Ashes, Ashes

We All Fall Down

Tony's POV

It's been hours since he boarded Quill's ship and Tony still can't bring himself to wash his hands.

His clothes are torn, stained with dried blood, sweat, and something else. Something he doesn't want to think about. There's not one part of him, inside or out, that doesn't ache. The deep wound in his side is the most obvious of his injuries, white-hot and burning like there's a metal rod ramming into his ribs constantly, over and over again. Simple tasks, like breathing, is becoming harder and harder to accomplish, making his head feel weightless yet heavy at the same time.

The space-ship, super jet, cosmo-car, whatever the hell he was on, jumped and he tensed. Grunting, he swung his free-arm over his side, hissing at the applied pressure, before going slack. He leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes with a light groan and tipped his head back. Swallowing hard, he tried not to let the dark mask of his lids turn into haunting images of a decaying planet, a team fighting for their lives, a knife glinting in an immense purple hand, innocent brown eyes, a red suit crumbling in his fingers.

It's quiet. Too, too quiet. He wasn't used to it. Not after the hours of chatter, and noise, and plan making, and stupid comments, and...and pop culture references, and questions, and the 'Mr. Stark's, and, and, and...

If possible his wound hurts even more. Firing up like someone took a blow-torch to his insides, and Tony shifts to try and palliate the pain. Yet, at the same time, he can't bring himself to care. All he can do now is accept the pain. Embrace it. Take it because at this point did he deserve anything else?

"We're arriving at Earth," the blue-robot woman says, up front where she's at the controls doing who-knows-what. Tony glances at her, briefly, and slumps farther into the wall. He swallows, trying to fight down the rising swell of emotion that comes with that simple sentence, but can't quite staunch it completely. He doesn't know how many hours it's been since they left Titan, and he can't bring himself to care about that either.

His - his hands are dirty.

He sucked in a deep breathe, swelling his chest till it felt tight and ready to burst, rubbing a hard hand over his face. Scrubbing away the layer of stress, panic, and grief that had been falling on him since Thanos disappeared down that damned portal, trying to find something to fill the empty space in his heart. Something that didn't make him feel like he was dying from lead poisoning all over again.

There were only two people left in their rag-tag team-up against Thanos. Two people out of seven. One minute he had been surrounded by them, and the next they were just gone. After they all...after they disappeared, Tony felt something inside break. Everything dulled.

After their initial defeat, all he had felt was a heavy weight pressing on him. A weight that pushed on his chest and made it hard to breathe. The same kind that woke him up in the middle of the night, claustrophobic and suffocating. Disappointment grabbed him by the throat with two hands and was squeezing. He felt as though Moljnir had been put on his chest, and any minute now it would fall the rest of the way and crush his lungs. Anger stabbed him in the gut, furious of the outcome. Grief held his heart in its hand, new from the surgery, with a knife poised over the top, slowing digging the tip inside to draw out the pain and make him suffer. Terror filled the rest of him, from top to bottom, infecting his veins like a poison. What was the consequence of their failure? Who else had died because he wasn't good enough to protect them?

But now everything was gone. He felt nothing. Something, a purple, bald-faced, nut-sack chinned something, had drained him of every possible thought and emotion. Years of worrying and planning and waking up every night, blinking away the fragments of a nightmare was for nothing.