Tony’s mother leaves his father before he’s even born. There’s a typed-up report of the court hearing, where Howard calls Maria a hysteric, unstable gold-digger and where Maria answers: At least I’m not an alcoholic.
Having a father is a strange concept. He stares at himself in the mirror and dissects his face, taking all that he gets from his mother (brown eyes, olive skin, dark hair, height) and looking at what’s left, comparing it to a picture of the other man he cut out of a newspaper. (Chin, glint in eyes, nose, mouth, jaw.)
They tell him he’s a genius, and Maria purses her lips but cards his hair out of his eyes and says, a private joke, Well, I made him. Of course he is. Howard pays for the genius school. Howard, Tony is fairly sure, doesn’t have a single idea of what Tony looks like.
Mother, he understands. A language spoken between them, shield against the English-speakers of the crowd. The care she takes into writing down all her recipes in case he forgets, later, when she’s not around to remind him. Family homes in a tiny village, not many people left but Zia Alessia who tsks at his tactlessness while hiding a smile, and Nonno who lets him experiment on the old tractor after he was supposed to go to bed. Reading college math textbooks sitting on the closed toilet while she reads her latest novel in her bath. The piano she teaches him, the songs, the ink on her fingers after she scratches down a new composition. The shared and understood messiness that comes with their scrambled way of thinking. The razor edge to their words that they only bother to swallow down sometimes.
Father is a dictionary definition and a face-patchwork game. It’s the rolled-up blueprints under his bed that his mother can’t understand, and what has been referred to, on multiple occasions, as a spectacular lack of self-preservation instincts. It’s the research on genetics to appease his existential crisis, and then the research into Stark Industries that makes him retch into the toilet at the decimation that lurks in his blood.
It’s the gladness that Howard hasn’t made any other kids, this time to stick around for.
He meets Agent Carter mostly on accident. Mostly as in, he’d deliberately hacked into a very hush-hush, high profile, classified organization and had gotten so annoyed at their lack of online security that he’d left a note. “I THOUGHT YOU GUYS WERE SUPER SPIES.”
(Zia Alessia would’ve tsked. She would’ve pointed at his mother and said, in amused Italian, You’re her son, alright.)
Still, he didn’t expect a war hero to drag him out of English class and into the headmaster’s office. She sits in Mr. Ruthleg’s leather chair and stares at him. They’re alone in the room. He grins at her as charmingly as he can -- which, he’s gathered, is pretty damn charming -- and she badly contains a startle.
“Well,” he says, “thanks for that. Shakespeare is vastly overrated.”
Carter says, “You’re Howard’s son.” She doesn’t mean to, he can see, and it’s clearly not what she’s here for.
Tony tilts his head. Considers saying No, I’m Maria’s. He comes up with: “Sort of.” And then, “It took me about five minutes to hack into your servers. I don’t know who’s in charge of IT security, but they’re an idiot.”
A smile tries to pull at Carter’s bright red lips, but she valiantly fights against it. “Howard personally oversaw the coding of our firewalls.”
“Well there you have it,” Tony says. “Idiot.”
Before she leaves Carter shakes his hand and looks at him for a long few seconds. Tony grimaces but manages to keep his questions to himself. (What do you see? Hey. Is it the nose? Is it the genius? Can you add to my list?) Instead, he says: “Tell him to pull his head out of his ass, and his ass out of the 1940s. Or the British equivalent.”
She smiles at him, finally. “I’ll see to it, Mr. Carbonell.”
He doesn’t tell his mother about the agent’s surprise visit, or the hacking of deadly organizations that probably don’t take too well to snooping. Instead, he helps her make lasagna in their green-tiled kitchen and talks with Zia Alessia on speaker-phone until the whole room is warm and familiar.
Maria falls in love later into that same year. May Reilly stole her kart at the supermarket, refused to admit to the accidental exchange, and promptly cursed out Tony’s mother in an Italian so colorful Maria had been unable to stifle her laugh. They get drinks every Thursday, and May comes home with her a few times for diner. She’s banned from the kitchen after her first fire, and she ruffles Tony’s hair despite his teenage protests.
Maria comes back from a Thursday walking unsteadily. She drops onto the couch at his side and steals some of his ice cream wordlessly. Tony sticks his freezing toes under her thigh in retaliation. Staring at nothing, she declares, “I think I’m in love with May.”
Tony snorts. “You’re definitely in love with May.”
“I think I’m a lesbian.”
“Then thank God you figured it out late,” he says, “I like existing.”
She pushes at his face, hand cold from cradling the tub of ice cream, and he laughs at her. “Coglione,” she tells him. Her shoulders have lost their tension.
“She likes you too,” he says.
“I know. She kissed me.” Tony makes a vaguely approving noise around his spoon. “I left.”
He chokes. “What. Did you just run off without saying anything?”
“Pretty much.”
Tony pushes her off the couch. “Go. Go, right back, go. Do not let that fine piece of Italian bread escape, go back, right now.” He scrambles off the couch and hauls her up back to her feet as she alternates between gawking and laughing at him. “Cogliona,” he accuses, pushing her out the door.
May is in their kitchen the next morning. She’s wearing his mother’s bathrobe.
Tony scrunches up his nose at the vaguest idea of his mother having a sex life but high-fives May nonetheless. He shoves her away from the pan and makes her omelet for her before she burns down the house.
So, father stays empty and, somehow, stepmother is less of a clusterfuck than stepfather would’ve been. May picks him up from school. She doesn’t pretend to understand when he babbles about maths but takes him on an MIT tour and buys them pancakes after. She teaches him how to punch, and he teaches her how to make pasta. She’s a nurse, and when she moves in the whole house smells a bit like antiseptic. Tony doesn’t mind.
(Zia Alessia complains, over the phone, Being the gay one was my thing. Tony snorts and consoles, Your focaccia is still better than hers. Alessia makes a triumphant noise.)
Moving into his dorm makes him wonder about his father again, seeing hundreds of others swear and struggle to move furniture. Tony tries to imagine the proud man in the newspapers heaving bags up the stairs and can’t quite manage it. He thinks, not for the first time, that even if Howard had stuck around, it wouldn’t have been exactly right.
Between him, May and Maria, they manage to shove everything into his dorm.
“Cucciolo,” May tells him, because she likes to make her nicknames as annoying as possible, “you are not a minimalist.”
“Minimalism is for the rich and pretentious,” he says. “I’m just pretentious.”
Tony doesn’t really speak to his roommate (James R. Rhodes, as claimed by their door) until he punches Justin Hammer in the face. Hammer goes down, slurs stopping abruptly, and Rhodes appears out of nowhere to drag Tony away before Hammer’s goons get over themselves and finish the fight.
“Nice right hook,” Rhodes praises, turning right to make them disappear behind a new row of buildings.
Tony grins. His hand doesn’t even hurt. “Thanks. My stepmom taught me.”
Rhodey -- as Tony immediately dubs him -- is a bit like him in that he’s smart, and into robotics, and lives in a house full of women. He has three sisters, all older, and a mother not to be reckoned with who insists that Tony call her Mama Rhodes.
Rhodey, though, had a father, before, that he lost when he was old to remember him. That, Tony can’t understand, can’t begin to understand. Rupert Rhodes died in Libya wearing the uniform, and it’s in the dark that Rhodey tells Tony he plans on enlisting. No, Tony doesn’t get it. The sharp words he and Maria share rise to his lips (You’re going to make your mother lose you, too?), but he swallows them down.
On the anniversary of Rupert’s death, he drags Rhodey down the labs and shows him the bare bones of his first learning AI. His friend’s eyes clear a little with the distraction, and when they come up for air Tony cooks for him like he suspects Mama Rhodes does in moments of crisis. (Mothers, Tony understands.)
(I’m bi, he tells them over the phone.
Maria laughs softly and answers, Hi bi, I’m Mamma.
May shoves herself closer to the phone and says, You can’t see me right now, and you’re hundreds of miles away, but I’m high-fiving you.)
(Zia Alessia groans.)
Tony graduates out of MIT with three doctorates under his belt and a brilliant smile for the camera. He gets job offers - a lot of job offers - and when he sees the Stark Industries logo on one of the letters he laughs so hard he cries. He scratches FUCK YOU across the neatly typed offer and sends it back.
Agent Carter calls personally to offer him a job in her weird shady organization and he says, again, if agreeably, “Fuck you.” She doesn’t pause before answering, “Fair enough.”
No. Father is a half-empty word, a vague explanation for the way he grins when he’s trying to convince someone of something. It’s the long-lost newspaper picture and the vague notion that Howard wouldn’t have helped him move into his dorm, or listened to Tony as he cried after his first heartbreak.
He starts Carbonell Solutions and the scientific community goes insane. His mother frames his first interview despite the picture they chose being awful and May tells everyone in her book club that her stepson is on his way to becoming very rich and buying them a summer home.
Tony doesn’t have a father, and he doesn’t need him.
He's his mother's son.