Hello! This is just a short drabble I came up with while doing some "feel posts" on my Tony Stark FB page...
Sadly, non of the characters belong to me, it's all MARVEL property... However, FF and FB allow me to be my alter ego Tony Stark. Hope you enjoy, please leave a review!
Is this it?
Did I really just find my last act of defiance?
Did Tony Stark, the man on top of a multinational and billionaire company, ladies man extraordinaire, the genius of this generation, world's best living metaphor of the rise of the phoenix… is really death by now?
Maybe it is. Signs are, well, a bit evident. The pain is gone for starters. The weight of the armor and the stiffness of my muscles had given the space to a very light sensation of my entire being. The silence is overwhelming, and I can't see, everything is pitch black in here. I'm aware I can move, I'm standing in the middle of a very dark room and I can walk through it.
The blast was too much. The overload on the reactor was the only alternative I could find to stop Obadiah's suit. The mark I reactor was never design to sustain a fight with the Mark III armor; my chances were pretty low from the very beginning. But, as most of my stunts, I pulled it out just as expected, and got the result desired.
Well, almost as expected.
But seriously, did I really think I could get alive off this?
The suit is a state of the art piece of machinery; it's simply the world greatest… prosthesis? Yeah, that's actually best description I can make of it. But, I'm still just a man. I'm Tony Stark, human kind greatest creator… but I'm not a fighter. I just don't…
I've never had a reason in my life for it… nothing to stand and take the first hit.
So, why did I stop Obi?
It was either him or me, that's why.
-"Is that so?"
"Who is there?"
I turned around, searching the origin of the voice. After death is a complete mystery for a man that does not believe… and never any god seem to give a shit about me, so, why to start now?
-"I think you know my voice."
A shadowy figure was standing a few meters in front of me. For some reason, it looked familiar, but my mind was on a blur.
"Who are you?"
-"Let's just say I'm the messenger."
"Messenger?"
-"I'm here to tell you what to do, in case you want to keep forward."
"Oh."
A moment of silence spread between the two of us.
"So, this is really it?"
He kept silent again, before answering.
-"That's up to you."
"To me?"
-"Someone once asked you, many years ago, if that night was to be your last… would you be proud of what you've done so far? Would it be enough? Would it suffice you? Cause if it haven't, then you'll have waste your opportunity on this life."
"It was… my mother. She asked me that. She… how you know that?"
-"Well… Would it? Does the life you would currently leave, suffice you?" The second chance you were given… you got enough from it? Is this everything you can do to make your life worthy?"
What else could I do? The suit was just… a project, a prove to myself that I could upgrade it, make it faster, stronger, better. It was for my use.
What for?
The images of the people waving at me in Gulmira ran across my mind. Nobody else was doing anything to stop the massacre there… Until I did. I stood up against Obi, trying to protect the others…
For the first time on my life, I didn't care what happened to me, if that meant I was helping someone else.
My previous life was a complete chaos, a spoiled brat claiming for media's attention, sleeping around with women I didn't even care of, drinking myself to dead. But know…
Maybe it could be different.
Maybe, just maybe…
There was something bigger planned for me out there.
-'Don't waste your life, Stark. Don't waste it.'
Yinsen's last words are last thing I heard before feeling again the cold and the pain on my skin.