AN: The danger in watching movies with fangirls is that when you say "You know, this would be a good fic", they hold you to writing it. Unbetaed flashfic has long sentences.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit
Spoilers: The movie
Characters/Pairing: Tony Stark/Pepper Potts, Bruce Banner, Jane Foster, Steve Rogers
Rating: Kid Friendly
Summary: In which Tony has a near death experience, gets a new obsession and finally figures it out.
Truer Stars
It's not so much the near death experience that changes him. He's done that before. A lot, actually. It's starting to get a little passé. What's changed him, what's made him want to try new food in restaurants he'd just missed obliterating and kiss Pepper until both of them forget how to breathe, is the part where he saw an entirely different freaking galaxy the last time he almost died.
It's a bit ridiculous, he acknowledges, because he deals almost exclusively in what most people consider science fiction. He carries on deep and meaningful semi-existential conversations with a computer he designed himself, for crying out loud; a computer he is almost positive won't try to kill him when it inevitably achieves sentience, and his work interfaces are so interactive that he's pretty sure they'd stump Jean-Luc Picard. He fights with cutting edge weaponry and knows about extra-terrestrials.
But seeing it, so much bigger and clearer than the Hubble could dream of capturing, spread out in every direction around him, except for a tiny window home behind, and taking all sense of direction, of sensation, of down…
This is different. This is something new.
JARVIS had captured the image, using the last bit of power after firing the thrusters to get them through, and as soon as he restores power to Stark Tower, Tony recreates it in the media room. Pepper has been perfectly tolerant of his new obsession, and when he pulls her into the room to kiss her under the stars, he feels remarkably alive. She can reach out and touch them, and there is awe in her face, but it's not the same.
She's always been really good at humouring him, though. So when he spends hours in that room, with the stars around him, she makes sure his lunch gets delivered. She refuses to sleep there, though, even after he gets a bunch of overstuffed pillows he thinks give the whole set up a slightly more exotic feel.
"I'm not sleeping in a planetarium, Tony," she says. "Not even this one."
Sometimes he does fall asleep there, lost in the nebulae he glimpsed in that perfect moment, but when he wakes up at three in the morning, he doesn't have too much trouble leaving, and joining her in bed.
He convinces Bruce to move in, at least for a while, and tries to hammer out a plan to map where ever it is he went. They work well together, once they figure out that Bruce is entirely a morning person and Tony more or less fails to function before midafternoon, and they design half a dozen new implements for the Avengers that function usefully about half the time, but they're not astrophysicists, and they don't make much progress until an offhand comment from Agent Hill reveals that someone else, someone more qualified, is already doing the work.
It only takes him a couple days longer to actually make the call. A bit of that time was spent getting various contact information, but mostly he had to get over the fact that there was something he couldn't immediately grasp. Causality has never been his strong suit, and when Bruce points out that neither of them is really suited to anything that might eventually lead to time travel, Tony gives him the silent treatment for as long as he can manage: the two minutes it takes him to come up with a solution to the problem they are working on.
"Just call the woman," Bruce says. "You're starting to make me angry."
"You're just saying that to make me smile," says Tony, but JARVIS is already dialling.
He gets in touch with Jane Foster and offers her enough money to support her research that she'll never be reliant upon SHIELD for funding again. They bond over stars and things they've lost, talking on the telephone because where ever Foster is there isn't always wifi, and agree that while SHIELD doesn't bother them as much as it used to, they've decided not to do without a safety net, just in case. He can only touch the edges of what Dr. Foster is doing, but that doesn't prevent him from bankrolling her. He wants to see the stars again.
The more time he spends talking with Jane, the more his understanding of the science grows. He's no stranger to making something of nothing, to turning what another person would say is a crazy theory into something he can hold in his hands, but Jane is building a bridge where science and magic coincide, and even though Tony's only seen Thor's sketches, he's also seen that other galaxy, so he knows why Jane keeps going.
It's about a month before he realizes that Jane's research has almost zero military applications. That's when he doubles her funding.
He finds Steve in the media room, with the stars on, about two months after the battle of Manhattan.
"Is this what you saw?" Steve asks. He doesn't even turn around.
"Well, there was an alien mothership over there," Tony gestures in the general direction, "but I had JARVIS take it out. It was ruining the mood."
"It's beautiful," says Steve.
"I thought it was going to be the last thing I ever saw," Tony tells him. It's the first time he's said it out loud.
"Why'd you keep it?" Steve asks.
"Because you cut the wire," Tony tells him.
There's a small flash of light in Steve's hand, reflected glare from a pocket watch or compact mirror; something small, but big enough to hold a picture.
"I get that," Steve says. "And, I think, if you don't mind me saying so, I'm starting to get you. You get obsessive, like he did, but your heart is better at finding home."
"It wasn't always," Tony says.
"But it is now," Steve says. "Most of the time, anyway."
Tony laughs.
"Tell me how it works," Steve says, and Tony tells him about the stars.
fin
Gravity_Not_Included, October 14, 2012