Fic :: Avengers :: And Has Time Enough :: 1/2
And Has Time Enough
Fandom: Avengers
Rating: PG
Pairing: Steve/Tony
Summary: Tony asks if they have met. It's a matter of perspective. (A Time Traveller's Wife AU.)
A/N: This fic doesn't follow the plot to The Time Traveller's Wife, so no knowledge of that canon is necessary. "The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough." - Rabindranath Tagore.
*
Tony is walking down a corridor.
*
In the official records, the first thing Steve Rogers ever says to Tony Stark is, “Why didn’t you warn me?”
Tony lifts up his faceplate and says, “Have we met?”
It’s a matter of perspective.
*
On a hard drive in a safe in a bunker, there is a video that only three living people have seen.
There are men with guns. There is another man kneeling at their feet.
“You did not tell us the great Tony Stark was a witch!” the man in charge exclaims, and when he snaps his fingers, two of his companions thrust the kneeling man’s head under the water.
He thrashes, and thrashes, and then he is gone.
*
“Listen to me,” Tony hisses, grabbing Steve by the elbow and tugging him - Steve jerks his arm out of Tony’s hold, but follows him anyway - deeper into the recesses of the jet.
Tony looks around at Loki, who is watching them intently, and at Black Widow, who turns her head away. He grabs Steve’s arm again.
“You listen up,” he says, voice low and quick. “Whatever the hell I apparently said or didn’t say in your past, it’s still my future and I don’t wanna know. And if you think that’s confusing, try living it.”
“I’ve got some idea how confusing time travel is,” Steve snaps. “No thanks to you.”
“Don’t wanna hear it. And that?” he adds, jabbing a finger at the star in the centre of Steve’s chest. “That wasn’t time travel, pal, that was a guy taking a really long nap.”
Steve clenches his fists and draws in a breath, but whatever he’s going to say is drowned out by that first great roll of thunder, that incoming storm.
*
When Tony is four years old, Howard Stark looks dead into the centre of a camera lens and he says, “Tony.”
*
When Steve is six years old, and in bed with the flu, he dreams a man in a funny-looking suit appears in the middle of his bedroom.
“You aren’t meant to be here,” Steve dreams he says.
The man straightens his shirt cuffs. The whole suit looks wrong, like no clothes Steve has ever seen before, but the cufflinks are the strangest part; they’re faintly glowing.
“Well, would you look at that?” the dream man says, and then he looks down at Steve and begins to laugh, until Steve, feverish and offended, begins to cry.
“Oh, hell,” the man says. “No, stop, I’m sorry. I’m not - I’m laughing with you, not at you, okay? This is the smallest I’ve ever seen you. We’ll laugh about this in the, uh - in the future.”
“Go away,” Steve shouts through his tears. “I’ve got the flu.”
“Ninety years from now, you’ll laugh too, I promise.”
The man sucks in a breath and looks at his watch and says, “I’ll make it up to you in, uh, ten months, I think. And five seconds. And ninety years, wow, this never gets less confu-”
*
When Maria is eight months pregnant and Howard is smoking an after dinner cigar, a man crashes through their dinner table, naked and wet and shivering. Maria shrieks and knocks her chair over, and a maid comes running and begins to scream too, but Howard-
The man is choking, coughing out water and clawing at the strange glowing thing in his chest, but as he coughs he rolls over in the wreckage and looks Howard straight in the eye and he croaks, “Dad?”
The man’s eyes are dark and frightened. With one hand reaching out towards them, he disappears again.
Howard remains frozen, remains absolutely frozen with his cigar still burning down to his fingers, until Maria grabs hold of his elbow and begins to cry.
“The baby,” she sobs. “Howard, I think the baby’s coming.”
For a while, the baby, the hospital and Maria’s sickness consume everything, but when Howard comes back to himself, he’s holding his son in his arms. His greatest creation. Howard looks down into Anthony Edward’s eyes and knows with absolute certainty that he has seen these eyes before.
*
Tony remembers vaguely, over the incredible pain and half-consciousness, a familiar voice. The most familiar voice.
“There’s no time to explain, Yinsen, just trust me. I’m a trustworthy guy, this is my trustworthy face, I’ll - he’ll explain it all to you later. Just put this in now, before I...”
There is something cold inside the heat inside his chest. There is the most familiar hand on his shoulder.
“It’s okay. Dad solved - We solved it. It stays with us whenever we go. We’re a genius. See you in a few weeks, Ton-”
Tony goes home. A few seconds later, Tony goes as well.
*
The first thing Steve Rogers ever says to Howard Stark, his voice shaking with uncertainty and pent-up emotion, is “Tony?”
The lab is loud and busy, and in ten minutes a spy starts shooting and a simple case of mistaken identity leaves everyone’s minds. Howard thinks nothing of it.
Thirty years later, Howard thinks of it.
*
Tony is four and he can’t sleep, although it’s long past his bedtime.
Tony is four and tip-toeing, in his matching bathrobe and slippers, past the door of his father’s study, when a ghost appears at the end of the corridor - a boy who looks a lot like Tony, except he’s pale and naked and covering his mouth with his hands like Tony does when he’s trying not to cry.
They stare at each other, frozen. Tony is still deciding whether to run back to bed or to shout for his mother, when through the door daddy says, “Tony! How many times do I have to tell you-”
Tony jumps in fright. When he looks back at the end of the corridor again, the ghost has disappeared. He’s going to be in so much trouble. He begins to push the study door open and he hears an unfamiliar voice.
“You won’t be telling me anything anymore.”
“Oh, we’ll see about that, my boy.”
There’s the sound of a scuffle. Through the crack between doorframe and door, Tony sees daddy grab an older boy by the arm. The boy has no clothes on, and he shouts and struggles, hitting at daddy wildly with his fists.
“That is enough,” daddy says, his voice quieter and angrier than Tony has ever heard it before.
The boy stops fighting altogether and begins to loudly cry. He sits down on the floor of the study and daddy sinks down before him.
“Mom didn’t want to go! She didn’t want to but she went anyway, because you - Why didn’t you remember this? You left me nothing!”
Daddy says, “What are you talking about?”
“You left me nothing,” the boy sobs. “You left me, you’re gone, you left.”
Daddy hisses, “Quiet. Be quiet, you’ll wake Tony. You know he hasn’t started yet, you’ll scare him-” gripping the boy tightly by the shoulders.
Tony can see that daddy is shaking.
The boy looks up. He looks over daddy’s shoulder and right at Tony. His eyes are red and wet, his nose is streaming. He laughs wildly.
“I’m already scared, dad,” he says.
Daddy looks around. When he sees Tony, his face goes pale and his eyes go wide and he swears louder than Tony has ever heard him swear before. He lets go of the boy’s arms and reaches out for Tony.
“Dad,” the other boy says quietly, beginning to cry again.
Tony presses his hands over his mouth, trying not to cry himself, because even the ghost wasn’t as scary as this, nothing has ever been as scary as this, and he’s starting to feel dizzy.
“Wait,” daddy’s saying, “dammit, wait,” reaching back for the other boy with one hand and reaching forwards for Tony with the other.
Tony takes a step towards him and whispers around his fingers, “Daddy, I’m-”
*
“Now would be,” Tony grits out through clenched teeth, the armour rattling around him because it was built to blow up bombs, not to carry them. He can feel the weight of it, he can feel the creaking joints. The city is shrinking, the portal is growing, the sky is rushing down to meet him.
One-way trip, Steve had said, so uncertainly, because Tony’s meant to have a future; Tony’s meant to have Steve’s past, apparently.
What Tony has is a bomb behind him and the stars before him.
“Now would be a perfect time to disappear,” he says.
But he doesn’t look back.
*
All ten of Howard’s fingers close on empty air.
*
“Obie,” Tony gasps.
He reappears an inch above the cot, in a cave in Afghanistan. He crashes down onto it, naked and wheezing and clawing at the thing in his chest, catching his fingers under the rim and pulling and -
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“What have you done to me?” Tony says when he is capable of speaking again.
“I don’t know,” Yinsens says. “You are the one who did it.”
He hands Tony a pile of neatly folded clothes, with a car battery and a tangle of bloody wires balanced on top, and then he sits down on the edge of the cot and looks at Tony very hard.
He says, “What an interesting day we are having, Mr Stark.”
*
“This doesn’t mean you’re on the team, Stark. Consulting only.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Tony says mildly, leaning forwards with his hands on the edge of the conference table. “I think you’ve got me confused with some other guy. You know, some guy who didn’t do the vertical tango with a nuclear missile to save your ass.”
“Stark, Banner practically is a missile, and he’s still more reliable than you.” Fury fixes Tony with a stare, then adds, gentler, “Look, you did good. I’m not denying the good you did. But suppose next time, you go temporal walkabout and that missile drops on my city. If you can’t control it, you sure as hell can’t guarantee it won’t happen.”
Tony looks around the table. Hill is staring at her hands, and Barton is staring at Fury, but Black Widow gazes back at him, unflinchingly. Pathologically and physiologically unreliable, her report on him had said.
One moment he’s there and the next he’s gone, it had said.
“Screw you all,” Tony declares.
Kicking his chair away, he climbs to his feet and points a finger at Fury. “I’m going to control it.”
He shoves his way out of the conference room, the door swinging shut behind him not quite quick enough to keep Fury’s words from floating out after him.
“Well damn, Stark, what took you so long?”
“Never had the time,” Tony shouts back.
*
Tony is four and standing naked at the end of corridor, shaking, staring at another little boy standing in front of daddy’s study door. When daddy shouts, he runs away, until a hand takes hold of his and a friendly voice says, “Hey, hey, it’s okay now. Come with me, I’ll tell you a story.”
Tony is five, and six, and seven, and eight, and when he hears that other boy begin to cry, he runs and hides until it’s time to go back home again.
Tony is thirty-five and standing in the corridor, in the shadows, where he can watch the four-year-old disappear, the empty bathrobe falling suddenly to the ground and all ten of Howard’s fingers curling into fists.
In the grounds, Tony is twenty-one and turns away from the study window; is twenty-six and watches Howard’s hand cover his mouth; is forty, with a blue light glowing in his chest, watching only himself this time.
Tony is thirty-nine and there for barely a split second, choking on water and digging his fingers into the lawn so hard, tomorrow the gardeners will search for a stray dog.
Tony is seventeen and crying, still crying, as he disappears.
Tony is forty-two when he takes a little boy by the hand at last, turning him gently away.
*
“So,” Yinsen says. “You are a man who has everything and nothing but time.”
*
“Tony,” Howard says into the camera. “On the day you were born, I saw - you, I believe, with something strange inside your body. Something you had brought with you instead of leaving behind-”
*
Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark.
*
Steve is seven, kicking a pebble down the alley and pretending it’s a soccer ball and he can run as fast as anyone, when a naked man falls into the trashcans. It’s definitely not a dream this time.
“Where’d you come from?” Steve demands. “Why’re you naked?”
“That’s your most pressing question?” the man groans, climbing out of the trashcans. He grabs a lid and holds it up in front of his legs, peering down at Steve. His nose is bleeding, his chest is glowing, and there are wires coiled all around his body.
Steve picks up his pebble. It’s a good one; he might need it.
“I left my clothes behind. Not on purpose,” the man quickly adds. “I didn’t leave my clothes behind on purpose. I’m not a flasher. Uh - Steve?”
“Yes?”
“Steve Rogers?”
“Yeah.” Steve glares up at him. “What do you want, mister?”
“Okay, good, good to know I’m not just terrorising random kids. You’re irritatingly vague about where I meet you. Try to grow up less vague this time, okay?” The man wipes his nose and realises it’s bleeding. “Don’t punch me so hard either. You got a tissue? A hanky?”
“I never punched you!” Steve protests, but he passes the man his handkerchief automatically. He rolls the pebble between his fingers.
“It’s okay, don’t sweat it, my first suggestion was a kick in the balls.”
“That’s a bad word,” Steve hisses.
The man throws his hands up in mock-surrender. “Sorry, sorry, my bad.”
“Who are you? Last time you had clothes.”
“I did? Oh, now that’s promising. What else was different?”
“I dunno. You were talking crazy. Are you a ghost?”
“I’m a time traveller.”
The man says it with a straight face, dabbing at his bloody nose with Steve’s handkerchief.
Steve throws the pebble at him as hard as he can. It’s not so hard, all the same, because Steve is skinny and the doctor thinks he might have asthma, but it bounces off the man’s forehead and he stumbles back, exclaiming, “Ow! Dammit, Steve-”
He trips over the trashcans and falls backwards with a crash. Steve screws his eyes shut, throwing his hands over his ears until the alley falls silent. He lowers his hands and opens his eyes.
“Mister?” he whispers. “Hey, mister?”
He looks up and down the alley, then around the corner out into the busy street, but the man has gone.
*
Tony leans his full weight against the buzzer and waits, ankles crossed, with his elbow on the button and his head propped up on his knuckles. He stares right back at all the passers-by who double-take at the sight of him.
The intercom clicks on.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, hi, I’ve changed my mind, tell me everything.”
There’s a pause before Steve says, “Tony?”
“Bingo.”
The intercom crackles as Steve begins to laugh. Tony waits, resting his chin on his hand.
“And you want me to...tell you-?”
“My future. Come on, it’s not rocket science. Do I have to cross your palm with silver before you’ll let me in or what?”
Steve doesn’t answer, but with a click the door unlocks.
*
Steve is twenty-six, or ninety-four, and sketching idly on the back of a bank statement when he hears a clatter from the kitchen. He lowers his pencil.
“It’s me,” Tony shouts. “Not a poltergeist.”
“Good to know.”
Steve turns to face the door and watches till Tony appears in the doorframe, wrapped in tinfoil and looking sheepish. He tugs at his neckline and the whole costume rattles.
“That’s a new one,” Steve says.
Tony grimaces. It’s almost Steve’s Tony, he can tell. The Tony who he knows so well from the past and can only barely catch a glimpse of in the present; with slightly longer hair and a slightly restyled goatee and the ability to stand comfortably in Steve’s presence.
“Yeah, this - this seemed like a better idea at the time,” Tony says. “Hey, it works! But I look like a fourth grade production of the Wizard of Oz.”
“I think even fourth graders could do better. When are you from?”
“Not long now,” Tony says, vaguely. He moves fully into the room and peers out the window.
“I wish you’d told me,” Steve says, picking his pencil up again. “Not - not about Bucky and the ice. I can understand that, now, I guess. But that you didn’t like me.”
“What? Come on, I like you.”
“Now, I mean. In the present.”
“He like you now. He just has a unique way of showing it.”
Tony pushes the window open and sticks his head out, looking down into the street.
“Hey,” he calls back. “You remember that tiger drawing? When you were, I dunno, ten, eleven?”
“Twelve.”
“You were short.”
“Yep,” Steve says. “Yeah, I remember the tiger.”
“That was a damn good tiger.”
Tony falls silent, turning his attention back to the street below. Sound drifts through into Steve’s apartment: the susurrus of a million voices and a million vehicles in motion. Someone in the street shouts to a friend. A car comes to a halt and a car door slams.
Tony pulls his head back out of the window and tugs it shut. He twists the blinds cord back and forth between his fingers, winds it around his knuckles.
“Listen,” he says, speaking quickly, “you’re gonna have to trust me. Him. The other one. I dunno if I’m breaking the rules here or if my you - future you - had this same little chat, but screw it. Let’s be the masters of our temporally fucked universe, just this once. Trust him.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “I do trust you. All of you, whenever you’re from.”
Huffing out a breath of laughter, Tony rubs the back of his neck, his fingers still twisted in the cord.
“Okay,” he says. “That works. I’ll see you in a couple minutes.”
“What-” Steve begins, but Tony takes a step back, pulling an uncomfortable face.
Steve quickly closes his eyes. Ever since it registered to him, in his teens, that Tony probably was a real person disappearing into thin air, he hasn’t been able to stand to watch it. But he can feel the air shift. He can hear, or maybe just imagines he can hear, the faintest pop when Tony goes.
He keeps his eyes closed for a moment longer, until down on the street Tony rests his elbow on the buzzer and lets it ring, and ring, and ring.
*
They bring Tony back wet, so Yinsen brings him a blanket and then, when Tony doesn’t stop shaking, he brings him some tea.
“They held me underwater,” Tony says, his teeth chattering. “I went home.”
“Ah,” says Yinsen.
“When I got back, everyone was kinda freaking out.”
“I rarely see eye to eye with our esteemed captors, but in this instance I think I can understand their reaction.”
“Right.”
Tony laughs. He clasps his hands tighter around his knees until, at last, the shaking subsides and he continues.
“But once they’d stopped shouting and, you know, questioning their sobriety, they realised they’d got a bomb-building, genius, freak of honest to god nature on their hands. It’s like terrorist Christmas out there. I’m pretty sure I saw some dancing. Dancing was - definitely a feature.”
Yinsen pours himself a cup of tea. He holds it between both hands and blows gently on the surface of the steaming water.
“And then?” he asks.
“And then what?”
“And then what else?”
“The usual freak of nature stuff,” Tony says. He closes his eyes. “They want me to carry bombs with me. Can’t be done. I told them - I - They don’t know it’s time travel, but they know I’m going somewhere. Hard to miss, right? So now the million dollar question is do they wanna use me as transport or a weapon?”
“Or both?”
“Can’t be done,” Tony says again. “But they’re gonna keep trying anyway. They’re go-getters.”
He keeps his eyes closed. He raps his knuckles blindly against the arc reactor. “What if I don’t make this? Go back to that past, knocking-on-heaven’s-door me empty handed?”
There’s a pause before Yinsen slowly speaks. “No, I don’t think that will work. You have one, so you must make one. What’s done can’t be undone. We can’t go back.”
“I can.”
Tony rubs his thumb along the rim of the arc reactor. He remembers, vaguely, Obie’s hand reaching down. He hears Yinsen let out a soft breath.
“No, Stark, even you can’t do that.”
*
They thrust Tony’s head under the water and he disappears-
They thrust Tony’s head under the water and he disappears-
They thrust Tony’s head under the water and he disappears-
*
Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark, towards the sound of voices.
*
“- I don’t know what happens,” Howard says, “but I know Maria and I don’t have much time left-”
*
Tony is drunk. Thirty three and very drunk, when he finds himself on the floor, bleeding from the chest - no, bleeding from the edges of the thing that’s in his chest.
Downstairs, the housewarming party is still in full swing, but Tony checked out of the celebrations hours ago; the people in his life are old and boring, whereas his house is new and beautiful. He fine-tuned JARVIS’ installation for an hour or two, and then he fine-tuned the liquor cabinet, and then he appeared on the bedroom floor.
He stares down at himself.
He says, “JARVIS, you seeing this too?”
He pulls his shirt off - he didn’t like it much anyway - and he presses it over the other’s chest. He presses his hand over the metal in his other chest.
He hears familiar footsteps in the corridor. Obie sticks his head around the door.
“Hey, Tony-” he begins, before seeing the other Tony and smoothly adding, “Hey, Tonies. You’ve got a party to host. Everything okay in here?”
“Obie, I’m either too drunk or not drunk enough for this.”
Tony lifts his hand away and lifts his shirt away to let Obie see, and Obie steps fully into the room. He kneels next to Tony, at the other Tony’s side, and he taps a finger over the glowing glass.
“This is new. I thought nothing could travel with you.”
“So did I. You know me, full of surprises.”
Together, they move the other Tony onto the bed, where he lies quiet and still. Tony has a headache; Tony, who has been drinking since one pm, has the beginnings of a hangover and his fingers feel numb. The other Tony looks dead.
“This looks like the arc reactor,” Obie says, checking the other’s pulse. “Miniaturised. I never saw Howard come up with anything like this.”
He spreads his palm over the miniature reactor. He can cover it with his whole hand. His fingers curl under the rim, digging in.
“Well, let’s get a closer look,” he says, twisting it and -
The other Tony’s eyes snap open and he grabs at his own chest, knocking Obie’s hands away, sucking in a deep, shuddering breath.
“Obie,” he gasps.
He disappears, leaving Obie’s fingers curling in the air.
“Damn,” he says. He lets his hand drop. “Still, at least now we know what we’ve got to look forward to. If you can really make the arc reactor viable, Tony, there’ll be no stopping the company.”
“Yeah,” Tony says, looking down at the blood on the shirt in his hands. “Can’t wait.”
For the first time since his parents died, he thinks of the story another Tony had told him almost thirty years ago. He’d forgotten about it. The other Tony had had a light in his chest then too.
Ignoring the headache, wondering about his dad’s arc reactor blueprints and how Tony would make it that small - because he knows he’d never trust anyone else to put something like that in his body - Tony barely feels it when Obie’s hand lands on his shoulder and squeezes affectionately.
His fingers dig in. Obie’s never known his own strength.
*
In Steve’s crummy little apartment, Tony leans forward in Steve’s crummy little chair, scribbling notes on the back of a crummy little envelope.
“Look, a couple years ago I had some, uh - firsthand experience with a device that subdued the whole time-travelling thing. I mean, probably. It wasn’t exactly a scientific trial but considering I was literally in the middle of a slow, painful death and I stuck with the present - and normally,” he adds, pausing in his string of notes to look at up at Steve, “evading painful deaths is the only thing this party trick is good for, so I think we can reasonably assume some correlation there.”
“Wait,” Steve says. “There’s something out there that you think actually stopped you travelling? Why aren’t you using it already?”
Tony hesitates, pen to paper. The tip bleeds slowly onto the envelope, the letters behind it merging back into the spreading ink.
“Let me see, how to explain it in forties-speak? Well golly gee, Cap, stopping the time-travel was just a dandy side-effect of the super swell temporary paralysis. Gee whiz.”
Lifting his pen up from the paper at last, he swipes his thumb over the wet patch of ink, smearing it. He wipes his thumb on his jeans and smirks up at Steve. Steve stares stonily back at him.
“Just speak English,” Steve says.
“It deployed a sonic pulse that stopped people moving,” Tony says, licking his thumb. “I was an added extra. The prototype was destroyed, anyway, and somehow I never really felt like revisiting it. But that frequency’s a starting point.”
Steve nods, although he’s frowning. He looks away from Tony, gazing out the window, before he speaks. “You told me once that you were trying to - measure what you did, somehow. You wore all these crazy wires. But...”
He trails off. In the quiet, Tony can hear people shouting in the street and someone moving around in the apartment over their heads.
“Dunno how people live like this,” he mutters, before he sighs and lowers his pen and says, “But what?”
“I don’t understand why... Why has it taken you so long to try and work this out?”
Tony snorts, shaking his head and picking his pen back up again. “Come on, do I seem like the kind of guy who works on his flaws?”
“Maybe not, but from what I’ve heard, you’re more like the kind of guy to embrace them.”
“This one,” Tony says, eyes on his notes,” never seemed so embraceable.”
*
“-or at least,” Howard says, “we don’t have enough time-”
*
They thrust Tony’s head under the water.
He disappears, he disappears, he disappears.
*
“It’s some kind of bizarre-o survival reflex,” Tony says as he twists the last coil of wire together. He thinks of Yinsen’s steady hands. “Fight or flight, et cetera. I figure my body chose flight without consulting the rest of me.”
“I think the rest of you chose fight,” Steve says wryly. “Constantly.”
“Do nothing by halves, my old man used to say.”
He flashes Steve a bright, bright grin and watches as Steve’s eyes dart away. Smirking, Tony slots the end of the wire into position, then winds the coil down his arm to the sensors at his wrist. He stands back and spreads his arms.
“Well?” he says.
The wires crawl up and down his body, attached to sensors, branching out from the arc reactor at the centre of it all. He can feel them tingle against his skin in time with his magnetic pulse. Metal veins for a metal heart.
“I don’t know,” Steve says. “I don’t know which was your first attempt. It didn’t always work properly, I don’t think.”
He passes Tony his t-shirt and with a nod Tony takes it.
Steve rubs a hand across his mouth. “This never seemed real from my end of things. You were such a strange part of my life, I don’t think I ever really thought of you as real. Not properly. It’s a funny thing to wrap my head around, that I’m going to be sharing it with someone now.”
“Yeah.” Tony slowly wraps his shirt around his fingers, frowning down at it. “Well, if I wind up stark, hah, naked in the middle of old-time New York and cause a riot, I’m blaming you. Put it on my tombstone. Here lies Tony Stark, Steve Rogers’ fault.”
He unwinds his shirt, now creased and twisted, and tugs it over his head. Voice muffled in the fabric, he adds, “No, better make it Captain America’s fault. Adds gravitas. Anyway,” his head re-emerging, “you’re going to have to kick me in the balls or something.”
“Excuse me?”
“Stamp on a foot, then? Right hook? Use your imagination.”
At Steve’s mulish expression, Tony rolls his eyes. “I can’t just turn it on, you know. Really, cannot. Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s a reflex. Needs stimulus to trigger a reaction. Think of it like you’re testing my knee with a hammer. Or we could get Thor,” he adds, with a smirk. “And his hammer.”
“Definitely not,” Steve says.
He sighs, turning away from Tony, rubbing the back of his neck as he looks around the space they’ve cleared in Tony’s workshop. His feet shift back and forth as if he wants to walk away.
“Seriously, if you don’t wanna play in the time travel experiments game, we could grab Thor. Okay, maybe not Thor. Not sure I wanna be lost and naked in Asgard, but...”
“We both know it has to be me.”
Tony shrugs. “I like to think the future isn’t set entirely in stone.”
“The past is, though,” Steve says, still staring down at his feet. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” says Tony.
*
Tony is thirty-nine. Tony is pulling apart his bombs to build himself a heart. A heart for his past self. The heart he should have had in the past, people would probably call it.
A magnet, he thinks to himself as he works. A magnet, a magnet.
“D’you think the magnetism makes it travel with me?” he asks.
Yinsen, twisting wires together, shrugs and does not look up. His hands are quick and steady as he works. “I can honestly say I have no idea how it works. How can time travel work? How can you possibly exist?”
“Not the first time I’ve heard that question,” Tony says. He smirks. The welding iron showers a steady rain of sparks over his fingers, each touch bright and biting. “What do you think would have happened - if I’d travelled without something holding the shrapnel in place?”
Yinsen twists a wire around a wire around a wire. His fingers don’t falter.
“It’s hard to tell, when it has no basis in known scientific fact.”
“So imagine.”
“I imagine... the shrapnel would probably have ripped out of you when you disappeared. I imagine then you would have died.”
“Yeah.” Tony nods. He winces as a spark lands on the back of his hand, but bats it away without comment. His hands have always been scarred from his work. “Yeah, that’s what I was imagining, too.”
“It doesn’t sound like a pleasant death.”
“Never thought I’d die pleasantly.”
Yinsen lowers his fistful of wires and looks up at Tony over the rim of his little round glasses. He smiles faintly and says, “I’ve found that people rarely do.”
Tony is thirty-nine. His hands are covered in scars. Beneath the scars, he’s learning, they’re covered in blood.
There’s a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he looks up it’s already gone.
*
Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark, towards the sound of voices. He turns left.
*
Steve stares around the workshop, with his jaw clenched and his hands in his pockets, while Tony fixes the last wires into place. He can feel Steve moving around behind him as if he’s giving off a force-field of disapproval.
At last, Tony throws down his screwdriver and exclaims, “What? Did you see someone being unpatriotic on the way here or something?”
Steve jumps. He breathes out heavily, lifting his chin.
“I’m not going to hit you again,” he says. “That was dumb.”
“I did tell you to do it.”
“Then it was dumb of me to listen to you.”
Tony rolls his eyes, picking his screwdriver up again. He tightens another fastening. Steve’s presence, behind him, feels ten feet wide. It itches between his shoulder blades.
“Okay, fine,” he says, rotating his wrist. “This doesn’t need to be a two-man job from here, if you want out.”
“I want to help,” he hears Steve say softly, moving closer. “I just don’t want to hurt you.”
“Well, unless that stick up your ass is a magic wand…”
Tony pushes away from his desk and climbs to his feet, because the sensors are as ready as they’re ever going to be and Steve’s pressure between his shoulder blades is growing unbearable.
“What?” he adds
Steve is staring at him with something in his eyes that Tony can’t read. At Tony’s question, he shakes his head and looks away.
“Is it all… ready?” Steve asks the wall.
“Prepped and cocked and full of gunpowder,” Tony says, smirking. He throws his arms open. “Just waiting for the trigger.”
Steve sighs. While Tony stands and waits, his arms spread wide, Steve paces slowly around him. He scans the floor and then drifts over to the desk, looks over the mess on it and picks out Tony’s narrowest screwdriver.
“Really?” Tony says.
“Close your eyes.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m trying,” Steve snaps. “I know it’s not much of a trigger, but if you close your eyes and relax... If you don’t see it coming…”
Tony stares at him.
“Please trust me,” Steve says.
Tony holds the stare a little longer, raising an eyebrow. Steve holds his ground and stares back, until Tony shrugs. He shakes out his arms and lowers them to his sides.
“Anything for science,” he murmurs.
Shoulder blades itching, he closes his eyes.
*
“So if you’re really a time traveller, prove it,” Steve says, swinging his feet where they dangle over the edge of his chair. He’s eight. His feet don’t touch the ground. His mom promises he’ll have a growth spurt in a few years.
“I’ve appeared and disappeared multiple times right in front of you. Isn’t that proof enough?”
Steve stares up at the man until he snorts and shakes his head, saying, “Fine, not proof enough. I can’t tell you what’s gonna happen in the future, that’s cheating. Hey, what year is it? I could tell you who wins the World Series.”
“That’s cheating.”
The man shrugs, making the wires strapped to his shoulders rattle. He glances sideways at Steve.
“Trust you to be a toddler with principles,” he says. “What happened, did the righteousness form in utero?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
Steve knows his mom still has some of his dad’s clothes tucked away somewhere, but he doesn’t know where, so the man’s wearing one of Steve’s old blankets, fiddling with the edges, toying with loose threads.
“What happened to your cufflinks?” Steve asks. At the man’s blank look, he adds, “They glowed. It was neat.”
“I - haven’t made them,” the man says. “Yet. Not yet. But obviously now I will. You dumbass - not you, sorry. Grown-up you, who never mentioned anything glowing.”
Steve swings his feet. He bounces his heels against the leg of his chair.
“What’s your name?”
“Tony,” the man says, slowly.
“What year are you from?”
The man smirks and shakes his head. “Don’t cheat.”
“Okay.” Steve looks down at his hands, wiggling his skinny fingers. “What am I like in the future?”
There’s a pause. Steve lifts his head. He watches the man, frowning, scratch at a stain on the corner of the blanket.
“Bigger,” he says, eventually.
*
“-I’m limited by the technology of my time,” Howard says, “and I know now that I can’t wait for it to catch me up-”
*
“So I need to know who won all the World Series when you were a kid,” Tony says when Steve picks up the phone.
“What? What do - Tony, it’s three am. I was sleeping. Don’t you have the Google in your telephone?”
“Yeah, Steve, I have ‘the Google’ in my phone. And I have the boredom in my head.”
Drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair, he hears Steve groan and mutter and shift around so his sheets rustle.
“Okay, first off, you only need to know 1927. That’s the one you told me. New York Yankees. I was nine. I was pretty mad at you afterwards.”
“What, you didn’t even bet on it?”
“I was nine.”
“Your point?”
Tony snorts and, down the phone line, Steve too begins to chuckle.
“I did, uh - I did bet Bucky a candy bar that I knew who would win. I felt kinda bad about it afterwards, though.”
Steve pauses. He breathes into the phone. He says, “You meet him - Bucky - a couple times.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s something to look forward to.”
“Tell me what you think of him.”
“Will do.”
*
Fifty feet in the air over the desert, with every bone in his body rattling and the jet pack blasting and great billowing clouds of fire from the Ten Rings compound licking at his heels, Tony feels the familiar dip and swoop in his stomach.
“No,” he shouts, words inaudible over the explosions. “Not yet, just stay, just sta-”
He lands in water, the heavy metal suit immediately dragging him down, but for a second he sees blue skies and grassy banks, a man standing in the shadows of the trees and a little girl with red hair running full pelt down towards the shoreline, while the water closes over his head and -
He lands in the sand, coughing, hacking. He spits up water. The suit weighs him down, but as he begins to crawl out of it he can feel that parts are missing, left behind to be eaten up by fire or to fall out of the sky, but some of it stayed. Some of it stayed.
“Okay,” Tony croaks. “That’s a start.”
*
Later, he watches Pepper touch a hand to the battered edge of the helmet. She sucks in a sharp breath.
“I’ve seen this before,” she whispers. “Years ago.”
*
“Enough,” Tony says as soon as his feet unsteadily hit the ground. He grabs a bunch of wires and tugs. “Enough science, okay? It’s sunny, birds are probably singing somewhere. Let’s get out of here. Pick somewhere to go. I mean it, I’m giving you free rein here.”
“What-”
Shaking his head, Tony sidesteps Steve. The air in the workshop is cold and still and Tony moves quickly through it, removing the sensors and hissing when they pinch at his skin. He unplugs the wires and undoes the fastenings and slowly, slowly, sheds it like a skin, dropping it all piece-by-piece onto the floor behind him. He feels raw, pink and new underneath. He pulls a change of clothes from a desk drawer and tugs them on.
“Are you okay?” Steve asks, walking towards him.
“Me? I’m fine. JARVIS-”
“But-”
“JARVIS, did you get all those readings okay?”
“Indeed, sir. I have added the day’s results to the main database. The trend remains consistent.”
“I love the smell of a consistent trend in the morning,” Tony says. He turns to Steve and raises an eyebrow. “Come on, I’m waiting.”
And that makes Steve draw to a halt, crossing his arms and frowning. “Well, so am I.”
Tony sighs. Bending down, he picks up the clump of wires nearest to his feet and sets about slowly untangling them. He watches his fingers move.
“Look, you - your mom had just died and you were, what? Fifteen? It was bad. I couldn’t deal with my own teenage grief, let alone someone else’s, so let’s just - go to the zoo.”
“Oh.”
Tony glances up. Steve is still standing there, halfway between when Tony appeared and where he now stands. His frown is fading away, lost in thought.
“That’s it? Oh?”
“That was a long time ago,” Steve murmurs.
“Well, it was five minutes ago for me.”
“And eighty years ago.” Steve shrugs, smiling faintly, a little wistfully. “And eleven. It’s fine. You did fine.”
“I did what?”
“At dealing with my... teenaged grief. I remember. You did fine.”
Moving forwards again, Steve picks up the scattered pieces as he goes, wires and sensors, clips and fastenings. He doesn’t try to untangle them, just lays them down on the desk next to Tony.
“Mom took me to Breezy Point a few months before she passed,” he says. “I could go for another visit.”
“You want Breezy Point, we’ll do Breezy Point. I’ll buy Breezy Point.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Fine, fine.”
Tony throws his straightened wires down onto the pile on the desk. Waving a hand, he leads Steve through the workshop and to the garage, to the car. He feels jittery. He thinks, too often, of Steve’s closed suitcase on the kitchen table, of Howard’s slightly open study door. When he glances back over his shoulder, with his hand on the car door handle, Steve has stopped walking. He’s standing and smiling at the car as if it’s the punchline to his favourite joke.
“What?”
“This is it, isn’t it?” Steve says. “The one you drew for me?”
“What?” Tony says again, blankly.
“Never mind, I guess that’s still to come for you.”
But Steve still pauses, on his way round to shotgun, to touch a hand reverently to the gleaming red roof before he gets inside, and he smiles again, smiles with such great affection.
“You can’t laugh at in-jokes from the future,” Tony says, sliding into the driver’s seat. He turns to glare at Steve. “It’s cheating.”
Steve just smiles at him, that affection lingering.
*
There’s a crash from somewhere behind Tony. He’s thirty-nine and he’s spent enough of his life around loud noises that he carefully lowers his soldering iron and pulls away from the gauntlet prototype he and Dummy are working on, before he turns around to see.
“Next Thursday,” the other Tony says, levering himself up with the edge of a desk. He pulls open one of the bottom drawers and digs out a spare pair of jeans and a holey t-shirt. “Watch out for the screwdriver on the floor.”
“Thursday, screwdriver, got it.” Tony picks the soldering iron back up again. “Get over here and hold this wire steady, would you?”
“You’re gonna wanna move the Cobra first.”
Tony raises an eyebrow, but he learned long ago to trust his future selves, so he thrusts the soldering iron at the other Tony and heads over to the car.
“How’s the suit in next Thursday?” he calls from the driver’s seat.
“A little further to the left,” the other Tony says without looking up from his soldering. “Trust me.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“The suit works,” the other adds. “Quit it, Dummy, I’ve got this one. You’ll see.”
“It travels?”
“I swear I didn’t ask this many questions. Yeah, it travels. Where are the pliers today?”
“Second drawer down,” Tony says, parking and climbing out. He looks back at the empty space the Cobra had occupied. The other Tony pushes the pliers into his hand. “Thanks. And the-?”
“The hydraulics are fine.”
“The-”
“Flight stabilising? Terrific.”
“And it all really-”
“Really, truly, deeply.”
Tony glances up at himself. He’s smirking down at the wire he’s soldering.
“Smartass,” Tony says. He pauses, reaching around the other Tony to tidy up the wiring. “Does Pepper... know?”
“No,” the other Tony murmurs. “Not by next Thursday, anyway.”
With an almighty crash that makes them both jump, a red and gold robot falls down from the ceiling and lands in the empty parking space. The concrete cracks beneath him.
“I’d say don’t forget about the ice problem,” the third Tony says, lifting up his faceplate and scratching his nose, “but we all know we’re gonna forget about the ice problem.”
He disappears again, leaving the dust to settle.
“It works,” Tony breathes. “We’re awesome.”
“Told you so.”
*
They’re halfway to Breezy Point when Steve, still gazing out the open window at the world that rolls by, murmurs, “I kept that drawing for the longest time.”
He says it so quietly that Tony doesn’t know if he’s meant to have heard it or not, but he looks around anyway.
“You old sentimentalist.”
“Guess so,” Steve says, glancing sideways at him. He props his chin on his hand and smiles, first at Tony, and then out at the sky through the window. Tony’s driving fast and the neighbourhoods are rushing past, but there’s the sky, as blue as it has ever been, unmoving.
*
Pepper, touching the edge of the helmet, whispers, “I’ve seen this before. Years ago. Have I really spent my whole life watching you almost die?”
Part Two
*
Fandom: Avengers
Rating: PG
Pairing: Steve/Tony
Summary: Tony asks if they have met. It's a matter of perspective. (A Time Traveller's Wife AU.)
A/N: This fic doesn't follow the plot to The Time Traveller's Wife, so no knowledge of that canon is necessary. "The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough." - Rabindranath Tagore.
*
Tony is walking down a corridor.
*
In the official records, the first thing Steve Rogers ever says to Tony Stark is, “Why didn’t you warn me?”
Tony lifts up his faceplate and says, “Have we met?”
It’s a matter of perspective.
*
On a hard drive in a safe in a bunker, there is a video that only three living people have seen.
There are men with guns. There is another man kneeling at their feet.
“You did not tell us the great Tony Stark was a witch!” the man in charge exclaims, and when he snaps his fingers, two of his companions thrust the kneeling man’s head under the water.
He thrashes, and thrashes, and then he is gone.
*
“Listen to me,” Tony hisses, grabbing Steve by the elbow and tugging him - Steve jerks his arm out of Tony’s hold, but follows him anyway - deeper into the recesses of the jet.
Tony looks around at Loki, who is watching them intently, and at Black Widow, who turns her head away. He grabs Steve’s arm again.
“You listen up,” he says, voice low and quick. “Whatever the hell I apparently said or didn’t say in your past, it’s still my future and I don’t wanna know. And if you think that’s confusing, try living it.”
“I’ve got some idea how confusing time travel is,” Steve snaps. “No thanks to you.”
“Don’t wanna hear it. And that?” he adds, jabbing a finger at the star in the centre of Steve’s chest. “That wasn’t time travel, pal, that was a guy taking a really long nap.”
Steve clenches his fists and draws in a breath, but whatever he’s going to say is drowned out by that first great roll of thunder, that incoming storm.
*
When Tony is four years old, Howard Stark looks dead into the centre of a camera lens and he says, “Tony.”
*
When Steve is six years old, and in bed with the flu, he dreams a man in a funny-looking suit appears in the middle of his bedroom.
“You aren’t meant to be here,” Steve dreams he says.
The man straightens his shirt cuffs. The whole suit looks wrong, like no clothes Steve has ever seen before, but the cufflinks are the strangest part; they’re faintly glowing.
“Well, would you look at that?” the dream man says, and then he looks down at Steve and begins to laugh, until Steve, feverish and offended, begins to cry.
“Oh, hell,” the man says. “No, stop, I’m sorry. I’m not - I’m laughing with you, not at you, okay? This is the smallest I’ve ever seen you. We’ll laugh about this in the, uh - in the future.”
“Go away,” Steve shouts through his tears. “I’ve got the flu.”
“Ninety years from now, you’ll laugh too, I promise.”
The man sucks in a breath and looks at his watch and says, “I’ll make it up to you in, uh, ten months, I think. And five seconds. And ninety years, wow, this never gets less confu-”
*
When Maria is eight months pregnant and Howard is smoking an after dinner cigar, a man crashes through their dinner table, naked and wet and shivering. Maria shrieks and knocks her chair over, and a maid comes running and begins to scream too, but Howard-
The man is choking, coughing out water and clawing at the strange glowing thing in his chest, but as he coughs he rolls over in the wreckage and looks Howard straight in the eye and he croaks, “Dad?”
The man’s eyes are dark and frightened. With one hand reaching out towards them, he disappears again.
Howard remains frozen, remains absolutely frozen with his cigar still burning down to his fingers, until Maria grabs hold of his elbow and begins to cry.
“The baby,” she sobs. “Howard, I think the baby’s coming.”
For a while, the baby, the hospital and Maria’s sickness consume everything, but when Howard comes back to himself, he’s holding his son in his arms. His greatest creation. Howard looks down into Anthony Edward’s eyes and knows with absolute certainty that he has seen these eyes before.
*
Tony remembers vaguely, over the incredible pain and half-consciousness, a familiar voice. The most familiar voice.
“There’s no time to explain, Yinsen, just trust me. I’m a trustworthy guy, this is my trustworthy face, I’ll - he’ll explain it all to you later. Just put this in now, before I...”
There is something cold inside the heat inside his chest. There is the most familiar hand on his shoulder.
“It’s okay. Dad solved - We solved it. It stays with us whenever we go. We’re a genius. See you in a few weeks, Ton-”
Tony goes home. A few seconds later, Tony goes as well.
*
The first thing Steve Rogers ever says to Howard Stark, his voice shaking with uncertainty and pent-up emotion, is “Tony?”
The lab is loud and busy, and in ten minutes a spy starts shooting and a simple case of mistaken identity leaves everyone’s minds. Howard thinks nothing of it.
Thirty years later, Howard thinks of it.
*
Tony is four and he can’t sleep, although it’s long past his bedtime.
Tony is four and tip-toeing, in his matching bathrobe and slippers, past the door of his father’s study, when a ghost appears at the end of the corridor - a boy who looks a lot like Tony, except he’s pale and naked and covering his mouth with his hands like Tony does when he’s trying not to cry.
They stare at each other, frozen. Tony is still deciding whether to run back to bed or to shout for his mother, when through the door daddy says, “Tony! How many times do I have to tell you-”
Tony jumps in fright. When he looks back at the end of the corridor again, the ghost has disappeared. He’s going to be in so much trouble. He begins to push the study door open and he hears an unfamiliar voice.
“You won’t be telling me anything anymore.”
“Oh, we’ll see about that, my boy.”
There’s the sound of a scuffle. Through the crack between doorframe and door, Tony sees daddy grab an older boy by the arm. The boy has no clothes on, and he shouts and struggles, hitting at daddy wildly with his fists.
“That is enough,” daddy says, his voice quieter and angrier than Tony has ever heard it before.
The boy stops fighting altogether and begins to loudly cry. He sits down on the floor of the study and daddy sinks down before him.
“Mom didn’t want to go! She didn’t want to but she went anyway, because you - Why didn’t you remember this? You left me nothing!”
Daddy says, “What are you talking about?”
“You left me nothing,” the boy sobs. “You left me, you’re gone, you left.”
Daddy hisses, “Quiet. Be quiet, you’ll wake Tony. You know he hasn’t started yet, you’ll scare him-” gripping the boy tightly by the shoulders.
Tony can see that daddy is shaking.
The boy looks up. He looks over daddy’s shoulder and right at Tony. His eyes are red and wet, his nose is streaming. He laughs wildly.
“I’m already scared, dad,” he says.
Daddy looks around. When he sees Tony, his face goes pale and his eyes go wide and he swears louder than Tony has ever heard him swear before. He lets go of the boy’s arms and reaches out for Tony.
“Dad,” the other boy says quietly, beginning to cry again.
Tony presses his hands over his mouth, trying not to cry himself, because even the ghost wasn’t as scary as this, nothing has ever been as scary as this, and he’s starting to feel dizzy.
“Wait,” daddy’s saying, “dammit, wait,” reaching back for the other boy with one hand and reaching forwards for Tony with the other.
Tony takes a step towards him and whispers around his fingers, “Daddy, I’m-”
*
“Now would be,” Tony grits out through clenched teeth, the armour rattling around him because it was built to blow up bombs, not to carry them. He can feel the weight of it, he can feel the creaking joints. The city is shrinking, the portal is growing, the sky is rushing down to meet him.
One-way trip, Steve had said, so uncertainly, because Tony’s meant to have a future; Tony’s meant to have Steve’s past, apparently.
What Tony has is a bomb behind him and the stars before him.
“Now would be a perfect time to disappear,” he says.
But he doesn’t look back.
*
All ten of Howard’s fingers close on empty air.
*
“Obie,” Tony gasps.
He reappears an inch above the cot, in a cave in Afghanistan. He crashes down onto it, naked and wheezing and clawing at the thing in his chest, catching his fingers under the rim and pulling and -
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“What have you done to me?” Tony says when he is capable of speaking again.
“I don’t know,” Yinsens says. “You are the one who did it.”
He hands Tony a pile of neatly folded clothes, with a car battery and a tangle of bloody wires balanced on top, and then he sits down on the edge of the cot and looks at Tony very hard.
He says, “What an interesting day we are having, Mr Stark.”
*
“This doesn’t mean you’re on the team, Stark. Consulting only.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Tony says mildly, leaning forwards with his hands on the edge of the conference table. “I think you’ve got me confused with some other guy. You know, some guy who didn’t do the vertical tango with a nuclear missile to save your ass.”
“Stark, Banner practically is a missile, and he’s still more reliable than you.” Fury fixes Tony with a stare, then adds, gentler, “Look, you did good. I’m not denying the good you did. But suppose next time, you go temporal walkabout and that missile drops on my city. If you can’t control it, you sure as hell can’t guarantee it won’t happen.”
Tony looks around the table. Hill is staring at her hands, and Barton is staring at Fury, but Black Widow gazes back at him, unflinchingly. Pathologically and physiologically unreliable, her report on him had said.
One moment he’s there and the next he’s gone, it had said.
“Screw you all,” Tony declares.
Kicking his chair away, he climbs to his feet and points a finger at Fury. “I’m going to control it.”
He shoves his way out of the conference room, the door swinging shut behind him not quite quick enough to keep Fury’s words from floating out after him.
“Well damn, Stark, what took you so long?”
“Never had the time,” Tony shouts back.
*
Tony is four and standing naked at the end of corridor, shaking, staring at another little boy standing in front of daddy’s study door. When daddy shouts, he runs away, until a hand takes hold of his and a friendly voice says, “Hey, hey, it’s okay now. Come with me, I’ll tell you a story.”
Tony is five, and six, and seven, and eight, and when he hears that other boy begin to cry, he runs and hides until it’s time to go back home again.
Tony is thirty-five and standing in the corridor, in the shadows, where he can watch the four-year-old disappear, the empty bathrobe falling suddenly to the ground and all ten of Howard’s fingers curling into fists.
In the grounds, Tony is twenty-one and turns away from the study window; is twenty-six and watches Howard’s hand cover his mouth; is forty, with a blue light glowing in his chest, watching only himself this time.
Tony is thirty-nine and there for barely a split second, choking on water and digging his fingers into the lawn so hard, tomorrow the gardeners will search for a stray dog.
Tony is seventeen and crying, still crying, as he disappears.
Tony is forty-two when he takes a little boy by the hand at last, turning him gently away.
*
“So,” Yinsen says. “You are a man who has everything and nothing but time.”
*
“Tony,” Howard says into the camera. “On the day you were born, I saw - you, I believe, with something strange inside your body. Something you had brought with you instead of leaving behind-”
*
Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark.
*
Steve is seven, kicking a pebble down the alley and pretending it’s a soccer ball and he can run as fast as anyone, when a naked man falls into the trashcans. It’s definitely not a dream this time.
“Where’d you come from?” Steve demands. “Why’re you naked?”
“That’s your most pressing question?” the man groans, climbing out of the trashcans. He grabs a lid and holds it up in front of his legs, peering down at Steve. His nose is bleeding, his chest is glowing, and there are wires coiled all around his body.
Steve picks up his pebble. It’s a good one; he might need it.
“I left my clothes behind. Not on purpose,” the man quickly adds. “I didn’t leave my clothes behind on purpose. I’m not a flasher. Uh - Steve?”
“Yes?”
“Steve Rogers?”
“Yeah.” Steve glares up at him. “What do you want, mister?”
“Okay, good, good to know I’m not just terrorising random kids. You’re irritatingly vague about where I meet you. Try to grow up less vague this time, okay?” The man wipes his nose and realises it’s bleeding. “Don’t punch me so hard either. You got a tissue? A hanky?”
“I never punched you!” Steve protests, but he passes the man his handkerchief automatically. He rolls the pebble between his fingers.
“It’s okay, don’t sweat it, my first suggestion was a kick in the balls.”
“That’s a bad word,” Steve hisses.
The man throws his hands up in mock-surrender. “Sorry, sorry, my bad.”
“Who are you? Last time you had clothes.”
“I did? Oh, now that’s promising. What else was different?”
“I dunno. You were talking crazy. Are you a ghost?”
“I’m a time traveller.”
The man says it with a straight face, dabbing at his bloody nose with Steve’s handkerchief.
Steve throws the pebble at him as hard as he can. It’s not so hard, all the same, because Steve is skinny and the doctor thinks he might have asthma, but it bounces off the man’s forehead and he stumbles back, exclaiming, “Ow! Dammit, Steve-”
He trips over the trashcans and falls backwards with a crash. Steve screws his eyes shut, throwing his hands over his ears until the alley falls silent. He lowers his hands and opens his eyes.
“Mister?” he whispers. “Hey, mister?”
He looks up and down the alley, then around the corner out into the busy street, but the man has gone.
*
Tony leans his full weight against the buzzer and waits, ankles crossed, with his elbow on the button and his head propped up on his knuckles. He stares right back at all the passers-by who double-take at the sight of him.
The intercom clicks on.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, hi, I’ve changed my mind, tell me everything.”
There’s a pause before Steve says, “Tony?”
“Bingo.”
The intercom crackles as Steve begins to laugh. Tony waits, resting his chin on his hand.
“And you want me to...tell you-?”
“My future. Come on, it’s not rocket science. Do I have to cross your palm with silver before you’ll let me in or what?”
Steve doesn’t answer, but with a click the door unlocks.
*
Steve is twenty-six, or ninety-four, and sketching idly on the back of a bank statement when he hears a clatter from the kitchen. He lowers his pencil.
“It’s me,” Tony shouts. “Not a poltergeist.”
“Good to know.”
Steve turns to face the door and watches till Tony appears in the doorframe, wrapped in tinfoil and looking sheepish. He tugs at his neckline and the whole costume rattles.
“That’s a new one,” Steve says.
Tony grimaces. It’s almost Steve’s Tony, he can tell. The Tony who he knows so well from the past and can only barely catch a glimpse of in the present; with slightly longer hair and a slightly restyled goatee and the ability to stand comfortably in Steve’s presence.
“Yeah, this - this seemed like a better idea at the time,” Tony says. “Hey, it works! But I look like a fourth grade production of the Wizard of Oz.”
“I think even fourth graders could do better. When are you from?”
“Not long now,” Tony says, vaguely. He moves fully into the room and peers out the window.
“I wish you’d told me,” Steve says, picking his pencil up again. “Not - not about Bucky and the ice. I can understand that, now, I guess. But that you didn’t like me.”
“What? Come on, I like you.”
“Now, I mean. In the present.”
“He like you now. He just has a unique way of showing it.”
Tony pushes the window open and sticks his head out, looking down into the street.
“Hey,” he calls back. “You remember that tiger drawing? When you were, I dunno, ten, eleven?”
“Twelve.”
“You were short.”
“Yep,” Steve says. “Yeah, I remember the tiger.”
“That was a damn good tiger.”
Tony falls silent, turning his attention back to the street below. Sound drifts through into Steve’s apartment: the susurrus of a million voices and a million vehicles in motion. Someone in the street shouts to a friend. A car comes to a halt and a car door slams.
Tony pulls his head back out of the window and tugs it shut. He twists the blinds cord back and forth between his fingers, winds it around his knuckles.
“Listen,” he says, speaking quickly, “you’re gonna have to trust me. Him. The other one. I dunno if I’m breaking the rules here or if my you - future you - had this same little chat, but screw it. Let’s be the masters of our temporally fucked universe, just this once. Trust him.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “I do trust you. All of you, whenever you’re from.”
Huffing out a breath of laughter, Tony rubs the back of his neck, his fingers still twisted in the cord.
“Okay,” he says. “That works. I’ll see you in a couple minutes.”
“What-” Steve begins, but Tony takes a step back, pulling an uncomfortable face.
Steve quickly closes his eyes. Ever since it registered to him, in his teens, that Tony probably was a real person disappearing into thin air, he hasn’t been able to stand to watch it. But he can feel the air shift. He can hear, or maybe just imagines he can hear, the faintest pop when Tony goes.
He keeps his eyes closed for a moment longer, until down on the street Tony rests his elbow on the buzzer and lets it ring, and ring, and ring.
*
They bring Tony back wet, so Yinsen brings him a blanket and then, when Tony doesn’t stop shaking, he brings him some tea.
“They held me underwater,” Tony says, his teeth chattering. “I went home.”
“Ah,” says Yinsen.
“When I got back, everyone was kinda freaking out.”
“I rarely see eye to eye with our esteemed captors, but in this instance I think I can understand their reaction.”
“Right.”
Tony laughs. He clasps his hands tighter around his knees until, at last, the shaking subsides and he continues.
“But once they’d stopped shouting and, you know, questioning their sobriety, they realised they’d got a bomb-building, genius, freak of honest to god nature on their hands. It’s like terrorist Christmas out there. I’m pretty sure I saw some dancing. Dancing was - definitely a feature.”
Yinsen pours himself a cup of tea. He holds it between both hands and blows gently on the surface of the steaming water.
“And then?” he asks.
“And then what?”
“And then what else?”
“The usual freak of nature stuff,” Tony says. He closes his eyes. “They want me to carry bombs with me. Can’t be done. I told them - I - They don’t know it’s time travel, but they know I’m going somewhere. Hard to miss, right? So now the million dollar question is do they wanna use me as transport or a weapon?”
“Or both?”
“Can’t be done,” Tony says again. “But they’re gonna keep trying anyway. They’re go-getters.”
He keeps his eyes closed. He raps his knuckles blindly against the arc reactor. “What if I don’t make this? Go back to that past, knocking-on-heaven’s-door me empty handed?”
There’s a pause before Yinsen slowly speaks. “No, I don’t think that will work. You have one, so you must make one. What’s done can’t be undone. We can’t go back.”
“I can.”
Tony rubs his thumb along the rim of the arc reactor. He remembers, vaguely, Obie’s hand reaching down. He hears Yinsen let out a soft breath.
“No, Stark, even you can’t do that.”
*
They thrust Tony’s head under the water and he disappears-
They thrust Tony’s head under the water and he disappears-
They thrust Tony’s head under the water and he disappears-
*
Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark, towards the sound of voices.
*
“- I don’t know what happens,” Howard says, “but I know Maria and I don’t have much time left-”
*
Tony is drunk. Thirty three and very drunk, when he finds himself on the floor, bleeding from the chest - no, bleeding from the edges of the thing that’s in his chest.
Downstairs, the housewarming party is still in full swing, but Tony checked out of the celebrations hours ago; the people in his life are old and boring, whereas his house is new and beautiful. He fine-tuned JARVIS’ installation for an hour or two, and then he fine-tuned the liquor cabinet, and then he appeared on the bedroom floor.
He stares down at himself.
He says, “JARVIS, you seeing this too?”
He pulls his shirt off - he didn’t like it much anyway - and he presses it over the other’s chest. He presses his hand over the metal in his other chest.
He hears familiar footsteps in the corridor. Obie sticks his head around the door.
“Hey, Tony-” he begins, before seeing the other Tony and smoothly adding, “Hey, Tonies. You’ve got a party to host. Everything okay in here?”
“Obie, I’m either too drunk or not drunk enough for this.”
Tony lifts his hand away and lifts his shirt away to let Obie see, and Obie steps fully into the room. He kneels next to Tony, at the other Tony’s side, and he taps a finger over the glowing glass.
“This is new. I thought nothing could travel with you.”
“So did I. You know me, full of surprises.”
Together, they move the other Tony onto the bed, where he lies quiet and still. Tony has a headache; Tony, who has been drinking since one pm, has the beginnings of a hangover and his fingers feel numb. The other Tony looks dead.
“This looks like the arc reactor,” Obie says, checking the other’s pulse. “Miniaturised. I never saw Howard come up with anything like this.”
He spreads his palm over the miniature reactor. He can cover it with his whole hand. His fingers curl under the rim, digging in.
“Well, let’s get a closer look,” he says, twisting it and -
The other Tony’s eyes snap open and he grabs at his own chest, knocking Obie’s hands away, sucking in a deep, shuddering breath.
“Obie,” he gasps.
He disappears, leaving Obie’s fingers curling in the air.
“Damn,” he says. He lets his hand drop. “Still, at least now we know what we’ve got to look forward to. If you can really make the arc reactor viable, Tony, there’ll be no stopping the company.”
“Yeah,” Tony says, looking down at the blood on the shirt in his hands. “Can’t wait.”
For the first time since his parents died, he thinks of the story another Tony had told him almost thirty years ago. He’d forgotten about it. The other Tony had had a light in his chest then too.
Ignoring the headache, wondering about his dad’s arc reactor blueprints and how Tony would make it that small - because he knows he’d never trust anyone else to put something like that in his body - Tony barely feels it when Obie’s hand lands on his shoulder and squeezes affectionately.
His fingers dig in. Obie’s never known his own strength.
*
In Steve’s crummy little apartment, Tony leans forward in Steve’s crummy little chair, scribbling notes on the back of a crummy little envelope.
“Look, a couple years ago I had some, uh - firsthand experience with a device that subdued the whole time-travelling thing. I mean, probably. It wasn’t exactly a scientific trial but considering I was literally in the middle of a slow, painful death and I stuck with the present - and normally,” he adds, pausing in his string of notes to look at up at Steve, “evading painful deaths is the only thing this party trick is good for, so I think we can reasonably assume some correlation there.”
“Wait,” Steve says. “There’s something out there that you think actually stopped you travelling? Why aren’t you using it already?”
Tony hesitates, pen to paper. The tip bleeds slowly onto the envelope, the letters behind it merging back into the spreading ink.
“Let me see, how to explain it in forties-speak? Well golly gee, Cap, stopping the time-travel was just a dandy side-effect of the super swell temporary paralysis. Gee whiz.”
Lifting his pen up from the paper at last, he swipes his thumb over the wet patch of ink, smearing it. He wipes his thumb on his jeans and smirks up at Steve. Steve stares stonily back at him.
“Just speak English,” Steve says.
“It deployed a sonic pulse that stopped people moving,” Tony says, licking his thumb. “I was an added extra. The prototype was destroyed, anyway, and somehow I never really felt like revisiting it. But that frequency’s a starting point.”
Steve nods, although he’s frowning. He looks away from Tony, gazing out the window, before he speaks. “You told me once that you were trying to - measure what you did, somehow. You wore all these crazy wires. But...”
He trails off. In the quiet, Tony can hear people shouting in the street and someone moving around in the apartment over their heads.
“Dunno how people live like this,” he mutters, before he sighs and lowers his pen and says, “But what?”
“I don’t understand why... Why has it taken you so long to try and work this out?”
Tony snorts, shaking his head and picking his pen back up again. “Come on, do I seem like the kind of guy who works on his flaws?”
“Maybe not, but from what I’ve heard, you’re more like the kind of guy to embrace them.”
“This one,” Tony says, eyes on his notes,” never seemed so embraceable.”
*
“-or at least,” Howard says, “we don’t have enough time-”
*
They thrust Tony’s head under the water.
He disappears, he disappears, he disappears.
*
“It’s some kind of bizarre-o survival reflex,” Tony says as he twists the last coil of wire together. He thinks of Yinsen’s steady hands. “Fight or flight, et cetera. I figure my body chose flight without consulting the rest of me.”
“I think the rest of you chose fight,” Steve says wryly. “Constantly.”
“Do nothing by halves, my old man used to say.”
He flashes Steve a bright, bright grin and watches as Steve’s eyes dart away. Smirking, Tony slots the end of the wire into position, then winds the coil down his arm to the sensors at his wrist. He stands back and spreads his arms.
“Well?” he says.
The wires crawl up and down his body, attached to sensors, branching out from the arc reactor at the centre of it all. He can feel them tingle against his skin in time with his magnetic pulse. Metal veins for a metal heart.
“I don’t know,” Steve says. “I don’t know which was your first attempt. It didn’t always work properly, I don’t think.”
He passes Tony his t-shirt and with a nod Tony takes it.
Steve rubs a hand across his mouth. “This never seemed real from my end of things. You were such a strange part of my life, I don’t think I ever really thought of you as real. Not properly. It’s a funny thing to wrap my head around, that I’m going to be sharing it with someone now.”
“Yeah.” Tony slowly wraps his shirt around his fingers, frowning down at it. “Well, if I wind up stark, hah, naked in the middle of old-time New York and cause a riot, I’m blaming you. Put it on my tombstone. Here lies Tony Stark, Steve Rogers’ fault.”
He unwinds his shirt, now creased and twisted, and tugs it over his head. Voice muffled in the fabric, he adds, “No, better make it Captain America’s fault. Adds gravitas. Anyway,” his head re-emerging, “you’re going to have to kick me in the balls or something.”
“Excuse me?”
“Stamp on a foot, then? Right hook? Use your imagination.”
At Steve’s mulish expression, Tony rolls his eyes. “I can’t just turn it on, you know. Really, cannot. Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s a reflex. Needs stimulus to trigger a reaction. Think of it like you’re testing my knee with a hammer. Or we could get Thor,” he adds, with a smirk. “And his hammer.”
“Definitely not,” Steve says.
He sighs, turning away from Tony, rubbing the back of his neck as he looks around the space they’ve cleared in Tony’s workshop. His feet shift back and forth as if he wants to walk away.
“Seriously, if you don’t wanna play in the time travel experiments game, we could grab Thor. Okay, maybe not Thor. Not sure I wanna be lost and naked in Asgard, but...”
“We both know it has to be me.”
Tony shrugs. “I like to think the future isn’t set entirely in stone.”
“The past is, though,” Steve says, still staring down at his feet. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” says Tony.
*
Tony is thirty-nine. Tony is pulling apart his bombs to build himself a heart. A heart for his past self. The heart he should have had in the past, people would probably call it.
A magnet, he thinks to himself as he works. A magnet, a magnet.
“D’you think the magnetism makes it travel with me?” he asks.
Yinsen, twisting wires together, shrugs and does not look up. His hands are quick and steady as he works. “I can honestly say I have no idea how it works. How can time travel work? How can you possibly exist?”
“Not the first time I’ve heard that question,” Tony says. He smirks. The welding iron showers a steady rain of sparks over his fingers, each touch bright and biting. “What do you think would have happened - if I’d travelled without something holding the shrapnel in place?”
Yinsen twists a wire around a wire around a wire. His fingers don’t falter.
“It’s hard to tell, when it has no basis in known scientific fact.”
“So imagine.”
“I imagine... the shrapnel would probably have ripped out of you when you disappeared. I imagine then you would have died.”
“Yeah.” Tony nods. He winces as a spark lands on the back of his hand, but bats it away without comment. His hands have always been scarred from his work. “Yeah, that’s what I was imagining, too.”
“It doesn’t sound like a pleasant death.”
“Never thought I’d die pleasantly.”
Yinsen lowers his fistful of wires and looks up at Tony over the rim of his little round glasses. He smiles faintly and says, “I’ve found that people rarely do.”
Tony is thirty-nine. His hands are covered in scars. Beneath the scars, he’s learning, they’re covered in blood.
There’s a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he looks up it’s already gone.
*
Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark, towards the sound of voices. He turns left.
*
Steve stares around the workshop, with his jaw clenched and his hands in his pockets, while Tony fixes the last wires into place. He can feel Steve moving around behind him as if he’s giving off a force-field of disapproval.
At last, Tony throws down his screwdriver and exclaims, “What? Did you see someone being unpatriotic on the way here or something?”
Steve jumps. He breathes out heavily, lifting his chin.
“I’m not going to hit you again,” he says. “That was dumb.”
“I did tell you to do it.”
“Then it was dumb of me to listen to you.”
Tony rolls his eyes, picking his screwdriver up again. He tightens another fastening. Steve’s presence, behind him, feels ten feet wide. It itches between his shoulder blades.
“Okay, fine,” he says, rotating his wrist. “This doesn’t need to be a two-man job from here, if you want out.”
“I want to help,” he hears Steve say softly, moving closer. “I just don’t want to hurt you.”
“Well, unless that stick up your ass is a magic wand…”
Tony pushes away from his desk and climbs to his feet, because the sensors are as ready as they’re ever going to be and Steve’s pressure between his shoulder blades is growing unbearable.
“What?” he adds
Steve is staring at him with something in his eyes that Tony can’t read. At Tony’s question, he shakes his head and looks away.
“Is it all… ready?” Steve asks the wall.
“Prepped and cocked and full of gunpowder,” Tony says, smirking. He throws his arms open. “Just waiting for the trigger.”
Steve sighs. While Tony stands and waits, his arms spread wide, Steve paces slowly around him. He scans the floor and then drifts over to the desk, looks over the mess on it and picks out Tony’s narrowest screwdriver.
“Really?” Tony says.
“Close your eyes.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m trying,” Steve snaps. “I know it’s not much of a trigger, but if you close your eyes and relax... If you don’t see it coming…”
Tony stares at him.
“Please trust me,” Steve says.
Tony holds the stare a little longer, raising an eyebrow. Steve holds his ground and stares back, until Tony shrugs. He shakes out his arms and lowers them to his sides.
“Anything for science,” he murmurs.
Shoulder blades itching, he closes his eyes.
*
“So if you’re really a time traveller, prove it,” Steve says, swinging his feet where they dangle over the edge of his chair. He’s eight. His feet don’t touch the ground. His mom promises he’ll have a growth spurt in a few years.
“I’ve appeared and disappeared multiple times right in front of you. Isn’t that proof enough?”
Steve stares up at the man until he snorts and shakes his head, saying, “Fine, not proof enough. I can’t tell you what’s gonna happen in the future, that’s cheating. Hey, what year is it? I could tell you who wins the World Series.”
“That’s cheating.”
The man shrugs, making the wires strapped to his shoulders rattle. He glances sideways at Steve.
“Trust you to be a toddler with principles,” he says. “What happened, did the righteousness form in utero?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
Steve knows his mom still has some of his dad’s clothes tucked away somewhere, but he doesn’t know where, so the man’s wearing one of Steve’s old blankets, fiddling with the edges, toying with loose threads.
“What happened to your cufflinks?” Steve asks. At the man’s blank look, he adds, “They glowed. It was neat.”
“I - haven’t made them,” the man says. “Yet. Not yet. But obviously now I will. You dumbass - not you, sorry. Grown-up you, who never mentioned anything glowing.”
Steve swings his feet. He bounces his heels against the leg of his chair.
“What’s your name?”
“Tony,” the man says, slowly.
“What year are you from?”
The man smirks and shakes his head. “Don’t cheat.”
“Okay.” Steve looks down at his hands, wiggling his skinny fingers. “What am I like in the future?”
There’s a pause. Steve lifts his head. He watches the man, frowning, scratch at a stain on the corner of the blanket.
“Bigger,” he says, eventually.
*
“-I’m limited by the technology of my time,” Howard says, “and I know now that I can’t wait for it to catch me up-”
*
“So I need to know who won all the World Series when you were a kid,” Tony says when Steve picks up the phone.
“What? What do - Tony, it’s three am. I was sleeping. Don’t you have the Google in your telephone?”
“Yeah, Steve, I have ‘the Google’ in my phone. And I have the boredom in my head.”
Drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair, he hears Steve groan and mutter and shift around so his sheets rustle.
“Okay, first off, you only need to know 1927. That’s the one you told me. New York Yankees. I was nine. I was pretty mad at you afterwards.”
“What, you didn’t even bet on it?”
“I was nine.”
“Your point?”
Tony snorts and, down the phone line, Steve too begins to chuckle.
“I did, uh - I did bet Bucky a candy bar that I knew who would win. I felt kinda bad about it afterwards, though.”
Steve pauses. He breathes into the phone. He says, “You meet him - Bucky - a couple times.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s something to look forward to.”
“Tell me what you think of him.”
“Will do.”
*
Fifty feet in the air over the desert, with every bone in his body rattling and the jet pack blasting and great billowing clouds of fire from the Ten Rings compound licking at his heels, Tony feels the familiar dip and swoop in his stomach.
“No,” he shouts, words inaudible over the explosions. “Not yet, just stay, just sta-”
He lands in water, the heavy metal suit immediately dragging him down, but for a second he sees blue skies and grassy banks, a man standing in the shadows of the trees and a little girl with red hair running full pelt down towards the shoreline, while the water closes over his head and -
He lands in the sand, coughing, hacking. He spits up water. The suit weighs him down, but as he begins to crawl out of it he can feel that parts are missing, left behind to be eaten up by fire or to fall out of the sky, but some of it stayed. Some of it stayed.
“Okay,” Tony croaks. “That’s a start.”
*
Later, he watches Pepper touch a hand to the battered edge of the helmet. She sucks in a sharp breath.
“I’ve seen this before,” she whispers. “Years ago.”
*
“Enough,” Tony says as soon as his feet unsteadily hit the ground. He grabs a bunch of wires and tugs. “Enough science, okay? It’s sunny, birds are probably singing somewhere. Let’s get out of here. Pick somewhere to go. I mean it, I’m giving you free rein here.”
“What-”
Shaking his head, Tony sidesteps Steve. The air in the workshop is cold and still and Tony moves quickly through it, removing the sensors and hissing when they pinch at his skin. He unplugs the wires and undoes the fastenings and slowly, slowly, sheds it like a skin, dropping it all piece-by-piece onto the floor behind him. He feels raw, pink and new underneath. He pulls a change of clothes from a desk drawer and tugs them on.
“Are you okay?” Steve asks, walking towards him.
“Me? I’m fine. JARVIS-”
“But-”
“JARVIS, did you get all those readings okay?”
“Indeed, sir. I have added the day’s results to the main database. The trend remains consistent.”
“I love the smell of a consistent trend in the morning,” Tony says. He turns to Steve and raises an eyebrow. “Come on, I’m waiting.”
And that makes Steve draw to a halt, crossing his arms and frowning. “Well, so am I.”
Tony sighs. Bending down, he picks up the clump of wires nearest to his feet and sets about slowly untangling them. He watches his fingers move.
“Look, you - your mom had just died and you were, what? Fifteen? It was bad. I couldn’t deal with my own teenage grief, let alone someone else’s, so let’s just - go to the zoo.”
“Oh.”
Tony glances up. Steve is still standing there, halfway between when Tony appeared and where he now stands. His frown is fading away, lost in thought.
“That’s it? Oh?”
“That was a long time ago,” Steve murmurs.
“Well, it was five minutes ago for me.”
“And eighty years ago.” Steve shrugs, smiling faintly, a little wistfully. “And eleven. It’s fine. You did fine.”
“I did what?”
“At dealing with my... teenaged grief. I remember. You did fine.”
Moving forwards again, Steve picks up the scattered pieces as he goes, wires and sensors, clips and fastenings. He doesn’t try to untangle them, just lays them down on the desk next to Tony.
“Mom took me to Breezy Point a few months before she passed,” he says. “I could go for another visit.”
“You want Breezy Point, we’ll do Breezy Point. I’ll buy Breezy Point.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Fine, fine.”
Tony throws his straightened wires down onto the pile on the desk. Waving a hand, he leads Steve through the workshop and to the garage, to the car. He feels jittery. He thinks, too often, of Steve’s closed suitcase on the kitchen table, of Howard’s slightly open study door. When he glances back over his shoulder, with his hand on the car door handle, Steve has stopped walking. He’s standing and smiling at the car as if it’s the punchline to his favourite joke.
“What?”
“This is it, isn’t it?” Steve says. “The one you drew for me?”
“What?” Tony says again, blankly.
“Never mind, I guess that’s still to come for you.”
But Steve still pauses, on his way round to shotgun, to touch a hand reverently to the gleaming red roof before he gets inside, and he smiles again, smiles with such great affection.
“You can’t laugh at in-jokes from the future,” Tony says, sliding into the driver’s seat. He turns to glare at Steve. “It’s cheating.”
Steve just smiles at him, that affection lingering.
*
There’s a crash from somewhere behind Tony. He’s thirty-nine and he’s spent enough of his life around loud noises that he carefully lowers his soldering iron and pulls away from the gauntlet prototype he and Dummy are working on, before he turns around to see.
“Next Thursday,” the other Tony says, levering himself up with the edge of a desk. He pulls open one of the bottom drawers and digs out a spare pair of jeans and a holey t-shirt. “Watch out for the screwdriver on the floor.”
“Thursday, screwdriver, got it.” Tony picks the soldering iron back up again. “Get over here and hold this wire steady, would you?”
“You’re gonna wanna move the Cobra first.”
Tony raises an eyebrow, but he learned long ago to trust his future selves, so he thrusts the soldering iron at the other Tony and heads over to the car.
“How’s the suit in next Thursday?” he calls from the driver’s seat.
“A little further to the left,” the other Tony says without looking up from his soldering. “Trust me.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“The suit works,” the other adds. “Quit it, Dummy, I’ve got this one. You’ll see.”
“It travels?”
“I swear I didn’t ask this many questions. Yeah, it travels. Where are the pliers today?”
“Second drawer down,” Tony says, parking and climbing out. He looks back at the empty space the Cobra had occupied. The other Tony pushes the pliers into his hand. “Thanks. And the-?”
“The hydraulics are fine.”
“The-”
“Flight stabilising? Terrific.”
“And it all really-”
“Really, truly, deeply.”
Tony glances up at himself. He’s smirking down at the wire he’s soldering.
“Smartass,” Tony says. He pauses, reaching around the other Tony to tidy up the wiring. “Does Pepper... know?”
“No,” the other Tony murmurs. “Not by next Thursday, anyway.”
With an almighty crash that makes them both jump, a red and gold robot falls down from the ceiling and lands in the empty parking space. The concrete cracks beneath him.
“I’d say don’t forget about the ice problem,” the third Tony says, lifting up his faceplate and scratching his nose, “but we all know we’re gonna forget about the ice problem.”
He disappears again, leaving the dust to settle.
“It works,” Tony breathes. “We’re awesome.”
“Told you so.”
*
They’re halfway to Breezy Point when Steve, still gazing out the open window at the world that rolls by, murmurs, “I kept that drawing for the longest time.”
He says it so quietly that Tony doesn’t know if he’s meant to have heard it or not, but he looks around anyway.
“You old sentimentalist.”
“Guess so,” Steve says, glancing sideways at him. He props his chin on his hand and smiles, first at Tony, and then out at the sky through the window. Tony’s driving fast and the neighbourhoods are rushing past, but there’s the sky, as blue as it has ever been, unmoving.
*
Pepper, touching the edge of the helmet, whispers, “I’ve seen this before. Years ago. Have I really spent my whole life watching you almost die?”
Part Two
*