prologue
tony was diagnosed with chronic leukaemia during his first month at mit. he was fourteen years old and scared shitless for the first few months. from then on, he had to go see a doctor once every few weeks and during any anomalies regarding his well-being.
honestly, he developed a reckless type of behaviour during his university time. he took on twice the workload others did, for while his body was tired most of the time, his brain was what needed something to do during the nights he couldn’t sleep for sheer exhaustion (and questioning that fact was not on the list, it made him more anxious than it calmed him).
at the rate he was going the first three semesters, the billion-dollar heir (who probably would be an heir of no sort, let’s be real) would have had his bachelor’s by the end of the following semester. but his doctor had told him to cut back a little before it was time to book classes, for his dysfunctional blood cell count was rising slowly, and another spike was to be expected soon.
tony’s best friend, james rhodes, picked up on how much time tony had to spare easily. they had developed a very sober way of talking about death. no, they weren’t making fun of it generally, but rhodes at least wasn’t as careful anymore. tony had all but finished with the thought of becoming an adult, because he wasn’t a fighter and he’d always said to his best friend that once he reached a stage where he wouldn’t be able to pull himself up to go to the bathroom, he was to fly him out to switzerland and take him to an assisted suicide clinic. rhodes liked to joke about the fact that while he would help him get to said clinic, he wouldn’t wipe tony’s ass, they weren’t that close.
so tony finished his undergraduate degree within five semesters, and a spike never showed up in his cell count. however, his energy levels decreased slowly but surely, and so the by now 16 year old decided to configure his master’s to take six semesters with the hope of dying before finishing it. he knew that’s not how it would be. his chance of survival was pretty high regarding the fact that the illness wasn’t far along, he was young and otherwise pretty healthy.
howard had gotten mad and maria had cried when tony explained that he hoped he would never have to be worked into stark industries, and that they better find someone else to take over.
it was weird how his father, one of the leading scientists of the twenty first century, didn’t even try to understand what tony was going through, and how he couldn’t factually realize that tony’s chances of surviving his father were low; howard was 36.
tony had driven most people away that cared. he would get mad when someone said an 83% survival rate for the next five years wasn’t bad. because if the survival rate was 17%, they’d say that tony was so special, and cancer sure wouldn’t take him which was absolute bullshit to the boy. so yeah, survival rate high or not, he would die early on anyway, so what’s the point of getting a company dependent on him for a maximum of ten or fifteen years?