There Wasn't Much Tony Had That Was Truly His, But This Was One Of Them. Until He Noticed Bucky Struggling

There wasn't much Tony had that was truly his, but this was one of them. Until he noticed Bucky struggling and decided to help.

A fill for SFW Tuesday: Word - Flowers for the @winterironmonth, as well as a fill for the @tonystarkbingo:

Square: A4 - Gardening Card Number: 3022 Ship/Main Pairing: WinterIron Rating: General Audiences Major Tags: Getting together, Tony Stark has a heart, Bucky Barnes has issues, gardening, Howard Stark's A+ parenting Word Count: 1392

I hope you enjoy it! 💙

Ohhh prompt 8 - Making homemade chocolates for their beloved with WinterIron please?

Revelations

An Avenger’s Academy AU - this is probably not what you had in mind, but this is what you get :D

Therewas a time and a place for revelations about love, and further, being in it.

They were not when watching one’scrush falter during a test flight and fall out of the fucking sky, but thereyou had it, and there Bucky was, realizing that, he was, in fact, in love withTony Stark.

About four seconds before heswerved into a tree, tearing off a dozen branches and then falling to the quadpavement with a clank.

Despite being all the way over byMadam Hydra’s class, on the far side of the Quad, he was the first one to getto Tony’s side. Tony was already popping open the faceplate and panting, hisface pale and strained and sweaty. If those were tears in his eyes, Buckywasn’t going to mention it, his own eyes prickling a little to see Tony awakeand alive. 

“Holy cow,” Bucky said, dropping tohis knees at Tony’s side. “That was a bit of a fall, you– are you okay?”

Tony pressed his lips togetheruntil they were a flat, bloodless line. “No,” he finally admitted. “I, uh…well, the fault tolerance wasn’t supposed to do that, write that down, it’s notscience unless you write it down. And. I uh, think I broke my leg.”

Bucky winced. “All right there,doll, hold on.”

“To what?” Tony said, and thengasped in pain and astonishment as Bucky slid his arms under the injured geniusand lifted. Even with bits and pieces of the suit around him, Tony barelyweighed a buck-fifty, so it wasn’t like he was putting any strain on Bucky’slifting capacity. Bucky’d been known to lift cars, when he needed to.

(Not quite She-Hulk levels oflifting, or even Spider-Man levels of lifting, but he could carry Tony over tothe campus infirmary. That he was getting to put his hands on Tony and cuddlehim close was a nice silver lining. Not for Tony, however, who was breathinghard through his nose, eyes squinched shut as he fought not to cry.)

Bucky didn’t bother to tell Tonythat it didn’t matter, Bucky wasn’t going to judge. Bucky’d sobbed like a childevery time Hydra let him out of the chair, but he knew that would just makeTony feel worse. It wasn’t a contest, and pain was pain, butBucky knew something about not letting people see you suffer.

“You don’t have to do this,” Tonysaid, as they got closer to Claire Temple’s little clinic.

“Bucky Barnes, ambulance,assistance, musical composition, performance, and assassination, at yourservice,” Bucky said. He gave Tony a smile, sympathetic and friendly. “It’sokay, I like helpin’ you out.”

“Don’t tell me that, I’ll make youbring me cookies. And also, shoot Crossbones, because he’s annoying. Butnowhere important. Like, the brain would be a safe spot. He doesn’t use hisanyway. Also, you should come to the hospital and sing for me. Since I have tobe there anyway.”

“Cookies and singing,” Bucky said.“I can do that.”

“Really? I mean– I was kidding,unless you’re gonna, in which case, perfectly serious.”

“Perfectly serious,” Bucky said. “Ilike you. What kind of cookies do you want?”

“Chocolate chip,” Tony saidpromptly. “But not the kind with walnuts in them. I don’t like walnuts. Theytaste like tree bark, and I just recently reinforced that comparison.”

“Gotcha.”

Bucky put Tony down gently on thehospital bed that Claire jerked her chin at with a “Be right there.”

“So– I never had a broken legbefore,” Tony said.

“Do you want me to stay?”

Tony glanced at the wall, eyeswatering, then, without looking at Bucky, “Yes, please stay.”

“All right,” Bucky said, pulling upa chair. He offered Tony his metal hand and Tony twined their fingers together.“Moral support now. Cookies later.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” Tonysaid. “About the cookies, I mean.” And then Tony managed to look at Bucky, atentative, questioning smile on his face.

Maybe Tony was having somerevelations of his own. 

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A short ficlet for @winterironmonth, filling SFW Friday - Word: Homesick and Dialogue/Sentence: “Just shut up and kiss me, you idiot.”. Hope you enjoy!

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Tony's homesickness had always been more about the people than the places. At seven, he'd missed Jarvis terribly, to the point of silently crying himself to sleep. At nineteen, despite the fact that Rhodey had been the one to leave for the Air Force, he'd drowned his loneliness in alcohol and people who didn't care for him at all.

He'd thought he'd gotten better at it since then. Thought he'd gotten over the nausea and the restlessness and the feeling of desolation.

And then he'd gotten into a relationship with Bucky, and it had started happening again. When he'd have to go on a business trip, or when Bucky was off doing missions, the loneliness returned again. It made it near impossible to sleep properly, leaving him exhausted and even more miserable.

Which, overall, was doable. Tony's schedule had never been the most consistent, and with enough coffee he could hide it very well.

But there had been a business trip, and Bucky had been called on a mission before he'd returned, and it had been over a week without a proper night's rest. And even for Tony, that was... too much.

So he was near-delirious when Bucky finally did return, manic and bouncing on far too many cups of coffee.

"You're home!" He just about jumped into Bucky's arms, and it was a good thing Bucky was prepared for him or he'd have fallen flat on the floor due to miscalculating the distance just a little. "I missed you! Just a healthy amount, of course, nothing to worry about at all, it's just weird when you're not here but I'm fine and just don't ask JARVIS how much I've slept because I'm pretty sure you'd be worried about that and I don't want you to be worried, because you just got home..."

Bucky, smiling down at him fondly, pressed a single finger to his lips. "Just shut up and kiss me, you idiot."

That was a brilliant idea, and Tony happily brushed his lips against Bucky's. And once more. And again. And with every kiss, he felt the tension ease a little more, until he was just leaning against his partner.

"Yeah, let's go for a nap," Bucky murmured, but it hardly even registered anymore.

Sighing happily, Tony let himself fall asleep in Bucky’s arms.

Finally, he was home.

I recently came across a discussion on Tony Stark as a queer-coded character in the comics (which I’m not going to link to because many of the threads were already deleted, ergo I’m assuming that the participants didn’t want the conversation to be spread), and I found it very interesting. For years I have read Tony Stark as subtextually bisexual in the comics, which hasn’t really translated to the films – at least not to the extent that the character of Captain America has been coded as bisexual in them. There has always been a borderline homoerotic relationship between Tony and his armor especially. But adjacent to this conversation, there was also an interesting thread in which Tony Stark as the most female-coded superhero was discussed that I found fascinating.

Someone commented on the concept stating that while it may be true for the comics, movie-verse Tony Stark is certainly not female-coded.

But isn’t he, though?

We’ve discussed before how hypermasculinity sometimes seems to go so over-the-top that it does a full 360, coming out the other side seeming rather feminized, the hypermasculine male presented as a sexual object with assets on display (slim waist, thick thighs, full chest) for the consumption of the male gaze. But that’s not the case with Tony Stark; it isn’t his hypermasculinity that makes him seem female-coded, it’s the question of agency.

Tony does seem to possess many traits that we consider culturally feminine, female cliches, such as talking a lot and talking fast, using a rich vocabulary, a short and petite stature as compared to other superheroes, the narrative passing jugement on his promiscuity, the narrative passing judgement on his desire for junk-food, his passive demeanor, his self-consciousness about his body and having to wear underarmor in public to manage his chest, his avoidance of interpersonal conflict, looking for daddy’s love and approval, the way in which he conceals much of his intelligence because he knows that if people saw him for how he really is, they would be off-put by it ie. giving the appearance of being smart-but-not-too-smart, the eroticizing of his appearance in the narrative, the focus on what he’s wearing, his obsessive-compulsive behavior, meticulous grooming habits, delicate features, dressing to impress professionally, carrying conversations, his weakness being his heart, the fact that he has to dress into a suit that conceals his identity, his true self, to interact with the world, a hard outer shell that conceals his soft inside. There are aspects to Tony Stark in the films that are female-coded.

I think that some people might find these aspects difficult to see because there are three distinct personas to the character: there’s the Tony Stark that he projects to the outside world to hide who he really is that is his true armor, there’s Iron Man that is a prosthetic, an armor that shields him and allows him the protection of being who he really is, and then there’s Tony Stark, the person he is in his heart of hearts that we see only when’s alone with the artificial intelligences he created for himself, as his friends, the only friends that really, truly get to see him, because he knows that they won’t judge him (outside of him being alone, we see glimpses of the ‘real’ Tony Stark in Afganistan, in his interactions with Natasha and in two scenes with Steve: while they’re cutting wood and Tony asking Steve whether he knew).

These are the three sides to Tony Stark, and I see a lot of fans confuse his Tony Stark armor, his protective persona, with who he is because that is, by design, the loudest, most visible side to him.

There are many sides to him that are female-coded, but it’s the limited agency that he is given in the narrative that is the most telling. Most of his stories seem to revolve around the stripping of his agency and his struggle to regain it. This character – a genius, billionaire, playboy, philantropist – who ought to be the ultimate male power fantasy has all of his stories constructed around his lack of agency and his need of a prosthetic to claim agency for himself. It’s easy to assume that an able-bodied, rich, good-looking, well-educated, white CEO of the American upper crust has all the power and control in the world, but the narrative begins disabusing the viewer of this notion right off the bat. The narrative deconstructs his agency.

What I appreciated about the Iron Man films was how they subverted the role of the damsel in distress in Pepper Potts. Especially the end of the first film in which Pepper marched through broken glass in her stiletto shoes to save Tony Stark was something that made me stop and think for days afterwards. The third film basically recreated this subversion of the trope louder for those in the back that hadn’t caught it the first time. It was Pepper Potts that was the knight in shining armor, not the title character.

And it is Tony that we see as the damsel in distress, particularly again in the first and the third films. The first film contains the iconic scene of Obadiah Stane literally removing Tony’s agency in a scene that is filmed like a sexual violation, a none-too-subtle air of erotic violence in the air as he uses his date rape technology to incapacitate Tony. This is a turning point in the film. The third film contains a scene in which Tony Stark is zip-tied to a bed frame with the villain taunting him. It is implied that Tony is similarly submissive in bed. The main villain in the scene acts like a spurned lover, a definite air of seduction to his conduct toward the tied-up hero.

That is two cases of villains making eroticized advances toward a physically incapacitated Tony Stark. And it isn’t the violence or the incapacitation that makes the scenes female-coded, it is the eroticization of it. It is female characters that are subject to eroticized violence, generally speaking. The second film does not follow the pattern, but it could be interepreted as an obsessive, spurned man making unwanted advances toward our hero.

I wrote about the interaction between Natasha and Tony previously, on how she allows us to see a side of him that we usually don’t get to see. Some people have described Tony’s hiring of her as sexist, undoubtedly influenced by Pepper’s interpretation of his behaviour as he tried to figure her out (“And she is potentially a very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit if you keep ogling her like that.”), but his interest in her was never that kind of interest. His eyes don’t track her sexual assets. Tony saw something of himself in her, especially in the way she was playing a role, but even more than that, I think Tony saw in Natasha Romanoff something that he wanted desperately to be. In control.  

Natasha Romanoff gives the air of being in control even when she gives up control, and in this she is the opposite of Tony Stark.

With this in mind, and I don’t remember whether I wrote about this before, I was quite disturbed by the way the climax of Civil War was shot not unlike a pornographic sex scene, Tony Stark being double-teamed by the super soldiers. The ending of the scene especially, with Steve straddling Tony, pounding on him, grunting, finishing it off with breathing heavily as he falls off Tony having penetrated his arc reactor with his shield, having incapacitated Tony’s prosthetic. Tony spits out blood as the super soldiers walk away from him. It’s rather symbolic, the implications of the scene very uncomfortable.

While Bucky Barnes is another character whose storyline heavily features the stripping down of agency, the female-coding of the strong, stoic silent-type is largely absent. Bucky Barnes and Tony Stark share similarities, and in this he offers a contrast to Tony.

So, yes. I do see Tony Stark of the movie-verse as a female-coded superhero because his story revolves around desperately grasping for agency. Among these hypermasculine heroes, the genius-billionaire-playboy-philantropist is at a disadvantage, so Tony Stark invented, constructed, and put on a suit that hides his true identity in order to have a measure of agency in a hypermasculine world, that allows him to assert himself. And in Civil War he was willing to sign off on his self-created agency because the establishment had managed to convince him that as a person with near unlimited resources, he was a danger to the world that he had risked his life and the lives of his loved ones to protect.

I think one of the most telling aspects of his character vis-à-vis Civil War is that, convinced that it is too dangerous for him to attempt to influence the outside world and other people in it, Tony Stark instead turned within and attempted to modify his own internal world, to (literally) influence his own internal state instead – to accept what he can’t change. This is a classic strategy of the disenfranchised.

Tony Stark is the most female-coded of the male superheroes.

Tony: You said you wanted a pet.

Bucky: Cat. I said I wanted a cat.

@tonystarkbingo Square: A5 - Adopting a Pet Card # 3087