Tony Stark woke up with a start.
He was shivering violently, his body wracked with tremors he could not control. The cave around him was dark, damp, and freezing, frost coating the stone walls.
Every day, he hoped to wake up back in bed with Pepper, praying that everything that had happened was just a nightmare. But now—
When Tony closed his eyes, he saw it all again. Peter's death at the hands of that flaming-skulled demon, the kid's screams cut short as green hellfire consumed him. Bruce, killed by a thousand orange spears that materialized out of nowhere, piercing through the Hulk like he was nothing. Rhodey… oh God.
"AAAAAHHHHH!" Tony screamed in agony as he sat up violently, his hands clutching his head.
He was still covered in what remained of his armor. The Mark 50 suit was damaged, badly damaged, but it was still functional enough to protect him from the elements. The nanites were running low on power, barely maintaining basic functions. Life support. Temperature regulation. Minimal structural integrity. That was it.
He had woken up here in the biting cold days ago. From what he could gather from the stars and the suit's failing sensors, he was somewhere in far northern Canada. And he was pretty sure he was not even in his own time. Sometime in the past. How far back, he could not be certain. Centuries, maybe more.
Tony stood up slowly, his muscles protesting, and walked toward the cave entrance. He was determined to go out and explore. The heavy snowfall that had trapped him for the first day seemed to have ended.
Tony stepped out into the wilderness.
The snowy forest stretched before him, endless white broken only by dark pine trees heavy with snow. The silence was oppressive, broken occasionally by the distant howl of wolves and the crack of branches collapsing under the weight of ice. Animal tracks crisscrossed the snow: deer, rabbit, and something larger he could not identify.
"Great," Tony muttered hoarsely. "Stranded in the Ice Age, barely alive, and no coffee too. Just another Tuesday for Tony Stark."
He walked into the forest.
He was able to gather firewood: dead branches that had not rotted yet and bark that could serve as kindling. He spent hours collecting enough to last through the brutal nights, dragging it back to the cave entrance.
After that, he searched for materials to build a proper shelter near the cave. Branches, pine boughs for insulation, anything that could block the wind.
He spent the rest of the day cutting down wood, shaping nanites into an axe. The repulsors were broken. No flying, and only one still functioned well enough for limited blasting.
The next day, he began constructing a proper shelter near the cave entrance. A lean-to design, reinforced with rocks and packed snow.
It was funny, in a dark way. His life had changed drastically in a cave. The cave in Afghanistan where he had built the first Iron Man suit, where he had become something more than just a weapons dealer. And here he was, having lost everything and everyone, back in a cave once again.
He laughed, a dark and hollow sound, as tears rolled down his cheeks.
By day three, he had a proper shelter. He had also been eating rabbit he caught using crude snares fashioned from salvaged armor wire. The meat was gamey and tough, but it kept him alive.
Over the next few days, he created better traps for rabbits and even managed to kill a deer. Not something he had done before, but hey, new experience. The armor's remaining repulsor made it quick, at least. Humane. He butchered it, trying not to think about how far he had fallen from private chefs and five-star restaurants.
At night, when the shelter was finished and the fire was burning, he watched the recordings of the battle.
The suit had captured everything before its systems failed. Every death. Every moment of the invasion.
Nine beings had invaded Earth.
Tony watched all the footage, analyzing all nine invaders frame by frame, pixel by pixel. The Black Skull with his symbiote. The monster with his green flames. Apocalypse, who could manipulate matter on a molecular scale. The feral Berserker. Sadurang the sorcerer. Uranos. The fiery bird bitch. The one in orange who had killed the Hulk. Doom, someone had called him.
And finally, of course, his own father.
Howard Stark.
The Iron Inquisitor.
How was he even supposed to process that?
Hello, Tony.
Bye, Tony.
Tony tried not to think of him. It was not his father. It was some twisted version of him. His father was an asshole, but not evil. Never evil.
All of this proved something. Something Tony had only heard about in theory before.
The multiverse was real.
They were multiversal invaders.
And many of them were simply too powerful. They had destroyed the Avengers as if it were nothing. Especially the ones who arrived last, the fiery bird bitch and the orange man. Even Bruce and Thor had not stood a chance. None of them had.
Tony replayed the words of the tall, massive gray man, Apocalypse, he thought, who had told the others, "This world was weak. We should leave for the next."
Tony began to theorize, connecting dots, analyzing patterns.
They were hunting Avengers. All across the multiverse.
Different universes. Different versions of Earth. But always targeting the Avengers specifically.
He began to question why.
Why would they do this? What was the reason? What could they possibly gain from systematically destroying Avengers across infinite realities?
Were they already in another universe, hunting another set of Avengers? Another him? Another Rhodey? Another Peter?
The thought of Peter broke something in Tony.
He was just a kid. Sixteen years old. He had his whole life ahead of him. And it was Tony's fault. The kid was there because Tony had brought him. Tony had recruited him, trained him, put him in harm's way.
"I'm sorry, kid," Tony whispered into the darkness, tears streaming down his face, freezing on his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."
He went to sleep with tears in his eyes, the fire burning low, alone in a frozen wasteland with nothing but his guilt and his grief.
========
Tony woke up the next morning to sounds outside his shelter.
He was instantly alert, adrenaline spiking as he commanded the suit's nanotech to ensure the one functioning repulsor was ready. His heart pounded as he listened. Footsteps, multiple, crunching through the snow. Low, guttural growls.
He stepped outside cautiously, assuming it was another wolf he could scare off.
Instead, he saw monsters.
There were five of them. Tall, gaunt figures with pale blue-white skin that looked like ice or crystallized frost. They had elongated limbs, clawed hands, and faces that were almost human, with black eyes and mouths full of sharp teeth. They wore what appeared to be armor made of the same ice-like material.
With them were dog-like creatures. Massive, wolf-sized beasts covered in the same ice armor, frost vapor spilling from their mouths as they sniffed the air. Their eyes were the same empty black.
"Okay," Tony muttered, backing toward the cave. "Ice demons. Sure. Why not? Just add it to the list of shit that's happened this week."
The creatures noticed the shelter in front of the cave, clear evidence of human presence.
They turned toward Tony, their black eyes locking onto him.
Then they attacked.
Tony raised his hand and fired. The repulsor blast hit the first one in the chest, shattering its ice armor and sending it flying backward into a tree. The second lunged, but Tony blasted it point-blank, the creature exploding into frozen shards.
One of the ice dogs leapt at him with terrifying speed. Tony could not dodge in time. It slammed into him, knocking him to the ground, its jaws snapping for his throat. He shaped the nanotech into a knife and stabbed upward, driving the blade into the creature's neck. It shrieked, a horrible sound, and collapsed on top of him, freezing blood spilling across his damaged armor.
Two more ice demons rushed him. Tony rolled, came up on one knee, and fired at both. The first took the blast to the head and dropped. The second dodged, impossibly fast, and raked its claws across Tony's shoulder. The armor held, but barely.
Tony fired again, and this one finally fell.
"What the fuck, what the fuck," Tony gasped, standing and staring at the corpses.
He stood there for a moment, breathing hard, then made a decision. He needed to leave. His mind worked overtime. He had clearly wandered into some kind of demon territory, or something close to it. More would come.
Tony began walking south, away from whatever frozen hell had spawned those creatures.
He traveled for four days through the wilderness. The journey was brutal. Endless snow, freezing temperatures, and minimal food.
On the third day, he saw more of them. Another pack, four ice demons and two of the dogs. He managed to kill them all, but it cost him. More nanites were damaged, and his left arm barely functioned anymore.
On the fifth day, he encountered a large group of them, at least twenty, attacking a village of natives.
The village was small, maybe fifty people, built along a frozen riverbank. Crude shelters made of animal hide and wood dotted the area. The villagers fought back with spears and bows, but they were losing. The ice demons tore through their defenses, killing anyone they could reach.
Tony did not hesitate. He rushed in to defend them.
The battle was chaos. Tony used repulsor blasts to target creatures threatening women and children. He formed a nano-sword to kill any that came too close.
With the help of the warriors of the tribe, brave men and women fighting with stone-tipped spears and desperate courage, they were able to repel the attackers.
One of the ice demons struck Tony hard across the head with a club-like arm. His vision went white, then black around the edges. He nearly lost consciousness, stumbling.
Strong hands caught him. The tribal warriors pulled him back, protecting him as he collapsed.
When Tony woke, he was inside one of the shelters, lying on furs near a fire. His armor had retracted into the reactor.
He spent the next few days recovering, drifting in and out of consciousness.
The tribe cared for him. They brought him food and water and tended to his injuries as best they could with their limited resources. They treated him with reverence, almost worship.
Tony could not speak with them. The language barrier could have been solved with FRIDAY, but she was gone. He improvised with signs and gestures, pointing and miming. It was frustrating, but slowly, he learned some basics.
The chief's name sounded like "Nakota," a broad-shouldered man in his forties with scars covering his arms and a kind face.
There was a young warrior named something like "Kitchi," maybe twenty years old. He was eager, always asking Tony questions he could not answer, trying to learn about the "magic" Tony had used, or at least what Tony thought he was asking.
There was also an older woman, the tribe's healer or shaman, Tony guessed. They called her "Nokomis." She brought him strange herbal remedies that actually helped, muttering what sounded like prayers as she worked.
They believed he was a warrior sent by their gods. Tony tried to explain that he was not, but they either did not understand or did not want to. To them, he had arrived with strange power and saved their village. What else could he be but divine?
On the third day of his recovery, Tony sat with Nakota and Kitchi, watching the perimeter where warriors stood guard. More ice creatures had been spotted in the distance. The tribe was under constant threat.
Tony decided he needed to repay their kindness. These people had saved his life. They were defenseless against creatures that were clearly supernatural or otherworldly. And from what he had observed, the attacks were becoming more frequent.
He needed to fix his armor. Properly.
He just needed to figure out how to do that with Stone Age resources and no power source.
Tony Stark had built the first Iron Man suit in a cave with a box of scraps. He could do this.
He was fucking Tony Stark.
Yeah, he could fucking do this.
========
The first thing Tony did was create a makeshift forge, upgrading the tribe's extremely low-tech setup, if it could even be called a forge. It was basically just a fire pit with a few stones arranged around it. Tony rebuilt it with improved airflow, designing animal-hide bellows, rearranging the stones to concentrate heat more efficiently, and creating a crude but functional workspace.
The tribe helped him constantly, seeing that Tony planned to end the threat for good. They brought him materials, tended the fire day and night, and watched him work with fascination and hope.
Next, he had to figure out how to patch the damaged parts of the armor, which was nearly impossible with the resources available. The nanites were damaged, and he had no way to synthesize new materials.
He was stuck there for some time, and it was during his third week in the village that he found the solution, something discovered completely by accident.
The people had begun cutting away the icy armor from the demon corpses, realizing it was incredibly hard and durable. They tried to make weapons and tools from it, but had little success shaping the material because it was so difficult to work with.
Tony helped them to pass the time, using his nano-sword to cut the material more easily than they could.
That was when it happened.
As he sliced through one of the armor plates with his nanite blade, something strange occurred. The nanites bonded easily with the demon ice-chitin, as if they recognized it as compatible. Even though it was clearly organic or magical in nature, he watched the ice material integrate with the nanites almost seamlessly.
Tony stared at it for a long moment.
"That's it," he whispered.
He could recreate parts of the armor using the demon ice-chitin. The nanites could bond with it, integrate it, use it as a structural framework. It would not be as advanced as his original suit, but it would work.
Tony began repairing his armor immediately.
He spent days harvesting the best pieces of demon armor, heating them in his improved forge, and shaping them with nanite-assisted precision.
CLANG.
The hammer struck the anvil, a flat stone he had designated for metalwork.
CLANG.
Tony shaped the icy chitin, softening it with heat, hardening it with cold, learning the material's properties through trial and error.
CLANG.
Sweat poured down his face despite the freezing temperatures. His hands were raw and blistered, but he kept working.
Tony took the pieces he had shaped and arranged them on the suit's frame. The armor lay disassembled before him.
He let the remaining functional nanites do their work, spreading across the demon-ice pieces, bonding with them at a molecular level, integrating the organic, magical material into the suit's systems. It was slow and painstaking, but it worked.
The ice-chitin responded to the nanites' programming, becoming part of the armor, reinforcing damaged sections and replacing what had been lost.
When he finished, Tony stood before a suit that looked as if it were made of ice. Crystalline blue-white plating covered it, with darker veins running through where the nanites had integrated most heavily. It still held the familiar shape of an Iron Man suit, but it looked like something forged in the heart of winter itself.
"Mark 51," Tony muttered, running his hand over the cold surface. "Ice Age Man. Why not."
Children and many others from the village gathered to see the new armor, surrounding it with awe and reverence. They touched it carefully, whispering prayers, clearly believing this was divine craftsmanship.
Nakota spoke in his language, gesturing to the armor and then to the sky. Tony did not need a translation. The chief was calling him a gift from the gods again.
Tony did not have much time to admire his work.
Scouts ran into the village, shouting urgently and pointing toward the valley.
Kitchi rushed to Tony, gesturing frantically. Through signs and desperate pantomime, he made it clear. An army of demons was in the valley. Dozens of them. Maybe more.
Tony immediately donned the armor.
He began directing the warriors through gestures and quick drawings in the snow, laying out a battle plan. They would stay behind, protect the village, and defend the women and children. He would go out and kill as many demons as he could before they reached the settlement.
Nakota tried to protest, but Tony shook his head firmly.
Tony ran out into the open, the ice-chitin plating moving smoothly, responding perfectly to his commands.
He spotted three of them first, scouts moving ahead of the main force.
Tony raised his left hand. Instead of a repulsor blast, something else happened. Icicles formed from the ice-chitin material, razor sharp, launched by the nanites as they unlocked some hidden magical property of the chitin. They fired in a spread, and all three struck true, impaling the scouts through their chests.
His right hand fired the repulsor blast, the one good repulsor.
"Come on!" Tony shouted as he ran deeper into the forest. "Is that all you've got?!"
More of them appeared. Five. Ten. Twenty. They turned toward him, recognizing a threat.
Tony went on a rampage through the forest.
He killed as many as he could, pouring all his rage into every strike and every blast. All the pain he had been holding inside. Peter's death. Rhodey's death. The destruction of the Avengers. Being stranded, broken, and alone.
BLAM. The repulsor blew another one's head clean off.
The demons kept coming, and Tony kept fighting, his rage and grief fueling every movement.
"You want me?!" he roared, blasting apart a dog-creature that lunged at him. "I'm Tony fucking Stark! I'm IRON MAN! And you picked the WRONG planet!"
=========
He stood there, panting from exertion, the last of the demons he could see lying dead around him. As he turned to head back toward the village to check if any had gotten through, he felt the earth shake, like something massive had just landed.
He turned and saw it.
Nine feet tall, wreathed in flames. The demon was far larger than the others, clearly their leader, with horns curling from its skull and eyes that burned with hellfire.
It spoke.
"So you are the one causing trouble here. We were so close to not attracting attention from those—"
It did not get to finish the sentence.
Tony fired a repulsor blast directly at its face.
"INSECT!" the demon screamed, its voice shaking the trees as it punched down toward Tony with a fist wreathed in flame.
Tony barely dodged, rolling to the side as the ground where he had been standing exploded into molten rock.
The fight was brutal.
Tony unleashed a barrage of attacks. Icicles from his left hand. Repulsor blasts from his right. The nano-sword formed and reformed as he searched for an opening.
"Come on, ugly!" Tony taunted, firing again.
The demon fought back hard, impossibly fast for its size. It conjured walls of flame that Tony had to leap around, hurled fireballs that exploded like grenades, and swung massive burning fists that would have pulverized him if they connected.
Tony dodged and dodged.
He fought as best he could, using every trick he knew. Feints. Calculated strikes. Targeting weak points. But this thing was strong. Far stronger than the others.
The demon grabbed him mid-jump, its burning hand closing around Tony's torso. The ice armor hissed and cracked under the heat.
"You die now, insect!" it roared, hurling Tony with tremendous force.
Tony flew backward, tumbling through the air, completely out of control. He was heading straight toward a cliff edge. A hundred-foot drop onto frozen rocks below.
Tony closed his eyes. This was it. He had survived the impossible before, but this time there were no more tricks. No more—
Then he felt himself land on something.
He opened his eyes and saw that he was suddenly encased in a glowing green orb.
What the fuck? Tony thought.
The construct caught him gently, stopping his momentum completely. He heard sounds from above. The demon's screams. Thunder and lightning tearing through the sky. Someone was fighting the demon. Soon, a loud scream echoed, and then silence.
Then he heard voices. Men and women.
Some spoke languages he did not understand, but two voices were clear.
"Yeah, I got him!" one said.
Tony felt the orb begin to move, descending carefully toward the ground. He braced himself to see who his saviors were.
The orb dissipated.
Tony stood face to face with nine people.
His jaw dropped.
One wore robes and wielded the same kind of magic as Strange, golden geometric patterns floating around his hands.
An East Asian woman stood nearby, her fists glowing with golden energy.
There was the Black Panther. Not the sleek, modern suit Tony had seen die, but an ancient-looking variation, heavier, more primal.
A red-skinned giant loomed behind them, flames rolling off his body. He looked like the Hulk. What the fuck.
Then there was Thor, or someone who looked so much like him it was uncanny. He even held Mjolnir in his hand.
Then the other four made Tony's blood run cold.
A woman wreathed in fire stood beside him, her flames eerily similar to the fiery bitch who had killed Wanda.
A tall gray man who looked disturbingly similar to the gray invader who had killed Vision.
A man riding a mammoth, his head a flaming skull. The same as the demon who had killed Peter. Tony's hands clenched involuntarily.
And the man standing in front of them all, surrounded by a green aura. The same power as the orange man who had killed the Hulk. Tony recognized it instantly, down to the ring on his finger. Green instead of orange.
Nine here. Nine there.
Tony's mind raced through the implications, the impossibilities, the sheer cosmic joke of it all.
He was too tired and too hurt to do anything except ask one question.
"Who are you?"
The green man answered, his voice steady and kind. "We are the Avengers."
Something snapped inside Tony, and he started to laugh.
"Hahahaha… HAHAHAHA!" His laughter grew louder, more manic, echoing through the frozen forest. "AHAHAHAHAHA!"
"The Avengers," he managed between laughs. "The AVENGERS!"
All nine looked at him in confusion. All except the green one, who wore a look of recognition.
"HAHAHAHA! Oh, that's… that's PERFECT! The fucking AVENGERS!"
"THE AVENGERS!"
.
.
Tony.