AN: I'm… sorry?
WARNINGS: sort of suicidal character, a graphic and bloody nightmare
THERE ARE INFINTY WAR SPOILERS AHEAD. HEED MY WARNING, CHILDREN.
"…It ain't fair you died too young,
like a story that had just begun,
but death tore the pages all away.
God knows how I miss you,
all the hell that I've been through,
just knowing no one could take your place,
Sometimes,
I wonder,
who you'd be today…"
Kenny Chesney / Who You'd Be Today
They do not win.
They fail.
In the end, Tony finds that he doesn't give two shits about the 3.8 billion who died.
The 3.8 billion that they couldn't get back.
He only cares about one.
("Mister Stark? I don't feel so good.")
The one he couldn't save. The son he couldn't save.
("I'm sorry.")
In his last breaths, the kid had apologized. Through the haze of death and pain and fear, he had apologized.
The last thing Peter Parker ever felt was guilt.
And Tony Stark would carry that burden with him for the rest of his life.
Sunny days are the worst.
The day after they find Thanos' body, slumped lifelessly on a distant planet without the Infinity Gauntlet, is the brightest one Tony has ever seen.
He fucking hates it. If he could, he would tear the sun from the sky just for existing when Peter Parker did not.
He was brighter than you, he thinks, glaring up at the dying star and willing it to self-destruct faster, he was brighter than you could ever hope to be.
He goes to May Parker's apartment to apologize and only finds a pile of ash. Ned is gone, too. The scary girl that Peter had a crush on, MJ, met the same fate.
Everyone who loved Peter Parker, everyone who would remember his name, was gone.
Everyone except Tony Stark.
And that was probably the saddest joke the man had ever heard.
He has conversations with Peter in his head. It is easy. He had learned every facet of the child's dialogue. Every twitch and quirk and mannerism.
Peter Parker's ghost lives on so vividly inside him that Tony Stark wonders if he can trick him back to life. The memories are too much. They are too clear. They are too real to be a figment of a grief-addled mind.
But Peter Parker is dead. These are just echoes. Copies. Insubstantial concepts that he cannot touch. He cannot hold. He cannot keep.
They slip through his fingers like ash on a foreign breeze.
"I bought a new book today, Mister Stark. MJ wanted me to read it so I'm going to. It's a sci-fi classic, apparently. Oh, and I'm trying to pick out a gift for May for Mother's Day. I don't wanna do flowers because that's kinda dumb, y'know? Or is it not? What do you think, Mister Stark?"
"I think she'd like flowers, kid."
"Yeah? Maybe I'll get her some flowers, then."
"Maybe you should."
"What do you look so sad, Mister Stark?"
"I just miss you, Peter."
"I'm right here."
"'Course you are, kiddo."
And Peter isn't wrong. To Tony, he is everywhere. He sees teenagers spilling out of dinged up school buses and sees Peter. His phone lights up with a notification and he wonders if it's Peter. He sees a report about rising crime in Queens and, for a heart stopping moment, he wonders why Peter isn't patrolling as much as he used to.
He isn't patrolling because he can't. He isn't patrolling because you didn't save him.
He begged you, Stark. He begged you for comfort and you didn't say a damn thing.
Peter's seventeenth birthday comes just months after his death. Tony lights a single candle on the coffee table and puts on all the Star Wars movies in the order Peter preferred. He eats Peter's favorite pizza and throws it right back up into the kitchen sink.
He'd had all of Peter's stuff moved into the Tower. There wasn't anybody else to handle it, anyway. He goes into the room where it's all arranged and ends up reading through his AP Literature notebook with the taste of bile sitting heavy on his tongue, back pressed against a stack of cardboard boxes.
Time is not concrete. It is an ever-stretching plane that has no beginning, middle, or end. Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Book of Sand," focuses on this complex concept.
He lets Peter Parker's ghost teach him about Hamlet, and Frankenstein, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. He runs his fingers over the smeared pen ink and thinks about the kid's hand, hastily scrawling out the essays after his patrols. His eyes always linger on the name at the top right corner.
Peter Parker.
Peter Parker. The kid I couldn't save.
(The death of a child is also the death of their parent. These are the things that they don't say. These are the things that cannot be spoken because the words would splinter under the horror of the truth. There are the things that settle in Tony Stark's gut every single morning.)
"Mister Stark, please. Please, Sir, please. I'm scared. I'm scared."
The dirt is stained with blood. The air around him swirls with dust and ash and death.
He has no suit. This is not a place for Iron Man. Iron Man does not know grief like this. No, this is a place for Tony Stark. For Tony Stark and his failure. For Tony Stark and his endless chasm of regret.
Peter screams and Tony stumbles towards the sound. He knows that he cannot save him, but he always tries. He is a mouse in a maze that never learns. Run and run and run and fail and fail and fail.
"Save me! Tony, please! Tony! Save me!"
He sees an outline disrupting the horizon and he knows who it is before he even sees his face.
The certainty reverberates in his soul. It is as if he has a compass in his stomach, and the North points him home.
The North points him right to Peter.
"Kid."
Peter turns. He is drenched in blood. A blade, Tony's blade, protrudes from his stomach.
Tony catches him when he falls.
(I always catch him. I always do. I can catch him but I can't keep him. The universe dangles him within my grasp and then snatches him away. I am given just enough love to feel the crushing weight of loss. I am given a compass to guide me but its focal point is gone.)
Peter is choking. Thick, nearly black clots of blood bubble up from between his lips. His hands scrabble against Tony's chest, then fall still.
He has given up. Tony wishes he had the courage to do the same.
"Tony."
"Shh, Peter. You're okay. I'm here. I've got you."
(I caught you. I caught you. I caught you.)
Peter blinks, and his eyes turn to ash. It pools in the empty eye sockets as the kid lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
He reaches for Peter's face, desperate to do something, to do anything, to comfort his kid. To take this away. To piece him back together.
His fingers come away heavy with ash and blood as Peter's cheek crumbles underneath his touch.
He wakes up screaming.
"Did It hurt, Peter?"
"Dying?"
"Yeah."
"Like hell."
(Nobody else saw it coming. Nobody else even knew.
But Peter Parker did. And Peter Parker died afraid.)
Assuming a heartbeat of 80 beats per minute, Peter Parker's heart beat about 670,924,800 times.
If he lived to be 100, it should have beat about 4,204,800,000 times.
That's 3,533,875,200 that he never got.
Tony sets up the Peter Parker Foundation. It's an outreach program that works in low-income communities to offer education, support, and scholarships to children and teens who are interested in robotics.
He keeps an eye on the program. Takes an interest in any particularly brilliant applications and makes sure those kids get every resource they could possibly dream of.
But he never meets them.
Everything pure that Tony Stark touches crumbles into ash.
He already has Peter Parker's blood running red along his soul. He cannot bear the weight of another sin.
Harley Keener has a kid. Tony comes and meets on his third birthday. His name is Charlie and he has curly brown hair and deep brown eyes.
He looks into them, wide and so full of innocence and wonder and time, and all he can see is Peter staring back at him.
(Terrified eyes. Pupils blown wide. So scared. So scared. So scared. "I don't wanna go. Sir, please."
Eyes going glassy. Eyes going dead. It is a truth Tony Stark does not know how to interpret.
Peter Parker was dead before the ash claimed his face.)
Tony manages to make it to the car before he vomits down the front of his shirt.
"What do you want to name your kids, kid?"
"Han? Maybe Leia."
"Please don't name them after Star Wars characters."
"I won't."
"You won't?"
"I can't, Mister Stark. I'm never gonna get the chance."
He wonders if there's an afterlife. He wonders if Peter really is looking down on him, like his mother believed. He wonders if he'll see him again.
The flicker of hope that he might have done something, just something, good enough in his fucked-up life to warrant just another five minutes with his kid is the only thing that keeps him living.
Everyday, for the rest of his life, Tony Stark wakes up and asks F.R.I.D.A.Y. how old Peter Parker would have been that day.
(And that is how Tony Stark lives. He lives in has been and once was. He lives in echoes and copies. He lives but he does not live at all.)
He keeps track of the dates. He celebrates every missed birthday with a candle and a day of looking through the kid's things. Some birthdays, he reads through Peter's dog-eared copy of The Hobbit. Other birthdays, all he does is clutch one of the kid's nerdy t-shirts to his chest and stare absently at a wall until the sun sets and rises on a new day.
A new day, but never a different one. Every day is still a day that Peter Parker will never get to see.
(Please, Sir. I don't wanna go.")
And isn't that the only thing that really matters?
Somewhere in a graveyard, there is a headstone that is unassuming where the life it marks was anything but.
Tony Stark
05/20/1970-06/16/2061
Hero, Father, Friend
(Tony Stark lives to be 91. That is 10 years more than the national average. And isn't that a tragedy?)
Hundreds of years later, historians will argue about the famous Tony Stark's grave. No records indicate that he fathered a biological child, nor is there any evidence of a secret adoption. By all formal accounts, there is no reason for his headstone to reference him as a parent.
But this is the truth that records don't show: Tony Stark became a father the moment he met a gangly, brilliant teenager from Queens.
This did not end when Peter Parker took his last breath, and it did not end what Tony Stark took his.
There are some things that are even more infinite than the universe itself. Things that transcend reality. Things that are woven into the fabric of a plane that is beyond what it known.
You cannot count the number of points on a line, because they do not have an end. That line will stretch on beyond horizons and nebulas and human comprehension.
And so will Tony Stark's love for Peter Parker.
Catching and keeping are not synonymous. Tony Stark learns this.
Many years later, he learns that death and end are not synonymous, either.
"Peter."
"Tony."
(Did you know that if you break two atoms apart, they will strain to reconnect? There are energies that cannot be separated. People that belong.)
"I thought about you every single day."
"I know. I heard you."
(The universe always meant for Peter Parker and Tony Stark to fall together, and the universe always gets its way. Thanos could not disturb that. Nobody can.)
The universe breaks and the universe mends.
This is what Thanos could never understand.
This is why, at the end of it all, his victory stands as hollow as his memory.
This is why he lost.
AN: *pokes head out from behind barricade of pillows* so, uh, what did y'all think?