Chapter Three: Eternal Spring
Abbi took forever to dress for her date. Tony had said he'd just take her to someplace out of the way, somewhere that celebrities liked to go when they didn't want to be recognized. He promised that dressing in casual 'date-wear' would be enough, but once she was wearing the little black dress with the asymmetrical neckline, she wondered if 'date-wear' for the wealthy was far more fancy than that.
The skirt was flirty and fell to her knees, and she paired it with her sexiest black heels and an eclectic green necklace that brought out her eyes, but Abbi still worried.
She was less worried when she'd only had to wait thirty seconds for his car to pull up. It was the same one he'd dropped her off in, and when she'd gotten in, the expression in his eyes told her she'd dressed just fine. Tony was looking at her like he'd missed seeing her for a few years, and drinking her in was all he was capable of.
"You're exaggerating your expression to make me feel better," she finally said, at the first red light. "Watch the road."
"Yes, dear," he teased. The endearment made her glow from within, just a bit, because it seemed to come so very easily. Abbi felt tongue-tied, and she sat in the car and just watched him drive for the five minutes it took to get to the side street he pulled into.
"I made a special arrangement," he said. "Wait here."
She definitely felt self-conscious waiting in a car that expensive in an empty alley, but he came out after less than five minutes with two large carryout bags.
"Wanted to eat looking out on the city. What do you think, Persephone?"
Under the light of the restaurant's rear light, he looked a little bit like a Hades figure, she decided. His hair was lighter at the tips, like he'd gotten it styled in the twenty-four or so hours since she'd seen him last. She could picture him like a modern-day Greek God, sitting on his throne in the Underworld and complaining about the poor quality of people that kept dying and cluttering up his domain.
"Get in and show me?" she said, feeling brave.
"I'd love to."
Again they didn't chat much on the drive, which felt strange considering their easy discourse the night before, but that hadn't been a date, so Abbi wasn't too concerned. The sunset was well underway once he was parked at his destination, which turned out to be an exclusive parking garage. It appeared that he had a special tag on the car somewhere because the gate opened right away when he pulled up. The surroundings were kind of bland but the actual view was spectacular. So was the food.
"I can't believe you're letting me eat in here. You just met me," she said after a few heavenly bites.
"Sometimes you just know," Tony said, looking over at her.
Abbi was blown away by the expression on his face. Had he been hiding this from her? He looked- he looked like he was in love with her. Something about her reaction must have spooked him, though, because his lips twisted up into a sad kind of smile and he looked back at his food.
"So did you do something with your hair since I saw you last night?" she asked, trying to break the tension.
"Yes. Yep. Touched it up a little."
For the first time, Abbi felt uneasy. Certain things about his behavior just felt off to her. Granted, she didn't have much to go on, but the dynamic between them seemed completely different, from his side. He was acting as if somehow they were much more emotionally attached, but also as if he was reticent to hold any kind of a meaningful conversation.
Abbi had set her phone on DND when she'd hopped into the car, but she pulled it out, ostensibly to check up on her mother. Before she got a chance to hit the button to turn on the screen to check notifications, Tony's voice, sharp and anxious, startled her into dropping it into her lap.
"On your phone already? That doesn't bode well."
"I need to check up on my mother. I told you about her cancer?"
"Shit, yes, I'm sorry," Tony said. "Your mother."
"It was just yesterday," Abbi said, meaning that he hadn't known for long, but once again, Tony's behavior triggered a kind of alarm in her.
"I have a lot on my plate right now. I just forgot." He sounded defensive and pissy, if she was honest with herself. "It's been- I forgot."
"Well, if it's all the same to you, I'm going to stand up. I think I dropped a piece of rice down my dress, and before you offer to find it for me, standing up will get it to drop onto the pavement," Abbi said. She phrased it as casually as she could, but inside her head all of her senses were screaming to check her phone. Her dress didn't have a pocket, so she did the only thing she could think of, certain that with his odd behavior, Stark would take the device and hide it somewhere if she so much as set it down within his reach.
Abbi tucked her phone into her bra.
Stark grinned. "Is that on vibrate?"
"Hold that thought?" she said, trying to sound enticed.
"Always."
Again, he looked at her like a man drunk on the sight of her. Abbi brushed aside the way it made her skin crawl. It was almost like someone else was wearing his face? It was the strangest feeling. She opened the car door, sliding her feet onto the concrete and shifting the meal setup off of her lap and onto the floor of the car. When she stood, she shook her dress out, and, hoping it wouldn't actually break her phone, slipped it out of her bra in as surreptitious a move as she could before letting it fall against her skin and down inside the dress.
Whoever she was on a date with, she couldn't risk that he wasn't as smart as Tony Stark was, and it seemed like he really didn't want her to look at her phone.
Luck was on her side. The phone landed face up, and she said, "Shit," under her breath, leaning over to pick it up.
"Abbi," Stark said, his voice very serious.
The phone was full of notifications. From Tony. Who was wondering where she was.
Abbi's whole body broke out in goosebumps.
"Abbi, don't freak out," the man in the car said.
"How exactly do I not freak out?" she said in a high-pitched voice. She lifted her foot, knocking the shoe off of it. Her hands were shaking, but she unlocked the phone as fast as she could, tapping one of Tony's messages and starting to type a response. Running could only do so much if he didn't know she was in danger!
She heard a noise and tried to turn to protect the phone, smashing her fingers against the screen to try to trigger the 'send' button, even if she hadn't gotten everything typed out.
Stark wrapped an arm around her, pulling the phone out of her hands in the moment of frightened confusion when she felt him grab her.
The screen showed that she had sent a message.
I'm with you! who. HEL;'lp,/]
He looked at it and swore under his breath, throwing the phone off the side of the garage. Abbi started to cry.
"No, no, no, sweetheart, don't, don't," he said, his voice tender and his arm gentling around her.
"Who are you?" she gasped out.
"I'm me. Tony. I'm just- the hair, it wasn't yesterday. Been like this for over a year. I'm from, well. A different universe doesn't quite describe it. Call me Hades, I guess. Lord of the Underworld. I came for you."
He started walking them to the car, and Abbi stumbled, kicking off her other shoe.
"You came for me?" she asked, hoping she could figure out how to stall him.
"You are- were my wife. You… well, you're dead, but you didn't die. You disappeared. A lot of people did. We tried to fix it. It didn't work, but we figured out how to travel between universes. I gave myself a few years to try to unravel what went wrong."
Abbi let her body go limp, resisting him as best she could. This- this was Tony, a version of him. A dark, desperate version of him. Hades, he'd called himself, and that seemed apt. He seemed practically consumed by hubris. Unfortunately, Tony Stark was Tony Stark. He was one of the strongest people she'd ever known, and her passive resistance was doing practically nothing. He sat her in the car seat, throwing her food into its bag and tossing that into the back.
"Why not take her? Take your wife, before she disappeared!" Abbi pleaded. Tony, find me, please have done something ridiculous to my phone! she pleaded silently.
Stark buckled her into the seat so tightly Abbi winced, and he immediately loosened the belt, touching her face with a loving hand that felt ghoulish.
"Can't. She's doing something important seconds before. I tried."
"Pick a different universe, then! Why would you rob another self of his possible happiness?" Abbi asked, aghast. She watched him start around the car and reached for the door handle, only to find him lunge to stop her.
"Abbi, for fuck's sake! It's me, I'm still Tony. I love you. Don't you want to be with a Tony that already loves you? I need you. More than he does."
She could scarcely breathe for the terror she was feeling. "You're not mine. I'm not yours. This is wrong."
"I'll convince you," he promised. He tapped at the glow of his ARC reactor on his chest, and his suit started growing from the thing, spreading in tiny particles to cover his whole body. Abbi was only inches away and she was frozen in fear to watch it, understanding that this was futuristic technology for her time. When he was fully encased, Stark pried up a loop that appeared on his right arm, and a handcuff appeared.
"Not with that you won't. If you truly loved me, you wouldn't lock me up, or restrain me, or, or handcuff me to you!" she protested.
"I would if I had to," was his bleak reply. "If it was the only option. And it is."
"JARVIS, do you hear me?" Abbi asked in inspired desperation. "You're running his suit, right? You have to stop him!"
"Clever girl, but JARVIS is gone," Stark told her.
"Hands off my soulmate, Muldoon." Tony's voice was coming from above them. It was Abbi's version of him, hopefully, hovering with both repulsors in his hands activated and pointing straight at Stark.
Stark gave up on the handcuff and shot a repulsor at Tony, who was knocked out of midair and landed in a scrape of metal on the concrete, ten feet away.
"Time to go," Stark said, tapping at his ARC reactor again to reveal his pants pocket, where he pulled out a bracelet with a small suspended gap between the edges. He tried to slip it onto her arm using the gap, but she unbuckled her seatbelt and shoved at him, her hands scrabbling at the door handle.
"Duck, Abbi," her Tony's voice called out, and she threw herself down as far as she could.
The motion gave the alternate version of Stark the opportunity to get the bracelet around her arm, but she crushed it against her chest before he could activate anything. Stark's determination to do even that small thing got him knocked sideways when Tony fired his repulsor not at either of them, but at the engine of his car. The whole thing rocked up into the air, but she was less jostled than Stark was, who fell over and out onto the concrete.
"Stay down. Help is on the way," her Tony told her, flipping up the faceplate so she could see him. The two men looked different, she saw, but for both of them, she was a distraction.
"Don't focus on me!" she told Tony, seconds before he shoved the probably totaled car away from the two men with a powerful kick. The whole thing slid probably twenty feet, her stomach lurching with the lateral speed, but what Abbi was more frightened by was the huge, wide repulsor Stark had created out of the center of his suit.
"Mine's more powerful than yours, Tony. You have ten, fifteen years before you'll get results like this," Stark said, firing a beam of white, concentrated power at her Tony. Luckily he was smart enough to jolt away.
Something about the triumph in Stark's face made Abbi remember the bracelet, and she tore it off of her wrist and threw it onto the driver's seat beside her in fear.
It flashed something like an aborted countdown, and she heard an anguished cry.
"Abbi! Please!" Stark screamed, grief writ large across his face for a split second before a white suit with red accents encased his body, including his head. Then, he seemed to shrink into nothingness in front of her and completely disappear.
An Iron Man suit flew over to her and hovered. It looked authentic- the chestpiece had a triangular window to Tony's ARC reactor, and there were no strange geometric glowing shapes at certain joins of the armor, but Abbi still eyed it warily.
The version of Tony struggled with the faceplate for a while until it finally lifted. "Okay, that was weird. Wasn't that weird?"
"Weird you got frosted tips or weird there were two yous?" Abbi asked, half of her attention still on the strange bracelet-thing. In the sky far behind them she saw what looked like a third suit of armor, and in utter fear and dread, she pointed. "Another you incoming!"Tony's faceplate slid down with a servo sound, and he spun around, activating his repulsors, but seconds later, he powered them back down. "It's Rhodey. My best friend. I called for backup."
"Which you called for backup, though?" she asked.
"Good point. If he has frosted tips, I'll blast him to Mars," Tony promised.
"I don't even know him and I have a feeling he won't appreciate that you said that." For the first time that evening, Abbi smiled. Tony smiled back, and her heart leapt just a bit. "You might want to grab that thing and put it in stasis or something. I think he was trying to take me back with him. You might be able to figure out how to make a dimensional portal or something with it." She pointed to the bracelet.
"Just do me a favor and don't touch it. I'll have Rhodes lock it down before I take it anywhere," Tony said, and his caution warmed her heart even further. "Why don't you get out of there just in case?"
"Gladly," Abbi said. As she climbed out of the car in her skimpy dress (something she was pretty sure Tony would have loved to have witnessed if he wasn't reporting the absolutely batshit events that had just transpired to his similarly-suited friend), she felt a pang of loss for the desperate, insane Tony Stark they'd encountered.
"You're dead… You… disappeared. A lot of people did."
It didn't seem like that Tony Stark was trying to save the 'lot of people' who disappeared, though. He was just trying to save her. Because he loved her so much he tried to steal another version of her just so he didn't have to do without anymore. It was sobering.
She walked away from the car and shivered. Night had fallen, and they were on something like the ninth floor of the parking garage, which was already situated on somewhat of a hill. The wind cut right through her thin black dress.
"You okay?"
It was Tony's voice, but Abbi still started in surprise, looking over to see that he'd taken off the armor. She walked closer, lifted her hand to brush it through his hair, which seemed like it was all the same brown color. The look on his face as she touched him reminded her a lot of the look on the fake Tony, and Abbi backed away, still shaken by what had just happened.
"He didn't fuck things up for us, did he?" Tony asked, his tone resigned, vulnerable.
"No, I don't think so," Abbi said, truthfully. "That man loved me. I could see it in his eyes. Whatever happened between this night as it was meant to go, and the day he lost his version of me, it was real. But the way he looked at me? It was toxic, Tony. Destructive. I don't ever want you to turn into that man, even if it means we have to part ways right now."
"Don't go all noble on me," he said in a shaky voice, taking a step toward her. "I saw it too. I'd like to try on the good parts before we toss it all for the good of humanity, maybe?"
"You saw what his suit was made of, and you're probably already figuring out how to make one. He said, what? Ten, fifteen years? I give you six months," Abbi said, hearing the pride in her voice and marveling at the way it made Tony's eyes light up. She took a few steps in his direction, only leaving a few feet between them. "And then there's that bracelet."
"Rhodey used one of his gauntlets to contain it. He's flying it back to a facility we're building, upstate, for containment," Tony interrupted. He grinned, looked down at what space was left between them, and reached out his hand to grab and pull her so she was more like an inch away. "Did he kiss you?" he asked, suddenly.
Abbi shook her head, tipping her head to the side as she looked up at him. Confidence and concern wove patterns in the lines on his face. There were fewer lines than the other Stark, and these were already becoming familiar to her. They'd shared something, this night, something more profound than a simple first date. Not that she was going to count this as a first date.
"Good," Tony said. "I want to be the first Tony Stark that falls in love with you and gets to kiss you."
"Selfish as always," Abbi teased lightly. "It doesn't lose something, knowing it's going to happen? I mean, not just us, but- he was haunted, Tony. Something's going to happen. Something really terrible. And he didn't even try to warn us. I don't want you to ever get that broken."
"Well, losing you was a step toward that, so…" Tony said, dangling the conclusion with an insufferable smirk.
"You'll lose me to the cold, at this rate," she said, exaggerating by about fifty degrees. Abbi shivered, and he dragged her up against him, rubbing his hands along her back and arms.
"I'd put you in the car and turn up the heat, but-"
"He totally stole it from you, didn't he? How do you even report that to your insurance?" Abbi asked, laughing against his chest.
"I'd rather he stole the car than the girl, honestly," Tony said. He tipped her head up toward him and lifted his eyebrows, silently asking. Abbi nodded, and Tony leaned down, brushing her lips with his once, twice, then pressing in for a deeper third kiss, nudging her lips open and brushing her tongue with his gently before pulling away. "Tell me you're not going to have nightmares that wear my face," he whispered, kissing her temple and pulling her against his chest again.
"I can't promise that, but- Tony?"
"Hmm?"
"Hades didn't succeed in taking Persephone, in this universe. Maybe we can prevent the terrible Winter he was so destroyed by?" she suggested. "That would do a lot to declaw those nightmares."
"Eternal Spring," Tony said, a hum of happiness resonating through his chest to the cheek she rested against it. "I like the sound of that."
"Me too," Abbi said. Spring was the start of something new. The broken, desperate version of Tony Stark had asked her if she wouldn't rather be with a Tony who already loved her, but she hadn't even been tempted. Sure, this version didn't look at her like she was a goddess personified, yet, but she wouldn't give up all of the moments in between now and then for anything. Not even the chance to be Queen of a technologically advanced underworld ten years in the future.
Persephone was the goddess of new beginnings, after all. That was close enough for her.
NOTE: According to some of the websites I consulted about Persephone, when she was born to Demeter and Zeus, she was also known as 'Kore' or 'the girl.' It seemed like a great opportunity to make my Persephone stand-in to be a courier. I toyed with calling the service Koreier and Ives but it was too obscure. I scattered some references to the myth in the story, but tried not to be too heavy-handed, so not everything has a hidden meaning. Abigail's name is just her name, because in the end, she's not actually Persephone at all.