A/N: Inspired by a poem called Lonely Is Just One Word.
—one word chosen to represent so much—
Vision remains, when almost all the rest are gone. He glides through the empty shadows, busies himself about the echoing kitchen. Speaks when spoken to, the works.
Tony would like to think of it as loyalty, but then again, Vision bears the unmarred fingerprint of J.A.R.V.I.S., whose affection was preprogrammed and permanent.
Tony thinks of it as loyalty anyway.
(He believed it of J.A.R.V.I.S., too).
—in echoed footsteps of a departing friend—
He has never been able to hide behind square-jawed purpose or unshakeable sincerity. They are not, after all, the virtues of those who hide.
Steve said, he's my friend, because he believed it, and Tony said, so was I, because he had to.
Because that is always the sort of thing that comes to light, when there is nowhere left to hide.
—in the silence of sorrows too deep to speak—
Tony stands in the long hallway, in the room of mirrors, in the center of his Babel. A tower could reach to the skies; a compound like this, with so many empty rooms, reaches for something else.
He is always so sure he has lost everything; he is always wrong.
—stays and torments until new Love shatters it apart—
Pepper finds him. Pepper, who left him when things were far from good, won't stay away when they're worse than ever. Her sole weakness looks very much like him. "You don't have to tell me what happened."
She is warmth in this cold place. Only, Tony never meant it to be cold.
He meant it to be a home. Pepper stands stiffly, like a stranger, reminding him that it isn't.
"I lost them," Tony says. And once he might have meant his parents, or the suits and the tech that made them, or the countless unnamed dead. But today he means the only people he ever thought were really very much like him.
"You should come with me," Pepper says. "Stay at my place for a few days."
It may well be pity in her voice, but he follows it anyway.
