Chapter Text
When his own flames suddenly turned on Killian, Tony knew something weird was up.
When the man with faded red hair walked into view, he drew all of their attention. ‘All of this, just because these people said “no” to you? If you’d have gained your powers like us, they’d have been gone in a heartbeat.’
Killian snarled and fired a blast of fire – or rather, tried to. It ended up flaring back over him and engulfed his whole body. Tony let out a low whistle as he watched. Killian screamed as the fire consumed him. Tony quickly glanced over and saw a young woman with long brown hair cutting the bonds on Pepper.
A little bit of a blur after that. They clearly knew what they were doing and they worked fast. The brunette, it turned out, was an old friend of Pepper’s from her childhood hometown. Sharee Pertinicle was the daughter of the guy who’d initially put a good word in for Pep and got her into Yale University. She also had powers of her own.
The only ones Tony saw then and there though were what she called the Mystic Arts, ‘for simplicity’s sake.’ That included gold-coloured bonds conjured out of thin air, and the ability to create portals. She used that for the third guy.
He walked in, knelt down by the tied-up and cussing Killian, and took a hold on the back of his neck. The nut-job’s eyes went wide and he make a choked sound. The glowing embers of his pyrokinetic powers drifted up and faded away. When the guy stepped back, he nodded to the other two.
‘What’d you bastards do to me?’ Killian demanded.
‘I took your powers away,’ the third guy said in a generalised American accent. ‘And don’t think you’re getting them back.’
‘No.’ Sharee walked over and grabbed him by the collar, dragging him over to a support beam and creating another golden rope to tie him to that. ‘You’re going into a straight-jacket in a padded room.’ He started screaming at her, so she picked up a rock and shoved it in his mouth. Then she walked over and folded her arms.
‘How long have you been able to do that?’ Pepper asked from under his arm. The third guy had already removed the powers Killian had forced upon her, as per her request, and Tony had given her his jacket.
Rather than answer directly, Sharee said, ‘Any regular guy on the street can learn the Mystic Arts if they can find someone willing to train them. Some people are more inclined to it than others, but it’s not exclusive.’ She nodded her head at Killian. ‘That’s actually pretty elementary.’
‘Willing to train them?’ That came from the President, who Rhodey was leading down.
Sharee frowned. ‘I opened a portal with this power to the other side of the world. It’s just as easy to open one to a black hole. You can understand why they’re very selective about who they train.’
The nightmare images Tony saw then didn’t bear reliving. He managed to reel it in though and heard the President give a, somewhat shaky, affirmative answer. Then he noticed Sharee start looking around. She was really having a good look around. She looked up, around corners and through the steel bars.
‘What are you looking for?’ Rhodey asked.
‘Cap,’ she said. ‘I’d think the President being kidnapped by a pyrokinetic nut-job would be a flame to the proverbial moth.’
Good point. Tony frowned and tapped his earpiece. ‘Hey, J. Where is Cap?’
‘One moment, sir,’ JARVIS said. After that moment passed, he reported back. ‘He doesn’t appear to be aware of the situation.’
‘How?’ the redhead asked. ‘It was splashed over every news station broadcasting.’
‘Is that a rhetorical question?’ Sharee cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘You know the answer.’
‘Unfortunately, I do: He obviously doesn’t pay any attention to the news.’ He frowned and looked at Tony. ‘Come to think of it, has he even undergone any integration programs.’
Tony shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge. I tried to give him some help but he didn’t want to hear it.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Sharee said. ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’s always been about exploiting rather than helping.’
‘What do you mean?’ President Ellis asked.
The three of them looked at each other.
‘Do you have it?’ the redhead asked.
‘I certainly do, Reuben.’ Sharee pulled off her backpack and opened the back pocket. She then extracted a thick file from inside. ‘These are the notes of one Otto Fabian. He was a citizen of Germany during World War II. During the War he infiltrated HYDRA – which, by the way, did not die with the Nazi Party because it was not a Nazi organisation. It was much, much older.’
President Ellis sat down and held his hand out. Sharee walked over and gave him the folder.
‘How did you get it?’ Ellis asked.
‘We found it in among grandma’s stuff when we were moving her,’ Sharee said. ‘Even she didn’t know it was there. My best guess is that he determined her the safest place to hide the data and snuck it in before he died.’
They were mostly silent after that. The President read through the file and the rest of them just sat down and waited for Secret Service to arrive and pick the President up. He found quite a few pieces of interest in among Fabian’s accumulated data. Most notably, just how deep HYDRA’s quiet infiltration of the system had gone.
So...when Secret Service did arrive, President Ellis handed the file back to Sharee for safe-keeping, and asked her to ensure there were electronic copies. He also had her and Reuben given a pass each to the White House. The other guy had already left via one of Sharee’s portals. Had somewhere to be, apparently.
Well, regardless, they had someone else dealing with it. As soon as Happy was up and about, they’d all head back to New York and work things out there.
But, one night, Sharee dropped by. She called first, and this was right after Fury had dropped by unannounced because apparently the President was giving every inch of the American Intelligence System a thorough going-over and Fury wanted Tony to fix it. Seeing as everything Tony saw indicated that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been infiltrated up to the teeth by HYDRA, Tony elected to ignore him. Regardless, Sharee’s common courtesy had brought Tony to the conclusion that if Sharee, who he hardly knew, could make a goddamn appointment, then Fury certainly could.
‘JARVIS,’ he said as he sat down at the systems while waiting for Sharee, ‘what say we make sure Fury and his cronies learn to enter someone’s house politely.’
‘Are you thinking of giving them a little zap every time they try to hack, sir?’ JARVIS asked.
‘How about we just send a virus through their systems?’
‘Very good, sir.’
He occupied himself with that until Sharee actually arrived. Then he went up to see what she wanted.
He had to give her this. She skipped the gristle and got straight down to the bone. ‘When I said a portal could be easily opened to a black hole you had a...stronger reaction than the others. In fact, I’m sure I saw the beginnings of a panic attack, but you reeled it back.’ She leaned forward in her seat. ‘The only conclusion I can draw is that you saw something when you went through that portal in New York.’
Slowly, Tony nodded.
Sharee huffed. ‘The fact of the matter is that there were two Infinity Stones involved in that mess. That makes it our business. We have our powers so that we can ensure the Infinity Stones don’t all fall into one set of hands.’
Tony looked at her. ‘That’s what Reuben meant when he said about losing the powers, isn’t it?’
‘Yup. So, I need to know what you saw.’
Though it hadn’t done him much good before, Tony explained what he’d seen. At the end, Sharee nodded and stood up.
‘I’m guessing no one else listened to you,’ she said. She didn’t even have to wait for his confirmation. ‘Well, I’ll be frank: they’re idiots. No war was ever won in a single battle.’ Sharee sighed. ‘If it helps, they’re not the only enhanced around – and I’m also very suspicious about why a couple of master assassins are on that team. There are plenty of other teams banging about the place. They’re just hiding from S.H.I.E.L.D. I’ll introduce you to some of them after me and the others deal with whoever was directing Loki.’
Tony nodded and watched her go.
For a moment, he mulled over what she’d said.
‘J?’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Why are there a couple of master assassins on that team?’
JARVIS paused. ‘Do you really need me to answer that, sir?’
Tony paused and took a deep breath. ‘No.’
***
When Sharee returned she, again, called before she arrived.
Tony invited them to join them for dinner. Happy had just gotten out of the hospital and they’d filled him in. So he wanted to meet Sharee himself, especially considering she’d been then one to prompt Tony to get as much distance between himself and those “Avengers” who couldn’t even be bothered to show up and help him against pyrokinetics, yet seemed to believe he should be at their beck and call.
‘So, what’d you find?’ Rhodey asked.
‘Some guy called Thanos,’ Sharee said. ‘Was huge! Anyway, he was the last of the Titans, and he believed the resource crisis was what killed them. I don’t know what actually happened but he’s been going around culling half the population on various planets as some kind of twisted balance. Evidently, it occurred to him that he is mortal and he can’t do this to the whole universe one planet at a time, in his lifetime.’
Pepper looked alarmed. ‘And the Infinity Stones would have let him do this?’
‘Like that.’ Sharee clicked. ‘Literally.’
‘So, how’d you stop him?’ Tony asked.
‘Well, he was determined that he was saving the universe and he couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. Trust me, we debated with him for over two hours.’ Sharee grimaced. ‘We had to kill him in the end. Good thing we’re so O-P.’
‘So, you saved the world,’ Tony said. ‘That’s the end of that.’
Sharee waved a hand dismissively. ‘Please. Saving the world is something you do.’
‘What, the nuke?’ Tony shook his head. ‘That was just New York and I only did it once.’
‘I’m not talking about New York,’ Sharee said.
They all looked at her. ‘Huh?’
Sharee chuckled. ‘Oh, you didn’t know. Yeah, we considered that. But you did actually save the world back in the 90s.’
‘When?’ Tony asked.
Sharee sat back with her carton of Chinese food. ‘Do you remember a bunch of guys who smelled like rotting cheese and had cheese-based names. Romana Parmesana, Napoleon Brie, Lawrence Limburger – those guys?’
‘Yeah,’ Tony said. ‘They were buying up natural resources and vanishing them. Used extortion and if they wouldn’t be sold, they tended to just roll in and take them. All I did was point the authorities at them.’
‘Yeah, consistently,’ Sharee said. ‘And that’s what saved us.’
‘Once more with clarity?’ Rhodey asked.
‘Those guys were not human,’ Sharee explained. ‘They were disguised as humans, but they were not human. They were a race of bipedal lunged fish aliens called Plutarkians. Seems back on Plutark, they’ve wasted all of their own natural resources so they go around strip-mining the cosmos, and they take everything.’
‘Everything?’ Tony asked.
‘Everything. Ever heard of Planet Alpha D-23? No, you have not, because the Plutarkians took off with it two centuries ago.’ Sharee scowled. ‘Venus is a good example of what happens that you actually can see. As far as I understand, they only realised what was happening in time to stop the Tub Transformer from taking their planet to become Plutark’s newest moon.’
‘So Venus used to be inhabited?’ Pepper asked.
‘Used to be, yes.’ Sharee frowned. ‘But because they were so late to the party, they couldn’t survive. These people were not capable of space-travel. Before the last of them died out, though, they transmitted a message; a warning about the Plutarkians. It was picked up either by a single Martian or a group of them.’
‘Martian?’ Rhodey asked.
‘Yeah. It went Venus, Mars, Earth.’ Sharee shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me why. The Martians actually started fighting back in time to save their planet. It launched a war with the Martians at a severe disadvantage, but it allowed them to actually save themselves.’
‘Disadvantage?’ Rhodey asked.
‘Turns out, the Martian government was fine destroying the planet if they got to line their pockets.’ Her voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘What a shocker, right?’
Tony snorted.
‘So, the government would have been subverting them,’ Rhodey said. ‘They would have had to act outside the law to get it done.’
‘Well, they did it anyway,’ Sharee said. ‘Anyway, by Tony here doing what he did he made this planet too expensive of an investment. Added in a few other factors and they withdrew. They even ended up defeated by the Martians – more specifically a small core group of them. So now the people are rebuilding.’ She chuckled. ‘It should be interesting to see how Earth responds to the cities being rebuilt.’
The mental image made Tony chuckle a bit – but only a bit because he could see himself having to step in here.
‘Why didn’t we notice the signs of life before?’ Happy asked.
‘That’s how bad they strip-mined the place,’ Sharee said. ‘And most of the Martians retreated to caves.’
‘Not to mention the size of the planet,’ Tony put in. ‘It may be smaller than Earth, but it’s still a pretty big planet. That would take years to mine – add in the Martians fighting back, and we don’t know when that started. And most of the early photos were poor and taken from a distance. If these guys were taking resources from the planet, and they’re fish, not to generalise but water was probably one of the first things to go.’
‘They certainly went after our water when they came here,’ Pepper pointed out.
‘Right.’ Tony nodded to her. ‘Exactly how much of their resources did they take off with?’
‘No idea.’
‘Enough to make the planet look dead, I’d say,’ Rhodey remarked. He nodded to Sharee before turning to his best friend. ‘You’re right. Tony, you did save the world back then.’
‘Guess I did,’ Tony mused. ‘And I didn’t even realise it.’
Sharee smiled. ‘More than that. You saved the world without throwing a single punch.’
Tony gave her a wry smile. ‘Well, punching them wouldn’t have helped.’
‘Exactly.’