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Howard was only on his second drink of the night when he was approached by a man wearing a dress. A dress and a red cape. Again, it was only his second drink, so he was pretty sure he wasn’t seeing things.
But hell, Howard was not a close-minded man, and this guy was pretty good looking. He’d never seen such neatly trimmed facial hair, and he was wondering what it might feel like against his—
The man rolled his eyes and groaned. “I hardly knew the man, but I’m entirely certain that Stark would despise everything about this.”
“Huh?” Howard asked, glancing over at his highball, still sitting on the bar, mostly empty with just the remains of a few melting ice cubes. It had only been his second, right? Turning back to the man, he leaned on the bar and put on his smooth media persona. “Actually, I’m Stark. Howard Stark. And you would be?”
The man lifted his hands, kneading his temples as though he had a sudden headache. The scars on his fingers were odd, almost like—
“Stephen,” the man cut into Howard’s thoughts. “I am Stephen.”
“I know a guy named Steve,” Howard mused, reaching for his glass and getting it all the way to his lips before remembering that it held only ice. He looked over to make eye contact with the bartender for another, but the guy was busy at the other end of the bar, his back to him.
“I am aware of Rogers, Mr. Stark. He is why I’m here.”
And that? Well that was downright suspicious. He wished he had a gun on him. Was the guy a German spy? Dresses and capes weren’t exactly standard American or German dress, and it would be weird for a spy to grab that kind of attention, but it was possible. Strangers on the street—or in random bars—shouldn’t know about Rogers.
What if knowing about Rogers meant he also knew about Project Rebirth, and how Rogers was slated to go into the machine tomorrow? Was it sabotage? Gun or not, Howard would end anyone who tried to stop this experiment.
If Project Rebirth worked, it could end the war. Save so many lives.
“Just what is it you want, Stephen?” Howard asked as he set his glass back on the bar with a thunk. “Because I’ll warn you now, nothing will convince me to work against my country.”
The man smiled at that, and it wasn’t some kind of evil, “we have ways of making you talk” smile, but what seemed like true pleasure. “You know, the ways I’ve heard people talk about you, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But utter loyalty, from a Stark? Well, I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me at all.”
“It . . . it shouldn’t? No, I mean, of course it shouldn’t, but what other Starks do you know? My parents are dead.” It barely even hurt anymore, thinking about them. His father had been cold and distant, his mother usually too drunk to be bothered with him, so it wasn’t hard to push them out of his mind most days.
The man sighed as though Howard were the one being confusing, but finally shook his head. “I’m sure I’ll have to offer you proof before you believe me, so why don’t we start with that? I’m sure you don’t believe in magic, so call it science if you like.”
Howard had barely opened his mouth to demand what kind of nonsense the guy was on about when he lifted his hands and made a series of gestures, and . . . everything around them just stopped. The bartender at the end of the bar held a drink suspended in midair where he was about to place it in front of a portly, balding guy in a cheap suit, who was trapped in the middle of wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.
A bunch of young sailors sitting at a table were in the midst of a raucous toast, glasses of beer lifted, their mouths open and cheering. It was like a painting, perfect and mid-motion, and completely still.
Howard jumped up, turning to the man, then back to the bar at large, looking everyone over yet again. “How the hell did you do that?”
“As I said, Mr. Stark. Magic. As a man who spent years in college to become a neurosurgeon, it took me some time to believe it myself. I once heard your son refer to magic as science we didn’t yet understand, so if you’d like, believe that.”
And that? That froze Howard Stark in his tracks. His son.
He had a son? No, he’d always been careful, and frankly, didn’t get half as far around the block as some people thought he did. A dozen sighing girls clinging to him in public didn’t mean he took any of them home.
“Your son in the future,” the man continued, apparently seeing the disbelief in his eyes. “A son conceived in marriage, and as far as I know, love for your wife.”
He leaned against the bar. This was ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
Right?
Howard wasn’t married. He didn’t have a kid.
The man made another series of motions, and the necklace he was wearing opened, revealing a shining green stone. “This is a secret that I hope you will take to your grave, Stark, but it is called the time stone. With it, I can manipulate time itself, to a degree.”
“The war—” Howard managed to croak out, not even sure where he was going with the idea. But if the allies could manipulate time, surely they could end it, couldn’t they?
But the man shook his head. “I’m not here about the war, Stark. You’re going to win the war. Stop Schmidt and Hydra”—he stopped and glanced around as though perhaps someone was going to jump out and stop him—“and don’t allow Shield to take in Arnim Zola as a part of project Paperclip. Frankly, the entirety of Paperclip is a mistake, it seeds Hydra everywhere.”
Hydra? What the hell was Hydra?
Before Howard could ask, the man put up a hand. “You’ll know about Hydra soon enough. I don’t know when you found out, but you knew by the end of the war. The point is don’t. Don’t allow Hydra to proliferate after the war. But that’s not why I’m here either.”
The man was telling Howard about the future, about possibly immense and important things that would happen in the future, and that wasn’t why he was there? The fucking war wasn’t why he was there?
Howard shook his head in shock. “What the hell could be more important than the whole world at war?”
The man closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deep, seeming completely overwhelmed by emotion. “The entire universe, Mr. Stark. Eighty years from now it won’t be the world at war. It will be one madman with the entire universe on its knees. He’s going to collect the six most powerful artifacts in the universe and put them together, then snap his fingers and kill half the population of not only Earth, but every planet, everywhere.
It was ridiculous. It was like those pulp novels about aliens living inside the hollow core of the Earth. Still, against his will, Howard’s eyes slid down to the necklace the man wore, once more closed, around his neck. Then he looked around the room, still trapped inside a tiny fraction of a moment, unmoving.
“Take me to the future, then,” he hedged. If this man was from the future then he could do that. He could introduce Howard to this son of his. Howard’s son. A son that had apparently made this Stephen think that Starks were loyal to a fault.
“That, Howard Stark, is precisely what I am here to do.”
“I—what?” He hadn’t been expecting it to be that easy. Wasn’t the guy supposed to tell him he couldn’t do that, and hedge and try to trick him? Of course, because Howard still didn’t believe this was real. He didn’t believe this man was from the future.
“I am here to take you to the future.” He stood and motioned for Howard to follow him. Howard didn’t hesitate for a second. Sure, it was probably a trap, but what kind of scientist would say no to even the scant possibility that the man was going to show him the future. “I apologize I cannot show you more than I will, but I need something from you, Howard Stark.”
“I kind of figured that,” he agreed easily, still gawping at the frozen people as they swept past, Just as the door was closing behind them, the noise in the bar restarted, glasses clinking and people laughing and cheering. “Doesn’t make sense for you to just wander up and offer to show me the wonders of the future. That’s kind of my job.”
The guy chuckled. “Flying cars, right?”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “It’s going to stop traffic problems.”
“Then the world will be utopia indeed,” the man said, sounding like he didn’t believe it at all.
That was a little obnoxious, but before Howard could call him out, they walked into an alley and promptly weren’t at home any longer. Howard knew this because he was absolutely fucking freezing. It had gone from a balmy warm evening to the dead of winter in an instant, without warning. And the alley wasn’t brick and filth, it was a hallway that seemed to be made of concrete.
Ahead of him, Stephen walked confidently forward, still talking. “I apologize for this, Mr. Stark. It isn’t going to be pleasant. But when I was watching the news of this situation, I became concerned, and used the time stone to search through possible futures. By the time I reached fifteen million, I realized something very important.”
“W-w-what’s that?” Howard asked around his teeth clicking together. He tucked his hands under his armpits, trying to keep them warm.
As though he’d only just realized that it was cold, Stephen turned and made some motions with his hands, and suddenly the temperature increased. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but at least Howard was no longer concerned about losing his precious fingers to the temperature.
“We cannot defeat Thanos without Tony Stark. Your son.”
Howard blinked at that for a moment, feeling slow and thick. “Thanos is . . . the guy who’s trying to destroy the universe? Or, uh, half the universe?”
“That’s right,” Stephen agreed.
“And my son is going to stop him?” It didn’t much matter how cold he was, that was incredible. His son. Tony. A Stark. Was going to save the universe. Half the universe, whatever.
“I cannot say who, precisely, is going to stop Thanos. I can say, unequivocally, that without Tony Stark, Thanos will not—cannot—be defeated.”
The way he said it made Howard’s heart stutter. What had he said a moment ago about seeing something on the news? And now this, that without Howard’s son . . . something about this situation was wrong. Completely wrong.
He hesitated, and Stephen turned back to him, seeming to falter as well. “I am sorry, Mr. Stark. I wouldn’t expose you to this if I didn’t think it were entirely necessary. But after I found this place, found . . . I spend almost a day trying to decide how to proceed. I looked at every possibility. I determined that the only way to move forward was to go back. To remove a single piece from the board.”
That didn’t sound great. “Me? Oh god, are you working for this Thanos guy and you came to kill me so my son will never be born?”
Stephen chuckled and shook his head. “No. Not in the least. But you’re the man who can do what needs doing. And I knew that to convince you to do it, I would have to show you precisely what happened here. To break through that Stark loyalty.”
He waved Howard around a corner, into a room that looked like a war had happened inside it.
There was a metal arm on the floor. A few feet away lay a shield—a shield that looked too damn familiar, and like something already sitting in his lab—a shield that he’d thought unique. And then there was the man.
Or at least, he’d been a man, once. A man in a suit of red and gold armor that Howard would have given anything to peek inside, if he hadn’t been busy holding down his dinner. Because the man’s chest was cracked open, the shape of the wound matching the curve of the shield. A stream of blood had run from his lips, frozen in place, enough to probably indicate internal bleeding, no surprise given the wound.
The man’s eyes were open, staring at the ceiling above him. His nose was turning black in the cold.
Howard’s knees stung, and it took a moment for him to realize that he’d fallen to them beside the body. Beside . . . his son.
He looked up at the man, horrified. “Anything. You could show me anything, and you show me this? My—he’s my son. Yes? My son?” It was obvious. The man couldn’t have looked more like Howard if he’d tried, and he just lay there, dead on a cement floor in a silent room.
“He is,” Stephen agreed. “This is Tony Stark. I am sorry for this, but again, I need you to see. I need you to understand.” He motioned to a screen on the wall, a shockingly large one—technology had come so far—and it flipped on.
Howard turned to watch, and suddenly, right next to him was a specter, a see-through version of the—of his son.
“I know that road,” he said in a voice that reminded Howard of his own father’s. It quavered in a way his father’s never had a second later when he called out a demand. “What is this?”
Howard and his son proceeded to watch his filmed assassination. He looked old in the film, so he imagined he’d had a good, long life. His wife was a stunningly beautiful woman, and even not knowing her yet, it was impossible not to turn away as the man—a man that Howard apparently knew as Sargent Barnes—choked the life out of her.
The noise his son made was broken, and Howard could understand. Especially when he turned to find two more specters standing there on either side of him, unsubtly surrounding him, and one of them was the murderer himself.
The other . . . the other was—but no, that wasn’t possible. Was it?
But it was, because a moment later Tony—his son—was demanding, “Don’t bullshit me Rogers, did you know?”
The fight that followed was horrific, and Howard had to turn away before the end. He couldn’t. Couldn’t watch Steven Rogers smash the shield that he’d made, the shield that he had apparently given the man, into his son’s chest.
And then, the assassin and Rogers limped out together, abandoning his son to die in that frozen hell.
The room went quiet once again, the only noise Howard’s harsh, panting breaths as he tried to hold down his dinner and not panic. If he lived to 1991, as the date on the tape implied, he wouldn’t complain. It was a ripe old age for any man, even if the end of it had been horrific.
But his wife . . .
And this?
This was his son, murdered by Steven Grant Rogers, the very man he was about to try to make into a super soldier. Apparently, he and Erskine had succeeded beyond Howard’s wildest dreams.
All for this.
“Take me back,” he croaked when he’d managed to catch his breath enough to speak and wasn’t in danger of being sick. “Take me home. Please.”
“Of course,” Stephen agreed.
A moment later, something warm settled onto his shoulders, but before he had a chance to think it was Stephen’s hand and shrug it off, he realized it was the man’s red cape. As though it had a mind of its own, one of its corners reached up and patted him consolingly.
“I cannot go back and change things,” Stephen explained to him, coming up beside him and making more strange hand gestures. A golden circle opened in front of them. “I could visit your time, but only very briefly, and if I tried to stay and affect changes, it wouldn’t work.”
“You have to get someone who belongs there to change things,” Howard guessed. He was a smart guy. He was usually good at guessing. How the hell had Steve Rogers gotten past all his cleverness and convinced him he was a nice guy? Was Howard just a sucker for a sad story?
Stephen nodded. “I would like to say that I’ll take care of him for you if you do what needs to be done and make sure he lives long enough to meet me, but I cannot know that. If you change things, I may never become a sorcerer at all.”
“Doesn’t that just point out how playing with time incredibly unethical?” It was a ridiculous question, because Howard already knew what he was going to do. There was no question in his mind.
Stephen gave a hint of a smile and nodded, motioning toward the circle as though urging Howard through. “Among other things. Unnatural. More complicated than any of us like to think. I was trained not to toy with natural forces beyond my understanding.”
Howard paused a moment to look once more at the body of Tony Stark, his son, before stepping forward.
“But here we are,” Howard pointed out as they stepped out of the golden circle together. It was a portal, it turned out, to future New York City.
Overwhelming would be too small a word to describe it, enormous and noisy and smelly as it was, full of sleek looking cars and so many people it made him feel claustrophobic, like he was surrounded on all sides. If there had been any doubt left in Howard that this man was telling him the truth, that killed it.
“Here we are,” Stephen agreed. “I would like to say I wouldn’t play with people’s lives unless it was entirely necessary or something important and weighty, but frankly, after looking at fifteen million futures without Tony Stark in them, all I’m actually thinking right now is that I hope in whatever you make of this chance I’m giving you, Howard Stark, I get to properly know your son.”
“Not so worried about that Thanos guy?”
Stephen laughed at that. “Oh I’m terrified of Thanos. I don’t want to face him at all. I recommend not letting Shield keep the tesseract when you find it, too. It’s one of the artifacts. Frankly, Shield itself is simply a bad idea.”
“What the hell is Shield?”
Stephen waved a dismissive hand. “Strategic Homeland something something, I never paid much attention. The government organization Carter makes to honor her dead sweetheart. Unethical and full of Hydra agents. They’re an offshoot of the Nazis, for the record.”
“Paperclip,” Howard repeats from what Stephen had said before. “After the war we take in Nazi scientists?”
Stephen nodded, and Howard shook his head at the sheer ignorance of the notion. He hoped he hadn’t been responsible for that, but he probably had, at least somewhat. He liked to think that scientists, true scientists, were above the warmongering masses, and it was a dangerously naïve line of thought.
“Tony can save half the universe, though,” Stephen continued, breaking Howard’s irritated thoughts. “Trillions of lives. Regardless of selfishness or the ethics of time travel. If ever there was a time to say ethics be damned because this saves more lives than it could possibly ruin, this is it.”
Trillions of lives. Even Howard could barely conceive of the number. He swallowed hard and nodded. “That is convincing. But I think you know I didn’t need that.”
Stephen smiled and pointed to a huge, sleek building with a giant A on the side. “In a moment, I’m going to send you home. I won’t know either way since I won’t remember, but I’d like very much if after that, that building says Stark once again, instead of being a monument to the arrogance of people who believe themselves to be superheroes.”
Howard took in the building, looking like a rocket about to take to the sky.
Maybe one day he’d see it say Stark.
Stephen motioned again, and another glowing golden portal opened. The man’s red cape finally lifted itself from Howard’s shoulders and floated back over to his own. Somehow, Howard couldn’t even be surprised anymore. Magic, for goodness’ sake.
“Not coming with me?” Howard asked him.
Stephen shook his head. “It was hard enough to go once. I’m not sure I could make it again. I have enough strength left to send you back where you belong.”
Howard nodded, looking the man over. “Do you have a last name, so I don’t just call you Stephen in the blue dress for the rest of my life?”
“Stephen Strange.”
“And where are you from, Stephen Strange?”
The man gave him a knowing look but smiled and answered anyway. “Nebraska, Mr. Stark.”
“Nebraska. I’ll see you around Stephen Strange from Nebraska.” And he stepped into the portal.
Just two snipped wires were all it took. The machine made a lot of noise and sucked up power like nothing else—it knocked out power for the whole block.
But it was such a pity.
Neither it, nor Erskine’s formula, seemed to do a damn thing. Little Stevie Rogers stayed little Stevie Rogers, and the military asked Howard to move on to more important projects that they knew would work.
Project Rebirth was scrapped.
Hydra was defeated handily without the help of super soldiers, and Arnim Zola was not invited into the US as a part of the ill-fated Project Paperclip.
The shield in Howard’s lab gathered dust, and no organization by the name ever rose.
And Howard looked forward to the day that he would have a son.
If he happened to keep an eye on Nebraska for the birth of a certain Stephen Strange, well, he didn’t think anyone would fault him for that. His son was going to need friends who were as loyal as a Stark.