Kinda inspired by a fic I wrote a few years back by the same name. This fic is shit and I dont give a shit lol.
Tony greedily sucked in cool air as his injured side roughly slammed into the cracked and debris-covered pavement, the armoured man bouncing and sliding in a spray of sparks a few feet as he came to a skidding halt, his aching muscles and numerous wounds screaming for attention and care as the result of his unexpected fall from the skies, which had not been a fun trip for the man.
The aching and tired genius pushed himself to his feet, the heavy armour weighing down on him as he stumbled a mere few feet toward, the cumbersome suit clanking loudly in the deserted and quiet street as he ungracefully moved forward as the worried inquiries and tones of his teammates came crackling through the suit's communications system, which had been damaged enough to warp his teammates' questions into discombobulated bits and pieces of sentences and unintelligible words that Tony's weary mind couldn't be bothered to even try to figure the meaning of, much less figure out well-phrased and understandable replies to what he was able to understand of the overlapping and static-filled statements of his team.
Every thing had been going well, the fight was drawing to a close with the Avengers coming out on top - as always - but of course Tony just had to go and throw himself in front of Clint when one of their cliché bad dudes shot at him from the roof of a building that Steve was still in the process of clearing. Turns out that even the Iron Man suit, the technological wonder that it was, wasn't quite the match for whatever high-powered machinery that particular villain was packing.
And of course it had to be the one bad guy with extremely good aim - or luck, because a shot that close to the Arc Reactor sure wasn't a nice and easy fix. It wasn't certainly fatal, but Tony was pretty sure it was a through-and-through, and he could probably do with some medical attention sooner rather than later.
"Ah, shit." Tony swore as his legs trembled, before giving out, the man sliding in a less-than-graceful drop to the sun-warmed pavement as agony coursed through his battle-weary body - the adrenaline was wearing off, and the pain was settling in. Lucky Tony.
As Tony lay there, his heavy breathing and the pounding of his heart filling his ears, he could distantly hear his team yelling for him, incessantly inquiring about his status and location. It seemed they knee something wasn't quiet right.
"The building... Steve was," Tony reached up and fumbled around the back of his helmet, quickly pulling it off of his head as he panted, each moment becoming harder and harder for him to draw in new breaths. "was clearing. Shooter, aimed at Birdbrain."
"Clint?" Natasha's voice. It was minuscule, almost unnoticeable, but Tony could hear the slight fear for her partner in her tone.
"I'm here 'Tasha. I never even saw the shooter, I assume Tony got him. Tony, you good?" Clint's voice now, reassuring the female assassin.
"Yeah, yeah," Tony swiped a hand through the sweat-soaked strands of hair that had fallen in front of his eyes as he nonchalantly spoke, resting his head against the building he had come to sit against as he did. "He managed to get a shot on me, but I'll be good with some TLC."
"What?!" Steve's angered voice came over the comms, concern and anger clear in the ex-soldiers tone. "Stark, why didn't you tell us when it happened? Are you in immediate danger of bleeding out, where was the shot?"
"I'm not-" Tony paused as something flickered through the corner of his vision, dancing just out of sight in his peripherals.
"Yes? What is it, Stark?"
"Guys..." Tony watched as a red circle trailed across the pavement, wove it's way up Tony's still-armoured leg, up his chest and past his eyes.
"What is it?"
Tony stilled as his eyes snapped upwards, seeing the form of the man that had shot him crouched hundreds of feet away on the top of the building across the street from Tony, the bright sunlight gleaming off of the lovingly polished gun that the man had in his confident grip. The gun that was currently pointed at Tony's head, aiming a red dot sight in the middle of his forehead.
"Tony?"
Tony barely had the time to feel or even register the feelings of fear that had forced their ways into his heart as the distant sniper pulled the trigger of his gun.
The gunshot cracked through the air, echoing through the streets.
"Tony?!"
Tony knew he was about to die. His only regrets were that he didn't get to say goodbye. He didn't get to fix his mistakes. Everything he had done. The weapons he had created, the people they killed, the families that they ripped apart.
"Stark!"
It happened in less than a second, but as a bullet ripped it's way through Anthony Starks forehead and skull with a gruesome spray of blood and shattered bone, the genius had one last thought as his heart beat its last, as his blood ran its course through his veins one last time, as his Arc Reactor protected its creator till the end.
He just wanted to say goodbye. To the team, to Happy, to Peter, to everyone that had ever mattered to him.
To Pepper.
But not all heroes get the happy ending that is deserved.
And Anthony Edward Stark definitely was one of the heroes that got an undesirable ending, sitting against a building with a hole torn through his suit with a matching hole torn through his brain, a spattered array of his blood, skeletal fragments, and his genius brain sprayed out against the wall behind him, a blank and unfocused look in his still open eyes which gazed out at nothingness as the increasingly concerned and worked voices of his teammates called out from the suit that lay beside his rapidly cooling body.