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The portal closes and there is no Tony.
Natasha weighs her options as heavily and as quickly as she can. On the one hand, he’s her – teammate? On the other if she doesn’t close it, the nuke is going to do exactly what it intended to do, regardless. Either way, Tony Stark will die. She closes her eyes as Cap gives the command to close it and she leans heavily on Loki’s staff, feeling as the Tesseracts energy field gives under her weight. When the staffs tip touches the core she can feel it, unlike anything else.
Her eyes flicker behind close lids and she knows what true power feels like for a split second, before it all explodes before her. For a second she understands Clint, and Selvig. Loki. For a second, Natasha knows. It grips at her throat like an icy fist, the weight of it heavier than anything she’s ever had to face before which...
Well, it says a lot.
She flicks her hair back as her head tilts, heart seizing and mind blanking as the red-gold clad Tony falls towards Earth.
For a second, just one second, she allows herself to hope.
Natasha hasn’t cried, not truly, since she was seven years old. When the portal gurgles and pulls and Tony disappears into a cloud of blue, the icy fist around her throat squeezes. Her breath wheezes out of her like Clint’s fist to her gut in a sparring session. The gash on her forehead throbs pitifully. When the fist releases it leaves behind a lump in her throat, even as her middle convulses as she tries to vomit up the nothingness that she’s eaten the past few days, during all of this.
Selvig tries to touch her.
She drops him like a sack of bricks – alive bricks – before she stumbles towards the ledge of Stark Tower, wondering how she is going to get down.
Everyone else will later express surprise over what he did.
She worked with him long enough to know, without question, that sacrificing himself is a thing that Tony – never Anthony, not in her mind – Stark was as familiar with as breathing. He was that kind of person; the one who would give you everything while laughing it off.
And why?
Because he could.
Because he understood loss.
Somehow, that thought will be no comfort to her. She will always remember.
OoOoO
Clint doesn’t know Tony. Not like how any of the others do, anyway.
Nat worked undercover with him for a while. She said she didn’t like him but the bags under her eyes are telling enough. All Clint knows is the reports he’s read. How Tony doesn’t play well with others.
How Phil had silently adored the eccentric genius. The quiet conversations over coffee with Nat and Phil, the way they’d spoken poorly of him with pride in their voices.
He doesn’t know Tony – didn’t. But the exploding arrowheads he carries, that he used in the Battle? He traces a thumb gently over the Stark Industries logo stamped onto a sharp ridge. Tony had stopped making weapons before Clint got this particular arrowhead. He knows without question that Tony read his file – he has the suspicion that Phil may have slipped it into Stark’s office without him knowing.
Still. They weren’t friends, shitty Lord of the Rings references aside.
He thinks that maybe they could have been a team. That Tony would know about his nightmares, and that Tony would be awake around the time Clint gives up on sleeping and just needs to do nothing. He thinks that eventually they would have grown to tolerate each other.
Instead he sits in his nest, watching the repairs on the hellicarrier.
They took his bow away.
Clint thinks that maybe, just maybe, instead of making him a new one Tony would have –
He would have helped him sneak his old one back.
Clint doesn’t feel much for other people, but as he hunkers over his railing with no one at his side, he relearns what it feels like to want.
And that night he’ll have nightmares, alone. Again.
OoOoO
Steve just doesn’t sleep. He can’t, not really. He knows he was the one to goad Tony – remembers clearly mocking him, trying to pick fights. He wishes he could say it was because he genuinely thought the man was a rat bastard.
It’s mostly because when he looked into Tony’s eyes, he saw Howard – they don’t, didn’t, look that much alike. Don’t get him wrong. But they have the same expression. Calculating, faintly cold. The look of a scientist. The kind of expression he’d grown to trust years ago. Tony had – does – remind him of everything he has lost.
Tony was the epitome of modernism. The very thing that confounded, angered Steve. Now he’s gone. Just like everybody else.
Natasha teaches him how to use Tony’s tablet and he’s not really that surprised when he finds the file.
Peggy hadn’t died until two weeks after the battle. In an old age home, unable to remember the dates – there’s medical charts and histories. He wonders how Tony got hold of it, why he hid it. Then he sees the SHIELD footers at the end of each page and realizes that they kept this from him too. That it’s just one of the many things Tony wanted to give him.
There’s flight schedules on a private jet that end up in a remote Florida port, a car already ready to be waiting.
He doesn’t find out until she’s dead.
The dates are for a month after the battle.
So Steve goes to her grave and sits beside her. He’s man enough to admit that he weeps. The gravity of it weighs heavily on him and he knows, without question, that there is no turning down SHIELD’s job offer as a...
He doesn’t know what to call it. They tell him what to break, he breaks it.
When he isn’t breaking the things they tell him to, he sometimes has lunch with Bruce. He thinks that Tony would like that.
Sometimes, very rarely, he manages to convince Natasha and Clint to come.
Tony would have liked that too.
Their first meal together is cheeseburgers. Something that hasn’t changed since Steve’s time. They sit in silence around a square table, staring at their food. Steve is the first to take a bite. The others follow suit, and it is in that moment that he knows what it means to be a leader.
It takes both the good, and the bad.
OoOoO
Bruce does what Bruce does best.
When he manages to get himself under control, that is.
It’s easier, somehow these days.
There is no doubt in his mind that if Tony was still here, that Tony would be his best and only friends. He can’t stand blueberries but he finds himself buying them constantly, squirreling them away. He thinks of a time when he was high on being a good guy. When a tiny, dark haired man stabbed a taser into his ribs just to see.
He thinks that no one, even before the Hulk incident, trusted or believed in him so surely.
He knows without needing proof that no one ever will.
The Hulk screams inside his head, asking, begging, and pleading. Bruce has never felt more human.
He does what he does best, now. He helps people all over the world. He knows now that SHIELD keeps close eyes. Occasionally Natasha floats into his world, eyes flat. She slides a phone across his table and he follows her blindly while seeing all, as Tony once had. He lets the Hulk out and together they scream their pain at losing the only person who ever really knew them without knowing anything at all.
Bruce sleeps. He dreams of the Stark Tower that Tony promised him and tries hard not to be bitter. He wonders if he would still be welcome there.
He knows that he would.
Instead he goes to Budapest, because Clint hates it there and it’s harder for Natasha to track him down.
Occasionally, they all have lunch.
Tony would like that. He’d like it almost as much as Bruce walking out to the middle of nowhere, closing his eyes. Letting go.
He knows though, that Tony would hate the fact that Bruce cries for him. He’d hate that there is mourning. He imagines Tony begging them to get piss-drunk and crash a half dozen parties. He imagines Tony wants the Hulk to go to some big event in downtown NYC, break a few walls.
He images the Hulk drunk on rich vodka as he lets his other side take over.
They do none of that of course. Hulk just screams at the sky while Bruce shrivels up inside, wondering if it’s even worth it to let the Hulk tire out.
Sometimes, he has to convince himself it isn’t worth it.
It gets harder every time, especially with Ross closing in – the shiny labels on the side of the Hulkbuster units screaming HammerTech and the Counsel laughing the entire while.
OoOoO
Thor has lived and will, for many a year.
It doesn’t make the pain of losing a comrade any less. He remembers the sarcasm and dry humor throughout Loki’s trial, which he does not attend. His brother is banished to the dungeons. He tries to care, even as he remembers the haunted, tight look in everyone’s faces as they buried their Man of Iron.
The hate, murderous and raw, when they sent them back to Asgard.
He stands beside Heimdall, silent for a long while. He doesn’t realize how thick his throat feels until he tries to speak. He can’t make it past “Do you – “ before he chokes up, having to fall silent.
Thor has lost soldiers in battle.
He has never once lost a friend.
Not until now.
“I see him.” Heimdall says in the softest way he knows how. Gold eyes turn to him, looking through him – forever seeing, blessed eyes. “He is greatly welcomed into Valhalla, Thor Odinsson. I see him.”
Thor bows his head and forces the tears down as he turns in a swirl of cape, knowing all he needs to know.
That Tony Stark is welcomed. That they will – all of them – someday meet again.
He throws himself into battle and with a heavy heart eventually releases Loki from his chains.
His mortal friends never once leave his thoughts, occupying as much space as his Warriors Three and kin always had.
OoOoO
Loki could not see, but he does see – how easily the genius could have become the villain. He wonders why it never happened.
He pictures the Avengers standing above him, save one. He tries to smile as he imagines their breaking point.
When they decide to go bad...He knows without needing any form of proof that they will be formidable. Brilliant. They will glow as bright as the Knowing of the Tesseract. What he doesn’t know is if he should be reverent or fearful.
He settles into his cage.
OoOoO
Pepper plays his staticky voicemail over and over. She plays it until the phone dies and then she uploads it to her computer. She’s at Stark Tower – A Tower – as she bends over her keyboard and screams until she feels like her throat will bleed.
He’s always been reckless but he’s always had a second plan. She thinks of how close her plane had been to home, how the nuke would have just – how it would have destroyed everything. She knows that JARVIS would have run the schematics. She knows Tony would have run them himself before his AI ever had the chance.
She listens to his voicemail telling her sorry. He apologizes so sincerely. Like the sacrifice he just made hasn’t completely destroyed her world. Like it hasn’t saved the lives of countless other.
Sometimes she watches the stars and wonders if he’s alone, floating in space. The thought makes her tremble until shaky fingers call up Rhodey or Happy.
Falling in love with Happy is a slow process. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be over him when Happy asks her to marry him. She knows that Tony would be happy for her. That she’s moved on – because she has, as much as one can with the love of their life dying like that. They settle into life happily.
He left her the company. She takes it over as gracefully as she always had, and Happy remains their head of security.
Sometimes she opens up his crystal whiskey bottles. She keeps them stocked always. Happy doesn’t question those times, although he doesn’t always join.
Rhodey, though.
Rhodey sits beside her on the couch and gets so drunk he can’t stand. She lays against his chest as he strokes her hair, as he had when Tony was lost in – well, when he was lost. When they rarely had a moment to rest and they broke together. They drink in his honor as Rhodey laugh-cries through college stories and Pepper regales him with the very old story of Tony trying to make her eggs for breakfast, their first morning after.
They are broken. Her, Rhodey, Happy. They don’t know what to do, but they know that Tony wouldn’t want them to idle. So they work hard and Pepper’s funding helps rebuild the city.
She knows that Phil isn’t dead. She can’t tell anyone how she knows because it’s top secret but she knows. She also knows that Tony is, and she has to repeat it to herself over and over as she sits and watches Thor fly around the world trying to save it.
Alone.
They’re all broken, she thinks.
OoOoO
JARVIS has been programmed to serve.
When the portal closes, those orders do not change.
He knows what Tony would want.
He knows.
But he can’t bring himself to listen.
Instead the AI sits silent and stagnant, filing away every single movement of every single person that Tony has ever loved. Of all of the Avengers.
There’s little things he does, of course – his programming can’t change, not like that – but when Tony’s cell comm falls dead in space, so does the voice that is JARVIS.
He watches and as much as an AI can, he waits.
Somewhere in space on long-dead lines, JARVIS tries.