The second the door was locked and they were sealed in their own, private world, Tony had slid an arm around her, the obi keeping him from pressing against her back but he nuzzled behind her ear, tracing his fingers up the edge of her kimono like he might just pull it off of her, and asked, "Can I see you?" He may have imagined her singular, blue form what felt like every idle second of the last two months, letting her invade his dreams and finally force him to make his choice. This was his choice, and he wanted to face it, if she would let him. After all, he'd already seen her at her worst, how hard could it be? This mutation, that she hadn't meant to hide from him, just the baggage that came with it. Tony knew baggage.
Turned out, it wasn't hard at all-- well, not the coping part. So they ended up tangled together on the bed, the cool hue of her skin reflecting in a subtly strange way on the stark white sheets, and Tony's fingertips blindly tracing the contours along Raven's neck. He started to laugh at her comment, maybe in a slightly desperate way, and wrapped the other arm around her like he was afraid she might have meant right now. He wasn't sure he would last round two. "Hey," he had to say, wiggling away from her so he could meet her featureless yellow eyes over the swell of the pillow. He rolled his eyes at himself, then kept his gaze down, unnerved, splaying a hand without anything to grasp when he realized he didn't really know what he wanted to say. "When we first started, you know, I was in a really dark place, and I don't know if--... I mean, without you, I didn't have anything--... What I..." Okay, that wasn't working. Tony had scrunched up his face, frustrated with himself, and the proximity he had forced himself to contend with while he tried to share this without thinking it through.
Maybe a different angle. Start with what brought them there. "The last long term thing I had, we were together for...well, we broke up a lot, we were probably together for two weeks, but I thought I was going to marry her," he started more confidently, but it wavered and Tony got fidgety, like he had to distract himself from what he was saying. "I got the ring and everything, and I sat her down and we were having a nice dinner and I was going to ask her, but we never got to finish that dinner because this business thing came up, and then I was in the Iron Man, and that was what we always fought about, that she never felt like my number one priority, it was always something else. So we split again, and she never...never even knew about the ring, or what I was trying to tell her that night, and after that I was going through some really tough shit and I got to thinking...I mean, I realized that this was much better for her anyway, that if I loved her like that that I should let her stay away from me because otherwise she was going to get hurt. And then..." It dawned on Tony that this was getting to be a very long story, but he had come this far and could only give Raven an apologetic look for it as it kept coming out; "Just as I start to tell myself that maybe that's just me doing what she always accused me of, she's so much stronger than that and she could take care of herself and I knew that, I was just prioritizing Iron Man and not her, she dies." By then, Tony was sitting up, hunched over with his legs crossed and manipulating the sheet pulled into his lap intently enough that he was probably stretching the weave. "She was killed, and she must have been so confused because it was Iron Man, it was a guy who had stolen my tech, that killed her. And when she was dead, when I couldn't do anything about it, I realized that I didn't just want to be with her, and it was too late, I...I needed her, and I didn't know what I was going to do, and..." Tony pursed his lips, swallowing past the lump in his throat and keeping his eyes fixed on his lap. He never told anyone that before. Pepper didn't even know, not even about the ring. He felt exposed and exhausted and could only hope that Raven understood the myriad of implications he intended in the story because he didn't want to say any more.