ok anyway, in im3, tony yells NO! right as, and maybe a little bit before, he fails to catch pepper’s hand (like as soon as that whole metal structure tilts), and not after. when rhodey’s falling in cap 3, tony yells NO! way before rhodey hits the ground, but not as soon as rhodey’s shot and starts falling
this makes me think of the im1 novelization: when tony uses the faulty flight power of the mark 1 to boost him out of the terrorist camp, he figures out mid-fall what his trajectory was and what would be the force of his impact against the ground or whatever. similarly, when that SI rocket lands right next to him during the ambush, the first thing he does is to consider the distance between him and the thing and he quickly concludes that he won’t be able to get out of the blast range
so now i’m emotional over tony’s seemingly preemptive cries of NO! in light of this thing where he’s constantly doing the math in his head. so for instance, with pepper, he’s ~relatively chill and reassuring and confident that he’s gonna catch her, up until that rig unexpectedly tilts – and that would be the moment when pepper veers off the trajectory tony had projected for her and he knows he won’t be able to adjust in time, so he starts crying out BEFORE we ever get the shot of him missing pepper’s hand. and then with rhodey in cap 3, he realizes rhodey is going down and goes back for him, and then the point at which he actually cries out would have been the point when the numbers clicked in tony’s head and he realized he wouldn’t be able to get to rhodey before rhodey hit the ground
and i’m in pain because if we’re to go with this, then we have tony grasping his failure before it even happens
there’s a special place in my heart for tabloids that are straight up slander
It all makes sense now… Iron Man and Spiderman both have the same last name…….
the proof is out there
Rhodes tells all is my absolute fave part bci love the idea of rhodey eating a pizza on the couch in avengers tower, taking revenge on tony for screwing with his suit, TMZ on speaker, going: ‘ya, the kid’s his son [chewing] who’s the mother? [more chewing] uhhh black widow [chewing] they’re both spiders, you see. [taking a sip from his soda] why it didn’t work out? well, tony cheated on her with uhhh [steve walks in, waves at rhodey] with captain america. yeah it was very bad for team morale.’
As much as I dislike gossip rags, if I lived in the MCU I would be a regular subscriber of super hero tabloids.
“Listen, Cap and I have our differences but I have enough respect for him to put that aside and mark down his exact time of death.”
“Oh my god.”
“All I’m saying is Hydra’s been trying since the forties but Captain America was murdered in cold blood right here right now by a high schooler.”
“Tony—“
“The ice couldn’t even do it but that’s because no amount of arctic ice in the world could measure up to the iconic freezer burn my kid just gave him.”
So I watched IM3 last night, and one part had me remembering the confrontation scene between Steve and Tony in Avengers 1 – specifically, the part where Steve says that Tony’s “not the kinda guy to lay down on a wire and let the other guys crawl over you.” Tony’s reply is “I think I would just cut the wire,” and Steve responds with “Always got an answer for everything,” or something like that.
And it just abruptly struck home how incredibly representative that scene is of Tony’s overall character. Because in IM3, in the space of four minutes of film, Tony “cuts the wire,” so to speak, twice.
First off, Rhodey tells Tony that they can either save the President and AirForce One, or they can save Pepper, but they can’t do both.
But Tony manages to do both. The options were “pick between the President and Pepper,” and Tony didn’t like those options, so he created a third option, and he managed to get to both AirForce one and Pep. He “cut the wire.”
And secondly, after all the staff have been sucked out of the plane and are falling to their deaths, and Tony flies after them:
“How any are there?” he asks JARVIS. “Thirteen, sir,” J replies. “How many can I carry?” Tony asks. “Four, sir,” is the answer.
Yet, again – Tony manages to save them all. He can only carry four, but that’s just not gonna fly as an option, so he creates another choice. Thinks outside the box, and runs a team effort game of barrel o’ monkeys and saves all 13.
And that’s just in four minutes of film. That’s not counting all the other times someone has told him “these are your options,” and Tony has replies with “cool, thanks, I’m gonna go with none of them,” and then goes off script ans creates a whole new, unique, successful option.
“I think I would just cut the wire ” “Always got an answer for everything.” Yes, actually. He kinda does.
And obviously, sometimes when the only option genuinely is to lay down on the wire and make the sacrifice play, he doesn’t hesitate to do that too: hi, nuke through a wormhole.
So yeah. Just got to thinking. Everyone quotes the “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist” line as a way to sum up Tony’s character, but I think the “I think I would just cut the wire” encapsulates him far better.
so DID U KNOW China’s nickname for tony is rlly cute & feminine “nī-nī” (like the end of toNY or dowNEY) also they consider him one of those “girls who are cold on the outside and warm in the inside” (ie a tsundere) i love china & i love my fav avenger nīnī
(also steve is “captain big tits”?? but more common nickname is 美队 ie american cap but 美 also means beautiful so… beautiful cap ajsdfhask)
Post Infinity War, slightly OOC Nebula because I have no idea how to write her. IW didn’t really inspire a lot of ideas for me in terms of fic, but as I was discussing it with doux-amer, part of this came about, so I finished it up. Very rough.
“What would you have done?” he asks. Nebula doesn’t look at him, doesn’t even blink. “With the Gauntlet?”
They are ten jumps away from Earth, or so she’s told him. They are five days out from Titan. (Five days out from apocalypse, and here he sits, flying through space on a dead man’s ship named after an 80′s rock singer with an honest to god cyborg to his left. It’s the perfect set-up for Tony to wake up at any moment.
But he doesn’t.)
Nebula is quiet for a long moment. Nebula is quiet in general – the most she’s ever spoken to him in one go is to tell him exactly how and why Peter Parker had faded away from his hands – but there is something pensive to her silence, so he waits.
“Destroyed Thanos,” she says after a moment, so flat and determined, no question. “Destroyed him and his ship and his ‘children.’“
“Aren’t you his kid?” Tony asks.
“I was,” she answers simply. Tony doesn’t know what to make of that, but he doesn’t ask. He got his answer, sparse as it was. He settles back into his chair and doesn’t watch the stars go past.
They’re between jumps. Nebula is hesitant to put him through too many at once, something about his puny human body being unable to take the strain. On these first few stretches of time between hops, they would drift near planets and Nebula would flip the outbound communicator on. He thinks she was hoping to hear of one planet that was unscathed, proof that Thanos’ power wasn’t absolute, but every broadcast was panicked, hurried, alien words tripping over themselves. After a while, she stopped listening.
Earth had no one to broadcast to. They were alone in their terror and anguish. And Tony is returning to bring back more. Would May Parker still exist, wondering where her son was? Would Wong be holding the Sanctum for a man who wasn’t coming back?
Was Pepper still there? Happy? Rhodey? Vision or Harley or Bruce or Nat or –
What if Steve was gone, too?
(What if the last thing the Avengers ever did was tear each other to pieces?)
He had persuaded Nebula to pilot him to Earth with the promise of other heroes who could help her take the fight to Thanos. There was a fifty-fifty chance that any one of them still remained.
Heads or tails.
“What would you have done?” Nebula asks abruptly, and it takes a minute for his brain to catch up. She still isn’t looking at him.
“Before?” Tony muses. “I don’t know. I had an infinity stone in my grasp before and that didn’t end well for anybody, so I’d like to think I’d just lock it up in a vault, maybe split the stones.” Maybe he’d fix his heart first, maybe he’d end world hunger, maybe he’d – maybe he’d – “I don’t know. Now, though? Now I – I just want Peter back.”
“The child.” It is not a question. Tony nods.
He’d want Pepper safe of course. His team. He’d want the Earth back, six billion plus with all their misery and hope. But Peter is still under his fingernails, in his clothes.
(Peter was barely seventeen.)
Nebula hesitates. For a moment he thinks she’s spotted something, but her eyes slide towards him, never meeting his own but fixing on his hands. “There was a moment,” she says haltingly. “Gamora offered me a chance to join her and her crew. I refused. I was going to defeat Thanos, and she just wanted to be happy. I didn’t want her holding me back. If I wore the gauntlet now, I would not ressurect my sister. I would go back to that moment, and I would say yes.”
Tony thinks of a dozen lost moments then, a cold bunker, a glassed room, a handshake in a park. But his mind stutters on a green lawn, a man in red and blue in his rearview mirror.
“Together,” he breathes. It tastes like ashes.
“Yes,” Nebula whispers back, and he doesn’t mention the tears in her voice.
It’s almost time for the next jump. Ten more, and they’ll be home. Fifty-fifty, he tells himself. Steve’s done more with less.
wupacing 