#tonybio

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Quick Bio: Tony Stark is the heir and CEO of Stark Industries, an internationally renowned and cutting edge tech company that his father founded after WWII. Though his father's company made weapons for the military, pitching Stark Industries as a "patriotic" American company, Tony has reinvented the business to instead focus on medical technology and vowed never to work for the military or U.S. government again. As the superhero "Iron Man," he secretly flies around the world, destroying bombs and guns and returning stolen resources commonly used in the tech industry.

Note: Tony is a canon character from the Marvel Comic Universe (616) and the majority of my characterization comes from the Disney XD Show Avengers Assemble and the novel Iron Man: Extremis by Marie Javins

Extended bio under cut:

TWs: child abuse, alcoholism, car crash, torture, war

Anthony "Tony" Stark was born to founder and CEO of Stark Industries, Howard Stark, and his wife, Maria. Publically, Howard was a weapons manufacturer known for his contributions to the super soldier program, which produced Captain America, and his work on the Manhattan Project during WWII. He also founded S.H.I.E.L.D., an international intelligence and peace keeping agency. To the world, Howard was a patriotic industrialist, but to his family, he was as a drunk prone to bursts of anger and verbal and physical abuse. As the years stripped away the last of the charming man she'd married, Tony's mother became deeply depressed and rarely left her room, though prior to her her self-isolation from society, she founded the Maria Stark Charity Foundation which helped to fund women's shelters and youth centers.

As a child, Tony quickly showed signs of genius and at the age of five began to create machines which provided order in his chaotic household. At six, his father began to force Tony into consuming large quantaties of alcohol, beginning an addiction that would continue for the rest of his life. He left home at seven to attend boarding school, and at fifteen, Tony went to MIT, graduating two years later at the top of his class with a double major in Physics and Engineering. He would eventually earn seven doctorates.

At seventeen, Tony fell for a twenty-two year old woman who convinced him to give her the access codes to Stark Industries. Her family, a rival of Howard's, later released all of the same products, and the woman broke up with Tony once he'd served his purpose. He was sent to Europe for further schooling, where again, he met a woman whose parents rivaled his own; though they attempted to run away together, their family's tracked them down. Her family, HYDRA agents, attempted to kill Tony before he escaped. A few years later, Tony's parents died in an assassination disguised as a car accident.

After inheriting Stark Industries, Tony changed the company from soley a weapons manufacturing firm to a beacon of technological futures, including state-of-the-art medical tech, in hopes that one day they could create more things that saved lives than took them. He also bought the car company that made the vehicle his parents had died in and fixed their faulty break systems. Tony not only continued but expanded his mother's charity efforts.

During a weapon's demonstration in Afghanistan, Tony's convoy was attacked with his own weapons, and he was taken hostage by the Ten Rings organization. He would have died from shrapnel drilling into his chest if he had not been saved by fellow prisoner, Ho Yinsen. Yinsen performed open heart surgery on Tony in the cave where both were being kept, and instilled a battery-powered magnet in his chest that kept the shrapnel at bay. When their kidnappers attempted to torture Tony into making them a missile, he and Yinsen instead built the Iron Man armor with which he escaped the cave. Yinsen, however, sacrificed himself in the attack, wishing to be reuinted with his late family.

Once back in America, Tony immediately shut down all weapons manufacturing at Stark Industries, after seeing first hand that he was part of an industry with no accountability. What he had been raised to believe was patriotism was indeed violent imperialism, and his weapons had been used to terrorize people all over the world, whether it be by the hands of terrorists or American soldiers. Tony continued to update the Iron Man armor and eventually used it to remove as many of his weapons as he could throughout the world. Eventually, Obadiah, his father's business partner, learned what Tony was doing and attacked with a suit of his own, revealing that he had been the one order the hit on Tony in the first place. The two fought, and Obadiah was killed.

About six months after Iron Man was created, Tony was approached by Nick Fury, the new director of his father's organization, SHIELD, who claimed he was building a team of super powered individuals. Because of his deteriorating mental helath, Tony was not immediately cleared to join, but when a Norse god, Loki, took over New York City with an alien army, Tony and several other super-powered individuals were brought in to save the day. Tony earned the trust of his team by flying a nuke into an alien wormhole, a journey he barely survived.

After their successful save of the city, the Avengers decided to continue fighting forces of evil, and Tony set up their headquarters in the top few floors of his company's New York building.

Hoping to keep his super hero identity and famous persona separate, Tony operated for many years in secret, claiming Iron Man to be his body guard until one day he rushed in front of a car to save a dog and was photographed without his mask.

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Anthony Delgado || 52 || Frank Grillo

Tony’s always been a fighter.  A scrappy kid from the Bronx, he didn’t have the easiest time growing up.  When he was six, his father shot his mother in front of him and that was the beginning of the end.  He bounced around to different relatives, but none of them wanted the responsibility of raising a kid that wasn’t theirs while his father rotted in prison.  He ended up in the system, and thankfully he was young enough at the time that people still thought he was worth something.  The family that fostered and eventually adopted him were good people.  They helped him focus the anger and resentment he had towards his birth father and channel it into sports.

He boxed when he was angry, played basketball when he needed to not feel tied down, and he played football when he really needed to fuck somebody up.  He made it to college and studied kinesiology in hopes of becoming an athletic trainer of some sort.  He was good at a lot, but he didn’t have what it took to go pro in any of the sports he actually pursued, so he wanted to get involved in another way.  

Tony met Anna the last semester of his senior year.  He fell for her almost immediately, and he fell hard.  Thankfully, it was mutual, and after a year and a half of dating, the two were married.  They were happy too, bought a nice little house together and had plans to start a family.  Three years into their marriage and Anna couldn’t get pregnant.  Fearing the worst, they went through some testing and found out that Tony was unable to father children.  Devastated, they went home and discussed the possibility of adopting a child before going to bed.

The next morning, Tony woke up to an empty bed and a note from Anna that she was leaving him to start over somewhere new, and not to look for her.  This was back before cell phones and the internet were a thing too, so once she was gone, she was gone.  The only time he heard from her again was two years later when a lawyer showed up with divorce papers.

He went through a really rough patch for a few years and briefly considered taking his own life.  Instead, upon hearing that his father was being released from jail after all that time, Tony decided to take his anger out on the man.  He tracked him down in the apartment he was staying in, and fully intended to kill him.  It was a vigilante pipe dream he’d had since he was a kid, and in his mind, it would be short and sweet and he could get out of there without any problems.  What actually happened?   He beat his father to death with a baseball bat and was arrested minutes later because he hadn’t bothered closing the damn door and the neighbors had called the cops as soon as they’d heard yelling.

He did ten years in jail, and had a lot of time to think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life when he was in there.  He was thirty-three by the time he was released on good behavior, and returned to that tiny house he and Anna had bought years ago like he’d been on a long vacation.  Nobody had visited him and nobody was waiting for him when he got back.  Tony kept to himself mostly, getting a job at the Y as a trainer despite his record.  His boss understood the circumstances and Tony was more than forthcoming with the truth.  

His job helped him get in touch with humanity and become a member of society once again.  He acted as a mentor for a lot of the kids who spent their time at the Y, and started coaching basketball as well.  It’s where he met Clyde Wright so many years ago.  Tony had recognized the kid when he showed up at the gym alone one day, and he’d taken him under his wing. He was one of three kids Tony’s neighbors were fostering to pay their rent, and he didn’t seem to have many friends.  

A week later he came home to social workers from the city ready to take all three kids back to whatever group home they’d come from.  The foster parents had been found guilty of something or other that made them unfit, and the kids were going back into the system.  He thought about it overnight, and the next morning was volunteering to foster Clyde.   Though he turned eighteen before Tony could adopt him legally, Clyde was, in Tony’s mind, his son.  He helped shape the kid into the man he is today, and as a thanks, has a bigger family than he could have ever imagined.