People tend to overlook Tony Stark's time in Afghanistan. They forget that he was just a civilian, just a rich, arrogant man with no real military or combative training. That he was kept for 3 months. That he woke up with metal embedded 4-inches into his chest. That he didn't seek any medical help after. That he single-handedly destroyed a terrorist camp.
It's not their fault, Tony Stark himself tends to overlook it.
Until he doesn't.
Until he wakes up in the middle of the the night, screaming, crying, hands clawing at his chest, where surely there's hands, cutting, cutting, blood, pain oh-
He has people to lean on, Pepper, Rhodey, Happy, Obadiah Stane. So maybe it's not so bad, right?
Obadiah.
He guided him through his life, always there, in the background, leaning a sympathetic look and a hand on his shoulder when his father got drunk. He took over the company when his parents died, and he counted him as friend - almost a father figure.
Then he's a traitor, undercutting him, selling out to the very people that put him through three months of hell.
And it all happens, Iron-Man, the fight, and suddenly he's dead.
Dead.
Tony Stark has killed before, even before his escape from the Ten Rings. His father murdered, and when he died, gave the legacy to him, and oh did he use it. Tony Stark, in the words of Raza, 'the most famous mass murderer in the history of America'. He didn't despise his title, no, took pride from 'The Merchant Of Death' but then he saw, he saw the death, the destruction. And he shut it down. You can call Tony Stark many things, but complicit in the murder of innocent lives is not one of them.
Slowly things become okay again.
With Pepper and Rhodey and Happy. And then Cap and Bruce and Natasha and Clint and Thor - in some strange way, these people are more his family than his mother and father ever were. Definitely more than Obidah Shane.
And he forgets, and the world forgets with him.
Until he doesn't.
Cap's betrayal.
That's what set it off, because it reminds him of Yinsen. And all he can see is his face - on the back of his eyelids, in his dreams, imprinted into every courtroom. It leads to more, until all he can feel is the unbearable heat of the cave, the dust, the dirt, the rough shouts in a language that he doesn't understand.
But then he finds a kid, a kid that he's only dreamed about. And that kid who laughs and jokes and makes terrible science puns pulls him together again, even the parts long lost to sun and desert.
And the world sees, well not really, but they see him, a new era of him - without the Avengers, without Obi, without anyone. They see Tony Stark, in his purest form, self-sacrificing and guilty and so terribly broken.
And somehow, somewhere, people understand.
But then a giant donut descends from the sky and goes back up again and he follows it.
And he doesn't come down.
Not the Tony Stark that we all know, whether you love and hate him.
No, this version is harder. The veil of arrogance, of sex and witt and playboy charm is gone. Cut away to show hard, hard intelligence, and deep-seated issues - the barest bones of Tony Stark. These things only the dead and closest trusted confidants have seen before.
And somehow, somewhere the world understands again, that somewhere up in space, Tony Stark changed, the man they've known for so long is not the same and he never will be again.
Ross stops trying him. He no longer replies with jokes and quips, but with fire, with broken shards of glass, with a murderers legacy and a man who been through too much.
And the world learns, slowly, that they can no longer push him and blame him, because something snapped and he's done being their scapegoat.
The world learns that Tony Stark has seen the gates of hell so many times. He has tasted hellfire and had drinks with the devil, only to come back with a suit of iron.
Tony Stark is not unbreakable, oh no, he has broken many times. He is not unbreakable, he is unrelenting, like waves along a shore. He may fail, he may become weak, but he is always there, and he will always rise.
Because Tony Stark is not Iron-Man.
Iron-Man is Tony Stark.