I'm sorry this is so short, particularly compared with the other chapters, but I have a feeling the rest are going to be shorter than the first two, if not as short as this one :) I didn't get much feedback for the last chapter so please read and review this one xx

He was dying. What with everything that had been done to his genes and there was nothing in his blood to prevent palladium poisoning. Then again, it was unlikely that Howard ever considered the possibility, even though he considered most other things.

Howard didn't consider how other people would survive without vibranium, when he used it all in the good Captain's shield and the goddamn man went and buried it in the ocean with him.

There is cheetah blood running through his veins, poisoned by the metal that powers his heart.

Isn't that just a metaphor for who he is?

What he's been created to be and who he's created for himself, colliding until it destructed somewhere near the middle and he hurts the few people he cares about on the way.

He saw it all unfolding like a map and it was trapped inside his head. He couldn't look at Pepper without seeing how devastated she would be about his death, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He couldn't do anything.

Or at least that's what he thought.

Even when he'd gone to tell Pepper the truth, to get it over with, he'd been distracted by the image of Howard's plan for the Stark Expo. He's a cat, it's in his nature to be easily distracted by shiny things and this model was definitely shiny.

But this took the cake, to not be able to do the right thing by Pepper because of what Howard had made him to be.

Even from beyond the grave Howard was screwing up his life.

Tony didn't know what it said about him that he let it.

He ignored it though, and carried on working, because although he'd just about given up hope, there was no way he was going to let the Ten Rings win, to let Obadiah win, to let Howard win. Because if he lost against himself they had.

If he lost against himself then he was nothing more than the abnormal freak Howard had created. He would have done nothing with his life, only gamble and fool around and murder innocent people with the legacy his creator gave him.

Tony growled.

He would not let that happen.

That is what Iron Man is for. But if Tony was dying, perhaps the world needed a new Iron Man.

In the depths of his madness, or perhaps brilliance, it's remarkable how the two traits coincide, he found the footage of Howard, telling him how proud of Tony he is.

And wasn't that a change?

Normally it's how disappointing, how abnormal, how much of a freak. Normally it isn't nice things.

This time it was.

It knocked him off-balance slightly, because Tony is, first thing first, a mathematician and he can't do anything without all the variables - and they certainly weren't present for that conversation.

There was no data there, no evidence. For all he knew this had been tampered with, beyond belief, to get him to get back to work. Nothing about that footage had made sense, none of it matched up.

The maths wasn't adding up.

Howard put the world back on his axis though.

He was proud at his own genius, his own success, not Tony's. Why would he care about the abnormality that was his son, even of he'd recorded this for him?

This was Howard's last praise, last act of annoyance for Tony Stark, to praise himself from beyond the grave and utterly ignore and diminish the work of Tony. His last act of defiance in a world that had moved on.

And they moved on thinking of Tony Stark.

But somehow, Tony still knew that Howard had won.

Once upon a time he was proud of his arc reactor, if not the circumstances he received it in.

Now that it's killing him, it is just a reminder that even Howard can build him better than he can build himself.