Toni's six and she's a girly-girl, she's six and she's a tomboy with a circuit board in her hands, she's six and her parents are just waiting for her to grow out of it.
Toni's twelve and she's been wearing a sweatshirt over her jeans for a month because her chest makes her feel wrong, she's twelve and she's wearing a new dress that she loves because the skirt flares when she spins, she's twelve and her parents are still waiting for her to develop the right sense of fashion. She chops her hair off with her own scissors when her mother refuses to let her get a haircut. Half the time she's miserable and doesn't know why.
Toni's fifteen and she's still wearing a sweatshirt over her jeans, she's fifteen and her hair is shoulder-length because she misses how it looked long sometimes, she's fifteen and she watches the androgynous college student across the hall with something she refuses to call envy. Rhodey asks her a little awkwardly if she's a girl or not and she doesn't know how to answer. She's wearing lipstick with her oversized Metallica t-shirt when she visits home and her parents look at her with pinched expressions.
Toni's seventeen and she wears a tuxedo to her parents' funeral, she's seventeen and the tabloids scream about her lack of respect, she's seventeen and she doesn't know how to explain it just felt right so she doesn't. She cuts her hair off again. Toni buries herself in her work and does what Obie tells her to and doesn't think too much about what he tells her to wear to events.
Toni's twenty-five and she wears a blood-red gown to a gala, she's twenty-five and the tabloids say she's finally grown up, she's twenty-five and she wears suits in public for the next year.
She's thirty and she stands up and walks out when an interviewer calls her Antonia.
She's thirty-five and she doesn't talk to Obie for three months after he tells her to stop acting like a child and wear a goddamn dress.
She's thirty-eight and Yinseng calls her "them" and it almost makes her smile through the blood on her teeth.
Toni's thirty-eight and they call her Iron Man and it fits, feels as right against her skin as the suit does. She's listening to two news anchors argue about who the man behind the mask is when she reads the Wikipedia article for "non-binary gender" and thinks,
Oh.
She tells Rhodey first. He isn't surprised.
"So… should I use "they/them"?" he asks. Toni can hear the sounds of helicopter rotors in the background.
"Uh… I have no idea."
"Cool. We'll figure it out." Rhodey pauses as someone shouts his name. "I gotta go, but… talk later?"
"Yeah. Be safe."
Toni hangs up with shaking hands and a smile.
Pepper isn't surprised either.
Toni wants to hate Steve. And they do, for so many reasons- he's a self-righteous prick who's only special because he was a lab rat. Still, when he clumsily but earnestly tries to understand their pronouns over the remains of their shawarma, Toni has to admit maybe he's not so bad.
"Why not Iron Woman?" a journalist asks during one of the many press conferences after the Battle for New York. Her eyes are bright with the thrill of a story.
"Because I'm Iron Man," Toni snaps. "If anything, it should be Iron Person, but that doesn't really have the same ring to it, does it?"
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Gender's overrated," Toni says.
Fox News goes insane.
Toni gets a letter from an MIT student who thanks Toni for giving them the courage to come out.
Toni's smiling as they hurl a piece of scrap metal through the TV.
Toni sees the same journalist on their new TV a few days later.
"Toni Stark, the person beneath the Iron Man suit, has yet to respond to our request for comments," she says. "However, if I may speak on their behalf, I would like to say that I rather agree- gender is overrated."
Toni tells Pepper to schedule an interview with that journalist.
Toni's forty, and they're Iron Man.
That's all they really care about.