Author's Note: The first three lines are directly taken off the Endgame transcript.

. . . Tony had the stones on his own gauntlet, the gamma radiation coursing through him.

"And I," he said. "Am Iron Man."

He snapped his fingers.

Chapter 1: Purgatory 101

Tony was ninety-nine point nine percent sure he was dead.

Cross that, he was a hundred percent sure he was dead, but only ninety-nine in terms of what came afterward. Because he'd been pretty sure he would wind up in hell, but he was somewhere that looked more like purgatory than anything else.

There was no infernal fire nipping at his heels. No skulls hanging from the ceiling. No demons and no screams, no signs of torment whatsoever. Nothing of what he'd expected from his crash courses on death and the afterlife, and considering the impressible database JARVIS and FRIDAY put together for him, that was saying something.

Because knowledge was power, even in death, so he'd given this damn matter a whole lot of thought. And even if not, Thor provided him with plenty of ideas on what kind of pleasantries to expect in the afterlife, and Tony knew that if anything that the guy said about his father and sister turned out to be true, he was not going to end up in a place like Muspelheim without a few good buffers. Some part of him had always hoped that whatever crazy-ass heroic finally managed to kill him would be enough to appease the spirits of hell, Hel, or something; ease up on the punishment and hand him a free pass, more like, but it would have to do.

"Hello," he called. (Wow, he had a voice.) "Hey. Anybody there?"

Nothing. Nada. Goose egg. Zero.

It was just him in the middle of nowhere, suspended in an empty white limbo that stretched on forever. For an idle moment, Tony wondered if his dad was too busy being roasted alive to miss out on the chance to come yell at him

Or maybe, he thought. The geezer somehow scaled Valhalla, and it's really me who ended up in hell.

He ended that train of thought before it got too depressing.

Instead, he turned in a slow circle, drinking in the whiteness that was so pristine in its, well, whiteness that it encroached on obscene. He was half expecting some kind of elder spirit to come running up at him any moment now, laden with pamphlets that described all the perks of being dead, because even the worst kind of afterlife had to have a procedure of some sort on appeasing newly dead souls, mostly for the reason that they were . . . newly dead. He had the thought that they wouldn't take kindly to being stuck down here for the remainder of eternity, and even he was only barely managing to get used to the idea.

He cleared his throat (wow, he had a throat), and played at parlay.

"I know you're supposed to irritatingly objective," he called. "But I could do with a guide. Like, right now."

Nothing.

Maybe whatever higher being that resided over hell-Asphodel-Niflheim-purgatory operated like one of those antique shops, owned by grandfathers that had personal grudges against all things bureaucratic. Maybe they thought dead people didn't need introductions to the afterlife, anyway, because what on earth could they possibly do? Kick their ways out alive through cremated bones and ashes?

Or maybe, he thought, he just had the crap luck to land himself in an obscure pagan culture where the standard procedure for the dead was to be left stranded in nowhere, lost and confused as fuck. Which could hardly be called fair treatment—he was Tony Stark—but then again, life had never been fair to him. Not since conception, and that was putting it mildly.

He raised an arm (yes, he had an arm), brushing a hand through his hair, thinking hard (and he was relieved that he was still capable of conscious thought). There was no way someplace as bleak as this space could be heaven, Christian or not, unless its intention was to trap him in eternal meditation. It would work for someone like maybe Natasha or Barton, because they were pro assassins who took the meaning of dead calm more than literally. Clint needed someone to bring him down from the whole I-give-zero-fucks outlook on life, anyway.

But for Tony Stark, walking embodiment of thoughts and inventions, this was almost a brand of hell that was too personal.

He knew one thing with certainty. If he didn't have someone or something to talk to, never mind the subject matter, he'd go from Stark Raving Hazelnuts to Stark Raving Mad in a mere matter of minutes. Seconds.

Maybe he was already there, and just didn't realize it.

He was not having a panic attack in the afterlife.

"Holy spirit of Wherever I Am," he called. "I want a tour of this place! And a guide. That should be within my rights as a citizen of, uh, Wherever, don't you have a Constitution lying around this place, I could write it for you if you don't know what it is, if you just hand me a pen—"

"Hey, Tony."

He swiveled so fast on his heels that he stumbled and lost his balance.

Immediately there was a wiry arm wrapped around his middle as she hauled him to his feet. He muttered an automatic thanks, looked at her, looked at her, and somehow she was more vibrant in death than she had ever been in life. She smirked in a way that wasn't just a slanted crack at mirth, as he'd grown to accept over the years, but both sides of her mouth were lifted into what was a wide grin.

He had still been keeping his fingers crossed for heaven. Or Elysium. Or Valhalla, if any of his Norse acquaintances proved themselves to be of worth and managed to pull him out of here, Wherever He Was.

But.

"Weird," he said.

"What's weird?"

"I thought it would be Thor's bitchy sister coming out to greet me in hail and thunderstorms." Tony swallowed, somehow managing despite himself not to choke on his words. "Or do you have more god in your blood than I know, Agent?"

She shook her head and smiled.

"Oh, Stark," said Natasha. "How I've missed you."

It was still him doing the majority of the talking, but she was at least listening to him.

As they walked, they were talking about this, talking about that, talking about Thanos ("hope you beat the shit out of him for me", "I'm insulted, Agent, just who do you take me for?"), but they were mostly talking after everything that happened after she'd fallen off that awful cliff, because they didn't keep her updated on anything important in this version of hell. Or purgatory. Because heaven was out of the option, now, with Romanoff down here with him.

Natasha seemed reluctant to tell him where they were, save for the fact that no, this wasn't hell.

"Oh, good," he said. "I thought it decided to disown me, for a moment there. And I had such nice plans to spend my afternoons rolling boulders and tantalizing myself over the idea of food, then shrivel down into a little flower when my sentence was done with. Or a tin can."

They shared a short laugh after that.

Tony only noticed that they were walking nowhere after minutes into his afterlife jog, maybe hours, he didn't know. How did time pass in this place, he wondered aloud, did the concept even exist? As always, Natasha cut him off before he could end up as a motherlode of questions, rolling her eyes.

Tony was a man of mechanical accuracy if nothing else, but he found that he wasn't too pissed off by his ignorance. A definite first.

Because death was doing him some good, too, and his muscles felt like they hadn't in years. On top of that, he'd somehow managed to bring his favorite black pinstripes and shades into the afterlife with him. Which really was quite fortunate, because he remembered this suit burning to its irreparable death way back when in Afghanistan.

The brogues on his feet that he'd formerly abandoned in the pits of a Siberian bunker helped, too, but he wasn't traveling down that memory lane yet. Preferably never.

"Nice shoes, Tony."

"Yeah," he said. "You're looking pretty good yourself."

Natasha grinned.

He took the chance to study his guide from a distance. Her hair was red and curling, instead of being tucked into the bleached braid he remembered. Her face was more rounded, the features soft (if such a thing was even possible). She looked a lot like when they'd first met, actually. The logical part of his brain was pulling these details apart and glue-gunning them back together into big white letters that spelled out impossible in all caps.

The other part of his brain drew the conclusion that whatever newfound vigor he found in his guide and in himself, it had something to do with a manifestation of the soul.

Even after the whole Thanos shitstorm, Tony had always thought of himself as a man in his thirties. He'd only mellowed out after Morgan came along and tackled him into fatherhood. He knew for a fact that Rhodey bemoaned on a regular basis about having wanted to remain forever in his twenties; Happy thought along the same lines. Pepper had been middle-aged for four decades or so, and . . .

Wrong memory lane, wrong memory lane.

And here he was, dumb and innocent in thinking that he could bring himself to conciliate with the afterlife. Embrace the terms of his death, forget about everything, forget about his daughter, et cetera.

"There must be some kind of kick-start pack Jesus used," he said. "You think it's been three days and three nights yet? Any chance I could summon myself back into life? They haven't done the funeral yet, I think."

There was no answering quip from Natasha. No hmms, no ahhs, which would still be more than anything he used to expect from her, but still, nothing. Tony stopped in his tracks at the next words that came out of her mouth.

"Tony," said Natasha. "You aren't dead."

"What."

It was proof of how much that took him by surprise that his exclamation ended up as one pithy syllable. Apparently, Natasha wasn't blind to this observation, either, because she raised both arms in an appeasing manner. It looked as though as she was trying to reign in a raging Hulk. And boy, was that a sight he missed when she continued speaking.

"You really aren't," she said. "And I'm about to prove it to you."

He thought he recognized her tone from somewhere, and after a moment it clicked in his mind. Out of all the Avengers, Natasha wasn't someone who had the proclivity to linger after a mission—most of the public cleanup was done by Tony and his brilliant, brilliant PA team, but on the rare occasions that she had to remain and deal with the aftershock of whatever disaster they landed themselves in, she used that precise tone of voice to talk to people who'd just lost their families. Their friends. She used it to talk to old ladies and sniffling girls she would have to be morally crippled to turn away from, not that he was denying her anything.

And Tony would know, because he talked the exact same way to deal with any underage Iron Man fans.

Oh my God, was she babying him? She was babying him.

He was glad he had pockets in his suit he could stuff his twitching hands into.

"What do you mean, I'm not?" he said.

"You just aren't, Tony." Natasha let out a sigh, rubbing a frustrated hand along her temple. She was probably aware that he was hyperventilating, observant, sneaky little spy that she was. The nerve of her.

(Oh my God.)

"Look, Tony, I really can't explain it in words. For starters, I have no idea how this place functions—"

"I'd have an idea if you gave me a blueprint!"

"Or what led to you being the exception to all rules, again—"

"Or took the time to explain things for once, dammit!"

"Shut it, Stark."

He did, content with the knowledge that he was driving her more up the wall than she was driving him.

Natasha sighed, suddenly sounded very old. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Um." That question gave him food for thought. Deep breaths, Tony. Deep breaths.

If he was bothered by the fact that his inner voice of reason sounded a lot like Pepper, he wasn't going to show it.

"The gauntlet, right? The snap, obviously. Me and my famous dying words and the look of utter panic on Old Blueberry's face. Wish they had a VCR here so I could record that and see it on repeat for eternity, I—"

Natasha glared. He did the clichéd little gesticulation of pretending to lock and zip his mouth.

"But you don't remember dying," she said. He could tell that she was struggling to make herself sound calm. Hah.

Tony took his hands out of his pockets and made another exaggerated gesture, moving his arms to scratch at the side of his neck. He knew for a fact that it was a nervous tick marked down in his SHIELD dossier, but by this point he was willing to let all acts and pretensions to go to hell. No Fury for the Russian to report to.

"Uh, no. I thought that had to do with the spontaneous combustion I was bound to suffer from the effects of snapping. Remember the power surge I told you about, from the gauntlet? Remember Hulk's arm?"

He paused there, lips twisting in a grimace. "Remember Bruce?"

It was a bad jab, and he knew it, because he was abruptly pulled sideways with his forearm in a death grip.

"Look," Natasha hissed, releasing his wrist. "Just . . . just hear me out on this, okay?"

She pointed toward something in front of them.

He blinked. Stared. There was a surface floating in nothing, for lack of a better word, shimmering and rippling like the top of a very large lake. If his eyesight was any worse, he could have believed that the entire limbo was just a big room painted white and that this was the door made out of stuffy vinyl.

Almost.

His eyesight was quite intact, and, well, the door appeared to be liquid. There was a distant haze of shadows that moved someplace behind it, and he could hear voices coming from the surface as well, whispers and words that were nothing more than wisps resembling the human voice. Voices that sounded very, very dead, and unreal.

Natasha must have seen his expression, because she held up a preemptive hand to stop him.

"Fact one." She folded a finger. "You aren't dead. Fact two: the Infinity Stones aren't compatible with each other. And by that, I mean fact three: they really aren't compatible with each other." She paused, scratching at her own chin in turn. "I should have just stuck that onto fact two, but I how you science geeks are with numbers."

"You're getting there."

"Tony," she said. "Thanos . . . was very goal-orientated, despite his truckload of faults. He also was a Titan. Big, powerful, you get the idea. He had a purpose, a . . . distinct idea of what he wanted to do with the Stones as well as the physical body and tool to harness their energy, and even those weren't enough to stop the Stones from killing half of him."

"Well, Thor killed the other half." He crossed his arms. "You're still getting there, Agent."

"I told you to hear me out on this, okay? Aside from the fact that you're only human—and I'm not taking any objections." He hadn't been about to object, but maybe Natasha was losing her edge. "Can you remember what you were exactly thinking when you put on that gauntlet? What you think you wanted to do with the Stones?"

Tony frowned. That was actually a very astute question, because somehow, he just couldn't remember.

He thought back to his final moments. His last memories of the battlefield were fuzzy at best; it was as if he was examining something through the top of a very dirty mirror. His snap and immediate incineration should have been the freshest things in his mind, though, even in death, barring any residue of PTSD in the equation.

Weird didn't even start to describe this conversation. Everything was crazy.

"I just wanted some peace and quiet for once, I think." He thought about it some more. Orange bits of light, Strange raising a finger, Thanos throwing him on the ground . . . "For the alien army to fuck off and leave everyone alone. For the Stones to blow themselves up."

"Go on."

"I didn't want to die, Romanoff. You think I'm suicidal? Is that what you're implying?"

She left the question unanswered. Wise of her.

"I told you to listen, Stark. Those are some very vague things to ask for."

"Okay," he said. "Agent, I'm too aware that I am, was, only human at the time of the snap, it wasn't enough, and that this vague goal you keep talking about could have killed me. And I can't believe I'm talking about vague goals when I've spent more than thirty years out of university, dammit."

He gave her a long stare. "Is there another but you haven't told me about?"

There was a prolonged sort of silence. She was definitely stalling.

He could hear the faint voice melting through the surface of the liquid door, from the liquid mirror, an anxious, angered voice that suddenly sounded more real than before. Voices, to be exact, because now that he was paying attention he could discern that there were more than one. It sounded like they were talking to each other, with different lulls and halts in the conversation.

He strained an ear toward the door, but kept most of his thoughts focused on Natasha. Never mind the fact that she had on the best poker face he'd seen in his life; it would take both Barton and Bruce to crack it. Maybe a bad language word from Steve Rogers. He would know.

Finally, finally, she decided to explain herself. "Tony," she began in the quiet, low voice associated with general bad news and planet invasions, "the Reality Stone took your wish more seriously than it should have."

What?

"Are we talking about sentient jewelry now? Are we talking about sentient jewelry now. That's a direct trope ripped off Lord of the Rings, Agent, and as much as it pains me to say so, I don't understand."

"We studied the mechanics of the Stones together."

"Not that you understood any of them—"

"Shut up, and tell me more about those alternate timelines of yours."

"Um." He thought he'd steeled himself for any strange questions, but he hadn't expected that request. "Divergences from the original timeline, right. We had to pick exact points to travel back in time so that we didn't overlap with our past selves, avoiding the time paradox and all that crap, which was why I ended up with a mild case of cardiac dysrhythmia in 2012 and had to make that half-baked attempt at overcoming my daddy issues. It could have been worse, I think."

He was rambling.

"What if I told you . . ." Jesus, Natasha was stalling.

"Spit it out, Romanoff."

And here he could tell she was bracing herself for his reaction, "What if I told you, Tony, that instead of pulling you to a point in the timeline, that vague wish of yours sent you to a different world? Courtesy of the Infinity Stones?"

His train of thought stuttered to a stop.

"A different world where reality is so twisted, the Stones no longer exist?"

The rails promptly blew themselves up.

"But, but." The conductor of his little mental train was climbing out of the compartment and running circles on the ground, screaming his head off. Oh God. Oh God. "I destroyed it. Them. The Stones."

"You think you did, Tony."

"It's not just a thought, I'm a hundred and twenty percent certain that I—"

Her mouth thinned into a hard line. "For your credit, you managed to get rid of the other five."

"Romanoff," he snapped. "Natasha. I'm dead. You're dead, too, all because of some shiny stones a sadistic megalomaniac couldn't leave alone, and you're here as well. I don't see you trying to talk your way out of death." He flailed his arms. "I thought this was our little reconciliatory heaven for Valiant Losers or something! Or, or Winners, since we both kicked our relative buckets at a nice age. I don't mind. Do you mind?"

She had on the impenetrable poker face again. "Who knows, Tony? Maybe I'm just a figment of your imagination."

"Wait, I can't be that delusional."

Wasn't he, though?

The poker face broke. She laughed. Pointed at the shimmering door.

"Go, Tony. My time's up."

Time?

"I don't get it."

"You need to go back into the world of the living, Tony." Her face softened. "Wrap your big, fat head around it, would you?"

"I . . . I don't understand."

And it was physically paining him to admit it, but yes, for the first time in the quasi-long life of Anthony Edward Stark, he understood nothing about a conversation. He was stranded in a blank space with a dead teammate, both of them saddened by death and burdened by those they had to leave behind, and after the most absolving conversation he'd had in years, she was choosing to direct him toward madness and sin.

Again.

He was changing his mind: this wasn't purgatory. This was his own special brand of hell.

The door, the mirror, was somehow edging closer to him. Or maybe he was being pulled into it, he didn't know, he was grasping at the edge of the whiteness and talking fast—

"Or I could stay here instead, I know you think I'm annoying as hell, but hey, I'll be good company! The eternal meditation and repenting could be good for me long-term-wise, I used to learn yoga at the gym, did Happy ever tell you—"

"I said go, Stark." He couldn't even see the lines of her face anymore. "And try to remember us, yeah?"

His sight rippled into silvery puddles, their glow all but blinding. He lost the grip on one hand. Then the other.

"Nat—"

Apparently Natasha had no intention of letting him ever finish, because she raised one leg and kicked him in the behind.

He stumbled through the door, flying into nothingness.

"Use the boy . . . Use the boy . . ."

"Yes—Potter—come here."

Tony was lying in the middle of an unfamiliar room.

For one short, brief second, he let himself believe that everything had just been part of a bad dream. He was going to wake up and hear FRIDAY chirping in his ears. Morgan would jump on the mattress next to him, demanding Daddy cook dinosaur pancakes for breakfast because she was in that phase all five-year-olds went through. And then Pepper would come inside the room, kiss him on the cheek, and say . . .

Oh, shit. Who was he kidding?

He looked up. He was in an empty stone chamber; there were no traces of the pristine whiteness here. More stone stretched above him, the tiles arching higher and higher into a gloomy darkness—he was sensing a historic pattern in the architecture—but there was a cold wind blowing through the dark, the underground, enough to provide him with a fresh gulp of air instead of the emptiness he'd been inhaling inside the limbo. Which wasn't much of a shock, really, because everything about today had been the very definition of unfamiliar. He had no idea how he'd managed to land himself in the Middle Ages, though.

God, he was going to strangle Romanoff.

Shaking his head, he sat up, noting with a slight preen that he still had on his favorite suit and shoes. So limbo had been good for something, at least. To hell with the fact that anyone who found him here would burn him alive at the stake for the witchiness of his Tom Fords. Now, if only he'd wrangled more information out of Natasha before that unceremonious kick, he could perhaps find his way back into—

Tony rubbed his eyes. A shattered mirror stood behind him.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

One minute in the land of the living, and he was already a vandal.

He wished he could choose to curl up and die (again), but he knew that Natasha would kick him back into the land of the living at the sight of his face. And his legs hurt like crazy.

Tony tested his weight on the soles of his feet, stood, and fell flat on his ass.

There were two other people in the room.

One stood a few feet away at the foot of a door that seemed to be fashioned out of smoke and fire, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he could see that the person was dressed in various shades of medieval and crazy. He was a wizened old man who had a magnificent white beard tucked into a belt. Tony immediately dubbed him as Gandalf inside his head, because he couldn't let his Tolkien go to waste with a perfect simile right in front of him.

Instead of a blue wizard's hat, Gandalf had on the strangest combination of clothes Tony had ever seen outside a screen, and considering what he'd been put through for the last decade or so, this was by no means a small feat. He had a cloak; a robe; and little half-moon spectacles glinted off the light coming from the flickering flame door as he turned.

A thin piece of wood was pointed at his companion, who lay in a crumpled heap on the floor, the back of his head smoking like a badly burnt potato.

Gandalf cleared his throat. The body of the blackened bald man rose into the air.

"Perhaps," he said. "You would care to explain how you came to fall out of the Mirror of Erised."

Notes: (It's almost funny, because we never do know what happened to Quirrell's body. Do they bury it? Cremate it?)

And that's that! Reviews are greatly appreciated; please tell me what you liked.

On a side note, it feels so cathartic to be writing again. Stay safe, guys.