A gift for @outercorner for this year’s @rhodeyfest!
Rhodey, Tony, and legacies. After Iron Man 3, Tony leaves the Avengers, and Rhodey steps up. (pg. 3,191 words. pre rhodey/tony. brief alcohol mentions and profanity)
read below the cut.
a/n: @outercorner, I tried to use as many of the more general prompts you gave me in your Dear Author letter as I could, and I very much hope that you enjoy this fic! I had a great deal of fun writing Rhodey’s voice for the first time, and I hope that I did him, and your prompts, justice. Happy Rhodeyfest!
This is set post Iron Man 3, but before Captain America: the Winter Soldier, in an AU in which, after destroying all the Iron Man suits, Tony left the Avengers, and, at the time of this fic, has neither resumed building suits or rejoined the Avengers.
Rhodey moonlights as a superhero, is full time active duty USAF, and still, the most exhausting thing in his life are goddamn superheroes. Not that he doesn’t love Tony (he does, he has for most of his life, by now), not that he doesn’t know that having a career soldier as family or a friend or a lover must be equally exhausting. Still, there is something about watching someone important to you shove their body into a souped up tin can to fight aliens and robots and, once, a god, that leaves you worried and worn. It’s better, feels less like biting down on tin, when they’re in the field together, but War Machine is swaddled in red tape these days, as the lines between US Armed Forces and SHIELD and the Avengers stratify further, and as Rhodey and his suit get pulled in different directions.
The worst is when he’s with Tony when the call goes out, when he’s left behind in the tower because his suit doesn’t belong to him, technically speaking, and he’s locked out of a fight he could have helped. Rhodey’s spent his entire life trying to do the right thing, and even though the Secretary of Defense himself had sat Rhodey down to underline that the Iron Patriot suit, the War Machine Rhodey wants to interrupt, is a USAF asset, Colonel Rhodes, not one of those goddamn Avengers, not suiting up with the team feels like doing the wrong thing.
Tony blows up all his suits, save for War Machine. He pulls the reactor out of his chest, lets someone else pull the shrapnel out after, and gives it all to Pepper like a promise. Like his heart on a platter.
She leaves him two months later, tells him all these heroics are too rich for her blood, that she’s been burning hot since Extremis and she hasn’t once stopped being scared.
Later, Rhodey will ask Pepper if this is what she wanted. She won’t know. Months after he asks, she’ll tell him that it would have been worth it, for Iron Man to die so that Tony could live, if only Tony could live without Iron Man. Pepper has always been ruthlessly practical, as careful as she is brave; Rhodey can’t blame her for saving herself, for knowing what she could and couldn’t withstand.
But now, there is no Iron Man; just Tony, just Pepper, just Rhodey and the wall of red tape keeping him away from War Machine. No men in flying suits, no armored Avengers at all.
Until there’s Nick Fury, sitting Rhodey down in some Los Angel donut joint, saying, “I’ve done some military property requisition on behalf of the Avengers,” and asking, “think you could hack it as an Avenger, Col. Rhodes?”
It feels like dirty pool, like losing big on your last hand, like some sort of gambling metaphor that make a lick of sense. Rhodey wants to do what’s right, but he doesn’t want to carry Tony’s leftover burden. He wants to stand as his own man, not as Tony Stark’s best friend wearing Tony’s Stark’s last suit. But who is he to say no when Nick Fury looks him dead in the eye and tells him that somebody’s gotta take the job, and there aren’t other choices. There are no better choices. Rhodey knows a lot about hard choices, about the morality you can allow yourself when in war zones; this isn’t one of them.
“By now, I doubt there’s much I couldn’t hack it as, Commander Fury.”
Rhodey decided to be a solder a lifetime ago. Deciding to be a superhero is easy after that.
“So you and Pep are hanging out,” Tony says, two months after Rhodey had become an Avenger, and three weeks after Tony had become a single man. He’s lurking, mostly. The flying car is Rhodey’s pet project, something to tinker with every time he’s in town. It was his work, for all that he’d copped and modified Tony’s repulsor tech for large scale propulsion, and Tony knows better than to touch the car, or do anything more exciting than pass Rhodey the tools he asks for.
“I don’t want to know why you know that,” Rhodey says, asks for a socket wrench. He and Pepper had gotten coffee once, to discuss SI reopening old military contracts, diversifying from weaponry to energy. She’d asked about Tony while she stood to grab her coat, like he was an afterthought. They both knew he wasn’t.
Tony lays on the workshop floor to reach under the car, holding the wrench out. Rhodey grabs it as Tony asks, “She’s good?”
Rhodey stops and turns to meet Tony’s eyes. He tells himself, this is not being left behind, this is not being passed over; it doesn’t matter how he and Tony matter to each other, only that they’ve always mattered. It’s just that Pepper matters, too. Even so, nothing feels good about being the friend in the middle, passed back and forth because he’s close, but not quite. Tony Stark’s best friend. Pepper Potts’ military liaison. Something to everyone, always more that he asked to be and still second best.
What he’d told Pepper was, “He hasn’t started building armor again, if that’s what you’re asking. But if you’re asking if he misses you, you’re more than welcome to ask him yourself.”
“I’m glad you’re there for him,” Pepper had said, instead of clarifying. He thinks she’d been asking both questions, that he’d answered both anyways.
What he tells Tony is, “She’s Pepper. Of course she’s good.”
“Of course.”
He doesn’t add, ‘of course she’s surviving without you.’ They both know it’s true, anyways.
Instead, what he says is, “I come out all this way to see you, and you don’t want to talk about this flying car I’m about to get up and running, any day now?”
Tony laughs, “you know I always want to talk about that brain of yours, honeybear. Talk dirty, dirty mechanical engineering to me, all night long.”
Rhodey already knows the Avengers, more or less. Bruce, who Tony had dragged from New York to Malibu and back when Tony still had a Malibu home to drag anyone to, he knows more than he knows the rest; Barton, who barely ever attended Tony’s social events, he knows less. Thor and Captain Rogers fall somewhere in between, with Natasha, who he’d thought he’d known back when she was Natalie, is a category all her own. After all that, he figures introductions for a wasted gesture.
When it comes time for him to run his first mission with the team, Rhodey just follows Bruce to a bland conference room in the Avengers compound, where Rogers is holding court with a PowerPoint and leaflets.
“I taught him Microsoft Office last week,” Bruce tells him as an aside in the doorway. “Steve’s very proud.”
Rogers gamely pretends he didn’t hear, and stands and salutes the moment Rhodey steps into the room behind Bruce.
“Colonel Rhodes,” he says, six feet of childhood hero crammed into a tee shirt and Levis and looking at Rhodey like he was the big deal in the room.
And maybe Rogers is a culture hero who once punched Hitler in the face, but Rhodey just returns his salute the way he would with any other lower ranking officer and nods. “Captain Rogers.”
Rogers claps both hands together with a grin straight out of a seminar on workplace teambuilding and starts by passing the handouts around the table. “First of all, welcome to the team, Col. Rhodes. I would say you have big shoes to fill, but we all know that Stark has dainty feet,” Rogers says, professional smile not budging. These superhero types have clearly been a bad influence on him.
Natalie, or Natasha, or whatever she’s calling herself these days, snorts from Bruce’s other side, putting her feet up on the conference table. Rogers scowls. “If we were that invested in Stark’s dainty rocket boots,” she says, “he’d be on the team still. Welcome to the Avengers, Rhodes. Fill your own damn shoes.”
Rhodey smiles at her and says, “you better believe I plan to.”
By the time Rhodey’s peeled himself out of the armor and retrieved his phone, six or so hours of punching robots later, he already has three voicemails from Tony.
“I see you didn’t die.” Tony answers before the phone has time to ring once. “I knew you wouldn’t. Not in my armor, right, gumdrop?”
“The USAF’s armor, you mean?” He can’t help it; precision is in his nature. And riling Tony up has always been just as much fun as watching him spin out.
“Moving past your blissful ignorance,” Tony says, “did you make me proud, Jimbo?”
“Not everything I do is about you, Tony.” He says it because somebody has to. The media circus is already labelling his existence as ‘a new look for Iron Man,’ and ‘a Stark-spangled paint job,’ as if the idea that somebody other than Tony might be inside the armor had never been entertained.
“Obviously,” Tony says.
“But no,” Rhodey says, “I didn’t die.”
“Come over,” Tony wheedles into the phone line. “I’ve started creating my own cocktails, and I want to reminisce about the glory days of last month.”
“I have plans with the team. Barton’s gotten some idea into Rogers’ head about grilling, and I’m not missing it.”
“Send me a video of Steve-O catching meat on fire?” Tony asks. He’s hiding his disappointment well, but Rhodey knows him best. He tells himself: he might be the superhero now, but he won’t leave his best friend behind.
“I would have even if you hadn’t asked,” Rhodey promises.
The things that have been always been important still are, flying suit and transfer to the Avengers Initiative notwithstanding. His family, his best friend, and his country; honor, duty, respect, and always doing the right thing, no matter how hard. When he breaks his new life down to basics, it’s the same as it has always been, and there’s a comfort in knowing this.
Two Avengers ops later, his niece Lila calls from West Philly to say she saw him on the news. “Everyone’s calling you Black Iron Man,” she says.
“That so?”
It is. Lila’s growing up in Rhodey’s father’s house, growing up where he and his sister and his brother had, and Rhodey is thinking about getting older in a country where Steve Rogers action figures were a dime a dozen, but nobody knew Gabe Jones by name.
“And what are they saying about that?” Rhodey asks. He knew better than to watch himself on the news, even without the casually dire warning Bruce had given him on the subject, early on.
“Kids at school, or on the news?” Lila asks. “News people say you ought to give Uncle Tony his armor back, but Darrien in first period math says it’s about time we got a black Avenger.”
“Listen, Lila,” Rhodey says, takes his time because this is important, and he wants to get this right. It’s not lost on him that the Avengers got an alien on their team before any of them noticed that their whole team was white. He doesn’t think there should be anything controversial about black kids like him getting heroes of their own, but he knows, in the country he lives in, it will be. “Tell those kids I’m not some new Iron Man. You tell them I’m War Machine, and then you tell them War Machine’s always been black.”
Rhodey isn’t just a second generation Tony Stark, not a new Iron Man for a new Avengers lineup; he’s his own hero. He’s an Avenger, and he’s not any less of a symbol than Tony was, than Tony still is, but it’s in his power to be a different symbol altogether. When people talk about War Machine, he doesn’t want anyone to ever forget that it’s Col. James Rhodes, from West Philadelphia and then MIT, piloting that suit.
“And then tell your grandad I’m coming up for the weekend,” Rhodey says, before he hangs up. “It’s been too long since I was back in Philly.”
Rhodey stepped down as the USAF liaison to Stark Industries when he stepped up as an Avenger, but Pepper still runs all military contracts by him, first. He’d vouched firsthand for Col. Danvers as his replacement, but Pepper’s learned not to trust so easy in recent years. They have fairly regular meetings, some of which include Danvers, which Tony certainly knows about, but has so far had the good sense not to nose around in.
This time, Rhodey’s come with an agenda of his own. “I want War Machine,” he tells Pepper. “Full time. Otherwise, I’m a liability to my team.”
Pepper nods, like she’d been expecting this. Maybe she had been. “We want you to have War Machine. Nick Fury’s requisitioned the War Machine unit from the Air Force on behalf of SHIELD and the Avengers Initiative, but it’s tentative.”
“I assume you’ve got a plan?”
Pepper smiles, like a generous saint. “SI is prepared to sell you the Iron Man Mark 14 prototype, better known as the War Machine unit, Jim. A closed record transaction.”
“How broke am I about to be?” Rhodey asks. He’ll pay it, whatever it is. Owning his suit, taking his legacy into his own two hands, is of the ultimate importance.
“I’d just as soon sign it over to you and let you take me out for a drink to make up for it,” Pepper tells him, “but closed record or no, the transaction needs to be based in legal tender. So let’s call it five US dollars and the suit’s yours.”
“No shit?”
Pepper laughs. “No shit. It’s a formality, more than anything. Without a legal transaction, I can’t verify a transfer of contested property to private ownership. Consider this covering all of our asses.”
Yours, mine, & Tony’s.
“Can’t say no to a deal like that,” Rhodey says. He pulls a five out of his wallet and slides it across Pepper’s desk.
“Between you and me, Jim,” she says, “I’m glad to see the last of the suits go.”
Rhodey’s had all of the pieces of how and when and why Pepper and Tony failed, but this confession is what puts the story together, with a clarity he doubts even Tony is privy too. It wasn’t Tony that Pepper couldn’t live with, suits or no, it was herself.
“I’ve never felt more powerful,” Pepper says, “then when I wore that armor. I’ve never been more afraid of myself.”
Rhodey knows a lot of heroes these days, war heroes, local heroes, superheroes, and the one thing they all have in common, is the constant, relentless fear of what they might become. But none of them have the prescience of Pepper to remove themselves from that temptation, to choose being human over heroic. Not all of them, he knows, even have that choice. There are, he thinks, a multitude of different types of heroes on this earth. Maybe Pepper Potts is the one he admires the most.
Rhodey sees Tony more than he did then when he was on his last tour, but now that he’s living in Avengers headquarters upstate, he sees him less than he ever has while living in the same state.
“I quit, like, fourteen years ago,” Tony insists when Rhodey invites him to visit. “No offense, platypus, but no power on God’s green earth is dragging this ass back to the Super Friends Storage Facility. I’m too down to earth these days. Too humble.”
“Tell me more about how humble you are, Tones. Really. I want to hear.”
“Incredibly,” Tony says. “Deeply. You wouldn’t believe how good I can humble, baby.”
So Rhodey takes a long weekend, drives into the city to crash in Tony’s giant brand labeled monument to his dick. It’s like old times, almost, just the two of them and their genius and a truly unhealthy amount of pizza and beer, no Pepper or Obie or Stark Industries vs. US Armed Forces feud hanging between them. All that’s different is that this time, it is Rhodey who has gone on ahead, and come back for Tony.
“You’re good at it, being a hero,” Tony says. “You’re better than I was ever going to be.”
“Nah,” Rhodey smiles. “Just different. Iron Man and War Machine were never gonna be the same.”
“No,” Tony says. “They weren’t.”
Rhodey is quiet while Tony demolishes three slices of pizza. They’ve both got things to say, but Rhodey’s not entirely sure how to tell someone he hasn’t lost that he misses them, and Tony’s not ready to talk. Finally, Tony polishes off the last of his microbrew, wipes his hands, and kicks the pizza box towards Dummy, who trundles it off for the recycling chute.
“I’m seeing someone,” Tony says. Rhodey’s known how he feels about Tony long enough to keep his face blank; he’s used to the kind of fond disappointment that’s unrequited love and wishing the best for those who matter. “A therapist,” he clarifies, “not a special friend, or whatever. Some guy Bruce knew. Whatever.”
Tony’s flustered in the way that means what he’s saying is so important, he doesn’t know how to get it out. When Rhodey prods, he keeps talking, struggling through the urge to hold tight to his fragility in fits and bursts. “It’s good. I’m good. Better. I’m doing good work, important work. I’m collaborating with Helen Cho; you know her, right? Reengineering some of her tech to be cheaper, smaller, greener. The whole shebang. Saving lives, no suits.”
“That’s great, man,” Rhodey says, nudging his shoulder into Tony’s. When Tony bumps him back, they end up leaning into each other, backs against the workshop wall. “Really.”
“Did you know,” Tony is speaking faster now, like he’s got to force the rest of this speech of his out before he loses his nerve, his voice, his will to share. “That when I’m thinking about doing something really fucking dumb, and throwing away everything I’ve built up these last few months, I think about you? And then I do exactly what I think you’d tell me I ought to do, since, you know, you’re a genius, too.”
In a few years, Tony will say the same thing, and Rhodey will hear something very different. Something just as heartfelt but a little softer, less of a shout in the dark and more of an offer. And even later after that, Tony will say it again, and Rhodey will realize Tony has only ever meant the same thing: I love you; don’t leave me; never forget that you’re important.
“Man,” Rhodey says. “You ever think we’d end up like this?”
“Obviously,” Tony snorts. “I was always going to be rich and brilliant.”
“That right, wise guy? And me?”
“A guy like you?” Tony says. “You were always going to end up someone’s hero. Just turns out that someone is a little more like everyone.”
