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Things will always get worse before they get better.
The surgery didn’t solve all of his problems right away. Sure, it solved the most immediate one, he didn’t have to worry about shrapnel crawling its way towards his heart, but it didn’t magically erase every other problem in his life.
For one, the gaping hole in his chest. It didn’t close once the shrapnel was removed and he didn’t need the arc reactor anymore. It stayed wide open. There isn’t an implant for that, no protocol for dealing with holes in someone’s chest that aren’t traumatic but are big enough to fit a fist through. So, he waited. He hired the best and brightest minds who were willing to experiment, and they helped him grow a perfect implant to fit into it. The first choice they mention is titanium, it’s commonly used, a reasonable enough choice, but he vetoes it instantly. He remembers the day he woke up with a hole in his chest, the coldness of it, the emptiness even though everything vital was still inside him, and he knows without a doubt that he could never live with the titanium. They acquiesce.
The implant isn’t bone or cartilage, if he’s honest the exact substance was beyond even his capabilities, PhD isn’t equivalent to MD after all, and it took a handful of tries before they finally got it right.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
After that there was still the muscle, the blood vessels, the skin. They told him they didn’t know if they’d be able to restore nerve function, to restore feeling beyond pressure. They didn’t know if it would even be worth it to try to redirect existing nerve passages through where they haven’t been for years, and he took it in stride. He hadn’t felt that spot in years, and as long as everything was in working order, he didn’t need to feel it now. It took months and months, it took skin grafts, muscle flaps, being under the knife more times than he’d ever dreamed of, unseemly scars in convenient places, but they did it. There were a couple of scares, a couple of times when they had to put him back under almost immediately after he healed to correct an error after seeing that the scar was still too sunken, too deep for him to be able to go out in public, much less in the suit.
There were days when he regretted every single thing he’d done since the shrapnel was removed. Days when the physical therapist would have to go and get Pepper just to get him to drink water, to eat, to get out of bed. There were days when he wished he had left well enough alone and been fine with the hole in his chest. There were days when he missed the shrapnel, the arc reactor, the pain of being alive.
It took him a long time to be ok without the constant pain. To realize that he was allowed to live without it. To unlearn the fear that had become ingrained in his muscles, in his bones, since the first time he woke up and realized that he was hooked up to a car battery.
It got worse, it got so much worse, before it got better.
They covered it up, but it would never be perfect. He would always have that indented circular scar around where it used to be. They had managed to make it only barely noticeable, just a smooth circle of skin mere centimeters deeper than the skin around it, but it was visible. The wounds were too deep to erase, even the best plastic surgeons around the world admitted they couldn’t do much, if anything, and if they tried, they were likely to just make it worse. He took it in stride.
So, he has to live with it.
It still aches when it rains.
When he gets hit too hard in the chest, in or out of the suit, he gets scared. Even though his own body has grown and accustomed to the implant, (he never bothered to ask if it even qualifies as an implant, would it be more proper to call it a graft?) even though they made it out of a biocompatible substance and it’s impossible for his body to reject it, he gets scared. He worries.
Pepper caught him once at 4 in the morning, after a particularly scary fight where he had been thrown face-first into a building, running himself between the x-ray and MRI machines with JARVIS trying to talk him down. And isn’t it telling that he’s more scared for his life now than he was with a goddamn gaping hole in his chest?
Pepper takes her time, holds him as he looks at the scans, as JARVIS relays the information on them, reassuring Tony that nothing is wrong, the implant is fine, his heart is fine, his lungs are fine, he might be having a panic attack, but he’s fine. He’s not dying.
He falls asleep in her arms a couple hours later, having stressed himself to exhaustion. The first time she uses the Rescue suit is to carry him to bed, which JARVIS promises to keep a secret, because she knows Tony wants it to be a surprise.
***
The last time she uses it, Tony knows it isn’t the first time, but it’s the first time they’ve fought together. He never dreamed of having her by his side like this, and they’re both excited while still taking seriously the fact that the fate of the universe is in their hands.
The last words she says in it are the last words he will ever hear.
“Tony, look at me. We’re going to be ok. You can rest now.”