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“I think I might be in love,” Tony said, staring up at the absolute piece of junk in front of them, feeling no small amount of awe. “This thing is a work of art.”
Stephen let out a little huff of feigned annoyance. “I’m sorry, do you need a minute alone?” he asked. “Or can we get a move on.”
Tony sent him his snootiest look. “Can I not take a moment to appreciate true art?”
“Mr. Stark is right,” Peter agreed. “This… this is amazing.” Tony glanced over to see that Peter was practically vibrating with his excitement. He looked a little bit like a kid on a sugar high, which Tony actually understood. At the moment Tony currently felt like a kid on a sugar high. “I can’t believe we just bought the Millennium Falcon.”
“You do realize that we just changed the timeline and now the Falcon might never belong to the future Han Solo?” Stephen reminded them.
Tony had considered that, yes, and had acknowledged that it could theoretically be very bad. Admittedly, that fact hadn’t been enough to stop Tony. He’d been in love with this ship from the moment he’d first watched Star Wars all those years ago. Now he could own it? Yeah. There hadn’t been a chance of Tony resisting, especially with Peter going right along with him.
Peter waved a hand dismissively in a way that Tony was pretty sure Peter had learned from him. “I’ve got a plan for that,” he said, tone making it clear that he was offended that Stephen would for a minute believe that he hadn’t thought it through. “We won’t be here that long. We can give it back.”
They had better not be here that long, Tony couldn’t help but think. But Stephen still hadn’t figured out how they were getting back to their own universe—or if he had, he hadn’t told Tony, yet. Though, admittedly, they had other things on their mind, like survival and the whole ‘save the universe’ plot.
Peter’s wish had had them ending up in the clone wars era. Which, sure, probably nice that they hadn’t ended up under the thumb of the Empire and that they could—theoretically—stop a whole bunch of atrocities from happening. Though really, where was the love for the original trilogy? Peter’s favoring of the prequel trilogy was an affront to Tony’s sensibilities and the cruelest of betrayals.
Tony turned back to the ship, examining it again. It was a disaster. It absolutely looked like it was about to fall to pieces. Not that Tony had a problem with that. Tony had spent the last four months they’d spent in this particular universe working as a ship mechanic and learning the ins and outs of space travel in this universe—which was different from space travel in their universe based off what he’d gotten Nebula, Rocket, and Quill to teach him; given he’d hated the wormhole-travel technology they’d insisted on, he was actually okay with that—as he, Stephen, and Peter had planned and figured out where they were going from here. He was pretty sure he could fix anything that the ship needed him to. He thought he could probably also make it better.
But he made everything better, so that wasn’t saying much.
“I think I’m lucky we arrived in this time era,” Stephen said. He sounded reluctantly amused. “If we’d ended up in the original trilogy, you’d have divorced me so that you could seduce Han Solo, just to get your hands on this ship.”
Tony smirked, looking at Stephen. “Would I do that?”
“Yes,” Stephen said, not missing a beat. “Fortunately for me, we can just buy the ship and I don’t have to deal with my husband leaving me for another man.”
Tony sauntered closer, pulling Stephen down into a deep kiss. After a few moments, he pulled a few inches away. “You’re right. You’re incredibly lucky that Peter thinks the original trilogy is old and landed us here, instead.”
Stephen’s arms wrapped around Tony and let out an agreeing hum. “It’d have been very poor taste for me to curse a hero of the rebellion after he stole my husband.”
There was a long, exasperated sigh from Peter. Really, he should be used to this by now. “Can you two wait until we’ve gotten on the ship?” Peter asked, tone one of pure long-suffering. Tony glanced over to see that Peter’s face had twisted into an expression of exaggerated disgust.
Tony pointedly kissed Stephen again, laughing at the “ugh” from Peter.
“Right.” He pulled back. “I call dibs on being the pilot.”
“Wait, no!” Peter immediately protested. Tony didn’t wait to listen as he climbed aboard; Peter followed immediately behind, still protesting about how he’d make the better pilot. As if. Peter could be co-pilot—Stephen had no interest in piloting, anyways—but no way was Tony giving up his dibs. He rather pointedly took the pilot’s seat, ignoring Peter’s complaints as he took co-pilot. Stephen’s scoffs from behind them made it clear he thought they were both idiots.
“All right,” Tony said once they’d made it into hyperspace and gotten on their way and they were set up in the entertainment space. “Stephen doesn’t want to just assassinate the Chancellor of the Republic for some bizarre reason…”
Stephen let out a sigh of pure long-suffering. “We’re not assassins.”
“I could be an assassin,” Peter offered.
Tony rolled his eyes. Peter couldn’t kill a fly, no way would he up and assassinate a man. Not to say that Tony was bloodthirsty, but he was pretty sure that he was the only one around capable of becoming an assassin. He glanced at Stephen, or rather, he glanced at where the cloak rested on Stephen’s shoulders. The cloak would probably also decide that assassination was a valid plan—the cloak had absolutely tried to suffocate more than one person over the years.
There was a multitude of reasons why he and the cloak got along so well. The first was because they both absolutely adored Stephen, obviously; their penchant for handling things in a more… direct fashion was a close second, though.
“So, according to the Clone Wars—”
“I still can’t believe they made a tv show,” Stephen muttered.
Peter wrinkled his nose; Tony could tell they were moments away from getting a lecture on why the Clone Wars tv show was the greatest development in the Star Wars media universe.
“According to the Clone Wars,” Tony prompted, trying to head off that particular lecture.
Peter looked like he was debating ignoring the prompt in order to give them what he no doubt considered a well deserved, but then he nodded and continued with the planning. ”—And my own calculations. We’re in the last year of the war. Which means we need to act fast if we’re going to stop Palpatine.”
“All right, remind us of everything you know,” Tony said. Stephen had postulated that if the Star Wars universe was truly and genuinely real—Tony was having new appreciation for people who found Schrödinger’s Cat a confusing principle, because the whole ‘may or may not be a real universe’ thing was throwing him—then George Lucas and the subsequent Star Wars creators had likely received that inspiration via cracks in the fabrics that tied different realities together.
Disney would lap this up if they knew.
If—no when—he, Stephen, and Peter made it back to their own universe, Tony was going to make sure Disney never found out.
However, the cracks in the fabric of reality theory meant that Peter was their official expert in this thing, having devoured pretty much every piece of Star Wars media that had ever come out.
Tony had watched the movies, but he hadn’t even known there was a Clone Wars tv show. But then, it’d come out in 2008 when Tony had been rather busy being tortured in a cave and becoming Iron Man. Priorities.
Peter, on the other hand, had practically grown up with it.
Peter jumped to his feet, taking center stage. If they were back on earth, Tony thought that Peter would probably be pulling out a powerpoint presentation right about now. As it was, Peter paced back and forth as he talked like one of Tony’s old college professors, hands gesticulating wildly as he did so.
Tony felt a headache coming on as Peter talked about mind control chips in people’s heads, people surviving being cut in half and returning for revenge—wasn’t Darth Maul supposed to be dead, Tony distinctly remembered that happening; he’d fallen into a reactor pit!!!—and plans that really bordered on over-convoluted. Hadn’t these people ever heard that simple was better?
And if Tony of all people was saying that, then it was clearly a problem.
Though, to be fair, Chancellor Palpatine might have a problem with over-convoluted plotting, but he’d won, so, Tony supposed that he couldn’t criticize. Who was Tony kidding, he’d probably criticize the man to his face and end up killed by over-exposure to Sith lightning. Which would be a pretty awful way to go, if anyone bothered to ask Tony.
“So,” Stephen said slowly. “What I’m hearing you say is that if those chips are removed from all of the clones’ brains—presumably the right frontal lobe, if neurochemistry can be relied on—then… the Emperor, excuse me, the Chancellor loses his ace in the hole?”
Peter paused, head tilting to the side in a way that meant that he was analyzing the situation. “I think so,” he said. “I mean, there are additional threats, but that’s the worst of them.” He bit his lip. “That’s if everything we know is actually true. What if it’s not?”
“We need to find some sort of corroborating evidence,” Stephen said. “Something that will tell us if we’re on the right track.” He glanced at Tony. “What are the chances of you being able to hack into those chips if we can get access to one? We need to verify that they’re there, for one. Then we need to make sure they actually do what we think they do.”
Tony shrugged. “I found a few modules on how their tech works and how to hack it on the pitstop three planets ago, you know, the one where we bought those forged identity cards and where everything smelled like mangos.” Which had kind of been weird, especially since Star Wars didn’t have mangos, as far as Tony could tell—which sounded like a tragedy to Tony. “It’s a different coding language, but I’ve been learning. Shouldn’t be hard.” He glanced at Stephen’s hands, because there was one obvious way they got access to a chip. Stephen had been the best neurosurgeon in the country once upon a time, after all. “Can you stabilize your hands long enough for that?” he asked. Did the dimensional energy in this universe even work the same way?
“Yes.”
Tony didn’t ask Stephen if he was sure, or if he thought the pain that would follow—always so much worse after periods without it—was worth it.
He already knew those answers.
“All right,” Tony said. “So, how are we going to get access to a chip? Because something tells me that walking up to a bunch of soldiers and telling them they have something in their heads is what we’d call a bad idea.” As much as he liked bad ideas, he preferred those to be calculated decisions. The sort of bad ideas that kept him from a worse idea. This wasn’t one of those. This was just a plain bad idea.
“Fives,” Peter said promptly.
Tony blinked at him. “Five what?”
The look Peter sent him was one of pure disappointment. “Not five. Fives.”
Because that explained so much. Tony hoped his expression told Peter just how unhelpful he was being. “Right. That cleared things up.”
“He’s one of the clones in the 501st,” Peter explained. “He discovered the chips, but he was killed before he could get the information to anyone who would believe him. I don’t know exactly when it happens—the timeline is kind of wonky—but I’m pretty sure it’ll be happening soon.”
Ouch, Tony thought. If that was true, then this universe had been so close to diverting the destruction that Tony remembered from watching Revenge of the Sith. Close, as Tony had learned over the years, really wasn’t good enough. Something about close only counting in horseshoes and hand grenades.
This was not a horseshoe or hand grenade situation.
“All right, so we keep Fives from being killed,” Tony said. “That means…” He raised an eyebrow, indicating that Peter needed to let them know what the first step was.
“We need to get to Coruscant,” Peter said. “Then we can keep Fives from getting killed, help him get the information to the people who can do something with it, save the Jedi and the clones, and keep the Chancellor from taking over the universe and causing massive destruction.”
“Right, no problem,” Tony said dryly. “Just all that.”
Peter just grinned at him. Tony found his own smile tugging at his lips. It wasn’t that the situation wasn’t serious—it was—but Peter had an unquenchable belief that things would work out that was annoyingly contagious.
Tony was supposed to be too practical for that.
He glanced towards Stephen to find that he was smiling as well, that small, fond smile that Tony was pretty sure was reserved for him and Peter alone.
“All right,” Tony said. “Let’s get to Coruscant so we can save the universe. Again.”
Coruscant, Tony decided, was both achingly familiar and the worst place that Tony had ever been. It was like New York on steroids, which included all the worst parts of New York, magnified to an unseemly level.
The pollution was going to give him hives, Tony was pretty sure. Which, now that Tony thought about it, led to questions about how their immune systems were going to react to the variety of diseases in this universe and, perhaps worse, the possibility that the three of them started some sort of plague with their own universe’s bacteria.
He winced at the thought. They were all up to date on their vaccinations, which, hey, good sign, but they were from a different universe. For all he knew the common cold wasn’t quite so common here.
It was not, however, what he should be focusing on right now.
It had taken work, but they’d found a cheap sub-basement that was just above what he’d been informed was the ‘sub-levels’ of Coruscant where the ‘lowlifes liked to squander their lives away’. Their realtor had been a rather opinionated two-headed alien.
Since then they’d been collecting what they needed. They’d, thankfully, been fairly set for their inadvertent move into a different universe. Peter had his web shooters and enough webbing to get through a few fights—something they could hopefully find a way to produce more of—Tony had his nano-housing unit, Stephen had his sling ring, which unfortunately wasn’t opening a portal into their universe, but was managing within this universe well enough. Which gave Tony so many questions about how dimensional energy worked within different universes—and if perhaps dimensions weren’t connected to a single universe but were an underlying layer that connected all universes—and if Stephen was secretly Force Sensitive; Stephen had just laughed when Tony had suggested the possibility and said that if anyone was Force Sensitive it was Peter with his ‘spidey-sense’.
Tony was a little disappointed that, of the three of them, he was the one most likely not Force Sensitive.
But, hey, he was a genius, billionaire—though not in this universe—devoted husband, philanthropist, it would just be unfair if he had all the perks.
Now it was a waiting game.
It had taken a little effort to hack into the comm system that the Coruscant Guard used so that they could track the developments on Fives’ ‘assassination attempt’ against the Chancellor and subsequent manhunt when it finally happened. It had been a bit of a pain. Peter had needed to temporarily steal a helmet with in-built communication systems—which given how rarely the Coruscant Guard removed their helmets had been a frustrating and time-extensive endeavor—and then Tony had needed to work his own non-literal magic.
Tony was a fast learner, but he’d had to learn both a whole new writing system and a new coding language. Somehow English had translated to ‘Galactic Basic’, some sort of magic inherent to the wish Peter had made. Which meant that Tony hadn’t needed to learn how to speak Basic, but he’d still needed to learn Aurebesh; apparently the magic hadn’t considered written language a necessity.
Still, Tony had succeeded—which, had it ever really been a question that he would?—and now they were listening in to the Coruscant Guards’ communications. Which consisted of a remarkable amount of gossip—apparently everyone knew about the ‘affair’ between Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala, among a long list of other affairs—and a significant number of complaints about the general attitude towards the clones among certain less pleasant senators.
It was honestly a little painful. Even listening in for a day had made it clear that these men were unique individuals who deserved the same respect that everyone did.
It seemed, however, that it was a rarity, at least for the Coruscant Guard.
Tony had gotten a job as a mechanic in a speeder repair shop—they needed the credits, food was something of a necessity after all, and none of them liked the idea of stealing—while Peter was working as a delivery boy. Stephen wasn’t working, exactly, but that was only because he’d found a medical course that would aid him in getting up to date on medical practices in this universe.
Tony was more than happy to leave him to it.
It was halfway through their third month when the comms came alive with barked orders about an assassination attempt on the Chancellor committed by a Traitor to the Republic—a certain CT-5555, which explained the nickname ‘Fives’ pretty clearly—that needed to be hunted down.
It took Tony five minutes to make it out of the speeder repair shop—sick sons made for great excuses, apparently his boss had seven of his own—and start towards their little homebase.
Peter had been listening in on the comms as well, because he got there three minutes after Tony did.
“All right,” Tony said. “Time to find this Fives.”
Peter nodded. “Then we can help him get the news to the people who can do something with it, save the Jedi and the clones, and keep the Chancellor from taking over the universe and causing massive destruction.”
“Right,” Tony said, recognizing the list from their planning session months ago. “Just that. No worries. Let’s go save the universe.”