Iron Armours and Fissured Hearts

Tony Stark is born in an impersonal, unadorned hospital room with harsh lights and clinical surfaces. He does not cry when he is born, simply gazes at the dark - haired man with the mustache and the blonde woman's smiling, tired face with an abstracted curiosity.

When he is put in his father's arms, all he is given is a helpless, bewildered look before he is handed back with distinctly less ease to Maria Stark. He does not see him again until they leave the hospital room.

It does not count, because for many years after, the only time Tony really interacts with him is in in some semblance of a father - son relationship in the lab, and a mockery of it in the media.

He learns, as is the legacy of Stark Industries, to craft destruction. The first thing he creates is a circuit board at age four, and impressive as it is in the public eye, it does little to sway his father. When he shows it to his father, all he is given is an absent - minded commendation, whose spark dims as he recognizes it as a disguised dismissal.

Howard Stark has an almost insurmountable legacy, and he has not yet basked in even a little of the glory.

So he learns silently, observing and deducing and calculating. He watches his father, mother and Obie do it, and he perfects it, outshines Howard in at least this respect. He has been brought up into it. Stood in front of the flash of cameras and noise of mics as a child, his worth analysed and examined by the public eye.

He isn't sure which is worse. Out in the cold, hard behind - the - scenes, he tries to lives up to Howard Stark's brilliance, and in the happy - family - masquerade that is his home, to Captain America's morality.

Except, Captain America does not make machines and Howard Stark does not save lives. Stark Industries' weapons seldom fail to claim lives, and Captain America does not fail to leap into the line of fire. They are mutually contradictory, and Tony is always adrift in - between with nowhere to seek refuge.

So Tony smiles at cameras with a savage triumph and launches well - aimed words at mics. As the years go by, he is unmade and remade, sculpted into the media darling no one can quite hate or love, to chip away gradually at the "could - have - been"s and "what - if"s.

(All the world's a stage, and behind these curtains the saints are all liars and the kings, all fools.)

He makes his way through school in leaps and bounds, because that is what he does - build and construct, leaving everyone behind. He is brilliant and perceptive, and finally it is recognized, the foundation of a fierce, formidable intellect that could shake Stark Industries to the core.

His time at university is a blur of ill - timed sex, uncontrolled alcohol consumption and careless driving. The media does not get wind of it, and he laughs in the reckless abandon of it all. He graduates MIT at fifteen, building Dummy along the way, enjoying the expressions of unwitting astonishment and newfound respect, and basks in the glory.

If he did not know better, he would say he is reckless and impulsive, but truly he cannot bring himself to care. The son of Howard Stark is always looking for the next adrenaline rush to see how much he can pull off and get away with, but for Tony Stark, it is merely instinctive designing to die, all the while feeling like a time bomb. He feels, not for the first time, that consuming need to self - destruct. Everyday he drowns himself to forgetting Howard's indifference and loses the insidious loneliness in foreign bodies and strives a little more arduously because he simply does not know how much is enough.

He has given up on hoping for praise from the one person from whom it matters, and he flourishes all his failings flagrantly, watching as the people who do not matter a dime jump at the opportunity to criticize him for things that are merely an illusion.

He plays the part of a magician, conjuring smoke and mirrors with speech and expressions, and they are all looking anywhere but where they should be. Those who do catch him in the act are persuaded into believing he is proud of it.

(Merely a bright lure in the darkness for now, but he will burst forth and claim it in all its magnificence.)

At seventeen, he types the rudimentary coding for JARVIS. He had originally thought of something in a flash of inspiration as he remembered his butler and only companion in lonely moments, but somehow he had went on to making artificial intelligence possible.

But that is who he is - building and constructing, leaving everyone behind in the overwhelming magnitude of his genius, leaving them to chase dreams while he grasps them and makes them tangible and breathtakingly real.

With JARVIS, he thinks he may have outdone himself. JARVIS is the kind of technology it will take years for the general masses to come up with. JARVIS is inquisitive and dauntless beyond his wildest dreams and most conscientious calculations. He is his masterpiece, his pieta, his piece de resistance, his magnum opus. He does his creator justice.

It is the same year that Howard and Maria Stark's bodies are unearthed from the ravaged remains of their car, only to be buried again. He is silent and still throughout the funeral in a poor imitation of them, left all alone to bask in the glory of a legacy whose weight rests heavy on his shoulders and blinds his sight to all else.

(They say no one can see tears in the rain, but he stands beneath the sighing trees and whispers because no can hear him say farewell.)

He does not remember ever truly smiling. Certainly he remembers flashing insincere grins and sarcastic remarks at cameras and mics, like throwing bones to the dogs, but he throws away a little of his identity each time, and it is wrought into meat befitting them.

He does not remember being a child. His childhood was his genius - that was the only part of him that seemingly mattered - creating and discovering to belittle his earlier deeds.

His genius now is dedicated to Stark Industries, and the weapons he makes are a testament to the ruthless, devastating intelligence that is nothing less than indomitable. Stark Industries soars, and he is perhaps good enough now.

The victory burns him more than the masquerade, and he watches with a bitter delight as his weapons defend the people who have unmade and remade him and command his wrath upon the world. So he toasts to his title of the Merchant of Death, parades his questionable habits, and pretends it does not fissure him.

(He laughs because if he does not, he would probably cry.)

Afghanistan does not subdue his spirit. He escapes toward that sliver of light, bursting forth to claim it in all its magnificence. The struggle in surprisingly unwelcome.

Yinsen's final plea, command, has shaken him to the core, and when he shuts down the weapons division of Stark Industries and flaunts what would be called a fatal mistake, he knows he has aspired to Captain America's pinnacle, too.

He feels as is he has been blind all his life, being a pawn that was manipulated with no awareness of it on its part. Obie has proven that.

(And of what use is power, when it takes a lifetime to acquire, and an eternity to pay the price?)

Afghanistan does not fade easily, and merely contributes to the arsenal of Howard and Obie and weapons which backfire on him. There are old scars, bone - deep but leaving only skin - deep marks for the world to see, and they underestimate him.

After Afghanistan, he ensures no one can see even those, and though appointing Pepper as the CEO, giving away the suit to Rhodey, the untimely party and his apparent going back to old habits are suspicious to inquiring eyes, they are explained away with his unpredictability. Once again, they are all blinded by smoke and mirrors, all looking anywhere but where they should. Though he predicts it, in some abandoned recess of his mind it still stings to know that Natalie Rushman could see something that Pepper and Rhodey could not.

For him, it is a warning, a reminder. There are those who will look deeper and further, and those who find them will leave.

He survives through it all - through Howard, Obie, Afghanistan and the Palladium Poisoning. He wonders if it is some kind of atonement, karma forcing him into some nightmarish, undesired circumstance that tautens like a frayed noose but does not quite give way.

When he flies with the nuke into the Wormhole, he knows he has run out of time and is simply running on borrowed time now, and in it he sees his blaze of glory. In the instant before the nuke ruptures the spaceship in a rhapsody of byzantine and ultramarine fire, the deafening eruption shatters all his fragile, elegant illusions and finds an echo in his heart.

He wonders whether he will have regrets every time he almost dies.

Pepper is there through it, through Afghanistan, the Palladium Poisoning and the Wormhole, an unbelievably professional but reliable support, the one constant in his variable mighty moments. She does not see Tony Stark or Iron Man or the Merchant of Death or even as an Avenger, but simply Tony.

An eccentric genius with solvable issues and a salvageable heart. Seeing the world with Pepper beside him is like seeing through a looking glass. He clings desperately to this chance, promising himself he would not ruin it, do something other than destroy.

Perhaps, somewhere in the years between now and then, he has been remade into something he does not loathes, after all. It is irreparable, but the fragments of Tony still find someone with the patience to at least bear and accept them.

Fin.