1. Back to the Future didn't prepare me for this
Tony Stark watches the dust drift away on the breeze, too overwhelmed by the unimaginable horror of what is happening to even really mourn. He is alone, trapped on a dead planet with no means of escape, and there aren’t even bodies he can bury. There’s nothing but dust. Thanos has won.
Eventually he heads for the remains of the crashed Q-Ship, intending to try to figure out something about how it works, but exhausted and still too numb to even cry, he finds something approaching a bed, and falls asleep.
He wakes up in a room that’s too bright and smells of bleach and Pepper’s perfume and that uniquely sterile smell you only get in hospitals. The disorientation and the horror of what he’s just survived means the anxiety attack starts before he’s even fully awake, but instead of helping him the way she usually does, Pepper panics as well, like she’s never seen this before.
Once he manages to calm down, he asks Pepper what happened, trying to make sense of how he could have made it home from Titan on a dead ship he didn’t know how to control, but instead of telling him anything useful, Pepper tearfully tells him that Obadiah Stane is dead. He’s baffled as to why she’s bringing that up now, a decade after it happened, but when he says that, she looks at him like he’s lost his mind. Gently, in that voice people use when they’re talking to someone they think is having a breakdown, she says no; it had happened the previous night.
Finally, he makes the connection to the Time Stone. Strange must have used the Eye of Agamatto to send him back in time. Assuming he didn’t imagine the whole thing.
He borrows Pepper’s tablet, and tries to look up the people he remembers, the ones he hadn’t met yet in 2008. Bruce Banner has a published article in a physics journal, but he could have read that and forgotten. Searching for the Winter Soldier brings up a lot of articles about a war in Finland and a single ambiguous reference from a John le Carré novel. Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton are ghosts, as he expected. He finds a Myspace page in the name of Wanda Maximoff, but even when he manages to translates it from Sokovian, there’s nothing to tell him if it’s the right person - for all he knows, that might be the most common name in Sokovia. Finally, though, he finds what he was looking for. Sam Wilson has a Facebook page, full of photos of him and his sister, him and his army buddies. Pictures of someone Tony won’t meet for five years, someone he’d had no reason to have met before the Avengers.
Proof that Tony isn’t crazy.
He discharges himself from the hospital, ignoring Pepper’s disapproval, and heads back to Malibu. He’s supposed to be giving a press conference that day, this is the day of ‘I Am Iron Man’, but he tells Rhodey to do it for him and tell the journalists whatever the S.H.I.E.L.D party line is.
Being back in Pinnacle House feels a bit like stepping inside a ghost, and when he hears JARVIS’s voice, for the first time in three years, his legs nearly give out.
He heads down to the workshop, just the same as he remembers it, greets Dum-E and U and Butterfingers, and then tells JARVIS to record. He describes everything he can remember of the decade that never happened, everything that might be useful, worried he’ll forget something important if he doesn’t get it all down right away, worried that every minute’s delay might mean some crucial detail missed, or misremembered.
When he’s done, he asks JARVIS’s opinion. JARVIS says that since he didn’t have time to have invented it, shows no other signs of mental illness, and isn’t usually that kind of creative, believing Tony is currently the most reasonable option, and he agrees to help Tony plan a way to save the future.
Together they figure out the locations of four of the stones - the Masters of the Mystic Arts have Time, the Tesseract must be Space. They’re not sure which of the stones is the Aether, but Thor told Tony enough of the events of the Second Dark Elf War that he knows it must be one of them. And finally, they figure out that Loki's Sceptre must hold Mind. He can’t do anything about the Mind Stone until Loki comes to Earth, and the Time Stone seems to be fairly safe with the Sorcerers (and also he has no idea how to contact them when Steve Strange is apparently currently a perfectly normal non-eldritch surgeon who has a Google+ account). S.H.I.E.L.D. aren’t going to give up the Tesseract without a fight, so he might as well leave that for Loki’s invasion as well, and he has no idea where the Aether could be. There seems to be nothing he can do, but he knows Thanos can be physically fought, and presumably killed, especially before he gets the Stones. They’d nearly managed it back on Titan, would have done if Quill had kept control. He might not be able to protect the Stones, but maybe if he can bring the Avengers together earlier, get them to work better as a team without the schisms that had torn them apart, they can at least be prepared for the fight ahead.
With that in mind, he starts setting up his dominos. He gives the ‘I Am Iron Man’ speech, because too much hinges on it to not. It’s considerably less cool when he already knows how everyone will react, but it’s got to be done. Afterwards, Nick Fury approaches him, asking him to join the Avengers Initiative. Tony agrees, on one condition - he wants to speak to the Black Widow.
While he’s waiting for Natasha to contact him, he implements his other plans. First, he reaches out to Jane Foster and offers to fund her research in exchange for a simple condition; if she ever runs over a handsome blond guy in her van, she calls Tony. Once he’s convinced her that his apparently going insane won’t negate the funding, she agrees.
The other part of his plan is more complicated. JARVIS had found - from Friends Reunited of all places - that Bruce had been dating a biologist called Betty Ross before his accident. Persuading her he’s not working for the military isn’t easy, and she doesn’t know much, but eventually he gets her to trust him enough that she tells him that in the one email Bruce managed to send her after he went on the run, he used the pseudonym “Mr Green”.
Using that, JARVIS locates and hacks the secure messaging programme Bruce is using to contact Samuel Sterns. He can’t persuade Bruce to give him any identifiable information, but he gives Bruce his phone number, and tells him that if he’s ever in a jam, he can call Tony and Tony will hide him from the U.S. Military.
Finally, Natasha turns up in his lab. Realising that superpowers will be an easier sell than magical space rocks, especially in a pre-Thor world, he tells her he can see the future. She asks for proof, of course, and since he knows almost nothing more personal about her than her preferred Chinese takeout order, he tells her everything he knows about Clint; his history, how she met him, and about Laura Barton and their kids. All the things he won’t learn for another four years.
Although she says not everything he told her is correct, he knows enough that she’s prepared to listen to him. He tells her he’s intending to take up the hunt for Steve Rogers (just as soon as he has Bruce and his expertise in detecting weird-Nazi-energy-weapons radiation) but if they want him to actually stick around, they need to find the Winter Soldier and bring him in from the cold as soon as possible, and Natasha is the only person he knows who might be able to do it. She’s a super-spy, she’s Soviet, she was always a little bit weird about Bucky in a way that made Tony think maybe they’d met at some point in the mysterious past she never talks about...
She neither confirms nor denies Tony’s suspicions, but she admits that, with Tony’s unlimited funding and advances in technology, she might be able to succeed where others in the past have failed. Though she’s still suspicious of Tony, catching the intelligence community’s White Whale is enough of a challenge to intrigue her, and she agrees to try.
Finally, he sets up a broadcast into space. It’s a long shot, but he knows now that there’s people out there, and maybe someone will hear his message and pass it on to the Guardians of the Galaxy.
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