before Afghanistan, and the kids went with him.
...
"Hi, I'm Tony," she says, asserting the non-obvious and offering a tiny hand. It is almost weightless, this hand, but the grip is firm and businesslike. You could be forgiven for thinking that you had just shaken hands with a preternaturally bright, but affable, eight year old boy. With her hair trimmed short, just brushing the tips of the ears, dirty jeans and untied shoelaces you would be forgiven for making that mistake. You would also be wrong. Not that Antonia "Tony" Stark would notice, of course, as she has better things to do than correct a middle-aged reporter from _The New York Times_. Better things like help her father, Howard Stark, founder and CEO of Stark Industries, fix a kink in the trajectory of the latest in long range weaponry.
[babble dialogue between Tony and her father. Tony asking technical questions. Howard answering them, a little distracted.]
Tony is not yet at the point where her father will let her work full-time at the company. There is the matter of school, for example, which Tony brings up with a roll of her eyes as we ride back from [name of research station]. Her parents are in the process of finding one that works for her; the program that she is currently enrolled in, a well-known Upper East side institution for the precocious children of bankers and doctors, doesn't have enough math and science to satisfy Tony, who finds the emphasis on logic puzzles and enrichment annoying. Howard tells a story about the time Tony went missing during a class trip to see the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tony disappeared halfway through the tour. Two frantic hours later, the school principal called Howard's office, where Howard was in a meeting. Obadiah Stane, Howard's business partner and a family friend of long standing, happened to be standing by Howard's secretary when the call came through. He took the phone to tell them to look in the historical armor section.
"It's her favorite part of the museum. Did you check there?"
The museum dispatched a security guard, who found Tony pestering an exasperated docent with questions about a display of English longbows in the style of those that had beaten back the French knights at Agincourt.
At age eight, Tony Stark has chosen a career path: building things that win wars.
BACK AT THE STARK FAMILY HOME, a limestone-fronted townhouse two blocks from Central Park, Tony keeps a workshop in the basement. The family moved out of their penthouse duplex directly overlooking the Park when the buildings co-operative board refused to let Howard Stark build a workshop on the apartment that the family had purchased for exactly that reason. Now, Tony has roughly five thousand square feet in the basement of the house, and she prefers the term "workshop," rather than "laboratory." That is because she uses it to build things, rather than investigate, a distinction she explains with the solemnity that most children her age reserve for discussing Saturday morning cartoons. It's the sort of practical versus theoretical distinction that you draw when your father's greatest achievement, in his pre-business life, involved extended periods at Los Alamos, designing chemical triggers for the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The projects in the workshop are a little more peaceable.
"Learning algorithims," she says, settling down at her work bench. "For robots."
Jim moved out years before Afghanistan.
...
Begin this way: suppose that in a number of universes, Tony stays at MIT for an extra semester after she turns seventeen. There is no reason to stay. In fact, thanks to having knocked around the back halls of Columbia since being, at the precocious age of eight, expelled from Manhattan's last private school with a talented and gifted program, Tony has had the credits to graduate since spring of '90. Maybe before that, if she'd wanted to. Things like this are flexible when the engineering library is not only named after your father, but you, yourself, happen to be a once-in-a-century, possibly once-in-a-civilization, genius.
Instead, she knocks around the back halls of MIT. She does a little consulting work for her father, does some drinking. In the course of the extra semester, she only pulls one hack, and it is, admittedly, a minor one. Only two cop cars show up, two. Jim points out practically makes her really-really-senior prank a downgrade from the really-senior year one, but anything would be a downgrade from an AT-AT going down Mass Avenue, and yeah, at the bottom of his heart, Jim has a vague idea why Tony has stayed in Cambridge, but he doesn't want to talk about it. Tony certainly isn't going to talk about it, either.
One drunk, lazy New England fall afternoon during the extra semester, in a certain subset of those universes, Tony climbs into Jim's lap and starts to kiss him.
Most universes, Jim shoves her off his lap. Tony rolls her eyes, points out that she isn't fifteen anymore. Jim ignores her until he feels guilty because yes, he knows that she stayed on because some tiny small part of her brain that actually works on things that don't involve math and notation has decided that he's the only person she can really count on to car --
At least one universe, though, Tony points that she isn't fifteen anymore. It has, in fact, been years she has been fifteen, and it flashes across Jim's brain that Tony does, indeed, have a point. She isn't fifteen anymore. She hasn't been fifteen for at least two years. He doesn't say it out loud, but the thought passes over his face. He isn't good at hiding things like this, and Tony grins. She fists his shirt in both hands.
"Of course I have a point. I always have a point, and my math is always right," she says, and before he can start compiling a list of all the times where she hasn't had a point, because her math has never been wrong as far as he can remember, Tony goes back to kissing him, long and slow.
The problem set falls from Jim's hand.
...
"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."
...
Jim moved out years before Afghanistan. The kids went with him.
...
Suppose that, as expected, Jim finishes his degree and goes to fly planes, but he doesn't go overseas until after the car crash.
Suppose that Jim is actually there with Tony when she puts her parents into the ground.
After all that, do you think Tony would let go of Jim Rhodes? She already stayed an extra semester at MIT for him. By the time Tony turns thirty, in fact, she has a couple of anniversaries under her belt and a two year old daughter who squeals at the sight of fighter jets overhead: the story here is about Tony as a married woman. It's an easier story, in ways, because Tony doesn't spend two years in Europe, personally investigating the edges of synthetic chemistry and blowing-through-your-trust-fund. She doesn't have to fight the directors quite so hard to prove that she is responsible and adult; she starts on the Board at nineteen, in a nominal position, but they appreciate that despite her terrible grieving, she is taking steps to learn about the company and not just taking over, at twenty-one, when her rights kick in.
When she takes a runner to Europe six months later, exhausted and terrified, she calls Jim three nights in, from a hotel in Berlin.
He tells her to take as long as she wants. She stays on the line an extra minute or so, just to listen to him breathe, and comes home two days later.
In short: Tony is never quite so lonely. Tony never has to fight the Board quite as hard; Tony never has to cling quite so strongly to the idea that her father was a hero despite -- no, because he built bombs.
...
"Of course I have a point. I always have a point, and my math is always right," Tony says, and before he can start compiling a list of all the times where she hasn't had a point, because her math has never been wrong as far as he can remember, Tony goes back to kissing him, long and slow and, for Tony, surprisingly sweet. She has her hands on either side of his face, and when Jim finally brings his hand up and touches her back, between the shoulder blades, she pauses and goes still, except for her breathing, which, for a moment, goes a little shaky. She takes her hands away from Jim's face, and they are connected, therefore, only by her mouth over his.
They sit like that for a moment. Tony doesn't do more than breathe.
She has, maybe, been waiting for this for a long time.
Twenty years later, Tony is in the Funvee with three other people.
"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."
Nobody says anything. Ice cubes clink inside thirty-five year old blended Scotch. Tony follows this crowd-pleaser by toeing the Maxim open to the centerfield and makes a comment indicating, in no uncertain terms, that she fucked the centerfold long and good and thorough. She does not neglect to indicate, too, that she fucked the December twins.
Tony smiles. That is, in fact, the way that she likes it. This Tony is never quite so lonely. She never has to fight the Board in quite the same way, and she never has to build her identity, her self-worth, on a few personal memories and a pile of newsreels.
In short: Tony has far fewer reasons to be an asshole in this universe.
In short: it doesn't mean she is any less of one. Tony is, in fact, quite possibly even more of one; Jim leaves years before Afghanistan, and the kids went with him.
...
"Hi, I'm Tony," she says, asserting the non-obvious and offering a tiny hand. It is almost weightless, this hand, but the grip is firm and businesslike. You could be forgiven for thinking that you had just shaken hands with a preternaturally bright, but affable, eight year old boy. With her hair trimmed short, just brushing the tips of the ears, dirty jeans and untied shoelaces you would be forgiven for making that mistake. You would also be wrong. Not that Antonia "Tony" Stark would notice, of course, as she has better things to do than correct a middle-aged reporter from _The New York Times_. Better things like help her father, Howard Stark, founder and CEO of Stark Industries, fix a kink in the trajectory of the latest in long range weaponry.
[babble dialogue between Tony and her father. Tony asking technical questions. Howard answering them, a little distracted.]
Tony is not yet at the point where her father will let her work full-time at the company. There is the matter of school, for example, which Tony brings up with a roll of her eyes as we ride back from [name of research station]. Her parents are in the process of finding one that works for her; the program that she is currently enrolled in, a well-known Upper East side institution for the precocious children of bankers and doctors, doesn't have enough math and science to satisfy Tony, who finds the emphasis on logic puzzles and enrichment annoying. Howard tells a story about the time Tony went missing during a class trip to see the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tony disappeared halfway through the tour. Two frantic hours later, the school principal called Howard's office, where Howard was in a meeting. Obadiah Stane, Howard's business partner and a family friend of long standing, happened to be standing by Howard's secretary when the call came through. He took the phone to tell them to look in the historical armor section.
"It's her favorite part of the museum. Did you check there?"
The museum dispatched a security guard, who found Tony pestering an exasperated docent with questions about a display of English longbows in the style of those that had beaten back the French knights at Agincourt.
At age eight, Tony Stark has chosen a career path: building things that win wars.
BACK AT THE STARK FAMILY HOME, a limestone-fronted townhouse two blocks from Central Park, Tony keeps a workshop in the basement. The family moved out of their penthouse duplex directly overlooking the Park when the buildings co-operative board refused to let Howard Stark build a workshop on the apartment that the family had purchased for exactly that reason. Now, Tony has roughly five thousand square feet in the basement of the house, and she prefers the term "workshop," rather than "laboratory." That is because she uses it to build things, rather than investigate, a distinction she explains with the solemnity that most children her age reserve for discussing Saturday morning cartoons. It's the sort of practical versus theoretical distinction that you draw when your father's greatest achievement, in his pre-business life, involved extended periods at Los Alamos, designing chemical triggers for the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The projects in the workshop are a little more peaceable.
"Learning algorithims," she says, settling down at her work bench. "For robots."