Chapter Text
“What do you mean, can’t?”
Tony was standing on the chair, because having Stephen Strange look down on him (even if he was only looking down at) wasn’t doing Tony’s ego any good, and he’d had a lot of ego problems recently. Enough to last two lifetimes. Bad enough he was reduced to asking Strange for help. He’d had just about enough of people named Steve, too.
Strange settled back into one of his plush chairs, having examined Tony thoroughly. While standing, shivering, in a circle of runes dressed in something that resembled a mix between a hospital paper gown and something an extra in a stage performance of Oliver Twist might own.
“What the young witch did,” Strange said, templing his fingers together in front of his chest and leaning his chin delicately on the apex of his index fingers, “is both ingenius and irreversible by normal, and even some abnormal, means. I’m afraid in this particular circumstance, there is no magic spell to reverse. You have absolutely no magical trace clinging to you. If I passed you on the street, I would never know that you’d been so affected.”
“Try it again in English for the thaumaturgically impaired, doc?” Barnes suggested.
“There’s nothing to get a hold of. She didn’t cast a sort of sustaining spell, like a curse or anything. You hear about them all the time in old stories and they have some basis in fact, that when a certain criteria is met, the spell will break?”
Strange waited until both Barnes and Tony were nodding. Of course Tony knew about curses, did Strange think he’d never seen a movie or read a fantasy novel?
“There’s nothing to get hold of,” Strange said. “This isn’t something she’s doing to you, it’s something she’s done. In other words, you can’t unbake a cookie.”
Tony sighed and let himself fall into the chair, not failing to notice that Strange looked relieved that his shoes were no longer on the upholstery. Probably. Or Tony was reading too much into everything. He continually felt like a kid these days. Certainly no one was taking him seriously. He was going to have to totally expand his ability to remote pilot, because no one was going to let him take an… he didn’t even know, an Iron Boy suit into combat.
“I did not say I couldn’t help you,” Strange offered.
“You coulda lead with that,” Tony said, but he was already sitting up straighter and paying more attention. “Go on.”
Strange fingered the green eye amulet he wore around his neck. “What she did was permanent; she didn’t grab an alternate you out of the timeline, or something -- otherwise you wouldn’t have your memories intact. She literally changed you. From being middle-aged to being a child.”
Tony grumbled a little at being called middle-aged, but he supposed he was… if you considered middle-aged to be the middle of one’s life. At least Wanda hadn’t cost him his AARP discount or anything.
“So?”
“So, all of us are time travellers,” Strange continued, his voice taking on that slow, pedantic cadence that reminded Tony of intermediate school teachers, and he was somewhat disgusted (again) that Strange was, actually, a genius, and therefore, the talking-down-to-you voice was probably to be expected. Tony make a mental note to get with a vocal coach, though, and make sure no traces of that condescension hung out in his own explaining-things-to-idiots tone. “We travel forward through time at a speed of one second per second. Which is how you’re going to have to grow up again.”
“Great, puberty,” Tony groused.
“I can at least make it comfortable for you,” Strange said. “And, to some degree, accelerated outside the normal time stream for this particular dimension.”
“Louder, for those of us in the back,” Barnes muttered.
“I can shift Stark into a timestream that passes faster than ours,” Strange said. “Or, slightly slower than a thousand days pass there, when twenty-four hours pass here. A period of two weeks here, and Stark would be able to return to his life, without too many people realizing he was gone at all.”
“Is it dangerous?” Probably a good thing Barnes asked that, because Tony was never one to be particularly concerned with his own safety.
“Sounds boring,” Tony retorted, not waiting to see what Strange had to say.
“To some degree, Stark is right,” Strange said, although he addressed that to Barnes, like Barnes’ opinion had any weight in the matter. Not that Tony didn’t appreciate Barnes turning traitor on Steve (see how you like it, Rogers!) but the intent, razor-focus that Barnes sometimes turned on Tony was… unnerving to say the least. He wasn’t sure how he’d ended up with a six-foot deadly shadow. And he really wasn’t sure what to do with it, now. “It will be boring. He’s going to have to grow up, and grow old, again.”
“Alone,” Tony mentioned, because even he’d seen that particular variable in the equation. “What the hell am I supposed to do for forty years? Alone in a room?” Also, how was he supposed to eat and go to the bathroom and… yeah. Logistics and magic didn’t go together particularly well.
“There are magical energies that can coalesce well enough to provide for your needs; food, water, clothing, elimination. A servant, consider him, formed of magical substance, that can transfer those items from one dimension to the other without a significant time lapse. As for the other, I have a dreamwalking spell that might give you something to cling to. If I locked anyone in a room for forty years, I would not open the door to sanity. Much less, Tony Stark, who could probably not handle the boredom for forty hours.”
Barnes, damn him, laughed.
It was annoying, in that Tony didn’t particularly want to be laughed at, and annoying in the secondary fact that Tony wanted, for some reason, to make him do it again. He hadn’t heard that particular laugh before, full of joy and humor.
Not that Tony was surprised by that -- what had Barnes had to laugh about for the last seventy years or so? Given the alternatives, Tony might be willing to admit forty years of boredom was probably better than seventy years worth of torture and brainwashing. He swallowed around a lump in his throat; feeling sorry for Barnes wasn’t a thing Tony was used to, even yet. Deal with him, sure. Work with him? Easy. Tony’d been working with people he wanted to kill, or could kill him, since he graduated from college.
Like him?
That was both an entirely different story and completely irrelevant.
“That’s where the dream walking spell would come in,” Strange said. “Think of it as an alternate reality, if you wish it. The world will conform mostly to your expectations, populated by those you remember. They’ll give you friends and caretakers to interact with.”
“Great,” Tony said, not meaning it at all. “I can have another decade or so with Howard. Just what I want.”
“I did say mostly,” Strange reminded him. “With some effort, you can, essentially, fit the shadows of memory to do better.”
“That’s gonna still be great, figuring it out while Howard breaks my arm again,” Tony muttered. It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to pain, but it had seemed so big when he was a child, terror and pain and--
“I’m afraid you will still have to suffer pain,” Strange said, giving Tony a shrug that could have meant anything. “Otherwise you might grow too bold. Without pain’s reminder, your body will forget it shouldn’t do things like--”
“Fly a metal suit of armor?”
“But you won’t die,” Strange said. “Nothing in there will actually physically harm you.”
Tony didn’t protest that time, but he could see all sorts of ways that it would go wrong. Torture that never ended, for instance. He glanced at Barnes, but there was nothing there that Tony could make use of.
“Give me a day or so to get everything lined up for a two-week vacation reliving all my best memories,” Tony said, sarcasm dripping off each word, “and I’ll be good to go.”
***
Tony was twelve, the first time Bucky Barnes showed up in his memories, completely out of context.
He arrived as a hired driver for Tony’s parents, complete with metal arm and Brooklyn accent. It wasn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibilities, Tony decided, that his messing around with memories had weird ripple effects.
It had taken Tony exactly one session of being told why he wasn’t living up to Howard’s expectations, along with unfavorable comparisons to Steve Rogers (there was a trip down memory lane that Tony was just about done with) to hack into his father’s computer (Apple II, and what even the fuck were computers these days?) and drop the locations for the Valkyrie.
Steve Rogers had been brought back from the ice in 1978 and Howard had better things to do than denigrate his son. Peggy Carter had been in her mid-fifties, but was still active in SHIELD, even if she’d retired from the field. Rogers was still Rogers, hostile, angry, and resenting being in the future, but he wasn’t a dick enough to take it out on Tony, and that was all Tony really cared about.
With SHIELD firmly under control of Rogers, Stark, and Carter, Tony could guess that Hydra might have a harder time gaining a foothold.
Which didn’t necessarily mean that Barnes was safe. In fact, Howard might have gotten on Hydra’s radar faster, having access to Rogers.
Which meant Tony was going to have to do something about it, and as he’d been down in his workshop -- Howard pretty much gave Tony unlimited funds, so long as Tony stayed out from underfoot, and Tony was taking advantage of it to get a lot of engineering done when no one had to bother him for company business or saving the world -- he was resenting the interruption.
He’d built himself a suit, kept it hidden from everyone, and might have been responsible for a whole slew of UFO sightings over central New York. He decided the easiest way to deal with the possible Winter Soldier problem was to just grab the guy in the suit, fly him off somewhere, and shoot him. It wouldn’t matter -- with the changes Tony was making in the false-world timeline, the appearance of the Winter Soldier only mattered to people whose lives had already been changed.[]
It wasn’t hard to find Barnes; being the so-called driver and all, Tony got his Iron Lad suit on and ambushed Barnes in the garage. Howard was probably going to get on Tony’s case at least a little, because Barnes was not particularly easy to sneak up on, and they sort of squashed the Bugatti in the tussle before Tony got hold of Barnes’ belt and yanked him away from the house.
What he wasn’t expecting was Barnes to be both armed and ruthless.
Barnes grabbed his own belt buckle and tore it open, letting himself fall at least fifty feet into a small grove of birch trees.
And then he shot Tony out of the sky.
Which Tony probably should have been expecting, because Strange had warned him that the people in this world would conform to his expectations, until he had time to practice getting them to react differently, and Barnes had been at the center of all of Tony’s bad life choices when he was back at the real world.
But Tony had sort of forgotten about the real world. Not… entirely. But it was faded and unimportant here. With Tony’s eidetic memory, he never forgot a thing, but he used his memories from the real world more like a false world wikipedia. (Which was how he’d managed to get his father to interrupt Obadiah’s marital relations enough, through subtle suggestions, that Obie’s wife hadn’t died in childbirth, delivering their only son, and instead had later presented Obie with three daughters, one right after the other. Tony was keeping track; thus far, Obie was a lot less greedy and hadn’t yet been approached by Ten Rings. Tony was trying to keep it that way. He still had memories of Obie that he wanted to savour and relive. Killing the man as a pre-teen wasn’t going to be fun.)
Falling wasn’t fun, either.
Landing… even less so. Tony bounced down a particularly large elm tree, hitting, it seemed, every damn branch on the way down. He landed heavily in the dirt, all the wind knocked out of him.
Barnes was already there. “Hi, Tony,” he said. “Hell of a greetin’.”
Tony gasped and gagged, trying desperately to drag air into a chest that wasn’t working. Why, why, why couldn’t Strange have made a world where there wasn’t any pain?
“... ow.”
Barnes sighed and holstered his weapon. “Come on, you’re okay,” Barnes said. He pushed Tony into a sitting position, hand gentle around the throat of the Iron Lad suit. “Where’s the manual?”
“Why would I tell you that?”
“Because you like breathing, and I don’t want to rip into it with my bare hands,” Barnes said, although there was a slight tip to his mouth that suggested it wouldn’t be that difficult for him.
“How do you even know my name?”
“Did you think I wouldn’t know it? Strange’s little fun-house is weird enough, but it didn’t cost me m’ wits.”
Tony hadn’t run into that before, that knowledge that they were part of an alternate reality. The people in Tony’s world acted like people, with independant wants and wishes. Tony’d been able to nudge those. He had more knowledge than would be expected, had been able to give his parents what they needed, both from him as a child, and from their own lives.
But Barnes had been there, when the whole spell went down, and Tony didn’t really have a lot of memories of the man, and they’d, honestly, mostly been bad. So, it maybe wasn’t so surprising that Barnes came into this new life with more knowledge than the rest of Tony’s pretend companions.
Tony gave him a suspicious glare. “What are you doing here?”
Barnes stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Been watchin’ you for a while,” he said. “Let m’self fall into SHIELD’s hands, an’ they were key t’ gettin’ me away from Hydra. Th’ brainwashing techniques improved a lot over the last twenty years, so takin’ 1975 Winter Soldier turned out to be cake, compared t’ what you an’ Steve went through t’ get me back.”
“So you have all your old memories, and this new set?” Tony raised an eyebrow. It probably didn’t look nearly intimidating enough on his twelve-year-old face as it did on what he still thought of as his face. (Looking in the mirror was still disconcerting, and Tony was desperately waiting until he got to be sixteen or so and could start thinking about growing out his beard. Even if it did look like a complete joke for the first three years. And by that time, he’d have Rhodey.)
Barnes just looked at him.
Oh. Tony guessed that might have been a bit insensitive, even if he was talking to a pretend anomaly person. “Right, nevermind. What’s the plan, snowflake?”
“Th’ plan is t’ live my life,” Barnes said, his face soft and weirdly vulnerable and Tony didn’t know how to feel about that, so he just shoved it off. He could still compartmentalize with the best of them. “I never had one, you know. Seventy years as something that was alive, but not quite real? I just… want to do a job. Have a home. Maybe find someone to care about.”
“All right, but why here? Why let yourself fall into SHIELD’s hands? Why take a job working for my father, for fuck’s sake, because you’re the one who’s supposed to kill him.”
Barnes gave Tony a tight-lipped smile. “You’ll be watchin’, I expect,” he said. “You’ve already changed a lot.”
“Well, forewarned is forearmed and all that,” Tony told him. “Just, you know, stay out of my way, and don’t get all murderous. We’ll be fine.”
***
For someone who was supposed to stay out of Tony’s way, as the years passed, Tony saw more and more of Barnes.
Who unexpectedly became Bucky when he saved Rhodey’s life.
Tony had not remembered the experiment going that badly, the first time around. Or maybe it was a side effect of Strange’s little homegrown fantasy land.
“I distinctly remember an explosion,” Tony was telling Bucky -- officially Tony’s driver/bodyguard after the third successful kidnapping attempt, “from before. And it certainly blew the roof off the lab, but Rhodey didn’t get caught in it. Not like this.” They were sitting in the hospital waiting room. It was three in the morning and the only other person there was a drunk who was claiming he had chest pains because it kept him out of the cold. Tony wasn’t sure the drunk didn’t have chest pains, and might well be actually sick, but the triage nurse had kept the man waiting for over an hour now, which was not what triage was supposed to be.
Rhodey was still in surgery, but it would have been a lot worse if Bucky hadn’t been there and held up a section of collapsing ceiling structure while Tony dragged Rhodey’s body out of the building.
“You want an honest assessment, Tony?” Bucky asked him.
Tony blew his hair out of his face and stared at his filthy hands. There were small cuts all around his knuckles and his shoulder hurt like hell. Nothing that wouldn’t keep. “It’s my fault.” He didn’t know what would happen if Rhodey died in this fantasy land. He assumed nothing would happen to the actual Rhodey, the one back in the real world, the one with the broken back, the one who had followed Tony into danger and had paid the price for it, a million times higher than Tony ever would.
That didn’t mean, however, that the Tony in this world wouldn’t suffer for it.
Tony couldn’t die, but that didn’t mean that the people around him would stay.
Nobody ever stayed.
“Your personality’s developin’ faster,” Bucky told him. “The man who suffered Afghanistan an’ Siberia. That’s who you are now, and relivin’ your childhood ain’t changed that. You ain’t a reckless kid playin’ around in a lab anymore, th’ one who’d run as soon as things started t’ go wrong. Rhodes is followin’ your lead.”
It was his fault; Tony’s memory of the original event -- they’d fled as soon as the fire started. The whole damn building had gone up. Howard had been livid. But also impressed, and the explosive power that Tony had developed there had been snatched up by Stark Industries and eventually -- Tony shuddered -- used to develop the Jericho missile.
Today, Tony’d managed to put out most of the fire, the explosion had been substantially more controlled.
At what cost? He couldn’t help but stare off toward the room where Rhodey was getting a ton of shrapnel removed from one leg. Seemed like the universe, any universe, thought that Rhodey would be better off not being able to walk.
“What do you suggest, then, oh brilliant one?” That was bitterly sarcastic, but really, Tony was hoping that Bucky had a suggestion.
“First, I suggest we both put effort into gettin’ your friend well again -- like we did with Peggy last year, when she got sick. We wished her better,” Bucky said. “Think highly effective surgery, think radical improvement from physical therapy.”
“The power of positive thinking?” Well, that certainly wasn’t Tony’s strong point, but he held on to hope like a motherfucker, because sometimes hope was all he had. “And then what?”
“You’re almost an adult,” Bucky said. “Why not finish the Iron Man suit? Join SHIELD. You know as well as I do, you don’t need this education, you got everything you need up in your head already. You, me, Steve. We can start the Avengers. Look at it this way; you won’t have to deal with palladium poisoning to run your arc reactor. You won’t start out with public opinion learning about superheros at the battle of New York. We can get a jump on everything. We can be ready, before Loki even gets here.”
Tony almost said Why bother? It’s not like this universe was going to exist once Tony left it. But at the same time, there was some desperate need for a do-over. To be able to do it right, to not be bogged down by bad opinion. To know that they had a better chance.
To find the tesseract before SHIELD got a hold of it; with Hydra already in the crapper, Tony wondered if the twins would even exist at all, if Wanda and Pietro could be prevented from starting the events that lead to Ultron. Certainly, their reasoning was going to be different. Tony’d already put the kibosh on a lot of the illegal weapons sales.
And… come to think of it, the minimal explosion at the lab… would prevent a lot of deaths, in the long run, because Howard probably wasn’t going to jump on Tony’s invention and steal it out from under him for the purposes of weapons improvement.
Tony raised his head to stare at Bucky.
“That… that is fucking fantastic idea,” Tony said. “Let’s do it. Let’s absolutely do it.”
***
“Why are you the same complete douche in every universe?” Tony demanded, pushing Steve out of his personal space. It was rather satisfying that the new suit -- the one he’d developed from a mix of Extremis and nanites and called Bleeding Edge -- gave him extra strength even when he was in a tee and jeans and Tony actually could shove Steve around.
“That doesn’t even make sense!”
Bucky laughed, the asshole, from the other side of the room. It was even more satisfying to have private jokes with Bucky, because very little pissed the Captain off more than realizing that somewhere along the line, his best friend had fallen in love with his biggest rival.
Tony guessed no matter what universe they were in, Steve was still just a stubborn little man trying to do what was right.
But right was so seldom a matter of black or white, and Steve kept wanting to divide the world into good guys and Death Eaters. Tony reminded himself to put Harry Potter on the movie night list. You know, when the damn thing actually got written.
“I’m telling you, she can be brought into the fold.”
“Tony, she killed a US Senator!”
“Yeah, well, Pierce was an asshole, trust me, we’re not missing anything.” Project Insight had been slowed and slowed again, but they still couldn’t find Zola -- even though Tony knew he had to be around somewhere -- and until that was accomplished, the worry would be in the back of Tony’s mind.
Bucky hid a broad grin behind his metal hand.
“You’re not helping, Bucky,” Steve snapped. “I know you think he’s perfect, but Howard says--”
“Oh, my god, will you just go ahead and marry my dad, become my stepmother or something, holy shit,” Tony retorted. Maria had walked out on Howard almost five years ago, and was much happier set up in a little Italian villa near some of her girlhood friends. Tony took the suit over to Europe a few weeks out of the year to vacation with her.
Weirdly enough, his parents were both still alive, and mostly functional, and Tony was rapidly closing on his twenty-fourth birthday. It was nice…
He and Howard had started getting along better once the Avengers were formed; and Tony had proved something obscure to his father.
Maybe it was just that Tony had finally become the ass-kicker and name-taker to rival Captain fucking America, and Howard didn’t feel like such a failure as a father.
“Look, we’ll bring her in,” Bucky said, interrupting whatever the hell umbrage Steve was going to take with Tony’s mouth. Again. “She’s been brainwashed.”
Steve flinched. Even with the terrible seventies tech that Hydra had been working with, Bucky’d been tortured for damn close to thirty years and Steve knew it, even if that realization hadn’t happened until after the fact. Way after the fact, really. Steve didn’t know about Bucky’s stint as a soviet agent until shortly after the Berlin wall came down and a lot of information got leaked.
“You really think you can bring in the Black Widow?”
Tony gave Steve a tight smile. “Bet you fifty dollars.”
***
It was really nice to collect that fifty, crisp and clean and starchy.
Tony had it framed and hung on the wall.
Bucky laughed every time he saw it.
Eventually, Natasha found it pretty damn funny, too, once her sense of humor had recovered.
***
Tony stared at the situation map. “I don’t understand,” he said, plaintive. “Ten Rings was just a bunch of terrorists. Not some mystical elite ruler with a bunch of magic rings.”
“We changed the map, Tony,” Bucky said, calm and soothing and for Tony’s ears only. “We took Hydra out early.”
“Nature abhors a vacuum?”
It was so nice, Tony thought, to have someone who understood. Someone who knew what the future had held before, and how this had been so much better.
It had been better, right up until the Mandarin hadn’t been some asshole playing a long-con, and had turned out to be a magical powerhouse. And that Nat had joined him. And brought half of Pymtech with her.
“What the hell happened with the Widow?”
Steve had been the first in the goddamn line to say “I told you so,” when Nat jumped ship and cut a huge hole in their defenses at the same time delivering particle-tech and a fleet of Yellow Jacket warriors to Ten Rings.
“Maybe we grabbed her too early,” Bucky suggested. “She hadn’t had time to get disillusioned with her life. Brainwashing isn’t always just about the drugs and the mind control. Sometimes it’s a need; you grow dependent on having someone else tell you what to do.”
“Or maybe it’s just me,” Tony said. “I was destined to be betrayed by someone I cared about.”
“It happens to everyone, Tony,” Bucky said. “People leave us, they outgrow us, they have different goals. Yours… just happen on a larger scale, baby. Because you’re out there, operating on a global scale.”
Tony sighed through his teeth. “I want a do-over with Strange’s little dream world,” he said. “I just want everything to go according to plan. Just once.”
“Eh, you’d be bored, lover,” Bucky said. “Come on, we can do this. We can change her mind. Double-crossing is part of her nature. We can bring her back to the fold.”
“You are the most ridiculously positive person I have ever met in my life.”
Bucky’s expression turned soft and loving and Tony’s stomach clenched up, knowing that Bucky was about to say something sincere and heart-rending and that Tony didn’t deserve. “Because I have you,” Bucky said.
Yeah, there it was.
“Love you, too, old man.”
“Not like you’re not just about th’ same age as me,” Bucky told him.
“It’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” Tony quipped.
“Yeah, gonna run up your mileage, if you don’t stop bein’ a brat.”
Tony cocked his head to one side, a smile creasing his mouth and a curl of heat wrapping around his spine. “Is that supposed to discourage me?”
“Have I ever--”
“Come here, you,” Tony said, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s neck and pulling him in for a kiss. They were still kissing when Steve came in to report. And still kissing when Steve stormed out in disgust.
Win fucking win.
***
The cost of beating back the Mandarin and Ten Rings had been high.
The death count was higher than the Ultron Incident and the Fall of SHIELD combined.
Tony rested his head against Bucky’s thigh and wept for the dead.
God, he loved Bucky.
He had no fucking idea how he’d lived so long without him.
***
When Dr. Strange arrived and requested a moment of Tony’s time, it wasn’t the oddly young, still-in-med-school asshole, but the one wearing the Cloak of Levitation and the Eye of Agamotto around his neck.
In other words, the real one.
Tony ushered him into one of the offices, feeling sick. He didn’t bring Strange into his own office, mind; didn’t think he could stand seeing Strange among Tony’s own things. Just a boring, meet-and-greet office. The Avenger’s mansion had three of them, in various sizes and degrees of comfortable, depending on who was there, and how the Avengers felt about them.
“It’s time to go, Stark,” Strange said and his voice was unusually grave.
“What, no? I’m not even thirty, I have a good ten more--”
“No, you don’t,” Strange said. “You’ve… done something remarkable, but also dangerous. Somehow you’ve invested this dream world with enough hope and love and determination that it’s becoming real. Another decade and we’d have a dimensional event. This would become… real.”
Tony swallowed, looked around. “Is that bad?”
Dr. Strange sighed. “It might be,” he said, at last. “We don’t know what the effects will be. All the dimensions that have been mapped thus far -- between the sorcerer's research and Reed’s discoveries -- have been millenia old. This would be a new dimension, a fresh rift. Earth 616-b, so to speak. The energy released from the sudden split could be catastrophic to both dimensions. We’re talking about spontaneous black holes and supernovas. Across not only this reality, but your home dimension as well.”
“Your little dream world could destroy an entire universe?” That seemed far-fetched.
“It was mine,” Strange said. “You’ve made it your own. Your passions and fears and emotions and wants and needs have all shaped it. I’ve never seen such raw, natural power before. It makes me believe that you, my old, sadly mundane friend, might want to take up study of sorcery. Eventually.”
Tony scoffed. That’d be the day. “So, what do we do?”
“We leave,” Strange said. “Now.”
Tony’s chest ached, like he’d had the arc-reactor shoved back into it. Of course, this body had never been modified. This body had new scars from new injuries, but nothing like what he’d suffered in a cave in Afghanistan. “Now? I can’t… I can’t even say goodbye?”
“How would you explain it, where you were going?” Strange said, and his uncomfortable eyes were full of compassion. “This world will cease to exist as soon as we leave it. There will be no one to miss you, mourn you, or wish for closure. All you can do now is harm yourself. It’s a clean break.”
“I can’t… I can’t leave,” Tony said, aware that he was pleading, nearly begging.
“We have no choice,” Strange said, implacable. “Every moment we linger, with your emotions running so high, the danger of a dimension event grows. Come, take my hand, and let me take you home.”
Tony swallowed his tears.
How the hell was he going to go back to a world where Bucky Barnes hated him?
***
Tony couldn’t get away from Strange fast enough. He knew he’d have to go back, apologize or something. Someday.
Right now, though, he just wanted to get away from the Sanctuary, away from a reality that wasn’t his own. Try to come to some grips with the life he had now.
What was real, what had happened. What had never happened.
He caught a brief glimpse of himself in the mirror just before the door and nearly staggered to a halt.
He was so… young.
Somehow he’d expected to be back to his mid-forties, hair graying, wrinkles around his eyes, pain in his knee, the shaking left arm, the ache in his sternum where the arc-reactor used to be.
None of that…
He was… not even thirty.
How the fuck was he supposed to explain that to anyone.
He leaned in closer, looking at his eyes. The Tony in the mirror… looked like he slept regularly. That he ate more than whenever he fell down. That he’d been well rested, well loved, well taken care of.
“Jesus, what the hell did you do to my life, Barnes?”
“I’m back to Barnes, now?” Bucky strode down the hall, looking for all the world like he’d been running. “You couldn’t wait for me?”
Tony blinked. “Why would--”
And then Bucky was there, in his arms, kissing him, hands twining into Tony’s hair, pulling him closer. Tony melted into it, he couldn’t help it, he was too damn used to Bucky in his life, in his bed. In his heart.
“I thought--”
“Did you think I’d forget? I mean, I know I don’t got th’ best track record for rememberin’ shit that’s important, but… Tony, that was our life.”
“You weren’t there.” Tony exploded into a flurry of motion, flailing his arms around wildly. “I dreamed you up, just like I dreamed up a Howard that liked me, and a Steve that I could boss around. You weren’t real.”
“Honey,” Bucky told him seriously, “I was the only damn thing in there that was real. You, and me. Us together’s what fucked up Strange’s dream. I-- look, I asked him if I could go in, a few hours after you left. I just… I wanted some life, Tony. Wanted some of what I’d been cheated out of. An’... an’ you gave it to me.”
“Bucky--”
“Don’t tell me that’s over, just because we’re home, because god damn you, Tony Stark, I love you.” Bucky’s gray eyes filled up with tears and spilled, shameless, down his cheeks.
“Oh, honey,” Tony said, and he let himself fall back into Bucky’s embrace. “You’re the only thing I was going to miss, and the only thing I couldn’t figure out how to live without.”
“Well, you don’t have to,” Bucky said. “We just need t’ figure out what to tell people about your face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?” Tony leaned closer to the mirror. “I look great.”
“Yeah, that’s th’ problem,” Bucky said. “You look like a kid.”
Tony waved a hand around carelessly. “New youth treatment. Plastic surgery. I’m rich. People will believe anything. Maybe I’ll even get on that. Stark Beauty line. I’ll make millions.”
“You already have billions.”
“I’ll give it to you,” Tony said, tucking his arm around his boyfriend’s waist and directing them the hell out of the Sanctum. “Your pin money.”
“You’re such a sugar daddy,” Bucky said.
“Hey, you’re the one who’s old now,” Tony retorted.
They made the sidewalk and Tony glanced back to see Stephen Strange leaning against the door frame. He gave a perky little two fingered salute. “Good luck, Stark.”
“Don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t need luck,” Tony said to Bucky, earnestly. “I’ve got you.”
“You certainly do, kid,” Bucky said.
“Oh, no, old man, you don’t get to call me kid.”
Bickering cheerfully, they headed down the street. Eventually they’d think to call for a cab, they’d have to make arrangements for Bucky to be back in the States, they’d have to figure out what to do about the renegade Avengers in Wakanda.
But all that could wait.
Tony was going to take his beautiful miracle of a boyfriend somewhere private and have his wicked way with Bucky.
Bucky’s answering smirk told Tony that he was onboard with that plan.