Thread: Iron, Whiskey, and Redheads: An Ironman RP (SevenxGwendolyn)

Before Afghanistan, Tony Stark had always thought of himself as a Patriot his years of toying with weapons of relatively minor destruction had never bothered him one iota. Tinkering with explosives, building better bombs, better rockets, better jets and new tanks had all just been part of what he had thought was an honourable goal. It had never occurred to him that his lifelong career of building weaponry for the American people to protect their country with - he'd never once thought that - - well, before, he'd always slept. And damn well. Not so much anymore. After he'd been struck by the shrapnel from one of his own rockets, and after he'd been put through hours of invasive, horrifying surgery, and after they'd hooked him up to a car battery to save his life only to torture him and nearly end it later, and after he'd seen the massive storage they'd had of Stark Industry weapons - he'd realized that he had supplied the enemy with a means to kill the people he was trying to protect. And after the sweat, and the blood, and the anger, and watching as Yinsin - the man who had kept him alive - died an agonizing death in front of him, he'd realized that he'd had it all wrong. He was the enemy. It was Stark Industries, it was all of the munition and arms dealers, all the people who had built lives around finding new ways to kill eachother, new ways to torture and mutilate and horrify eachother, to force others to submit or be terrorized. It was Stark Industries that had a hand in killing Yinsen's family and destroying his village, and countless others before it, and it had been his lack of focus, his innattentiveness that had allowed Obidiah the opportunity to work behind his back, to sell to people who wanted the weapons solely for the purpose of killing, not to defend anything. But he wasn't even sure there was a difference anymore. So he'd done the only thing he could think of, and he'd shut down the weapons factory of Stark Industries, and he'd turned his attention to other aspects of the business renewable energy and medical technology. After his time in Afghanistan, Tony had changed - he refused to think of it in terms of 'soul-searching' or a 'life lesson'. He'd just - changed. Of course, this was the sort of change that he couldn't come back from, not with a miniature arc reactor buried in his chest. He still never went to the award shows that were held in his honour, which was no real change, but he'd even stopped attending the parties, stopped showing his face at casinos, he'd even stopped bringing women home with him - after all, it was difficult to explain why his chest was capable of lighting up the room. He was a freak now. And, presently, a very drunk freak. After Obidiah had left the picture, and he'd stopped producing weapons, Tony had found he would lay awake at night some nights he would think about how he could improve medical technology, and other nights he could only think about all the people he had killed with his ignorance. How many innocent people had died because of Stark Industries? How many people would he have killed in the future if he'd kept the war machine rolling? And some nights, when he was lucid enough, he would think about Pepper. He wasn't sure why, but he told himself it was guilt, the knowledge that, if Obidiah had it his way, she would be dead. In fact, if Obidiah had it his way, he would have killed Pepper right in front of him, because he knew what it would have done. She could have died, and it would have been because of him - because she had tried to help him. Because he'd convinced her not to leave him. Not that Pepper was with him, exactly, but - he'd never been without her, not since he could remember. That night, he had laid in bed for hours, unable to sleep, scratching irritably at the metal piping that fit closely to the skin on his chest when the clock hit the very early hours, he rose and went to his workshop where he stayed well into the morning. Bare foot and dressed in loose slacks and a gray t-shirt, Tony's hands were strong and sure even while the whiskey made the rest of him unsteady.