I need to figure out why he keeps going. Out of what? Guilt? They say there's a fucking correlation between generosity and guilt. It makes the most sense, in the moment. He can't waste the life Yinsen gave to him. The life he gave up for him.
Do you think it's all he is? I think it's all Tony allows himself to be. And I get it. I understand the instinct to throw yourself into the line of fire when peace and privilege is all you've known. In the beginning, you tell yourself that you're doing it for some grand, noble reason. That's what we all tell ourselves, I think, to keep us going. Like a little dose of hope in the morning to get you to the night. But you're not. You're just itching to bleed in order to justify the pain you're going through. Suffering is not noble. Suffering is not enough. The gratification you get from numbing the pain doesn't mean you've found the cure; guilt is chronic when it weighs on your soul, the deeper a bullet goes, the gentler the extraction must be.
I'm trying to imagine the night after. Returning home, alone, to that pristine, shiny mansion. Tony always had a habit of overworking, but I think that's where the habit became instinct; an hour past midnight, under the dim moonlight on one of his many balconies, or maybe sat stock still on that smooth, expensive leather couch—either calculating how much everything cost and where that money could have gone, or staring a hole into the ground imagining it were him.
No one's looking back. Two hours past one, he snaps out of it. He rises far too quickly, and his vision blurs into a nauseating blend of brownish reds and greyish greens, it doesn't matter. Tony breathes in once, far too deeply. Gliding through the massive mansion, making not a sound, Tony enters his garage.
He has to be alone. Who did he have at the time? Obie? He fondled Tony's chest the second he got home—"show me, I wanna see it"—there's no chance that he'd be there that night. Tony has, seemingly, exactly four personal relationships at the time, and three of them seem to only tolerate him at best, meanwhile the third begged him to undress. The others can only be around him for so long, right? Comfort him a little at lunch, abandon him by evening, 'cause they're only available for an hour and then they're leaving, again, we all have work to do—'I wish I could be here for you'—fuckin' hear that enough times and it starts feeling like a lie they tell to keep you from offing yourself. There's a specific kind of Hell that rich-dick assholes trap themselves in, and it's called courtesy, where everything is said as a segue into some dumb bullshit Tony couldn't care less about.
He'll have one moment of vulnerability the night after. It'll last an hour at most. He'll reach out and someone will be there to hold him. And then they will go. It's no one's fault, really. Tony wants them to go. It'd just be better if they went. Because he can't be around other people without signing away just a little bit of his autonomy. They'd insist that he eat, or sleep, or drink something. And God knows they won't take no for an answer, we're only human after all.
Yeah, right. He's gonna be alone.
Better off alone.
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