Tag: marvel

superhusbands4ever:

“I don’t like to be handed things.”

Can we talk about the implications of those words? Like, what happened to Tony that made him weary of taking something from someone else’s hands? Is it just a weird quirk, one of those things that people have but can’t explain? Or is it something more.

Like just imagine:

Young Tony Stark, so desperate for his fathers attention, would do anything he could to spend time with his father. So imagine young Tony, helping his father in the lab, but because Howard is Howard he doesn’t treat Tony like a kid, he just treats Tony as he would any other genius assistant.

“Here, hold this,” he says, as he holds out a soldering iron by the hot end. Howard had never given Tony any protective gear and Tony don’t want to irritate his father by pointing this out and risk getting kicked out of the lab, not able to help anymore. So he takes it. It burns like nothing he’s ever felt before, and he fights against the reflexive urge to drop it, to cry out and cradle his hand. He puts it down calmly and uses his shoulder to wipe away the tears before Howard can notice. Howard has already moved on.

Jarvis tisks over the burns as he bandages them later, pursing his lips, but he doesn’t say anything because he knows Howard would never listen and this is one of the few ways he’ll spend anytime with his son. And it’s not his place because, unfortunately, young Master Anthony is not his is child.

Tony’s older now. Fourteen. Away at MIT, away from his fathers disapproving stares, away from Maria’s despondent smiles as she lays in bed, unable to gather the energy to face the day, away from that look Jarvis gets on his face whenever Howard starts to talk about Captain Rogers again.

He’s at a party, surrounded by people, surrounded by girls – and some boys – beautiful people who give Tony attention, affection, something he’s never had before so he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He’s already had a few drinks and is a little tipsy, but he’s fine. A few drinks never hurt anybody. “Puts some hair on your chest,” he remembers his father saying when he was younger, eleven maybe twelve, pressing a glass of iced amber liquid into his hand.

A boy comes over and presses a drink into his hand. Stone, he thinks his name is, Tiberius Stone. He seemed nice, had been kind to Tony when he first arrived a couple months ago, younger than his peers and afraid of rejection. “Drink this,” Ty says, “it’ll make you feel better.” He takes it and drinks and the rest of the night is a blur, he doesn’t remember much after that, but he does remember waking up in a room he doesn’t recognize with no memory of how he got there.

It’s the little things that add up, he thinks, when suddenly one day he’s looking down at the file in his new assistants hand – Pepper, he thinks, but he knows that’s not her real name – and he can’t bring himself to take it. It’s harmless, a simple paper file and all he has to do it sign it. And he knows he can trust this girl, hired her himself after she barged into his office with – or technically without – the threat of pepper spray to his security. But the thought of lifting his hand makes his stomach turn, makes his body grow cold, and he can’t figure out why suddenly reaching out and taking a file from someone’s hand is now such a struggle.

“I don’t like to be handed things,” he says slowly, eyeing the file and trying to relax his body.

Pepper doesn’t seem to notice his struggle, simply putting the folder down on the desk by his hand, moving on to the next item on her list. She brushes it off as one of those weird billionaire eccentricities and doesn’t question it again.

~

Weird billionaire quirk or learned aversive behavior stemming from a subconscious fear of being harmed by those around him? I think about this all the time.