A/N: Based off the Robert Frost poem of the similar title:
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire
But I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction, ice
Is also great and would suffice
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I do not own them outside of wildly vivid fantasies...
--
In these past months, there are two moments he is sure his world will finally come to an end.
The first time, he knows his world will crash with the acrylic bite of blood on his tongue and the scorching heat of the sun on his face.
A part of him desperately struggles to comprehend what just happened, to fit bloody bits of a boy-barely-man and the bomb he gave life to into something logical, something he can analyze and make sense of. But for the first time in his life, time has become the one thing he lacks and there will be mere seconds before everything draws to a fiery blazing close. He wonders if this is how his parents felt in the crash's aftermath, surrounded by the crumbling, broken remains of their life, blood hot and thick beneath their fingers. He wants to laugh at the irony then, the audacity of it all.
In a hazy, laughable way, Tony Stark will die from his own hands, thrown to the ground by the very ideals he'd once held dear.
He wonders if anyone will cry at his funeral, if the world will mourn his passing.
Rhodey will miss him, he is sure, miss the boy he had once been and the man who occasionally comes out from behind the girls and the booze and the snarky comments. Of course, Rhodey won't miss him if he's dead and the thought makes something clench in his chest. He hopes against that the one man he could quite possibly call a friend survives the fiery hell he's sinking into, and then he imagines the sand beneath his fingers as coarse strands of fire, the one way he could burn with a grin on his lips.
He's not sure why Pepper Potts' face pictures crystal clear in his mind's eye or why his heart tightens at the sight, but he knows the searing desire across his gut and let's himself imagine the vanilla of her scent and the soft, freckled skin beneath his callused fingers. That desire's like a sucker punch to the gut and he can feel something on his fingertips, a thought with the kind of clarity that comes only once, but the knowledge slips sieve-like through his brain, gone to god know's where.
As the world ends, he feels fire ghosting over his skin and tasters her sweetness on his tongue and knows he will now never know why.
--
The second time his world ends, he knows he will die with the icy chill of betrayal rigid in his spine and his heart frozen in his chest.
He's ignored that seed of betrayal growing in his mind for far too long and now his ever-slipping grasp on twisted innocence has finally faltered. Now, more than ever, he feels more metal than man, held in place by steel blots and plated anger, with liquid iron running through his veins in place of crimson blood. As he watches the man he'd viewed as a second father, held as close as family, deteriorate into a smiling, manical cone, Tony wonders if this is the final blow, if fate had decided he didn't deserve this second chance.
When Obadiah speaks of golden geese and selfishness, all he wants to do is spit in his face and break his nose, to bash in his entire head until the outside matches the inside, until the chilling hate in his gut stops driving into his heart, fixing the gears in place until even the loathing and the anger take too much energy.
The bite of his heart leaving his body feels oddly satisfying, symbolic in the way only Tony Stark can be. If he could laugh, he would, raw and throaty and full of bitter, bitter pain.
This time, he wonders if Rhodey will avenge him, take Obadiah down with the suit he's been fiddling with downstairs. He tries to imagine the burning satisfaction of revenge in his guy, but all he feels is cold, chilled by emotions that roll through his body with startling clarity. He tries so hard to ignore the fear spiking inside because fuck it all, he refuses to die on his couch with this as his legacy.
He will not waste Yinsen's sacrifice on giving this monster any sort of power.
When Peppers' face pictures in his head, at least he knows why this time, but that doesn't explain the way his heart feels like ice or the chills clenching his body. This time, the vanilla of her scent's been covered with the copper tang of blood and the freckled, creamy skin his hand once ghosted over no longer remains free of bruises or worse. Desire's been replaced with something stronger, something that sends icy determination flooding through against the gear.
All he knows is a world without Pepper Potts is one he won't survive.
Clarity's right out of reach once again, but Obadiah's taunting words as he walks out of reach grips him away again. Her face burning brightly in his mind, Tony sits in cold silence. Patiently, he waits, frozen by both fear and his own hands.
And while he waits, the ice filling his chest grows large enough to cover the crippling brunt of hate and the brutal sting of betrayal, grows so all that's left is Pepper's body safely beside him and Obadiah's dead on the ground.
Frozen, he waits, knowing that either he will win or his world will end with ice clenching his gut and his heart frozen away.