(no subject)

[withmoreme]

History: On May 10, 1971, Tony Stark was born to billionaire and genius weapons inventor Howard Stark and his philanthropist wife, Maria. A child genius, Tony built his first circuit board at the age of four and his first engine at the age of six. Tony was never very close to his parents; Howard, especially, seemed not to know what to do with a child, and nothing Tony did ever seemed enough to impress the man. Tony grew up seeing more of Howard's business partner, Obadiah Stane, than he did his own father, and only recently has Tony really begun to understand what his father was going through at the time and let those wounds heal.

By age fourteen, Tony was enrolled at MIT. While there, Tony met James Rhodes (or, "Rhodey"). By all accounts, Rhodey initially thought Tony to be an impossibly unlikeable brat, but eventually, Tony worked his way into the other man's affections, and the two became close friends. While at the school, when Tony couldn't find anyone willing to log the same hours as him in the lab, he built his own assistant - a fully functioning and fully automated robot that he then named "Dum-E".

Tony graduated MIT at the age of 17. After college, Tony tried to talk Rhodey into letting him get the other man a job at Stark Industries, but Rhodey declined, choosing instead to pursue his own military career with the Air Force instead. It was a move that Tony took as something of a personal blow, considering Rhodey had been his first real friend, and for a while, he held it against the other man. That changed when, a year later, Howard and Maria Stark were killed in a car accident, leaving Tony an orphan and Stark Industries in the control of Obadiah.

At twenty-one, Tony regained control of his father's company and settled into his new position as CEO. Later, when he learned that Rhodey was working in weapons development for the Air Force and that Stark Industries was in need of a new liaison with the branch, he insisted on having Rhodey in the position, where he remains to this day.

Given his position and the fame and fortune it involved, it was likely inevitable that the company's successes would start to go to Tony's head. He became an insufferable playboy, obsessed with surrounding himself with beautiful women (and the occasional man) and flaunting his money. He also followed in Howard's footsteps and became alcoholic, though he would never let anyone tell him he had a problem with any of it. He felt he was accountable to no one, and the harder anyone pushed him to be responsible, the harder Tony pushed back.

Sometime in his thirties, in response to Stane's complaints that Tony couldn't keep track of his schedule and his threats to find him a personal assistant, Tony created an artificial intelligence, ostensibly to serve as an electronic butler, and named him JARVIS. The name is an acronym standing for "Just A Really Very Intelligent System", and while JARVIS did seem to serve his purpose as far as what Stane expected, Tony had bigger dreams for the AI and carried on teaching it past what anyone thought possible. Today, JARVIS is self-aware and Tony's partner in the Iron Man suit, as well as running much of what happens inside Stark Tower and Tony's other houses.

A little over ten years ago, a young woman named Virginia Potts who worked for the company's accounting department brought to light a mistake that Tony himself had made - and dared to argue with him about it. Stane had been interviewing a stream of applicants to get Tony an actual person to make sure he was where he was supposed to be with all of them quitting shortly after starting the job. Their interaction was enough for him to transfer Virginia out of accounting and into being Tony's personal assistant. Their relationship was initially volatile, Tony forever insisting he didn't need a personal assistant and Pepper - a name that had been a childhood nickname - growing increasingly frustrated at how difficult Tony was, until she finally went off on him. Afterwards, Tony seemed to gain an actual respect for her, and they eventually became good friends, even if Tony did still make her job more difficult than she felt it really needed to be. Their relationship also continued to bloom, and today, they are something of an item.

Three years ago, Tony and Rhodey flew to Afghanistan to demonstrate the new Stark Industries creation, the Jericho missile. While there, the convoy Tony was riding with was attacked by enemy forces bearing Stark Industries weapons. Tony was kidnapped, but not before he took shrapnel to the chest. When he came to sometime later, it was to find that he was a prisoner of the Ten Rings - and that his fellow prisoner, Yinsen, had inserted an electromagnet powered by a car battery into Tony's chest to stop the shrapnel from penetrating his heart. The leader of the Ten Rings, a man known as Raza, told Tony he would be given freedom if he built them a Jericho missile of their own. Yinsen and Tony both agreed it was a lie and so made their own plans.

Over the next three months, Tony built a miniaturized version of the arc reactor that powered Stark Industries' main factory in California and had Yinsen implant it in his chest to power the magnet. The two then went on to develop a metal suit that Tony intended to pilot in order to break them out of the terrorist compound. The suit was a success, but during the escape, Yinsen was killed. Tony went on to destroy the compound and fly away, though he crashed into the desert, where he was later picked up by Rhodey, who never stopped looking for him.

Immediately after returning to the States, Tony called a press conference and announced that Stark Industries would no longer manufacture weapons. Stane advised Tony that it was a bad decision and that he should lay low and let him deal with the fall-out. In the meantime, Tony built an improved version of the miniaturized reactor, as well as improving and rebuilding the armored suit.

During his first public appearance since the press conference, Tony was alerted to the fact that Stark Industries' tech had been used to destroy Yinsen's home village. When Tony confronted Stane, Stane revealed that he had plans to replace Tony as the head of Stark Industries. Enraged, Tony flew his improved suit to Gulmira and destroyed the Ten Rings' weapons stashes, as well as killing the men occupying the village. On the way home, Tony was attacked by a pair of United States Air Force F-22s. In an attempt to stop the attack, he revealed his secret identity to Rhodey. Back in Malibu, Pepper discovered him trying to get out of the suit, thus outing him to her, as well.

After the attack on Gulmira, Tony sent Pepper to hack into the company's computer system through Stane's computer. While there, she discovered that not only had Stane authorized the shipment, he was the one who had paid the Ten Rings to kill Tony, though they decided to use him to build them weapons instead. Before Pepper could warn Tony about Stane, the other man ambushed Tony in his home, paralyzing him with a Stark Industries device and cutting the arc reactor out of Tony's chest to power a suit Stane had reverse-engineered from the ruins of Tony's first suit.

Tony managed to crawl his way down to his garage and make use of the original reactor. He then went to Stark Industries to help Pepper and agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. stop Stane, who had donned his suit to avoid being placed under arrest. With Tony's suit not at full power, he was outmatched, but Pepper was able to overload the original, full-size arc reactor, electrocuting and shorting out Stane's suit and causing him to fall into the exploding reactor, killing him.

At the following press conference, Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D. presented Tony with a cover story; instead, Tony outed himself publicly as Iron Man. Tony later returned home to find Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., waiting. Fury was less than impressed with Tony's performance in front of the press and informed him that he wasn't the only superhero out there, also explaining to him a proposed and so-called "Avengers Initiative".

Tony spent the next six months using the Iron Man suit to help maintain world peace and working on reinstituting the Stark Expo in order to carry on his father's legacy. After the opening of the Expo in New York, Tony was summoned to a senate hearing where Senator Stern demanded that Tony turn over the Iron Man technology to the United States government. Tony refused, claiming that he was the only one capable of creating the technology and that it was his property.

In the meantime, the palladium cores Tony had used to power the arc reactor were slowly poisoning him. Despite his best efforts, he had been unable to find a substitute, and, as a result of his impending death, grew increasingly withdrawn and reckless. He didn't tell anyone about the problem, but appointed Pepper as CEO of Stark Industries and, when a Natalie Rushman from the legal department came to make it official, hired her as his personal assistant.

While in Monaco, Tony decided to drive his own race car in the Circuit de Monaco, where he was attacked by Ivan Vanko, son of Anton Vanko, a former business partner of Howard's who Tony's father had had deported for espionage. Tony discovered that Ivan was out for revenge on the company after his father died in poverty. A few days later, though, Ivan was apparently killed in an explosion.

During what Tony suspected would be his final birthday party due to the palladium poisoning, he donned the Iron Man armor and got drunk, forcing Rhodey to don an older suit and intervene. The two fought until a simultaneous blast from their repulsors caused an explosion. Rhodey took the suit back to the military, and Tony went for doughnuts, where he was confronted by Nick Fury. Director Fury revealed Natalie Rushman to be S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff, assigned to keep an eye on Tony, and that Howard had been a founding member of the organization. Fury gave Tony some of his father's old materials which led to Tony's discovery of a hidden message in the diorama of the original Stark Expo. With JARVIS's help, Tony was able to synthesize the element, vibranium, and use it to power his arc reactor, thus reversing the palladium poisoning.

Afterwards, Ivan Vanko called Tony to reveal that he was still alive and wanting revenge. Tony donned a new suit to fly to the Expo, interrupting a presentation by rival weapons manufacturer Justin Hammer, with Rhodey in his new, heavily armored suit as the centerpiece. While there, Ivan remotely took control of Rhodey's suit and the armored drones he had created for Hammer, using them to attack Tony and the people attending the Expo. Natasha was able to get Rhodey back control of his suit, and the friends were able to defeat the drones. Ivan himself then appeared in an improved version of his own suit, and neither is a match for him until they fire simultaneous repulsor blasts, recreating the explosion. Unable to escape, Ivan set off the self-destruct in his own suit, as well as in the downed drones. Tony, Rhodey, and Pepper all narrowly escaped; then, Pepper attempted to quit as CEO, and she and Tony finally kissed.

After the fight at the Expo, Fury told Tony that, while Iron Man was approved for the Avengers Initiative, Tony himself was not. Tony agreed to serve as a consultant for S.H.I.E.L.D. as long as Senator Sterns would personally present medals to Tony and Rhodey at a ceremony planned for the two.

Sometime later, the Avengers Initiative was reinstated after the Asgardian Loki attacked a S.H.I.E.L.D. base and stole an item known as the Tesseract, an energy source and weapon, as well as brainwashing several agents and a doctor who was studying the Tesseract. Agent Coulson alerted Tony to the new threat, and when Captain Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America, and Agent Romanoff encountered Loki in Germany, Tony arrived to help take him down and back into custody. On the way back to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s flying base, Loki's brother Thor took him, leading to a confrontation between Thor and Tony which ended only when Steve intervened.

Back on the helicarrier, Tony and Dr. Bruce Banner worked together to track the Tesseract using the gamma radiation it emitted. By using JARVIS to hack S.H.I.E.L.D.'s computers, Tony also discovered that they were planning to use the Tesseract to create weapons. An argument ensued, and one of the agents Loki had brainwashed, Clint Barton, set off an explosion, disabling one of the helicarrier's engines and causing Bruce to transform into his alter ego, the Hulk. Steve and Tony were able to get the engine restarted and save the helicarrier from falling out of the sky, but in the chaos, Thor and Bruce were both ejected from the helicarrier, and Loki managed to escape after stabbing and apparently killing Agent Coulson.

Fury used Coulson's death to motivate the team into working together. Tony was able to figure out that Loki would use the arc reactor powering Stark Tower to use the Tesseract to open a portal to another dimension, allowing an army of beings known as the Chitauri to invade New York. During the attack, Fury's superiors unleashed a nuclear missile on Manhattan, but Tony was able to divert it through the portal. Instead of falling back to Earth, however, he ended up on the island.