Chapter Text
And as suddenly as he went, he was back.
Breath knocked out of his lungs, Tony feels his entire being snapping into existence. Flesh and bones reconstructed out of thin air, atoms shoved between atoms, the universe stretching to make space for something long gone. Something that was meant to be long gone. It is simply so viscerally unnatural, skipping all that is meant the precede the creation of human life. Forceful, painful.
It all comes back suddenly, the force if at all making him double over. He almost vomits as he remembers the snap, the white-hot pain coursing through his body, yet all that is left in it’s wake is a faint tingling trailing his left side.
The sound of wailing still echoing in his mind, Tony opens his eyes.
It’s a strange feeling, really. It’s as if it has been less than a second and at least a decade simultaneously since the snap. It’s odd and uncomfortable and he really doesn’t appreciate being a lab rat for the theory of relativity. Strangely enough, aside from some stiffness and a healthy dose of possible emotional trauma, there’s not a single speck of evidence that the snap ever even happened.
This is relieving yet concerning, and Tony needs to find out the full extent of what happened. Did it work? Have they won? Every passing second everything seemed more and more like an LSD-induced hallucination.
Okay, he needs to do something. Call someone.
Patting down his pockets it becomes blatantly obvious this is no simple task either. No phone, clearly no nanotech suit, and absolutely no way to reach anyone.
Unless...
Tony gathers his bearings, and with a throbbing head full of questions he heads off in the direction of the nearest public library. Regular civilian style.
If the attention he gets wondering the streets, or rather the lack thereof, is anything to go by, this really isn’t the Earth he knows. Not the one he left before their final trip to Titan. Or the one he left has changed far more than he imagined. There are no screaming, desperate fans gawking as he walks the crowded streets of what he assumes is New York. Merely the occasional fleeting side-glance or a raised eyebrow.
Interesting.
He really needs to find out what on Earth is going on. He needs to call someone, anyone. Needs to make sure everyone is okay. And he needs to do it fast.
It’s been a while since Tony has set foot in a public library. Perhaps not since his early collage days. Maybe even high school, really. Late nights out when he wanted to get away from the house, from his father. Great, now he feels old.
The sudden urge to talk to Peter catches him off guard. Frowning, he recalls the sound of his voice, the faint, “We won, Mr. Stark” he uttered.
An empty seat at the end of one of the tables seems like the optimal choice. The chair screeches loudly as he sits down, booting up the dusty library computer. There is a multitude of things that strike him in that instant.
Firstly, it’s the twenty-fifth of October, and Tony is sure the fight took place on the seventeenth.
His second, and perhaps far more alarming discovery is the fact that the year on the screen reads 2028.
Now, he’s no expert when it comes to the effects wielding the Infinity Stones might have on the human mind, but he is pretty fucking sure that’s over five years more than it’s supposed to be. Than he remembers it being.
But then again, he also distinctly remembers not being dead. All things considered, he feels positively alive.
And when the first thing that pops up upon searching his own name is a shot of a grave stone accompanied by a death date, his convictions are proven quite useless.
Encore et encore.
He stares at the screen, one second passes. Then two.
The date doesn’t change.
Okay, so, we’re looking at a case of -what? Time travel and resurrection? Looking back at his life, not the worst predicament.
Now for the harder part.
There is virtually no way in hell he’d be able to easily search up Pepper’s or Happy’s phone number, much less a residential address, and Tony mentally curses himself for not having ‘memorizing phone numbers’ in his habits.
He wracks his brain looking for a different approach until ultimately searching up a certain Peter Parker, hoping a phone number will pop-up eventually.
Hell, if not, his next step might be checking instagram.
In the end, Tonys not fortunate in his quest for a phone number, but he does (albeit after some digging and increasingly creative search terms, perhaps more than he’d like) eventually come across an address.
That’s how he finds himself, not even thirty minutes later, standing in front of a shabby-looking apartment complex in the middle of, unsurprisingly, Queens. He is surprised however that the apartment was listed directly under Pater Parker, rather than May Parker.
Jeez, as he climbs the stairs he wonders just how old the kid would even be now.
Twenty?
Twenty one?
Theres a not-so-discreetly placed camera mounted directly above the apartment door. Honestly, it reminds Tony a lot more of an entrance to a storage room or a supply closet than someone’s home and the alleged apartment it is.
Something about the place gnaws at him, the whole ordeal rubs him the wrong way.
Why would Peter be living like this?
He should have inherited a hefty portion of Tony’s estate. Together with Happy, they’d wasted far too much time on that damned paperwork, making sure Peter and May would never have to worry about money again after his passing.
In all honesty, ‘hefty’ is a criminal understatement, if anything.
With a heavy heart, those damned cries still playing their wretched melody in his mind-
“Please, sir… I don’t wanna go… I don’t wanna go, sir… please-“
-in true Tony Stark fashion, he opens the door.