Actions

Work Header

Epitaph

Notes:

I couldn't resist playing in scifigrl47's sandbox a bit, but she said it was okay, so. ^.^ Just a bit of drabble inspired by some lines in Four (Or Five) Reasons. Not spoilery, really, but it loses a bit of impact if you don't know said lines. And honestly, if you haven't read her Toasterverse yet, what have you been doing with your life? Go read it now!

Work Text:

It will happen one day. Not soon. Twenty, maye thirty years from now. Or fifty. Yeah, fifty's a good number, it'll give him a long life full of robots and fighting evil and science and team movie nights. And Steve will get a chance to tease him about finally being the nonagenarian in the relationship, and Clint will joke about the next Iron Man being a wheelchair suit, and Coulson will thwap Clint upside the head with his cane, and when did this become a superhero retirement home fic, what the heck brain, focus here.

Anyway, one day, in the distant (but never distant enough) future, Tony Stark will die. Maybe it's in a fight with the ubiquitous supervillain, or yet another explosion in his lab. Perhaps he goes quietly in his sleep. Or in bed, not so quietly, you know he'd love that.

And there will be mourning, and memorials, and monuments. Statues of Iron Man in cities and towns all over the world. Plaques commemorating donations he made, signs in bars saying, "Tony Stark got totally wasted here." Speeches and eulogies lauding his scientific advances and humanitarian endeavors. The inevitable tell-all books that try to dig up all the old dirt, resort to making up eighty percent of their stories, and still fail to be half as interesting as the truth. (Coulson and Pepper have only gotten better with age. At cleaning up after Tony. And in general.)

Tony Stark's body will not be buried or preserved among any of these great, gaudy, public monuments. Assuming he doesn't will his remains to science (I think it's a toss-up between paranoia and hubris if he does or not), he will have a private grave, with a small, unexpectedly modest headstone. Almost too small: the epitaph requested so long ago won't completely fit on the stone, and will have to be shortened. Instead, it reads:

HERE LIES ANTHONY STARK
Once, He Made An Awesome Toaster
and his friends loved him