Chapter Text
This is precisely why Tony should be supervised at all times.
He’s currently down in his workshop (one can only wander around the mostly-empty tower for so long before it becomes too soul-crushing), a mess of mechanical parts sprawled out over every available surface, including a tarp he has spread on the floor. Dum-E sits helplessly in the corner, as if to say “I don’t even know where to start”.
The faintly-glowing screens Tony has set up around him are absolutely coated in numbers and variables, and the occasional cluster of words he’s scribbled out with his finger. Completely indecipherable to anyone, sometimes including Tony. He scratches at his beard, which has become unkempt with the last two months, and rolls his shoulders to illicit a couple pops. He feels so close—to what, he isn’t completely sure. If it’ll actually work, he has no clue whatsoever.
Even though dying isn’t necessarily something Tony would object to at this point in his life, it isn’t the goal here, so he’d like to avoid explosions if at all possible. He’s been cranking out numbers for the past two weeks straight, and has also essentially closed off communication with the outside world for the past five or so.
The world is quiet in the wake of the Avengers disbanding. The accords are still in need of adjustments, but are otherwise holding up. Rhodey is showing excellent progress, now that his legs have been outfitted with everything Tony could possibly think to assist his friend’s ability to walk. He’d never be 100% again, but at least he was closer now.
Natasha was still MIA: she left last month, presumably to hunt down Bruce, or perhaps to traipse over to Wakanda to rendezvous with T’Challa and his merry band of fugatives. Or whatever else it was she did these days. Thor was still up in rainbowland out in space, or another dimension. Tony still didn’t like to think about that one. Everyone else was equally scattered, most of them were with Steve. Tony didn’t like to think about that, either.
There was some framework already assembled, just a bare skeleton of the picture in Tony’s mind. The other components were similarly incomplete, but he had almost all of them started, at least. His workshop was a total nightmare, more so than usual, and that included the engineer himself. Hair just a little shaggy but sticking out at all angles from hands tugging through it constantly, eyes glinting with half-manic, half-desperate energy, his normally immaculate facial hair now resembling that of a lumberjack. Clothes stained with all kinds of stuff.
How pathetic was it that a futurist like Tony Stark wanted nothing more than to return to the past? Time travel was largely dismissed by the scientific community as a possibility, with current technology and the understanding of physics, but like hell had that ever stopped Tony before. He wanted to try. Was he actually capable of pulling it off? Debatable. Was he crazy? Absolutely.
Pepper wasn’t really keen on talking to Tony after their split, but she’d made an effort to reach out on many occasions, and was dismissed every time. Eventually, Tony cut off the methods of reaching him altogether. He half-expected the police to come see if he was dead any day now at this point.
The strangest part of all of this was, Tony didn’t have a specific goal in mind. Go back when? Run where? Where could he go that things would change and be better for anyone? Was time really a delicate fabric that could be torn apart by anomalies, was it a pond that was effected with every tiny ripple across the surface? Did Tony care if he messed things up worse? Was there something worse than this?
He just…had to leave. And it wouldn’t be enough to go live in another country, it wouldn’t be enough to change his identity and live in the woods someplace. He needed to really, truly disappear; and this was his solution. Of course it was, he was Tony Stark. Desperate, strange, and brilliant.
His company didn’t need him, now that it was in the capable hands of Pepper. The Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D were both burned to the ground. No girlfriend to worry about him, no friends to miss him. In his eyes, Tony was now free to fuck off to wherever he wanted. Maybe he could go back to a time long before he was born, see how it felt to not be recognized by every man, woman, and child on the planet.
He was focusing on the mechanics first, since that was the key component of this plan, but he also needed to plan for whatever happened to him when it worked. If it worked. He’d need an assumed identity, and to avoid most anachronisms. He needed a way to come back to the present, if he chose to return.
With a long sigh, Tony resigned himself to returning upstairs for a shower and a proper meal, maybe even sleep for a couple hours in a bed instead of the couch in the workshop. Even he could tell when he was useless.
The shower was nice, but looking in the mirror wasn’t such a treat. Tony trimmed the beard down to a more normal style, and did the same with his hair, at the very least just to manage his appearance enough so that if someone came asking around they wouldn’t be horrified by what they found.
The food he prepared was hardly a five star meal, but it was marginally better than Red Bull and protein bars and microwave meals. He ate in the near-painful silence.
“Boss, there’s a charity gala next Saturday if you—“
“Friday, I already told you. Wipe my schedule clean. No charity events, no press conferences, no special appearances, nothing. I’m laying low.”
“According to local news reports from the last five weeks, many people are beginning to speculate on your whereabouts, and your current mental condition.”
“Let them wonder.”
The AI didn’t respond. Tony briefly, bitterly, thought of how pathetic it was that a computer was the last thing around that even remotely cared. And he was the one who programmed it to.
“Wake me up in four hours,” he says, dragging himself to his bedroom.
Dropping onto his mattress in a limp pile of exhaustion, Tony fell asleep almost as soon as he was settled. He always liked these nights the best, when he’d exhausted himself to the point that he couldn’t think anymore. Sure, it meant he couldn’t come up with new ideas, but it also meant he couldn’t think about the bad stuff, everything that was wrong in his life. The kinds of stuff that haunted him at night.
In the end, it wasn’t Friday that woke him up, it was an obnoxious ringing. The noise persisted, no matter how much Tony groaned, so he rolled out of bed. As consciousness started return to him, Tony groped around in the dim lighting of his room until he came to one of his dressers. The drawer was ringing. Brows furrowed in his half-awake stupor, Tony ripped the drawer open and pulled up several layers of folded shirts until his fingers wrapped around a buzzing cellphone. His stomach dropped, and as if sobering, he suddenly become fully awake. It was the cellphone Steve had mailed to him, now resting in Tony’s too-tight grip, still ringing. He stared at it, the little square of light that read “Incoming Call: Unknown”.
He was always the one given the choice, he was the one who decided if he would contact Steve. That was the deal, Tony held all the power of the arrangement. He never thought that someone might call him. The light went black again, and it stopped ringing for a moment, before coming back to life. “Incoming Call: Unknown”. Tony’s heart squeezed painfully in his chest.
“Hello?” He patted himself on the back for only sounding tired, and not all the other things he was feeling.
“Tony--” Unmistakably Steve’s voice. Tony hangs up immediately. The phone starts ringing again almost as soon as he ends the call.
“What?” His voice is harsher this time, and somehow even more tired.
“It’s been a while,” Steve clears his throat, obviously not enjoying this conversation either. “I was wondering if…if maybe we could try to sort some things out. Not necessarily that we’d come back to America, but maybe we could meet in the middle somewhere?” He pauses, before adding “I really hate the way we--I left things. It wasn’t fair to you.”
Tony’s mouth is dry. His brain is going 200 miles per hour, but words escape him. What can he say?
“Sorry, Cap. I’m busy right now. I don’t feel like talking.”
“…I know I hurt you. I know that. But please, I—“
“What does it matter what you want anymore, Rogers?” his voice is shaking and low. “You’ve made your choice. You didn’t want any part of the Avengers anymore, least of all me.” He hates the truth in it.
“Tony…”
“No. You don’t get to sound like the mature one. You don’t get to be exasperated with me.” He closes his eyes, keeps them squeezed shut. “You’ve lost all rights. I’m done.”
“Tony—“
“Call me when the world is ending. Or just don’t.” He thinks about just destroying the phone then and there, but instead he snaps it shut and throws it back into the drawer.
“Friday, how much longer until the alarm goes off?”
“An hour and a half, boss.”
He goes back to bed and dreams of nothing.
Fueled on by pure spite, and trying to distract himself from whatever Steve was calling about but didn’t have the chance to tell him, Tony works twice as hard. The framework becomes fleshed out with wires. It starts looking like…something. And then is starts to look like something straight out of a cheesy sci-fi movie and Tony has to suppress his mild disgust.
The components start to become completed and become a part of the frame, the equations sort themselves out on the screens, become neater. Tony dons more protective garments as he prepares for the trial runs.
The following weeks are a mess. And a lot more fire than Tony was expecting, really. The machine threw off sparks every time he attempted to use it. Hundreds of adjustments crept closer to thousands as the days passed. Eventually though, the machine started to show signs of progress. In almost a month’s worth of tinkering and even more research, it was holding a stable portal.
Tony started small, sending a coin into the future by several seconds. Each time, the coin materialized at the time Tony specified. Next, he tried organic matter: an apple, which returned seemingly unaffected.
“Holy shit…” he muttered, turning the fruit in his hand before taking a bite. It tasted alright, he thought.
Of course, the tests didn’t account for human transport, or even living animals, and he couldn’t really test sending objects into the past, or he would’ve already? Time travel made even his brain hurt. And anyway, he was feeling reckless enough to assume that the machine would work as well backwards as it did forwards. He should send something a month into the future, just to be sure.
Tony develops a device to take measurements while passing through the field. In the meantime, he thinks of a fake name and gathers up whatever he thinks he’ll need. He writes out a half-assed will; makes Pepper the executor, divides up everything between her, Rhodey, Happy, and various charities.
In a month, the device returns, and provides Tony with enough conclusive evidence to think it’s worth trying. Or maybe he’d already decided he’d go a long time ago, because what did he really have to lose?
Tony takes a long pull from a bottle of Jack Daniels and looks at himself in the mirror. His facial hair is finely groomed once again, as is his hair. Is this a suicide? He hopes not, it would be embarrassing to die this way. He kind of wants to succeed, just so he can return someday and rub Reed Richard’s smug face in it.
His clothes are the plainest he owns: a pair of nondescript pants, a blank t-shirt, and a grey canvas jacket. He also has a watch on his wrist, with dials on it for date inputs. It corresponds with the machine, makes it lock on the device’s location and bring him back to the present, or whatever new date is entered. In theory.
He's filled a bag with a wad of loose bills, some changes of similarly plain clothing, a different watch (this one similar to the one he used when Barnes had gone berserk at headquarters, containing only a temporary version of an Iron Man gauntlet), and various tools, including his faithful Swiss Army knife. He can’t think of much else to take with him.
“Here goes…well, everything.” He approaches the machine, which hums impressively as it holds a shimmering blue portal open, beckoning Tony to pass through it. He looks over at Dum-E, and it waves sadly, its beeps almost trying to convince him to stay.
“Don’t worry, pal. I’ll be back.” Eventually. Maybe.
He gets to the keypad and has no idea what year to type in. Certainly nothing too far back, or he’d die from the lack of technology, but still well before his birth in the case that overlapping Tonys would disrupt the timeline.
1940, he types in finally, one digit at a time. He stares at them, lined up neatly on the screen. He stops to write a messy note on a piece of scratch paper and leaves it on a workbench for someone to find.
Tony tries to push his body through the portal in one jump, because he’s not entirely sure what would happen if he put one foot in first. What happens next is not what he was expecting. He isn’t really sure what he was expecting, to be fair.
It’s a blur of near-blinding light, a wave of nausea, and it lasts for forever and for the blink of an eye at the same time. Then darkness. Tony stumbles into a pitch-black room with hard cement floors, and collapses. He groans, the sound echoing.
“Ugh…” He tries to stand up, but instead he just doubles over and vomits. A sweat breaks out on his forehead as he continues to dry-heave. “Bad idea…terrible idea…”
Then he promptly passes out.
He comes to, he doesn’t know how long it’s been, but the lights are still off, wherever he is. He stands up, legs buckling, and pats himself down, checking for any signs of damage. Worse for wear, but otherwise in one piece.
Tony recognizes the room as the workshop, now that his eyes have adjusted to the dark. It’s much different than what he’s used to, but he can recall from the old videos of Howard the placement of the workbenches, the dated technology lying around. He’s in Stark Tower, but it’s definitely not the one he knows.