Work Text:
Tony Stark had spent his entire life in the spotlight. That’s what happened when your father was one of the smartest and most famous men alive, and your genius outranked even his. And he was good at the spotlight - even blackout drunk, he could hold a conversation better than a lot of sober people could.
The spotlight was all he knew.
Tony had never had the luxury of his every move not being dissected, of being able to do anything without 3 news outlets following him as he did. The spotlight, the media, was always there.
When he was young, it was mostly there out of curiosity. He was 8, and making things most adults couldn’t - people were bound to be curious, and Howard never kept them away. Howard actively encouraged them, actually.
There were such high expectations from everyone. Howard, the news, anyone and everyone had an idea of who Tony Stark could be.
But here’s the thing, a truth that Tony was intimately aware of: You can’t always live up to expectations. Media is sadistic in that way - they set you on a pedestal you can’t quite live up to, because it’s a good story. When you inevitably fail, well, that makes a good story too. And the media loves a scapegoat. If you’re powerful, and you fail, it’s hard to recover. That’s why most people step out of the spotlight after a certain point.
That was never an option for Tony Stark.
It had been engraved in him since a young age that Stark men weren’t cowards. They weren’t supposed to take slander, either, but Tony had always hated himself more than the media ever did, so he had given up on the slander a long time ago.
Almost immediately, actually.
By the time he was 20, he’d ruined all of the expectations anyone had ever set for him. His parents were dead, and he was so far down the bottle that it was a wonder he was still alive, much less with neurons firing faster than almost anyone else’s.
By the time he was kidnapped, and the whole thing with Obadiah, he’d been so vilified in the public eye as a warmonger for profit that nothing he could have done would have saved him. Of course, nobody had taken into account the fact that he was barely running the company, or the fact that he was so out of it most of the time that he probably couldn’t even understand that that’s what he was doing.
He did save himself, with Iron Man and the end of weapons production - but just a bit, and never for long. He was too convenient to ever be fully forgiven. The destruction at the Expo? He took the blame for that, even though he’d quite literally been on the verge of death less than 3 hours before, and that it was quite literally a mix of Hammer, Vanko, and, as always, Howard.
But he was still convenient, so it was all his burden to bear. He didn’t mind - he would have blamed himself, even if the media hadn’t.
When New York was demolished in 2012, people forgot about the fact that he’d literally carried a nuke into space, had prevented thousands of casualties even without carrying the nuke into space, and was paying the entirety of the cost of rebuilding extraordinarily quickly. It was actually insane, how quickly they pinned the blame on him, considering.
But he was Tony Stark, still always the villain. Who else would you blame it on? Captain America? Thor, a literal god? No, not when you could blame Tony Stark.
He, of course, accepted it with open arms. He was used to it, at this point, and he was at the point where he could barely loath himself more, so why fight it?
With the Mandarin, people blamed him for blowing up his own house, and for the random casualties caused by Killian’s men. It was almost too convenient, at that point - he’d been blamed for everything else, and the media loves blaming people who desperately need help for all the bad things that happen to them. Never helping them. Especially not when it was Tony Stark, the perfect scapegoat. No - who else would they have to blame for everything?
Ultron, of course, was pinned on him. Nobody pointed a finger at Bruce, who’d encouraged and helped him. Not at Wanda, who’d openly admitted to manipulating him into creating Ultron, who’d helped Ultron carry his plans as far as he had. Not Hydra. No, of course not. Why would they pin it on anybody but Tony Stark? He was at fault for everything else - might as well add this to his long list of disappointments, his endless list of sins.
Civil War was his fault too, of course. He could have been nicer, more civil, according to the media. He didn’t have to start the fight at the airport. Of course it wasn’t Steve Rogers, America’s Golden Boy - even now, he couldn’t do anything wrong, so it obviously wasn’t his fault. No - it was Tony’s. Tony, who’d extended olive branch after olive branch, who’d sacrificed his life time and time again for the greater good, who’s peace offerings just weren’t good enough for the media.
Again and again, it was always Tony’s fault. Nobody thought about the man himself - he was just a convenient person to blame. Nobody ever considered how he felt, how article after article telling him he was horrible made him feel. No, the media doesn’t really care about the people it follows - not when they’re such perfect problems. Not ever, really, but especially not when they were Tony Stark.
Forget the virtues, only remember the sins.
The blip was blamed on him, too. He’d abandoned his team, according to most articles - he should have stayed on earth, helped there. Nobody mentioned that he hadn’t had a choice in the matter. There was never a mention of the fact that he was abandoned first, that when it all started, he was the only one left.
Not a word.
Tony was still the convenient scapegoat, made even more so by the fact that he accepted it. He believed it himself - you can’t be told, over and over again, by everyone in your life, that you are bad and at fault and to blame for everything that is wrong in the world, and not believe it yourself. He deserved it, he knew - he hadn’t been enough, hadn’t done enough. If he had just been better, everyone wouldn’t have left him alone to face the threat he’d been warning the world about for 10 years.
When he snapped, one of his last thoughts was to hope that finally, maybe, it would be enough. Maybe he’d finally be the hero, finally not be at fault for everything that had gone wrong.
And he was, for the most part, a hero. There were murals, and articles, a statue or two. It was better than Natasha had gotten, but then again she wasn’t in the public eye as much as he had ever been.
But heroism is always conditional, in the eyes of the public. And he wasn’t missed, per say, by the public either. It was almost as if they did the memorials, and the mourning, out of an odd sense of duty, without their ideas of him changing.
Their ideas never changed, and Tony Stark died to save a world that hated him.
There were articles about why the world was better off without him, using things that he didn’t cause, things that weren’t his fault by any realistic stretch, as evidence. The murals might have been gorgeous, but they weren’t maintained, and they were always of his suit, never the man inside. The murals for Captain America, for Steve, for the man who’d left the world behind, who’d made one selfish decision after the next his whole superhero career, were of his face, and almost none of Tony’s were.
But the world was not forgiving of Tony Stark, and dying to save it didn’t change that.
Tony Stark died to save a world that never loved him back.