Fic Annotations 1 - Live Wire

[icarus_chained]

For queen_of_ravens, who asked for Live Wire, my random brain blurt on Tony Stark and the making of things. Um. Went a bit mythological and archetypal on me -_-;

Live Wire - Annotated Version

[Right. Firstly, this was a really, really random fic. The word doc file on my laptop is actually entitled 'brainblurt'. So. You know. Sometimes things pop out of my brain? *grins sheepishly* Sometimes that happens to me. Also. Um. This is extremely metaphor heavy, so I'm not sure how much sense this is going to make -_-;]

There were worlds in the making of things. [Tony-as-Creator is a massive thing for me. I think I've talked about this in relation to JARVIS, but most of the reason I actually like Tony in the first place is because IM1 gave me two things about him: a stubborn survivor who can build salvation out of scraps, and a pure creator who delights in making things and interacting with the people he's created. Tony and the making of things is, for me, the core of his character.]

Not magic. Tony didn't know what magic was, if it was a word or a force, or just a fuzzy idea someone had to explain all the things that didn't fit. Whichever. Magic, as a concept, was fuzzy enough to be functionally useless, and Tony only liked useless things when they were only useless in one direction. [This is an odd thing. It's that ... Tony can repurpose like a boss, but only if what he's repurposing is concrete enough for him to grasp. He doesn't seem to like things that ... aren't real? At least not to him. It doesn't matter if a thing is something he can't use for its original purpose, so long as it's still something he can use for some purpose. But magic he doesn't have a grasp on at all, so I don't think he likes it.]

But there was something in the making of things. Something that was more than science, something that was more than industry. Something that, sometimes, only the words people used for magic quite fit. [Language is imprecise, and maintains artificial boundaries around certain concepts, links them exclusively to certain types of experience, when it seems to me that some things can only be described by referencing another experience entirely. Um. Which is to say, words are a lot more versatile than people think, and I think Tony must have noticed that, if for no better reason than that JARVIS wields language like an expert, and someone had to help teach him that. Besides. Language is a fascinating system.]

There was the energy. Muscle and bone and fire and steel, the humming in the body and the brain, potential energy in the cusp of an idea and the fall of a hammer. There was power, torque and leverage and electricity and kineticism, burn and break and lift and build, power to build and power to use, power to go up like judgement day at the push of a button, and that was just energy, just science, but it was power too, and power was a different thing. [... The archetype of the smith is a big thing, yes? I read a lot of fantasy, I read a lot of sci-fi, the forge and the smith are a massive iconic image for me. Making things. Wresting them up from the fundament and forging them anew. It's the image I keep wheeling back to around Tony, the central image I have of him, the source of the power he holds over my thoughts. It's the archetype as much as the character. The smith, like the trickster, is one of those figures I'm just fundamentally drawn to.]

And then there was ... the changing of things. The part where you pulled, an idea, a metal, a machine, where you pulled it up out of your mind and out of the materials, where you bent and shaped, forged and drew together, something that was metal and electricity and chemical explosives and the thing in your head that bounced sparks off the world and came back with machinery painted on the backs of your eyelids, and that was transmutation, that was alchemy, that was the goddamn philosophers stone, and whatever idiot had thought that was about gold had never fused gold to titanium and built the power to defend a world from it. Tony could stick a fist out into the universe, and pry the key to the fundament out in painted light, and that was more than science, and magic wasn't a good enough word. [I ... *rubs face* Magic and science, smithery and sorcery, the alchemical basis of creation. There's a raw fundamental nature to creation that isn't about words, that isn't about the little boxes language puts it into or people put it into. Creation is a force, an ideal, a primeval thing. Inspiration, procreation, construction, transmutation, all the processes and paths, they boil down to the fundament in the end. They boil down to the ideal, and that ideal is a burning, shining thing. I love it.]

And then ... Then, under that, worlds beneath that, in the places where the images painted in light had meanings that were only explicable in code, and defied any and all words, there was that other thing. There was life, there was genius, not his, not only his, there was the making of more than things, there was the making of people. There had been fever in that, ecstasy in that, that had been a livewire plugged through him, exhaustion and pain and jittering exactitude, satisfaction and delight and a strange, distant, fuzzy joy, at the whirr of pistons and the first fumbling answers of a learning machine, of a person, of a partner. That was a different thing, so much a different thing, that was not science, because science was no more a good enough word than magic, when there was an intelligence that answered his own, that had come from inside him, and all the sparked humming of the universe ran through them both. [And, look, I have a mad and desperate love of the bots, of Tony and the bots, of the idea of creating a life, the sheer majesty of that, of having reached and forged and made something that's not yours, made something that has a self, that can think and act and disagree, a whole pure self, a person. I don't know, maybe I'm female with the child thing, maybe I'm aspie with the creation thing, whatever, I don't care. If you reached down through the universe of your own will and pulled free a life, made a space for some living thing with your own two hands, felt the spark of its creation inside yourself, wouldn't you love it? Wouldn't it be a thing like nothing else?]

There were worlds, in the making of things. Not magic. Not words. Not science. All those things, but never just any of them. Never that. There was power, and transmutation, there was love and the shaping of the world, there were words and codes, and the things too fuzzy to be held in any of them. [I love language. I love it like a burning thing, the capacity of it, the shaping of it, the way it shapes in turn, but there are times when the frustration of all it doesn't hold gets to me. Language is a system of symbols, and sometimes symbols are just too crude and imprecise to hold the totality of what they're trying to express.]

There was the smell of the metal, the smell of the fire. There was the roar as worlds burned, and the hum as intelligence unfurled. Lives taken and lives built, in the fall of a hammer and the cusp of an idea. There was potential, and power, and energy, and pain. There were worlds, in the making of things. [Life, so much life, there are so many experiences that words struggle to hold, to encompass. I spend so much time trying to distill the sensation of life into words, to relay to people this experience, this life, and there are times when it just doesn't work, because there's ... there's so much. You know?]

He was a fighter. And a lover. He was vengeance and the end of the goddamn world if he so decided. But under that, worlds under that, he was the maker of things. The builder of things. Engineer, because engineer was a good word, a right word, there were engines beneath all things and he would find them, he would figure them out, he would make them hum when he was through, and that wasn't magic, was maybe only barely science, but hell if that mattered, because they were only words. And words, like smiles, were a dime a dozen, words made the world go round, but when there were no words left, no money left, when the heart was all but torn from your chest and your blood was on the cave floor in the stink of electricity and fear, even then, there was still the making of things. When there was nothing else, there was still the making of things. [That's why Tony. For me. That's why it's him, of all that universe. Because it's blood and survival and pain and death and creation, it's pain and it's passion, it's pure creation and the love of what you've made, it's changing the world on the strength of vision, it's reaching down into the fundaments of the universe, taking them in your hand, and using them. Tony is the smith and the engineer and the broken survivor, all of that, Tony is the father and the lover and the friend, Tony sparks off so many goddamn archetypes that bounce up and fucking down on my buttons, okay? *grins sheepishly*]

Not magic. Not miracles. Those things belonged to gods, and he'd met gods, and maybe one or two of them were decent people, but that was besides the point, because he wasn't one of them. He wasn't a god, wasn't ever going to be a god. He'd pulled one god from the sky, fought another to a (costly) standstill, flown through a rip in the heavens with fire in his hands and burned Olympus to the ground. He wasn't a god. No god in the universe would have him, after that. [Prometheus. Wayland. Ahura Mazda. Azazel. The creators and stealers of fire, the titans and demons and creator gods. Look. Me and mythology, yes? Tony is straight out of mythology, he seriously is, and he's a man, he's human, he's one of those that mythology tends to make tragic because he goes against the order of things, and I blame my grandfather. I've decided. My grandfather handed me a book of bible stories, a book of greek mythology and a book of egyptian mythology when I was, I don't know, less than ten years old, it's all his fault, okay? I've got the archetypes of a bunch of mythologies floating permanently in the back of my head, I'm blaming this one on him]

Fine then. Fuck them. Didn't matter, couldn't matter, because there were worlds beneath the world, worlds in the making of things, and he was Tony Stark. He was the maker, and the builder, and the engineer. He was a man, and he'd made life between his own two hands, and he'd burned worlds to the ground, and given a decent run-up he was a one-man armageddon all on his own, and it didn't matter. None of it, not magic or science or gods or men mattered. [It's blasphemy, it's disordered, it changes the world just by the force of itself, but that doesn't matter. There are some forms of chaos that need to exist, that need to be there. Check them, balance them, fight them, whatever you like, but they have to be there. Creation is chaos distilled and death is the ultimate form of order, the ultimate equaliser, and you need both. And, look, I told you this mightn't make much sense, yes? This fic is my brain on speed, spitting out associations and archetypes and something spun up out of the more subconscious parts of my psyche. This is as much a screed on creation as it is on Tony Stark, but it's Tony Stark because these are the things he pings inside me.]

Because when there was nothing, when there was blood on your hands and a good man's body at your feet, when your heart was beating out of time and the shards of old sins crept close around it, when there was electricity in your veins that you hadn't put there and the stink of pain and old fear in the cave around you, when there was nothing in all the world left to you ... [IM1 was a revelation for me. Creation in extremis, salvation from despair, forging an almost literal heart from the guts of dead weapons to keep yourself alive. Seriously, Tony is straight out of mythology and it grabs me by the heart every goddamn time.]

There were worlds beneath the world. There was fire and the fall of the hammer, there was lightning and the taste of metal, there was a fist full of light and the philosophers stone, and if you pulled the metal from your own flesh and set a burning jewel in your chest, you could build a world from it, and break one too. [Creation and destruction, fire in all its aspects, a self-made man who forged salvation from his own flesh because he'd nothing else to work with. I love transhumanism, I love AI, I love making things, and Tony forged himself. I'm never getting over that. I'm just not.]

When there was nothing left, there was still that. Make it in words, make it in metal, make it in blood and fire and the ending of the world. Wherever, whenever, however. There was, in the end of all things, still that. [It's not a binary. Creation is a flower seeded inside destruction, and destruction a shadow at the heart of every creation. The image of hands gripping fire at the heart of a bloodied chest, life from death and death in life.]

He was a made man. A forged man. He'd built, and been built, and there was electricity in his chest and metal under his skin, and he'd forged the armour to go around it, forged the armour to cover over it, armour in words and metals and smiles, he'd made a thing to disguise the making, because man made the machines, but machines maketh the man, when the blood is on the sand and all that's left is the making of things. [And I think so much of it is that, Tony didn't just make other people, he didn't just make other things, he reached inside himself and made something there too. Reflective creation, self-creation, reforging from the shards of your own being. That's why him and JARVIS are more equal than they could be, that's why I believe he might have the right to forge life. Because he reaches inside himself and forges his own flesh in their image at the same time. They're his and he's theirs, and that makes it better for me. That makes it close to right.]

There were worlds beneath the world, worlds in the making of things, and he was a man, and he had made them. When there was nothing, there were still worlds in the making of it. When there was no magic and no words and no science, when the world ended and the hammer fell, there was still, there was always, the making of things. [This came out of me in a mad rush, one of those black burning spurts of inspiration. I'm not sure what to do with it, really. Life in death in life, creation and destruction, the forging at the center of things. *shrugs carefully* I don't know?]

When there was nothing of him left, when there was nothing and he was nothing too ... there would still be that. Always. And forever.

Or, at the very least ... so he had to hope. [Legacy and memory. He's not the beginning, he's not the end, he's just the thing spun up from the maelstrom to reflect the world back at itself. Tony isn't so much a character to me as he is an archetype given form and personhood, and maybe that's not the way it should be, but it's the way it is.]

[*smiles, rubs neck* And, ah. I'm not sure this is what you wanted, or even something that makes sense, but ... there you go?]

[Finis]