Pain, pure unadulterated pain, his whole body ached, creaked, and cracked, he could feel the blood running all over his chest staining his pricey dress shirt, his suit jacket was shredded as he felt a warm breeze pass over him as he was whisked down some kind of hallway. His hair was laced with sand from the desert he just came from. His eyes were finally starting to sharpen as his dizziness began to go away. His ears were not ringing anymore but there was still something wrong with him as all the sounds around him were muffled as if he was underwater trying to hear what was happening on the surface. He looked around and saw several Middle Eastern men moving him at a spirited pace on some kind of bed or stretcher. He looked straight up and saw rectangular lights on the ceiling "Hospital" he thought "That's what hospital hallway lights look like." He looked back to the side and noticed that the walls were not white and clean such as a hospital walls would look. They looked dirty and jagged as if roughly carved out of rock and nobody bothered to dull the edges of what was left, he was positive that he could easily cut himself on the walls even if he was careful in touching them. The stretcher bumped and skidded as the men continued to push. The muffling of his ears began to subside as he could now hear the men pushing him through the passageway were seemingly arguing about something although he never bothered to learn Arabic so he could not even hazard a guess as to what they could be arguing about.
Suddenly there was a flash over his face and then another flash and then another and another until he was sure he would be permanently blinded by the flashing. After he regained his eye sight he saw that it was a young man with a very old disposable camera who was taking pictures of him for some reason. He tried to move his arms to grab onto something but found them bound to the stretcher he was in; he quickly discovered his legs were in the same state. He was now bleeding out through his chest and bound to a stretcher against his will "Could not get much worse" he thought until he saw another young man holding a camera that had a little red light on it. "Great now they are recording me on my death bed" he pondered the whole death bed part of his last thought, it was then that the realization that he could die in this moment in some section of the middle east without his friends by his side hit him; No Pepper, no Rhodey, no Happy. He began to cry as the stretcher stopped in front of two large green double doors that looked like they had come off of some old bomb shelter from during the cold war.
The doors were big and heavy, he could tell by the fact that it took four very large men on each door to open it enough for the stretcher to slip through. He could see two men of roughly the same height talking as the stretcher approached them. The first voice appeared to be in charge as his voice was much more authoritative than the other voices and demanded respect and mainly because when he spoke everyone else shut the hell up. The voice of the second man sounded calm and soothing as if he knew everything would be ok if he did all he could to help. He started going through everything he would miss after he died since given all the things he had done, he doubted heaven would unlock the front door for him, his cars, his toys, Jarvis, his workshop perfectly cluttered and messy just how he liked it to be, and especially his friends if he managed to somehow survive this he would make it up to them for all his mistakes but at this point he knew that it was a big if given the whole bleeding to death in some cave bomb shelter thing in the Middle East somewhere. He was quite confused and worried when he entered but his worry became fear when he understood one word that was spoken by the one of the two men "Stark" one of them said his name.