Part One
It had all happened so fast. From the moment that Thanos had attacked the compound it had been one chaotic moment tripping over another that led them stumbling into the newest fight of their life. Tony had known that they could be opening themselves up for something like this. If he had known exactly what this was going to be when he had taken the leap, he couldn't be sure he would have gone with it. He had faced Thanos and lost. Horribly. While the others had killed him it hadn't been in a place like this. They had told him the story: a quiet place with an injured Titan. Their actions had managed to bring him back. If the kid hadn't come back too, Tony was sure he would have regretted it.
Peter Parker had come bounding through one of Strange's portals to join the fight already in full swing. He swung around with the gauntlet, playing a dangerous game of keepaway. They needed to end this before he got himself killed. Again.
Tony thought he'd been close, though as he lay mostly buried beneath the rubble that he had gone crashing through it was tough to pull those fractured memories together long enough to be sure. The stones… he'd been going for the stones. He was pretty sure that he'd gotten them too, and he'd been ready to unleash on Thanos what he'd done to them all five years before: death. Destruction. The end. It had to be what Strange had meant. He remembered thinking that right before he'd been slammed so hard that the glove had been ripped from his hand. He had rolled and barely scrambled to his feet when Thanos had hauled him up and thrown him clear across and into the debris of the destroyed compound.
Right. That's what had happened. Well it wasn't the first concussion he had gotten fighting someone trying to kill them all.
Tony groaned, instantly regretting it the moment he tried to shift his weight. Pain broke through and he had trouble pulling a breath in. He squeezed his eyes shut, bare fingers scraping at the rubble beneath them. If Friday was still functioning at all she would shoot him up with enough painkillers to at least get him focused on getting out of the immediate danger. He had lost his helmet somewhere along the way, so if she was still connected he couldn't hear her. As he lay there, desperately trying to string together coherent thoughts through the pain, he had a rare flash of nostalgia. He missed JARVIS. If this was going to be the end, he wouldn't have minded that old, familiar voice in his ear. At least then he wouldn't die alone.
Light flooded in and Tony squinted hard. The battle had left the entire stretch of land drenched in haze and dust, but in that moment it was like he was staring into the sun. Finally his dark eyes focused enough to see a woman hovering above him, the light emanating from her, and she tossed aside a massive piece of the rubble. "He's here!"
Danvers. That's right. She'd come crashing into the battle at some point.
"You need to be saved a lot, don't you?" she asked as her feet touched the ground next to him, the glow fading enough for him to spot the signs of damage on her right arm. It looked like burns, but not nearly as extensive as Bruce had suffered. Surely she hadn't….
"Thanos?" Tony managed, his voice weaker than he would have preferred and he heard the sound of someone making their way down towards them. He tensed, but Danvers knelt next to him.
"Dead," she assured him.
A soft sound escaped him. "Better stay that way this time."
"There's no coming back from that." She was exploring something, and Tony tried to crane his head to get a better look at what she was looking at.
"How bad?" came another voice and Wanda Maximoff skidded down the debris in a cloud of red.
"Straight through."
Tony's lips twitched down. "What is?"
"A steel pipe," Wanda answered softly, her gaze sweeping over him. "How's your suit? Can you -?"
"Yeah," Tony managed, teeth clenched. Somehow knowing the source of the pain made it worse. "Just get me off the damn thing."
The two women shared a look before Danvers nodded. Wanda took a step back and Tony shut his eyes and waited, feeling the tentacles of magic wrap around him, easing him upwards and pulling him from the pipe that was lodged just below his ribs. Ironic. It was opposite the wound Thanos had dealt him five years before with his own weapon.
A scream clawed its way out of his throat as Wanda pulled him up and balanced him on his feet. His bare hand went instantly to the wound to put pressure on it and he had to force himself to activate what was left of the glove on his left, temporarily sealing up the wound so that he wouldn't bleed out. As soon as he had, Wanda released him slowly, easing him to the ground. "What happened?" he managed.
"We lost," Wanda answered, her voice soft.
Tony blinked hard, his gaze flickering over to Danvers. "You said Thanos is dead."
"He is. So is everyone else."
"Did he…?"
"He didn't have to." Wanda took a surprising seat so that she was eye-level with where Tony was just barely propping himself up. It took him a moment to realize that joining him probably wasn't her goal. She was exhausted. Five years of… whatever - wherever - they had been and she came back into this. A war that, even though their enemy was dead, she was counting as a loss. "His army overpowered ours. Even with everyone back. As far as I can tell, only a few Avengers made it out."
"Who?"
She cringed. "Us and Thor."
Tony pushed himself to his knees. "Pepper? Rhodey?"
"I'm sorry."
"Peter?"
She shook her head.
"No," he managed, finally to his feet on his own power. He stumbled forward but caught himself. "No. They can't be… No."
"Cap, Banner…. They're all gone. Tony, stop."
He pitched forward, leaning against a pile of rubble. "My daughter."
"You have a daughter?"
"A family friend was watching her while we…. I have to get to her. I have to make sure Morgan is okay."
"Hey." It was Danvers this time, and the blonde caught his gaze. "You're not going to do her any good if you're dead."
"Where is she?" Wanda asked.
"Pepper and I have a place…. Between here and the City." He didn't like the look they both wore. "What?"
"Reports have already come in that the creatures were making their way to New York City."
"I need to go. I need to…"
Wanda was on her feet again and reached forward, but he managed to steady himself before she had to. "Not alone."
Tony looked over at her. He wasn't the only one who had lost. The girl's brother had given his life and Thanos had murdered Vision. Before all of that one of his own weapons had killed her parents. She was alone too.
She reached forward, her fingers just shy of his arm. "Let's go find your daughter.."
Thanos' creatures had made it out beyond their battle. Making their way to New York City… that's what Danvers had said. Where she'd gotten the intel, he had no idea, but it was true, and they'd destroyed everything in their path.
Wanda had come with him. It wasn't like she had anything left at the compound and she didn't have a lot of interest in sticking around for the government officials to show up. Neither did Tony, if he were honest. Someone would try to get him to do something and the only time he could afford was a moment with Pepper, knelt down on the fractured ground, kissing her bloodied hand and whispering broken apologies. He'd wanted to protect her. He'd needed to protect her. He'd failed. And not just her. Rhodey, Cap, Bruce…. Peter. All he had was that dangerous hope that he'd walk through the door and his little girl would rush into his arms. That was the only thing keeping him on his feet as Wanda and he made their way to the cabin in the woods that the Starks had called home for five years now.
Tony stood staring. He couldn't breathe, but it had nothing to do with the barely held together wound and everything to do with the fact that there was nothing left of his home. A crater pitted the ground where the house had once stood, the decimation stretching out to swallow up Morgan's tent and her toys, the trees, and the peace that they'd clung to so hard to since she'd been born. It had stolen everything. Thanos had stolen everything.
"Tony?" Wanda asked softly as he stumbled forward, falling to his knees at the edge of it all. "Maybe they -"
He shook his head. False hope was worse.
The Scarlet Witch knelt down with him, her fingers against his arm. They paused there and carefully, hesitantly, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. "You need a doctor."
"No."
"Tony -"
"It doesn't matter," he managed. He would just be another casualty. One of many. He hadn't been able to save them, so why should he bother taking up a bed at an ER that was likely overflowing? He was done. The will to fight driven out of him.
"Dr Strange - the man that brought us all to the battle - he said all of you traveled through time to get the stones. Maybe we could -"
"That's not how it works," Tony breathed, shifting so that he was sitting. "Time travel won't change our present. It would just open up a new…." He stopped, blinking hard. "A new timeline." He could almost hear her question hanging in the air between them, but his mind was spinning too fast to string the words together into anything that someone other than he could understand.
After a long moment he loosed a breath. "What are you thinking?" Wanda finally asked.
"Timelines." He stood, one knee threatening to give, but he forced it into submission. "When you mess with time, it messes back. We were careful. Mostly careful. Kinda careful. We didn't break anything. Thanos didn't care. He took a damn sledgehammer to it."
"Okay…?"
He turned, one hand sweeping out as he spoke. "He could have fractured the timeline when he followed us through which would have opened up… I don't even know how many parallel universes."
"Can we get there?"
There was something careful about her tone and Tony looked at her. She looked as broken as he felt. "Maybe."
Her eyes brightened, and he didn't have it in him to tell her the odds. They had to make it back to the compound and down to the lower levels. If they could salvage any of the technology, if any of the suits had survived, if the Pym Particles he and Steve had brought back from the past hadn't been completely destroyed... Those were a lot of ifs, but in that moment he didn't have anything else to hold onto. He had to try.
They found Thor at what was left of the compound. If he had been helping with the clean up or not, they couldn't seem to get that much out of him. Talk of alternate realities and potential paths to get them there seemed to perk his interest enough to be willing to lend some strength into getting down into the destroyed compound to see what they had available.
"How are you feeling?"
Tony glanced back from where he had taken up residence on a slab of fallen ceiling. "I may be onto something. See this piece here? I should be able to use it to channel the power to a single pad. One at a time, but a little-"
"That's not what I asked," she pressed, her voice quiet.
"Fine. I'm fine," he said dismissively. He fit the piece in place and the machine gave an encouraging buzz.
A loud crashing sound pulled both of their attention over and Thor came stumbling through the debris, several of the suits they'd created to travel draped over one arm. They were filthy, but looked to be mostly intact.
"Did you find three?" Wanda asked.
"I did. How close are you, Stark?"
"Getting there." He squeezed his eyes closed and massaged at the bridge of his nose. They had the suits, Wanda had found the Pym Particles earlier, and for the first time since he'd started tinkering with it hours ago Tony felt hopeful about getting at least a single pad up and running to send them through individually. This could work, which left him forced to look at what couldn't. He cringed at that thought and forced his tired eyes open. "Wanda… listen. Cap and I lost Loki the first time that we went after the Space Stone -"
"You lost my brother?" Thor demanded. "Why wouldn't you say something sooner?"
"Been a little busy, Point Break," Tony grumbled, waving him off. He turned his full focus back to Wanda. "It opens up a place where I can send him that he might not break the timeline any further by looking for him."
"It does sound like you have already done that," the god of thunder groused.
"Could you not? I'm doing you a favour here."
"It's a point where he can find his brother but won't have to deal with his other self. There's nothing like that for me… not if I want to find Vision."
"Yeah," Tony admitted softly.
"It's okay. As long as I can save him in one reality, that's all I'm really looking for."
She wanted to save him, not be with him. He could get that. Something was better than nothing.
"I mean… that's what you're doing, right? Saving them?"
Tony tried for a smile, but for all of his usual quips and sarcastic retorts, his voice failed him then. Save them? He didn't think he could save anyone right now. He'd be lucky if he could get to his feet without help. Closing the wound had slowed things down, but without medical attention he could feel his body rebelling against him. He wouldn't make it long enough for infection to get him. No, he knew he couldn't save them. He just needed to see them one more time. If he was lucky he might even get a chance to beg for their forgiveness.
Wanda reached out, her touch startling him out of his thoughts. "None of us really made it out," she said softly. "All we can do is try to find something from it now."
"I'm sorry."
"This wasn't your fault. I wouldn't be here if all of you hadn't -"
"Your parents." He watched her eyes widen. "I'm sorry."
"So much has happened since then. Including a chance to find out that you're not the man I thought you were back then."
He nodded, accepting that. He stood slowly, unsteadily, and looked at the makeshift pad. "Okay. That should do it. Last chance if anybody wants to stay."
"There is nothing here for any of us," Thor echoed the earlier sentiment.
"Right."
A few minutes later they were changed and ready. Thor went first, gone in a flash through the Quantum Realm to try his hand at a new timeline that Tony and Steve had accidentally ripped open in their attempt to get ahold of the Space and Mind Stones. Tony leaned against the makeshift control panel and glanced over to Wanda who was adjusting her gloves. "Ready?"
"Yeah." She stepped up onto the platform, her blue gaze sweeping him up and down. "I hope you get to say goodbye to them."
He tried for a smile. "Me too. Good luck."
Then she was gone, leaving Tony alone in the rubble. After a long moment he set the timer and moved into position. A wave of pain hit and he pressed a hand below his ribs and widened his stance, desperate to stay on his feet. He wouldn't get another chance at this. It was now or never, and he didn't think he was ready to go without seeing them one last time.
TBC
Notes: It's been a long while since I wrote for MCU. I threatened to jump back in last year when Infinity War came out and we lost Loki, but it didn't take hold and refuse to leave. I cope with character death by finding a way to turn it around and bring them back, and I spent the first week and a half or so after watching Endgame trying to do that for Tony. He was my first fav out of MCU and had stayed at the top of my list. After going through a Tony rewatch of MCU movies, I found one.
Apologies if Captain Marvel is a bit off... I haven't had a chance to see her movie yet, though I loved what I saw of her in Endgame. I just didn't think it would make a lot of sense for her to have died at Thanos' hand.