Title: The 'Why' We Fight

[falsecaterpillar]

Title: The 'Why' We Fight
Author: starkravinghazelnuts (aka falsecaterpillar)
Universe: MCU (hypothetical post-Avengers: Endgame)
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 2230
Warnings: (Past) Major Character Death. Body Trauma.
Author's Note: 1/2 gift for southpauz who requested this prompt: "[Pepperony or (not yet established)Stony // any rating you deem appropriate // MCU] the Avengers all work together and take down Thanos. In the end, Tony is the only one able to wield the Infinity Gauntlet and brings everyone back. It's at a great personal risk to Tony and could easily kill him, but he still does it. Bonus points if when everyone gets back the Avengers get to see and react to Peter returning and freaking out over Tony's ""corpse"". Bonus bonus points if in the end Tony is unable to use/loses his left arm afterward." I didn't fit in all the bonuses for this one, but it is a story about the aftermath of Tony using the Infinity Gauntlet at great personal risk. As a note, I did write two stories for you, and the other one fits the prompt much closer, haha! But I couldn't resist.

~

‘I’m here.’

It was a simple mental ping, checking to see if there was something there. With nothing but nothingness all around him, it was comforting to know at least he had his thoughts.

‘And I am…’ It took a moment to find his name in the knot that was his brain. 'Tony. Tony Stark.’

Excitement and revulsion hammered in his chest at the discovery. He brushed it off, not caring to examine why he felt so conflicted about his identity. His next thought surfaced as a question and came before he could mull over whether he wanted it answered.

‘So. What happened?’

Tony's mind had always been terribly efficient at solving puzzles. When other toddlers were trying to slot a circle through a square peg, he’d been assembling 1,000-piece puzzles of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. The pieces of 'What happened?’ effortlessly slid back into place from a tangle of broken sounds and images, but the moment they started to form a clear picture, he shook his head to jar them loose again.

Okay, so he definitely didn't want to remember. Big nope to memories. Those were bad.

Tony tried to dig back into the warm dark where there’d been nothingness, not even thoughts, but the quiet began to crescendo into noise: the hissing of air, the scratchy rustling of hair against a pillow. The nebulous nothing he’d been floating in began to stiffen around him.

It was clear: the outside world wasn't letting him go back into the dark. It punctuated that point with the sudden pungent smell of iodine in his nose and the arrival of pain. Each hitch of his chest came with a sharp, stabbing ache.

To distract himself from the new sources of discomfort, his brain generously filled with scenes, flickering like the reel of an old horror movie: a hole in his chest connected to a car battery; his heart crumbling into ashes in his arms; his family dead all around him.

But this wasn’t some arthouse horror.

These were scenes from his life, real and irrevocable.

With titanic effort, Tony tried to lift his arms, but one of them felt heavy as iron. Much too heavy to lift with his faltering, kitten-level strength.

A ghostly voice intoned, “Stark, I know you're in there, wake up.” He shut it out, but it stubbornly persisted. “Come on. Wake up.”

Against his will, Tony’s eyelids fluttered opened. Everything was blurry, but he could make out a drop ceiling with water-stained acoustic panels hovering above him. The walls were a plum color paint that must’ve been bought on clearance. A curtain was pulled over, cutting off view to the door. A dry erase board hung nearby with hardly legible notes between nurses and doctors.

Hospital. He was in a hospital.

He glanced down at his body. He could see now why he couldn’t move his arm before. It wasn’t because it was heavy.

It was because it was gone. His left one was no longer there. It had been cut off at the shoulder with surgical precision that left nothing but a thick patchwork of gauze.

“They had to do it.”

The voice sounded familiar. Tony looked over to the side of the bed, saw a man obscured in the shadows. The man leaned forward, and light from a table lamp spilled over his face.

He looked like someone he knew, Tony thought, squinting, and it took a moment for his brain to recall the name. Nick Fury. The spy guy whose secrets have secrets.

What was he doing here?

“Your injuries were atypical and too extensive for conventional surgery,” Nick continued. “But they were reluctant to do it. No surgeon worth his paycheck wants to cut off Iron Man’s arm. But your doctor friend, Strange, he looked over your chart—and convinced them it had to go.”

Tony stared at Nick for a long moment, absorbing him sitting there. Eyepatch and all. He knew something was wrong about the former director of SHIELD being in the room, but he couldn't deduce what.

“N-Nick?” His mouth finally forced out. He’d meant to say it earlier, but it was like he was on a delay. Like a TV signal in a storm.

Now he remembered why it didn't make sense. Why none of this made sense. Nick was dead. Nick couldn’t be here. Unless he'd faked his death. Again. Or unless…

Tony was dead too.

“In the flesh.” Nick smiled. “Thanks to you.”

Tony paused. ‘In the flesh. Thanks to you.’ So this wasn’t some afterlife welcoming committee. Tony glanced back to his arm, then back to Nick—

A scorching sensation flooded the length of his left arm, like it was being dipped, elbow-deep, in molten lava—even though it wasn't there. He instinctively curled the fingers that were no longer there to move.

He remembered now. The gauntlet. It had been so heavy he could hardly stand. Everything had crashed to white. The last thing he remembered was wishing, with every fiber of his being, to bring back everyone Thanos turned to ash.

Had it worked?

“Did everyone—?”

“Yes.” Nick nodded. “Everyone is back where they should be.”

Tony closed his eyes as relief washed over him. He relaxed back into his pillow, not realizing until now how tense he had been. Everyone was back. He'd finally fixed something. He'd finally done something good.

The euphoria was short-lived. Tony bolted upright, breath caught in his throat.

“Pepper?” He gasped out. Her presence hung at the edges of his consciousness. Nothing but a voice in the dark, but he knew it was her—and now she wasn’t here. “Pepper, she—where—”

“I sent the future Mrs. Stark home. Told her I’d keep my eye on you. She’d been here for days. Needed sleep, and, between you and I, a long shower.” Nick got up, moving his chair closer to the bed. “Do you want some water?”

Tony took a second to process the question. His lips did feel chapped, and his throat was dry. He nodded. Fury picked up a glass cup from the tray table, but the moment the straw grazed Tony's lip, Tony turned away from it, fighting the urge to vomit.

It wasn’t right. His soul had experienced eternity in a second—and infinity within this tiny, fragile prison he called a body. He’d had the fate of the world dancing at his fingertips. To be back here. In a plum colored room. With an itchy blanket. Enjoying a glass of water. While the rest of his team never made it back home?

“Stark?” Nick frowned but his eyes were gentle, understanding. Like the kind of assuring, but firm, look a father would give their son.

“I—” Tony’s voice was sandpaper hoarse, but he swallowed and powered on. “How am I alive?”

“Because of the hard work of many talented doctors.”

“But I… I shouldn't be.” Tony looked back at Nick. “They’re all dead, Nick. I saw them. It was never just a vision, was it? It was real.”

Tony trembled. The Avengers. They were dead—left out in the blackness of space, lost floating among the stars, without even graves to their names—mowed down like sacrificial pawns. All because of his plan. Because of his orders. He'd known it too. He'd known the cost.

But he was supposed to have died too. He wasn't supposed to live through the aftermath.

“It came true.” Tony choked. “I killed the Avengers.”

It was what Tony had told him before at Barton’s farm. The horrible prophecy now come to pass.

“Do you know why I scrubbed you from the Avengers Initiative, all those years back?” Nick said, bracing his elbows on the armrests.

“Doesn’t play well with others,” Tony said immediately. “Textbook narcissism. Self-destructive tenden—”

“You should know damn well it had nothing to do with Romanoff’s assessment,” Nick said. “I didn’t bench you because you weren’t a hero, Stark. I benched you because you’re too much of one.”

“But that’s—” Tony would’ve laughed if he knew it wasn't going to hurt like a bitch. Him? A hero? Not when there were people like—“Cap.” The name came out in a sob, stabbing him right in the heart. “You didn’t bench him and he—”

“Rogers was a hero, maybe the best, but he knew the risks inside and out. He trained for it. But you? You were never supposed to get dragged into this. You were a civilian, Stark. But you threw yourself headfirst into trouble anyway.

“Howard knew you would change the world. ‘Destined for greatness,’ he said. So, I kept an eye out for you. Can’t say I was impressed with the heir to the Stark legacy. But I grew to know the man behind the mask. Maybe I even liked him. When you disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a shot up humvee, I thought, ‘well, old man Stark was wrong for once.’ And then? You came back from the dead with fire in your eyes, wearing that metal suit… I knew the bastard was right. This is it, I said. This is the guy old man Stark told me about.

“You stopped Vanko. You saved New York. Hell all of Earth is in your debt for what you did to the Chitauri. You saved the President of the United States from a fire-breathing nutjob.

“Then you created Ultron. I came to see you because I knew something was wrong. Somewhere, someone had made a mistake, because the Anthony Stark I know is a hero. You told me what you just said then: They’re dead because of me. But did that happen? No. They lived, we all lived, because of you, because of all of you. You saved the world like you always seem to do.”

“But I killed them,” Tony said, voice cracking. “I can't... I can't live with this.”

“Tony. I know you. Maybe better than you know yourself. You wouldn’t have done it if there was a choice, a different way to fix this.” Nick leaned closer. “Look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.”

Tony met Nick’s steely gaze for only a moment, but it was enough. He didn’t want to admit it, the guilt wouldn’t let him admit it, but Nick was right. Tony had played the numbers—and his math was always right. He knew it had been the only course of action.

The others had known it too, and had accepted the risks. Just as heroes always do to save the world.

“See?” Nick’s glare softened. “Even you know there was no choice.”

“But why me?” Tony began to scrape his nails along the coarse fabric of the blanket, wanting desperately to shred it. “Why did it have to be me?”

“You know the first thought I had when I saw Agent Hill turning to dust right in front of me? ‘Why?’ All around me, people were dying, and I wanted to know, for even a second, why I wasn’t one of them. And then damn if I didn’t start turning to dust too—and I wanted nothing more than for it to stop. It’s easy to say you want to join the dead until it happens. Because then it's over. It’s the after that’s the hard part. Funny it’s also the reason we do what we do.”

“To go home,” Tony said.

“Yeah.” Nick nodded. “Welcome home, Tony.”

The word 'home’ conjured a symphony of thoughts: wind blowing through a canopy of trees, Pepper's joyful laugh, the smell of oil and grease, the feeling of a wrench in his hands, Happy’s wild flailing gestures—

The Avengers. Together.

“But they’re gone.” Tony felt like a broken record, but it was all his mind could focus on.

Nick said nothing, but his eyes spoke for him. ‘I know.’

“I… Earth still needs them.”

Something loud thudded against the window. Tony startled with a jolt. He tried to swing his left arm to fire a gauntlet, remembering too late neither his arm—nor armor—was there. He froze, processing the figure outside his window—clad in red and blue spandex and distinctly spider-like webs.

“Oh, Mr. Stark! You’re awake!” the figure yelled loud enough he was audible through the glass. He waved enthusiastically.

Tony couldn’t believe it. “... Pete?”

As if in response, Peter pulled up his mask, revealing his whole face, bright-eyed and beaming from ear to ear.

Tony’s throat grew tight. “Kid? You’re—”

“Sorry for sneaking up like that, I was just in the neighborhood and—oh, hi, Mr. Fury!” Peter waved at Nick, who waggled a few fingers back in acknowledgment.

“I’ll—oh,” Peter looked down. His eyes bugged. “Ah, I gotta go. There’s people staring. I’ll be back in a jiff, okay?”

With that, Peter vaulted off the window, diving out of view. A moment later, Tony could see him web-slinging away.

“I think Earth is going to be just fine,” Nick said. “Don’t you?”

Tony mulled over Nick’s words. He wanted to scoff. Earth had lost her best defenders. Tony had lost his family. What could possibly make Nick think that—

With a start, Tony looked back out the window. He could hear raised voices of people on the streets marveling at Spider-Man.

Earth may have lost her defenders, but she hadn’t lost her future. Tony hadn’t lost all of his family—

Hope made itself known, rising in Tony’s chest with a quiet, ‘I’m here.’