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Dr. Stephen Strange had begun to notice he was forgetting things.
It began with a vague sense of absence, that unsettling feeling you experience when you enter a room and forget why you went there in the first place. He had dismissed it as fatigue, nothing more than working too much and not getting enough sleep.
But then he started to notice more… anomalies.
It started with a gap, a two-week blank in his memory. It was recent enough that he couldn’t blame it on the natural fade of memory that comes with time. It was just…gone. Two weeks erased, as if someone had hacked it out of his mind.
He remembered nothing. Not where he’d been, what he’d done. When he asked Wong about it, Wong told him he’d been investigating a lead but came back because it was a dead end.
There were other gaps, too, details of the second Snap, the battle with Thanos. It was as if someone pulled down the shutters across his mind.
He tried not to think about it too much. He was aware of memory spells; perhaps his past self had chosen to forget whatever had happened with good reason. He trusted himself to make the right call, even when it was difficult.
He was content to leave it alone until he stumbled across a note tucked into one of his books. A final gift from Christine before they decided to end things. Not a book he read often, but sentimental enough that he kept it close to his bedside.
He did not recall writing the note, but he could identify his own unsteady scrawl.
It was dated on the same day as the start of the gap in his memory. It had a series of numbers and a single warning:
If you don’t remember this, be careful. DO NOT TRUST STARK.
Stephen didn’t exactly have strong feelings about Stark. He only recalled working together once. Still, after mulling things over and racking his brain for an explanation, his curiosity gave in. He wouldn’t have left that note for nothing.
The numbers were a series of coordinates that led to a small clearing in the middle of upstate New York. Fourty minutes from the nearest store, no roads leading in.
He slowly stepped out of a portal, quietly placing a cloaking spell over himself.
The field looked unremarkable…except for the fact that the clearing was perfectly square.
It was unsettling.
He used an uncloaking spell with little success. He tried again. Nothing.
He gritted his teeth, and he glanced around the clearing. That’s when he saw them. A series of indents on the grass, barely visible. As if the ground itself had been sliced open.
“Hmm, “ he muttered, opening a portal directly beneath the markings.
It opened to an elevator shaft—pristine and gleaming. He descended, opening another portal into a cold and grey room.
___
The air was freezing, colder than Stephen expected, even given that it was underground. His breath fogged in the air.
The room was sleek and modern, but it resembled a morgue with rows of square hatchways on the walls. Each hatch a number on the plaque, but the numbers did not go in order.
Nothing could have prepared him for what he found when he opened the first hatch.
He pulled back the sheet —and froze.
It was more like a skeleton than a body, half charred. But what caught his eye was the arm, blackened and burned, the faint glimmer of chrome where the metal had fused into the bone. The burns travelled up the arm into the shoulder, along the neck into the side of the face, only ending at the brown and grey tuft of hair.
A memory tugged at him. Something important, but it was gone before he could grasp it. He tugged at his hair in frustration.
He opened another hatch.
This corpse was smaller, but it had similar burns, gleaming metal fused into the charred flesh of the arm. There were flecks of blue and red metal running on the edges of the burns. But the body was arranged—arms crossed neatly, hair combed back. It implied care.
Stephen's breath hitched when he realized.
It was a child.
His head pounded. He clutched his temple as he frantically opened the next hatch, flipping back the sheet with more force than necessary. This one was less decomposed. Fresher. And then he sat the face,
Even with the sagging and blackened skin, he recognized it.
Peter Parker.
“What—?” How is it possible? His mind raced. He’d seen reports of Spider-Man just a couple of days ago, fighting the Rhino.
A sharp splitting pain tore through his skull, reverberating through his head to behind his eyes, painful enough to send him buckling to his knees.
Images…no memories flashed through his head.
A red planet. Stark with a gauntlet in his hand, bright white light.
A funeral by a lake.
Then another–metallic white light, flashes of a fight. A portal opening. A voice, desperate and pleading, “You’re not my Mr. Stark—”
Then another voice, lower, screaming out harshly, “ —Peter don’t!”
“Stephen,” a voice called out from behind him. “I am really starting to hate wizards.”
Stephen’s blood went cold. His heart hammered with something very wrong.
He turned slowly. “Are you even Tony Stark?” Stephen asked, slowly climbing up to his feet.
“I am,” Tony said. “Not from around here, though.”
“What do you want? Did you….Did you kill the kid?”
“Kill the kid?” Tony scoffed. “Are you kidding? I’m saving him. Everything I do is for him.”
Stephen finally whirled around to face him. Stark stood alone in the center of the room, wearing an old sweatshirt and grease-stained jeans. It was quite disarming to see him without his suit or any of his gadgets, but Stephen knew it would be unwise to underestimate him.
“What did you do, Stark?”
Tony sighed, “I really didn’t want to have this conversation again. Thought that if I wiped your memories, you’d let it go. Thought I could finally get rid of my pest problem the humane way, you know? Like a catch and release. But it looks like I am going to have to kill you, instead.”
He said it so casually that it made Stephen’s skin crawl.
Stephen snapped on guard, summoning his tao mandalas.
Tony smirked. “You took me more seriously this time. Interesting.”
“As Sorcerer Supreme,” Stephen said evenly, “I have to take you in, Stark. You are clearly not from our world, and are a threat to this universe.”
Before Stark could move, Stephen quickly cast a binding spell, a tao mandala materializing at Stark’s feet.
Stark grunted in surprise as the golden chains coiled up his arms and legs, tightening his arms together. It seemed to work for a moment until the chains started to crack and shatter, falling down his arms.
Stephen's eyes widened. Impossible.
He conjured another, but it slammed against an invisible barrier.
“I’ve had some upgrades,” Stark said, dully.
Liquid metal rippled from his chest, as if it were materializing from underneath his skin. It pooled up from his chest to his arms, encasing him in a gleaming silver and gold armour.
What froze Stephen on the spot. It wasn’t the armour that surprised him; it was the glow at the center of his chest. Five colours pulsing faintly around the white glow of the reactor in the middle of his chest plate.
“You’re not supposed to be capable of wielding that.” Stephen whispered, “It’s not possible.”
“They are remnants,” Tony said softly. “Residue I scraped off the corpse of my dead child.”
“In this world, you snapped,” Stephen said. “You died.”
Stark smiled bitterly, “Well, in my world, you told Peter, there was one chance.” He held up a finger. “One chance we could come out the other side. One chance to get it right. And he took it.”
His expression hardened. Then, as if undoing a sleeve, he let the metal of his suit melt back into his skin —the armour folding away until it looked like it wasn’t there at all.
Stephen’s mind reeled. “He took it?” he repeated, his voice low. “What does that mean?”
Tony’s smile was thin and brittle. “It means that he took my place. Did what I couldn’t. What I should have done.” His gaze flicked to the row of hatches. “Of course, his body couldn’t handle it. It was never meant to carry that kind of power.”
Stephen followed his eyes to the hatches, bile rising in his throat. “Then what? What did you do?”
Tony’s jaw flexed. “I fixed it.” He glanced at the second body, the charred remains of his Peter. “First, that meant travelling back in time. It didn’t work, though, not in the way I wanted. It was like every time I tried, somehow, someone kept taking him away from me.” He grimaced, his face twisting in pain. “I lost Pepper. I lost Morgan. Tried again. I was aware of the risk, but when you start messing with the timeline too much, you end up with too many rips in spacetime. I think you call it an incursion. The price of doing business.”
Stephen’s stomach clenched. “How many times?”
Tony tilted his head, calculating. “Hard to say. Some universes are more unsavoury than others. In some, Pete died before I met him at all. But this—” he gestured around the cold metal room “ —this was supposed to be the last one.”
“He died here too, didn’t he?” he said quietly.
“He put himself in front of you.” Tony said, bitterly. “The kid figured it out. Even when I wiped out the memories of the snap using one of your spells, he knew I wasn’t his Mr. Stark. And you got in my way.”
“Spider-Man is still here. I saw him a week ago.”
Tony didn’t answer. Instead, he moved towards the third body, his fingers slowly brushing through the wiry curls of the corpse. “He bled out in my arms. Did you know that? And still, he begged me not to kill you.”
“So you started over?” Stephen asked. “Found yourself another Peter?”
Tony didn’t say anything. His eyes were still on the corpse.
Stephen took a cautious step forward, his mandalas still glowing at his sides. “You’re playing God, Stark. You think you can brute force your way through universes until you find something that ends differently. You’re putting everyone in jeopardy, for what? For salvation? This is madness.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Stark said in a low voice, his hand stilling in Peter's curls. “You think I wanted this?” His voice cracked. He looked up, expression twisted —not anger, but something worse. Grief suddenly sharpened into resolve, his irises glowing white. He stood tall now, walking towards Stephen. His feet seemed to clank against the floor. “You’re right. God knows I haven’t felt sane since I lost Pete for the second time. But what’s the alternative? Letting him die over and over again when it is within my power to do something about it? I know about the dark hold. When I have it, there is nothing anyone can do to stop me.”
Stephen felt the air shift— then energy around them thickening, humming. “You don’t have the right,” he said, firm and deliberate.
Tony took a step closer. “Neither did you when you played with time and told my son to sacrifice himself. “
The words hit like a physical blow.
“Difference is,” Tony continued. “I never thought of myself as the hero or a God. I am just a man. I don’t try to justify the means, I am only fixing what is broken.” His eyes glowed again, the arcs of light and silver pulsing through him. The air around him seemed to shimmer. “And you’re standing in my way —again.”
Stephen's grip on his magic tightened. Putting up more shields. “If you keep doing this, you’ll rip another hole in the multiverse.”
Tony’s lips curved into a grim half-smile. “Then I guess I'd better get it right.”
The lights in the lab flickered. The air around Tony shimmered faintly; the light seemed to distort and bend in strange angles. The energy cackled between the two men—red-orange manadalas flared to life in between them. Stephen's eyes widened at the mandala shields that mirrored his own.
“How..?”
“Picked up a couple of things two universes ago. Your ‘magic’ is just energy sources from other universes; it is just science.”
For a moment, neither man moved. The world seemed to hold its breath.
Then Tony whispered, almost gently, “Something I always noticed, Stephen. You always underestimated how far a parent would go for their child.”
Suddenly, there was a blur of motion, a ripple in the air. The faint shimmer around Tony seemed to materialize into silver and gold, but it was too late for Stephen. Before Stephen could react, his wards fell around him. Stark moved fast. Too fast to be entirely human. He could only watch as the cloaked nanotech sliced through his chest.
White hot pain seared across him. His breath hitched as he watched, detached, as the blood spread across his robes, staining them a deep crimson. Tony retracted his arm, blood running in thin rivulets down the arm of his gleaming silver and gold armour.
Stephen crumpled to his knees, all his mandalas flickering out.
He looked up. There was no fury or triumph in Stark's gaze, like he’d expected. He was only met with a grim, hollow resolve. The gaze of a man who'd do whatever it takes.
In some ways, Stephen understood. In some ways, he envied Stark's resolve and inability to let the important things go.
He gasped a final, shuddering breath.
The last thing he saw was the white, blinding light of Tony’s gauntlet.