Iron Man/Doctor Who - The Man Who (Tony Stark/Eleven)
Yesterday, Southland got renewed for S3. Today I am writing Iron Man/Doctor Who for sparky77. See how these two things don't follow at all? I believe that writing this will get me closer to writing Ari-fic for pinkfinity. Oh c'mon, you cannot possibly expect any logic from my writing brain at this point.
Iron Man (movie)/ Doctor Who
Tony Stark/Eleven
Rated PG-13
The Man Who
There's a strange man in Tony Stark's bed.
Actually, he's not so much in Tony's bed as perched on the edge of it. Tony can feel his face creasing into a frown. He hasn't brought a man home in at least six weeks. Not since the last one turned out to be surprisingly clingy and lacking in the cock department.
If Tony had wanted pussy, he would've ordered it.
Still, that... person hadn't been wearing a bow-tie. Tony wouldn't bring home someone in a bow-tie. "Yurgh," he says, rolling away and rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
The alarm clock tells him that it's 7:18 in the morning. The tinting from the floor-to-ceiling windows begins to lighten as though attuned to his gradual alertness. What fucking idiot programmed them to do that? Oh, he did.
It's bright outside, ghastly bright.
Tony rolls back over and the man beams at him. "Yes, my thoughts exactly."
English accent.
Tony closes his eyes, maybe the hallucination will go away.
When he opens his eyes, the hallucination is still there.
"Jarvis." Tony's voice is scratchy, used. The victim of the better half of a bottle of Knob Creek. "There's a strange man in my bedroom."
"I thought you would be used to that by now, sir." For a non-sentient box of wires and artificial intelligence Jarvis is surprisingly sarcastic.
"You think you're cute, don't you?" Tony retorts.
"I hadn't really considered it," the man says thoughtfully.
"Not you," Tony says irritably. "Jarvis, why is there a strange man in my room?"
"Technically, The Doctor is not a strange man," Jarvis replies.
"The doctor?" Tony repeats, his voice echoing off the bedroom walls. "You're a doctor?" he asks the man
"I'm The Doctor," the man agrees.
Tony pushes himself upright, sheets falling away from his chest. "Why is there a doctor in my house?" Tony demands climbing out of bed. "Pepper!"
The doctor looks at Tony up and down rather obviously. "Oh, I wouldn't say it looks like pepper, maybe more like a pepper mill."
Tony glances down at his naked form before glaring at the doctor. "You. Out."
The doctor stands up. He's wearing a tweed jacket and his hair is floppy. Gravity-defying almost. And he's pale, even in the bright sunlight streaming through the floor to ceiling windows. His face is strange, his mouth too wide. He shouldn't seem nearly as attractive as he does.
"The arc generator in your chest is fascinating," the doctor says brightly. "Humans aren't going to put those into real production for another fifty years at least. Where did you get it?"
Tony scratches his left ass cheek. "I built it."
"You built it?" the doctor repeats. A pause. "Well, the books did say you were smart."
"Whose books?"
"The history books. Your photos don't do you justice though. You're much shorter."
Tony scowls. "You're not from around here, are you?"
The doctor shakes his head, his hair falling across his forehead. Tony's cock gives a minute twitch. "No, not really."
Tony gives him a dismissive wave and goes into the bathroom to take a cold shower and possibly a Vitamin B3 shot and some Lithium. He's clearly losing his fucking mind.
"I'll just wait for you downstairs, shall I?" the doctor calls.
There is a massive blue phone box in the middle of Tony's living room. Actually it's not in the middle of the living room inasmuch as it's standing in the rubble of what used to be his Steinway piano.
This is unacceptable. Only he is allowed to decimate his piano
"What the hell is that?" he says, pausing on the stairs to stare.
"That is the TARDIS," the doctor's voice calls from somewhere Tony can't see.
"How do you even know what I'm talking about?" Tony takes the last few steps down the stairs and looks around. The doctor's in the kitchen making tea. Tony didn't even know he had tea.
"I didn't know I had tea," he says, padding over to the doctor in his bare feet.
"You don't," the doctor replies. "I brought it with me."
"You bring your own tea with you everywhere you go?" Tony asks, shaking his head as the doctor offers him a cup.
"Well, I didn't have to bring it with me, did I? I mean I only had to pop into the kitchen in the TARDIS and get it."
"You only had to pop into the phone box to get your tea." Tony shakes his head. The doctor is clearly insane. He doesn't seem to be dangerous, but he's definitely insane. "What else is in this TARDIS of yours. A Cuisinart? Gordon Ramsey?"
"I don't know what a Gordon Ramsey is - is it a type of fruit?"
The doctor sips at his tea, makes a face and tosses it over his shoulder. The cup makes an enormous crash in the sink and pale brown water flies everywhere.
"I hate tea," the doctor says. "Let's have something else."
"Something else, like what?" Tony says.
"I don't know, let's see what we have."
Tony's expecting the doctor to open his refrigerator and look in it. He's not expecting the doctor to walk past him smelling of butter and something like overripe mangoes. He has to follow because this is a hell of a lot more entertaining than the Stark Industries board meeting he's supposed to be going to today.
The doctor opens the door to the TARDIS and gestures for Tony to enter. Tony eyeballs him shrewdly. "Both of us aren't going to fit in there. You may be hipster skinny, but I'm not."
"You'd be surprised."
"At how skinny you are? I'm pretty sure you'd blow over in a strong breeze - you and Kate Moss."
"I don't know him. Her. It."
Tony smirks. "She could be all three. She's definitely not from around here."
"Well, neither am I," the doctor concedes. "So are you coming or not?"
Tony gives the doctor a very thorough once-over. There's potential there. "I don't know," he says. "It's too early to tell yet."
The doctor cocks his head to the side, his hair bouncing with the motion. It's utterly fascinating. "Trust me," he coaxes.
"Why?"
"Because I'm The Doctor."
"Yeah," Tony says, walking towards the TARDIS door. According to the clock on the wall it's 7:55 a.m. "And what kind of doctor are you exactly?"
"The best kind."
The TARDIS is a phone box.
The TARDIS is a phone box with a giant, glass pistoning dildo in the middle of it.
The TARDIS has a pool and a kitchen that could feed the entire United States Marine Corps.
The TARDIS...
"What the hell is this place?" Tony calls over his shoulder, running from one room to another and getting more and more excited. There are tennis courts and a cricket pitch. There are bedrooms and bathrooms and balconies to places that have eighteen suns and nine moons.
It's...it's...
Tony runs back to the center of the TARDIS. The doctor is leaning against a console panel and dunking several stalks of celery into something that looks like a container of chocolate pudding with marshmallows.
Tony's heart is threatening to burst in his chest. He can feel sweat running down the V of his spine. His fingers are itching, yearning to touch, and all he can do is stare in wonder as though it's Christmas and his birthday and New Year's Eve at the Playboy Mansion all at once.
"Where am I?"
The doctor sucks on a stalk of celery. "You're in the TARDIS."
Tony takes a step forward. The doctor doesn't blink. "And what is the TARDIS."
"Time and Relative Dimension in Space."
"You're joking."
The doctor talks as he chews, bits of celery going everywhere. "I could be, but I'm not. At least not about this."
"That's impossible."
"Nothing is impossible," the doctor says patiently. "I thought you would know that, Mr. Stark."
Tony grabs the doctor's wrist as he's about to dunk his celery back in his pudding. "Prove me wrong."
They're in the park. Hyde Park to be exact. It's a Sunday in May in London and there are men playing football across the green from where Tony and the doctor are standing. There are older women sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons and a young man is smoking furiously as he flips through a copy of The Guardian. Less than twenty feet away, Tony is watching a young woman with long dark hair play with her toddler son. The baby is chubby. He doesn't walk as much as he waddles. He has a riot of black curly hair on his hair and there are grass stains on the seat of his blue jumpsuit.
The baby is gloriously happy, laughing up a riot as his mother plays Peek-A-Boo with him. At one point he laughs so hard he almost topples over. Tony is so engrossed in watching the tableau that he completely misses the businessman striding up to the woman and child.
One minute the baby is giggling in the grass and the next he's been snatched into large hands and is shrieking as he's flown around like an airplane. "How's my boy?" the man asks as the baby yells and giggles and hiccups.
Sitting in the grass, the woman just laughs. "Howard, he just ate, you probably shouldn't do---"
The baby chooses this time to vomit all over the man's jacket. It's disgusting. And hilarious.
Howard Stark hands his son back to his wife and pulls a handkerchief from his suit pocket. "No more flying for you," he says, pointing at his son.
Eighteen month-old Tony Stark just stuffs his tiny fist in his mouth and drools.
Forty-two year-old Tony Stark turns back to the doctor. "How did you do this?"
The doctor shrugs. "I didn't do anything. This is all you."
"This is all me?"
"Yes. This is your past."
"My past."
"Is repeating what I say a trick of yours?"
"It could be. It fits nicely in the repertoire between belching and farting."
"Intriguing."
Tony looks back at his parents. At himself. "What else can you do?"
The doctor's eyes crease at the corners. "Whatever you want me to do."
It turns out that the doctor is actually The Doctor.
Capital 'T' capital 'D'.
And The Doctor takes Tony to attend Aristotle's classes at Plato's Academy in Athens.
They go to the Battle of Gettysburg and fight on the beach at Normandy with the first Airborne Division.
Tony and The Doctor discuss improvements to the telescope with Galileo and Tony poses for Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. He meets Pepper's great-great-great-granddaughter in the 23rd Century and runs from Daleks in the 26th Century.
He watches the Earth explode on New Year's Day in 2318 and is there when the second Big Bang happens in 3129... with a little bit of help from he and The Doctor and the sonic screwdriver.
Or as Tony likes to refer to it, The Green Glowing Penis That Just Happens to Fix Stuff.
Tony's used to being the smartest man in the room. In the building. In the state. With The Doctor he's not even the smartest man in the TARDIS. It's strange and humbling. And a little bit of a relief.
Being with The Doctor is like letting someone else take control for a minute. It's like believing that someone else can take control and not fuck everything up irrevocably. It's a huge leap of faith.
Strangely enough, with The Doctor, when Tony takes that leap there's actually someplace to land.
They're watching the moons rise over Zanzibar Fifteen. The orange tide is rushing over purple sand and Tony is making little mountains with the grains in his hand. "How do you feel about In-and-Out burgers?" he asks, turning to look at the man on his left.
The right corner of The Doctor's mouth turns up at the corner in profile. "I can't say I've ever had one."
"You should. You probably won't like the meat, but I think a bun slathered with mustard might be just what the doctor ordered."
The Doctor's smile is broad. Brilliant. Tony licks his lips. He's traveled across the galaxy with the doctor, been his companion through millennia and it's the most sex-less relationship he's ever had. Even Pepper kissed him once. Okay, she kissed the Iron Man helmet, but it was pretty fucking close.
For all their celibacy, Tony's pretty sure he's in love with the doctor.
He's also pretty sure that The Doctor is beyond simple human emotions like that. Thank God. It's one thing to love someone, it's something else entirely to have it reciprocated. Tony would hate to fuck this up because he's mature enough to know how emotionally stunted he is.
"You miss the 21st Century," The Doctor says.
Tony shrugs. "I think you might like it if you gave it a chance."
"Earth needs Iron Man."
"And the galaxy needs The Doctor."
"It is a bit of a conundrum."
Tony purses his lips. "The world doesn't need Iron Man. I want it to need Iron Man. I don't know if you've noticed, but I have this narcissism thing. I like being needed."
The Doctor leans forward, moving closer, his hair shifting. Tony reaches out and pushes The Doctor's hair behind his right ear. It's the closest they've ever come to physical affection. "Your world does need Iron Man. It needs Tony Stark. He's the only one of his kind."
"And you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?"
The Doctor smiles. "If you won't do it, who will?"
"What about you?"
"I'll be fine."
"What about what you need?"
The Doctor ducks his head, his hair coming untucked. "After a while you get past things like that."
When Tony opens the door of the phone box, it bangs into the coffee table. The Doctor landed on his living room sofa.
According to the LCD screen on the Blu-Ray player it's 7:56 in the morning.
Tony's been gone approximately one minute give or take a few galaxies, planets and centuries.
Tony nudges the coffee table out of the way and exits the TARDIS. He turns back when there's no familiar clack of loafers behind him. The Doctor hovers in the doorway. "This is the part where I leave," he explains.
Tony nods. There's a weight in his chest that aches more than the skin stretched by the arc reactor. "So this is good-bye."
The Doctor laughs. "I said I was leaving, I never said I wasn't coming back."
And just like that the ache dissipates. "Okay, well when you come back, make sure to land on the TV, because that's the only thing you haven't completely decimated this morning."
The Doctor grins broadly. "I'll see what I can do."
"You do that."
The Doctor gestures behind him. "I should go."
Tony swipes his tongue over his lower lip. "Yeah, you probably should before I tie you to my bed and introduce you to the joys of being defiled by filthy human sex."
"Oh, of course you bring that up as I've got to go," the Doctor complains. "How many millennia have we been doing this and now you try to chat me up?"
"I thought you weren't interested," Tony protests.
"You're Tony Stark, you fuck everything that walks. It says so in your autobiography. That you wrote. Of course I'm interested. I'm Gallifreyan not dead!"
Tony glowers even as he crosses the space between them to make this right. Fucking Doctors.
He pauses and looks behind him when there's the familiar sound of a door unlocking and prohibitively expensive heels clacking across the slate flooring. "… Mr. Stark would be happy to buy a table, but I think he draws the line at auctioning off his underwear for the children of Haiti. I'm pretty sure the children of Haiti don't want Tony's boxer-briefs anyway," Pepper's voice carries down the hall.
Tony turns back to The Doctor only to see the TARDIS flickering out of sight.
"I'm so kicking your ass later," Tony bitches as the blue phone box vanishes.
"How many times do I have to remind you that you can't kick Jarvis' ass because he doesn't exist in corporal form, Tony?" Pepper says in greeting.
"I don't know, Potts, how many?"
Pepper shakes his head. "Too many. And what are you wearing? You cannot wear sweatpants to the board meeting. Also, Rhodey called this morning and he said that the Pentagon is going crazy about some flying blue box. I told him that you didn't know anything about a..."
Pepper keeps talking and Tony looks back at the unscratched piano and the perfectly upright sofa. It's as though The Doctor was never there at all. "...ny... Tony... Tony!"
Tony looks over at Pepper. "Potts, I'm right here, you don't have to shout."
"You're not here, you're a thousand miles away," Pepper retorts.
Tony laughs and feels it down in his toes. "Yeah, you're right. I'm a thousand miles away."
A thousand miles away give or take a few million.
-end-
For sparky77. Beta by the lovely lazlet.
Title from the album by Travis.
Thanks to my flist for their support in my brand new Eleven adoration.
Iron Man (movie)/ Doctor Who
Tony Stark/Eleven
Rated PG-13
The Man Who
There's a strange man in Tony Stark's bed.
Actually, he's not so much in Tony's bed as perched on the edge of it. Tony can feel his face creasing into a frown. He hasn't brought a man home in at least six weeks. Not since the last one turned out to be surprisingly clingy and lacking in the cock department.
If Tony had wanted pussy, he would've ordered it.
Still, that... person hadn't been wearing a bow-tie. Tony wouldn't bring home someone in a bow-tie. "Yurgh," he says, rolling away and rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
The alarm clock tells him that it's 7:18 in the morning. The tinting from the floor-to-ceiling windows begins to lighten as though attuned to his gradual alertness. What fucking idiot programmed them to do that? Oh, he did.
It's bright outside, ghastly bright.
Tony rolls back over and the man beams at him. "Yes, my thoughts exactly."
English accent.
Tony closes his eyes, maybe the hallucination will go away.
When he opens his eyes, the hallucination is still there.
"Jarvis." Tony's voice is scratchy, used. The victim of the better half of a bottle of Knob Creek. "There's a strange man in my bedroom."
"I thought you would be used to that by now, sir." For a non-sentient box of wires and artificial intelligence Jarvis is surprisingly sarcastic.
"You think you're cute, don't you?" Tony retorts.
"I hadn't really considered it," the man says thoughtfully.
"Not you," Tony says irritably. "Jarvis, why is there a strange man in my room?"
"Technically, The Doctor is not a strange man," Jarvis replies.
"The doctor?" Tony repeats, his voice echoing off the bedroom walls. "You're a doctor?" he asks the man
"I'm The Doctor," the man agrees.
Tony pushes himself upright, sheets falling away from his chest. "Why is there a doctor in my house?" Tony demands climbing out of bed. "Pepper!"
The doctor looks at Tony up and down rather obviously. "Oh, I wouldn't say it looks like pepper, maybe more like a pepper mill."
Tony glances down at his naked form before glaring at the doctor. "You. Out."
The doctor stands up. He's wearing a tweed jacket and his hair is floppy. Gravity-defying almost. And he's pale, even in the bright sunlight streaming through the floor to ceiling windows. His face is strange, his mouth too wide. He shouldn't seem nearly as attractive as he does.
"The arc generator in your chest is fascinating," the doctor says brightly. "Humans aren't going to put those into real production for another fifty years at least. Where did you get it?"
Tony scratches his left ass cheek. "I built it."
"You built it?" the doctor repeats. A pause. "Well, the books did say you were smart."
"Whose books?"
"The history books. Your photos don't do you justice though. You're much shorter."
Tony scowls. "You're not from around here, are you?"
The doctor shakes his head, his hair falling across his forehead. Tony's cock gives a minute twitch. "No, not really."
Tony gives him a dismissive wave and goes into the bathroom to take a cold shower and possibly a Vitamin B3 shot and some Lithium. He's clearly losing his fucking mind.
"I'll just wait for you downstairs, shall I?" the doctor calls.
There is a massive blue phone box in the middle of Tony's living room. Actually it's not in the middle of the living room inasmuch as it's standing in the rubble of what used to be his Steinway piano.
This is unacceptable. Only he is allowed to decimate his piano
"What the hell is that?" he says, pausing on the stairs to stare.
"That is the TARDIS," the doctor's voice calls from somewhere Tony can't see.
"How do you even know what I'm talking about?" Tony takes the last few steps down the stairs and looks around. The doctor's in the kitchen making tea. Tony didn't even know he had tea.
"I didn't know I had tea," he says, padding over to the doctor in his bare feet.
"You don't," the doctor replies. "I brought it with me."
"You bring your own tea with you everywhere you go?" Tony asks, shaking his head as the doctor offers him a cup.
"Well, I didn't have to bring it with me, did I? I mean I only had to pop into the kitchen in the TARDIS and get it."
"You only had to pop into the phone box to get your tea." Tony shakes his head. The doctor is clearly insane. He doesn't seem to be dangerous, but he's definitely insane. "What else is in this TARDIS of yours. A Cuisinart? Gordon Ramsey?"
"I don't know what a Gordon Ramsey is - is it a type of fruit?"
The doctor sips at his tea, makes a face and tosses it over his shoulder. The cup makes an enormous crash in the sink and pale brown water flies everywhere.
"I hate tea," the doctor says. "Let's have something else."
"Something else, like what?" Tony says.
"I don't know, let's see what we have."
Tony's expecting the doctor to open his refrigerator and look in it. He's not expecting the doctor to walk past him smelling of butter and something like overripe mangoes. He has to follow because this is a hell of a lot more entertaining than the Stark Industries board meeting he's supposed to be going to today.
The doctor opens the door to the TARDIS and gestures for Tony to enter. Tony eyeballs him shrewdly. "Both of us aren't going to fit in there. You may be hipster skinny, but I'm not."
"You'd be surprised."
"At how skinny you are? I'm pretty sure you'd blow over in a strong breeze - you and Kate Moss."
"I don't know him. Her. It."
Tony smirks. "She could be all three. She's definitely not from around here."
"Well, neither am I," the doctor concedes. "So are you coming or not?"
Tony gives the doctor a very thorough once-over. There's potential there. "I don't know," he says. "It's too early to tell yet."
The doctor cocks his head to the side, his hair bouncing with the motion. It's utterly fascinating. "Trust me," he coaxes.
"Why?"
"Because I'm The Doctor."
"Yeah," Tony says, walking towards the TARDIS door. According to the clock on the wall it's 7:55 a.m. "And what kind of doctor are you exactly?"
"The best kind."
The TARDIS is a phone box.
The TARDIS is a phone box with a giant, glass pistoning dildo in the middle of it.
The TARDIS has a pool and a kitchen that could feed the entire United States Marine Corps.
The TARDIS...
"What the hell is this place?" Tony calls over his shoulder, running from one room to another and getting more and more excited. There are tennis courts and a cricket pitch. There are bedrooms and bathrooms and balconies to places that have eighteen suns and nine moons.
It's...it's...
Tony runs back to the center of the TARDIS. The doctor is leaning against a console panel and dunking several stalks of celery into something that looks like a container of chocolate pudding with marshmallows.
Tony's heart is threatening to burst in his chest. He can feel sweat running down the V of his spine. His fingers are itching, yearning to touch, and all he can do is stare in wonder as though it's Christmas and his birthday and New Year's Eve at the Playboy Mansion all at once.
"Where am I?"
The doctor sucks on a stalk of celery. "You're in the TARDIS."
Tony takes a step forward. The doctor doesn't blink. "And what is the TARDIS."
"Time and Relative Dimension in Space."
"You're joking."
The doctor talks as he chews, bits of celery going everywhere. "I could be, but I'm not. At least not about this."
"That's impossible."
"Nothing is impossible," the doctor says patiently. "I thought you would know that, Mr. Stark."
Tony grabs the doctor's wrist as he's about to dunk his celery back in his pudding. "Prove me wrong."
They're in the park. Hyde Park to be exact. It's a Sunday in May in London and there are men playing football across the green from where Tony and the doctor are standing. There are older women sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons and a young man is smoking furiously as he flips through a copy of The Guardian. Less than twenty feet away, Tony is watching a young woman with long dark hair play with her toddler son. The baby is chubby. He doesn't walk as much as he waddles. He has a riot of black curly hair on his hair and there are grass stains on the seat of his blue jumpsuit.
The baby is gloriously happy, laughing up a riot as his mother plays Peek-A-Boo with him. At one point he laughs so hard he almost topples over. Tony is so engrossed in watching the tableau that he completely misses the businessman striding up to the woman and child.
One minute the baby is giggling in the grass and the next he's been snatched into large hands and is shrieking as he's flown around like an airplane. "How's my boy?" the man asks as the baby yells and giggles and hiccups.
Sitting in the grass, the woman just laughs. "Howard, he just ate, you probably shouldn't do---"
The baby chooses this time to vomit all over the man's jacket. It's disgusting. And hilarious.
Howard Stark hands his son back to his wife and pulls a handkerchief from his suit pocket. "No more flying for you," he says, pointing at his son.
Eighteen month-old Tony Stark just stuffs his tiny fist in his mouth and drools.
Forty-two year-old Tony Stark turns back to the doctor. "How did you do this?"
The doctor shrugs. "I didn't do anything. This is all you."
"This is all me?"
"Yes. This is your past."
"My past."
"Is repeating what I say a trick of yours?"
"It could be. It fits nicely in the repertoire between belching and farting."
"Intriguing."
Tony looks back at his parents. At himself. "What else can you do?"
The doctor's eyes crease at the corners. "Whatever you want me to do."
It turns out that the doctor is actually The Doctor.
Capital 'T' capital 'D'.
And The Doctor takes Tony to attend Aristotle's classes at Plato's Academy in Athens.
They go to the Battle of Gettysburg and fight on the beach at Normandy with the first Airborne Division.
Tony and The Doctor discuss improvements to the telescope with Galileo and Tony poses for Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. He meets Pepper's great-great-great-granddaughter in the 23rd Century and runs from Daleks in the 26th Century.
He watches the Earth explode on New Year's Day in 2318 and is there when the second Big Bang happens in 3129... with a little bit of help from he and The Doctor and the sonic screwdriver.
Or as Tony likes to refer to it, The Green Glowing Penis That Just Happens to Fix Stuff.
Tony's used to being the smartest man in the room. In the building. In the state. With The Doctor he's not even the smartest man in the TARDIS. It's strange and humbling. And a little bit of a relief.
Being with The Doctor is like letting someone else take control for a minute. It's like believing that someone else can take control and not fuck everything up irrevocably. It's a huge leap of faith.
Strangely enough, with The Doctor, when Tony takes that leap there's actually someplace to land.
They're watching the moons rise over Zanzibar Fifteen. The orange tide is rushing over purple sand and Tony is making little mountains with the grains in his hand. "How do you feel about In-and-Out burgers?" he asks, turning to look at the man on his left.
The right corner of The Doctor's mouth turns up at the corner in profile. "I can't say I've ever had one."
"You should. You probably won't like the meat, but I think a bun slathered with mustard might be just what the doctor ordered."
The Doctor's smile is broad. Brilliant. Tony licks his lips. He's traveled across the galaxy with the doctor, been his companion through millennia and it's the most sex-less relationship he's ever had. Even Pepper kissed him once. Okay, she kissed the Iron Man helmet, but it was pretty fucking close.
For all their celibacy, Tony's pretty sure he's in love with the doctor.
He's also pretty sure that The Doctor is beyond simple human emotions like that. Thank God. It's one thing to love someone, it's something else entirely to have it reciprocated. Tony would hate to fuck this up because he's mature enough to know how emotionally stunted he is.
"You miss the 21st Century," The Doctor says.
Tony shrugs. "I think you might like it if you gave it a chance."
"Earth needs Iron Man."
"And the galaxy needs The Doctor."
"It is a bit of a conundrum."
Tony purses his lips. "The world doesn't need Iron Man. I want it to need Iron Man. I don't know if you've noticed, but I have this narcissism thing. I like being needed."
The Doctor leans forward, moving closer, his hair shifting. Tony reaches out and pushes The Doctor's hair behind his right ear. It's the closest they've ever come to physical affection. "Your world does need Iron Man. It needs Tony Stark. He's the only one of his kind."
"And you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?"
The Doctor smiles. "If you won't do it, who will?"
"What about you?"
"I'll be fine."
"What about what you need?"
The Doctor ducks his head, his hair coming untucked. "After a while you get past things like that."
When Tony opens the door of the phone box, it bangs into the coffee table. The Doctor landed on his living room sofa.
According to the LCD screen on the Blu-Ray player it's 7:56 in the morning.
Tony's been gone approximately one minute give or take a few galaxies, planets and centuries.
Tony nudges the coffee table out of the way and exits the TARDIS. He turns back when there's no familiar clack of loafers behind him. The Doctor hovers in the doorway. "This is the part where I leave," he explains.
Tony nods. There's a weight in his chest that aches more than the skin stretched by the arc reactor. "So this is good-bye."
The Doctor laughs. "I said I was leaving, I never said I wasn't coming back."
And just like that the ache dissipates. "Okay, well when you come back, make sure to land on the TV, because that's the only thing you haven't completely decimated this morning."
The Doctor grins broadly. "I'll see what I can do."
"You do that."
The Doctor gestures behind him. "I should go."
Tony swipes his tongue over his lower lip. "Yeah, you probably should before I tie you to my bed and introduce you to the joys of being defiled by filthy human sex."
"Oh, of course you bring that up as I've got to go," the Doctor complains. "How many millennia have we been doing this and now you try to chat me up?"
"I thought you weren't interested," Tony protests.
"You're Tony Stark, you fuck everything that walks. It says so in your autobiography. That you wrote. Of course I'm interested. I'm Gallifreyan not dead!"
Tony glowers even as he crosses the space between them to make this right. Fucking Doctors.
He pauses and looks behind him when there's the familiar sound of a door unlocking and prohibitively expensive heels clacking across the slate flooring. "… Mr. Stark would be happy to buy a table, but I think he draws the line at auctioning off his underwear for the children of Haiti. I'm pretty sure the children of Haiti don't want Tony's boxer-briefs anyway," Pepper's voice carries down the hall.
Tony turns back to The Doctor only to see the TARDIS flickering out of sight.
"I'm so kicking your ass later," Tony bitches as the blue phone box vanishes.
"How many times do I have to remind you that you can't kick Jarvis' ass because he doesn't exist in corporal form, Tony?" Pepper says in greeting.
"I don't know, Potts, how many?"
Pepper shakes his head. "Too many. And what are you wearing? You cannot wear sweatpants to the board meeting. Also, Rhodey called this morning and he said that the Pentagon is going crazy about some flying blue box. I told him that you didn't know anything about a..."
Pepper keeps talking and Tony looks back at the unscratched piano and the perfectly upright sofa. It's as though The Doctor was never there at all. "...ny... Tony... Tony!"
Tony looks over at Pepper. "Potts, I'm right here, you don't have to shout."
"You're not here, you're a thousand miles away," Pepper retorts.
Tony laughs and feels it down in his toes. "Yeah, you're right. I'm a thousand miles away."
A thousand miles away give or take a few million.
-end-
For sparky77. Beta by the lovely lazlet.
Title from the album by Travis.
Thanks to my flist for their support in my brand new Eleven adoration.