rogue avengers return │ peter parker¹

.Ｆｌａｓｈｂａｃｋ.

Please listen to the video, it's a beautiful song and relates to the chapter. It doesn't matter if you like musicals or not. It's beautiful :(

Word Count: 2802

The hole goes down past the basement levels. Down into the dirt and into the darkness of the earth. Tony can't see how far down it goes, but he knows that it once contained the body of his son. Of JARVIS re imagined and reborn, pulled into the Witch's orbit like so many around them and left in the dirt when she had no use for him anymore.

How is Rogers justifying that? Is he even trying to or does he not even care? What was Barton even doing here? Why hadn't Tony considered the thought that Rogers would escalate this whole thing and call in soldiers beholden only to him to the detriment of the world? How had Tony not seen it coming? How had he been so blind?

"Sometimes my teammates don't tell me things." Rogers words echo in Tony's mind. "Don't lie to me Rogers, did you know?" "Yes." Tony wonders if the hypocrisy keeps Rogers awake at night like the lies do for Tony.

He doubts it. It'd require a level of remorse and empathy that Tony's very much learned at this point Rogers just doesn't have. Maybe that's why he took in the Witch. Maybe there was something to be said about the similarities that he saw between the two of them. Maybe Tony should have listened, maybe he should have looked closer.

He's getting so tired of those he lets close being the ones he should have kept the farthest away from him.

"Are you so blinded by your own ego?" Not one of Natasha's better manipulation moments, but Tony can see now why she thought it'd work. Who knows, maybe it has on some level. Tony's ego. That thing that the Avengers felt needed to be chained and collared and controlled from the moment they stepped into his life. God he'd been so foolish as to ever think it was anything else. He wants to be mad at himself, he wants to rage and punch any glass that shows the reflection of a broken man in it but he knows that it wasn't entirely his fault. After all, even he still had a little innocence leftover at one point. Too bad it had to go away and now the man standing alone amongst the wreckage doesn't know how to make the world believe and trust in heroes when he no longer does either himself.

He sits at the edge of the hole and spends the night looking down into it. Waiting to find answers he doesn't find.

+++

'Tony, you're worrying me man.' Rhodey tells him from his hospital bed. 'FRIDAY says that you keep going back to the Compound every night. Alone.'

'I'm just thinking Rhodey Bear.' Tony tells him, and it's the honest truth. 'I'm just trying to find clarity.'

'There's nothing there Tony.'

'I don't know about that.' Tony says. 'You know that feeling when you're on the precipice of a giant breakthrough?'

'Yeah?'

'That's how I feel when I'm there.'

'...that doesn't make me worry any less.' Rhodey says to that after a pause and Tony figures it really shouldn't.

+++

Vision can't look at the hole. He doesn't even like to come into the area, calling out to Tony instead from the doorway as Tony sits at the edge and keeps looking down. Vision's apologized time and time again, and so has Tony. Neither of them were at fault, neither of them are to blame and yet the world comes for them all the same.

There's a letter that comes in the mail. It's from Wakanda, FRIDAY tracked the package despite the attempts to throw off its originating location. Even if the block phone hadn't told Tony who sent it, the scrawl on the front of the letter spelling out his name does it for him. Outside the world demands justice, it demands answers and retribution and inside Tony sits with a letter and a phone from a man who thought himself a modern day Hercules fighting against the evils of corruption and never looking up from his fists to see the truth.