Chapter 100

"So time travel," Toni said, as she sat in her lab, for the first time truly being excited to work on a new project.

"Time travel," Bruce mimicked, repeating her words back to her.

"I see we've just become full on mad scientists now," she said with a grin, "Very science fiction of us. I'm proud. It only took me how many years to get here?"

He smirked at her, "I don't know, Toni. I'd argue that you've always been something of a mad scientist. I don't think it took time travel to achieve that title."

"How dare you?" she asked, shaking a screwdriver at him, and he chortled in response. She went back to putting the finishing touches on her hologram screen, as she began to type on the keyboard. She'd had holo screens before, but nothing to the extent she was using now. And with a few finishing touches, the entire room filled up in front of them with all the logistics of their plans in front of them.

Time travel.

She wanted to laugh at the entire plan, because really, who would have thought that she'd one day be here, trying to figure out how to go to the past?

She'd never been one to look back onto her past and reminisce until recent weeks, not wanting to dwell in what once was, and would rather think about what could be instead. She was about making, creating, and building. She would much rather shape a new future than try and fix what once was.

But now, she didn't really have another choice. She hadn't been exaggerating when she said the readings post-snap were alarming. There was a food shortage. Farm animals had been cut precisely in half. And the dust in the atmosphere; well it was definitely harder to deny climate change now, when the timeline for when the ice caps would melt completely moved up.

"How are you thinking we do this?" Bruce asked her, as he looked at the specs in front of them.

"We can't just go back to the past," she admitted, "If we did, then there would be two versions of ourselves. And that would be confusing for everyone. While the extra manpower against Thanos may be nice, it wouldn't be feasible in the long run."

"So what do we do instead?" Bruce asked her.

"We have to replace ourselves," she said with a bit of a grimace, knowing it was far from ideal, "Merge with our past selves basically. We send back our bodies and our minds so that we have all the knowledge we do now, that we know Thanos is coming, that we know how to defeat him, and that we all stand together against him."

"It could work," Bruce said, as he looked at the screens, "But Toni, you know as well as I do that this isn't going to be easy. I mean time travel is one thing. Now we also need to stop the other timelines from off shooting as a result, meaning we have to win. And on top of that find a way to become one with our past selves. There's a lot that could go wrong here. You know that and I know that."

"I missed working with you," she told him, with a soft smile. It had been years since the two of them had been together in a lab working to try and solve problems. Of course, then Ava had often been with them, but she didn't say that. She knew the man was also grieving the loss of her cousin, and it hadn't been easy on him.

"I missed this too," he offered her in response. "I really am sorry that I left. I don't think I can ever make it up to you guys enough that I just took off like that. Especially after everything you did for me. You got Ross off my back and got him arrested finally. You gave me a home. A real life where I wouldn't be on the run constantly. And it was wrong of me to take off like I did after everything."

"I get why you did it," she admitted, "I used to think about running away too. As a kid. I wanted to move in with my Aunt Peggy and Uncle Daniel so badly, that I'd dream about running away from my home. But I knew I'd miss my mother and Jarvis too much, so I never did."

He cocked his head to look at her, "You don't talk about your childhood much."

She gave him a sad smile, "I know. But that's not really the point of all of this, is it? We're not trying to fix my childhood. We're trying to fix the recent past."

And with that, she walked over to where the holographic stones were in the room and enlarged one in particular.

"The Time Stone?" he asked her in confusion.

"The Time Stone," she nodded. "Before you returned, there was an incident in Hong Kong. Doctor Stephen Strange and apparent Sorcerer Supreme whom you met briefly was battling something from the Dark Dimension. The details of which aren't particularly important. But Doctor Strange was able to use the Time Stone to turn back time while everyone around him went backwards, he preserved his self and his memories. He used it to undo damage and no one around him was any the wiser."

"That's great and all, but you're forgetting that the Time Stone has currently been destroyed," Bruce pointed out.

"Perhaps," she said in agreement. "But what you don't know is that after the incident, I paid the Good Doctor a little visit. To recruit him into the Avengers Initiative. I mean you saw what he could do, I'd have been foolish not to. And he agreed to join. I also was able to get readings from the Time Stone with his consent, meaning I have data on how it works. Alongside the Space Stone and the Mind Stone. The latter of which I don't think will help our case. But if we can use the readings from the Time and Space stone, in conjecture to the Quantum Realm, I think it might just work."

He blinked up at her, "I think it's crazy," he said finally. "But I also think it's just crazy enough to work."

"Well then, shall we get to work?" she asked him with a grin, and he nodded.

Mad scientists indeed.


Less than forty-eight hours later, they were ready to begin some basic field tests.

She wasn't convinced that they had the solution just yet. But she knew that if they didn't test it out then they would never be able to get anything working.

Science was experimentation. It was trial and error and testing out hypothesis to try and prove theories. It was research and while they could theorize about how time travel worked until the sun came down, nothing would be in place until they conducted some field tests.

Sure, she knew JARVIS could also help run simulations, and she'd had him run the numbers on when the best moment to go back to would be alongside working out some of the finer kinks. It was one thing to have all the data she did from the Time and Space Stones. It was another thing to actually put it to use.

"Are we sure this is safe?" Steve asked, as he crossed his arms, stretching his t-shirt over his body. She blinked a few times, trying to focus on the question he was asking her and not the sight in front of her.

"No," she admitted with a sigh, "I don't know. But we need some basic tests to figure out just how the Quantum Realm is going to work in combination with the Time Stone and Mind Stone data if we're going to be able to figure this out."

"And maybe we'll get lucky and get a win for once," Natasha said dryly. "Get things working without it being overly complicated."

"You are aware that we're trying to solve time travel right?" Bruce asked her with a deadpan. "We're kinda rewriting the current laws of physics as we know it. No big deal or anything."

She shrugged at him.

She looked around their room at their numbers. They were missing the Asgardian, but that was for a reason. Thor had been taking the entire situation as poorly as she had been. And well, they'd agreed not to get his hopes up unless they'd known for sure that they were going to be able to go back and stop what happened from happening.

And Clint. Well none of them had seen him since before the Snap. And she'd learned that his family had not been among the ones left behind. Natasha claimed to have kept tabs on him, and she knew that they'd need to bring him back before they went back.

But part of her wondered if that was the right choice. Was it not crueler to replace their past selves with a version that knew the painful truth of what was to come? Would he not be happier if he'd never experienced the pain of losing his family?

"Ready to go?" Bruce asked her, and she nodded. "Okay. Here we go. Time travel test number one."

"Scotty beam us up," she said, and Steve shot her a fond look.

Scott Lang shot her an appreciative look, "Opening the portal," he said.

"Breakers are set," Steve said, looking at them with a nod, "Emergency breakers on standby."

"Good," Bruce said with a nod, "We don't want to lose Scott here in the 40s if something happens to the grid."

"Is that a possibility?" Scott asked, paling a bit.

"Not a big one," Toni said, trying to calm him down, before whispering to the man beside her, "Bruce you can't scare him like that!"

"Look, we don't know what's going to happen," Bruce whispered back at her, "Who knows what any of this is gonna do."

He turned back to the man, who Natasha had managed to calm down, "I'm gonna send you back a week, okay? You can walk around for an hour or so, then we'll bring you back here in ten seconds. Make sense?'

The man looked utterly confused, and she didn't blame him.

Hell, she was one hundred percent convinced none of this was going to work?

Why would it? Quantum fluctuation messes with the Planck Scale, which then triggers the Deutsch Proposition.

It was destined to fail.

But the numbers were needed. They were doing an experiment not to succeed but to fail.

"Good luck, Scott," her Captain said. "You got this."

"You're right, I do, Captain America," Scott said, trying to sound braver than he must have felt.

"On the count of three," Bruce said, as he began to count them down, "Three, two, one."

He pushed the button and Scott Lang disappeared.

She began to count down in her head.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

She held her breath, as Bruce pushed the button to bring Scott Lang back to the present.

The ant-suit returned. But inside of it was a teenager.

"Uh guys?" the kid asked. "This doesn't feel right."

"What is that?" Natasha asked them.

"What's going on?" Steve asked as well.

"Hold on," Bruce said, as he began to push a few buttons, and she took over the keyboard beside him to begin typing rampantly.

"Is that Scott?" Natasha asked in confusion.

"Of course it's me!" the kid who was roughly Peter's age said.

The kid got sucked back into the quantum tunnel, and in his place, an old man stood.

Dear Hawking, this was going terribly.

"Ow! My back!" the old man grumbled.

"Give me some space!" Bruce said, beginning to sound stressed.

"Hey," she said, placing a hand on his, "We got this, okay? We're two of the most brilliant minds on the planet. Take a deep breath, and let's bring him home."

He nodded at her, and the two of them began typing quickly on the keyboard.

And in less than thirty seconds, the correctly aged Scott Lang was standing in front of them.

"Kill power," Bruce told Natasha, and she turned off the generator.

"Oh thank god," Natasha said, relieved that they'd brought him back. And she echoed the sentiment.

"Time travel," Bruce said tiredly, as he looked over at her.

"Time travel indeed," she repeated. "This was the EPR Paradox. We pushed time through him. Extremely dangerous."

"But we managed to get the data we needed," Bruce said, looking at the readings.

"We still don't have time travel working," she said, and Bruce looked over at her.

"We're going to figure this out, okay?" he told her, and she tried not to let herself feel dissuaded.

She didn't think that they were going to be successful right away. But she'd hoped it would go better than that.

But the science there had all told her it wouldn't. It wasn't supposed to work.

But still.

"I know," she said with a small smile. "I think I just need to take a break. Let JARVIS integrate the numbers in his system and then we'll revisit."

"Okay," he said in agreement.

They were going to figure this out. It just wouldn't be right this second.

And that would have to be enough.


She stood in the kitchen of her home, as she carefully finished up putting away the dishes. Steve was still at the compound, talking to Scott about some finer details. The man had wanted to go visit his family for a few days, but they'd convinced him to bring them to the compound instead.

And Steve was currently working on the arrangements to have Natasha fly out to bring them back.

If there was one thing she'd really come to appreciate, it was how much family meant to other people during the aftermath of the Snap.

Even in the relationships she'd seen.

She knew Loki and Thor had become closer in recent years, and the god had been rendered heartbroken by his loss of family. Loki had been all the god had left, having confessed that his father had died recently, and that his sister that he'd recently discovered tried to kill them all. And now he was gone.

Erik Stevens on the other hand, had been hardened by the loss of his cousins. He'd had to take up the mantle of King once more to help Wakanda through their losses, and she knew that as much as he'd once wanted to rule, he had long since come to appreciate his family and wanted more than anything for his family back over the throne.

She looked up with a sigh, as she saw a picture of Peter holding Morgan hours after she was born, and instead of heartbreak like she'd felt so many times before, she felt a sense of hope. Hope that she could bring them back. That her loss wasn't permanent.

"That's probably my favourite picture of my grandchildren," Aunt Peggy said as she came into the kitchen. Her Aunt and Uncle had moved back into the Tower after the Snap, out of worry for Toni and out of the desire to be around the family they had left.

"It was probably one of the happiest days of my life," she admitted, "My family felt so whole in that moment. And now it feels like it's been torn apart by a mad man who didn't have a basic understanding of how ecosystems work."

She leaned across the kitchen island as she took her aunt's hands in her own.

She looked up at her aunt, "I'm going to bring them back," she promised the woman who'd been there for her over the years. "I promise. I'll bring back all of them. Harry and Ava. Peter and Morgan. Every single last one of them. And I'm going to kick Thanos' ass so hard for the pain he's put you through."

Peggy smiled at her softly, with a small twinkle in her eyes.

"I know you will, Ducky. Whenever you set your mind to something you always managed to accomplish it," Aunt Peggy told her proudly.

"Even if it terrified us half the time to walk into the lab and see you handling equipment far larger than you," Uncle Daniel said, as he entered the room.

"I can't help it if the machinery was larger than I was," she said, indignantly.

"Of course you couldn't," Uncle Daniel chuckled.

"You know, if I were any younger, I'd be right there by your side, fighting that Jackass with you," Aunt Peggy said.

"Well, we might not have invented time travel, but we didn't invent a way to push time through your body and make you younger," she said, casually as a joke. "So we could always make you younger again and have you fight by my side."

Peggy looked at Daniel, and he shook a finger at them both sternly.

"Don't even think about it," the man told them both, despite knowing they wouldn't be doing it anyways. Not when it was uncontrollable and risky.

Aunt Peggy pouted, "I suppose it is not my time to fight by your side," she said in mock sadness to her goddaughter. "Perhaps in another life."

"Perhaps," Toni said, a bit sadly.

"It'll all work itself out, Ducky," Aunt Peggy promised her, and she wished she could have the woman's optimism.

"I hope so," she said with a sigh. "I can't fail this. I need to bring them all home. Because I don't know if I'm strong enough to live in a world without them.

"You have always been strong enough to survive whatever life throws your way," Uncle Daniel said fondly. "We'll get through this. No matter what happens. Because we're a family, and we're always going to be here for you."

She smiled at them both, feeling grateful for not the first time in her life that she had them both in her life.


The calculations were taking forever to complete.

Not that she was really surprised. They were attempting to invent time travel. She didn't expect it to be easy. If it were, everyone and their mother would have done it already.

Still, she couldn't help but feel a sense of frustration at the fact that she didn't have the answer. She was supposed to be a genius, and this would probably be the most important thing she'd ever do. Her children's lives depended on it. Her families' lives depended on it. The universe's fate depended on it.

And yet, as she stared at the computer model rendering different simulations for time travel.

Failure, after failure, after failure.

None of it worked, and she couldn't help but feel a sense of dismay.

If they couldn't get a simulation working, then they had nothing. How much time would pass before they had one? Days? Months? Years?

She knew she would do this for however long it took to come up with the model, but she'd rather not wait decades to see her son and daughter again. If it were up to her, they'd go back tomorrow if she could only get it working.

She sighed.

"JARVIS, try a mobius strip," she said finally, running out of ideas. "Invert it, if you please,"

"Processing," JARVIS told her, and she watched the model begin to render in front of her and Bruce.

"What are you thinking?" Bruce asked her, a bit surprised that she'd thrown in her own suggestion while the other simulations were running.

"I'm thinking that we may need to try something with less boundaries," she said, "The mobius strip only has one boundary." She turned back to the screen, "J, give me the eigenvalue, particle factoring, and a spectral decomp."

"Just a moment," JARVIS said. On the screen beside it, the endless simulations FRIDAY had taken over running continued beside the one she'd asked for.

"If this doesn't work out, I think we need to take another break-" she started, as JARVIS finished the simulation.

"Model rendered," JARVIS told them. She stared in shock as the screen showed them that the model had worked with 90% success.

"Oh my Darwin," she said in surprise.

"It wouldn't work completely though," Bruce commented, pointing out the ten percent failure.

"The boundary," she said as she moved closer to the model, "Look, time travel would work with it, but it would spit out a new version of us at the same plane as our past selves. Because the boundary exists. Which means we'd be able to go back but we wouldn't be able to carry out our plan as we originally wanted to, so it's of no use to us. Not when only one version of ourselves should exist at any given period."

"So we need a boundaryless surface," Bruce nodded, understanding what she was getting at.

"JARVIS, try a Klien bottle please?" she asked, "It has no boundary, so time would be able to flow freely without a beginning or end. We wouldn't have the same issues as we do with the mobius model."

"Rendering," JARVIS said, and she stared at the screen with intense scrutiny, waiting to see what the result would be. She felt her heart beat faster, as the numbers moved on the screen to create the simulation.

She closed her eyes and she prayed. This had to work. It had to. She needed to get Time Travel working so she could save her family. So she could save them all. It couldn't fail.

Please.

She wasn't religious. She believed in science and believed all problems could be solved with science and mathematics. But if there was anyone out there, anyone who could help them in righting the injustices that had been done, well then she found herself praying to them that they would help her. That they'd give her a way to save everyone that they'd lost.

She knew Steve had been thrown for a loop after the Snap. He'd always been a religious man himself, but he, alongside so many others were struggling to understand why if there was a God that he'd let such a thing happen.

She didn't have any answers for him; how could she when there was nothing she or anyone else could say which would explain why such an injustice happened? There was no explaining why Thanos had been allowed to do what he'd done in any sort of way that was acceptable or made it hurt any less.

"Model rendered," JARVIS said, and she opened her eyes.

"Toni," Bruce breathed out, speechless.

"Oh shit," she swore again, as she saw the numbers on the screen.

99.999998% chance of success.

Oh shit.

She threw her arms around Bruce, as she felt her face begin to grow wet with tears that began flowing freely down her face.

"We did it," he said, in disbelief, as he hugged her tightly "We really did it."

"It's going to work," she cried, "JARVIS, please tell everyone to get down here immediately."

It took exactly five minutes for the troops to gather, in which time she'd manage to stop herself from crying and straighten out herself.

"What happened?" Steve asked the moment they'd all gathered.

"It worked," she said, and the room began to cheer excitedly, "We have a working simulation. Of course, it's just a simulation and we still need to build the model and test it before we actually have any sort or time machine or anything, but based on just the numbers we're seeing now, there's a really good chance that this is going to work. We can go back and save everyo-"

Steve cut her off by pulling her into a crushing hug, and she wrapped her arms around him tightly as Bruce took over answering any of their questions.

"We're going to get them back," Steve told her determinedly, and she nodded in agreement, as hope filled her.