Who: Nick Fury and Tony Stark What: Nick Fury wants some damn answers about this universe slapping him with all its b.s. When: Presently. Rating/Warnings: Chartreuse, for language with these two. Obvs.
It'd taken some time for Nick to fully get his head around things, but once he did, he knew exactly where he would have to start: Tony Fucking Stark.
There were days that Nick felt completely responsibility for unleashing that playboy onto the world, but truth be told, Tony had already forced himself upon society years before, and Nick really didn't have much to do with it. Other than give Tony a vehicle in which to wreak havoc, but that's another story for another time.
Walking into Stark Industries felt like deja vu, especially when the head security looked at him with fear and awe. Exactly how he liked it. There was no need to say anything, as he was directed to the express elevator, right to where Stark was. Anything else would be a waste of Nick's time.
With a whistle on his lips, he strode into Tony's office, acting like the last few years hadn't happened, and placed himself directly in front of the desk.
Oh no. The second that Nick Fury came through the door to the office area of his lab, whistling like he was strolling through a park on a summer's day, Tony sat up straight in his office chair and looked like he was busier. Which he was, doing some nanotech coding. But somewhere in there he was having to backspace due to typing a bunch of asgagllashgaakhlaksa into the weapons configurations.
There was looming. Tony tried to ignore it. There was that stare. Tony still wasn't sure what eye he should look at, or if he should just look at Nick's nose. He tried to ignore the stare. He kept typing and backspacing. And then Tony reminded himself he was really bad at ignoring things, so he stopped typing and tapped his hands on the desk like he was pounding out the beat to some dance club music.
"This looks like trouble. Whatever it is? Not it." Tony wasn't sure why Fury was there but already not liking it. There were few people on the planet that could wrangle Tony in. Pepper was one of them, most of the time. Half the time. Nick Fury was the other, considering he ordered his hungover ass out of a giant donut display.
There were few things Nick enjoyed more than a squirmy Tony Stark. Whipping the cell phone from his pocket, Nick let it dangle from his fingers. "This came today, just as I was packing for the UK. Came with an interesting package."
From his other pocket, he took out a note. Hastily scrawled on it was "talk to tony". One could also read the pure joy it was written with. "You and I both know the T in your name stands for Trouble. Quit the bullshit."
Tony eyed the note and grumbled darkly under his breath about how Strange could go screw himself on the astral plane. Thrown under the bus by a time-breaking magician and now Fury had been dragged into the mess. This sucked on too many levels to even count, and Tony could do some pretty mind-bending math. The level of suck was significant.
"Okay. That's bad. That's a bad note," Tony said, pointing at it. "Do you want to have a seat, or do you want to keep glaring down at me like mad dad? Because I so don't need that. Like, at all."
"And I don't need this level of fuck up in my life either." Fury gave Tony a pointed stare. "So explain to me why I'm not sitting in the Hamptons, enjoying a fine Chablis, instead of glaring at your sorry ass." This was actually far more enjoyable, but Tony didn't need to know that.
The glare intensified. "Talk. And in English. I ain't got time to decipher your speech."
Oh great. Fury wasn't sitting down. The only thing missing from this utter complete shit fest was Pepper behind a desk and a really annoying spinny thing, because Tony picked up a pen and started wagging it around between two fingers, as he scooted forward and back in his chair a bit.
"Well, uh...you see, I....ok, here's the thing...." The pen looked like it was in danger of becoming the propeller to a plane, it started to move so fast it was a blur. "I mean, I could explain it, but it's probably going to be in physics terms and you are looking way angry right now."
The pen took off, flying across the desk where Tony tried to smack his hands on it to catch it. It rolled off the far side before he could get up out of his chair to catch it. So he sat there, like that didn't happen, his mind whirling for a proper response.
"So, time broke," he summarized. "In two. Because, and I know this sounds ridiculous but we've been smacked by alien armies before? Because magic."
Tony held up both hands and made a little fireworks exploding motion with his fingers. That was the universal hand sign for magic. Unmistakable.
Magic.
Of course.
Magic. It hadn't even cracked his top 10, but now that Tony said it, it was like everything was falling into place. "Magic". The word rolled around his tongue in a bemused manner. He nodded his head at Tony.
"So that means Loki is out."
"Nope, not Loki," Tony said, folding both arms over himself in a defensive posture. "Doctor Strange. Super magician. Time breaky mega wizard. Like Gandalf, with more dry sarcasm. Total accident while saving the world from some soul eating demonic thingy."
Nick ignored Tony's rambling as he tried to process this information.
A few months back, he'd read a book. Japanese magical realism where the protagonist did something mundane yet out of the ordinary and created a parallel universe in which the only difference was the insertion of magic, and a second moon. The woman eventually was able to go back.
Nick had a feeling there was no ending for this.
"And this world is our world now." He said it bluntly as a statement of fact. Why mourn what would never come back? It was done. "Any significant differences?" In other words, how would Fury navigate this new reality without seeming off.
Tony wouldn't disagree. The first thing Strange had told him was that there was no going back. That he was the parallel counterpart, and the other 'him' was on his own path of no return. That was like squirting lighter fluid on the dumpster fire of his life. Tony hadn't taken it well, to say the least, and had given Strange the chewing out of a lifetime. Which apparently was coming back around to bite him in the ass, because Strange saw fit to leave a freaking note saying 'talk to tony' as some sick form of revenge for that first meeting.
Tony kind of wanted to flip Strange off, so hard. Except not kind of. More like really, really. A lot.
Better to cut the bullshit, because Tony wasn't a fan of it either.
"Not much that I know of, but Sharknado happened," Tony admitted, as the fidgeting stopped. "I got arrested. I got broken out of The Raft. Strange mentioned that hadn't happened over there, in the main universal whatever. He hasn't said if anything else is different. Just that only a few of us are aware of it, like the universe is trying to right things somehow. It's like a divergence that no one else knows about. And keeping it quiet means no one else is rioting in the streets because they might think the world is ending. If anything else is different, then I don't know about it."
Strange hadn't said a word, even after The Accords were declared unconstitutional and Tony publicly executed the Avengers as a concept, so there weren't any scapegoats left for governments to blame.
"Right."
Nick Fury sighed. Sighed. Gave himself one moment of self-pity before standing up straighter than before.
"So. Looks like you're the expert here. Or maybe this Strange fellow. I'll need to speak to him. Figure out my place here. I was planning on travelling, refreshing my connections but I can do that from here."
He strode to the window and looked out over the city. Millions of people, living their lives, no idea that irrevocable changes had been made, no idea that who they were only moments ago would never be them again.
Ignorance was fucking bliss.
"My eye is always on you, Tony. Make the call. Connect me with Strange. I'll have a plan soon enough."
Well, they had already all been there for a while, unaware. But with how messed up the timeline was, Tony wasn't sure who was coming from where anymore, including people coming there from the original historical timeline before it branched off, or different points in time, or even being randomly copied from the prime timeline. According to Strange, things were still fragmented and overlapping. 'Beyond repair,' from what he was told. It was enough that Tony went off the deep end into an anxiety pit for a bit, and things kept happening, and happening, on and on....
Regardless, a lot of people out there were real, and alive, and could get hurt if something bad happened. So ignorance really was bliss for them. And if Tony could help keep it that way? He'd volunteer to do his part, in a hot second.
"Hey, what do I look like? Your secretary?" Tony groused, writing down Strange's address on a post it note. He was too happy to ping that ball right back into Strange's court where it should've been. Strange was a monumental jerk. "I've got suits to build, so I made a whole secret network thing for you to hop in and go harass wizards or whoever. Took a page off you with the whole shifty sideways super spy stuff."
The sooner that Fury was trying to get a clearer sense of this mess, the better.