Tony remembers the accident in snapshot stills. His mother turning around to smile at him in the backseat, her dark hair around her face, the raindrops running down the glass of the window. His father's hands steady on the steering wheel, silver plated wristwatch glinting under the headlights of the dark family sedan, driven by a drunk teenage girl who falls asleep and lets her car drift into the wrong lane. She hits them head on.
He wakes up in the hospital, and he's told that the twisted metal wreck of their cars had caught fire, and the paramedic that cut him out of the backseat had brushed his arm and hand against superheated metal. The back and sides of his left ring finger are scarred up to the nail, twisted white flesh with dark smudges where the signature of his soulmate used to be.
He undergoes therapy, hypnosis, lawyers and doctors, private investigators and psychiatrists. They try to make him remember, find papers where his parents might have noted it, unseal his hospital records to see if the doctor recorded it, and finally they shake their heads sadly and give him a black cylinder of metal to fit around his finger, from the base of his knuckle up to the joint, the widow's ring.
/
Tony starts sleeping around at seventeen. The only thing he remembers is that it was a girl's name, loopy and scrawled, and that his mother had told him he would propose with her engagement ring, a feminine band of gold with a single tiny diamond set in the center.
Tony refuses to believe Obie, who tells him that there are plenty of relationships, plain matches of people who reject soulmates, the society, or have lost their mate. Tony thinks that there's no reason he wouldn't be able to find his soulmate and have some fun with some blondes along the way. He switches the black band for a silver one, the mark of someone searching for their soulmate, and manages to sleep with almost the entirety of the MIT female undergraduate community before graduation.
/
He takes over the company at nineteen, and it's pointed out (calmly and logically by Pepper and in loud pointed accusations by Rhodey) that he appears to be searching for his soulmate less and hooking up with busty socialites more.
/
Tony wakes up in the middle of the night to find Christine Everheart and a pair of snips trying to cut his band off. She freezes when she sees him awake, and then shrugs.
"Nothing personal," she says, and for a minute Tony wishes the name on her finger was Anthony instead of of Edward.
/
Yinsen wears a gold band, the sign of a mated pair, and speaks of his soulmate softly with lovestruck eyes. Tony absolutely hates that he left that ring behind in that cave, that he didn't fly to every village in Iran and give the worn down band to the woman with Yinsen's name marked across her skin.
/
When he kills Obie he gets spectacularly drunk, throws away his silver band and puts the old black one back on.
"Oh Tony," Pepper murmurs, sliding her fingers through his hair affectionately. Then she throws him into his shower, fully clothed, and turns the cold tap all the way up.
Tony has met Darcy before, at some function or another, and sees her around the labs, gesturing effusively at her assistants and leering at Bruce to see him blush. Tony likes that about her, that she tells Bruce how attractive he is, that she snarks off to Fury, that she swears constantly around Steve to see him stammer, but he doesn't spend a lot of time with her. Mostly he's running around modifying his suit and running through endless drills with the rest of the team, and she's off fucking around with Thor's girlfriend rewriting wormhole theory.
So he's not really sure what to do when he hands her a memo officially requesting expensive lab equipment and she screams in surprise, an entire tray of beakers crashing to the ground.
"Why is this signed Anthony," she shrieks, waving the memo in his face and showering him in little bits of broken glass.
Tony takes a step back. "Because... I am named Anthony? Are you okay? Can I get you anything: water?" He takes another small step away. "Sedative?" Darcy stares at him.
/
"Uh-I." She blinks, and suddenly looks close to tears. Tony feels a rush of fresh terror. "I'm on my period," she blurts, and flees the room. Tony scratches his head and goes to get a broom.
/
"Hey," he says to Jane, "have you seen Darcy?"
Jane narrows her eyes at him. "Why are you looking for her? Where do you get the nerve?"
Tony feels like he's missed something very important. "She seemed upset and... I need her tesseract analyzer."
"Maybe you should have asked for the tesseract analyzer earlier," she hisses. "maybe if you didn't want the tesseract analyzer before you shouldn't ask for it now. Maybe you don't deserve the tesseract analyzer." Jane storms past him, knocking him hard in the shoulder, and Tony gapes after her.
"Mr. Stark!" Erik greets him, coming into the lab. Tony holds his hands up.
"I'm unarmed," he says, "don't shoot."
Erik looks confused. "What?"
"Your colleagues are actually insane," Tony says, and Erik looks suddenly understanding.
"You have no idea."
/
Darcy and Jane are kidnapped by a team of wannabe ecoterrorists so inept Fury almost has an aneurysm watching the security footage. He's still ripping a new asshole into two SHIELD agents when the team takes off to the warehouse where they've been instructed to leave three thousand dollars in marked bills.
"Marked?" Steve asks.
"I think we can reasonably assume they meant unmarked," Clint says.
Natasha looks insulted that they've actually suited up for this mission. "Oh for fuck's sake."
Tony is also extremely insulted, albeit for a different reason. "Three thousand dollars? I spent more than three thousand dollars on the paint job for one finger of this suit."
"BY THE HAMMER MJOLNIR THIS INSULT AGAINST JANE SHALL BE AVENGED," Thor booms. Natasha rolls her eyes.
Bruce leans closer to Clint, looking slightly desperate. "Are we there yet? Are we close?"
/
Thor pretty much takes down the operation with one swing of his hammer, right in the middle of their outraged rant on the rights of three legged goats in the Sahara. Bruce and Clint start cuffing them, tightening the zipties harder than necessary, and Natasha leans against the wall like this entire day has been beneath her.
Tony has lost patience with the entire situation at this point, so he booms his way straight through the walls into a small room attached to the main building, where Darcy is untying Jane from a chair. Tony crouches, ripping the ropes apart, and Jane stands, flexing her wrists.
"You okay?" Tony asks, looking them over.
"We're fine," Darcy says, "those morons can't tie knots for shit."
A roar echoes from the warehouse. "I WILL RIP YOUR HEADS FROM YOUR SHOULDERS AND FEED THEM TO WILD KVORLAKS."
"I'm gonna go deal with that," Jane says, and leaves at a jog. Tony turns to crack a joke and freezes. Darcy blinks at him.
"What?"
Tony grabs her by the wrist. "What is that," he demands, and she clenches her hands into fists.
"Nothing."
"That's my signature," Tony says, yanking at her fingers until he can see it more clearly. "That's-you?"
Darcy glares at him, jerks her hand back. "You already know that. It's not funny to rub it in my face."
"Why didn't you say anything," Tony demands, refusing to let her go.
"Like I really need you to reject me to my face," she snaps. "now let me go before I remove your need for a codpiece in that shiny suit.
"I gotta go," Tony says, feeling numb, and almost breaks the sound barrier getting back to SHIELD headquarters.
/
Tony wears his father's watch to Darcy's door. His mother's ring is in his pocket, the slim weight a reminder not to fuck this up.
"What do you want," she demands, and Tony holds up his left hand, the skin on his ring finger pale pale white from lack of sun, still mangled and burned.
"I don't remember what was written here," he tells her, and her eyes go a little wide. Tony scratches at the back of his head, suddenly nervous. "Would you like to get a cup of coffee with me sometime?"
Darcy looks at him, and then slips the silver ring off her finger and shows him the black chickenscratch across her skin Anthony. "I'm free now," she says, and they walk hand in bare hand to the mess.