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The sky fell before Tony had time to understand that they had won.
Later, he would remember the moment in pieces. Bruce standing in the middle of the lab, his breathing loud and unsteady, the ruined arm hanging beside him while the Gauntlet smoked on the floor. His eyes were still open. He was still alive. Clint’s phone had begun to ring.
That was the sound Tony remembered most clearly.
A phone ringing in a room full of people who had spent five years teaching themselves not to hope too quickly.
Clint stared at the screen. Scott smiled, slowly at first, as though he was afraid the expression might frighten the moment away. Somewhere inside Tony, something shifted. It was too early to call it relief. Relief had proved unreliable over the years, particularly when it came to things that mattered. Still, there was suddenly room in his chest for the possibility of Peter, Strange, T’Challa and all the other names they had learned to speak carefully.
Then Friday shouted a warning, and the ceiling came down.
The armor closed over him before he consciously called it. Nanites rushed across his chest and throat, covered his face and sealed around his eyes. He saw Steve turn. Thor’s hand came up. Bruce tried to reach the stones with one working arm while Rhodey shouted something Tony never heard.
The first strike erased the room.
The floor dropped out beneath him. Steel tore loose from concrete. Glass, dust, fire and water folded together until there was no clear direction left, only pressure and falling wreckage and Friday’s voice breaking apart in his ears.
Tony had fallen from space once. He knew what it felt like when gravity caught up with you after the universe had briefly let go. He remembered frost forming over the suit and JARVIS calling his name while New York grew beneath him.
This was worse because it was home.
The compound came apart around him. A beam spun out of the smoke, and he caught it against one shoulder, redirected it and lost track of where it went. Something struck the helmet hard enough to blank the display. His thrusters fired into rubble, then air, then the remains of a wall. He went through it, hit the ground and rolled until the suit finally found enough space to stop him.
When he came up on one knee, there was smoke where the compound had been.
“Friday.”
Static cracked through the helmet.
“Friday.”
“Boss. Systems recalibrating. Structural collapse across multiple levels. I’m detecting several life signs, but interference is—”
“Rhodey.”
“His signal is obstructed.”
“Pepper.”
“Off-site.”
“Morgan.”
“Off-site. Safe.”
He shut his eyes for less than a second.
Safe.
For the moment, safe was enough.
Tony pushed himself upright and looked across what remained of the Avengers Compound. The glass walls, bright corridors, training floors and conference rooms had disappeared beneath torn earth and burning concrete. Water poured somewhere below, probably from the lake, the pipes or both. Damaged Stark systems burned with the wrong colours, electrical blue and chemical white among the ordinary orange flames.
Warnings moved across the edge of his display. The left shoulder had taken a heavy impact. His chest plate was scored. Nanite reserves had dropped seven percent but were holding. Air filtration remained online. His heart rate was, according to Friday, considerably higher than recommended, which was a bold criticism from a suit that had been present for most of the reasons his heart had developed such strong opinions.
Then he looked up.
The ship hung over the compound, vast and black against the smoke.
Tony knew what it was before Friday finished identifying it. Alien invasion craft. Heavy artillery. Technology consistent with forces previously encountered in New York and on Titan.
His mouth went dry.
There were things his body remembered faster than his mind did. Smoke over Manhattan. The portal. The cold beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Peter fading between his hands while Tony begged a frightened kid to stay with him.
“No,” he said, though there was no one listening.
The ship fired again.
This time it was not aiming for a particular building or person. It simply raked the ruins, turning the whole compound into a target. Tony threw both hands up and hit a falling slab with his repulsors before it could crush the half-collapsed structure to his right.
Steve came through the smoke nearby, shield raised and uniform grey with dust. Thor landed a moment later, cracking the ground beneath his boots. Lightning moved over his armor as he stared at the ship.
They looked at one another.
No one asked who had done it.
There was only one answer.
They found Thanos beyond the worst of the collapse.
He was sitting among the ruins as if he had arrived early and decided to wait for them. That calm was worse than anger would have been. There was no Gauntlet on his hand and no stones burning across his knuckles. He was younger than the Thanos Tony had watched die in the garden. Whole. Armored. Certain of himself.
The double-bladed sword rested beside him.
Nebula stood nearby.
Tony knew immediately that she was not theirs. The difference was small enough that someone else might have missed it, but he had spent weeks trapped on a ship with Nebula while they both starved. This version held herself differently. She lacked the exhausted vigilance of the woman who had spent years pulling herself, one painful decision at a time, out of her father’s control.
Steve moved into place beside Tony. Thor tightened his grip on Mjolnir and Stormbreaker.
They walked toward Thanos because there was nothing else to do. The stones were somewhere beneath the wreckage. If he reached them, the last five years would become the opening act to something worse.
Morgan would remain safe only if Tony stopped him.
Thanos rose and began to speak.
Tony heard the words, but very little of them stayed with him. He already knew the argument. Mass murder presented as necessity. Cruelty dressed up as wisdom. The particular arrogance of a man who had decided the universe belonged to him because no one had managed to kill him yet.
The fight began before Thanos finished talking.
Thor attacked first. Lightning ripped open the smoke while Steve moved with him, reading the battlefield as naturally as other people breathed. Tony took the air and came around from the side, aiming for the gaps in Thanos’s armor.
It should have been enough.
Three of them against one man should have been enough.
It was not.
Thanos did not move quickly in the usual sense. There was no wasted speed, no frantic scramble or blur of motion. He simply seemed to be where he needed to be each time one of them made a mistake. Lightning hit him and slowed him without stopping him. Steve’s shield struck with enough force to stagger almost anyone else. Tony’s lasers cut through sections of armor, scorched skin and earned a grunt, but Thanos stayed on his feet.
They had fought him on Titan. Tony had spent five years dreaming about that fight, sometimes waking with dust in his mouth and the memory of Peter’s weight disappearing from his arms.
This version of Thanos had never been there.
He did not know Tony, except through whatever Nebula had told him. To him, Tony was another name in a report from the future, a dangerous piece on a board he had only just begun to understand. There was no recognition in his face, none of the terrible familiarity from Titan.
Tony hated him for that almost as much as he hated the other one for remembering.
The suit changed around him as he fought, forming blades, shields, clamps and launchers as quickly as he could think of them. Thor forced Thanos back with Stormbreaker. Tony fired into the opening. Steve came in low and struck the side of Thanos’s knee.
For a second, they had him off balance.
Then Thanos recovered.
He caught Tony out of the air and drove him into the ground. The display went dark, returned in fragments and filled with warning messages. Tony rolled before the sword came down, fired at Thanos’s face and missed by inches.
Thor hit the ground somewhere behind him. Steve moved to intercept.
Tony forced himself up.
As Thanos turned toward Steve, an old memory surfaced beneath the noise of the fight.
A mountain before sunrise. Cold air. A paper cup that looked absurdly small in a Cybertronian hand.
Jazz had been clear when he gave Tony the line.
Don’t use it because you’re bored. Don’t use it to ask whether I’ve heard a song. Don’t use it because curiosity gets the better of you.
Call if something comes through your sky. Call if your people are in danger and you think I can help.
Tony had not called from the Benatar.
The knowledge had sat inside him for five years.
He had not thought about it every day. There had been too much else to do, and grief had gradually stopped looking like an empty room. It had become Morgan wearing her socks on the wrong feet, asking for juice and falling asleep against his chest. There were whole weeks when Jazz did not cross Tony’s mind.
Then there were nights when he remembered lying on the floor of the Benatar with the oxygen running out.
The line had been there, hidden in the remnants of JARVIS’s architecture and carried forward into Friday’s systems. Tony did not discard gifts that mattered, especially dangerous ones.
He could have tried.
The ship was failing. Its communications were damaged. They were far from Earth, and Tony had no idea whether a Cybertronian relay could have reached him across that much space. Jazz might have been gone in the Snap. He might have been dead already, out of range or fighting a war on the other side of the galaxy. Trying to connect might have drained power the Benatar could not spare.
Tony had gone over every practical reason many times.
None of them had been the real one.
The line had been given to him for a catastrophe, and Tony had not wanted to spend what might be his last transmission asking someone to come and rescue him. Worse, he had not wanted to make the call and hear nothing in return.
So he had saved the last of his strength for Pepper.
Then Carol found them. He came home. Five years passed, and life filled the space where the question had been.
Now Thanos was on Earth again. The compound was burning, the stones were somewhere beneath them, and an army was waiting above the atmosphere.
This was what the line had been made for.
Tony hit the ground near a broken section of concrete and tasted blood where his teeth had caught the inside of his cheek.
Thanos was advancing on Steve. Thor was trying to get up. Tony’s left hand shook before the suit compensated.
“Friday.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Open the black archive. Designation Live Wire.”
There was a brief silence.
“Boss.”
“Open it.”
“The relay architecture is still intact. Signal conditions are poor, and I cannot confirm the current location of the receiving unit.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Cosmic interference is significant.”
“Friday.”
“You asked me to tell you when you were making decisions JARVIS would have questioned.”
The comment went through him more cleanly than any of the pain warnings.
Tony drew a breath.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
Her voice softened. “Opening Live Wire.”
The display changed. Stark diagnostics, battlefield overlays and emergency frequencies moved aside. A line of Cybertronian script appeared in the centre of his vision.
JAZZ // PERSONAL RELAY // DORMANT
Tony could read it because Jazz had left him a translator seed, and because Tony had spent several sleepless nights over the years learning pieces of an alien written language while insisting to himself that it was nothing more than professional interest.
He raised one hand and fired past Steve, forcing Thanos to turn his head. It bought Steve barely a second, but Steve did not waste it.
“Manual trigger required,” Friday said.
Tony pressed his thumb and two fingers together inside the gauntlet.
“Biometric confirmation accepted. Secondary authorization?”
“You have it.”
The arc reactor pulsed.
It was not providing meaningful power to the signal. The pulse acted as a signature, a key built around an agreement made years earlier.
The channel opened.
Noise flooded the suit.
It was different from ordinary radio static. The sound seemed too wide, as though the signal were dragging itself across distances no human transmission had been designed to cross. For an instant Tony remembered the inside of the crashed ship on the mountain. Music playing through a tiny speaker. Jazz laughing somewhere in the dark.
Friday transmitted the first packet without waiting for instructions. Earth’s coordinates. Images of Thanos. Battlefield telemetry. Confirmation that the Infinity Stones were active and a planetary population was in immediate danger.
Then the voice channel opened.
“Jazz.”
Tony heard the strain in his own voice and hated it.
He tried again.
“Jazz, it’s Tony. We need help. Thanos is here, and he brought an army. The stones are on the field.”
Across the battlefield, Thanos struck Thor hard enough to send him through a bank of rubble.
Tony swallowed and continued.
“You said to call if something came through our sky and the road got too heavy.”
The channel shrieked.
For several seconds there was nothing but interference.
Then a broken sound came through.
“—ny?”
Tony’s heart struck hard against his ribs.
“Jazz?”
More static. Then the voice returned, distorted and faint, but unmistakable.
“Tony? Repeat. Signal’s breaking. I received coordinates—”
The ground shook.
Beyond Thanos, Sanctuary II moved through the smoke. Shapes collected beneath it. Outriders poured forward in restless packs, joined by Leviathans and troop carriers. Their number spread until the entire horizon seemed to be moving.
The channel crackled again.
“Close enough. Sol perimeter. Tony, hold—”
The connection broke.
A burst of static filled the helmet. Red flashed across the display.
SIGNAL LOST
Tony stared at the message a fraction too long.
Thanos hit him.
He landed hard enough to leave a crater.
When he managed to drag himself upright, the channel had gone silent. The relay remained open but empty, consuming nothing and offering nothing. Thor was down somewhere among the rubble.
Steve stood alone.
Tony saw him through smoke and drifting ash, one man in a torn uniform with half a shield strapped to his arm. Blood ran down his face. Beyond him, Thanos’s army gathered across the field.
Steve pulled the broken strap tighter.
“Oh, Cap,” Tony said quietly.
Steve began walking.
Of course he did.
Tony tried to stand. Pain tore through his leg and forced him back onto one knee.
“Friday.”
“Left leg actuator damaged. Nanite reserves are down to—”
“Fix the actuator.”
“I’m working on it.”
He watched Steve move toward the army and knew he could not reach him in time.
Then the Avengers channel crackled.
Static passed through it, followed by a familiar voice.
“On your left.”
Tony stopped breathing.
A ring of golden sparks opened behind Steve.
For a moment, Tony’s mind refused to make sense of the green landscape visible through it. Then T’Challa stepped onto the battlefield, followed by Okoye and Shuri. Wakandan soldiers moved behind them.
Another portal opened.
Then another.
The battlefield filled with circles of light. Wakanda. Titan. New Asgard. Kamar-Taj. Ravager ships came through the sky. Sorcerers stepped onto the earth. Bucky appeared with a rifle. Sam rose into the air. Wanda walked forward with red light spreading around her hands.
Valkyrie. The Guardians. Wasp.
The people they had spent five years mourning returned through openings in the air as though the universe had finally decided to give some of them back.
Then Tony saw Peter.
He swung through a portal at the far side of the field and landed among the others.
Everything around Tony seemed to recede.
Peter was too far away to touch and too alive for Tony’s mind to accept immediately. He looked exactly like the kid Tony remembered, all narrow limbs and restless movement, as though five years had passed everywhere except through him.
Tony tried to say his name. Nothing came out.
The battlefield surged back into focus.
Steve was no longer alone. Thor had made it to his feet. Tony braced one hand against the rubble while the suit rebuilt enough support around his damaged leg to let him stand.
His chest hurt for reasons that had nothing to do with Thanos.
Not everyone had returned. Natasha was still gone. Vision. Heimdall. Loki. Reversing the Snap had not reached further back and corrected every loss. Tony knew better than to mistake one miracle for a complete one.
Still, Peter was there.
Sam was there.
The dead they had been trying to bring back were standing on the field.
Thanos’s army stretched across the horizon, but their own forces answered it now. Soldiers, spies, sorcerers, gods, kings, aliens and one raccoon Tony could hear complaining somewhere over the open channel.
Friday completed the repair in his leg.
“Mobility restored to seventy-two percent,” she said.
“I’ll take it.”
“Boss, look up.”
Tony followed the prompt.
At first he thought the glow was another fire behind the smoke. Then it resolved into a descending object, coming through the upper atmosphere far too quickly and at an angle that would have torn an Earth aircraft apart.
The ship opened fire before anyone identified it.
Its first shot hit one of Thanos’s troop carriers and split it open in the air. Burning sections fell on the far side of the battlefield.
The second blast cut through a group of flying creatures that had begun diving toward the portals.
A third struck the ground in front of the Outrider vanguard. It did not land close enough to endanger the Avengers, but the force threw the front ranks backward and left a scorched line across the earth.
Tony forgot the pain in his leg.
“No way,” Rhodey said over the channel. His signal was rough but clear enough. “Is that what I think it is?”
Tony laughed.
The sound cracked halfway through, too sharp and too relieved, but it was a laugh.
“That,” he said, “is my alien."
The ship tore across the sky above them, silver-black against the smoke. It was cleaner than the wreck Tony remembered hidden inside the mountain, although there were still scars worked deep into the hull, the sort no amount of repair seemed able to remove entirely. Jazz had clearly found someone capable of rebuilding it properly. He had made modifications too. The ship was sleeker now, faster, and armed with several things Tony was certain had not been there before. Prowl probably had a file somewhere explaining why each of them was irresponsible.
Autobot markings flashed along the side as the ship banked over the battlefield.
Thanos looked up.
Everyone else did too.
For a second, the fighting faltered as soldiers on both sides tried to work out what had just entered the atmosphere.
The ship answered the question by firing into another section of Thanos’s army.
A line of enemy soldiers disappeared beneath an explosion of mud, fire and torn ground.
Tony grinned.
“Friday, please tell me that’s friendly.”
“The vessel carries an Autobot signature matching the information in Jazz’s relay archive. Its current flight and combat systems appear to be operating autonomously.”
Tony stared up at it. “Autonomously?”
The ship came around again, low enough to draw fire from several of Thanos’s artillery positions. It rolled out of the way with insulting ease. There was something almost smug in the movement, which meant either Jazz had programmed the flight system himself or Tony had finally reached the point where he was assigning personality to evasive manoeuvres.
A hatch opened beneath the hull.
Tony’s smile disappeared.
“Oh, no. Don’t you dare.”
Something dropped out.
It was large enough to be visible immediately, silver and black against the burning sky, falling much faster than anything that size had a right to fall.
For a moment Tony was back in the mountain, looking up as Jazz stepped from the darkness of the ship for the first time. The blue of his visor. The impossible height of him. The damage across his armor and the laughter in his voice despite it.
Then Jazz hit the ground.
He came down in the middle of Thanos’s front line. The impact threw soldiers in every direction and sent mud, stone and broken pieces of armor flying across the field. Several Outriders vanished beneath him. Most of the others barely reached his knees.
Jazz straightened out of the crater with his weapons already deploying.
Tony had never seen half of them.
Cannons locked into place over his shoulders. Blue-white light built inside the weapons along his wrists. A blade unfolded against one forearm, curved and bright, its edge giving off a low hum that Tony could hear even through the noise of the battle.
Special operations, Tony remembered.
Jazz had mentioned it once on the mountain in much the same tone another person might use to say they had worked in accounting.
There was nothing casual about it now.
He was armed without looking weighed down by any of it. War Machine carried weapons like a tank. Thor carried power as though a thunderstorm had chosen a human shape. Jazz was different. Every piece of armor and every weapon seemed designed around the assumption that he would remain in motion.
There were new marks on him. Repairs Tony did not recognise. A length of darker plating ran over one shoulder, and old damage showed through the finish along his side. His visor had a scratch across one edge. The Autobot insignia on his chest remained clear beneath the smoke and dirt.
Then he started fighting.
Tony understood almost immediately that fighting was not quite the right word for what Jazz did.
There was a rhythm to him. He shifted between shots and strikes as though he knew where everything around him would be several seconds before it got there.
Outriders swarmed his legs, claws scraping against metal as they tried to climb. Jazz turned and swept one foot through them. It was not a wild movement. He placed it carefully enough to clear the creatures off himself without losing balance or turning his back on the larger enemies ahead.
His wrist cannon fired three times.
Three heavy units dropped.
A blast passed over his shoulder as he ducked. He spun, transformed halfway through the turn and shot beneath the next line of fire in vehicle mode. A second later he unfolded behind the weapon emplacement and drove the blade on his arm through its centre.
Tony realised he had stopped breathing.
Sam’s voice came over the channel. “Okay. Who brought the giant robot?”
Tony found his voice again.
“I did.”
There was a pause.
“Of course you did,” Sam said.
Rhodey cut in. “Technically, Tony found him in a mountain.”
Rocket sounded personally offended. “You found a giant robot in a mountain and never mentioned it?”
An Outrider charged Tony from the right. He fired a repulsor through its chest and kept moving, because apparently explanations about his private history with alien robots would have to wait until after the apocalypse.
“It was a private moment.”
“Was it romantic?” Rocket asked.
“No.”
“Sounded romantic.”
Before Tony could answer, another voice entered the Avengers channel.
It came through clearly this time, without the distance and distortion of the direct relay. Jazz had found the frequency and joined it without invitation, which was exactly the sort of thing Tony would have expected from him.
“Tony Stark,” Jazz said. His voice was warm, almost cheerful despite the gunfire around them. “You call this road heavy?”
Tony laughed as he lifted both hands and fired into an approaching troop carrier.
“You should see my inbox.”
Jazz laughed too.
Hearing it clearly after five years did something unpleasant to Tony’s throat.
“Good to hear you, tiny menace.”
Tony swallowed. There were too many things happening to stop and deal with whatever that sentence had done to him. Steve had somehow acquired Mjolnir. Peter was alive somewhere on the field. Several monsters were making a serious attempt to remove Tony’s limbs.
“Good to see you too.”
Jazz landed beside him a few seconds later. The ground shifted beneath Tony’s boots.
The years had changed him. That was obvious now that he was close enough for Tony to see the details. His armor was darker and less polished. A long repaired burn ran over his left side, and the plating near one shoulder did not quite match the rest. He had probably replaced it somewhere that did not carry original parts.
He looked larger than Tony remembered, although that might have been because the last time they had been together Jazz had spent most of his time crouching inside his ship, trying not to crush Tony or any of the equipment around him.
Despite everything, he still looked like Jazz.
Jazz glanced down.
For a moment the battlefield disappeared behind the memory of a cold mountain and a damaged ship.
May the road ahead not be too heavy.
Don’t forget the beautiful things.
Tony looked past him.
Golden portals burned through the smoke. Pepper flew overhead in the Rescue armor. Steve stood holding Mjolnir. Thor was laughing as lightning broke around him. T’Challa, Wanda, Sam, Bucky and Strange were all there. Peter was there.
People who had been dead that morning were breathing again.
The beautiful things, Tony thought, had always been frighteningly easy to lose.
Jazz tilted his head.
“You look older.”
Tony gave a short laugh. “You look armed.”
“Been a long few breems.”
Something in Jazz’s voice changed.
It was slight, and it passed quickly, but Tony heard it.
The Snap had not stopped at Earth. Thanos had not limited himself to humans or even organic life. Half of everything meant Cybertronians too. Autobots and Decepticons, already reduced by a war that had lasted longer than most human civilisations, cut in half again because one self-important bastard had decided murder was arithmetic.
Tony looked at the scar along Jazz’s side.
Jazz’s visor moved briefly over Tony’s face, taking in the grey at his temples and whatever else the years had left there.
Neither of them apologised.
There was no useful way to apologise for what had happened to the universe.
An Outrider came at Tony from the left.
Jazz shot it before Tony turned his head.
Tony looked up at him.
“Still squishy,” Jazz said.
Tony blasted two soldiers away from Jazz’s ankle.
“Still rude.”
“Still a decent shot.”
“You too.”
Jazz’s visor brightened.
Then Thanos’s front line began moving again and the small space they had found inside the battle disappeared.
Steve’s voice came over the comms.
“Avengers…”
The word was quiet enough that Tony almost missed it.
Then came the pause.
Tony looked at Jazz. Jazz turned toward the army.
“Assemble.”
Everything moved at once.
Tony ran forward.
Jazz stayed beside him for three steps, although each of Jazz’s strides covered more ground than Tony could manage at a sprint. Then he transformed. Metal shifted with a deep mechanical roar, and the silver-black vehicle shot past Tony into the first wave of soldiers.
He did not simply drive through them. Weapons opened along the body of the vehicle, firing in short controlled bursts before closing again. He turned sharply between clusters of their own fighters, tyres cutting through mud, and split the enemy line in two.
Tony took off.
From above, the battle became several wars taking place in the same field.
Wakandan shields struck Thanos’s vanguard. Sorcerers opened portals beneath charging creatures and dropped them somewhere else, occasionally from a considerable height. Valkyrie cut through the smoke on the back of a winged horse. Wanda pulled machines apart in the air with both hands. Pepper’s armor flashed blue at the edge of Tony’s display while Rhodey laid down fire across the ground.
Peter swung between two enormous creatures.
Tony’s first instinct was to go after him.
He forced himself not to.
Peter was alive. He was also wearing the suit Tony had built him, surrounded by several thousand people currently trying to keep him alive. Tony had other targets. He repeated that to himself until he believed it enough to turn away.
Jazz was already causing problems throughout Thanos’s formation.
Tony had known he worked in special operations. He had not understood what that meant in practice.
Jazz did not fight by remaining in one place and destroying whatever came close. He moved continually, choosing targets that did not seem important until they were gone. Communication units. Heavy weapons. Groups preparing to flank the Wakandan line. He broke charges before they gathered momentum and drew artillery fire away from smaller fighters who would not have survived it.
He used his size whenever it helped, but he did not rely on it. There were too many enemies for that, and several were large enough to damage him if they got close.
One moment he was visible through the smoke, firing into an enemy command position. The next he had vanished. Then a transport on the far side of the field exploded and Jazz came through the wreckage behind it.
His ship continued circling above them under autonomous control. It targeted enemy aircraft and troop carriers, adjusting its fire whenever allied forces moved into range.
The firing came in measured bursts.
Tony listened for a few seconds.
There was a pattern to it.
Of course there was.
“Boss,” Friday said, “Jazz’s ship is requesting access to our targeting information.”
“Give it a restricted feed.”
“I have already done so.”
Tony rolled beneath an artillery blast. “Then why tell me?”
“The request included a formal courtesy notice.”
“Tell him his manners have been noted.”
Jazz answered before Friday could relay anything. “My manners are impeccable.”
Tony climbed rapidly, released a spread of micro-missiles and watched them strike the artillery ridge below.
“You hacked the Avengers channel.”
“Politely.”
“You jumped from a ship without warning.”
“Dramatically.”
“You called me tiny menace in front of everyone I know.”
“Accurately.”
Tony laughed.
It was probably inappropriate, but there was very little about the day that could still be classified as appropriate.
The sound felt strange coming out of him. Five years earlier he had nearly died on an alien planet. That morning they had brought everyone back. Now he was fighting beside a Cybertronian he had known for three days and missed for five years while half the people Tony loved ran beneath him through the remains of his home.
It was ridiculous.
It was also the first time in a long while that the air entering his lungs felt like enough.
Then Thanos entered the centre of the field.
Tony saw the effect immediately.
The enemy troops shifted around him. Their attacks stopped being scattered and began pushing in the same direction. Even the larger creatures moved out of his way.
Thanos cut through Wakandan soldiers, sorcerers and Avengers without slowing. His attention was fixed on one thing.
The stones.
Tony’s stomach tightened.
Clint had managed to get the Gauntlet out from beneath the compound. It had passed to T’Challa and was moving again. Tony followed the signal through the battlefield, tracking every person carrying it and every group of enemy soldiers turning to intercept them.
Jazz had noticed too.
“Tony.”
“I see it.”
“Purple gets the shiny glove, things get worse?”
“They end.”
Jazz was quiet for half a second.
“Understood.”
He changed direction.
Rather than heading for Thanos, Jazz cut across the field toward the forces closing on the Gauntlet. He transformed while running, accelerated over broken ground and used a fallen section of concrete as a ramp. He left it in vehicle mode and unfolded in the air.
Jazz landed between Peter and a swarm of Outriders.
Peter skidded backward, both arms wrapped around the Gauntlet.
He looked up.
Jazz looked down.
“Hey,” Peter said, breathing hard. “Mr. Stark, is this your giant robot friend?”
Tony heard his voice over the channel and nearly lost control of his flight.
Alive.
Peter was alive, talking too much in the middle of a fight and asking questions at the worst possible time.
Exactly as he should be.
Jazz glanced toward Tony, then returned his attention to Peter.
Peter looked even smaller than usual standing beneath him with the Gauntlet clutched against his chest.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.”
Three Outriders broke through the line behind him.
Tony dived and hit them before they reached Peter.
“Peter!”
Peter looked up.
“Mr. Stark!”
Tony landed beside him and grabbed him.
It happened too quickly to be dignified. One arm around Peter, armor pressed against the softer material of his suit, pulling him in too tightly and not caring. Peter hugged him back at once.
For Peter, only minutes had passed. Tony knew that. One moment the kid had been on Titan, terrified and apologising while his body disappeared. Then he had returned and walked straight through a portal into another battle.
Tony had lived five years in between.
He had married Pepper. Raised Morgan. Learned how to make peace with a world that no longer contained Peter.
Now Peter was clinging to him as though none of it had happened.
Jazz turned his back on them and opened fire on the soldiers approaching from the east.
He did not say anything.
He simply gave them the moment and kept the enemy far enough away that they could have it.
Peter started talking. The words came too fast, falling over one another. Doctor Strange had said it had been five years. Peter thought he must have passed out because he woke up and everyone was gone, except then they were not, and Strange had opened a portal and—
“Kid,” Tony said.
Peter kept going.
“Kid, I know.”
Peter stopped.
Tony raised one hand to the side of his helmet.
“I know.”
Peter stared at him.
The fighting closed in again before either of them could say more.
Peter still had the Gauntlet.
It needed to keep moving.
Tony had to let him go.
Jazz looked over one shoulder. “Hate to interrupt.”
Tony released Peter.
“Yeah.” His voice did not work properly the first time. “Yeah. Go.”
Peter nodded and launched himself back into the fight.
Jazz stayed beside Tony for another second.
“You all right?”
Tony almost laughed.
“No.”
Jazz nodded as though that was the answer he had expected.
“Later.”
“Later.”
It was a stupid thing to promise in the middle of a war.
They did it anyway.
Carol arrived through Sanctuary II.
There was no better way to describe it. One moment Thanos’s warship was firing on the field. The next, a line of light struck it from above and went straight through the hull.
Jazz’s ship broke away sharply as burning wreckage began falling around it.
Tony watched Carol tear through the warship and briefly imagined introducing her to Jazz under calmer circumstances. The amount of damage the two of them could cause together would probably make Fury angry from several planets away.
The Gauntlet changed hands again.
Everyone began moving toward the same part of the battlefield.
Tony lost sight of Jazz.
It lasted perhaps thirty seconds.
That was long enough for panic to start crawling up his spine.
“Friday, where is he?”
“Northwest quadrant. He remains active, although a substantial number of enemy combatants have converged on his position.”
Tony turned.
Jazz had drawn a large section of the Outrider force away from the Gauntlet’s route. They covered him from the knees down, climbing over one another, claws tearing at seams in his armor. More leapt for his arms and back. One of his shoulder cannons had stopped firing, smoke pouring from the housing.
Blue energon ran down his thigh from a deep cut.
His blade continued moving, but there were too many enemies around him for Tony to see where one ended and the next began.
Tony changed course.
“Don’t,” Jazz said sharply.
Tony stopped in the air.
Jazz fired his wrist cannon into the chest of a larger creature at close range and kicked another off his leg.
“Stay with the stones.”
“You’re being overrun.”
“That’s the point.”
“You are not a disposable diversion.”
Jazz gave a breathless laugh. “Never said disposable. Said diversion.”
Tony’s jaw tightened.
Battlefield calculations had always made sense to him. That was the problem. He could look at a fight and understand exactly why someone had to remain in the worse position so everyone else could reach the objective.
Understanding it had never made him like it.
Pepper’s voice cut across the channel.
“I’ve got him.”
Rescue streaked toward Jazz’s position. Blue-white blasts tore through the creatures climbing over him. Rhodey followed, flying low with every working weapon on the War Machine armor firing in controlled bursts.
The pressure around Jazz eased.
He transformed, rolled clear of the remaining swarm and unfolded again several metres away. He staggered as he came upright. The movement was small, almost nothing, but Tony saw it.
“Thanks,” Jazz said.
“You’re welcome,” Pepper answered. Then, to Tony, “Your alien is bleeding.”
Tony watched Jazz straighten.
“He does that.”
“Rude,” Jazz said.
“We’re going to discuss the fact that you have an alien later,” Pepper told Tony.
“In my defense—”
“No.”
Tony nodded inside the helmet. “Fair.”
The battle shifted again.
Everything around Tony seemed to spread across the entire field while narrowing toward the Gauntlet at the same time.
He saw Strange in the distance, one hand holding back a wall of water. Strange was watching him.
Tony remembered asking the question on Titan.
Is this it?
Strange had refused to answer.
Now he raised one finger.
Cold settled through Tony’s body.
One future.
One chance.
He understood enough.
Tony looked across the field.
Pepper was alive.
Rhodey was alive.
Peter was alive.
Steve, Thor, Bruce, Clint, Carol and Wanda were all still fighting. People who had never met one another before that day were throwing themselves between Thanos and the stones because the alternative was losing everything again.
Jazz stood in the distance, damaged and bleeding, five years older than the alien Tony had left on the mountain. He had crossed into the Solar System because Tony called him.
May the road ahead not be too heavy.
It was heavy.
Tony could see every reason why it still had to be carried.
Thanos reached the Gauntlet.
Tony moved.
He thought about surviving.
Of course he did.
He thought of Morgan’s face, Pepper’s hands and Peter’s voice. The house by the lake. Cheeseburgers. Coffee. A paper cup that had looked ridiculous between Jazz’s fingers.
He thought of all of it while he threw himself at Thanos.
Wanting to live did not change the calculation.
Thanos got the Gauntlet onto his hand.
For a moment, triumph crossed his face.
Tony crashed into him.
They fought for control of the glove. Thanos struck him and threw him aside.
Tony hit the ground.
Thanos raised his hand.
“I am inevitable.”
He snapped his fingers.
Nothing happened..
Tony looked down at his own hand.
The stones had transferred into the armor.
They burned through the nanites almost immediately. White, gold, purple, red, blue, orange and green light spread over his arm and into his chest. The suit tried to contain the energy, rerouting power and rebuilding itself faster than Tony could follow, but the systems failed as quickly as Friday brought them back online.
Then the power reached his body.
Pain erased everything else.
His arm no longer felt like an arm. Every nerve seemed to fire at once. The reactor flared so brightly it washed out the display. Tony tried to breathe and found that he could not. His vision disappeared under the light, returned in fragments and expanded until he no longer knew whether he was looking at the battlefield or through it.
Thanos stared at him.
Tony forced himself upright.
His voice barely worked.
He thought of Morgan. Pepper. Peter and Rhodey. The team. Earth.
He thought of the blue sky above the mountain and Jazz telling him not to forget what was worth saving.
Tony managed a small smile.
“And I…”
He raised his hand.
“…am Iron Man.”
He snapped his fingers.
The stones answered.
Thanos’s army began to disappear.
This was not the random destruction of five years earlier. The power moved only through Thanos’s forces. Outriders broke apart in the middle of their charge. Soldiers vanished before they could fire. Ships crumbled in the air, their remains turning to dust before they reached the ground. Weapons fell into the mud as the hands holding them disappeared.
The fighting stopped in uneven waves across the field.
Jazz was near the remains of the northwest line, one hand braced against the ground after the force of the snap had knocked him down. Dust streamed around his legs as the creatures surrounding him vanished.
He looked across the battlefield.
Tony saw him through what remained of the HUD.
He saw Jazz find him.
Saw the instant he understood where the stones were and what Tony had done.
Then Tony’s legs stopped holding him.
He dropped to one knee and tipped sideways, although the fall seemed strangely slow. The battlefield had become distant, all the noise softened beneath the ringing in his ears.
Someone shouted his name.
Rhodey, at first.
Then Peter.
Peter reached him first and dropped beside him, hands moving over the ruined armor without knowing where it was safe to touch. His voice was breaking. He was saying Tony’s name again and again, too young and far too alive for the grief already spreading across his face.
Tony tried to answer.
Nothing came out.
Pepper landed nearby and knelt beside him. The armor opened around her face and hand. She touched him gently, and the world narrowed until there was only Pepper, her voice and the warmth of her palm against his chest.
She told him they were going to be all right.
She told him he could rest.
Tony looked past her once.
Jazz had come closer, but he had stopped behind Peter and Rhodey. He did not push his way into the small circle around Tony or try to claim a place that belonged to his family. He simply stood there, enormous and damaged, his visor dimmed.
Tony met his gaze.
There was nothing left in him for speech.
Jazz lowered himself onto one knee.
Years earlier, in the mountain, he had done the same thing so that Tony would not have to look quite so far up at him. Now he bowed his head over a battlefield where the road had finally become too heavy.
Tony remembered the coffee. The music inside the ship. The private line he had carried for five years without using.
Jazz’s voice came quietly through the comm.
It was rougher than Tony remembered, the edges breaking under something he was trying to hold back.
“Road’s clear, Tony.”
Tony wanted to laugh.
He wanted to tell Jazz that his taste was still terrible. To warn him not to let Prowl become too pleased with whatever report came out of this. To make it clear that the line had not been misused.
He wanted Jazz to play Springsteen.
Mostly, he wanted to say thank you.
There was no air left for any of it.
Pepper was beside him.
Peter still held on to him. Rhodey was there, close enough that Tony could see the damage across his armor.
Jazz remained on one knee behind them.
Above the smoke, the sky had started to clear.
Tony remembered the mountain at dawn. Blue sky over the trees, birds making too much noise, Jazz’s ship held together by repairs, stubbornness and trust. Human music playing through speakers made for someone from another world.
The beautiful things.
He had remembered them.
Then the light was gone.