Bitter

They tell him that they love him. That they’d be lost without him. Damn right they’d be lost without him. They don’t love him though. They love Iron Man. Well, they love Iron Man until things get destroyed when he tries to save them. He risks his life and they bitch about the millions of dollars in damages. Ungrateful bastards.

“Careful, Tony, you’re starting to sound bitter and angry at the world,” he mocks himself.

It’s because he is bitter, because he is angry at the world. He’s angry that the world has done this to him. A miserable rock that’s overpopulated with self-centered people has turned him into a self-loathing, bitter person. He despises them for always calling to him for help.

He hates these people down to their very cores because they don’t care about Tony Stark. They don’t care that there is a man inside that hunk of titanium gold alloy painted hot rod red and gold. Even newscasters refer to the suit as “Tony Stark’s Iron Man.” It’s not “Tony Stark” or “Iron Man”; it’s “Tony Stark’s Iron Man.”

Tony can’t count how many times he’s listened, on loop, to those newscasters say that. Like his suit is a remote controlled suit that can simply be remade if worst comes to worst. Like his suit doesn’t house his human body, shielding it as he tries to please the vultures. Like his suit is a mercenary for hire.

That’s what he is, isn’t he? He’s a mercenary for hire. As long as there’s a threat to peace, the center of the universe is Iron Man. When Iron Man slips up, when Iron Man can’t handle it all himself because he’s only fucking human, he bears the weight of the world on his shoulders.

And they don’t care. Iron Man isn’t supposed to fuck up. Iron Man is supposed to take all the problems, all the ugliness of the world and make it disappear. So he does. He makes the world a nice place to live all with a smile, a bitter, loathing smile, on his face.

Then they don’t need him anymore. Suddenly, he’s worth more trouble than the problems he’s saved millions of lives from. He’s the bad guy all of a sudden. These same people, these same self-centered, self-obsessed pieces of shit human beings, that were screaming for him to save him just days ago, they want his blood.

It doesn’t matter that he gives every fucking last piece of himself to them. As Iron Man, he’s willing to give everything he has. He has given every last inch of himself multiple times. But as Tony Stark, he doesn’t want to give them anything.

He wishes it was different. There’s a part of him that wishes they cared. That wishes these people could really just look at him and realize he’s human. That he’s not some infallible man because there’s a glowing light radiating from his chest. It’s not his heart, despite what they think. It’s protecting his heart, ensuring that he survives another day to watch them not care.

Despite wanting them to care, even if it’s just a little, Tony doesn’t want them to either. Because he looks at himself in the mirror, just a glimpse, and he hates himself. He loathes himself to the very core. And if there’s someone who can hate something down to molecular levels, it’s Tony Stark.

There isn’t anything good enough in him to warrant love, compassion, care. Love? His entire life has been spent using women, trading one every day like he changes socks. Compassion? He designed and created weapons for years that were used to slaughter people, to slaughter so many people that no even knows the totals. Care? Since when does Tony Stark care?

“Never,” he answers his unspoken question.

So there’s nothing to really stop him as he opens a new bottle of Jack Daniels. Or when he opens that bottle of Xanax. But he sits there for a long time. He just sits and stares at the bottles, stares right through them at times as if they aren’t really there.

And, because he’s Tony, he lies to himself. Tries to lie to himself. Because there’s one thing that will stop him. And it’s the only thing Tony hates more than himself. Failure.

He hates to fail, always has; though that may have been because his dad hated Tony when he failed. If he’s going to do this, he doesn’t want to fail. Wouldn’t that be a riot? He fails at the one thing he’s only really wanted for the past six months. To cease.

It’s not that Tony wants to hurt anyone. It’s that he wants peace. Even he doesn’t know how many times he’s woken up from nightmares. Recurring nightmares that come every night, have come every night for months on end. Since Yinsen died, they’ve come.

For once, Tony just wants to close his eyes and not think about all of the death warrants he’s unknowingly signed. To not think of all the families he’s ruined. He wants to exist, if only for a few hours, in that state of peaceful limbo that has eluded him since Yinsen died.

But he can’t. It’s not that he hasn’t tried because he has tried. He is Tony Stark and he tries every last solution that he can think of. And none of them work. Alcohol doesn’t work. Xanax doesn’t work. At least, not alone.

Tony Stark, even when he wants to die, is that vain. No matter how much he loathes every fiber of himself, he will always be vain. And he wants to stay the way he is as some sort of subtle jab at these people.

He doesn’t want to think about how self-centered, how self-absorbed, it is of him to do this.

“Same old Tony,” he mutters bitterly.

So he dumps the remains of the half-empty bottle of Xanax into his hand. And for everyone person there is that says they care, there’s a sip of whiskey and two pills. Pepper gets double because it’s Pepper. And she’s always cared.

“Thisss un’s fer ya, dad,” he slurs before popping the last pill.

Tony isn’t even sure if he swallows the sip of whiskey and Xanax because he blacks out then. The next thing he knows is that he’s lying in puddle of his own vomit, his throat raw and burning.

And it’s probably at that moment that Tony’s never hated himself more, never felt so disappointed in his own failure as he does in that moment.