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Tony Stark didn’t die. It's not that Stephen is upset about the fact; as irritating as the man is, he wouldn't wish death on an ally so easily. It's just that...Tony should have died. In New York, on the battlefield, after his Snap. Stephen Strange, Future Sorceror Supreme, did not live fourteen million lives in four seconds just to be told that he had miscalculated their only chance of survival and unwittingly almost caused Tony Stark's death.
Except that’s exactly what the world’s telling him, he realizes as he stares into an overpriced cup of black coffee and questions his entire existence. Across from him, Peter fiddles with some home-brew video game console while Morgan munches on a blueberry muffin. The trio catch some attention from passers-by - of course they would, it’s a billionaire’s five year old daughter, a disgraced surgeon-turned-time wizard, and unknown random civilian Peter Parker - but most of them only spare them a second glance. After all, Stephen is a regular at this corner; any more high profile figures would just be business as usual.
Business as usual...considering he and a not insignificant number of people had been dead less than two months ago, business as usual is still a prospect he’s coming to terms with. And it’s not even as usual when compared to before, either. He’s an Avenger, for one, and not totally of his own volition. After the Battle of Earth - as the media so lovingly called it, which makes Stephen wonder if they were willingly ignorant of the rest of the universe - almost all of the participants had been pulled into the bureaucratic nightmare, Stephen himself included.
(Almost all, in this context, meant everybody who hadn’t immediately headed off-world, and that is the only reason Stephen Strange, Sorceror Supreme, will ever say that he is jealous of Peter Quill, Ruiner of Everything.)
Peter’s also an Avenger, albeit still a masked one, but it hasn’t changed his life too much; no, the Snap probably did more damage than the Sokovia Accords, considering half of his schoolmates are now five years older than him. Stephen idly wonders if any of his long estranged friends and coworkers got snapped, but then realizes that he’s so old it doesn’t even matter. The difference between forty and forty-five isn’t nearly as drastic as that between seventeen and twenty-two.
As if sensing he’s being thought about, Peter accidentally drops his pet project on the table with a loud crack, bringing Stephen back to reality. “Is it broken?” Stephen’s question is quick, even if slightly uncaring.
Peter surveys it before shaking his head. Of course it isn’t, Stephen chastizes himself dryly; he’s an honorary Stark, so he must have access to materials that put Nokias to shame. “Mr. Stark’s letting me use a vibranium alloy to test this...y’know, to make sure that it’s just as strong as pure vibranium, and...”
Peter keeps talking, but Stephen tunes him out; he’s gotten good at that, now that he’s spent more than two hours in a dying spaceship with the kid. What had he been thinking about? Oh right. Tony.
After the Battle of Earth, Stephen had been ready to collapse in relief that his plan had worked- and just as soon as he was about to, Tony propped him up on his shoulder.
Once again, Tony. Tony Stark who, by Stephen’s calculations, should have been dead. Tony Stark who had greeted him with a very tired but very alive, “Don’t drop dead on me, Strange, we’ve got a mess to clean up.”
And you know what? He almost had dropped dead, out of pure shock. He had been wrong. He , the Sorceror Supreme, had looked through time and found the wrong outcome. And if he had followed that outcome, he would have skipped over an entire timeline where lives weren’t needlessly sacrificed.
He barely remembers what happened after. He vaguely remembers something about Banner controlling the Stones - which explains why he’s not longer green and lumpy, as sad as Banner is about it - and Captain Marvel doing something cool, but it had all been lost in the whirlwind of I was wrong and I could have killed him .
Then, Stephen did the most sensible thing that any man named Stephen Strange could do: he signed a stack of documents, half-heartedly joined the new Avengers roster, and locked himself in the Sanctum for fifty whole days with no human contact aside from Wong.
A month and a half later, after he thought he had finally compartmentalized his insecurities as he was wont to do, he had seen Tony again for the first time since the battle at an Avengers internal conference, and the shock came back to him. Not at the thought of a friend being alive, but the thought of him almost not.
He had still been in a state of shock three days later, when Tony shoved Morgan on him - Tony, not Pepper - so the two could go to some conference in Vienna concerning the state of the international market. And he had just been winding down from his confusion when Peter had stopped by as well, babbling something about being Morgan’s official babysitter because Tony decided last second that he didn’t trust Stephen enough.
Tony. Still living Tony. Tony the reason for Stephen’s current mental breakdown in public. He sighs, rubs his forehead, and finally takes a swig of his coffee. As expected, it’s cold. His expression sours even more.
“Whatcha thinkin’ of, Doc?” Peter looks up from his PlaySpider (patent pending) and poses his question as soon as he sees the darkness over Stephen’s expression. Stephen doesn’t blame him; if he saw somebody as in-tune with the cosmos as he was looking as though the world was ending, he’d be just as ready to pick their brain for the impending apocalypse.
(He’s not gloating, he’s just stating a fact.)
It takes Stephen a moment to come up with an adequate answer- something that explains his mental process more than ‘cold coffee’, but nothing so alarming as ‘your closest paternal figure should really be dead right about now’. Finally, he answers with a clipped, “the universe.”
“Ooh, I think about that a lot too, you know,” Peter says, and Stephen knows Peter well enough to know that he’s the kind of kid to ramble when he’s nervous, so if Stephen lets him get out another word they’d be stuck talking about the number 42 for several hours.
Instead, he cuts him off. “Yes, well, do you think of the universes? ” That makes Peter stop, think, and shake his head. “There are billions of universes out there,” he continues as soon as he knows he’s received Peter’s full attention, “billions upon billions of futures where things could have gone any which way.” He stresses things as if it’s some big secret, because it is- to the public, Peter Parker who was on a school field trip when the world ended should have no awareness of the Snap. “I saw plenty of them, and I can’t help but wonder how lucky we were that we’re in a world where nothing went wrong.”
It’s only half luck that they survived, he knows this much. A vast majority of it was Stephen’s own drifting through time and making puzzle pieces fall into place from beyond the grave. A non-zero percent of it, however, was luck; he was lucky that Tony had survived. That Wanda and Vision had survived. That he hadn’t led them into a world where they were-
"How many futures did you see?" Peter asks all of a sudden, and he's just like Tony in a way, eyes wide and ready to receive information that only people like Tony would be able to understand. It's almost strange, and Stephen hopes the similarities end at their insatiable curiosity.
He repeats what he had told Tony five years ago. "Fourteen million, six hundred and five."
"And how many futures did we win?"
He pauses before answering. "One."
Peter looks at Stephen as if contemplating his next words, before asking carefully, "but humanity has infinite potential and all that. Billions of universes, right? Why did we only win once?"
Stephen laughs; this boy is smart. Smarter than Tony, and he's loathe to admit it, but smarter than himself, as well, if he’s asking all the right questions that Stephen hadn’t even asked himself.
Such insight deserves an honest reply, even if it makes Stephen reflect on his ego far more than necessary. "Because that's the one I stopped at."