Archive of Our Own

Natasha Marie Stark was born twelve minutes before midnight on May 29th, 1970. She weighed a healthy seven pounds and two ounces when she arrived. 

She was the most beautiful thing that either of her parents had ever seen. 

And she was screaming loud enough to scare the pigeons from the trees outside. 

Natasha knew that she was smarter than the rest of her classmates by the time she was in elementary school. She often overheard her parents arguing about whether to make her skip a grade or not. Her father wanted her to skip over third and fourth grade, so that she could continue rising to the top like the bright Stark woman she was. Her mother wanted her to stay in the same grade as all her friends, and warned her father that she needed to develop socially as well as mentally. 

Her father won. 

That’s how Natasha found herself in a classroom filled with rowdy students a few years older than her. She quickly found an open desk near the back and started pulling her supplies out of her backpack. 

One of the biggest in her class caused the rest of the students to part like the Red Sea. His name was Brock, and he had a disgustingly common last name that she had forgotten almost instantly. 

“You’re sitting in my seat,” he said, pointing at the uncomfortable plastic chair she had unpacked her bag around. He spoke in a monotone voice, as if any change in tempo or pitch would show some kind of weakness. 

She looked up at him and jutted her chin out. “Don’t see your name on it.”

He exhaled. She thought idly that he looked a bit like a brick wall. “It’s mine.”

“Tough shit,” she replied tersely. She had heard the phrase a million times from her father, spoken whenever she tried to follow him into his lab. 

She didn’t expect the room to react, but it was like a switch had been flicked. All of the students were staring at her, including Brock. 

He laughed and leaned in close to her, close enough that she could feel his breath part her shoulder-length hair. “You’re cute, Natasha,” he said, thin lips spreading slowly across his face. “You’d be even better if someone taught you how to keep that pretty little mouth shut.”

It felt like someone had poured ice water over her head. 

The moment was broken by the teacher walking in. Brock sat down a few chairs away from her, but she could feel the weight of his glare all the same. She learned that even the toughest kids in school fear the teacher. 

Said teacher left them with minimal supervision while they were waiting to be picked up outside the school. 

Natasha sat on the edge of the school’s property with her sketchbook, watching how the different ways the girls on the swingset pumped their legs gave them different heights. Something about the way they moved made it hard to look away. She imagined their movements breaking down, trying to find the relationship between their legs pumping and the swing’s height. She had her sketchbook out, trying to map out the motions. 

She was stopped by a rough hand jolting her shoulder. She looked up to see the sun blocked out by Brock. 

“Ready for your first lesson, freak?” he growled. 

She put her sketchbook on the grass beside her and stood up. “I’m not a freak,” she weakly retorted. 

“You think you’re hot shit because you’re younger than all of us, huh?” Brock bared his teeth at her. “I wonder who your mom had to whore herself out to so that you could get in our class.”

Natasha threw the first punch. 

Before she knew it, she was laying on the ground next to her sketchbook, which now sported a muddy shoe print on the cover. 

Her nose was bleeding. She reached up to touch it gingerly. It felt numb and sparkly, like when she would sit on her leg wrong and had to shake it awake. She looked up at Brock with wide eyes. 

“Didn’t anyone tell you that you shouldn’t hit girls?” she gasped.

Brock spat onto the ground. “Ain’t nothin’ girly about you.”

When she had dinner with her parents that night, her father never looked at her long enough to notice the faint bruises covered with foundation that was two shades too dark. 

Before she went into high school, Jarvis taught Natasha self-defense. 

He told her that since she was small, she didn’t have to play by the rules. 

She didn’t see why she would have ever cared about them in the first place.

In tenth grade, Natasha sat in front of an English worksheet that read, What do you want to be in ten years?

She rolled her eyes and wrote, Finishing my first doctorate degree, if I haven’t done so already.

Everyone always laughed at her when she told them her plans for education. They expected her to say something innocuous and easy, rather than something that’s realistic for her skillset. She was starting to get tired of having to minimize her abilities to make the people around her comfortable. Nobody liked a girl that was smarter than them. 

Not that she particularly minded how people felt about her. 

“I bet I can guess what Natasha wants to be,” she overheard someone mutter to their friend from the desk behind her, despite her best efforts to ignore the whisper. “I bet she wants to be an even bigger dyke than she already is. Have you seen the way she dresses?”

Natasha broke the tip of the pencil against her paper as the two girls giggled quietly. Her cheeks were burning. She gritted her teeth and pulled out a new pencil. She wasn’t even a dyke, not that they cared. She knew that she liked women, but she wasn’t… She didn’t feel like a lesbian. Something about the label made her set her teeth on edge. 

She tried not to think about it. 

Her answer, Finishing my first doctorate degree, if I haven’t done so already, stared up at her from the worksheet. She chewed her bottom lip as she looked at it, ignoring the weight of the stare coming from the girl who was sitting behind her. She sniffed quickly once before crossing it out.

In its place, she wrote, An even bigger dyke.

She could handle the call to her parents. Maybe it would cause her dad to finally give a shit about her schooling, since getting straight A’s clearly wasn’t doing anything. 

She was still fuming by the time she walked out of the classroom. One of the girls that had always been nicer to her, Jessica, sped to catch up with her. 

“Hi Nat,” Jessica greeted, over-friendly as ever. “What’d you think about that assignment?”

Natasha huffed and adjusted her backpack straps. “Bullshit, like the rest of that class.”

“I, um,” Jessica struggled to start her sentence for a few seconds. “I heard what Brittany said about you. That was so bitchy of her. Why would she ever say that?”

“Well, she’s right,” Natasha growled. “I am a dyke.”

“What?” Jessica stopped in the hallway. “You’re a lesbian?”

“I am.” 

Natasha also stopped, turning to face Jessica head on. She had taken a step back at Natasha’s confirmation. 

There was a moment where it felt like they were the only two people in the hallway, frozen in time against the current of students. 

“Don’t come near me,” Jessica said coldly, before turning on her heel and walking purposefully away.

Natasha was never let into her father’s lab. 

She had tried to sneak in countless times, but each time she failed, the security would double. Each time she succeeded, her father would yell loud enough to make the walls shake. 

She could go in and out of any other room in any other building, but she always felt the siren song of her father’s personal lab.

The absence of meaningful friendships meant she had a lot of free time to imagine what it must be like to be able to work freely, without having to dumb herself down. 

She spent most of her time in the garage working on old cars instead.

Jarvis was helping her clean a scratch on her face. One of the boys at school pushed her into a tree branch for telling him that his design was going to fail in engineering class. She was one of the few girls in that class, and the boys didn’t take kindly to being told what to do by her. Even if she was right. 

“Why can’t you make friends with one of the girls in your classes, Miss?” Jarvis asked as he dabbed the scratch with a cotton ball soaked in antiseptic. “These boys that you mess with will only continue to antagonize you.”

“It’s not that easy,” Natasha said, flinching against Jarvis’ hand. “None of the girls like me. I don’t like them either.”

Jarvis hummed in response. “Then maybe you should look for nicer boys to spend your time with. You’re at the age where you could start looking for a suitable boyfriend.”

Natasha looked away. “I’m not going to do that either.”

“Well, then.” Jarvis leaned back to see all of her and gave her a small smile. “I suppose you should get used to this.”

The sting of the antiseptic caused small crocodile tears to well up in the corners of her eyes.

Natasha went to a salon and got a pixie cut the summer after she graduated high school. Her father yelled at her. She didn’t care. It was getting in the way and she was tired of searching for hair ties. 

She never let it grow past her ears again.

Natasha met James Rhodes in one of her first-year physics classes at MIT. He quickly became her resource for when she was too hungover to make it to class and needed the notes. He shared his notes with her begrudgingly, and always reminded her that he was only doing it out of the goodness of his heart. 

He was one of the few people who didn’t treat her differently because she was the only woman in class, or because she was a few years younger than everyone else. When she was with him, she didn’t feel constrained by her body. 

They moved into an apartment together after her first year. Her parents were not thrilled. 

She didn’t care.

Natasha lost her virginity to a woman named Joan. They spent more than a few nights together, not all of which were sexual. Sometimes they would just lay on Joan’s roof and watch the stars, passing a joint between them. 

“Did you ever feel different growing up?” Joan asked one night. 

Natasha tore her eyes away from the sky to look at her. “I still do. All the time.”

Joan nodded. 

“I thought something in me was broken.” She took a drag and let the smoke spill out of her mouth. “Everyone else seemed to be able to figure it out. All of their cliques and romances and teenage love stories.” She sighed. “It wasn’t until I saw Desert Hearts that I realized what the difference was. I was never going to fall in love with a man.”

Joan passed the joint to Natasha and she just held it, not ready to take another drag yet. 

“I feel like a freak,” Natasha said, filters weakened by her growing high. “It’s like everyone else has this innate knowledge of how to live normally, but I don’t.” Joan turned so her whole body was facing her. “Something’s wrong with me.”

Joan frowned. “That sounds heavy.”

“I can get through the day okay,” Natasha reassured her, giving a half-hearted shrug. “There’s just this weight on my shoulders. I feel guilty all the time, and I don’t know why.”

Joan’s frown deepened. Natasha took a drag and blew the smoke upwards onto the stars. 

She didn’t see Joan much after that.

“Do you ever think about what life would be like if you were a girl?” Natasha asked Rhodey one day, while they were both doing homework in their shared apartment’s living room.

Rhodey had gotten used to her strange non-sequiturs. She used him to bounce ideas off of at all times of the day, much to his annoyance. 

He scoffed. “Why would I think about that?” He smirked at her. “Are you that desperate for a new girlfriend?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “It’s a conversation starter.”

“A bad one.”

“We’re conversing, right?”

Rhodey laughed and shook his head. “No, Nat,” he finally said in a sarcastically simple tone. “I’ve never thought about what life would be like if I was a girl. Is that what you wanted?”

Natasha went back to her homework. “Spoilsport,” she grumbled. 

She tried to focus on the problems in her textbook, but she couldn’t get her mind off of his answer. He had never thought about what life would be like as the opposite sex. Was that the norm?

She thought about it constantly. 

It had been an idle daydream of hers for a while now. Being in an environment like her electrical engineering classes where it’s very obvious that she’s the only girl made her wonder if she would feel any different as a boy. It was only natural to wonder what it would feel like to blend in with the rest of them. 

She shoved the feeling down.

It was like an itch she couldn’t help but scratch. She watched Rhodey as he puttered around their apartment, noticing the curve of his shoulders and sharpness of his jaw. He was only two years older than her, but somehow, so different. 

Every time she looked at her own body in the mirror it felt distant and impersonal, like she was just a ghost possessing it instead of an actual soul with an intimate connection to the body. Somehow, she felt a stronger connection to Rhodey’s than to her own. She didn’t know why. 

She rubbed her thumb along the modest swell of her hip. She didn’t think it was because she was ugly. She felt confident about her looks, and she knew that if she saw a woman who looked like her, she would appreciate her beauty. 

There was just… something. It made the pit of her stomach twist when she looked at herself. It made her avoid makeup and dresses. It made her look the other way when her mother said how proud she was of the woman she’s becoming. 

She just had to figure out what it was. 

It made her jealous of the men in her classes who never had to try. She would watch them, sometimes. They would drink from their water bottles and take their notes and bounce their legs. It wasn’t a sexual longing, she just liked to… watch them. She was a voyeur to the average life of a man.

She had heard about people who act like the opposite sex, in whispers and averted glances. But it was something that only happened to other people. To a friend of a friend’s uncle who got caught wearing a dress. To someone you see once on the street, and then never again. To performers who spend their days in seedy bars where you can hardly see the show through the haze of smoke. 

Never to you. 

It was like a car crash she couldn’t look away from, this slowly dawning realization. At some point, she couldn’t avoid it any longer. 

It was an overnight stay in the MIT library, surrounded by books from uncovered corners of shelves. There was an entire hidden subculture of people who were able to live as the opposite sex. There were many terms for these types of people, transsexual being one of the kindest. Men who want to become women were talked about often, the scant few times the topic was even breached. But women who became men existed too, they were just able to blend in easier. 

There were surgeries that could be done, to masculinize the chest and even to modify the genitals, although the latter had very little research surrounding it. 

Hormones proved to be an effective treatment for either subsection of transsexuals, but the regular injections of testosterone worked especially well on those wanting to become men. They were even more effective if started when the subject was young, but they will transform the body at any age. The introduction of testosterone caused more permanent changes to a developed body than that of estrogen. Facial hair, fat and muscle redistribution, even male pattern baldness could be caused by the treatment. One of the books even had pictures showing a timeline. By the time the subject reached a year on testosterone, they were virtually indistinguishable from any other man. 

She stood up quickly and haphazardly dropped the books onto a cart on her way out. She shoved the knowledge into a corner of her brain and tried not to think about it.

Natasha had never paid much attention to her breasts. They belonged to her body, but not to her. 

The bathroom was filled up with steam from her shower. She could still see herself in the mirror, but it was slightly blurry. It had been a few weeks since she raided the library, but her mind tended to drift back to the knowledge in moments like these, where she was alone in front of a mirror. 

Without reason, she felt a flash of anger build up. She wanted to make her reflection shatter. 

Instead, she slammed open the cabinet underneath the sink. She knew they had medical supplies packed away somewhere. 

Finally, she found what she was looking for. A spare roll of Ace bandages. She gritted her teeth and wound the strip of elastic bandages around her chest, binding her breasts down flat. 

She didn’t know what she was doing. It felt like she wasn’t in control. She put on the old band shirt that she wore as pajamas so she didn’t have to see the wrapping. 

The mirror showed a different person when she looked back at her reflection. The bandages gave her the illusion of a flat chest. She didn’t look quite like a man, she was still too soft around the edges for that, but she no longer fully looked like a woman either. 

There you are, came unbidden into her mind. 

She tore off the shirt and bandages and threw them onto the bathroom floor. Her chest was heaving with ragged breaths. She dressed as quickly as she could and hid in her bedroom for the rest of the night. 

She didn’t sleep. 

Before the sun began to rise, she dressed in her darkest clothing and went to steal the required components to synthesize testosterone from one of the biochemistry labs on campus.

She started injecting herself with her synthesized testosterone a few days later. 

She didn’t have a plan. She just needed for something to change.

Rhodey was sitting on the couch stoically when she came home from class one day. Sitting on the coffee table in front of him was a used needle. 

“I can explain,” Natasha instantly sputtered, not knowing where to begin. 

Rhodey held up a hand to cut her off. “Let me go first.” He lowered his hand and sighed. “Natasha, I’ve seen how easy it is for students to get drugs. But I’ve also seen the police get called to apartments and dorm rooms at the drop of a hat. You don’t know the danger that you’re bringing here.”

Natasha opened her mouth to speak but Rhodey shut it with a look. “No, you don’t understand, Nat.” He picked up the used needle and held it in front of her. “If the cops come in and find these laying around the apartment like I did, you’re not the one they’re going to take back to the precinct.” He dropped it back onto the table. “You need to work your issues out some other way. I can take you to a rehab clinic if you need, but I’m not letting you do this in here.”

Natasha’s eyebrows were scrunched together as she processed what he was saying. “No, Rhodey, it’s not heroin. Or cocaine, or anything like that. Look--” She walked over to sit next to him and rolled up her sleeve to show her unmarred inner forearms. “I’m not shooting up, it’s not like that.”

“Then tell me what it’s like.” Rhodey adjusted his position so he could face Natasha head-on. Somehow, his voice was still steady. 

“It’s testosterone.” Her eyes snapped up to track Rhodey’s expression. 

Rhodey leaned back in surprise. “What? Why would you need to take testosterone?”

“I’m a--“ her jaw kept working without a sound. She looked down at her lap. She had never said it out loud, never given a voice to her deepest thoughts. 

“I think I’m a transsexual.”

It was silent for a moment as her words filled the room. Saying them out loud felt like something clicking into place in her chest. She knew that she was right. She cautiously looked up at Rhodey. His face was blank as he processed what she said. 

“I’m not going to explain myself to you,” Natasha said, clenching her fingers into a fist. “I started injecting it almost two months ago. I take a third of a milliliter weekly. Nothing you say can make me stop now.”

“No, this is…” Rhodey trailed off and shook his head lightly. “I’m not mad at you. Confused, sure. You’re saying you want to, what, be a man?”

Natasha pursed her lips slightly. “Yes.”

“Hm.” Rhodey rubbed his jaw with his knuckles. “So, is this a feminism thing?”

“It’s not a feminism thing,” Natasha said, jutting her chin out. 

Rhodey raised his hands in defense and laughed softly. “My bad. What is it, then?”

“It’s a…” Natasha trailed off for a moment to think about how to respond. She wasn’t doing this because of sexism or homophobia or anything like that. She was doing this because it made her feel better. She had been hurt for so long that she didn’t realize there was any other way to live. This was something that she could do to get rid of the burden she had been carrying her whole life. 

“I don’t know what it is. But it’s what I’m going to do.”

Rhodey nodded slowly. “I’m not going to pretend like I understand your thought process here,” he said. “But you’re my best friend and I trust your judgment. If this is what you’re doing, I’m going to support you.”

Natasha nodded back at him. “Good.”

“Good,” Rhodey parroted. “But I’m still right about the needles. You need to get a sharps container and dispose of them safely. You can’t just hide them around the apartment.”

“I know,” Natasha replied. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.” Rhodey put a hand on her shoulder. “Nat, you need to expect this level of respect from the people you choose to have around you. Especially if you want to go through with this. It’s going to be rough. But in the middle of everything, you’re always going to have me.”

“Thanks, platypus.”

Rhodey raised his eyebrows at her. “What’d I just say about thanking me?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, either.”

Natasha groaned. “You’re making this difficult on purpose.” 

Rhodey laughed and playfully pushed her arm. 

 “So, are you going to change your name or something?” he asked after a few moments of silence had passed. “It’d be kinda weird to be a man named Natasha.”

“Yeah,” Natasha replied. “I mean, you’re right. I have to. I just haven’t decided on a name yet.”

Rhodey hummed in understanding. “Do you need help thinking of one?”

“No,” she said. “This is something I have to do on my own.”

Rhodey patted her leg and then stood up from the couch. “Okay. I’ll be here if you need me.”

He started to walk out of the living room towards the hallway to his bedroom. 

“Anthony,” Natasha called after him, causing him to stop and turn back around. “I’ve been thinking about Anthony. Tony for short. It’s Dad’s middle name. He’d like that.”

“Okay.” Rhodey nodded and smiled at her. “Tony.”

She never knew how to live in peace. 

He’s starting to figure it out.

He starts to bind his chest regularly. He only wears bras when he visits his parents. His voice starts to crack and deepen, but he tells them he just has a cold. 

I’ll tell Mom and Dad eventually, he tells himself. Once they ask about it.

They never do. 

His classmates stop talking to him, only a small decrease from the very few interactions he had with them before he started taking testosterone. He always knew that Rhodey was one of his only true friends, but this cements his belief. The other students may not talk to him anymore, but he can still feel the weight of their eyes on him. 

They still let him into their parties. He doesn’t talk to anyone there, either.

Sex isn’t as comfortable for him as it was before. He still sees Joan on campus every once in a while. He tries to make things work with her. 

“You’re so butch now,” she whispers into his ear as the moonlight filters onto their bare skin on the bed. 

He pushes her away. She startles and looks at him inquisitively through the dim room. “Don’t call me that,” he says.

“What, butch?” She laughs lightly. “It’s not an insult, I promise.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not butch.” He swallows. “I’m a man now.”

Joan laughs again. “Nat.” She motions to his body underneath hers. “Care to explain this, then?”

“I don’t want to explain.” He pulls his legs out from underneath her and wraps his arms around his knees. “Don’t call me Nat anymore, either. It’s Tony.”

“Tony,” she croons. “I can call you whatever you like, but--”

He cuts her off. “But what?”

“You can’t--” She huffs and clicks her tongue. She adjusts so that they’re both sitting, facing each other on the bed. “You’re not serious, right? You have a vagina and tits. Men don’t have those.”

“I didn’t ask for this, okay?” He stands up off of the bed. “I know what I look like. I know that I’m a freak. But it’s who I am.”

Joan is speechless for a second. “Nat--”

“Tony.”

“No, your name is Nat.” Tony looks away as if he was slapped. “Look, I don’t know what you’re going through, but you need to figure it out. You’re not making any sense.” With each time she laughs, it loses more of the humor behind it. “I mean, seriously. I’m a lesbian, I don’t fuck men.”

“Then maybe I should stop coming around.” Tony turns around and starts to shove his clothes on. 

Joan sighs. “Oh, come on. You’re being dramatic.”

“I’m not being dramatic, isn’t this how it works?” He looks over at her while he pulls his pants up. “I’m not happy with this relationship, so I’m leaving.” He shrugs. “Good luck on your finals.”

Joan stands up and grabs one of his arms. “Nat, I’m sorry.”

Tony shakes off her hand and pulls on his shirt, not bothering to do anything with his chest. “I told you that it’s Tony, and no, you’re not. You’ve made your position clear.”

He grabs his keys and wallet from her nightstand while she stands frozen in shock. He makes it to her door before she says anything. 

“You’re going to regret this!” she calls after him. He doesn't know whether she's talking about leaving her or transitioning. 

Tony pauses with his hand on the door. He turns to look at her, one last time. 

“I won’t,” he finally says, opening the door. “Lose my number.”

I never told them, he thinks. 

Tony Stark is alone in his parent’s house when they die. He’s still blinking away sleep. The phone he holds is cold and heavy against his ear. The woman on the other end is blathering on about something. He idly wonders if her parents are still alive.

What should he say? What are you supposed to say when your parents die? 

I haven’t talked to my dad in a year. His thoughts are beginning to spiral. I can’t remember what the last thing he said to me was.

He might be in shock. 

It was something about sarcasm. 

The phone hurts his ear with how heavily he’s pushing it against his head. “Ms. Stark, are you still there?”

He’s definitely in shock. 

“Yep. Still here.” He takes a deep breath that makes him shudder when he exhales. “How bad’s the car?”

The woman behind the phone’s tone jolts at his voice. “The car?”

“The car, the car they were in. You said they died in a car crash, right? So, how’s the car? Is it salvageable, wrecked, what? How’s the car?”

“Ma’am, the car’s been moved to the junkyard.”

“I can--” he rubs his face, surprised to feel tears trailing down his cheeks. “Get me the car. I can fix it. It can’t be that bad.”

“I can try to find the number of the junkyard for you, but I don’t--”

Tony cuts her off with a snarl. “Did I ask you for the number of the junkyard? I’ll give you however much goddamn money you need, okay? Just send the car--” All of the air escapes his lungs for just a moment. He vitriolically spits, “Send the car to my dead parents’ house.”

He hangs up before he has to hear another word. 

Howard and Maria Stark are dead. 

Time turns to liquid as Tony slowly slumps against the wall and ends up sitting on the cold, hard tile of the house. He barely hears the phone ring again over the sound of his own buzzing thoughts. Somehow he answers it and holds it against his ear. It’s hard to focus on the voice on the other end. 

“Tones? Is everything okay?” The voice finally makes it to his conscious mind. It’s Rhodey. He wonders how long he’s been holding the phone to his head without speaking. 

Tony rubs his mouth, idly noting how snotty his upper lip is. “Nothing. It’s nothing.” He sniffs and half-heartedly shrugs, even though he knows that Rhodey can't see him. “My parents died.”

“What?” Rhodey's voice feels too loud. “Tony, oh my God, what-- I mean, what happened?”

“Car crash.” Tony leans against the wall and shakily stands. “So I was thinking I won’t be able to visit your family before Christmas after all. I don’t feel like going outside.” 

Rhodey’s voice is calm.  “Tony, don’t worry about that. Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m not okay,” he growls, wincing at the crack in his voice. “Of course. They--” His words die before they can spill out of his mouth. He shakes his head and pivots off of the wall. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m sorry--”

“God, Tones, don’t apologize.” Rhodey interrupts, but Tony talks over the end of his sentence. 

“--I have to go. I need to take care of…” He trails off haltingly and turns mechanically to face the window, the gears in his brain already turning. It’s too sunny. It should be raining. “I won’t be at our apartment for a while.”

He hangs up numbly without letting Rhodey say goodbye. He has a short window to make everything right. He can fabricate his return to the public eye as a different person entirely. The Stark name won’t be sullied by his decisions.  

He stays up all night calling, emailing, turning in favors, and exchanging money. 

By the time the sun rises, the front page of every newspaper tells how Natasha Marie Stark has tragically died in a car accident with her mother and her father. The only remaining Stark on Earth is their recluse son, Anthony Edward. 

It doesn’t make him feel any better.

The mangled car is brought to the garage the next morning. Edwin Jarvis arrives later in the day. He freezes when he sees Tony for the first time. 

“Miss,” he says with a soft voice, “I heard you passed away. Your brother--”

Tony holds up a hand to cut him off. “Don’t.” His voice is still clipped, his face is still raw. He takes a deep breath. “I’m not going to talk about anything that you’ve heard.”

Jarvis sighs. “The Starks never cease to amaze me.”

“You won’t tell anyone that I’m here.” Tony feels tears start to well up again, against his will. “Please.”

Jarvis steps into Tony’s personal space and gently lays a hand on his cheek. “Of course, Miss. I trust that you understand what you are doing.”

Tony pulls his face away. “I’ll be in the garage.”

He turns on his heel and leaves. He doesn’t come out of the garage for a week.

Tony doesn’t go to the funeral. 

Instead, he visits his parent’s graves the evening after the procession has gone home. There’s two cold gray gravestones that read Maria Collins Stark and Howard Anthony Stark . Sitting next to them is another that reads Natasha Marie Stark. All three of the graves have many flowers left around them. 

He stands at the foot of the three graves silently. He doesn’t speak. 

He has nothing to say. 

When he’s ready to leave, the cemetery is only lit by the moon. He lays a white carnation on both his mother and his father’s grave. 

He leaves nothing on his own.

The hallways in the house are long and lined with flowers in heavy modern vases. It isn’t long before Tony ends up in front of his father’s personal lab’s frosted glass door. It has a fingerprint scanner and electronic passcode to the left of the entrance. He’s known the passcode since he was old enough to trace the movement of Howard’s fingers as he entered it. He carefully inputs the passcode into the machine. 052970. His birthday. 

He breathes out a soft, “Come on,” as he puts his thumb over the scanner. The light flashes red. 

“Let me in, let me in, let me in,” he mutters as he punches the numbers in and scans his thumbprint again. The light continues to flash red.  

“Why didn’t you let me in? You never let me into your fucking lab!” he shouts at the glass door. He flinches at his own volume and for just a moment, he can only hear his ragged breath echo through the hallway. He can feel the oppressive silence as the light flashes red at him once more. His vision starts to blur. 

“Too good for your only daughter to ruin, huh?” he yells again as he clenches his jaw, lavishing the way his raspy throat causes his voice’s texture to roughen. 

He pounds his fist on the glass door. “You wanted to make me into a ‘proper woman’, right?”

“God damnit, Dad!” Tony slams his whole body against the door. 

“You never wanted a drugged-out lez for a daughter, did you?” He shoves himself into the door again, knocking the air out of his lungs. “You never even fucking looked at me!”

The hallway is becoming blurry through Tony’s wet eyes. He pushes himself off of the door and grabs one of the heavy vases resting by the wall. He heaves it over his shoulder and swings it at the door. “Well guess what, Dad? I’m--” 

He is cut off by the sound of glass shattering as the vase breaks the entrance to Howard’s lab. He falls to the ground because of the shift in balance. Tony stares at the glass surrounding him, his hands beginning to bleed. His head snaps up to the end of the hallway when he hears a throat being cleared. 

“I heard the crash from my quarters, Miss,” Jarvis says. “Do you need any assistance?”

Hearing Jarvis speak breaks the spell. Tears start to well up and spill over Tony’s cheeks. He roughly wipes his eyes with the back of his wrist, getting a small streak of blood on his jaw from the cuts on his hands. 

“Jarvis, I--” Tony’s mouth moves noiselessly. “I can’t live like this any longer.”

Jarvis walks closer and puts a hand carefully on Tony’s back. “What do you mean?”

Tony takes ragged breaths until his breathing is even. He carefully adjusts his position so he’s leaning against the wall and looking at Jarvis. “Why haven’t you asked me why my voice has changed?” He finally asks. He motions to himself. “Or why I cut my hair short? Why haven’t you asked me what happened with my tits?”

For once, Jarvis seems flustered. “Miss,” he says, ”I don’t want to cause any offense." He visibly struggles to find words to say. “You have been enamored with alternative lifestyles for many years, now. You have always been an interesting young woman. I didn’t want you to treat you any differently than I have in the past.”

Tony turns his face to the side as if he had been slapped. More tears are growing in the corner of his eyes. 

“Jarvis, I can’t--” Tony finally gathers the courage to say. “I can’t be a woman anymore.”

He sees a hand enter the side of his vision. He takes it and Jarvis helps him off of the ground.

 “I’ll walk you to your room, Miss,” Jarvis says in a low voice. 

“No,” Tony yelps, pushing himself away from Jarvis. “Don’t call me Miss anymore.”

Jarvis frowns slightly. “Natasha, I’m not sure that I know what you mean.”

“Don’t call me Natasha either!” Tony sighs and relaxes the muscles in his hands. “She’s dead. I’m Tony.”

Jarvis scoffs and asks, “You’re the recluse brother?”

Tony juts his chin out at him. “Yes. I go by Tony. And I bind my chest. And when someone treats me like a man, I don’t correct them.”

There’s a heavy silence that fills the hallway at Tony’s confession. He never thought this far. 

“You’re a transsexual,” Jarvis says flatly. 

Something about the way he says it makes Tony flinch. He looks away and nods. 

Jarvis exhales with a long, slow breath. “Miss, I know that you must miss your parents deeply, but you aren’t making sense. Let’s get you to your bed.”

Tony can feel a blush rise in his cheeks. “This isn’t about that. I’ve known for a while.”

The words that they aren’t saying are filling the room. 

Jarvis finally breaks the silence. “I’m not sure what to say to you.” Tony lifts his head to look at him head-on. “What would you like to hear?”

Tony’s mind produces many options, but he can’t bring himself to voice them into reality. After a few moments have passed, he shrugs and tucks his head into his arm. He presses his eyes shut and ignores the hot trail that his tears trace on his cheeks. 

“Then I’m going to retire for the night. Goodnight.” Jarvis’ lips press together in the beginnings of an M, but he relaxes them and turns to exit the hall. 

Tony sits alone in the empty hallway. He leaves to his bedroom when the sun starts to peek through the windows. 

When he returns in the morning with bandages on his hands, the broken glass on the floor has disappeared.

Jarvis and Tony don’t talk about that night for another week. 

“I wasn’t lying,” Tony says once, over breakfast. 

He spends the rest of the morning explaining. It’s not much, but it’s a start. 

Jarvis stops calling him “Miss” that night. 

He calls him “Sir” for the first time a few weeks later.

He finds a very confidential Southern-Korean woman to perform surgery on his chest. He pays her handsomely and she tells him stories about her bright young daughter while he recovers.

Natasha graduated from undergrad, but it’s Tony who gets the doctorate degree.

Anthony Edward Stark enters the public eye loudly. He’s been taking testosterone for over two years now, and the scars from his top surgery have since healed over. So long as no one catches him with his pants down, it’s virtually undetectable that he ever lived as a woman. Not even good ol’ uncle Obie recognizes him. It helps that he had never given Natasha a second glance. No one did. 

He starts by booking an interview with Vanity Fair, which turns into a follow-up interview with another magazine, which turns into multiple news outlets wanting him to speak on their channel. He has to come up with an elaborate story for his childhood, but he has the press eating from the palm of his hand. They’re so blinded by their pity and rising viewership that they don’t bother analyzing the minute details. 

It isn’t long until he needs to hire an assistant to help him keep his schedule straight. 

That’s where Pepper Potts comes in. As soon as she enters his life, he knows that he won’t be able to go back to not having her around. She’s a godsend. 

He wants to tell her.

The playboy facade is surprisingly easy to carry. It starts without any prompting from him or his PR team. The media simply sees the way he acts and forms its own story. 

His reputation precedes him. The women he meets at events are all too happy to be the great Tony Stark’s next conquest. He takes them back to his mansion and takes care of them, but brushes their hands away when they creep down to his underwear. 

The stories tell themselves. No one wants to be the only woman that Tony Stark didn’t fuck.

One of the last conversations that Tony has with Jarvis takes place in the muted lighting of Jarvis’ retirement home. 

“Could you tell, when I was a kid?” Tony pauses and takes off his tinted glasses. “That I would end up like this?”

“Children are strange creatures, Sir. It’s impossible to say which traits will last until adulthood,” Jarvis says, humming thoughtfully. “Would my answer change anything?”

Tony rubs his glasses’ lenses with the hem of his shirt, thinking. Finally, “Nah.” 

Jarvis makes eye contact with him out of the corner of his eye. “Then I’ll let you decide.”

The two men sit in silence for a few minutes. They both feel open and raw in the cramped room that they’re sitting in, as if they know that this meeting will be one of their last. 

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Tony confesses softly. His voice is hardly louder than a whisper. He clears his throat before continuing. “Everything that I am is based on a lie. You’ve seen the stories that are sprouting up. It’s only a matter of time until the public turns on me.”

Jarvis smiles and rubs his thumb on the back of Tony’s wrist. “My dear boy. You will always find the path to redemption.”

Tony laughs despite himself. “Thank you, Jarvis. You were--” Tony’s voice catches in his throat and he has to try again. “You were more--”

Jarvis cuts him off with a pat on the cheek. “Don’t worry about that, now.”

They sit in silence for many minutes, both reminiscing at their own pace. 

“Help me understand, Sir,” Jarvis says, gently breaking the silence. “You never seemed unhappy when you were a child. What made you choose this path?”

Tony sighs and puts a hand over Jarvis’ on the railing of the hospital bed. “I was always unhappy, Jarvis. I just never knew why.”

Edwin Jarvis passes away late on a dry August evening. 

Tony Stark goes into his lab and doesn’t come out for a week.

JARVIS is out of beta by the end of the year.

He tells Pepper late one night, when he’s had a few shots too many. 

“I’m transsexual,” he mumbles against her shoulder as she helps him back to his room, an event that happens all too often. 

“You’re what?” she asks, in the tone of voice she would use to speak to a toddler.

Tony pushes himself off of Pepper and looks at her head-on. “Transsexual.”

Pepper looks at him blankly and then laughs drily. “Tony, you’re drunk.”

“No, I’m not--” He stops, then corrects himself. “I’m drunk, but I’m not lying.”

“Tony,” Pepper scolds. “You’re telling me you want to become a woman? Have you seen yourself? You’re the epitome of male hedonism.”

Tony laughs, despite himself. “No, Pep, I--” he cuts himself off by laughing again. Maybe he is more drunk than he planned to get. “You’ll get why that’s funny in a minute.”

Pepper glares at him. 

“Ms. Potts,”  he croons. “I’m not trying to say that I want to be a woman, I’m telling you that I already was one.”

He’s still laughing to himself a bit, but Pepper leans back in shock. “What? Tony, what do you mean?”

“I mean that when my mom popped me out, the doc said, ‘Congratulations, it’s a girl!’”

Pepper scrunches her eyebrows together. “But you look like--”

Tony cuts her off. “Testosterone shots.”

“But, I mean.” Pepper shakes her head in shock. “What happened to your…” She trails off, looking vaguely at his chest. 

“Oh, check it.” Tony unbuttons his shirt to his belly button and pulls it to the side to show his right pec. “I found a lovely plastic surgeon and paid her double to keep it confidential. You can still see the scar.”

Pepper leans over and lightly traces the scar with her fingernail. Tony suppresses a shiver. Her gaze falls lower. 

“So does that mean you have a…” She trails off again, not wanting to say it. 

“Vagina?” Pepper cringes at his brashness. “Yep. Hasn’t seen any action for a while. Well, from other people, I mean. Personally? I’ve been--”

“Okay!” Pepper cuts him off. 

Tony pauses for a moment. “Oh my God,” he says. “I think I am drunk.”

“Yes, you are.” Pepper seems glad to be reminded of what she was in the process of doing. “I am taking you to your room because you are completely wasted and I am too nice for my own good.”

“You are,” Tony says. “Nice, I mean. You’re one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.”

Pepper rolls her eyes, but smiles. “Flatterer.”

Eventually, they get to Tony’s bedroom. Pepper helps him get to the bed, where he flops on top of the covers unceremoniously. 

“Don’t be weird about it,” he mumbles from the pillow. He rotates his head to look at Pepper. “Please. I know it’s a lot. But you deserve to know.”

Pepper sits on the bed next to him and puts a hand in his hair. She scratches his head as she talks. “I won’t make it weird, I promise.” She sighs softly. “It gives me a new perspective on you. Not better, not worse, just different.”

“I can’t lose you,” Tony roughly whispers. 

She smiles. “You’re not going to. I don’t think of you as any less of a man as I did before.” She runs her fingers through his hair once more then removes her hand and stands up. “I’ll have questions, I’m sure, but we can leave those for when you’re sober.”

Tony nods against the pillow, eyes already half-closed. 

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” Pepper says, taking her heels off and leaving them beside Tony’s bed. “I’m going to go pour you a glass of water, put some Advil on your nightstand, and then crash in your guest room.” She smirks down at him. “You’re going to take the Advil when you wake up and then give me a raise for putting up with you when you’re drunk. Five percent.”

Tony laughs a low chuckle and settles into the bed even more. “Three.”

“We’ll settle on four and a half,” she says, patting his cheek. She leaves to get water from the kitchen.

Tony is asleep before she returns.

This was supposed to be a simple weapons demonstration. 

Tony’s panicking before his eyes even have a chance to open. The haziness from whatever anesthesia, if any, they gave him snaps away as his adrenaline skyrockets. He instinctively covers his bare chest with one hand, but his fingers get tangled in wires coming out of him. 

He might throw up. 

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Tony hears a voice say from outside his view. His fingers loosen slightly. 

“What the hell did you do to me?” Tony finally says to the man in the cave with him. 

“What I did?” The man looks at him. ”What I did is to save your life. I removed all the shrapnel I could, but there's a lot left, and it's headed into your atrial septum.” He motions to Tony’s hands covering the twin scars on his chest. “Don’t bother, I already noticed them.” He pauses gracefully for a moment. “I’ve seen that style of scars before. You lead a brave life, Tony Stark.”

Tony turns his head to the side and winces instead of responding.

He flinches when he’s introduced to Black Widow.

Pepper stays with him. Pepper stands by him in every sense of the word and when she stands by him, she towers. 

She asks him, once, while cradling him under silken sheets, if he wants her to stop wearing heels. If her breaching his height is somehow a hidden faux pas.  

“No,” he whispers, and leaves it at that. The answer slides out of his mouth and onto her arms wrapped around his chest. They cover his scars partially, but not completely. There’s too much scar tissue on his chest now, anyways. He can’t help but wonder if there’s any divine meaning behind that. If maybe, some things are unable to be hidden. 

Her question plants a seed in his mind. No one bothers him about his height in the tower, the rest of the Avengers either too polite or too stubborn to crack such an easy joke. When he stands next to Nat while they’re serving up their plates for dinner, he can’t help but puff out his chest at the measly few inches of difference. 

He deflates when he practically runs into Thor. Being toe-to-toe with a literal god, who’s not only half a foot taller, but stacked like a brick shithouse as well, he can’t help but feel a little emasculated. He’s glad that Steve tends to give him more personal space. Even though he knows that Steve got practically the biggest testosterone dose a guy can get, comparing himself to Captain America would only be disheartening. 

It’s different with Pepper, he decides. It’s different with Pepper. He can’t tell if it’s because she’s a woman, or if it’s because she’s only taller when wearing heels, or if it’s because he’s hopelessly in love with her. 

A week after Pepper asks him, he talks about it with her. It’s not that they’re tall, it’s that they’re taller than him. He can’t fight the feeling of resentment towards them building slowly in his gut. That maybe they all get together in a goddamn tall Adonis biweekly club to make fun of him. That every time he tilts his chin up to make eye contact it feels like baring his neck. 

It starts as a joke, him wearing her high heels. Something to help his sudden-onset Napoleon complex, Pepper had said as she threw them onto the bed near his feet. His feet are only slightly bigger than hers, a common, if strange, effect of the hormones. They pinch at his toes. He looks in the full-length mirror by their closet and laughs. They don’t affect him like he thought they might. At the end of the day, they’re just shoes. Women’s shoes, shoes that would get him on the cover of a million tabloids if he left the house, but shoes nonetheless. 

He keeps laughing to himself until he looks over to Pepper, who’s eyeing him from across the room. 

His breath catches when his eyes meet hers. There’s a light in her eyes that she reserves for special occasions. He raises an eyebrow.

“Really, Ms. Potts?” he mutters. 

“You look delicious, Mr. Stark,” she breathes, closing the gap between them with each word. 

For once, he leans down to kiss her.

Tony is more aware than he lets on. 

He notices Peter’s quickly-hidden binder strap peeking out from his collar. The way that he adjusts his stance when someone throws a glance his way. The wall of vigilance that refuses to come down until he’s completely alone in a room. 

He recognizes the habits from his own past. 

He has to excuse himself from the room when he accidentally sees a text on Peter’s phone from May reminding him to pick up his testosterone on his way back from the compound, the final clue that cemented his idle hypothesis.

Peter is trans. 

He’s young. Too young , is Tony’s first thought. 

He sighs and leans back against a wall. 

The boy is just shy of 17. He doesn’t know the type of life he’s condemning himself to.

He has to take a minute to level his breathing. 

More than anything, it just makes him feel old. It reminds him of what he had to go through at Peter’s age. All the trauma he had to put himself through to become the man he is today. It’s been a long time since then. 

When he returns to the lab where Peter and him were tinkering, Peter gives him a smile from over his project. He’s adjusting the pressure of the web-shooters.

“I--” Tony starts, cutting himself off when Peter looks his way. He doesn’t know how to breach the subject. “You’re, um.” He waves his hand in a circle. 

Peter looks on-edge from the direct addressal, but manages to say, “Yeah?”

Tony sighs. He decides to try a different approach. He pulls up a chair near Peter’s desk. “Have I ever told you about my sister?”

“No,” Peter says quickly, but then nods his head. “But I know about her. I didn’t want to bring it up, because I know she--” his vocal tone bounces slightly “--died.”

He holds up a hand. “It’s okay, we can talk about it. It’s been over twenty years now.” He clears his throat. Lord, two decades. “You can’t find much about her online. She was never talked about much. Those days, it was hard for a woman to make a name for herself. Doubly so in an industry like this.” He motions to the lab around him. 

Peter nods enthusiastically. 

Tony chews the inside of his cheek subtly. He still has very little practice with talking openly about his past. He feels like he’s on the verge of a heart attack. 

“She went to MIT,” he manages to say. 

Peter notices the silence. “Like you?”

“Yeah, like me.” Tony rubs his eyes. “Damnit.” He’s a few seconds away from leaving this conversation for another time.

“You don’t have to talk about her, if you don’t want to,” Peter quickly says, nervously fiddling with the parts in front of him. 

Tony’s eyes flicker to the parts on Peter’s table and back to his face. “This is important for you to know.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s something only Pepper, Rhodey, and as few SHIELD agents as possible know about.”

He has Peter’s full attention now. 

“Kid, I’m--” He can’t bring himself to say it. 

There’s something different about this time than what he’s said before. He isn’t sure if it’s because he knows that the kid is like him, or if it’s because he knows that he looks up to him. 

He exhales softly and lowers his head. He knows that Peter will be nothing but accepting, but he has to fight off the years of denial and bias that have grown around him like walls. 

He clicks his tongue and looks over to one of FRIDAY’s screens. “Fri, throw up a pic of me from the 70s.”

Peter follows his gaze to see a picture of a young Natasha, dressed in an outfit picked out for her by her mother before a family reunion. Her hair was down to her shoulders and tied with a bow. She was unmistakably a young girl. Peter doesn’t say anything, but his eyes widen. 

“That was me,” Tony says, so the room isn’t filled with silence. “I’ve never had any siblings.”

Peter looks back at Tony, mouth slightly open, still speechless. 

“I don’t know the modern verbiage for it.” Tony runs his tongue along the backside of his teeth. ”Back then, people like me were called transsexual.”

“What, um,” Peter finally says. “How did you…?” He trails off, his eyebrows doing a little dance on his forehead. 

Tony gets what he’s trying to say. “It helps that there wasn’t as much media back then.” He nods thoughtfully as he remembers. “I paid off a handful of important people to make it so she died in the car crash with my parents. By the time I went into the public eye as Tony for the first time, I was virtually unrecognizable.” He pauses and gauges Peter’s reactions. “I synthesize my own testosterone. I have been since I was a little older than you are now. I came up with a fake childhood, and everyone filled in the blanks themselves. You’d be surprised at what people will come up with before they reach the truth. Especially back then. You didn’t talk about it.” He looked back down at his hands. Now that he’s started talking, he wants to unload his whole life’s story onto Peter, but he can’t dump that onto the kid. “Money and fame make people look the other way easily. I’m not proud of that.”

Tony nods after he’s done speaking.

“No, that--” Peter cuts himself off again. “You did what you had to do. I can’t imagine how it must have been, to live like that.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Wow, Mr. Stark. I never would have guessed. That’s awesome!”

Tony laughs drily. “That’s the first time I’ve heard it like that.”

“No, I mean, I--” Peter averts his eyes for a moment. “I am too. Trans. If you couldn’t tell. It’s just transgender now, though. I think transsexual is uh, a little offensive now. But I’m… I’m like you.”

He genuinely smiles a little at that. “You are.”

“Wow,” Peter says again. “Sorry, this is just crazy. I’ve never met a trans adult in real life.” He pauses. “It’s... it’s kind of sad, really.”

“I won’t lie, kid.” One of the corners of Tony’s mouth droops slightly. “It’s hard for people like us to make it this far. I’ve been much luckier than most.” He trails off for a moment, drawing a blank. He has to say something that’ll stick to the kid. “You can spend your whole life grieving those of us who didn’t make it. There’s a million people that you’ve never met whose lives were snuffed out because they lived like you’re living.” Peter frowns. Tony tries to catch his eye. “You can’t avoid feeling the weight of their legacies. You can carry them with you, but the best way to respect them is to keep living. You don’t have to start a revolution all on your own, you just need to make it to tomorrow.”

Tony surreptitiously rubs the corner of his eye. 

“Thanks, Mr. Stark. That was really nice.” Peter clears his throat. 

Tony nods. “I’m going to help you. Whatever you need. With this, or anything.”

“No, no,” Peter stammers. “It’s enough to help with the Spider-Man stuff.”

“Drop in a bucket, kid.” Tony flexes his fingers against his pant legs. “You name it. Testosterone, surgeries, anything. I want to help you. It’s the least I can do.” 

Peter shakes his head firmly. “Aunt May and I have that all figured out, we don’t need any help.” He adjusts his position in his seat. “But… The other people.” He looks up at Tony. “They need it. I want to help them. Someone has to look out for the little guy, right?”

He imagines a foundation of some sort, designed to help raise funds for hormone therapy and surgeries. Something that has a building for trans kids who get kicked out and need a place to stay. Something that could help people, led by him and the kid. 

Tony smiles.