NOTE: I've had a few PMs and reviews expressing distress at the idea of Tony and Fianna being in a relationship, for various reasons. I understand the issue, though I disagree generally about whether it's 'cheating' or other negative terms. Simply put, this older version of Tony can't take Leigh from the past without creating the same conditions that created his destructive grief in the first place. Personally, I'd rather he get the ending I have planned for him (so excited about it, omg) than find someone else, or live a life alone from that point. I just want to encourage you to bear with me, when you see what I have planned, I think what I've done makes sense. If it makes you feel better, the story doesn't end with Tony and Fianna- there's a section of Tony and Leigh before 'the end.'
ALSO: this chapter depicts extreme grief, so this is a warning for that
Chapter Twenty-seven
You understand my hesitation
Why I get quiet sometimes
All the ways I've been conditioned
What I think is real, you redesign
It's how you catch me every time
.
I've been holding my hopes waist-high
So they don't tumble down
And keep me yesterday-bound
I've been holding my breath
Cause I don't want to be let down
But we're too far for that now
So I'm saying it out loud
It's different now
.
I don't need special attention
Just as long as you are mine
Then there's no reason to mention
What came before
The who or the why
Cause it all adds up this time
~It's Different Now, Pentatonix
Fianna's standing in his room, her eyes shut. Tony walks up to her.
"Then believe me," he says. He leans over, lips close to hers, heart racing. "Take one step onto the escalator. I'm at the top."
She opens her eyes. Her unique eye seems to him like it's carrying the whole world, brown dirt and blue ocean. Fianna lifts her right hand, almost touches his face, but then looks at her wrist and shakes her head.
"No trespassing," she says in a voice rich with sadness.
He watches her step back and head into her bedroom. The sound of the door shutting behind her has a finality to it that Tony rebels against with all his might.
Shit, he thinks to himself. If he'd only known she was watching the holographic message, he would have stopped her. While he has been marking the ways she's different from his wife, she's been hewing closer, finding flaws in herself as a result. Tony spent his teenage years wishing he could be the man his father saw in Steve Rogers, so he knows how hard it is to measure up to someone who isn't around to show they're not perfect.
What he wouldn't give to come up with some approximation of Thor's hammer, to show her she's worthy.
Tony shuts off the light and lays in bed trying to think of one. When he does, it's the only thing that prompts him to sleep.
8888888888
Day two of Lacey Balci's visit starts with a long walk around the property. Fianna's with two people who will absolutely contact him if she seems like she's faltering, so he feels comfortable leaving the area to pick up some food for the next two meals.
Tony comes back and sets up lunch (wraps from Roly Poly) and heads up to his room with a sharpie, so he can check something in the mirror.
They come home while he's up there, and he jogs down the stairs feeling like it's going to be instantly obvious to all three of them that he's wearing his heart on his sleeve. Literally.
Tony hugs Ember and helps her take off her tennis shoes, as one knot has gotten tangled and turned into a snarl that's hard to untie. The two of them walk into the kitchen, and Tony leans on the island as nonchalantly as he can to advise her on which wrap to pick for herself.
Lacey's already in the dining room, and soon Ember's rushing after her, gleeful that she gets her aunt to herself for a short while. Tony holds still and waits. Because she obviously thinks she's the square peg in a round hole, Fianna stops on the other side of the island and regards him with a look of frustration when he doesn't move out of the way.
"Come get your food," Tony says.
"What are you doing?" She's suspicious, but he likes that. It means she knows him well.
Tony smiles. He turns on the charm, pushes it, lets how he feels show. "Nothing." If she complains about how obvious he's being, it means she's noticed. He's an ass, but this is necessary.
Fianna rolls her eyes at him. "Serve you right if I don't eat anything."
"So you agree it would bother me if you did that?"
"What are you doing?" she gives up and hisses in a furious whisper, her face flaming.
"What do you want me to be doing?"
Tony can see her praying for strength before she heads over to pick which wrap she wants to eat. The prayer fails, because she gasps when she sees his arm.
Written in solid black along the top bend of his elbow are the words, Oh my God, thank you so much!
They were her first words to him.
Fianna's eyes lift to his, vulnerable and hopeful before she pulls herself back, crushing the emotions down into neutrality. She starts to walk away.
Swearing under his breath, Tony reaches out and pulls her to him, backing up so they're out of sight of the people in the next room. Fianna's hands are fisted, her forearms pressed against his chest. It's the closest they've ever been, and his veins are burning with delight at the contact.
"Tony, I can't-"
"Do it anyway," he tells her, kissing her temple. She trembles, and her hands spasm, gathering handfuls of his shirt.
"If I do, I won't have anything left. I'll be subsumed," she groans, but she shifts just a tiny bit closer.
"Stop comparing yourself to a ghost. If I don't do that anymore, you shouldn't," he tells her. "That's the point of this." He takes her hand, sets it on the words he's written on his arm. "If anything, this should mean more to you. I put it there myself. I'm the one choosing you."
Fianna sighs, her eyes closed, but when she opens them, she smiles. "You really are just-" Without finishing the sentence, she lifts herself up on her toes and presses her lips to his.
He's wanted this for so many hours straight Tony can't hold himself back. He bands an arm around her waist, buries a hand in her hair, and turns them so he's crowding her against the wall. Fianna kisses like she's stealing joy, with fierce determination and sweet advances. He's desperate to keep up, loving her unexpected onslaught.
He pulls back only because they hear the sound of a chair being moved in the other room. Tony reaches up into the cupboard beside them for something, he doesn't even care what, and Fianna slips past him, squeezing an encouragement onto his hand before taking her plate to join her sister.
8888888888
For dinner, Tony reveals that he'd gone all out on foods they can roast themselves over the fire. After too many S'mores and stories she probably wouldn't be quite old enough to hear about if she had a sibling to perpetuate them with, he ushers Ember to bed, leaving Lacey and Fianna to chat alone.
On a whim, he inflates the air mattress he pulls from storage in the very back of the closet. The Rec Room shares a wall with his bedroom, and the truth is, his bed creaks. There's… no way he wants to deal with the implications of that, but also no way that he wants to give Fianna time to rethink their kiss and what it might mean.
The two women talk late into the night, so Tony's dozing on the air mattress when the sounds of Fianna opening her bedroom door wake him up.
He's barely awake enough to catch her when she trips on the mattress walking into his darkened room. The adrenaline he gets from that simple action is enough to help wake him up the rest of the way. She'd walked almost directly through the adjoining door, barely pausing to do anything else in her room.
"What on Earth?" she says, slipping her hand over her mouth when she hears how loud her shocked exclamation sounds.
"Loud, creaky bed substitute," Tony admits, falling back with her onto the rubber mattress.
"There isn't even a sheet on it!"
"I might not have been thinking with my brain."
Fianna is resting against his chest, her hips beside his hips, bare legs curled up right where he can touch her. Her tiny shorts have been driving him crazy ever since she changed into them thanks to the heat from the fire.
"Is now the point where I tell you I know exactly how loud a bare air mattress can sound during extracurricular activities?" she whispers.
"Is now the point where I tell you my heart is so far gone on you that I'd consider doing this on the floor?" he says, lifting his head to chase her lips.
"I'm right there with you, because I'm considering letting you, despite-"
Tony stops her by rolling the two of them off of the mattress onto the floor, using his body rather than his words to explain exactly how he feels, and why.
8888888888
The next three months are a whirlwind of sensation and laughter. They spend a lot of it in Pennsylvania, where his in-laws embrace Fianna with the kind of generosity he's always seen in both Balci women he's fallen in love with. It's as if all of them have checked their grief at the door, along with their worries and concerns about health, the media, and anyone else who isn't part of their small familial circle. Ember's birthday is a joyous occasion, and one of the things she specifically asks for is a package of female Lego people. Tony supposes it makes sense- she'd created lives and storylines for all of the other figurines. Whether or not this is shade that his daughter is casting on him, she doesn't think it's okay to simply take those characters from the lives she'd given them so they can be placed in families that already exist.
Ember's teachers all contact him within a month of school starting back up, praising him for whatever it is that he's done.
Their idyllic life made up of the most unconventional family on the face of the planet cannot, of course, continue indefinitely. The result of letting themselves act like it can, though, is that no one really pays attention to whether Fianna should be the one answering the door, come mid-October.
Ember's at school, but they're expecting some packages to make up her Halloween costume (Ember had thought it would be hilarious if she dressed up as the Infinity Gauntlet, with Tony dressed as Thanos, and Fianna dressed up as Leigh, but both adults had nixed that idea right out of the gate), and the Secret Service who guard the property usually bring those right up, knocking and leaving the packages. So when Fianna went to answer the door, she probably hadn't thought it would be a person at all.
"Tony!"
He hears her cry out, recognizes the fear in her voice, and grabs his ARC reactor from the desk, tapping on a gauntlet as he runs down the stairs.
At the door is Natasha Romanoff, her gun drawn, head cocked sideways. The gun is leveled at Fianna's head.
"I need an explanation that isn't sex robot or an affair with a wayward Skrull, Stark, and I need it now."
"Neither of those options require the use of that gun, Nat, so maybe you can fucking stand down?" Tony says evenly, holding out his palm, repulsor first.
"Black Widow?" Fianna asks. Her voice is still shot through with fear, but she sounds excited, too. "I've always wanted to meet you."
"Charmed," Nat says harshly. She'd pointed her gun down at the porch at Tony's request, but she looks no more ready to accept what she's seeing than when he'd first come down the stairs. Nat snaps her eyes up to meet his. "Tell me what large feature was on the roof of the diner where you met Fury and I."
"A giant donut," Tony tells her right away. He moves to stand in front of Fianna, his own weapon, the Iron Man gauntlet, still encasing his palm at his side.
"What did I give you there?"
"An injection to mitigate palladium poisoning."
Nat shifts her head, making it clear that she's addressing Fianna, though Tony's blocking most if not all of her from view. "What part of your body struck the wall when we were attacked in a house in New York City?"
"I've never been to New York. In either universe," Fianna says. Her tone is placating, but Tony catches a note of stubbornness in it. She thinks he should tell his former teammate the truth.
Natasha's expression is withering. "Really, Tony? She's from an alternate universe? That's selfish, even for you."
"Glad to know you thought there were depths I might not have reached."
"Do you like sun-brewed tea, Ms. Romanoff? We still get enough light in the fall." Fianna kisses his back and walks away. He doesn't check, but it's probably into the kitchen.
"How charming did you have to be to manage that?" Nat asks him. She's really angry, he can tell.
"It wasn't on purpose," he says. Of all the people that have met Fianna, Natasha has the potential to suss his original idea out. If she does, he really doesn't know what she'll do. "How's Bruce?" he asks, hoping to change the subject.
Nat crosses the threshold, but her expression is stone cold. "I should slap you in the fucking face, you get that, right? I could interrogate her right now and find a million reasons why you should be in a jail cell-"
"I took the guess that you're not much of a sugar girl," Fianna says, holding out a delicate glass filled to a precise three-quarters with amber liquid. "I can't tell you why he came to my universe. My guess is the answer has a lot to do with grief, as you suspect. But when I left, my life was in serious danger, and I've been grateful ever since. Kick his ass, by all means, but do it for things you feel hurt by. I can take care of myself."
Tony takes the opportunity to tap his ARC reactor, prompting full coverage of his Iron Man suit. "Just in case," he says, voice distorted by the suit.
Natasha Romanoff does not have to struggle to repress a smile. If she appears to be doing so, it's because she trusts you to see it. He's not so egotistical at this stage of his life that he thinks he merits her trust, but he's glad to see proof of it nonetheless.
She takes the tea from Fianna, and the three of them move to sit at the dining room table. "Always wanted to meet me?" Nat's expression is challenging.
Fianna's smile is slow and brave. "It occurs to me that I could make up anything about my universe, right now."
Tony taps off the suit. "Don't forget to tell her about President Rogers."
"Stop," Fianna says fondly. "Nothing so drastic. There was a particular reporter who was obsessed with footage of a red-haired assassin-looking fighter during the Battle of New York. Compiled a master-cut of footage, and I always thought it was particularly bad-ass."
She looks down at the table, and Tony thinks to himself, Uh oh, here comes the shoe drop. When it's about her universe, there's always a shoe drop.
"You were killed at the signing of the Sokovia Accords. You saved King T'Chaka's life in the process."
"I like that better than some ends," Nat says.
8888888888
If he'd been given a choice, Tony never would have introduced two separate groups of people with a draw on Fianna's time within three months of each other. By winter, they were spending what felt like every other weekend with someone, whether it was visiting Clint and Laura Barton and their family, talking shop with Bruce while Nat, Fianna, and Ember did things he probably didn't want to know about, or painting nails with the Balci cousins- all of the Balci cousins.
Tony starts to feel like they're a snowball gathering responsibilities and obligations as they slide downhill. He and Fianna do their best to keep to a schedule for Ember, but as Christmas approaches, Tony notices that Fianna's strength is flagging.
He'd once heard about a doomed aircraft, JAL 123. The pilots had done everything they possibly could to prolong the flight, to keep their passengers alive. Unfortunately the plane itself had been fatally damaged by circumstances beyond their control, and thirty-two minutes after the initial explosive decompression, the plane crashed. The efforts of the pilots to keep the plane airborne had enabled passengers to write letters to their loved ones- they'd known they were going to die, and had time to prepare themselves.
Tony had always wondered whether he would prefer to be on a plane with little to no warning before crashing, or to have some time to prepare. He'd never come to a solid conclusion on that. After living through Leigh's unexpected sacrifice and as he's about to begin a series of months watching his current girlfriend's health deteriorate, Tony is still no closer to an answer.
I think I'd just CUT the wire, he'd said to Steve Rogers, all those years ago. Oh, how he wishes there were such an easy solution for this.
8888888888
They stay back at the farmhouse instead of heading out for carol singing, on Christmas Eve. It's mostly because the Balci family's habit of turning holidays into week-long affairs has been cutting down on their alone time, but Tony also suspects Fianna's just not up for the walk.
She settles into the couch beside him in front of the actual fire, slipping her hand up under his shirt at the small of his back like she often does when they're alone. Tony likes to joke that she's his own personal heating pad.
"We should talk," she says, her eyes on the crackling blaze across from them.
Tony kisses her temple, then her cheek. "Yes, I 'like you' like you."
Fianna turns her lips into his, presses a warm hand to his cheek to hold him there. It's a searching kiss, stoking a fire he hopes they'll kindle further when she's finished telling him whatever she feels she has to say.
"I'm not doing well," she confesses. "I've been pushing myself too hard, keeping it quiet for the holiday. But we'll have to ramp back on visits, and I might have to sort out a pain relief solution sooner than later."
"What?" Tony whispers, shaken. "That's too soon. We should have months before that, yet. Healthcare has to be better here, and you're happy."
Inside, Tony's frantic. He thinks back to the time differential, how long Strange had said she'd have, when he'd rescued her, how many months that meant. By his rough internal calculation, they should have another year yet before her symptoms worsen enough to worry about her life being at stake.
"Settle your mind," Fianna says to him gently.
"I can't. You should still have twelve months before you're feeling this poorly!" Tony knows he can't argue his way out of everything, but that doesn't mean he can't try.
"For all you know, Tony, they had me on life support for ten months using my plasma for testing purposes," she says, pulling a blanket down from the top of the couch and spreading it across her shoulders and his legs.
"Don't say that," he begs.
"Do you want me to make you forget I said anything?" she asks, sliding the hand at his back down past his waistband a little.
He never claimed to be a well-rounded, responsible person, Tony thinks to himself as he loses himself in the task of forgetting.
8888888888
They get a reprieve throughout the winter of 2028, but Fianna breaks her leg the week before Easter, and the scans they do as a result show a catastrophic spread of her cancer. While he waits for her to be released from the hospital to home care, Tony designs a device she can use to zip around the house, with an attachment that guides the svelte seating device (he refuses to call it a wheelchair. Her doctors think it's a fucking revelation when he brings it to take her home, and they beg him to patent it, which he will do, once he's not working on keeping Fianna alive), or SSD up the stairs.
Ember's school allows her to have an extended Easter holiday, the non-holiday part spent, against Tony's better judgment, with Nat and Bruce at their house. He's not sure whether she's going to come back knowing how to use some sort of deadly weapon or with science knowledge she should probably be about ten years older before learning.
Fianna's exhausted on her first night back, so Tony just holds her all night. In the morning, after giving her pain medication, he slides back into bed with his laptop.
"Tony?"
He looks over at her. She looks nervous.
"Yes?"
"If I ask you something difficult, will you promise not to get upset?"
"No," he says casually, looking back at his screen.
"Tony!"
"You asked!" he protests.
"The point of asking is to prepare the person for the difficult question, not give an opportunity to reject it!"
"Sounds like a flawed system." He doesn't think he has the strength to answer anything she'd consider a hard question, not today. He's just glad he hasn't had to lay in bed without her for another night.
Somewhere in the depths of his mind, a dark truth stirs, but he stuffs it back down yet again.
"Did you come to my universe hoping I could take her place?" Fianna asks quietly.
Tony looks over at her in consternation. "No? You're not still worried about that, are you?"
"No, Tony," she says, and there's a note of chastisement in her tone that touches up a spark of fear inside him. "On Vormir."
"I should never have underestimated your ability to ask a truly miserable question," he says, the words leaving his mouth riding on a cough of surprise.
"Don't deflect," she says, a touch of steel crusting over into her tone.
He closes the laptop, turns his body, sets his feet on solid ground. "Yes." Getting up, he walks the laptop over to its case, sets it down. Familiar movements, comforting actions. "I threw out the idea before I met you the second time." Tony crosses his arms and looks over at the bed from across the room.
"I believe you," she says. "Do you still have the time quantum machine… whatever thing?"
"That's the technical term," he says, smiling, hoping she'll take the hint and continue with levity instead of gravity.
Carefully, painfully, Fianna starts to lift herself to a seated position. He starts over, but she holds up a hand. When she's done, she fixes him with a look. "Maybe we should pick the idea back out of the trash."
"Absolutely not."
Tony has hardly ever in his life been so frightened. The last time he can recall this level of desperation, he was trying to figure out how to save Leigh. How ironic that his ultimate solution brought him to Fianna, who has just started the same process over again.
He can't handle it.
Tony walks out of the room.
"Goddamnit, Tony, you know I can't follow you!" Fianna shouts after him, furious.
He's hardly ever run from a challenge in his life, but he's running from this one. Beside the front door is a bucket of miscellaneous things that might be useful on the way out the door, one of which is an old Iron Man bracelet. He grabs it and stalks outside barefoot, heedless of the blanket of snow. It'd be less cold if he ran, Tony thinks, so he does that, runs and runs until he reaches the clearing where he first met Leigh. His heart is racing, his feet ache, and he can't breathe.
Tony jams the bracelet onto his wrist, taps it in sequence, and pulls the mechanism to pop out the repulsor. Then he fires it, over and over and over again until the small battery inside is depleted and it starts smoking. Falling to his knees, he starts to cry.
"How many times do I have to repeat history before I've done my penance!?" he screams with a throat raw for some inexplicable reason.
"You're going to end up getting the police called on us," Fianna's voice says from behind and above him. It's distorted, and when Tony turns to look, he sees that this is because she's in his fucking Iron Man suit, hovering above him.
"Doesn't that hurt?" he whispers through what feels like shredded vocal cords. He must have been yelling at the top of his lungs for the entire time he was firing his weapon, he realizes. The ground in front of him is blackened, a miniature battlefield complete with impact craters and overturned earth for a good twenty feet.
"Not as much as being stuck in bed hearing you scream like that," Fianna says. Even through the distortion of the suit, he can hear how upset she is.
"I'm not sorry," he says, because he's not. He's not.
"Neither am I. I want to do it. I'm telling you now because I don't think you can get more upset, and you need to hear me."
Tony falls onto his back in the snow and feels its coldness seep into his clothes. "I'm not strong enough to do this," he says. He doesn't know if he's talking about the action of going back to Vormir, or talking about it at all.
She lowers herself unsteadily, clearly unused to the suit, but doing a damned good job controlling it even so. Tony would be proud of her if he weren't so fucking ashamed. "What would make it easier?"
"My stock answer used to be a time machine, can you believe that?"
"I don't want to be buried. I hate the idea of being cremated. Wouldn't it be better if-"
"If your body spent eternity on a shitty planet a million light-years away?" he asks. His tears aren't freezing on his face fast enough, but they're cold when they drip into his ears.
"If I could do something worthwhile, something to help, before I die?"
He's being unfair, Tony knows, but he'd rejected this option before he loved her, so it's even more impossible to him now. "Loving me is worthwhile."
"You wanted to do it once, you might change your mind again. At least one version of you should get a happy ever after," Fianna says. He can tell by the way her voice sounds in the suit that she's crying. "Don't make me sleep out here with you, Tony. Come back inside."
"Okay," he says.
8888888888
They agree to wait until her leg is fully healed to talk about it.
A week later, Fianna's weaned herself down to one prescription painkiller a day with supplemental tylenol. She sleeps a lot more than he's comfortable with, but she's coherent and vital when she wakes up, so Tony will take what he can get.
He finds out just how coherent (read: clever and manipulative) Fianna really is when he gets a visit from Natasha while Ember's at school.
"Take a walk with me," she says when he opens the door to find him there.
It's a warm spring day, not unlike the day he'd first met Leigh on that very property. Tony fully expects to get a lecture on making sure Ember's prepared for what's coming. He and Fianna have had some talks with her. The truth is that they've kept Ember in the loop on Fianna's cancer diagnosis and the realities of her chances of survival long term after Christmas.
Em's response had been both mature and painful to hear, but it also made sense. After having seen her mother's last message to her so many times, one thing had been drilled into Ember's mind.
"It's not on purpose, though, right? I mean, Mom made a choice that helped a lot of people. But it was a choice. She would still be alive right now if she hadn't have made it, right? You don't have that choice."
"What are you thinking about?"
Natasha's voice cuts through Tony's reverie.
"I was thinking about Ember. We've talked to her about Fianna being sick, and her big thing is that she's not sick on purpose." He looks over at Nat, whose expression is studiously blank on purpose, he thinks. It's a kindness. "Fianna's not choosing to leave her, you see. It makes a difference."
"What if Fianna chose a treatment that might take her life earlier than expected?" Nat asks.
"There's no treatment for fully metastatic cancer, Natasha," Tony says bleakly.
"Not a treatment, then. A decision."
His heart sinks. The lesson of his entire romantic life just might be, never fall in love with someone as stubborn as you are.
"She recruited you?" he asks Natasha.
"I was going to offer to go instead of you. If it's too hard- not just watching Fianna's decision, but handing over the stone to your other self, seeing what kind of life he'll get to have without the loss you went through."
Tony holds up his two hands as if framing a picture. He can picture that life. It's glorious. He can't even picture himself partaking in it, anymore. That younger Tony isn't really him.
"That's the only good part. I'm an egomaniac, Natasha. A narcissist. I can bring another fucking universe into being." He rocks back onto his heels and tries to smile, but his lips won't cooperate. "All I have to do is relive the worst moment of my life- worse than that. I didn't have to watch, the first time."
"You don't have to-"
"I owe it to her not to look away."
"She really wants to do this."
He looks up into the sun and remembers lying on his back on a hospital bed staring at the utilitarian lights overhead, barely a half hour without his wife, staring into them hoping to go blind. That light wasn't powerful enough, but this one is.
"I'm probably going to let her. Fuck, maybe I deserve this. Bury me under a single-word epitaph, Nat. 'Hubris.'"
"You don't deserve it, Tony. It's just that you were never taught not to try something that sounded like it might work," Natasha says, her lips twisting into a smile that would have looked mocking on someone without her subtlety. "Over and over again, technology and power made those things work. Sometimes magic did. That's not your fault."
"Yes, well. It's time to pay the piper, and all I have left is my girlfriend's life."
"She was going to lose that whether or not you met her, Tony. Don't forget that. She spent it better here, and you know it."
"Are you done manipulating me, or would you like to do it some more?" Tony asks her. "I think I need to go research how to punch a ghost in the skull."