Ash stared at the calendar on May's kitchen wall.
March 1995.
The bright floral print around the border felt out of place against the mental countdown ticking in his skull. He scratched an X through the date with a pencil and walked back to the garage, sliding the door closed behind him with a soft click.
Time was running out.
Not immediately. Not tomorrow. But soon.
He knew how these things worked—causality didn't wait. The moment Stark fell into that cave, the Marvel universe as the world knew it would start unraveling. Iron Man. SHIELD's rise to prominence. The Avengers Initiative. The public arrival of gods, monsters, aliens.
And the Snap?
That damn cosmic coin toss?
It all traced back to one moment.
The cave in Afghanistan.
It was still years away—2008 if the film-aligned timeline held—but Ash knew better than to wait for the first explosion to start building a bomb shelter.
"People didn't prepare," he muttered, adjusting the soldering wire as he reattached the pulse regulator on the prototype HUD module. "And half of them paid the price for it."
He wouldn't be like them.
---
He stepped back and examined the makeshift display unit mounted onto a pair of broken sports goggles. The HUD flickered to life. Crude, green-tinted overlays appeared—temperature, air pressure, and EM field readings fed in from his scanner.
Primitive.
But a start.
With more time, he could build a proper micro-reactor. With better parts, he could build armor sleek enough to rival Tony's first suit before Tony even hit rock bottom.
Ash smirked.
What if Iron Man wasn't the first?
What if the world's first armored protector was already watching by the time the cave collapsed?
The idea tempted him. But he didn't let it fully take root.
He wasn't here to be a hero.
Not yet.
---
Over the next week, Ash became obsessed with timelines.
May assumed he was just catching up on his studies when he asked for old newspapers, TV broadcasts, even encyclopedias. She had no idea he was trying to calibrate reality against memory.
1995:
Carol Danvers should be arriving any day now—if the Kree plot was in play.
SHIELD, under Fury and Coulson, was already keeping files.
Project Pegasus existed.
The Tesseract? Still in Earth custody.
That last one made his stomach twist.
The Space Stone was here. Now. A cosmic nuke wrapped in a shiny cube sitting in some Earth facility—unguarded, misunderstood, and doomed to be exploited.
It wouldn't stay buried forever.
Ash made another note:
> "Steal it before someone else does? Too risky. Monitor instead."
---
It was during a trip to the library—an excuse to study electronics magazines—that Ash saw her again.
The girl with the blond hair, the quiet sneakers, and the sharp eyes that didn't miss a single movement.
She was pretending to read a book on Norse mythology.
He was pretending to not notice her.
But her eyes flicked toward him a beat too long.
And he knew.
She was watching him.
---
He left early.
By the time he reached the alley beside the school fence, she was already there, leaning against the brick wall like she hadn't just followed him across two blocks.
"You build stuff in a garage," she said flatly.
Ash blinked. "You watch people without blinking."
"Touché."
Silence.
Then:
"Who are you?" she asked.
Ash considered lying. But his instincts said this wasn't a normal girl. Her presence felt wrong—too composed, too clean. No tells. No fidgeting. She could be an operative. Or worse, an anomaly like him.
"I'm Ash," he said carefully. "Who are you?"
"Camryn," she said. "That's all you get."
"Fair."
She looked him over, then tossed something at his feet—a power cell. Stark Tech imitation, early model.
"Garage security's weak. Hide your parts better."
Then she was gone.
---
Back in the garage, Ash cracked open the cell. Custom wiring. Foreign circuits. Tracking marker—disabled, but only recently.
Who the hell was she?
She'd gotten in and out without triggering his basic EM tripwire.
That meant one of two things:
1. She was trained.
2. Or she wasn't from around here. At all.
He added her to the notebook:
> Subject: Camryn
Age: ~12–13
Skills: Surveillance, infiltration, intelligence-level observation
Gear: Modified Stark replica tech (stolen or issued?)
Status: Unknown allegiance. Possibly time-displaced?
The multiverse didn't play favorites. If he had been reborn, others might have been too.
And if that was the case?
He was already behind.
---
The next night, he worked harder.
He installed the first piece of his Mark Zero frame—a shoulder rig made from aluminum piping and steel-braided cables. It offered no protection, but it housed his battery cell and proto-sensor array. Ugly, clunky.
But real.
Ash looked at his reflection in the garage window.
Just a kid in scraps.
But under the surface?
A tactician. A builder. A survivor.
"I won't wait for the cave," he whispered. "I'll be ready before the first piece of shrapnel touches Stark's heart."
Because when the gods fell…
When giants came from space…
When half the universe stood at the brink…
Someone had to be there to catch what Iron couldn't.