Chapter 1
In another universe...
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Mary Jane picked up on the third ring. “Hi, Tony.”
If her greeting carried a little strain, at least it lacked the urgency which in the previous week had brought her to call Tony Stark, of all people, to tell him Peter Parker was missing.
Tony twirled an imaginary cord around one finger. He hadn't used a landline in decades, of course, but it was something his mother used to do and old habits died hard. When he'd told Morgan years earlier that phones used to have tails, she'd lit up at the fairy tale and looked expectantly at his cell phone as if it might grow a pig's spiral. “Mary Jane,” he greeted in return. “I can't believe I'm saying this, but please tell me that was your husband who stole a Degas for eight minutes last night.”
“Actually, it was a new friend of his.”
“Parker doesn't make new friends.”
“I don't think he had a real choice in the matter.”
Though her voice was dry, there was a worryingly terse undertone. Right as he'd spoken Tony realized that he had unthinkingly referred to Peter as her current husband, not her ex, but she must have been too distracted to correct him.
“How did you know?” she asked. Missing, as well, was the slight edge in her voice. Either that was a sign she'd relaxed, or she was concerned about something worse than holding a civil conversation with Tony Stark.
“We've got a security contract with the Met. No, he wasn't caught on tape,” he said before she could ask, “but my cameras were bugged by a familiar-looking virus in a code I could just swear I've seen before.”
“By the way,” MJ said, “you're in the dating simulation business. If anyone happens to mention anything about sentient holograms.”
She was too flippant, in the kind of way that was forced.
“Mary Jane, is Parker home or not?” he asked with a frown.
“No, not yet,” was her reply. “But I—sort of—know where he is.”
Well, that was progress. When MJ had first called him, Tony had been unable to resist visions of Peter, gutted on some rooftop or or sprawled sightless in an alley, blood swirling down a storm drain. “Great. So we know where he is. Do we know how he is?”
MJ was silent for a moment. When she spoke, it was with deliberate composure. “Waiting on that.”
He didn't know what to do with that.
“Listen, Tony...” she sighed. “Thank you for looking for him. I mean it. I know you dusted off Steve Rogers for this too, but...”
“But now you don't need the help.”
She hesitated. “There's nothing either of us can do. I can't reach him right now, but he said he'd come back.”
Tony drummed his fingers in the rhythm of an old Metallica song. He wasn't about to admit he'd hoped he would be the one to find Parker—in one piece, presumably—and bring him home, but he suspected that MJ suspected as much. A search-and-rescue wasn't exactly a substitute for reconciliation, but it was a handy excuse to begin one. Still, what he was hearing did not much encourage a positive outlook on Peter Parker's general well being.
“Is he hurt?” he asked finally.
“He's not well, but it's not an injury so much as... a condition.”
“Are you going to actually tell me what the hell's going on, or do I get twenty questions? Or—” he counted on his fingers— “sixteen now, I guess.”
She was silent and he guessed she was deciding what to tell him. That aggravated him some; hadn't she come to him for help? Now that Parker was no longer in the wind, was she going to kick Tony's foot out from where he'd inched it inside the door?
Finally, Mary Jane said: “Peter, in the most literal sense, fell off the face of the planet. Or universe, rather.”
“Another...universe? Did I hear that right?”
“A parallel dimension.” She said it self-consciously, as though he might laugh.
Tony, naturally, asked for clarification.
Over the course of the next twenty minutes, he got it. It occupied that familiar gray area between the fantastic and the just-barely-plausible that he knew well enough to not discredit offhand, and while Otto Octavius breathed no more in this particular dimension Stark still made a mental note to check his basement for Stargates.
MJ seemed torn between an obligation to give him the details, having involved him in the first place, and lingering reserve stemming from the decade-old fallout he'd had with her husband—no, ex-husband, he had to stop forgetting that. It still felt like trying to just forget about some geometric theorem.
It was, he had to admit, a plan most effective for its simplicity. If Parker survived.
He might not, said a sly little voice in the back of his head. And then you'll never get the chance to talk to him. How selfish would your grief be then?
Stark pushed away the thought. MJ ran out of information and a silence stretched over the line.
“So what are you going to do once he's back?” she said suddenly.
“I thought you said my part in this was concluded?” Stark said, not without some bitterness.
Cryptically, MJ replied: “That's up to you. I just said he wasn't missing anymore.”
“I've been trying to reach him,” he reminded her. “He was ghosting me even before he ghosted the rest of this dimension, you know.”
MJ acknowledged this with a vague hmm. Stark felt irritated. What made her think Parker would answer this time? Sure, he could track Parker down in a heartbeat once he graced this dimension again—the man worked at Empire State University, after all, he knew the lunk's office hours for crying out loud—but he'd been respecting Parker's choice or whatever, and hadn't that been one of the catalysts of this fight?
“Can someone at least tell me when he's back?” he asked her, failing to make it sound as arch as he'd intended. It sounded more plaintive, a genuine plea, and he felt slightly embarrassed. Damn it, though, he wanted this.
“Sure,” said MJ, a little more gently.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Stark said suddenly before she could hang up. She held on to the line, and Stark's eyes fell on a small sculpture Pepper had purchased to class up the joint a little in between Black Sabbath posters.
“Yes?” said MJ.
“Did that friend of his just steal the one painting?”
Surprised, MJ replied cautiously: “Yes, I was there... his, ah, friend only had the Degas for a minute. It was just for a distraction. Then he stuck it in the Lost and Found.”
Now that was interesting; MJ had been on the scene? Parker had always been so relentlessly determined to keep her well out of his capers that he'd practically exiled her. Nonetheless, Tony hummed acknowledgment.
“Why do you ask?” MJ said curiously.
“Oh, no reason, really,” said Stark, twirling at the air again. “Just because two paintings got stolen last night, and only one made it back.”
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The theft made the headlines the next day. The Met had desperately tried to keep it under wraps a little while longer but naturally, on the heels of the chaos at the recent gala, the news got out.
On television, a somber brunette looked up from a Stark Industries-patented data pad to address her unseen audience. “Two nights ago, a masked man in a purple cape stole Degas' 1874 work The Dance Class for a span of eight minutes before depositing it in the Lost and Found of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then disappearing. Around the same time, a recently unearthed masterwork by Botticelli, dating to the late fifteenth century, was stolen from a conservation lab at the institution. It was not placed in the Lost and Found.”
Her tone and expression were faintly condemnatory, as though she thought the thief was tuning in and wished to express her disapproval. To her left, the co-anchor seemed to be having trouble smothering his grin.
“If it wasn't in the Lost and Found, I'd suggest checking in a bonfire of the vanities,” he said over a strangled giggle. The anchor flicked a disparaging look his way and tapped something on the data pad before recounting more details Tony already knew, briefly touching on Botticelli's classical oeuvre of work and moving on to the next headline.
“Next, we have a preview of Matthew Burns's upcoming retrospective as the twentieth anniversary of the Avengers' formation approaches—”
Tony flipped the channel.
News outlets truly loved an art heist. If the cameras had panned over from the poker-faced anchor, dutifully reading off the developments from her data pad, it would have been to reveal shameless producers wringing their hands in abject glee.
Though it distressed the Met, Tony had to admit it made for a convenient distraction. Every so often his mind would drift to an unknown dimension where Peter Parker was at that moment in either one or ten trillion pieces, like some ghastly Schrödinger's Spider-Man. He'd already called to update Rogers, who'd been doggedly peeling up the sidewalks in search for the missing hero.
No old soldier liked to hear the mission fizzled out before it could finish. Tony suspected that was why he took on another so quickly, when ostensibly the old Commando had hung his helmet up for good.
“What the hell are you and Strange up to?” Tony said irritably over the phone the next night, after sending Morgan off to a sleepover. He was rinsing his dinner plate, an act of labor which Pepper insisted was good for his character.
“Stephen wants to see if there are inter-dimensional holes in the boat,” replied Rogers. The speaker was picking up a strong wind which made him sound like he was having a casual chat on the battlefield. “For some reason he thinks the Bermuda Triangle's a weak spot. He's a little concerned about how easy it was to open up a portal here.”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Even one 'he' opened?”
“Actually, Wong opened it. Their Wong. But it was the particle collider that worried him—he didn't like the idea you could forcibly remove someone from one universe without even stepping foot in it. He wants to put up some protections.”
That worried Tony too, and he was secretly glad the old Supreme was on the case. Known for his general disparagement of magic scribbling, however, he wasn't about to admit it.
“Well, let's hope that stupid painting's still in this dimension,” he muttered.
And that Peter Parker would find his way back to it.
On cue, Rogers asked: “Any update on Spider-Man?”
No, not since he'd asked at the start of the phone call. The old Commando was more upset than he wanted to let on. “No,” said Tony. He paused in the act of drying the plate, then roused himself to set it in the drying rack and sling the towel over one shoulder. “Not a dicky bird.”
“Let me know if that changes,” said Rogers. He paused. “And if... well, you're sure that other dimension would send him right back?”
“Spider-Man? That hurricane?” Tony said with more confidence than he felt. “They'd beg us to keep him.”
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It was days later before he knew anything more.
Stark rarely kept to strict office hours anymore, and the doorman was bemused when the typically nomadic billionaire popped up bright and early each day and didn't leave 'til five. For some reason he suspected that if anyone contacted him it would likely be at his office; while not a neutral ground exactly, it was more impersonal than home.
He'd left instructions that he was not to be bothered by mundanities, which excluded pretty much everything but the Met. And boy, did they want his undivided attention. He was getting fifty reports a day of every cape spotted in the city, and some abroad. Most of them he suspected were wisecracks donning them to mess with people.
Despite apprehensively waiting for word on Parker, Tony wasn't quite prepared for the entrance to the lift in his office to quietly lumber into motion one afternoon.
Tony Stark's private elevator, which was inaccessible to anyone not granted special permission, seemed to have been mysteriously overridden without even tipping off the little indicator that should have ticked the carriage's progress through the floors.
Though he didn't drop his hand to the little nanite blister plastered to the underside of his desk, Tony's heartbeat accelerated.
The door slid open. Peter Parker stepped into the penthouse office, dwarfed by the sprawling Manhattan skyline. Then he stepped clear of the elevator.
Parker stopped halfway down the miniature flight of steps, hyperaware that he hadn't warned he was coming. He and Tony stared at each other.
It was the first time in nearly ten years they'd been in the same room.
(The last time they'd come face-to-face had been in a Dunkin Donuts on the upper West Side. Parker usually stopped there before work and, two weeks after the war over the Accords ended, in an indescribable act driven by some kneejerk need of the moment to both defend himself and antagonize, Tony had agitatedly walked over to see him there and stalked in to get the last word. It was sheer rare luck no one recognized them or understood the argument. By the time the nervous assistant manager asked them both to leave, Tony and Parker were hurling savage last words at each other with the unerring accuracy of missiles locked on target.)
Since then he hadn't heard two words strung together from Peter Parker. Once or twice they'd both ended up on the scene for the same disaster, but Spider-Man always bailed before a conversation could haltingly begin—and Iron Man let him, as did the other Avengers.
Parker hadn't been a protege for all that long, anyway, and hadn't ever relied on Iron Man for much. The Iron Spider suit had been a gift. Alright, yes: Tony Stark, noted doomsday prepper, had installed an override, and a component which analyzed—and fine, maybe it could interfere with—the famous spider-sense, but it truly had been a gift.
Except Pepper had warned him about gifts that came with strings attached.
The confrontation at Dunkin Donuts occurred about three days after Tony Stark had received a cheap FedEx parcel containing the remains of the Iron Spider, ruined beyond possible repair.
For a decade after the civil war, things had settled into an enduring stasis: Spider-Man did his thing and the Avengers did theirs. For a city in which you could hardly throw a rock without hitting a Spandex onesie, Parker had gotten very good at compartmentalizing his affairs without involving anyone else.
Maybe he'd even gotten too good at it, for Mary Jane's peace of mind.
“Hi, Tony,” said Parker after a moment, sticking his hands into the pockets of a jacket which appeared to have actually been pressed. Beneath the wan, crooked little smile Tony detected nervousness; the same as he'd intuited on the morning Parker had told him he wouldn't unmask. “Sorry I didn't knock.”
Tony certainly hadn't expected any more than a terse phone call at best, whichever way the wind blew, and suddenly coming face-to-face with the kid threw him for a loop.
Except Parker wasn't a kid anymore. Tony knew this, and it still startled him to see the gray infiltrating the hair, and the shadow of stubble that didn't seem to entirely shave away, and the faint creases above the brow and at the corners of the eyes. He didn't expect the kid to look so tired.
Instinctively he searched for the glitching MJ had spoken of. He didn't see any. That was promising. Parker otherwise looked like a pile of used matchsticks glued together.
“Hi yourself,” said Tony, rising from his chair, irritated by his own nerves. He glanced at the elevator door, which quietly whooshed closed as if ashamed for its betrayal. “Do search-and-rescues typically end with the rescuee hijacking the would-be rescuer's private elevator?”
“It does if the would-be rescuee's accountable for a priceless work of art gone missing.” Parker scratched at his neck, and Tony couldn't tell if it was truly nonchalant. Parker's soft, hoarse tenor had always been deceptive, and until Dunkin Donuts Tony hadn't even been sure if the kid could rage. “And I guess I just kind of wanted to see if I still could.”
Tony frowned, pausing at the foot of the mini flight of steps leading to the landing where Parker stood. So that was the reason for the personal visit then, the first in a decade: the missing painting? Not because Parker had finally listened to his damned voicemail?
“Guess you're not as rusty as I thought,” said Tony, trying to keep the bitterness to a minimum. At some point he'd removed the wet bar once stationed on one side of the office, in a fit of good character he didn't feel at the moment. “And that painting's not priceless. It has a price, as the insurance company keeps hysterically reminding me every two minutes.”
“Why wasn't it on display?” Parker asked.
Straight to the shop talk, huh?
“They were spit-shining it or something,” muttered Tony. “I'm about to go over there again.”
Fifteen feet remained between them. Parker was the taller of the two men, and standing midway up the mini flight of stairs, it felt like he had the conversational advantage of the high ground.
If Rogers were there he'd probably have gone forward for a handshake, as if they were all meeting again for the first time.
For some reason the kid seemed surprised. “You're going to handle the equivalent of a breaking and entering?” Parker said dubiously.
Tony ignored the implication that he didn't get out of bed for less than a catastrophe.
“It's my security contract. Besides, even an old pensioner like myself might want to dust off his old business suit from time to time.”
“What makes you think you'll need it?”
“I was referring to my Tom Ford three-piece,” Tony said haughtily, shaking his cuffs for emphasis. “White-collar crime doesn't always require a red-armor solution.”
Parker seemed to suppress a sigh. A stretch of silence fell over the conversation, and Tony wondered if they were finally going to address the elephant in the room. He opened his mouth to beat Parker to it—
“Do you need any help?”
Tony's mouth snapped shut.
Parker looked nervous, defiant, and oddly hopeful, all at once. He shuffled his shoes a moment before glancing to the side and shifting his jaw side to side. “I mean, it is kind of my fault. I needed a distraction, and someone else took advantage.”
Spider-Man did not waste breath on the Avengers; now he wanted to investigate a robbery with Iron Man?
“Is MJ behind this?” Tony asked suddenly, frowning.
Parker's eyebrows shot up. “No,” he said. “Why?”
“Well, kid, last I heard your cells were trying to hitchhike dimensions. Sure you're up for a trip to the museum?” It came out more snide than Tony had intended. Stress had frayed his temper, and that jackass just breezed into his office like they'd said more than a damned word to each other over the last ten years. The way things had ended...
Tony crossed his arms and rocked back a step, glaring through the polished office walls. “I mean, sure, this reunion beats the hell out of the bloody gutter Rogers and I thought we'd find you in...but can you even go through a metal detector right now?”
Why was Parker looking at him like that? After a moment the kid—or man, or whatever the hell he was to Tony now—said with the ghost of a smile: “I'm sorry I worried you.”
No kidding. Even before Parker had dropped off the face of the universe, Tony Stark's voicemail had been collecting dust in his inbox.
What if Parker had died in one of these other universes before getting word to MJ? They'd have waited forever for him to come back. What if he'd fallen into ten trillion pieces with none of them any the wiser?
That sly voice surfaced again, like a shark fin disturbing black water: Would the Iron Spider have protected him? Would he have kept that suit, if your paranoia hadn't sabotaged it? Could the nanites have saved him when the collider tried to pull him apart?
Tony knew the answer was no, and it still shook him.
When MJ had called to tell him Peter was missing—not just off handling some bizarre calamity, but really, truly, scarily missing—Tony, energized by the necessity of action, had poured all his attention into finding the kid. Now that Parker was standing in his office, the wind had gone out of Tony's sails and he didn't know what to say.
Except for what he'd wanted to say when he'd left that voicemail. It would be so easy to just say it now. What was stopping him? Parker had given him and Rogers both a bad scare, was that it? Had it made Tony lose his footing somehow? Was that his left arm going numb?
Parker raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “C'mon, man, just let me help. You know I'm useless at being useless.”
“Ever the Boy Scout,” muttered Tony.
Parker gave that slight, wry grin again. “Maybe I'll just head over to the Met and if you're there, you're there. How's that.” He tugged at his collar to indicate he wore a suit beneath the suit. Then he turned and stepped up one of the risers leading back to the elevator shaft, scuffing his shoe in the process.
Looking to the side and folding his arms, Tony grumbled: “Won't the nightly news love that. Two superheroes investigating a museum heist.”
Parker said over his shoulder, “Are you that worried about the painting?”
“I don't give a shit about the painting. Is that the only reason you're here?”
Stopping at the elevator, Peter turned and frowned at him, dimly surprised. “What? No, duh. I'm responding to your voicemail.”
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