One
Tony Stark is nine years old and waiting for his little sister to be born.
They’re at home, because Mom had hated having him at the hospital and refused to make the same mistake twice. He sits with his dad outside Mom’s room, hands findling with the mobile he’s been making but too shaky to actually make any progress. Dad is pacing back and forth, back and forth, his fist clenched around a tumbler of bourbon. Doctors and nurses and surgeons, the best money can buy, are all rushing in and out of the room.
Mom is screaming.
Something’s gone wrong, that much is obvious.
(Something’s gone wrong, but Dad keeps saying everything’s alright even as his fist starts cracking his tumbler. Something’s gone wrong, and Tony is smart enough to know that his mom is probably too old to be having kids at forty-six. That she really should be at a hospital because for all that they have the best doctors money can buy, they don’t necessarily have all the right equipment in the manor and-)
Mom’s screams stop.
There’s no infant wails following it.
A nurse comes out of Mom’s room-
(Have you heard of Schrödinger's cat?
Cassandra Stark is a little like that cat, alive and dead in a green box.
The thing is, the outcome is entirely dependent on what opens the box.
The Time Stone is tired of being crushed by mad titans and sitting inert in drawers.
It opens that Green Box for the first time.)
“Mr. Stark,” the nurse says, smiling as she takes down her mask, “It’s a girl.”