The problem is it's very hard to tell when a superhero is recklessly endangering himself versus when he's accepting the very real dangers of the job. Tony, who is the embodiment of reckless on a good day, doesn't know if Captain America is throwing himself into his work because it's his work, or because secretly he wishes he were dead.

It scares him. And the fact that it scares him also scares him. Tony is used to being a shallow jerk; he's very good at it. Caring about Steve to the point that he worries if the guy goes off his own personal radar for more than an hour is seriously fucking with him.

There is a pattern. At twelve he surrounds himself with engine parts and tries not to think about the empty spaces. Fourteen and it's the first time he hears about molecular engineering, nanotech and how to bend the laws of physics as he knows them. He meets Rhodey and booze and the three become the kind of friends that don't need explanation.

He can see the line of Steve's bare back, the breath that pushes into his body, too fast, uneven, and he wonders what Steve sees when he looks at the wall.

"What year is it?" Steve asks.

"Twenty-twelve," Tony replies, and he sits up slowly, lets the sheets slide loose, doesn't touch. He remembers this – how he felt sure he would shatter. There are grey spaces, empty time where he thinks perhaps he did.

I don't have a problem with opportunism. What I have a problem with is that we are asked to root for him as an agent of justice despite the fact that he is clearly impulsive, compulsive, and deeply narcissistic to the extent that he does not see how privileged he really is. The movies establish him as someone who does what he wants, when he wants, and because he wants to do it; and that the reason he does what he does is that he is so completely lacking in self esteem that merely doing these things makes him feel better, without any thought to the greater ramifications thereof.

"What happened to him before?" Steve interrupts. There's a growing feeling of unease in his stomach, and worse, he recognizes it. Ever since he walked away from Tony he's mentally been cataloging the way Tony hunched around his injured shoulder, favoring his arm, and the unsteadiness in his hands, and the way he swallowed like there was some sort of sour taste lingering in his mouth. He recognizes the symptoms—not precisely, but close enough.

Tony being insecure and Steve reassuring him. WITH HIS PENIS.

“Bad judge,” Tony says, gesturing at himself and spilling water all down his shirt, “of character. Like. Always. Thought Rhodey was a dick too, felt like an ass later--liked Pepper from the beginning, she was always good, she’s like. The exception. And fucking Obie, I always get it wrong. People’re hard.”

“So I should...take it as a compliment?” Steve says, sounding completely at sea. “That you thought I was a dick?”

“Smarter,” Tony says. “If I’d thought you were good you’d probably be like. Uh. Plotting...things, are you plotting things, no one has tried to kill me in awhile, but I don’t think you would. That’s a compliment, sorry I called you a dick. You’re not. A dick, I mean.”

Steve stares at him for a second, then sighs and shakes his head. “You’re a complicated guy, Tony, has anyone ever told you that?”

Tony remakes the world, one project at a time, and doesn’t even know if it’s a good thing.

He loves his machines, though. They’re more real than most of the people he meets.

It’s one of Reed’s machines, of course. This is the world after the war and SHRA and it’s a very cold world. It’s a world after Steve.

Tony Stark lives a double life; he's secretly the supervillain known as Iron Man. But his loving husband Steve has a few secrets of his own, as Tony is about to discover.

Years of searching. Years of disappointment. He’d all but given up on ever finding his mate – and now here he was, standing in front of him. His mate was Captain America.

In which Tony Stark and Thor talk about being betrayed by people they trusted and loved, and then get drunk.

“Like, you’re set really. You have the mustache,” Clint ran his greasy fingers over his nonexistent mustache, leaving a dark line on one half. Tony remained silent on the matter, patting the ground in search of his grease rag. No such luck. He sat up, planting his feet on either side of the creeper so as not to roll away. “Not to mention you’re already sleeping with the Captain friggin’ America. Just set up a camera in your room.”

Steve is an ex-gladiator. Tony wears a toga. Together, they litigate civil cases.

Summary: Romancing Steve Rogers is hard enough. The last thing Tony Stark needs is a rival. In the shape of Iron Man.

He was fine when he handed Steve the tie, fine when he nonchalantly said he enjoys being tied up during sex, and several orders of magnitude more than "fine" when Steve took the tie with a smile and said, "I know just the right knot for that." But now, even though he's sure he's not in any danger, Tony can't shake the feeling at the edges of his mind. It doesn't make sense; he's pushed harder limits than this, in stranger places, with people he barely knew, back before the Funvee and life as Iron Man.

Steve shrugs. “I know you don’t like me much. Or at least that’s what you said. But I think we’re friends anyway.” He gets up and leaves, before Tony can puncture the moment with a joke.

"We have a situation that is somewhat delicate," says Storm's voicemail. "Captain America was – affected – by Nightwitch." "Cap somehow got selective amnesia and doesn't remember you," says Spiderman's, which is even worse. "It would be kind of funny, if it weren't so weird."

"So, your night's shot." Tony gestures at the bag. "I'm bored, so come drink with me." "I can't get drunk," says Steve, standing up to follow Tony out anyway. "Didn't I say I like a challenge?"

Summary: The reasons not to join the Avengers were many and varied. The problem was that when Captain America smiled at him, Tony had trouble remembering what they were.

Tony is the WWII hero waking up in the future.

Written for the Thor kink meme, Avengers movie-verse. Tony gets a look at his new team mates and decides he needs to sleep with all of them. Thor and Steve take notice and decide to double team him.

Five missing scenes from Thermocouple Junction.

Five times Tony Stark came out.

That had been the reason he was drinking, Tony remembered suddenly. The Avengers had answered a call at Daytona, and then stuck around to relax. "Tony Stark" hadn't been there, and Iron Man couldn't take off the armor to swim, obviously, but he'd watched Steve being swarmed by beautiful women. They were all out of costume, but the ladies still surrounded him, even without knowing who he was. Steve, who was honest and kind and a real hero and probably the most heterosexual man since God created Adam. When they'd gotten back, Iron Man had vanished, and Tony had started trying to do the same.

Tony knows that worthwhile things take hard work and sacrifice. Steve's not so sure.

Here's the thing about Steve Rogers. He hates Tony. Tony can tell. Every time Steve looks at him, he sees Howard Stark, who personally tested the guns he built to kill Nazis—on Nazis. Whereas Tony's social conscience was more comfortable at the level of strapping into a robot suit and punching other robot suits. And Steve reminded him of that every time he did that little double-take of seeing Tony and reminding himself it wasn't his father and he wasn't in the 20th century. It was enough to make Tony want to shave his goatee. And he had an awesome goatee.

Are we human, or are we dancer - the oft asked question.

The similarity to his own thoughts just moments earlier made Steve twitch, but Tony continued on. "I'd guess that Pepper ordered you in here, since I ignored her, and that makes your Pepper about as happy as it does mine." Steve saw the corners of Tony's mouth curl up, but the man continued, "And honestly, what I'm really wondering about right this moment is why you've been avoiding me. I know it must be hard, since I look like your Tony and I'm not him, but that can't be the only reason. I know you've experienced alternate universes before."

Music: The Mountain Goats/ Fandom: Iron Man Character(s): Tony Stark

This is Vietnamese-American Tony Stark, based off the unbelievably amazing fic horns of a deer, feet of a tiger by softintelligence.

Description: Oh war I despise. Tony Stark is faced with the destruction he's reaped the benefits from his entire life. Through this reality, Iron Man is born. ("It's all so so true on that deeper level, and it's like Tony himself said: peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy. And that's what the Iron Man suit is, really, the bigger stick.")

Tony Stark is trying to set up a new superhero team when he's given a sex change, courtesy of Victor von Doom. He copes with that about as well as you'd expect.

He is a boy in the process of becoming a man, and the process is almost—but never quite—finished.

Toni Stark in her greasy work clothes. Design totally yanked from that well-known cover in the Extremis series.

"Such things may be discussed later," Thor says finally, quietly, "and while I will not deny that I am angry, you are my shield brother still, and there is precious little in existence for which I could not forgive you." Even Thor, in spite of his godhood, has made at least one terrible error in judgement in the past; an unthinking blow he himself dealt to Steve, for which he has long been forgiven. "I will not leave you here alone."

Tony had calculated the number of television appearances he would require in order to mention every victim by name. Six hundred and twelve names. He was making a good start of it, but they would have to keep this up for years. That was all right with him.

Everything had to be somewhere, and things that weren't quite real went to places that weren't quite real. Strange had explained it with the kind of careful patience Reed Richards used when addressing Congress . This was a place shaped by Tony's mind, or his spirit, or perhaps it was inside his spirit - perhaps both - and didn't surprise him that it wasn't a very nice place. Steve had vaguely expected something futuristic and gleaming, a crystal city or a metal labyrinth, but there was no sign of Tony's seething creativity and innovation here. Just a bare plain, the far horizons smudging into the sky. It was dim and dusty, and for some reason Steve had appeared in his uniform, the only patch of colour visible in this faded place.

Soundtrack : Kanye West - Stronger

Summary: Better living through technology.

Description: Tony Stark: …billionaire, playboy, inventor, superhero…ROCKSTAR! Audio: "Let It Rock" by the Kevin Rudolph feat Lil Wayne

He stared at him. "I don't like seeing you like this," he confessed after a moment. "Every time I looked at the shield I missed you and I- I want you to be Captain America again. I want you to be happy. And safe."

Henry counts ten slow ticks of the clock on his bedroom wall, until Tony says, "I don't have a drinking problem."

"Hey, Decepticon," he said, still staring at the screen. "If I asked you nicely to stop putting your hand up my skirt, would you actually do it?"

She tells him she forgives him: she tells him that she knows what drove him to this. For years she’d wondered about his breaking point, but she doesn’t have to wonder any longer, because his breaking point is her fractured arm and crushed hand, the burn scar high on her cheekbone, the long rent of gashes down her calf. His breaking point was when she was in danger and he was too drunk to save her.

But he did, and Steve listened for once, and together they found a third way of handling the whole mess, and Tony thanks God every day that they did. He has nightmares about how it could have turned out. Happy dead. Steve dead. Sal dead. Clint's accusing eyes--though in the dreams he's Ronin, not Hawkeye, which is always confusing.

"Tony," he starts. "This is - well - have you been avoiding the piano?"

“Finally gracing the living world with your presence, Sleeping Beauty?” Steve sounds like he’s turned away from Tony, working at the stove, and there’s a grin in his voice.

It’s so simple to believe that Tony Stark died from the Extremis injection, and this body, this body that recalls nothing of what Tony Stark has done, is a clean slate - and that makes it okay for Steve and Thor and everyone else to hate him, because this new person, the one without that lifetime of friendship and camaraderie and respect, completely deserves it.

Five drabbles. Women, falling, War Machine, Pepper, and the weather.

“You like motorcycles?” the man asks, head cocked to the side, peering at him with a curious, unreadable expression on his face. Happy sizes him up, because the man owns a Honda NR750, so he must be somebody.

It’s the ocean, as it always is. He’s still in love with it, and she still can’t figure out why.

"Pepper doesn't like it when I show up this late," Tony said. He passed Jim without looking at him and headed downstairs, to the rec room. To the bar. Of course. Halfway down Tony turned. "Could you grab your laptop? Pepper snagged some of Obadiah's private data off a ghost drive on the company server. You can help me analyze it. Hey, and do you know a guy named Nick Fury?"

He said, "The shit that used to work, It won't work now."

That means I can't regard the villains in Afghanistan as "the bad guys," even when it turns out they're a for-profit, for-hire enterprise. I can't watch secondary (even tertiary) characters get churned to pieces and consider it shits and giggles. Tony Stark's intervention isn't just imperial, isn't just the white man's burden to fix those benighted natives: it is literally a scorched-earth program to punish those who would capture an American. You don't get to burn people to death and then say in the same breath that you're against weapons proliferation. Or: you can say it, but I can laugh in your face and call you an asshole.

He goes back because he can, because nearly no one would be able to stop him if they tried. It’s an exercise in power, really. Mind over matter, phantoms over breakfast. He’d made it a point not to tell Pepper (she’d try to talk him out of it, and would probably succeed), and all he’d said to Rhodes was: put the stealth flyswatters away, I’m going up.

A mutant comment thread full of insanely awesome Tony Stark meta, e.g.: "I don't think we (WE THE INNER IM FANDOM CABAL) have even begun to touch on how unimaginably furious he must be, deep, steaming down there. A teenage kind of anger when you realize the world isn't the way you thought it was, that you can't have everything, that you have to get a job, that your parents aren't rich, that they're flawed and sometimes awful, that you yourself can and have hurt people, that other people hurt you for no good reason and the universe doesn't care. Everything was a lie and he's got to be so, so, deep down pissed. And now he has a big metal suit with rockets on it."

Tony Stark is on a mission from God. Shiver-inducing throughout, but the real jaw-dropper is the very last second, underscoring the menace and finality of one of the most iconic and repeated moments from the film.

Tony Stark is the most interesting man Steve has ever met, and he's met a lot of people. Tony is something fast and flashy, the citizen of a world that won't exist for more than the rest of the century. Tony comes from a world where if you talk to your refrigerator it will talk to you back, where vast invisible nets circle the globe in a wild storm of free information, a million billion radios going at once. A world where people go wherever they want and do whatever they want, whenever they want. And Tony doesn't just *come* from that place, he *owned* it, *made* it, carries it with him like an ambassador on foreign soil.

"Actually, I'm not. They're all," Tony gestures around vaguely, grandly. "They're all smug and they think it's just another weapon, a big toy with guns all over it which, by the way, it doesn't have. But. But it looks like one. I've used it like one. If they knew what it was like in there, though, in the middle of the sky, by yourself. They'd never question. It's more than a weapon. It has to be."

One afternoon, taking a moment out of the day, on the couch in Tony's tv room, her legs folded under her, her arm stretched out to toy with the strings of the Les Paul he hasn't touched in years, Pepper imagines, quite vividly, Tony in thirty years' time.

"Talk to me Rhodey. Tell me what a fucking cool suit I made for you. I want to know what it's like."

Rhodey angled at getting an answer as to where Tony's parents were, but Tony never wanted to talk about it.

Fucking Nathan has always been like narcissism. Like doing it with mirrors on the ceiling. This time, as he tugs him away from two last lines and an inch of a spectacular top shelf Estonian vodka, the mirror is decidedly cracked. They don’t laugh, they don’t tease, they don’t make the obligatory jokes about whose dick is an inch bigger than the other’s. Instead, they move in total silence, painfully careful so Nate’s ribs don’t crack and the arc reactor doesn’t either. Imperfect synchronicity. That’s what they have now. That’s what they’ll always have.

He thinks, oh God. He thinks, I did this. He thinks, there's something in my chest and I can't breathe. He can't move. He can't move his finger. There is no-one in the corner of the room. He can see the hairs on the back of the hand, unexpectedly large and black. The tendons and veins of the hand stand up. He thinks, nobody will come for me.