Ibidem Characters: A pair of Tonys, Wanda and Pepper Setting: 919-OMVerse, New York City, night Content: Human barbeque. Summary: The answer was right in front of him all along and Tony really wants to kick himself. Physically.
Although he had made many mistakes, Tony had never landed himself in jail. He didn't know who to thank for this because the experience had quickly become one of his biggest regrets, dwarfing any questionable choice in food or sexual partner. There were some things just not worth testing twice, he knew that now, and one of them was Agent Coulson. On Tony's first hour, he had ruminated on all of the misguided plans that had landed him in this position and realized with great clarity that every successive one, from inviting himself to Wanda's to stepping through the portal to ditching Coulson to meeting Pepper and her exquisite children to coming back to the scene of the crime, every move he made produced its own weight of crushing despair that only increased exponentially with every passing minute forced to spent doing absolutely nothing. This would have been an almost manageable level of torture if he never had the chance to wonder about what Pepper was doing and what he could have been doing if he was there and not wasting away in here.
Not every successive minute was wasted, though. For long stretches of time, Tony could apply himself to increasingly elaborate escape plans that were consistently foiled and pushed the next into exponential manic heights. By fifty-two steps ahead, Tony was starting to think this Coulson bought himself some kind of pre-cog implant and Tony was going to have to convince his familiar Coulson to submit to a totally routine examination. He really didn't need this kind of aggravation. At least if he ever got back home he was pretty sure being foiled wouldn't end in bodily harm, though-- just a friendly tasering. This Coulson had moved well beyond that fixation.
While recuperating from his unsuccessful bids for freedom, Tony could also reflect on a solution to his larger prison and that big dimensional wall between him and his home goddamn planet. This was challenging enough when he had full mobility and could move beyond the theoretical into testing. Of course, that was what landed him in this conundrum and maybe some more time spent pondering would do him good, maybe impart an important life lesson that he had skipped over--
Of course. It was so obvious. When lightning struck, Tony was scraping another half-formed concept into his confining walls and abruptly slapped his hand down on the tally he had been keeping of the passing hours, not punishment enough for what they had done to him, or to himself for taking so long to figure it out, but it was a start. It cracked open a freshly healed sore on his palm and left the white wall stained pink as he lept up and left it behind to pound on the door and get someone's attention. "Hey! HEY, COME ON! I get phone privileges, right? You don't even have to let me out of here, you can even dial-- just one call! HEY!"
It was a simple set of instructions, relayed to Pepper before Tony's contact to the outside world was snatched away from him in case this was going to end in another conflict in the bowels of SHIELD headquarters. There was a case collecting dust in a PO Box in Nebraska. Get it in Tony's hands.
Just a few more hours. Tony didn't bother keeping tally.
Elsewhere, the portal (thus far unresponsive, no matter how hard SHIELD's monkeys banged on it with their primitive tools, and no matter how many times Coulson paraded Tony out to demand answers) flickered back to life. It was so sweet and quiet that nobody noticed until Tony was shouting again-- "HEY! Agent Coulson! I think I got something for you!"-- then it was all hands on deck. In Tony's cell, with Pepper waiting, patient as ever, just outside, a briefcase sat open on the hard bunk with only one thing inside: a note, handwritten, reading simply,
REED I KNOW IT WAS YOU. I'M COMING FOR YOU. HARD.
T
It was long minutes still before Tony was ushered into the room with the humming engine, a small, flat stone secreted in with him and warm under his tongue. Tony didn't know yet what number of ways he could be regretting the contact. He didn't have to convince Coulson to let him through the portal without ceremony-- on the contrary, he had to push to talk to Pepper one last time, and only was allowed a glimpse of her over an agent's shoulder as he was shoved bodily out of the foreign dimension.
In Wanda's serene apartment, where a warm breeze that smelled like summer teased the curtains, Tony fell back onto his ass and a hand slipped across the polished floor, then cracked his head against the table. With one eye squinted shut and a hand rubbing his sore head, he glanced around, thinking maybe he was remembering wrong after going stir-crazy in that cell; maybe the other Tony and Wanda had stepped away before he went through, maybe the window had been open and the sun had set by the time he left, maybe the winter chill had long been out of the air. That was how it worked last time; they came back to everything exactly how it was. Tony spat the Infinity Gem out into his open palm and watched it throw its light onto his fingers. Of course it was exactly where he had put it when he returned from the fantasy desert with Wanda.