madimpossibledreamer

Main Points:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Iron Man Crossover (Self-Made Hero)
Summary: Despite how it might look, the transition isn't easy. There's only so long the destabilized situation can continue before something's gotta give...
Miraculous AU
Word Count: 1499
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Tony/Pepper (implied)

( Stray Cat's sixth sense is tingling. )

Releasing this into the wild without looking over it too much, because I've already spent too much time on this already.  Just so you know what you're getting into, spoilers abound, and this thing is 3,628 words.  Brief mention of the harassment stuff + sexism + racism because this is Whedon.  If you're good with all that, then buckle up.

          Do I have the time to write this?  No.  Should I be writing Shadowed Suspicion instead?  Yes.  Am I doing it anyway?  Yes.  Here, you can get a taste of my first drafts for a college paper.  (The Xander as a Trickster Figure one would count, too, I guess.)  Sorry if this is well-known in any of the mentioned fandoms.  I definitely haven’t read all the literary analysis on the subject, don’t have access to the journals I had when I was in college (JSTOR, I miss you!), and google is generally not being useful in this endeavor.  I’m going to try to have a few quotes if I can find any quickly, but like I said, first draft.  Quality’s going to be a little bit freewriting.  I’m structuring it as much as I can, but I’m not editing.  Also, there are going to be spoilers for Buffy, the MCU, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible's, Firefly, and Yakuza of varying degrees (mostly the first two, but I do address the rest).  No real spoilers for Babylon 5 but I wanted to tag it because it is mentioned.  Not tagging some of the Whedon stuff as I don't plan to talk about them much in the future and don't want them taking up a tag slot (which probably inevitably means I'll be writing about them in the future but shh leave me to my delusions; they're cozy).  Assume when I’m referring to Marvel without further elaborating, it’s on the MCU.  While I don’t particularly want to be listening to Whedon about anything at this point, Word of Joss has said that the general outline of the movie, at least, is considered canonical, so I’m going to briefly talk about that too.
 

( spoilers + long essay )

 

this is related to idle thought #189
Watching Yakuza playthroughs + the realization that there’s a resemblance between Tony and Goro in some pictures + the Dresden Files short story Even Hand (POV John Marcone).
Headcanon 1: this Tony is actually trans.  It’s part of why he feels like he has to be so much in control.  Surgery was the first thing he went for after the deaths of his parents, only he made it out like he was grieving so much he couldn’t be seen in public and was blindingly drunk most of the time.  That last part might actually have been true.  He’d pretty much blackmailed Howard into letting him bind and saying he had a son, unless he wanted some nasty rumors about the abuse to float around.  He was five.  He’d also been kidnapped for his first time a few months before that point.  Before that, Howard “went along with” the “crossdressing” thing because of Maria, but was planning to put a stop to it.
Headcanon 2: he was also nursing a headache through this whole fic.  He doesn’t put in the artificial eye when he’s in pain, because the extra signals can make it worse just like really old/really new glasses.  It’s also why he’s drinking.  Usually, he keeps a tight control on his alcohol intake, because the last thing he wants to be is his old man, but it does help dull the pain of the missing eye in a way that other medications haven’t been able to do (at least, he hasn’t found the right one through experimentation).
Headcanon 3: Pepper's a lot better of an agent than you see here.  She was working off bad intel, and didn't expect her employer to stab her in the back.  Then again, Stark just makes her nervous for very good reasons.  If he hadn't put her on the defensive almost immediately, the conversation would probably have gone very differently.
Headcanon 4: He's also not a sociopath.  He's just ruthlessly practical and has found that business tends to go better if he pretends he is.
None of these headcanons make sense to actually appear in the fic itself, but they’re important.
(I'm also kind of surprised more Mob AUs with Tony being the mob boss don't exist.  On Ao3, anyway.)

Main Points:
Iron Man Mob AU (one of the AUs that's going to show up in Self-Made Hero)
Summary: A different first meeting for Stark and Potts.
Word Count: 2265
Rating: Teen (offscreen violence)

( come on in; the water's fine )