Chapter Text
Tony is ten years old when the number shows up on the inside of his left wrist, kind of early. Most kids get theirs later, but he’s always been smart, that’s what his parents say, so why shouldn’t he get his mark early, too? He notices it, three digits in blue, while he’s wiring a circuit board, and he nearly burns himself in surprise.
He can barely wait for the iron to cool down before running to tell his parents. He finds his mother first and points. She smiles at him, but when she sees the number, she goes still and serious. She holds his wrist with one hand, too tightly. “Tony. Did you write this?” She rubs her fingertips against the number like it might be pen.
When it doesn’t come off, she just stares at him for a moment. She looks at him in that strange way he won’t understand until he’s older and it’s too late: soft and oh-so-worried. “Oh, Tony.” She smooths her thumb over his wrist. He can just barely see her number, two faded gray digits under the cuff of her blouse. “Let -- let me tell your father, okay?”
And twenty-nine years later, Tony’s got a car battery hooked up to his chest while he works, and Yinsen, who’s brilliant and hilarious and just as terrified as Tony, nods towards the rag Tony keeps tied around his wrist. “I noticed that,” he says. “The number you have.”
“Yeah,” Tony says. He adjusts his goggles instead of looking up at Yinsen. “Ever met anyone else with one this high?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“I try to keep it covered up, but you know the funny thing?” He brings the welding torch down to metal and watches the sparks fly. Lifts it up. There’s a perfect red-hot seam joining the two plates together. “People I’ve slept with, they’ve tried to tell the paparazzi. No one ever believes them. Everyone figures I’m a blank, and it’s a joke.”
Less than one percent of humans don’t have a number. Point-two percent, based on the latest studies, one in five hundred. Everyone else, 99.8% of people on the planet Earth, has a number on their wrist giving the age their soulmate will be when they first meet them.
Yinsen might look amused, but it’s dark, and goggles or not, Tony’s eyes burn with afterimages from the welding torch. “Do you know who it is?” Yinsen asks, nodding towards Tony’s wrist.
“Hell no. Haven’t met anyone who’s a hundred and thirty-two yet. Not to my knowledge, at least. I guess you never know, though. Long-lived aliens may walk amongst us.” He readies the torch again, but he looks up at Yinsen again first. “What about you? You know yours?”
Yinsen nods once, curtly. “I do.”
Tony tells himself the hollow feeling in his chest is from the shrapnel, nothing else. He’s gonna get out of here. Eventually, one day, who the hell knows when, he’ll meet his soulmate, and he’s gonna give them hell for making his life so annoying. But before that, he’s gonna get Yinsen out of here too.
He gets out. Yinsen doesn’t.
Don’t waste it. Don’t waste your life, Stark. Tony can’t close his eyes without seeing Yinsen’s face, hearing Yinsen’s voice.
He can tell Pepper and Obi are worried, but no matter how many times he tries to tell them, he can’t make them understand. Maybe Tony doesn’t understand himself. Even with whiskey loosening his tongue, even in his fits of sobriety outside the suit, he can’t make it clear to them: he hopes it’s someone like Yinsen who’s waiting for him. Kind, serious, demanding the best of him.
Someone who’d hate the weapons that the Starks have been profiting off of for too long.
So he tries to change. He tries, and Obi nearly kills him, and Tony should have seen it coming. Should have known. Should have figured it out.
Tony staggers up to the press podium with flashcards that tell him what he’s supposed to say in one hand. He thinks of whoever it is who he’ll meet one day, when they’re over a hundred years old. He’ll be a disappointment to them. He’s always been a disappointment. He thinks of Yinsen, staring down at him, saving his life after he’d been nearly killed by shrapnel manufactured by the company that shares his name.
There’s so many cameras in the room. Too many. There’s Pepper, trying to be reassuring. Tony wonders who Yinsen’s soulmate had been.
He prattles on to the press for a bit about his mistakes, his character defects, all the shit he’ll never be able to escape. He can nearly feel Pepper’s blood pressure spiking. And he’s sorry but he’s not that sorry because Yinsen’s right, he’s been an idiot, he can’t ever get the blood off his hands but at least he can try so that when he finally meets his soulmate -- if his soulmate is someone like Yinsen -- he’ll be able to look them in the eye.
“The truth is,” Tony says, staring down a roomful of cameras, “I am Iron Man.”