Let’s waste it right
The schematics of building a Time Machine again really shouldn’t have been so difficult, especially given the fact that they had done it all before. But they were practically starting from scratch, with Scott’s van having been crushed and Tony’s machine receiving the same treatment. The encryption Tony had left behind in it was almost uncodable and heavily protected. Even Rhodey was having difficulty accessing it. He’d gotten as far as to discover that one wrong move would permanently remove the file from existence. Thankfully he stopped his meddling just in time.
They weren’t sure where to go from there. With Scott and his friends working on the particles, they didn’t have much in terms of man or brain power for the time machine. But they started working with the few materials and partial blueprints they had.
It wasn’t until Bruce stumbled through the halls near Tony’s room that he got an idea after seeing Peter Parker sitting on the floor across from his mentor’s door.
“Hey kid,” Bruce Banner approached Peter as he sat on the floor in the hallway.
Peter wipes his eyes and stood to talk to Dr Banner. All the while trying not to freak out over the fact that THE Dr. Banner was talking to him and had just seen him crying like a baby.
“Listen, Tony’s told us that you’ve got quite the brain and are an excellent engineer.” Dr. Banner said.
“Thank you, sir,” Peter whispered quietly. “But I don’t know about that.”
He glanced towards the door he had been sitting across from.
“Tony doesn’t brag about the genius of anyone else,” Dr. Banner said. “Even me and I have seven PHDs.”
“But you are a genius, sir,” Peter insisted. “You have seven PhDs.”
“Exactly, but I wasn’t the one who could figure out time travel,” Dr. Banner said looking into the room that Peter had yet to take his eyes off. “I tried but I turned Scott into a baby.”
“The Einstein- podolsky - Rosen paradox or the EPR paradox,” Peter nodded in understanding. “ I mean that’s close. Instead of pushing Mr. Lang through time you pushed time through Mr. Lang. That’s still so cool! Time travel, wow. It does sound like something out of a sci-fi movie. Time travel, Did Mr. Stark really invent time travel? That’s what Happy said? He told me that’s how you all got the stones and brought everybody back and I don’t think I understand it. I mean that’s-that’s crazy.”
The kid spoke fast and rambled a lot like his mouth couldn't keep up with his brain. It surprised Bruce because so far the kid had been pretty quiet and would only really talk to Pepper, Rhodey, Happy, and Clint. The only time the rest of them had heard him speak was after the whole alpacas debacle and they hadn’t really seen him since. And still they had been bystanders while he addressed mostly Pepper and the kids' parents.
“Yeah well, he had a good motivator,” Dr. Banner said looking at Peter with a gentle smile.
Peter cocked his head to the side, a little confused. Dr. Banner said that like it was supposed to mean something to him. His eyes darted back and forth between Dr. Banner and Mr. Stark's room.
“Anyways, so you know that we got the Stones from the past?” He asked Peter. And the kid nodded. “Well time travel is tricky, and dangerous to mess with.”
“Right like back to the future. Dr. Who. Or like you could go back in time and kill your grandma and then you wouldn’t exist but then if you didn’t exist you wouldn’t have gone back in time so then you didn’t go back in time and it would create a time Paradox.” Peter nodded.
And Bruce noted that Tony had been right when he had told them that the kid tried to speak in one breath like he needed to get everything out. And he noticed that he was also right in that the kid also tended to trail off awkwardly. It amazed him to know that Tony had accurately noticed such a minute detail about the kid. After hearing so much about the kid over the course of five years it was amazing to see him in person. Like looking at a legend.
“Time travel doesn’t exactly work like that,” Bruce said. “Or maybe it does, I'm not sure if I completely understand it still or not either. All I know is that we need to return each of the stones to the very exact moment we got them otherwise it would wreck the timeline and reality as we know it.”
Peter nodded like he understood. His eyes were wide and contemplative.
“So you're going to return the stones now?” Peter said.
“We’re working on it, that's why I wanted to talk to you,” He answered.
“Whoa!” Peter's eyes widened and he practically bounced from foot to foot in excitement. “Are you asking me to help you return the stones? Do I get to time travel?”
It was the first time anyone had seen Peter smile and Bruce relished in it. But now he felt uncertain because he knew if he let the Kid actually time travel Tony would wake up from his coma just to murder him.
“We do need your help,” Bruce said, deciding to start with the positive. “But you won’t be the one returning the stones.”
“Oh,” the kid deflated a little bit.
“It’s like I said, Tony was the one who figured out time travel and basically built the machine that let us into the quantum realm,” Bruce said. “But as you know that got destroyed.”
Peter nodded.
“And again as I said, Tony said you're a brilliant engineer,” Bruce said. “We could really use your help recreating everything.”
“You want me to help you build a time machine!” The boy's eyes widened and finally focused on bruce.
“Essentially yes,” Bruce said.
“But I’m not, I can’t,” Peter said. “Mr. Stark was the one that did that, if you can’t do it, I definitely can’t. I’m no Tony Stark.”
“Maybe not,” Bruce said. “But according to him, You’re better.”
They had been given access to one of Wakanda’s top labs, second only to the Princess’s. And Peter relished in it. Looking at all of the heightened technology from wakanda that he had only ever dreamed of existing.
And next to him was Rhodey and the one and only Dr. Bruce Banner. To be honest he didn’t think he’d be able to help too much. But what else was he supposed to do here?
Dr. Banner and Rhodey explained to him and showed him the time space gps bracelets Tony had created and as much of his notes as they had access to.
“Interesting,” Peter muttered as he examined the bracelet and listened intently, “letting you enter the quantum realm at one point in time and exiting the other. But how to make sure that critical events aren’t changed to avoid the grandfather paradox? Obviously making the trip twice which is what we’re trying but then that could just create alternate timelines and what would happen to this because it sounds like this timeline is so far still intact… but does that mean we’ve already figured it out a second time? Or is there a timeline in which we haven’t? And how long until we find out? Will half of us just vanish again? Or worse?“
He kept muttering quickly and swiping through the notes. It was so quiet that his two older companions couldn’t really hear and watched in fascination. Rhodey in particular felt as if he had already gone back in time and was back at MIT watching a 16 year old Tony Stark studying for exams or working on class projects, especially as he watched Peter make quick and messy annotations on Tony’s own notes.
Suddenly Peter froze as if realizing he was being watched. He looked up with wide deer eyes, like a child with their hand caught in a cookie as if freezing would make him seem invisible.
“What?” He asked, staring at them and blushing.
“Nothing,” the two men said quickly and scrambled for a couple tools to continue building what they could.
“I’m just-—“
“We’re gonna—“
The two men spoke at the same time and muttered nonsense while Peter still stared at them before he blinked rapidly, shrugged, and turned back to his work.
The machinery and the clicking of the computer, the buzz of the lab, all of it were familiar to him or at least in some ways. Even if the presence of the men around him weren’t exactly the same. Except Rhodey was. In the two years before everything happened, Rhodey had come on the rare occasion and worked with him and Tony. So he wasn’t new, even if Dr. Banner was.
It wasn’t long though until he hit the same snag as Dr. Banner and Rhodey. He paused in his note taking and looked up hesitantly.
“Um,” he started hesitantly.
“What’s up, kid?” Rhodey came and looked over his notes.
“Do you, uh, is Friday… here,” Peter said.
Before Rhodey could respond, a voice sounded out of one of the stark tablets Peter had been messing with.
“Hello Peter,” Friday said. “How can I be of assistance?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said hesitantly, “can you show me what Mr. Stark has on the uh time GPS.”
“I’m sorry Peter, but I have no files or supporting documents for a time gps or anything similar.” Friday replied.
“Kid,” Rhodey started but Peter ignored the man in favor of turning over the tablet around in his hands, staring at a blueprint for the time space gps that was currently displayed in confusion.
“What? But I’m looking right at some of it!” He exclaimed.
“Peter, kid, hold on,” Rhodey said. “Don’t try to access it, I checked the code, one false move and it’s all gone. And I can’t hack it.”
Peter groaned and cursed Tony under his breath. But nevertheless he pulled up the code and found that Rhodey was right. Of course Tony would put a clean slate protocol, if this were to fall in the wrong hands it would be disastrous. And while he could code, he wasn’t so good as to hack into Tony Stark’s unhackable systems.
But he did know someone who could. Someone who had done it before.
“Friday, call Ned Leeds,” Peter said quickly.
“Who? This isn’t the time to make social calls,” Rhodey said.
“And this isn’t something that can be shared with just anyone,” Dr. Banner added.
“Connecting to the Kid Who Hacked Me, ” Friday announced instead of allowing Peter to respond.
“Kid who what?” Rhodey gapped. He watched as the screen was replaced with an excitable young Asian boy, clearly Peter’s age. He’s pretty sure the boy hadn’t even waited for the phone connected before he started exclaiming excitedly to Peter.
“—and I’ve found out who from our class didn’t die and who’s come back. At least so far. Did you know Abe is married??? That’s weird right?”
“Yeah yeah, weird, listen Ned. That’s great and all but I need your help.” Peter interrupted his friend.
“Yeah sure, anything. What’s up? Is it guy in the chair stuff!?” Ned said eagerly.
“Guy in the chair?” Rhodey muttered to Bruce who just shrugged. With all his doctorates he was just as confused as to what was happening.
“Oh yeah definitely guy in the chair stuff.” Peter said, ignoring the two men behind him. “You remember how you hacked my suit.”
“Excuse me?” Rhodey’s eyes widened. Tony happened to know for a fact that Tony had implemented some of his best work into Spider-Man’s suit.
“Dude, I am not hacking the suit for you. As cool as it was to be lectured by THE Tony Stark I’d rather that be blacklisted from every university for what was it he called it exactly? Ned paused dramatically pretending to think. “OH YEAH! CHILD ENDANGERMENT. Which by the way is still ridiculous since I’m also a kid. But I exactly argue with Ironman.”
“Ok I wouldn’t let him do that and he wasn’t serious.” Peter argued.
“Dude I’m pretty sure he was and I’m not gonna test it.”
“Besides! This isn’t that, and if you help I’ll tell you everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Fine, but you and I both know you would have done it anyways.”
If anyone looked up the definition of bewilderment, surprised, and having the utter sense of deja vu they would find a picture of Rhodey. Because he still had no idea what this kid’s plan was and he clearly seemed ready to spill all avenger secrets to his friend, and in terms of deju vu the kid could easily persuade his friend into every hair brained scheme, much like Tony always managed to him. In fact with all of it he couldn’t even blame the kid, because Tony had spilled everything to him and Rhodey still never knew what his plans were.
“Uh hold on,” Bruce said, “like we said before this isn’t something we can tell the public.”
Rhodey just waved him off. “Don’t think we do anything to stop them man.”
“Ok but we can’t just have him telling a stranger everything on an unprotected call.” Bruce protested.
“Take that back you’ll offend Friday.” Peter whispered.
“It is true, I am very offended, Dr.” A robotic voice cut off.
Rhodey put his head in his hand and closed his. He couldn’t even be in disbelief at the absurdity of it all. With a sigh he muttered something about calling Happy and walked out of the room.