Chapter Text
It is the sound of thunder that finally makes Tony glance up from his workbench.
He regrets it immediately when a sharp, searing pain clings to the back of his hand, loosening his grip on the soldering iron. He fumbles for it, like a failing juggler, but the tool slips through his fingers yet again, crashing noisily onto the printed circuit board underneath. All stages of grief collide in him as all his hard work becomes an amorphous puddle of melted copper.
Acceptance takes a long time coming so he settles for resignation and pulls the plug on the entire operation. The incident has been the latest one in a long conga line of mishaps, which really should have clued him into leaving this complicated redesign for a later date. Whether he likes it or not, his brain is still reeling from the very recent battle of Sokovia, struggling to fill a void of feigned normalcy. The realization only makes him feel even more useless as he throws a mourning look at the bubbling fruits of his labor.
Perhaps it’s for the best, he thinks sourly. He was doing a piss-poor job and would have had to start all over in the morning.
As if to profess its agreement, dampened thunder rumbles across a restless sky. It comes with an incandescent flash that strikes directly above the tower, turning night into day and sending a prickling feeling over the nape of his neck. The storm had crept up on him over the course of the last few hours, but now that it has his full attention, it conjures up images of dark castles, torches and pitchforks. Given what just happened with Ultron, they wouldn’t be completely undeserved.
He holds back a humorless laugh as he remembers that JARVIS’s name was almost IGOR. He had even called himself a mad scientist that very day. Should he really be surprised if the universe had decided to play along?
He reaches for a remote to lower the blinds against the inclement weather. The lights above him begin to flicker before he can find it missing and a second later, he is plunged into soft, velvety darkness. It proves to be an unexpected comfort for his strained eyes, which after a solid minute, starts to wear out its welcome.
He turns to the nearest camera, guided by a pinprick of red against black. “FRIDAY? I know it’s your first day on the job but you are taking your sweet time.”
The AI makes him wait a bit longer still. When she speaks up, she sounds groggy, as static crackles its way over the speakers. “Sorry, boss, that last lightning strike hit us right where it hurts. The main generator is fried and its backup just went the same way. I’m afraid it’s candlelit dinners for us until they get replaced.”
Tony sighs, rummaging around for a flashlight. The sea of pitch blackness grows less impenetrable as the light from nearby buildings trickles in through a thick curtain of rain. “Pepper’s gonna love that,” he quips and winces when his foot slams against a cabinet. “Wait, how are you talking to me then?”
“I managed to reroute some power into my auxiliary bank before the surge hit its peak. It should keep me operational for the next couple of hours.”
Tony’s low hum of acknowledgment turns into a yelp as his groping hands brush against something sharp in the depths of a long drawer. He gives up on the flashlight and fishes out his smartphone which flashes ‘1:00 am’ at him, beside a dying battery icon. Its dull glow lasts for about fifteen seconds before it vibrates pitifully and turns off as well. If the universe is trying to tell him something, it is running out of subtlety.
“Clever girl,” he yawns. “Tell you what, keep your functions to a minimum and make sure nothing explodes. I’m gonna go catch some serious Z’s.”
He punches in a security code and steps out of the workshop moving practically on autopilot. The tiled floor under his shuffling feet becomes hardwood after about a dozen steps and the air soon grows thick with the pungent scent of artificial pine. He twitches his nose, reminding himself never to let Clint pick an air freshener again. His latest acquisition makes the whole place smell like a car and when mixed with fresh popcorn, produces a whole different unholy miasma which Tony suspects is behind the team’s reluctance to movie nights.
The team’s reluctance to stay at the tower is a lot less light-hearted. Tony had built it as a safe place where they could all recover after a mission, but after a while, he began to suspect he was the only one to view it as such. For everyone else, their presence there came to mean that something had gone awry, no matter how many team-building events took place within its walls. Even Vision, who as far as Tony was concerned, was born yesterday had chosen to disappear for the night, leaving the room that used to belong to Steve empty. Cap himself was probably back in his tiny apartment in Brooklyn, pouring over a growing stack of files he only ever seemed to discuss with Sam. Clint and Natasha had returned to the Barton Homestead and were probably now reminiscing under the stars, beers in hand. Their resident god of thunder has been uncharacteristically quiet since their return, roaming the upper floor with a troubled look, not even coming down for dinner. As for Bruce, he hasn’t seen him since the Quinjet fell off the Avengers’ radar and as he flashes back to the news reports about Johannesburg, Tony can hardly blame him.
He realizes he is going to miss their company. The past three days had been a turning point, one he really should have seen coming. No matter what tomorrow brings, things can never go back to the way they were.
He pushes open the door to the living room and feels the wall for a useless light switch. Sleep slides right off him when the static electricity caught in the carpet burns his toes like poison ivy. He sucks in a sharp breath and stumbles back towards the doorway as he finds himself staring at a very disheveled Thor Odinson.
The other, in turn, seems completely unaware he has company. He stands barefoot in the middle of the room, dressed only in baggy shorts and a t-shirt that still retains a vague print of some obscure metal band. Long hair, unrestrained by the usual braids and ponytails, falls over his slumped shoulders in a tangled mess. His unsettling stillness is only punctuated by pale lightning that streams across his body in thin rivulets, conferring him an almost ethereal glow. It comes to pool in his eyes that stare blankly ahead, past the raging storm reigniting the night in irregular flashes.
“Point Break?” Despite the trepidation mounting inside him, Tony’s voice manages to come out cautiously low. “You okay there?”
He gets no reply except for the loud rustle of rain outside the window. Before he has a chance to try again, the sky tears itself apart in a blinding instant, followed by a thunderclap that comes close to rattling the bulletproof glass. It is only then that a willowy silhouette comes into focus beside Thor, cloaked until now by the room’s long shadows. As a slender hand slowly reaches out towards his head, Tony recognizes their new Sokovian guest.
Anger lashes through him in its purest form, before any other emotion can catch up. “What the hell are you doing?”
He barks the words out without processing them. Wanda startles and jerks her hand away, brown eyes laced with fear. “Nothing!” she blurts out, “I was just…”
“Get away from him! Now!”
Again, the words come out as a barked order. The late JARVIS pipes up in Tony’s head to calmly point out that antagonizing a telepath in sweatpants is among the stupidest things he could be doing. His replacement, however, proves to be a lot more proactive as an Iron Legion drone takes only five more seconds to burst into the room, dragging loose cables behind it. Tony is genuinely amazed at how fast FRIDAY has cobbled it together until he realizes it spells bad news for the state of his power armor.
A retreating Wanda stops dead in her tracks when faced with sleek taser pointed straight at her. “I’m not your enemy,” she mouths.
Tony has to work hard to hold back a dark laugh. “That’s a pretty hard sell, kid, but I’ll bite. You have thirty seconds to explain yourself before this guy sends you off to dreamland.” He watches her gaze dart madly between him and the drone and adds, “Twenty-five seconds now.”
His deceptively undisturbed tone manages to jog something in her as frustration overrules fear. “I don’t know, alright?” she snaps. “I kept hearing horrible things in my head all night! Screams, explosions, children crying...” She sinks long fingers into her hair, rubbing circles over her temples. “It kept growing louder and I just couldn’t stand it anymore! I stepped out to see where it was coming from and found him wandering around.” She points at the cluster of red light unraveling itself around Thor’s head, like an alien spider web. “All I wanted was to make it stop!”
Tony follows her gesture in a stupor that has nothing to do with his ever-growing sleep-deprivation. It takes him a moment to translate the jamming gears in his brain into coherent thought. “Are you seriously telling me his dreams wouldn’t let you sleep?”
She gives him an awkward nod, still not tearing her attention away from the taser. There’s an audible crack in her answer, as she fights back a shallow streak of tears. “I used to calm Pietro’s nightmares when they got too bad. I thought I could do the same with him.”
She hugs her elbows and shuffles in place, like a tall bird trapped in a narrow cage. Pepper’s ill-fitting nightgown hangs loose on her skinny arms. The shadows the storm projects upon her angular features make her look even younger and the sight is enough to make Tony’s paranoia waver. If pointing weapons at grieving teenagers became the Avengers’ MO, they shouldn’t remain the Avengers for much longer.
He waves at the drone to stand down. “So? Did it work?”
She tugs at her sleeves as if expecting lightning to strike her down where she stands. “I’ve never seen a nightmare like that,” she confesses. “Have you?”
“I had ones that felt like this.” Apprehension snakes its way across Tony’s spine again as he steps closer to lay a careful hand over a glowing shoulder. “Hey, Razzle-Dazzle?” he ventures. “Our witch-girl says you’re dreaming too loud. Mind switching to something else?”
He tightens his grip when a swarm of sparks rushes eagerly up his arm. Three of his fingers go numb before he can reconsider his decision and it doesn’t take long for the sensation to travel all the way to his wrist. The growing discomfort pays off right before he is ready to let go as Thor slowly tilts his head in his direction. The endless light burning inside his pupils dims just long enough for a spark of recognition to settle in them. Behind him, the storm bleaches the dark canvas of the sky one last time and melts back into the invisible clouds.
Lightning drains away from Thor’s eyes just as fast. The ethereal, electric web takes another few seconds to come undone. When it dissolves into crepuscular darkness, it takes whatever strength was holding its prisoner upright.
A stunned Tony barely has a chance to react before the god of thunder crumples like a broken doll. The effort of catching him almost knocks the wind out of his lungs as he sways dangerously. “FRIDAY…” he pants. “Give me a hand, I’ve been neglecting my weightlifting.”
The hastily assembled vessel doesn’t need to be told twice. Thin, steel limbs rush to his rescue, helping him lower the lifeless burden in his arms on the carpet. Tony drops to his knees, never breaking his hold and grasps for a sluggish pulse which eventually meets his fingers from under moist skin. By now, it is becoming difficult to ignore how weak and shallow Thor’s breath is growing or the unnatural heat that radiates from him when Tony pulls him closer. When the blond head lolls boneless against his shoulder, it starts to feel like he is cradling a human-shaped furnace.
“That could have gone better,” he murmurs and turns his attention to the AI. “Time to flex all those med files I fed you, girl. Is this normal?”
The drone gives out a long, pensive hum. Its half-repaired chest cavity shines down on them unsteadily, sending their shadows into a complicated dance. “There’s no ‘normal’ with him, boss. I believe our official description for Asgardian physiology is ‘this article is a stub’.”
If the reply was meant to carry sarcasm, her phlegmatic demeanor reflects none of it. An unhelpful memory sneaks up on Tony to remind him he wrote those exact words himself. “Fair enough,” he mutters. “How’s the medical wing looking? Don’t we have an emergency generator in there?”
He can’t even begin to count his blessings when he hears FRIDAY’s telltale hum again. “It’s a very expensive fire hazard now,” she says after a flickering pause. “The surge left it in a very unstable condition. I’m trying to keep the damage contained but for now, it’s...”
“Candlelit dinners, got it.” He rests his back against a nearby couch and leans over the prone form slumped against him. “Thor? I need your help here, Asgardians don’t come with a manual. Even if they did, you’re probably one big, flashy exception.” His fingertips sink in the blond hair, brushing away matted strands from closed eyelids. “Thor?” he insists, “Come on, sunshine, you have to wake up.”
He pats a warm cheek with a clumsy hand and watches the blue eyes flutter on the edge of consciousness. It takes a few more seconds for them to open but relief bleeds straight back into concern for Tony when they look past him, dull and unfocused. In the muted glow of the arc reactor, Thor’s dilated pupils seem as deep and dark as the beckoning void between the stars. Soon, they stop reacting to the light at all, staring far into infinity with the empty look of the dead.
“I went for the head...”
The words are little more than a whisper. Tony is convinced he has misunderstood something until he puts an ear to the faintly moving lips and hears them again in a hollow, broken tone. Shock and grief stare back when he leans away, frozen upon Thor’s face like an ill-fitting mask he finds disturbingly familiar. He has seen a paler shade of the same shadow haunting the faces of the Avengers when he returned to Klau’s base of operations with an unconscious Bruce in tow. It reappeared in Thor’s eyes, like a passing storm cloud, after he dropped on them out of nowhere and slammed Mjolnir into the Cradle to complete the birth of Vision. Seeing it again, especially considering his strange behavior throughout the evening, makes a painful knot tie itself beneath Tony’s chest. He hadn’t even tried to talk to him before burying his head straight back into work. None of them had. They made it a habit to keep an eye on Bruce after a code green but they had completely neglected to do the same with the other nuke in their arsenal.
Perhaps it was because he was usually the first to lighten the mood after a mission. Nobody ever thinks to ask the guy who cracks the first joke or makes a fool out of himself if he’s alright. In retrospect, Tony is almost impressed to see the craft he pioneered perfected to such a degree.
“Whose head?” he asks, more interested in keeping him talking than in the actual answer. “Ultron’s? He’s gone, remember?”
Thor doesn’t seem to hear him, his gaze still locked in some terrifying abyss. “Gone,” he echoes numbly, choking on the word as if it was poison. “All of it… all of them…”
He trails off, exhaustion claiming the rest of the barely audible mantra. Tony cannot begin to make sense of any of it, but the heartbreak in the frail voice cuts through him like a razor and pushes all questions onto a backburner. His own skin feels oddly cold when he places what he hopes is a soothing hand over a boiling forehead.
"I know, buddy,” he murmurs at a loss for any other words, “It’s okay, it doesn’t matter. It’s all just a screwed-up dream.” He snaps his head up to look at Wanda, still lingering beside them like a forlorn apparition in an oversized gown. “What did you do to him? I need you to be specific.”
She steps closer, hands still clenched around her elbows. “Nothing bad,” she assures a little too vehemently. “A nightmare is like a knot. You have to find a loose thread and pull at it until it’s gone. Some knots are more twisted than others but this one is too complex to come undone.” She gingerly crouches down to touch Thor but pulls back when she meets Tony’s expression. “I don’t think it’s a knot at all. I think it’s a tapestry.”
Tony closes a frustrated hand over his face. “Right, I’m glad we had this talk. That cleared everything up.”
She glares a pointed dagger at him. “You said to be specific!” she fumes, only to immediately clam up. “What is that?”
A second later, Tony feels it too. A powerful magnetic field rises around them like a tide, making his skin break out in goosebumps and the arc reactor glow warm and bright. It’s an unexpectedly pleasant feeling, which doesn’t last long when he raises a hand to his face and finds it stained with blood. He looks down just in time to see a thin, crimson streak make its way down Thor’s upper lip.
The next word out of his mouth is a loud curse.
Lead congeals in the pit of his stomach as the nosebleed shows no signs of stopping. The blond head quivers in his hold, blue eyes slipping closed, then falls limp in the crook of his arm. A strong convulsion runs across Thor’s body like an electric shock, followed closely by a second and then a third. By the time the fourth one hits, Tony is clasping his hands across Thor’s temples, trying to keep them both still, as static electricity crackles in the bone-dry air.
“Hold on, sunshine,” he breathes. “FRIDAY, the power armor...?”
His reply is another dejected hum. “It’s not taking off any time soon, boss. I don’t think it can even walk.”
Tony cards a hand through his hair to ease the crawling sensation across his scalp. His mind rushes through a quick list of alternatives before returning back to the source. “I don’t need it to. Extract the life support and keep that battery going no matter what.” He turns to the teenager rising back to her feet and points to a glazed door. “Hey, Carrie! See the kitchen over there?”
Wanda’s nod is followed by confused, furrowed eyebrows. “My name’s not…”
“I know, kid, force of habit. I need you to get me a towel and all the ice that hasn’t melted yet.” He recoils from a flurry of sparks settling on Thor, like dying, blue fireflies. “And rubber gloves.”
About three hours later, Tony feels a tentative calm wash over him.
It is about at the same time that the vital signs monitor, cannibalized from the power armor, stops acting up. It has taken more than a few re-wirings for it to work and even now, it can’t be kept too far away from the rest of the life support system that hangs around Thor in a messy nest of cables. It is kept in place with medical patches and gauze, making him look like a cyborg from a cheap movie but it serves its purpose well enough to tame the anxiety slithering across Tony’s mind. It gives him access to numbers and graphs, it gives him information. Information means at least an illusion of control.
He reaches out to untangle a few wires keeping the flimsy monitor straight. Outside its fitted casing inside the suit, it is the size of an average smartphone and only as thick as a sheet of paper. It had wobbled precariously, when he and the drone lifted Thor from the blood-speckled carpet and let him sink into a restless delirium on the biggest couch in the living room. It had flickered like a dying flame, getting close to shorting out when his fever had spiked and lightning danced under his skin, as if struggling to escape it. When it settled into a calm, subdued glow, it did so alongside a steadying pulse and long, deepening breaths that finally convinced Tony to pull off his encumbering but necessary protection. The gloves lie discarded in a tray beneath his feet now, next to a hand towel, soaked to the very last thread.
He picks it up and dips his hand under the last ice cubes floating inside a large ceramic bowl. Droplets of stinging water slide towards his elbows as he drops them into the towel and twists it loosely around his wrist to prevent them from sliding out. When the cold compress returns to its place over Thor’s forehead, he doesn’t seem to feel its presence at all.
By now, Tony can’t tell if that’s a good thing or not. He had watched him toss and turn, growing weaker with every movement, and could do nothing but shush him and keep a comforting grip on his shoulders. He had thrown a thin blanket over him when he had started shivering and his skin grew clammy and gray instead of flushed. Loki and Heimdall’s names had poured out of his mouth several times, first as pleas, then as a silent imprint on his lips, until they vanished into the back of his throat and became shaky, faltering breaths. Now that he lies motionless, oblivious even to the sting of hypodermic needles, he looks peaceful enough but it is a fragile kind of peace for Tony. The kind that keeps his fingers on Thor’s pulse despite what the vital signs monitor flashes at him and makes him lean down every once in a while to make sure he is still breathing.
He wipes a trail of water dripping down his arm, wishing for the hundredth time today that Bruce would step through the door, if only for moral support. He is completely out of his element here and he knows it. Even in its wounded state, SHIELD is the only one with resources to help him but Nick Fury has disappeared into thin air again, along with the helicarrier that saved them on top of a doomed Sokovian city. Asgard is as far from his reach as the nearest solar system. Any hospital would be flying as blind as him, and would definitely have their equipment fried in the long run. He had been tempted to try them anyway until his best possible option answered his call on the other side of the world and eased his mind from growing panic to soul-stirring concern.
As he dabs the remains of the fever out of Thor’s skin, Tony is ready to consider that an improvement.
A tablet balanced on a netbook stand flickers back to life at the corner of his eye, replenished by a thick power bank. On its dusty screen, Helen Cho takes a long gulp out of a plastic mug with a cute logo that clashes irrevocably with her serious expression. “How is he doing?” she asks.
Tony wrings out the quickly melting ice from the compress. By now, his reddened fingers are as cold as the water so he rests them against Thor’s collarbone and frowns when he remains unresponsive. “Sleeping, I think,” he replies. “He was muttering nonsense about rabbits and Ne-dah-something for a while. But I can’t expect him to make sense when he isn’t burning up.” He shifts his weight on the padded chair. “His temperature dropped to a hundred and eight Fahrenheit fifteen minutes ago and hasn’t budged since. That’s not a hundred and twelve but I still wouldn’t call that normal.”
To his surprise, tension melts away from Helen’s taut face. “He’s supposed to run a bit hotter than humans,” she says and allows herself a small smile as she peeks at the screen in her hands. “This is good news, Stark, his fever’s breaking. Not as fast as we expected, but it is breaking.”
Tony nods and gently presses down on the towel, letting the leftover moisture seep into the blond hair. “Shouldn’t he be awake, then? If he’s really getting better?”
“Seizures are traumatic experiences. You don’t just bounce back from one, Asgardian or not.” Something must have changed in his expression since Helen’s eyes stop skimming the tablet and seek his through the lens of the tiny camera. “I know you’re worried about him, but he’s stable and there’s no damage to the nervous system. The chances of his condition backsliding are astronomically low at this point. What’s really important now is to find out what caused this.” She bites her lip in thought, waiting for the vitals monitor to sync up with her device. “Pre-existing condition, maybe?”
“If it is, he doesn’t know about it.”
Helen peers at him intently over thin-rimmed glasses. “Are you sure? People don’t normally talk about these things. And if history has taught us anything it’s that royal families like to keep their weaknesses under wraps.”
Tony shakes his head, tapping his foot against the rickety chair. “He’s not the type to keep secrets, doc. At least not from me. By now, I can probably draw a half-decent map of Asgard and chart the orbit of its sun.” He chuckles at the memory of Thor’s bemusement when the Avengers expressly forbade him from revealing the shape of his home planet to the general public. “Not that I go around advertising that. We have enough flat-earthers as it is.”
Helen’s mouth tugs as she turns away to refill her cup. “I see,” she says. “Whatever it is, he’s lucky to have you.”
The empty acetaminophen flask Tony’s been nervously fiddling with slips out of his grasp. A wall of awkward silence slams between them, amplifying every sound to an unbearable degree before Helen clears her throat strategically and sips her drink. “I mean, he was lucky you were there,” she clarifies.
Tony just shrugs and attempts an equally strategic yawn. “Like hell,” he says. “He was lucky you picked up the phone. I was completely useless before that.”
She aims a reassuring smile at him through the thin coat of dust. “You did fine. Just take it easy on him when he wakes up. He needs to rest and you guys have never been great at that.” Stern eyes linger on him as she sets the tablet away at her desk. “I’ll be monitoring his vitals from here but there might be a lag so call me if anything changes. Understood?”
“Understood,” he nods. “Goodnight, doc. Or good afternoon, I guess.”
The screen blinks to black, leaving Tony only with the glow of a battery-powered lights scattered aimlessly around the living room floor. Normally used to illuminate dark warehouses, they have been dimmed to their lowest setting, which lengthens every shadow around them into a spindly caricature. This is how he manages to spot Wanda’s slender frame way before she makes her way through the door, carrying an open shoebox. When she sets it down on a nearby chair, its contents clink softly against one another.
“These are the last ones we have,” she says. “Will they spoil if we don’t keep them cold?”
Tony fishes out an intravenous acetaminophen flask and turns it over, looking for imperfections. “They’ll be fine, just keep an eye on them. If they break, we can’t restock until morning.” He raises an eyebrow when their fingers meet over an unsealed disposable syringe. “What are you doing?”
The girl throws him a pointed look from beneath long auburn strands. “Your hands are shaking,” she says. “My mom was a diabetic so I know my way around one of these.” She tries and fails to slide the syringe out of his unsteady grasp. “What’s wrong? Still don’t trust me?”
It takes a moment for Tony to admit to himself she is right. After two hours of working with cold water and increasingly less fluffy towels, his dexterity is compromised and the last thing he wants is to mess up an injection. Reluctantly, he releases his hold and weaves his fingers together to massage life back into them.
“I’m working on it,” he grumbles. “You can forgive me for being jumpy when you were running with HYDRA only two days ago.”
She chooses to ignore him and proceeds to methodically fill up the syringe. Her fingers tiptoe across the inside of Thor’s arm, looking for a suitable vein. She completes the injection without a hitch, but when she looks up from her work, her eyes are as hard as stone.
“Your archer friend told me that Pietro died an Avenger”, she says coolly. “Do I have to die to be one too?”
“No, but it tends to be an occupational hazard. You might take that into account before signing on the dotted line.” Her long, pregnant silence speaks for itself so Tony takes it upon himself to break it. “Cards on the table, kid, I’m not thrilled about your life choices but you’re not the only one with a checkered past around here. I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of back in the day. My archer friend isn’t squeaky clean either. Greased Lightning here nearly started a war with another realm, Bruce still won’t go anywhere near Harlem, and Romanoff…” He pauses, trying fruitlessly to sort out a mess of conflicting records, “Well, she legitimately scares me so I have given up on asking about skeletons in her closet.”
Wanda’s response is merely a slow nod. “So HYDRA’s files were only slightly exaggerated,” she says. “What about Captain America? Any skeletons in his?”
Steve’s remark about not showing his dark side yet is a foreboding echo in Tony’s head. “He’s the white sheep, here to make us all look bad,” he replies. “My point is that if you really want to be redemption buddies, you’re in the right place. But if you’re cooking up some elaborate revenge plan, you can save yourself the trouble. Just knock on my door and get it over with.”
She regards him with suspicion, her hand stopping halfway to the plastic tray. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I know you have issues with me.” A pang of fresh guilt twists his heart and mind when he stares straight into her unrelenting, cold eyes. “I get it, I know about your parents. We tracked down the terrorist group that used those weapons but it never should have happened in the first place. I also know that ‘sorry’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
His words only prompt a cynical laugh before she exhales sharply and looks away. “You’re right, it doesn’t,” she says. “It’s funny, two days ago, I thought I knew exactly what would. Now, I’m not even sure about that.”
Tony follows her wandering gaze towards the light drizzle the storm has devolved into. “I have no answers for you either. If you ever want to talk about it, I’ll listen. If you want to stay in the country and never look at me again, I’ll make sure you’re provided for. Want to punch me in the face? Go right ahead! But that kind of courtesy extends to me and me alone.” He catches her surprised look and tosses his head meaningfully towards the sleeping form on the couch. “I love these people. They make the world a better place and they sure as hell don’t deserve to pay for my mistakes. So make a wrong move, do anything to harm any of them and I won’t hold back on you. Am I making myself clear?”
The girl doesn’t reply right away. Instead, she lapses into another long bout of silence that makes Tony wonder if she’s questioning his sincerity or putting together an elaborate escape plan. “Crystal clear,” she concedes eventually. “As long as you don’t look the other way if something takes a shot at me. Or take a shot at me yourself when you think no one is looking.”
“You want to be an Avenger, don’t you? Believe it or not, we look out for one another.” He frowns, very aware of her unspoken reticence. “Is it you who doesn’t trust me now?”
Wiry shoulders rise dismissively under the crumpled gown. “I’m working on it,” she parrots back with a slight quirk over her lips. “If you must know, Strucker called you the weakest link in the chain. He said there were rifts to exploit between you and the rest. Attachments too.”
Tony groans at the thought of HYDRA agents potentially trash-talking them around their equivalent of a watercooler. “Shows what they know. I’ve never played favorites in my life, and I’m not about to start now.” He waves her off just as she is about to drop in a chair beside him. “Don’t sweat it, you can go back to bed. I got this.”
She seems to hesitate when he fails to suppress a genuine yawn. “Are you sure?”
Tony rubs his newly warmed hands. “Very sure,” he says before lifting the towel from Thor’s head and slipping it back into the cold water. “Besides, I kind of owe him.”
It is an insultingly nice day for the world to come to an end.
Tony’s unfinished projects scroll across his mind uninvited, along with his painstakingly curated bucket list. It vanishes in a flash when he turns his attention back to his visor, taking in the mass, speed, and shape of the pseudo-asteroid above him. The arc reactor hums against his skin in anticipation of the massive power blast bound to destabilize the antigravs propelling Sokovia towards the stratosphere. His heart shrinks at the prospect of using the Unibeam at all. It was conceived as a desperate last resort and it functions as such, never failing to drain the power armor and inevitably leaving him open for attack. The heart-clenching thought only makes him double down on his calculations. Running out of steam too soon now would mean global annihilation in less than five minutes.
He raises a hand to his comm, trying to break through the roar of the thrusters. “Thor, do you read me? Are you back at the church yet?”
His reply is a loud crash that reverberates painfully in his helmet. “I have been here for a while now.” The words drown in a sea of static, letting Tony know he’s indeed near the Vibranium core. “Whatever it is you are doing down there, you have to do it faster. We are running out of time.”
Another knot twists in Tony’s stomach at the wholly unnecessary reminder. “Relax, sunshine, I can only do this once. You don’t want Earth to become a smoking crater because I forgot to carry a zero.” He waits for FRIDAY to confirm the projected trajectory of the asteroid and readjusts a few settings on the arc reactor’s twin. “Did they tell the great Bragi of Asgard to hurry up when he was working on Eclipse of the Setting Sun?”
There’s a brief pause before Thor speaks again through the increasing interference. “He wrote that on his deathbed, Stark. You may want to pick another example.”
Tony cannot help a nervous laugh. “Details, details,” he mutters, as power flows towards the core of the armor, sapping the strength from his limbs. “For the record, if I end up as an iron pancake, Rhodey can keep the suit.”
“I will make sure he knows that.” Thor’s voice rings somber but as earnest as ever. “If I am the one to die today, Vision can keep Mjolnir.”
“You’re really going to snub everyone else for the new guy? And here you were my second favorite Avenger.” Tony grips the asteroid to keep himself in position, as stragglers from Ultron’s dwindling army rush past him through the thinning air. “You’ve got incoming, by the way.”
“I see them.” There’s another deafening crash that ripples through the rock before torn robot limbs plummet towards the clouds below. A familiar crackle bursts from the comm, followed by the slightest hint of dejection. “Second favorite?”
Tony’s lips curve into a smirk beneath the visor. “We can talk promotions when you have seven PhDs and can turn green.” He finishes his final calibrations and closes his eyes, ready to pray to any deity willing to listen. “You ready?”
“Say the word.”
He does, feeling the air leave his lungs along with the Unibeam. It pierces the antigravs like a hot knife through butter right before it meets the tidal wave of lightning cascading down the airborne bedrock of Sokovia. The sheer magnetic force of it hits him first, almost short-circuiting the power armor, as he finds himself in a barely controlled freefall. His eyes scan madly across the visor, searching for any changes in the asteroid’s structure. It has to have worked. He has run every verification there was, accounted for every possible variable. Cold sweat springs from his pores as he glances down at his own looming deadline.
His math is off by only two seconds.
The explosion seems to shatter the sky itself. It shreds the air around the suit to ribbons, sending him into a tailspin through a growing cloud of debris that blocks out the sun. FRIDAY’s radar is his only guide as Sokovia rains down upon him in bits and pieces and he soon realizes it will not be enough. He falls into the most aerodynamic position he can and tries to make a beeline for the green blot peeking through the receding clouds. The forest should provide him with enough coverage until the energy wave at the stratosphere finishes polishing off the biggest chunks. It should be smooth sailing from then on.
He has just enough time to feel optimistic again before one of those chunks smashes hard against his head.
The world drops into a distant background, muted against the sharp ringing in his ears. Darkness takes him only for a second, but it is enough for another fragment to slam into his side, hurling him into a shower of jagged metal and broken glass. Stars bloom before his eyes, as he struggles to return to a safer flight path, which is quickly slipping further and further away. His whole body suddenly seems encumbered by the suit, powerless against its weight and the inescapable gravity pulling him towards certain death. His inner visor flickers, starved for power, before going out for good.
In the chaos that earth and sky become to his unenhanced eyes, it takes him a while to realize he isn’t falling anymore.
It takes him a while longer to understand there’s an arm wrapped around him as he is dragged through the wispy clouds and into the rich air of the lower atmosphere. He flails instinctively against the unexpected restraint but the grasp is tight, despite his rescuer clearly being on his own collision course with the ground. Their perilous trajectory corrects itself only at the last minute, as they both glide across the surface of a lake, close enough for water to splash across his visor.
Tony braces himself for an impact that turns out a lot less intense than expected. Instead, he ends up on his back, staring at a clear blue sky, with an arm still around him. Autumn foliage rains over his helmet from blurry canopies looking down on him. As he blinks back the landscape, his eyes catch the sunlight reflecting off a sand-speckled hammer stuck firmly in the muddy bank.
Thor’s voice reaches him like distant thunder from far above. “...ark? Are you alright? Are you hurt?” Blond hair falls straight into Tony’s line of sight as firm hands clasp his shoulders. “Stark! Answer me!”
Tony coughs and raises a reassuring hand, running another over his bruised ribs. “Ease up, mother-hen, I’m okay. Just give me a minute.” He hears Thor’s deep sigh of relief and raises his eyebrows at the uneven breath that follows. “Is that a collapsed lung I hear or are you actually laughing?”
He gets his answer when he flips up his visor and is greeted with an exhausted but genuine smile. “We just saved the world! And we survived! Is that not reason enough?”
Tony can only chuckle helplessly as he drags himself away and settles into a more comfortable position on the pebbly shore. “Only if we never have to do this again,” he says. “My Terminator LARPing days ended in college and I’d like to keep it that way.” He gingerly prods a bump growing right above his hairline. “You have all your bits where they belong?”
Thor reaches out towards Mjolnir in reply. The hammer flies to his hand as usual before sinking into the fallen leaves when his wielder lets go and falls back with a pained groan. “I think I do,” he replies. “But we are definitely going to need the team to pick us up.”
Tony nods, feeling FRIDAY coming back to life in his helmet. “Signaled them right now. They should be here in about twenty minutes.” He settles down and enjoys the crisp wind on his face as drowsiness creeps over him through the fading adrenaline rush. “I don’t know about you, but I could use them.”
“So could I.” Thor leans heavily against the trunk of a large tree, split in half by his fall. He remains silent long enough for Tony to think he’s out cold until he hears him stir on the coarse sand. “Stark?” he mumbles.
Tony raises his head, eyes hooded against the sun. “Hmm?”
Thor lets out a soft sigh that turns into a yawn. “I hope I am your favorite Avenger now,” he says and drifts off into the kind of sound sleep Tony can only dream of.