Tony Stark is drunk at his parents' funeral, and everyone knows it.
There are too many people who are sorry. He recognizes all of them and knows very few. The alcohol keeps him from putting names to faces, relentless names to blank and friendly faces, his parents' friends—his father's friends—who pity the son only because he is an orphan.
Tony Stark drinks at his parents' funeral, expensive scotch straight, no rocks. The rocks are in his throat, grit like gravel. It doesn't go away.
He wishes he knew if his father loved him.
He thinks it would have made a difference if he had listened to his mother, and spoken when he should.
...
The caskets were closed at the funeral. Tony skims a hand over the polished wood of his father's coffin and thinks, you left me, as he has thought a thousand times before.
He does not touch his mother's casket. It would make her death too real.
...
The pictures are ranged around the room, pictures of a happy family that Tony recognizes only from the corners of his eyes. His gaze skims over the too-bright smiles of Howard Stark and Steve Rogers, side-by-side in his father's prized photograph.
If there is an afterlife, Steve Rogers would have been waiting there. Tony doesn't really believe in such things, and it's better that way. He hates to think of being replaced by an idol forever, out of reach, with no hope for redemption.
...
There is an old woman in the crowd. She is British; her hair is soft and silver, and her eyes are very bright. She has a handkerchief folded neatly in her hand. She pities him, but it does not grate the way it does from others. He humors her, and wonders if she can smell his sorrow on his breath and on his clothes.
Drunk at his parents' funeral. So it goes.
"I am sorry," she says. "I knew your father well."
He didn't, and he did. Both truths are painful. Tony opens his mouth and shuts it again.
"You look so much like him," she says. She's seventy, at least. "He was a very handsome young man, at least when he forgot about it."
"I'm nothing like him, ma'am," Tony says dully. Politeness even over the alcohol—something has changed in him. He's met her once or twice, probably; he rarely gets to see his father's old friends. Howard Stark liked away-from-home meetings, and if Tony knows why he won't say it aloud.
"Is that so?" She, too, is in pain. She's old; she's probably had a lot of people die.
He doesn't want to talk to anyone, but the words start tumbling out. Inhibitions lowered, blown to hell really. Everything blown to hell.
"I didn't turn out how he wanted me to." His voice turns bitter; tears are bitter, too, but he has to hold them back. "He wanted me to be like Steve Rogers."
The woman's eyes mist over. "Do you know something?" she asks, and then, before he can answer—"Your father wanted to be like Steve too."
His blade-sharp memory turns back on, inconveniently late. He recognizes her. Peggy Carter, red lipstick smiles and a steely reserve in her interviews, that only faded with time.
"Miss—uh—Carter." She's married; he doesn't know her married name, or if he did, he's forgotten it. He, Tony Stark, with the perfect memory. "Sorry." Drunk Tony is quite miserably meek. If his father could see him—but even if he could, Tony doesn't know if he'd be looking.
"Don't be sorry," Peggy says. "This is all very dreadful, isn't it? Death is the price we pay for love."
"Oh." He isn't sure how to answer.
"And do you know what?" She tucks her handkerchief in her silver-clasped purse. "They are both too much for each other." She presses his hand in hers, and moves away, her shoulders bowed for a brief instant, and then straightening to soldier posture.
Tony slumps against the wall. He wants something to drink; he wants to forget. He wants to remember, and he wants more time.
Love and death. They always come at the worst times, after and too late, before and never soon enough.
...
Tony Stark is drunk at his parents' funeral, and drunk long afterwards.
And when he hears the news that Steve Rogers is alive, his first thought is a selfish one. He thinks that, if there is an afterlife, at least his father couldn't replace him there. Not yet.
There's still hope for redemption.