Heroes Do Exist

And that’s the story of his life, really, isn’t it? Tony is obsessed with fixing things, making things better, improving them, and yet he doesn’t even know where to start with fixing himself.

Tony learns that becoming a hero doesn't always mean saving the world. Sometimes it just means saving one person.

Tony Stark is not a hero.

He knows this. He has had it told to him many times, by many people, in many different places. His father told him that heroes don’t exist, that the only way to become something similar to one was to work, so Tony worked. Tony has spent his whole life trying to impress a dead man, trying to be better, to shake off the shadow of his own father.

It hasn’t worked. It never worked.

Tony, for a long time, didn’t believe in heroes. Sure, the idea was a nice one, but the only real superhero America had ever seen was dead and gone, lost beneath thousands of layers of ice.

Until suddenly, he wasn’t.

*

“I can’t be that person,” Tony admits. He is pretending not to see Pepper, sitting next to him in the