He told Pepper he wanted to be a father.
(I had a dream.)
And here is the truth about dreams: they are not the same as visions. Tony remembers what spurred him to Ultron: Steve's broken shield and rasping pleas. Remembers, too late, that that shield might as well be broken.
Visions are crueler than dreams.
And this is crueler still.
.
I don't want to go—
And where is there, to go? The closed-casket funeral for his parents gave enough weight, enough permanence to death to last him a lifetime.
But this? One moment he's trapped by the terror in Peter's eyes, and the next there's nothing left of Peter at all.
Ash and dust and outer space.
Tony, alone, always one-half of everything even when he tries to be whole—
He grieves. And no, not for Aunt May, waiting and waiting, nor for the high-school friends and the girl who Happy's been surveilling, just to be sure—
No. Tony has always been selfish. First, he grieves for himself.
.
There is no universe, no future, where Tony deserves to live and the boy in his arms does not.
A day ago—or was it even a day?—he was sure that nothing could shake him. Sure that he had figured it out by now, sorted out the mess left by Steve, the Accords and the emptiness that followed Cap's absence in a mockery of a parade.
Tony was going to be better at this. And not just better, good.
Good enough to be a father.
.
Mr. Stark? Mr. Stark?
(I don't want to go.)
.
Tony told himself he'd get to choose. If it came down to the loss of him or the kid, he'd save the kid. He'd gussied him up in that shiny suit, promised him the world and then taken him to another one, and it was a damn stupid plan but it was almost working—
They are all gone.
It is no closed-casket funeral. It is ash and dust and outer space, and something worse than that:
It is the future, and it is what Tony deserves.