Butterfly Effect

December 15th, 1987

Tony never really thought much of that night anymore. He could still remember it, clear as a bright summer day, every single detail etched into his mind like stitches in fabric, but it felt like something from a fever dream. Something that felt so real, but wasn't. This idea was further supported when his dad became even more distant and detached from him, seeming to flee to the lab every time he got close as a young child. He claimed to love him, yet he couldn't even look his own son in the eyes. He could remember hundreds of nights he spent crying in his room, sometimes being comforted but most the time waiting until all the lights were off and the monsters in his mind pounced, telling him how much of a disgrace he was that even his own father didn't love him. He knew his mom, Jarvis, and Ana loved him - they never went without saying it - but he was desperate to win the love of his father, or at least a little praise. A small 'good job' or 'great work' when he built or made an A on his test would have been the best thing he could have imagined back then, but it never came. He got it from everyone else, from Uncle Obie to the maids, but never from his own dad.

As he grew older, this resentment grew with his body. From a little seed of sadness came a tree of hurt, anger, and detachment. If he and his dad had any semblance relationship before, it was gone. An axe chopped away the thin string between them when one too many cold shoulders hit him in his heart, and Tony decided that he didn't need his father's approval. He just wanted some attention from him, and he would get it any way he could. Even if it meant acting out and almost getting himself killed in one dangerous stunt or another, from parties to pranks on teachers with Rhodey. MIT probably only kept him due to his sheer genius, excellent grades, and his dad's reputation and money. Howard's reputation and money. He didn't like calling him dad, even if it was just in his head. What kind of father abandoned their own flesh and blood? Their own son? Fathers were meant to love their children, right? That's what Rhodey and those Father's Day cards always said. Howard wasn't his father. He didn't love him, so Tony didn't love him back.

Except he did. As much as he tried to convince himself that he didn't, he still felt a sharp stab of pain in his heart every time Howard dismissed him with barely a word or grunt. A cold feeling still washed over him every time he was ignored, and flames of rage and sadness bit at his fractured heart when the embers were churned enough for them to argue. Sometimes it was his additude. He could admit that. But there were times when the elder man drove him up the wall until he eventually cracked, basically exploding into a metaphorical ball of anger and bitterness after their combination of harsh sarcasm and quick tempers blazed into an inferno Tony didn't feel like quelling, and neither did his father. Jarvis and Ana tried. His mother tried. He could hear them telling his father to 'go a little easier on him' and 'be less stern.' Tony supposed that was the nice way of telling him he was emotionally stunted around his son. They also told him to try and be a little more understanding of the stress his father was under and be more patient with him.

One big problem was that Tony didn't have patience. Zilch. He couldn't go five seconds standing still without being bored out of his mind and wanting something bizarre to happen, from dinosaurs coming to life to some kind of explosion. He did try to be patient a few times - for the sake of his poor mother and maybe a little bit because he did want his father to talk to him casually. Just a little. He tried it four different times, and each time he either got two worded answers or non committal grunts as his father worked on machines or signed off on paperwork at his desk. The only time they could ever have any semblance of getting along was in the lab where they both had their own space and their own projects. The two of them could stay down there for hours and not speak, lost in their own little worlds. Tony had stopped showing Howard his projects when he was thirteen and he gifted him a robot dog he had made for Father's Day, which was promptly called simple despite the complexity of the coding that the teen had spent a week of sleepless nights developing. He still took it, but Tony had no doubt it was hiding somewhere in a storage bin in the attic, covered in cobwebs and shattered pieces of his heart.