Iron Lightning; Valuable [ II ] P. PARKER

XXIII. FLOWERS AND SAUERKRAUT

-part two of the stone retrieval-

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
"flowers and sauerkraut"

NEW YORK, 2012

Tony was still wrapping his mind around the fact that he lost the Tesseract and talked to Jade- well, past Jade. He tried thinking of someway to get the tesseract back but he had nothing, there was no way around this.

He wished he could have spent more time with Jade, he wished he had some more, to say how much he loved her and what she means to him and that she would be okay- it was killing him. He thought about going back a few times but decided against it knowing it was the right thing to do.

Tony and Scott were sitting in a car where they all first started and waited for Steve to show back up. Then suddenly he landed a few feet away from the car with the scepter in his hand.

"Cap-" Tony said. Steve turned around, following the voice. "Sorry, buddy. We got a problem."

"Huh. Yeah, we do," Scott scoffed from the back seat.

Tony explained what happened, how 2012 Hulk rammed him with a door and how Loki escaped with the Tesseract.

"Well, what are we gonna do now?" Steve asked, his voice rising.

"You know what? Give me a break, Steve. I just got hit in the head with the Hulk," Tony groaned still sitting in the car.

"You said that we had one shot. This- this was our shot. We shot it. It's shot. Six stones or nothing. Six stones or nothing-" Scott said, rambling on very fast.

"You're repeating yourself, you know that? You're repeating yourself," Tony said.

"You're repeating yourself. You're repeating yourself. You know-" Scott said acting like a five-year-old.

"-Dude, come on-"

"-No!" Scott said cutting Tony off. "You never wanted a time heist, you went on board with the time heist-"

"I dropped the ball," Tony said calmly.

"You ruined the time heist," Scott pointed at Tony and turned away, unable to look at him.

"Is that what I did?" Tony asked.

"Yeah!"

"Are there any other options with the Tesseract?" Steve asked, stopping the two from arguing.

"No, no, no. There's no other options. There's no do-overs. We're not going anywhere else. We have one particle left. Each! That's it, alright? We use that- bye, bye. You're not going home," Scott explained, slamming the car door close.

And suddenly, it hit Tony.

"Yeah, well if we don't try, then no one else is going home, either," Steve said.