#clint is in no shape to be a dad in any universe

[rainstories]

this version of clint is written so much better than whatever 616’s clint’s writers are up to rn 🤭

edge of the spiderverse (2024) v4 issue #4

[samurx]

In the wake of Iron

(I don’t know what this is, but felt like writing it)

I was ten when my father built the first Iron Man suit in a cave.

Not a lab. Not some shiny Stark tower. A cave. With scraps.

The world saw a miracle. I saw a man who had finally met the monster he helped create and decided to fight it. Before that, he was… charming, reckless, brilliant, and completely unavailable. I loved him. I also resented him. You don’t grow up as Tony Stark’s daughter without learning how to hold a conversation by yourself. He loved his work—sometimes more than he knew how to love people. But that cave changed something.

When he came home, everything shifted. He shut down weapons manufacturing—Stark Industries, the empire my grandfather built. The board wanted his head. The world called him unstable. But I remember how steady his hands were when he held my face and said, “No more.”

Then came the suit. The real one. Red and gold, loud as hell, fast as light. I watched it take shape in the garage under our house—not a product, not a prototype. A promise. He said, “I finally know what I have to do.” And from that day, he didn’t stop.

People think the Avengers started with some government file or top-secret program. It didn’t. It started with my dad, flying too close to the sun and refusing to come back down. He pissed off the right people, saved the wrong ones, and somewhere along the way, a god fell from the sky.

Thor was the first alien I ever saw in real life. Golden hair, hammer that no one else could lift, voice like thunder in a suit. My father didn’t like him at first. He didn’t like anyone at first. But they needed each other. All of them did. Steve Rogers, brought back from a time when everything was simpler and more impossible at once. Banner, trying to keep a beast in his skin. Natasha, who could kill with a glance and still hold a conversation like nothing ever happened. Clint, quiet eyes that saw everything. And later… Wanda, Vision, Sam, Peter…

It was never a team. It was a collision.

But they became a team. In New York, when the sky opened and aliens poured out of it, I watched from our panic room. I couldn’t reach him. Couldn’t talk to him. I just sat there, eyes locked on the screen, watching him fly that nuke into a portal with no promise of return. That was the moment I knew—he would always choose the world over himself.

That was the first time he almost died for it. It wouldn’t be the last.

And Hydra? Don’t even get me started. They weren’t just the villains. They were the reason Dad couldn’t sleep, the reason he started building AI, the reason Ultron existed at all. He wanted to protect the world. But he never realized how close you can get to destroying something when you try too hard to save it. Ultron was that mistake made real. And when Sokovia fell… part of him broke too. He didn’t say it out loud, but I heard it in the silence between his sentences.

Then came Wanda. I think he saw her as both a threat and a tragedy. He never blamed her—not really. Maybe because he understood what it was like to live with guilt stitched into your bones.

Vision was different. Something Dad created, almost by accident, that became better than any of us. Calm. Curious. Gentle. He looked at the world like it was worth loving. Even when it wasn’t.

And Peter… God. The kid. He reminded me of Dad in ways that scared me. All that potential, all that heart. So desperate to do good, to be enough. Dad tried to protect him, but let’s be honest—Peter broke through the walls he built better than anyone ever had.

When the Sokovia Accords happened, I stood in the hallway and listened to my father argue with Steve. It was like watching two sides of the same coin fight to be heads. Steve believed in people. Dad believed in structure. And they both broke something in the process.

Then came Thanos.

I don’t think anyone can understand what it felt like to see half the universe vanish unless you lived it. And watching my father come back after five years—older, quieter, with a daughter of his own—it was like watching a man reborn. He had everything to lose now. And still… he went back. He put the suit on one more time.

I watched the footage of that final fight once. Just once. That moment where he takes the stones, where he looks at Thanos and says, “I am Iron Man.”

He knew.

He always knew.

He didn’t win because he was the smartest man in the room, or because he had the best tech. He won because he never stopped caring. Even when it hurt. Even when it killed him.

People call him a hero. The godfather of the Avengers. The one who started it all.

To me?

He was my dad.

And I miss him every day.