Well, I realize that I made a mistake. When Wanda became an Avenger, FRIDAY was already online, but I did that mistake in the past chapters, so I'm going to hold it. I never said when this fic is exactly happening and I realized now that I mixed event so much... but I don't care xD This fic is AU as hell anyway, so xD
Beta Reader: Alia275
"WHO THE HELL ARE THEY?!" Tony yelled when he saw the evil Avengers enter.
It was not a big explosion, just one of the console panels in the Avenger's Mansion Lab. Then, the next one. Some of the Avengers were too shocked to react, but not Carol. She began to glow, summoning her power, when Hawkeye stepped forward and raised his hand. Carol doubled over in pain, her glow fading. He stepped away from her as she tried unsuccessfully to stand.
"We are not here to fight," Steve Rogers told Carol, who was gasping in pain.
Robbie turned on his Ghost Rider mode, intending to attack Hawkeye with his chain, but Natasha raised her hand, creating a golden shield that protected Clint from attack.
"Then why are you here?" T'Challa asked diplomatically before the situation could worsen.
"It's a warning. Surrender or die," Steve answered, voice cold.
That cold voice and expression from this Steve sent shivers down the Avengers' spines.
"I think you know us better than that, punk," Bucky said uneasily to Rogers.
Steve smirked.
"Yeah, I know," he answered as another part of the lab exploded
Peter was trying to connect with the network of Mansion, trying to figure out what the hell was happening.
"Kid, stop," Tony said with a smile. "E-D-I-T-H," he spelled, smirking.
Peter realized what he was saying.
"What's going on?" Natasha asked Tony, who seemed to have the same realization that Peter had.
"Even dead, I'm the hero. That... other me - he knows Edith's coding. It's like breaking to his own house, because he has the keys," Tony rubbed his eyes in tiredly. Literally, the legacy that Peter was trying to carry bit him in the ass. His technology would be turned against him. He was too tired to make this science talk that only Bruce would understand, he was always giving, so he gave them a simple metaphor that everybody would understand.
"Treat this as a warning. You are no match for us," Thor said as Clint created a portal that sucked up the Sinister Six.
When they had left the room, something big blew up.
"God, this is so fucking complicated, so weird - fucked up," Clint groaned.
"Why are you two here, Edith?" Tony asked the hologram.
"To save our world from the Sinister Six," Edith answered honestly, watching Tony with some mixed emotions.
Natasha looked at hologram... she was so human that Tasha almost could read her like she was reading any human. Edith was hiding something.
Well. Probably a lot.
"But this... evil, future Tony from the Sinister Six managed to take control over... you," Banner clarified, looking at Edith.
" The Merchant of Death. Yes. But I'm not in his control anymore. I guess you'll see," Edith sighed.
"The Merchant of Death?" Tony gulped. He was not pleased with that nickname anymore.
- Yes. The 'father' that the Black Widow in Peter's memory was speaking of sometimes was called 'Lover of Death'. He found it amusing to call one of his sons the 'Merchant of Death,'" Edith explained.
Tony thought that he was apparently doomed to have shitty excuses of fathers in his life. The thought made him snort bitterly. It was kind of downgrading, returning to that name.
The next memory was in the lake house. They were sitting in the living room, tending each other's wounds. Robbie was pulling broken pieces of glass from Lila's leg on the sofa. Carol was sitting in the chair. icing her head and unable to pull herself together after whatever Clint had done to her.
"That was not a real attack. That was just a little warning," Peter said quietly to Wilson, who stood nearby.
"A little warning?" Clint snorted.
"If...if he...uses the whole firepower of EDITH, we will no longer be among the living," Peter continued.
"I'm aware," Wilson sighed. "Can you retake control of her?" he asked.
Normally, Peter would argue with him again...but for now, he was too tired for that.
"I don't know," he answered honestly. "Tony wrote her after all," he added with a sigh.
"They can destroy the Earth with her..." it was not accusation from Wilson, just a simple statement. "God, never in my wildest dreams did I think that we would have to fight them." Wilson sounded tired too.
"Yeah." Peter only nodded.
"How are you feeling?" Sam asked.
"Knowing that even in his darkest, most fucked up version, Tony still can't let me die? Wonderful," Peter snorted sarcastically. He was still thinking about that. Why did they save him?
"They're going to play on our feelings," Wilson said. "We can't give them that."
"Do you think you can do it? Use this shield to punch Steve in his perfect, evil teeth?" Peter asked Wilson. "I don't think so. Because during the day, we can be Spider-Man and Captain America...but when it ends...I'm a kid who got rich on the Stark Effect and you are the man that carries a shield that isn't his," Peter said, then left the room.
"Stark Effect?" Steve asked, looking at Edith.
Clint chuckled, hearing that name.
"After Tony's death in our universe...everybody in the universe learned that the Terran warrior, Tony Stark, killed Thanos and created the technology that brought their loved ones home. Stark Industries became the biggest company in the universe then. Basically, Peter meant that he got rich on Tony's death." Edith shrugged.
"It seems that like you, Peter knows how to say what hurts most," Natasha observed to Tony, thinking about Sam's expression when Peter had said he carried a shield that wasn't his. She could guess that both of them had heard that accusation before. Part of carrying someone else's legacy, it seemed.
Tony knew that you couldn't be the owner of Stark Industries and play nice at the same time. Nice meant weak in the business world.
Peter sat in the kitchen and pulled out his phone. He opened Instagram and looked at the profile with the username iron_queen with Morgan's photo as the profile picture. He clicked the newest photo.
There was a photo of building with the Stark Industries logo that was tagged Xandar.
"Hey! That has my name on it!" Morgan had captioned.
Peter chuckled, happy that Morgan and Pepper were safe.
Tony actually smiled, seeing this. For him, his name on those buildings was heavy responsibility... for her, it was "hey! It's mine!" So careless. Free.
Then, he looked at the photo of the Avengers' holographic statues...but surprisingly it was not much of a "superhero statue". They were wearing normal clothes, not their armor. They were statues of the humans behind the suits, powers, and technology.
"'Cause you burn with the brightest flame, the world's gonna know your name, and you'll be standing in the walls of the hall of fame'", Morgan had captioned this photo.
Peter put his phone away and rubbed his face in a tiredly.
"There's a statue of us on Xandar?" Thor asked.
Edith rolled her eyes, Tony-style. Tony-esque.
"There is a statue of you on every planet I know," she answered.
The Avengers didn't know what to do with that info, but for their sake, they didn't have to think about it a lot, because memory continued.
Then, his spider-sense picked something. He turned around and saw... Tony Stark himself, leaning over kitchen island. He looked so...so much like Tony like that it hurt. It was hard for Peter to think that this was not his Tony. But there was something different about him at the same time. His aura..his aura was heavier, darker. And what the hell was it with that leather jacket?
"Hi Pete," Tony smirked. "Don't worry about the rest; they're sitting in the living room and I made sure that they won't hear us," he said calmly.
Peter was standing in the room, not sure what he should do. Fight? Talk? Yell for the others?
"How are you feeling, kid? - he asked, looking at him with... concern? No, it can't be.
"What did you do to me?" Peter asked.
"You know what." Tony rolled his eyes. "I used the DNA of the spider to help your body adapt to the poison." He shrugged it off, opening the fridge and taking some soda from it.
Peter decided to ignore that Tony made himself feel like he was at his home...well. Shit. He kinda was.
"Since when you are a DNA mutation specialist?" he asked, knowing that this Tony Stark could be completely different than his.
"Since I got a spiderling under my roof. I hacked Oscorp ages ago... I'm surprised that your Tony didn't do that," he answered and drank some soda. "I have always known that there would be some shit going on with your spider mix-up," he added after taking a sip.
Peter was surprised by that information.
"If he did, the info that he found there was lost alongside with FRIDAY," Peter revealed.
"What happened to FRIDAY?" Tony asked, curious.
"She... died," Peter said carefully.
"Who is FRIDAY?" Thor asked, looking at Edith.
"My sister, Boss's main AI after JARVIS," she explained. "When my Boss died, she was...damaged. A lot of her coding burned alongside Boss. A lot of data was lost too," she added sadly, making everybody in the room uncomfortable again. The AI was grieving the death of her "sister," Tony's other creation.
"Alongside your Tony, right? I guess I could suspect that. The energy of Infinity Stones can destroy anything on its way," the Merchant answered after a few seconds of thinking. He picked up a frame that was hanging on the wall. There was a picture of Pepper, Tony and little Morgan in front of the house. Tony's lips cracked in something that could be called a smile.
"As much as I envy your Tony's life, I don't envy his death. Exposing himself to the energy of the stones...that's a painful way to go," he said, returning the frame to its place. "If my math is right, he lived very painfully for fifteen minutes before he died. It's kinda ironic. if you think about it," Tony chuckled, taking another sip of soda.
Tony frowned.
"Yeah... it's ironic," he admitted.
"What? Why?" Pepper asked.
"Fifteen minutes... that's how long my first arc reactor was able to power the first Iron suit," Tony answered. He thought about that day in the Afghan cave. Something big for fifteen minutes.
"You envy him?" Peter raised his brow, he was standing still, watching Tony carefully.
"Sure. He got everything I wanted. He married Pepper, had Morgan. Our pasts are not that different...I would say that they are the same for one moment. Our universes stopped being one sometime after your homecoming. Even if he didn't live long enough to enjoy it fully, he still managed to have it." Tony shrugged.
Pepper and Tony exchanged glances.
"Something was very off about it... the Sinister Six was so cold, so devilish...and Tony seems to be..." Natasha couldn't find the right word to describe it.
"Normal?" Clint suggested.
"Yeah... normal," Tasha nodded.
"Why are you here?" Peter asked, looking in the direction of the living room. He could hear conversations from there; everybody seemed to be okay, but maybe that was only the illusion. No. He would sense it if it were an illusion made by BARF.
"To talk. To check up on you. To spy. To kill you. To create a distraction. To spent time with you. Are you going to believe anything that I'm going to say?" Tony chuckled bitterly. He sounded actually hurt by the mistrust in Peter's eyes.
"No, I don't think so," he admitted.
"Well, before Thanos kills you all, using us to do so...I wanted to talk. It's good for my mind to talk to somebody not brainwashed by Thanos from time to time. Keeps me sane," Tony chuckled.
"So, you are suggesting that you are not brainwashed and the rest are?" Peter asked warily. He was not as relaxed as the Merchant; no, he was far from it. He didn't trust his words either but decided that maybe it was worth listening to him.
"Like I said. Sometime after your homecoming. What made the difference between our universes is the fact how Thanos looked at the Avengers, you know? In this and many other universes, he saw Avengers as bugs, meddling in his divine quest. He only knew me by name," Tony chuckled.
Peter looked at Tony and sighed.
"You blew up half of his army, delayed his quest for over a decade, of course he knew your name," Peter shrugged.
"What?" Pepper asked, looking at Tony and then at EDITH.
"New York. Loki was only leading the army; it wasn't his. He was doing it poorly, if I may," Edith answered with kinda bored voice. This was an elementary part of future-modern history.
"Do you mean that my brother..." Thor started, but then he was interrupted by EDITH.
"Was he mind-controlled? Probably. I don't know. Nobody really checked that. When we learned about Thanos, it was too late," Edith answered. What she could say? That his 'beloved' brother was going to die? She was not sure if in this timeline Loki already died in the Dark Elves' realm, but looking at Thor's face, she could assume that Loki was "dead" for now in his opinion. Tony paled, remembering the wormhole.
Flashback -
Peter was on the orange, dusty planet, like the one that they saw in the memory where Peter turned into dust. He tried to put himself together after some heavy punch. He looked in Tony's direction. Stark was in his Iron Man suit, and he landed on the ground.
"You throw another moon at me, and I'm gonna to lose it," Tony said, looking at a big purple guy. Peter was able to hear this thanks to his super senses.
"Stark," Thanos answered.
"You know me?" Tony sounded...surprised. Troubled. How did somebody feel when he realized that the biggest psychopath in the universe knew your name?
"I do...you are not the only one cursed with knowledge," Thanos answered calmly.
There it was...these few seconds of silence, where Tony didn't know how to answer this.
"My only curse is you," he finally answered, and then attacked.
- Return.
Tony was as pale as a sheet. His heart rate was crazy; he could feel it. He knew New York was beginning. He was right. He was always right.
Void. Army. War. Emptiness. Spaceship.
Thanos.
He knew Tony's name.
In some twisted way...Thanos believed that they were the same.
Cursed with knowledge.
"Tony. Tony!" He heard Pepper's voice. The first time she said his name was soft, the second was more worried, trying to ground him. Pull him back from the place where he shouldn't go.
"Breathe, Tony. Breathe." He could feel Pepper's hands on his arms. He looked at her, trying to control his breathing. He didn't have a true and severe panic attack, but it was a close call.
He looked at his teammates, with a glare that meant "not a word."
"In our universe, Tony made him bleed...and sharks came," Peter added.
The Merchant of Death looked at him and chuckled.
"He told you a lot," he noticed.
"If you could make God bleed, people will cease to believe in Him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come," Tony said weakly, knowing this quote all too well. Bloody Vanko...guess he was right about that one. But Tony was not the one that was consumed...was he?
Thor raised his brow. He didn't quite understand that quote, but the rest of Avengers realized that somebody had said that thing to Tony, that this was about Tony, and he remained silent.
Peter didn't say anything. Remembering times when he and Tony just talked. Peter started developing "superhero problems" and Tony was worried, the only way to make him talk was to talk about his own problem too.
Flashback -
"All that for a drop of blood," Thanos said, wiping the blood from something that looked like a papercut on his face.
The scene changed -
"That's part of the act. Iron Man can't bleed. Stark can't bleed. I can bleed to death, but none of them...because there will be blood in the water and sharks will come. Do you understand what I'm trying to say, kid?" Tony asked with a heavy, tired voice and looked at Peter. They were sitting on some rooftop.
- Return.
"My own past is going to come back and laugh at me," Tony murmured and rubbed his eyes. He knew what his future self meant about bleeding, the sad truth about his life. It was a play and he played too many characters at once.
"That never happened to me. I guess it was spectacular," Tony smirked.
"No, I cut myself heavier with paper," Peter answered with a similar smirk.
"Still impressive when you know from what Titan skin is made of," the Merchant shrugged.
"I have to ask...what the hell is it with that leather jacket?" Peter asked Tony, who chuckled, looking at his clothing.
"Every killer wears synthetic leather. It's easy to clean blood from it," the Merchant answered simply, making Peter shudder. It was easy to forget that this man was a killer. Son of Thanos.
Natasha and Clint looked at each other and nodded. It was true.
"I guess you are not here to drink soda and be an exposition man," Peter tried again.
"You are kinda right. But only kinda. I'm looking for what you are made of, kid." The Merchant came closer, dangerously close. "Because, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but Thanos will order me to kill you...and I fought that battle too many times, Peter. You will have me vulnerable...but you will hesitate...you always hesitate...and it will be your doom. It was the doom of my Peter." Peter stared into Tony's eyes. There was an endless sea of pain roiling within their amber depths.
"You killed Peter from your universe?" Peter asked without thinking.
"Yes. I choked the life out of him," Tony admitted with a face that showed no emotion, but his eyes...damn, that was a whole different story. "My new daddy dearest likes to say that the hardest choices require the strongest wills. When Thanos orders me to kill you and believe me, he will, I won't be able to hesitate. You shouldn't do that either," the Merchant said and with that he left the room, leaving a shocked Peter behind him.
Tony Stark was asking Peter to kill him.
"Dude, what the hell were you doing in the kitchen so long?" Robbie entered the room and asked Peter, who looked like death itself.
The Avengers didn't know what to say. The silence in the room was heavy. Even if this guy was from a different universe...he was still Tony Stark in some way. Tony Stark was suggesting that Peter kill him, he wanted to die, he was asking the kid to not to hesitate when the opportunity came.
"Uh...we...we should put some things together," Natasha was the first to say something and break the silence. "This...Merchant of Death suggested that he is the only one of us who is not brainwashed totally. How does it work for him? It's like his mind is clear, but his actions are controlled," Natasha said, but it was truly a question, pointed at Edith.
"Yes. Thanos couldn't fully control his mind. When the rest of the Sinister Six believed that this was the right thing to do, that this was their holy mission...Thanos couldn't brainwash his favorite son to that point, no matter how hard he tried," Edith answered.
"Why?" Steve asked.
"It's because of Tony's mind, right?" Bruce asked and Edith looked at him.
"What?" Tony asked, surprised.
"Tony, the way your genius brain works... hat's a miracle," Bruce answered and looked at Edith.
"Yes, it is because of that in some way. No mind control can hold a grip on him for a long period," Edith answered with a sigh.
Tony actually hummed. This was kinda new. Wanda had managed to control him, but he was never truly tested for a long time.
"Favorite son, huh?" Tony asked with a grim expression.
"In every universe that I'm aware of...Thanos treated you as equal in some way. Futurist, genius... cursed with knowledge. Then, he couldn't break your mind. You impressed him on every step. Even when you were only 'mortal' and weak, you still could use your brain, your genius to fight for you," Edith explained...then realized something that she had said. She became tense for a second, then she realized that no one caught her slip...
Many of you thought that this is going to be kinda fix-it endgame time travel fic... weeeeeelll... IT KINDA STILL IS! xD
And now... WILL PETE HESITATE OR NO?! :O
You will see that in the next chapter and I PROMISE, the next one will be the last one with memories.
See ya in the next :D