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Send in a 💏 and my muse will kiss yours... 29: as a promise.
Every once in a while, other Avengers would contract fleeting bouts of sudden and irrevocable guilt about realizing how much of his work he did alone, and how little they knew about when he was in or out of the dimension. Sometimes that would just mean them stopping in to keep tabs on him and medicate their consciences - Luke and Danny, sometimes Wade, Peter and Matt often. Other times he would get calls or voicemails from people who didn’t feel comfortable enough to drop by themselves, at least not unannounced, but who felt the need to at least be sure he was still out there - Steve, Carol, and even Xavier when the other man wanted to kibitz but couldn’t afford to leave the school. Then there were those who he would catch surreptitiously Googling him, or monitoring the satellite surveillance feed and checking on the Sanctum to see if it was still standing and settling on that as being good enough until otherwise needed - Natasha, Bruce.
Tony was both all of the above and something considerably more heart felt and at times annoying. Because regardless of how many times Stephen warned him, he would swan in on any given Tuesday afternoon, leaning against the bannisters or whatever big relic Stephen was trying to move, asking him about his diet, his Netflix queue, why he was currently saturated in various forms of magical radiation, if he liked the new bodega on the corner.
Or, less pleasantly, on days like today whether or not he was really sure he wanted to face his current suicide mission alone. If he had to actually face it alone, or if he weren’t just hiding behind his own mystery enough to keep everyone else safely away. Tony always had been eerily good at seeing through him, but today, it was the unfortunate truth that he was being pressured by the former rather than the latter.
“You can’t save me this time, Tony,” he’d said with a slant smile, though the bilious downturn of the inventor’s mouth told him what he thought of that gallows humor. The whole reason Tony was there was to save him from himself, and to be denied that opportunity out of necessity was for him a noxious concept. “It’s somewhere only I can go, and something only I can do.”
“How are we going to know, if one of these days you just never come back and the new Witch of Wall Street doesn’t follow social media like you do, and drags your merry band of monks back to the dark ages?” the billionaire asked archly.
“Okay first, Wong likes Snapchat way too much for that to happen, no matter who took up Mastership of the New York Sanctum or the title of Sorcerer Supreme. And second, our merry band of monks kind of owes the Avengers at least several million emergency favors, which they’d hold to even if they didn’t like it.”
Predictably, Stark didn’t seem even the slightest bit mollified.
“This isn’t going to be the end of the line for me, Tony,” he said, hoping that at least some of his calm optimism would rub off on the other man. But he knew this wasn’t just a question about this time. This was a question about next time, and the time after that, and every time after that he had to drop off the face of the earth to do his “lone wand-slinger” act. “This is just a simple diplomatic clean-up meeting. No assassination attempts, no recreational poleaxing known to be prominent in this area.”
“Give me a break, Strange,” Tony griped, his expression nonetheless softer as he stepped toward him. “Just. Give me some sort of promise I’m not going to lose the one guy I have on the front line none of the rest of us can easily get to.” And the earnest concern in his tone alone made Stephen sober up.
“I promise. And if you don’t believe me.” Stephen stepped forward, giving Tony plenty of time to flinch back or push him away, cupping one cheek in one scar-lined palm, and planting a kiss to the other cheek. “Consider this a promise to follow that up with a proper conversation or Q&A session as soon as I get back. And I might be a slippery bastard, but even I’m not that much of a bastard,” he said as he drew back.
Tony chuckled, bright and disbelieving as he quirked a brow at Stephen. “I’m not so sure about that, doc. Because now you’re making me wait for that explanation, which might just be worse.”
“I think somehow we’ll both survive.”
