Chapter Text
As far as explosions went, Tony’s lab had seen worse. Messing around with arc reactors and electromagnetic pulse generators sometimes left more than its fair share of smoke, and just because the smoke was red this time didn’t make it any more impressive. Tony made a brief mental note to figure out what was up with that particular shade of crimson before he apparently inhaled too much of it and blacked out.
He was wet when he woke up, and his first thought was that it had taken way too long for the sprinklers to come on, and his second thought was that he’d had Jarvis disable the sprinklers after they kept on messing with his attempts to upgrade the suit’s repulsor rays, and his third thought was that it was raining on his face.
Tony raised himself up on his elbows. He was lying in a puddle, and someone in a shabby drape suit was vomiting into a trashcan a few feet to his left. A wrought-iron door grille clanged open in front of him, and a stout man in a graying apron tossed some wooden crates at Tony’s feet. Nearby, someone was cursing very loudly, and someone else was grunting, and a third someone was speaking rapid-fire Italian, and several cars were honking in a clear staccato pattern.
Tony kicked at the crates to dislodge them from his $38,000 Amadeo Testonis, and stood. As far as wakeups went, this one wasn’t particularly alarming; Tony was a sometime-drunk (or a survivor who, like countless Americans, courageously waged a daily battle against the demons of alcoholism, if you listened to that quack publicist who kept calling Pepper and threatening to quit) and a sometime-womanizer, which meant that, unless he woke up a) in a seedy Twin Cities nightclub back room with b) Congresswoman Jacobson underneath him and c) her potentially-underage adoptive supermodel-of-a -granddaughter Ekaterina on top of him and d) coated entirely in a fluffy white substance that he shouldn’t taste because it was absolutely not whipped cream, this was probably not going to be the worst day of his life. The vomiting man, who smelled remarkably like cheap rye whiskey but was probably still several leagues behind Tony in the “Drink, Make Bad Choices, Drink Some More” game of life, turned a bleary eye in Tony’s direction and then quickly looked away.
“Carbohydrates,” Tony told him. “Drugs. Then another drink.” This was objectively bad advice and Tony knew it, but, in terms of cataloguing the greatest hangover cures known to man, it was the best counsel Tony could offer. With this public service performed, Tony made his way around the trashcans and through a narrow alley hemmed in by red brick on either side. A small sliver of worry began to tug at his thoughts, which were surprisingly not-at-all alcohol-clouded.
The thing was, Tony had very little reason to wake up soaking wet in an alleyway these days. Pepper would have said that he’d never had a reason to begin with, but that was just because she’d never accepted “thinking about my father again,” “I needed that extra drink – no, seriously, without it I was going to die,” and “I was bored” as valid reasons. He was rarely bored anymore; Steve and the Avengers took care of that. He was no longer going to die, thanks to the vibranium that powered his armor (and comprised Steve’s shield). And he rarely thought about his father, except for those moments when Steve began a sentence with “You know, Howard once told me that—“ and then bit his lip, remembering that those sentences were best left unfinished.
So that left one reason for him to get drunk enough that he ended up in a filthy back alley with no recollection of how he got there: Steve.
But that made no sense. He and Steve couldn’t have had a fight. Things were going well. Like, super-serum-enhanced-sex-drive well. I-don’t-even-mind-that-Thor-clearly-thinks-I’m-your-concubine-or-something well. Let’s-beat-up-the-Masters-of-Evil-and-then-make-out-for-a-while well. At the very least, Tony had assumed they were at the level of sure-I’ll-stop-drinking-and-I-really-mean-it-this-time-no-honestly well.
Maybe Steve had accidentally finished one of those sentences about Howard Stark. Or maybe Tony had been the one to fuck up, which was more likely. Maybe Tony should call and apologize, either way, because maybe he didn’t want to lose Steve even if Steve had been the fuck-up and Tony had wonderfully, improbably been in the right.
Tony reached into his right pocket for his phone, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in his left pocket, either, and neither was it in his back pocket. He last remembered leaving it on one of the worktables in the lab, just a few minutes before the explosion with the red smoke, but...
Accidental teleportation, Tony decided. It was the only possible explanation. It was a relief, really. It meant he hadn’t been fighting with Steve, and it meant he had a cool new angle for research if he could just pinpoint the trigger. Really, he just had to get back to the lab and secure his boyfriend and figure out where he’d gone wrong and –
And he rounded the corner and walked straight into some sort of mob hit.
At least, that’s what Tony thought it was at first, because what else could it be if four oversized thugs were intent on beating the crap out of one defenseless guy? Crooked cops didn’t need to band together like that because they had the state on their side, small-time types didn’t have that much muscle, and any villains bigger than the mob usually attacked with magic or superpowers or fantastic space weaponry or radioactively-enhanced extra limbs or all of the above. This was just a few goons beating on a little guy in an alley.
Whoever these guys were, four against one wasn’t fair, and Tony wasn’t having it. He pulled the biggest one off and decked him, sending him crashing into a heap of crates right at the mouth of the alley. Then he turned around and faced two more, who came barreling at him while the last one contented himself with the little guy. Tony got one with a jab to the larynx and the other with a left hook, and then the first one came back for more and Tony noticed the swastika armbands.
Well, that was just tacky.
Evidently the little guy thought so too. Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw him twist just out of reach and hold up one broken side of a wooden crate as a shield. This was a bad plan and would probably result in a splinter to the eye, so Tony helped him out by reaching back and punching the last tormentor so hard he careened into the alley wall, and then he seized another piece of crate and broke it over the first one’s head, knocking him out cold. The ones left standing spat something at him and took off, and Tony silently thanked Steve for all those sober lessons in hand-to-hand and Happy for all those semi-inebriated boxing sessions. Not that the latter had prepared him for fighting back-alley Nazis or anything, but it wasn’t like Tony had been completely helpless before he’d met Steve. Even putting aside all of his skill with a super-powered robot suit, he’d actually done pretty well for himself in the area of not losing horribly to his personal assistant.
From behind Tony, the little guy cleared his throat.
“Oh,” Tony said, holding up a hand. “Don’t thank me. It’s fine.”
“I had it under control,” said the guy who would have been some crushed bones and an untidy red splatter on the pavement if it weren’t for Tony. Something about his voice, surprisingly deep for such a scrawny guy, was familiar, but Tony wasn’t going to focus on that when faced with such a complete lie and such utter denial of his heroism.
“Oh, okay,” Tony said quickly. “It’s not like I saved your life or anything.”
“I wasn’t having such a hard t—“ the guy began, an irritated cadence slipping into his tone that put Tony in mind of Steve’s Brooklyn accent.
“No, of course, skip on the thanks,” Tony said. “You were doing so well against those wannabe Nazi mobsters—“
“Fritz Kuhn’s boys. The German American Bund.”
“Excuse me, I don’t know them personally,” Tony said. “Special friends of yours? Next time I’ll leave you to it. I hate to break up a party.”
“I didn’t ask for a rescue.”
“Well, I’m the guy that gives them,” Tony said. “Friendly neighborhood Iron Man, champion of the ungrateful.” With that, he made his way to the mouth of alley, leaving his thoroughly unappreciative companion to mutter something about drunks, which was fair enough, Tony supposed.
When he reached the street, Tony stopped cold. Something was off. Possibly it was the cars, which were Auburn Cabriolets and Nash Coupes and 12-cylinder Lincoln Zephyrs – enormous, lumbering, antique monstrosities of the kind one kept in the garage to dissect the engineering of bygone days or to impress attractive female steampunk enthusiasts, or to really hammer home how superior one’s own sleek designs were by comparison. Possibly it was the pair of passing girls, whose hemlines were so long that Tony briefly wondered if they were Amish, before noting their bright red lips and immaculate makeup. Possibly it was the weedy young man hawking newspapers for five cents each. Or possibly it was the men in flannel and suspenders who were painting over the “L” on an advertisement on the building opposite the alley. The advertisement now read, “--adies, Stay Fit And Slim for 1941 By Taking Bile Beans.”
Fuck. Not teleportation, then.
Time travel.
“Hey,” Tony said to the man with the newspapers, “Give me one. “ He reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet, which contained something like five useless credit cards and a few equally useless debit cards and wads of cash with oversized presidential heads and all sorts of anti-counterfeiting maneuvers and a print date that was definitely too far in the future to make any of that matter. Finally, he located a nickel and handed it off to the young man, glancing briefly at the tiny, engraved “2002” on its face. He figured that, as long as he hadn’t landed in the era of nickels engraved with pictures of buffalo and the crying Indian, he’d be fine.
It seemed the Jefferson nickel had already been introduced; the man stared at it for a moment, pocketed it, and gave Tony a paper.
It was the Brooklyn Eagle, a paper he’d never heard of before. The front-page story discussed the prospects for the coming world series, focusing largely on the Dodgers and complete with an editorial that promised hell for “those Crumbs, the Yankees.” The interior had a poorly-drawn caricature of Gene Kelly; an obituary for a dead department store owner; a notice regarding the re-dedication of a statue in Prospect Park commemorating the Battle of Long Island and something called the Dongan Oak; an obituary for a dead socialite; several articles expressing concern over slums in Brownsville; an announcement of the marriage of Mr. Laws of Pierrepont Street and a pretty blonde descendant of Ethan Allen; an obituary for a dead lawyer; photos of several attractive Brooklyn Junior League actresses; and advertisements for stockings, hickory girdles, Model 1 Remington typewriters, and, yes, even bile beans. Tucked away in one corner of the second-to-last page, there was also a short article about the German counteroffensive against the British in North Africa three days earlier; a tiny brief assuring citizens that entry into the war wasn’t assured; and an even tinier brief detailing the government’s seizure of all German, Italian, and Danish ships in local ports thanks to a military agreement with the British.
The paper was dated April 2nd, 1941.
Tony decided not to focus on the 1941 for the moment. Early April. So this all had to be a joke, right? April Fools: congrats, Happy, you got me. Or maybe it was Pepper or Rhodey, as they both had about ten million more reasons to play a really cruel prank on Tony. Maybe they’d roped Steve into it. This certainly seemed too elaborate and historically accurate for anyone to set up without Steve’s input, only…
No. This was a little too mean for Steve. It was a little too mean for any of them, to be honest.
Someone came out the alley behind Tony, brushing lightly against the back of his thin T-shirt. Tony wouldn’t even have noticed it, only suddenly it seemed too cold and he was feeling hyper-sensitive to everything and his chest hurt, and he was in fucking 1941. Tony whirled around and caught the bypasser’s sleeve. It was the man from the alley fight, sans his makeshift shield and swimming in a dirty, oversized khaki overcoat with traces of blood on the sleeve.
“Hold on,” Tony said. “Hold on just a second. Who was it? Was it Rhodey? Was it Coulson, that fucker?”
The man tried to shrug out of Tony’s grip, but he wasn’t strong enough to do so, and Tony went ahead and held on more firmly.
“Just tell me this is some joke,” Tony said quickly. “I think it’s very funny. I’m definitely not pissed off or freaking out right now. Are they paying you? I’ll double that.”
“Give it up, buddy,” said the man, showing no signs of giving up on being free of Tony himself. “There’s a mission down the street. Go clean up or something.” He tried to shove Tony off again and continue along his way, but Tony stepped in front of him, and that’s when he got a good look at the man.
It wasn’t Steve.
It couldn’t be.
Steve didn’t have such a delicate, pointed jaw, or such a narrow, tired face. He wasn’t slight, and he didn’t have such thin shoulders, and he never disappeared inside his own clothes like this guy did. Steve wouldn’t try to twist out of Tony’s grip like that, and Steve definitely wouldn’t end up wheezing from the exertion of it. Steve wasn’t this frail. Steve wasn’t this short. Steve wasn’t this weak.
Only. He would have been. Back in 1941, anyway. Back before Project Rebirth.
“Steve…?” Tony said.
Steve’s eyes widened and he took a swing at Tony. It was a really crappy swing, and it wouldn’t have affected Tony even if it had any power behind it (which it didn’t, because where would this Steve get it from? He probably weighed less that Tony’s suit), only Tony was already in shock and so he stepped out of the way without thinking.
“Get lost. Leave me alone,” Steve said, although he didn’t push past Tony. He dropped into a crouch with his fists up, seemingly, improbably, ready for another fight.
Tony held his hands up.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no. No way. Steve.”
“I said to leave me alone,” Steve snapped.
“I do not want to fight right now,” Tony said. “Just listen for a sec—“
Someone grabbed Tony’s shoulder and spun him around, and Tony was suddenly looking up at an unshaven young man with cocky blue eyes.
“You don’t want a fight? Then don’t pick one, greaseball,” said the newcomer. Then his fist connected with Tony’s jaw and everything went black again.