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Tony Stark was a genius.
He knew it, his parents had known it, the world knew it. When Stark Industries had been handed to him at sixteen, he didn’t hesitate. He accelerated its growth, pushed boundaries, reach heights never seen before, until he was the face of not only weaponry, but a whole other plethora of sectors. He was innovation. No one could compete. He worked relentlessly, wore his brilliance like armour, and smiled like he knew everything.
And really, Tony did know everything he set his mind to. Complex scientific theories took him mere weeks to master. Invention came effortlessly. He could become an expert in anything within moments. The workings of Tony’s brain made it so he would always be able to learn, to create, to adapt. He had the brightest mind on Earth.
So, naturally, Tony believed he could distinguish between what was scientifically fact and fiction. He dismissed the whole “life flashing before your eyes” as sentimental nonsense.
That was until the day he nearly died.
Lying on the dusty ground of some location slap bang in the middle of nowhere, slowly bleeding out from the shrapnel lodged in his chest, imagine his surprise when he found himself looking at his mother’s gentle face and his father’s stern gaze. The memories had been sporadic, a rush of colour that formed his life. Building his first computer. Hacking the Pentagon. Inheriting the company. Moments frozen in time of youth and ambition.
And he was almost disappointed with what he saw. All that work, the expansion of the business, and he still felt he could do more. It wasn’t enough. In that moment, he had closed his eyes, heavy with regret, and waited for death to claim him.
Then he woke up. He’d barely been able to register the surprise before he was hit with two terrible revelations: the only thing keeping him alive was the car battery strapped to his heart, and the weapons that was his life’s work was being sold to terrorists. His legacy wasn’t brilliance; it was destruction, pain, death. The memories of his life had been tainted. Horror replaced his disappointment.
That was the moment Tony Stark decided to change – provided he escaped the terrorists, of course. When he saw his life again on his deathbed, hopefully as a very old man, he wanted to be happy with what he saw.
With that thought in mind, he vowed to escape – to save himself and his fellow captive, Yinsen. Together, they built a crude metallic suit that was clunky at best and unreliable at worse. It became Mark One of the Iron Man. When the time was right, Tony harnessed the suit and managed to escape.
Yinsen didn’t.
He sacrificed himself so Tony could live, revealing that his family had passed long ago and he intended to join them. Tony carried the guilt for months but eventually accepted Yinsen’s death, keeping his memory in a special place of his shrapnel-riddled heart in honour of him.
When he’d discovered he was dying again months later, the very device keeping him alive also poisoning him, he waited for the flashes of memory. It never came. He didn’t know if that was because he was only dying and hadn’t yet met the criteria of being dead. In the end, he solved the problem with a new element – one his father had theorised – and moved happily along.
Then came the Battle of New York.
This time, the choice was his. No one had asked him to guide a nuclear warhead into the wormhole, but he would be damned if the civilians of New York were to suffer for the government’s stupidity. The fight below had been long and arduous, but Tony was certain that this one sacrifice would give them victory. His life over billions. It was an easy choice.
The last thing he saw before his life flashing before his eyes was the explosion of the alien ships as the nuke hurtled into it.
When he came back to the Hulk’s roar, his heart mercifully still pounding in his chest, he wasn’t relieved. He was hollow. The flashes had doused him in cold reality, displaying the flaws in his actions sin the years since Yinsen died. He was meant to live on and do better, not just for himself but for Yinsen’s sacrifice.
Since escaping captivity he had buried himself in work, using his arrogance as a mask in hope no one could see how broken he was. Between nearly dying from blood poisoning, getting scoped out by SHIELD, and the return of Captain America (his late father’s favourite science project), his promise to do better was slowly chipped away. Self-destruction had become an armour, though invisible compared to the Iron Man one. He had failed, and it frustrated Tony to no end.
The months that followed New York were brutal. He was riddled with nightmares, struggling to cope from his most recent brush with death. He dreamed of Yinsen, of the abyss of space, of failing the world again and again and again. The first attack had hit him in a bar with Rhodey because a kid showed him a drawing. A drawing. He had honestly thought he was dying again. He braced for the memories. Nothing came.
JARVIS had been the one to break the news to him it had been a panic attack. It seemed so absurd that he, Tony Stark, proud and arrogant and clever, had a panic attack. But then it happened again, and again, all triggered by some memory of New York. A question, an image, a phrase. It was destroying him, slowly.
After that, Tony put in the work to get better. He went on medication to temper his panics, smoothed things over with Pepper, and finally got the surgery to get the remaining shrapnel out of his heart. He slowed the frantic production of his Iron Man suits, no longer building a new one weekly. He got better. It took a while, and he occasionally fell into old habits, but Pepper helped him, and he healed.
But he still couldn’t shake the thought of space out of his head, the worry lingering. The threats were up there, lurking, waiting for the right time to strike. In the quiet moments, the thoughts consumed him. They’d already nearly beaten humanity once. He couldn’t risk that again.
So Tony did what he did best: he invented. With the assistance of Bruce Banner, he created the first ever AI which had the capacity to think for itself. He had looked at his creation, still configuring, and finally felt satisfied. This could be the thing he could offer the world; his legacy. The co-creator of the Earth’s Greatest Defender. A suit of armour around the world.
Then the AI – Ultron – had looked at humanity and chose extinction.
Tony hadn’t anticipated that. But really, what did that say about humanity that Ultron took one look at it and decided it had to go? Regardless, it was another failed attempt; another smear on the name he hoped to redeem. With the Avengers, he took down Ultron and tried to ignore the scathing looks sent his way.
The Sokovian Accords were supposed to be the solution. Tony believed in them, believed the team needed them. He had seen the collateral damage the Avengers left behind – the shattered buildings, the grieving families. The Accords were finally going to hold them accountable for everything they’d done wrong. They would protect the innocent. They would make the team better. Thaddeus Ross explained the consequences if they didn’t comply, but Tony had doubted they would come into play.
He had been surprised when the rest of the team had been vehemently against it. The terms of the Accords were strict, sure, but they were for the greater good. Yet, the Avengers fractured. Those who signed, like Tony, would continue to perform superhero work under the watchful eye of the government. Those who did not were forced to retire.
But of course the precious Captain America couldn’t comply, and just had to go rescue a suspected terrorist. When Ross ordered him to hunt down the fugitive heroes, he hadn’t had a choice. Old loyalties tugged at him, reluctant to betray those he called friends, but logic prevailed. Cap was protecting a man who was known to have killed hundreds over decades, and who was responsible for the recent bombing that resulted in the King of Wakanda’s death. He had to be stopped.
Tony did everything he could. Called in old favours to clear the airport, picked up a promising young vigilante from Queens, tried to reason peacefully with Cap. It hadn’t worked, and all it had gained him was a crippling weakness in the form of Peter Parker – the teenage vigilante he’d recruited. The kid was extremely talented and had abilities that rivalled even the strongest on the team. But he was new to the scene and naïve, triggering something fatherly instinct long ago buried. Peter wormed his way into Tony’s heart, and it would haunt him for many years to come.
But at the time, it was worth it. He needed all the help he could get, and the kid was good at what he did. Even if Tony’s heart jumped into his throat when Cap dropped a whole aircraft loading platform on the kid – a move that could have outright killed Peter if he hadn’t had the strength of someone one hundred times his size – it didn’t matter. Cap and the terrorist needed to be brought in, and he would damn well succeed in his mission.
And that had been Tony’s line of thought until he found out the truth. Cap’s “terrorist” friend was Bucky Barnes, a war hero from Cap’s glory days. Bucky was his childhood friend from before World War Two, before he was assumed dead after falling from a train. Worse still, he had been framed of the bombing. Tony was hunting an entirely innocent man. He had been wrong. Another failure. Another mark on Tony’s conscience.
But he simply dug his grave deeper when he found out that Cap had been keeping a secret about Bucky. As it turned out, Bucky had been responsible for the murder of Tony’s parents. It didn’t matter than Bucky was under control of HYDRA at the time, that he was brainwashed and hadn’t known what he was doing. Those were his parents and Cap, his supposed friend, had lied.
Tony saw red. Cap’s excuses fell on deaf ears. Bucky had the nerve to lift his chin, defiant in the face of Tony’s anger. Blinded by fury, Tony hadn’t held back. The fight had been brutal on both sides, but it had been Tony who saw defeat. He was left in the ruins of an abandoned HYDRA base, his suit in tatters, completely and utterly alone.
Even after returning to America, he tried to cling to the belief that the Accords were right. He accepted the blame when Ross called him in, faced the public backlash of all the destruction the Avengers left in their wake. Once the face of innovation, he became a name spoken about in whispers, the hero persona he had created a taboo. Luckily, Stark Industries remained strong; Pepper had taken over running the company and it was too ingrained within so many sectors that they would collapse without it. Still, he didn’t fight against the backlash even as doubts began to seep in, because he’d half his friends over this and he didn’t want it all to be for nothing.
But it became quickly apparent that Ross was a power-hungry fool, more interested in control than protecting innocents. Wrong again. Tony didn’t blame any of his remaining allies when they split to join Cap.
Mistake after mistake. Failure after failure. Tony was glad he’d not had any more brushes with death. He wasn’t sure he could handle seeing the montage of what his life had amounted to.
Tony did everything he could to make up for his errors. When Ross searched for his fugitive teammates, Tony covered their tracks further under the guise of helping him. When Peter reached out for help, he did the best he could, even creating suits for the kid in the meantime. When Pepper gazed longingly at a jewellery store, he walked in and bought the ring he knew she’d love – nothing flashy or gaudy that he knew she’d hate, but a simple silver band with small glimmering diamonds embedded. The day she said yes was the happiest of his life.
Months after the Accords debacle, life was going well. He was planning the wedding with Pepper, was dreaming of starting a family, was still successfully steering Ross away from the hiding Avengers. Then the Earth was attacked again, and the life he’d built came apart when an egotistical mystical doctor-wizard opened up a portal in the middle of his morning stroll with his fiancée, and Bruce Banner followed out from behind him.
The shock hit Tony like a truck. Banner had been missing for two years by that point, disappearing after their fight with Ultron. He hadn’t even been sure Banner had been alive. His sudden return was the only thing that convinced him to go through the doctor-wizard’s portal and into battle against the two alien invaders.
The situation was explained to him, each word another weight to the burden he carried. Banner told stories of a great purple beast, stronger than the Hulk, and searching for Infinity Stones that would grant him unlimited power. He went planet to planet, massacring half of the population, before moving on. His intent was to do that but on a universal scale. His name, Banner had told him, was Thanos.
And there it was. The threat he’d feared for years. What had prompted him into creating Ultron in the first place. A cosmic force with a singular, devastating purpose: to wipe out half of all life. Tony broke the Accords without hesitation, jumping into action to protect not only the Earth, but the whole universe from the threat. He fought. He bled. It still wasn’t enough.
On a distant planet, with a gaping hole in his side and no way home, Tony had been helpless to watch newly formed allies crumble to dust. The worst had been the kid. Peter had stumbled into his arm, terrified, apologising, then vanished. Ash in the wind. It was a moment that would haunt Tony for the rest of his days.
A week later, infection nearly claimed him. He lay as he watched the flashes of memory in silence, staring at the destruction he left in his wake, and was not only unsatisfied – he was disgusted. Ultron, the fracturing of the Avengers, the death of the kid he’d sworn to protect. He kept a mental tally of every wrong and watched it grow.
The new alien ally he had made, Nebula, pulled him back from the brink. She didn’t ask why he was so quiet as he recovered. Half of the universe was dead because of their failure. Tony didn’t tell her that every time he came close to death, he got to watch his life play back like a horror film. Taunting him for his failings. He didn’t need the flashes though. He remembered every mistake.
It had taken nothing short of a miracle for him to make it home alive. Finding out Pepper was still alive, being reunited with her… The relief had staggered him. Tony had lost everything: the trust between him and Cap was broken, his connection to the rest of the team severed, the kid gone. But he had Pepper. With her, he began to piece together his life bit by bit.
They got married. Moved away to a secluded cabin in the middle of the woods, far from blame and battle. While the rest of the Avengers scrambled to fix the impossible, Tony and Pepper found solace in each other. The cabin had been built piece by piece with Tony’s own hand. It was modest by his standards, accustomed to living in skyscrapers worth millions. The cabin was simple, quaint. Perfect.
Once it was complete, he put away his tools and didn’t look at them for a long time. To invent was part of him, as ingrained as breathing, but it was a part he could ignore in favour of relaxing and rebuilding his life with Pepper. The lingering injuries from Thanos and his three weeks of starving slowly healed. Eventually, he stopped flinching at every sound or scanning the night sky, waiting for the next threat to appear. He framed a photo of Peter, who would always be his kid, and he mourned those he lost.
But he recovered – slowly, painfully, but healing, nonetheless. There were bad nights – nights filled with terror and screams and memories – but they tapered off as the years went by. Life moved on and, for once, Tony moved with it.
Then Morgan was born. His little girl, with Pepper’s gleaming smile and his eyes. He gazed down at her, tiny and precious, and everything felt right in a world forever intent on proving him wrong. She was everything. He would move mountains for her. Sacrifice galaxies. Nothing would ever harm her, or pose her threat, as long as he lived.
Five years had passed from his return when the Avengers came looking for him. Tony was surprised when they showed up, and had immediately clocked Cap’s timid expression, afraid of reopening old wounds. Instead, Tony opened his arms to them, inviting them inside, resolved on letting bygones be bygones. He hoped it was – just maybe – a friendly visit. That maybe they’d want to see him after all their years apart. But it was just as he expected: they needed his brain for something again.
The idea they proposed was not only absurd; it was psychotic. To play with time in the way they planned was terribly dangerous, and Tony had shut it down immediately. The Avengers had left with their tails between their legs, though not dissuaded. And, unfortunately, they’d planted a seed in Tony’s mind.
It took him an hour. One hour to solve time travel. The old brain had flexed, dredging up knowledge he hadn’t looked at in years, and pieced together the solution. It came together easily – as disturbingly easy as it always did. Tony Stark was a genius, after all, and inventing was what he was good at. For a long, long moment, he stared at it, not quite able to believe it. It had been Morgan who had dragged him out of that stupor.
God, how he loved that kid.
But the idea gnawed at him, preventing him from being able to relax. Even as he tucked Morgan back into bed, he wrestled with it, debating what was the right thing to do. Finally, he confessed to Pepper what he had done. She gave him a long look, her expression equal parts love and resignation, and told him that he would give the technology to the Avengers eventually, whether he wanted to or not. It was just who he was.
Tony knew she wasn’t wrong, but he still tried to resist, unwilling to sacrifice everything he had gained. It took him another two days to finally cave, speeding to the old Avengers facility where they had set up base again. Cap had already brought Banner in after he hadn’t gotten Tony, but it had gone as well as Tony had expected. Time was a fiddly thing, and it was outside Banner’s area of expertise. It was no surprise that their test subject had ended up a baby.
Once the Avengers had their hands on Tony’s device, their plans moved quickly. Every ally they contacted were quick to agree to their proposal, rallying together for one last chance. Only Tony had any degree of hesitancy, wary of losing everything he had built up over the years. He had a life worth protecting – peaceful, fragile, previous. But he knew others hadn’t been so lucky. Families torn apart by the Snap. Lives erased. He could at least try to save them all.
He had to try to bring Peter back.
And they did succeed in the end. The Stones were gathered, had snapped their fingers. People lost five years ago were back, confused and unknowing of the five-year war fought to save them. Relief took root in Tony’s chest. He was alive. His family was alive. Peter would be alive, stranded on Titan but breathing. For a moment, everything felt perfect. He could be truly at peace.
The universe was still intent on proving him wrong. Fire and bombs rained from the sky, a Thanos from the past come to take his revenge and determined to ensure the Snap’s permanence. All of their efforts, their fight to bring back those lost, had been for naught.
It wasn’t an outcome Tony accepted. He dove into battle, every hero imaginable joining forces against Thanos and the destruction he brought. It took everything they had and more, and still they were beaten. He watched, helpless, as Thanos seized the Infinity Stones once more. Power surged through the beast, ready to fulfil his murderous dream. Tony watched Thanos’ triumphant smile as he announced himself inevitable. He watched his fingers come together.
Tony lunged. Desperation drove him. His hands reached, grasped, pulled. Thanos swatted him off like a fly, disgusted. He brought his fingers together again. It didn’t matter anymore though. He couldn’t do anything. Tony ignored the beginnings of agony and watched the show. Thanos snapped his fingers.
Nothing happened.
Thanos tried again, then again. Confusion twisted his face. It was only when he turned his fist to find the holes where the Stones should have been empty that Tony finally revealed his hand. He moved slowly, trembling, veins shimmering the colours of the rainbow. The Stones glimmered on his knuckles, thrumming with unbearable power. Thanos understood. Tony saw it in his eyes with grim satisfaction – the shock, the rage, the fear.
It hurt. God, it hurt. But he didn’t need to hold them long.
Just long enough to snap.
Pepper was the first to reach him, having joined the battle midway, falling to her knees beside his broken body. he was wearing the suit he made her for her birthday – just in case something should ever happen to him. Tony wasn’t able to whisper a greeting. He could hardly think with the pain, lying helplessly with the Stones still lodged into his suit. Pepper’s eyes brimmed with tears, her hands hovering, wanting to touch him but afraid it would cause too much pain. He wanted to reach out and comfort her, but his body wouldn’t obey him.
He knew that this was it. He had so many close brushes with death, but this time it was legit. He was dying. It was the end.
His life flashed before him; not as a torment, but as a gift. He saw the cave, Yinsen’s quiet wisdom as they worked, smiling and joking despite the circumstances. The friendship he had with Banner, the comradery he had with Cap. Pepper’s laughter, her fury, her love, her beautiful beaming face. Peter, and the awe and trust he had for Tony, even when he hadn’t been deserving. The world, whole, complete, saved.
He saw Morgan. Her tiny hands and bright eyes. He saw everything she was, everything she would become. His pride and joy.
The memories wrapped around him like a warm embrace. They were soft, nudging for him to see who he was and the legacy he left behind. Not a man of destruction, but creation. Not a man who brought fear, but hope. Not a selfish coward, but a man willing to sacrifice everything he had for the greater good.
Around him, the most powerful people in the world kneeled. Kings, warriors, Gods. All of them took a knee and bowed their heads to him.
He was finally satisfied in all that he left behind.
Tony Stark was a genius. He knew it; everyone knew it. But he had become so much more. He was a friend. A father. An ally. Someone to rely on. Someone to care for. To mourn.
Tony Stark sacrificed his life even though he had everything, to save a world which had nothing.
Tony Stark was the best of humanity. He wasn’t perfect, but no one was. He made mistakes but he kept trying anyway.
Tony Stark was a hero.
And Tony Stark died with a smile.