Chapter Text
Quantum Realm
Time Unknown
Scott Lang drifts aimlessly in the miniature universe between atomic layers. His last successful radio call to the others took place an hour ago. Maybe longer. Probably longer. He’s not entirely sure. Hank had said his watch would be useless in the quantum universe, even if it looks like it’s working. Something about how time flows differently down here. Slower, but not. Either way, he’s starting to get a little bored.
“Uh, hey, guys? It’s been longer than ten minutes,” he says. He holds up the machine he used to gather the healing energy Ghost needs. “I got the glowy stuff! It’s full! Can’t get any fuller!”
He shakes the container enticingly.
No response.
“Okay, is this because I drank your coffee, Hank? Because I did apologize for that.”
Actually, he probably didn’t. Probably he made some snarky remark and drank it harder to rile the old man up for the pure joy of it. Or maybe he just used the old guy’s favorite mug. Whoops. Maybe Hank will have a spontaneous and harmless bout of memory loss and not remember that.
Again, no response.
For him, it has been one hour and thirty minutes. For the rest of the multiverse, give or take a few shifting time lines, it’s been three years.
He floats on, alone.
“Aw, man. This sucks,” Scott mutters.
* * *
Yggdrasil
Time Unknown
Steve finds himself again in a strange place with stranger company, trading space for the place between spaces. He isn’t catching a leisurely ride in a spaceship this time; he’s walking along a massive tree branch the size of a highway, surrounded by smaller branches that shake and wave in a violent wind. It’s being kept at bay by a thin layer of heat and flame swirling around their small group, but it isn’t so thick that he can’t see through it. Every now and then, he glimpses into a passing reality, seeing a version of himself in another time or place or, sometimes, face. It’s jarring.
The wind hasn’t reached inside their protective bubble yet, but that will change once Constantine’s endurance runs out. Steve doesn’t know how long they’ve been walking like this, so he doesn’t know how long Constantine has been protecting them. He has the uncomfortable feeling that time doesn’t actually have any meaning here.
“Are you sure you want to try this?” Constantine asks Thor. His hands are shaking with effort, and he’s gone pale and sweaty. He puffs. “If I drop this and it doesn’t work, we’ll scatter like leaves—“
“I can’t bear seeing you wear yourself down to nothing,” Thor replies. “It’s a storm. I can control those.” A beat. “At least, usually. In theory.”
“He’s pretty good at it,” Steve adds. Thor grins at him.
“It’s a cosmic storm,” Constantine says, strained but thoughtful. “It’s different.”
“How?” Thor asks.
“How the bloody hell should I know? It just is!”
“Constantine, let him help,” Diana says quietly.
Constantine scowls, glancing around at his three companions before sighing. “Fine! You win. We’ll stop at the next branch and figure something out. I could use a break anyway.”
“Thank you,” Diana says, ignoring Constantine’s grumbling tone.
They drift across the massive branch, moving slowly against the strangely colored wind. Steve keeps to the rear, occasionally catching glimpses of odd scenes between the branches of the tree.
In one, he’s old and greeting Sam like an old friend, the shield resting against a bench beside him.
In another, he’s dancing with Peggy in one of his modern suits, a broken machine emblazoned with Stark Industries’ symbol on his wrist.
In a third, he’s not Captain America at all, but a man covered in flame. That man blinks at him in frank astonishment before Steve moves past him and deeper into the branches of the tree.
Something huge and dark and hungry drifts past, a black shadow lined with purple lightning occasionally flashes into view. Steve isn’t sure if it’s drawn by the storm or is the storm, and he’s not quite sure how to ask. Gods, monsters, universes—this is all beyond him, and he’s overwhelmed by it.
And here he thought Loki invading New York was beyond the pale. Silly him.
Constantine guides them towards the central trunk of Yggdrasil, sheltering from the storm among the glimmering leaves and odd shining wood of the massive tree. Constantine and Thor start to talk. Or argue. With Constantine, one seems to be as good as the other. Steve, who can see more than few shades of Tony Stark’s more aggravating habits in the man, keeps his distance. After a few minutes, Diana joins him at the edge of their safe zone.
He nods to her respectfully when she comes close. “Everything okay?”
“For now, yes,” she says, idly resting her hand on Mjolnir at her hip. “Constantine is worried. He tends to get loud and angry when that happens.”
As if to punctuate her point, Steve hears Constantine yell sharply at Thor, who seems both amused and mildly annoyed by it. Blue lightning starts to crawl along Thor’s arms and wrists, flickering across the tips of his fingers as he raises one hand to the sky (does it count as a sky if they’re stuck in the cosmos between universes?).
“In his defense, he’s probably the most normal guy here. And he’s been holding that storm back from us for awhile now,” Steve says. “That can’t be easy.”
“It isn’t. It’s impressive he managed it once,” Diana says.
Storm clouds of shifting color and light grow large, and the wind builds into a crescendo when Thor’s lightning catches hold of it. The storm rages, then calms, pushed away from their hidden nook inside the tree. Constantine stares, dumbstruck, and then pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Right. Thor. God of storms,” Constantine says. He flicks his hand and the thin wall of flame that he was using to shelter them from the storm stutters and disappears. He slumps, and Steve can see lines of exhaustion and pain on the man’s face. “I need to rest, and then I can try and figure out how to get us out of here and onto the right timeline branch. How long can you hold that?”
“As long as needed. Rest, sorcerer,” Thor says, his voice distant and distracted.
Constantine grunts, sits down, leans his head back against the tree and closes his eyes. He starts to snore seconds later. Thor stands nearby, hand outstretches to the massive cosmic storm above, eyes shifting to the blinding blue-silver of lightning.
Steve looks at the scene, rubbing the back of his head. He glances at Diana, and shrugs.
“We should keep watch,” she says. “I can take the first shift.”
“I’ll join you,” Steve says. “It’s not like there’s anything else to do, and I’m too awake to do anything else.”
After a moment, she smiles. “I’d like that. Perhaps you can tell me what happened to your universe while we wait.”
Steve takes in a breath and lets it out slowly. “Okay. Did World War II happen in your universe?”
* * *
Stark Lake House
Morning
Tony came back, starved and sick, to a ruined world and empty Avenger’s Compound. The ones that had survived the Snap left on some mysterious mission and haven’t returned. Tony, stuck in recovery at the medical facilities that were remarkably still functional after the end of the world, waited for their return.
Days turned to weeks turned to months.
No Avengers.
He was alone. The last Avenger.
He shut down the compound for good three months later, and he lives full time at the lake house Pepper picked as their getaway house years ago. A vacation cabin turned permanent living space, where he doesn’t have to look at anyone he doesn’t want to talk to ever again.
He’s lived an extraordinary life. Building up an ordinary one in the ashes of that seems like a good thing to do with the rest of his life. Morgan is a part of that. She’s almost four years old now, and fascinated by the world around her, as small and peaceful as it is. Tony, of course, gives her anything and everything she wants, and the only reason she isn’t completely spoiled is because of Pepper’s intervention and Morgan’s own habit of deciding what is and isn’t too much. He assumes that comes from Pepper, too.
Happy, of course, is just as bad as Tony, if not worse. Morgan takes every opportunity to commandeer Happy during his brief visits from the city, where he represents what’s left of Stark Industries on Pepper’s behalf. Right now, he’s lumbering behind Tony, Morgan in his arms with a dandelion flower tucked behind one ear. Morgan’s latest gift for her favorite (and only) uncle.
“I know I have those keys somewhere,” Tony says, leading the way downstairs. “But I don’t know why you need them.”
“We need the solar panels locked up in the warehouse under the old tower,” Happy says. He’s already explained himself twice, but he’s used to Tony’s quirks. “And since FRIDAY is out of commission…”
“She’s not out of commission. She just hasn’t been acting right lately.”
And by ‘lately’ he means a few years. There’s some sort of garbage signal that’s jammed her code, something that the AI has been puzzling away at for the past three years. A signal from herself that she can’t parse through and one that has Tony privately baffled. It’s like she’s being told a memory from herself, but the timestamps are all off and contradict what’s in her logs. It’s probably a bug, something going haywire when Tony’s suit reconnected with the Stark satellite network. Eventually, he’ll have to dig it out and figure out what’s going on, but between Morgan, the ongoing crisis, and his own recovery…
Well, he’ll get around to it.
“And those panels are ancient and inefficient. I put them there to donate to hobbyists whenever I got around to it,” Tony says.
“Right now, we need any we can find. And even your worst work is ten times better than what we can make now,” Happy says with a sigh. He leans down and gently sets Morgan down onto the floor of the basement. “Okay, monster, Uncle Happy’s back needs a rest.”
Morgan immediately sprints off into the basement, giggling. Tony looks after her briefly, frowning, making sure she doesn’t sprint into anything dangerous—not that he has weapons or anything down here, of course, but children are experts at nearly getting themselves killed.
Just ask Peter.
He pauses and violently shoves that thought aside. The intrusive grief comes in waves, and hasn’t gotten any easier to deal with despite the years. It’s usually Peter, but other times it’s Rhodey, or Natasha, even Steve. It used to paralyze him, keep him trapped inside his own mind and grief, but now it just rises to the top to poke and prod at him during unexpected moments. He’s found the best way to deal with it is focusing on small things.
If he lets himself get caught up in the small details around the house, if he focuses on the little victories he’s managed to carve out since he became Iron Man, he might even forget about everything he’s lost.
“If you’re that hard up for solar panels, I can put some together in my spare time,” Tony says. He starts pulling open drawers and sifting through bits and pieces on the battered lab table he shoved into the corner, searching for the keys.
Why the hell did they use keys for that place anyway?
“Honestly, that’d be great—“
“Pee!” Morgan shouts from an unseen corner of the basement.
“God, I hope that’s a request for a game of peek-a-boo and not something else,” Tony says quietly. He calls out over his shoulder, “One sec, Daddy needs to remember something. Which is difficult. Apparently.”
He blames parenthood, frankly. And the fact that he’s still physically recovering from his time spent drifting through space. Coming back from a near fatal infection and starvation is hard on a body, and he’s not as young as he used to be. He could ask Pepper for help finding the damn things, and she would, of course, help him with a knowing, teasing smile. But his ego won’t let him. At least, not yet. He was a CEO, an Avenger, a literal goddamn hero, he should be able to find some keys--
“Peek-a-boo!” Morgan declares in the back of the workshop.
Thank god, she doesn’t need a diaper change.
“Sure, just give Daddy a second,” Tony says absently, rummaging through his tools. It was right here, he remembers it was here, where the hell—
“Boo!” Morgan shouts.
“I know, honey, just a sec—“
And then she laughs. The laugh she saves when she’s having the absolute time of her life, usually when playing with Pepper or Happy or Tony. It’s so sudden and so obviously in response to something that he stops digging through his tools and whirls around to see what—or who—she’s playing with.
“Daddy, he’s cheating! Lightning is cheating!”
Tony pauses, stops to think over the names of Morgan’s recent imaginary friends, comes up blank, and turns around to face Happy. Happy has shifted from his placid, patient expression into something harder and meaner, more reminiscent of the champion boxer and private guard he used to be, before age and good food caught up with him. He stalks into the basement ahead of Tony, and Tony’s quick to follow him.
“Sorry, I missed the memo on your newest addition to the imaginary friends—“ Tony says.
“What,” Happy says.
She’s sitting in front of the glass pod he and Nebula brought back to Earth years ago. The one with the frozen man inside of it, in the red suit with the yellow lightning bolt across the chest. As he stares in shock, the man’s eyes slowly inch up to meet Tony’s, the movement so gradual that he can barely track it at all from this distance.
His stomach drops, and he feels a sudden surge of nausea. “Oh, shit.”
“Shit!” Morgan declares happily.
“That’s Mommy’s word, we don’t say that,” Tony says. He stops, gathers himself, crosses the room to pick up Morgan and gently sets her on the stairs. “Hey, speaking of Mommy, go find her with Uncle Happy and tell her I won’t be free for lunch, okay? I’ve got a thing I have to do.”
Morgan squirms in his grip, but happily sprints up the stairs when he sets her down, somehow thundering up them with all the force of a herd of elephants. Happy gives him a dark look, but quickly follows after her.
“Morgan, sweetheart, wait for me—“ he calls out.
She emphasizes the noise with a happy cry. “Mommy! Mommy! Daddy taught me a new word!”
He’s totally going to pay for that later, but it can’t be helped. “FRIDAY, set up a look-and-speak on the glass of that pod.”
FRIDAY activates, gently lighting up the corner of the basement.
“Done,” FRIDAY says, projecting a series of words, letters, and punctuation across the glass of the man’s pod. “Simply look at each word or letter you would like to speak.”
The man in the pod seems overwhelmed for a moment before using his eyes to pick and choose his words. FRIDAY waits until he finishes before speaking the phrases aloud. It takes awhile. An hour passes before he finishes the first sentence, and the man is clearly sweating from the strain of it by the end. Tony’s concern ratchets up just that much further.
“Hi, I’m Wally, glad you finally noticed me,” she says. “Is the other pod still here? The one with the S on the front?”
“Hi, Wally,” Tony says, sick at the thought of the man stuck inside his garage for the past three years. Was he awake the whole time? Fuck, he hopes not. That’s utter torture, on top of whatever Thanos did to make him like this. “Yes. It’s in the corner. Please tell me whoever’s in there also isn’t awake.”
There’s a delay while Wally picks and chooses his words. Sometimes his eyes move smoothly from one word or letter to the next, other times it’s an obvious straining trial. As if it’s hurting him.
“He isn’t awake, but he is a friend of mine. Could you check on him for me?”
“Right, yeah, sure—shit, you’ve been awake this whole time,” Tony mutters. “I let my kid draw on your pod when she was two.”
“She has talent. The alpaca was a nice touch.”
Tony snorts back a laugh, still in shock, and walks over to the other pod. It’s still sealed, still eerily red and green, still cold. He checks the seals, looking over the entire thing. What was impossible a few years ago definitely won’t be an issue now, but he isn’t sure what he’d find inside.
Tony drums his fingers along the black pod. “I can’t figure out how to open this without bringing out the big guns. I’ll have to pull something out of storage for it. Happy will bring it, but it’ll take a day for him to make the trip. Things are—well, they’re not as safe as they used to be. He needs to be careful.”
“Okay.”
Tony runs a hand down his face. “I have to go upstairs. But I’m not leaving you down here in the dark. FRIDAY, give him something to watch or bring up games, whatever, anything he needs to not lose his mind.”
“Thank you, Tony,” Wally says through FRIDAY’s interface. He imagines he can hear the relief in the man’s voice.
“I literally used you as a shelf for my Christmas decorations, don’t rush to thank me for that,” Tony says.
He’s still hesitant to leave, but ultimately does so once Wally manages to type out request to FRIDAY. Wikipedia. And the first thing he searches for is ‘Superman.’ Tony puzzles over that on his back up the stairs to find Happy.
* * *
Wayne Manor
Night
“Master Tim, it’s good to see you,” Alfred says, greeting Tim with a small smile as he stands aside to let him in. “Though I’m afraid you’re the only one at the manor tonight. The others are on patrol or otherwise indisposed.”
Tim gladly steps inside. The rain has been constant and unseasonably cold for the past week, and the manor is a warm respite. “That’s fine, I won’t be staying too long. I need some tools I left in my room.”
“Of course not. I begin to wonder why Master Bruce has me prepare a budget for family dinners, at all,” Alfred replies.
Tim grins, despite himself. “Do you know when Peter will be back? He was on patrol this morning when I tapped out.”
“No. He doesn’t bother to sleep much these days, and when he does, it’s not often here,” Alfred says. “It’s beginning to cause friction with the others, I believe.”
“It’s been three days. He hasn’t slept?”
“Four,” Alfred corrects. “And no. He’s been on one continuous patrol, stopping occasionally to get more web fluid from the cave, but only when he knows no one else is there.”
Tim frowns. Ever since coming to the manor, Peter’s strength and endurance have improved by leaps and bounds over the years, coming close to Kryptonian endurance in some respects. But there’s enough plain humanity to him that makes these marathon patrols dangerous, even by Tim’s standards.
“That’s not great. Even he has limits.”
“He’s determined to find them, apparently,” Alfred says. He looks at Tim from the corner of his eye. “That isn’t exactly uncommon in this family.”
“His temper’s getting worse. The lack of rest can’t be good,” Tim says thoughtfully.
“No, it cannot. Master Bruce and Master Richard are in agreement over that. I believe they both intend to talk to him about it tonight,” Alfred says.
Tim winces. He’s not sure how well that conversation will go. “Hopefully they get through to him. Listen, I need to grab something from my room. I’ll come by tomorrow for dinner. Promise.”
“I will set a plate for you,” Alfred says, neatly stepping away from him and down a hallway as they reach the stairs leading up to the bedrooms.
Tim jogs up the stairs, his thoughts thrumming along. He really won’t be here long; he needs a specialized set of tools that he left on his desk in his bedroom. He ducks into his bedroom, rummages around through his desk, grabs his toolset and is back in the hallway in a moment. He stops to double check the tools and looks up.
The hallway is empty and still, the door to Peter’s room slightly ajar. The light is off, but the lightning and city glow is bright enough to fill Peter’s room with a faint light.
He crosses the hall to Peter’s room, knocking twice on the door out of habit even though he knows Peter hasn’t been here for days. Peter avoids most of the family, leaning into his meta abilities to keep distance from the rest of the Bats. It doesn’t work, of course. Nothing will stop the others from shadowing him if they’re worried, and Tim isn’t sure there’s a force in this universe capable of keeping Dick away from his family.
Tim’s poured some distance of his own between himself and Peter, and he’s hoping to rectify that fact. It’s going to take time, and a lot of careful planning. He’s hoping reviving FRIDAY will help smooth things over between them. He’s not sure it will; Peter’s been out of reach more often than not, typically only tolerating a conversation that lasts less than five minutes with the others, if that. The only exception is Dick, and sometimes Duke. Even Jason doesn’t warrant much more than an extremely brief team up during a raid in Crime Alley. Cass has more luck, but that’s because she’s not afraid to match Peter’s tendency to swing for and leap off of the tallest buildings in the city, and even then their team ups rarely last longer than a night or two.
He’s worried, to put it lightly.
Peter’s room is still and silent, and only slightly less empty than when he first moved in three years ago. There are some odds and ends scattered around—gifts from the others, books Peter’s scavenged either while on patrol or from Jason’s bookshelf, tools—but in many ways it feels hollow compared to the others in the manor. Tim has the uncomfortable feeling that Peter uses his home as a hotel room. A brief respite and little more.
That’s when he sees the notebook on Peter’s desk. It’s old, battered and worn, and Tim has the vague idea that he’s seen it before during their brief stint at school together.
He picks it up, mostly on a whim, flipping it open and glancing at it briefly—
And pauses, reading it much more closely on a second glance.
Tim pages through it, stopping at one of the final pages. It’s covered end to end with calculations, theories, and math, some of which he struggles to keep track of. Tim’s thoughts are pinpoints of information, going from one data point to the next in a logical chain, each occurring lightning fast. Peter’s thoughts appear to happen simultaneously. Some of the calculations are half finished, others are scribbled in parts, linked only by a wiggling line connecting problem to solution. It takes Tim a few moments to fully understand what he’s seeing. When he does, all thoughts of going back out onto patrol fly out the window.
He goes through it slowly, carefully, marveling at both Peter’s meandering thoughts scribbled along the margins and his brilliance. Tim knows for a fact that Peter wrote in this notebook while homeless and starving in Crime Alley. He idly wonders why he hasn’t seen him show even a hint of this since. Of course, the answer to that starts and ends with the Spire that’s still being disassembled three years later.
After a moment’s thought, he takes the notebook with him. Peter won’t notice; he hasn’t been home in days, after all.
* * *
Tim has a lot of places kept only to himself. All of the Bats have their own personal caves to withdraw to when Bruce becomes too focused or too obsessed with his own investigations. Duke has the Nest. Barbara, Cass, and Steph have the Belfry. Jason has a bunker hidden beneath the heart of Crime Alley. Damian has a few hidden caches of his own. Peter is on the move, constantly shifting between an apartment in Crime Alley and manor.
Tim has a warehouse near the marina, tucked away at the edge of the pier where he keeps the larger and more dangerous objects in need of studying. He’s dragged his biggest prize yet inside it.
He paces around the ruined portal machine that Peter destroyed years ago. The hodgepodge machinery, a mix of stolen tech from various parts of Gotham and the alien designs that hold it together, is still somewhat functional even without the unstable kryptonite crystals strapped to it to serve as power sources. It’s mostly sat inside one of Tim’s hideouts, gathering dust over a period of years, but it’s a mystery that’s been tugging at the back of Tim’s mind almost constantly.
It’s still damaged. Still scorched. Peter destroyed it from the inside by breaking the circuit between the machine and his home universe, transferring a lethal amount of unstable energy from the portal machine to himself. If he hadn’t been wearing his suit, if his AI had been less intelligent, if he had been less strong than he is, he would have burned himself alive right then and there. Tim knows Peter’s hands still carry lichtenberg scars that trace up the length of his forearms. They’ve faded, but they shine sliver bright when the light strikes them just so.
Tim climbs up the side of the machine, peering inside at it. It’s a mess of melted metal, shattered electronics, and odd piping, so he merely scans the inside--
The light catches something, deep inside the machine. It glitters, sparking off an eerie blue light in the darkness of the cave. It’s tiny, and Tim would have missed it entirely, if not for the odd color. He reaches down to grab it and stops when it flares to life, causing the air to shiver with unseen force around it. He pulls his hand back slowly. He recognizes it now.
A blue sliver of stone. A piece of infinity.
The space stone.
Tim stares at it, his thoughts turning slowly.
He glances at Peter’s notebook and thinks of the damaged spider suit in the cave.
After a moment, he makes his decision.