No matter how many people I save, it isn’t enough. Because I can still hear the ones I didn’t save.

some days I don’t know which is worse: that I can remember what it feels like to be on the receiving end of my fire, or that nothing I do ever lifts that weight of the people I can’t help.

The hardest thing, always, is knowing that so often I /must/ not help.

Take Tony, for example. God, please take Tony.

I know who he is. Who doesn’t know? but I’ve had my powers longer than he’s been Iron Man. Twice longer. So I know that when we first hooked up, it was just a game to him, like so many others. He barely opens his heart to Pepper. He wasn’t going to open it to a random girl, even if she was a heroine. I slid in through the cracks.

It wasn’t my idea either. I wasn;t so foolish as to make any kind of vow after Cro. I’m an empath, I can’t help getting close to people, but even for me there’s close and there’s close. He slid in through the cracks.

So I know the days he can barely look himself in the eyes in the mirror. The days when he’s Iron Man because Tony is in too much pain to exist. The days when he wants to convince himself he could have stopped Ivan, could have saved all those lives if only he’d been better.

Afghanistan. Yinsen. Iron Monger. Stane. His father. Palladium. The armor war. Vanko.

Manhattan. Loki.

I know those nightmares, almost as intimately as he does. Some of them I share.

See, although i can wield fire, i’m tasked for search and rescue or crowd control. I’m needed more there, and I don’t argue. But sometimes it means I get a more up close and personal look at the results of combat than even the Avengers. That’s what fuels my nightmares. Having to choose, in the rubble of a collapsed building, who I /can/ save. Can this person last long enough to even be got out, or do I apply painblocks and move on to the next person? Every choice like that haunts me.

I know I’m not the only person facing the aftermath of those choices. Every emergency worker has those nightmares. Sometimes that knowledge helps.

Mostly, it doesn’t.

But in the end, even if someone holds me while I shudder through the backlash, even if someone wakes me before I scream myself awake, the only person who can deal with those thoughts is myself. No amount of outside concern, no amount of — therapy, no amount of drug-induced or adrenaline-induced forgetfulness will do more than postpone the inevitable.

And I have to remember that although I have the power to change other people; to wipe out Tony’s self doubt; I must not. To do so would be to negate everything they’ve achieved, everything they could achieve. On their own. Knowing that, sticking to that, is the one burden I can’t share.

Or forget. if I rationalize it even once, I’m lost.

I can’t ever let myself choose for anyone else.