Work Text:
and is it over now? do you know how
to pick up the pieces and go home?
⭑✩⭑
Stephen can’t remember the names of the stars.
He lies on his back on the hood of a car that has been gutted and restuffed so many times it no longer bares resemblance to a brand. The windshield wipers press into the skin on the back of his hands, and his arms cross behind his head. Red paint washes smoothly beneath him. It looks blue in the dark. Even with the headlights on, it looks blue.
Time lies in heavy hexagons across his memory, but it has no baring in the dark. Somewhere undefinable in the nighttime hours, it has slipped away. Stephen’s world blurs together with the countless others that occupy his soul. For once, it doesn’t matter.
Reality doesn’t have to matter during the hour that is always quiet.
There's someone lying beside Stephen. Someone who smells like the car and like laserburn and like Stephen himself. Stephen looks at them and doesn’t remember.
"Why are we here?" He whispers the words, because time might hear.
The figure looks at him, and Stephen doesn’t know which one they are. Which version of those sad, tired eyes they are. "Because you needed it."
"I don't remember."
"It's your witching hour. You don't have to."
"But I will when it's over?" Stephen asks hopefully.
The being looks away. They don’t answer. Instead, they murmur, "You don't remember the names of the stars."
Stephen's insides squirm uncomfortably. "How do you know?"
"You told me."
"Oh." Stephen pulls his hands to his chest, incredibly guilty and disconnectedly serene. "I'm sorry."
"I know," the being says. "Me too."
"For what?"
"For being the one you had to save."
⭑✩⭑
The last time Stephen put gas in a car was millennia ago.
"It'll come back to you," Tony said, holding his credit card and standing beside Stephen. There was a teasing grin tugging at his lips.
"You said that about riding a bike," Stephen reminded him.
"Yeah, well, it's not my fault you're literally the single exception to that generally accepted principle."
"The exception that disproves the rule."
Tony smiled. "The exception that disproves every rule."
Stephen stared at the blinking lights that ran up and down the facet of the gas pump that faced him. The machine was old, dusty and creaking out here in the middle of nowhere. It had yet to be replaced by the newer, carbon-focused designs Stark Industries perfected over those long five years. Still, this one was shiny and complicated enough.
Stephen took a deep breath and tried to read. Maybe Tony was right. Maybe this time it would come back— maybe the memory of pumping gasoline wasn't one of the countless that had been rewritten to make room for lifetimes of others. Taped over like old cassettes.
Stephen would never know how many. He’d never even be able to mourn the holes in his reality that he'd never be able to identify.
No one else had heard those old, overwritten melodies.
Stephen read, and Tony watched him. Stephen tried not to get distracted by his empty, unreadable gaze. There were magpies fighting over old sub sandwiches on the other side of the gas station. A rusty pickup idled on the other side of the pump. The driver smoked as she sat against the tire and didn't seem at all surprised to be standing not five feet from Tony Stark. She must not have Blipped—must have seen everything.
A magpie crowed. The woman startled. Stephen thought he might like magpies, and looked back at the gas pump.
The lights blinked at him. The labels on the buttons had rubbed off over time. Stephen's mind slid emptily through his grasping fingers.
"Tony, I don't remember how to do this," he said. His voice shook.
"Alright," Tony said. Stephen winced at the disappointment in his voice, the exhaustion. Tony's eyes were unreadable like they never used to be, and on bad days, Stephen thought Tony looked empty. Hollow.
A man wrung dry, and a man who couldn't take a step without leaking realities all over the pavement behind him.
Perhaps that was why they got in the car in the first place.
"Where are we going?" Stephen asked.
"I was thinking Loudonville," Tony said. "It's on Lake Erie. You won't have a problem with the water, will you?"
Stephen shook his head. "Only if we see it in the evening."
He'd drowned a few times, in a few universes. But only in the evenings.
"Sure," Tony said. "So we'll make sure we get there in the morning."
The magpies took off from behind the station, loud and sudden. They roosted in the surrounding trees. One settled on the power line and made it away slightly.
Tony was still looking at the pump. "Are you sure you don't remember?"
"I didn't have space for it, I guess."
Tony nodded. His jaw was tight.
And maybe he was disappointed and tired and hollow, but he still re-taught Stephen how to pump gasoline. And that, that , was why they'd gotten in the car.
⭑✩⭑
Soft grass presses flat beneath Stephen’s shins, wicking at his sides and the insides of his arms. The night sinks down on him, an inescapable weight of metric tons. It’s comforting, knowing he’ll never be able to get up again.
The grass tears beneath Stephen’s fingernails. He lets the dirt stain his skin, his face, the scars that stripe his body from deaths and resurrections healed instantaneously. He blends in with the night, this way.
Stephen wishes he could stay with the night. Stay with the hour, the hour where reality doesn’t matter, as it flees across the landscape.
Grass crunches beside him. Footsteps whistle through the crushing, impenetrable night.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Stephen doesn’t recognize the voice. But he knows it, and it is the opposite of the night.
“I’m not afraid,” Stephen reassures it.
“You’re shaking.”
Stephen looks down at his arms, finding them wrapped around his middle as he sways erratically like the grass in the field. His shoulders are shaking. His ribs feel like they will crush the heart trying to flee, the spirit trying to reach for a clarity in memory it will never find again. “Oh,” he breathes.
“It’s okay,” the voice says. It never comes closer. “It’s okay if you’re scared of me.”
“Okay,” Stephen mumbles, drifting in the dark. “If you’re sure.”
The voice sounds like stars falling. “I’m never sure anymore.”
⭑✩⭑
The rumble of an engine greeted Stephen when he spiraled awake. His cheek was numb, pressed up against something smooth and warm from his own body heat. Upright, his back twinged and his neck remind him what angle it was supposed to be at. Stephen blinked an eye open.
It took a long time for the machine around him to settle into the shape of a car. Stephen had been so convinced he’d see a spaceship.
“What the hell?” he grumbled, shoving himself upright. The seatbelt had cut a deep red groove into the skin of his neck.
“Rise and shine!” said the voice in the driver’s seat. It was filled with so much casual warmth and hidden nervousness that Stephen was momentarily taken aback.
His memories flip-flopped again. The sensation was disarming. Turning his head, Stephen glared at Tony Stark to his left and stitched reality into something orderly, if not accurate, within his mind.
“I would like to repeat, with passion; what the hell?” Stephen’s words were curt, a hairsbreadth from angry as he pushed unruly morning hair out of his eyes.
“Before you flip out at me, you agreed to this.” Tony raised a finger to the roof of the car, then pointed it at Stephen.
Stephen was not in the mood to banter with him right now. Stephen was so far from joking that it would take quite inordinate amounts of sweets to even bring him into the same galactic quadrant. “Turn around.”
Tony’s hands tightened over the steering wheel. “No.”
Stephen's hands twitched. "Turn around. Right now."
"You know, the last time you told me that, we ended up crash landing on a planet half a galaxy away."
"Because you didn't. Take us back to New York. I can't be away. You can't be away."
Tony didn't even look at him. "No."
Stephen seethed. He wasn't wearing his robes. He didn't have his sling-ring. "I don't know what world you think you're living in, but it's the one I'm supposed to protect. So get me back, Stark! Whatever this game is, I don't want it."
Tony did look at him, then, his gaze cold and stubborn and kind. And Stephen knew.
His anger died without glory or presence. Stephen looked down at his hands. "Oh," he said.
"Yeah, oh." Tony's knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "Have you finished being a world class asshole yet?"
"Never." Stephen smirked.
Tony just glared at him. "No," he said, "you don't get to do that."
"Would you prefer earnest apology?"
"I need you to stop pretending it doesn't happen, damn it. Every time, you just— you just brush on. Like it's normal."
Stephen looked at the smudge his cheek had clouded on the car window. "It is normal."
"No, Stephen," Tony said, and his voice was crackling like radio static, "it's not."
"You don't get to tell me that. You, of all people. You don't get to tell me that I'm broken."
"You're right," Tony snapped. "You're right, but here I am. Here I am, because I'm the only one who's going to. The only one you have, so take it or leave it."
Stephen swallowed. His mouth was dry, and it almost hurt. "I know which one you are," he said. "Which Tony."
"Good." Tony nodded, and he reached out to tap a three beat rhythm on the back of Stephen's hand. "Remember it. As best you can."
Stephen hummed his agreement, touching the edges of the car with quiet disgruntlement. Even if he was in the right timeline now, he wasn't sure what merit this had. He did have a multiverse to protect. That, at least, stayed constant.
“What are we doing?” he asked, helpless.
“We’re driving,” Tony said. His eyes were fixed on the road in front of them, unmoving. “You said it was alright last night.”
“I can’t just leave in the middle of the night,” Stephen protested. He turned around in the car seat, rubbing at the strap of the seatbelt as it burned across his skin. The road stretched just as infinitely behind them.
“Neither can I,” Tony replied, the edges of his voice weighed down with something Stephen didn’t know how to touch, how to reach out and soothe.
Tony kept driving. Stephen watched his hand move on the manual transmission, shifting as he sped and sped and sped. He wanted to cover it with his own. He wanted to touch his cold, shaking hands to the skin that ran too hot with chronic fever but wouldn’t couldn’t didn’t falter.
Tony Stark was a pine stretching endless needles through scarred branches. Stephen didn’t remember if he was the blight that had killed him or the November wind that had brought him back to life.
He didn’t remember, and he remembered too much. Those were the same thing, when all was said and done.
“I didn’t pack anything,” Stephen heard himself say.
“Neither did I.” Tony looked at the horizon, and Stephen saw it shining back to him. “I just drove. You and me, Merlin.”
Stephen pulled his knees up to his chest beneath the seatbelt. Without taking his eyes off the road, Tony reached out and brushed a curl of hair behind Stephen’s ear.
They drove.
⭑✩⭑
There’s a heartbeat beside him, trailing lazy circles against his own. It’s too close and too far away. Too vulnerable and too protected. Stephen counts the edges of it, its polyhedral impression in the swirl of realities he holds against his bones. It carves out its name, and Stephen lets himself remember.
Stark is on his side on the car seat, eyes like haze-covered windows. “You should sleep,” he says.
“That’s what I’m doing,” Stephen tells him fondly.
“Is that so? Well, sweet dreams then.”
Stephen rolls his eyes back up, looking at the stars through the ceiling of the car. He doesn’t remember their names. His eyes flicker. His reality wavers. Stephen doesn’t care, doesn’t have to care.
Tony speaks again. “Is driving alright? With your memory—your hands?”
Stephen hums dazedly, honestly. “I don’t remember the crash,” he says.
Like old cassette tapes.
⭑✩⭑
The book practically whacked Stephen awake, and he shot upright against his locked seatbelt with a yelp. Tony laughed, and Stephen calmed.
“Wake up call,” Tony chirped. He looked brighter, more awake in the rising sun, even though Stephen was sure he hadn’t slept.
“Thanks,” Stephen grumbled.
“Come on, I got you a gift!” Tony took his eyes away from the road for a moment to grin at him. “It’s your favorite, you nerd.”
Stephen looked down at the book that had fallen and crinkled a few of its pages in his lap. He smoothed it out carefully—and a little suspiciously. The title made him raise his eyebrows.
“Norse myths?” Stephen asked. “You got me a mythology collection?”
“Not in the original Norse, unfortunately,” Tony said, looking back at the road. He pulled over and slowed slightly to let a tailgating convertible zip by them.
“Why?”
“Because it’s a long drive.” Tony shrugged. “I thought you might enjoy reading it out loud. We could laugh at Thor—which is one of my favorite pastimes, you know.”
“Second only to throwing books at me.”
A grin crinkled the side of Tony’s face that Stephen could see. “That’s the deep satisfaction of a primal instinct fulfilled.”
“Glad I can be of entertainment.”
“An area at which you excel.”
Stephen snorted, even as he flipped the book open to its first page. “Who’s the drama queen here?”
“Can’t we both hold the title?” Stephen read the opening line and amended: “I lied, the Scandinavians’ characterization of Loki reigns supreme.”
Tony poked him eagerly, then dropped his hand to rip open another package of skittles. “Read!”
Stephen did.
⭑✩⭑
There is an indeterminate hour of the night, where this day and the next tangle themselves together, that Stephen seeks out regardless of timeline or dimension. The speed of dimensional rotations, the color of their suns, and the lengths of their tomorrows never seem to factor into the blank space of time that prefaces their sunrises. This is the moment that time can’t touch. It means everything to the sorcerer who time can’t touch, either.
It’s this hour that a voice chooses to burst into the Sanctum and call Stephen’s name in the tone that allows no arguments.
Stephen raises his head from his crossed arms and blinks out the exit to the library, too disconnected to be miffed. Stark, he thinks.
Perhaps it’s wrong. Perhaps he should have used an honorary, or an insult. Perhaps they’re on a first name basis in whatever universe had decided to rear its head in the witching hour tonight.
Stark appears in the doorway quicker than Stephen had anticipated. He’s been here before. That’s useful information. In a different time, Stephen might’ve paid attention to it, used it to stitch together a proper estimate of the history unfolding around him. But not now. Now is the one moment, the single stretching instant, where he doesn’t have to.
Standing against the edge of the doorframe, Stark looks Stephen up and down. He ears wrinkled dress pants and an old t-shirt as if it’s a perfectly sane hour and not the only one that isn’t. He has car keys in his hand.
“Hello Stark,” Stephen says.
Stark’s face softens. “So it’s one of those nights, then.”
“Yes,” Stephen says, because he doesn’t know what isn’t.
“All the better I’m here.”
“Hm.”
Stark moves across the library floor without looking down, stepping over the books that had gotten overexcited that evening and thrown themselves off their shelves. His steps have an even rhythm, a steady one. He settles on the chair opposite Stephen and sets aside the cup of old tea in front of him. Ceramics clink. Stephen winces. He can’t stand the sound tonight.
“Where are you?” Tony asks.
“Nowhere.”
“When are you?”
Stephen hums, floating. “Never.”
“Are you hurt? Scared?”
Stephen shakes his head. The meanings of the questions are lost on him. “No.”
“Okay.” Stark reaches for the teacup for a moment, automatically wanting to fiddle, but stops himself when Stephen winces again.
“You’re fidgeting,” Stephen observes. “Is something wrong?”
Stark smiles at him. “Everything’s alright.”
That sounds like something you say when everything isn’t. When everything is so far from right you feel peaceful in the moments it overwhelms you.
“Come with me?” Stark offers, holding out his hand.
Stephen cocks his head at him. “Where are we going?”
“To the car. Is that alright?”
Stephen can’t remember why it wouldn’t be. Is this the universe, or is it the next? Is this the taste of dreams?
Tony leads him down endless stairs and out into noisy streetlight. Stephen feels like it burns, like it will blister across his skin. He flinches away from it, flinches toward Tony.
He drifts.
The seatbelt rubs at the skin between his fingers, warm and sharp. Back and forth, Stephen brushes his hands across it as he watches Stark drive. No, Stark isn’t in the car yet. He is sitting now, though, looking almost guilty when he turns those hollow, hollow eyes on Stephen.
“You’re taking advantage of this,” Stephen realizes, without anger. “Of the witching hour. You know I won’t argue with you when I can’t feel the timeline.”
“Yeah,” Stark breathes, and his voice breaks. “But I need this.”
“Okay,” Stephen says. Millions of lifetimes drip into kaleidoscopes off the tips of his fingers, but he knows that much. “Whatever you need.”
They drive.
⭑✩⭑
“You know, when I agreed to this, I thought there’d be more scenery and less cows.”
Tony threw another book at him.
⭑✩⭑
Stephen has seen the end of the world, and it looks like this.
Stephen has seen every end of the world, seen it’s creativities, it’s disappointments, its bangs and its whimpers. He’s seen it end in flame and he’s seen it end in dark, seen cold and death and life and emptiness.
And when it’s all over, when the world has run its course, it looks like this.
Stephen stands in nothingness and looks at the empty land rolling out around him. A single pathway snakes through it, the final signpost toward the peace of death, but Stephen doesn’t know how to follow it. Every time he does, he never reaches death. Every time he does, the night crawls back to day and Stephen wakes up, choking on time and knowing it’s more elusive than forgiveness.
The land is scorched and the universe is empty.
And in the purple grass, Stephen sees a firefly.
He doesn’t follow the road to the end. He follows the firefly, because he is still stupid enough to believe in magic.
⭑✩⭑
“Am I supposed to subsist on Skittles alone, or…?”
Tony rolled his eyes, his eyes skating the signs along the edges of the highway. They passed another car—the first one in what felt like years, and Stephen thought it deserved a metal. The road was bright from the rain that must have fallen before Stephen and Tony arrived. It turned the tips of hills and the edges of painted lines into mirrors.
In Stephen’s hands, plastic crinkled. He wadded the wrapper into a ball and chucked it at Tony.
The man caught it, rolled his eyes, and threw it back. “Working on it, whiny. We are in the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s nice,” Stephen said.
“Isn’t it?” Tony looked somewhat triumphant, an expression so vibrant across his grey-streaked face that the radio skipped.
Stephen smiled at him. “It was nice the last time we were here,” he said. “We should stop at that lake. See if the magpies are still there.”
He tried. He tried, but he still couldn’t catch the happiness when it slipped from Tony’s face, leaving weariness behind. Stephen’s chest twisted. All that he caught in his shaking hands was guilt and dismay.
“What?” Stephen heard the flinch in his own voice. “What did I do?”
Tony took a breath. He sounded angry, and like he was trying not to be. “We’ve never been here before, Stephen.”
Stephen blinked. Then frowned. Everything was so clear; he couldn’t believe that. “But…” he began. “What about…”
“It’s okay,” Tony told him. “You’ll remember. You always do.”
Frustration tinged the back of Stephen’s throat. Because he did remember—he did, and it turned his bitterness into anger. “Why?” he demanded. “Why does it have to be your world? You have too many, too damn many and I’m tired of it! Why do I have to stand between the future and the past because none of you could get it the fuck right the first time?”
Tony’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. The air that trickled through the filter tasted bland, empty, dead. “I don’t know,” he hissed. “The world is fine, Stephen, moving on like it always does. But I’m not. I’m so far from fine I’ll kidnap a wizard when he can’t fight me, when he can’t even remember my name, just so I can get away, get away, go anywhere.”
“I tried,” Stephen says. His breath is corrosive. His touch is the same, and he wants to reach out and burn Tony with it at the same time he wants to curl away. “I tried to find a world where you were alright. I tried.”
“But instead you saved the universe,” Tony snaps back. “As you should of. I blame you for it and you blame yourself for it and it doesn’t matter—it doesn’t fucking matter because I’d have you anyway, I want you anyway. We’re all still here, because of me and you, and I don’t know what to do.”
Stephen pressed his eyes into the heels of his palms. He bit his tongue, scraping his teeth across the surface of it and tasting his pulse behind the skin. He breathed.
Beside him, a miracle, Tony did too.
“This place really is nice,” Stephen said. His voice sounded like the middle of a sigh.
The empty man sat beside the one who overflowed. And maybe, somehow, they equalized.
Maybe, somehow, they didn’t have to.
“Isn’t it?”
⭑✩⭑
There’s a figure lying beside him. A figure who smells like the car and like laserburn and like too much and too little all at once.
Starlight is rolling down his face.
“I wish I didn’t know you like this,” the figure whispers, voice shaking like Stephen’s hands on his face. “I wish you didn’t need me, I wish—I wish I could never get into your core, that you were still armored and impenetrable.”
The man who is both a corpse raised unwilling and a wonder presses his forehead to Stephen’s, and starlight drips onto Stephen’s cheeks.
“Better to cling to the outside of a jade heart than have something crack you into pieces so I can know you all the way through.”
⭑✩⭑
The gas station was ratty and littered, and Stephen stretched his arms above his head with a yawn that split his entire face open. His legs tingled as he shook feeling back into them, and he ducked around the side of the car to open the door for Tony. The man patted him sagely on the wrist as he stood.
“Driver picks the food,” he announced.
Stephen grumbled. There was no swaying Tony, however, so Stephen raised his hand to catch the spare credit card Tony tossed at him.
“Fill the tank,” Tony told him. Then he waltzed toward the convenience store with a confidence that compensated for exhaustion. An empty Cheeto bag followed him most of the way. Magpies gave battle cries on the other side of the station. His clothes were wrinkled and his hair disheveled, and Stephen thought he looked untouchable.
He knew better, though.
When Tony came back, Stephen was still standing there, staring at the pump.
⭑✩⭑
Stephen holds out his hands, a light shining between his fingers like a captured star. It lights up the face in front of him, the face Stephen knows and knows and knew . “I found it,” he says. “I thought you might like to see it.”
“See what?” asks the empty voice, the hollow man, the beauty and the wonder of every catastrophe. Stephen smiles and drops his hand, and the firefly hangs between them like a string between hearts.
“See what?”
“That you don’t have to be scared of the end of the world.”
⭑✩⭑
They doubled back on themselves twice, so they wouldn’t make it to the lake in the evening. In the morning, it was wide and empty and peaceful. The water mirrored spacetime.
“Thank you,” Tony said.
⭑✩⭑
Stars fall like sand in an hourglass, measuring so much more than he can touch with his mortal, immortal hands. They form looping shapes and diamond drapings, and they are as numerous as infinity.
Stephen lies and looks up, the press of a car’s warm metal against his back. His fingers are laced through someone else’s.
“You don’t remember the names of the stars, do you?”
Stephen looks over at a miracle and smiles.
“No. But I remember yours.”