Work Text:
Steve still wasn’t sure what to think about the whole situation. Pepper had cried, last night, in his and Tony’s arms, and Steve... wasn’t good at dealing with dames crying. Well, anyone crying, really, but dames seemed to matter more. She’d finally drifted off completely at 2 am, Steve following shortly after, but Tony was fiddling with some dimmed holographic schematics in the dark when Steve woke up at five.
He murmured a good morning, then got up to go through his morning workout routine and tried not to think, which... was not really that successful. He didn’t really blame Pepper, or Clint, and he didn’t even know Maria very well, but … part of him was angry about this. That something of this magnitude had been kept from everyone. Especially the Avengers, who were tasked with protecting the planet.
Part of him was angry at them, and he knew it wasn’t fair, wasn’t right, and that just made him angry at himself. A long run and a busted (Tony-enforced) punching bag later, and he finally realized what it was.
He was scared. Steve knew about public battles, and he knew about the battles that the public never knew about. Steve knew even in the public battles that there were things that were never made public, and that they were usually the most horrific things. The type of things that he saw in his nightmares.
Steve couldn’t imagine what his friends had gone through in an entire secret war, and the tiny pieces that he couldn’t help but think might have happened, just from what little he knew, made him sick. Maria was distant from the Avengers most of the time, but Clint was his teammate and Pepper...
Pepper was Pepper.
And whatever it was that they’d been through, Steve knew he wasn’t going to like it. At all.
***
In the morning, the - well, ‘Avengers and Associates’ was sort of sticking in Steve’s head for the extended group - drifted slowly into the main kitchen/common area.
(One of the things that Steve genuinely liked about the future - or, at least, the future of living-with-Tony-Stark - was that indoor spaces were open and vibrant, and even when full of people they never felt cramped.)
Steve had arrived first, after his workout, and started the coffee makers (Yes, plural. Tony drank an entire pot by himself in the morning, and others were... impatient), pulled out the breakfast tea stash he didn’t really understand, and started on food.
He’d gotten pretty good at making bacon, scrambled eggs, and pancakes for a crowd, and they had fresh blueberries...
Pepper and Tony both loved blueberry pancakes.
Thor and Jane trickled in around nine, both getting coffee first (Jane’s unsweetened with cream, Thor’s with a thick layer of sugar at the bottom of the mug) and Jane started making pop-tarts. Bruce arrived shortly after and made himself tea, while Thor and Jane were eating. (Breakfast was always an eat-when-you-get-there type of meal.) Darcy slumped in afterwards and went for some orange juice while Steve gave her three pieces of bacon then moved the rest out of her reach.
The five started quietly chatting, but were clearly avoiding the subject of the previous night until Darcy broke the unspoken taboo.
“Okay, so. Did last night actually happened or did I dream the fact that ten years ago there was a secret alien invasion in Los Angeles?”
Steve grimaced at her bluntness, though Bruce smiled softly.
“Well, if it was a dream, I had it too, Darcy,” Jane replied.
“Oh. Okay,” Darcy looked into her glass of juice blankly. “Because I gotta say, that’s weird, even for us.”
A soft snort came from the other end of the room and they looked up to see Tony and Pepper walk in.
“Santa Barbara, technically. And trust me, Darcy,” Pepper said as Tony beelined for the coffee, “It only gets weirder.”
Steve couldn’t help but wonder and dread how.
“Ah, Lady Pepper,” Thor beamed at her, “I must admit to my curiosity as to the peoples you encountered, and if we Asgardians know them as well.”
Pepper smiled diplomatically at Asgard’s Prince while Tony put a mug of coffee in front of her and Steve slipped her a plate of food.
“I doubt it,” she said to Thor as she began cutting her pancakes, “But it will all be in Phil’s briefing.”
Damn, but Steve always admired her poise. He always thought it was mostly from years of dealing with Tony but... maybe he should rethink that, after last night.
“Yeah, yeah,” Tony waved his hand in the air, slurping his coffee. “Okay, is the dance of ‘I’m the Crown Prince of Asgard and this information is possibly relevant to my people and have to ask’ versus the ‘you know I don’t want to talk about it and you’ll find out soon enough’ is over, alright? There is food. Good food, because Steve made it. Pancakes! Blueberry pancakes, even! I think that this can all ways until after we eat all of Steve’s pancakes,” Tony ended with his mouth full of food.
“Forgive me, Lady Pepper,” Thor said with a sheepish grin. “I did not intend to upset you.”
“It’s fine, Thor,” she replied as Rhodey walked in and the conversation returned to neutral ground.
While Rhodey was getting his food, Maria appeared and started to get hers. Steve noticed that they avoided each other, and hoped that they would sort something out soon.
But, well, that would have to be between the two of them, he knew.
Everyone was quiet for a few minutes, between chewing and dragging their brains into full consciousness - the latter less obvious than usual, actually, as curiosity overcame the remnants of sleep. Darcy was visibly antsy and driving both Jane and Thor closer to verbal curiosity when the elevator disgorged the last three members of the group.
Steve breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Coulson - finally - even if the man had his arms-overflowing with files and was accompanied by Clint slumped against Natasha, the archer clearly hungover. Finally finished cooking, he dished up plates for the three and placed them in front of them as they sat. Coulson waved off the plate of food as he set his heavy stack of files in front of him with a significant thump.
Steve took the plate and retreated to sit next to Pepper and eat, well, a second breakfast, since he’d eaten earlier. No use letting the food go cold, after all.
Tony reached across the table with a syrupy knife to poke at the files. Phil knocked it down with a pen before it could touch the papers.
“Do not damage these, Stark,” the Agent said over Tony.
“Really? Is this a thing?” Tony was asking, “Paper? In my tower? I know you have a perfectly good tablet, Phil. I know this because I designed it, I made it, and I gave it to you. So why, Agent, do we have this blasphemy of paper files cluttering my house?”
Phil just glanced at Tony and said, “Stark, SHIELD is many things, but we are not headed by idiots, and only an idiot would leave files meant to be at this level of security electronically in a world that contains you and JARVIS; and just because you two are, as of last night, cleared to see them, does not mean we want them accessible to the random unknown genius or potential alien threat who might succeed in hacking our system.”
Tony twirled his forkful of pancakes in the air.
“Point. JARVIS, make sure last night’s discussion on the former alien-battling lives,” he paused, face wrinkling in mild consternation, “former, of course, being a relative term with this group, Christ our lives are weird, of Barton, Hill and Pepper under top security settings. Remind me to set up a specific clearance for them later but for now restrict access to only the people in the room and... onsite access only, J, nothing external, including the Suit.”
“Done, sir. And thank you, Agent Coulson, for the compliment. We do our best.”
“Yes, Jarvis, I’m well aware of that,” Phil replied dryly. “SHIELD will continue to have paper-only copies, but I certainly can’t prevent you and Stark from keeping electronic ones, however, I will leave that between you and Ms. Potts.”
Everyone at the table grinned a bit, at that. Pepper and Steve were the ones best able to rein Tony in, and Pepper had had far more practice at it.
“Jarvis and I have already discussed it, actually,” Pepper replied.
Coulson simply nodded. Steve started to wonder when Pepper had done so and then disregarded the thought - it was Pepper, she could have told JARVIS years ago, as far as anyone knew.
Tony’s look was the one he gave her when he was thinking that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Steve couldn’t blame him there, and maybe he had a bit of a sappy grin on his own face at it. At them.
“Practical interruption,” Darcy said, “But we just ate pancakes for breakfast, and most of us are sticky. So how about everyone clear their dishes and wash their hands, and Phil doesn’t have to kill anyone for getting syrup on the Super-Secret files, huh?”
Clint and Natasha were finishing eating along with Steve, but everyone else obliged and though Tony grumbled he took Pepper’s plate for her.
He listened as Phil gathered Clint, Pepper, and Maria to the living area and made sure everyone else was helping clean up. It wasn’t a private place, by any means, but they could make the conversation as private as feasible, at least. And if Steve could still hear every word... well, it’s not like he could turn his hearing off, and no one else could over Darcy’s instructions and the inevitable clatter of so many dishes.
“These are simply the basic files of the Yeerk invasion and the role the Animorphs played in the conflict,” Phil was saying. “This will, of course, only open more questions for them. Especially Stark, I’m sure. You three are welcome to either stay or leave for this briefing, though I do recommend you all stay.”
Clint gave a grunt and shifted towards the door as Pepper put a staying hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Phil, we’re all staying,” Pepper said, “It’s not something easy for any of us, Clint, but I’m not letting anyone, oh, go sit on the roof and wonder how their friends are going to treat them after this. Right, Maria?”
Steve just glanced over in wonder as the other two immediately gave in.
“I’m glad to hear that,” was Phil’s response.
“None of us have ever been cowards,” Pepper said firmly. “I’m not letting anyone start now.”
***
Most days, Darcy Lewis wondered just how she’d gotten to where this was her life.
A year and a half ago she’d been a college senior getting her required science credits through an internship no one else wanted, that she’d applied for mostly on the premise to go see New Mexico for a few months. She’d expected a summer of baking heat, boredom, and learning more about astrophysics than any normal person needed to know, then graduating and hopefully being blessed with a half-decent job somewhere, ideally in her field but with this economy she knew that beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Instead, she’d met the expected astrophysicists and the unexpected aliens and secret agents, became besties with Jane, still graduated, and was somehow living and working in Stark Tower with the Avengers, with free rent in a ridiculously spacious apartment in NYC, and a job with a salary that was more than she expected to make for a least ten years, if ever, and, well, she was awesomely ahead of her student loans. She even had a retirement fund!
Darcy was, in short, mind boggled that she was this damned lucky, especially knowing that ex-classmates of hers were struggling everyday to make ends meet, and she didn’t know what the hell she’d done to deserve this.
So, hell, she did what she could. Around the tower mostly, for Jane, for Thor and the other Avengers, for Pepper and Phil and anyone who stopped by. (And she was still, months later, mind-boggled that she was on a first name basis with all the Avengers and PEPPER POTTS.) She baked, she made sure common areas got regularly cleaned, she kept Jane fed and watered while the woman was trapped in SCIENCE. Jane had expanded into Thor and Bruce, and then eventually Tony. (Thor didn’t actually need reminders to eat, nor did any of the other non-scientists, and Tony was mostly limited to putting a deli sandwich by his elbow when Jarvis suggested she do so, but she was helping, okay?)
She’d never anticipated being in this position after college. She’d never anticipated being friends with these people, especially as she’d usually been among the oldest person in all her previous friends groups, and now she was the youngest by a lot. And Christ on a cracker but she never thought that her friends would somehow be made up of superheroes, a billionaire, secret agent super spies, and PEPPER POTTS. (Sometimes she wondered what her parents would think of all of this, and then she had to set those thoughts aside and just live her life. That option, like a lot of other options surrounding her parents, was gone from her forever now.)
Darcy didn’t know what she was doing here, most days, but she wouldn’t trade it for the world, and she would defend it to her last breath.
So here she was half-bullying superheroes into cleaning up their breakfast dishes, doing a basic sweep of the kitchen floor, and basically making sure they lived like semi-normal human beings because really, none of them had enough normal in their lives. And sometimes, Darcy knew, especially when your life got turned upside down (which everyone here’s had) you just needed that bit of normal.
Even if you were Tony Stark and had never washed your own dishes growing up.
Yeah, some days she wondered if it was worth it. (And then she remembered her student loans. It was totally worth it.)
And honestly? Keeping superheros distracted to let her bossman (Yes, she worked for SHIELD under Phil, and lived in Stark tower for free, how was this her life?) deal with semi-private personal stuff was usually interesting.
Darcy Lewis didn’t know everything. She didn’t have to. She just had to know enough to keep her friends safe.
So, when the dishwasher was running and the pans were scrubbed and dried and put away, the table wiped down, and the floor swept, everyone else was gradually dismissed to the living area, sitting with coffees and juices and teas, as Darcy and Bruce finished up sweeping the floor.
Bruce was a sweetheart like that, and Darcy gave him a big grin as they finished. He smiled shyly back.
Anyway.
So.
They sat back down onto the couches and Tony prodded Coulson gently to pass out the paperwork.
A quick glance over her friends showed Natasha interested and a tiny bit peaky - probably from taking care of Clint all night. He looked pretty damned hungover, and while Darcy wasn’t surprised at that it still didn’t look pleasant. Steve looked nervous and protective, Tony looked... well, Tony was always hard to tell, he had one of his ‘bored’ masks on, but out of the corners of her eyes she got a sense of nervousness from him. Pepper looked controlled, mostly, with hints of resignation peaking through when she sipped her tea.
Darcy didn’t know either Agent Hill or Colonel Rhodes very well, and everyone else was confused but relatively normal, if a bit anticipatory.
She knew that she just wanted to know what was going on.
“The top form is the standard SHIELD non-disclosure on this topic; everyone who has not signed one already on this manner should do so as should Ms. Potts,” Coulson said as the packets all went around.
“Why does Pepper have to? Wasn’t she involved in all this?” Tony asked.
“I have to sign it because, technically, there’s no link between Pepper Potts and Cassie the Animorph. It’s not in SHIELD records anywhere. So, technically, Tony, Pepper Potts doesn’t know about this yet, and if everyone else here gets official clearance on this, excluding me? Someone who doesn’t know already might note that, and I don’t want to deal with the potential fallout from that,” Pepper answered him.
“Everyone here though is going to know. Already knows. And, look, I mean, Barton and Hill and Coulson all knew, obviously. Why’s that then?”
“Nothing on paper, Tony. I’m not stupid. Those that needed to know? Knew. And I trust everyone in this room to not abuse the knowledge, not that there’s any real way to keep it from you all now. There are reasons for this, Tony. Now sign the paper and read.”
“Well... all right.”
Darcy knew that Tony wasn’t done with the topic, and so did everyone else, but he signed the NDA, let Pepper hand it to Phil, and opened the packet.
Darcy followed suit.
The Packet (and Darcy felt it deserved capital letters) wasn’t so much a packet so much as a filled three-ring binder. And this, she could tell, was the brief version. Briefly wondering how Coulson had managed to juggle ten or so of these to get them here, she picked it up, tucked her legs underneath her, and settled in to absorb it.
The entire first section - several pages long - was a ‘main points’ briefing. Some undefined point in the late 1970s had a parasitic alien species known as the Yeerks discovering the existence of humans through means unknown. ‘Parasitic’, in this case, meant that the Yeerks infested the brain of an animal-type species and controlled their body. Without a host, the Yeerks had very limited sensations of sight, scent/taste, touch, and hearing. Within a host a Yeerk could do anything that host body could do. They could have absolute control over the host body. A yeerk could dig through your thoughts, could move you anyway they wanted, coul -
Darcy had a vision of what could be done to a person like that, beyond even what Loki had done to Clint and Erik, and found herself running for the sink, and vomiting her breakfast into it.
***
Jane looked up as Darcy rushed towards the sink, but Pepper waved both her and Bruce off and went after Darcy. And Pepper knew what was going on anyway. Jane wasn’t sure what in particular had set Darcy off but everything she had read so far was fantastic. The only noise besides Darcy was pages turning, but Jane quickly tuned everything back out, engrossed in the files.
She was deep in “research reading” mode pretty quickly, absorbing everything carefully and as completely as possible. Jane knew that it slowed her reading speed, but that it also let her remember everything she read close to word-perfect.
The major resistance to Yeerk domination over other sentient species was an opposing race called the Andalites. In physical form the Andalites most closely resemble a legendary centaur, blue and purple in fur coloration, with a long, bladed tail and four eyes, two main eyes in the face and another pair on mobile stalks. The Andalites were the first spacefaring race to land on the Yeerk homeworld, and Yeerk technology was almost entirely derived from Andalite designs and concepts, adapted to fit common host bodies of the Yeerks, mostly the Gedd, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxons (see attached files).
In 1996 a single Andalite domeship, GalaxyTree, emerged from Z-space, an interstellar travel method not yet well understood, into near-Earth space to assess and combat the Yeerk presence around Earth. The Yeerks had a much greater presence than Andalite intelligence at the time had indicated, and the GalaxyTree was destroyed. Four Andalites are known to have survived the crash.
Someone was swearing in the background, but Jane read on.
One of these survivors, holding the Andalite rank of Prince, was Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. In the aftermath of the space battle that took place, Prince Elfangor, badly wounded, landed his small fighter in an abandoned construction site, [location redacted] (see attached file). At the time, five human teenagers, at the time aged 13, were walking through the site. The children interacted with Prince Elfangor, who broke Andalite law to give them access to Andalite morphing technology, giving them the ability to turn into any animal that they could ‘acquire’ the DNA to via touch (see attached file). It must be noted that the morphing ability has one major drawback: If an individual is in a morph for a timespan of greater than two hours, they are trapped in that morph, and cannot return to their original body or morph another animal. Persons who are trapped in such a condition are called nothlits.
The five children were given the morphing technology by Prince Elfangor, and then sent to hide as Yeerk forces, including the Yeerk Espiln 9466 (see attached file), then holding the rank of Visser Three, landed. Visser Three then killed Prince Elfangor.
From 1996 to 1999, the five teenagers, who called themselves the Animorphs, fought the Yeerk invasion of Earth on their own, joined only by another survivor of the GalaxyTree, the Andalite cadet Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, who was Prince Elfangor’s younger brother, and on his first military mission. (See attached file: Animorphs)
Wait a minute, Jane thought in the distance.
The Yeerks, assuming that any fighters in morph would be Andalite warriors, called the group the Andalite Bandits. Yeerk records show that the damage they inflicted, secretly, on the Yeerk invasion was significant, despite the Animorphs own beliefs that their battles were not-
Holy shit.
“- I MEAN WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK,” Tony’s exclamation fully intruded onto Jane’s thoughts.
Thirteen year olds.
“WHO WOULD GIVE FIVE TEENAGERS -”
Five of them.
“SOME SORT OF SUPERPOWER -”
Fighting aliens trying to take over the Ear-
oh shit
“AND LEAVE THE FATE OF THE EARTH IN THE HANDS OF THIRTEEN YEAR OLDS?”
Maria Hill, Clint, and Pepper had fought a war. Maria was in a body she had freely admitted to not being born in.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP STARK!” Barton interjected, leaping from his seat to face Tony, “You have no fucking clue what the fuck you are talking about!”
Jane looked up and the archer was angry, furious, more emotional than she’d ever seen the man - he was up in Tony’s face and pulled back his fist and -
“TOBIAS!” Pepper barked from the kitchen area, “Stop.”
Clint - Tobias? - stopped, his face going pale. He lowered his arm
“Stark,” Maria said, standing up and flanking Clint. “The kids you just read about? The thirteen year olds? The Animorphs? They’re all right here. What’s left of us.”
Pepper joined Maria on Clint’s other side, glancing around the room and ending by looking Tony in the eyes.
“Tony. We were the Animorphs.”
***
“Fuck.”
Tony heard Bruce swear softly but it felt like it was removed and was this dissociation? Was he dissociating right now? Because none of this felt real, none of this felt like it was happening none of this should be happening, and his jaw was wide open and he should probably fix that maybe and -
snap
- okay maybe he shut his jaw a little too hard there and right on his cheek but funny it didn’t even hurt, really, that was a weird feeling in his throat was he choking up?
“Tony.”
And what was it Pepper just said? She was looking at him like she just said something important and she was next to Clint and Hill and what wa-
Thirteen years old in 1996.
-s really happening again? (oh god he was choking up, damn you body stop that shit)
Pepper was fourty years old, though. She’d started as his personal assistant ten years ago, in 2002, and he remembers hitting on her the first time he met and being impressed by her rebuff and -
Everything just felt weird and Bruce was swearing again and -
Thirteen years old in 1996 means that in 2002 she wasn’t even 20 years old -
A hand was clapping him on the shoulder and a voice was saying his name -
- and he had stopped sleeping with people younger than 20 years old sometime around... well... 1996, and there he had been hitting on Pepper and -
“Tony are you okay?” He didn’t know who was talking but he was pretty sure he wasn’t okay he just felt sort of green - not vomiting green but like there was a spot of deep forest green at the back of his jaw and the room seemed kind of unfocused -
and fuck Pepper wasn’t even thirty.
“Thirteen years old in 1996 means you’re not even thirty yet,” he heard himself say blankly, and then he sat down.
He was really fucking glad that Rhodey caught him because he’d been standing in the middle of the living room, nowhere near a chair, but he didn’t know that at the time and his knees were going to give anyway so he sat down and Rhodey’s hands caught him and steered him to the couch and shoved his face in his knees and Tony could deal with this, really.
Maybe he’d just sit here and breathe for a minute. In front of everyone. Watching him freak out.
... fuck...
Pepper fought a war with only five friends when she was a teenager.
... fuck ...
***
Bruce stood up and put his glasses on. This was getting out of hand, and it was clear that the people usually in control - Coulson and Pepper, mostly - were much too close to the situation to have a grasp on it.
Steve would usually step in, but Bruce couldn’t blame him for feeling too close, too, especially with Pepper right there, defiance layered over fear on her face (and they all knew that one), beside the people she’d fought with as child soldiers, and Tony sat down on the couch with Rhodey shoving a whiskey in his face and they’d all been trying to curtail his drinking but the man looked to be on the verge of a panic attack, and Bruce knew everyone had enough trouble getting him to take antibiotics, much less psychiatric medication.
So, a moderate amount of alcohol might help Tony in this case, and they may have been spending too much time in the lab together because ‘It usually does’ just rang through his head clear as a bell in Tony’s voice and - all right. Bruce was just going to let that one be for now.
Bruce had learned how to let a lot of things just be over the past few years.
The Hulk was rumbling in his own personal background, worried about Tony and Darcy - and how did that happen, again? How did he wind up here, with friends, somehow hip deep in the closest he’d felt to family since... forever? That thing, how had that happened?
Not the time, he thought to his brain.
Surveying the situation, he took a deep breath.
“Right. Everyone, let’s take a minute to catch our breaths. JARVIS?” he asked.
“Yes, sir?” The AI responded with his usual prompt deference. Good. Someone was acting somewhat normal here.
“Play a brief, calm piece of music please. While we all are quiet for a minute and calm down, at least until the end of the piece, because if that does not happen, there might be property damage beyond my control.”
“Very good, Master Bruce.”
Bruce swore Jarvis sounded like Batman’s butler on purpose, especially as Tony actually let out what... might be close to a slightly-hysterical little giggle at it.
Okay. Okay. He’d be fine. Well, no, he was fine, he was just using the Hulk as a good excuse to make sure everyone else would stay that way. Because if everyone else stayed that way, so would he.
The instrumental music started, a piano piece, and everyone quieted down, and he walked across the room to check on Darcy.
She was staring blankly into the kitchen sink.
“Darce?” Bruce asked, handing her an empty glass. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she replied blankly, filling the glass with water, and then turned to look up at him. “Yeah I just need a minute.”
Bruce nodded. “I think most of us do. It’s a lot to take in. Are you going to throw up again?”
She swallowed. “I don’t think so,” she said quietly.
“Alright. Rinse out your mouth and come sit on the couch with me then, please? If you have to get up again that’s fine.”
“Yeah. Yeah let’s do that.”
He took her back to the couch, and sat her down next to him, and looked around and assessed what was going on before the music stopped.
This crowd was good at hiding their feelings, but could also be pathetically open in safety, which this had become for all of them.
Easy people first. Okay.
Darcy was next to him, and she was a bit shaky and curled into him but he could handle that, and she’d be fine. She was good not only at taking care of other people, but at taking care of herself. Thor was watching the room while Jane read on, a division of tasks that he noticed had become normal for them. Jane translated human things for him later most of the time, Bruce knew.
Rhodey was next to Tony who had downed the whiskey and looked like he was coming out of it. ‘It’ being the borderline panic attack of realizing that your friends had been child soldiers.
Bruce took a deep breath and coiled up the anger and pressed it back down. He did not need the Hulk now, and he would save the rage to use when he needed it.
Moving on.
Pepper, Hill, and Clint had settled on the other couch, on the other side of Phil from everyone, and Bruce figured that was a bad sign - it meant that they really weren’t sure of how everyone else would take this, and were watching each other’s backs.
He couldn’t read Hill; partly because he didn’t know her well. Pepper showed the most worry he’d ever seen over a tiny bit of fear, and Pepper was rarely afraid unless Tony was in danger. Clint was as blank as only Clint could be, the fury of a few moments ago off of his face like it’d never been there and - oh. That would be a problem, wouldn’t it? Whatever had made Clint so visibly emotionless.
Steve was in the middle of the room, just this side of Phil, looking... Torn between his people. Right. Because he’d go to whoever needed him most, but they all needed him. Right. And that was exactly why Bruce had asked for the music for the breathing space because there were times that everyone needed a moment.
Phil was the second hardest to read, always, but the wrinkle of the man’s brow told Bruce that he was worried and not... entirely dispassionate about this himself. That was bad.
Natasha was always impossible, but she was there, on the other side of Steve, staring at Clint like a - ha.
A bit like a hawk watching it’s prey.
And changing into animals could mean a lot of things that Bruce could not process right now.
The music ended.
Right, Brucey, said Tony’s voice in his head, Time to strut.
He squeezed Darcy’s hand, released it, and stood up, gathering everyone’s attention to him.
“This was not a good way to tell us, but I appreciate that there was no good way to tell us this information,” he began. “Phil,” the man looked at him, “Can you give us a brief verbal rundown, and we can absorb the rest of the text later?”
Agent Coulson’s face smoothed out and took charge. “Yes. I- yes. That might be best.”
***
Natasha looked at Clint and wondered about his eyes.
They didn’t meet each others eyes very often, actually. Clint was always - always - so visually alert that his eyes were always in motion, constantly scanning the surroundings. And she was no less alert.
But there were certainly times, a number of them, where they had some measures of safety. Where they could focus on each other, and take care of each other.
He had been Hawkeye for as long as she had known him.
And, she thought, he probably had been since he was somewhere around 13 years old.
He certainly understood her more than anyone else she’d ever met. He had understood what it was like to not be loved as a child. He understood what it was like, to find that first love, and lose it, and if the names James and Rachel echoed between them almost as often as Clint and Tasha did, well, that was no one else’s business.
More importantly though, more than anything else in the world, they both been brought up predators and warriors.
Mar and Pepper were more surprising, but the way the three of them moved together in that moment, automatically, in ancient ingrained habits? To these stimuli and old memories? Natasha had no problems believing this was true. (And Hill she had known was a fighter; Pepper though? Natasha would have to step more carefully around Pepper in the future. Then again, they shared a shoe size, so maybe not too carefully.)
Before Thor, of course, she might have been more disbelieving on the aliens part, but when an alien Norse God is sitting on the other end of the couch, one can’t be too disbelieving.
Coulson was rattled, though. That... Natasha didn’t know how that fit in yet, but she had a feeling it wasn’t pleasant. Mind-control aliens and - oh.
Mind-control.
Aliens.
Loki.
(She had wondered a bit, had expected Barton to carry more guilt and more pain from the attack on the Helicarrier. But he’d told her once, practically shouting, that it had been his hands but not him, and she’d known then that he would be okay)
He handed her feathers sometimes, out of the blue.
So as Coulson stood to try to explain again, all Natasha could wonder was how much of Clint was as hawk as his eyes were?
“Right, people,” Coulson said, and Natasha felt the entire room turn to listen. “It may be best to boil things down to the bones as a foundation here. So here are some facts: The Animorphs were a group of human teenagers given the power to morph by an Andalite warrior, dying far from home. The Yeerks believed they were Andalites for over two years. In early 1999, The Sharing, a Yeerk front organization, was being investigated by SHIELD, mostly focused on its financial excesses and it’s somewhat cult-like exploitation of its members, as reported not by any member themselves, but by family members. The Sharing had two tiers of membership: the general membership, which was used to recruit potential voluntary and often involuntary human hosts, and what was termed full membership.
“All Full-Members of The Sharing were Controllers: Humans whose bodies had been infested by Yeerks and were controlled by them. Several things were of interest to SHIELD in the organization, but the most notable was that at the time we could not find any Full Members who had left the organization and were still alive. It later turned out that there were a few, but most were homeless or in long-term mental health care for claims that aliens had been in their heads, or had had periods of each.”
It was amazing, Natasha reflected, how calm Phil would look to most people. But there was something off. There. That was it. The corner of his left eye was a little wrinkled, as if holding back a wince.
He’d probably worked the case, then.
“SHIELD, having no idea of the true scale of The Sharing’s organization, nor that it was a front for something larger, sent in a junior agent on his first mission who was unfortunately woefully underprepared for the reality, and was captured and compromised.”
Compromised in what sense?
“By ‘captured and compromised’, of course,” Hill interrupted dryly, “He means ‘caught trying to get into the Yeerk-only areas by a Hork-Bajir and getting himself infested by a Yeerk’, good going there, Phil.”
So, compromised had been a euphemism for Mind-Control in SHIELD for longer than she’d realized. Good to know that. And it confirmed what she’d thought about Phil. And the way that Hill easily and casually pronounced the alien names was telling.
“Agent was compromised?” Tony’s voice rang clear. Stark was coming fully out of the panic then, good, even if he insisted on being an ass. “You Phil? I thought better of you than that!”
“Tony,” Pepper sighed and Phil waved her down.
“No, he’s right, I was an idiot then,” he grinned in Tony’s direction, “But I learned. Quickly.”
It was always a tiny bit eerie, even for her, to see that shark-sharp expression on Coulson’s face.
“But, moving on. At that point, the Animorphs had been fighting the Yeerks for three years, with very little outside help, and were on the verge of being discovered as humans, rather than the Andalite survivors the Yeerks believed them to be. From there, it would be a short path to the Yeerks discovering who they were, and infesting them and the uninfested portions of their families, and destroying what was effectively the only Earth-based resistance to the invasion.”
“Uninfested portions?” Darcy’s voice rang out. “Are you saying that -”
“Yes,” Hill answered - apparently being the voice for the group of her, Clint, and Pepper on the couch. (Natasha could now see the camaraderie between them clearly, though it was obviously muted by time and distance, but it was still difficult to think of them as a group - or part of one. These Animorphs.) “Some of our family members were involuntary Controllers.”
She stopped there, and Darcy said, faintly, “I almost wish I could throw up again.”
Natasha didn’t quite understand the statement but Bruce was beside her, sorrow in his eyes, and she wondered not for the first time if Darcy’s easy way of expressing herself and her emotions helped him keep his in check the way he needed to, to control the Hulk.
Hm. Maybe.
“Moving on,” Phil continued, as Jane flipped another piece of paper, apparently reading and listening at the same time, “The Animorphs had few options, and an opportunity for them appeared in an potential rescue mission.
“Because fortunately for everyone - and I am not exaggerating there - the Animorphs were able to gather the information that a government agent had been captured, and managed to rescue me from the Yeerks. After freeing me, we formulated a plan that put the Animorphs in contact with SHIELD. After that, the Animorphs and a small group of SHIELD agents, including myself and then Assistant Director Fury, managed to end the war quietly, from Earth’s perspective, with help from the Andalite people and a few other alien Allies against the Yeerks.”
Hill snorted ungracefully at that. “Help. Yeah. Sure. We got their help almost too late and basically won the war for them, and oh look, in return they didn’t release a quantum virus on Earth like they did on the Hork-Bajir world and basically took all the credit at home.”
“Quantum Virus?” Bruce started.
“But they had face to save for their people, and it bought humans some valuable political allies, there, after everything needed to do.” Clint interrupted, turning to Hill, and that was odd, Natasha thought, because Clint never talked to Hill directly if he could help it but oh, she had to reassess that now because what had happened, there?
Hill gave him a look, “Humans, Tobias?” she asked quietly.
Clint flinched. “You know what I mean, dude,” he snapped back. “And I get where you’re coming from even, but tell me, all these years later, all the shit you’ve seen in SHIELD? Can you honestly tell me humans would behave any better.”
Hill winced in turn, at that. “No. No, you’re right there it’s just - “
“It’s just that they were supposed to be the good guys and save us, and all we had to do was hang on until they got there,” Pepper calmly interrupted at that. The dynamic here was interesting. “And it didn’t turn out that way. I don’t think Elfangor knew how it would turn out - I don’t think he even guessed. He just gave us what he could, to give us something to hold on to.”
“Tell that to Jake. Tell that to Rachel,” Hill replied to her, only hints of venom in her words. Rachel was a name Natasha knew, but Jake? Another lost comrade?
“I am way too sober for this conversation,” Clint said.
“Me too,” Hill replied.
Neither of them drank much alcohol at all, Natasha knew - the night before was the first time she’d seen Clint drunk in over a year and she’d had to ask JARVIS to monitor him for signs of alcohol poisoning. But this seemed to be too overwhelming for them otherwise, so she said nothing. She’d need to be drunk for a conversation like this, too.
***
Thor knew he often did not understand the internal politics of Midgardians, but he certainly knew that they existed. Sometimes people treated him as if he didn’t, but that was fair - it was difficult to contend with someone alien to your native culture.
Throughout his time on Midgard, however, all of his new friends in the Avengers had been conscious and conscientious of his adjustments to Earth’s culture. The good Captain Rogers had had to do some adjusting of his own, having been effectively transported through time to a new place, but the two of them found different things about their new world to be strange and unusual. Tony Stark was extremely interested in anything Thor could share about Asgard’s technology, which was the word the man insisted on using for the magical arts. Thor admittedly could not tell him as much as the man wanted to know, lacking the technical and foundational knowledge that made both his mother and Loki such formidable mages. Lady Natasha seemed to respect his warrior arts the most, and insisted on training along side him in the arts of war. Lady Pepper had taken him aside after he had ‘moved into’ Stark Tower with the rest of the team, and had introduced him personally to Jarvis, telling him that most anything he questioned about Midgard and its customs could be asked of the Intelligence, and that she would be happy to address any questions left unanswered. Thor had appreciated the offer, even though he continued to rely on his love the Lady Jane and her handmaiden Darcy for almost any question he had.
But the greatest ally he had found within the team itself was Clint Barton. He’d expected the human to be understandably bitter after being under Loki’s control - after all, Loki was Thor’s brother and fellow prince of Asgard. But once the battle had passed that had not been the case. Instead, when he’d sought the archer to apologize on Asgard’s behalf, the man informed him that Loki, and Loki alone, owed the debt for such a grievous sin, and then introduced Thor to the Midgardian delicacy called Ice Cream.
Thor was delighted by this development, and from then on, Clint had not simply been a comrade in arms, but his genuine friend, and an excellent guide to Midgard from the inside, sharing the realm’s delightful food items with him. Clint’s hawk-like eyes saw much, though Thor had refrained from commenting on their differences from the other humans he had met; it seemed rude.
Though he could not comprehend the written language of the Midgardians as well as when it was spoken to hear through the Allspeak, he was passable in the reading. The files, however, were quite dense, and Thor found himself mostly relying on the interactions and reactions of his teammates and friends in front of him to gain meaning from their contents.
He understood quite quickly, however, that Loki had not been the first to sin against Clint by taking away the hawk-man’s will, and that his friends were distraught at realizing that he, Lady Pepper, and Agent Hill had been warriors at a young age.
“I do not understand,” Thor said to the room at large after both Clint and Agent Hill had professed a desire for alcohol. “You say you were victorious in your battle against these creatures - but why? Why are such great deeds hidden from all of your people? Why is there not much feasting and rejoicing for the great feats surely accomplished in such a victory?”
“I have to go,” Clint made to stand up and Pepper pushed him back down.
“I’ll get you and Mar drinks,” she said.
“It’s ten am.”
“Yes, Tony, it is.”
“You don’t let me drink at ten am.”
“These are extenuating circumstances, Tony. Ask Steve if you can have a drink.”
“No, Tony,” Steve put in, recognizing his cue.
Lady Pepper and Tony Stark both looked better for the moments of banter, even as Tony whined at Steve.
“There’s a lot of reasons why the war was kept secret while we were fighting, but you are addressing why we don’t just come out and tell everyone now, right, Thor?” Lady Maria - perhaps he should call her Lady Mar? He would have to ask her preference - asked him.
“That is correct.”
“Politics,” she replied.
A moment passed.
“Maria,” said Lady Darcy.
“Yes?” Lady Maria accepted her drink from Lady Pepper.
“You do realize that just saying ‘politics’ is about as useful as saying ‘for reasons’ right?”
“Yep,” Maria downed her beverage with a mighty quaff, and handed the empty glass back to Pepper. “I just needed more alcohol in me before I tack- holy shit, Pepper, what the hell was in that thing?”
“Alcohol.”
“Clearly,” Lady Maria’s voice was hoarse.
The hawk-eyed Clint was coughing after trying his own brew.
“Anyway. Politics,” Lady Maria returned to the subject at hand, and began counting items off on her fingers. “A lot of things happened in 2001: We finished kicking most of the Yeerks off of the planet for good, we made a treaty with the Andalites, those bastards, we set up the Free Hork-Bajir Colony in a permanent location - it has Redwoods, very nice, perfect for them - and the human politicians up top who knew what was going on were basically going ‘Hey! Great job guys!’ and everyone was discussing public disclosure and innovations and technology and trade and things like that. And we were on track to start disclosure by the end of the year, if some freak battle hadn’t set it off sooner.”
“What happened t- oh.” Darcy interrupted her own question. “2001. September Eleventh?”
“Yeah. That happened,” Mar nodded at her. “A great many politicians were suddenly MUCH more in favor of keeping things secret so as not to ‘distract the nation’s focus in this time of need’ and that is a direct quote, I shit you not. It was mostly bullshit, but it was useful bullshit, as a lot of us wanted to keep it secret anyway. And things have been in kind of in a holding pattern since then.”
“But it’s been over a decade since then. Why hasn’t anything changed?” Lady Jane asked, still looking at the papers in front of her. “Why haven’t any of the former Yeerk-infested people talked to the press? Why is this so secret that most of SHIELD doesn’t even really know about it?”
“I’m glad you picked that up, Dr. Foster,” the Son of Coul said, “And the answer is both complicated and simple. The simple answer is that we decided it should be secret for as long as possible.”
Thor watched his Lady look up to meet the Son of Coul’s eyes. “And the complicated one?” she asked, never hesitating.
“The complicated answer is also a simple answer: Humans are intolerant assholes,” Clint said somewhat viciously.
***
Humans really were intolerant assholes, and as a black man who grew up in the middle of Philly, Rhodey didn't need to have all the particulars spelled out for him.
He listened anyway, to Pepper's short description of their interactions with alien races, to Mar's explanation of human and Andalite and Yeerk politicians all being ridiculously bigoted at times, to Coulson outlining the very real concerns within SHIELD at the time that if Earth advanced too quickly, bad things would happen.
Bad things including: Alien species exterminating humans for advancing too quickly, which apparently was a real concern from the Andalite military with something called a Quantum Virus, but also entirely Earth-centric things like the potential for World War Three.
Clint had finished with an observation about how the Boy Scouts still apparently couldn't tolerate gay people, so how were they supposed to accept an alien like the Hork-Bajir? (By the ‘All I’m saying’ before the statement and Mar's eyeroll, this was not a new observation of his.)
Which, also, apparently there were aliens that the Yeerk's brought to Earth now living on Earth permanently. Mostly the aforementioned Hork-Bajir, who Clint in particular seemed fond of.
It was kind of weird.
No, wait, it wasn't just kind of weird, it was ridiculously weird. At the same time, it was weird in the way of his best friend getting kidnapped and then building a flying suit of armor. It was weird in the way that he piloted another version of said flying suit of armor. It was weird in that he was sitting in a living room with four shield agents, three scientists at the tops of their field, whatever Darcy Lewis was this week, a CEO, Captain America, and a Norse deity, and most of them there were actual superheros who had actually saved the world.
Rhodey had occasionally wondered where the hell his life had taken a turn for the weird, and always came up with the day he met Tony Stark. He wasn't going to complain too much about it though.
So here he was listening to how, Post-War, Pepper who had once been Cassie and Maria who had once been Marco and Clint who had once been Tobias and their allies had worked with SHIELD to get some basic rights for sentient non-human residents. (And that was exactly the term they all used, clear and precise.) How SHIELD had updated all of its contingencies to include things that the Animorphs had run into and more.
"Basically," Coulson had said, "We wound up going with: If it was in an episode of Star Trek, consider the possibility anyway. Other Sci-Fi series were also submitted at times."
Rhodey had been listening. Had been listening to all of that.
But mostly, he'd been watching Mari- . Mar. Maria, who'd been Marco, who her friends, which was mostly just Pepper, all called Mar. Maria, who had been born and grew up as a Latino boy from Southern California, and had replied something about how it hadn't been their fault that their lives had turned into a list of TV Tropes.
He was trying not to, y'know, just stare and be obvious about it, but this? THIS?
This was probably the exact weirdest moment of his life, and thank God being friends with Tony had gotten him used to continually being in situations that just got weirder and weirder with time but this rated over the fire breathing human he'd fought a few months ago and that? That was impressive.
Of course, he was sitting around with a team of superheros hearing how a group of teenagers fought off an alien invasion in the late 90s. If it got weirder than this, man, he didn't want to know, okay?
At the rate things were going, though, it’d be weirder by tomorrow anyway, so Rhodey was kind of resigned to his fate there.
But a lot of this stuff, right now, was beside the point that Rhodey was avoiding thinking about. Which was Mar.
They'd met as Agent Hill and Col. Rhodes, of course, but had hit it off fairly well, and in the months since then had been building up into a nice, if subdued, flirtation. He'd finally asked her out last week. And now this?
Okay, so, yeah, he didn't exactly expect Mar to tell this stuff to just anyone - and he was probably lucky that he fell under 'Need to Know' now. Because the honest-to-God truth was that building a relationship with secrets was bad, and while some secrets couldn't be avoided in their lines of work, this - identity thing? - This was pretty intensely personal and relevant to a good relationship. And it wasn’t like they’d been dating forever or anything.
Basically, Rhodey found himself at a place where he had to decide if he could live with the fact that the person he'd fallen in love with had a really unusual fucking past that included a) being a child soldier, and b) being an adult woman but having grown up a boy. Oh, and c) did he mention the former ability to turn into animals that they used to fight aliens? Because that was pretty fucking unreal.
Damnit Tony, he thought out of habit, and then realized that Tony actually had nothing at all to do with the causes of this situation, which, Huh. That was new, having his latest “weirdest situation ever” being entirely uncaused by Tony Stark.
And then he realized that he thought the words 'in love with', and shit. He didn't just like Mar, he wasn't just attracted to her and wanted to date her. Sure, those things were true, but he knew the difference from that and 'in love' and it was a pretty big difference.
Yeah, Rhodey realized. Yeah, he could live with this.
And suddenly he was tuned back into the conversation.
"So you guys and SHIELD let this be collectively be thrown behind a brick wall because you thought humans in general can't handle aliens? I don't buy the reasoning on that," Tony was saying, glaring in the general direction of Mar, Clint, and Coulson.
"Because maybe you weren't the one with your boots on the ground, then, Stark!" Mar exclaimed "Maybe you weren't the one smiling prettily for the Andalites and working behind the scenes with SHIELD and batting off the WSC with everything you could to keep them from getting the Morphing Cube. Maybe you weren't one of the people who wound up wanting to grieve in fucking private!"
Her words washed over Rhodey, and hey, he wasn't a spy, he didn’t always read people successfully, but he could tell there was more here. He didn't like seeing Mar in pain.
"That doesn't give you the right to decide everything for the entire human race!" Tony shot back, and Rhodey knew this Tony - this was a tony who had the world change on him too many times in the past day, and was taking it out on the nearest available target.
"Tony, knock it off," he started to say.
"You have no idea Stark," Clint, surprisingly, was the one who had cut him off. Rhodey didn't know the man very well, beyond his fucking excellent shooting work, but his voice was rough and raspy with pain - probably a combination of a hangover headache and some pretty overwhelming emotional shit. “You have no fucking clue.”
"So enlighten me!"
"We'd been fighting for over five years at that point, the six of us. We had a better appreciation for where Earth stood in the interstellar hierarchy than anyone. We had a general idea of what type of tech was out there, and what it could do.
"And we knew what some humans would do with it," Clint continued. "That that amounted to mass murder."
"To unpack that statement a bit," Coulson interrupted over the room, "The World Security Council gave us two options: concealment or full disclosure to the public. A full revelation would have given the U.S. Government captured examples of Yeerk technology. This included weapons that could disintegrate things with a shot, as well as spaceships. Tell me, Stark, if someone had handed something like that to you in 2001 and asked you to mass produce it for your country, what would you do with it?"
Tony paled.
Pepper held up a hand at that.
"Enough, Phil, you made your point."
“And then there’s always the Morphing Power itself,” Mar took the space Pepper had asked for and filled it instead. “Do you know what it does? It replicates a body based off of DNA, making it easy to not only become an animal, but to impersonate another human being. Or multiple other human beings. And we’d learned what it would be in the hands of a sociopath the first year we were at War, Stark, and that’s a nearly unstoppable, nearly untraceable serial killer.”
Rhodey felt the blood drain from his own head a bit, and decided not to touch that just yet.
But goddamned Tony always had to poke things with sticks.
“A serial killer. With this, this morphing power.”
Pepper sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“We, as in the Animorphs, ran into a kid who had found the morphing cube. We had thought it was destroyed the night Elfangor was killed, but somehow it had survived. The Yeerks went after the kid, and his parents, and we tried to recruit him to be another Animorph, to fight with us against the Yeerks. Instead, he was manipulative, stalkery, tried to sell us out to the Yeerks, attempted to kill Tobias in hawk form with the excuse that it’s not murder if it’s an animal, and probably actually did kill a kid who was dying from a car accident to morph and impersonate him. We trapped him as a rat and stranded him on a small island.”
Darcy swore lowly in the background at that.
“If the morphing power was accessible, and known,” Coulson finished in the shocked silence, “It would require an entire revamping of our justice system, especially for crimes that rely heavily on DNA evidence, such as murder and rape.”
“Fuck,” Dr. Foster was the one to swear at that, and Rhodey couldn’t blame her.
“Those… are really good reasons,” Tony allowed.
Mar rolled her eyes at him, ostentatiously unsurprised.
“Oh, well, it’s almost as if we made a decision while holding all of the relevant facts!” she snarked, and God, Rhodey loved how she was so professional on the job and so sarcastic any and every time she could get away with it.
Well, damn, he was officially fucked - he was head over heels for her, and surprisingly okay with it.
***
Jarvis ran another systems check: No one was present who shouldn’t be, and all of those who should were either there, or, in Director Fury’s case, had been informed. there were those who perhaps believed they should be informed, but the Chee had had their chance to impress Jarvis. They had not succeeded.
It had, however, led to an enlightening and ingenious discussion with Ms. Potts, several years ago. Mr. Stark had not needed to be informed then or until now. Jarvis was, in his own way, glad that Miss Potts and her compatriots had chosen to inform the others before Jarvis’s protocols had deemed a necessity for Mr. Stark’s informing.
The truth was still a disaster, but not, Jarvis thought, an unmitigated one. Thankfully.
The conversation throughout the morning had been strained. Understandably so, but as Jarvis had made it part of his duties to see that interpersonal relations throughout the team were positive, it was most discomforting. Finally, after a thorough discussion of the facts that yes, Miss Potts, Agent Barton, and Agent Hill all had been different people, all had been child soldiers in a strange war, and all were no longer capable of morphing, they had moved on. Through the common aliens, and oh my were the scanning tables getting a workout. Jarvis took a few milliseconds to be thankful that he did not have a digestive system and thus had nothing resembling the illness that Miss Lewis had succumbed to as he processed the information about Taxxons. Disturbing creatures.
They’d gotten to explaining the free Hork-Bajir’s history and current status when it abruptly became clear that the room was suffering from information overload; they’d broken for lunch an hour or so before, but Mr. Barton had let loose a long yawn and Miss Lewis had followed suit. Five minutes later, even Captain Rogers had discretely yawned, and Agent Coulson had noticed.
“We’ve been at this for hours, it’s past time for more than just a break, people.”
There were vague grumbles from Dr. Foster and Sir at that, and a smaller one from Dr. Banner, but when Agent Coulson made it clear they could take the briefing packets with them as long as the material stayed in the secure areas of the tower and wasn’t discussed outside of such or with visitors, even they agreed it okay to take a break.
Jarvis considered the scene, even as his processors continued scanning and correlating the information. Sir disappeared to the workshop after a hug and kiss to Miss Potts and a fist bump to Agent Barton. Captain Rogers was still clearly in fussing mode, but Miss Potts asked for some privacy for herself and her comrades. Dr. Foster, Thor, Miss Darcy, and Dr. Banner all took the elevator to another floor.
“Aliens,” Doctor Foster was muttering to herself. “Aliens. In the 90s.”
“I know, right?” Miss Darcy simply agreed.
Colonel Rhodes and Agent Hill were having a brief conversation on one side of the room that Jarvis designated as “Terribly Private, Sir, Stay Out”, the type that if Sir found the file he’d pout and say that Jarvis was “killing his fun”.
And Sir would look for it.
Captain Rogers finally left to draw in the workshop with Sir, after a brief conference with Miss Potts.
When asked to leave, Colonel Rhodes graciously stepped out, Jarvis having to dissuade him from grabbing Tony from the workshop as he’d interrupt important interpersonal relations time between Sir and Captain Rogers.
Agent Romanoff, however, did not leave.
“I also grew up fast. If Phil is staying, I’m staying.”
Pepper shrugged at this and simply poured another glass of Sir’s best scotch. With her and Agents Barton, Hill, Romanoff, and Coulson, it put a significant dent in the level of the decanter.
“Now,” Agent Romanoff said to the group at large. “Tell me about those you lost.”
And they did.