I am Ir⎊n Man

The world says he's a genius, that he did the impossible and brought back half the population and died as a saviour.

Morgan knows he did it for her brother. Nobody seems to be interested in that.

Then one day, Morgan is angry. Her dad died for a world that never understood him. They speak sagely about him one day, then as the Merchant of Death the next.

She doesn't know why he laid everything down when he had his family to lose.

She doesn't want a hero. She doesn't want hushed whispers or awed looks. She doesn't want the baggage of being Ironman's daughter.

She wants the man who helped with her first steps in the world to help her with her homework now. She wants him to meet her partner by the door. She wants him to sit with her by the porch at the lakehouse like she sees in the photos.

The world can debate his life all they want.

'tony do you have adhd'

and he would deny it so much or no

I think tony stark was taught to mask at such a young age that he genuinely doesn’t deign an official diagnosis as necessary. so many behaviours of his are listed off as “quirks” that nobody bothered to look into, rather than symptoms, because he purposely swerves them into a different direction. he has a lot of control over his image.

tony’s carelessness toward his company and general blasé attitude towards specific tasks people tell him to do could just as easily be a nasty combination of rejection dysphoria, oppositional defiance, lack of motivation, executive dysfunction, or just simply a lack of interest— and he never had to bother with accountability for that because he could hire people to do things for him. that’s why he prefers pep being the ceo. that’s not what he’s good at, and he knows it.

he spends most of his time in the world hyperfixating on things that keep his hands and brain busy. he spends hours and hours in his garage, he often neglects his own physical needs (sleep/bladder/hunger) in favour of whatever his brain has decided the more important task in the moment. i’m sure a lot of these things are only exacerbated by external factors, like his ptsd-driven paranoia keeping him awake and wanting to look for more problems to solve via invention, or perhaps self-medicating for a large portion of his life with alcohol or other substances when alcoholism already ran in his family.

i think if anybody did ask him if he had adhd, his answer would be something along the lines of: “probably. who cares?”

The dust that once made him breakdown in tears down the kitchen floor now makes him sigh and sweep it away.

An exhausted sigh from his loved one mixed with I'm sorry was enough to constrict his throat. Now he's able to swallow the stone down and whisper back it's alright.

Somedays the lab is a fortress. Somedays it's a mausoleum. Somedays he restricts entry. Somedays he shows it around carefully to Morgan.

The name still doesn't roll down in ease like it did from before. Tony switches it to kid, sometimes it becomes my kid, sometimes it turns to your brother.

But anything that points to who he really was - the genius going minute-a-mile in his lab, connecting theories fast and concocting solutions even faster, the hero who swung down the tall buildings in NYC and helped the elders with their groceries and fought crime with a motor mouth that never seems to stop, Tony avoids it like a plague.

The photo of them sits on the kitchen shelf. Pepper moved it from the living room after Tony ended up with glass splinters in his hand from the broken frame.

The world lost its hero.

when he looked in the mirror he saw his mom’s wide eyes and his dad’s frown lines. when he got angry, he heard howard’s words out of his mouth. and he hated that. he was going to be better.

peter had become, in a way, a training ground for parenting. not on purpose. but tony seeing this kid, all the brightness in his eyes, his spark and his drive and his unyielding empathy— he promised himself he would never be like howard had been to him. he’d never dull that spark.

tony would be generous, he would share his lab, his technology, his expertise. he would hide all of the parts of himself that were too sharp, all of the big bold stark-isms from his father that he’d been told needed to be the loudest. when he yelled at peter, it was only ever out of fear, but he still felt vitriol over the way he raised his voice. he’s just like his dad, he’s just like his dad.

tony stark had tried everything to run away from that fate. but in the end, he’s sitting with his last breaths shaking his whole feeble frame. his eyes drift to the teenager, not all that tall, so young, that bright spark gone from his eyes.