"Now I see. The demon is me."
Lisa May Stark is so much more than the child she used to be when she and her father were kidnapped in Afghanistan five years ago. She's Iron Man's daughter, she's the Red Raven, she's, well, you know who she is...
i wish you'd hold me when i turn my back the less i give the more i get back oh, your hands can heal, your hands can bruise i don't have a choice, but i'd still choose you poison & wine━━the civil wars
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stark manor february 16, 2000 ( tony's point of view )
The Beginning.
I didn't think it was going to begin like this.
I swear to God, I didn't think it was going to begin like this.
To have your life start with something like this, it was the perfect recipe for destruction. Maybe I wouldn't have even taken custody of Lisa if I had known this was going to happen, if I had known that I was going to be like this. She could have been shipped off to some nice, middle-class family in some suburban part of Minnesota. Maybe there she would have been surrounded by a whole festering pack of five suffocating siblings and two incredible parents who knew what the heck they were doing.
Instead, what did that kid get? No siblings, no mom, just me. And the definition of me, well, it wasn't pretty. When I wasn't drunk out of my mind, getting some hot leggy blonde's number, or working my butt off at my company, I was sitting and staring off into space, trying to remember what the point of this was. I mean, come on, I was just this stupid kid who was as damaged as his own kid was, though it wasn't like he'd admit that. Right, because not coming out with your problems is the best way to handle them.
I was such an idiot.
I let out sigh as my head fell back and my shoulders and spine pressed into the wallpapered wall. The crystal chandeliers hung limply up above me and gold light illuminated my twenty-one year old face. Loud music pounded through the floorboards and I could feel the rhythm of it through my dress shoes. Men and women alike were shouting and cheering down below, probably being loud enough to make the cops come knocking with complaints from the neighbors that lived nearly a mile away. My hand was barely holding onto the rounded top of a solo cup, almost completely full of its burning contents. I wasn't sure why I was up here and not down there, once again successfully losing just a few moments to the peace that came with the nothingness.
It was agony.
You know, to be.
I had never found actually living to be so Godawful as it was during those first months after it happened. I found stupid, senseless joy in worthless things because they passed the time. Now time had stopped in the wake of the New Year when I sort of lost my kid and, as an effect of that, Pepper and Aunt Peg tore into me. I guess you could say that I woke up. I came to realize that I had to get my act together.
