Ultimate Sacrifice

There comes a moment in every great story when everything that has come before — every choice, every friendship, every mistake, every triumph — comes together in one shining moment.

For Tony Stark, that moment came on a battlefield at the ruins of the Avengers compound.

The story leading up to it had been long and hard. For five years, the world had lived in the shadow of the Blip — that terrible moment when the Mad Titan Thanos had snapped his fingers and made half of all living things turn to dust. Half. Friends. Families. Pets. Birds. Forests. Half of everything that breathed had simply blown away on the wind.

The remaining half had grieved. The world had been quiet for a long time.

Tony Stark had tried, harder than most, to make peace with what had happened. He had walked away from the life of a hero. He had moved with Pepper to a quiet cabin by a lake. They had a daughter together. Her name was Morgan, and she was the best thing Tony had ever made. She was three thousand. (When Tony asked her how much she loved him, she would hold her tiny arms wide and say, "I love you three thousand." Tony said it was the highest number he had ever heard.)

For a little while, Tony was happy.

Then Scott Lang — Ant-Man, who had been trapped in the Quantum Realm during the Blip — found his way back. He brought an idea. An impossible, wild, dangerous idea.

Time travel.

If they could go back through the Quantum Realm to the moments before Thanos got the Infinity Stones, they could collect the stones themselves. They could bring everybody back. They could undo the Blip.

When Scott first sat at the kitchen table in the cabin by the lake and explained it, Tony shook his head. He said no. He had a family now. He had a little girl. He could not risk losing what he had built.

But that night, Tony went into his old workshop. He sat down at his computer. He started running the math.

By morning, he had cracked it.

He had figured out time travel. Of course he had. He was Tony Stark.

He stood up from his desk. He looked at his sleeping daughter Morgan, curled up on the couch with her stuffed bunny. He looked at Pepper in the doorway, who had known, the moment she saw his face, exactly what he had done.

She did not stop him.

She asked him, quietly, "Would you be able to rest? If we didn't try?"

And Tony, with tears in his eyes, said, "No."

So the Avengers gathered. They built time-travel suits in Tony's workshop. They split into teams. They went back through the Quantum Realm to gather the Infinity Stones from different moments in history. They brought them back. They built a new Infinity Gauntlet — one strong enough to hold the stones.

The Hulk, in his Smart Hulk form, snapped his fingers. The lost were returned. Birds flew. Children appeared. Lost people walked out of their old homes blinking in the sun.

But Thanos was not done.

A version of him from the past, alerted to what was happening, came forward in time with his entire army. He landed at the ruins of the Avengers compound, ready to destroy everything again. Ready, this time, to use the Infinity Stones to wipe out the whole universe and start over with one of his own design.

The battle that followed was the largest gathering of heroes the universe had ever seen. Every hero who had been brought back came through golden portals opened by the Sorcerer Supreme. Wakanda's armies came. The Asgardians came. The Guardians of the Galaxy came. Pepper came in her Rescue armor. Even Captain America, after so many years of distance, stood beside Tony again, his shield raised, his eyes steady.

"On your left," said Sam Wilson over the comms.

"AVENGERS," said Cap, lifting his shield. "ASSEMBLE."

The battle was vast. It was terrible. It was beautiful in the way only the truest hard things can be.

In the middle of it, Tony found himself face to face with Thanos one last time. The Mad Titan had wrestled the new gauntlet onto his own purple hand. He stood tall amid the ruins, his fingers ready to snap.

Tony hit him. Thor hit him. Captain Marvel held back his fist. Cap, wielding Mjolnir at last, struck him with thunder. Thanos was strong. Thanos was very nearly invincible.

But Tony had been studying the gauntlet. Tony had been waiting.

In one swift movement, with his own nanotech armor, Tony reached out and PULLED the Infinity Stones from Thanos's hand. The stones flowed up his arm and clustered on his own gauntlet, their colors burning bright as suns.

The power was too much for any human body. Tony's face contorted with the strain. The veins on his arms glowed.

Thanos looked at him in shock. "I am... inevitable," the Titan whispered.

Tony looked at him. He took a breath. He let it out.

"And I... am... IRON MAN."

He snapped his fingers.

The Infinity Stones flared. Thanos and his entire army began to dissolve into golden dust on the wind, scattering quietly into nothing. The world was saved. The universe was saved. Every life that the gauntlet would have taken was preserved.

But the cost was Tony's.

He sank down against a piece of broken wall, his right side burned, his strength leaving him in a soft tide. His friends came running. Rhodey knelt beside him. Peter Parker — the young Spider-Man Tony had grown to love like a son — fell to the ground next to him, sobbing. Pepper pushed through, her Rescue armor opening, her face calm but her eyes shining.

She knelt beside him. She placed her hand on his cheek.

"Tony," she said softly. "Look at me."

He did.

"We're going to be okay," she whispered. "You can rest now."

It was, perhaps, the greatest gift she had ever given him. The permission to stop. The permission to lay down the weight he had carried for so long.

Tony Stark smiled, just a little. His glowing blue chest dimmed, very slowly, until it was a soft warm twilight.

And then it was quiet.

The funeral that followed was the largest gathering of heroes the world had ever seen. They came from every corner of Earth. They came from across the galaxy. The little tribute that Pepper placed on the water of the lake by their cabin was Tony's very first Arc Reactor — the one he had built in the cave, all those years ago. It was encased in a small glass cube. On the front, in Pepper's handwriting, were the words she had once given him as a gift.

"Proof that Tony Stark has a heart."

The reactor floated gently out across the still lake water. The sun caught its blue glow one last time.

Tony Stark was gone. But the world he had saved was alive. The friends he had loved would carry his memory forward. The technology he had left behind would change the future. The little girl he had loved three thousand would grow up to be brave, and clever, and so deeply loved that she would never forget where she came from.

He had been a genius. A billionaire. A philanthropist. He had been, at times, a difficult man.

But in the end, he was something better than all of those things. He was a man who, when the world needed him most, said yes. Who flew into the storm. Who gave everything.

He was the first Avenger.

He was Iron Man.

And he loved us. Three thousand.