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Tony Stark has always believed that every problem has a solution. Sometimes that solution requires a little ingenuity, occasionally a spectacular amount of money, and, on particularly bad days, a willingness to do something catastrophically stupid.
Dying to save the universe should have been the end of his story.
Instead, Tony wakes up in his own past, decades younger and with no explanation for how he got there. Before he can make sense of what's happened, he's somewhere else, or rather, somewhen else.
Each unexpected journey takes Tony further into his own past. Familiar faces who don't know him the way he remembers. Conversations he never knew he'd had. And the growing suspicion that none of this is happening by accident.
Tony Stark has been given time.
The question is what he's supposed to do with it.
Chapter 4
Tony was back in the void.
The darkness was familiar by now, though being suspended in it without any control over his own movements wasn’t getting any more comfortable.
“Now,” Asshole demanded.
“Not yet,” Grandpa replied.
“Now.”
“Wait.”
“You two have been doing this since the beginning,” Debbie observed.
“And neither has learned anything,” Tinker added.
Before Tony could offer his own opinion on the subject, the void released him.
The transition came as a slow, heavy descent, like sinking into cold water with iron weights strapped to his ankles.
Tony opened his eyes.
The air smelled of fresh paint, polished concrete, and high-grade industrial solvent. A high-frequency hum vibrated through the floorboards, the power conduits running beneath the main glass atrium of the Avengers Compound in upstate New York.
He sat at a wide, curved glass desk overlooking the tarmac. The sun was slanting low over the trees, casting long golden rectangles across the minimalist floor.
Tony looked at his left hand.
A black compression wrap bound his wrist and forearm. Beneath the bandage, the joint throbbed with a dull, persistent ache, the souvenir from a repulsor backfire in a bunker in Siberia months ago.
He stood up, his joints popping, and turned to the wall terminal behind him.
The digital calendar in the upper right corner read:
Tuesday, August 23, 2016.
Forty-six. He was forty-six years old.
“FRIDAY,” Tony said. His voice was lower, gravelly with the lingering fatigue that had defined the months following the Sokovia Accords and the split at Leipzig.
“Good afternoon, boss,” FRIDAY’s voice replied smoothly from the ceiling speakers. “Biometric scan indicates elevated cortisol levels and irregular heart rate. Should I prep a dose of your prescribed anti-anxiety protocol?”
“No. I’m fine,” Tony said, rubbing the back of his neck.
He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling glass window, looking out over the empty landing pad. In his memory, his true memory from 2023, this compound was a crater, pulverized into ash and twisted rebar by Thanos’s warship. Seeing it standing pristine, silent, and half-empty felt almost surreal.
The Avengers were fractured. Steve, Nat, Sam, and Wanda were scattered, their whereabouts uncertain. Rhodey was down in the medical wing, spending four hours a day in physical therapy learning how to walk with carbon-fiber leg braces.
And Tony was here. Alone with a stack of legal documents, government oversight queries, and a building far too large for one man.
Then he remembered.
2016
Three months ago, he had sat on a thrift-store sofa in a cramped apartment, eaten date loaf, and recruited a fifteen-year-old kid in a homemade sweat suit before taking him to Germany.
Tony turned back to the terminal. “FRIDAY. Pull up the internship files.”
“Which division, boss?”
“The special project. Queens.”
A holographic interface expanded across the desk, floating in pale blue light. Files, telemetry charts, and audio logs cascaded into view.
At the top of the folder structure was a single contact tag: P. PARKER – HIGH SCHOOL INTERNSHIP (LOGGED BY H. HOGAN).
Tony tapped the folder.
After flying back from Berlin, Tony had assigned Happy Hogan as Peter’s primary handler. It was supposed to be a buffer, a way to keep the kid at arm’s length, keep him out of danger, and let him focus on pop quizzes and sophomore geometry while Tony sorted through the wreckage of the team.
He clicked on the audio log archive.
There were dozens of entries. Hundreds.
Tony selected the first file from two days ago and hit play.
A staticky line opened, followed by a loud, hurried rustle of fabric.
“Hey, Happy! It’s Peter. Peter Parker. Just calling for my daily check-in!” The voice was light, breathless, and cracking with youthful enthusiasm. “I got an early start on patrol today because school hasn’t started yet. I helped a lady named Mrs. Delgado find her lost cat, it was on a roof, really high up, totally routine, and then I stopped this guy from stealing an unlocked ten-speed outside the bodega on 21st. I left a note for the owner! Anyway, just wondering if there’s any… you know, updates on the next mission? Or if Mr. Stark got those suit suggestions I drew up? Okay, call me back! Bye!”
The recording clicked off.
Tony stood motionless beside the desk, staring at the audio waveform.
He clicked the next one.
“Happy! Hey! Me again. It’s six-thirty. Just finished my homework. I was thinking, if Mr. Stark is busy with the UN stuff, I could totally handle something regional? Like, upstate? I can take the bus! Just let me know. Tell Mr. Stark I said hi!”
And another.
“Hey, Happy! So, crazy thing, my web-shooters had a slight pressure drop in the left nozzle today. I adjusted the fluid viscosity by about two percent, and the tensile strength went through the roof! I uploaded the schematics to the drive. Do you think Mr. Stark could look at them when he gets a second? No rush! Thanks!”
Tony scrolled through the list. Every single entry was flagged as UNREAD / UNFORWARDED. Whatever Happy had listened to himself, none of it had reached Tony. The calls had been left sitting in an archive while Happy managed logistics for the Compound’s relocation.
Tony sat down slowly in the leather chair, leaning his chin on his steepled fingers.
Just hours ago, from his perspective, he had been sitting on a couch in 2018, listening to a sixteen-year-old Peter talk about Uncle Ben, circuit boards, and capacitors.
Here, in August 2016, Peter was fifteen.
He had the suit Tony had built for him in Germany. He had the high-tech lenses, the web-wings, and the encrypted comms. But he didn’t have Tony. Not really. He had Happy’s voicemail box and an endless supply of hope that if he just stopped enough bicycle thieves, Iron Man would notice him.
Tony opened the suit telemetry logs recorded by the Stark suit’s internal HUD during Peter’s patrols.
A video feed materialized on the screen.
It was recorded from Peter’s perspective: sweeping views of the Queens skyline at sunset, the blur of brick walls and fire escapes, the rhythmic thwip-thwip of web-lines catching on streetlights.
Then the movement stopped. Peter had settled on the edge of a roof, overlooking the evening traffic below. He pulled his mask up over his nose, and a churro appeared in the corner of the frame as he took a bite.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, checked the screen, tapped it twice, and waited.
No new messages.
Peter sighed, tucked the phone away, and pulled his mask back down. A moment later, the skyline tilted as he launched himself off the roof and swung away.
Tony watched the footage, feeling a sharp, quiet ache tighten in his chest.
In 2018, Tony had held Peter’s body as it turned to dust on Titan. He had lived for five agonizing years with nothing more than a framed photograph of Peter on his kitchen shelf, the one taken during the fake internship award ceremony, with Tony holding the certificate upside down and Peter making peace signs behind his head.
He had built a time-GPS just for the chance to bring that kid back.
And here, in 2016, Peter was alive. Whole. Unharmed.
He wasn’t fighting alien warlords or dodging plasma fire on a ruined planet. He was a fifteen-year-old boy sitting on a rooftop in Queens, eating a churro, and desperately trying to impress a man who was too busy, too bruised, and too afraid to pick up the phone.
A soft double-knock sounded at the door of the office.
Happy Hogan stepped inside, holding a tablet and a thick stack of shipping manifests. He looked tired, his tie loosened at the collar.
“Hey, Boss. The movers from the Malibu depot just landed,” Happy said, walking toward the desk. “I’m having them clear out the lower bay for the turbine prototypes.”
Tony didn’t look up from the floating video feed. “Happy.”
Happy stopped, noticing the blue light reflecting off Tony’s face. He glanced at the screen, seeing the suit telemetry.
Happy cleared his throat, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Oh. You’re… looking at the kid’s logs?”
“I am,” Tony said quietly.
“Look, Tony, I know he’s… persistent,” Happy said defensively, shifting the iPad under his arm. “He calls four times a day. He leaves twenty-minute voicemails about cats, stolen bikes, and car alarms. I keep telling him to stay on the ground and do the ‘friendly neighborhood’ thing like you said, but the kid doesn’t stop.”
Tony turned his chair slowly to face Happy. His expression was completely unreadable.
“You haven’t been forwarding these,” Tony said. It wasn’t a question.
Happy blinked. “Well… no. You told me to keep him off your plate. You’ve been dealing with Ross, the Accords, Rhodey’s rehab… I figured you didn’t need a play-by-play of a sophomore stopping a mugger in Flushing.”
Tony looked down at his desk. He reached out and touched the holographic window containing Peter’s web-fluid viscosity schematics. The math was brilliant, unorthodox, raw, but undoubtedly genius.
“He fixed the pressure drop,” Tony murmured.
“What?” Happy asked.
“The web-shooter nozzle,” Tony said, looking up at Happy. “He recalibrated the fluid mix by two percent. Increased the shear-thinning threshold by twelve percent without clogging the ejection port. At fifteen.”
Happy rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah. Well. Kid’s smart. I give him that.”
“He’s not just smart, Hap,” Tony said, his voice dropping into a quiet, steady tone that made Happy freeze. “He’s running around in a multimillion-dollar suit of armor I gave him, taking on adult problems with zero backup, because he thinks I’m watching.”
Happy frowned, sensing something different in Tony’s tone, a weight, a gravity that hadn’t been there when they landed from Germany. “Tony… are you okay? You look… tired.”
“I’m fine,” Tony lied smoothly. He leaned forward, tapping the terminal interface. “Effective immediately, update the protocol. Forward all telemetry logs directly to my private server. Every voicemail, every suit diagnostic, every web-fluid tweak.”
Happy stared at him. “All of them? Boss, he calls when he’s doing homework!”
“I have excellent noise-canceling headphones,” Tony said. “And tell him…”
Tony stopped.
Tell him what?
If he told Peter too much, if he pulled him into the Avengers’ mess now, in August 2016, it would alter the course of the timeline. The closed loop would fracture.
More than that, Tony knew that Peter’s fundamental heroics weren’t born from Iron Man’s guidance. Peter didn’t become a hero because Tony Stark gave him a suit. He was already a hero when he was wearing a ten-dollar hoodie and goggles from a hardware store. His courage was his own.
Tony swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Tell him…” Tony cleared his throat, forcing a small, characteristic smirk to his lips. “…tell him I got his suit suggestions. Tell him the yellow accent trim is hideous and I’m vetoing it, but he should keep working on the fluid viscosity.”
Happy looked at Tony for a long moment, then a faint, genuine smile touched his mouth. “Got it. I’ll pass it along.”
“And Happy?”
“Yeah?”
“Pick up the phone once in a while. He’s a good kid.”
Happy nodded, his posture softening. “Yeah. He is. I’ll… I’ll check in with him tonight.”
Happy turned and walked out of the office, the door sliding shut behind him with a soft pneumatic hiss.
Tony sat alone in the dimming light of the office.
He looked back at the holographic screen. The video feed showed the Queens skyline rushing past as Peter swung between buildings. A billboard flashed into view, followed by a dizzying rotation as Peter flipped through the air and landed on a rooftop.
He’s doing it anyway, Tony thought, remembering the voices of the Infinity Stones from the void between jumps.
Tony leaned back in his chair.
“Keep swinging, kid,” he whispered. “I’m watching.”
The sound disappeared first.
The faint hum of the ventilation, the distant activity beyond the office, even the quiet whir of the terminal vanished.
Tony looked up.
The room was still there, perfectly intact, but he couldn’t hear a thing. Then the colors began to fade, leaving the office in shades of gray.
He glanced back at the holographic screen.
The blue light of Peter’s telemetry was the last color to disappear.
And then the room was gone.
I’m glad Tony did what he could for Peter.
Good update
Nice to see Tony being able to make a change for the better.