tony is for friends
“Before,” Pepper started. “Before it all happened, you said you wanted kids.”
Before. Before seemed so long ago, now. It must have been centuries since Thanos snapped, millennia, because Tony felt like the hollow feeling in his chest had been there forever. It must have been forever since he had heard Peter’s voice, since he had ruffled his hair.
“Yeah.” Tony’s voice was barely a whisper. “I did.”
“Was that still something you were considering? It’s just… I feel like we got lucky, Tony. I know, I know, not lucky per se, but… We’re here. Both of us. Not many couples got that, you know.”
“I know. It’s just…” Tony took a breath. “It’s just-”
“Peter?” Pepper always looked at Tony so fondly, so softly; she made him feel like he might be okay someday. That look was on her face at that moment, the one that made him feel like everything would be alright if only he cherished her.
Tony nodded. “I… I failed him, Pep. I promised him, I promised him I would never let anything happen to him. I told him that I would always protect him, and I failed. He’s… He’s dead. He’s dead, and I couldn’t stop it. How could I bring another kid into this world if I can’t even protect them? And, even if we do get them back somehow…” Tony took a breath, before beginning to ramble on. “I don’t know, with him here, I don’t think I need anything else. Besides, we’ve never really actually talked about it until now, and we shouldn’t have a kid just because we feel lucky-”
“I get it. You’re right. If we decide to, it should be for the right reasons.” Tony nodded quickly, and Pepper sighed. “You have to know it’s not your fault, Tony.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It’s not. You can’t put the weight of the world on your shoulders. How many times do I need to tell you that?”
“Until it sticks.”
Tony sighed, massaging his temple. Pepper moved closer to him, allowing him to rest his head on her lap. If he was leaving tear stains on her pants, she didn’t have the heart to tease him for it.
“It shouldn’t be this way,” Tony said, his voice muffled. “I shouldn’t… Adults don’t outlive their kids. That’s not… It’s not supposed to happen like that. Right?”
“No. You’re right.”
“I can’t keep going like this. I… I build things, I try to help, but I just can’t focus. Every little thing in that stupid lab… I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s my fault. I know. I’m the hero. I’m supposed to get right back to work and save everybody, but I don’t know how, Pep.”
“It’s okay,” She whispered, running her fingers through his hair. “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
---
Speaking of kids, Peter was starting to get lonely. Cripplingly lonely. He could barely be alone for a day let alone however long it had been since Titan. There was no sign of the passage of time, and he never felt tired… It felt like forever, like an eternity had passed by and when Peter finally got out like he always did, there would be nothing left of Earth. It would have been destroyed because of stupid global warming, rebuilt by aliens, and then wiped back out again.
He was getting kind of stir crazy.
There was no need to worry, though, because Tony would come for him.
Tony would always come for him.
---
Ava Starr was beginning to get desperate. Scott and the others were supposed to meet her weeks ago with the quantum particles, but no one had showed up. She had stopped by the lab, the Pyms’ house on the beach, Scott’s house, and even Hope’s new place. There was absolutely no one.
(Cassie had looked crushed when Ava said she hadn’t seen Scott around.)
All she knew was that their quantum traveling gear was still up on that roof, just like it was when Scott had traveled there to get the particles. She had almost stepped on the dust surrounding the machines. Still, she had to hope. She had to hope that someone out there somewhere could help her, whether they found her friend or got her the quantum particles she needed. She knew hope was dangerous, but without it, not much, if anything, remained for her.
She was unable to control her quantum shifting anymore, and it hurt, it hurt more than anything. It was so much worse than she remembered, and she certainly didn’t look back on the memories fondly. She needed someone, anyone, who could help her. She could barely even think; the pain was overwhelming.
She fell to the ground, wondering what would happen if it got so bad that she glitched right through it and materialized below the surface. Her gut reaction was to pull her knees to her chest and rock until the pain went away, but she found she couldn’t remain solid long enough to do so. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut, hoping it would dull the awful feeling in her head.
When she opened her eyes again, there was an Iron Man suit standing in front of her.
“Don’t worry, miss. I am not going to hurt you,” it said. “You seem to be in need of medical assistance. Will you allow me to lead you to the Avengers Compound?”
(Scott knew the Avengers, bragged about it constantly. Maybe they could help her.)
She hesitated a moment.
“Yes.”
---
“We need to talk.”
(At the airport, all Tony had wanted to do was talk. Maybe even beg or plead, if that’s what it took. Keeping the team together was what was most important. Whatever it took. Whatever it took.)
Tony barely even looked up from his tablet at the sound of Steve’s voice. He was the tiniest bit embarrassed he had an entire breakdown in front of the man yesterday, but Tony Stark was a man of iron. He was Iron Man, and Iron Man stood up to the bad guys.
“Funny.” He said. “ I don’t really have anything to say to you.”
Steve sighed. “Tony-”
“I meant it, Cap. I mean it. I’ve got nothing.”
“Then how about I talk and you listen?”
“Interesting. How about… you talk and I actively ignore you?”
“You know we can only save them if we’re together. Save him.”
Tony went rigid. How did he know about Peter? He wasn’t supposed to know because Tony had figured he’d say something stupid, something condescending, and guess what? Peter was Tony’s weakness, his vulnerability, and Steve was already preying on that like a fucking vulture. How had he even found out?
“Who told you? I haven’t told any of the more loose-lipped members of our party. Oh, did you bug the place? I honestly wouldn’t-”
“Bruce told me. When he was yelling at me the other day, which I deserved.”
Tony snorted.“I don’t want to talk to you about the kid, if that’s why you’re here. You can’t use his name against me. I’m not going to let you do that.”
“It’s not why I’m here. I wanted to apologize,” Steve said, his eyes full of sincerity.
The sincerity took him aback. It always did, even more so when he didn’t see it coming. Tony wanted to believe him, he really did.
(He saw his mother, in the passenger’s seat, her face streaked with blood. He saw Bucky’s hand around his father’s neck. He saw the gun shooting out the camera, he saw… Steve, who knew, who didn’t tell him, and maybe all of this could have been avoided if he had just told him-)
Tony turned off his tablet. He looked up at Steve, raising an eyebrow. “Well, go on, then.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t… I’ve never really lost before, and… I didn’t know how to handle it. Sam’s gone, and he’s the one who usually talks some sense into me. I took it out on you. Treated you like a human punching bag. I’m sorry, Tony.”
Tony was tired. So, so tired. He was too tired to talk about the old wounds that had opened up in the face of Steve’s betrayal. Too tired to talk about how much his mother had meant to him. Too tired to talk about how fucking ironic it was that Cap knew Howard was murdered and didn’t say anything about it. Too goddamn tired.
“That’s Stark to you, Cap. Tony’s for friends.”
“Tony, please-”
“Stark,” Tony said, his voice dark. It would have maybe even been threatening if his shoulders weren’t still set in defense at the mention of Peter.
“I’m sorry about it all, okay? I’m sorry. What more do you want me to say?” Steve was growing impatient.
“I just want you to know that the only reason I’m even half accepting your apology is for Peter. It’s not for you. It’s for him. Anything to get him back. Anything. But after it’s over? We’re done. You’re gone. I don’t want to see you. No anniversary dinners. No grabbing a beer. No ice skating trips down in Siberia. Done.”
Steve sighed deeply.
“Deal.”
---
Nebula wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself around the Compound. She was friends with Tony, yes, but whenever she thought to approach him, she noticed how tired he looked. Nebula didn’t really know how to deal with that kind of tired, so she thought it better to distract herself some other way. She’d also acquainted herself with Rhodey, Tony’s best friend.
(Her hand was growing stiff. Her joints needed repair. Nebula was old enough to know how to do the job herself, and Rhodey had shown up when she was nearly done. He watched quietly, maybe waiting for her to finish. She wasn’t certain why he would want to talk to her, though.
“I wasn’t always like this,” She said, turning her head just enough that she could see him out of her peripheral vision.
He gave her a sad smile. “Me neither. But, we work with what we got, right?”)
Nebula wasn’t great at making friends, so she did what she could to simply gravitate between the three people at the Compound she knew. However, on this day, Rocket was prepping Tony’s new round of suits to be sent off for relief efforts, Rhodey was off meeting with the U.S. government about allocating more to account for all the new orphans that came about due to the Snap, and Tony… Well, Pepper had told the Avengers that Tony had a fever, so that meant he was thinking about Peter. He’d already told her his sob story and she’d told him hers, so she didn’t think there was really anything else she could do for the man at the moment. She didn’t know how to deal with emotions like that considering she was punished for even having them in the past.
She was busying herself working on improving the parts of her hand when someone pulled up a stool and sat across from her at the lab table. She paused her work, hesitating a moment before looking up at the newcomer. There sat Natasha, Black Widow, looking absolutely exhausted.
“What do you want?” Nebula asked. See? She wasn’t great at the whole ‘friends’ thing.
“To talk to you,” Nat replied as if it was the simplest question in the world. Who knows? Maybe, right at that moment, it was.
Nebula slowly put down her screwdriver, eyeing Natasha closely. “Why?”
“What, you can’t believe that I would want to be your friend?” She asked. Her voice wasn’t even the tiniest bit offended.
“No.”
Natasha smiled. “Smart. No wonder the others have taken a liking to you.”
“They have?” Her voice was more suspicious than actually curious.
“Yes.”
Nebula pursed her lips, squinting at Natasha as if that would help her read the woman more easily.. “You’re sure you’re not just telling me what I want to hear?”
“Maybe.” Natasha seemed impressed, or as impressed someone with a blank slate for an expression could look. Nebula knew what it was like better than anyone to feel like a blank slate. She was that way, too: unreadable. Cryptic. Intimidating.
“I know who you are, Widow. I know how you operate,” Nebula said, her voice chilling. “You’ll say whatever you have to in order to make me trust you, and then you’ll take what you want from me. So what is it? What do you want?”
“You told us about how you grew up. With Thanos. How he tore you apart and put you back together again.”
“And what about it?”
Natasha blinked. It was clear that she wasn’t used to situations like this; she wasn’t used to being known, understood. “I went through something similar. With Red Room.”
The blank expression seemed to be teetering on the edge of sadness. Her eyes drooped the tiniest bit, the corners of her lips sagging downward like Atlas holding the weight of the world. Natasha didn’t need to speak; everything she was going to say was obvious just in the shine of her eyes. Watching her pupils drop to the table between them was like watching a movie; she saw it all, heard it all. Trauma, so much trauma, culminating in the woman sitting before her. Nebula figured she might not have noticed had she not been so adept in the art of feeling ‘nothing.’
“I’m sorry,” Nebula said. Her shoulders relaxed a bit. Natasha watched them do so, exhaling softly. It was a relief, somehow, that it was clear she wasn’t lying. “No one should have to live like that.”
“I just wanted you to know that you have someone to talk to, here,” Natasha continued. There was an ache in her chest as she spoke, little fireworks of feeling that begged her to drop the act for once and be genuine. Show, don’t tell. “Someone’s who’s been through what you’ve been through. Who will understand.”
To any onlooker or eavesdropper, their words would have sounded empty, counterfeit, maybe, but the conversation was anything but. Any communication occurring between the two took place between their eyes. It took place in the droop of their shoulders, the volume of their breaths, the measured glances they took at each other. Maybe the conversation was so overwhelming that this was the only way it could be had at all without one of them drowning in it.
“It looks like you need someone like that, too.”
Natasha just stared at her.
“We’re the same. The only difference is my experience manifested in some anger issues, while yours just… took you away.”
“Took me away?”
Nebula shrugged. “You’re gone, aren’t you?”
Natasha considered this a moment. “I don’t… know.”
“That is what happened to me, too, until I found my sister. There must be something holding you back.”
Natasha’s eyes drifted to Nebula’s head, her new gold piece, specifically. “Thanos didn’t give you that.” Instead of a question, it was a statement requiring confirmation.
“No. The piece Thanos gave me was broken. Tony fixed it.”
“Hm.” Natasha may have been trained in hiding her emotions, but she seemed almost disappointed in this revelation. Nebula figured it wasn’t too much of a logical jump to assume that she was disappointed in herself rather than Tony. Maybe she regretted leaving him alone or thinking that he didn’t care. It was okay, though. Truth is subjective, she remembered someone saying. Natasha had known Tony while he was in his bad place. Nebula had never known Tony to do anything but care.
“Thanos wasn’t always so bad,” she said, though she was not quite sure why she felt the need to do so. It was true, though. He was her father. She may have hated him with absolutely everything she had, but he was still her father. In an awful way, she missed him. She missed the good memories, the very, very few good memories.
“They never are.” The response was so quick, as if it was prepared. Maybe Natasha had known Nebula was going to say something like that.
“Whenever I lost, whenever he was putting me back together, he’d… hold my hand, and tell me a story. I hated him, I hated him, and I wanted him to leave, but he wouldn’t let go. He would just tell me a story, always the same story.”
“What was it about?” Natasha had clearly adapted into the role of intent listener, her head resting on her hand as she kept her eyes on Nebula.
“He said someday, we would go somewhere where we couldn’t feel pain anymore. He’d save us, and we’d go with him to the end of the universe, where the stars are the brightest. He said we wouldn’t need to fight anymore, Gamora and I, because all the world’s problems would be solved.” Nebula clenched her hands into fists, hoping for a release of some sorts. “He told us we would be happy, and for years, despite what he put me through, I believed him.”
Natasha’s expression had faded into something fuzzy at the edges. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she wanted to speak but was still thinking of exactly what to say. (Nebula thought it actually looked like the expression of someone who was dead and/or dying, but she didn’t find this appropriate for the current situation.) Her eyebrows were wrinkled just slightly. “He’d save you, and you’d go to the end of the universe? Where the stars are the brightest?”
“That was the story, yes.”
The redhead’s eyes widened in recognition. “The end of the universe, where the stars are the brightest.”
“Romanoff-”
“That’s where he is. Right now. With the stones.” Natasha stood quickly, one hand on her stool to keep it from toppling over.
“His Titan II,” Nebula said, her voice soft in realization. “At the end of the universe, where- I know where he is. I know where he is.”
Natasha grinned then, her face slightly smug as if this had been what she was planning all along. Like she had inserted the knife hours ago, and now, the blade was free again, the blood leaking. “I think it’s time we call a meeting, don’t you?”
---
“You look exhausted.”
Thor looked up at the sound of the voice. Bruce was smiling softly down at him, his hands awkwardly toying with the bottom of his shirt. He had always been an anxious man, but losing to Thanos in such an awful way certainly didn’t help.
“Yes, well, there is nothing for you to worry about, Banner. I will be okay once we finally confront Thanos again.”
Thor had plastered the fakest of smiles on his face, desperately hoping that his eyes would at least sort of go along with it. The wary expression Bruce wore confirmed that this had not gone very well.
“I mean, I get that, but…” Bruce trailed off, sighing. “Do you want to talk about it? Keeping those things to yourself is never a good idea, pal.”
Thor allowed the smile to fall from his face, his eyes dropping to the floor. “What is there to talk about? The people you lost… It can be undone. But mine? My people? Heimdall, Loki, Odin, Frigga… They were slaughtered. You are all holding on to this hope, to get revenge, to bring them back, and I don’t have that option anymore. I had my chance at revenge. I could have killed him, Banner. My people would not have died in vain, but… It’s too late, now. Some king I was.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it? I had him. I had him. I could’ve done what he said. I could’ve gone for his head.”
“Yeah? Wanda could have focused her powers on the gauntlet. Do you blame her?”
“No-”
“Steve could’ve never gone anywhere. Never went rogue. Do you blame him?”
“...No.”
“Tony could’ve killed Thanos in space. Strange didn’t have to give up the time stone. Loki didn’t have to steal the Tesseract. Hulk didn’t have to go into hiding. Do you blame us?”
“Of course not.”
“Then, why do you blame yourself? It’s just as much our fault as it is yours. We all made mistakes, but you can’t carry around guilt like that. It’ll drive you crazy. Of course, I’m not a grief counselor-”
“It’s okay, Banner.” Thor mustered up a smile, small but real, and placed a hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “I always appreciate our little talks.” Before Bruce could answer, the door slammed open, and Thor’s hand was gone.
“Good to see you, dear rabbit! What do you need?”
“It’s Thanos!” Rocket declared. “Cyborg told us where he’d likely be hangin’ out. We’re gonna fly out there, and we’re gonna kill him. You in?”