Chapter Text
Tony Stark wakes up in a dark cave in Afghanistan with a car battery sewn into his chest.
It’s the turning point of his life, his superhero origin story, the place of his metaphorical rebirth. So maybe he shouldn’t be surprised when he opens his eyes after snapping to rid the universe of Thanos and finds himself back where it all began. Maybe it was—to borrow the phrase—inevitable.
“Shit,” Tony says as he struggles to sit up. He stops as pain flares in his chest. It’s not as excruciating as wielding the stones was, but so far life after death is a hell of a lot more painful than he hoped it would be.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The voice is one Tony hasn’t heard in years, but he recognizes it all the same.
Yinsen. He’s standing there in the corner, shaving.
How…mundane, for a ghost. Do ghosts need to shave? Will Tony still need to shave?
“Yeah,” Tony manages to croak. His throat is dry and scratchy. He could really use a glass of water. “I figured that out.”
It’s not that Tony has deeply held beliefs about an afterlife, despite years of Catholic boarding school as a kid, but everything about this situation is startlingly physical. Admittedly, the idea of a fiery hell does seem predicated on the necessity of the dead feeling pain, but this is also so much more personal than the traditional flames and a devil with a pitchfork.
Carefully, Tony begins pulling the nasal cannula from his nose. “So what now?” he asks Yinsen. Or Yinsen’s ghost. Or more likely the facsimile of Yinsen, since surely the good doctor would be somewhere peaceful with his family, not once again stuck in this cave with Tony. “Do I just sit here or am I supposed to do something?”
Yinsen’s face creases. “I’m sure our captors will make their demands clear soon enough. You should rest while you can. Here,” he puts down the razor and crosses the room, bringing Tony a cup of water from the nearby table, “drink this.”
“Thank you.” Tony sips it slowly, even though he’s parched enough to want to gulp it down. He’s in no hurry to find out if ghosts can get nauseous and throw up.
Yinsen gives him another funny look.
“What?” Tony can’t help twisting his lips up into his trademark press smile. “Do I have something on my face?”
Yinsen doesn’t smile back. In fact, he looks even more bewildered. “You are handling this situation with more equanimity than most men would.”
Tony shrugged. “My life has been insane for 15 years. After awhile, stuff just stops phasing you. Besides, it’s not as if I didn’t know becoming Iron Man was gonna kill me someday.”
“We are a long way from the life you are used to, Stark. Your money and influence won’t help you here. Neither will your reputation as The Merchant of Death, though that is no doubt why our hosts ordered me to save your life.”
“There it is.” Tony scoffed, “You know, I did hope that saving half the universe would be enough to clear the red out of my ledger, but I guess that’s not how this works. Hope it’s going better for Romanoff, and that she’s not stuck in The Red Room for all eternity.”
“Stark, are you sure you’re feeling quite well?” Yinsen asks. He’s making an effort to school his facial expression, but not quite succeeding. There’s fear in his eyes.
“You mean apart from the car battery in my chest? Or the fact that I clearly pissed off whatever deity is in charge here? No surprise there. Not to mention the fourth degree burns I gave myself while wielding the infinity stones. But yeah, I feel great. Swell, even. Just peachy.”
“That is not what I—the things you are saying, they don’t,” Yinsen abruptly cuts himself off and clenches his fists. Apparently, Tony has driven him to the point of speechless frustration.
He’s good at that. Though this time Tony sort of regrets it. He liked Yinsen. And the man saved his life. Twice. It seems rude to be so efficiently pissing off his ghost. Or facsimile.
Yinsen takes a deep breath, unclenches his fists, and begins again. “Maybe my English is not as good as I thought it was, and you are merely using American colloquialisms, but many of the things you are saying, Stark, make no sense to me.”
“Like what? Give me examples.”
Yinsen holds up his hand, ticking off fingers as he goes, “An iron man, roaming off, a red room, and infinite stones.” Yinsen looks at his hand then at Tony, as if an idea has just occurred to him. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Four.”
“Do you have a headache? Blurry vision?”
“No and no. I feel like I have an elephant tap dancing on my chest, but I don’t think I’m concussed, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“How would you explain your puzzling conversation then, Tony Stark?”
Tony wishes Yinsen would stop saying his name like that, like it’s a slur. Did he do that before? Tony can’t remember. Afghanistan was too long ago, and the memories are too well suppressed. They were friends by the end, he remembers that, but a lot is blurry. Maybe he just needs to earn Yinsen’s respect.
“I was on Titan. I snapped, Thanos got dusted, and then I died.”
Yinsen’s eyes nearly bug out of his head, and the older doctor takes another deep breath before replying. “It is not unheard of for patients near death to have disturbing dreams that feel very real. Yours sounds more…surreal than most, but I can assure you that you are not dead, Stark. At least, not yet. Your convoy was attacked and the Ten Rings took you. You were wounded. I removed as much of the shrapnel as I could, but there’s a lot left. That,” he points, “is an electromagnet, hooked up to the car battery. Together they are keeping the shrapnel from entering your heart.”
“No,” Tony whispers. He shakes his head. “No, no, no. This isn’t happening. It’s not possible.”
Time travel doesn’t work this way. He should know, he invented it.
And yet his own warning to Steve and Scott rises in his mind. You mess with time it tends to mess back.
Is it possible…can the infinity stones have sent his 53-year-old consciousness back into his younger body, to the event that turned him into Iron Man? He should be dead, but the longer he lays here, breathing around the fiery pain in his chest, the less dead Tony feels. He’s even hungry.
Surely dead men don’t crave cheeseburgers.
But if he’s alive, and this is 2008, then that means…
Morgan doesn’t exist.
The one thing Tony insisted he couldn’t lose, absolutely wouldn’t risk, and she’s gone.
Tony can’t breathe. Tears burn behind his eyelids. This isn’t the time or place to fall apart. He can mourn his daughter when he’s back home.
Back home in Malibu. In a house that was blown up a decade ago. A cold, empty monument to his own ego with none of the comforts of an actual home. Without Pepper, who isn’t his wife anymore, just his employee. And just how is he supposed to interact normally with her after everything they’ve been through together? The life they built together out of literal ashes after half the universe died? The daughter she doesn’t remember?
This, this, is hell. A living one. There is no other description for it. If it weren’t his knowledge of the future, Tony would simply curl up into a ball on the cave floor and let himself die.
But he can’t do that. Thanos is out there, again, and the earth is counting on him. The universe is counting on him. Peter Parker, who is currently just a first grader in Queens, is counting on him.
Tony can do this. He’ll fix it all. Keep the Avengers together. Collect the Infinity Stones and defeat Thanos before the big purple grape can say I am inevitable. The Mad Titan isn’t going to know what hit him.
But first, he has to get out of this cave. And this time, he’s getting Yinsen out with him.
The Ten Rings think they kidnapped Tony Stark, the spoiled playboy. Instead, they have Iron Man, the Avenger, who’s trained with some of the strongest, fastest, most dangerous people on the planet. And beyond. He’s faced Nazis. He’s faced gods.
A few terrorists aren’t going to be a problem.