Ice Blue
My gift for @understarkercover for the @starkersecretsanta gift exchange. I really hope you like this!
Post-Endgame, Peter is 18 and has spent every waking moment trying to find a way to get Tony back. He finally settled on building a portal to find a Tony from another world in the multiverse, Earth-616 to be exact, but things don’t quite go according to plan.
((I had accidentally written a much longer dub/noncon ending because I didn’t remember at first that it’s something they didn’t want. I may eventually post that, but I wanted to be super respectful of their wishes and cut that ending for this iteration of the fic. I decided to leave it much more open ended in this version))
cw/tw: starker, Peter is 18, angst, fear/anxiety, Superior Iron Man, kiss
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It had taken him weeks to get it right. So many perfectly good bananas wasted for the cause. He’d needed something living to test out the portal, and May had just bought a whole bunch of them, so they seemed like the perfect test subject.
Now, though, staring down the face of this long, ebbing tunnel, he regretted his decision not to do a little more testing. See, the thing is that Peter hadn’t actually tested it on something that wasn’t just peel and potassium. And he was suddenly realizing the myriad of things that could, and probably would go wrong.
Ned had encouraged him to try it on one of the science department’s lab mice, but Peter couldn’t bear to see them locked in their cages, so how could he even think about sending a helpless, defenseless creature into a portal of his own making? He shuddered at the thought, wiping back tears. He didn’t know if they were for the mice, for Tony, or maybe even for himself. He didn’t have time to think too hard about it. He knew he’d lose his nerve to step through if he did.
See, the thing about bananas is they have no real way to return to this dimension, so he could only hope they’d made it through safely. If his calculations were correct, and they usually were, he’d be stepping into an alternate dimension, one that Dr. Strange visited often, Earth-616 he’d called it.
Dr. Strange had said it was almost entirely like their own universe, save for small details. Clint was apparently blonde and had an over-fondness for purple, which Peter could hardly imagine. And Dr. Strange had mentioned one time that Tony’s eyes were blue, not brown, but he was still the arrogant asshole they all loved.
Blue. Peter had fallen asleep every night since the battle dreaming of blue eyes. It wasn’t his Tony, he knew it wouldn’t be the same, but he had to try. If this Tony was anything compared to Peter’s, he had to fucking try.
And according to Dr. Strange, 616 Tony was still alive and annoying the fuck out of him every time he went to visit that universe. Peter had grasped on to any small details about Earth-616 that he could, eager to gather information, but also trying his best to not seem too desperate.
Thankfully Dr. Strange was too preoccupied with an ancient text he’d been spending weeks decoding to really give Peter too much thought. He’d answer Peter’s questions distractedly, and then shoo him away, vexed that this one book was giving him so many difficulties.
Peter had collected all that info, created a unified plan based on some old arc reactor teleporter plans he’d found in Tony’s lab, and thus the portal was built. A few weeks spent fine tuning his calculations, and he was finally going to take the plunge tonight.
He shivered, adjusting his backpack on his shoulders and steadied himself, trying not to freak out about what he was about to do.
Don’t think about how this is really stupid and you might get stuck there, if you can even get there, and that if your math is even one millimeter off you could get spliced into a trillion pieces and oh my god I missed that one question on the Calc test last week. What if I made a mistake on this? Nope, nope, blue eyes. Just breathe and think about blue eyes. Blue eyes.
And with a shaking breath, Peter crossed into the unknown, vanishing like a blip in the night.
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Brightness. It was almost blinding compared to his dim bedroom back in Queens.
He didn’t know where he was, but it certainly wasn’t his room back home.
Blue eyes, that’s what he’d been thinking about as he crossed over. It was certainly possible that intention could play a factor in the math of multiverses. Had his preoccupation with that one thought altered the portal?
But no, he realized, his eyes finally focusing enough to take in the world around him. He was in a room, bright white and sterile, a clean off-putting design that felt alien. Everything too pristine, untouched.
He looked around for some sign of life, some indication of where the hell he’d ended up, but saw nothing besides modern uncomfortable furniture and a white, perfectly made bed.
But just as he was crossing to the door, something caught his eye, a math textbook from 2 years ago that looked oddly familiar, tucked under the bed. He pulled it out, immediately recognizing the crumpled corner from when Ned had dropped it out his window as a joke gone too far. It was his… but why was it here?
This must be his room, Peter realized. The portal wasn’t made to travel you to another location, just another universe.
But why was it so... different?
Peter heard a ringing, a low dulcet chime coming from a stark white phone sitting on the dresser next to the bed. Extremis Industries, the brand label proclaimed. The caller ID said Tony.
He stared at it, transfixed in horror and glee, still too shocked to process it all. Tony was alive in this universe. He had to answer.
“H-hello?” Peter stuttered out, mentally kicking himself for sounding so childish on the phone.
“Peter, I’ve been waiting a long time for you to arrive.” The voice was lower, smoother and more silky. But it was, unmistakably, Tony.
“Tony! Oh my god, Tony it’s really you!” Peter felt tears welling up, willing himself not to let them fall.
Tony let out a laugh, something deep and more biting than the Tony he knew, but he brushed the thought aside as he launched into a rambling explanation of what had happened and why he was here. This Tony seemed all too aware of what Peter was saying, as if he were merely humoring Peter’s explanation, but Peter didn’t care. He was just so glad to be able to talk to Tony again.
Before long Tony was offering to send over a car to whisk him back to his offices, where they could talk in person. Peter eagerly agreed, desperate to see Tony, to hug him tight. He tried not to think about all the other things he wanted, things he’d never had the courage to ask for with his Tony. Maybe he’d be brave enough with this one. Maybe this Tony would want all the same things he did.
Within 5 minutes a buzz alerted Peter to the sleek white car waiting on the street for him. A stocky driver ushered him out of the apartment, which was an equally sleek white building, no longer the brownstone he knew so well. He vaguely wondered where Happy was, and why the streets looked so… dirty in comparison to the clinical design of his building, but before he could really process it, he was whisked into the back of the car, and the too-dark tinted windows obscured his view.
He settled into the back seat, trying hard not to fidget, thinking through everything that had happened, everything he wanted to say, trying to shove down the delicious excitement of maybe, this time, finally having the relationship with Tony that he wanted, not just a student learning from him, but an equal, a peer, a lover. He shivered, the thrill of kissing him, touching him, fucking him, running through his mind. Maybe this time things could be right.
And then before he realized it, they were stopping in front of a massive building, looming like a warning in the back of his skull. Dr. Strange had said there were only little differences in this world, hair color and little personality traits. But this world seemed so different. Too different.
He shoved those thoughts down once more, choosing instead to focus on his goal. Tony. Blue eyes. This was all happening so fast, too fast, but he didn’t want it to stop. So he had to keep moving forward.
An elevator, sleek doors closing soundlessly, and suddenly he was soaring a thousand feet in the air, his stomach dropping as the floors raced past, too fast for his mind to process.
With a quiet ding, the elevator stopped, opening onto a seemingly empty hallway. White and modern and empty, not unlike his room back home. It felt cold, lifeless, and Peter felt himself growing even more nervous as he made his way down the hallway.
Just as he was wondering where to go next, a figure appeared. White armor, with black undercasing and an electric blue glow radiating from it. The man turned, and he saw it was Tony. Or at least this universe’s version of him.
Without thinking, Peter ran to him, held him tight and finally let the tears he’d been holding onto fall, sobbing into Tony’s chest. He was taller than the Tony Peter had known, more muscular too, it seemed. But he held Peter tight, like his Tony would’ve, and in that moment he didn’t care that things were so different, because Tony was the one constant, the thing in his life that would always be the same, right?
Joy turned to confusion as Tony ducked his head down, grasping onto Peter’s shaking chin, holding him steady as he kissed Peter. He didn’t know who this version of Tony was, but he was just so grateful to have some iteration of Tony back in his life.
“You’re here now, safe with me, and you’re not going anywhere been waiting a long time for you to show up,” Tony said with an icy glint in his eyes.
Peter swallowed and nodded. This may not be the Tony he wanted, but something was better than nothing, right? He sure hoped he was right.
