Note: Not my usual fandom to write in, but pre-and-post Infinity War watching I went on a bit of blitz of MCU rewatches and a few ideas poked at me. This was the first of them. Feedback and brickbats welcomed in equal measure!

Iron

It's a headline that gives him a name and, though he mutters about journalistic license and metallurgical inaccuracy, he can't deny there is something evocative about it.

Something of fairytale blacksmiths warding off evil fairies with cold iron.

Something of the rough, grubby romance of the railroads. Pressing their way through the landscape, connecting north and south and striving west. Engineering in defiance of natural obstacles. Trusses vaulting over rivers, tunnels piercing mountains. Building the world into a smaller place, forging links between places and their people. The connectivity of its day.

Something about the balance between the simple strength and mathematical complexity captured in the sweeping lines of a suspension bridge. Something pure.

Iron.

Iron Man.

A name for the better part of himself.

A name not written on the side of a bomb.

Nicknames

He throws out nicknames almost by reflex. It's safer. It's a game, a distraction and he always appreciates a useful distraction from the messes they're in. There's a distance there and it helps.

"Reindeer Games", "Point Break". The alternative, to use the names from myth and legend, names of gods, is to be forced to acknowledge their claims that that's the literal truth. Telling himself that they're only aliens and quoting himself Arthur C Clarke on the subject of science and magic doesn't help in the slightest because the fact he finds himself fighting aliens and their might-as-well-be magic makes his breath shorten and his guts curl every bit as badly.

He does the same even with his own team but it's rooted in the same seeking for distance. "Legolas", not "Clint". Not even "Barton".

"Underoos" or just "kid" and definitely never, ever, "Peter".

Not in a fight.

Real names are too human and humans are too real, too easily hurt, too easily killed.

He lets his mind distract itself with the trivial.

Gets through the fights.

Doesn't think about who might not.

Pepper

He knows it's not her given name, but it's who she is to him and he shortens even that, as though it was real.

Of the people he knows who actually call him "Tony" even outside of life-and-death crises – a number he suspects he could count on one hand – she's the one he never tires of hearing it from. The one who can make his knees wobble just at the sound of his own name.

He adores her and he has no idea at all why she stays and every time he screws up he's terrified that this time, this time will be it.

He'll lose her and he has no idea how he'll survive it.

Avengers

Some of them wear their assumed names more lightly than others.

To at least half of them – the soldiers and spies and agents – codenames and callsigns are routine, and unremarkable. Barton rolls his eyes if anyone calls him "Hawkeye" outside of a firefight. Wilson takes "Falcon" only seriously enough to name his techy toys on-theme. If Romanoff or Maximoff have any opinion at all about their sobriquets, they keep it to themselves.

Tony suspects that Rhodey's gleeful adoption of "War Machine" is at least 50% for the purpose of telling tall tales and for screwing with him, since Tony doesn't entirely remember naming that particular suit anything in particular. It wasn't, after all, one of his finer moments.

Banner actively disassociates. "The Other Guy" is the least of the assortment of epithets and euphemisms, both he and the rest of them deploy to let him do so.

Rogers, of course, probably has "Captain" stamped on his bones. It's so much a part of him that, "Cap" is almost more a mark of familiarity than "Steve". Tony's never worked out whether he loathes, envies, or admires that certainty.

And no one know what Vision thinks.

Spider-Man

Tony sits, curled in on himself, on a world he's already forgotten the name of, if he ever heard it at all. He thinks about the indignant mix of embarrassment and determination with which Peter Parker had insisted on "Spider-Man", not "Spider-Boy".

It hurts to remember it, but so it should, because he was only a boy. A kid really and Tony had drawn him in and led him here here to die on an alien world, uncountable miles from everyone he cared about and had wanted to protect.

It should hurt, Tony knows. It should. He should have been able to stop it. Years he's been looking for a way and he should have found one. He should have done more. He catches himself thinking it. A phrase out of a nightmare become reality. Worse. Worse than the nightmares, because while the nightmares saw every other Avenger dead around him, at least they had never included him leading a damned teenager to his death. A damned kid.

"Peter" he tells himself "Pete". "Peter." Give the kid the courtesy of a name. Have the guts to acknowledge what you've lost. He knows how little he used Peter's name to his face, and then almost always in frustration, and he knows exactly why.

He doesn't think Peter ever used "Tony" in return. He'd guessed he'd eventually have to insist – it would be ridiculous in a few years after all and he could imagine how it would have prompted the same embarrassed, alarmed pride as when he'd declared him an Avenger.

Instead, the formality of "Mr Stark" hangs between them even at the uttermost extremity of death.

And it hurts.

And it should.