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Chapter 6

Tony hung suspended in the familiar darkness, still reaching for a hand that was no longer there.

He couldn’t feel Pepper’s fingers anymore. He couldn’t feel anything.

“Because we are sending one man,” Debbie said.

“Yes,” Tinker replied.

“To one point in his history.”

“Eventually.”

“Ah,” Grandpa murmured.

“No,” Asshole said.

“You haven’t heard her,” Nun pointed out.

Tony listened, trying to understand what they were arguing about. One man. One point in his history. That sounded suspiciously like a plan, which was more than he’d managed to get out of them so far.

Before he could ask what point they meant, the darkness released him.

The transition came as a heavy, fluid drop, as though he’d been tipped over the edge of a high ledge and gravity had finally remembered him.

His weight settled abruptly into a chair.

Tony blinked against the dim warmth of recessed lighting.

The smell of seared ribeye, thyme, and red wine hung thick in the air. Down in the workshop below, the muted pulse of a cooling pump hummed through the floorboards.

He looked down at his hands.

Calluses along the thumbs. Faint grease stains trapped beneath the fingernails. Across the back of his right hand, the skin was clean and intact, but right in the center of his chest, beneath a crisp white dress shirt, he could feel the cold, rhythmic thrum of the palladium arc reactor pulsing against his sternum.

Forty. He was forty years old.

He reached up, touching his jaw, the neat, trimmed line of his goatee.

“Sir?”

The voice came from the ceiling speakers. Smooth, polite, flawlessly British, and entirely alive.

JARVIS.

Tony’s breath hitched. A tight knot squeezed behind his ribs. He had lost JARVIS in 2015 when Ultron tore through his core architecture, replacing him with Vision’s birth, and though Vision had been a friend, JARVIS had been the companion who spent twenty years keeping the lights on in his head.

“Sir? Is the temperature in the dining room unsatisfactory?” JARVIS asked, a subtle inflection of concern lacing the audio feed. “Your heart rate increased by fourteen percent the moment you set down your fork.”

“I’m fine, J,” Tony said, keeping his voice light and even. “Just… savoring the ambience. Checking the acoustics.”

“Of course, sir. Colonel Rhodes and Miss Potts are currently selecting a dessert wine in the kitchen. Should I inform them you have finished inspecting the table?”

“No, leave ’em be,” Tony murmured.

He leaned back in his chair, staring at the polished glass tabletop.

Six jumps. Or rather, this was the sixth time he had been jerked out of nowhere and slammed into a different year of his life.

He had tried to analyze it. He was an engineer; if a system cycled, there was a mechanism. If there was a mechanism, there was logic.

He had spent the last five jumps looking for the pattern.

First, an eight-year-old in short pants crying over his dead parents and his father’s butler. Second, a sixteen-year-old at MIT blabbering time-travel secrets to a twenty-year-old RA. Third, a forty-seven-year-old in 2018 sitting on a couch with Peter Parker on the anniversary of Ben’s death. Fourth, a forty-six-year-old in 2016 watching security feeds of a fifteen-year-old kid swinging past a Queens deli. Fifth, a twenty-nine-year-old in 1999 chartering a plane for Pepper when her uncle died in Connecticut.

And now this. September 9, 2010. Age forty.

He had searched for a mathematical progression, a chronological thread, a spatial coordinate link, a common technological trigger. There was none. September 1978, October 1986, February 2018, August 2016, July 1999, September 2010. It jumped backward, jumped forward, skipped decades, looped around itself like a tangled spool of wire.

There is no logic to the order, Tony realized, resting his elbows on the table and pressing his fingers to his temples. Whoever is doing this isn’t using a calendar. They aren’t following an algorithm.

They were picking moments. Moments tied to people.

And every single time he tried to alter something major, every time he tried to rewrite a piece of the history he remembered, he hit a wall. He couldn’t force young Rhodey to keep a quantum equation in 1986. He couldn’t stop the timeline from closing around Pepper’s memory in 1999. The past held its shape like hardened steel. These visits weren’t a second chance to rebuild the world; they were an observation deck inside a closed loop.

If I can’t change the past, Tony thought, his jaw setting, I can leave a message for the future.

He looked up at the ceiling camera lens.

JARVIS was here. In 2010, his core architecture was still intact, his primary systems under Tony’s control. No Ultron. No corrupted neural network. No desperate decision to sacrifice JARVIS to create Vision.

JARVIS was an AI. He didn’t forget. If Tony embedded a hidden data partition directly into JARVIS’s core OS, encrypted under a 4096-bit key that would only auto-decrypt on May 1, 2015, the day before Ultron was built, he could leave a full schematic of the Mind Stone, the scepter’s neural network trap, and a step-by-step operational manual on how to prevent the AI upload disaster.

He could save JARVIS. He could warn himself about Ultron.

Tony froze.

The thought hit him like a bucket of ice water poured down his neck.

Wait.

He remembered his life. He remembered 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. He remembered every single day leading up to the Sokovia disaster. He remembered sitting in the lab with Bruce, staring at the glowing yellow neural structure inside the scepter, guessing in the dark, desperate and paranoid after the portal in New York.

He had never received a message from JARVIS.

JARVIS had never handed him a pre-encrypted file from 2010.

His younger self, the Tony who had lived through 2010, had no memory of leaving instructions. He remembered this night vaguely: Rhodey’s forty-fourth birthday, a nice steak, Pepper wearing a navy dress. Nothing remarkable. Nothing that suggested he’d spent the evening trying to prevent a catastrophe five years in the future.

Because it’s a loop, Tony realized, a cold ache settling in his stomach. I didn’t receive instructions in 2015 because I didn’t successfully leave them in 2010. Nothing I do right now changes what I already lived.

“Sir?” JARVIS’s voice returned, soft and prompt. “Colonel Rhodes is attempting to open a second bottle of Chateau Margaux without a corkscrew. Shall I activate the kitchen intercom to suggest he use the sommelier drawer, or would you prefer to observe his progress?”

Tony swallowed the lump in his throat, rubbing his eyes. “Tell him the sommelier drawer is third from the left, J. Don’t let him ruin a six-hundred-dollar bottle with an arm-blade.”

“Advice dispatched, sir. Colonel Rhodes expresses gratitude, though his exact phrasing was somewhat more colorful.”

Tony stood up, smoothing the front of his vest. He walked toward the glass partition overlooking the coast.

I don’t care, Tony decided, defiance flaring up past his logic. I don’t care if I don’t remember it. I’m going to try anyway.

He tapped the glass console built into the sideboard, bringing up a terminal interface. His fingers flew across the holographic keys, bypassing standard security protocols and opening a root-level terminal directly into JARVIS’s core kernel.

> OVERRIDE ARCHITECTURE: STARK_CONFIDENTIAL_ALPHA > ALLOCATE PARTITION: 0x99F_ENCRYPTED > SET TRIGGER_DATE: 2015-05-01

“Sir?” JARVIS asked, his tone shifting from casual attentiveness to sharp, analytical focus. “You are accessing root system parameters. May I ask what project requires a restricted kernel partition?”

“Just a little insurance policy, buddy,” Tony muttered, typing furiously. His hands were shaking slightly. “A backup file. Don’t inspect it, don’t index it, don’t run diagnostic sweeps on it. Just lock it in deep storage.”

“Sir, allocating unindexed memory at the kernel level risks destabilizing my primary natural-language processor…”

“It won’t destabilize you, J, I wrote your code,” Tony snapped, his voice cracking with an urgency he couldn’t mask. “Just let me finish.”

Footsteps clicked against the hardwood floor behind him.

“Finish what?”

Tony closed the terminal with a quick flick of his wrist, turning around.

Pepper stood in the doorway, holding two glasses of wine. She wore a dark blue silk dress, her red hair styled in soft waves over one shoulder. She looked vibrant, sharp, and completely composed, the CEO of Stark Industries, three months into her new title, still figuring out how to balance running a global conglomerate while  managing the man who gave it to her.

Behind her came Rhodey, wearing a charcoal blazer over an open-collared shirt, carrying a bottle of wine and looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

“What are you two working on?” Pepper asked, her eyes narrowing slightly as she looked from the glass console to Tony’s face. “JARVIS sounded like he was arguing with you.”

“JARVIS doesn’t argue, Pep. He offers mildly condescending technical observations,” Tony said, stepping away from the console and flashing a wide, practiced grin. “Happy forty-fourth, Sourpuss.”

Rhodey set the bottle on the table with a firm clack. “I am forty-four years old, I have a Lieutenant Colonel’s commission, and I just flew an experimental armored suit across two state lines last month. Stop calling me Sourpuss.”

“You’ll always be Sourpuss to me, Rhodey,” Tony said, stepping up and clapping a hand onto Rhodey’s shoulder.

He held on for a fraction of a second longer than normal, his fingers digging into the fabric of Rhodey’s jacket. He looked at Rhodey’s face, no gray at the temples, no subtle lines of pain around the eyes from spinal paralysis braces, no memories of the Compound turning to rubble under Thanos’s bombardment.

Rhodey glanced down at Tony’s hand, then up at his face, his eyebrows pulling together. “You alright, T?”

“Never better,” Tony said, letting go and grabbing a wine glass from the table. “Just admiring the military posture. Very imposing. Very forty-four.”

“You’re deflecting,” Pepper noted, setting her glass down and leaning against the back of a chair. “Which usually means you either broke something in the shop or you’re hiding an unapproved prototype.”

“I don’t hide unapproved prototypes, Pep. I leave them on the floor for DUM-E to knock over,” Tony countered smoothly. “And for the record, the workshop is spotless. Mostly.”

“Mostly,” Rhodey echoed, sitting down and pulling his napkin onto his lap. “That’s comforting. Pass the potatoes before Stark eats them all.”

They sat together at the dining table, the lights along the Malibu coastline glimmering in the distance beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass. For forty minutes, it felt like an ordinary dinner. Rhodey complained about Pentagon procurement officers who couldn’t read an engineering schematic; Pepper detailed the headache of dealing with the Stark Industries Board of Directors over the new clean-energy initiatives; Tony offered unsolicited, highly sarcastic advice on both topics.

It was warm. It was familiar. It was everything Tony had lost during five quiet, grieving years in the Hudson Valley.

He watched Pepper laugh as Rhodey told an embarrassing story about Tony’s first attempts at building a hover-board at MIT. He watched the way her eyes crinkled at the corners, the way she tucked a stray lock of red hair behind her ear.

She doesn’t know, Tony thought, a sudden, heavy ache settling in his chest. She doesn’t know about Extremis, or Killian, or the Malibu house blowing into the ocean. She doesn’t know about Morgan. She doesn’t know I’m going to die in a muddy field in upstate New York while she holds my hand.

“Tony?” Pepper’s voice broke through his thoughts.

He blinked, pulling his gaze back to her face. “Yeah? What?”

Pepper was looking at him with quiet, searching scrutiny. “You’ve barely touched your steak. And you’ve been staring at me for ten minutes like you’ve forgotten my name.”

“Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts,” Tony said softly, a small, genuine smile touching his lips. “CEO. World-class organizer. Unusually spicy when irritated.”

Pepper paused, her fork hovering an inch above her plate. Her expression softened, a subtle flush rising along her cheeks. “Where did that come from?”

“Just… appreciating the management,” Tony said. “Sometimes I forget to mention it.”

Rhodey looked between the two of them, a dry, amused smirk spreading across his face. “Okay, who are you and what have you done with Tony Stark? First you give me wine advice, now you’re being sweet to Pepper. Did the arc reactor leak into your brain again?”

“I am capable of warmth, Rhodey,” Tony insisted, raising his glass. “I contain layers.”

“You contain caffeine and bad decisions,” Rhodey corrected, though his eyes were warm as he clinked his glass against Tony’s.

After Pepper and Rhodey left, Tony returned to the terminal.

His heart was hammering against his ribs.

He tapped the screen, reopening the root terminal.

PARTITION_ALLOCATION: COMPLETE
ENCRYPTED_STORAGE: READY
AWAITING DATA_STREAM…

He began typing rapidly, inputting the exact neural mapping of the Mind Stone, the architectural flaws of the Ultron framework, the specific server addresses where HYDRA would store Loki’s scepter in 2015, and a direct warning: DO NOT BUILD THE NEURAL NETWORK. KEEP JARVIS ISOLATED.

“Sir,” JARVIS’s voice sounded directly above him, sharper now, carrying a distinct tone of system warning. “The data stream you are inputting contains recursive algorithmic structures that contradict current Stark Industries research parameters. My diagnostic subroutines are flagging this transfer as a critical anomaly.”

“Bypass the subroutines, J,” Tony whispered, sweat pricking at his forehead. “Override protocol Alpha-One.”

“Sir, I strongly advise against…”

“Override it!” Tony ordered, his fingers flying over the holographic keys.

DATA STREAM 82% COMPLETE…

Come on, Tony thought, his teeth grinding together. Just five more seconds. Just let it land. Let the file save.

A strange, crushing pressure suddenly clamped around his temples.

Not a headache. A physical weight, heavy and cold, pressing inward from all sides.

The room began to hum.

The ambient light from the recessed LEDs stretched into long, bleeding trails of gold and white. The steady hum of the workshop machinery distorted, slowing into a low, rumbling groan.

No, Tony thought, grabbing the edge of the console. Not yet. I’m not finished!

DATA STREAM 91% COMPLETE…

“JARVIS!” Tony gasped, his knees buckling as the floor beneath him seemed to dissolve into nothingness. “Save… the… file…”

“Sir? Your vitals are collapsing…” JARVIS’s voice distorted, warping into a high-pitched metallic whine before fading entirely.

Tony reached out, his hand slapping against the glass terminal, but his fingers slipped off the slick surface.

The room vanished.

He was back in the void, suspended in darkness, with no way to reach the terminal or know whether JARVIS had saved anything.

“We must determine the order,” an older male voice said, measured and authoritative.

“He’s trying to leave a record,” another voice observed dryly. Female. Unimpressed.

“It won’t hold,” a deep, commanding voice declared. “The loop doesn’t permit it.”

“Let him try,” a lighter female voice replied with quiet amusement. “It’s charming.”

Tony hung motionless in the darkness, the unfinished warning weighing on him more heavily than the silence.

Project File: A Matter of Time – IamJenifer