Chapter Text
In hindsight, maybe Nico shouldn’t have eaten that Underworld chili.
But to be fair, Will had dared him. And Nico di Angelo was a lot of things—brooding, death-adjacent, perpetually annoyed—but he was not a coward.
The problem was, when a son of Hades sneezes, it isn’t just a bodily function. It’s a magical event. A magical event with consequences.
Like, say… accidental necromancy.
One minute he was trying to summon a ghost to get directions through a particularly annoying region of the Underworld (thanks, Charon, for the zero signage), and the next—
ACHOO.
—his sneeze echoed through the cavern like a shotgun blast made of regret and dark magic. A black shockwave pulsed out from his body, rattling bones, crumbling ancient columns, and knocking Will Solace flat on his glowing, very alive, golden butt.
“Nico?” Will coughed, covered in ghost-dust. “Did you just—did you just sneeze the veil between worlds open?”
Nico blinked. “...Maybe.”
A tear in space hovered in front of them, crackling ominously. It shimmered like a heat mirage, but inside was a flickering image of another world—some kind of shiny metal tower, a glowing blue sky, and what looked suspiciously like a man in a red and gold suit lying on a table.
“Uh,” Will said helpfully, pointing.
The tear zapped and vanished.
Far, far away, in a universe known for having too many movies and not enough therapy, Tony Stark opened his eyes.
He was not supposed to be awake.
He was also definitely not supposed to have a metal shard embedded in his rib cage, or a faint echo of the Mind Stone whispering in the back of his brain like a really bad Spotify ad.
“...Oh no,” Tony muttered, sitting up on the cold, metal slab of a Stark Industries medical lab. “Not again.”
His reflection in the chrome ceiling was not pretty. He looked like a mix between a Halloween decoration and a very expensive corpse. His hair was still mostly intact, though. Small wins.
An alarm started blaring in the background.
Location Breach Detected. Security Override: Level Nine.
Unauthorized Lifeform Activity.
“Rude,” Tony said, dragging himself off the table and limping toward the door. “I built that override.”
A few floors up in Avengers Tower, Peter Parker was hanging upside down in the vent system, having a perfectly average anxiety attack over some chemistry homework, when he heard the words no one wants to hear in the middle of the night.
“Mr. Stark?”
He froze. His heart stopped. That voice. That exact voice, sarcastic and tired and—
“MR. STARK?!” Peter crashed out of the vent in a flurry of limbs, papers, and one unfortunate ham sandwich. “YOU’RE DEAD. YOU DIED. I—I LITERALLY WATCHED YOU—"
“Yeah, kid, thanks for the reminder,” Tony muttered, holding up a hand glowing faintly blue and a little too skeletal. “Zombie Stark, back at it again. Don’t worry, I still got the suit.”
Peter passed out.
Tony sighed. “Yeah, that tracks.”
Meanwhile, on Mount Olympus (because yes, unfortunately, it still existed), Zeus squinted at the sky like someone had farted in his divine bubble bath.
“Did anyone else feel that?” he rumbled, gripping his lightning bolt a little too tightly.
“Feel what?” Poseidon asked, barely looking up from his kelp-tini.
“That… ripple. Something unnatural.” Zeus narrowed his eyes. “Something necromantic.”
“Oh,” said Hades, appearing out of nowhere with a skull mug and a bored expression. “That? Yeah. That was Nico. He sneezed.”
“He what?!”
“Yeah, probably summoned a few things by accident. No biggie.” He took a sip. “Could’ve opened a rift in reality. But, you know. Tuesday.”
Back in the mortal world—no, back in a different mortal world—something stirred. A god in green watched from a throne of mirrors as magic shimmered across the realms.
Loki’s lips curled into a smile.
“Interesting,” he said, and stepped through the nearest portal.