The palladium poisoning didn't hurt, no matter how painful it looked, and Tony almost wished it did. Because maybe if it hurt, he would have paid more attention to it, done something besides ignoring it.
Cause maybe he didn't actively want to die, but he sure as hell wasn't fighting it too much, because it was so goddamn easy.
But then things happened and he was given the final push he needed to actively decide to live, and wow, look at that, things worked out pretty fine in the end.
(Okay, maybe he blew up half of the Expo, but whatever. Not his fault. And he was alive, and Pepper was alive, and Rhodey was alive, and honestly, Tony couldn't ask for much more than that.)
Earth sort of went to hell in a handbasket after that, what with the angry demi-god that decided he needed a playground, and hey, Earth looked available.
The Avengers happened, and they sort of saved the world, but they couldn't save all of them, and Agent died, the idiot, because he had to do the self sacrificing thing (and wow, that didn't remind Tony of anyone else in his past at all, nope, definitely not the man who went running through a cave with a gun to give him more time to escape) and that hurt more than his own, albeit temporary, death.
Because he did die, but it didn't hurt, because nothing did, but there was something in his chest (which he blamed on the near death thing) that ached afterwards.
And yeah, he'd always sort of understood that emotional pain could be just as, if not more, real than physical pain, and for him, it was the only kind of pain he had. He'd felt it before, a sort of hollow in his chest, when he broke up with a girlfriend that he thought he could make it work with, when his father brushed him off again and again, hell even when his parents died he didn't feel more than an ache.
But Coulson, Agent, Phil, made Tony's chest feel raw and open and burning, like he imagined the surgery would have felt. And it was strange, for him to feel that way, when his own parents' death hadn't been more than a simple hollowness, but maybe this was the first death that really hit home.
Or maybe it was just combined with his near death experience, and he was waxing poetic with the oxygen deprivation.
Whatever.
So he didn't die, and they sort of became a team thing, which was weird.
Because there was Captain America, the man he'd grown up hearing about, right there, completely real and just like his father told him. Because really, if anyone was the embodiment of perfect, it would be Steve Rogers.
And Tony kind of wanted to hate him for it, because growing up it was always 'Steve Rogers would never...' 'Captain America was braver...' 'If Steve were here...' and Tony was never good enough.
But Steve was actually that perfect, and it made Tony want to hate him even more, because honestly, it wasn't fair. He always tried to do the right thing and he was always honest and he was always brave and loyal and it made Tony sick, maybe because he knew how he looked next to him.
Because Steve's words stuck.
"The only thing you really fight for is yourself. You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you." "You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero."
But Tony proved him wrong, didn't he, flying that nuke into the portal, fully aware that he wasn't going to come back, and Steve... well, Steve was less judgemental after that.
But he still wouldn't call him a friend. They bickered, and Tony made fun of him, which maybe Steve didn't recognize, and they were generally in the same orbit, but never really connected.
But that was fine, because there were four other team members as buffers, and then whoever else happened to be in the Tower, and it was enough.
But Thor's statement about being ready for a higher form of war rang true, because it seemed alien invasion became a weekly thing. Certainly not on the scale of Loki's attack, and not always in New York, but aliens seemed to pop up around the world on a regular basis, and they were usually dispatched to fend them off, no matter the apparent threat.
Because they were dispatched one day to fight off cotton candy aliens (that's what Tony was calling them, and he didn't give a damn what anyone else said) in Brazil, and seriously, they were literally fluff balls, how dangerous could they be?
Okay, maybe they were kind of dangerous, because they kept respawning new ones, because all they needed was a bit of fluff, and bam there was another one. But they figured it out eventually, because damn those things burned beautifully, and it took them more than six hours, but they were all dead by the time they left.
He kept going and going and his teammates joked that he was an Energizer Bunny, at least the ones who knew what that was (Clint and Bruce, because Thor, Steve and Natasha had no clue, seriously, did that woman live under a rock?) and he didn't tell them it was because he didn't know when he should stop.
Pain was important. Pain taught lessons and let you know when to stop. Pain tells you where your limits were, that the joint couldn't bend that way, that the water was too hot, that you couldn't jump that distance without getting hurt.
Tony had none of that. He had to learn through trial and error, experiments involving x-rays and careful examination of his limbs. He couldn't feel temperature, he had to measure it.
(He thought it was one of the things that led to his scientific nature, his love of numbers and statistics and data, because he didn't know how to comprehend the world in any other way. Qualitative couldn't mean anything to him, so he had to stick with quantitative.)
He was Iron Man, and broken ribs could kill him easily before he even realized what was happening. Without the pain to warn him, he could crack a rib, and not know about it until the next fight, when it became dislodged and punctured his lung.
So maybe he ended up with three broken ribs after he didn't notice how hard the impact was with the super giant cotton candy alien that seemed to be the boss level.
It wasn't his fault, and really, no harm was done.