st_arkintern | Ghost of Christmas Future

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Ghost of Christmas Future

"Mr. Stark?"

Peter stands at the edge of the bed that Tony shares with Thor. He wears the Iron Spider armor Tony made for him, the faint glint of the moon through the thin slit between either side of the curtain reflecting off the suit's dark colors.

Peter's hair is styled differently from the Peter here at the inn; it's longer, more wild, even floppy. School had grown more and more demanding as the end of his sophomore year approached and balancing school and his time as Spider-Man was difficult. He had promised May he'd maintain his grades as part of the Spider-Man Negotiations of 2017, but criminals didn't stop just because he had two papers to write by Friday, a quiz tomorrow, and a test next Tuesday.

Hair had been less of a priority. Peter couldn't put off his homework if he wanted to continue being Spider-Man; he couldn't put off his evening patrol if he wanted to protect Queens, either. There were no serious long-term consequences to not getting his hair cut (save for perhaps more bullying from Flash, who was prone to bullying him anyway). A haircut could wait until later.

Peter always thought there'd be more time later.

Tony doesn't stir. Peter presses his lips together -- a nervous habit acquired when he was still alive -- and draws a little closer. He resists the natural urge to place a hand on Tony's shoulder to wake him; he knows that his fingers will slip right through. Instead he repeats, this time a little louder:

"Mr. Stark?"

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Quill starts pommeling Thanos. Iron Man starts flings towards him to stop him. Spider-Man comes close enough to pulling off the gauntlet that it visibly slips off the butt of his hand and down to his fingers. Thanos thumb is completely out of it when he yanks it from Spider-Man's grip. Thanos sends the alien-woman flying and Spider-Man catches her.

Everyone else continues to fight, but the mad Titan sends the wizard flying; he easily knocks the Guardians back with a pulse of purple energy; he headbutts Iron Man to the ground.

He looks at Iron Man for a beat, then gestures at Titan's moon. The Blue and Purple stones light up as the moon shatters, and he sends all of it slamming onto the red, dusty planet below as effortlessly as a professional pitcher delivering a pitch.

Thanos seems to have a response for everything they throw at him.

A nanite hand pins Thanos' gauntleted hand open and Iron Man lands in front of him.

"You throw another moon at me, and I'm gonna to lose it."

"Stark."

"You know me?"

"I do. You're not the only one cursed with knowledge."

"My only curse is you." Rockets launch from the Mark 50 and launch themselves at Thanos.

"Come on!"

It's just the two of them now: the Guardians are incapacitated and Spider-Man is with them; the wizard is still splayed out on the ground. The fight itself seems almost even, until Iron Man flings a metal fist at Thanos' face.

The metal catches his cheek. When Thanos lifts a hand to his face, he finds there's blood there.

"All that for a drop of blood."

Thanos smiles.

He kicks Iron Man with enough force to flip him over, then continues to punch him -- over and over again, without mercy. He lifts him by the head, then punches him, using the force of the Power Stone.

Iron Man puts his everything into firing his repulsors at Thanos, but the Titan is not deterred. He continues to steadily close the space between them, then knocks the malformed remains of the helmet off of Iron Man's face. Iron Man forms his glove into a shortsword and attempts to attack Thanos with it, but Thanos breaks it off --

-- then slams it into Tony's torso.

The world around Tony went silent. The color drained away.

This was it.

This was how Tony Stark's story ended.

He watched numbly as Thanos walked him back slowly, as if putting a wounded animal to rest. The monster's hand rested upon his head in a twisted show of sympathy, and Tony watched himself seize up in shock and pain the entire way.

"You have my respect, Stark." Thanos spoke softly, soothingly. "When I'm done, half of humanity will still be alive." Then, Thanos was leaving him and taking aim with his gaunlet. Overkill for a human who was minutes from death--perhaps his way of showing that respect to send his enemy off with the sum of his might.

Tony didn't want to watch. He didn't want to see what came next. He knew. There was no other way this would end, yet he couldn't look away.

"Stop. Spare his life... and I will give you the stone."

Thanos turns and regards the wizard with a curious look; his expression quickly neutralizes.

"No tricks."

Strange shakes his head.

"Don't."

Despite the order, Strange lifts his hand and the Time Stone materializes out of thin air and floats, spinning in the space between his forefinger and his thumb.

Thanos holds out his hand and Strange sends it towards him. The stone snaps into the second-to-last socket in the gauntlet.

"One to go."

Quill launches himself at Thanos, blasters blazing, but Thanos opens a portal with the Space Stone and vanishes with it.

Everything stops then, as if the entire scene had suddenly been put on pause.

"Mr. Stark?" Peter says quietly from behind Tony.

Beat for beat, Tony's emotions and thoughts mirrored his future self's. The shock of the bargain--who was this Dr. Strange to offer up a stone for his life?--to the despair of Thanos accepting. He was on a crash course to Earth.

Where The Avengers were.

Tony's utter numbness at the revelation he lived for that much longer burned away by a sudden fire lit in him. He spun to face Peter, his mind entering crisis management mode. "Pete. Earth. We need--we need to go to Earth." He pleaded.

"I can try to bring you to Earth, but there's still more I need to show you here before we go anywhere else." Peter wishes he didn't have to show Tony any of this -- just as he wishes he didn't have to show any of Peter this, either, but he had to.

"This is --" Peter looks out at the landscape around them; the planet looked bad off when they arrived, but after just a few minutes with Thanos on it, it looked even worse. "-- it's a lot to take in all at once."

Tony shook his head uselessly as if to ask what could be even left to witness on this hellscape. But he owed this much to Peter, no matter which Peter it was. He owed it to everyone--if for no other reason than to see what his failure bore.

"Alright." He steeled himself. "Alright."

"You know why I brought you here, right?" Peter asks quietly.

He doesn't wait for an answer.

"None of this has to happen for you or for me," he says. "There's so much time to change things. Even now, things are probably already changing."

This Peter can't be certain of it.

"Everybody needs to work together. And everybody needs to know what will work, what might work, and what won't work at all. I really think we can beat Thanos."

Tony forced himself to meet Peter's eyes, pained as he was to do it. "So there's hope." He didn't realize it, but he was holding his breath. "That when I get shunted off whenever the hotel decides...I can change things."

Peter keeps his gaze steady on Tony.

"If I didn't think there was hope, I wouldn't have visited you. I wouldn't have visited Peter, either."

Tony felt his heart sink at the mention of Peter--his Peter. He shut that emotion away. There would be time to deal with it later.

"Understood."

Peter presses his lips together.

"You okay?" He knows the answer's probably no, but Tony just needs to be okay enough.

Tony's face was a mask, as it so often was. "I'm here."

Peter turns away and the scene swings back into motion. Spider-Man helps Iron Man up as everyone on Titan gathers together.

"Something's happening," Mantis says, her eyes turning skyward.

Moments later, she turns to dust.

The same happens to Drax and to Quill and to Strange; the most any of them is able to manage is a few short words.

"Mr. Stark?"

It's not the ghost Peter speaking, but the real one.

"I don't feel so good."

Tony had no concept of what half of all life meant. The universe was far too infinite for even a genius of his caliber to grasp. When Thor finally confessed that Thanos had succeeded, Tony didn't even have a concept of what their deaths would look like. When he began hallucinating caskets floating in the sky shortly thereafter, he was certain one of the many was left for him. A still corpse to feed the earth.

But Thanos wasn't so kind. The once-living faded away into the breeze, leaving nothing but the memories.

Mr. Stark.

Tony's mask shattered at the sound of Peter's voice. Moving on pure instinct, Tony went to him, right as his other self caught the boy.

"Please." Tony begged, watching himself give the only real embrace he would have given the boy in his life if not for the Madonna Inn.

"I don't want to go. I don't want to go, sir, please. I don't want to go." Please, I don't want to go. I don't want to go."

The other Peter clutches Tony so tightly that when he falls back, he takes Tony down with him.

For a moment, the other Peter's eyes go skyward, then turn back towards Tony.

"I'm sorry," he says softly.

The other Peter dissolves into dust.

His other self made a desperate grab for what little remained of Peter, only to have it slip through his fingers. Tony slowly lowered to his knees, staring at the spot where the boy used to be. And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared--as if he could will the particles that once composed Peter Parker to come back together.

Time stops on Titan again. Peter crouches down next to Tony.

"There's a chance that even if we eventually stop Thanos... this still might happen," he says softly. That was his whole reason for showing Tony; he's not sure he would have shown him otherwise. "You need to be ready for it because you're still going to have to keep moving forward. You can't just stop."

Tony looked towards Peter--the sole light to be found anywhere around him. He wanted to ask how the boy could live his death all over again and have the calm within him to build Tony himself back up after his utter failure.

Then, it truly sunk in. He lived. Peter didn't. Thanos might as well have carved him out with his own weapon and left him barren.

"Earth." Tony mechanically replied. "I need to--to see."

"Are you sure?" Peter asks. He had planned to take Tony there from the beginning, but now he wasn't so sure it was a good idea for him to see it on top of what he'd just seen on Titan. "It's not going to be any better."

Hesitation. And then, Tony heard his own words on replay.

We don't stop just because it gets scary. We don't stop just because it hurts.

He nodded. "I'm gonna see this through." Tony stared right into Peter's eyes, clinging to the hope that the boy had. "I will."

For a few long moments, Peter doesn't say anything.

"Okay," Peter says, finally.

In an instant, they're on Earth, in the middle of the jungle. A portal -- identical to the one Thanos left in back on Titan -- opens up.

Thanos steps through.

Bruce in the Hulkbuster is the first to come at him, but he's quickly disposed of, trapped in the rising Earth behind Thanos. Black Panther, Falcon, War Machine, Bucky, Oyoke, Black Widow, Groot -- all of them are disposed of easily with Thanos' power. Captain America fights him, holding Thanos' gauntleted hand open with what is clearly all of his strength only to be knocked aside easily before Thanos heads for Scarlet Witch and Vision.

She has to split her powers to hold him back; half of her is devoted to destroying the Mind Stone lodged in Vision's head as the other half is dedicated to keeping Thanos at bay, if even for a little bit longer.

Tony watched his comrades fall like dominoes, one right after the other. Former or no, they were still his. Tony didn't dare let himself hope when Thanos seemed to linger on Steve Rogers--and flinched in his core when the man went down. The hopes and struggles of all people weren't created equal.

Turning his attention to Wanda, the sheer grief and panic wrought on her face reminded Tony of how young she really was. Taking down Vision clearly took every ounce of will left in her body. And Vision himself--that brought forth stabs of pain that Tony didn't know he could still feel in his state.

The Mind Stone shatters in a burst of brilliant yellow light. When the light finally recedes, Wanda is on the ground, sobbing and Thanos does not look the least bit disturbed by any of it.

"I understand, my child. Better than anyone."

"You could never."

Thanos reaches down and runs his fingers over her hair familiarly. "Today I lost more than you can know. But now is no time to mourn."

Thanos proceeds back to Vision's broken, purple form. "Now is no time at all."

The green Time Stone lights up in his gauntlet, and everything rewinds. The stone is reformed and the red returns to Vision's body.

"No!" Wanda lunges at Thanos, but he knocks her back and raises Vision up by the neck.

Thanos shoves his fingers into Vision's head and plucks the stone out.

Hearing Vision gasp helplessly in his voice--JARVIS's voice--and then he was a gray corpse on the ground to join the coming pile. Tony's eyes scanned the environment uselessly as Thanos relished his victory, final stone in hand. One question kept replaying over and over and over in his head--

Where was Thor?

The Mind Stone snaps into the final empty socket and Thanos bellows as the power courses through his body.

Before he can revel in his power, he's knocked back a tremendous burst of lightning from above. The force of it drags him backwards through the jungle soil.

Thanos is back on his feet in an instant; all the stones light up simultaneously to form a singular beam of light. Above, Thor tosses Stormbreaker straight at it. The weapon barely slows against the force of Thanos' beam; it breaks through it and lands solidly in the Titan's chest.

Thor lands in front of Thanos. He is on one knee now, his breathig labored. Thor reaches out and presses a hand against the back of Thanos' head. He looks down at him.

"I told you..." Any of Thor's typical warmth has been drained completely from his voice. "...you'd die for that."

He shoves the blade in deeper and Thanos screams. Thor's eyes, filled with rage, never leave Thanos' face, not even when the titan's head lolls to one side.

And then, Thanos turns his head up. His eyes open.

"You should have... You should... You should have gone for the head."

The stones light up and Thor lets out a No! just as Thanos snaps his fingers.

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