#fanworkstuff

“Where were you?” Tony demands. He’s on his feet, and he doesn’t remember standing. He presses a hand to his side. Even after two months, his abdomen still aches where Thanos had impaled him, though the wound is long since healed.

The figure, the sorcerer, steps into the space. Strange looks awful--haggard and malnourished and somehow still glowing with that sense of knowing that had drawn Tony to him once, but now just makes him sick. Strange’s whole form is soaked in ash. He tracks it in from the barren land outside into the meticulously cleaned threshold of Tony’s ship, Tony’s lair. It feels like an invasion.

“Not far,” Strange says. He rests against the wall, his eyes fluttering closed.

“Not far? It’s been two months, wizard!”

Two months. Two months of dark anger and frozen loneliness, two months of being the last creature left alive. Two months of that hope Tony had tried so hard to coax dwindling to nothing--two months of slowly realizing that Strange hadn’t been lying. It truly is the whole universe, gone. The unlucky fifty percent didn’t happen to be everyone on Titan except the two of them, no. The two of them are all that’s left.

Tony still wakes up clawing at the ash he can feel on hands every single morning. He still wakes up praying this was all a cruel joke, a twisted reality. And he’s still wrong. Every single time.

This is the world he lives in, now.

The world this wizard chose.

“You were productive,” Strange says. He looks under his brows at the spaceship, stitched together under Tony’s hands for the last eight weeks.

“Yeah, I was,” Tony spits. “And where were you?”

“I told you.” Strange just looks at him, face impassive. Tony used to be certain there was a soul underneath there somewhere, after he’d seen it shining in sorrow and empathy. Now he isn’t sure. “I wasn’t far.”

That familiar, desperate rage curls through Tony’s throat. He jerks forward. His hands curl into fists, one of them still coated in nanotech. “You left me alone, Strange.”

Strange turns to face him fully--and Tony can see, then, the waxy burn scar that creeps around his left eye. “We both know I had to.”

He’s right--but Tony’s sick and tired of hearing about what he had to do. He’s sick of dreaming about those impossible eyes flickering to him as Strange offers the end of the world to Thanos on a silver platter. He’s sick of remembering the way Strange had knelt and watched Quill and Nebula and (Peter Peter Peter--) dissolve into nothingness, repeating “there was no other way” like that made any difference.

Tony had waited for Strange to disappear, too. Waited for there to be some fairness in the universe, some justice. But Strange hadn’t. He’d knelt there, solid and real and alive, and looked at Tony like he knew what was about to happen.

He’d let Tony take the shot. But he hadn’t let Tony finish the job, drawing one last handful of the ash that was all that remained of his Cloak through his fingers, and disappearing in a flash of orange magic. And he hadn’t come back.

He’d been gone, all the days when Tony needed to kill him. All the days when Tony needed him alive.

Tony should kill him now and complete his transition into the monster he can feel building beneath his skin.

Should kill him now and be truly and completely alone.

Tony turns away, shoulders falling. He twins his hands around the ship’s controls again, feeling the way the newly repaired engines purr at his commands. “I should leave you here,” he says.

Strange doesn’t answer. Tony wonders if he agrees.

There’s no one else in the universe.

Tony should leave and return to Earth to scavenge what little hope he can. Because he might be clinging to the dregs of his spirit, might be coughing up ash, but there’s one thing that the end of the world can’t strip from Tony Stark. It can’t take the fundamental in his ribs. He’s going to fix this. There’s no question in his soul, no question in his future--he’s going to fix this, or he’s going to die trying.

And there’s no one else in the universe.

“I’m taking off tomorrow morning,” Tony says, his voice flat and resigned. “Be on the ship if you want. See if I care.”

Then he turns on his heel and leaves to check the engines.

-----

Stephen only lets his form crumple when Stark has gone.

When the man’s footsteps are far enough away that Stephen’s constantly ringing ears can no longer pick him out, he finally sinks down against the side of the wall and buries his head beneath his arms. It’s so much warmer in here. Stephen swears he can sense the air touched by Stark’s body heat. Stephen’s even starting to shiver again, which is remarkable.

When Stark is gone, he tucks his shaking hands into his hair and lets the Count spill from his lips again. It isn’t pride that keeps him upright around Stark. It’s self-preservation, pure and simple and animalistic. If Stephen looks dangerous, looks like he might be some sort of threat, Stark is less likely to kill him. If Stephen offers some sort of use to the man, Stark is less likely to kill him.

Not that he shouldn’t.

But the universe isn’t about justice, anymore. Stephen doesn’t get the luxury of being killed by Tony Stark, of being redeemed. He has to save the universe.

He always has to save the universe.

Stephen sits and waits, listens for the next Scene. He prepares his lines, letting them assemble in his mind beneath the Count. The hours slip by to the deafening ringing in his ears. Slowly, the numbness starts to fade from his extremities, warmth sliding through his veins like fire.

It hurts. It hurts, and so it feels wonderful. Stephen sighs, clenching his fists tight to shock the pain intense enough he can feel it in his shoulders.

Then he lifts his head and looks around the ship. He’s left ashy footprints where he walked--after two months alone in Titan’s sands, he practically wears the stuff. He’s still alone--

Of course you are. There’s no one else, remember?

--and so he Counts out loud. He’s up to five million, one hundred and fifty-six thousand, seven hundred thirty-six, now, after two months. He has an infinite distance left to go. An infinite number of lives he took. They ring in his ears, even still.

Stephen stumbles a circuit around the room of the ship. This is the largest area, and it will do well for what he needs. Stephen picks out five relatively evenly spaced areas of flat metal. He scrapes some of the ash off his hand, then disconnectedly pats himself down until he finds the scabbed cut on his thigh were he’d sliced himself falling down one of Titan’s ravines. Digging his fingernails beneath the scab, he slicks his hand with blood.

Then he starts to write.

He’s on the fifth sigil when the voice shocks through his concentration. “What are you doing?” Stark’s furious tone demands.

The Count pauses itself in Stephen’s mind, and he buries thoughts and anticipation and frozen, frozen fear beneath the practiced lines of the Scene. “Blood runes,” Stephen says simply.

Footsteps tell Stephen Stark has stalked closer to him. “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“They’re wards,” Stephen explains. “They complete an aura of protection. The strongest there is.”

“What do they have to protect against? You killed everything in the universe, remember?”

Stephen doesn’t flinch. “The energy of the creatures who died remains. It will manifest, when there’s no life around to absorb it. Much of what forms will be vengeful, built on the fear and anger of the last moments of the universe.”

“So they want to kill you.”

Stephen finishes the rune with a flick of his wrist. “Yes.”

Stark doesn’t dispute that they should. “But they aren’t a danger to me.”

“That’s correct,” Stephen says. His voice is empty. “With water and elbow work, these runes can be scratched away without issue, and you’ll be rid of me.”

Stark inhales--a shuddering breath of rage that makes Stephen’s shoulders tense instinctually. “I don’t let magic do my dirty work, Strange,” he hisses. “I don’t load the gun and hand it off to someone else. I don’t give the Stone away and let someone else snap.”

He scoffs, and its full of enough disgust that Stephen almost thinks he’s back in the cold of Titan again. “Do whatever you want,” Stark says. He turns, already stretched to his breaking point in Stephen’s presence.

Stephen waits for the last line. The end of the Scene.

“Finish your runes. Live, if that’s what you want.”

Stark’s words echo even after he’s gone.

Stephen looks after him for a long, long moment, trying to swallow down the bitter disappointment that Stark didn’t just kill him.