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There are very clear...lines...to his life. Distinct boundaries, separating Before and After. Many people have these lines, but few people have so...many...sets of them.
He used to wonder, in the darker moments, just how many of these "decisions and revisions" he would be required to make in a single lifetime. How many times did he have to fall from the wall, unable to be put back together again? How many roads must he travel, how many times did his life have to be destroyed, leaving him to pick up the broken shards and try to carry on with what was left?
It hurt. The broken peices, they cut and jabbed and sliced. They tore into soft spaces and revealed red, wet, sacred places that should never have been exposed to the light of day. Over and over and over...And he was so very tired. But there are still "miles to go before he sleeps" and all that. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep"...but just as with the traveler and his bell-clad mount, Tony, too, had "promises to keep." And, God, did they weigh heavy...
The lines. The thick, dark, permanent, the Berlin Wall of Before...and After. But there was not to be any reconciliation, no call of "bring down this wall!," not for these lines, no. These were the no-man's land of barbed wire, mustard gas, of agonizing pain and death. Watching a man he trusted, loved even, bleed out on bags of rice in a cave. Holding onto a treasured boy as his body crumbled. Obie, ripping his very heart from his chest. The call from the California state troopers with the news..."Son, there's been an accident..."
The first one was when his parents died. For a child who had been brought up by the butler and boarding school, an outsider might see the loss of his parents as being less traumatic than for someone brought up in a loving home. But, at least to Tony, it seemed just the opposite. The permanence of their loss, the irreparable wounds that could now never be healed, closed, atoned for. Gone, in one act of almighty violence, and then...the western front of grief, of a life unlived, and a future unknown.
Next, was twenty-two years later, in a cave, in a land of sand and the dichotomy of blazing heat and searing cold. Of violence from the beginning of recorded history, and the basic, innumerable facets of human greed and violence. The man who rode in a convoy that day and the man who stepped off a plane three months later were not the same person. And the two would never meet again.
The next came four years after Afghanistan, as he carried a nuclear warhead into a literal tear in the space-time continuum. He knew the odds, he knew the mission, and for the first time, he accepted that mortality was more than just a far-distant horizon. It was immediate, and it was almost guaranteed. The last phone call to Pepper, unheard, unanswered, alone in the absolute blackness of space, with only Jarvis' gentle voice to accompany him to his doom. That's when the nightmares really took off, the tipping point into a psychological nightmare that lasted another eleven years.
But, there was one bright delineation, one, shining example of a Before and an After that wasn't pain and death and loss and torment. On November thirtieth, 2019, a six pound, seven ounce baby girl arrived, delineating a life, yet again, the Before, and the After clear as sunlight on water. But, for once, the line was bright, and held a second chance instead of pain and loss. And four years later, when three former comrades came to call him to duty once more, Tony tried to explain that his second chance was a line he could not leave. This After was a place he could not draw another line away from.
He had picked up the broken shrapnel-glass shards of his life, and tinkered, and engineered, and mechanic'd them into a happily ever after...how could they expect him to leave it, willingly? How could he resurrect the rest of the world, meanwhile losing his own soul? There was only one possible outcome to this sacrifice, and only one reason to make it.
Peter. Peter was the one whisper slick, slice and sliver shard that remained unaccounted for, unchecked, and forever painful to the touch in this near happily ever after. Peter, the boy Strange had called his ward, and how apt that question had been. A parentless child, too moral, too good, too determined to live a life worth having...Lost to a madman on a planet so very far from home. Tony could not leave that fragment unchecked, unaccounted for, and unsalvaged. Even if the cost was a final, immutable line. After all, his entire life had been about lines in the sand.
Credit to: T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Mother Goose, "Humpty Dumpty". Bob Dylan, "Blowing in the Wind". Robert Frost, "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening". A subversion of Mark 8:36, KJV, and US President Reagan.
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