Parents.

[quigonejinn]

1. Howard.

There are talking camels and pink grass. A windup elephant goes down Melrose Avenue, and a couple Senators that Tony met his last trip to Washington DC walk around with orange ties and top hats and wave at Tony and his dad.

What the hell did you expect?

2. Obadiah.

The room is comfortable and warm. Tony doesn't recognzie it, but it isn't one of his rooms, and it isn't a room in Obadiah's house. Carpet, fireplace, two armchairs. Maybe the mantle has a couple small blue-and-white Chinese vases. Tony sits in an armchair, and Obadiah sits in the other. Obadiah reads a book that Tony can't see the cover of and ignores Tony.

Time passes. Everybody stays fully clothed. Obadiah never touches Tony.

Seriously, what the hell did you expect?

3. Maria.

They're sitting on a grassy hill together. The night is dark and clear; it looks a little like the house that they had in the Hamptons before it was sold, except there was no hill leading to the sea, and there should be a yacht club stretching to the water all along the coast. Lights of other houses, too.

Still, Tony has memories of this place, but he doesn't turn around to look at it. Instead, he sits next to his mother. She wears a white ballgown and long gloves; she looks younger than he ever saw her, and she is talking and laughing and pointing out stars and the ocean and the planets. It is charming. It is friendly. Tony leans in, just a little, to see what she is talking about when she says there are pictures in the sky, and then she says that she has a present for him. She opens her palm, and there is a tiny, tiny model of the car she ran into a railing on Long Island and plunged into the Sound.

In the dream, the last thing Tony remembers was his mom putting the model in the grass and walking away. On waking, his first thought is certain knowledge that if he had picked it up in the dream and rocked it in his hands, it would have sloshed: Scotch. The sweetest Scotch he or his mother ever tasted.

Really, what did you expect? A sense of what had been lost? That isn't Tony Stark.