5203 words including author notes at the beginning and end.

Possible TW: Near death experiences, canon-typical violence, talk of losing family members

ENDGAME SPOILERS AHEAD, DON'T GET ANGRY THAT YOU IGNORED THE WARNING.
———

Tony Stark has been through some shit in his life. Flying a nuke into an inter-dimensional portal comes to mind. Getting kidnapped. Chemical poisoning, shrapnel to the chest. Years of alcohol and drug abuse. Being stabbed by a titan on a planet called Titan. Surviving five years with half of Earth's population.

Anthony Edward Stark lived through all of this and did it while holding up a peace sign.

Well...That might be an exaggeration for some of the last events on that list, but he survived it without turning back to hard drugs or joining a cult, so most would see it as a success.

It made sense that the thing that came closest to ending him was the weight of the entire universe. The power of the infinity stones burned him, boiled his blood inside his veins, but it couldn't come to par with the fury burning in his eyes in those last moments.

Tony Stark saved the world. The galaxy. The universe.

It was more poetic if you weren't there to watch it happen.

———

Colonel James Rhodes was a very straightforward man. He had his morals and stuck to them, learned his priorities and chased them with calculated risks. He wasn't one to jump headfirst into fires and expect to march away without any burns.

He had a mostly normal life before he was pulled into the whole War Machine ordeal. Honestly, it was a miracle to at he made it that far in his life without getting directly involved in Tony's messes. Sure, he was the one to help him through Afghanistan, and he was Tony's best friend through their MIT days (which could either be smiled at or a taboo phrase depending on the day or situation that was being brought up), but that's what Rhodey got for being his closest person for so long.

MIT was a mixed bag of tricks. Rhodey and Tony had been roommates then, which meant that James had to deal with Tony's bullshit almost 24/7. Back then, Tony was high off his rocks more often than not, but he was filthy rich and too smart for any school to give up on him.

Life back then wasn't simple, but it was much more so than the present day. The things on those people's minds (back in the eighties and nineties, mind you) could be laughable now. Rhodey was concerned about graduating with good enough grades as to not waste the money his parents paid for his education. Tony was a bag of daddy issues and bad choices, but the two hit it off almost as soon as Rhodey had to assume a sort of Big Brother role for the kid who was definitely too young to be in college.

There were enough incidents involving baggies of spiked marijuana and having to drag Tony's bloody ass back to their dorm because he tried to fight an upperclassman that it was a miracle that Rhodey grew fond of the kid. Maybe it was those catastrophic (used ironically due to recent events, of course) moments that made their friendship grow so strong.

Nostalgia wasn't always happy, and the same went for those memories. The people back then are nearly unrecognizable now. An odd concept, as well as an easy one to lose yourself in when you have hours of free time on your hands.

Rhodey didn't blame Tony for the paralysis in his legs. He didn't even blame Vision, for that matter (he wasn't exactly fond of the guy, but he couldn't hate him). He knew it was an accident, and though Tony was the only one who apologized, Rhodey had forgiven everyone involved the moment he was coherent enough to.

Rhodey remembered the sight of his best friend sitting at his bedside after the accident. He remembered seeing Tony look him in the eye for the first time after he fell from the sky, and he remembered the incredible grief that settled behind the weak grin he had given him.

He thought about that moment one of the days he was sitting at Tony's side after the snap that had nearly ended his life.

Tony had been in and out of surgery for the past eight days. Doctor Strange had stepped in as soon as he dealt with the cyclone of water and portaled Tony to the hospital he once worked at (Rhodey learnt this later, of course). The portal didn't close after him, so the people who knew Tony followed. Pepper, himself, the remaining of the original Avengers, and Spider-Man (who, as it turned out, was a kid. Rhodey had heard Tony call him 'kid' on the few occasions he's been around the two, and he has heard Spider-Man's voice, so he knew he was young, but the child walking next to him was not who he was expecting under the mask).

They'd all sat together in the waiting room as an oddly dressed, ragtag group. Some of the bolder nurses came and treated the worst of their injuries so they wouldn't die of blood loss in the time being (some of this might be because the Norse god of thunder and Captain America was among them, but Rhodey wasn't about to complain). The kid left his mask on the whole time and refused care, which was stupid, because he had been dead hours before and what little Rhodey had seen of his face was swollen and bruised. Wanda never appeared. Rhodey was struck by how odd it felt to be near Clint but have Natasha absent.

Colonel James Rhodes has been in the Air Force for a good half of his life. He couldn't pretend like hadn't seen gristly injuries before. Despite this, the damage done to Tony was some of the worst he's ever seen.

Even if he survived it, there would be horrendous scarring, if not loss of some motor functions. He hoped there hadn't been serious brain damage.

He overheard doctors murmuring about nerve damage and amputation and head trauma and all he could do was sit in the waiting room. Spider-Man was taken home by Happy, who dropped by about three hours after Tony went into his first round of emergency surgery. Happy was taking him to his family. Clint went soon after him with the same goal in mind, and the faint smile on his lips was refreshing compared to the somber expressions on everyone else's faces.

Pepper had gotten out of her suit and was sitting alone. She was still dressed in sleep clothes, which told the story of Strange's arrival in the middle of the night. Eventually, Rhodey got up and settled into the chair next to her. She gave him a grateful, though exhausted smile and finally drifted to sleep.

Rhodey spent another two hours listening to Sam and Steve talk to each other in hushed voices. Bucky did not come with them, which was one of the subjects the pair whispered about. Thor sat ever so slightly removed from the group, dead to the world. Even in sleep, his enormous form was tense. Oddly enough, Rhodey had seen Nebula, who once led Tony out of the spacecraft less than a month after the Snap stalking around the hospital. She never talked to anyone, and she stared down anyone who approached her.

Sam was the next one to leave, and then Strange disappeared as well. One by one, everyone trailed off to sadly go back to their own lives. Pepper and Rhodey were not one of those.

Now Rhodey sat at Tony's bedside, head bowed, hand clasped in his best friend's. Tony was still out cold, but his chest rose and fell with his breath and the heart monitor hooked up to him displayed the muscle's pulses. His right arm was encased in a plaster cast and sling, and even his fingertips were covered in thick layers of gauze. There was a square of cloth taped over Tony's right eye, and what was left of the shell of his ear was bound right to his head. A nasty line of stitches were set along the back of his skull. His skin was sallow, and his cheeks were hollowed in a way that matched the way he looked when he stumbled off of the spaceship five years ago.

All of this, and he was alive. Tony's hand was warm in Rhodey's. He was so going to chew Tony out for...something when he woke up. Probably something along the lines of grabbing the gauntlet himself when Captain Marvel probably would have been able to handle the stones much better. Or Bruce. He did it before. Hell, even Steve or Bucky might've been able to wield it better because of their supersoldier genetic modifications.

It made him angry to think about. Tony had sacrificed himself for others too many times to be comfortable with the number. Anger wasn't necessarily easier to deal with than sadness, but it almost felt good after five years of the latter.

———

Pepper was going to beat the shit out of her husband when he woke up.

Frankly, she was sick of the (repeated) disappearing acts and the near-death experiences. She was sick of them from the beginning. Tired of seeing him dodging a hospital bed, or worse, in such bad condition he couldn't avoid one. Like now.

She told him this while holding his hand. She talked about how pissed she was going to be when he opened those damn eyes she liked so much and how much she loved him. She talked about Morgan too. Their kid was getting impatient, Pepper said with a bittersweet smile. She wanted her dad back home so she could play Space Monster Tea Party with him, a request sent directly from the child.

Oh, to be blissfully unaware. Morgan didn't care that her dad saved the universe. She didn't even know, and if someone told her, she wouldn't understand the gravity of it. She knew that something was going on, because this was the longest that Tony had been away from her so far. It almost hurt to tell her that daddy wouldn't be home yet.

Morgan had been good for both Tony and Pepper. Pepper had been skeptical when Tony first started talking about his wish for a kid or two. She thought it was another one of his phases, but when it was a topic that came back for a series of months, she wasn't as keen on dismissing him.

It was after the Snap when Tony asked her if she still wanted to be with him. It was in the dark and silence of their newly shared room that Pepper said yes. The paradox of both times Pepper said yes to marrying him was interesting. The first, in front of a wall of reporters and cameras, all dramatics for the public. The second time, vulnerably and absolutely wrecked from the inside out, alone and in the silence of their room.

She understood what wasn't said. If he had died on Titan, he would have done so without being married to her, and that idea haunted him. If the universe had chosen either one of them to have been dusted. They were lucky.

They got married and when Pepper found out that she was pregnant, Tony definitely cried (he's denied it for four years since then, but he couldn't ever hide the soft smile that overcame his features every time the moment is brought up).

Morgan was a lighthouse in the hurricane.

Pepper's pregnancy was always looked back on with rose-tinted glasses. It had gone overwhelmingly well, which was a small blessing from whatever deity took pity on the pair who had been through hell and back.

The moment Pepper got to hold her newborn daughter for the first time made everything that led up to the moment worth it. Cradling a baby, no, your baby against your chest was a feeling Pepper can and will never be able to describe. Euphoria.

Despite the I Hate Small Sticky Things shtick that Tony kept up for 40+ years of his life, he loved their kid with all of his heart. He complained about his old knees when he crawled across the floor after their toddler, of course, but he still willingly did it.

Pepper also thought about the nights she and Tony spent together after the Snap, before Morgan. The nights after the Avengers broke again and Tony came back to live with Pepper once more.

They had laid together that first evening, tucked into each other's embraces and sandwiched carefully between sheets. They said nothing and slept like the dead. It was the first time in a while that they slept in the same bed without it ending in disaster. There was no need to break the habit, so they didn't.

During the day, Tony had been restless. He paced halls and built until his fingers were swollen. Pepper couldn't remember a time as bad as then since New York. Tony created twenty, thirty new suits and blueprints for a new replica of Strange's time stone. Ideas and notebooks with scrapped drawings were underfoot for nearly seven months after the Snap.

When he wasn't building something, he paced. He would prowl the halls at night and wear holes in the bottoms of his socks from the sheer amount of walking he did in them. Pepper would watch him, sadly look onto his vacant face as he furiously moved. Staying still made him antsy, and an antsy Tony was never a rational Tony.

Even during his sleep, Tony was always moving. He twitched and made little sighs and his expression changed depending on the story that was playing in his head.

All of this made it even more disconcerting that the man was completely still. Pepper knew he was alive. She felt his heartbeat against her fingertips if she pressed them in the right spots, and she heard him breathe. He was alive. Alive, but still. Quiet.

It was wrong. Like watching a #2 pencil write in ink. Unsettling.

All Pepper could do was wait for the pencil to write in graphite again.

———

Nebula would have liked to say she didn't care for Tony Stark. The old Nebula would have killed him the second they had become aware of the low oxygen on the spaceship after the Snap. Everything old Nebula did was to benefit either herself or her father.

Nebula was more machine than organic matter, and the same was said for her teaspoon range of emotions. Thanos spared nothing that would get in the way of the perfect daughter, the perfect warrior. Empathy, love, happiness, sadness, longing. What was left was a fierce protectiveness for those who managed to get on her 'Maybe I Won't Kill You Right Away' list.

Somehow, somehow, Tony Stark made that list. Maybe it was the table football, or his offer to fix some of her damaged wiring (Nebula could do it perfectly fine on her own, and she told him that), or overhearing his speaking to his suit helmet like it might talk back. She wasn't sure why she didn't kill him.

Nebula stood in the background, caught glimpses of the man unconscious yet again, and absorbed the lack of light in the people around her. There was the woman with red hair who met them after leaving Titan. She was almost always visiting. Nebula almost told her to stop talking to Stark. He couldn't hear her. She only stopped herself when she realized that the woman's behavior might be something she yet again didn't understand. She silently cursed Thanos for the umpteenth time.

Thanos left Nebula's jealousy alone. All her life, Nebula fought by the skin of her teeth to stand on even ground with her sister. Each time she failed, she lost another piece of her to smooth metal and electrical panels. She didn't understand, sometimes, and there was no way to fix it.

Her protectiveness over Stark might've been born when she saw the child die in his arms. Both people were new to her but she knew that they had some sort of connection stronger than the others around them. She wondered if he was Stark's child but never asked. They had a vague resemblance (it was possible that Nebula wasn't used to the Terra as a race, and that they all still looked the same to her). She was not jealous of the death of the child. She was jealous that she never experienced the type of relationship Stark and the child obviously had.

The sight of a younger creature dying in an older's arms, and then leaving the older devastated, was intriguing. Morbid, but intriguing. Thanos had killed her sister and his daughter, but he walked away holding the soul stone and didn't regret it. Tony lost his/a child and it took an embarrassingly long time for him to stand up from the dirt and suggest that they go to Earth together. Maybe that was her lack of empathy talking.

The pain had shone in Stark's eyes, and though it never overflowed, it lingered. Nebula had seen no such thing in Thanos' gaze.

Nebula saw Thor around the hospital every few days or so. She knew he had no family left. His brother was killed by Thanos. What a disgusting parallel between the two, yeah? Nebula and Thor were strangers to this planet, to everyone occupying it. The only difference was that Thor was seen as a god, and no one looked Nebula in the eye, not out of respect, but in fear.

She knew of Thor. He was a legend among the cosmos, as he was the one who brought the end to many threats. He and his now deceased brother. His father was known too, if not more, than his son. He was dead as well.

Nebula had forgotten her parents. She knew she wasn't biologically Thanos' daughter, but she couldn't remember who her real family was. She couldn't even mourn them.

She and the god had things in common, but never spoke of them. They stood near each other in solid, though silent support.

Was mourning by talking to a loved one in a coma healthy?

Nebula eventually left the hospital. She was tired of the smell of death and antiseptics, and the sight of creased faces with dead eyes.

The connection she had with Gamora was gone. The sister she had made up with was dead, laying decomposed and broken at the bottom of a cliff in a timeline erased. She knew Quill felt that anguish, but she hated him too much to talk to him about it.

Nebula knew she was going to come back. What she didn't know, was how long she would take to visit her unusual choice of a friend.

———

Peter had nothing to do but wait. Wait for school to start again, wait for Mr. Stark to wake up.

Peter wasn't there when he parents died. They had left him with May and Ben for a weekend, so that they could take a mini vacation for themselves. They never came back. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there was a wreck.

Peter hoped it had been quick, once he got old enough to finally understand what had happened.

Ben's death was much more traumatic for Peter. At that point in his life, he was old enough to understand what death was and why someone he knew could disappear and never come back.

Ben was involved in a mugging and was shot in the chest. He did not pass quickly. Peter and May had driven to the hospital, police cars escorting them, with a sense of panic so strong it could have suffocated them both. All the Parkers wiped out in one evening.

Benjamin Parker died in the hospital.

Peter and May Parker did not.

Peter remembered that evening through flashes of blue and red lighting and May's sobbing and the broken record phrase of 'this can't be happening.' Part of him was glad he couldn't recall more, that he had either repressed parts of it that were too painful to process or that his memory slipped like any other human being's did.

That was two father figures who would never see Peter graduate high school.

Two weeks before Ben, Peter was bitten by the spider that would change his life.  Three weeks after Ben, Spider-Man was born.

Spider-Man was a fresh face, a new vigilante who existed to support the little guy. He stopped car wrecks so no more parents of young children would die. He stopped dollar store muggings so no more uncles of orphaned kids died.

That time in Peter's life was the second most painful span he's ever lived through. He wasn't necessarily lost, but he was scrambling for something to hold onto and everything he grabbed wasn't a person. He lied to May and Ned and let Flash push him around at school. He cultivated a crush on a girl he rarely talked to and continued to be a vigilante who might've been in over his head.

He learned that Spider-Man was a handhold for tired a bone-tired mind and limb, but only when he was by himself. Around other people, it was a dirty secret.

And then came the fiasco with the homecoming dance. He had a warehouse dropped on his back, crashed a jet full of Avengers stuff, and nearly caught himself on fire. He felt awful once the dust cleared because suddenly, Liz's dad was in jail because of him, and to top it off he had abandoned her at the dance like a douchebag. 0/10, would not recommend.

Liz moved. He was left with one less person.

Life moved on. He started having fluttery feelings when MJ looked at him and Peter tried to shut that down, because the last time he had a crush on someone, he put her dad in jail and she moved to Oregon.

He wasn't an Avenger, but he knew one, and he knew he could be on call for a cool fight or something.

And then came Titan. The spacecraft that took him into space was the coolest thing on Earth (even though Peter wasn't even on Earth anymore, ha), but only for a span of an hour or two.

He saved Doctor Strange on the ship and was dubbed an unofficial Avenger, and Peter thought that was the best day of his life. If Peter could punch his past self in the teeth for that thought alone, he would.

Peter's best day turned into a not-so-great day when he realized Tony had been stabbed. It got a little worse when Strange gave away his glowy green necklace. The silence that followed that fight was horrible. None of them knew what to do. The Footloose guy was near tears over the woman named Gamora, and Mr. Stark was definitely pretending that he was fine when he obviously wasn't. What had really scared was the resigned expression that fell over Strange's person. He'd betrayed them all, and he sat calmly like he hadn't just doomed everyone on Earth.

It was silence and arguments for a painful ten minutes. And then, Peter's body was alight with an angry tingling, uncomfortable and numbing. It startled in his feet and raced up his spine and scalp, and every single hair on his body was standing upright.

That was when the guardians disintegrated.

The moment it happened, it was almost too anticlimactic to be registered. One moment the foreign bodies were there, and the next they were dust, floating away. A sense of foreboding overtook Peter's mind and he turned just in time to see Strange disappear too.

That was when he realized what was happening within himself. His extremities were numbing, not because of his spidey-senses, but because he was disappearing too. He was falling, babbling nonsense into Mr. Stark's shoulder and he held onto whatever he could. He grasped until his legs were nothing but ash and he had no fingers to use and he was apologizing.

I don't wanna go. Please,  I don't wanna go.

I'm sorry.

Then he was dead.

He came back to life five years later, after an abyss of absolutely nothing. No memory of an afterlife, no souls who passed with him. It sounded blissful after Peter rediscovered the world that he had felt behind.

He was dragged back and thrown into a battlefield where he was able to hug his mentor for the second time ever and bonus, he wasn't dying this time.

And then Mr. Stark snapped and he was burnt and they won, but Mr. Stark didn't and Jesus Christ...Peter had heard the moment Mr. Stark's heart stopped. He heard it quietly give up its lifelong duty and retire to dormancy.

Peter heard Tony Stark die. He was there. He was there and he wished that he wasn't there, like with Ben and with his mom and dad, but he was there.

He almost forgot to move when Doctor Strange surged forward and opened a portal. Peter saw that it was a hospital, wiped his face of some of the tears rolling down it, and put up his mask yet again.

He sat in a seat tucked against the wall and tried not to cry too loudly. He felt rubbed raw, like his skin never came back when the Snap was reversed. The only person he actually knew in the Avengers was in surgery, and he was so tired. He brought a knee to his sternum and looped his arms around it. He tensed and hoped the trembling in his shoulders wasn't too obvious to anyone else.

Doctor Strange came back sans his cape, crinkly paper covers on his shoes. His forever quaking hands were clasped in front of his chest, and for a heart-stopping moment, Peter thought he was going to say Mr. Stark died.

No, he made it through the first of the surgeries. They had to drain his lungs of extra fluid and restart his heart. While he began discussing skin grafts with a bit more excitement than is normal, Peter zoned out.

He was brought back with a snort (which made him wonder if he had fallen asleep) when a hand touched his metal-plated shoulder. He looked up to see Steve Rogers' grief-laden face. There were reddish marks along his chin and the bone of his eye sockets, a testament to the helmet he wore during the battle. Despite the evidence, his skin was scrubbed clean.

This was the first time Peter looked him in the eye so closely, if you didn't count Germany. Peter didn't count Germany. He was much bigger than he imagined, when he was looming over him in that creaky, plastic waiting room chair.

"Do you have somewhere to go, son?" Peter was struck with the manic urge to laugh, because Captain America really did talk like an old man.

"Oh, uh." Peter was embarrassed to realize that he hadn't had a thought aimed at May or Ned since before the spaceship. He didn't even know if they had been Snapped. What if Ned grew up without him? "I...I don't know."

Steve nodded. "Do you need help?"

"I need a phone."

Forty minutes later and Happy Hogan marched through the hospital like a man on a mission. His shoes actually squeaked against the linoleum when he stopped and to Peter's shock, pulled the teenager to his chest in a hug.

They eventually broke apart and Peter pretended not to notice the sheen to Happy's eyes. "How's Tony?"

Colonel Rhodes, propped in a chair across the room, gave a weary sigh. "Alive."

"Morgan's going to bully me for an answer better than that. We both know this." The two shared a weak smile and Peter was left wondering who Morgan was. The chasm in his chest ached. The world seemed to have moved on without him, and despite how he should have been glad for that, the thought made him feel sick.

"Who's babysitting Morgan?" Pepper spoke up for the first time since sitting down in her chair. So Morgan is a kid. Or maybe a pet?

"I brought her with me. She's in the limo." Happy's hand protectively grabbed Peter's shoulder. Peter didn't protest the contact, but he wasn't used to it from the usually stoic bodyguard. Judging by the beard on his face that definitely wasn't there last Peter saw him, he had stayed for the five years. "She's asleep. I won't bring her in."

Pepper nodded and ran a hand across her hair, freeing more flyaways from her ponytail.

"C'mon, squirt. Your aunt is at home." Peter nodded, voiceless, and forgot to say goodbye to everyone.

He followed Happy to the car in the parking lot. The bodyguard brought a finger to his lips and held open the passenger seat door for Peter. Peter curiously looked into the backseat and saw a tiny girl, maybe four or five, asleep in a booster seat. Her hair color was exactly like Mr. Stark's, and Peter was clobbered with the realization that this was his daughter.

He shifted so he was facing the front again and let his mask fall away. Happy said nothing, though Peter was sure he looked like a mess. His eyes were swollen, and it vaguely hurt to squeeze them shut. His nose had been caught by something at some point, so it was sore to the touch. Happy started driving.

Peter watched the lampposts slide by in his field of vision. The sun was rising, peeking over the horizon. Peter imagined that he could see the smoke and ruin of the battlefield from the highway he was on mere hours ago.

He fell asleep.

———

A/N-
Hello, everybody! I haven't published anything in a while now, but I've been writing in my free time pretty much the whole time I've had this account.

This is the first chapter of a fix-it fic surrounding Tony and his recovery from the snap, because Endgame broke my heart a lil bit and we would all like to ignore the canon ending for a while.

This might be threeish chapters long, all about the same length? Not sure yet. I would love feedback and all that jazz. It's great to hear what other people think about my writing!

Please point out spelling and grammatical errors where you find them, and I will fix them accordingly. The writing may also change a little bit as time passes, because I'm rereading and editing it as I go.

Not sure when the next update will happen, but hopefully within the next week or so. I'm starting in-person school, which means I'll have less time to write between classes so we'll see where it goes.