Tag: mcu

just your obligatory angsty trailer reaction fic

IRON AGE

AO3

Simply put, the reason Pepper Potts and Tony Stark work is that they are made of the same stuff. At the very core of them, once you dig past the pleasantries and diplomacy and killer heels on her side, and the layers and layers of masks and misdirection on his, dig deep enough and you hit a core of pure iron. Something that won’t budge, something that can’t budge, something that when you push it pushes back, harder.

It’s that part of her which, when Happy reaches to open the car door for her and instead crumbles in front of her eyes like wax, races through oh god what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what is happening oh god this is why tony left this is what he was fighting he lost tony doesn’t lose he doesn’t stop but he lost that must mean he’s- and lands right on no. unacceptable. tony isn’t dead because i haven’t allowed it. time to work cleanup.

It’s the part of her that lets her grit her teeth and invite Steve Rogers into her home, and the same part that won’t hear his apologies.

In the next weeks, maybe she’s shorter with people than she would have been, maybe she isn’t quite as patient, maybe she seems a little cold. But she’s running on iron and nothing else. When you’re running on iron, soft is a synonym for breaking.

So Pepper lets May Parker cry on her shoulder, and invites the kid from Tennessee and his sister to the compound when they have nowhere else to go, and she gives the Avengers back their old rooms, which Tony never allowed her to clear out even during the remodel. She doesn’t cry. She twists her engagement ring around on her finger and pours money into stabilising New York’s crumbling infrastructure, and then when that’s done she fiddles with the shrapnel pendant and sets up foundations to do the same across the world.

Sometimes she feels like she’s fossilising. Pepper lies in their big empty bed in their big empty bedroom in a compound that is too full of people she doesn’t want to see and wonders if there is a similar word to petrification for when something is being turned to metal. She stretches her hands out in front of her and imagines them coloured red and gold.

Then she gets up and has FRIDAY reactivate the Iron Legion.

Jim is worried about her. She can tell and she doesn’t care. He should remember how it works from Afghanistan. They don’t stop until Tony gets home. They don’t pretend for a second that he isn’t coming back. That’s how this works.

That’s how Pepper stays functioning.

She’s in the kitchen when it happens. Steve and Natasha are also there, and neither of them are quite able to look her in the eye as they fix their breakfasts. Pepper considers that solely their problem, iron doesn’t feel awkward.

FRIDAY’s alert sounds as she is pouring her second cup of coffee, and she starts and spills some onto the counter. She is too focused on the AI to clean it up.

“Miss Potts, I’m receiving a transmission from off-planet!”

Pepper’s heart leaps into her throat and it’s hard to force the words out around it.

“Play it please FRIDAY,” she says.

A network of blue lights dance in the air in front of her, projecting an image of Tony. He’s mid-sentence, tapping what must be his helmet as he talks.

“-thing on?” He leans back against a wall and Pepper’s gut clenches at just how awful he looks. awful but alive alive alive.

“Hey Miss Potts,” he says and Pepper can’t place his odd expression. Natasha and Steve have stood and and moved to stand either side of her, like some kind of guard detail. They watch the message grimly.

“If you find this recording don’t feel bad about this.”

no. Pepper’s heart drops from her throat to the pit of her stomach.

“Part of the journey is the end,” he continues and irrationally she wants to tell FRIDAY to stop, to pretend that she isn’t looking at his goodbye. “Just for the record being adrift in space with zero promise of rescue is more fun than it sounds.”

He’s trying to be brave for her. She can see it in his face, in the way he’s not looking at the helmet, in the set of his jaw.

“Food and water ran out four days ago, oxygen will run out tomorrow morning… that’ll be it.” His voice breaks and his mask slips and she can see how scared he is. Then he leans forward and something like peace settles into his eyes. That acceptance might be the most terrifying thing of all.

“When I drift off, I will dream about you,” he says with absolute conviction. “It’s always you.”

Tony reaches out and the message cuts off. The finality of it hits her like a blow to the stomach.

Pepper blinks and stares for a moment and is dimly aware of Steve and Natasha exchanging a panicked look. She delves down deep inside herself, searching for that familiar iron. She needs something to lean on, something strong to hold her up as she struggles with the weight of his words, but there’s nothing there. Nothing but an endless starry expanse and somewhere out there, Tony Stark struggling for breath.

scamcnders:

"I love tony Stark. Tony loves me. We're not competitors (...)
anything Tony and I do is a healthy competition."

i love moments like this where we get to see tony’s coping mechanisms in action. he’s in an uncomfortable situation with someone he openly calls his “least favourite person in the world”, so he reaches for his favourite emotional crutch: his sunglasses

justin here is invading tony’s space and touching him against his will very much like obadiah frequently did, and tony is having his picture taken, something that rarely happens at positive moments for him (but that’s a whole different meta). it’s a lot like the scene in im1 where obie reveals he‘s the one who locked tony out of the company. so of course he’s uncomfortable, and of course he uses his sunglasses as a defence. he’s leaning away from hammer and clearly trying to get away and he puts on his sunglasses to hide just how much he hates this

it’s a really wonderful character detail which we see again a few times but really prominently in civil war. after steve rejects the accords and his olive branch, tony is left struggling to come up with a solution and he puts on his sunglasses, even though he’s alone, as way of building up his emotional walls so he can do the job that needs to be done

there isn’t a single film in the mcu where tony makes an appearance and his sunglasses don’t. they’re not just an affectation, they’re a very real part of the defensive mask tony wears, and, symbolically, his heaviest piece of armour

Source: scamcnders

bivalkyrie:

“My people have a tale, about a Prince –– much hated by his King –– who was banished to the underworld and jailed there. The evil King gave him the most difficult labor –– working the iron pits.  

Year after year the Prince mined the heavy ore, becoming so strong he could crush pieces of it together with his bare hands. Too late, the King realized his mistake. 

When he struck at the Prince with his finest sword – it broke in half. 

The Prince himself had become strong as iron.” 

–– Iron Man (2008), original script

Source: bivalkyrie

rescueironman:

starkravinghazelnuts:

itismarvelicious:

Tony in AoU: “isn’t that why we fight? So we can end the fight and go home?”

Tony in IW and Endgame: couldn’t end the fight and can’t go home 😦

That line from AoU sticks out to me a lot, because it’s partially why I am so convinced Tony will end up making it out of all this alive.

Tony, since the beginning of the story, has been the one character really working towards “the endgame.” By that I mean he’s making plans. His arc has been establishing a life–a home–after the war is over.

Endgame isn’t just a chess term to refer to the stage when the major pieces are blowing out–it’s also a term to refer to the final stage. The conclusion. That’s why it’s a term used in fandom to refer to the “final” ship (ex: their relationship is endgame). It’s where a character is at, and will presumably remain, when the adventure is over.

Tony’s endgame has been his family. Since Iron Man, his internal arc has been the slow build towards this goal. Starting a relationship with Pepper, mentoring kids like Harley and Peter, getting his heart fixed (literally and figuratively), proposing, dreaming about wanting a child, maybe even building Pepper that farm. All of it.

He’s been doing this since Yinsen told him all those years ago he’s the man who has everything and nothing when he admitted he had no one back home. Yinsen told him not to waste his life–

And Tony decided to make his home.

The narrative fails if he doesn’t get home. In this way, he’s very much like Odysseus. (Funny enough, it also took Odysseus 10 years to get home to Ithaca.)

The Odyssey begins in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Tony’s story also begins in an active war zone and the journey is fraught with danger.

Odysseus used his clever thinking to rescue his crew from Polyphemus, similar to how Tony uses his wit to save his friends (e.g. Flying the nuke through the wormhole and stopping the invasion).

I like to think that Tony’s Scylla and Charybdis moment (a metaphor for the lesser of the two evils) was when he created Ultron to stave off the threat from Thanos. Ultron (Scylla the six-headed monster) almost destroyed the world, and many people died, but Earth survived. Unlike in the Odyssey, the threat from Thanos (Charybdis, the giant ass whirlpool) manifested anyway. 🤷🏽‍♀️

i have been thinking about this a lot for a long time so here goes. all the odysseus and tony parallels i’ve noticed:

-odysseus didn’t want to fight. at the start of the trojan war when agamemnon and menelaus went around recruiting all the greek heroes, he literally faked madness to try and get out of it. it was only when the choice was kill his infant son or drop the charade that he finally agreed to go

-tony never wanted to go to space. he wanted to stay at home and get married and have babies. but when the time came and he had no choice off he went (and in doing so he was also saving peter, his son-figure, from falling off the q-ship and dying)

-odysseus ends the trojan war. the horse is his idea. it’s his brain that ends ten years of warfare

-we don’t know exactly how thanos is gonna be defeated but tony will be crucial

-tony wanted to build pepper a farm and there’s hints that’s where he’ll retire to

-when odysseus gets back home and has dealt with all the suitors, one of the first things he does is goes and gets all his sheep back. he’s a farmer-king

-warcrimes. odysseus has been known to dabble in some light… warcrimes

-tony’s past as a weapons manufacturer is NOT a warcrime and should not be considered as such, but there’s no question that tony views it that way

-tony loves pepper. he wants to get home to pepper. his last message to pepper is one of the most heartbreakingly romantic things i have ever seen (my previous favourite moment of romantic heartbreak is from the iliad, go read book six so we can both cry about hector and andromache)

-the very first time we see odysseus in the poem he is sitting on a beach and crying because he misses his wife so damn much. it’s been *twenty* years since he last saw her and he still misses her that much

-tony is currently stranded in space, and for odysseus being shipwrecked and stranded is practically a hobby

-odysseus meets his mother in the underworld and is able to say goodbye to her there. it’s highly tragic because he didn’t know she was dead and was looking forward to seeing her at home, and she died of grief after loosing faith he would ever return. they both get closure from that meeting

-h*ward will reportedly appear in endgame, and hopefull tony will get the closure he needs from him then

-odysseus is constantly saved and helped by women. it happens with calypso (not that i’m particularly enthusiastic about including her here because if someone isn’t allowed to leave your relationship isn’t consensual), nausicaa and most importantly athena. circe also counts but their relationship is a little more complicated

-pepper kills the villain in iron man and iron man 3 (and she helps take down hammer in im2). nebula and natasha help tony. carol, pepper and valkyrie seem to be the most popular options people are theorising to rescue tony

-fighting side by side with their sons! the climax of infinity war and the climax of the odyssey have tony and peter fighting together and odysseus and telemachus fighting together

-tony has a strained relationship with many of the other avengers, and the narrative often villainises him

-odysseus is also frequently villainised. in euripides’ trojan women odysseus is seen as the most stinkman garbage ever to exist, even though he never actually appears in the play and agamemnon is also around. ajax hates odysseus in life and even when they meet in the underworld despite it being him who persuaded the greek generals to give ajax a proper burial (even though ajax literally tried to murder them). the romans also weren’t fans of odysseus and honestly if the romans didn’t like you you were doing something right

they’re not exactly the same, odysseus is definitely a lot more morally grey than tony, and i’m not suggesting that the similaries are on purpose or anything. but the fact remains that there are A LOT of parallels between tony and odysseus (i’m not even sure i’ve covered all of them here), significantly moreso than the obvious tony cassandra parallel

hopefully this indicates their stories are heading in the same direction. i’d really like that to be the case