There are some things that Tony can't handle. Water, for instance. He hates water, and after Afghanistan, that's no surprise. It is a surprise that he's crippled by his social phobia, so that's just one of the many things he keeps to himself. Bruce isn't so good with people either, what with the Other Guy making a mess of things. He kept himself away from society in the interest of safety, but after years of isolation, he's aching for some company. (Can be read as friendship or pre-slash.)

Tony Stark wasn't a particularly social man. Sure, he demanded the attention of rooms full of people, crowds of strangers, and business meetings full of crotchety old men with the ease of someone who spent their whole life training to be a public speaker. Words came easily to him and jokes appeared on the fly, easing the tension in even the worst of situations, but when push became brutally acquainted with shove, all Tony wanted was to surround himself in music cranked all the way up and the artificial friends he'd made from scraps in his spare time. The bots kept him sane without making him feel like all the air was being choked from his lungs.

Dummy, You, Butterfingers, and JARVIS. That's all Tony needed—all he wanted, aside from fleeting encounters with strangers and people who called themselves friends. He went to parties, sure, and invariably came away with some sweet blond attached to his arm, but if someone could find record of Tony not getting plastered at one of these events, it would be news to him and the world around. He had the sort of personality that people gravitated toward—or, more likely, he had the sort of money that people gravitated toward.

He found difficulty being serious when he spoke to people, anxieties driven into override, so he cracked jokes and fooled around and tried his very damn best to convince himself that everything was fine (even though he knew, with every fibre of his being, that things were about fifty miles from fine at any given second). He practiced his extempore speeches in his head about a hundred times a day and had to keep a steady supply of whisky on hand so that his tongue wouldn't stick to the roof of his mouth when he was forced to give them. He was drowning, like he was back in that damn cave and they were shoving his head into the basin.

His doctors (read: the one they had locked him in a room with after the press conference announcing the change of direction) called it social anxiety disorder. Tony called it being a fucking toddler and refused to take the doc up on the suggestion of therapy and medication. He'd gone his whole life struggling not to faint because he'd been thrust into the spotlight, he wasn't about to duck out into pills and therapists just because he had a name for it. No, he was going to play it cool and force himself to behave as normal. For Tony, this meant projecting an outgoing personality that wasn't his and pretending that he was thrilled with all the attention thrust onto him.

For a long time, Pepper was the only one Tony felt remotely comfortable around. There was Obie, of course, but Obie was like a surrogate parent since the day Howard and Maria died, and just look at how that turned out for him. Pepper was the only one who could fall asleep in Tony's bed and wake up with him still in it, when hundreds of people before her had been abandoned mere minutes after falling asleep for the safety of the workshop and his bots.

Still, in the end, she proved to be too much and he shoved her away just as forcefully as the rest. He couldn't handle the thought of fucking everything up (as he did every time, without fail) and the panic choked him when he woke up one morning with her legs tangled in his and he couldn't, he just couldn't, and he fled.

JARVIS was already blasting AC/DC's Hell's Bells by the time Tony threw open the door to the third floor from the top of his building, hurling himself headlong into the designs for the newest model of his Iron Man suit. You made some smoothie-fashioned drink of liquefied vegetables (at least, that's what Tony hoped was in it—he could never be certain when it came to You) and Dummy made a mess of the shop trying to make Tony feel better.

He barely even noticed when he had company four hours later.