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With the infinity gauntlet on his hand Tony stared into … well infinity. He had once heard the night sky described as staring into infinity. It wasn’t, not really. Stargazing was limited by human perception. Eventually your eyes gave up and told your mind space was gray not filled with billions of stars and millions of galaxies. Hearing didn’t even get you that far. Neither didn’t taste or smell. They only told you about a small distance around you.
With the infinity stones though the universe stretched away from him in all directions. Anywhere he turned his attention he could hear, touch, taste, feel, see, know the past present and future of it. He could understand it.
He surged forward in space and time flying through reality in stomach dropping loops as he sought to know everything. There was too much. From the sub-atomic structure to the gravitational spikes of stars. The mind numbing void of tiny songs between galaxies. The infinitely thin boundaries between realities. So ephemeral that Tony was sure that he could push his hand through them and pull back grains of sand from three realities away from his own.
“HALT YOUR.”
It echoed in Tony’s teeth and brain. He turned his attention to it and back to the tiny piece of the multiverse where he and his allies were scattered on the battlefield. He felt colors moving around him, gently shepherding his attention, his will, back to his center.
“WHAT”
“What?” He thought back at the questioner.
“WHAT WANT?”
This thought was more structured. It felt like a cube of thinking. A cube where every time Tony’s attention shifted there was another corner with more meaning. Lines drawn but so much contained within the expanding shape.
“I” was all Tony got out before his brain spiraled out into plans, ideas, memories, then feelings. In a heartbeat he was thinking about those he loved, those he wanted the best for, and those he wished would get there fucking heads on straight and help him save the fucking universe.
And just beyond his own mind he could feel the stones there like a sheer cliff. There was the space that separated the observer from the observed. And beyond that the stones watched Tony’s mess of feelings unfold.
There was the feeling of movement and the cliffs locked and softened at the same time.
“GIVE.”
“Whatever it takes.” Tony replied with his heart.
There was a ripple of gentleness. “WE GIVE.”
“Oh.”
There was another ripple of gentleness.
“COME kkkysysfycdy.” Tony felt his mind pressed open by the meaning of that word. It could have been feel. It could have been judge. It could have been shape.
In the end it was “Power.” He whispered through dry lips.
“YES”
They were offering him the power to reshape reality, to make it what he wanted and thought it should be.
He threw himself away from them.
The stones didn’t vocalize this time just dropped the feeling of questioning into his head.
Tony yelled “I shouldn’t have that power.” He flayed himself open to show them just how much giving him control of the universe would lead to disaster.
He felt poked then the sense of the stones sitting back on their haunches. Tony could sense thoughts flying between them but like things moving underwater he couldn’t make out their shape.
“SAFE”
Tony twisted so that the darkest part of his soul refracted at them.
“SAFE” The word was stronger now.
Something came out into the void between him and the stones and ever so gently pulled at his at wrist, at his brain, Tony was sure anymore.
Before him laid five realities. Though when he turned he could see more and more realities sleeting off into the distance.
“JUDGE”
The cliff was back behind him. Inhaling as much readiness as he could he expanded his attention to what was in front of him.
Tony peered into the reality before him. Then he fell and surfaced into it knowing and unknowing. At the same time he was the Tony Stark standing there in front of Thanos and he was the Tony Stark observing the battle. In the moment of stone stillness he cast a glance over his right shoulder and saw Pepper in her Rescue armor. Beyond her Rogers and Ant-man watched. Over his left shoulder were Quill and his band, Bruce there as Hulk, even Dr. Strange.
He looked to where Peter had been standing a reality ago. He, the Tony Stark of this reality, saw Gwen looking beat up but still on her feet. The eyes on her suit wide white on black. He, the part of Tony Stark that wasn’t of this reality, thrust himself back. Back into and under that watery breach of reality.
The universes in front of him slid like a rock fall and he was pressed under the surface once again.
This time when he looked over the battlefield it was less empty. There we’re ranks upon ranks of soldiers ready, waiting, dying. The Tony Stark of this reality looked at his personal army with a casual eye, already thinking how he would train the next ones better. The other Tony screamed inside their skull that people were dying. The twin mind thought with reptilian indifference, that yes, people were dying.
Tony shoved himself away again.
He went under again.
He felt... not so good. This Tony remembered watching his arm turn to dust, remembered watching his legs blow lightly away on the wind and wonder what had suspended physics so that his chest didn’t fall to the floor before it too disintegrated. This Tony also remembered reforming, coalescing together like a dust-devil brought together by the wind. This Tony was leaning over his desk, yelling, trying to find out what had passed. Who was left.
Tony pushed away. Not as quickly but certainly.
The Stones moved thoughts between themselves. Then the realities in front of him shifted again and he rose up to lie on a dingy cot. The bare bulb overhead haunted his nightmares. The far away sound of another language grew more frantic. Tony knew, both of them, this was the reality where he never made it out of the cave.
Tony dropped back through the cot as quickly as he could not wanting to feel his last heartbeat.
“No.” He told the Stones. He tried to shape the thought in a way they would understand. Let the wrongness of that reality ripple out in waves from his soul.
The realities wheeled around again. Tony could track them and knew they were presenting something three hops from his own, that was yellower, and beat different vibrations.
Again he was on the battlefield, everyone spread out around him. At this moment it wasn’t much different from the reality he had been pulled from, but what came before had been so much different. He remembered being friends with them all. He remembered introducing Steve to new music, and Steve pulling him out of the lab when he had been in there too long. He remembered long talks with Thor about the nature of reality. He remembered Natasha making faces at him behind Fury’s back. He remembered years of friendship and knew what a true team felt like. It made his heart hurt to think that in another life he could have had this.
From outside the reality the Stones clucked and created shadows. Tony looked around again, there was Steve, and Pepper, and Rhodey, and Barnes and Natasha, and, and, and, but. He looked harder, looked further, lighting up the reality as he searched along it for that last presence. He wasn’t there.
Tony raced to the dwindling unreality and made it through back to the unspace with the Stones.
The Stones paused, heavy questions floating between them. Tony tensed.
The realities went by more slowly this time, juddering as each Stone pulled in a different direction.
“?” imprinted on his brain as he was tipped into another reality.
He wasn’t on the battlefield. He was above New York. Sitting with his back to the building. He pointed his feet and threw out his hands willing the thrusters to kick in. They didn’t. The Tony of this reality tucked and flipped his arm back so his hand was on the building again, where it … stuck. Tony held his other hand up to his face. The glove was lighter, thinner than any Iron Man suit he had ever made. It had stylized spiderwebs on it that were achingly familiar. Tony scanned their memory searching to see if there would be a teen upstart in a metal suit coming to meet him up here. He knew there wasn’t. Tony shrunk himself into a ball in the suit and poured himself back into the unreality.
“Not what I meant.”
The realities still glitched passed him but faster again.
Going in this time was walking around a corner and finding himself in a crowded hallway. There were lockers and kids with backpacks and a bell ringing to tell him he was going to be late to his third period class if he didn’t hurry. He grabbed the strap of his bag and jogged to the room. He slid into his seat just in time. “Hey, Peter.” He greeted the teen next to him.
“Hey, Tony.” Peter smiled.
Tony detached from that reality slowly. “Good option.” And because he would always ask for more, brighter, faster, better, he pushed to the stones what would make it perfect. This time the thought shapes weren’t dark things under the water but glowing things under the water.
The realities pinwheeled around and deftly left another in front of him.
This time he was in his lab, the Mark 15, 20 and 23 over his shoulder and his phone next to him on his desk. He flipped it over. They already knew there would be a dozen new messages, some from the Avengers, some from Pepper and other friends. And he pulled up the contact marked with a heart. There was Peter’s latest rant about grad school and before that them figuring out their dinner plans. He breathed in. He smiled just a bit as he felt his shoulder sink free of the nagging pain that started after his forty fifth birthday. Not that he had turned forty five here. He stretched legs out in front of him and marveled at how effortlessly his knees moved. His elbows moved beautifully too.
“Hey.” Came a slightly nervous voice from the door.
Peter was there in all his warmth.
Tony strode across the room and cupped the man’s face in his hands. And then a spike of dread. Dread he sent back threw the portal.
Peter looked up at him with wet eyes. “Tony, do you remember a battlefield?”
He sagged and dropped his forehead to rest against Peter’s. “I remember everything.”
Peter brushed his lips against Tony’s. “Together?”
“Together.”
Tony could feel the stones slipping away behind him. The hole they had made in reality becoming less and less real until the pin prick collapsed in on itself. Tony laughed. He had a whole new life in front of him.