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Tony hated what he was about to do, but there was no way around it. A door had appeared in his tower that had no business being there. To make matters worse, it was old and weird and there was no door on the other side of that wall. Hell, there wasn't even space for a room or even a cupboard on the other side. It was literally a door to nowhere. Even Jarvis couldn't scan through it, despite it just being wood.
“Go on, Jarvis, call the others,” he said when he ran out of ideas.
“I couldn't possibly, Sir,” Jarvis replied.
Tony could hear the smugness behind that smooth, polished voice.
“What if I order you to?”
“You’d have to make me an Avenger first, Sir.”
Tony sighed. His own damn fault for having coded Jarvis in such a way he had become a sassy little shit.
“Fine. Patch me through,” he said, waiting a moment before saying in his most unenthusiastic tone: “Avengers Assemble.”
Then he had to explain that yes, it was an emergency, but not the “I'm about to die” kind of emergency, just the “Things got weird” variation that they had to see for themselves.
“It's obviously a trap,” Romanoff said. “I wouldn't put it past Loki.”
“Sounds like something he'd do,” Barton muttered. “Can we just ignore it? You said it's not doing anything or going anywhere.”
“That I know of,” Tony corrected. “Do I want to sleep next to a potential gate to hell? No. Is it ruining my interior design? Absolutely. Ergo, we gotta do something about it asap.”
“I could just open it real quick and peak inside,” Rogers offered, as unscientific as ever.
“Great plan, Cap. Is your choir boy charisma immune to eldricht monsters, radiations, or poisonous fumes?”
“Radiations, maybe?” he answered, then frowned. “Alright, what do you think we should do then?”
“Well, if Thor was here, I'd tell him to open the door, he’s damn near indestructable.”
“So am I,” Bruce replied softly. “Well, the Other Guy is.”
“Yeah, but my tower isn't, and it's already got holes in it, so I don't think that's a good idea, Brucie Bear.”
Bruce looked relieved, and as they exchanged more idea of what to do with this anomaly, it suddenly resolved itself when there was a knock from the other side.
“You all heard that, right?” Barton asked when they'd all stood frozen for far too long. “Oh, thank God,” he added when they all nodded.
“May I come in?” a woman's voice asked from the other side, her voice muffled although it was obvious she must have been shouting to be heard.
“Do we have a choice?” Tony yelled back.
Given the pause on the other side, their guest must either be debating the point, or preparing to kick the door open.
“I just want to know why you put a door here. It's a restricted area, you know.”
Romanoff chuckled. Looked like they were in the same pickle. She raised an eyebrow at him, but it's the Captain who stepped forward.
“Move back. Looks like we're back to plan A,” he said, raising his shield between them and the door before yanking it open as they all prepared for the worse.
A woman stood there, as normal as you please in her jeans and a wooly jumper. Not exactly the Eldritch horror he'd been expecting.
“Peggy?” Steve said.
“No?” she replied, then seeing how broken the Captain looked, she added: “I’m Hermione. Sorry?”
The Captain wouldn't take his eyes off her or move an inch, and it was starting to creep Tony out as much as her, so he nudged him out of the way.
“Don't mind him. He's not very good at chatting women up. Tony Stark, as I'm sure you know.”
“I don't, actually,” she said, no doubt joking, before taking in the others and doing a double take at Romanoff. “Ginny? What are you doing here?”
“I'm Natasha. Do I look like this Ginny you know?”
“In every way. It's uncanny. Except you don't talk like her.”
Natasha nodded, then turned towards Rogers.
“And she looks like the Peggy you know?”
“Absolutely. Even her voice,” he added, his own sounding strangled.
“What are you thinking?” Tony asked the Black Widow, although he had his own idea now.
“Portal to another world full of Doppelgängers?” she said.
“An alternate universe,” Tony confirmed.
“Dimensional travel,” the woman considered, nodding to herself. “If it were to happen anywhere, it would be here,” she added.
All Tony could see behind her was a very messy room. Piles of dusty books, broken chairs, empty bottles, stuffed animals, and parts of what looked like metal armors - the kind worn by Knights, not Ironman. Honestly, the place looked like a dump.
“What kind of place is it?” Tony asked as diplomatically as possible.
“Well, I suppose I can tell you… This is the Room of Requirement. I was searching for something and it should be here, but since it opened a door to your world, I wonder if what I'm looking for didn't accidentally fall into your dimension.”
“Accidentally?”
“Magic,” she shrugged.
Not satisfied with that answer, Tony glanced at Bruce who might know more about multiverse physics, but he shrugged too.
“Fine. Let's assume something from your world slipped into ours: how dangerous is it?”
She bit her bottom lip. Never a good sign.
“It's a horcrux. A piece of soul. Very dark magic. I've seen their handywork when I was younger, and it can get pretty ugly.”
“Great. And I suppose it's lurking in my tower?”
“If that's where the door leads to, then I guess.”
Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. They had just gotten rid of Loki and his army. He still has an Asgardian shaped hole in his living room for crying out loud. Now there was an evil piece of soul haunting it? How was this his life again?
Without a better solution, he invited the woman in who reintroduced herself formally: Hermione Granger, witch, human - because now they had to check apparently. He gave her a tour of his place, learning in the process she truly didn't know who he was. In fact, The Avengers didn't exist in her world, but they had magical societies, so maybe they didn't need them.
“I can feel the horcrux was here, but only for a short while,” she concluded after waving her wand around.
“That's good news, right?” Barton asked, looking eager to wash his hands of the whole affair.
“Not really. It probably means it attached itself to something or someone it deemed worthy or strong enough to be useful for its purpose.”
“Which is?” Romanov asked.
“Oh, the usual. World domination, enslavement, torture, death...”
“You shouldn't have opened the door,” Tony mock whispered to the Captain who scowled back.
“It was already in,” he sniped back before turning all sweet on the witch again. “How can we help?”
“Since the dark magic still lingers here, it means the horcrux hitched a ride not long ago. Any idea?”
“Would watching security footage help?” Tony asked, although it felt like far too simple a solution.
“Yes!” she exclaimed with a smile bright as the sun, and okay, he could see why the Captain had the hots for her now.
Jarvis played the footage for her on his large TV screen which had somehow avoided getting a scratch. Barton fell asleep on the couch not even a minute in, but everyone else scanned the images for an anomaly. Unfortunately, she said horcruxes could be hidden in anything: inanimate objects, pets, even another human being.
“There,” Romanov pointed out.
Jarvis turned the footage back and she showed them the area where something just appeared out of nowhere and fell in the middle of the room, not doing anything as far as he could tell.
“Huh. Weird. Can you enhance the image Jarvis?”
When he did, goosebumps prickled his skin. He knew what it was: an ornate silver fountain pen. After Jarvis accelerated the footage forward, there he was picking it up, twirling it between his fingers on his way to the coffee machine.
“Ha. You fingered it,” Barton mocked.
Tony glared at him. He liked him better asleep.
“You put it on the kitchen counter,” Bruce added, Rogers and the witch already halfway there.
“Doesn't look evil,” Tony said when he joined them by the pen.
“Because the soul isn't attached to it anymore,” Hermione said with a frown, pocketing the pen before returning to the TV.
Her eyes widened when the aliens began flying around the Tower, her mouth fell open at his cool duel with Loki, then she gasped when the Hulk mopped the floor with Loki's face. It was hilarious, until a dark shadow grew behind the Hulk and he seemed completely oblivious to it.
“Brucie Bear, do you feel possessed?”
“More than usual you mean?”
Tony snorted, then had to explain Bruce was the Hulk as well. After taking a good look at him, she dismissed him as a threat. Ballsy. He liked her. Meanwhile, on the screen, the shadow slithered around the Hulk like some misty dark matter and Tony would have bet it was headed straight for Loki. Evil calling evil. Seemed logical. However, it did a 180 and headed straight for the Black Widow instead.
Tony looked at her suspiciously. He couldn't help it. She had lied to him before. She could be possessed right now and not even show it. However, she looked far too taken by what was happening on screen.
“I didn't see it,” she whispered, like she was afraid of admitting she wasn't perfect.
“You were dead on your feet. We all were,” the Captain reassured her, patting her hand like she was a fragile dame from his time and not a ruthless assassin who may or may not be possessed by evil mist from another dimension.
However, the shadowy piece of soul latched onto the sceptre instead, disappearing into the glowing blue stone.
“That doesn't look like good news,” Barton said, having to explain to the witch what the sceptre was, who it belonged to, and where it was now.
With a sigh, she stood, and announced she had to exorcize the alien weapon, which wasn't a sentence he ever thought he'd hear. Unsurprisingly, Barton and Brucie didn't volunteer, and seeing the Captain was about to, Tony cut him off, just to annoy him.
“I can fly you there, bypass security one way or another, and I'm way more fun than these bores,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand towards Captain Stare-a-lot and Romanoff-putting.
And who could say no to that?
The sceptre, as it turned out, was not where it was supposed to be, and he couldn't alert Fury about it, or he would have to explain why he'd invited an interdimensional witch who looked just like Peggy Carter into their world without clearing it with him first. Not the headache he'd signed up for.
Nor was Pepper blowing up his phone because he'd gone running off again without waiting to see her first. Like he had a choice about saving the world again, although Pepper seemed more suspicious he had left with a pretty young woman.
“Problem?” Hermione asked, waiting like she actually cared about his answer, and he was tempted to rant about how difficult real relationships were, but he shook his head and plastered his showman smile on instead.
“Nothing I can't deal with,” he told her, shifting the subject back to the STRIKE team who had last taken custody of the sceptre, Sitwell and Rumlow in particular.
“This can't be good,” Hermione said when he shared their profiles. “They’re the spitting image of two Death-Eaters in my world.”
“Bad guys?” he guessed.
“Magical nazis,” she confirmed.
Wondering if they could base people's look-alikes here on who they were in the other dimension, Tony showed her the pictures of several other people on their long flight towards their two targets. The results were pretty telling.
“Probably for the best you don't know my doppelganger on your side, or you would have gotten a bad impression without me saying a word, and that would have been a new low...”
“I doubt that,” she scoffed.
That honest answer, given without a second's hesitation, made him feel better about himself for the first time in a long time.
Tony hated sleeping on planes. It made him feel like something the cat had dragged in, all rumpled and smelly. Hermione seemed suspiciously well put together in comparison, so he excused himself to the bathroom before they were due to land in Sokovia of all places.
“This place looks even more suspicious than the Shrieking Shack,” Hermione muttered as they looked up at the fortified castle.
“Just screams evil at play, doesn't it?” Tony chuckled. “How do you want to do this? Do you want to blast our way in? Or do you have some witchy tricks up your sleeve?”
Whatever she had been planning suddenly went out the window at his words.
“Tony! You're a genius!”
“Well, sure. I already knew that,” he grinned back, watching as she waved her wand around, chanting a spell.
Suddenly, the sceptre came flying out a window, headed straight for them, pointy end first. By the horrified look on her face, Hermione hadn't planned for that, so he pushed her out of the way, just in time to twist around the blade and catch the hilt. Her horror turned to shock.
“You could have gotten hurt,” she scolded him.
Admittedly, it was more the sort of stunt the Captain pulled off, and he may have hurt his wrist some because he had underestimated the speed and weight of the sceptre, but he wasn't about to tell her that now, not when she looked so impressed.
“I wouldn't mind if you took it off my hands before it tries haunting me,” he deflected.
But as soon as she reached for the sceptre, a wall of darkness appeared between them. Up close, he could see it wasn't so much mist as it was living darkness, now squirming around his wrist like viscous tar.
“Hermione?” he called out, his voice a few octaves too high as the disgusting thing inched up his arm.
He could take his eyes off it. There were things in it, faces, some familiar, all dead, whispering murderer, murderer, murderer…
“Tony!” Hermione voice cut in before it was drowned out by all the others, whispering in his ear now as the black tar began strangling him.
Seconds later, pure white light burst through the darkness, a chubby little creature made of the same blinding light started biting and scratching at the dark soul until it retreated into the stone. Tony dropped the sceptre immediately, basking in the creature’s comforting gestures as it patted his cheeks and nuzzled his neck. Funny because it wasn't actually touching him. It was like being petted by a warm ghost, which wasn't something he ever thought he'd experience, not believing in ghosts and all.
The sudden burst of fire next to him could barely distract him from it, but the ear-piercing wail sure did. It must have frightened the ghost creature too, because it popped out of existence, like it had never existed in the first place. And now he was starting to question his sanity.
“Tony?”
Hermione was snapping her fingers in front of his face.
“Yeah… yeah, I'm alright,” he said, his own voice sounding far away.
Shock? Maybe shock. He'd just been near possessed by an evil piece of soul from another world, saved by a witch, then comforted by a ghost. This was so not his area of expertise.
“Good, because there's angry-looking people coming our way.”
“Keep the sceptre. We gotta run,” he told her, still trying to catch his breath.
“I can do better than that,” she said, grasping his arm.
Next thing he knew, they were back in his private jet. Teleportation?
“Wow. Now this I could get used to,” he said.
Hermione smiled sadly.
“I'm afraid I have to return to my world to report the Horcrux’s destruction, and once I do, the door will vanish.”
“Oh,” he said, although he should have guessed as much.
She had only been granted passage to their dimension to hunt down a stray artefact. Of course she was never going to stay. A shame when she could have been one hell of an Avenger, and they could have become good friends too.
“I'm not gone yet,” she said, squeezing his hand, so maybe she felt their connection too. “And we've got a few hours for you to tell me everything about your world.”
“Not fair. You're seeing it. Tell me everything about yours first.”
After bickering some, they agreed to take turns asking questions, each trying to gain as much information with the fewest questions. Time flew, and before he knew it, they were back in his tower, facing the door to nowhere. It didn't look so bad now that he thought about it.
“I wish I could visit your world. It sounds insane,” he told her
“I wish I could visit again. I'll miss you,” she replied before pulling him into a hug.
“Me too,” his whispered into her crazy hair, half hoping she didn't hear him, because he was still as bad with his feelings as ever.
Then she crossed dimensions, and with one last look at him, tears streaming down her face, she closed the door. It vanished, like it had never been there. He might have questioned his sanity once more, whether he had not hallucinated the whole thing, if it weren't for the sceptre on his kitchen counter. Now this, he would gladly get rid off. Maybe at the bottom of the ocean? He nodded to himself, then suited up despite Jarvis's protests that he should sleep for at least twelve hours. Tony knew he meant well, but he needed to do stuff to erase the grief he was feeling right now.