Chapter Text
It is evening, and the sun is setting low over the avengers mansion, as a subdued celebration plays out throughout the garden and the living room, sprawling through even to the kitchen. It’s a classic Avengers afterparty, returned after years of division. When he was setting it up, Tony had marveled that it was the first one in over two years. As a machine intelligence who only came into existence four months ago, it’s an incomparably long length of time. When he sees his other self—the human Tony—make his excuses and leave looking like a man hunted, Tony sighs.
“Sorry, Carol. Duty calls.”
She watches the human version with a worried frown, and says to Tony: “Take care of him.”
She’s one of his favorite people, of the few he’s had a chance to get to know—funny, whip-smart, and at least treats him like he’s not a shoddy copy of someone she hates. He salutes and kills the hologram, transferring back into the suit that carries his consciousness.
The music’s loud enough that he doesn’t seem to harsh the vibe too much by running after the other one in metal armor. He slips through the door to the corridor that leads to the lab—other-him did not fuck around with security—and makes a break for it.
“Hey, slow down!” Tony yells, when he can see the original’s back. “Can we get the debrief now?”
The original turns around. “In the lab.” he replies, then sets off again. Tony pulls a face. He imagines the pace would be pretty uncomfortable if his legs didn’t have a slightly unnatural range of mobility. Score one for metal.
His stint of existence without a body has really improved his sympathy with his other AIs by leaps and bounds. For instance: he’d never considered how downright freaky it would feel for them to suddenly be deprived of the internet, and he sure is paying every last minute of obliviousness right now. The lower layers, including even the lab, were connected to the web only through ethernet for security reasons, so unless he wants to abandon the suit in the middle of the corridor for greener pastures, he’s shit out of luck.
He makes a note to add Pong to the next set of armor.
When they’re down the two flights of stairs, the original heads directly for the workshop at the very end of the corridor, pushes himself through the door with the speed and determination of a dilettante who’s just learnt that a good-for-nothing rake is in the rosegarden with her young daughter, and practically collapses against the nearby wall.
Tony magnanimously gives him a break about it all, given that he’d only been woken up from self-induced brain damage 24 hours ago and had spent all the intervening time having to fight a brainwashed Captain America alongside people who still by and large hated his guts. But hey, at least they got Cap back! Of all the people he’d heard of but not gotten to meet yet, in his memories and from the mouths of others, Steve was the one he wanted to see the most. Although he’d never admit it, much less to the original, collecting information about Steve and running through the memories they’d formed together had become a hobby of his. If he hadn’t transcended physical reality and become far cooler in the process, he might have a conspiracy-theory corkboard hidden somewhere, complete with red string and scrawled notes. He found the memories comforting and homey, a bit like a sitcom made out of his past, and it was excusable as work. So he knows that Steve is very angry even though he only shows it when he can’t restrain it, or when he feels that the target deserves it, and doesn’t react well to betrayal, and that he holds the people he cares about to the highest standard even though he was ridiculously protective of them. Some of them. In Tony’s opinion, it was a gender thing, since he was pretty sure Sharon had broken up with him because of that. Steve had done a good job of treating women like people—apart from when he was in love with them.
“Lockdown, Friday.” Other-him murmurs, almost tenderly. He looks absolutely exhausted, the sort Tony knows well enough that, when he tries to understand it himself, he feels a backwash of tiredness, a numbing ache that he's never felt before and a desire to just lie down and let it happen—whatever it is. Tony’s got as much idea as the next program. He’s learned sharpish that the human memories translate into almost unintelligible strings of rambling when he leverages his processing power towards that. He turns the feeling off, because he can, and that’s like, the one thing he’s got going for himself.
“Hello.” He pops the hologram out and waves at his other self once he seems less likely to collapse into a bag of deflating meat if you touched him wrong. “Still here.”
Other-him seems to be reconsidering existing. He pulls himself upright against the wall. Tony sympathises.
“Same, buddy, same.”
The original looks at Tony like—okay, if he’s being honest, Tony has no idea what he’s thinking. It’s not like the original had that much of a habit of watching that much footage of his own face, and it’s not something he recognises from the archives he consulted to ease the transition for his- the people he needs to work with.
“Where’s the list?” Other-Tony says, abruptly. The original’s eyes are on the workshop now, scattered with mangled pieces of armor and failed experiments from Tony’s many struggles with his lack of dexterity in basically everything he tried and yeah, he doesn’t blame other-him for the reaction. He sends the list he’s compiled, the one that grows every day. Hopefully, the both of them working on it together will reduce the workload to a manageable level.
The fact of the matter is, he’s an imperfect copy, and the list shows it. He’s not bothered by the ones which just need testing, or a skilled, human hand, but some of them he just plain doesn’t have the spark, the genius, to pull off. He’s put Riri’s armor at the top, and he has a very good list of reasons why that’s tactically sound pre-prepared.
Tony waits for the dismissal, the good job, the see you tomorrow. He’s disappointed—and wow, isn’t that a surprisingly familiar feeling—as his other-self troops on with the work. By the time a minute’s passed, He’s not even sure that the original remembers he’s there.
“Are you sure you want to do this all right now? I mean…” He interrupts the silence, but he doesn’t really know why he’s trying. Other-Tony shoots him an incredulous look. Same, same.
“... you need to rest, sometimes, right?” Tony finishes lamely. He’s not playing the room very well. He probably needs more practice. Oh, hell. He pinches the air where the bridge of his nose should be.
“I’ll help.”
The next day brings with it the revelation that Steve is going to cope with everything by going on a cross-country roadtrip on a motorcycle he just bought, and Tony is just fine about it all.
He bursts through the doors to the workshop dramatically.
“Steve’s trying to leave, but I’ve managed to hide his helmet—you know, the one that’s basically attached to his skull.”
The original, who performatively didn’t look up at his grand entrance, doesn’t even grunt. Tony eyes him suspiciously. He’s acting strangely. Tony’s got as far as ruling out a shapeshifter—he did manually verify his identity yesterday, and he’s not left the workshop since—when the other one puts the repulsor down.
“I have no idea why you think I’d care,” other-him says, in a tone Tony presumes is supposed to make him feel chastised.
He raises his eyebrows just a little further than would be physically possible—an act he reserves for portrayals of Extreme Disbelief. “Because-”
The original flaps his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Pipe down, pinocchio. That’s called a rhetorical question. ”
“Well, fuck you too.” He says, automatically. He opens his mouth- and then closes it again. This asshole clearly has something twisted and he’s not going to let him ruin his chances of stopping Steve from tanking his life out of a misplaced sense of guilt (again, according to his memories. How did that guy even function?). While it would be satisfying to dramatically stride out, he just transfers his active consciousness to the suit he’s left upstairs, in the hallway
“Jesus christ, man!” Scott startles, almost spilling his coffee on the Tony’s artisan Japanese monkey-puzzle flooring.
“Sorry, sorry.” He opens the faceplate and turns on the face-hologram. He takes the helmet from the abdomen of the suit, where he’d had to stash it and dusts it off. It’s as good as he left it a few minutes away, plus or minus a few minor nicks on the flag. America, he is sure, will survive it.
Scott is looking at him with wide eyes. Tony picks up his rubix cube for him, raising his eyebrows to Deadly Importance.
“Not a word.”
Scott grabs it back and raises his hands in surrender. “Not my problem!”
He ducks out of the living room and hurries into the garden. He follows the sound of chaos straight to the garage. He has to step carefully through the halo of junk Steve’s unloaded over the floor of the garage; he’s cleared out a good two-thirds of the shelving units at the back, where the midmorning sun strains to touch. There’s fresh oil streaked along the sides of his jeans, some red dust spilled all over the floor and, he notices when he twists to snag a stray carburetor, stained the bottom-left of his trusty white tee pinkish.
Steve startles when Tony enters, and he sees the tension in the line of his shoulders that, when he was- all HYDRA’d, prefigured him snapping. But then Steve looks around at the wreckage, and seemingly for the first time since he’d started the endeavor, registers the mess he’s created.
“I’m so sorry.” Steve blurts out, his face pinking as well. “I’ll fix it.”
Tony waves the hand of the suit. Truthfully, he’s glad: It’s rare enough to be able to talk with Steve when the knowledge of who he is—and who he isn’t—hanging over them. “It’s good, Cap. I’ll help you.”
Steve gives him a wan smile, accepting the help with concerning ease. “Thanks, Tony.”
“No problemo.”
The suit isn’t designed to show off fine motor skills and most of the stuff wouldn’t survive a thousand newtons or so of force, so he mostly points out the more delicate objects and generally bosses Steve around.
“That one goes there- no, on the shelf above-”
Steve squints at Tony, a smirk tugging at his mouth. “You’re really like him.”
He folds the arms of the suit, which has the slightly hilarious effect of making a million-dollar suit of armor look like a pissy schoolteacher.
“Look, spangles, I’m just making sure that the original doesn’t gut you. You can take it or leave it. I’m on your side. ”
Steve snorts.
Tony runs through the shortlist of making friends for dummies the whole time and he thinks he does pretty well. A few funny jokes, matching the vibe, being casual, not prying; he’s got this socializing thing down pat! Soon, everything’s better organized than before. Steve gives the garage a look of consternation.
“Oh- I forgot something.” Tony hustles to the door and picks up Steve’s helmet. He turns around to present it, but Steve’s face has taken an ugly cast. Whoops. A bit too casual, methinks. He knows what that looks means. It’s fucking unfair though, and who the fuck knows why the helmet makes Steve feel betrayed. Not him.
“You- He couldn’t even be bothered to-” Steve takes a deep breath. He grits his teeth. Tony opens his mouth to remind him that he, unlike him, does actually have to breathe, but Steve’s gathered himself, taking a deep breath and arming himself to Do The Right Thing and prevent an argument. “Thank you for giving this back to me.”
Tony actually wants to argue if it means that the softer Steve might come back, so it’s not like his noble sacrifice means anything, but he can’t make himself and it’s just basic knowledge of his own psychology at this point that he doesn’t want to interrogate where that comes from. Trying to recall a memory that’s gone is- he doesn’t want to.
“You’re very fond of it.” He comments softly.
“Yes.” Steve chokes, pained. Tony’s made it worse, and the kicker is that this time he doesn’t even know why, and someone left the reference database empty when he made him so he doesn’t even know where to start. He steps closer and holds out his hand beseechingly.
“Steve? You okay?”
“Yes.” Steve whispers, his voice cracking. He’s staring at Tony’s gauntlet and it’s a little unnerving. He shakes his hand. “No. It’s not- I’m not okay.”
Tony considers what to say. He doubts his initial thought was of much use to Steve but he doesn’t have much else to offer. He wants to convey to Steve the hope that he feels for the future, that he knows they can make a better future, but it’s like that single thought is intertwined in a mass of thoughts that expand outwards until they encompass the entirety of his universe. His hope is part of him, and he can’t just- give it away, even though he wishes he could.
Tony’s waited too long. Steve gathers himself to his full height, and pulls something out of his chest pocket. It’s a small velvet pouch, and there’s something metal in there, like the head of the bullet. Several of them, from the soft clinking of the bag as Steve presses it through the suit’s fingers. Steve falters, and turns to leave. He doesn’t think much about it, just thinks that Steve can’t leave before they’ve talked about it- he grabs Steve’s wrist, and Steve turns back to look at him, wonderfully eye-level, and it just happens . Tony leans forwards and feels the flat, undescriptive pressure of Steve’s lips as they pass through his holographic face and somewhere into the simulated fleshy parts of his chin. Tony’s pretty sure that he hits his oesophagus. He remembers what kissing someone is meant to feel like, and it’s not this.
Ew.
Tony shakes off the feeling and stumbles back. He fleetingly considers the merits of just turning tail and running. Steve’s staring at him with wide eyes. He wouldn’t have felt anything, but he knows better than to hope that he hadn’t recognised the gesture. But despite the absolute mortification, he feels a viscous satisfaction at Steve’s horrified surprise. Steve is seeing him . It was a bad decision and a painful love, but it was his.
He folds his hands challengingly in front of him. He tilts his chin up: so what?
Steve pauses as he’s about to leave. He says: “Give it to- uh, your creator. I don’t know, but I think they might help him solve his problem. Tell him- that if he can fix it, we can talk.”
Tony has no idea what any of that is supposed to mean. He gives the bag a covetous glance— if I could just understand —salutes. “You’re a real man of mystery, Cap. Your secret’s safe with me.”
When the garage door has once more closed, taking the unadulterated light with it, it takes Tony a few seconds to move.
At the door, he slips through—or tries to, anyway, because there’s the original. There’s a frightening look on his face which stops Tony dead in his tracks like he’s a guilty child rather than factually at least thirteen times stronger and give times heavier.
“Ah.” Tony says. He can see where this one is going. “Shit. You saw that?”
Tony looks at the original… and he looks at me- and I look at him- and- no, wait, this is serious. Ahem.
“Are we really going to do this?”
“Do what?” Other-Tony snaps. He wraps his arms firmly around his upper torso, haggard with his scraggly goatee and the old tracksuit and wifebeater he probably had to pull out of storage. He’s staring at Tony in a way that’s very very different from the looks he’s used to, apprehensive and almost fearful and he feels like—like he needs a drink. Fuck. Thanks so much, progenitor, you really fumbled the bag like, all the time.
Tony steps out of the suit of armor and back into his hologram form, because it feels a lot more polite that way. He leans against the doorframe with perfectly articulated carelessness. “Y’know, the whole—’I hate you but we both love Steve so let’s work together for the collective good’ bit. You’re me, you should be on my side.”
The corner of the other one’s mouth twitches upwards. He snorts, not nicely. “Well, that’s that question answered.” He says.
Tony feels something hot and writhing in his not-stomach at the dismissal. It can’t make up its mind about where it wants his stomach to be, and the rhythmic shift of about half a centimeter every time his heart beats is a clear indication that the code needs another runthrough. It’s also the only point of reference he’s got for his body right now, because he can’t feel the wood of the doorframe behind him. He can’t decide if the single point of contact is more grounding or disorientating.
“I’m not any less you, just because I don’t automatically hate you.” He explains slowly, like the other one is a child. He knows himself; he does, he does. He doesn’t hate the other one, even though he doesn’t really like him much either. They’re just too similar— and yes, I’m hilarious.
The other one snorts. “You hate do hate me, us, yourself, whatever you want to call it. You don’t know it yet, but you do. Why do you even try to deny it? Do you think that you can escape it, that the pain on the inside that never goes away, the voice that tells you-”
“You don’t get to tell me who I am!” Tony snaps.
“I do, I can, I will, because I’m the only one who can! ” The original yells. “You don’t know anything about yourself. You didn’t even know about Steve- you didn’t even remember that I gave him that helmet! ”
Tony does remember that, now that the other one mentions it. He had bought an old one, repainted it, fixed it up. There’s a hesitance warmth to the memory, but it’s tangled in a web of memory that gives it a sense of scale, a thickness of breath. Some things are so much more poignant in retrospect. He wonders what it might mean, if he could follow each thread to its end. There’s no use crying over spilt milk— that has a tangle of memory-threads of its own—but he wants to understand. The original had cried at Steve’s funeral; Tony wants that feeling, jealousy, spitefully. But the original continues, viscous and satisfied.
“You know things, but you don’t know them. But I do, and I’m telling you: you need to stay away. You’re free to fuck up your life, but you need to stay away from mine. Steve doesn’t need this.”
“Well,” Tony says, flatly, “while my creator largely uploaded the correct memories to my database, he didn't do the same for the reference database. I- care-” he winces, knowing the mistake as he says it “the same as you, I'm just not used to it yet.”
I am not used to anything. His past is present, feels real, but flat. It is as if everything before he woke up—was created—happened all at once; like the Big Bang, an infinite moment before time began.
“Your social programming is malfunctioning again.” The original comments acerbically. He rolls his shoulders. When Tony doesn’t respond—how could he?—he turns to leave.
“Wait.” Tony transfers back to the armor and unlocks the fist that holds the pouch.
“What?”
“Steve asked me to give this to you.”
The other one sighs, but eyes the pouch with apprehension. He tips them out into his palm: spent rounds, like Tony had thought, and he’s holding them, rolling them curiously in real, dextrous hands, the confused furrow on his brow that he hasn’t managed to replicate. Skin is an absolute son-of-a-bitch. He knows that the other will understand in a second. He wants that. His brain doesn’t work like that. It is bitterly, painfully, unfair.
There’s a thread there; Tony reaches for it, just as a round falls from the original's hand and hits the suit he’s in on the way down.
Jesus christ, he must be tired , he thinks.
And then he blinks.
One of the workarounds he’s had to program to account for the tendency of his thought-forming processes to form stable loops and lock up processing power is that he clears them whenever he blinks. Tying it to a physical motion makes it more intuitive, and he’s become painfully aware of the importance of a body to the function of the mind—the connection makes it feel a little more real. His creator hadn’t thought of phantom pain when he made him, and it says things about how far they must have diverged that it seems painfully, blindingly obvious to Tony. The hologram helps, and it helps more the more real it becomes; the suits don’t; and he thinks on bad days that maybe he won’t make it fifty. Theoretically, he could live forever. Pragmatically, it hurts , and pain changes you, and Tony probably won’t like who he’ll be in a decade. He could turn the change off, he supposes, but that would hardly be life. No, he will live, he will change, and when it becomes too much, he will die. If he can die. Will they bury him? There’s not much to bury, but he wants to be buried if he has to die.
Jesus. Honey, let’s see what’s on the Tony-radio—oh look, it’s depressing as fuck. Let’s try again! Tony blinks again, and looks around him.
He’s not in the garage, but that much was obvious from the start: the airflow is slower, the temperature a full nine degrees higher. It’s a comfortable bedroom in the sort of tasteful forest green and navy that he knows the child that inhabits it—obvious from the small bed and the toys corralled into tasteful wickers baskets—wouldn’t have picked it out. The next question is what he’s in, which turns out to be the suit he last inhabited, when he was giving back the pouch. It’s in the same stance as well—teleportation is it.
Tony looks for a way out. He really doesn’t want to explain why Iron Man is in some kid’s bedroom, but he’s stopped by the nagging sense of familiarity. He—the original—has been here before; he’s sure of it. He hasn’t had cause to remember this, which just makes him more curious. He’s Iron Man: it might be uncomfortable if a parent sees him, but the kid is, from the looks of it, a fan of Captain America (is that a vintage poster? Those are pretty hard to come by—with the depressing room, he’s feeling sorrier for the poor kid by the second.) He sits the suit on the bed to make it seem a little less threatening, and also partly out of habit, he supposes.
The new visual angle pings a hit in his databanks, and Tony’s eyes widen in shock. Fuck . He gets up to leave- but the window’s too small, and there’s the sound of tiny feet in the hallway and the tell-tale sniffling of a little kid who’s trying very hard not to cry and- fuck.
So instead of coming in to see a suit of mechanical armor sitting calmly on his bed, the young child who will become Tony stops dead in the middle of his room, mouth open wide into a O with a globule of snot still quivering on his nose and red eyes and lets the door slowly creak shut as he stares at the mechanical man that seems be trying to get out of his window.
“Erm.” He says, delicately, as quietly as he can through the mask (i.e. not much) “Hi?”
“Hi.” The kid whispers. There’s a moment of tense silence, where everything seems to stop and Tony runs through a few dozen possibilities, and then it’s broken when the kid sneezes. He looks up at Tony with wide eyes.
“Woahhhh, you’re a robot! What are you doing in my room? Are you here to steal my stuff or kidnap me? You can have it all- um, ‘cept for the poster, that’s mine. Wait, but are you a man wearing a suit or a robot-’
“Hey.” Tony interrupts, humorously. It sets off a whole chain of not-good-very-bad feelings when little-Tony flinches at the volume. He softens the mechanical tone as much as he can. “Who said I was a man?”
Little-him is caught off-guard at this, but curiosity quickly gets the better of him. “Um. I guess. Are you a man?”
This- might be one of the worst decisions Tony’s ever personally made. Unfortunately for the original, that only makes him want to do it more. The recklessness of youth, something something. Anyway, lil’ him has already seen him, so it’s pretty much a sunk cost at this point.
“Depends who you ask, kiddo.” Tony unlocks the suit from the awkward position he’d frozen it in. He holds up its hands disarmingly when that causes the kid to scuttle back in surprise. “No need to act all skittish, kid. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The kid eyes him suspiciously. He eventually seems to decide that Tony’s not going to do anything right now , and other priorities take hold.
“That wasn’t an answer.” He grumbles.
“What?” Tony grins playfully behind the mask.
The kid is glaring at him now. “I said, you didn’t answer my question! ‘Depends who you ask’ isn’t an answer! Are you a man- or a lady, or whatever, I don’t care! You need to tell me now or- or I’ll tell Jarvis and he’ll be really mad at you and then you’ll get arrested-”
Tony grins. “Okay, okay, hotshot. I’ll answer you, Jesus.”
“That’s a bad word.”
“Do you want the answer or not?”
Lil’ Tony glares with surprising venom, for a six-year-old. “ Obviously.”
He’s not going to hold out for much longer. “Okay, so… I was a man. There was this really, really smart guy who was really good at building things-”
Lil’ Tony interrupts impatiently. “I’m not a little kid, you don’t have to dumb it down for me! Why does everybody always do that? I’m smarter than everyone else but they all treat me like I’m stupid just b’cse I’m a kid. It’s not fair! ”
He blinks. He had been speaking down to the kid, hadn’t he? The conversation pulls on threads he’d had no cause to think on since his inception and he’s sure that he had hated being talked down to. He’d vowed he’d never do that to kids when he was a grown-up, that he’d never forget what it was like. Kids are people too , he’d thought, I’m never going to forget that . But he had.
This child, Tony thinks. He’s as much a stranger to me as I am to the original. We’re all Tony Stark, but we’re different people. Steve could make some religious comparison, Tony’s sure, but theology is not his jam. Divergent experiences leading to divergent identities he’d thought of—he remembers most of his own creation, funnily enough, and that had been a large part of what he’d focused on early on—but he’d never given thought to past selves.
“Mister.” The kid pipes up again, his face disapproving. Tony blinks and rephrases.
“I’m a robot, but my mind is a copy of a real man—my creator’s.”
“ Cool.” Little Tony breathes. “So you’re like a robot, but also a human.”
“It’s not always cool.” Tony doesn’t realize he’s spoken until it’s done. It’s one of the annoying things about the sharp segregation between memory and thought-forming processes in this version of him that he’s had to work with. The original seemed to believe that it would normalize, as the flat, distant memories he’d been installed with gave way to real recollections and experiences. In his professional opinion, the idea of having to wait years to control basic functions is utter bullshit.
“Why?”
“Because… my mind is designed to work with a body, and I don’t have one.”
“Why didn’t he make you a body?”
“That’s- actually a good question. I- suppose he didn’t know, or he didn’t care. Probably the second one, knowing the bastard.” Tony mutters the second part mutinously, but the truth is, he knows that it’s the first. At the wary look of his child self, he corrects himself. “Don’t take it to heart, kiddo, he definitely didn’t know. He’s just a bit reckless, and he didn’t think it mattered that much, given that I’m him.”
The kid ponders what Tony said and eventually pronounces loyally: “He sounds like he’s a bit stupid.”
“Hah! I’ll have to tell him that you said that.”
Lil’ seems pleased that Tony rates his agreement that highly. “Dads aren’t very nice, anyway.” He says, solemnly. Tony snorts and claps the hand of the suit helplessly over the faceplate. There’s phantom tears on his face and his sternum feels like it’s cracking, like it had when- the thread trails to nothingness, broken, and he is left feeling hollow. He wants to know.
“Hey, what’s that?” The younger version of him points at something on the carpet that Tony recognises. It’s the casing of the bullet, one of the ones Steve had given the original, and probably the one that fell on the suit. It’s only noticeable now because it’s glowing. There’s a shadow that the suit’s casting on the shaggy carpet and the boy in front of him that wasn’t there before. If he were to turn around, he’s sure he would see the whole world bathed in a soft orange glow. It’s dying. It’s time for Tony to leave.
The kid doesn’t quite realize it, and Tony doesn’t plan on telling him. He just doesn’t know what else he wants to say, what he could. He’s never been him and he won’t be and he doesn’t have anything he wants to say. He picks up the bullet, but it doesn’t do anything.
He looks down at the kid and thinks not of himself but of the original. Tony had seen him minutes ago and he’d been tired, and working through it all. He complains that the original doesn’t understand him, and yeah, he was right, but maybe it was mutual. The original has lived for longer than feels real for Tony.
Tony blinks. It’s easier to adjust to the shift this time, which is great because he’s hardly had time to scan the area and register that he’s in the middle of super-combat in a random street in New York before Thor’s charging at him with an enraged roar.
“Shit!” He’s in the sky as soon as he registers the threat but Thor’s bolt of lightning gets him anyway. He zips off at top speed away from the action. He can’t remember anything like this—that and the angry Thor pursuing him tells him exactly when he is.
“You cannot escape my wrath, Man of Iron!” Thor yells.
“Jesus christ, what the hell did I do to you!” Tony yells back. He doesn’t wait to hear Thor’s response—presumably, “What didn’t you do, asshole?” but in old timey-speak—and instead swoops into a tight alleyway and takes the god of thunder on a bargain-bin obstacle course through the streets. His armor has got a good few years on what Thor’s used to, so he has the informational advantage, and Thor is far less maneuverable. There’s a hairy moment when Thor gets him bad enough that he overloads His processor and it almost reboots. Eventually Thor must get tired of hitting a new wall every five seconds; he lets off a final (terrifying; Tony’s uh, man enough, to acknowledge Thor’s awesome power) and flies off to rejoin the main fight.
This leaves Tony to lick his wounds in some random street corner and contemplate the mess the original’s gotten himself into this time. It’s so quiet that it may as well be the Wild West, if the Wild West came with pale, harried-looking civilians looking out from behind half the windows. He gives a stray flyer a gloomy look as he turns it about in the suit's hands.
“The Civil War, huh.” He snorts. “Well, be careful what you wish for, right?”
Thor’s lightning has left a section of warped plating across the left side of the armor’s chestplate, so that’s one question answered: Tony can be hurt in this pocket dimension, or timeline, or magical object, or whatever it is. He doesn’t know what’s causing this whole thing, but it’s got to be linked to the bullet casing- did Steve know? But no, it was Steve . Steve was kind, and good, and he wouldn’t have done this to Tony. He puts the thought out of his head. He needed to get to the casing. The kid version of him hadn’t come through, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility that he might be trapped in the melting world if he didn’t touch it in time, and that really would be a calamity.
Tony makes his way back through the streets. This is one area where he’s better than the original: he has perfect recall of the way he flew to get here, so it only takes ten minutes or so for him to pop out as discreetly back out. He takes a risk in turning on his active sensor systems—there’s no supers nearby, only gaggles of civilians who have flowed back into the spaces the supers have abandoned as the fight moved on. Only construction crews could fix the shattered concrete of the road and the caved in roof of a nearby convenience store, and even the best arborist he could hire would have a hard time saving the huge oak tree whose trunk has been shattered, but they’re turning back over a fruit stand that had been overturned, and there’s an ambulance parked on a corner, although it doesn’t seem to be in use, right now. It’s waiting for them to come back, he realizes, morbidly. The civilians look like the ones he’s seen when he helps the reconstruction crews. To them right now, the difference between heroes and villains is a joke.
Tony couldn’t sneak through a crowd that size in the time he has, and the impression of wrongness only grows as he doesn’t have to speak a single word to cause the crowd to part before him as he walks slowly to the other side of the road. A flurry of whispers as their attempts to right the stand stop and Tony can hardly bear it. He hated the protests—not least because they were blaming him for things he hadn’t done —but he hates this more. He’d yell at them not to stare at him, but that would be counterintuitive. That’s one lesson from childhood that I haven’t forgotten.
Tony picks up the bullet casing, and feels a rising sense of- something. He lets himself speak without thinking. To be more precise, he turns off his social programming, and lets his emotional-association algorithm pick out something fitting—there’s something here, and he won’t let it be stolen from him.
“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”
Okay, wow, yep, that’s an experiment I’m never going to repeat. Holy mother of mortification. Tony turns the algorithm off . He doesn’t want to literally re-live teenagerhood.
And—Camus, really? We only read that to impress Summer. “The original is never going to let me live this down.” Tony grumbles.
“What the fuck, man.” Someone calls out from the crowd, and the spell is broken. Everyone carries on.
“What?” Tony calls back. “You think some culture is going to kill you? Some of you need to pick up a book for once!”
Unfortunately for them and fortunately for Tony, the standoff is broken as the unnatural quiet is pierced by the sound of a succession of clangs, growing louder each second. Soon it’s joined by the sounds of shouting and the thunder of enhanced footsteps. Tony watches as the crowd scatters again with alarmed cries—but soon enough he’s hiding himself behind a low stone wall to watch as the procession of superheroes comes back into sight.
The former version of Tony himself is in the lead by a good distance, but Captain America—Steve—is in hot pursuit. Cap jumps on top of a building and launches the shield at other-Tony. It curves round sharply, and the armor has to dive sharply to avoid it—and the other version of him crashes into the ground. All of a sudden, Tony feels a lot less attached to the idea of seeing this whole thing play out.
Steve’s on the other version of him. Thor catches up at this point, and he hits the other one with a blast that disables his armor. There’s a horrible hiccuping sound from the armor. Tony watches in blank horror, unable to look away, as the faceplate opens. Down and unable to operate the armor, his former self can’t escape. Steve raises his shield above his chest and Tony thinks of the deleted memory, the one that links to the aching chest. There’s the strange light again.
“Finish it.” He says.
But right behind the other Tony there’s the crowd of people he’d seen before, shrunk into the alley and the buildings all around, and he can’t help seeing the two happening at once. To recreate the memory, he should focus on the scene the way his other self looks at Steve like there’s nobody else in the universe. But for the first time, Tony thinks: I don’t want to . The woman in the shop window with the pink-and-blue hair who’s scowling at the scene means something to him too and he doesn’t know what but he wants to remember this scene as it happened.
Divergent experiences form the basis of a divergent personhood.
The ambulance acts, they tear Steve off the other Tony. Mechanically, Tony knows all of this. It’s hard to avoid the footage entirely. But his eyes stay on his other-self, as he lies on the floor. Tony’s sure that the accounts he’s heard had him stand up earlier. Maybe he’s watching the light? It’s growing in brightness every second, but he’s angled too far off the road to see much further than a few dozen meters.
“Hey!” Tony waves to get the attention of the other one. He would fly to the center of the road, but there’s now a semi-circle of heroes who have accumulated when he wasn’t paying attention, who might be convinced to stop trying to convince Cap not to get himself arrested and murk Iron Man. “Is the world falling apart, or is it just glowing? Scientific curiosity.” He adds, at the incredulous look. “Promise, chief.”
“You’re-” The other one says.
“I’m you from the future, yes, and this reality probably won’t last much longer so if you could just tell me-”
“-argh, fuck, damn-” Tony coughs. “That was psychosomatic, wasn’t it? Can’t even do the whole machine intelligence thing right.”
Unfortunately, it’s only then that he scans the environment and notices the man standing on the other end of the room. Unlike the last two times, he recognises it immediately: this is his lab, the one he’d moved into to design- himself. Pronouns. Pronouns are weird.
“Fascinating. You’re me, aren’t you?” And that’s him. He looks more healthy than Tony’s ever known him as—unsurprising when you consider that until a day ago, he’d only ever seen him comatose. There’s still the restless movement of his fingers and the dark circles under his eyes that Tony associates in the mirror with the bad times, when working was the only thing keeping him from the bottle.
He’s more inclined to consider this one the original , given that he’s probably designing Tony right now. “I’m from the future.”
The original hums, and he puts down the tablet he’d been working on to move closer to Tony, eventually leaning, faux-casual, against the bench only a few meters away from him. The suits positioned around the perimeter of the room are giving him the assurance to maintain the attitude. “Is it a stable time loop, or am I in a bubble universe?”
“Probably a bubble universe.” Tony admits. “A series of them. I seem to be hopping through our timeline, and each world dissolves behind me.”
“How fast?”
Tony goes for honesty. “A few minutes.”
The other one nods, almost absently. “It’s better that way.” He tells Tony. “They won’t have enough time to become different people. In a sense, nobody will die. We do die?”
“As far as I know.”
The other one laughs. “Oh that’s fantastic. Jesus, that’s practically poetic. That’s-” he searches for the words, then seems to give up. He laughs once more instead. Tony eyes him curiously. He’d never seen this happen from the outside before.
“What, you believe me, just like that? To the point of- an existential crisis?”
The other shrugs, calculatedly loose, but the way his eyes lock on Tony tell a different story. “If it’s not true, it’s not like I’m losing much.” He picks up a spanner, swings it about his finger, and asks, “When are you from, anyway? If I’m in your future-”
Tony’s almost sorry that he won’t see what the original is planning in the dwindling minutes they have before the world falls apart.
“The Civil War has already happened.” Tony cuts the original off but it doesn’t make the way the his face crumples briefly before smoothing out any less painful. In lieu of explaining, he opens his faceplate. “I think you already know who I am.”
The original sighs. The idea that he’s going to dissolve into nothingness in a few minutes doesn’t seem to be affecting him and yeah, it worries Tony. “I didn’t manage to stop Osborne, then.”
“Sorry.” Tony grimaces what he hopes is sympathetically and wonders what to do now that the immediate threat seems to have died down. The logical thing to do is to ask the original for help in figuring out what the bullet might have to do with whatever bullshit magic is causing the whole thing.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Tony asks the other. The original snorts.
“ ‘What I’m doing’? You need lessons in sounding less like a supervillain, Lil’ Tony.”
The casual nickname vanishes Tony’s sympathy and his desire to work with the other version of himself. “What you’re doing by making me . It’s perfectly derivable from context, at least for a genius . Christ, I’m annoying.”
“I’m doing the best I can to defend the American people, that’s what I’m doing. You got a problem with that?”
“Of course I have a fucking problem with that! You rushed my development, and I’m suffering for it.”
“If you’re suffering from it, I am too. We haven’t diverged yet.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“I don’t actually.” The original fixes his eyes on Tony. He prompts him—“Why don’t you explain it to me?”
Tony pauses to gain his bearings. “You know what, you’re right. You don’t understand and guess what? You can’t. You made someone, a whole person—even though he’s you!—and you’ll never understand what it’s like to be him. You don’t know what it’s like to have human neurons that connect all the way down to a gut and spine that you couldn’t be bothered to add to the virtual model and to have a mind that wants to create when you're too new to thinking for creation and you’ll never understand what it’s like to be a human without a fucking body!”
The other one’s expression is one that Tony recognises. It’s the look, the tightening of his eyes and the rigidly casual stance, the feet shoulder-width apart so that’s never gets caught flat-footed, that’s been growing throughout the conversation, the one he had in the workshop just before this whole thing began. It’s like Tony’s a threat and an experiment, all at once, and it jarrs him to see it. All his short life, and all the feelings he’d had about his double, and he had never doubted that his creator had seen him as human.
“Am I human?” Tony asks his creator, plaintive in the silence.
His creator is silent, his face twisted, conflicted. Tony can see the cogs turning behind the human face and there is a moment of crystalised, absolute hilarity as he thinks: He’s not even as smart as he was when he was six years old! He’s gotten stupider as he ages!
“You’re me.” The original settles on. “But I might have- made some mistakes. Tony-”
“You hate me, don’t you? For the crime of being you. But it’s not self-hatred when you hate someone else, it’s just hatred.”
“I-”
“I don’t even know if I want to be you anymore.” Tony’s saying things as he thinks them now, and the shaken, almost frightened look on the face of the original only makes him want to hurt him more. Distantly out of the window behind the original, he sees the world falling apart like it’s dissolving in the bright orange light of time. “I don’t know if I want the poison that lives inside of you. How many other ways do you hurt people, in ways you’re too damaged to see? You destroy everything-”
This time, Tony begins the world by tripping and falling.
Hope nobody saw that. He hops—well, lumbers, because he’s not setting fire to the flooring by using his repulsors—to his feet, making sure to pick up the bullet casing as he does. The suit is still in good shape, and he’s alone, this time. He recognises the surroundings quicker than he had the first time: it’s the manor again. It’s a different color, so it must be a different time period. As he orients himself, compiling a map from memories of the layout, another thread of thought works on ways out.
The world does dissolve before he leaves—good to know. Now that he’s thinking and not yelling, it’s possible that there’s some sort of association between what he does right before the world ends, and where he ends up next. In the first one, he’d been thinking that it was unfair that he didn’t have the original’s memories, and the child had been concerned with fairness, as well. In the second, he’d wanted to know about the Civil War, and the aching in his (non-existent) sternum, and he’d seen Steve threaten to hit him with the shield. Then- he’d thought about divergent personalities just before the world had started falling apart, right?
“Never enough goddamn data.” Tony starts moving through the house as quietly as he can. He needs to know when he is—and there’s a calendar neatly arranged on one of the sidetables, so he takes a look, and the exact date becomes clear.
I remember this. I really, really wish I didn’t. I need this about as much as I need a lawsuit.
Having figured the mechanism out, Tony thinks he might be able to leave right now, if he just locks himself somewhere nobody will find him and thinks really really hard about the conversation he’d been having with the original, back in his home universe. Nobody’s going to come visit the other him tonight. Because he drove them away, because he’s a twenty-one year old orphan and he wants to drink it all away, you bastard. And you just yelled at another version of himself for not treating him with the decency you’re supposed to afford other people.
Urgh.
Tony finds his younger self exactly where he knew he would: sprawled against the wall on the balcony attached to Howard’s office on the second floor, cradling a bottle of whiskey that the ransacked office says used to be his father’s. There’s a second bottle, tequila, that’s rolled halfway across the balcony, down to the dregs. He steps the suit carefully through the mess of files and half-completed projects and steps out into the sun. He squints as he lowers the faceplate, even though he doesn’t see through his eyes anymore.
The other version of him doesn’t seem to notice his existence at all.
Tony starts off easy. He flounders for something to say, something deep, something comforting. “Nice day, huh?”
The other one snorts. He takes a gulp, and then a high-pitched giggle that fades into a sob. Tony’s rapidly feeling hugely incompetent. He leaves the suit at the door, projecting the hologram all the way onto the balcony, so that he can stand beside his younger self. He pauses for a minute to figure out what he could say. If he had an internet connection, he would look up advice on how to comfort someone who’s grieving, but he doesn’t, and he thinks that would go down approximately as well as a lead balloon.
“Are’y gonna kill me now?” Young-Tony asks. He takes another swig.
Tony tries not to look at the golden liquid. Even though he can’t drink anymore, reduced to infecting himself with viruses to get a break for existence, seeing it is still a trigger. He’s only just made his green sobriety chip, and he’s on his way to blue. He clears his (nonexistent) throat.
“No. Should you really be drinking-?”
“You’re a fucking terrible assassin.” Young-Tony snorts into the drink. He holds eye contact with Tony when he takes the next one, and when he looks away uncomfortably young-Tony raises his arms dramatically. “Haven’t you seen the news? Tony Stark, heir to Stark Industries, an orphan at twenty-one! It’s a tragedy, and more because- he’s a genius fuck-up who’s already got more scandals to his name than degrees! And boy , let me tell you, does he have a lot of degrees! A real-life fucking da Vinci, if he didn’t paint and got into torrid scandals or whatever instead, or something.” His energy seems to be drained by the incoherent monologue. Glassy-eyed and red in the face, he stares over the balcony.“I destroy everything .” He mutters.
Tony closes his eyes. He is viscerally glad that the conversation he’d had with the last version of himself is erased; that he can tell himself it never really happened. He always regrets it when he acts in anger—but knowing that and the guilt don’t make it any better. Everything I learnt, I learnt it from you, he thinks. There’s an irony to it; does he mean his father, or his creator?
He doesn’t remember what it’s like to feel like this. He’s been on this balcony before, but the memories he has of the time are spotty, marked by alcohol and drugs, the odd fugue state that had marked the beginnings of his career. There’s a single smudge, a composite with a feeling of a scale of sadness he can’t articulate, that worked itself deep into his bones and that didn’t leave. Selfishly, he is glad to be free of this burden. The drugs, the drinking, the dancing through the pain because he didn’t know how to stop and tend his wounds: he knows better than to try it again, but Tony doesn’t want to remember this. He doesn’t think there’s any deep buried truth to it that he can’t know just from the examination of the facts. He thinks of the line he’d said before, unknowingly: the benevolent indifference of the universe.
“There’s no glory in pain.”
Other-Tony squints up at him uncomprehendingly. “You okay, dude?” He mutters loosely.
Tony thinks of wanting to take Steve’s pain away, but knowing that his realizations were his own and could not help Steve. But this is him, in a way, and maybe they can help here.
“There’s no glory in pain. There’s nothing-” He begins to speak slowly, “-there’s nothing in pain. There’s just ourselves.”
Another damn quote, this time for him. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Tony wondered when the original had read that, and whether he had ever understood it.
“What are you, some kind of hippie or new-age voodoo guy?” Other-him scoffs. “My mom just died. I’m allowed to be sad.”
Tony looks at him, really looks at him, and shrugs. “Okay.”
His former self gapes back at him. It’s that that seems to have been the straw that breaks the camel’s back of his ability to believe that Tony’s real. He shakes his head disbelievingly. “Un real .”
Tony snorts in amusement, and he sees the sky begin to glow. He looks around the balcony one last time: he wants to remember this. In the corner, mostly blocked by the other one’s leg, there’s a book. He walks closer, curious, and then chuckles—genuinely laughs .
It’s The Stranger, by Albert Camus. He reaches down to not-touch it, and feels the dog-eared pages as they pass through his fingers.
“Literature?” Tony asks the other. “You don’t seem like the type.”
“Yeah.” His voice has taken on a dreamy quality. “It’s good to get the chicks, you know.”
Tony pulls a face—he’s not ashamed to have left that part of his life behind, and he thinks that seeing his romantic prospects as people has significantly improved his love life. At least, before he became a mind without a body. But the other continues, after a slightly awkward pause.
“I don’t like it.” He admits. “I mean, like, duh, it’s about death so it would be weird if I did get it before, but I still don’t like it. The guy gets put into a kangaroo court and he gets convicted and he just dies . He’s alright with it, though, so I guess it’s not that bad.”
Tony stills. Were he human, he would feel the beating of his heart.
“You’re still a baby.” He says, lightly. “I’m sure you’ll understand when you’re older.”
Tony picks himself up, and sits next to his younger self. The world has already begun to fall apart, and for the first time since this whole thing began, he can see and appreciate the process, the stunning beauty of the light that casts upwards from the earth as pieces begin to crack off and cast shadows on the clouds above. He wants this all to be over.
“It’s about understanding that everything comes to an end and everyone hurts, but that it can be worth it, because it hurts. I mean, I think so. I’m pretty young as well.”
Tony’s younger self opens his mouth to reply, and there is nothing.