Tony had been getting the strange feeling that something was off since Sam had arrived in Atlantis. It wasn’t solely Sam either - Stephen and Peter had arrived soon after and had been acting…odd. Not in any specific way and Stephen had always been somewhat enigmatic and indecipherable because of the whole ‘could maybe alter the future in a bad way by telling people exactly what to do’ thing but this time, it had been different. Everybody new had been different, and it was either that or the Arena that had Tony’s hackles up for the vast majority of May.
It turned out that he was right to be concerned.
He was woken up at midnight on the dot in a cold sweat, looking down at shaky hands where he had just held the Infinity Stones and he knew - he just knew that he was about to die, but they weren’t there. Nothing was there. All he could feel was the distinct sensation that he’d been hit by a ten-ton truck and that this was it. It was over, whatever they’d been fighting for for five years, it was...over. The war, his family, his daughter.
He didn’t stay in bed long. He couldn’t stay in bed with the restless itching under his skin that he wasn’t finished and that he had to go back and finish it, even though he knew it would seal the fate that he’d been trying to avoid ever since that goddamned cave in Afghanistan - that he had been putting off his inevitable death ever since then. He’d been on borrowed time, and it’d finally run out.
Once Tony was out of the choking walls of his shared house, he...didn’t really know where to go. Atlantis was full of quiet places but he was almost certain people would look for him as soon as they realised he was missing and quite frankly, he wasn’t sure he could face anybody from home right now. If they knew, if they remembered, they’d either still find some way to tell him he was an idiot for doing what he did or they’d meet him with sympathetic gazes and half-baked condolences. Nobody could really take away the sting of imminent death, after all, and Tony was starting to think that the only person who’d really get this feeling was Natasha. He made a cursory check of the network and ignored any messages sent his way as he took off on foot in the direction of the beach, deciding that the suit would be far too noticeable.