He goes to sleep, dreaming of pepper. Like he promised.
He wakes up the next morning.
He wakes up.
He shouldn’t’ve woken up. He’s furious, for a moment, terrified for longer than that — he doesn’t want to be awake, he doesn’t want to suffocate, slowly, that horrible empty feeling in his lungs, he doesn’t—
He checks the air, in the ship.
0% oxygen, it blinks at him.
Tony tests it agian. And agian. And agian, breathing, conscious, for the whole time. He should be dead. The air ran out over four hours ago, when he was still asleep, he should be dead—
He’s not.
And suddenly, he remembers.
“Spare his life,” Strange said, and Thanos had agreed. The stones had glowed.
Tony had assumed that it was in anticipation of being made whole.
There is no oxygen, and he is alive. He is beginning to think that it was not only anticipation that made the stones glow.
Okay, consider: With the lack of oxygen, Tony hallucinates. The conversation goes like this.
“I’m sure they’re looking for you, Stark. But they’d never find you here, hidden behind the stars. Look, back there, what you saw? That is your legacy. The greatest powers of the universe in the hands of that murderer! Is that how you want to go out? Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark? Or are you going to do something about it?”
“Why should I do anything? Either way, the lack of oxygen is going to kill me, and if not, then I’ll be dead from dehydration by the end of the week.”
“Well then, this will be a very important week for you, won’t it?
i hate and love this.
tony using what’s left of his strength to build a machine that does photosynthesis artificially, recycle the CO2 of his breath and obtaining new oxygen, using the light of the stars as fuel. it won’t last long, he has brought himself a month, tops. now he needs water. he makes a fusion tank, mixing the new oxygen with hydrogen he collects from the vacuum of space (wich is not that empty anyway.) it’s not much, but he won’t die in 24 hs. food is the hardest. he can’t eat anything alien without risking poisoning himself in the process, but he can last at least two more weeks on complete starvation.
enough for a certain captain to pick up his distress signal, and come for rescue
Scott arriving to the avengers compound where everyone is miserable because their friends are dead but it’s ok cuz he gave up hope years ago and he’s got a gen z way of dealing with depression
clintbbarton 