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Sam doesn’t realise he’s out of the loop because after the world has, somewhat, settled from the mess of the blip, he doesn’t think there’s any loop to be in on.
Then, two years after the blip, Sam is coming off a commercial plane with his sister and niblings, and is being assaulted by messages from associates he hasn’t spoken to in years, Barnes, and Fury who he genuinely believed to be deceased.
Waiting around in baggage claim with his sister giving him the stink-eye, Sam curses twice-over the fact that wizards exist.
Wizards, sorcerers, whatever. Magic people.
Fury has sent paragraphs upon paragraphs between voicemails, emails, and texts, and Barnes has linked several comics Sam read as a child as a summary of current events. Clint, in a show of being team dad, has sent a GIF of a children's cartoon reading we’re getting the band back together! Bruce and Rhodes, within ten minutes of each other, both lamented the fact that they were banking on a day off.
If things weren’t a shitshow, it’d maybe be amusing.
Apparently, while everyone who once was gathered under the Avengers initiative has been off doing their own thing, there’s been a building problem that makes everything with Thanos sound almost mundane in comparison.
Sam is proud to say that he did not contribute to this problem, but being Captain America means that it’s his problem by proxy.
According to what Fury has explained (in a summary with shockingly few insults, implying it was ghost wrote by anyone else), about six months after the blip, there was an incident in Europe that had vaguely been on Sam’s radar, but it seemed as though SHIELD and Spider-Man (why the kid was there, Sam has no idea, but it’s frankly not his problem what that freak of nature gets up to in his spare time) were on top of it, so he’d pushed it aside. Apparently, there were false claims (this will be important in a second) of an entity crossing universes and wreaking havoc on their own. Much bullshit was spouted that week that ultimately ended up being disproven over time.
Unfortunately, this led to an overall dismissal of multiversal incidents, which would proceed to bite SHIELD in the ass so hard it tore out several layers of metaphorical skin with it.
Wanda and Strange caused shit. Spider-Man and Strange caused shit. Strange caused so much shit, essentially, along with several new players, some still unidentified. This all converged with an incident involving Space Cap (she has a name, but Sam has not a clue what it is), a SWORD staff member, and Space Cap’s brand new protege. Since Space Cap is, apparently, Fury’s special girl, and had miraculously not been involved until that point, when she brought a bunch of ignored info to Fury, things got kicked into high gear.
It should be worth mentioning, for the sake of Sam’s sanity, that the only person who seems to be involved that he met outside of Tony and Nat’s funerals is Spider-Man, who, while he seemed like a sweet enough kid, very much met Sam under the pretense of a fight.
The kid is also, apparently, missing, according to a brief note in the report.
He hugs everyone goodbye and isn’t at all surprised to find Hill waiting for him as soon as he leaves the airport.
⠀
⠀
The average age of recruits has dropped about a decade since Thanos.
This would be less of a mindfuck if it wasn’t mostly because Carol’s kid is 15, and especially less of a mindfuck if said kid didn’t seem to have more security clearance than Sam.
In an amusing twist of fate, even to Sam who barely knows the guy, Strange is being held by the Sorcerer Supreme until further notice, along with yet another 15-year-old. While waiting for the entire party to arrive, they have both been dubbed the problem children.
At Sam’s side, Bucky is making big shrugging hands over at said problem children, but more likely just at the kid.
Sam points out the other kid and Bucky goes rigid all over.
“Glad to see you,” Rhodey deadpans.
“Not that glad to be here,” Sam admits easily.
“Getting called together is never a good thing,” Bruce agrees gravely. “Especially when we’re supposedly disbanded.”
That never would have lasted. Enhanced persons have been cropping up far more often since the Chitauri Invasion of 2012, and once the Sokovia Accords were forgotten in the chaos of the blip, there was more reason to be themselves than not. Unfortunately, this means that criminals with powers were just as likely to not wind up in a lab as normal persons with powers or self-proclaimed heroes with powers.
The world is weird.
But the point is that more enhanced people means more enhanced threats, inevitably, and one or two of those under SHIELD’s thumb would never be enough.
“Who-all are we waiting on?” A kid wearing a notable amount of purple at Clint’s side asks. Sam hadn’t even noticed this one. “‘Cause, uh, I only got the barebones, but it seemed to me like the sooner the better?”
“We should just start,” Carol’s kid agrees, clearly not adjusted to protocol. “I’m going to forget everything that I want to say at this rate.”
“Write it down,” Carol instructs.
Her kid perks up like this is divine knowledge. It’s a little cute, but Sam doesn’t understand why the kid clearly has a SHIELD-issued tablet.
“That’s not how things work here,” Rhodey sighs.
“Meetings don’t start until Fury makes his entrance in a dramatic swish of leather,” Clint explains in the direction of the kids. It’s not a good explanation, but it’s certainly not wrong.
“What about cliffnotes?” asks a guy that Sam has no idea about and doesn’t plan on asking. He’s probably in his mid to late 20’s, and the only indicator for why he’s here is a set of odd, bulky bracelets on each arm. “Can we get those?”
“No,” Rhodey says, in the same moment that Strange calls, “The multiverse is broken,” from across the room.
The other sorcerer in the room curses, apparently having been under the impression that Strange couldn’t be heard from in there.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Bracelet Guy notes.
“Sounds above our goddamn paygrade,” Sam grumbles.
“Here, here,” Bruce chimes.
⠀
⠀
Fury doesn’t get his dramatic swish of leather.
More and more folks in either civvies or extremely bold attire fill up the meeting room, but they’re still left waiting.
Carol’s kid has disappeared and came back with snacks, which are being passed around when everything for the briefest moment goes to shit.
A jagged hole in what must be the fabric of reality forms over the conference table, the world warping oddly in Sam’s vision even as he finds himself mesmerised. A blur of red and blue flies through, thudding onto the table and gasping. Spider-Man claws at the wood frantically, not sparing a second to take in his surroundings before ripping open another hole in reality with his bare fucking hands and vanishing through it.
The kid next to Strange throws herself through the magical walls around her and Strange, slaps Wong for good measure, then quite literally throws herself into the hole before it can close, followed by another figure who barely flashes between one tear and the next.
Everything then goes back to normal.
A validating number of people blurt variations of “what the fuck?” in the same instant.
⠀
⠀
Sam leaves the room for barely five minutes, and when he reenters, Spider-Man has apparently replaced Strange in the magic cage. He’s bouncing from foot to foot with more nervous energy than, clearly, he knows what to do with.
All of the sorcerers/wizards/what-the-fuck-ever are working on interrogating the kid while the rest of the room watches on. It involves a lot of repetition and redirection, to the point it’s more entertaining than important.
Strange asks who was chasing Spider-Man. It is reiterated that whoever was, they were an asshole. Strange puffs up angrily, helped by his magic cloak, and Spider-Man draws attention to how Strange’s kid is putting more weight on one leg.
She claims it’s a cramp. She is a miserable liar.
The interrogation is momentarily abandoned in favor of taking care of the kid, those in charge of it evidently having tuned out the rest of the room.
Sam watches with what may be a little too much dismissal, as Spider-Man explores the sparking cage, climbing up the only real wall and then getting a hand on the ceiling.
He then throws himself fluidly over the top of the cage, webs open the conference room door, and vanishes.
Strange groans and flicks open a portal, getting thrust through it by his cape.
“He totally knows something,” Carol’s kid notes casually, still scrolling on her SHIELD-issued tablet. “And he really doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“I’ll get it out of him,” Girl Hawkeye (names are neither of their strong suits, evidently) announces confidently.
⠀
⠀
She does, in fact, get the information, though it takes two days.
Apparently, the NYC vigilantes have a whole thing going on that’s not quite camaraderie, but they certainly all know one another. Also apparently, there are approximately 5 fucking thousand of those, because why not.
Hawkeye JR. bribed/blackmailed someone else into talking to Spidey, and then later declared they only brought the gained info back to Hawkeye JR. because it involved Wilson Fisk, who’s only on Sam’s radar enough to consider the name vaguely familiar.
In the next meeting, with about half of the previous attendees gathered thanks to the wizards’ portals, Hawkeye JR. sits at the head of the table and struggles to recap what she’s learned.
“Okay, so, according to Spidey, a Fisk from another universe was somehow more batshit insane than our local kingpin of crime, and made himself a multiverse machine to yoink his dead wife and son out of another dimension,” she opens with.
There is far, far too much in that sentence.
Clint puts his head in his hands and somehow manages to say levelly, “Yup, that sounds like him.”
“Actually, no, he didn’t make it,” Hawkeye JR. amends. “He commissions a scientist who, according to Spidey, is apparently universally an asshole to Spider-People everywhere. He hires enhanced criminals as grunts, and this combo of assholes catches the attention of local Spider-Man, who we’ll be calling A for the sake of clarity.
“So A notices a bunch of enhanced criminals and other crime-related POI’s all going off the radar and catches on to some shady shit afoot. He does his research, but he doesn’t manage to track down this multiverse machine until the day it’s set to be activated. When he gets down there, there are a bunch of enhanced assholes fighting him, and there’s an innocent kid who, apparently, has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, we’re calling him M because apparently B is taken. M is important because, during tests for this experiment, the source of Spider-Man’s powers was brought from another dimension into his, and got into his bloodstream, linking him up to all Spidey’s everywhere on multiverse-terms. So A is busy stopping M from getting beat to shit or being launched into the multiverse death ray, so much so that he winds up getting launched into the multiverse death ray. This, apparently, gives some sort of fucked up rattling to every Spidey in every universe, and then A promptly fucks off and dies.
“Thanks to him alerting every Spidey everywhere that something’s off, a bunch of them start worming their ways into the multiverse. They start linking up, making structure, concocting theories and learning as much as they can, but they’re all purely science-driven fucks and a lot of them can’t understand something if science doesn’t support it. So, M, whose DNA was altered by something that shouldn’t have been stable in his dimension, pisses off a guy, pisses off some more guys, and then he meets this guy who, for all intents and purposes, has turned into the multiverse death ray machine, and blames M for it. Through fighting this guy, M and some other Spideys learn that the multiverse death ray has made them a lot more… loose in the multiverse, like reality can’t tell who’s who, and this lets them all reach out to one another and sneak through. Then, same thing happens to some other gal who I’ve never heard of, and they realise that more and more of these fuckin’ death rays are being built, and they’re making everyone fluid in the multiverse.”
She finally stops for breath. Sam’s brain has not.
Information overload.
He gets the jist, there’s something off with multiple Spider-Mans (a horrifying thought all on its own) and it lets them pull off that move everyone witnessed earlier involving tearing holes in the fabric of reality.
Its above his fucking paygrade, clearly, or maybe Hawkeye JR’s explanation just had a few too many extra details.
“So, according to Spidey, there’s now two big groups with different ideas to help heal the multiverse, and both, apparently, have decided not to fuck with our universe because of how bad things have gotten here, and only he and Double D are supposed to be involved because they’re the ones who have been like, linked up. And now that’s all of it.”
Sam, personally, feels happy with their universe being ignored if it means he no longer has to be involved in this comic book shit.
“Here, here,” the new Widow mutters.
Sam genuinely cannot tell whether or not he’d just said that out loud.
⠀
⠀
It’s lucky that Kate got that debriefing to them before everything went to shit.
There’s a second Earth inching closer in the sky, and while not visible to the naked eye, its moon is covering the sun until there’s barely a sliver of it reaching the planet, creating a neverending chill.
Outside there is pandemonium, and there is nowhere to run because this phenomenon is worldwide, doubly so. Soaring over the streets and screaming remain calm is about all Sam could do, and he doubts that it’d be helpful in any way.
Sam can only watch as the world begins to splinter, cracks in the fabric of reality glowing a shade of purple that doesn’t seem to belong to the visible light spectrum like it’s trying to.
He watches glitches rearrange everyday city structures into art installations and turn the roads from asphalt to dirt to gravel to boardwalk. He calls his family as much as possible and is endlessly thankful that they are always okay.
By day two, it’s gone from summer weather to late fall, and the city looks like a post-apocalyptic mess.
He wonders what it’s like on that second Earth. It hasn’t rotated at all while it’s been here. He likely would regret knowing.
Strange calls this whole thing an incursion, and then disappears into the Sanctum and never re-emerges. The longer he stays gone, the less Sam believes that there will somehow be a band aid solution for this shit.
He learns a lot more about the NYC vigilantes on day two, since they’ve all kicked into high gear to help out civilians, including Spider-Man and Daredevil who are not answering any Avengers and seem to be on their own comm line.
There are as many as Kate had implied. Some go out in civvies to help out however they can, and they have Sam’s full respect for it.
Near the end of day two, when the sun has passed the eclipse zone and is starting to inch towards the horizon, Sam’s room at Stark tower starts to distort with every glitching effect that has been observed thus far at the same time.
There’s a feeling like the violent kind of pins and needles that makes you not want to walk, but it shoots through his entire body, and when he looks down he realises that he’s glitching as much as the room around him.
This will be how he goes. Not even helping out, helpless in the face of an event he doesn’t understand.
He tries to call out for assistance, but it doesn’t seem like his vocal cords exist.
Somehow, someone gets a hand on him anyways. It’s a steady pressure on his shoulder that then yanks him to the floor, and Sam falls down and then through.
There’s a second where Sam is staring into a mesmerising abyss, speckled with colours he doesn’t have names for. Then, there’s a blinding flash, and a hard collision with the ground.
⠀
⠀
“You landed just fine, get off your ass.”
The echoes of collision suggest that this isn’t quite right, but the pain still stings like it's fresh, so hopefully he hasn’t been out long enough to be concerned.
More concerning is the unknown evidently standing above him while he’s vulnerable.
Sam’s body does not want to get up swiftly, but he gets up anyway, and he winds on the unknown.
They look like a kid, because that lines up pretty well with how his week is going. They’re gangly as hell, there looks like there’s no muscle or fat on the kid. They’re either a really impressive cosplayer or involved in the shitshow that is the hero business, based on the familiar set of flight goggles resting on their forehead and the bulky tech strapped to one wrist.
“Know where you are?” The kid prompts, clearly unimpressed.
Probably a hero, in that case. The other option would likely involve a hell of a lot more fanboying.
“Not really,” Sam admits, just starting to properly tune in on his surroundings. The sky is grey through dense fog, and the world looks like a desolate concrete walkway in every direction. “Got any hints for me?”
“Another dimension,” the kid deadpans, which figures. “Folks tend to call this one Loomworld.”
Well, it seems that Sam’s doing this now.
“And why’s that?”
“It’s the oldest and biggest dimension, a bunch of gods and demigods who exist outside of dimensions are from here, and it's at the centre of the currently reachable multiverse, no matter what dimension you start from.”
Maybe Sam did sign up for this and just forgot about it. He feels far too involved in this magic shit right now.
“And you are?”
The kid finally pauses, at this, not seeming certain of how to answer. Unlike most teens that Sam meets these days, he remains completely still as he thinks, then finally elects to say, “You wouldn’t know me in your dimension.”
“You sure?” Sam asks, just to be contrary.
“You’d know if you know me,” the kid declares confidently.
“Give it a shot?”
“No.”
Stubborn shit.
“Fine. You got a codename, at least?”
He doesn’t answer directly. He stares at Sam for a long moment, then observes, “You have a wing pack. Some Cap Wilson’s don’t.”
Good to know?
He doesn’t know what to do with this kid, but the two of them are in the middle of the void, and he has a feeling the kid’s his best bet at getting out of it.
So, electing to abandon the last line of thought for the moment, Sam asks, “You catch how I got here?”
“You glitched in,” the kid explains. “If I had to guess, either you were already in another dimension, in a corrupting dimension, or Wilson’s just got linked up. Any of those options could get you thrown in here pretty easily.”
“And how do I get out?” Sam asks.
The kid hesitates, shoots a look over his shoulder, and sighs. “There’s a lot of miles between where we gotta go. My jumper watch is shot to shit, and we didn’t land all that close to the Loomworld base. With any luck, someone will notice you’re gone before we go there, but otherwise it’s about a days trip with the wings.”
A fucking what now?
Sam’s wings are primarily for gliding. With well-placed dives and swerves, he can keep up his speed, but flying on them would be extremely tedious, and he doubts he has enough fuel to last the trip.
He flies faster than he walks, however, so that’s still turning into at least two days of travelling, and the last two days in his own dimension have shown how much can change in such little time.
And he can’t exactly leave the kid, since he doesn’t know where he’s going and like hell is he leaving a kid in the middle of what seems like a wasteland, so that’s hours of putting up with one another before, with any luck, finding a car to borrow.
With no food and no water, as well.
“Should probably get going before we run low on fuel,” the kid comments, clearly on a similar page.
“We’re going to be dehydrated by the time we make it if it’s a wasteland like this the whole way through.”
“It’s barely an hour of walking once the wings fail. We’ll be fine, unless you’ve been skipping out on water for—”
“My wings won’t last me that long,” Sam tells the kid. “It was late when I got pulled here, I hadn’t refueled, and they’re not made to cover long distances like that, they’re made for fights.”
“Well I’m not gonna fucking carry you just because you don’t know how to mod your wings,” the kid snaps. He pinches between his brow, “Fucking hell, there’s so many of you who just fight with those hunks of metal without even knowing how to do basic maitenence on them. Am I the only one who cares about the wings? Is this a sign to prepare for batshittery from one of the mutants?”
Sam oh-so-carefully avoids the details of the rant in favor of the better information. “You’re my alternate,” he realises.
The kid does not confirm. Instead, he bristles like this is an insult, and snaps his attention back to Sam to scream, “NO I’M NOT.”
The explosion doesn’t do anything to disprove it, because Sam’s pretty sure this is far from the first time someone’s said this to the kid, but he figures that Falcon, the codename given to him by the press and SHIELD as if life were just one giant fucking comic book, is a good enough substitute name for now.
“Fine, then,” Sam says, going for de-escalation.
Falcon isn’t receptive to it. His back seems to almost ripple, and a stunning set of metal wings unfold with a loud whirring of fans. He kicks off the ground with impressive force and while he uses the gliding method to get up, he switches to a more traditional beating of wings to hover above Sam.
“Learn from me,” he instructs.
Sam’s own wings shoot out of his pack, and he follows the kid into the air.
⠀
⠀
The wasteland lasts far past the stamina of Sam’s wings.
Falcon’s begrudging, but he joins Sam on the ground since he doesn’t want to strand anyone out here. He has, however, been initiating the only conversation in the form of sending Sam another blueprint for his own gear every fifteen minutes.
Texting working in the middle of nowhere in a whole other dimension is about the only interesting thing about the walk.
The major sign they’re getting somewhere is that on the horizon, there’s an odd glow that doesn’t take the shape of a cityscape, yet is clearly growing closer as they walk.
At the hour mark, Sam considers asking the kid about himself, but then redirects to focus on the situation, since Falcon seemed more receptive to that.
“Why do they call it Loomworld?”
Falcon shoves his phone into his pocket, and looks into the distance instead of at Sam. “For one, it’s because of the size. It’s the oldest one anyone’s found, so it’s expanded a shit ton. And this place’s Earth, specifically, is basically double-sized. As well, this place is the foundation for a massive weaving, but you really can’t understand that until you see it.”
“Weaving,” Sam echoes skeptically.
“Yeah,” Falcon sighs. “If it helps you picture it at all, it was made over a millenia ago by a group of spiders. It’s got some really messy properties that a lot of the sorcerers want to get their hands on, but the magic seems to be some sorta Spider-Man-only type of thing.”
“Everything about this week has sounded so fake.”
Falcon barks a surprised laugh. “It’s all the sorcery shit. None of them can publish an actual research paper to save their ass, so the rest of the folks trying to figure everything out just gotta guess and check.”
What the fuck would a research paper made by wizards look like? Why is this real life?
“And before you ask, the Spiders are all involved because they’re giant bleeding hearts, and there’s a handful of them who are delusional and think they got their powers from a goddess. And no matter what you tell yourself, they’re much more miserable to be around once they’re adults.”
Yeah. Yeah, that tracks.
⠀
⠀
At the four hour mark, they finally pass a town, far off to their right.
“Want to see if we can find a car?” Sam suggests. “Or at least stock up on water and food?”
“That place won’t have any cars, it’s not worth it,” Falcon dismisses. “Time gets… messy when you get closer to the base.”
“How messy?” Sam checks.
“That place ain’t ever heard of cars,” Sam explains. “And the city that base is in is a blend of victorian and beyond our century. Loomworld’s never been the most stable place, that’s why it’s so easy to slip in.”
“Wonder if that has anything to do with the Infinity Stones,” Sam comments, since they’re his entire basis for time travel.
“Maybe the other way around, actually,” the kid ponders. “If the time stone or reality stone got chipped, or even chipped each other, then it could be used by different people at the same time, and that could break a lot of shit.”
“Two people with infinite power,” Sam agrees. “Not my strong suit, but sounds like a physicist's worst nightmare.”
The kid nods. “Or, I guess an animal could pick up a stone, or a kid, or really anyone who doesn’t know what the hell it is, and fuck a lot of things up by not knowing what it does.”
“Which would be worse, though,” Sam muses. “The ones with no intent, right, because they’re not expecting anything to happen.”
“How would someone know their infinity stone is chipped?” Falcon argues. “Their exact dimensions aren’t exactly documented for the wider universe. If you’re not someone like the Asgardians who can get a read on magic, it won’t seem like anything is wrong.”
Hm.
This thought experiment is certainly better than the endless silence.
⠀
⠀
Dawn breaks over the horizon when they make it to the city, and Sam hadn’t even processed that he’d arrived at night thanks to the clouds being an odd pale grey colour and the desert sand not being much better.
As they walk, the point about time being inconsistent here only gets clearer. Stark differences in architecture are everywhere, and there’s no rhyme or reason to the heights of buildings. Sam watches someone who looks plucked out of the 70’s walk into a monstrosity of modern architecture, and on the other side of the street is someone with a goddamn powdered wig.
There’s a set of purple, glowing wires stretching between buildings and cutting across the sky. When Falcon stops at a store for water and food, Sam finds one of these wires anchored to the sidewalk, stretching at a slow incline to the sky.
Falcon returns with a box of protein bars and two bottles of Diana water, which Sam is certain doesn’t exist back home, and a taste test reveals that it has the same miserable taste as Dasani.
“Should just find a hose instead,” Sam jokes, grimacing even though he takes another sip, since he can’t help being parched.
The kid squints at him in a clear show of not getting the joke, and then hesitantly takes another gulp of his water, trying to hide that he regrets buying it.
Sam considers the logo. It… it might just be Dasani, actually. Ugh.
The protein bars are normal, at least.
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⠀
Sam does not figure out the relation between Zero and Spider-Man because of the tattered red and blue leggings she’s wearing, or even the obvious half-mask.
No, because that’d be too easy on his processing power.
Those glowing wires, which had only increased in frequency while approaching the base had all turned out to be lines of web, tangling with one another and forming a horrifying sight to behold, a glowing spider web that’s likely capable of capturing a human to be trapped and eaten, if not something larger.
Zero, muttering to herself, shoots a web of her own into this madness from her wrist, and swings herself up into the center of the glow. She lands on it as naturally as a real spider, each wire barely bouncing with her weight. She darts in and out of Sam’s sight among the strands, and after a long moment of being out of sight, a large hunk of metal is dropped nearly to the ground.
“That was cleaned since Karn died on it, right?” Falcon calls up at Zero.
“I sure hope so,” she calls back down.
The two of them simultaneously grimace.
Zero weaves through the wires and plops herself, upside down, in front of them both. This unfortunately has already proved to Sam to be the way of Spiders. “Well, he was old as hell and probably didn’t have use of his legs for a lot of that time, so the crawlers gonna smell like oxygen-less flesh no matter what we do, but it’s the best thing we’ve got for scaling the web safely.”
“Consider: clean it. Just get any product. Or just mix baking soda with something. But that sounds disgusting, Zero.”
“Everyone’s enhanced, anyways, there won’t be any viruses on it that we can catch.”
“I’m not,” Sam tells her.
“He’s not,” Falcon agrees.
Zero’s face goes entirely neutral. “I’ll put baking powder on the shopping list.”
“Baking soda.”
“That’s… what I said?”
Sam’s never getting home, is he?
⠀
⠀
“You’re a fucker from the banned dimension!” The second spider person, who arrived at some point to do mysterious magic shit with Zero, accuses. Both Zero and Falcon have exclusively been calling her anime and she hasn’t seemed to care. “No wonder Zero needed backup!”
With this declaration, the section of web that had been glowing blue beneath her feet abruptly switches back to purple. Zero groans, drops down, and swings underneath the climber in order to get up next to the second spider-person.
“It’s only banned because Miggy used to be in charge and Miggy is an asshole,” Zero explains as though talking to a small child.
In response, she gets a huff. “Well, for all that he was wrong about, he was pretty good at telling when a universe was too unstable to stick to.”
“When a universe loses stability, it’s fairly obvious.”
“Well, duh.”
Sam clears his throat. “If it helps any, recently there was an incident involving a second Earth appearing in the sky?”
Two equally white-eyed stares turn to him in complete sync.
Also in complete sync, the girls blurt, “Oh, shit.”
“I would like to reiterate,” Falcon sighs, “That I am only affiliated with this man and his actions nominally, and his forgetfulness should not reflect on my capabilities—”
“Birdbrain.”
⠀
⠀
Sam is not deposited where he left, not the room, the building, the city, the country, or even planet.
Instead, he is deposited on the second Earth brought by the current incursion, in the streets of a New York where everything is uncanny in a way he’s unable to put his finger on.
Similar to his home dimension, there’s pandemonium in the streets. Enhanced individuals are scattered all over, flashes of colour at the top of Sam’s vision. As much as he needs to help, Sam’s priority is making contact and getting everything into motion before the universe fucking breaks, so he stomps his way through the streets until he makes it to where Avengers Tower… should be.
It’s similarly shaped, if a little shorter, but where the Avenger’s logo should reside is a number four in a slightly darker shade of blue.
Sam would fly up to see how far the similarities stretch, but his wing pack is entirely out of fuel, he’s grounded. His only option is running through the streets like a goddamn maniac until he catches someone’s attention.
Lovely.
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“Spider-Man is everywhere,” Johnny Storm tells Sam with far too much seriousness for what has just come out of his mouth. “You cannot escape him. You’ll find a universe where Earth is uninhabited, and there will be an Asgardian Spidey, somehow.”
Sue Storm looks up from the science huddle to holler at her brother, “You’re just saying that because you want to—”
Johnny lunges across the table to slap his hands over Sue’s mouth.
Sam fights hard not to huff.
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Reed Richards is the kind of man to unironically exclaim fascinating, Ben Riley needs a pen the thickness of a cup to write, and Sue Storm is incapable of not trying to do everything at once, but undeniably, the team gets shit done.
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“I am going to need you to truthfully identify yourself before I agree to—”
“Hi, Fury,” Sam snarks into the microphone. “Could we get this show on the road, please?”
He gets several seconds to bask in the fact he just sent Director Fury to stunned silence. For all the shit that Sam’s pulled, usually with the help of one supersoldier to the other, he’s never managed to get an advantage over Fury before.
“You have been off the radar for a while, Wilson,” Fury notes evenly.
“Not by choice,” Sam tells him, “but I’m back right now, and we got shit to do.”
⠀
⠀
“Congratulations,” Zero says to him after the fact, and also having gone over the obligatory panic fest of oh fuck there’s someone in my room and what the fuck is she doing in my room!? “You’re the first Captain America to get access to these comms.”
Sam raises both brows. “Is the bar really that high?”
“For Caps? Unfortunately.”
“Caps, specifically?”
“Every Cap I’ve ever met has been one stubborn motherfucker, and after being forced to take control so often, the first-gen ones usually don’t know how to handle being told to step back. It’s easier to organise with Avengers who understand the need for different team structures in different situations.”
Sam, tucking the comm into his pocket, tries, “Steve would have listened.”
“Your Steve, I’m guessing, would have freaked out when he realised just how many kids have gotten sucked into this bullshit, and would try to mother hen them all in the most obliviously rude way possible. And yeah, knowing how many kids are involved sucks for everyone, but those are damn-capable kids and telling them not to show up to fights is just going to encourage them to come without even knowing the plan.”
“We’re not dealing in absolutes,” Sam quotes. Zero had said a lot of shit while working away at the web, but this bit in particular has stuck to Sam like glue. “None of us are ever, strictly, one thing.”
Zero meets his gaze steadily. “There’s this one Sam Wilson, one who was the same age as Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. One who got the serum. One who got launched through the multiverse instead of into ice, and one who clawed back 70 years later after fucking up countless things trying to get home, and the Spidey in that dimension is being targetted by all of SHIELD because the Cap there believed that Spidey had killed someone, based soley on gossip. And for a lot of our team, that’s the only Cap they’ve ever met.”
It’s one hell of a way to give a long spiel with, inevitably, no substance.
“That Cap doesn’t speak for everyone,” Sam argues.
“Rationally, yes. Emotionally, we still have kids on our team.”
⠀
⠀
The band aid patch on their crumbling universe falls apart 5 months after it was installed. In terms of the lifespan of a normal band aid, it’s impressive, but in terms of getting the world stable, it’s… not great.
Sam and Spidey have wound up as the point persons for the greater multiverse of heroes (still a wild concept, still mostly assorted Spiders), and thanks to Spidey being ridiculously hard to reach outside of an emergency, Sam’s the one who sends out the wider distress beacon.
It’s not an incursion, but it might be worse. A set of Chitauri are being steadily funnelled worldwide, and while their team isn’t as American-heavy as it used to be, it’s still not great.
Especially when they’re down to only two Chitauri Invasion Veterans, with one of them being the hulk and the other one being a depressed Dad nearing the line of too old for this shit. The rest of them have only fought Chitauri on massive battlefields with hundreds of options for backup, not scattered to the winds in teams of three or four if you’re lucky.
So Sam opens the third comm line of this mess of a battle, and hits his distress beacon, because aliens are not his strong suit.
(It might, maybe, also, possibly… have something to do with how he hasn’t seen the SHIELD in going on ten minutes.)
He hears the beep of someone entering his comm line and surprisingly, it’s Falcon again.
“Hey, good Cap,” he greets, a loud sound of shuffling in the background. “Where you need me?”
“Houston,” Sam grits out. One of the zombie things are charing at him and knocking them off without the shield involves an up-close and personal experience with the muck that stains their skin. “There’s an army, things are going to shit worldwide.”
“GImme five,” Falcon orders, and then the static form his comm goes silent.
Sam switches back to the main commline (the second is currently being used for delegating tasks) and snaps, “Where the hell’s my backup!?”
“You know how big Texas is?” Barnes snaps. “I’m stuck in suburbs, Sam, suburbs. I can’t leave ‘cause this whole area looks like a hurricane went through and I’m needed on evac.”
“Hand out medical supplies,” Bruce orders. His voice is rough in a way that hints at a full Hulk-out. “Civilians can handle it, we need people in high population areas.”
Barnes argues, “Civvies shouldn’t be near rubble, and no way in hell there are enough EMT’s anywhere that have been combed through by Chitauri.”
Sam checks comm line 2 to find that it has devolved.
“Can everyone get out of New York?” Spider-Man begs, and it's unclear how much is his usual voice and how much is disappointment or exasperation. “There are so many enhanced people here, we need to spread out.”’
“It’s a well-documented hotspot,” someone that Sam doesn’t even know argues.
“There are literally vigilantes in every borough,” Spider-Man sighs, definitely exasperated.
“And none of them are on comms, so I’m staying.”
Sam moves back to line 3, still with only Falcon for company. He jumps into the air to get a better view of the situation in the streets, and it’s just… not great. At all.
“Mind if I call in backup?” Falcon asks the moment he unmutes. His mic has lost the grainy quality altogether.
“About the opposite. We need all the help we can get out here.”
“Great. I’ll be with you in 30 seconds, no promises on my backup.”
Sam still can’t see his shield, even from a vantage point of where he’s been fighting. The streets are a maze of grime and the screeching of sirens everywhere are starting to make his ears ring, and this whole thing is a mess.
Redwing peels off of his wing pack and goes off in search of the shield, and Sam reenters the fray.
He doesn’t keep count, but he notices when the kid (claims he’s in his twenties, Sam has his doubts) arrives because the glowing portal dyes the shadows reds and purples, and his wings have a distinct noise as they cut through the air.
“You read me?” Falcon asks at the same time two others join the comm line.
“Loud and clear,” Sam confirms.
“Great. Logan, Kat?”
“We’re on,” a gruff voice responds. “ETA 5, can crunch it down to four if you really need us to.”
“Names?” Sam requests.
“Logan.”
“Codename: Wolverine,” a girl’s voice cuts in. “And I’m Kitty, codename: Shadowcat.”
“Don’t indulge her,” Logan immediately orders.
“Kat, give us 5 minutes of sobriety,” Falcon begs. “Just five.”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n Grunch.”
That is absolutely a second kid being brought in. If it weren’t for the fact that their team is spread practically transparent and there are plenty of other kids already in the field, he’d object.
As it does, Sam relays, “Make sure you’ve got something that works as a distance weapon. These guys are a big fan of charging with brute strength.”
Kitty cackles vibrantly, telling a lot about her character. “Oh, fuck yeah. We’re gonna get up close and personal with them, just you wait.”
“That is a bad idea,” Sam reiterates. “A you’re going to die, kind of idea.”
“Won’t be an issue for us,” Logan tells him. “We’re both pretty damn hard to kill.”
“Hey, Cap, where’s your shield?” Falcon interrupts. “Seems to me like you’re not taking your own advice right now.”
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Sam sighs. He’s a little preoccupied trying to hold off the hoard.
Falcon swoops in and lands at his six, wings fanning out to create a mini barrier between the two of them. “I’ll find it,” he declares confidently.”
Yeah, good fucking luck, kid.
⠀
⠀
Kitty was not joking when she said that she and Logan would get up close and personal with the Chitauri and that it would work for them.
He learns that Kitty is able to make herself intangible, Logan has speed healing that makes Steve and Barnes seem normal, and they both have a set of sharp claws that can slide in and out of their knuckles.
At first, the four of them are weaving in and out of each other’s space, but as time passes, Sam manages to pull out and moves himself onto relief efforts, and the two Redwings have switched from scanning for the shield to scanning for anomalies that could let these Chitauri slip onto Earth, and identifying which dimension these Chitauri come from.
Barnes, when Sam gets a moment to check on him, has started coordinating a group of able-bodied and fit individuals with some of the wizards in order to have greater relief efforts than could be achieved with all of their teammates really being needed in the field.
Sam recruits some people to join in, and he just hopes that it’ll do something to help.
Kitty finds him on the outskirts of the metropolitan area and gives a knowing smile that fits her a little too well. “You’re a good Cap,” she declares.
“Thanks, I try.”
She snorts. “You’re not trying, you’re just doing it. It doesn’t take any effort to be a good person.”
“I’d argue that it does.”
“Nah,” Kitty dismisses. “Maybe for some people, but for the people who go around flaunting primary colours and beating the shit out of anyone who hurts others? You’re not thinking about why you’re doing it, you just do it. You don’t need justifications, or orders, you just need to react.”
“It takes effort,” Sam repeats. “If I gave up on effort, I’d snap, and I’d hurt people because of it.”
“And that took effort to think about?” Kitty taunts. “Don’t think so, pal.”
⠀
⠀
The multiverse makes no sense.
It’s ever expansive and infinite and yet there are constants that are hardly ever even challenged, let alone opposed.
It’s full of things that Sam once saw in Saturday morning cartoons, and it's full of science that he can’t even begin to work through, but it’s also full of heroes.
It’s full of people who, regardless of where they started, picked themselves up and started doing the right thing.