Heroic Histrionics

So, vampires. Everyone has a vampire AU, and I’m certainly no exception. I just happen to have created my own, very uniquely me, variation of the things. And I’ve figured out how to apply it to Tony.

The first point to mention is how Vampires work. There are two kinds, the Born and the Made. The Made are what spring to mind when people think of vampire stories, really. They don’t age, they burn in the sunlight, they can’t have children, and they actually have to die to get that way. Of course, there’s more to it than that. The very act of turning someone is a fifty-fifty chance at best, is highly traumatic as one has to either be stabbed in the heart with a needle (something which has only come about in modern times) or have their chest cracked open so that blood can be dripped directly onto their heart. Either way, it’s not pretty, it’s not storybook perfect, and of that half, only half of those even come up with a chance of ever being sane again. And that’s after coming up out of a berserker mode that at least a third of the time kills the person who turned them.

Suffice to say, those who are Born are a little different than those types. That is not to say it’s all sunshine and roses. They’re light sensitive, and they’re also, to their eternal misfortune, long-lived. People truly tend to underestimate what this means. Born vampires are practically helpless the first couple years of life, take another forty-odd years to get to what humans might see as the age of ten years old, and another few decades after that to fight their way to full maturity. A century from birth to adulthood, essentially, which is an understandable hazard given that it means they breed slowly. Unfortunately, this has a dual failing as Made Vampires often require the blood of a Born (or one who is older and stable from doing so themselves) to become truly stable. It’s led to the Born Vampires being nearly extinct as the various lines have been hunted down over the centuries.

The genes being recessive doesn’t help. If they interbreed with humans the chances of the kid coming out vampire is incredibly low. Of course, this means that kids who manifest with full vampiric traits pop up from time to time in ‘fully’ human lines. Usually, these children die, as the first year or two these infants can only ingest blood, with their bodies unable to process anything else like their older counterparts (though it should be noted that no vampire will ever be able to do solids without being ill, and the Made never leave this stage at all) and thus usually perishing within a month or so.

So, onto our story.

Howard, oddball that he was, was blessed with a particularly long life for a human and had none of the benefits other than that (no enhanced healing, only slightly buffered aging, human tier strength, speed, and senses, to say nothing of the utter lack of magic) but also none of the other drawbacks (no purely liquid diet, no sensitivity to silver, no need to avoid the sun). He also happened to be a bit older than he bothered to tell people. Still a native of the United States, he was actually born in 1884 in this particular timeline, and even happened to get married to a lovely woman he met in New York as he tried to start finding his way through the minefield of old money to try to make a life for them.

And this is where Tony comes in.

He was born, unlike his father, with a completely undiluted form of vampirism. He was also born in 1910, and his father had no idea what to do. Tony, fortunate as he was, had a parent that figured him out quick enough, but his mother couldn’t handle it and ended up bailing fairly quickly, leaving Howard to have to find a caretaker for this seemingly unaging child when he was dragged off to war the first time for WWI, and then went more willingly the second time, in WWII.

Of course, the second go-around had Tony old enough to be getting into things, and by then Howard had seen just how quickly the boy healed from his mishaps, so when the Supersoldier program came calling, Howard knew exactly what he was looking at. Somehow, Erskine had found a way to rouse the latent genes for Born vampirism. That the process was started by HYDRA was utterly beside the point to him, because here Howard saw a way to make sense of his child.

One that didn’t seem like a fantasy story.

But then, things don’t have a way of working out, and Steve was the only one, an unreplicable experiment, if one that Howard was proud to be a part of the making of. He never talked about Tony, not at the time, as he, while not a particularly attentive or loving parent by any means, was at least protective enough to keep him hidden and out of sight until it might be safer. And, if Howard put it around like his own life that placed him as dramatically older than Steve, before finally getting a foothold in business after the depression, then that just made sense to him too.

Tony never did understand it. After all, his dad still aged mostly properly.

But ultimately, it was Ana Jarvis who was Tony’s saving grace, having practically tripped over the child one day shortly after Edwin brought her home with him from Hungary and instantly understanding what the boy was. It was a balm to her when events conspired to keep her from having any children of her own, and by the time Maria came around, vibrant and full of life, Tony was finally creeping into the starting stages of a very long stretch as a teenager.

Still, he loved her, and she was good to him, even if she had no idea what he was, not really. She’d led him through the stages of going from a sheltered hidden child with limited access to the outside world to being in the public eye as a ‘prodigy’ in 1985 so he could go to college and finally be out in the world. Her death was a heavy blow, especially in the wake of having lost both the Jarvises in the years just prior. Losing his dad wasn’t a picnic either, of course, but that was different, and he was, all told, still young for what he was.

Come the turn of the century, Tony might have hit maturity, but there were a lot of theories around that his dad had dosed him with something along the lines of the serum at some point because of how young he still looked. The beard helped, yes, but only so much. Ultimately, however, it seemed to not make that much of a difference, not to the way things unfolded in the MCU at least, give or take a few things.

Like the fact that HYDRA was trying to recreate Born vampires so they could raise them up in power and steal the abilities they manifested for their clan of Made vampires.

But other than that? Totally on track with the MCU. Really. Mostly. Just with Vampires.