Iron Man fic: Turn (Me) Down (Mirror, Mirror Remix)
New fandom! Technically two, if you count Iron Man and Avengers movieverse separately. Wrote this awhile ago, never posted it here. I wanted to do something much different with this, but ended up not having the time to make it work. I'll have to shelve that idea for later, because I do think I will write more Avengers movieverse fic.
Title: Turn (Me) Down (Mirror, Mirror Remix)
Author: escritoireazul
Written for: Highlander II for Remix Redux 10, a remix of Turn-down Service
Rating: 13+
Word count: 1900
Acknowledgments: Many thanks to my beta.
Summary: After, he can ask for what he needs only from those whose roles (or entire selves) he has created.
1.
“No blindfold,” Tony says before she even touches him. His sunglasses paint her - and the world - with a hazy golden glow, but there are shadows beneath his eyes, shadows of shrapnel caught and held just so away from his heart, and he remembers the way darkness swallowed him, blindfolded and bound and then beaten and bloody and broken.
Trixie puts her hands on her hips, so much like Pepper in that moment that he clenches his fists, but her smile is gentle, and so is her voice when she says, low like she’s soothing a worried passenger on a commercial flight, “Can I get you a drink?”
He’s kind of pathetically grateful when she hands him scotch on the rocks, so much that he doesn’t even mind that she’s treating him like he’s scared and needs her to hold his hand through the rough spots. It’s his plane, but she's carved out her place, she controls the details, makes sure everything is in its place, everyone. She's been with him for years, and somewhere along the way, all this became hers too.
Isn’t that his life, bossy women everywhere.
He drains his drink and tries not to remember the feel of cloth over his eyes, because in his memories, he knows what comes next.
2.
He comes awake sharp and sudden, heart racing, breath sticking in his throat until he gags for it. He’s only been asleep a couple hours, tops, but he’s wide awake now, and there’s no going back. His chest hurts - everything hurts, he can still feel the scratch of sand and the burn of freezing water in his lungs - and though he drank himself to sleep, what he tastes is the dirty penny tang of blood under his tongue.
Something woke him. Some noise - there it is.
The drip, drip, drip, drip of water.
It’s fast and steady and louder than his heartbeat, than his breath, than the slide of silk sheets against rough skin. It’s louder than the whir of his machines, louder even than Jarvis’s gentle, “Good morning, Mr. Stark. Should I start the coffee maker, sir?”
Tony’s “no” catches rough on his tongue. He sits up slowly, but not slow enough. He took the sling off before he laid down - and that took forever, just him and his AI welcoming him home - and without it, he forgets for a second and tries to use his right arm. The flash of pain makes him want to vomit, but he swallows it back and swallows it back.
“What is that?” he asks. “That noise?”
“What noise, sir?”
“The,” he has to stop and breathe while he swings his legs over the edge of the bed, but at last he’s on his feet, right arm held awkward against his side, “the water.”
There’s a moment of silence, and if it was possible for an AI to silently be judgmental, Jarvis would be the one to manage it. (Tony programmed him, after all, and Tony is a genius. Even into death. He bumps one knuckle against the edge of the arc reactor.)
“I believe you mean the waterfall wall, sir.”
“Sir, sir, would you care for some more?” He rolls his eyes, even though like programmer, like program, and Tony is still creator here.
“Some more what, sir?” The back and forth with that steady voice eases his breathing. “I do not care for gruel.”
“I will pull your circuit board, Jarvis.”
“Perhaps you should not have created such a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence if you did not want electronic sarcasm.” There’s a noise that might be a digital laugh. “Sir.”
But behind it all, still the sound of the water falling, falling, falling --
Tony’s head is underwater, then he’s not, underwater, not, all his breath is gone, he is dying and dying and dying
-- “Shut it off. Now.” His voice is too high, panicked, but he can’t bring it down.
Finally, then, silence, perfect, deep silence. He’s alone in his house, with his cars and his toys and his machines and his Jarvis.
He keeps a stocked bar along one wall of his room -- oh, Tony, how clever, how prepared, how wonderful, he can almost hear the praise - a heavy mahogany piece set against big windows. As he pours himself a drink, the glass panes reflect soft blue light back onto his face.
Throat tight, he squeezes his eyes shut and swallows everything down.
3.
“Bring a gun,” he wants to tell Rhodey, “a big one” -- and that says something about them, the things between them, that he could, and that it wouldn't be the first time Tony's asked for it -- but when his mouth opens, all his words are gone.
Instead, he offers him a drink, already poured, and when Rhodey turns it down, that's just more for Tony to drink, burning up his throat.
4.
"Jarvis."
"Yes, sir."
"Order me a gun."
It's not as easy as all that, but he is a genius and Jarvis his creation -- Frankenstein and his monster of metal and bits -- and Jarvis gets whatever Tony wants.
When it’s there, though, nestled in the box, cradled by the packaging, he can’t bring himself to look at it straight on.
(He can taste it in his mouth again, metal and oil and the promise of bullets.)
5.
Tony slams hard into one of his cars and, cradled by dented metal, the backwash of heat from the suit prototype buzzing his skin, he finds himself, behind that mask, smiling for the first time.
#
He sits on the roof and sets fire to pieces of cardboard, holding one edge until it burns down to his fingers, hot against his fingertips. Better blisters like this than from dirty metal and the threat of a bullet in his back and Yinsen so steady and calm and wise by his side.
#
If he was the kind of guy who analyzed why he did the things he does, he’d wonder at this dying father-figure thing he has going on, but since he’s not, he pours himself another drink - god, how he loves the sound of ice against glass - and takes his new suit out for a test run.
Nothing like cock rock at gut wrenching decibels and a spiraling flight just this side of out of control to drive away such thoughts.
6.
He’s a hotrod machine of metal and steam, and, yeah, yeah, he can fly.
7.
"Poor Tony." Trixie strokes his hair, gentle and unsexy. Almost maternal, not that he really knows what she's like as a mother, and with his head in her lap, this could go quite Oedipal. Tony sighs, squeezes his eyes shut tighter, and her fingers move to his temples, carefully pressing away the pain. "I'll put on a movie." Her fingers leave him for a moment, and the big screen lowers, just a whisper of sound.
Pepper cried for him. Pepper cried for him, and he almost died, and she is his only friend at Stark Industries, and maybe she shouldn't be, because she's his assistant, but they crossed that line long ago. That line, and no others, but she cried for him.
He should have asked her to come to New York, but he didn't. He couldn't. Not even that little thing.
"Nothing Pepper watches," he mutters. Trixie stops clicking through movies, and the sound of her breath is loud. Then he feels her move -- maybe she shrugs -- and she chooses something. He doesn't open his eyes to see what.
"Here's your drink." It's cool in his hand, ice against the glass, and he half sits up, eyes still closed, to drink half it in one gulp.
She works for him, she sleeps with him, she takes care of him, but they are not friends.
He lies back, and she strokes his hair again.
8.
When the upgrade is done, red and gold and beautiful, he stands and stares, and it’s like stepping outside of himself.
Tony’s a simple man: he’s brains and booze and babes, and all his billions. What he isn’t is a superhero.
He touches it -- him -- and cool metal warms beneath his fingertips.
9.
“If you’re going to drink all the good stuff,” Tony tells Rhodey, teeth bared in a shark smile, “you’d better earn it.”
“I put up with you, don’t I?” Rhodey snorts and stretches out, balancing his drink as he gets comfortable.
The twitch of Tony’s lips is like a startled laugh.
“I was thinking more a show on the pole, myself.” He sips his own drink. “Maybe that’s too hard for you.”
“I’m not dancing on your pole,” Rhodey says, and then starts, and Tony actually, loudly laughs.
“Walked you right into that one.”
“The Tony Stark Snark Hour.” Trixie grins and leans against Tony’s seat, the blindfold dangling from her fingertips. “I have missed that.”
He bares his teeth at her, hopes it looks more like a grin than it feels. He touches the blindfold, considering, then tugs it from her fingers and lets it flutter to the floor. She gives him a little nod and starts to turn away, but he touches his fingers lightly to her wrist.
Trixie waits, one eyebrow lifted. He gulps his drink and takes her hand, eyes wide open. The room in the back, with its bed and its mirror - he hasn’t used it for awhile. Hasn’t wanted the blindfold, hasn’t wanted to look and see the pieces of himself he doesn’t recognize.
“Are you sure?” she asks, rising up on her toes to press her lips to his temple. Tony’s eyes flutter closed; his body is burning, and for once it’s not the bite of his salvation poisoning him even as it keeps him alive. Life from death; death from life.
He doesn’t know a better way. If he were smarter, better - more like Dad -- maybe it would be different. Maybe everything would.
Tony forces open his eyes and drops onto the edge of the bed. Trixie kneels between his thighs, and carefully opens his shirt, slipping one button free at a time. Her fingers linger, and she presses kisses to his throat as she bares it, then his chest. His body goes tight, but she doesn’t go near the arc reactor. So smart, this woman, and he squeezes his hand around his drink. She pushes his shirt off his shoulders, eases it down his arms. He catches sight of himself in the mirror, blue of the arc reactor in his chest, shadow-bruised skin beneath blood-shot eyes.
Too much alcohol, too little sleep, but if he looks long enough, he can see the flash of red gold metal, and if he’s lost bits of what he was once, there are new things he can become.
He watches himself and tries it out, silent, just lips and teeth and this reality, this rightness, this thing he has to do, that he knows, that he feels all the way down to his bones, to his blood, to the metal that touches him inside and out.
10.
He watches them watch him, media of all stripes, and in their cameras, in their faces, in their questions, in the carefully worded speech he clutches in one hand, he sees the reflection of all he has been: victim and villain and lost little boy. Their biases, their beliefs, the mirrors they hold up to him and never question what they think they know.
That's why he says it, hero of metal and machinery, to see them see him the way he knows can be done.
"I am Iron Man," he says, and in that end is his new beginning.
This entry was original posted at http://escritoireazul.dreamwidth.org/350974.html with
comments. Reply here or there.
Title: Turn (Me) Down (Mirror, Mirror Remix)
Author: escritoireazul
Written for: Highlander II for Remix Redux 10, a remix of Turn-down Service
Rating: 13+
Word count: 1900
Acknowledgments: Many thanks to my beta.
Summary: After, he can ask for what he needs only from those whose roles (or entire selves) he has created.
1.
“No blindfold,” Tony says before she even touches him. His sunglasses paint her - and the world - with a hazy golden glow, but there are shadows beneath his eyes, shadows of shrapnel caught and held just so away from his heart, and he remembers the way darkness swallowed him, blindfolded and bound and then beaten and bloody and broken.
Trixie puts her hands on her hips, so much like Pepper in that moment that he clenches his fists, but her smile is gentle, and so is her voice when she says, low like she’s soothing a worried passenger on a commercial flight, “Can I get you a drink?”
He’s kind of pathetically grateful when she hands him scotch on the rocks, so much that he doesn’t even mind that she’s treating him like he’s scared and needs her to hold his hand through the rough spots. It’s his plane, but she's carved out her place, she controls the details, makes sure everything is in its place, everyone. She's been with him for years, and somewhere along the way, all this became hers too.
Isn’t that his life, bossy women everywhere.
He drains his drink and tries not to remember the feel of cloth over his eyes, because in his memories, he knows what comes next.
2.
He comes awake sharp and sudden, heart racing, breath sticking in his throat until he gags for it. He’s only been asleep a couple hours, tops, but he’s wide awake now, and there’s no going back. His chest hurts - everything hurts, he can still feel the scratch of sand and the burn of freezing water in his lungs - and though he drank himself to sleep, what he tastes is the dirty penny tang of blood under his tongue.
Something woke him. Some noise - there it is.
The drip, drip, drip, drip of water.
It’s fast and steady and louder than his heartbeat, than his breath, than the slide of silk sheets against rough skin. It’s louder than the whir of his machines, louder even than Jarvis’s gentle, “Good morning, Mr. Stark. Should I start the coffee maker, sir?”
Tony’s “no” catches rough on his tongue. He sits up slowly, but not slow enough. He took the sling off before he laid down - and that took forever, just him and his AI welcoming him home - and without it, he forgets for a second and tries to use his right arm. The flash of pain makes him want to vomit, but he swallows it back and swallows it back.
“What is that?” he asks. “That noise?”
“What noise, sir?”
“The,” he has to stop and breathe while he swings his legs over the edge of the bed, but at last he’s on his feet, right arm held awkward against his side, “the water.”
There’s a moment of silence, and if it was possible for an AI to silently be judgmental, Jarvis would be the one to manage it. (Tony programmed him, after all, and Tony is a genius. Even into death. He bumps one knuckle against the edge of the arc reactor.)
“I believe you mean the waterfall wall, sir.”
“Sir, sir, would you care for some more?” He rolls his eyes, even though like programmer, like program, and Tony is still creator here.
“Some more what, sir?” The back and forth with that steady voice eases his breathing. “I do not care for gruel.”
“I will pull your circuit board, Jarvis.”
“Perhaps you should not have created such a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence if you did not want electronic sarcasm.” There’s a noise that might be a digital laugh. “Sir.”
But behind it all, still the sound of the water falling, falling, falling --
Tony’s head is underwater, then he’s not, underwater, not, all his breath is gone, he is dying and dying and dying
-- “Shut it off. Now.” His voice is too high, panicked, but he can’t bring it down.
Finally, then, silence, perfect, deep silence. He’s alone in his house, with his cars and his toys and his machines and his Jarvis.
He keeps a stocked bar along one wall of his room -- oh, Tony, how clever, how prepared, how wonderful, he can almost hear the praise - a heavy mahogany piece set against big windows. As he pours himself a drink, the glass panes reflect soft blue light back onto his face.
Throat tight, he squeezes his eyes shut and swallows everything down.
3.
“Bring a gun,” he wants to tell Rhodey, “a big one” -- and that says something about them, the things between them, that he could, and that it wouldn't be the first time Tony's asked for it -- but when his mouth opens, all his words are gone.
Instead, he offers him a drink, already poured, and when Rhodey turns it down, that's just more for Tony to drink, burning up his throat.
4.
"Jarvis."
"Yes, sir."
"Order me a gun."
It's not as easy as all that, but he is a genius and Jarvis his creation -- Frankenstein and his monster of metal and bits -- and Jarvis gets whatever Tony wants.
When it’s there, though, nestled in the box, cradled by the packaging, he can’t bring himself to look at it straight on.
(He can taste it in his mouth again, metal and oil and the promise of bullets.)
5.
Tony slams hard into one of his cars and, cradled by dented metal, the backwash of heat from the suit prototype buzzing his skin, he finds himself, behind that mask, smiling for the first time.
#
He sits on the roof and sets fire to pieces of cardboard, holding one edge until it burns down to his fingers, hot against his fingertips. Better blisters like this than from dirty metal and the threat of a bullet in his back and Yinsen so steady and calm and wise by his side.
#
If he was the kind of guy who analyzed why he did the things he does, he’d wonder at this dying father-figure thing he has going on, but since he’s not, he pours himself another drink - god, how he loves the sound of ice against glass - and takes his new suit out for a test run.
Nothing like cock rock at gut wrenching decibels and a spiraling flight just this side of out of control to drive away such thoughts.
6.
He’s a hotrod machine of metal and steam, and, yeah, yeah, he can fly.
7.
"Poor Tony." Trixie strokes his hair, gentle and unsexy. Almost maternal, not that he really knows what she's like as a mother, and with his head in her lap, this could go quite Oedipal. Tony sighs, squeezes his eyes shut tighter, and her fingers move to his temples, carefully pressing away the pain. "I'll put on a movie." Her fingers leave him for a moment, and the big screen lowers, just a whisper of sound.
Pepper cried for him. Pepper cried for him, and he almost died, and she is his only friend at Stark Industries, and maybe she shouldn't be, because she's his assistant, but they crossed that line long ago. That line, and no others, but she cried for him.
He should have asked her to come to New York, but he didn't. He couldn't. Not even that little thing.
"Nothing Pepper watches," he mutters. Trixie stops clicking through movies, and the sound of her breath is loud. Then he feels her move -- maybe she shrugs -- and she chooses something. He doesn't open his eyes to see what.
"Here's your drink." It's cool in his hand, ice against the glass, and he half sits up, eyes still closed, to drink half it in one gulp.
She works for him, she sleeps with him, she takes care of him, but they are not friends.
He lies back, and she strokes his hair again.
8.
When the upgrade is done, red and gold and beautiful, he stands and stares, and it’s like stepping outside of himself.
Tony’s a simple man: he’s brains and booze and babes, and all his billions. What he isn’t is a superhero.
He touches it -- him -- and cool metal warms beneath his fingertips.
9.
“If you’re going to drink all the good stuff,” Tony tells Rhodey, teeth bared in a shark smile, “you’d better earn it.”
“I put up with you, don’t I?” Rhodey snorts and stretches out, balancing his drink as he gets comfortable.
The twitch of Tony’s lips is like a startled laugh.
“I was thinking more a show on the pole, myself.” He sips his own drink. “Maybe that’s too hard for you.”
“I’m not dancing on your pole,” Rhodey says, and then starts, and Tony actually, loudly laughs.
“Walked you right into that one.”
“The Tony Stark Snark Hour.” Trixie grins and leans against Tony’s seat, the blindfold dangling from her fingertips. “I have missed that.”
He bares his teeth at her, hopes it looks more like a grin than it feels. He touches the blindfold, considering, then tugs it from her fingers and lets it flutter to the floor. She gives him a little nod and starts to turn away, but he touches his fingers lightly to her wrist.
Trixie waits, one eyebrow lifted. He gulps his drink and takes her hand, eyes wide open. The room in the back, with its bed and its mirror - he hasn’t used it for awhile. Hasn’t wanted the blindfold, hasn’t wanted to look and see the pieces of himself he doesn’t recognize.
“Are you sure?” she asks, rising up on her toes to press her lips to his temple. Tony’s eyes flutter closed; his body is burning, and for once it’s not the bite of his salvation poisoning him even as it keeps him alive. Life from death; death from life.
He doesn’t know a better way. If he were smarter, better - more like Dad -- maybe it would be different. Maybe everything would.
Tony forces open his eyes and drops onto the edge of the bed. Trixie kneels between his thighs, and carefully opens his shirt, slipping one button free at a time. Her fingers linger, and she presses kisses to his throat as she bares it, then his chest. His body goes tight, but she doesn’t go near the arc reactor. So smart, this woman, and he squeezes his hand around his drink. She pushes his shirt off his shoulders, eases it down his arms. He catches sight of himself in the mirror, blue of the arc reactor in his chest, shadow-bruised skin beneath blood-shot eyes.
Too much alcohol, too little sleep, but if he looks long enough, he can see the flash of red gold metal, and if he’s lost bits of what he was once, there are new things he can become.
He watches himself and tries it out, silent, just lips and teeth and this reality, this rightness, this thing he has to do, that he knows, that he feels all the way down to his bones, to his blood, to the metal that touches him inside and out.
10.
He watches them watch him, media of all stripes, and in their cameras, in their faces, in their questions, in the carefully worded speech he clutches in one hand, he sees the reflection of all he has been: victim and villain and lost little boy. Their biases, their beliefs, the mirrors they hold up to him and never question what they think they know.
That's why he says it, hero of metal and machinery, to see them see him the way he knows can be done.
"I am Iron Man," he says, and in that end is his new beginning.
This entry was original posted at http://escritoireazul.dreamwidth.org/350974.html with
comments. Reply here or there.