Chapter 126: 121 The End Of The Beginning

Pepper didn't say anything as I helped her unpack and put her things away. She gave me odd looks occasionally as we worked and I ignored them until we were done and I took her hand and led her back to her living room.

I sat her down on the couch and brought a chair over to put right in front of where she sat and sat down myself. It was my turn to stay quiet and I kept my face neutral as I waited for her to decide when she wanted to tell me what she wanted to tell me.

Pepper took a deep breath and let it out. “I suppose you're wondering why I'm not jumping your bones, even though this is the first time we've been alone together since you gained a personal bodyguard.”

“The thought had crossed my mind once or a hundred times.” I said with a slight smile.

“Ben, you're a really great friend and... well, that is... I...” Pepper let out a sigh. “This is a lot harder to say than I thought it was going to be.”

I let the silence linger for several moments before I broke it. “You decided to give Tony another chance.”

Pepper caught her breath and looked into my eyes. “How did you know that?”

“I'm not unobservant.” I said. “My first clue was that you dropped everything to rush to his side when I gave you the means to save his life.”

Pepper blushed slightly. “Ben, I...”

I leaned forward in the chair and took her hand. “Pepper, you love who you love. Sometimes there's no helping that and you want to give him the chance to change, even after all this time.”

Pepper nodded. “He was so different while he was recovering and...”

“You don't have to explain.” I said and smiled at her. “I'm just glad you remembered that we're friends and you can talk to me about anything you want.”

“But, I... we...” Pepper paused and sighed. “I'm sorry, Ben. We can't do things like that anymore.”

I gave her hand a light squeeze. “Pepper, that's the great thing about sharing so much with each other and being sex friends. You can change your mind about it.”

Pepper gave me another odd look. “Why are you just letting me do this? Why aren't you arguing that you want to keep me in your bed and...”

I moved forward and gave her a passionate kiss. She moaned and her free hand went to the back of my neck and she ran her hand through my long hair. Her other hand let mine go and she pulled me close to kiss me back just as passionately. We did that for several minutes and we slowed down and broke the kiss. The surprised look on her face was worth proving my point.

“Pepper, you will always be welcome in my bed. I would fight for it if that was what you actually wanted.” I said and she caught her breath. “Instead, you want to try and find love that will be exclusively yours and you know I can't offer that. I do admire that you are willing to try and I'll help you as much as I can.”

“B-but... I thought...” Pepper stopped talking and looked unsure.

“You've already made a huge difference in Tony's attitude. Just mentioning you makes him smile.”

“It does?” Pepper asked, surprised.

“You obviously have not been paying attention to how dedicated that Tony and I are to making you happy.” I chuckled and sat back on my chair. “I pretty much gave you his company and guess what? Surprise, surprise! He doesn't resent either of us because of that.”

Pepper looked shocked.

“I've even done my best to collaborate with Stark Industries and we've made about a billion dollars in profit. I didn't want your decision to look out for yourself to ensure your financial future to become the wrong one. It wasn't.” I said and grinned. “I hope you're ready, because it's going to happen again next month when the smart televisions are going to be released.”

Pepper closed her eyes and hugged herself slightly. “Ben, you... why are you...”

“Pepper, you are a very important woman in my life. If it wasn't for you, I...” I stopped and took her hand again to kiss the back of it. “I would feel horrible if I didn't make sure that you were happy with your own life. If that means standing by and letting you devote yourself to the man you've spent years with before we became friends, then I am going to do exactly that.”

Pepper blushed and looked into my eyes. “Do you really mean that?”

“Yes, I do.” I said and tried to let her hand go and she held on. “You do your best to build a future for yourself and you can depend on me to help as much as I can.”

Pepper pulled on my hand and I leaned forward for her. She leaned forward as well and gave me a chaste kiss. “Thank you for understanding.”

“That's what friends are for.” I said and sat back. “Just so you know, the contract is still active. If you change your mind about anything, a huge batch of supremely magical swimmers will find their way to your womb.”

Pepper blushed and laughed at the same time.

“Now that we've got that pleasantness out of the way, why don't we get a coffee and start discussing our future business dealings and a few new products that should make us even more money?”

Pepper's blush faded and she nodded. We went to the kitchen and I made us some coffee before we sat at the kitchen table. I did not miss the happy smile she shot me between each sip of coffee.

*

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A week later, I sat at my desk at school in Geometry class and ignored the teacher and what he tried to explain, because I had pretty much crammed all of the information into my head already. Instead of paying attention, I slowly went over everything that had happened since I woke up in this world and what was going to happen next. It was now the middle of May and I had a month left before my intense exam schedule was going to start.

The thing was, I couldn't remember any significant events happening between when the Chitauri invasion happened and the Convergence of the Realms that was going to happen next year. I was almost flabbergasted at that realization until I carefully went over the events I had streamlined and altered to both fit and not really change anything important.

I had already saved Tony's heart from shrapnel and removed Killian and AIM as the villains, which stopped the Iron Man 3 movie from happening this coming Christmas in California. That meant no fake Mandarin or Ten Rings, which wouldn't come to a head for another ten years or so. With no pretender to the title, they wouldn't expose themselves or their hidden village. Shang-Chi might never gain the Rings of Power at all.

Agents of Shield wouldn't happen as it did, because of my interference. At least I assumed so, because Phil Coulson hadn't been given his own team yet to investigate the anomalies popping up. If it went by my previous knowledge, it wouldn't be approved until near the end of 2013. That was going to be a long time to wait for anything interesting to happen.

I had also changed the need of and appearances for Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Cloak and Dagger, and a few others. It was funny what the removal of all mobs and major criminal elements from an area would do for the local population. In fact, most of them wouldn't even be created as a hero and would keep their normal lives. I was actually a little proud of that.

Because of the extensive clean-up of all alien artifacts, none of the technology had made it into the hands of civilians. That meant no creation of the Vulture, thanks to my own campaign to make sure Adrian and his guys all had great paying projects to do. Also, no random unexplainable crimes would happen because of the alien tech. I had pretty much erased any need for Spider-Man's first solo movie in the MCU, too.

That thought brought me to the current crop of heroes and Spider-Man's first official appearance in Civil War. Since I had changed a lot of their opinions and we all got along, and because I also diverted the creation of the main villain for Age of Ultron, there would be no Sokovia disaster or Sokovia Accords as a result for the heroes to fight over.

It was a heavy thing to change that much and also not change anything significant. I would need to keep an eye out for any replacement events that might happen, even if there was no inherent cause that seemed to drive everything.

Of course, the Infinity Stones were still a thing and Earth was currently home to three of them. Two of the other three were unobtainable at the moment. The Soul Stone was on that weird planet and you had to give up something you loved to get it. I wasn't doing that. I had already given up my old life to get this one and I wasn't going to take the chance that me loving my new life would be the price I would have to pay.

The Aether was also out of reach, since there was no way to convince the Asgardians to tell me where the Forbidden Planet was that they had stashed the uncompressed form of the Reality Stone. It was also the power that the Dark Elves desired to change the universe into Dark Matter. I would definitely need to arrange a few things to divert those events during the Convergence while portals opened up at random around the world.

The last one, the Power Stone, was ridiculously easy to obtain for someone used to traversing space, as long as you knew where it was and how to get it. I did and had informed Carol Danvers about it and what it could do if Ronan gained it. Captain Marvel was going to do me a favor and would switch it with the fake I had made and bring it to me for safe keeping.

No one would discover the metal artifact it was inside for about three years, during the events of Guardians of the Galaxy. I didn't want to change the creation of that successful team and had even suggested that Captain Marvel might want to show up then and maybe hang around to give them a hand or two. The universe was a big and dangerous place, after all.

Of course, there was the mess that Natasha Romanoff would have gotten into during Civil War when her adopted sister approached her for help with rescuing the remaining Black Widows from the Red Room's influence. Then again, they had some massive brainwashing and believed they were perfectly okay as Black Widow Assassins.

I smiled as I thought about another mission for some European SHIELD agents to complete for me. I could bring Natasha in on it as well and also tell her that I could remove the brainwashing influence, because I had Loki's mostly depowered sceptre. I could only hope that she would jump at the chance and agreed to help. Clearing out some of the 'red in her ledger' was a high priority for her.

Doctor Strange was next, around 2016 and 2017, and The Ancient One had been planning to train her replacement for decades, not counting the time we had spent in a time suppression field. My comment about her actually living her life instead of planning for her death, really gave her a shock and a lot to think about.

I didn't mention that seeing her death might not mean her losing her life, since any significant change in someone's life could be considered the death of the old one. That was a bit too existential and mind-twisting for us to have during an after sex conversation.

Of course, the thought of death made me think of Thor: Ragnarok, where the goddess of Hel named Hela, who in the MCU version is the sister of Thor and Loki and not Loki's daughter, successfully escaped her exile in Hel to assault Asgard to bring about the End Times for the Asgardians. Most of them would be killed, despite them being practically immortal.

Hela's realm overflows with the dead and she is killed and sent there herself. Since she loses her life, she is no longer exiled and becomes the permanent ruler of the Realm and resigns herself to an eternity of doing the same boring job. On the plus side, she had a lot of new members to torture and torment and they would keep her interest for a century or more. That wasn't so bad, really.

I would definitely need to intervene somehow. Then again, I couldn't really change it, since the event is pivotal in the timeline's events and Asgard needed to be destroyed to free the nine realms from its influence.

However, I could... with a lot of work and money... perhaps fake all of those Asgardian deaths. Hela would go to her final resting place believing she was getting nearly everyone and would realize she had gained nothing at all.

I almost laughed out loud at the look that would be on her face when she died and realized she had been cheated. I stopped myself before I caught the attention of the teacher and ducked my head to pretend to copy down what he had drawn on the board.

My mind went to Hank and our quest to get his wife Janet back from the Quantum Realm, which meant he wouldn't have to wait another six years for it to happen. Maybe a few words about how his daughter might help with the project could start to mend a few fences. Then again, she had betrayed him and their family for personal gain. That was a hard thing for someone to come to grips with.

After that was Infinity War, which I had already changed significantly. I wasn't sure if The Snap has to happen, because it gets undone five years later and everyone is brought back. The chaos that caused all across the universe when the people that had died years ago were suddenly back, actually made the overpopulation problem that Thanos was concerned about become infinitely worse.

I sighed and stopped doodling the Infinity Gauntlet. If the Snap event happened as before and was reset, thanks to both the Avengers going back through time to gather the Infinity Stones from other timelines and they performed the Unsnap, I could stop the event from happening completely and it shouldn't upset the timeline at all.

That also derailed the other movies in Spider-Man's MCU life, Far From Home in 2023 and No Way Home right afterwards. The first was a trick by Mysterio to get Spider-Man to help him get revenge on Tony Stark for stealing his tech and the second was because Mysterio revealed Spider-Man's civilian identity and he had Doctor Strange rewrite history and it opened the multiverse.

I took out my cell phone under the edge of my desk and checked with Jarvis about Quentin Beck. He had a job application with Stark Industries and I had Jarvis reject it and blacklist the man. It was more humane than putting a bullet into Quentin's head later when he discovered that anything he made while working for Stark was actually the company's property and not his own.

I thanked Jarvis and put my phone away. The bell rang and I packed up and left the class to go to Statistics. It was another wasted class and I sat there as I thought about what happened after the multiverse was opened by accident. The Ancient One's caution was justified about opening dimensional rifts without centuries of experience to handle it.

The Multiverse of Madness was as eye-opening as it was damaging. There were multiple iterations of existing heroes and villains, including ones from the different movies I had seen. That meant that all of the superhero movies I knew about actually did exist as a real dimension within the multiverse. Hell, even aspects of the comics I knew about were represented as well.

Doctor Strange had not been prepared to handle the task he had dropped on his lap, even if it did kind of work out in the end. America Chavez having the ability to traverse the multiverse however she wanted was a shock as well as being a completely broken power.

Forget about all of the multiverse diseases and infections she could spread across multiple Earths, or any evil beings that might have chased her, like an emotionally broken Scarlet Witch or a dimensional tentacle demon that hunted anything that breached the multiverse's integrity.

Instead, just imagine the technology and scientific developments she could copy and bring back. She could raid multiple dimensions for things and could become insanely rich or even destroy the world if she found the wrong kind of technology, like out of control nanobots or sentient machines bent on humanity's destruction.

At least she's not native to this dimension and won't show up here for another decade or so. I thought with relief as the bell rang. I left the classroom and dropped my things into my locker and went with Jubadi to the cafeteria. Val, Max, and Sally met us there and we spent the time eating great food, chatting with Shuri, and enjoying each other's company.

I had robotics class that afternoon and Mr. Kinneson said he was looking forward to me building a mock-up of an artificial brain to complete my high school education in his course. It really was nice of him to sign off on it and award me all of the credits I would have earned if I spent four years in his course.

I would have to put his name into my first dissertation paper as a thank you.

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