Darkness.
Not the soft, velvety darkness of a Malibu bedroom, scented with salt air and expensive linen. This was a thick, suffocating blackness. It had a taste: rust and stale sweat. It had a sound: a low, guttural shouting in a language that scraped at the edges of his memory, a dialect he'd heard once in a weapons demonstration video. Pashto.
Then came the fabric. Rough, wet, and smelling of mildew. It was pulled tight over his face, pressing into his eyes, his nose, his mouth. A memory, sharp and unwelcome as a shard of shrapnel, lanced through him. Not a memory from his past. A memory from his future.
The Gauntlet. The raw, cosmic power searing through his veins. The smell of ozone and burning metal. The faces of his friends, etched with a terrible, fragile hope. Peter's face, crumbling to dust. Morgan's face, beaming up at him from the porch swing. "I love you 3000."
He was not in the cave. He couldn't be. He was on the battlefield. He had just snapped his fingers. He was dying. He was…
The water hit.
Ice-cold and brutal, it flooded the fabric, turning it into a second skin of suffocating liquid. It filled his mouth, his nose, his lungs. The world dissolved into a frantic, panicked explosion of drowning. His body arched, straining against restraints he hadn't realized were there. He was a machine, and his engine was flooding.
This wasn't right. This wasn't the quiet, victorious death he had earned. This was a regression. A violent, horrifying *un-waking*.
*Not again.*
The thought wasn't a thought. It was a primal scream from a part of his soul that had already lived this nightmare. The water, the shouting, the rough hands holding him down—it was a scene from a movie he'd starred in fifteen years ago. A movie he thought had ended.
He fought, but his limbs were heavy, unresponsive. The future and the past were at war inside his skull, and his body was the battlefield. He could feel Pepper's hand in his, her quiet strength as his arc reactor faded. He could feel the rough-hewn cot of the cave against his back. He could see his daughter's holographic smile, a flickering light in the darkness of his final moments. He could feel the car battery wired to his chest, a crude anchor in a sea of pain.
The two realities tore at each other, shredding the fabric of his sanity. He was dying on a battlefield in upstate New York. He was drowning in a cave in Afghanistan. He was both. He was neither. He was coming apart at the seams.
Just as the blackness began to consume him, the pressure vanished. The fabric was ripped from his face. He was hauled upright, sputtering, coughing, vomiting water and bile onto the dirt floor. Air, precious and sharp, scraped its way back into his lungs.
Through a blurry, water-stung haze, he saw them. Bearded men, holding rifles. The Ten Rings. The memory was so clear, so vivid, it felt like a recording playing back. He knew what came next. Their leader would enter. He would make his demands.
But something was wrong. Someone else was in the room. A figure kneeling beside him, holding a cup of water.
A voice cut through the chaos, speaking English. A calm, steady voice that had no place in this symphony of violence.
"He is awake."
Tony's head lolled to the side. His vision swam, then focused with a sickening lurch. He saw a kind, tired face. He saw intelligent eyes, filled with a weary compassion. He saw a familiar mustache and a receding hairline.
He saw a face that belonged to a ghost. A ghost he had carried with him for over a decade, a symbol of his first great failure.
He saw Yinsen.
The shock was not a jolt, but a system-wide shutdown. His heart, already straining, hammered against the crude magnet in his chest. The air he had just fought for abandoned him. The two warring realities in his head—the victorious death and the torturous rebirth—collapsed into a single, impossible point.
This wasn't the past. This wasn't the future.
This was wrong.
The terror was absolute. It was the terror of a physicist seeing the laws of the universe break. It was the terror of a programmer watching his own code achieve a malevolent, impossible sentience.
His last coherent thought before the world dissolved into a pinprick of light was not one of strategy, not one of hope, not one of defiance. It was a single, soul-shattering question, born of a logic that had run out of every other conceivable answer.
"Am I in hell?"