Stark's Weakness

Chapter 15

By the time the rest of the Avengers find Tony, he has drank his way through an entire bottle of whiskey and is sitting in the middle of his not so very secret "secret" liquor room. "Stark, we need to talk," Thor says as he walks in. "Bout what?" Tony slurs as the rest of the Avengers group behind Thor to watch. "The love of muh life is now completely inssshane and is all because a me. Because I couldn't protect her when she needed me to. How m' I posed to tell her folks bout this? Huh? Ansher me dat Mr. Thunder dude!" Thor looks down at Tony with sadness in his eyes and lifts the genius over his shoulder and carries him out of the room and into the living room. Tony squawks in surprise but can't do much due to how badly drunk he is.

"Hey! Put me down!" He whines sullenly as everyone follows Thor into the living room. "Not until you listen to reason," Stephen says and the cape flies off of him and wraps itself around Tony to hold him down. "Thank you." Stephen says with a smirk as Tony gasps and whispers, "You traitor!" A few giggles are heard around the room before the atmosphere turns right back to deadly serious as Steve slowly walks to the forefront of the group and says, "We've been throwing some ideas back and forth that may or may not actually work. Some of them are a little more...extreme, than others but I promise that we only have the best intentions. Also, we wanted to run all this by you before we just decided to go off and do something." Steve and several others including Natasha, Bucky, and T'Challa are all looking at the ground at this point because they know that the civil war was still fresh in Tony's mind and that if given the chance he would be more than happy to bring that up in a heartbeat.

"Oh, well thanks for actually thinking of me in all this." He says slightly less slurred thanks to both Loki and Stephen secretly using their powers to sober him up without him realizing. "So what are all these ideas that you've come up with?" He says as he leans back and crosses his leg over his knee. "Well, one of the ideas is to go back in time and prevent her from ever being taken but we don't exactly think that's a good idea. We've already messed with time far too much at this point for it to be feasible." Stephen says from right beside him as he lowers his hand and discreetly nods to Thor to signal that Tony is indeed sober. "Ah right. Because you guys decided to bring my parents back from the dead. How exactly did you think that was going to help again?" Tony says back to his usual snarky self.

Steve rolls his eyes but refrains from saying anything as Thor says, "Mind your tongue, Stark! They are still your parents and you will still show them the respect they deserve. Remember after this is all over with they will be placed back in their own time and that will mean that they will go back to being dead to you. So I suggest that you beef whatever squash you have with them now so that your guilty conscious can be put to rest once and for all!" Natasha, Bucky, Shuri, Loki, Peter Parker, and several others all have to leave the room for a few moments to keep from laughing out loud at Thor's scrambling of a common phrase and taking away from the gravity of the situation. When they finally do come back Thor sighs and continues. "The other option that we've thought of is that we let Princess Shuri get ahold of her. We know for a fact that she helped Sergeant Barnes with his...problem. Who's to say that she can't help your (Y/N/N) with hers?" He says in an almost hopeful tone.

Tony sits silently and anyone with one eye and half good sense can see that he's going over logistics and weighing pros and cons in his mind until finally after what seems like a complete eternity he looks up at all of his friends, people he's fought for and against, people that he now considers the closest thing to family in his life even though some days he'd like nothing more than to smack them upside the head with a stick and says, "How long would it take and what do we need to move her?"