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Tony never realized how much light he had had in his life. Not until there was an ashy remainder of it in the air, a grim mist hanging around the world, obscuring the sun, reminding them of the light that used to be up there and the lights that used to warm their lives. Not until his hands were gritty with his own light, dimmed into nothingness, reduced into a shadow, struck out from existence by the cruel hand of fate.
Peter was gone, murdered, crumbled down into dust like everyone else, his remains floating eerily around somewhere in the planet of eternal sunset. The orange light had speckled the dust mockingly, highlighting the last remains of something he can never undo, never recover, never save. The image is carved into his retinas alongside the kid’s last moments. They haunt him every time he closes his eyes, inescapable, devastating and crushing his heart and soul slowly, inevitably.
“I lost the kid,” he says as he stumbles down from the spaceship, hollowed out by grief, defeat and failure, slowly bleeding out from the gaping hole in his chest that had once been his son. His heart, his life, his light, lost to the cold, merciless, infinite shadow of Death.
He had lost the kid to the same shadows that have been cast on every planet in the universe. The same shadows that now dim their daily lives, making previously vibrant, noisy, lively cities painted over in grey. Lifeless. Silent. Empty.
Dead.
The first time Tony came back to New York, he couldn’t recognize it. Gone was the city that never sleeps. Gone were the rush hour traffic, the lively, constant noise, the continuous flow of life. Gone were the people, the lifeblood of every city. Instead the shadows had taken over the streets as well, in the forms of wraith-like survivors. They wandered around the city like ghosts, following skeletons of daily routines, playing pretend with their own lives. They traveled from their home to their work without a purpose, just going through the motions, because that was all they knew, all they could do. Just repeating the same things over and over, like a broken record. They resembled robots more than real human beings.
Tony would know. He was one of them too.
Slowly, oh, so slowly, life picked up and the humankind, the universe, started to piece themselves together.
They still had collective PTSD – avoiding looking at the grey mist, having panic attacks when someone disappeared for a second, flinching at dust clouds – but they were becoming more alive.
Sometime after the recovery period had started, Tony decided to take a trip to Queens. The kid and May were gone, but Tony had grown fond of the neighborhood, especially one particular sandwich shop. He didn’t know if Mr. Delmar had survived the Snap, but he headed to his shop either way. No harm in checking it out.
Besides, it probably still had the best sandwiches in Queens – if not in all of New York – and to be completely honest, Tony really needed a pick-me-up.
It also didn’t hurt that Delmar’s reminded him of good memories with Peter, and those were in short supply these days.
Business was not good. Mr. Delmar’s clientele had dropped in half, and most of his wholesalers had been Snapped. He had had to set up an entirely new delivery system, and his sandwiches still didn’t taste quite the same. He assumed that the devastating loss of his only daughter was the reason: instead of love, his baking and cooking was now infused with bottomless grief.
Somebody had claimed that the evil alien who had done this, had done it so that the world’s resources would be enough for everyone and no one would starve. Mr. Delmar had scoffed at that. The bad guy was obviously an idiot who didn’t know anything about how modern food distribution and economics worked. If there weren’t enough people to cultivate and distribute the planet’s reserves, they would still starve.
And if they didn’t starve because they weren’t fast enough to recalibrate their whole economy, they would wither away from the grief.
There had been way too many people stumbling to his shop, who were mere shadows of themselves, weary and worn. They had glassy, dead eyes and baggy clothes and their frames were shriveled up and wilting, like they were slowly wasting away and not caring a whit about it. He himself had lost a little weight, and he knew he would see the same hopeless stare if he looked into the mirror. Still, he persevered, keeping the memory of his cheerful little girl bright in his mind. She wouldn’t have wanted him to waste away.
He had started to keep a bowl of free chocolate bars at the counter in an attempt to bring even one good thing to the days of these wraiths. The half-smiles and the occasional grins got from that were the most treasured parts of his days.
Mr. Delmar was just filling up the bowl again, when the doorbell rang.
He didn’t have enough time to turn around before a familiar voice said, “Number five with pickles and an Italian BLT, please.”
He turned swiftly, hope filling his chest, looking around for the other person that usually accompanied that voice to his shop.
After a few seconds of searching, his hope deflated, dragging his shoulders down with it.
No curly-haired, sparkly-eyed kid had entered his shop.
Instead there was just Tony Stark.
(Yes, he knew who he was. He’d figured it out a month after Tony had started visiting with the kid, after noticing his picture on a magazine right after the billionaire had left his shop. But he hadn’t let that affect his treatment of the man. The guy was obviously in the kid’s favor, and Mr. Delmar figured that even billionaires had the right to be treated as real humans, not animals in the zoo.)
(It also hadn’t been a big leap to deduce his connection to the kid, afterwards. He had known that there had been something familiar in the Spider-Man’s voice when the brat had come to save him after that ATM thing.)
Grief had left its mark on Stark as well.
He was almost as wraith-like as some of Mr. Delmar’s regulars, with pale countenance, a hollow stare and deep lines of sorrow etched onto his face. In short, he looked like a man who had lost and was lost, just like everyone else. There was a mutual recognition of their grief on each other’s faces, Stark’s features falling with empathy and a deepening sorrow.
You too, huh, his eyes seemed to say.
Mr. Delmar felt his own face slackening in compassion and reflected grief. He offered the poor man a half-smile, which Stark returned with one of his own, and set out to make the sandwiches.
After a silent moment, loud with the absence of a certain brat, Mr. Delmar cleared his throat, desperate to fill the silence. “So the kid was a victim as well?”
Stark’s eyes were full of familiar heavy, soul-crushing grief.
“…yeah,” he answered.
Mr. Delmar spread the lettuce evenly on the BLT and said, “I figured as much, given that Spider-Man disappeared as well.”
Stark shot him a piercing look, all redundant protectiveness, before he seemed to realize who he’s speaking to and sags in resignation. He brushed a hand over his face as he remarked with a dry smirk, “The kid never could keep a secret, could he?”
“No,” Mr. Delmar smiled fondly as he pieced the other sandwich together from mere muscle memory.
Another moment passed.
“Did he participate? In the battle?” Mr. Delmar couldn’t help but ask, even if he already guessed the answer. The kid had been too good to do anything less.
Stark sighed, a complicated mixture of regret and pride and heavy bitterness in his tone as he answered, “Yeah. He went to space with me and fought until the last second. Did very well too, but the opposite side was just too strong. I almost wish he’d stayed on Earth, but he probably would’ve been Snapped either way, and at least this way, he had someone familiar with him, when—,” Stark choked on the rest, and Mr. Delmar averted his eyes respectfully.
He gave him a couple of minutes to gather himself, before extending the sandwiches. The man flashed him another half-smile full of gratitude that sparked into genuine little chuckle as Mr. Delmar nudged the bowl of chocolate towards him. On the side, Mr. Delmar had scribbled a note that read: “Free chocolate – to ward off the dementors” – the obvious source of Stark’s humor. His Sofía had loved Harry Potter, and if Mr. Delmar remembered correctly, Peter had loved the series as well.
He could see the fondness sparkling in Stark’s eyes as he took his time in selecting his preferred chocolate bar. Stark was clearly deliberately choosing to remember the good part of whatever memory had sprung to mind at seeing the reference, instead of focusing on the cruelty of having the ability to make new ones so violently stripped away.
They share another bittersweet smile as Stark picks up a Twix bar, one of Peter’s favorites.
Stark grabs his purchases and turns around to walk away with a friendly wave, taking Peter’s memory with him, and leaving Mr. Delmar to stare at his retreating back contemplatively.
It turns out Mr. Delmar had been right. The kid had ended up going places, reaching as far as space. But thing about going is, that when you arrive, you sometimes don’t get to come back. Sometimes reaching means that you don’t bounce back. Instead you fall over and get lost.
As Stark leaves, the same heaviness on his slumped shoulders that Mr. Delmar can feel on his heart, he can’t help but bitterly curse at fate. At the kid for reaching too far.
For not coming back.
For being lost.
Outside, the grim mist swirls gloomily, an inescapable, everlasting remainder of all the things they’ve lost.
And the shadow of the day will embrace the world in grey.