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They save the world, and then they go their separate ways – Thor in a flash of light, Steve on a motorcycle, Natasha and Clint like they were never there at all, and finally Bruce carrying a battered bag and looking apologetic.
Tony pours money and time into rebuilding the city and the Tower, but when Pepper says she wants to go back to Malibu, he can't say he's not glad.
He saw it in their eyes, all of them. They all know it's not a matter of if, but when. As for himself, he's just trying to be prepared.
"Prepared for what?" Pepper asks, leaning in and kissing his cheek.
"Anything," Tony says. "Whatever's coming."
She watches him over her steaming mug of coffee, waiting.
"We just threw down the gauntlet." Tony looks out the window over the water. "We don't know who's going to pick it up."
---
He dreams of battles, of stars, of dying alone. He dreams of burning cities, rivers of blood, falling missiles with his name on them. He dreams of watching Pepper die screaming, dreams of them all dying, everyone he's ever cared about, and he's always too slow and too late.
Sometimes, he dreams of the cave.
He was reborn there, in the mountains by the desert across the world. Reborn out his own hands, created from metal and flame. Everyone knows that, and it's true. But it's Yinsen who remade him, Yinsen who decided Tony Stark was worth saving, Yinsen who paid the cost.
Tony dreams of ghosts, all of his ghosts, a line of them stretching out into the horizon, disappearing in the distance.
---
"Tony," Pepper says gently. "Come to bed."
The exhaustion feels like he's stepped a little sideways out of reality, shaky and out of place in his own skin. Pepper turns off his blowtorch and puts it away, takes his hand and massages the cramps out of it.
He loves her desperately. He paid Pepper for years to do anything for him, but now he doesn't pay her and she does it anyway.
Tony passes out with Pepper curled at his back, but he wakes unable to breathe in the middle of the night, his hands already twitching for his tools.
---
He dreams of blood all over his hands, dripping onto hot metal and coals.
"I have to make it better," Tony says.
Yinsen looks at him over the table strewn with pieces of weapons. "So make it better."
"I'm trying." His chest hurts like something is trying to claw its way out of his ribs. He squints at his schematic, but all of the lines blur together.
Yinsen picks up a cylinder stamped with Tony's name. "Do you think it will be enough?"
---
"I wake up surrounded by a dismembered robot army," he hears Pepper say on the other side of the door. She's trying for humor, but the hysteria strings her words out too tight. Tony pulls his hand back from the doorknob.
"You have to give him time," Rhodey says, voice low and even. "Like after Afghanistan. You know how he is."
Tony backs away, loses the stack of signed papers somewhere on his way to the workshop.
Time. Time is ticking away. Tony is standing on a chess board nobody else can see, but he doesn't know the stakes, or his opponent, or when the game begins.
---
"Make it better," Yinsen says. They're in the cave, but they're also in the workshop. This doesn't seem strange.
Tony drops the helmet in the fire, metal pooling like blood. His ears are ringing. "I can't."
He turns around and faces the line of armors, each one better than the last, and none of them good enough. The despair drags him down and swallows him whole.
"Well then," Yinsen says. "You have a problem."
---
Tony remembers the first time he put everything he had into building something. He was six, and he built an engine. He wanted his father to see what he could do; he got a magazine cover.
Yinsen buckles him into the armor. Tony knows this is a dream, a memory, knows how it ends.
"I have a better suit now," Tony says in a rush. "I can get both of us out."
Yinsen doesn't look at him. The armor weighs so much that he can hardly breathe. He thinks of the Mark VII, wills it to come to him, to exist in this place.
He can fix things, here. This is a dream.
There's the explosion behind him, gunfire and shouting, right on schedule.
Those are Stark guns. Tony knows everything about them; could disassemble and reassemble them blindfolded. He learned how to shoot as soon as his hands were big enough to hold a gun steady. He was building explosives before he needed to shave.
He did the impossible here in this place – created something everyone said couldn't exist, made a weapon the likes of which no one had ever seen. It's what he does. It's not enough.
"We need more time," Yinsen says, and he looks at Tony. His eyes are bright with fear, and something else. "I'm going to go buy you some time."
---
Tony wakes surrounded by metal, one hand in a repulsor gauntlet and the other clutching at his chest. Dismembered robot army, he thinks. Is that what he's doing, building an army? A bigger stick?
He is Iron Man, but he's not, is he, not really. He's just a man in a suit. Tony built the armor, but Yinsen made the man.
"Make it better," Tony says, and he looks at the line where the metal meets skin.