Tony wakes up lying flat on his face with taste of bile and bad scotch in the back of his throat
with his nose glogged up and his eyes grimy. Not entirely unfamiliar with any of it, he groans and attempts to turn to his back, only registering the fact that he’s lying on a table when he swings over the edge and falls onto the floor, hitting a couple of chairs on his way down and landing in a heap on top of what feels like a bottle. It digs into his midriff, hard.
Its not the worst way to wake up, but it’s up there. Jesus Christ how much did he drink?
“FRIDAY, time,” Tony groans, squirming to get the bottle from under him. He feels wet and everything has the cloying taste of regret, including the air which is saturated with the stench of alcohol, bad decisions, and vomit.
The bottle he landed on is a wine bottle. God damn chardonnay of all things. Why the hell had he drank chardonnay?
Throwing the bottle aside and listening the weirdly soft clatter of it rolling away, Tony rubs a hand over his eyes, trying to get the grit out. “FRIDAY,” he calls a bit louder as his stomach roils. “What’s the time?”
Tony waits and then opens his eyes, frowning. “Did I mute - FRIDAY, come on baby girl, you can talk… to me…”
For a moment Tony just stares at the ceiling. Its wood. Long wood panels painted creamy white, with just enough grain to identify the material, marked with dark red oulutlines.
He knows those panels - and they don’t belong to his building.
Slowly, his head spinning and pounding, Tony sits up. Sure enough the panels of the walls are the same - cream white with red velvet outlines, like a goddamn cake.
“Oh god,” Tony groans and for a moment covers his face in his hands, making a desperate bid for smothering himself and putting himself out of his, now considerably worse, misery. Just how drunk had he gotten to come here, of all damn places? Really fucking drunk, is the answer.
He’d been so good too, 4 months and counting sober. He’d been getting somewhere. Shit.
Tony spends a moment just feeling miserably sorry for himself, desperately putting off facing the reality for as long as he could. God he hopes he hadn’t taken a car to get here. Not that flying was any better, drunk piloting never worked out well for him and FRIDAY is still too meek to just take the stick from him when he’s being an idiot. Shit. Shit.
Eventually he has to give up on denial and look up, taking in the damage. It consists of about dozen bottles in various stages of spilled - mostly on the floor, judging by the looks of it. At least two bottles have been smashed against the wall - one of them red wine and that probably isn’t going to wash off. There is one broken chair, rest are strewn about in disarray but the dining table is still standing at least - it was where he’d been lying before. The carpet is irrevocably ruined, not just by cocktail of dozen different brands of alcohol, but at least two puddles of vomit. And for some reason there are shreds of newspaper everywhere
It has been a classy night apparently.
“Shit,” Tony sighs and slowly levers himself up to his feet, swaying. He still feels half drunk and his neck is like carved stone. Stretching a bit he waits for the usual tug at his chest, expecting the pain.
It doesn’t come.
Frowning, Tony pats tentatively at his chest and then stops there, his palm pressed flat against the stained shirt. He runs his hand down a bit and then looks down in confusion.
His chest feels fantastic.
And flat.
Slowly Tony unbutton the alcohol soaked shirt and pushes it off his shoulders. It takes a while for what he’s seeing to fully register, but understanding sadly doesn’t follow after.
His surgery scars, faint though they had been thanks to thousands and thousands of dollars a of plastic surgery… are gone. And he’s skinny. His chest is flat, his stomach is soft.
The surgery scars aren’t the only ones missing either. The scrapes and cuts and burns of almost decade of good intentions turning to bad decisions aren’t there either. His skin is practically virginal.
“Well this is… new,” Tony mutters and looks up. Then, dropping the dirty shirt on the soaked carpet, he goes to see what else is new.
-
Hour later he’s back at the dining hall, staring at the carnage of alcohol he’d left behind the previous night, seriously debating on just giving up and continuing it.
Turns out, nothing is new. Absolutely nothing.
The mansion is as he last seen it - worse than that, it is as it had been before the contractors had stripped it of everything personal. This wasn’t the mansion he’d sold more than twenty five years ago - no, it is the mansion he’d lived in more than twenty five years ago, full with portraits, paintings and old bookshelves with albums full of baby pictures.
There is a landline phone in the hall. The television is a CTR. And Tony’s reflection is that of a clean shaven twenty-something with skinny arms and frankly twiggy wrists.
He would’ve called it an illusion or another bit of mind fuckery ala Wanda Maximoff, except this place… there are details here he’s forgotten. Books in the shelves, pictures and their details, the patch up done on the minute wear and tear the mansion had gone through. Small things like stains in the carpet, the glasses in Howard study, the knitting needles Tony’s mother had forever been meaning to use but never got around to. Papers and files in the safe. The vault.
Too much too minute detail.
Slowly, Tony picks up the nearest tipped over chair and sits down on it, staring at the dining hall table. Its covered thin layer of drying muck, red and clear and golden liquids congealing into each other. There is one bottle - champagne - which is still standing unopened - everything else had been tasted and tested and then spilled everywhere.
Last night, Tony had done his damn hardest to drink himself to death.
He remembers the night now, or the before and after anyway, though the memory is hazy with time and bad nostalgia. Drinking away like this in his father’s house - Tony has done it precisely once.
The day after his parents died, good twenty five years ago.
It was the last night he spend at the old mansion too - he’d left for a hotel the next day and bought a place in Malibu the next week. Only time he’d been back had been for the wake and then to direct the contractors to clear it out of everything important, and even then he’d been there barely an hour. He’d sold the place without ever setting another foot in and he’d never looked back.
Now he is back. Back all the way at the fucking end
Shit, but he wishes he could deny this. Just little bit of denial would be nice.
Problem is, he and Bruce theorised this long ago - and Thor had cheerfully confirmed everything. Time travel isn’t just possible, but it is established fact and the rules aren’t just theorised - they are known, written-down absolutes of the multiuniverse.
You can go back in time. You can go forward in time. Hell, under certain circumstances it is offensively easy even.
It’s just that every time you do, you don’t change the time line - you just create a whole new one. Time travel is easy - changing the past, impossible.
And here he is, in the past.
Tony runs a hand over his face and really tries to convince himself is a delusion, hallucination, illusion - lusion-word of some kind. Or maybe a vision - maybe he’s dead and his mind has been uploaded into his own personal BARF hell.
He can feel the stickiness of drying wine under his bare feet, smell the stench of it all. His stomach is still roiling and his head aches, like someone’s trying to drive a nail through it.
BARF can’t do this. Illusions, he know, get minor sensations wrong. Delusions aren’t this detailed. Hallucinations don’t go for this long. He certainly wouldn’t be this brutally clear headed and desperately sceptical in any of those situations.
And only reality is cruel enough to do this - and land him precisely beyond the point of no return. He’s back in time - and his mother is still dead.
For a long moment Tony stares at the disaster zone he’d made of the dining room, listless in his wordless frustration and misery. And if it all isn’t the perfect metaphor to everything too. Tony Stark, back at it again in a literal pool of debauched filth. A full circle of fuck up
He wants a drink so bad it sickens him.
Then he hears a distant thrum of an approaching car, echoing down the yard and frowns, looking up. He half expects instant identification for it - “Colonel Rhodes is on his way to the garage, sir,” - but of course it doesn’t come. This isn’t Malibu and JARVIS isn’t here.
And it’s not Rhodey coming down the driveway
- - -
Aka I wanna fix it the whole goddamn mcu right now.