Chapter 1
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The Avengers go back in time and bring back everyone that was turned to ash. The bad guy gets defeated and the day gets saved.
It's a nice daydream.
But reality is..
Reality is Tony can't bring back Pepper. He can't bring back the mother of his child.
Morgan had been traumatized by watching her mom turned to ash in front of her. She was only two and the Therapist Tony was paying a hefty amount to had told him his little girl now had an anxiety disorder called Selective Mutism .. she has screamed and wailed when her mom had crumbled into ash.. Tony's brilliant little girl who used to speak in full sentences and was already able to add and subtract smaller numbers at only two was now a quiet shell of herself. But sometimes Tony could hear her whisper to herself. When he overheard her telling herself a fantastical fairy-tale reality where The Good Guys all won and The Bad Guys all lost and the day was saved and her mommy could come home again because The Good Guys had saved her when they brought everyone back from the ashes, Tony had almost broken down sobbing because he didn't think she meant for him to hear she had seemed so lost in her own little world. The therapist said that was probably Hyper-Visualization it was where a person could go so fully submersive in a daydream that they could see, hear and maybe even feel what was happening in the daydream almost like it was reality. It was a method of dissociating. Tony suddenly realized that Morgan's Selective Mutism was probably less Mutism and more just her being completely lost in her own head living in a fantasy reality where either none of the bad things really happened or they did but had been promptly fixed. She was quiet because she was off in a world where she had her mother back and she was only very rarely back in the real world with Tony at small spaces for a time. Tony's heart clenched at the realization.. sadness and envy warring inside him because he wishes he could just live in a fully submersive fantasy where the bad things were all fixed and the woman he loved always got to come back to him and their daughter safely at the end of the story but he was also jealous of that fake perfect world for stealing his little girl.
Jealous that, that fake perfect world could give Morgan and Pepper the Happily Ever After that he couldn't.