Tony falls asleep in a cold bunker in siberia, as the light slowly bleeds out of his arc reactor and his heart bleeds with it. He’s lying in a pool of his own blood, both literally and metaphorically - his fragile weeping heart cut open as much as the arc reactor casing.
„Proof Tony Stark has a heart“ - well not anymore apparently. He can’t move a whole lot, the suit’s power having been cut off now that the arc reactor has been destroyed and has no way of calling for help except with his voice, which he knows will do nothing as he had made quite sure no one was around when he followed Steve into this icy hell.
It is fitting, in a way, that his final resting ground should be a place devoid of warmth and comfort, so diametrically opposed to the cave in which his life was first taken out of his hands and the hot, almost unbearable pain of extremis. He managed to survive then, barely, by the skin of his teeth and not without sacrifice. Never without sacrifice. „You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play“ All he ever did was sacrifice, but of course the others can’t see that.
As the sun goes down among the siberian snow, he’s already almost dropped off to unconsciousness, a place without pain, without the pesky limitations of an all too human body and the nagging feeling in the back of his head reminding him of all the things he’s guilty of and the remorse he should feel. And though his body is slowly freezing to death in the icy landscape as frost starts to take over his body, first freezing the little droplets of blood on his suit, glistening like ruby pearls and jewels, then moving on to the suit itself, and the fragile, shivering human inside it, in his almost unconscious state he feels more free than he had in years.
Alcohol lessens the burden, but only ever for a while. And once the high is nearing its end, it all comes crashing down on him again. The guilt, the panic, the weird feeling in his gut that these friends, these colleagues of his, the ones he risks his life and money and position for, are actually not worth it at all.
And he didn‘t listen to that gut instinct, even though it saved him so many times before. Didn’t wonder why nobody could lend a helping hand during that extremist debacle with the mandarin, why nobody ever helped him when that seemed to be all he was doing for them, constantly. Helping Steve acclimate, protecting Wanda from herself and the masses calling her a witch, clamouring for her head on a stake and ignoring, always ignoring all the ways his heart tried to tell him to stop it. That’s what he gets for all of his hard work, isn’t it? A shield in the ribcage and a promise of „I can do this all day“.
Someone he thought of as a colleague, a friend even, and he didn’t hesitate for even one second to kill him to save his old flame. Because that’s what he did, Steve tried to kill him, knowing full well how human, how fragile he was inside that suit. „Big man in a suit of armour. Take that off and what are you?“
He’s always known he wasn’t The Hero, the one adored by the masses. He’s been too much, too much of a rebellious teenager, too much of a war profiteer, too much of a genius, too much of anything, really. But to have all he’s worked his ass of for, all he’s tried to archive with his company after afghanistan, all the people whose lives he’s tried to improve thrown back into his face with a promise that he’s the villain in this story and an insinuation that he’s not the one who will do what needs to be done is false, and it hurts.
And he should know better by now, should be aware that someone who didn’t intervene as he was choking in the hands of a drunkard angry god wouldn’t care to save him, but he’s grown up with stories about the mighty Steve Rogers and his merry band of heroes, how they were strong, and kind, and just.
And every time he looks at Steve, he tries to find that man, the one his father admired so much that he gave him precedence over his own son, and he fails. Because Steve isn’t that man anymore, no matter how much he might wish that were true. He doesn’t know who Steve is now, not really. But he does know that he has nothing in common with the hero his father told him about the few times he deigned to acknowledge his existence.
Ultimately, he thinks, it doesn’t matter either way. He doesn’t have to reminisce in the past and neither does he have to build up resolve to do better, trust less easily and not to give his heart out to every person he meets, because poison can be slow acting, and there isn’t always an antidote, and he fully believes he will die in this coldest of graves. A fitting end, perhaps, for the life of one Tony Stark.
„Genius, Billionare, Playboy, Philanthrophist“, that’s what he’d always said when asked who he was.
Except that’s not who he is at all.
As he thinks that, he lets go of the last bit of consciousness he had stubbornly held on to.
Tony Stark falls unconcious in a siberian bunker and doesn’t expect to wake up ever again.