Archive of Our Own

Scott knew that something was wrong the moment he came out of the quantum realm.

The change in the location of the van made that obvious, of course, but the bigger reason why he knew that something was wrong was because he felt it, deep in his bones. His very soul seemed to scream with it. It was like when you were in a dream and touched your hair, only to realize that your hair was a different texture and what you were doing didn’t even make sense.

Except. Except the world that Scott woke up in was very much not a dream.

If anything, it was a nightmare.

The realization didn’t set in until he made his way to the Paxtons’ house. Seeing the world in disarray, with empty streets and monuments to the Vanished which included his own name on it, he registered, but it was only when he saw Cassie three years older and Jim with grey streaks in his hair, no Maggie in sight, that it finally settled into his mind.

They were the ones to tell him about what had happened. The battle with Thanos. The Blip, in which half of the entire universe had died, including Maggie and the Pym-Van Dynes. The three years, almost exactly to the date, that had passed since then.

“What about the Avengers?” were the first words out of Scott’s mouth in response. He didn’t think it was a bad question to ask.

But the answer only made the reality he was now apparently living in so much worse. The Avengers were dead; maybe not completely, but as good as.

“There’s five of them left,” Jim told him at the end of the revelation. Both he and Cassie had a resigned look on their faces, one which made them look so much older, as if they already knew what Scott was going to do with the news. “They’ve been living at the Compound in upstate New York.”

~~~

Scott honestly didn’t know who the five living Avengers were going to be.

Jim and Cassie wouldn’t tell him, and for some reason – totally not like it had been out of service for the last three years, or anything – his phone wouldn’t work, wouldn’t even connect to any wifi. So, for the entire, nearly weeklong trip, he was left with nothing but his imagination to answer the question for him. Because really, the living Avengers could have been comprised of anyone. They could have even included a talking raccoon, for all he knew.

Somehow, though, Scott’s imagination couldn’t truly prepare him for the answer he received when he got there.

In one of the kitchen/dining room combos of the main building, he found the Black Widow, her hair grown out with blonde dye at the edges and its curliness lost, Spider-Man, who now had a metal arm, and the Vision. Also there were two kids Spider-Man’s age, one with brown hair that had weird blonde tufts in it who had declared himself as Harley Keener/Iron Lad/Spider-Man’s boyfriend (well, he didn’t say that last part, but it was kind of obvious), and the other a girl with black hair who introduced herself as Kate Bishop/the new Hawkeye. Harley’s younger sister, who was about the same age as Cassie, Abigail, was there as well, although she was shooed out of the room rather quickly since she “wasn’t quite old enough” for the conversation they were going to have. Not that he blamed them for the decision.

Too late, Scott realized that the reason why he couldn’t prepare himself for them being the only ones left was because, in his mind, one of the others was always there. Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, the original Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch...even the Falcon and Bucky Barnes would’ve been fine.

But it didn’t matter.

“I think I can fix this,” he said.

He was expecting them to look at him in wonder, or at least with curiosity. He was expecting them to ask him about how he thought he could fix the Blip, about how he thought he might be able to get everyone back.

That was not the reaction he got.

Instead, he watched as all of the members of the team exchanged a long, hard look. “You’re talking about time travel, quantum physics?” Harley guessed.

“Yes! Yeah,” Scott confirmed, before he frowned. “Wait...this has already occurred to you?”

“It has,” Peter answered, with a nod and a small smile. “It’s not possible. Have you ever heard of the Planck Scale and the Deutsch Proposition?”

~~~

The Avengers invited him to stay for dinner.

Well, actually, they invited him to stay for as long as he wanted, but specifically requested that he eat dinner with them. Since Scott was starving, and admittedly still not completely done with trying to convince them that they could undo the Snap yet, he accepted.

Bemused, he watched as the six of them moved around each other with a fluidity he doubted the Avengers before Civil War could’ve had. Abigail set the table, Natasha worked the stove, Harley and Peter did vegetable prep when they weren’t sneaking in some disgustingly sweet PDA in-between, and Kate fixed the drinks and readied the bread. Vision was not allowed anywhere near the kitchen.

“Since I do not have tastebuds or a digestive system, it has been deduced that I am not a viable chef,” he told Scott with a small tilt of his head when he asked about it.

It was strangely...domestic.

Over the meal, they made small talk. “Shop talk” was specifically not allowed, so Scott settled with getting to learn about the youngest of the Avengers. Harley and Peter were both sophomores at NYU, with Harley double-majoring in physics and mechanical engineering and Peter in physics and biochemistry. The two of them were planning on taking over SI, which had been in the hands of the Board, as soon as they graduated, he was sure. Kate was looking to go to NYU as a freshman in the fall, since she hadn’t been able to do so sooner between her mom dusting and something to do with a guy called Kingpin. Abigail had an upcoming dance recital, which she was really excited about. She did ballet, taught in part by the Black Widow herself.

“Would you like to watch a movie with us?” Peter asked after they were all finished and the dishes were cleaned up, another group effort. The small smile had returned to his face. “WALL-E is off-limits, but we’ve got a lot of movies that came out in the past couple of years you’d probably be interested in.”

Instantly, Scott thought of the Shazam! movie Cassie had wanted to see, back when she was still eleven and not fourteen and now only four years away from college.

His stomach twisted.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said.

Sleep for him had been restless and only in short bursts ever since he came out of the quantum realm, so he tried doing that instead. It was a fruitless endeavor. His dreams were haunted by visions of Hope, Maggie, Hank, and Janet all turning into dust, their remains disappearing into the wind; of him never coming out of the quantum realm and Cassie doing the rest of her growing up with only one-third (it had almost been one-quarter) of her parents in her life.

Finally, at around one in the morning he gave up the pretense, kicking off the covers and heading back towards the kitchen for a glass of water.

When he got there, he found he was not the only person who couldn’t sleep that night. Harley and Peter were there, sitting at the table, the latter’s metal hand clutched in the former’s flesh one. They were staring at one of Stark’s hologram projectors, one depicting a –

“Is that an inverted Möbius strip?” Scott asked.

Neither of the two teenagers looked up.

“It is,” Peter said. There were dark bruises underneath his eyes, and his face was terrifyingly pale. “It would also be a way to navigate the quantum realm.”

Warmth suddenly bloomed inside Scott’s chest.

“You’ll do it?” he questioned, hope bleeding into his voice. “You’ll actually do it? You’ll help me get everyone back?”

The kid sniffled. “It’s not that simple. We’ll have to put it to a vote, and there’s every chance it could get shot down. We – we already lost a lot. We can’t lose anymore.”

Scott stared at them, at the way their hands were clutched in one another’s, at how close they were sitting together.

He stared, too, at the weary hope adorning their faces, blatant, as if the emotion hadn’t been there in years.

“It’ll pass,” he said, sounding confident. “I know it will.”

~~~

He was right.

The vote actually happened a couple of days later, when two of the other three apparent members of the team – their participation was a bit of a secret – arrived. Brunnhilde, otherwise known as the queen of Asgard or Valkyrie, arrived on top of a flying pegasus, which totally wasn’t the coolest thing that Scott had ever seen. Ororo, the queen of Wakanda, followed her with a sudden storm and a crack of thunder, her eyes glowing as her feathery white hair fanned about her. Which was also cool. A little bit of a Thor ripoff, but cool.

Carol Danvers, whoever that was beyond the last member of the team, didn’t make it. She was off-world and they couldn’t get into contact with her, at least not as soon as they wanted to.

“You’re serious about this,” Brunnhilde spoke, giving them all a disbelieving look when they were finished with filling her and Ororo in on everything. “You really think you can get everyone back?”

“Everyone of the Snapped,” Peter corrected, though after a glance at Harley, he added, “Maybe even Loki, if we can play our cards right.”

A myriad of emotions appeared on Brunnhilde’s face. “How would that even work?” she asked. “N – not the getting back everyone else, but also Loki?”

“It all depends on the wording, even subconsciously. In the past couple of months, we’ve started to debate if the reason why all of the other Avengers died is because he secretly wanted them to,” he explained, before his expression darkened. “And we also know that he would’ve excluded me when he Snapped. He promised it to my – to Tony shortly before he left for Earth.”

“So, it’s all about the wording,” Harley continued for him. “And we’re just in luck that we have the greatest, and only, android in the entire world to make the Snap. He won’t leave anything out.” The last part, he said with a wink.

Vision inclined his head. “Indeed, I won’t.”

Silence lapsed between them.

“So,” Peter said. “What do we think? All in favor, raise your hand.”

He immediately raised his metal one, and so did Harley. Just, it was made of flesh instead of metal. Kate and Vision raised theirs. And Scott, of course, raised his. He didn’t have to think about it. He was willing to do anything to get everyone back.

After a moment, Brunnhilde and Ororo did the same.

“I do not regret becoming the queen of Wakanda,” Ororo murmured. “But T’Challa deserves a right to rest in the city of Necropolis.”

Natasha was the last one to raise her hand. She did so hesitantly, though he had a feeling it wasn’t because of what they were discussing. He could see it in her eyes; she was just as desperate as the rest of them.

“We’re going to need help,” she said.

Harley’s face scrunched up. “There’s eight of us, Nat. Shouldn’t that be enough? Or are you talking about the X-Men?”

“Not the X-Men,” she replied quietly.

They all stared at her.

Sighing, she put her hands on the table and interlaced them. “A year and a half ago, when we found Vision in the HYDRA base,” she began. “I realized something was missing. Something they should have stolen, but didn’t. So, I looked into it. I – I wasn’t expecting to find him. I thought he was dead, like everyone else. He wasn’t at his house when I got there to find him.”

Scott had no idea who she was talking about, nor did it seem anyone else at the table except Peter, Harley, and Vision. The latter two both reacted mildly, Harley letting out a small sigh and Vision merely blinking. But Peter, he clenched his metal hand into a fist and then unclenched it, before he repeated the action several times over. “You’re talking about Barton.”

Natasha nodded.

“Wait,” Kate said, her mouth dropping open. “The original Hawkeye’s alive?”

Another nod.

Peter got to his feet. His chair moved to fall, but one swift catch from Harley prevented it. The other superhero, of course, didn’t exactly look happy himself, but the look he was giving Peter told Scott he was more concerned about other things. “Peter.”

Peter ignored him. “You knew,” he accused, seething. “You knew for what, six months at least that he was alive, for all this time, and you didn’t think to tell us? You didn’t think it would be important for us to know that there was another one of us left out there? That the man who knew about my – about everything was out there?”

“I didn’t think it would be safe,” Natasha admitted.

He glared. “Why? What’s so dangerous about Barton? He was retired when the Blip happened, wasn’t he?”

She shook her head. “Not afterwards. He became the Ronin.”

Naturally, Scott was out of the loop from spending the last three years in the quantum realm, so he had no idea what the name meant, yet across the table everyone else seemed to. Kate choked, Harley’s face scrunched up even more than it did before, Vision blinked in surprise, and Ororo raised an eyebrow.

Looking at them, he felt like he was missing something pretty big. “Alright, guys, fill me in here, who’s the Ronin?”

Harley snorted. “Oh, nobody. Just about the deadliest assassin to ever live.”

“What?”

“You have to understand,” Natasha said, and at first, he thought she was talking to him. But her eyes were on Peter, who despite the news was gazing back at her with a fire in his stare. “We – we haven’t really moved on, Peter. None of us have. But for Clint...it was worse. He saw his entire family die in front of him. His wife, his kids...” She trailed off.

The silence returned. Scott was kind of tempted to break it in that annoying way he did, like he had with Hank and Hope all those years ago.

However, before he could, Peter let out a large breath through his nose. “Fine,” he snapped. “I get it. But just for the record, I’m still mad at you, Mom.”

Next to him, Harley snorted.

Presumably relieved, Natasha offered him a smile of her own.

~~~

They hashed out all of the details before Natasha went to go and pick up Barton.

Six Stones, nine people. The Space Stone and the Mind Stone were in New York in 2012, so they were fairly easy to figure out how to get. The Reality Stone, as revealed by a very confused Darcy Lewis (one of the only other Avengers-affiliated people, Scott learned, to survive the Snap, although perhaps it was because she hadn’t been associated with them for a while) was in Asgard in 2013. And the Power Stone, according to details in the ship’s log on the Benatar, was on a planet called Morag until sometime around 2014.

That just left the Time Stone and the Soul Stone.

“What do we know about this Dr. Strange guy?” Natasha asked. She was sitting on one of the couches, crisscross-applesauce style with her bare feet pulled towards herself and a carton of takeout in her lap.

Next to her, Peter, who was sitting upside-down with his legs against the couch’s back, frowned. “Not much. I know he was in New York with the Time Stone in 2018 and that he was a doctor up until 2016, but not much else. I don’t even know how he got the Time Stone.”

“And there aren’t any wizards left to ask,” Harley pointed out from one of the other couches, Kate at his side.

The Black Widow hummed. “But we can assume that it’s likely, since he had the Time Stone, it had been with the wizards for a while? Because if so, there’s a chance that there are three Stones in New York in 2012.”

“It does seem likely,” Vision agreed.

“Okay, so we probably have the Time Stone, what about the Soul Stone? We know next to nothing about that,” Kate said.

“Not true,” Brunnhilde corrected. “When the Allfather still fashioned himself as a dictator, he decided that he wanted the Stones. He instructed Hela to find Vormir, the planet where the Soul Stone is said to reside.”

Natasha frowned. “And where is Vormir?”

“It’s at the center of the universe,” Brunnhilde explained, then abruptly turned hesitant. “It’s...said to be a dominion of death. Hela took some of us Valkyries with her when she went there. She wouldn’t let us go up with her to the mountain where it could be found, so I’m not exactly sure what happened. What I do know, however, is that she was unable to do whatever it was asked of her to take it. We went home empty-handed. Odin was most displeased.”

A dominion of death, Scott thought. He shuddered. “Not it!”

As it turned out, he shouldn’t have been concerned. Natasha decided she and Clint would go to Vormir, while Vision volunteered himself for Morag. Brunnhilde and Ororo were going to go to Asgard, leaving Scott, Peter, Harley, and Kate to take New York. He thought it was a good plan. The farther away he was from whatever was going on at Vormir, the better.

~~~

After she decided who was going where, or rather when, Natasha went off to go and get Barton. She was only gone for a day, and when she came back, she came with him in tow. Like with the rest of them, he was haggard-looking to Scott. His hair was cut up into some sort of weird style, the lines in his face were harsher than they had been during the civil war fiasco, and his left arm was covered in tattoos.

Looking at him, despite all that he had seemingly done, Scott couldn’t help but feel bad for him.

So, too, did the rest of them. Peter took one glance at the man before his gaze softened. “Clint Barton,” he said, reaching out with his metal hand. “No hard feelings over Civil War?”

“No hard feelings,” Barton replied, taking his hand, then paused. “But you know, I’m pretty sure Barnes was the only one with a metal arm that day.”

Peter grinned. “Yeah, well, what can I say? I took one look at the thing and decided I needed one myself.”

Harley rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Totally not like we built it together or anything,” he snarked, before he thrusted his hand out as well. “Harley Keener, aka Iron Lad. And the girl over there is Kate Bishop. She took over for you as Hawkeye while you were gone. She wants to say hi, but she’s too busy fangirling to actually do it.”

“I am not fangirling!” Kate protested, but her face was suspiciously red.

Barton’s eyes trailed over to her, followed by the rest of him. He looked at her appraisingly, and she sat with him nervousness in her eyes.

“I’ve seen your work,” he said at last. “You’re good. You should call yourself one of the world’s greatest archers.”

Kate’s eyes widened. “R – really?”

He nodded. “Really. Glad you could take my place, kid.”

They performed the test runs for the time travel after that. Well, a test run. Scott, like the idiot that he was, messed up trying to get one of the Pym Particles into the suits they had made, so they lost one of the test runs. Barton ended up taking his place for what would’ve been the second, but was now the only.

He was only gone for ten seconds for them, but when he came back, he fell to the ground, a baseball glove clutched in his hands. Natasha ran over to comfort him, her hands instantly on his back.

“It worked,” he said. His voice was broken. “It fucking worked.”

It was time to execute the time heist.

~~~

2012 was a...weird experience.

The Invasion was in full swing, so the Chitauri were running around everywhere and causing havoc when they got there, accentuated by a cameo by the Hulk. Kate left them early on, heading towards Bleecker Street where the wizard headquarters supposedly were.

“Don’t be stupid,” she told them before she left.

“Can’t,” Harley snarked, cupping his hands around his face for good measure as she ran down the street. “You’re taking all the stupid with you!”

She turned around long enough to flip him off.

. . .

. . .

Spoiler alert: they were stupid.

It started off well. Peter was able to sneak up to the penthouse of the Avengers Tower, with Scott riding small-sized on his shoulder. The Avengers were there, but none of them noticed the college-aged kid wearing a spider-suit in the background. Neither did the SHIELD-but-actually-HYDRA agents, which made it seem like they weren’t really as good at their jobs as they obviously thought they were, but whatever. Peter was able to flick him onto the case containing the Space Stone, while Harley, in another part of the building, ran point on the Scepter.

Downstairs was where things started going wrong. Scott was able to climb into the crevices of Tony Stark’s reactor to temporarily disable the entire thing. He made a quip about the Axe Body Spray, which the kid was strangely silent for. Strangely, because just a few minutes before he had made a quip himself about how the old Captain America suit did absolutely nothing for Steve Roger’s ass, which he and Harley might or might have gotten into a quick banter about.

Frowning, Scott looked up. “Are you sure you want to do this, kid?”

He had no idea as to what the relationship between Stark and Peter was, but it seemed like they were close. Had been close. Whatever.

Through the comms, he could hear Peter’s heavy breathing. “It’s the plan. Just do it.”

So, he did. Stark collapsed to the floor, spasming and gasping for breath. All of the Avengers crowded around him, shouting. The case went flying across the floor, headed towards Peter. He moved to catch it.

Suddenly, the doors to the stairwell burst open. The Hulk came out, and with a roar, he smacked Peter across the back. The action caused him and the case to fly in opposite directions; him backwards, towards one of the entrances of the building, and the case forwards...towards Loki. It opened, revealing the blue Cube inside.

“Shit,” Scott cursed. He moved towards them, his hand headed towards his adjustor, completely willing to blow their cover if it meant getting the Space Stone. “Shit, shit, shit...”

But he was too late. He never even got a chance.

Loki looked around, and when he saw that nobody was watching, picked up the Cube. He was gone in an instant.

Horror flashed through Scott’s body. “What the hell just happened?”

From where he had landed about thirty feet away, Peter groaned. “Oh, we just blew it.”

And of course, as if that wasn’t bad enough, upstairs, thirteen floors away, Harley got into a fight with Captain America a few minutes later.

At least he was able to keep the Scepter, though.

~~~

“I can’t believe you,” Kate stated, her hands on her hips. “I told you not to be stupid!”

“It’s not our fault!” Harley protested.

Peter sighed. The poor kid looked exhausted. He was sitting on a stack of empty crates in the alleyway where they had appeared, a hand in his hair and heartbreak on his face. “No, it’s my fault,” he said. “I should’ve gotten out of the way like my spidey-sense told me to.”

“It’s not your fault,” Harley repeated. He walked over and wrapped his arms around Peter’s shoulders, pressing a kiss into his hair. “Or if it is, it’s mine too. We split up again even though Nat’s always told us not to.”

Peter shook his head. “No. It’s my fault. Mine only. I just...I thought I could see him in pain,” he whispered. “But it was just – it was just like seeing him die all over again. My dad.”

Suddenly, the pieces clicked inside Scott’s mind. The same dark hair, dark brown eyes. Why the Avengers were still living at the Compound, besides the obvious. Why he and Stark had been so close.

This. This was Stark’s kid.

The feeling that he was intruding on an incredibly private moment washed over him. And it was only made worse by how Kate softened and went over to the two of them as well, pulling them both into a hug. “I get that,” she said. “My – my dad’s dying today, and there’s nothing I can do about it. He’s gone, he’s not coming back. But what are we going to do now? This was our only shot.”

There was a pause.

Harley’s head shot up, a predatory grin twisting at his lips. “Maybe not,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”

~~~

One of them didn’t make it back.

Scott didn’t realize it at first. He was just so happy to have landed his feet on the ground, to be back in their own time, and to see Harley and Peter there after they had decided to go back in time even more, that he couldn’t help but let out a whoop of joy. “Did it work?” he asked. “Did it actually work?”

Thump.

The sound made him look over to where Natasha and Clint had been, to where they should both now be. But only Natasha was there. She was kneeling on the floor, her wet hair out of its braid and obscuring her face from view.

Silence.

“Nat, where’s Clint?” Peter asked quietly.

Her shoulders began to shake.

“He wouldn’t let me do it,” she answered, her voice barely above a whisper. The raw pain in her voice made shivers go down his spine. “He – he wouldn’t let me, and it was just – just like he said.”

Then, she began to sob.

~~~

“Glad you could take my place, kid.”

~~~

“I’ve never seen her cry before,” Harley admitted.

He turned. The kid was standing right next to him, his hands clutching the rails of the balcony so tight that his knuckles were turned white. A defeated expression was on his face.

Scott chose not to say anything.

“I’ve lived with her for three years,” Harley continued, shaking his head. “I mean, she practically raised us after all of our parents died. She’s attended all of our extracurriculars, taught us how to fight – or how to dance, in Abigail’s case – and comforted us when we cried. But she never cried herself around us. She came close, twice. When Carol brought Peter home and when we found Vision. It’s weird.” He paused. “She says it can’t be undone.”

Scott looked back out at the view the balcony gave. It was a beautiful day. It had been a beautiful day, too, when he had gotten lost in the quantum realm and Hope, Maggie, Hank, and Janet had gotten dusted. It had been a beautiful day in Sokovia when the Avengers had gone there to fight Ultron and save the world for a second time.

Why did it always have to be a beautiful day when something bad happened?

Hesitantly, he reached out and clasped the kid’s shoulder. It was an awkward gesture, since he didn’t really know him well enough to do it under any other circumstance, but he looked like he could use it now. And he was proven right when Harley looked up at him with wide eyes and tears running down his cheeks.

“So,” Scott said. “Let’s make it count.”

~~~

Back inside, Peter and Vision were already working on the gauntlet through a portable lab container...thing. There was a determined expression on the former’s face, even as his teeth bit down into his bottom lip. Kate was nearby, holding her head in her heads. Ororo and Brunnhilde were talking to each other in the background. Natasha was nowhere in sight.

(And Abigail, of course, was off at school. Natasha, Peter, and Harley had all been insistent that they work on this “little project” of theirs when she wasn’t at home.)

Gazing at them, for the first time Scott realized that the reason why they had seemed so domestic when he had first arrived here was not because they were a team, but because they were a family, at least those of them that lived at the Compound. Harley was right. Natasha had raised them. He could see it in how Peter’s eyes kept on glancing towards one of the doorways, where the Black Widow had presumably left. How Kate kept on wiping at her eyes, not for her childhood idol and the man she had named herself after, but for the woman who had mothered her for the past several months. How Vision kept fidgeting, even though he was an android and thus immune to the mannerisms that plagued the rest of them.

He gazed at them, and for the twenty-second time since he had gotten of the quantum realm, he felt his throat tighten.

The sound of footsteps coming down the hallway made all of their heads snap up.

“Alright, what’s the progress?” Natasha asked as she appeared. Her eyes were still wet and shining, but her hair was back in its braid.

Peter hesitated, his teeth digging into his lip so hard Scott thought it was a wonder they didn’t draw blood.

“We should just be about ready,” Vision answered for him.

She nodded in response.

“There. Done,” Peter announced a few minutes later, as the last Stone fell into place. He stepped back, his eyes flashing over to Vision. “You ready, Vis?”

“I am ready whenever you are, Peter,” the android replied.

Peter glanced up at the ceiling. “FRIDAY, activate the Barn Door Protocol, please.”

“Of course, Peter,” the AI agreed smoothly.

All around them, titanium steel plates came down over the windows, covering them. Harley and Peter both tapped their chests, revealing their Iron Lad and Iron Spider suits, and Harley walked over to shield Natasha and Kate as the latter scrambled to her feet. Ororo’s eyes glowed as her hair fanned about her again, and Brunnhilde crossed her arms.

At the last second, Scott remembered he would not be immune to whatever energy it was that they thought the Stones were going to give off. Gamma radiation, probably. Yep, he didn’t want to be exposed to any of that. He pressed the watch on his wrist, causing the modified Ant-Man suit to wrap its way around him. It still kind of smelled like a new car, he noted with mild, bittersweet amusement.

“Three years,” Peter said softly. He took in a deep breath. “Okay, Vision, whenever you’re ready.”

“I am ready,” Vision repeated, a ghost of a smile at his lips.

Opening up the portable container, he took out the gauntlet and held it in his hands. Slowly, he examined it, cool metal meeting cool metal, before he went to put it on. The gauntlet intuitively adjusted to fit onto his hand, making it slide on with ease.

He did not fall to the ground like a normal person would as crackles of rainbow-colored electricity shot up his arm, because he was not any other person. His face did draw up in pain, though, and watching him Scott felt himself cringe. It looked to be the pain of a thousand – no, a million suns.

With a grimace, Vision Snapped his fingers.

In the aftermath, as the blinding white cleared from his vision, Scott could somehow tell on an instinctive level that it had worked, even as Vision pulled the gauntlet off of his hand, now strangely burned, and cradled it with his other, groaning. The horror he had felt ever since he had exited the quantum realm was gone. The scream inside his soul, gone.

For the first time in almost two weeks, he felt like he could actually breathe.

“Vision!” Peter cried out. He ran over to the android, nearly tripping over his own feet, and steadied him at the last second.

But Scott wasn’t paying attention to them.

Instead, as the steel plates slowly came back up, he craned his neck to watch what was outside through the skylight. At first, he thought nothing had changed. But then, he saw a bird. The first bird he had seen since before going into the quantum realm.

“Guys,” he whispered. “I think it worked.”

. . .

And then, of course, the world collapsed into a million pieces around them.

~~~

~~~

“Oh my God...”

. . .

“Peter? Peter, where the hell – ”

. . .

“Harley!”

. . .

“Oh, a bunch of Chitauri. Great. What’s new?”

. . .

“Bast and Sekhmet will feast on his blood.”

. . .

“Okay, Ororo. Hit me.”

. . .

“You’re the only stubborn and annoying asshole here!”

. . .

“Queens?”

. . .

“Hey Queens, on your left.”

~~~

~~~

The first thing that Tony thought of when he felt himself being put back together again was Peter.

Thinking of Peter was nothing new for him. Ever since he had found out that the kid was biologically his – even before then, really – he had been pretty much the only thing on his mind. Not just because of the shock over the fact that Peter was his son, or the pride over the fact that Peter was his son, but also he...didn’t know how to tell him. No moment had ever seemed right. No advice from Pepper, or Rhodey, or Vision, or even May had ever seemed good. The best he had been able to do was program FRIDAY with a last message to tell Peter in the case that he died, because...yeah, at the rate that he was going, that was the only way his son was ever going to find out.

But the thought of Peter that was on his mind as he gasped and fell to the ground, his knees collapsing into the dirt, was a lot more than that. It felt like he had just told Thanos after Dr. Strange had asked him to spare Tony’s life, to no, spare Peter’s. It felt like he had just watched everyone else around them turn into dust, had just realized that they had lost and he was going to leave Peter all alone. It felt like he had just watched his own hands fade away right before his eyes, turning to dust, never to be put back together again.

And yet, here he was.

“I – it’s going to be okay, Peter. You’re going to be alright.”

Wildly, his eyes darted around the miserable planet. “Peter?” he called out, voice rough because his throat tasted like fucking sandpaper. “Kid, where are you?”

But there was no sign of him, only the braindead Guardians of the Galaxy, the blue alien who didn’t seem so bad, and Dr. Strange.

Slowly, Tony got to his feet. His side ached something awful so it kind of made it pretty damn difficult, but he didn’t care about that as he approached the last of the group. “Strange,” he said, voice low. “Where the hell is Peter?”

Vaguely, he thought he heard Star-Lord say from behind him, “Holy shit, did we just die?”

“...I was not expecting this to happen,” Strange said, a flabbergasted look on his face.

Tony felt the strong urge to wring his hands around the sorcerer’s neck. He resisted it.

Barely.

“Where’s Peter?” he asked instead. “Strange, where is my kid?”

But the sorcerer only shook his head. “I don’t know. This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said. “I wasn’t joking when I told you that you lost us the battle by begging for Peter’s life, Stark. We shouldn’t even be here. We should be dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

Strange turned around and did his weird wizard motions to activate one of his portals. New York City appeared on the other side of it. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

“Wait, you’re not honestly going to – ” Tony began, then cut off as he watched the other man disappear into the portal without another word, which promptly vanished.

Yep, he was totally going to leave him there.

Tony ran a hand over his face and closed his eyes. He tried to think happy thoughts about Peter, about Pepper, about Rhodey, about all of the other people in his life. Even Steve.

It only made the terror coursing through his veins worse.

“Dude...where the hell is our ship?”

~~~

What felt like an eternity later but must’ve only been twenty or so minutes, Strange came back through another portal.

Tony, who had been trying to ignore the pain in his side and most definitely ignoring the bickering between the Guardians and the alien he had now dubbed the “blue meanie,” snapped his head up. “Strange?”

“You are the luckiest man in the entire universe, Stark,” the sorcerer told him. He had a scowl on his face, though there wasn’t any heat to it. More...relief? “Somehow, things happened exactly the way they should’ve, without you. And even earlier at that.”

Tony stared at him. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s been three years,” Strange revealed. “The Snap has just been undone. It’s time for us to go and finish the fight with Thanos.”

Tony continued to stare at him. It probably wasn’t one of his finer moments. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you right. Did you just say it’s been three years?”

“Keep up, Stark,” the sorcerer snapped, before he turned to the others. “Star-Lord, Nebula, the rest of you...get ready.”

Three years.

Three. Years.

Three years.

Before Tony could even begin to process what that information meant, Strange started firing up another portal. The blue meanie and the Guardians all broke into formation behind him; instinctively, Tony followed.

On the other side of the portal was a sight he couldn’t even begin to comprehend, but one he had seen before in his worst nightmares. It was Earth, but an Earth that had been burned to the ground. The Chitauri army was everywhere, the Leviathans looming over the scene ominously. Thanos himself stood at the front and center of it all, with only three people standing against him. Three people, who were staring back at them and all of the other portals that were seemingly forming besides theirs in amazement.

One of them was a woman, with flowing white hair and glowing eyes. The other was wearing a suit like his, but theirs was red-and-silver. And the third...

Tony felt his knees grow weak.

The third was Peter.

“Holy shit,” he heard a suspiciously familiar voice say through the comms.

Tony’s mind clicked into place then; it was good at that, sometimes. Whatever was going on, he understood the gist of it. The battle with Thanos had come to Earth. Peter needed his help.

Peter needed his help.

From where he was nearly fifty feet away, his kid, his son gave a toothy grin, his nanotech mask having come away to reveal his face. “Avengers,” he called out. “Assemble!”

~~~

The battle was, by far, one of the weirdest Tony had ever been through.

Almost everyone seemed to have no idea what was going on. Not that he exactly had time to ask anyone what was going on, but they all seemed to be just as confused as he was. Confused, yet still fighting a fight they knew would be one for their lives.

“How did we even get here? I mean, besides the obvious,” he asked Steve as soon as he saw him.

It was weird, because damn were those not the first words that he had been wanting to say to Rogers when he saw him again – he had been wanting to say something like “hey you, asshole” or “why didn’t you tell me your friend killed my mom?” or even “I’m sorry” – but the sight of something familiar made a desire to say something familiar bubble up inside his chest.

“No idea,” Steve quipped back as he killed one of the Chitauri by throwing his shield at it like a boomerang. He looked good. The beard and the dark suit weren’t exactly his style, much less the Wakandan shield, but Tony could snark on him later for that. No, he would snark on him later for that. “Last I remember, I was turning into dust.”

Tony snorted. “Huh, funny. Same here.” He paused long enough to blast a few Chitauri through their skulls. “Have you seen Peter?”

“Who?”

Oh, right. The Rogues didn’t know his identity, nobody did except for a few. “Spider-Man.”

“Ah, Queens,” Steve said with a nod. “Not since we got here.”

“That’s helpful,” Tony grumbled. He went to turn on his comms.

He stopped, however, when he heard a certain, painstakingly familiar voice.

“Aw, cute, you boys are talking just like the old times,” Natasha said from behind them.

Both of them spun around. She was there, her hair long and done up in a braid, red but with blonde at the tips. She seemed...older, somehow. Just a tad. It wasn’t just because of the hair, either; there was a sadness, a harshness to her eyes. One that hadn’t been there before, when they had talked shortly before she had taken down Dreykov.

Steve did a double take, his eyes widening. “That sorceress wasn’t lying. It’s really been three years?”

Three years.

Three years.

Her lips twitched. “What, did I age that badly?”

Tony wanted to say something witty to that. She was kind of asking for it.

He didn’t.

“Where’s Peter?” he said instead, the words flying out of his mouth before he could stop them.

Her eyes flitted over to him. “Last I checked? Our kid’s somewhere around where the warehouses used to be.”

He frowned. “Our kid?”

She looked at him like it was the most obvious answer in the world. “Of course, Tony. You’re his biological father, but who do you think took care of him after everyone else was gone?”

Tony resisted the urge to gape at her. “There is so much information in that statement I can’t process it right now. I’m going to go find my kid.”

“Our kid,” she corrected him.

“Whatever,” he said as he fired up his repulsers and headed for the sky – though honestly, he had no idea where he was going. “Somewhere around where the warehouses used to be,” his ass, because the entire landscape had basically been razed to the ground. “FRI, show me where the hell Peter is.”

A circle of blue centered around a spot which seemed like a marathon away, showcasing Peter and whoever was in the red-and-silver suit from before fighting side-by-side. They were fluid, moving like two halves of the same brain, two entities of the same soul.

Tony sucked in a deep breath. “Alright, show me the next best thing. What’s the easiest way to get there?”

A blue path lit up in his viewing panel.

“Thanks, FRI.”

“Anytime, Boss,” was the instant reply. Then, after a brief pause: “It’s good to have you back.”

Three years.

In some ways, traveling by the sky was a lot better than what he had been previously doing, which was basically running around like a chicken with its head cut off. In other ways, however, it was more confusing. The Leviathans were flying through the air, but so too were that Storm chick from before, Thor, and a woman riding on a pegasus, of all things. He even saw Vision and Wanda in his peripheral, fighting with their backs pressed together.

Like them, he didn’t let his newfound advantage go to waste. He blasted as many of the Chitauri assholes as he could, giving the people still fighting below at least a bit of a reprieve.

Finally, another eternity later, he landed about twelve feet away from the Spider-Iron Knockoff pair. They were fighting, doing good – great, even – but there was a twelve-foot-tall alien moving towards their blindspot. He shot at it without another thought, causing it to stumble, before a giant hand came down and snatched it up. Which was weird.

But hey, things were already weird. He wasn’t going to question it.

He blasted down the rest of the aliens headed after them, and watched how they both slowly turned to look at him. The eyes on the Spider mask widened, almost comically, then were gone entirely as the mask vanished away.

“Mr. S – Tony – Dad,” Peter breathed.

It was everything that he wanted to hear.

It was everything that he didn’t want to hear.

Tony tried to play it casual, tried to ignore how Peter’s face was sharper and older and holy shit, it really had been three years. “Hey, kiddo. Guess you had to watch that stupid video I made, huh?”

...Or, at least, that was what he would’ve said, had Peter not tackled him and pulled him into his arms. As it was, he only made it about halfway through the second sentence.

“I missed you,” Peter mumbled into his shoulder.

Tony hugged him back. “Yeah, I’d say I missed you too, but it’s only been about five minutes for me,” he joked. “Give it another ten.”

Peter laughed, although Tony was pretty sure there was a sob mixed in there somewhere, too.

Squinting, he looked at the Iron Knockoff guy. His suit wasn’t bad; it was amazing, actually, but Tony was a territorial genius. Sue him. “And just who are you supposed to be? Me? ‘Cause I gotta say, that silver just doesn’t do it.”

The Iron Knockoff groaned. “Come on, why does everyone think that? I’m Iron Lad. I’m not trying to be you.”

The voice was again suspiciously familiar, but it wasn’t until the nanotech faceplate came away that Tony realized who he was. He saw the brown-and-blonde hair, the older face, and was suddenly reminded of December 2012, the summer of 2013, and the on-and-off visits ever since then. “Harley? You became me?”

“Again, I’m not you,” Harley replied, but there was a grin at his lips and relief shining in his eyes. “I’m something better.”

Tony opened his mouth to say something else. What exactly, he wasn’t quite sure of.

Suddenly, the comms buzzed inside his ear. He had been keeping them off for a reason. They were a mess; everyone was talking, trying to shout over each other, and trying to make sense of the tide was just a little beyond what he could currently manage.

Naturally, FRIDAY was able to thin it out until he heard just one voice.

“Guys,” the voice of a girl said. She sounded chipper, and probably around the same age as Harley and Peter. Great. Had the kids been ruling the world while he and Steve were...gone? “Not to be a downer, but I have the gauntlet. What do I do with it?”

Peter and Harley must’ve been able to hear her through their comms as well, because their faces twisted. “Jesus Christ, Kate!” Harley exclaimed.

“I’m sorry! This blue alien tried to attack me in the sewers for it!” she shot back. “Just tell me what to do with it!”

“Get it away from here as far as possible,” Natasha answered.

“And if I, uh, can’t?”

The two kids in front of him shared a look.

“Head towards us,” Peter said. He turned to Tony, his expression pained. “We’ll talk more after the battle, okay? I love you.”

And then they were gone.

~~~

Tony wasn’t quite sure how it happened.

Despite their distance, he had been trying to keep tabs on his kid. He, Harley, a girl in purple who he thought was probably Kate, T’Challa, and fucking Loki, of all people, had been playing a nice game of throw-the-gauntlet between each other. Scott Lang from Germany had said something about activating a quantum tunnel, in order to get the Stones back where they came from.

Then Thanos ordered it to rain fire down on them.

Then, miraculously, a woman with long blonde hair flew down from space and took out his ship with only herself.

Then she took the gauntlet and tried to take it back to the quantum tunnel. And failed.

Anyways, that was how Tony found himself on the ground ten feet away from the gauntlet, staring at it.

For the third time that day, one moment seemed to stretch into an eternity. His thoughts raced at a mile per second. He thought about the day he had found out Peter was his in the lab, during a routine blood check that he had accidentally crossed with a DNA check and then boom, congrats, it’s a direct match! He thought a day before that, when Peter had told him no to being an Avenger and he had wound up proposing to Pepper on-stage in front of dozens of journalists. He thought about their smiles, their laughs; how different those two things were, and yet how similar.

He also thought about them turning to dust in front of his eyes just like he had, and him being unable to do anything to stop it.

It was never even a question in Tony’s mind, whether he should grab the gauntlet or not. In his mind, there wasn’t even the possibility for one. Just like with hours before for him on Titan, three years before for Peter, he would do anything to protect them. He would die for them, in a heartbeat. He had died for Peter.

With his right hand, he reached out to grab the gauntlet. His fingers grazed its surface.

That was all that they did.

Just before he could thrust his arm into its sleeve, a splat of webs appeared on the surface of the gauntlet. It was tugged back. “Yoink.”

Spinning around, Tony could only gaze in horror as Peter smiled sadly at him, the gauntlet being held in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t let you do that.”

Then, putting the gauntlet onto his right arm, falling to his knees and screaming in pain as electricity every color of the rainbow moved up it, he closed his eyes and Snapped.

~~~

“I love you.”

~~~

Tony was moving before the white flash even ended.

Stumbling, scrambling over his own feet, he all but crawled over to where Peter had collapsed, even as Thanos and his army turned to dust all around them. “Kid – Peter, no, no, no – ”

His kid was laying up against a piece of rubble, his suit badly burned. Lichtenberg figures had carved themselves up the right side of his face, singing parts of his hair and making other parts of it stick to his skin. His eyes were open, staring off into nothing.

“No, you can’t do this,” Tony was vaguely aware of himself saying. “Come on, Peter, don’t do this.”

Peter coughed. “My...my arm.”

He didn’t even look down at it. “You’re going to be fine, you hear me? You’re going to be just fine – ”

“No...” Peter said. He looked like he wanted to shake his head, but of course, he couldn’t. “Harley...”

From behind them, Tony heard the telltale signs of a suit landing. “Fuck,” Harley swore. He crouched down next to Tony, on his left side and Peter’s right. “ROSE. ROSE, what’s his condition?”

“Critical,” the southern AI from his suit responded. “But stable enough for removing the suit until medical services arrive. I’m calling them now.”

Harley didn’t need to be told twice. He tapped at the spider on Peter’s chest, causing the suit to collapse in on itself. His face hovered above Peter, their foreheads almost touching. “Peter? Peter, can you hear me?”

Dark brown eyes shifted to look into deep blue. “Harley?”

“I’m here, you self-sacrificing asshole,” Harley assured him. He looked downwards, and his face drew up into a grimace. “Your arm’s fried. I’m going to have to remove it.”

“Okay,” Peter said weakly.

Tony, who had been saying a bunch of nonsense on repeat all this time, as if that was going to make the situation any better, blinked. Wait, what?

Following Harley’s gaze, he looked down at Peter’s right arm. Or, at least, what used to be his right arm. The flesh there he had once known was gone, replaced with metal that had been warped and melted by the power of the Stones. Metal that Harley was already getting off, through a docking system that was eerily similar to the one Tony had made for him when they had been building his prosthetic leg all those years ago.

Three years.

Tony swallowed.

He could freak out about this later.

He had to freak out about this later.

Desperately, he clutched Peter’s other hand in his own. It was somehow both hot and cold at the same time. “You’re going to be okay, Peter,” he found himself repeating, again. “You’re going to be just fine.”

The metal of Peter’s ruined arm fell to the ground with a clunk. Harley let out a shaky breath, before a smile the same kind in quality arrived on his face. He reached up and pressed his lips to Peter’s forehead, an intimate gesture which Tony’s mind recognized the meaning of, even if it didn’t fully register it yet.

Wandering past his...well, whatever Harley was to him, Peter’s eyes locked onto his own. The ghost of a smile traced his lips.

“I know.”

~~~

At the hospital, the doctors and nurses wheeled Peter off to surgery, separating him from Tony and Harley before either of them could tell them not to.

Tony watched them disappear past a set of doors with a primal moan, his hand running through his hair. Because that was his kid. That was his kid who just exposed himself to God knows how much radiation, probably Gamma, and yeah although he had already been exposed, there was only so much the human body could take. Even an enhanced one.

“He’s going to be fine, Tony,” he heard Harley saying, but it sounded far away, as if it was underwater compared to the cacophony that was going on inside his head. “H – he’s going to be fine.”

“Tony!”

“Harley!”

Tony didn’t turn around to look at who was coming. He decided that he would let them walk around him instead, would let them do all of the hard work to see him see them.

That was how Natasha came to step in front of him, her green eyes full of worry and searching his own desperately. “How is he?” she asked.

“Ask Harley,” he snapped. He didn’t want to talk to her. Not when Peter was –

“I want to hear it from you,” she said with a shake of her head.

His breath shuddered. Before he could stop himself, he thought back to what Harley’s AI had said on the battlefield. What had she said? He closed his eyes. “He’s critical...but stable,” he said, the words tasting like ash on his lips.

“And what does that mean?” Natasha questioned. When he didn’t answer her, she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Tony. Tony, what does that mean?”

He opened his eyes. Stared her right in the face again. “H – he’s going to be okay?” he whispered, the phrase coming out more like a question than anything else.

She nodded. “Yes. Now, say it again.”

“He’s going to be okay,” he repeated.

“Again.”

“He’s going to be okay.”

They both breathed sighs of...not relief, but at least acknowledgment, at the same time.

Blinking, Tony turned and examined his surroundings. The hospital was in a state of disarray. Nurses and doctors kept on running back and forth, back and forth, between the patients that still kept on coming. There had been a lot of injuries sustained in the battle. Maybe even some deaths, he noted as he saw Dr. Strange and the Wong guy standing grimly over a girl laying on a bed. She wasn’t moving.

Past Harley, though, and the Kate girl, a little ways’ away, he saw Steve talking with Barnes and Wilson. They were all saying...something, he wasn’t quite sure of what. The noise in the hospital was deafening, and he wasn’t with it enough right now to read their lips.

Staring at the proximity of the three of them, the shock of everything that had just happened seemed to vanish a little bit from his mind. Just a little bit.

Nervously, he turned to look back at the woman who had now come to be one of his oldest friends. “Nat...Nat, what happened?”

She gave him a sad smile. “We lost, Tony,” she said. “We lost, and then we won.”

~~~

Of course, it wasn’t ever that simple.

Tony didn’t get to hear the whole story until a few days later. Once Nat remembered his nanotech suit had been damaged, and he himself had been hurt, she shoved him towards a doctor with the explicit order for them to not let him out of their sight until he was patched up. He tried to protest, but he was still led back to a room to get worked on.

That was how Pepper found him, in the middle of getting his gaping stab wound stitched up. “Oh my God, Tony,” she said, rushing over to his side with an expression of horror.

He tried to play down the severity of it. “It’s not that bad,” he lied. Then paused. “Okay...so maybe it is that bad, but I’ve been through worse.”

She sniffled. “When? When have you been through worse?”

He thought about it for a moment, and when no answer was forthcoming, decided to change the subject. “Are you okay?”

She laughed hysterically, her hands coming to wipe at her tears. “I – I don’t know. One moment I was – I was – well, it doesn’t matter. I was doing something, and then the next thing I know the penthouse is all boxed up and people are panicking and I just – ” She broke off, her eyes darting about the room. “Where’s Peter?”

In spite of the situation, Tony’s heart swelled. She and Peter had never really talked, not up until he had found out that Peter was his and not really after that either, but still here she was. Asking about him, because he was his son. His kid. “Peter’s in surgery,” he told her, as gently as possible.

Pepper closed her eyes.

“He’s going to be fine,” he assured her weakly.

She nodded, opened her eyes, and wrung her hands. “I heard Steve and Natasha talking in the hallway,” she said quietly. “Has it really been three years?”

He felt like he wasn’t really the person to ask about that. How could he answer her? “O brave new world, that has such people in ’t?” “I guess so.”

After the doctor finished stitching him up, they walked back into the waiting room where he had last been. There weren’t as many people around now; most of them seemed to have been stitched up. Kate was there, though, and she gave them a shaky smile as they approached her, since neither Natasha or Harley were in sight. Her eyes were suspiciously shiny, and her hands were fidgeting with each other.

“Peter’s in recovery,” she told them softly. “Room 406.”

The ride up the elevator to the fourth floor was torturous. Pepper held onto his hand like it was a lifeline, not that he was complaining. Her presence was just as much of a lifeline for him.

Inside the room, Harley was at Peter’s left side, holding his now-only hand, which he was gently rubbing circles into. His expression was crumpled, as if he was just one second away from crying. Natasha was on Peter’s right side, looking much the same. And May was sitting next to her, but the difference was as she peered up at them as they entered the room, she was already crying, tears running down her cheeks. “Tony,” she breathed. “Oh, Tony.”

Once upon a time, she had hated his guts. She had even smacked him when she had found out that he had been helping Peter out with being Spider-Man. Co-parenting the kid had made them closer, however. Finding out that Peter was his kid even more so.

“May,” Tony greeted her. He and Pepper both sat down next to Harley. “How is he?”

“Healing,” Natasha answered. Gingerly, she reached up to card a hand through Peter’s hair. “The doctors said the metal arm saved his life. The Lichtenberg figures are going to scar, but he’s been through worse.” She paused. “He’s also awake, but trying hard to act like he’s not.”

Peter’s nose twitched.

“No one...likes a little ninny, Nat,” he murmured.

The reference flew over Tony’s head, as well as May’s and Pepper’s, but Natasha bit her lip in gentle amusement. Harley gaped. “But you hate that song,” he said.

“It has its uses,” Peter retorted, a smile trying to form at his lips.

Harley snorted, then sniffled. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” was the response. Two dark brown eyes cracked open. “D – Dad? May? Pepper?”

May squeezed his leg gently. “We’re here, Peter. We’re here.”

“And we’re not going anywhere,” Tony added.

“N – not again,” Peter corrected him, almost immediately.

Three years.

His heart clenched.

“No. Not again,” he agreed.

It took Peter a few days to recover enough to talk for long lengths of time. A lot of people came to visit him. First were Kate, Vision, and the blonde woman from before who introduced herself to him as Carol Danvers; they existed in a closeness to Peter, Harley, and Nat he could scarcely believe, although perhaps that shouldn’t have been too surprising. Especially with Kate. Despite how all of the others seemed to have people with them when he went out into the hallway or to the cafeteria to get a bite to eat, she was always alone unless one of the others was around. Always.

Vision tried to apologize profusely for the final battle, saying something-something about being abducted by Thanos from Morag and not remembering it until they were being shot at, thanks to one of Thanos’ children hacking into his programming.

“Don’t apologize, Vis. We won,” Peter told him sleepily, before he made a “shooing” motion with his hand. Or tried to, anyways. He wasn’t exactly coherent enough to succeed in his endeavors. “Now, go be with Wanda.”

The Storm chick was next. She arrived with T’Challa and his sister Shuri, smiling. “You are the bravest person I have ever met, Peter Parker,” she said, bowing at his bedside with both of her cousins doing the same. “Thank you.”

Thor came by to thank him, too. Apparently, Loki and half of the remaining Asgardians had been killed by Thanos when he had come for them, following the destruction of their planet before the Snap. But now, they were back again, thanks to some clever wording. He called it clever, anyways.

Personally, Tony called it ingenious.

But the visit that tore him up the most on the insides was the one with Peter’s friends, Ned and MJ. Happy had pulled them out of the chaos that was going on all over the entire world just long enough for him to see them again, and when they arrived, they looked at him with wide eyes. Of course, it was no wonder that they did. He looked so much different now, between being older and the missing arm and the Lichtenberg figures and his half-singed hair. Plus, Harley was also at his side, because the kid just wouldn’t even leave it for anything, not even his own mother. She had to come and find him, not the other way around.

“Dude, you got old,” were the first words that flew out of Ned’s mouth. His face reddened. “I – I mean – ”

Peter laughed. He laughed so hard he cried, the tears running down his cheeks as his friends pestered him with all of the questions Tony had been refraining himself from asking. He didn’t answer them, not the ones that truly mattered. But he did tell them some things, like about how he was in college now, and a relationship. How Harley was his boyfriend.

MJ looked between the two of them, speculative and sharp. “Can I be your maid of honor?” she asked. “When you inevitably get married to this loser, that is.”

Harley choked, but Peter merely smiled as he clutched at his boyfriend’s hand. “Only if you’re fine with Ned also being my best man,” he said.

Now it was Ned’s turn to splutter, but MJ ignored him. “Deal,” she replied.

Tony had a feeling she was going to become quite the force to be reckoned with, one day.

After his friends had left, Peter had Harley and Natasha gather up everyone, and by everyone he meant himself, May, Pepper, Rhodey, Kate, Bruce, and Evelyn and Abigail Keener. He wasn’t exactly sure what Bruce was doing there, though he could probably guess, but he chose not to question it as Peter adjusted himself so he was sitting up, his legs crisscross-applesauce style. “Okay, let’s talk,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Tony said immediately, because it was the only real answer there was. “Tell us everything.”

So, Peter did. Taking turns with Nat, Harley, and a little bit with Abigail, they told them everything that had happened in the past three years. About where each of them had been during the Snap; about Natasha coming back to the Compound only to learn that Peter was his kid, about Peter nearly dying on the Benatar and the amputation, about Harley and Abigail discovering Evelyn was dead and driving up to New York. And about the time after that as well; about Harley and Peter building him a metal arm, about Quentin Beck, about finding Vision, about the Spider-people from the multiverse and recruiting Kate Bishop to the team.

And about Harley and Peter getting together, obviously.

By the time that they finished, there wasn’t a single dry eye in the room. Even Tony wasn’t spared; his heart had broken into a million pieces, many times over, and he just couldn’t take it anymore. “Stark men are made of iron” be damned, this was his kid, and his kid had suffered through so much.

“I’m sorry, Peter,” he whispered. “God, I’m so sorry.”

Peter smiled at him, that same smile that was always present, even in the face of oblivion. “Don’t be. You’re here now, that’s all that matters,” he said, before his eyes darted over to look at his boyfriend. “And besides, you can help us build me another arm.”

“As if we need the help!” Harley scoffed.

But there was a smile on his face.

Somehow, despite the tears, there was a smile on all of their faces.

~~~

A week later, Peter was released from the hospital.

Tony watched, bemused, as Harley snarked to him the entire time of helping him get his clothes on, yet still peppered kisses to his face in-between. He watched, bemused, as Natasha circled around them like a mother, making quips about how they were “never going to do anything this reckless again” and how she had “raised them better than this,” before she left to go reunite with the Bartons and track down the members of her “first family.”

And he watched, bemused, them during the car ride home back to the Tower, since the Compound had been completely and utterly destroyed, not quite sure how this had become his life.

...Or, at least, he did up until Pepper garnered his attention with a smile. “You were right,” she murmured into his ear.

He blinked. “About what?”

“We’re having a Morgan.”

He blinked again.

From across the car, Peter let out a whoop. “I knew it! I freaking knew it!” he shouted, laughing even as Harley playfully swatted his arm. Well. More like as Harley playfully swatted his arm with one hand and got out his wallet with another. “You owe me ten bucks, Harls.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” his boyfriend muttered, without any real heat.

So maybe it had been three years. So maybe Peter was three years older, with a missing arm and a boyfriend. So maybe Nat had been the one to parent him for all this time. So maybe the world that existed now was nothing like the one he once knew.

It didn’t matter. Because as Tony grabbed Pepper, placed a big, wet kiss on her lips, and told her, “I told you so,” he knew one thing.

Back on Titan, just before he had turned to dust, he had been right.

They were going to be okay.