I am Iron Man

Scully eyed Tony and his ice cream cone briefly. For all of his nonchalance, the man looked like hell. Had he slept? Somehow, she doubted it, but she didn’t think she would either. She’d been far away in DC, watching it explode all over the television, and it had still scared the hell out of her, and she hadn’t had a nuclear warhead strapped to her back.

The life of a superhero, she decided, was not one for her.

“Well, as for beating them faster, I’d consider for a minute Mr. Stark that you and your friends managed to hold off an alien army of not hundreds, thousands, in the span of less than an hour with only the six of you doing it, so I’d say you did a fairly good job of it, all things considered.”

She licked her own cone quietly, wondering if he even got the achievement that these so called “Avengers” managed. Seriously, had it been left to the likes of the US military or NYPD the death toll would have been staggering. These six unlikely individuals had all managed to come together when it counted to hold off world destruction and lived to tell the tale. She would call it a goddamn miracle. Admittedly, it was still horrid and sad, but compared to the alternative, to a world ruled and controlled by a megalomaniacal alien, they ended up on the winning side of these scales much more than the losing.

“As for the collateral damage, you are right, it would be ideal to prevent as much of that as possible. It’s unfortunate they had to choose New York of all places to pick a fight, but no one wants to ever pick someplace quiet, like Montana, to start their efforts for world domination. They are always happy to mutilate a few cows and leave cryptic messages in wheat fields in Montana, but never to stage an invasion.”

She eyed the corpse on the table thoughtfully as she wondered how to even approach it. “I can tell you what your friend Thor gave us before he left the planet. What little he knew is that they don’t seem to have a home planet that he was aware. That could mean it’s particularly remote, or it could mean they are a genetically engineered race, created to serve a particular client or clients. I’ll know more once I get inside to look at it. From your reports and the video of the battle, it appears they may display hive mentality. Judging from the patterns of their invasion and add to that the fact that once you destroyed the main ship, they faltered, my guess is that they act as a unit rather than individuals, communicating telepathically more than likely. Again, I’ll know more when I can dig in there and do some research. I’ll run some tissue samples, but I don’t know how conclusive they will be. Frankly, we don’t have a lot of information on alien biology for me compare it to, but I can give you enough so you can figure out how to kill them quicker.”

“Thanks,” he said with a small smile at her unexpected words of encouragement. He hadn’t thought about how quickly they’d fought off the invaders. All he could think about was the near constant onslaught of aliens hellbent on destroying life as he knew it, and the ones the others didn’t know about it. Tony was a pretty honest guy. For a business man and a scientist, he sucked at keeping secrets—the world knowing he was Iron Man was a prime example of his big mouth—but he wasn’t about to tell any of the other Avengers what he’d seen.

Or anyone else. It was bad enough that he was afraid. More frightened than he’d been when he’d been taken hostage in the desert. Being Iron Man meant he didn’t need to be afraid of anything or anyone, and now that safety net’d been yanked out from under him. It was as if his entire life was a carefully set table where some wise-ass magician had managed to rip the tablecloth without knocking anything over. The buildings were there. The people were there, but the foundation was gone.

“We did pretty good considering we hadn’t worked together before. Hell, we barely know each other. Nice to know Thor’s good for something besides pretty hair and a big hammer.” Part of him wanted to place the blame for the entire situation on the Asgardian. He was the only alien among them after all, and fucking Loki was his ‘brother’. He and Loki practically drew a map straight to Earth and painted a big target on it. Unlike them, Tony didn’t have other planets to escape to.

The accords laid unfolded in the coffee table in the middle of them. Thor had read them when he came back and the government probably thought that Stark could make him sign them. It wasn’t likely he would no matter who talked to him about it.

“I am a King of many things, some would say,” Thor chuckled, studying the color of his drink. A quiet moment was rare when he was on Earth, but most of his missions were just about to start. He had a message to give and he had met all the interesting parts, as hard as it was to locate Rogers. Heimdall always did his best.

“I will be leaving soon. I think it is better this way,” he shrugged, still watching his drink. He would love some beer instead. “Thank you for having me, Stark. Rogers received me as well,” Thor said cautiously, watching for Stark’s reaction. He needed their group to be on the same page or they would never defeat the threat that was fated to come.

“And I am sorry to hear that,” it was terrible to put someone whom you love in danger. This was exactly what happened to Jane in many occasions. She almost got killed when they were together and it was pretty clear they didn’t have what it took to make it work. She argued that she could fight for herself. She felt guilty for the fate of his Mother, even though she had nothing to do with it.

Thor understood the concept of secret identities for his friends who risked their lives while saving the world, but he never considered having one. He was loud, boisterous, thundering. Stealth was something he could never muster. “I thought the Iron Man was supposed to hide your identity. Why did you reveal who you were?”

“I suck at secrets. It’s a personality flaw.” He’d answered the question before a few times, but he usually colored it with enough bravado and bullshit to gloss over the real reasons—much like most of his life. How did you admit to a god, of all things, that you hid your insecurities by being an asshole.

“Christ, I just realized I’m a lot like your brother. Egotistical. Bullshitter. Master of distraction. Obfuscation.” Tony ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it sticking up a bit more than usual, but he was in scruffy mode. “Except I failed at the trickster thing. I’m not a very good liar. I also like the attention. I’m an attention whore, which I’m pretty sure you figured out.”

If your partner asks to end or drop a thread, be cool about it and say, “OK”.

It took your partner a lot of emotional energy to ask you about doing it. They’re afraid of upsetting you, and even though they’ve lost their muse for the thread, they’ve probably tried for awhile to make it work.

Don’t take it as a personal attack. (Yes, I know sometimes people do that kind of thing, but a good partner won’t.)

If you want to keep the story going, switch it around and find someone else to do it with. If you’re playing a canon muse, it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone else playing a dupe of your partner’s muse  to do the story with. (I’ve done this more times than I can count over the years.)

Respect your partner decision. They might not just being having trouble with your thread. They could be having problems in real life—which always comes first—and they just need to let a few threads go.

Sometimes styles clash. You might not RP in the same way they do. RP isn’t static. How you write and portray your character evolves with time, and what worked before might not work now. Be cool about it and let it go.

When a thread’s over, it doesn’t mean the verse is also over (in most cases). You can end a thread with a scene or situation, and then write a new thread after a time or scene jump. There’s nothing wrong with doing that.

Scully had to scramble to get to New York on request. Nothing was flying in or out of the city, save for the military and SHIELD, and she’d caught a transport up from DC at 5 am with barely any sleep, desperately trying to make sense of everything she’d seen on the television. Aliens? After all these years, and this was how the invasion was supposed to go down, a wormhole over the city and giant space whales floating through the streets?

Mulder was jealous he hadn’t been invited.

There wasn’t a need for him, however, there were no mysteries to solve. Scully was a different matter. She was a pathologist and they needed someone to crack open a dead body, albeit an alien one. She read through what she could on the flight up, the scant files on these “Chitauri” and what little was known of them, that mostly from this person, Thor - really, like the god of thunder - who seemed to know something. All the while she tried not to lose her composure over the fact that indeed, she was going to be handling an alien body, a real one. What in the hell was she supposed to do with it?

The lab they had set up was standard issue. The corpse was not. Scully stared at it long moments before even coming close to it, half afraid it wouldn’t even be dead. It was giant, reptilian, and foreign and they expected her to make heads or tails of this thing? Admittedly, in her time, she’d dissected everything from rubber suits to invisible men, but a true alien wasn’t in her repertoire.

She’d finished scrubbing up and suiting up when the door to the lab pushed open, someone backing inside. If the elaborate goatee wasn’t a dead giveaway, the glowing light under the AC/DC shirt certainly was, as was the swagger with which he held up an ice cream cone to her.

“They warned me you were about, Mr. Stark.”

He slurped at his own cone, eyeing the body on the table with cool curiosity.

She took off a glove, accepting the ice cream cone, if nothing else to be polite, though her stomach reminded her that coffee was not a proper food substitute. “It is my first autopsy on a complete specimen, yes. SHIELD wanted to take the opportunity to study one while they could get it, and conveniently it’s dead so I can do a proper autopsy. Judging from the entry and exit wound it suffered, I’m guessing this is one of Agent Barton’s kills.”

She added the last bit admittedly to tweek him. She knew of Tony Stark, everyone in the world did. He was brilliant, a genius, endlessly creative and could be quite giving. Obviously, he cared about the world and its safety. But he was also conceited, narcissistic, and a show off. She couldn’t figure out which of those sides she was getting at the moment, the generous defender of the Earth or the absolute self-centered horse’s ass. She guessed somewhere between the two.

She cut her eyes sideways at him, gamely licking on her own cone, since she had it. “None of this explains why you are down and about in my autopsy lab. I will have full reports of all my findings made available. Ice cream aside - and thank you for this, by the way - what do you want?”

“Curiosity,” he said with a shrug and then licked at a trail of melting ice cream that was running along the back of his thumb. His body temperature was always a little high thanks to the arc reactor keeping him alive, and t forced him to eat anything close quickly—whether it gave him brain freeze or not.

“Had a few hundred of the sons of bitches trying to kill my friends..” When did they become friends? Probably when they’d gone for shawarma after the battle. Nat wasn’t a friend. She’d spied on him for Fury to begin with. Thor was a conceited ass, and if Tony Stark thought you were arrogant, you had to be bad. Banner, he liked Banner. Science bros and all that. He barely knew Barton.

Then there was Cap. His father’s favorite subject. The man from another time who would do anything to save the world and fight evil. Tony admired the hell out of him. His hero worship was a few shades lighter than Coulson’s had been, but it was still there. If he was going to be friends with any of them, it’d be Steve Rogers. They could bond over stories about Howard, because Steve knew the real man his father had been, and Tony wanted to know more than he’d been able to pry out of Peggy Carter over the years.

Peggy! Shit! He’d need to tell Steve about her, if he didn’t already know, and he could tell Steve stories about her from the missing years in exchange. Yep, that would be his way in with Captain America. Swapping stories.

“If they ever come back, I want to know how to beat them faster with less collateral damage.” Stark didn’t want to think about how many people got hurt because they’d just been in the way of the battle. It wasn’t their fault. They’d tried to protect the civilians, but people still died.

“Did I say something wrong?”

He watched the man as he laughed and wondered what he did to cause it. Stark was a mystery to him and suddenly Thor was reminded why.

“But you two were on the same planet, I assume. And you are from the same species.” And they had a similar life span. Thor would still be young by the time Jane was dead. That thought crossed his mind whenever they were together and his Father’s words were clear to him, that human lives were fleeting, that he would be better served by an asgardian, like him. But he decided a long time ago that he wouldn’t let his Father’s prejudice ruin his life.

“She moved on too, I guess.” Analyzing it, he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything bad about Jane. She helped him when no one else did and she would always have a soft spot in his heart.  “I hope she is doing well. I put her life through a lot of danger lately.”

“That’s a different aspect,” Tony mused as he sank further into the cushions of his chair. It was comfortable, and he was starting to feel the buzz of the liquor. He knew he was drinking too much, but like most things that didn’t have anything to do with keeping the Earth safe, it was pretty far down on his list.

“Yes, we’re living on the same planet and yep, same species. You were the King of Long Distance Relationships. Here we count it long distance if you’ve got a 3 hour time difference.” It was weird to see Thor looking vulnerable. Sometimes he was so very human. All of them were when they were done fighting—except for Nat. The Black Widow was always on high alert. Always waiting for a bullet or a knife or some other danger to strike.

Steve couldn’t help but grin. One quick quirk, the side of his mouth lifting in a little shift. Even like this – maybe especially like this, both of them in a situation that could only be described as bad. Of course Tony could make him smile. And it made him miss him that much more. It left a little run-through of the time, of how long it had been before all of this that they’d actually ben in the same room together. That inevitably led him to the last time, and he shoved it down, felt the ache, and sucked in a noisy breath as he watched the man’s eyes narrow.

Anything he’d been about to say was cut off and he frowned. His brows flew up, hope obvious on his face. Then, he watched, mouth slightly opened, as a gleaming rush of glove slid into the small room and formed a very familiar looking glove around Tony’s hand.

“Wow.” Steve held his breath for a moment, eyes moving from the glove to Tony’s face, then back to the wall the glove had just come through. When nothing else came through, Steve cocked his head to the side. Then, slowly, he looked back at Tony again. “That’s new,” he said finally, then huffed out a quiet laugh, shook his head. “So, any chance the cavalry can blast us out of here?”

There was an unfortunate chance they’d get caught after getting out of the cell. While he didn’t doubt for a second that Tony could do a hell of a lot with his brain and a glove – and he didn’t doubt himself – they were stepping in unfamiliar territory. Getting out of there, though… that had to happen. Steve wasn’t about to stay there and wait to see what they had in mind for them. He wanted to get free, to have a chance to have a conversation with Tony, a real conversation. He wanted a lot of things, had wanted a lot of things for a long time that he hadn’t managed to find a way to say.

He pushed himself up, then, moved over to the wall, and placed a hand against it, several feet from where the glove had appeared from. When he heard a clanging sound, something coming toward the still-shut door of their cell, Steve looked to Tony again. Blue eyes lifted up to meet the other man’s. “I think they know about the glove,” he joked.

“Nanites,” Tony said as he flexed his fingers, dark eyes closing as the nanites bonded with his body in ways he couldn’t take the time to explain. He reached out to Friday, but while he could control the microbots, he couldn’t hear the AI. There weren’t enough of the nanites to allow that, at least he thought that was what was going on. “The others are probably out there too. They bond, become what I need them to, and hopefully the rest are out there looking for daddy.”

But they’d run out of time. The clanking of metal boots sent a shiver down Tony’s spine. Which a single glove, he had maybe a single shot, and he doubted that would be enough. With a frown creasing his forehead, he braced for the door to open, and then met Steve’s eyes.

“Not enough. Let’s go along with whatever. See what happens.” With a thought, he willed the nanites to crawl up his arm and hide. It tickled as they moved, and he let out a brief snort that was not at all appropriate considering the situation. But then again, it was a very Tony Stark thing to do.

“We had schedule problems, Tony,” Thor emptied the glass in a gulp, grimacing. He was always unpleased and not surprised by the human’s weak ale. Reaching in his pockets, he pulled a flask with mead before offering it to Stark.

“She was right to complain that I was not there. I missed her presentation about a project that I helped to develop. I brought her the evidence she needed to win her first Nobel and I was not there to watch it.” 

Of course, he had hus duties to comply. He couldn’t travel with her to Paris and ignore a situation in Sokavia. He hoped she would understand it, but her vast knowledge didn’t include accepting his apologies.

“Nay, I will not,” Thor played with his empty glass.  “She’s better without me. She needs someone who will see her on a daily basis.”

He almost snorted out loud at the ‘schedule problems’ answer. It was just so 21st century and not something you’d expect to hear from the God of Thunder. If they weren’t alone and bonding, Tony’s have made a joke about it, but his heart wasn’t in it. The teasing was never meant to hurt, and he knew the team got that. But it was always more fun to pull a leg or three with an audience.

“Pretty much the same story for me and Pepper. I was never around and when I was, I was too busy building this and that.” Mostly dozens of new armor prototypes and other tools of destruction, because while he wasn’t in the arms business anymore, it was still where his talents lay.