Logically, he could come back. He could be okay. Logically, there was a eighty-five percent chance that this could be fixed but Tony wasn't thinking logically. He was thinking with grief and anger and denial. He was thinking with the view of a man who just lost a son.
A son who pleaded to be saved, to be protected. He'd failed, failed so much. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry!" As if he, Peter, did something wrong. As if he got caught cheating or hacking into the Spidersuit and God, he wanted to cry. Thanos should've taken him, should've spared Peter. What if May was on Earth, alone and scared, wondering where her nephew is, where her son in all but birth is?
Dry fingers ran through greasy hair and he tugged roughly, knees to the ground and a choked sob ripped through his throat, decimating his lungs and all but burning his heart to a cinder. He'd done this, he'd failed. Thanos slipped through their fingers and they were so close.
Hard fists meet skull and an eerie yowl slices through the silence of a dying world and logically, he knows someone is watching but he doesn't care. Her gaze burns his body and he feels her pity, her grief, her exhaustion. Logically, he knows the sounds that leave his lips disturbed her more than Thanos ever could and that he should stop; now wasn't the time to grieve. But he couldn't.
Stinging eyes stare at soot covered arms and he screams and screams and screams. "Get off," He scratches at olive skin until pink lines turn to ugly, open wounds by blunt nails. "GET OFF OF ME." He can't deal with the thought that perhaps this soot is what is left of Peter. And logically, that is unfounded. But right now, he is not a logical man.
"I don't—I don't know what's happening. I don't...I don't wanna go. I don't wanna go, please. Please, I don't wanna go..."
He kneels over the spot where Peter once occupied, scared wet eyes staring into his, pleading him, begging him. That's all he remembers, all he sees when he closes his eyes. Logically, Peter isn't dead, he can't be dead. But Tony doesn't think logically. He thinks like a man who just lost his family. "My father never told me he loved me," he recalled saying that once. "never even told me he liked me..." His heart aches and his face burns where the tears trail down and his body folds in on itself, arms wrapped protectively over his chest as he screams and screams and screams for a loss that should've never have happened.
He screams for the fact that he never even got to tell the kid he loved him either. That he was proud of him. That he was already a better man than Tony Stark ever hoped to be.