Tony Stark (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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all_inclusive2014-12-27 10:49 am
iron_y) wrote in all_inclusive2014-12-27 10:49 am
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(OOC Note: I'm providing three different starters here because I've got a lot of ideas about what Tony is doing and I'd rather write a variety of circumstances and moods, etc. Just pick any one of them to reply to. Like an ordinary open post, any scenes that happen on this post, no matter which starter they start from, will proceed in parallel.)
#1
"We are not soldiers," Tony had shouted at Steve Rogers after Coulson (supposedly) died. Tony still stood by that heated statement. For one thing, Tony Stark would make a terrible soldier. He'd have been drummed out in five minutes flat for insubordination. For another, if he was a soldier, the idea of going on a mission probably wouldn't be so foreign to him. Tony had been in his share of tight situations, but the one thing Tony had never done was risked his life on a tight schedule.
There's a problem? Do something about it. There's an enemy? Do something about it. Now. He'd been imprisoned, on the run, almost dead, and he'd gotten though it all and come out on top. That was the Iron Man way. It wasn't always easy, but it happened when it happened.
This was different.
The culmination of weeks worth of demands and counter-demands between Tony and Nick Fury had come yesterday:
"I have consulted with my superiors, and we must refuse your request. SHIELD will not return Stark Technology donated to Project [redacted]. If you want it, you will have to penetrate our top secret facility and steal it, which I'm sure you will agree is impossible. I do not expect to hear from you again on this subject."
Which was basically an invitation, wasn't it? Especially considering what Tony had found out about HYDRA inside SHIELD -- the reason he'd started making demands in the first place -- and what he knew Fury knew, and what he knew Fury knew Tony knew and so on ad nauseam.
But the important thing was that HYDRA didn't know what they knew -- so far as Tony knew. And Fury wanted to keep it that way, which limited his range of actions.
The second part of the invitation had arrived shortly after, when Tony was hacking SHIELD and suddenly a file had shown up with schedules and maps for a certain top secret facility where Stark Technology was being used, completely with encoded hints about when the best time to raid the facility might be.
Sneak in, destroy the helicarrier-level repulsors, destroy all plans or attempts to reverse-engineer the technology, send Project Insight -- oops, Project Redacted -- back to the drawing board.
Tony Stark, who answered to no one, could occasionally be useful to Nicholas Fury, who answered to everyone.
All very simple, planned down to the second -- for half past one tonight. Which left Tony with eight hours to get though until then. That's how he'd ended up on the lawn of the hotel throwing coffee mugs for Dummy and U to take turns catching. (U, it should be noted, had a new paint job -- red, with "Stark" prominently displayed, along with a new fancy weather vane labeled "Nearest coffee" that constantly turned to point to the nearest known coffee in liquid form. In small print along the side was some discreet writing, in a hard to read cursive font -- "Don't you wish you had a robot to read the small print for you? Property of Tony Stark. Danger, do not attempt to dismember, dismantle, or in any way disassemble dis robot.")
"And I'm marching to Fury's fife after all," Tony said to Dummy. "Good catch! But here's a question, should I write a letter to Pepper, just in case?" Tony did his best thinking out loud; it was a habit so ingrained he didn't even think about it, he just said whatever popped into his mind. "You know, if you read this, I'm dead, I want you to know I...I mean, that sort of thing? Is that tacky? Unnecessary? Worse than not writing her a letter? It's not that she doesn't know anything I could tell her, so I don't know why I'm even thinking about this. I blame all this planning. No, I blame Fury. If there ever was a man who existed to be blamed--"
#2
Once upon a post-bellum period, back in those halcyon days after the second world war when SHIELD was still an uncorrupted dream in the minds of a small group of people, Howard Stark started collecting of strange and dangerous artifacts. He got a lot of them from Germany -- from HYDRA -- but he didn't stop there. The USSR, Japan -- with his money and connections and interest, and things just dropped into his hands.
At some point, some of Howard's artifacts were transferred to SHIELD for safekeeping, but not all of them. Specifically, there was some equipment from a lab in Germany that probably played a big role in one of Abraham Erskine's early trials of what was to become the Super Soldier Serum. This equipment had been sitting in a secure Stark storage facility since 1952, waiting for Howard Stark to bring it out and make something out of it. Howard Stark never had, much to the disappointment of various interested parties -- including HYDRA.
At least, that was the story Tony had put together from Nick Fury's cryptic hints, and the important part of the story was that the modern HYDRA still made the occasional sweep of SHIELD records, trying to find this equipment, in the hopes of using it for recreating Super Soldier Serum or something like it.
The party to draw out HYDRA had been Tony's idea. "I'll have a party, donate some old junk I've got laying around to a museum, and have a one time only display of some other old junk from my father's collection. I'll just happen to include some old German junk that I clearly don't understand the value of. If you can't use something like that to figure out who's interested and who's HYDRA, you're not trying hard enough," he'd suggested.
It had worked out a bit too well -- some of that old German junk had disappeared half way through the party and Tony wasn't entirely sure the old German junk they'd recovered was the same old German junk. Something about the calm look on Fury's face when the whole thing was over made him wonder if SHIELD had wanted that equipment too -- and just who might have gotten it, scanned it, or in some other way pulled something off during the party. It made Tony's head hurt -- and it totally ruined the rest of the party.
But the night was still young over in The Nexus Hotel! Tony checked in with Pepper first, but she was still handling the aftermath with unflappable aplomb. There wasn't much Tony could contribute at this point, so he snatched up some bits of old German mystery equipment in various shades of early twentieth century chrome -- no doubt specially designed to perform certain unthinkable experiments -- loaded his robots down with leftovers from the party, and led them in search of a simpler world.
He set up in the lobby -- drinks, food, music, old German equipment on display like it was artwork -- and whenever anyone entered the lobby he raised his glass and greeted them. "Welcome to the Stark Impromptu Lobby Party! We're celebrating the headaches our fathers left us. Have a drink!" He couldn't say it was the most successful party ever, but at least it was an uncomplicated party.
#3
Of course it was stupid to carry around mice loaded up with Extremis in his pockets, but these mice were important to Pepper's cure -- first mammals Tony had given a dose of Extremis to -- and Tony didn't want to let them out of his sight. So he'd just reinforced and fireproofed two pockets on the front of his shirt, and took the two mice with him everywhere he went. They'd quickly gotten used to it, and it let him keep an eye on them, poke them occasionally just to make sure they weren't about to explode, and inject them with various substances if he thought they might explode. The worst they'd done was smoke a bit, which was annoying but not fatal. He was making progress -- but not quickly enough.
Tony was worried about Pepper. He'd been working on this Extremis stuff for too long -- and all this time, she'd been living with it, and there was only so much that Tony could do for her without a complete cure. He didn't know how long that was going to take.
It had gotten so that Tony had a hard time looking Pepper in the eye whenever the subject came up, and he'd been spending more and more time in his lab and then, occasionally, at the Nexus Hotel, where Pepper was less likely to walk in and see something blowing up. He didn't think that was good for her peace of mind.
For his own peace of mind, Tony had started working on a suit. He wasn't entirely sure what kind of suit it was going to be, but he kept it in his Nexus lab, next to the cages where the mice lived when they weren't in his pocket.
Tinkering with the suit kept him busy when there was nothing he could do with the Extremis stuff. Babysitting mice kept him busy when the suit refused to cooperate. And when both of them hit a dead-end? He loaded the mice in his pockets and put the troublesome gauntlet on his left hand so he could keeping fiddling with it, and went down to the cafeteria to get a hefty meal.
The idea was that if he ate, and poked the mice, and fiddled with the gauntlet for long enough, some idea would break lose.
The idea was not to let mice loose in the cafeteria, but that was what happened. "Everyone please stand still," Tony commanded the cafeteria at large. Luckily it wasn't too crowded. "And tell me if you see--" He stopped himself before he said 'smoke', thinking that might start a panic. "Anything moving," he finished. The mice did have trackers, so they couldn't actually get lost, but if he didn't get them back quickly, his experiments would be ruined. And then there was the slight possibility of them exploding...
#1
"We are not soldiers," Tony had shouted at Steve Rogers after Coulson (supposedly) died. Tony still stood by that heated statement. For one thing, Tony Stark would make a terrible soldier. He'd have been drummed out in five minutes flat for insubordination. For another, if he was a soldier, the idea of going on a mission probably wouldn't be so foreign to him. Tony had been in his share of tight situations, but the one thing Tony had never done was risked his life on a tight schedule.
There's a problem? Do something about it. There's an enemy? Do something about it. Now. He'd been imprisoned, on the run, almost dead, and he'd gotten though it all and come out on top. That was the Iron Man way. It wasn't always easy, but it happened when it happened.
This was different.
The culmination of weeks worth of demands and counter-demands between Tony and Nick Fury had come yesterday:
"I have consulted with my superiors, and we must refuse your request. SHIELD will not return Stark Technology donated to Project [redacted]. If you want it, you will have to penetrate our top secret facility and steal it, which I'm sure you will agree is impossible. I do not expect to hear from you again on this subject."
Which was basically an invitation, wasn't it? Especially considering what Tony had found out about HYDRA inside SHIELD -- the reason he'd started making demands in the first place -- and what he knew Fury knew, and what he knew Fury knew Tony knew and so on ad nauseam.
But the important thing was that HYDRA didn't know what they knew -- so far as Tony knew. And Fury wanted to keep it that way, which limited his range of actions.
The second part of the invitation had arrived shortly after, when Tony was hacking SHIELD and suddenly a file had shown up with schedules and maps for a certain top secret facility where Stark Technology was being used, completely with encoded hints about when the best time to raid the facility might be.
Sneak in, destroy the helicarrier-level repulsors, destroy all plans or attempts to reverse-engineer the technology, send Project Insight -- oops, Project Redacted -- back to the drawing board.
Tony Stark, who answered to no one, could occasionally be useful to Nicholas Fury, who answered to everyone.
All very simple, planned down to the second -- for half past one tonight. Which left Tony with eight hours to get though until then. That's how he'd ended up on the lawn of the hotel throwing coffee mugs for Dummy and U to take turns catching. (U, it should be noted, had a new paint job -- red, with "Stark" prominently displayed, along with a new fancy weather vane labeled "Nearest coffee" that constantly turned to point to the nearest known coffee in liquid form. In small print along the side was some discreet writing, in a hard to read cursive font -- "Don't you wish you had a robot to read the small print for you? Property of Tony Stark. Danger, do not attempt to dismember, dismantle, or in any way disassemble dis robot.")
"And I'm marching to Fury's fife after all," Tony said to Dummy. "Good catch! But here's a question, should I write a letter to Pepper, just in case?" Tony did his best thinking out loud; it was a habit so ingrained he didn't even think about it, he just said whatever popped into his mind. "You know, if you read this, I'm dead, I want you to know I...I mean, that sort of thing? Is that tacky? Unnecessary? Worse than not writing her a letter? It's not that she doesn't know anything I could tell her, so I don't know why I'm even thinking about this. I blame all this planning. No, I blame Fury. If there ever was a man who existed to be blamed--"
#2
Once upon a post-bellum period, back in those halcyon days after the second world war when SHIELD was still an uncorrupted dream in the minds of a small group of people, Howard Stark started collecting of strange and dangerous artifacts. He got a lot of them from Germany -- from HYDRA -- but he didn't stop there. The USSR, Japan -- with his money and connections and interest, and things just dropped into his hands.
At some point, some of Howard's artifacts were transferred to SHIELD for safekeeping, but not all of them. Specifically, there was some equipment from a lab in Germany that probably played a big role in one of Abraham Erskine's early trials of what was to become the Super Soldier Serum. This equipment had been sitting in a secure Stark storage facility since 1952, waiting for Howard Stark to bring it out and make something out of it. Howard Stark never had, much to the disappointment of various interested parties -- including HYDRA.
At least, that was the story Tony had put together from Nick Fury's cryptic hints, and the important part of the story was that the modern HYDRA still made the occasional sweep of SHIELD records, trying to find this equipment, in the hopes of using it for recreating Super Soldier Serum or something like it.
The party to draw out HYDRA had been Tony's idea. "I'll have a party, donate some old junk I've got laying around to a museum, and have a one time only display of some other old junk from my father's collection. I'll just happen to include some old German junk that I clearly don't understand the value of. If you can't use something like that to figure out who's interested and who's HYDRA, you're not trying hard enough," he'd suggested.
It had worked out a bit too well -- some of that old German junk had disappeared half way through the party and Tony wasn't entirely sure the old German junk they'd recovered was the same old German junk. Something about the calm look on Fury's face when the whole thing was over made him wonder if SHIELD had wanted that equipment too -- and just who might have gotten it, scanned it, or in some other way pulled something off during the party. It made Tony's head hurt -- and it totally ruined the rest of the party.
But the night was still young over in The Nexus Hotel! Tony checked in with Pepper first, but she was still handling the aftermath with unflappable aplomb. There wasn't much Tony could contribute at this point, so he snatched up some bits of old German mystery equipment in various shades of early twentieth century chrome -- no doubt specially designed to perform certain unthinkable experiments -- loaded his robots down with leftovers from the party, and led them in search of a simpler world.
He set up in the lobby -- drinks, food, music, old German equipment on display like it was artwork -- and whenever anyone entered the lobby he raised his glass and greeted them. "Welcome to the Stark Impromptu Lobby Party! We're celebrating the headaches our fathers left us. Have a drink!" He couldn't say it was the most successful party ever, but at least it was an uncomplicated party.
#3
Of course it was stupid to carry around mice loaded up with Extremis in his pockets, but these mice were important to Pepper's cure -- first mammals Tony had given a dose of Extremis to -- and Tony didn't want to let them out of his sight. So he'd just reinforced and fireproofed two pockets on the front of his shirt, and took the two mice with him everywhere he went. They'd quickly gotten used to it, and it let him keep an eye on them, poke them occasionally just to make sure they weren't about to explode, and inject them with various substances if he thought they might explode. The worst they'd done was smoke a bit, which was annoying but not fatal. He was making progress -- but not quickly enough.
Tony was worried about Pepper. He'd been working on this Extremis stuff for too long -- and all this time, she'd been living with it, and there was only so much that Tony could do for her without a complete cure. He didn't know how long that was going to take.
It had gotten so that Tony had a hard time looking Pepper in the eye whenever the subject came up, and he'd been spending more and more time in his lab and then, occasionally, at the Nexus Hotel, where Pepper was less likely to walk in and see something blowing up. He didn't think that was good for her peace of mind.
For his own peace of mind, Tony had started working on a suit. He wasn't entirely sure what kind of suit it was going to be, but he kept it in his Nexus lab, next to the cages where the mice lived when they weren't in his pocket.
Tinkering with the suit kept him busy when there was nothing he could do with the Extremis stuff. Babysitting mice kept him busy when the suit refused to cooperate. And when both of them hit a dead-end? He loaded the mice in his pockets and put the troublesome gauntlet on his left hand so he could keeping fiddling with it, and went down to the cafeteria to get a hefty meal.
The idea was that if he ate, and poked the mice, and fiddled with the gauntlet for long enough, some idea would break lose.
The idea was not to let mice loose in the cafeteria, but that was what happened. "Everyone please stand still," Tony commanded the cafeteria at large. Luckily it wasn't too crowded. "And tell me if you see--" He stopped himself before he said 'smoke', thinking that might start a panic. "Anything moving," he finished. The mice did have trackers, so they couldn't actually get lost, but if he didn't get them back quickly, his experiments would be ruined. And then there was the slight possibility of them exploding...