What Lasts ( 939 words) by AnonEhouse
Rating: Gen
Warnings:None
Universe: 616, AU
Genre: AU, Fix-It

At the end of all things, Tony is alone. But there's the equivalent of a box of scraps. Tony's a fixer. Just have a little faith.

This is a fill for the Tiny Stony RB prompt Code Name: Heroic

(I'm refusing to go along with Marvel's *destroy everything that's sweet and pure and happy* Reboot. This refers to no specific arcs, it's pretty much an ultimate fix-it.)



After all was said and done, far too much said, and far too many terrible things done, Tony was alone. Alone as in, the only living being in the universe. At least he thought he was alive. He was going through the motions of thinking, breathing, even walking around an endless, formless, soundless, colorless, timeless, plane of eternity. Nothing changed no matter how long he walked. There were no echoes when he shouted. No tears when he cried. No hunger. No thirst. No clothes, or any scars, either, so far as he could tell.

He didn't know how it had happened. He'd been at the center of the battle, surrounded by gods and mutants, witches, warlocks, supernatural beings, cross-dimensional entities, gamma monsters, super soldiers, heroes and villains united, all of them greater than Tony Stark, who was, for all his sins, just a man. He'd been caught in the cross-fires of their mystical attempts to save reality. Maybe it all snagged on his basic ordinariness and clung.

So, when all else was gone there was Tony Stark. Immortal, apparently in defiance of all the laws of physics, but then they didn't seem to apply here.

There had been a mad flurry at the end of all things, a simultaneous fading out and exploding outward. Tony was familiar with death; had embraced it before when his sacrifice meant others might survive, but this? This was Armageddon, Apocalypse, Ragnarök.

Ragnarök. According to that, there would be one survivor who would immolate the entire universe. Tony tried to convince himself the fault wasn't entirely his own, but really, when you got right down to it, wasn't everything always his fault?

He should have seen it coming. Should have foreseen the chain of events. Should have... oh, god, he should have taken Steve aside, long before any of this, should have looked into his damned beautiful azure eyes and said 'Steve, I need you. I can't do anything without you. Stay with me.'

Maybe.

Maybe if he'd done that, at the least he would have gone with Steve, into the nothingness together. At least they could have gone, back to back. At least Tony wouldn't have memories of Steve distrusting him. Hating him.

"STEVE! It wasn't worth it. None of it." Tony sank to his knees in the not-gray, not-cloud, and bent his head. "I miss you. I will always miss you. I miss your smiles. I miss your righteous anger. I miss your stubbornness. I miss, God, I miss the days when I could fix things. Could even fix you when the serum failed. I tried to tell you, then. It wasn't the serum that made you my touchstone, my rudder. You were always my hero, Cap. I wish you were here." His fists bunched uselessly in formless matter.

He knelt there for an uncountable length of time, and then he drew a deep breath. He could feel the substance under his knees. He concentrated, and came up with a handful of... what... the belly button lint of the universe? Not Dark Matter. Gray Matter. Something new. Something real. Something he could shape. He stood up and rolled the matter into a ball, and then stretched it out thin. He poked it and it hardened, colorless gray shifting to the gray of iron. He smiled.

"I need a workshop." Tony clapped his hands. "I need a big workshop."



It wasn't magic. It was just a different set of physical rules. Just because Gray Matter responded to Tony's thoughts didn't make it magic. Just because Tony's imagined workshop turned out to be a city of smooth metal, and clear glass didn't make it magic. At least no more magical than the first ball of iron; it was just a question of degree.

"Tony."

Tony looked up from the matter he was shaping. It might possibly, just maybe, be ever so slightly like a shield. "Yes, Steve?" Steve had appeared not long after the workshop, which had formed not long after the gray outside had sorted itself into dark and light, speckled with stars. It wasn't magic, Tony firmly reminded himself. After all, if it had been magic, wouldn't he have turned up as Tony knew him? This was Steve without the serum. Young in a way that Tony had never known him.

"Come here," Steve said. "I want to show you something."

Tony left what he was doing, of course he did. He followed Steve to the nearest viewing port. The outside was blue now, blue and decorated with white puffs that had ambitions of becoming clouds. Steve put his hands against the glass in wonder. "It's beautiful."

"Yes. Beautiful," Tony said, looking at Steve. Steve was happy. They were together.

"Tony?"

"Yes, Steve?"

"We're going to remake the world, aren't we?"

"Yes, Steve." World was an understatement, but it would do.

"Good." Steve nodded and leaned against the glass. "Let's get it right, this time." He glanced up at Tony, smiling.

"Do you have a list?" Tony asked, serious. "No Hydra, No Illuminati, No Extremis, No..." He waved his hands, trying to encompass everything Steve had hated.

"Just one thing." Steve kept looking out at the new sky. "Us. I want a world where we're an 'us'. I want us to fight together, not each other. I never want to fight you again, Tony."

Tony swallowed hard. "I promise." He put his hands in his pockets, to resist the temptation to grab Steve and hold him tight. There would be time for that. There would be time for everything. Even, maybe, time enough to say the words he'd never said to Steve.