So close – they're so close Tony could taste sweet victory on his tongue. He scans the battlefield for anyone on their side who's still standing. Somebody, please. His suit is totalled. His limbs won't move, his heartbeat is all but a-roaring in his ears. He needs to get there, get to Thanos. The gauntlet is already wrapping around his fist.

Again.

Not again. Not this time – not on his watch.

He wills his suit to get on with it – move! – or he swears to God he will peel himself off this metal deadweight and crawl to Thanos if it comes down to it. But Danvers is on it. She's fighting, and Tony watches on in despair. There's no plan B. No options. If Danvers fall, it'll be all for naught while he's right here half-lying in muck.

Strange knows what to do. He's seen every outcome, every possibility of this madness.

Tony finds Strange walling off a tornado of water from massacring them in a great deluge. He could tear his scalp off wondering why in Odin's beard would the Sorcerer Supreme choose to water bend than dealing with the purple elephant in this godforsaken cosmic war –

And then, Tony sees it. From across the distance, over Chitauri carcases and fallen heroes, Strange's eyes seek his. Rather deliberately, he closes his fist, tucking in all but one index finger. One in fourteen million.

One chance.

One flick of Tony's wrist and he disengages Iron Man from his AI. Damn it all – he's flying solo from hereon out. The weight of nanomachine-structured suit of armour should've pinned him to the ground, but Danvers is falling. He doesn't have the AI to calculate what's going down next, but he can see the fight play out in his mind. Thanos swipes the Power Stone from his gauntlet and swats her away like a gnat.

Not one in fourteen million. Not one chance.

Let Thanos savour that sweet victory of driving the Terrans to the brink of desperation and hopelessness. All that's left for the Titan to do on this good earth is to snap, and total annihilation is absolute. Let him believe that his work here echoes that of Thanos' from 2018. It is after all, inevitable.

Let him not see Tony making a run for it.

"Cover him!" Tony hears Steve's desperate plea somewhere behind him. It's too late – no one's coming. He knows what he must do. He got this.

Thanos swings his free hand and flings Tony off the gauntlet. Tony's vision goes black around the corner as he whizzes through the air. This is his final seconds, and he's gonna make them count. His gauntlet tremors with the might of a tectonic plate shift, and for a hot second he wonders if the Stones are going to claim his first.

Thanos can gloat all he wants. "I am… inevitable."

His smirk, his words – they hold nothing against the hurt that is coursing through his veins, ripping flesh from bones and he's scared. He's scared that he's wrong about this. The planet and beyond will have to pay for his miscalculation. His. He's scared that is the end.

"I… am…" His heart is giving away. He can barely make out Thanos' outline. "Iron Man."

Tony rips the Mind Stone from his gauntlet and clenches his fist around it. He doesn't know how to work this but sometimes, he has to run before he walks.

"Eat this!"

Golden pulse shoots out between his knuckles and it blasts Thanos off his feet. His own too – and he finds himself flying through rubble. He's passing out again. This one may damn well be permanent. He's so tired –

"Tony!"

One second stretches a pretty good mile. He's probably smashed through enough wreckage that he could play accordion with what's left of his suit. His landing is surprisingly soft. Feels just like home.

"Tony? Come on."

He sees the mouth yapping but he's never listened to it. That voice that told him to stop. Don't sign the Accord. Don't kill Bucky. Don't dispatch a suit of armour around the world. Don't work alone.

"Don't – I got you, Tony."

It's never too late to start listening to Captain America, is it?

"Rogers…" He peers through heavy lids and sees a pair of bright, blue eyes, still so full of conviction after all they've been through the last hour. Their surroundings stink of death, and Tony's already knocking on its doorstep. "Fight of our lives, right?"

Steve grips him tighter around the shoulders. "Yeah."

And he sees his world tinged with red. "We'll end this. Together." He shoves the blue Space Stone into Steve's palm. It's almost kismet how the Tesseract intertwines with his path. Never too far away no matter how much Steve wishes it gone. "You trust me?"

Tattered gloves close around the shine of the Space Stone. Steve's eyes seem to glow brighter, lending warmth to his smile. "I do."

He supposes Natasha would, too. Or he'll explain in person when he crosses over to the other side. Won't be long, anyway. He flexes his gauntleted fist and four Stones hovers just an inch above his knuckles.

The ground beneath his feet quake. A roaring Thanos is rampaging, cursing the name Stark with every swing of his mighty fist on Thor and Danvers. They'll triumph over the Mad Titan, but a little boost won't do any harm, will it?

Tony smirks, and Time seeks out Strange, still busy cordoning water at the edge of the battlefield. The treacherous Power makes a beeline for Danvers, and Reality for Thor. But, Thanos' wits are as lethal as his double-bladed sword, and the Titan sees Reality coming in fast. Thor does not.

Maybe this isn't it. This whole thing has been a grave mistake – he should've manned up and put on the fucking Gauntlet and snapped –

"Thor!" Steve drops Tony to free up his hand, the one that's squeezing Space like a lifeline. A jet of blue catches Thanos in his chest and he loses his footing. He falls where Thor stands, and Thor reaches out.

A crater is all that's left in Danvers' vicinity. She seizes her chance. Thanos is no more.

Tony couldn't believe his eyes. "Are you seeing this?"

"Seeing this!" Steve turns to Tony, his quirked smile having grown wider. "Not believing it!" He's slowly lifted off the ground, hovering even without a suit. "Look alive, Stark. We still got work to do."

Two more Stones nest in the well of his palm. It's a given where the Mind goes to.

Wanda soars through the sky, charged and renewed, and heads for the wormholes where the Chitauri are still pouring through. He has no idea what a Soul Stone could do. He only knows it took a dear friend's life.

So, he'll take the rest for a change.

Tony is back in his wheelchair and drips, but the day has never been better. Full attendance for a Stark party even though he said there won't be strippers, booze or food. Which is decidedly not very Stark-ly, but all cooks, brew masters and belly dancers deserve their time with their loved ones, too. Not that it put a damper on the festivities, anyway. They have Asgardian mead on the tap and potluck lunch with Barton's meat pies and the Lang's mashed potatoes as centrepiece. Tony wheels along the buffet table, visibly drooling over the spread until he notices a plate of alien salad. He dips a finger in the dressing and licks it. Nebula's recipe, with a hundred percent surety. His soft spot for her food motivates him to play Jenga with the brimming bowl that he's balancing on his lap. Just two more ladleful of space radish and he's satisfied.

Upon noticing the predicament that Tony is in – trying and failing to wheel himself to the garden while not upsetting his meal – Stephen Strange takes pity on him and decides to lend a hand.

"That's quite an appetite, Stark." Strange takes the handles and pushes the wheelchair towards the lake. Not too far away from his guests, but enough for some semblance of privacy.

"This looks absolutely delish. You want some?" One forkful of salad later, Tony makes a face and promptly spits it out. "It's not ripe."

"You got me worried for a second there. I thought you were going to put on the gauntlet and commit cosmic suicide."

Tony scoffs at Strange, but neither denying nor confirming those suspicions. The fight is over, it doesn't matter what he was thinking or not. They won, they're all here. Strange puts down the brakes to his wheelchair and grips him on his shoulder. He takes his silent leave when it looks like Tony has new company.

"Nice property," Steve comments airily as he takes his place next to the wheelchair. The lake behind the house is shallow, so it's still most of the time, only rippling when Morgan skips stone from the bay or if it rains. Peace. A far cry from what it used to be for a Stark, all work and no play.

"It's nice, yeah." Tony sets his fork in his bowl and watches a dead stump sticking out of the mud. "Got a farm-y patch of land around this corner. Pepper is making her own compost these days. Here is where Morgan learns to ride the bike. She's a fast learner, that's for sure. Tough. Scrapped her knees and didn't cry."

Steve drops to his knees, bringing himself to Tony's eye level. He smiles, a tight one that doesn't suit the overall joyous affair at all, and holds out his palm. There the Space Stone sits, and Tony quickly looks away. He almost pushes Steve's hand away but thinks better of it. "You wanna skip stones, do what Morgan does. We got flat pebbles lying around here somewhere."

"There are six of these right here in your house, in our pockets."

"I keep mine in my socks."

"The job is done. What are we going to do with them?"

Tony wipes his face with a bandaged palm. He hasn't concocted any plans beyond killing Thanos simply because he thought it would be unnecessary. Returning the Stones to their original time and place is an absolute must, but between recuperation and organising this party, he hasn't thought of what to do with the Infinity Stones in the meantime.

He thought it was obvious until Steve brought it up. "You hold on to it until Bruce gets the time machine working again, yeah?"

Steve frowns. "You'd let us do that?"

"Do what?"

"Hold on to the Infinity Stones. Tony, last time I checked, you didn't even allow us to arrest bank robbers without the Accord's say so."

That snagged something in Tony's guts. "About that…"

"No, I –" Steve stows the stone away and keeps his hands in his pocket. He's closing up, and Tony reaches for his wrist. "Tony, no. That can wait. You need to get better. Your family needs you –"

"Yeah, waiting doesn't help, Cap. I tried. It sucks. We need to talk. I need to talk."

"I'm sorry," Steve says suddenly, and he takes his hand out of his pocket. No Stone in sight, not even the blue gleam it constantly emanates. He closes his fingers over Tony's. "It's too late, too little. I can't take back what I said and did to you. If there's a way for me to fix this, I would, but there isn't, so…" His voice cracks, just the barest but Tony hears it all the same. "You know what? I think I'll volunteer for our one last job."

And slowly, the realisation hits Tony. "You want to return the Stones to their timeline?"

"Yeah. We need to return Mjolnir too."

"After the heroic act of sacrifice everybody just pulled off, I think we're now all worthy of the hammer. Look, party's back there. Just pass Mjolnir around like a bag of treats –"

"It's risky business. You trust me, don't you?"

That's the last nail in the coffin. Tony sighs, resigned to the fact that Steve has already made up his mind. "We won, Steve. And the best is yet to come. If I ask you to stay, here, with all of us, will you?"

Return the Stones, and haul ass back to 2023. That's all Tony asks for.

"I tried moving on."

Very carefully, Steve returns Tony's hands to his laps. He stands up, straight up like the weight of the world has just been lifted off his shoulders. The bowl of food that Tony's been cradling with his thighs has long gone stone cold, as cold as the Benatar when Danvers brought it back to Earth. That feels like so long ago. "We love you, Steve. You have a family here with us."

Steve releases the brakes to Tony's wheelchair, and he pushes Tony away from the lake, back to the party he's hosting. As the cheers grow louder, Steve dips his head by Tony's ears, and he says, "Thank you. For everything."

STINGER

The doctors have removed the cast on his left forearm. That alone is a cause for another party. Truly, one can only appreciate something when it's lost. Not saying that Tony takes his hands for granted… he's always been working with both, hasn't he? Being a genius physicist-engineer-Iron Man necessitates it, but this time is different. He misses cuddling Morgan properly. And if only Pepper would let him frame the cast in his garage. He thinks Morgan just wrote her first set of trigonometric formulae somewhere under his elbow.

He leans back in his chair and surveys the glorious empty that is his study. At the centre of the cleared floorspace is Bruce's time machine, reworked based on Tony's designs. Steve went on it with six Infinity Stones in a pouch and Mjolnir in tow. That was seven hours ago. He hasn't returned. Tony has seen this coming a mile away, but he still hopes. A little.

He waits and waits until his eyes droop because he's still taking painkillers and boy, these are good stuff. It numbs his body, dulls his senses and it's rather profound… this could be a new kind of addiction after his lost love that is alcoholism, but he has Pepper and Morgan and the Avengers now, and that's world's best antidote for misery, right?

"Get up!"

A misfired bullet whizzes past his ear and Tony rolls to his side, ducking under his desk before anything makes sense. He swallows a painful gasp – he's torn some of his stitches. His nightshirt is starting to stick to his abdomen.

"Is this it, Rogers?"

Tony tries to blink away the black spots in his eyes. His first guess was drunk teens unknowingly breaking into Iron Man's retirement home. He crawls into the open, and what he sees has him throw all caution to the wind.

"Steve!"

It is Steve, though he's changed out of his uniform and into a casual white shirt with a denim jacket thrown over it. He's also pissed off, and then Tony sees it – the gun that he's pointing at a darkened corner of his study.

At another Steve Rogers.

"Don't move, me." Strong legs kick into the back of his knees, knocking him to the ground. Tony almost doubles into himself. He's definitely busted some of his stitches. The figure behind him freezes at the sight of blood on the front of his shirt. "Really, Rogers? What happened to keeping a low profile? And did you just shoot me? Not me me, but –"

This is all so weirdly confusing. Tony tastes copper in the back of his throat. That's two weeks' worth of recovery completely undone. "Fantastic impersonation there. What do you want?" And then he's forcefully marched towards Steve – the one who looks like he's been worked over by another super-soldier. He's shoved into the corner and his vision sways as he sinks, but Steve catches him before he could add concussion to his laundry list of pre-existing injuries. And now he finds himself eye to eye with… himself. Maybe concussion should be on that list.

"That's enough." Steve's voice is almost rumbling, deep and threatening in ways that Tony finds terrifying if he were on the receiving end. Call it first-hand experience. "Leave him out of this. Our battle with Thanos was just weeks ago. Picking a fight with an injured man is beneath you."

Tony would've rolled his eyes if he could. "Honour, really?" Now that he's certain this is the Steve Rogers who made him wait for seven freaking hours in his study, he leans heavily into that broad chest. Steve's steady heartbeats thrum through his vest.

"If he were me, honour will work. You OK?"

"Yeah. Shit… I'm passing out."

Something metallic clicks in front of their faces and Steve goes as still as a stone. "Right, let's get to business." The other Tony squats just out of arm's reach and surveys the pallid features of his doppelganger. His brow pinches with unease. "Thanks to you two meddling with our timeline, Captain Hydra over here and the rest of the Avengers are now strapped with – shall I say – interesting sets of issues. Political, military and inter-galactical. By the way, Loki is currently throwing a rave party at the edge of the universe since you gave him the Tesseract all tied up with a bow. And, I'm dying, again. Which is nothing new." He knocks Tony's knees with his. "Your little trick of disengaging my arc reactor is causing palladium to spill into my bloodstream. I'll be dead as a doornail if I don't fix this in a week. You got any ideas?"

Time travelling has always born a risk of messing up timelines and whatnot. The Ancient One said just as much, but they were too desperate to acquiesce. Alternate universes don't only sprout because of changed fates of any Infinity Stones. A minute shift in any parameter – like what they caused in New York 2012 – is enough. They're staring down the barrel of a Beretta M9, aimed between their eyes by Steve Rogers and Tony Stark from eleven years ago. This is proof enough.

Guess passing out can wait. Tony swallows thickly, and smirks. "We can explain."