A/N: I felt like Tony was in arguably the worst position at the end of Infinity War.
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Hopelessness was a feeling Tony was familiar with, as much as he might deny it to anyone who asked. He'd experienced his handful of hopeless situations. Being held captive by terrorists in a desert cave. The panic attacks that plagued him after being sucked through that weird portal when Loki was attacking New York. Basically any time he was in a combat situation without his suit. Take your pick.
He'd always pulled through, in the end. Both in his own battles with bad guys and when the Avengers came together as a team to save the world. There were bumps and bruises, a handful of heated arguments, some loss of civilian life. But they had always come out on top relatively unscathed, all considered.
Not this time.
Tony had lost. The team had lost. The entire damn universe had lost. Completely, utterly. They'd come close, so close he could taste it, the gauntlet sliding off of Thanos's arm. And then things had gone FUBAR when that idiot Starlord couldn't keep himself together for just another minute.
Could Tony have kept it together, finding out that Pepper had been killed by the guy standing before him? He didn't know, didn't care to dwell on it. It was so much easier to just blame that immature moron.
And Strange. Oh, he'd talked tough before they landed on that godforsaken wasteland of a planet, warned them that he would let them all die if it meant guarding the time stone. And then Mr. Cape had handed it over to Thanos as soon as things got a little hairy. Tony had hardly had time to inform Strange of just how stupid he was before it became quite clear that Thanos had taken Vision's soul gem, and completed his gauntlet. He'd won.
It happened in moments. Starlord's weird friends turned to dust, then the man himself. Then he'd held the kid, Peter, who should have been safe and sound on Earth instead of on some decomposing corpse of a planet, gasping and begging not to die as his body blew away on the breeze. Pieces of Peter were still clinging to his blood-sticky fingers. Strange had gone without much fuss, muttering some cryptic bullshit about it being "the only way." All gone except for him and that weird bald mixture of alien and metal that stood off to the side, staring at him with her soulless eyes.
Tony couldn't stay mad, not really. It would be easier to be mad. Anger would distract him from the pain stabbing through his side and the grief beating at his chest. But he couldn't be mad. They'd paid the ultimate price. They were dead. More than dead. Gone, with no bodies left behind to bury and mourn over. Presumably, so was half of the galaxy's population. Odds were, more of the team was gone too. Hell, Pepper might have turned into a pile of dust as well, he had no idea.
He had no way to get back to find out. The ship was destroyed. His suit was a wreck. No one knew where he was. The creepy metal woman was equally as likely to cut his throat as figure out some way to get off the planet. And if she did, she wouldn't want to go back to earth. With his suit destroyed and his body on the verge of collapse, what could he do to force her to? There was nothing he could bribe her with, no threats he could make.
Tony bit back a groan of pain as he lowered himself to sit on the ground. The wind whipped grains of dirt into his eyes and the sensitive cuts on his face. The wound in his side was no longer leaking blood onto his clothes, but he was surely still bleeding internally. There was no game plan, there was no rebound, there was no rescue. Hopeless.
The wind howled around the empty planet. Tony began to weep.