Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alas, New York

The stars were bright above New York City. It was a testament to humanity’s adaptability to even the strangest of circumstances that Tony barely noticed them anymore. They shone over the jagged edges of the broken skyline, the starlight catching on the rubble and the flitting exoskeletons of the invading species. The Chitauri didn’t mind the dark, apparently, or the hive mind back on their home planet didn’t let them mind it. Five years of occupation, and the humans still knew next to nothing what went on in that web of little bug brains. Either way, once they’d cut all human power to the city, they’d set up no alien replacement and thus—stars. And thanks to the destruction of nearly every skyscraper, Tony had an excellent view of the constellations.

Look at me, Steve. I’m marveling at the beauty of the natural world, he thought wryly as he flew low to the ground, almost skimming the debris still littering the streets after all these years.  You’d be proud if you were here to see it.

“Twenty-five percent power,” JARVIS reminded him as Tony banked onto the remains of Broadway. “I’d recommend turning back and starting the experiment again at a later date.”

“Like hell,” Tony said. “I’m almost there.”

JARVIS synthesized an approximation of tutting but otherwise stayed silent. Once the suit reached below thirty percent power, all nonessential features of the suit shut down. JARVIS finding new ways to call Tony an idiot, Tony had decided long ago, was a nonessential feature.

He landed with an undignified clunk on a street corner and winced at the sound. He’d put off upgrading the suit’s stealth for too long in favor of working on the new probe currently beeping in the suit’s left arm.  It didn’t seem like anything was around to hear him, but you never knew if a Chitauri street patrol was around until they shoved their spear through you. Tony thought he was alone, and he decided to get out of there before he could be proven otherwise. He did hate being wrong.

Tony pressed his back against the wall of a more-or-less intact building as he booted up the probe. “Tell me what I’m about to look at, JARVIS.”

“No lifeforms outside the shield detected within fifty meters. Inside the shield, sir, is beyond my capabilities.”

“Any patrols in the nearby blocks?”

“Sir, this close to the shield, the scanners see far less than human eyes.”

Tony sighed. “I know that, JARVIS. So the new filter’s not doing anything?”

“Unfortunately not, sir.”

Tony crouched below the average Chitauri eyelevel and peered around the corner. The coast seemed clear, and the last patrol he’d seen was ten blocks north and heading more so, chasing the timed charges Tony had placed throughout the city. The smallest of the Chitauri auxiliary nests was defenseless. Or, more accurately, unguarded, Tony thought as he studied the crackling silver and blue air that surrounded like a dome the twenty-story tall hive, built from the city’s scraps and the strange green bonding material that the Chitauri excreted. The sight of the hive made Tony’s skin crawl, but as long as that shield protected it, there wasn’t a hell of a lot Tony could do. Only Chitauri could get in and out of that shield. They flew through it like it wasn’t there. If Tony tried, well, the best case scenario was it would burn the suit clean away. Worst case, it fried the rest of him with it.

With one more furtive look around, Tony kept low as he ran to the outer edges of the shield. The rusted frame of an old truck provided some shelter from bug eyes. This close to the shield’s energy, Tony flicked off most of JARVIS’s displays. Something about Chitauri energy always made him go haywire. The only thing JARVIS could successfully measure a foot away from the shield was the power of the shield itself, and that was all Tony needed at the moment. “Shield power at one hundred percent. The drill is ready, sir,” JARVIS said.

Tony flicked his left wrist. A thin spike jutted out of the suit’s arm, deceptively simple and smooth. “Oh, you beauty,” Tony whispered as he extended the adamantium-coated tip into the shield wall. The shield sparked where the probe touched it, but just once. The tip held, protecting the delicate machinery inside from the shield’s defenses. The probe was the closest Tony could get to modified Chitauri tech that would actually serve a purpose without his old resources. Almost everything the Chitauri used relied on a low-level telepathic field, but the sensors that he’d been able to salvage from their speeders could be used even by a mute mind like his.

“You getting this, JARVIS?” Tony asked as data streamed into the suit’s memory banks.

“Always, sir. The readings are consistent with past probes.”

Tony smiled grimly. “Let’s change that, JARVIS. Boot up the insecticide, two percent power.”

The probe whirred gently as it fed killer energy into the shield. To borrow the incredibly simplified simile Tony had used to explain this to Pepper so she’d give him the last of the adamantium, it was like giving B positive blood to someone who was A negative. It was still blood, but the body couldn’t run on it. This energy was similar enough to the shield’s to be accepted into the structure but foreign enough that it would dissolve the bonds holding that structure together.

That was the theory at least.

“Shield power at one hundred and ten percent, sir.”

The probe’s data measurements streamed through Tony’s view filter. “What the hell? How is that possible?”

“The shield seems to have instantly adapted to the new energy source,” JARVIS said.

“Can we fry the system?” Tony asked.”Jack it the insecticide to one hundred and overload the shield?”

“The new energy does not appear to be overtaxing the system. On the contrary, sir, the shield seems to be running more efficiently.”

Tony closed his eyes and counted to ten in his head. He’d have preferred to punch something, but since his options right now were pretty much just the shield, he put ‘commit violence’ on his to-do list and asked, “Did we just fix the enemy’s defense system?”

JARVIS paused for a beat. “Technically, it wasn’t broken in the first place.”

Anger and disappointment dueled for supremacy in Tony’s heart. In the end, weariness outlasted them all. “Retract the probe,” he said dully. “We’ve got enough data to see where we went wrong back at the garage.”

“I am sorry, sir,” JARVIS said as the probe slid back into the suit. Tony crept away, keeping an eye out for any Chitauri coming back early to their nest. Then, with a sigh, he took off.

“If Pepper asks,” Tony said, “that went a lot better than it did.”

“Understood, sir.”

Tony should have headed straight back to the nearest entrance to the base, but the thought of slinking back home without accomplishing anything kept him flying. He had really thought that the insecticide program was going to do something, anything—anything besides make the situation worse. He’d try again. He’d make it work. The idea was perfect, it was just the execution that was off. He’d try again. And until he could get the satisfaction of it working, he could tide himself over with the spare charge hidden in the suit’s thigh holster, just waiting to be placed. No sense letting that go to waste.  

He landed on 23rd Street, little more than a crater in the ground. There was the twisted frame of a trashcan lying on its side that would serve his purpose well. Tony slipped the charge inside the can, covering it almost entirely with the chunks of sidewalk lying around. Only the sensor poked out, a specific shade of red light that stared back at him. Obvious to the human eye; invisible to the Chitauri. Any bug scuttling by would be blown to bits. Any human, well, if they could notice it, they could run. If they couldn’t—and anyone out here wouldn’t—the bomb was doing them a favor.

“Lifeform detected,” JARVIS said suddenly. In an instant, Tony whirled around, hands outstretched, palms beginning to glow. An infected, so dirty and starved that even though it was naked Tony could not guess its sex, stared dully at him. It was crouched on all fours, its knuckles like front legs. Matted black hair hung down past its shoulders, partially covering its naked, dirt streaked chest. Tony could count its ribs. Clenched in its mouth was a skinny pigeon, dying. It beat its wings weakly as its blood dripped down the infected’s chest.

The infected stared at Tony without fear. Fear would imply some level of understanding. Tony put down his hands, powered down the repulsors. Eighteen percent power, the bar at the edge of his vision informed him. The infected raised itself on its hind legs, its actual legs, her actual legs, and cocked her head. Its head. It helped to think of them as it. It studied Tony with blank eyes. He was not Chitauri so it would not go to him. He was not animal so it could not eat him. With no other reason to take an interest in him, it turned, falling back on its knuckles and loping away.

It had been a long time since he’d seen a middle-stage infected. He’d thought that they’d all surely died by now. Apparently not. The infection took its time in some people and raced through others.

“Sir, we must get back to base,” JARVIS said. “This is a needless waste of power.”

Tony raised his hands. His repulsors whirred on.

“This is not proper procedure.”

Tony aimed. The infected took no notice as it crawled away.

“Tony, no,” JARVIS said. It was half a command, half a plea. JARVIS didn’t ask for much these days. Tony lowered his hands.

Sixteen percent power, the bar now read as the infected turned the corner and disappeared.

“It’d be a mercy,” Tony said. He stood alone in the empty street.

“She would not think so,” JARVIS said. “Save it for those that can appreciate it.”

“She can’t think. Aren’t you not supposed to be talking right now?” Tony said as he readied for flight.

“You programmed me to eliminate all superfluous comments. Therefore, everything I say must be essential.”

“By whose judgment?”

“The most trusted judgment in the world. My own.”

Tony snorted and was about to take off (that’d be another two percent at least,he would need to take it slow and stay the hell out of any fire) when a familiar flash of blue sparked in the corner of his eyes. In a flash, Tony switched over to battle mode, hands up, missiles prepped, shields engaged, as he whirled around to face the source. And he paused. The source of the light was not a Chitauri spear or one of their riders or the eyes of one of their nastier creatures they’d brought with them through the portal. In fact, the source looked more like the portal itself, a line of blue lightning suspended in the air about as tall as Tony. It undulated getting wider and thinner, taller and shorter, like it was trying to shape itself and could figure out how.  Another portal? A smaller one? Could the Chitauri come through now without the Tesseract? It didn’t look nearly as neat as the Tesseract energy. That blue light sliced through the world like a laser; this one looked like the person on the other end was hacking their way through with a blunt knife.

He saw the curve of a head, maybe, something that could be a head, in the blue light. It thrashed and flailed like it was deep in pain. Words like shouts from so far away he heard them as whispers came out of the light. He couldn’t hear them. He cranked the volume of the suit’s receivers, and he still couldn’t make out the words. What he could hear, he didn’t understand. “JARVIS, why don’t more aliens forcing their way into our planet speak English?”

“Do you really think this is the time for wisecracks, sir?”

“Always.”

The head on the other side seemed to notice him. It looked human, humanoid at least. That wasn’t enough to make Tony trust it. The Earth’s track record with humanoid aliens was not stellar, clearly. The head said something, shouted it. Tony couldn’t hear. The light was fading, shrinking, and the thing on the other side clearly knew that. It shouted again. It almost sounded understandable.

And then, with a flash, it was gone. The air was still as if it had never been disturbed.

Tony took off.

Tony fell down.

JARVIS did not helpfully chime in to tell him that he had just reached zero percent energy. JARVIS did not need to, even if JARVIS could have. The fact that he was lying face down in a pile of rubble and seemed to have no ability to right himself was a pretty good indication of that fact. There’s got to be something in reserve, Tony thought, even as he knew there was not, of course there was not, maybe five years ago when this suit wasn’t five years old there would be, but this was now. There was not. This suit was a purely stealth outfit these days. Combat mode drained its systems.  

It wasn’t impossible to move in the suit without power. It was extremely difficult in a way that would have winded Tony when he was a healthy young man (although, let’s be honest a moment, Tony was never a healthy young man since he was pretty sure good health was not all that compatible with nightly binge drinking). So moving was possible. And if it was possible, that meant Tony could do it.

He always got blindly optimistic when he was about to die. In his defense, he hadn’t died so far. And the important thing was that he not panic. Panicking would use up air.  

“Come on, you little shit,” he muttered at his right arm, trapped and bent underneath him. If he could straighten it just a little, he could flip onto his back. It wouldn’t improve his situation much, but at least he could see things then. Maybe even look up at those goddamn stars as he asphyxiated to death.

“Straighten, straighten, motherfucker, straighten.” The suit didn’t want to move without electricity helping it along. Tough.  One inch, two inches, three, and Tony was rocking precariously before he toppled over backwards and landed with a thump on his back. “Woo! That was definitely something worth accomplishing,” he said, only partially sarcastic when the hideous bug face of a Chitauri grunt appeared in front of his faceplate.

Tony went silent and still. Both were fairly easy, considering his circumstances. Go away. Go away, he willed. Chitauri in groups were formidable. On their own, if they didn’t call for backup, they could be stupid as a sack of shit.

The head disappeared, and Tony heard a clunk clunk clunk. It was poking him with the end of his spear. Goddamn it. This was not how he envisioned dying. He always thought someone attractive would be the one the kill him. He deserved that at least. The bug face appeared in his line of site again. It appeared to be sniffing him. He’d never been so close to one of their faces while they were alive. Now that he had, it didn’t seem like an essential experience.

CLANK.

The tip of the spear bounced off Tony’s face plate. The second time the Chitauri hit, the tip stuck in one of the seams. It’d take the bug fucker a hell of a long time to pry open his mask, but Tony wasn’t going anywhere, and it had probably already called for backup. Once one Chitauri knew something, a thousand did, and they swarmed. Tony heard his mask creaking. Maybe it wouldn’t take that long.

At least I won’t have time to lose my mind. I’ll be dead before I’m infected.

The Chitauri seemed to know where Tony’s eyes were. It seemed to look into them. It seemed to smirk.

Then it definitely got knocked the fuck away by a blur of red, white, and blue.

Tony gaped up at the night sky. The moment dragged. To his left, he heard fighting. The suit’s neck was locked in place. Tony stared up and up and waited, the pounding of his heart echoing through the suit. Then it was all he heard. The world outside was silent.

Steve Rogers’ head popped into Tony’s field of vision—dirty, a little battered, a little older, but Steve, still Steve, good old Steve, the kind of face that belonged on a man you could call a good old anything without a shred of irony. He grinned down at Tony, and that was the same too. “You’ve got a knack for getting yourself in trouble.”

“You’ve got a knack for getting me out of it,” Tony said. Steve couldn’t hear. Tony knew that. He wouldn’t have said that if Steve could. He’d get smug, and self-satisfied Captain America was the worst kind.

To his right, Natasha appeared, beautiful, deadly Natasha. She seemed about as amused as Steve. About as dirty and battered too, but who was Tony to judge? Last week, he’d colored the grey hairs in his beard with one of the lab’s permanent markers and got a lecture from Dr. Wong in return on proper use of limited materials. Natasha rapped her knuckles on the faceplate. “Do you think he’s dead?”

Steve’s grinned drooped for a moment before he shook his head. “No, I can hear air going through the filters. He’s breathing. He might not be conscious, but he’s breathing.”

Tony stopped breathing for a moment. Then, after ten seconds, long enough they would know it was intentional, he started again.

“He’s conscious,” Steve and Nat said at the same time.

“Good,” Natasha added. “I’d hate to think that’d he’d slept through his stupidity.”

“Hey!” Tony protested. “Steve! Defend me!” Steve smiled. “Traitor.”

Then Steve and Nat disappeared and the next thing he knew, he was being lifted and dragged. They dropped him about twenty feet later, slightly higher than he’d been before. “You can pull your boyfriend,” he heard Nat say. “Get him underground. I’ll make sure this one didn’t have any friends.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Tony said as the suit started moving. He must have been on a cart of some kind, maybe even the SHIELD-issued sled that Steve and Nat had set out with six months ago for their two month trip. Pepper would be glad that they brought it back in one piece. He’d gotten the distinct impression on more than one occasion that a major reason that she was upset that they’d been gone so long is that she’d given them so many nice things that she would never get back. And, of course, feelings. Like the fear that they’d sent out their two greatest humans, metahumans, two of humanity’s greatest hopes on a suicide mission to a distant city to face an unknown threat, and if they were dead now, then what did that say for the rest of the schlubs that had survived so far? But Pepper and Tony didn’t talk about things like that, not anymore. They’d gone off the table when they’d broke up four years ago, and they had never come back on. It turns out you could say “We’ll still be friends” as much as you want, but you couldn’t turn bacon back into a pig.

Steve was alive. Natasha was alive. They were alive. Tony sounded like a dumbass right now, he knew that. It wasn’t his fault; he was still numb with relief. He hadn’t known he’d been mourning them until they had come back. The cart rattled as Steve dragged him down the deserted streets.  Tony stared up at the sky. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad night after all.

“Uh,” Steve said after a minute, right on cue to squash that ill-advised burst of hope. “Tony, can you move?”

Tony assumed his complete stillness was answer enough.

“Right. It’s just…” Steve coughed, and Tony could practically hear him blushing. “I lost the key.”

Oh. Brilliant.

“So I don’t know where the entrance is,” Steve said.

“Yes, I got that. That’s the point of having the magic key,” Tony said. Steve couldn’t hear. “Open my back panel.”

“You have to have a key on you,” Steve said, crouching beside him.

“Open my back panel.”

“Where would you keep it?” Steve muttered as he ran his hands over the armor’s chest.

“Open the back panel, Jesus, Steve.” Tony tried rocking. Nothing happened. Steve rapped his knuckles on Tony’s breastplate like that would do something. “Thank god you’re pretty.”

“Maybe the back panel?” Steve asked, and Tony was about to burst into sarcastic cheers when he looked over Steve’s head and saw the telltale blue lights streaming towards them. Chitauri riders, coming en masse. That was what they did. They weren’t much one-on-one, but if they could swarm, they’d eat you whole.

“Steve!” Tony shouted, and Steve couldn’t hear him, but he could hear the riders, and in a second he was on his feet, shield in hand. He wavered for a moment, and Tony knew what he was calculating. Fight or flight? Even if Natasha came back, and she had to be sprinting towards them right now, there were at least three dozen riders heading their way, and Tony could be no help. On the other hand, without a key in hand, the spells warding the Underground would keep warding. There was nowhere to run to.

Then the Chitauri were here, and the time for wavering was over. Steve tensed, in battle mode instantly, ready to throw his shield. And then he didn’t. “Huh,” he said instead as the Chitauri forces, about forty of their top-tier fighters sniffed the air and screeched at each other. They made no move towards the humans; they didn’t seem to notice them at all.

“I should warn you now,” a soft voice by the armor’s audio ports murmured, “I intend to be smug about saving you.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything less,” Tony said as Loki’s face appeared in his line of vision. Loki smirked like he’d heard, but his face was flushed, and he braced himself with one hand on the armor’s chest. Loki always complained about how much impromptu illusion spells winded him.

“Loki! What are you doing topside?” Steve asked, fastening his shield back onto his back.

“You’re welcome,” Loki replied. “It’s nice to see you after so long too. Please, save your effusive thanks. This spell won’t last, and I don’t fancy being caught standing around chatting when it ends.”

Steve stepped out of Tony’s sight and grabbed the cart. “Lead the way.”

“Lost the key then? I thought as much,” Loki said as the air started to shimmer around them. “You looked around too much for people who should have known you were already here.”

The view shifted slightly, and suddenly there was a subway station where there had not been one before. Tony had memorized the streets of New York long ago, but since he hadn’t activated his key, he’d entirely forgotten that the entrance had ever been there. While the Chitauri buzzed around, oblivious to where their quarry had gone, Loki lead Steve and Tony down into the cool dark, down into the twisting secret tunnels that lead to SHIELD’s New York City Subterranean Operations Base—down into the Underground.

Chapter Text

The Underground was the child of the Cold War or, more specifically, Howard Stark’s unique brand of Cold War paranoia. Under the auspices of SHIELD and the massive amounts of secret, untaxable money it paid him for building everything they used, Tony’s dear old dad had overseen the construction of six massive underground bunkers across the continental U.S. “Should we build some in Mexico and Canada?” one engineering advisor had asked, according to the meeting minutes that Tony had found when SHIELD had finally opened up their archive to him.

“Fuck Mexico and fuck Canada,” Howard had replied. “If they wanted to survive the upcoming nuclear winter, then they wouldn’t be Mexico and Canada.”

“Yup,” Tony had said after he read that as he tossed the file back into its box. “That’s definitely Dad.”

The six compounds that Howard had built for his chosen people were intended to survive the initial nuclear war and then some. Short of the Russians actually managing to split the earth in two, the bases would endure. The people cowering inside wouldn’t even feel the bombs drop. After everyone and everything on the surface was dead, the survivors could survive for at least fifteen frugally lived years on the massive reserves of Stark Industries patented powdered food which boasted all the efficient qualities of real food, like calories and nutrient, with none of the inefficient qualities, like taste. After fifteen years, the three thousand survivors that the base could reasonably support would be fucked, but presumably in that time, they would have used the advanced research labs in E-Block to manufacture a new food source, perhaps something that didn’t taste like the ashes of better food. If one base hadn’t managed the task on their own, they could always contact another base. All six were linked on their own communication grid with communication lines laid so deep in the earth that the bombs wouldn’t touch them. The quality of that communication was about a step above telegrams, but telegrams could still get the message across. The benefit was clear—the ability to draw on the twenty-thousand or so surviving brains while only having to feed three thousand of them.

That had been the theory, at least, those days when the question of thermonuclear destruction had been not if but when. The Cold Was ended more quietly than Tony’s father and the men of his ilk had expected—or rather, had hoped because Tony was damn sure that Howard wouldn’t have turned his nose up at the idea of building a new society full only of his hand-picked people all dependent upon him. But when Howard had died his mundane death, the world was still spinning on its axis, and soon the Cold War was over, capitalism winning in a blaze of stars and stripes. The global threat shifted from Russian nukes to roadside IEDs, and the giant and prohibitively expensive underground bunkers fell out of vogue. SHIELD maintained them, of course; SHIELD was like the Boy Scout from hell, always prepared, always plotting. They used them as prisons, as training grounds, as storage places, but they weren’t major assets. They had a flying fortress, after all. That beat a retrograde cave.

Then Nick Fury managed to activate that fucking Tesseract, and no one was ready for what was on the other side. Thor killed nearly five hundred people in his first ten minutes on Earth. Fury was one of them. Tony hadn’t believed it when he’d heard. No one in SHIELD could. Fury was one of those men who were supposed to live forever. But it turned out he wasn’t, and by the time Thor escaped with the Tesseract in hand, SHIELD was in chaos and leaderless.

Tony spent that night reading up on the Tesseract. Natasha spent it digging for Clint in the rubble. Steve spent it suited up, waiting for someone to fight. By the time morning came, they’d lost the war. Tony had spent the night trying to find Thor and the Tesseract, and he never thought to look up.

From the moment that the portal opened, the Earth was lost. Chitauri poured into New York by the thousands, as thick in the air as smoke from a wildfire. And they brought their beasts with them, their ugly fucking space whales at first and then the raptor-like creatures and the ten-winged birds and the elephant-shark combination. And leading all of them, laughing and roaring, Thor lit up the sky with lightning and fried the city from above.

Tony had done what he could. He was the first responder to the scene, the start of the battle being only two stories above his suit. Thor nearly electrocuted him six times as Tony tried frantically to destroy the Tesseract. It’d been another six months before Tony and company would learn that only Tesseract energy could penetrate Tesseract energy. By then, it had been too late, and that day, the only day it would have mattered, Tony wasted missile after missile on the impossible task of breaking through the barrier.

The Helicarrier arrived just in time to be attacked by swarm of the space whale motherfuckers that poured out of the hole in the sky. It’s defenses lasted an hour—six Leviathans had to jam themselves into the turbines of the ship to bring her down. Once, Agent Mathur told Tony that Hill had wanted to go down with the ship until Coulson had forcibly pulled her to the escape pods. “We don’t need another corpse!” he’d shouted. “We need a leader.”

Coulson’s last sentence before he got a spear through his chest.

And then, without warning, the light splitting the sky was gone. As what was left of SHIELD hunkered down on the streets of the demolished city, making the Chitauri pay for every city block they claimed, the survivors started to take heart. There were no new Chitauri reinforcements coming in. The sky was still black with them, but this was all there was. If SHIELD could wipe them out, they could end the war.

Then the reports came in. Thor opened a portal in Shanghai. Out of twenty-three million people, SHIELD’s agents in China estimated that twenty million were dead by the time the portal closed. A few hours later, Thor arrived in Sydney. Then Lagos. Istanbul. Sao Paulo. Tehran. Jakarta. Mexico City. Tokyo. Kinshasa. Los Angeles. Buenos Aires. Moscow. Delhi. Lima. London.

 “I should have let them nuke the city when I had the chance,” Hill told Tony once, four months after the invasion, when the Underground was still quiet most of the time, and everyone still teetered on the edge of numb despair.  “I could have stopped it here.”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Tony had replied. “Wouldn’t have killed Thor. Wouldn’t have killed all the Chitauri. The Tesseract’s energy would have kept the portal open. All a bomb would have done is give our people a quicker death.”

Hill had said nothing. She’d just looked at him, and he looked back, and they both thought the same thing—that would have been good enough.

But that was a long time ago, nearly five years ago, and Tony didn’t feel that way anymore. He was too much of a natural optimist, as he put it, too assured of his own cleverness, as Pepper would. The infected, they were better off dead than alive, sure, but they weren’t people anymore, and Tony wanted as many people alive as he could manage. When they took back the Earth from the Chitauri bastards, they were going to need a decent gene pool. There had been a rash of suicides when they first moved into the Underground. Tony understood why they did it, but he scorned them for it. He’d rather be alive than dead. He’d rather build a robot suit to fight his way out of a cave to try to avoid building a weapon for a terrorist than commit suicide and guarantee that he would not. As long as he was alive, as long as someone was alive, humanity was doing alright. They were a race of survivors. They’d wiped out bigger and better species than the Chitauri before. That’s what humans did. If they had no other choice, they’d do it again.

Natasha and Loki cheerfully waved goodbye once they were within the Underground’s inner core, leaving Steve to drag Tony though D-Block alone. “All of our friends are assholes,” Tony said. Steve, who had not figured out that he could release Tony’s faceplate, didn’t hear. What should have been a five minute walk took three times that as every person who passed Steve smiled and yelled and shook his hand while Tony lay like the world’s most intimidating Real Doll behind him.

“Cap? Cap, is that you?” the fifteenth passerby asked, like there’d be someone else wandering through Maintenance Sector in a mud-coated red, white, and blue jumpsuit.

“Be beloved on your own time,” Tony shouted as Steve shook their hand.

“Is that Mr. Stark?” a couple people asked, pointing at him.

“Just his armor,” Steve replied. “It got pretty battered out there today. I told him I’d take care of getting it to the garage for him.”

Tony could admit he was a bit pleased by that lie.

Down in the garage, Max laughed her ass off when Steve delivered Tony. Then she hugged Steve until he squeaked. Then she went back to laughing. “I’ll get him out,” she said, still chuckling. “You go ahead. Director Hill and Ms. Potts already sent word that they wanna see the both of you. I’ll send Tony along when he can get along.”

Once Max plugged the suit back into the garage’s direct access port to the Underground’s massive arc reactor, it was only another five minutes before the suit had enough juice in it to let him out. “Good,” Max said without looking up from whatever she was welding on the workbench when he staggered up beside her. “I was wondering if I’d have to do some delicate work with the crowbar again.”

“You’re not half as delicate with it as you think you are.”

She grinned down at the flat square of metal she was working on. Up close, he recognized the intricate rune work burned into the metal. Loki’s protection and concealment wards, batch one hundred something. When Max was done with the inscription, she’d swap it out for one of the older wards near the entrances of the Underground and swipe a handful of someone’s blood across the metal to activate it. By the strange quirks of magic, each ward lasted about a month before they burned up, and each of the four gates had at least five wards. They’d gone through hundreds by this point. Tony knew that Loki and his gaggle of amateur magicians were pulling their hair out trying to come up with something longer lasting, but no luck so far. Tony wasn’t as fluent in rune magic as Max or any of the other magelets, but he could tell at a glance that this was a new design.

“You heard what I said to Cap?” Max asked.

“Meeting with the mistresses.” Tony pulled off his sweat-soaked underarmor and shoved it in the garage’s laundry bin. He’d see if Pepper couldn’t schedule their cleaning early than next week. He pulled out a panel in the wall and grabbed a clean black tee and a pair of pants in a fabric that the girls in Textiles insisted was basically denim. That was one plus side to the apocalypse: no such thing as business attire. “I’m heading down now.”

“Should I lecture you on keeping an eye on your power level now or when you get back?” Max asked.

Tony grimaced as he walked to the door. “I don’t need a lecture.”

“After, then. If you see him at the head honcho meeting, tell the Wizard I’ve got the next batch ready to test.”

“You know he hates nicknames,” Tony said, leaning in the doorway.

“Of course I know.”

“That’s my girl.”

He heard her mutter, “You’re welcome, by the way,” as the doors slid shut.

The hallways of the Underground were disconcerting if you weren’t used to them. Tony was very much used to them, but they still caught him off guard sometimes. SHIELD had maintained its various secret underground bases  well over the years, thankfully, but the original tunnels that had been cut out during the very early days of the Cold War did not seem to be designed with any thought more analytical than, “Fuck, the Russians are going to bomb us any day now, better get it down before then.” As a result, the hallways weren’t quite human-sized, too wide and too low. Tony’s head didn’t bump against the ceiling, but he never felt comfortable standing upright anyway.

(Steve and Loki, on the other hand, being freakish giants, knocked their foreheads about once a week, something that never ceased to be the funniest thing in the world.)

As Tony swiped his key card to open the door to Control, he heard laughter pealing out. “Laughing at me?” he said as he entered.

Seated in one of the only decent chairs in the Underground, Hill raised her eyebrow at him. “As much as I don’t to encourage the idea you’ve gotten that the only thing we talk about when you’re not here is you, yes. Agent Romanov painted us a beautiful picture of your prone, metal-encased body.”

Natasha nodded at him from the corner. She and Steve stood side by side with the perfect posture only supersoldiers seemed to be able to pull off. Tony walked over to Pepper and pulled out a panel in the wall that became a stool. “Good of you to join us,” Pepper said quietly.

“I had a pretty good reason to be late.”

“Getting yourself killed in the most idiotic way possible isn’t a good reason.”

“I wouldn’t have died.”

“What would’ve happened if Cap and the Black Widow hadn’t run across you when they did?”

I’d have died. Tony didn’t say that. After all, it might not have been true. “You know how good I am at getting myself out of trouble.”

 As always, Pepper heard the words he didn’t say. “How could you be so stupid? Your batteries haven’t run out there since the first months.”

“Okay, first off, let’s not dismiss the world’s most technologically advanced energy source jerry-rigged from the Cold War rejects SHIELD chucked into their underground garbage dump as just a ‘battery,’ and secondly, I had a very good reason to be distracted.” Tony raised his voice and turned to the rest of the office. “Everyone hear that? I had a very good reason.”

“Is it because the probe worked?” Pepper asked.

“Not that reason. We’re still in beta, Pep, it’s a process.”

“Is this kind of reason we’re going to want to hear or the kind we’re not?” Hill asked.

“Not sure yet,” Tony said. “But it is weird as shit and pretty quick to explain.”

Hill pinched her nose. “Fantastic. Go.”

“Saw something while on mission today that looked like a miniature version of the portal that opened. Very, very miniature. It didn’t look like a Chitauri was on the other side, though, and it was gone within ten seconds.”

“Was someone trying to come through?” Pepper asked.

“Come through from where?” Natasha added.

“That’s all I’ve got,” Tony said. “Whatever it was, it was unsuccessful.”

Hill sighed. “That is not what we need right now. Normally that would take some precedence, but at the moment, it’s just a hypothetical emergency, and Captain Rogers and Agent Romanov claim to have a definite one. Stark, consider this your assignment to figure out what’s going on.”

“Love the specific parameters,” Tony said.

Hill ignored that. “Agents, now that everyone is here—” she said with a pointed glance at Tony.

“Whoa, okay, don’t pretend you were just waiting for me,” Tony interrupted. “Loki’s not here either.”

“I’m here,” Loki said, coming in through the door and running his hands through his long black hair. It was nearly time to bribe him into another haircut.

“And why are you late?” Pepper asked him.

“Reasons,” Loki said.

“Reasons,” Pepper repeated dryly.

“So many reasons, Ms. Potts. All of them exemplary.”

“Max’s finished with the new wards, Wiz,” Tony cut in. “All they need now is your approval.”

Loki snorted as he pulled out a stool of his own. “If they’re anything like the last six we’ve tested, they’ll need far more than my approval. And do not call me that.”

“Well, no pressure on your little magelets. if your wards continue to keep shitting out on us, we’ll still have my tech up and running.”

“Wonderful. The Chitauri will find our base and massacre us, but we will still have the lights.”

“Now that we are all here,” Hill interrupted, in that tone of voice that conveyed you are all children and I didn’t want any of you. In Tony’s limited interactions with her predecessor, he’d say that the tone must come with the job of running SHIELD. Or what was left of SHIELD. Which basically amount to what was left of humanity. “If you’re all done chatting, we can hear why our two finest agents took six months for their two month mission.”

“You sent us to figure out why our closest allied base dropped out of communication,” Natasha said, arms crossed and staring Hill down. “It took longer than two months.”

“What is it then?” Tony asked.

Natasha and Steve glanced at each other. Natasha pursed her lips. Steve raised an eyebrow. Tony rolled his eyes. They were always annoyingly buddy-buddy when they came back from missions together. The only two super soldiers in the world forming their own secret club. “They’re dead,” Natasha said. “By now, they’re all dead.”

The room was silent a moment. It wasn’t surprising news. When Chicago had dropped out of contact nearly seven months ago, everyone had immediately assumed the worst. That was what you did these days. You never risked anything overestimating the tragedy. But it was one thing to assume and another to know, and in one sentence Natasha killed about six percent of the Earth’s remaining human population.

“Dead now?” Pepper asked, breaking the silence. Tony could almost hear the gears whirring in her brain, pushing grief back, pushing practicalities forward. In moments like this, he loved her like he once had and never really had stopped. “What were they before?”

“Alive,” Natasha said dryly.

“Only just,” Steve said. “The Chitauri found the entrances to their base. They massacred their way through three sections before our people managed to quarantine themselves in the core.”

The room winced as Steve laid out their worst fear. Chicago was the twelfth base to fall, either because they were discovered and gutted by the Chitauri or discovered and fried by Thor. Tony glanced at Loki. As much as it galled him to say it, Loki’s magic half the reason that the humans of New York had managed to remain hidden under the noses of a Chitauri stronghold. The other half was, of course, Tony.  

“The Chitauri destroyed the communication infrastructure for interbase communication,” Steve continued. “That’s when they went radio dead. By the time Natasha and I arrived, our people had been barricaded for a month with the extremely limited supplies available in the core section—and that trip was about twice as long as it should have been. The Chitauri have exploded across the Upper Midwest. They’re grazing farm animals.”

Hill quietly cursed at that, voicing the room’s general sentiment. Even with the Chitauri terraforming, Earth’s atmosphere had been doing a pretty good job of limiting the expansion of this new invasive species. Apparently that limitation was lessening.

“Half the population was already dead at this point. We fought our way into the core and assessed the situation,” Steve said, accomplishing the impressive feat of dismissing the impressive feat of battling through a swarm of Chitauri in one sentence. Typical Steve understatement. “They were starving. Their food supplies had been kept in Ring B, and the Chitauri held that section. Many had been injured in the fighting. They—they were in desperate straits.”

“They’d been eating the dead,” Natasha said without emotion. “They were half-mad by the time we arrived. Some barely spoke. Others would scramble away from us. Most were catatonic. Maybe a third were lucid, about fifteen hundred.”

 “Infected,” Loki said.

Natasha nodded. “Tainted air was steeping into the core from the invaded outer rings. Not enough to drive them mad instantly. But they weren’t going anywhere.”

“The ones with high resistance that were still healthy, we tried to get out,” Steve said. “Thought there might be enough suits to let at least some of them safely travel. We spent a month trying to coordinate the trip, keeping the healthy in rooms sealed off from the infected air supply and getting enough items for travel.”

Natasha’s eyes were on the ceiling as she spoke. “Pointless. There were never enough supplies to get them here.”

Pepper’s mouth tightened at the edges, and Tony knew what she was feeling—relief. She would not have welcomed more mouths to feed. She could not have welcomed them. Even when she looked at Steve and Natasha, Tony could practically hear her counting the extra calorie allotment that she’d have to remove from the general food supply to account for their high metabolisms. She glanced at Tony; Tony looked back. He nodded. She gave him a weary smile. He understood. He too was glad Steve and Natasha hadn’t brought anyone back with them. They’d worked hard to build their food production rapidly to the level that starvation was no longer the omnipresent fear it had been in those first ten months, but their lives were leans ones without margin for adjustment.

“That’s one month,” Loki said. “Another month for travel there and back. What, pray tell, did you do with the other four?”

“The situation got complicated,” Steve said, not looking at Loki. “The day before Natasha and I were about to set out with our survivors, the Chitauri presence in the outer rings of the base tripled. The streets were swarming with them. They were so thick in the air, it felt like the first months of the invasion again. We could hear them buzzing through ten feet of steel. Then our survivors—they changed.” Steve paused. Natasha watched him through half-closed eyes.

“They were infected,” she said, looking away at him to glance across the room.

“We put them in biohazard suits with their own air supply,” Steve said. “It didn’t matter. They followed the usual pattern of infection. Loss of language. Loss of emotional control. Fear of touch. Violent tendencies to themselves in some cases. We locked them back in the sealed core, but their symptoms progressed just the same as if they’d been running around naked outside. The only reason some of them didn’t tear themselves to pieces was because they couldn’t claw through their suits.”

“Then there was a leak,” Hill said. “In the suits and in the core.”

“No,” Natasha said curtly. “There was not.”

Hill crossed her arms. “Then what? The infection can spread through walls and suits?”

Natasha’s mouth twisted. “Apparently.”

“The Chitauri figured out a way to boost their terraforming. We stayed there with the scientists who stayed lucid as long as they could to figure out how,” Steve said.

“What did you find?” Hill asked.

“It took a while. They don’t measure Tesseract energy the way that we do. They can’t do anything to harness it,” Steve replied, nodding at Loki. His magic often relied on hacking into the free-floating Tesseract energy left over from Thor’s spells. “But eventually we detected that the levels in the area were triple what they are in New York.”

“The Tesseract powers the terraforming,” Loki said, straightening up. “The last time its power spiked was two years ago in Australia, before Adelaide dropped off the map. It must have been taken to Chicago and harnessed to speed along progress.” Funny how Loki could slip into passive voice when his brother was the subject.

“Why now?” The furrows in Hill’s forehead were so deep they looked plowed. “Why start accelerating after five years?”

Tony and Loki looked at each other to confirm their mutual ignorance. “Perhaps they only recently learned how,” Loki said. “Or perhaps something on the Chitauri homeworld spurred this. An intergalactic hivemind can respond to a myriad of stimuli from a myriad of origins. Perhaps they’re simply tired of waiting. The motivation has no effect on the end result.”

“What would happen if the Tesseract came to New York?” Hill asked.

“Maybe it is already,” Tony said. “Would explain my portal earlier.”

“Your portal?” Loki asked.

“This is why we come to meetings on time,” Tony said and filled him in on what he’d told the rest of them.

“And if the Tesseract came to New York?” Hill repeated.

Loki met her gaze. “If they could enhance terraforming in Chicago, I see no reason why they couldn’t do it here.” The pause after that felt oppressively heavy. “I suppose you could try to seal yourselves in.”

Pepper shook her head. “The bases and suits don’t produce their own oxygen, not enough anyway. It’s why the air supply has never been a major concern for Materials. The elder Mr. Stark thought a more reliable method would be a combination of filtered and recycled air. If the air outside gets so infected even our filters can’t handle it—”

The image of the feral woman, blood dripping down her chest as she looked at Tony with her dead eyes, flashed in his mind. “Then we breathe in poison until we rip our own lungs out.”

Everyone in the room digested this information. Pepper’s face was a cool mask. Hill scowled at no one in particular as the universe continued to piss her off. Loki looked like he was mulling over an abstract proposition, but he tugged at the straps of his vanguards, the only Asgardian part of his wardrobe these days, and Tony was fairly sure that he only kept that scrap because they were useful to him. Loki was worried, Tony guessed, though Loki would probably die before admitting it. Natasha and Steve were looking at each other, speaking their secret language again. Annoyance flared up in Tony’s chest, irrational and inexplicable, but it was better to be annoyed at the two metahumans blocking out the normal folks than it was to think about what they were suggesting. Annoyance was petty, he knew that, but hell, he was entitled to some pettiness. Between the liquor rations and the awkwardness of one night stands in a population where you can reasonably know everybody, pettiness was one of the only indulgences left to him these days.

One of. Not the only.

“Fuck it,” Tony said, thinking along that line. “It’s the last Friday of the month, Steve and Natasha are back home, Joanna Wilcox has got a new batch on moonshine that we’re not supposed to know about. A-Block’s gonna be crazy tonight. Let’s hit it up and deal with this in the morning.”

“We’re talking about the possible death of all of humanity,” Steve said.

“We’ve been talking about that for the last five years,” Tony said and added an argument that could stop any discussion in its tracks. “Let’s go. It’s Maria Hill’s Monthly Karaoke Night, and the theme is hits of the 90s.”

***

Maria Hill’s Monthly Karaoke Night hadn’t started as any of those things—neither a night nor karaoke nor scheduled nor in any way endorsed by the Director of SHIELD and the New York Underground. For the first year, it was basically just the girls and boys in Communications playing pop music—uploaded into a central database from all the various MP3 playing devices people had brought into the bunker with them—over the intercoms when people seemed too sad. The concept of a group event nebulously centered around music had just been a way of staving off suicide, the theory being that people were less likely to want to kill themselves if you blasted Katy Perry at them. It might not make them happier, they might listen to the music for the sole purpose of complaining about it, but that was a familiar form of suffering at least, and there was something almost cathartic about taking a drag off one of the synth cigarettes and saying, “The good stuff never gets mainstream, you know?”

It was something to do at least. That was the problem with the end of the world; when it wasn’t terrifying or depressing, it was soul-crushingly boring. And back then, ennui was a bigger killer than despair. Losing everyone you loved and the Earth along with them? Yeah, that’d make you want to die. But staring alone at the wall of your quarters trying to think of one new person to talk to who might have one new thing to say? That made you wonder why you wanted to be alive at all.

Octavia Masters in Adaptive Tech coped by spending three months staving off her own immense suicidal boredom by isolating and removing the vocals from each track. When asked later why she’d done it, she just shrugged. “Seemed like something to do,” she had replied. Between that and her neighbor Joanna discovering that she could use the rejected materials from Agro Dev to make moonshine in her A-Block corridor’s bathtub, it didn’t take long for them to hold the Underground’s first party, a relatively intimate affair that sprawled across five quarters and hosted maybe twenty-five people when the evening started out. Two hours later, it was three hundred strong and had already racked up nine disciplinary charges. When almost everyone who’d been at the party was almost too hungover to function the next morning, Hill had flipped out. She issued what quickly became called the Footloose law—no drinking, no dancing, no singing in groups above five without the express permission of one of the high-ranking officers.

“And no,” the regulation concluded, “Tony Stark does not count.”

“Neither does Loki,” the revised version read.

“If they say, ‘Trust me, this is okay,’” the revised, revised version read, “IT DOES NOT COUNT.” Not had been underlined four times. The day that particular update was issued, Hill sent out a private memo to Tony, Loki, Joanna, and Sitwell that read simply, “You motherfuckers.”

It was not a popular regulation, to say the least. In fact, it had been so instantly and universally hated that Pepper compared it to Prohibition—a law that practically demanded that people violate it. “You can’t enforce that, and you’ll lose authority when they see it,” Pepper told her at what Tony still considered to be the most ridiculous general staff meeting they’d called.

“Are we just supposed to let people get drunk and shirk their work?” Hill’d asked. She’d been a younger director then. That was the polite way of saying “a worse one.”

“Yes,” Tony and Pepper had said at the same time.

“People need to be able to relax, they need to know there’s still hope,” Pepper had argued.

“They’re just going to do it anyway,” Tony had added, “so, you know, fuck it.”

After two months of clandestine karaoke parties as act of rebellion, Maria announced that the last Friday of every month in the dining hall of A-Block, the government of the Underground would sponsor an official party to “celebrate the hard work of the people who keep the compound running.”

“Can we still have booze?” everyone who spoke to Tony asked him.

“Sure,” he had said. “Why not?”

And thus Karaoke Night was born. In almost four years, Hill had never actually attended one, which is why of course the Underground had named it in her honor. The only people left on Earth these days were all pretty much dicks.

“Here you go, Princess,” Tony said, sliding a mug of moonshine to Loki who grabbed it without looking. He was in his normal spot on nights like this, the table closest to the back wall where he could survey everything without being dragged in. It’d seemed haughty when Tony had first met him—probably because it had been haughty—but nowadays it seemed more anthropological, an outsider observing the rituals of a strange foreign tribe. You never forgot that Loki was an alien—the blue helped with that—but his pride hide his ignorance of Earth so well that it was always strange to see him openly studying it.

“Don’t call me that,” Loki said automatically and drank and grimaced. “Gods, that’s worse than usual.” He drank again. “That’s terrible.” He drank again.

“You’re really a man who sticks to his principles.” Tony took a swig. “Mmm. You can really taste the grout.”

Loki grimaced at his drink like he agreed. “I find the key to enjoying Midgard’s alcohol is imbibing so much one’s standards drop.” Tony toasted that. “What are you even doing here?” Loki said, taking another swig. “Not that I mind your company, but I thought you’d be spending the evening finger popping Captain America’s arsehole.”

Tony snorted into his moonshine. “Movie night was 21 Jump Street again?”

Loki flung his hands up. “Fifth week in a row! I fundamentally do not understand this movie’s hold over B-Block.”

“Poor baby. When’s it your turn to pick a film?”

“My turn was last week,” Loki said. Tony stared at him. “This place has changed me more than I ever thought was possible.”

“We really have exposed you to all the best parts of our culture. When you return to Asgard, tell them of our art. And, to answer your insulting proposition,” Tony said, “first off, maybe Steve wants to finger pop my asshole. You didn’t consider that, did you, dick. Second off—‘second off’ sounds weird, I don’t think it’s something people say—it’s asshole because I’m not British, you’re not British, literally no one in this base is British so don’t you bring arseholes in here like we’re speaking the Queen’s. And third off—Jesus, that sounds worse than ‘second off’—it’s not like Cap needs me to finger pop that aforementioned asshole when the entire Underground’s willing to do that for me.”

Loki grinned the way he did when other people were being petty. “Is this jealousy, Tony?”

Periodically, and not that Tony was watching for it, he saw flashes of Steve’s head as the crowd milled around him. It looked like everyone here was trying to trying to say hello to Captain America, and karaoke usually had upwards of five hundred people cycling through. “I’m just saying, I’m here all the time and no one gives a shit about that.”

“You’re here all the time. Why would anyone want to celebrate that?”

Tony snorted. “Whatever. I get it. I’m not a beloved cultural icon that brings hope and light to people’s lives. I’m whatever the opposite of that is, fine.”

There was a pause. “Behated,” Loki offered.

“Thanks. That helped.”

Steve hugged his fiftieth person. Still hadn’t spoken one-on-one with Tony. Whatever. It was so fine. It was all so fucking fine.

On stage, which was just six tables pushed together with a light aimed at it, Fan from Security belted out a stirring rendition of “Ice Ice Baby.” “I forgot how terrible the music of the 90s was,” Tony said. “I feel like the end of most civilization gave us a chance to cast aside the mistakes of our forefathers, and we have refused to seize that opportunity.”

“Yes, we should sing nothing but AC/DC and Black Sabbath. That would be much better.”

“I don’t know why you sound so sarcastic. You’re speaking the truth.”

Loki made a noise like a groan in the back of his throat that Tony guessed was supposed to be his reply.  Tony glanced over. The toughest looking member of the Blue Man Group usually refused to cede the last word, but suddenly Loki looked pensive to a degree that Fan’s mimed bass solo didn’t warrant. “What’s on your mind, Gargamel?” Tony asked. “You’re looking blue.”

It was amazing the amount of contempt Loki could convey with just one eyeroll.

Tony nudged Loki with his bottle. “Seriously.”

“I’m thinking about the death of everyone in this room,” Loki replied.

Tony drank. “Cheery.”

“You asked. I’ll survive, of course. I’m less fragile than the average Midgardian.” He said it like he was commenting on the weather, if people commented on the weather anymore besides wondering what it must be like. He tugged on his vanguards again, unconsciously.

“Of course. Are we really gonna talk work?”

“I suppose not. I could do without ever hearing another sentence about circuits and, and, and reactors.”

“You know nothing about technology, and your ignorance is fucking hilarious to me, but you don’t need to pronounce them like their STDs, Lo.”

“Ki. Lo-ki. It’s two syllables.”

“That’s like one syllable too many.”

“Says Tony.”

“I’m thinking of switching to ‘Tone.’”

Loki snorted. Tony felt vaguely accomplished. Loki could be a melodramatic little drama smurf if you let him indulge himself.

One of Loki’s magelets dropped by to say hello. Tony listened vaguely as they chatted. Magic should interest him more than it did, but it didn’t. Pepper said that was just because he wasn’t that good at it. Tony thought that was an egregious insult that was probably true so he wasn’t going to admit it. While they talked he surveyed the room. There was Rey, grinding with Brad, both in Pharm working with replicating medical advances that had been made twenty years ago with medical equipment from the 1950s. Cory, Other Cory, and Spare Corey—a Nobel winner, a Rhodes scholar, and one of the most deadly assassins alive, even back when there was more competition—danced a fairly good Hammer shuffle next to them. Yolanda was behind them, conspicuously twirling in her new A-Line skirt. She treated nights like this as free advertising for her side business. She saved up her credits each month to purchase raw fabric from Textiles and cranked out fashion for anyone who could pay, and people were willing to pay whatever it took to stop themselves from looking like extras from shitty real world part of The Matrix. She was petitioning Pepper to change her full-time job fashion designer, arguing, as her application put it, that while it may not be an essential position, “everyone’s happier when they don’t look full-on terrible.” Tony was all for it. Hell, she’d made everything Tony wore. He’d never cared about fashion until the default outfit looked like a track suit.

In her entire fashion career, Yolanda had made exactly one pro bono outfit. It was the one Loki was wearing now, black pants, green tee, and a faux leather jacket that went a long way towards making the blue skin and red eyes less alien. She’d gifted it to him in the second year, when Loki had finally become less insufferable right around the time he saved a scavenge patrol from an ambush and got a Chitauri spear through his belly for his troubles. Yolanda had dropped the clothes off at the Med Bay the day before they released him.

“Thanks for that,” Tony said the next time he saw her. “That was surprisingly decent coming from you.”

“I’m a good person, asshole,” she’d said back, mock-offended. “Besides,” she added, waggling her eyebrows, “it’s not just nice for him if you know what I mean.”

“No?” Tony said after a second.

“A man who looks as nice as that should have something nice touching him, that’s all I’m saying.”

“He’s blue,” Tony reminded her.

“Whatever. I saw Avatar. I’m down with that.”

Yolanda would be dead, if Chicago happened in New York. The Corys, them too. Rey, Brad, Geoff and Madison , Octavia and Joanna, Pepper and Hill. Tony. He’d be dead too.

“Goddamnit, Loki,” Tony said when the magelet left.

Loki finished off his beer. “Whatever caused you to say that, I assume you had it coming.”

“You made me sad. You know I don’t like feelings.”

“And they don’t much care for you.”

Joanna’s kid was circulating with more dubious liquor. Tony flagged him down. “Do you think what I saw was a portal?”

Loki waited to answer until their waiter was gone. “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know who would be on the other side. There has always been a limited amount of people who can travel through realms without a Bifrost and that list is…very short, as of late.”

Tony drank to avoid having to answer. Before Thor had come to Earth, he had massacred his family and friends. Loki had waited nearly two years to tell anyone that, and he had never mentioned it again. At least not to Tony. But Tony knew that most of the people on that list had been related to Loki—even if not by blood.

“Perhaps our colleague in Los Alamos has a more exact theory,” Loki said. “From a more…scientific perspective.”

“Again, not an STD. But yeah, I’ll send a wave to Jane before I head to bed tonight. If there’re Einstein-Rosen Bridges opening anywhere within two thousand miles of her, she’d know.”

The Corys appeared to all be chatting Steve up at once. Steve smiled at them uncomfortably before sidling further back into the crowd. “I’m just saying, no one likes me half as much as him, and I’m here all the time,” Tony complained.

“You’re just fishing for compliments.”

“And yet you still haven’t called me pretty once this evening.”

“Boys.”  

The men in question turned. Pepper, still in her black SHIELD uniform but with her hair tumbling around her shoulders, smiled at them. “Sorry to interrupt what sounded like a very deep conversation—”

“Deep as balls,” Tony confirmed.

“Charming. But we just got a wave from Tokyo, and none of the comm operators on duty speak Japanese,” Pepper said, looking at Loki.

“Then you should get someone who speaks Japanese,” Loki said.

“I am.”

“I speak all languages. That doesn’t mean you can get me whenever you can’t find someone more specific.”

“I don’t want to bother anyone else.”   

Loki opened his mouth, most likely to point out that that didn’t mean she could bother him, when Pepper shot him a look. “I need,” she said pointedly, “a translator.”

Loki looked at her. Then he shut his mouth. He looked back at Tony, shrugged a shoulder, and drained his glass. “She needs a translator,” he said, standing.

“What? Don’t do work!” Tony shouted after them as they walked away. “You’re supposed to listen to me bitch about things! Ki! Lo! Come on!” Pepper waved at Tony over her shoulder before they disappeared into the crowd. Tony sat back in his seat and frowned down at his beer. “I should have said ‘balls deep,’ that’s so much better.”

He glanced around. Steve was gone. Someone was singing Celine Dion. Tony’s head hurt. The evening hadn’t been quite a fun as he’d hoped.

“Tony?”

Janie Lila Morgan tugged at his sleeve, her lower lip out and quivering. Only six years old, she’d been the only baby brought into the Underground, and between Pepper’s open refusal to allot more resources to families with unapproved new births and Hill’s refusal to approve births, Janie had remained the only baby in the Underground. It was a sweet gig, having spent the last five years being coddled, spoiled, and loved beyond reason. She looked up at Tony with her with blue eyes as she held a sealed meal tray that was half her size. “Miss Natasha didn’t pick up her food. Can you take it for me?”

Janie’s mother ran the distribution of Meal Three between 1800 and 2400 hours and had a soft spot for Natasha. Mrs. Morgan thought Natasha was quite the tragic romantic heroine. That was one interpretation.

 “Why would I do that for you?” Tony asked.

Janie put her hands behind her back and twirled. “Cause I don’t wanna. Please? Pwease?”

Tony sighed.  What a cute piece of shit. He hated it. “Fine, you little asshole. But only because this party’s cramping my style.”

She bounced up, dropped the tray in his lap, and made a kissing noise in the approximate area of his face. “You’re my favoritist, Mr. Tony!”  Janie said as she flounced away.

“You’re gonna be so annoying when you’re not cute anymore,” Tony yelled after her.

Tony hefted the tray and read what was stamped in the upper left corner. Romanov, N. M3. 6/16/17. 4500 c. Translated, Natasha’s third meal of the day, forty-five hundred calories. At least two thousand of those calories had to be from meat paste and its glorious variations. Some days, Tony was very happy not to be a metahuman. Or at least not to have their metabolism.

With one last look over the crowd, Tony pushed himself up with a sigh and walked out. He knew where Natasha would be—the same sad place she always was.

***

A-Block and B-Block quarters housed about five hundred loners each, people like Tony, Steve, and Loki who were willing to live alone in a room that had just enough space for a bed and a door if it meant they didn’t need to share those with anybody else. C-Block, D-Block, those were for couples or families with a little more space, ranging from a larger bed to a suite-style setup with multiple bedrooms clustered around a tiny common room; Pepper and Hill shared a double so they could talk policy late into the night. E-Block was dormitory-style for the shift workers. Three people were assigned to each bed, and they were assigned what time they were allowed to use it. That sounded like hell to Tony, but E-Blockers seemed content enough. They did get the best beds in the Underground.

The doors to F-Block slid up, six inches of steel ready to snap down and seal at the first break in the perimeter, and Tony walked into the quiet hall. F-Block had the smallest and most fluctuating population. This was where you stayed when you weren’t sick enough for Med Bay. This was where you stayed while you served disciplinary action. This was where you stayed when you were on suicide watch. In short, this was where you stayed if the base didn’t trust you to watch yourself.

“I know what you would have said if you’d been there.” Natasha’s voice floated down the hall. “‘Come on, Tasha. Of course the ammo’s going to run out. You can’t pick bullets off the ground and put them back in your gun.’” Tony walked towards the open door her voice was coming from. “You’ve always been so weird about arrows.”

Tony heard no response, though maybe there was one (or then again, maybe not) because Natasha added, “Yes, weird. It’s weird, Clint.” And then, “Stop picking. Stop.”

Tony knocked on the doorframe to the little common room where Natasha and Barton sat on the floor together. Natasha was holding him by the wrists, keeping his hands from his mouth. It looked like he was trying to bite off the mittens someone had taped over his hands. “Tony,” Natasha said like nothing about this was strange at all. For her, it wasn’t.

Tony held up the tray. “Meal Three.”

Natasha reached out her hand, and Tony passed the tray over. “No, stop that,” she told Barton, who had gone back to biting at his hands when she’d let them go. “He hasn’t turned,” Natasha said as she pulled back the plastic covering of her meal, steam billowing up around her face. “He nicked himself while working, and he won’t stop picking. That’s all.”

The answer to the question Tony hadn’t asked. He didn’t look at Barton with his mitts and his slack face and his distant eyes.

“He’ll settle down now that I am back,” Natasha said.

“Is he going to be able to work?” Tony asked.

Natasha stabbed a cube of tofu. “Yes.”

“Because your deal with Pepper—”

“I know my deal with Pepper. He will get back to work. And if he could not, my deal is with Pepper. Not you.” Natasha chewed. Barton stared in her direction. His hands twitched in his lap. “Was there anything else?” she asked without looking at him.

Tony didn’t sigh. “It’s good to have you back.”

Natasha didn’t reply.

Clint Barton had been the greatest marksman in the world, apparently, with a brilliant tactical mind and a smart mouth. Clint Barton had also been late to the bunker. He’d breathed that poison deep. It was Natasha who found him and Natasha who brought him back and Natasha who argued his way in. He could do simple tasks if you put them in front of him. He wasn’t violent towards others, that much was true, so he worked with weaponry most of the time—sharpening blades, cleaning empty guns, repairing any weapon that broke. He couldn’t speak, didn’t understand when people spoke to him, didn’t recognize one person from another, and didn’t take care of or know that he needed to, but by God he knew weapons. Five years of work, this was his first recorded injury. Weapons were the only thing left that he seemed to know, and he’d work with them for hour after hour after hour in the same place until someone moved him, sitting with no look at all on his face.

Natasha still thought she could save him. She used the credits she earned on missions to pay four women who took turns looking after him on their off hours. She grilled Loki on Asgardian magic’s healing capabilities. She worked with Clint every day that she was in the Underground, talking to him, prodding him, stimulating him. New games, new tasks, new puzzles, trying to coax him back. “Look!” she’d told Tony proudly once, back when she still talked to Tony about Barton’s progress. “He recognizes me.”

She meant that Barton tilted in her general direction when she spoke. That when he stared aimlessly, he stared aimlessly at her. That when she told him for the sixth time to stop doing something, he stopped doing it and it was conceivably because she said it. The scientists who studied the infection said that this was the most remarkable level of cognition they’d seen in a Stage One patient. The thought made Tony’s stomach turn.

Tony circled through F-Block, not ready to leave. He had nowhere else to go tonight. If the air filters couldn’t keep infection out, Tony would kill himself at his first sign of symptoms. He knew what he said about suicide earlier, all that crap about how it wasn’t for him. And it wasn’t. But the infection had made something very clear to Tony, something he hasn’t understood before—he was not a body. He was a brain and its method of execution. At any stage of infection—the mute borderline catatonia of the early stages, the animalistic competence of the middle, or the violent self-destruction of the final, when you stopped recognizing your body as your body, when it became something that was trapping you—the mind was already dead. It killed itself trying to become something that it wasn’t.

Because that was what infection did, that was the horrible kicker of it. The air was trying to make us like them. It fostered the hive mind. Changed your brain so you were linked in with theirs. It worked better on Chitauri. On humans? Your brain only changed so far. You could hear them whispering in your head, but you couldn’t understand what they said. You could smell pheromones you never even knew existed before, but the human ones reeked to you. If you were far enough along, you could forget that you were anything but part of the hive, but the flesh that surrounded you looked all wrong. Maybe you thought it was a cocoon. Maybe you thought it was a trap. Whatever the case, you knew it wasn’t yours, and didn’t that make it a good idea to start ripping it off.

Of all the defeats humanity had suffered since the invasion, this one seemed the most complete.

“Tony?”

His head jerked out of his thoughts, and Tony turned around to see Steve standing at the end of the hallway. Steve jogged to catch up. “Hey,” he said, a small smile on his face. “I was looking for you.”

“In F-Block?” Tony said before he could be flattered because that didn’t seem true.

“I was about to look for you,” Steve corrected himself. “I was checking up on Natasha.”

“Ah,” Tony said, walking on. Steve walked beside him. “They’re gonna miss you at the party. Man of honor and all that.”

Steve’s smile turned sheepish, and he rubbed the back of his head. “I hope not,” he said. “I don’t think I was very entertaining tonight.”

“Please. You could have napped in the corner and still been the hit of the night.” Standing next to Steve, Tony could say that without bitterness. So people wanted to be near Steve. He got that. Sometimes the urge came to him too.

Steve didn’t say anything to that. They walked in silence through the halls, their doors sealed shut and the lights dimmed. F-Block kept to a strict sleep schedule, and strictly speaking Tony and Steve were breaking curfew now. It was nice to walk without greeting anyone or avoiding them. Privacy was a scarce commodity in the Underground.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been here,” Steve said after a bit. “Everything seems so unfamiliar.”

“That must be nice,” Tony said wryly. “I go on patrol more than any other qualified agent, and I still have to stop myself from clawing at the wall sometimes.”

Steve shook his head. “No, it’s not. Familiarity is nice.” They walked in silence again, less easy than it had been before, until Steve spoke again in a more cheerful tone. “Megan Katz from Xeno was telling me about Easter. That sounded wild.”

Tony laughed at the memory. “Yeah, we hid almost five hundred eggs before Meal One. We’ve only got thirty-eight preteens in the entire compound, and it’s the adults that end up going nuts over the stupid things. And of course Loki decides that’s the best day to test his magelets’ mastery of selective invisibility spells so you’d have people wrestling over one egg when there’d be a pile of them to their left.”

“Wow. Was it worse that Halloween?”

“Depends on how you define ‘worse.’ If you go with ‘did Hill threaten to arrest all the adults of C-Block for sabotaging a child’s game,’ no, not worse than Halloween. Nothing is ever going to top Halloween. Think more along the lines of Purim three years ago.”

“The one with the human pyramid gone too far?”

“Nah, that was four years ago. I mean the one where Joanna whipped up a batch of moonshine so alcoholic that only Loki with his alien liver was allowed to drink, and it still was way more effective than anyone anticipated.”

Steve nodded. “That was a strange night.”

“That was a magical night. He still blushes if you bring up his performance of ‘I Got You, Babe.’ Sort of blushes. He turns kind of purple in the cheek area, I assume that’s what’s up. He’s blue, things get complicated.”

Steve stopped in the middle of the hallway, his hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders hunched. Tony stopped too and crossed his arms. Steve smiled, looking at Tony and then looking everywhere else. “I wish I’d been there.”

“You were there.”

“Yeah. No, yeah, yes, I was. I meant for Easter. And all the other holidays and days I wasn’t there.”

Tony nodded and looked down because he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. He knew Steve’s body language. He knew how fun it was to make him squirm too. So Tony sidestepped away from what Steve was trying to imply. “Chicago doesn’t sound like it was that much fun.”

Steve shook his head and laughed, not a happy laugh but the nervous one he got that was almost like a bark. “No. No. No.” He laughed again and coughed. “But I thought a lot, you know, I thought about things there.” Steve grimaced at his own words.

Tony loved the familiar feeling pooling and fluttering in his gut. A mixture of heat and butterflies, so very adult and adolescent at the same time. It was one of his favorite parts of moments like this, the waiting, the before. The during, though, that was pretty good too. The after, of course, was when life got complicated. “Things, huh?”

“Things. You. The night—the night before I left.”

Tony will admit it was a bit of a turn-on, the way that Steve’s body could loudly and enthusiastically say things that Steve’s mouth refused to voice. But, fuck, it was heady watching him try to voice it. “What about that night?” Tony asked. Without seeming to have moved, they were closer now, close enough that Tony needed to look up at Steve, close enough that the light of Tony’s arc reactor lit Steve from below. Blue was a good shade for him.

Steve was blushing. No, Steve was flushed. That was much better. “The things we did that night.”

Steve coming to Tony’s room twelve hours before he was due to depart. Steve standing outside the door so long that Tony wondered if he should tell Steve he knew he was there. Steve finally knocking. Entering. The breath before they lunged at each other and fell backwards onto Tony’s tiny bed, the door sliding down silently behind them. Not enough room, not enough time. Elbows bumping into walls as they tore each other’s clothes off. Steve laughing into Tony’s mouth when Steve couldn’t manage to take off Tony’s pants and kiss him at the same time. Tony gripping him by the neck, swallowing that laughter like a shot of whiskey.

He spent all night waiting for Steve to ask if this meant anything, if this was going to be their thing now. Steve never did. Tony was grateful for that. Steve wasn’t a blushing virgin no matter how much Tony teased him that he was, but he wasn’t like Tony either. If all Steve wanted was sex, Steve could get all the sex he wanted. But Tony wouldn’t look Cap in the eye and lie about romance when Tony couldn’t give it.

Tony’s grin was wicked as he tilted his head up. Steve bent his head like he couldn’t help himself. “Maybe you should remind me what those things were,” Tony murmured, his lips almost brushing against Steve’s. “I’m an old man these days. I need all the help I can get.”

“No one born in the 1970s is old,” Steve replied, and Tony could practically feel the upward turn of the edges of his lips with every word. His eyes were lidded, almost shut, only on Tony. Blue light flickered across his face, making artwork out of his cheekbones. That really was a good look on him.

But it was too bright and the wrong angle to be coming from the arc reactor.

Tony and Steve realized it at the same time. They leapt apart, ready to fight, as a blue shock of light hovered in the corridor not ten feet from them. Stupid, stupid, Tony thought as Steve placed himself in front of Tony, better able to take a hit if a hit needed to be taken. He was too old, too smart, and too experienced at sex to lose track of his surroundings because someone batted their eyelashes at him.

Behind the blue light crackling in the air, Loki rounded the corner, nearly sliding to all fours in his hast to turn. “Get back!” he shouted. “It’s magic!”

“No shit!” Tony shouted back.

“Get back!” Loki shouted again, something like fear or rage in his voice. “I felt its energy all the way from A-Block. That light is a tear in the walls between dimensions, and that is the work of a powerful mage.”

Pepper appeared behind Loki, an energy gun in hand. It was just a pistol, but she could vaporize a Chitauri with that with a single shot. “F-Block’s in lockdown,” she said, aiming her gun at the portal. “Everyone’s sealed into their rooms or out of the Block.”

In the blue light, Tony made out the curve of a head. Then the slope of a neck. The same humanoid shape as before. Blurry flashes of arm and leg. Something sharp and long. A sword. A sword? And then in the midst of the blue, bright blue, there was a streak of black. The hair on the head that was currently pushing its way into the world. Tony knew Pepper should shoot, she should shoot now while whatever it was was too weak to protect itself, but Tony couldn’t bring himself to shout the reminder as he stared. Call it shock; as Hill was always quick to remind him, he was a civilian, unprepared for the horrors of blah blah blah. Call it curiosity; he’d never actually seen someone claw their way through to another world.

Then, in a flash, the light was gone, and the figure was curled on the floor of F-Block, shaking and moaning.

 For a moment, nobody spoke.

Then, “Sif?” Loki said, released like a breath he’d been holding for years.

The woman in armor crumpled on the ground raised her head. Tony could not see her face as she looked at Loki. He could only see Loki staring back, teetering somewhere between hope and horror. Loki took a step forward like he wasn’t aware his feet had moved. The woman on the floor stiffened.

And then she was ten feet away from where she’d been a moment ago, and her hands were wrapped around Loki’s throat. “Traitor! Murderer!” she shouted, the words bouncing through the hallway as she screamed them again and again while Loki clawed at her hands. The whirr of the energy pistol, and Pepper knocked her off him with three shots to her chest—enough to turn a Chitauri to dust three times over. The woman—Sif—just looked vaguely stunned, slumped against the wall for a moment, before she shook her head and lunged for her sword, abandoned where she had dropped it to throttle Loki. Steve tackled her before she could reach it, and they tumbled over each other across the floor while Tony—powerless, suitless, gunless—watched. Pepper grabbed Loki’s arm and tried to pull him away. He just stared.

Sif was tired, that was clear, but she was stronger than Steve. If this was a fistfight with her at her prime, she looked like she could punch through steel. Get the suit, get a gun, get help, get out of here, get everyone out of here, raced through Tony’s mind as Steve barely kept his neck out of her grip.

Pepper aimed two more shots at her, but Sif was ready this time, dodging them without even looking. Tony knew that pistol didn’t have the battery life for another round. “Pepper!” he shouted. She tossed over the gun without needing him to say another word. While Steve held her off, Tony smashed his elbow into the door panel his left. Whoever was sleeping in there would need to be crowbarred out, but Tony had himself a fancy new battery.

Sif weaved beneath one of Steve’s punches only to catch his other hand in her ribs. She rolled out of his reach, wincing as she straightened. “I’m not here to hurt you!” she shouted, which seemed like a strange thing to shout while she was hurting him. Steve kicked her off, and she fell back, her head cracking against the wall. “Let me deal with the traitor,” she hissed.

At that moment, Natasha dropped from the ceiling panels above her and wrapped her thighs around Sif’s neck. She flipped the intruder to the ground in a move where ballet met the suplex and without looking, she caught the now fully charged gun Tony tossed her way, pressed it to Sif’s temple, and fired. Sif instantly went slack, her wild, raging limbs stilled. Natasha kept the gun where it was as she dug her fingers into the side of Sif’s throat. “She’s alive,” Natasha said.

“She’s Asgardian,” Loki replied, his voice hoarse like he’d been shouting. “It will take more than your normal methods to kill her.”

“Who is she?” Steve asked, his stern voice, his Captain voice.

Loki kept his eyes on Sif. “A dead woman.”

Chapter Text

The advantage of being in F-Block was they were only three corridors down from the cells, but Pepper quickly reminded them that they would need to take her someplace more secure. The cells were meant for humans. Sif was something else. Luckily Howard Stark, the man who helped kick off the super soldier arms race, had an understandable paranoia of the post-nuclear apocalyptic radiation powers that all humans would gain and built himself a few special cells, down at the very lowest level of the base. You could drop a nuclear bomb within one of those babies and not dent the glass. At least, that was what Tony babbled as they all walked there in silence with Sif tossed over Steve’s shoulders like a sack of potatoes. Tony wasn’t good with awkward silences.

“We should lock down and go on red alert,” Pepper said, her arms crossed and her face set as she studied Sif through the wall of glass. The cell had one chair, one bed, one toilet, and the wall. By Underground standard’s it was spacious.

“We’ve got her,” Tony said. “Bit late to panic now.”

“If she could come through then others can come through. Maybe they’re coming through now.”

“No,” Loki said. He stood against the back wall, as far from the window into her cell as possible. “I don’t think anyone else is coming.”

Tony and Pepper glanced at each other. “You didn’t think she was coming,” Pepper said gently.

“Guys,” Steve said. He nodded at the cell. Within it, Sif was stirring.

“You take two take the lead,” Natasha murmured. “Good cop and bad cop might work well enough.”

“You’re the better interrogator,” Steve said.

Natasha nodded. “I am. But I’ll talk to her after you two are done. I want to see who she needs me to be. Besides,” she said dryly, “somehow, she doesn’t strike me as a particularly subtle woman.”

Sif eyes fluttered before they snapped open. Her body was taut with rage as she jerked up in the bed. She stared at Loki. She looked at nobody else.

“Your true face suits you, Laufeyson,” she said, her voice low and dangerous.

Loki stood still, perfectly still, too still even to flinch, though Tony could see how the urge shook over him. “How are you here?” he asked after a pause. “You died when Thor first attacked.”

“I will not answer the questions of a traitor of Asgard,” Sif spat.

“How did you get to Midgard? You are no mage.”

“I will not answer the questions of a traitor of Asgard.”

“I am no traitor!” Loki pushed himself off the wall and stalked to the glass. “I know not what you have heard, but it is false. I am as loyal a son of Odin as when I believed him to be my blood.” How quickly Loki returned to his old, regal language. They had slipped away so gently over the years that Tony hadn’t noticed they were gone until they were back.

The cell was silent except for the breathing.

“We need to know how you got inside our base,” Steve said, stepping forward. Loki’s head twitched like he had just remembered that other people were in the room. Sif glanced at Steve and kept her mouth shut. “We have children in this base. We need to know if they are safe.” Her eyes darted down for a moment before she looked away. She stayed silent.

Pepper crossed the room and laid her hand on Loki’s shoulder. “Come with me,” she said softly, turning him from the glass. When he tried to look back at Sif, Pepper pressed her fingers against his cheek and turned his head back towards her. “Let’s talk in the hall,” she said. Sif watched them with narrowed eyes. Without saying a word, Loki stalked out of the room without a glance behind him. Pepper shot Tony a look and followed. The door slid down behind them with a quiet snk.

“Please,” Steve said, a word Tony was surprised would come out of his mouth while talking to a woman who’d tried to kill him ten minutes ago. “You said while we were fighting that you weren’t here to hurt me.”

“Because I am not,” Sif replied tersely. “I am not a monster who preys on those who have done me no harm.”

“Then why are you here?” Steve asked. “To kill Loki?”

“Which, by the way,” Tony interrupted, “is not gonna happen.”

Sif didn’t even bother to look at Tony. “You know nothing of the creature you keep in your base,” she said. And then she sighed and rubbed her eyes, the rage seeming to slip away, replaced with something heavier. “I cannot fault you for that.” Her voice sounded so weary now. “We knew nothing of his nature either. And perhaps, here and now, he is the man we always thought he was.” She laughed harshly at a joke that no one else understood. She looked back up at Steve, her face older than it had seemed before, twisted with rage. “I am not here to kill Loki, though that would be a pleasant diversion. My cause is higher than that.”

“What?” Tony asked.

“I am here to save the world.”

From her chair in the corner where she had watched the proceedings silently, Natasha snorted. “You’re about five years late for that.”

Sif shook her head. “Not this world,” she said. “The real one.”

“The real one?” Steve asked.

“The proper one. The one that was supposed to be.” Sif gestured at the cell around her. “Look at your lives! Do you think this is the way you were meant to be?”

“I don’t think anything is particularly ‘meant to be,’” Tony said, “but if I did, I wouldn’t confuse it with what I wanted to happen.”

Sif shot him a look of disgust. “Then you’re a fool twice over.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked before Tony could jump in with one of the dozen comebacks he had locked and loaded “What exactly are you trying to do?”

Sif settled back in her seat. “I mean what I said. This world was never meant to be. I will undo it and restore the world that the njorns weaved.” She folded her hands in her lap and surveyed her audience like a singer before a set. She knew receptive ears when she saw them. “Loki told the truth at least about this—I perished when Thor attacked, the night before his coronation as queen. Thor gripped me by the throat and tossed me into the void of space where no living being can survive. I was dead when the elves found me. They were scavenging the damage Thor had caused when he destroyed the Bifrost, and they stumbled across my body. They coaxed me back to life to keep me as a prize. I earned my freedom quickly enough.

“But that was not what happened the night before the coronation. The night before, Thor and I and the Warriors Three drank grog in Vanahiem to celebrate his last night before the throne. Loki begged off, claiming royal duties. Not until later would we learn the treachery he committed that night, when he snuck into Jotunhiem, the land of his kin, and smuggled his cousins into Valhalla.”

“So you went drinking before Thor killed you,” Tony said. “Fascinating story you have there.”

“No,” Sif snapped. “I am saying that we drank, we feasted, we fought as friends. He never laid a hand on me that night. And at the same time, he did, and we fought to the death, and he won. I remember both as if they were yesterday.” She shook her head sadly at Tony, something like pity in her proud face. “You remember not the world that came before. I do. I was there at the center of everything when we lost it.”

Steve dragged a seat from the back wall closer to the glass and sat in it, like he and Sif were having a friendly conversation through the glass. “Start from the beginning,” he said.

Sif jerked her head at Tony. “No interruptions?”

“None,” Steve answered without looking Tony’s way.

Tony rolled his eyes and pulled up his own seat. “Fine, story time, save your questions for the end.” He flicked his hand at Sif. “Go.”

Sif mock bowed to Tony. “As milord commands,” she drawled. “How is it your Midgardian tales begin? Once upon a time?”

And then she laid out a fairy tale where Loki, the jealous younger brother, plotted to have his brother exiled and steal the throne for himself. Where Thor was the big hero, learning to live and love in a small town in New Mexico because, gosh, that was all you needed to stop being the kind of person who wanted to conquer planets. Where Thor bravely, nobly, selflessly sacrificed himself for the sake of his new friends and love (Dr. Foster, actually, which amused Tony more than it should since Tony couldn’t think of a more radical anti-Thor firebrand than Jane, and it wasn’t like people who hated Thor were rare) and learned that the power to fly was inside him all along when he finally got his magic hammer back.

“You’ll notice that these days good old Thor is not wielding the hammer of the worthy,” Tony pointed out at this part of the story. Sif and Steve shushed him.

Thor fought his brother on Asgard and destroyed the Bifrost before Loki could use it to destroy Jotenheim. Loki, so distraught at losing, jumped into space. He was the one who gather the Chitauri army (or rather, was rescued by it) and he was the one who led them to Earth through SHIELD’s attempts to harness the Tesseract’s energy.

A collection of heroes gathered together to stop Loki, Thor among them. Sif could not tell them who had fought. Thor had not had time to tell his tale in full, and he would not have done a tale of valor such disservice as to summarize it. Whoever those heroes were, they defeated Loki and his army, bringing peace back to Midgard as Thor brought Loki back home to face justice.

“Thor always loved too much,” Sif said, her eyes low. She gripped the water bottle they had passed through to her half an hour ago like it was something else she was imagining throttling. “He loved his brother more dearly than his brother deserved—he who was not even Thor’s blood. The All-Father knew that he must be fair in his judgment. Loki dealt too much hurt and death and grief to be allowed mercy, and Loki showed no remorse, no guilt that would have earned him leniency. The All-Father sentenced him to a thousand years in the prison of Muspelheim, the realm of fire, where the heat would keep his Jotun body too weak to escape. Thor…Thor did not take that well.

“We are long-lived, but a thousand years passes no more quickly for our kind or Loki’s kind than it does for yours. Thor knew that the punishment must be harsh, but the thought of his brother sealed away for a millennia made him almost mad with grief.”

“Yeah, that seems pretty shitty,” Tony said. “Then again so does multiple counts of attempted genocide, so…” He shrugged. “I’m failing to see what alternative universe Crime and Punishment has to do with Brave New World here.”

“You need to understand why Thor did what he did,” Sif replied. “Loki was a child throwing a temper tantrum. Thor was a hero. A stupid, arrogant hero, but a hero all the same.”

“How?” Steve asked.

Sif turned back to Steve. She’d told almost the entire story only to Steve. She knew how to work the guy willing to listen. “The day of Loki’s sentencing was the day he returned, almost the moment. As the soldiers dragged Loki away to the cell where he would stay until Odin could escort him to his new prison, Thor still had the Tesseract in his grasp. The All-Father entrusted him with returning it to the treasure vaults, but Thor wanted to talk to his brother first, alone. He had his private counsel, and he left.” She paused, swallowed, closed her eyes. She did not open them as she started to speak. “I followed him to the vault. I meant to offer him comfort away from the eyes of the court where Thor did not have to play the role of the now sole prince of the realm. I arrived at the vault too late. When I entered, he was holding the Tesseract aloft.  That should have been enough to burn his hand to ash and the ash to nothing, but he gripped it tight and looked at me with glowing blue eyes.

“I ran at him, but a force knocked me back before I could reach him. I heard him say, ‘I will fix everything, Sif, I will make the world the way it was before.’ Then the Tesseract burst with a brilliant light so bright that closing my eyes was no different than opening them. I thought it would burn the eyes from my skull, and then I fell, backwards and backwards into the blue light of the abyss. Until I hacked my way to Midgard, I had never felt such pain and awe.”

She paused, as if the memory had overcome her.

“When I landed, it was again the night before his coronation. I was in my riding gear. My horse was saddled. Not knowing what had happened but knowing that it was wrong, I rode with all haste to the Bifrost where my memories told me Thor would be, waiting with my shield brothers for one last adventure. And just as I remembered, he was. But my shield brothers lay dead around him, and the gatekeeper too, and when I rushed at him, he grabbed me by the throat and tossed me into the abyss.”

She stopped again and breathed with an intensity that implied that she had to remind herself to do it. The water bottle in her hands was crushed to the size of a die. She opened her eyes at last and spoke as if she had never stopped. “After the elves found me, I spent the years searching for a way to undo the evils of Thor’s folly. At last I have found one. You have my sword. It is the work of the dwarves who forged Mjolnir from the heart of a dying star. It will slice the Tesseract in two. When the Tesseract is gone, there will be nothing maintaining this world. So in answer to your original question, knight—what am I trying to do—I will find the Tesseract, I will drive my blade through its heart, and I will kill any who stand in my way.” Sif leaned forward, her face serious as a battleaxe. “And here is my question for you—will you help? Or will you stay out of my warpath?”

Tony glanced at Steve and Natasha who actually appeared to be contemplating this. Tony sat up and cracked his back. “Okay, there’s so much wrong with your little plan there that I don’t know where to start,” Tony said, “so let’s just work with what’s in front of us and spread out from there. One, you wanna find the Tesseract, fine, so do we, but the thing is wherever you find the Tesseract is where you tend to find your ex-boyfriend. So maybe you’re planning on hugging it out with this world’s mass murderer du jour, but I’m thinking he’s not gonna take too kindly to you slicing and dicing his magic cube. So you’re gonna have to fight him. Considering you got taken down by a blaster pistol to the forehead, I doubt you’re gonna get passed the final boss, and that’s still dependent on you not getting killed by any of the eight million Chitauri currently scurrying across the planet.

“But let’s say that you’re just injured right now because travelling through the worlds without a Bifrost is blah de blah, I’ve heard the speech from Loki, it’s what he tells me when I ask him why he got his ass kicked by Big Brother. Let’s say you find the Tesseract, yay, and you hit it with that magic sword of yours, and that magic sword happens to penetrate the energy shield that surrounds the Tesseract for the sole purpose of preventing people from hitting it with swords, and your sword actually manages to do something, there is no guarantee that destroying the Tesseract would do anything to undo this world because, if we accept your premise that this is a different world which no one seems to know anything about but you and no one can possibly corroborate, and we accept the premise that the Tesseract has the power to do —something I might be willing to roll with because it did open a portal to a different physical location, it’s conceivable that something with that power can do the same for a temporal location— just because the Tesseract started this world doesn’t mean it’s maintaining it. You put out a fire, it doesn’t mean the kindling’s not burned.

“And Steve, Natasha, I see you wanna speak, and I respect that, but I’m on a bit of a roll here so let’s stop pussyfooting around the main problem—that your plan is a glorified suicide run, and we don’t know if you’re just a wacko in some armor which, I’d like to point out to the class, seems a hell of a lot more likely than the idea that the world’s magically different. The world’s a shitty, bleak place right now; that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Everyone in the room looked at him. Sif looked like she wanted to murder him, nothing new there. Natasha looked like Natasha always looked if she didn’t want you to know what she was thinking, her face as smooth and sedate as a Barbie’s. And Steve—Steve looked confused which confused Tony because the only confusing thing that had happened in the last hour was why they let a crazy woman ramble about alternative histories for the last hour.  

“Come on,” Tony said. “Don’t make me the only kid doing the reading questions.”

Steve’s brow was so furrowed, his eyebrow were meeting the middle. “You don’t think we should even consider the plan?”

“Did you not just hear me consider it?”

“You’re a fool,” Sif said. “You ally yourself with a traitor and turn your back on hope.”

“I turn my back on stupid, baseless hope, yeah,” Tony said. “And by the way, Loki? Not actually Satan in this world. If you haven’t noticed, according to your little story, it’s golden boy who fucked everything up here.”

Sif scoffed. “He spoke to Loki alone before he went to the vault. Silvertongue could have whispered such things in his ears. Thor would have never have had the knowledge to cast a spell like this without help. Perhaps Loki told him. Perhaps Loki even remembers.”

Tony crossed his arms. “Why would he remember if no one else could? Your logic is that you remember because you were a foot away when it happened? Why would that apply to him?”

Sif shrugged. “If you know the blow is coming, you can brace yourself. If Loki could instruct Thor, he would know enough about the Tesseract to shield himself. He could remember everything and correct his mistakes in conquering this planet. But something about the Tesseract changed Thor. Thor conquered first, and when Loki escaped Asgard to battle him for it, as you said, Thor defeated him.” Sif cocked her head. “It weakened him, didn’t it? However Thor defeated him, it left Loki too weak to hide his nature.”

“You’re right,” Tony said. “Thor damn near killed him with some kind of magic Frost Giant killing dagger. Also, fuck your entire race for making me have to say that sentence. We brought him into the base, and when he was healing, he realized that his magical nature was acting as a homing beacon to dear big bro. So he dampens it, makes himself weaker by strapping iron to himself and uses his limited magic to help us ward the entrances and heal our sick. You say in your world Loki’s evil, fine, I believe that in the right circumstances he could be evil. He’s a pretty big dick sometimes. But he’s not evil here, not unless he’s playing the longest con. And let me say, sweetheart, when you’re casting him as some kind of Machiavellian supervillain capable of plotting across all of space and time? I say this as one of Loki’s best buds down here, you’re really overestimating how good he is at stuff.”

“You underestimate how good he is at lying.” Sif shook her head. “You make the same mistake I once did. You like him, and you think that means something. He’ll betray you. That’s one part of the story that doesn’t change.”

She had it so convincingly, so passionately, so bitterly that Tony almost believed her for a second.

Tony heard the door open, heard Pepper shouting, “Stop, just stop it,” before it slammed shut again, and before he could turned around, his and Steve’s chairs shot off to the opposite sides of the room as Loki walked up the center of the room as if he had parted the Red Sea.

“How dare you,” Loki hissed, his blood red eyes narrowed. He looked almost feral with rage.

“I have longed to ask you that question myself,” Sif spat.

“Lies, Sif. You tell lies. Not one drop of truth has dripped from your lips as you poured your poison.”  

“I am not you, Loki. I do not lie to serve my needs.”

Loki laughed, humorless and black. “Not before, no. You’ve been vicious before, but cruelty doesn’t suit you. You haven’t the cleverness for it.”

“If evil words fit me ill, Silvertongue,” she snarled, “it is because I have torn them from your frame.”

Steve started to stand. “Both of you, listen—”

Without looking away from Sif’s face, Loki jabbed a finger in Steve’s direction, and Steve fell with a thud back into his seat. Tony shot to his feet and he was knocked back down too. “How did you get here?” Loki said to Sif, his voice like ice. “You aren’t clever enough to have managed it on your own.”

Steve struggled to get up, but Loki’s magic held him firm. Tony’s situation was the same. He turned to Natasha who watched the aliens with cold, calculating eyes. Tony opened his mouth, and Natasha shook her head. Just listen, her body language seemed to say. Natasha loved when people became vicious; she learned so much about them.  

“A mage in Vanaheim?” Loki asked. He cocked his head. “No. You couldn’t convince one of them to help you. Another, more illicit route? Could you even find one? Tell me, Sif. What dark deeds did you have to do to summon enough magic to bring you here?”

Sif pounced towards the glass and slammed her fists against it. “I will not answer the questions of a traitor of Asgard.” For a moment her rage seemed to burn too brightly for her to speak, but when she spoke again, her words were as cold as his had been. “I will not answer. Do what you will, Laufeyson, to get your truths. I will kill you myself when I am free and offer your heart to your dead. When I return to Asgard with your tattered body in my hands, we will place your head above the empty throne as permanent reminder of the true nature of monsters.”

“Thor killed his father and his mother,” Loki said, his voice shaking with something between tears and rage. “Thor slew the greatest warriors of the realm and shattered the bridge between worlds so none could follow him to seek justice. Thor allied with abominations to destroy an unprepared world. And I am still the less favored son?”

“Thor has done nothing, but what you have tried to accomplish.” Sif stepped back and looked Loki up and down, a look of disgust on her face. “Where you and he differ is that he succeeded.”

He reared back as if she’d slapped him. “If the throne is empty,” Loki growled, “then I am king of Asgard. Odin’s blood may not flow in my veins, but he held me as his son. You should speak with more respect to your sovereign, Sif.”

Sif stepped back and smiled a cruel smile as she sat in the small chair at the center of the cell. “I will not answer the questions of a traitor of Asgard.”

Then the claxons blared. They were connected to the sensors that monitored electrical activity for the surrounding area. Any rapid and unnatural increase, any freak lightning storms out of clear blue skies, they started to scream for exactly two minutes as the base went into automatic red mode. Still pinned to their chairs, Tony and Steve immediately looked at each other. “Thor,” they said at the same time. Natasha was already out and sprinting to Control. Loki and Sif were still staring each other down, blind and deaf to the world around them.

“Loki!” Tony shouted.

Loki barely twitched his head in Tony’s direction, but the weight on Tony’s chest lifted. This time when he tried to stand, his body shot to its feet. “Let’s go!” Steve shouted over the alarms. Tony looked back at Loki, who should no signs of movement. But the claxons were still screaming, and though Tony knew it was impossible, he could swear that he heard the sound of thunder getting closer and closer. Tony turned and ran, only a few steps behind Steve.

***

“Situation?” Tony asked as he skidded into Control.

“Thirty minutes ago, our machines pinged storm clouds forming in the Midwest out of nowhere. Six minutes ago they crossed three hundred miles in two minutes.” Hill was already logged into her account at her station, authorizing the shutdown protocols as subordinates sent them to her. “Is this related to whatever the hell was going on in F-Block thirty minutes ago?”

“Maybe,” Tony said as he jumped onto his terminal. All nonessential electrical programs needed to grind to a halt in the next two minutes. The arc reactor powering the entire Underground needed to get as close to dead as possible. Thor had a special affinity for electricity. They’d learned in that first terrible week how he could follow it to its source.

“Was whatever the hell that happened something you should have consulted the Director of the Underground about?” Hill snapped.

“Probably,” Tony said before he shouted, “Where the hell is Pepper?” She was supposed to be here, coordinating the rapid distribution of lockdown supplies. No one knew how long the base would need to stay silent, and having something to eat and drink went a long way towards preventing panic.

Natasha and Steve arrived, now suited up. Hill jerked her head towards them. “You going to join them, Stark?”

Tony gritted his teeth. “I can’t, the suit’s only at fifteen percent power.”

Hill made an annoyed sound that Tony agreed with before she turned to her metahumans. “I want you each with a platoon of gas-masked soldiers. Steve, you’re at the North Entrance with Alpha unit. Natasha, you’re at South with Beta. If Thor looks like he’s sniffing around here, you take the auxiliary tunnels into the subway, you come up as far from the base as possible, you make him think you came from miles away. Any questions? No? Then go.”

Steve and Natasha saluted. Tony caught Steve’s eye before Steve turned away. Tony saluted too.

“I’m here, I’m here!” Pepper shouted as she ran in as Steve and Natasha ran out. “The distribution’s already on route, my people have been having random drills for the last four years.”

“Where the hell were you?” Hill said.

“Dealing with something,” Pepper replied as she slid into her terminal.

“Like what?”

Hill asked it, but Pepper looked at Tony in response. “Like the fallout from the fact that you can watch interrogations that go on in the lower cells in a nearby room on close circuit.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Tony said.

“That’s easy to say in hindsight.”

“Where the hell is he now?”

Pepper shook her head. “I got him out of the cells and I sealed them behind me, but he ran off. I don’t know where.”

 “Is there something you need to tell me?” Hill asked, her voice deceptively calm. After this long of working with her, Tony could tell when she was pissed just by the shift in the wind.

“Yes, we do, we’re so sorry, Maria,” Pepper said. “We should have gotten you, but we didn’t, and we’ll fill you in on everything when this is over.”

“You do that.”

Tony’s radio crackled to life. “Control, this is Lt. Chang of MMD.” The Mathematicks and Metaphysics Division. Magic, basically, in bureaucrat speak, specifically magic blended with tech. Loki’s magelets and Tony’s techies.

Tony picked up. “Tony here. Talk to me, Max.”

“Tony, we’ve activated the aux wards at all five entrances. We’re rolling out with the blood charms now.”

“Is Loki with you?”

“He was. He took nine pints of blood from Med Bay to activate the angel wings.”

That was Loki accounted for then. Tony hadn’t known how tense he was about that before his worries had been eased. A stupid, pointless worry anyway. If Loki was a traitor, he still wasn’t a stupid, self-destructive one. Thor thought Loki was dead, and Loki needed to keep it that way. He’d help defend the Underground for at least as long as it served him.

“You guys on route for total lockdown?” Tony asked.

 “Loki put A and B squads in charge of the devil’s traps. C squad’s down with the arc reactor, masking its output. D squad’s creating a fake base signals twenty miles away. All on schedule.”

 “Stay that way. When you’re done with the wards—”

“Help distribution then get back to our Blocks. We got this, Tony.”

“That’s my girl,” he said. “Stay safe.”

“Right back at you,” she said. “Lt. Chang out.”

As Tony hung up, Sitwell walked into Control at a brisk clip. “Director, all nonessential personnel are in their rooms, and F-Block is all in their designated safe spaces. We’re ready for Phase Two lockdown procedures.”

Hill nodded and picked up her radio and set it to broadcast. “Entering Phase Two. Remain in place until I explicitly tell you otherwise. Except in cases of immediate emergency, maintain radio silence.”

“Ma’am, do we know why Thor is here again, after all this time?” Sitwell asked.

Hill glanced at Tony and Pepper. “I don’t.” She stressed the first word.

“We have an Asgardian visitor in the lower cells,” Pepper said. “Her arrival might have been conspicuous enough to attract his attention.”

Hill shot up out of her seat. “Someone opened a portal inside our base? How?”

Pepper opened her mouth and shut it again. “That’s actually a very good question. Loki himself said that traveling without a Bifrost is some of the most difficult magic you can wield. And from what he’s told me about Sif before tonight, she’s no mage.”

“He told you about Sif?” Tony asked. “He’s never told me about Sif.”

 “People can have conversations when you’re not there, Tony,” Pepper snapped.

Hill held up her hands. They fell silent. “Is anyone else coming through?” she asked.

Tony and Pepper looked at each other. “No,” Pepper said after a beat. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you have any guarantee of that?”

Tony shook his head. “But our warrior woman doesn’t sound like someone working with a team. And the angel wings should keep people from entering the base by magic.”

“Will they?”

“That’s the theory. It’s not like they’ve ever been tested, and Loki’s the only one who really knows how they work.”

Hill cursed. “I am going to nail him to the wall for not reporting to Control.”

“Director.” Captain Clay, head of Security, stood at his terminal. “We are go for Phase Three.

“MMD too?” Pepper asked. Clay nodded.

Hill chewed the inside of her cheek as she thought. “We don’t have the luxury of worrying about hypothetical Asgardians invading via portal. Not while we still don’t know what our very real one is doing here after so long. We go into Phase Three as planned, complete lockdown, near silence, and we will reassess when the mandatory wait period passes.” Hill nodded at the surrounding Captains. “We are now in Phase Three. Go.”

They went. Pepper went north to the food depot. Tony headed south, back to A-Block. At Phase Three, he was supposed to be with a platoon of soldiers ready to lead Thor on a goose chase. His job in Control done, he was useless now without his suit, little more than another civilian. There was nothing else that he could do right now besides keep his radio on and wait.

The only lighting was the thin line of emergency lighting, essentially high-tech glow in the dark paint. The only person still out of their rooms in A-Block was him. He passed his room and kept going. If he was going to die, it was not going to be in that bare, dark cell.

The emergency doors sealed off each sector, but Tony was one of the lucky ones who lived in the same sector that they worked. He’d always hated a long commute. The garage was silent, still, and cold when he arrived. It didn’t matter. He kept blanket in a drawer in the wall. He kept a rolled up air mattress in there too, but he wouldn’t need that tonight. Between the suit’s reactor and his own, there was just enough light to work with. Not that Tony needed light at this point. He’d been maintaining this one suit for the last five years. He could work by touch alone. Tony wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, strapped on his tool belt, and crouched between the suit’s legs. He ran his hands across the cool metal, searching for the seam of the breast plate, and the feel of it under his fingers stilled his heart for what felt like the first time since Tony’d left the base that morning.

***

Tony woke to the beep of his radio. He jerked himself up off the chest of his suit and blinked at the light filling the garage. “We’re scaling back to Phase One,” Hill’s voice crackled in his ear. “We’re keeping electricity at a minimum, but as far as we can tell, Thor is no longer in New York City.”

Tony rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “He left?”

“Thank MMD for that. Loki and D Squad managed to fake portal openings in down in Florida. Going by the storm activities, Thor went south chasing those. The mages aren’t sure what kind of range they can manage, but hopefully we’ll be able to convince him that the New York portal was just as much a false alarm as the other ones.”

And at the very least, they’d make Thor run from one part of the continent to the other. “Do you need me to report to Control?”

“Pepper briefed me for you. To be honest, I don’t know what to do with this information. We’ve got the prisoner under guard for the moment. Steve volunteered for the first shift. He says she seems relatively cooperative, but she keeps insisting that we’re wasting time.” There was a rush of static on the other side of the line. A sigh. “What do you think about she said, Stark?”

Tony leaned his head back against the suit’s chest. “That if we break the MacGuffin we can all go home? I think that I admire her hope.”

For a few breaths, Hill was quiet on the other end. “You were scheduled for an off shift today,” she said at last. “I recommend you take it. Sleep in a real bed. We’ve had more crises in the last twenty-four hours than we’ve had in the last year, and I get the feeling we’re just going to get more. We need you rested.”

“Same goes for you,” Tony said, feeling a little guilty for his impromptu nap even if he calculated that it had only been for an hour or two tops. Hill no doubt kept vigil all night. “Wait!” he said before she could hang up. “What are you going to do about Loki?”

“Eviscerate him for failing to report to Control, even if he did do his job.”

Tony rubbed his forehead. “That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?” She sounded honestly confused.

Maybe Pepper had not briefed her on everything Sif had said.

“I mean, he might be emotional,” Tony lied quickly. “His brother back in town and everything.”

“If you’re worried about him, then do something. Emotions are not the purview of Control. Hill out.”

Tony tugged the radio out of his ear and tossed it on the floor beside him. “JARVIS.” Tony knocked his knuckles against the suit’s chest plate. “Where we at, buddy?”

“Power at fifty-four percent, sir.”

“Only fifty-four? Jesus. You’ve been plugged in—”

“For eighteen hours, sir. During which time, the electricity that was charging the suit was turned off for twelve and a half of them.”

Right. Tony groaned and pushed himself to his feet. It sounded like every bone cracked on the way. “Give me a time estimate for full charge.”

“Suit should be fully operational in nine hours, twenty-three minutes.”

“Suit will be fully operational when it’s not made of salvage.” Tony scooped up his radio and tucked it in his pocket. “But I’ll settle for one hundred percent power.”  

The hallways were almost empty today. Phase One wasn’t the same as the all-clear and about half the base was still off shift. The caf in A-Block, the center of the party just last night, had just twenty or so people in there now, talking in low voices as they swiped their card for their meal. Tony got in line behind a couple who said nothing to each other but held hands the entire time. They’d probably spent the night together, crammed in either his room or hers, holding each other while they waited to hear if this was the end or not. How many people had ignored protocol and sought someone else out in the night? Tony was in no position to judge them, even if the person he’d sought out was a metal suit. He wouldn’t judge them if he could. Nobody wanted to die alone.

Tony swiped his card and selected the breakfast option. A reasonable approximation of orange juice, oatmeal, bacon, and eggs slid out on his tray, with his specific vitamin supplements in a small cup. He spent an extra credit on a piping hot cup of black coffee that tasted like death but would stop his eyes from drooping shut as he ate. He was weary beyond caring about taste. He should go to bed. A real bed.

One of the woman in the couple who had ordered before him leaned her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder. She wrapped her arm around the other woman’s waist.

Tony finished his breakfast.

It was a long walk to the lower cells from A-Block, and his body didn’t thank him for it. But he had more questions for the woman who had cut her way through the worlds. Not about her alternative history jag, of course, but Loki and Pepper were right, even if the line of questioning had gotten, let’s say, emotional. How had she gotten here? He and Steve could ask her together, if Steve was still on shift. Tony had almost forgotten that Steve would be there. He totally hadn’t thought about that at all.

Outside the entrance to the cells, Tony stopped. He rested his head against the cool wall because that felt more mature than headbutting it, and Tony was trying to be better about maturity these days. Pepper used to joke that that was the surest signal of the end of times, when they were closer and jokes like that didn’t seem cruel. She used to ask him how he could be so smart and know nothing about himself. She’d been wrong. Tony knew everything that he wanted to about himself. And because he did, he spent a decent amount of time pretending he didn’t. He pushed it to the corner of his mind, as if it would not exist if Tony refused to look at it. So Tony knew why he was really here. Of course he knew.

 “I thought you were never gonna knock on that damn door,” Tony said that night, their only night, while Steve spooned him. Cuddling was a necessity in A-Block. There wasn’t enough room for anything but intimacy.

Steve chuckled, and Tony felt it in his back, in his bones. He buried his face in the back of Tony’s neck. “I wasn’t sure either.”

“Why, Cap? Thought I’d be mean? Thought I’d say no?” Tony teased.

Steve nipped and kissed the bumps of Tony’s spine. “Thought you’d say yes.”

“And yet here you are.”

“Here I am.”

Steve had never asked him what that night meant. Hadn’t had time. Tony had been grateful for that back then. Now, in a way, Tony still was because the answer he would have given when Steve was headed out for a two month exploratory mission was a hell a lot different than the one he’d give now with Steve come back from the dead.

On the other hand, the way Steve left in the morning with just a quick kiss to Tony’s temple and a soft, “Goodbye”—that said sweet, so that said Steve, but that didn’t say whatever the hell it was that Tony wanted it to say. Tony still wasn’t sure about that bit. He genuinely did not. Steve had been a friend, a good friend, a great friend, for so long that Tony wasn’t sure when he’d slipped into something else. All Tony knew was this: It was hard to look death in the face and not think about who you’d want staring with you.

He should talk to Steve. But he didn’t want to do it and to his left was a door labeled, “Observation” that he hadn’t noticed before, and really, wasn’t that more pressing? Yes, Tony decided, it was.

This must have been the room where Pepper and Loki watched. That thought made Tony wince as he flicked on the CC TV. Loki would be yet another thing to deal with, another crisis Tony didn’t need right now. He wondered if he could just send a jug of beer to Loki’s room with the note, “I don’t know where your head is right now, but chill the fuck out.”

Loki’d never frightened Tony before. Even at his most haughty, his most blustery, his most fucking annoying, Tony had never been frightened of him. Not before last night.

On the paneled screens, Tony saw Sif from about six different angles. One camera was angled at Steve, back in his chair on his side of the glass. Sif was in hers. They were laughing. This didn’t seem much like guard duty.

“That really happened?” Steve asked, his voice through the speakers as clear as if Tony had been standing next to him.

“I swear it,” Sif replied, putting her hand up. “Thor never wore his helmet indoors again.”

“I can’t imagine him so young.”

“You wouldn’t be able to. Not in this wretched world.” Sif leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “I promise you, Captain, the true Thor is a warrior more gracious and good than any other in Asgard.”

“But you’d still try to kill this one.”

“This Thor is an abomination. This Thor is Loki wearing his brother’s skin. To bring back the rightful heir of Asgard, yes, I would let this one’s blood run through my fingers.” Tony watched Sif cocked her head from six angles. “You have no such affection for any Thor. But you will not risk fighting him. Is he so formidable?”

Lightning falling from the sky like bullets, bombs, hail, sleet, shrapnel, blanketing, inescapable. The stench of death and burned flesh hung in the air as loud as the thunder, the endless thunder. Inside the suit, the airs on Tony’s arms rose again, as he dodged another bolt and wondered when one would catch him, when he would fall to be faster than lightning, when he’d be fried from the inside out.

Tony forced himself to breath. He unclenched his fingers from the desk and stared down in horror at the dented metal. Had he done that? No, of course not, he realized when his brain started working again. But this is where you’d stand as you listened with horror, and that was where you would rest your hands, and if you ever had the power to crush metal, this would be where. How had Pepper tried to calm Loki, as he stood here and listened to his dead woman retell history so that he was the villain and Thor—Thor—the hero?

He could do those things though, said the little paranoid voice in the back of his mind that never shut up, that kept him alive. You saw what he looked like truly angry.

As if from a great distance, Tony heard Steve say, “He murdered the greatest warriors in your realm. You know how strong he is.”

“When he attacked, he had the element of surprise,” Sif replied. “Who would expect such violence from Asgard’s true son? Now we have the element of surprise. We can strike the first blow. And if what your argumentative friend said is correct, he can no longer wield Mjolnir. Thor’s power is a fraction of its true self if that is true.”

“It’s a hell of a fraction,” Steve said. “He still controls lightning. He’s still bulletproof. Russia dropped a nuclear bomb on itself to kill him, and he walked away.”

“So you will cower in the ground like rats until you die.”

No. We will survive, and there is nothing shameful about that. That was what Steve was supposed to say. Instead, Steve was silent.

“Do you have so little faith in the strength of your people?” Sif asked.

Steve looked down at the ground. Captain America looked up. “Convince me that I should not.” He said it like he was already convinced.

Tony spat on the ground. He hadn’t realized that all the times that people said betrayal left a bad taste in the mouth that they had meant it so literally. By his elbow was the switch for the intercom. Before Tony could think, he flicked it on. “A reminder to all security personnel,” he said sharply. In the cell, Steve and Sif jumped. Sif leapt up, ready to fight. Steve looked at the camera. “We don’t share information with prisoners.”

Steve didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. “Tony?”

Tony shut off the CC TV, and Steve snapped into blackness. Tony left the room and kept walking all the way out of the compound, back through F-Block, and back to the core. Steve could have caught up if he wanted, but he was still on guard duty. He wouldn’t leave his station. He remembered that much of his job at least.

He made it back to his room, swiped in, and fell forward. Entrances like that were why he kept his retractable bed permanently unretracted. The mattress wasn’t much more comfortable than leaning against the armor, but at least this door locked behind him, and he was so tired that it wouldn’t have mattered if he was lying on bare steel. He sprawled until his fingertips brushed the opposite walls. He didn’t think about anyone else lying there with him.

The glowing green clock in his wall told Tony that only three hours had passed when he woke to knocking. Four quick raps on the door. And then, nothing. Tony lay there in the dark as the only sound was the thrum of the art reactor. After a moment, the fist knocked again. Tony just lay there. There was no more knocking after that, but Tony didn’t go back to sleep for a long time.

***

The atmosphere when Tony woke was, if anything, tenser than when he had gone to bed. Thor hadn’t returned to the city, no, but as the initial panic subsided, a much more thoughtful type of fear descended. Why had he returned after having been away so long? Tony heard a hundred different theories before breakfast, each more frightening than the last, mostly because they sounded so plausible to people who didn’t know better. He’d discovered their base and was lulling them into a false sense of security. He was chasing some hero around the globe. He was surveying where he was going to build his palace. He was chasing his runaway bride.

Tony had needed to ask some follow up questions about that last one.

“You told everyone about Sif?” Tony asked Hill. It was another anxious dinner in Control, their trays balanced on their laps as they scanned the dozen or so reports turned in over the last twelve hours. Hill grimaced into her coffee.

“I’d have preferred not to.” Hill was a woman who understood the value of selective secrecy. Bit like her old boss that way. Bit like Tony too. “But it’s hard to hide that we locked down F-Block for an hour last night and hard to hide new high-calorie food distributions. Trying to keep that secret and failing would have done nothing but make this government look simultaneously untrustworthy and incompetent.” She’d learned a lot from the days when she tried to ban karaoke.

“What’s our official story on her then?” Tony asked.

“The truth, mostly. That she’s a warrior from Asgard who claims to be our ally. We’ll keep her alternative universe story to ourselves at the moment.”

“Unless you plan on doing something with it, I’d recommended keeping that on the down low forever. That’s the definition of false hope.”

Hill sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “Do we have any way of confirming what she said?”

Annoyance flared again in Tony’s chest. “Don’t tell me you’re listening to her too. I thought you were smarter than that.”

“Don’t pretend that shutting yourself off from possibilities makes you smart. I’m not saying she’s right or wrong, I’m not saying I believe her, and I’m not saying that if she is right that it does any good. But don’t sit there and tell me that it’s not worth pursuing. That’s not like you, Stark.”

“It’s a distraction,” Tony said, through a mouthful of decently replicated grilled cheese. “That’s all. And we don’t need distractions right now, not if what happened in Chicago is going to spread.”

“Then take it off my mind.” She drained her coffee and waved the empty mug over her head. “Find me someone who can corroborate or dispute it.”

One of younger agents ran over and poured Hill another cup. “How come I don’t have a bevy of young agents eager to keep me caffeinated?” Tony complained.

“Because when I’m caffeinated, I keep the Underground going. When you’re caffeinated, you blow stuff up.” Hill took a long slurp that sounded deliberately tantalizing.

“Excuse me, Director Hill. Mr. Stark.” Agent Moore of External Monitoring saluted. “We’re picking up some strange signals from the surface, ma’am.”

“Strange how?” Hill asked, moving her tray and standing.

Agent Moore handed over a holopad to her. “To be honest, we’ve never seen a pattern like this up there before. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was driving a tank through Manhattan.”

And suddenly Tony wanted part of this conversation. “Chitauri out to play?” he asked.

“It doesn’t seem like the Chitauri at all, sir. The movement is too concentrated to be a group, even for the hive mind, but one Chitauri wouldn’t be bulky enough. One of their animals, maybe, but most of their herds are in the Midwest.”

Tony turned to Hill, still scrolling through the data. “Someone should check that out.”

“No, Stark,” she replied without looking up.

“We could call it recon.”

“No, Stark.”

“The suit’s charged. You know the Chitauri can’t see through its stealth mode.”

“No, Stark.”

Tony pursed his lips. Hill glanced up, one eyebrow cocked. He waved Agent Moore away who left with another salute and when he was gone, Tony said, “I’ll send a wave to New Mexico. Foster’s research on E-R Bridges was miles ahead of SHIELD’s, and that was without access to the Tesseract, hell, without knowing if it actually existed. She theorized it from her data, and her projections of what it was capable of were spot on. I’ll ask if in her professional opinion the Tesseract is theoretically able to do what Xena claims it can do. She can’t confirm anything either way, but it’s another opinion.”

Hill tapped the holopad against her hand. “And what do you think, Stark? Do you think it can?”

Tony considered lying. He considered it hard. It would help his position. But if you had to change the facts to argue your case, it was a shitty case, and Tony knew his opinion was better than that. “I think it’s possible.”

She considered him and nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind. And I’ll call West Gate, tell them you’re cleared for exit. Be careful up there. Don’t attract any attention we don’t need. Oh, and Tony?” she said as Tony started walking away. “Take Captain Rogers with you.”

“What?”

She smiled wickedly and spread her hands. “What if you run out of batteries again?”

Sometimes, Tony remembered why he made life so difficult for her.

***

As annoyed at Steve as Tony still was—and, yes, Tony still was, for reasons that he couldn’t articulate, not yet, not until they’re percolated some more—there was something undeniably comforting about the old routine of flying the man through New York while holding him at the armpits. Steve was a familiar weight as Tony flew them so low that Steve’s toes were in danger of bumping the concrete. High was more fun, but low was more safe. They were shielded by an elaborate combination of magic and tech, but the Chitauri eye saw movement far better than the human eye did, and if they saw a flash in the air, they’d chase it down for miles. On another day, Tony might have risked it, but at the moment, it was better to stay below the new skyline and let the buildings help camouflage him.

Still, it was a good time for flying, this grey late afternoon when most of the Chitauri were sleeping, though that had little to do with the time of the day. At least, little to do with the time of the day on Earth. The Chitauri sleep cycle had nothing to do with sunlight or darkness, and neither seemed to make much difference to them. They were awake for about thirty-six hours, then asleep for ten. They staggered it so there were always Chitauri patrolling the skies of New York, but the majority slept like it was a compulsion. Once Megan Katz had figured out the Chitauri hive mind, she’d theorized that the invasion force was still connected to the Chitauri back on their native planet; they were sleeping according to the time back there.

 “Tony!” Steve said through his radio and pointed. There was a trail of smoke to the south that had not been there before.

“Looks promising,” Tony said, adjusting his trajectory.

“I just hope whatever’s crashing through the city isn’t another baby space whale,” Steve said. “Seeing one birth was enough.” He paused for a minute. “But that was better than seeing the conception.”

Despite himself, Tony laughed as he landed on a relatively secure bit of collapsed roof just on the other side of whatever was causing the smoke. There was the faintest green glow on the brick, letters that Tony couldn’t read glimmering in the dimness. One of Loki’s warded sections. He had them set up throughout the city, low-level magic areas that made whoever was near them utterly unremarkable. They’d saved Tony’s life more than once.

It would be massively inconvenient is Loki was evil, Tony thought, not for the first time. God, he makes like half our shit.

Besides Loki’s magic, the wall that was still standing blocked them from view—and blocked the view from them. Steve knew what to do and started to clamber up the wall the second his feet hit the roof, his jaunty little street urchin scarf waving in the breeze. (“My neck gets cold,” he’d told Tony defensively when he’d first knitted that abomination four years ago. Tony just wished he hadn’t used all his scarf-based insults up in the first six months. He didn’t know that Steve would hold onto the damn thing so long.) The Chitauri didn’t view colors the way humans did—hence why Iron Man and Captain America remained as colorful as ever since it didn’t make a difference—but they seemed to notice metal, even the dullest metal, before any other material. Steve was a safer bet to take a peek.

He took a peek. He looked down at Tony. He took another peek.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Steve said as he swung himself to the other side of the wall. Tony flew up and hovered beside him. There wasn’t any roof on this side for Tony to land on.

“Huh,” Tony said. “You are correct.”

What appeared to be a massive naked green ape was currently smashing two cars against each other, seemingly for no other reason than the pleasure he felt smashing.

“That was not in my top ten things I expected to see today,” Tony said.

Steve perched on a metal beam jutting out and grinned. His teeth still seemed unfairly white considering the circumstances of their lives. “He must have followed me and Nat back from Chicago. He got attached while we were there.”

“You left the Hulk out of your report.”

“You know him?”

“Know of him. Bruce Banner, gamma radiation. Science’s poster child for why you shouldn’t use yourself as your beta tester.”

“Doesn’t seem to stop you,” Steve said under his breath.

“I’m ignoring that.”

The Hulk roared at nothing in particular before he went back to smashing.

“I’ve never seen him as Bruce Banner,” Steve said. “The entire time that I was in Chicago, he was like this. Some days, he’d rampage. Some days, he’d follow us through the city like a puppy.”

“The Hulk’s supposed to come out when Banner’s in danger,” Tony said. “If he’s always out in the open air, then Banner’s always in danger. He must be hulked out since the invasion.” He looked around at the massive amount of damage the Hulk had caused already. “Seems like the Chitauri should be interested in this.”

“They’ve got that hive mind, right? They must already know what the Hulk does when they get near him.”

Down on the street, the Hulk grabbed another wrecked car and ripped it in half.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “I’d stay away.”

They watched him destroy the street for a few minutes. It was strangely cathartic. Like an action film if you took out all the boring bits where people talked to each other.

“Are you going to talk about Sif or am I?” Steve asked.

So that bit of peace didn’t last long. “You seem to like her,” Tony said. “That’s very Captain America of you. Forgiving. Willing to turn the other cheek. Me, I’m not so fond of people who try to kill me.”

“She wasn’t trying to kill me. She was trying to stop me from killing her.”

“After she tried to kill Loki.”

“Who she believes is evil in the world she comes from.”

Tony snorted. “You’re quick to throw him under the bus, Steve. That seems less Captain America of you.”

“I’m not throwing him under the bus.” Steve pulled off his cowl and raked his hands through his hair. “I don’t…I don’t want that part to be true.”

“You just want the rest of it to be.”

“Is that wrong?” Steve’s blue eyes were good at imploring. “Tell me, Tony. Do you think it’s wrong to believe that we could undo all—all this?” Steve swept his arm through the arm, gesturing at the entirety of New York’s twisted, stunted body.

“Yes!” Tony said exasperatedly. “It’s wrong. It’s stupid. It’s cruel. What is your plan here, Steve? What are you hoping to do? Find the Tesseract? Kill Thor? Skip off into the sunset like the last five years never happened?”

“If we destroy the Tesseract—”

“Nice of you to skip past everything that would take.”

“—then that would end the terraforming,” Steve said over Tony. He was still maddeningly calm. “Even if it doesn’t undo the world, we would still be better off.”

“Yeah, well, we’d all die in the attempt so ‘better off’ is a relative term.”

“Maybe we’d do better in the battle than we’d expect.”

Tony threw his hands up in the air at the naïveté of that comment. “Cap, a conservative estimate of the Chitauri in this city alone? About sixty thousand. To our three. That’s sixty thousand Chitauri in addition to their speeders, their war ships, their weaponry with limitless ammunition, their aforementioned giant space whales and space lions and space fucking flying octopus things. And if we even had enough troops to take them all out, the masses of people swarming out of our base would override all the stealth trappings we’d laid over them. Say goodbye to the Chitauri not knowing where we live, say hello to them burrowing into our homes and planting eggs in C-Block. Do you know what that means?”

“I was in Chicago,” Steve said quietly, firmly. “I know what that means a hell of a lot better than you do.”

That shut Tony up. For a moment. “Then you know nobody survives what you are suggesting,” Tony said. “The only reason we’re alive right now is because that’s easier for the Chitauri than tracking us down and slaughtering us.”

Suddenly the Hulk perked up. Tony and Steve stiffened. The Hulk sniffed the air before snarling and leaping across the road, dashing off into the distance. Tony laid out his mental map of New York. Chitauri patrol on route, five blocks south. He guessed they wouldn’t be there in a few minutes. The enormous green rage monster was quickly becoming his new favorite thing.

Then a burst of orange flame exploded into the sky. “I guess not all my charges went off last time,” Tony said. “Hope he’s okay.”

“Trust me,” Steve said dryly. “The Hulk is fine.” He sighed and shifted. “It is a suicide run. I know that. Thor—Thor destroyed us at our strongest. And I know that wherever the Tesseract is, there will be an army between us and it. But if Sif is right—and I know,” he said before Tony could, “that she might not be. But if she is right and we marshal everything we’ve got for one last push and succeed? Nobody will have died. Nobody since the invasion.” Steve was preaching to Tony; Tony wouldn’t look at him. Steve’s voice alone was convincing enough to make him believe those promises, no need to risk it with the visuals. “We can save them,” Steve said. “Not just the people in the Underground or the humans that are still left. We can save everyone.”

And then Steve ruined everything with one more sentence. “We can go back to a life worth living.”

The sun was setting. Besides the explosions as a Chitauri patrol and Mr. Hyde did battle, it was the only light in the sky, and Stark Tower nearly blocked that out. Tony didn’t like to call it that, didn’t like to think about it, but there his name still was, scrawled across the skyline. That was where he had been, the day that the sky split open and hell poured out. They gutted his baby and made it their home. Tony still woke up gasping some nights thinking about it, grasping for some sense of purchase and finding nothing but the steel walls.

But the steel walls were comforting. They hadn’t always been, but they were now. It had taken a year of them for Tony to adapt, a year of pretending that he was anywhere else whenever he closed his eyes. Sometimes he even pretended he was back in Afghanistan, back in the cave, because at least there the problem was solvable. His path was simple: escape or die. The only question? How to escape. Life was trickier in the Underground. It was infinitely messier. Nobody knew what success looked like, whether they were supposed to be surviving or adapting or retaliating or retaking, and there were more questions than even the great Tony Stark could wrap his head around. Who do you let into your bunker? How do you keep them in line? How do you feed them? Do you make weapons or food? Do you try to reclaim your city or stay underneath it? Do you trust the stranger or do you cast them out? How do you keep your people fed, healthy, maybe even happy? How do you keep going?

When everything tells you to stop, how do you keep going?

The answer to that last one looked a lot like karaoke. It looked like movie night. It looked like fashionable clothes and improvements in food and Easters gone too far. It looked like Tony’s neighbors in A-Block pooling their credits for a birthday cake, and it looked like Loki’s magelets playing the most intense game of hide-and-go-seek that New York had ever seen. It looked like forest Bio managed to grow underground, the tallest branches of the apple trees scraping against the low metal ceiling, and the bushels from the first harvest when the taste of apple made three thousand people cry. It looked like breakfasts with Pepper and lunches with Loki and dinners with Steve. When Steve was there to eat them.

Steve spent nearly every day that he stayed at the Underground above ground, and Steve wasn’t here all that much. Since they’d moved in, Steve had been on five extended month-long missions and two longer than that. Chicago was the longest he had ever been away¸ but Steve wasn’t ever really here. Even Natasha had Clint keeping her in the earth.  Steve lived on the surface. He didn’t understand. This was not just a life worth living; this was a life that kept people living. The marvel of humanity’s adaptability.

And Tony knew Steve wouldn’t appreciate it—God, not in the slightest—but in that moment, Tony felt so fucking sorry for him.

“You don’t know anything, Steve,” was all Tony said before he picked up Steve again and flew him home.  

***

“Anything?” Tony asked, popping his head into the comm room. Lois was the only one working that day, and she was a chain smoker. She went through synth cigs at a such a rapid pace that the joke was that she’d manage to get herself synth cancer, but Lois just laughed at that. “Damn, if that were true,” she’d say, “these bastards would be a hell of a lot more satistifyin’ than they are.”

“Foster waved back,” Lois said. “Your boyfriend picked it up already. Took the copy with him.”

“I’m not Steve’s boyfriend,” Tony said crankily. That was the only thing that seemed like it had been settled over the last few days.

“I mean the blue one.”

“Oh Jesus, I’m definitely not his boyfriend.”

Lois waggled her eyebrows at Tony as she shot smoke out her nose. “But you’re not definitely not Cap’s? You got a little somethin’ somethin’ with Captain America now?”

“Whether I say yes or no, you’ll tell everyone whatever you want, won’t you?”

She chewed on her synth thoughtfully. “Cap looks like the kinda boy for appreciates a silver fox. A little teachin’, you know? I bet that serum makes him a quick study.”

“That was surprisingly tasteful coming from you.”

She grinned. “Bet that’s not the only thing the serum gave him.”

“And there’s my Lois. You know where my ex headed?” Tony waggled the pack of synchs he’d picked up for her.

“Shoot, hon, I haven’t seen Miss Potts at all.”

“I meant the blue one who stole my wave. Lois, come on, we were supposed to be riffing.”

She waved him off. “Oh, that one’s where he always is. Hiding from Hill back in his palace.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Tony said, tossing her the pack. She caught it with one hand and blew him a kiss just like she always did. At least someone around here wasn’t complicating their relationship.  

Loki had arrived on Earth about two weeks after Thor conquered the whole place. He’d been nearly beaten to death by his brother within five hours. Those were the most hopeful five hours of the last five years. Loki had been weaker than Thor, that much had been clear, but he could take his hits, even dish back a few of his own, and that was a hell of a lot more than anyone else had managed. But he still lost, and lost hard. When Thor lifted Loki’s body above his head and threw him to the ground from the top of Stark Tower, the whole Underground had mourned.

That had been before Steve had found Loki’s true body, his suddenly blue body, while on patrol a week later. He’d used the last of his magic to have his brother kill a doppelganger. “I assumed that something would work out after that,” Loki had told Tony years later. “Events typically do for me.” It worked out in this case. Steve dragged him down to the Underground, and the base had been eager to nurse him back to health. That was before Loki had regained enough of his health to open his mouth.

This pillow wasn’t befitting the King of Asgard, that food was an offense to his mouth, all subjects should bow before they approach, he was burdened with glorious purpose, and everything in this Midgardian shack was so deathly boring. Everything that came out of his mouth in those first months made you want to smack him. Pepper hated him instantly. She would have resented any extra mouth to feed. A smart-ass one? Pepper and Loki’s shouting matches become infamous almost immediately. Tony on the other hand liked Loki immediately—or more accurately, didn’t hate him from the get-go. It wasn’t even affection so much as commiseration; Tony knew what it was like to wake up from trauma with a body you didn’t recognize. Knew what it was like to have someone you love try to kill you. It became a massive argument between Tony and Pepper, where Tony was taking yet another person’s side over Pepper, in those rough months before Tony and Pepper learned that they couldn’t love each other the way they used to in these new circumstances.

Loki discharged himself from the Med Bay. The doctors insisted that he wasn’t fully recovered. Loki told them that it would take a long, long time if they were waiting for that. It was then that Loki started to wear his homemade iron vanguards, specially designed to dampen a mage’s magic. Thor thought Loki was dead, but apparently magic signatures were about as distinctive as a fingerprint and a hell of a lot more visible. Hill had made it clear that if he gave Thor a target to hone in on, then Loki could get the hell out of the Underground. Loki was fine with that, ready to do that, he told everyone repeatedly, but getting to Midgard had taken so much black magic that Loki couldn’t reverse the process. Not after the beating he’d gotten from Thor. Loki had poured all of his magic and tricks and spells and power into that one battle, and he’d lost it all.

He didn’t do much that first year. He warded the place, sure, but he didn’t teach anyone else how to do, wouldn’t suffer anyone who asked him. He wouldn’t talk about Asgard. He wouldn’t talk about Thor. Most people wished that he wouldn’t talk in general, but he wouldn’t grant them that request either. And all the while he walked through the halls with his blue skin and his red eyes and his slight hunch, twisting away away from walls and the ceiling, as though he no longer trusted himself to know where his body began and ended.

And then, almost exactly on the one-year anniversary of his arrival to Earth, Loki snapped.

“Director Hill”—Tony could remember the squeak in Agent Moore’s voice on this, the first time the man had addressed her out of the blue—“Loki’s left the compound.”

“He’s not authorized to do that,” Hill had said. She’d sounded more baffled than angry. Those days, she still hadn’t grasped that not everyone was a soldier.

Loki was not authorized to leave and yet Loki had; the Underground went into crisis mode. “He’s gone off to betray us to his brother!” was the most popular rumor. “We should have known better than too trust someone who looked like that,” was everywhere in the halls too. By the end of two hours, half the base worried that Thor would break in at any moment, and the other half was certain of it. When Security announced, “He’s back! South Gate!” a crowd swamped the inner doors, ready for him. When the doors opened and Loki stood there, blinking at the mass of people, it was the first and only time that Tony had seriously worried about brutal violence erupting within the Underground. Tony, Steve, and Nat had tensed themselves to act.

Then Lisa Tinker, who must have been only eleven or twelve at the time, ran forward through the crowd, almost crashed into Loki’s legs, and asked him like she was talking to Santa Claus, “Did you find Ella Enchanted?”

And to the crowd’s immense astonishment, Loki reached into the bag he had dragged back with him and pulled out Ella Enchanted. Then he overturned the entire bag at his feet and as beloved childhood book after book tumbled out, he had asked, in the weariest tone Tony had ever heard, “Are you little bastards happy now?”

Loki, it turned out, was one of those general misanthropes who was irresistibly lovable to children. The more he openly hated them, the more they loved him, and they were so much more persistent in their affections than adults that they broke him. The average grownup would ask him about Asgard once and stop the moment Loki sneered at them. Children would take that as encouragement to keep trying for the next three weeks.

“I don’t even like them,” Loki had told Tony while a pack of preteens ran around their legs. “They just won’t leave.”

They called him Uncle Loki sometimes. Everyone except the children found it exceedingly weird.

On that day, surrounded by children who were never satisfied with just one tale of a great Asgardian hero or tragic star-crossed love, Loki had thrown up his hands and asked what, dear gods, could he do that would make them happy. Lisa said if he told the story of Ella Enchanted, she’d be happy forever and never say anything ever to anyone no matter what.

That plan hadn’t worked out the way Loki had expected it. To nobody’s surprise but his own, hunting down the charred remains of the New York Public Libraries to give children the gift of books they’d thought were lost forever didn’t make them stop liking you. To everyone’s surprise, it worked on the adults too. And to Loki’s particular surprise, he found that the tales of Midgard were no less stirring, moving, affecting, powerful, inspirational, comedic, or tragic than the tales of Asgard. If anything, with their exotic locales and strange characters, they were more so, and Loki read them as a life-long reader of realistic fiction might do when they finally discovered that fantasy existed. And they were, at the very least, not boring.

That was the start of the Underground Public Library, and as much as anything in the base belonged to anyone, it belonged to Loki. His scavenge missions turned towards a different purpose than scrap metal and burned out tech. When Loki’d collected more books than the two storage closets in B-Block could hold, he spent a week cleaning out the old ammo depot, filled with bullets for guns that hadn’t been made for a few decades, and moved his books onto the rotating shelves. Over four years he’d gotten nearly twelve thousand of them and spent his off shifts supervising volunteers scanning the books into the Underground’s central terminal. (Supervising looked a lot like Loki propping his feet up on the table, reading, and occasionally shouting general encouragement.)

Besides generally mellowing Loki out, exploring and expanding the library was the exactly one thing in common that Loki and Steve shared. It wasn’t that they disliked each other, their feelings weren’t so strong as that, but there was almost no overlap between them. Steve was one of the friendliest men Tony had ever met, and Loki enjoyed the sound of his own voice to an almost onanistic degree (not that Tony could judge), but somehow they had nothing to say to each other.

“I’m not one of those guys who insists that all my friends need to be friends with each other,” Tony had said more than once, “but I have no idea why you two can’t manage a five minute conversation. It’s fucking ridiculous.”

“You like him too much. You won’t like my reason why I don’t,” Loki had replied the sixth time Tony had pressed him on the subject.

“Try me.”

“He reminds me of Thor.”

Loki had been correct about Tony’s reaction.

(For the record? Steve’s explanation had been simpler. “I know you like him,” Steve had said apologetically, “but he’s a bit of dick.”

Valid.)

But for some inexplicable reason, despite having nothing in common, despite coming from literally different worlds, they had the exact same taste in books, down to the same favorite genres, down to the same favorite authors. Tony was pretty sure they were the only people in the center of the Venn diagrams of fans of dystopian science fiction and cozy English murder mysteries. Steve and Loki didn’t appeal to each other on a personal level, but as fellow book club members, sometimes Tony would drive himself nuts trying to drag one of them off to hang out with him, instead of listening to them spend another hour hashing out exactly where the Dune series had gone wrong.  

The library had been the first place that Tony checked when he went looking for Loki, but the only sign of him in there for the last few days was the dozen books open on the table that took up most of the room. But when Tony went into the stark white room now, there Loki was, his back to the door as he cycled through the shelves and shelves of books stored behind the walls. Tony leaned in the doorway and waited for Loki to say something.

 “Come in or go out, but shut the door either way,” Loki said without turning around.

Tony came in. “You’ve got my wave.”

Loki glanced over his shoulder. “Strictly speaking, it was addressed to Control. I happen to be a member of Control.”

“Didn’t come to our red alert meeting.”

“I still did my part. My little, little part.”

“Warding’s a pretty damn big part, Lo.”

Loki snorted. “I should have met him in combat.”

“Because that worked so well last time.”

“I remember what happened last time.” Loki held up his blue, blue hand for a moment. “It’s hard to forget the outcome of that particular skirmish.” Then he sighed and stopped the shelves from rotating. They rocked back and forth squeaking as Loki’s fingers tripped over the spines. “Just ask.”

“Ask what?” Tony pulled out a chair at the table and sat down.

Loki plucked a book from the shelf and tossed it onto the table with the rest. Parable of the Sower. From what Tony could remember, it was set on a devastated Earth and was relentlessly depressing about it. Loki’s idea of comfort reading seemed to be reading about people who were even worse off. “You know what,” Loki said.

“So what are you thinking about the alternative history genocide deal?”

Loki picked up another book and flipped through it. “We are not going to talk about that.”

“You literally just asked me to ask you about it.”

“I needed you to broach the subject so I could shut it down.”

Tony crossed his arms. “Seems to me you’re pretty good at telling people what to do, with or without an opening.

Loki glanced up at him. “What exactly does that mean?”

“I thought we’re not going to talk about that.”

Loki snapped his book shut. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed, and he had the look of someone who was very consciously reminding himself to take deep breaths. “I…lost my temper yesterday,” he said at last. Hs mouth twisted. “If I had considered that every action I’d take from that point on would be used as evidence of my guilt or innocence for the crimes of this world and another, I would have behaved differently. I would protest the examination, but any disagreeability on my part is no doubt a sign of the evil that has been lurking in my heart all along. I’m amazed that Hill hasn’t run me out of the Underground yet. I’m sure failing to make her meeting means that I have, of course, been collaborating with my brother all along.”

“Calm down, Loki. No one’s judging you, and Hill doesn’t know about any of this,” Tony said. “We didn’t tell her.”

Loki smiled humorlessly. “Pepper didn’t tell her. The rest of you are just going along with her.”

“Yeah, well, that hasn’t served us wrong yet.”

“Who knows why she bothers,” Loki muttered to himself as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a neatly folded square of paper. “Here.” Loki flicked the paper over. It hit Tony in the cheek like a ninja star.

“If I get blinded because you flung a piece of paper at my face, we’re telling everyone that we got into a real actual cool fight and it was very manly and impressive,” Tony said as he unfolded it. Loki just leaned back against the wall, scrolling through his shelves again. The note didn’t take long to translate. Waves were barely a step above telegrams, and this was still in the shorthand that was just a tad longer than actual Morse code. Yes, Dr. Foster said, in keeping with the Tesseract’s known energy properties, it is indeed possible that it could affect the timeline, and in keeping with its quality of shielding itself and its user from its full force, it is also conceivable that someone close to the Tesseract at the time of the energy exchange would remember the previous timeline. This theory was a radical extension of the Tesseract’s known qualities but not a baseless one.

More compelling, however, in the words of Dr. Foster, was the second wave’s—

“Second wave?” Tony asked. “A second unauthorized wave?”

Skimming through a new book, with two other ones tucked under his arm, Loki shrugged.

“Hill is just gonna straight up shoot you soon.”

More compelling was the second wave’s query of whether the unbound Tesseract energy released to accelerate terraforming (here, Darcy Lewis, Dr. Foster’s perpetual hanger-on, added a helpful “Yikes!!!!”) could be used to power an unmediated E-R Bridge between two previously traveled points. This answer was far more conclusive: Yes. Though it would still be extremely difficult, Dr. Foster reluctantly added after spending half a page excitedly laying out all the ways that it could be done. Tony scanned her math. She wasn’t wrong, not on either point. It was very close to not being possible, but it was.

“Did you know that Sif skipped every magic lesson forced on her?” Loki said quietly, watching Tony from the corner. “They are standard for young ladies of the realm. She hated them with as much passion as she loved swordplay and battle. We struck a bargain early on. I was skilled with illusion from a young age, and I used that skill to disguise myself with her image. I took lessons in her place so that I might learn twice as magic, and she would spend her lesson times learning the fighting arts with my brother. We both got what we wanted.”

It was the most that Loki had said about his life on Asgard since three years ago, when how drunk and maudlin Loki had become after Joanna’s latest batch of moonshine had turned, without warning, far less funny.

“Do you understand what I had to do to get to travel between realms after Thor destroyed the Bifrost?” Loki asked. “I was not at home when he went on his rampage. I missed the carnage. I used so much magic trying to get home to Asgard that I thought I would die in the attempt, but I was not successful even at that. I was trapped in an alien and hostile realm for five Earth months, like so many other travelers that have been stranded by the Bifrost’s destruction. After five months, when I had given up hope of rescue, helped arrived in the form of my—of Odin’s ravens.”

“Huginn and Muninn,” Tony said. Loki stared. “Yeah, I know Norse mythology.”

“I wasn’t marveling that you knew it. I was marveling that you could manage to so butcher the pronunciation.”

“Hurtful, Loki.”

“So were the sounds that just came out of your mouth. If I might continue?”

Tony gestured magnanimously.

“Thank you, my lord,” Loki said dryly, but his eyes seemed less distant, his body less tense. Men like Loki and Tony needed their sincerity diluted. “With his dying breath, Odin had sent them to find me, and they passed on the knowledge of my true heritage. I saw—I saw myself grow up through his eyes. I learned everything that he had felt and planned and hoped for me.” Loki fell silent for a moment. Tony didn’t press him. Daddy issues were yet another thing the two of them had in common. “His dying wish was that I would bring my brother home so that he could face justice and find redemption in the courts of Asgard. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to please him. I needed more power than I had to get through. I was…too impatient. I slit the throats of Huginn and Muninn and sacrificed them for enough black magic to force my way to Midgard, where the ravens told me that Thor had fled.” Loki smiled bitterly and held out his arms. “See how well it worked. Now Thought and Memory are dead, and I am crippled and stranded here.”

Tony whistled and tried to think of something to say. “Wow.” Then he slapped Loki’s knee. “Well, we’ve all fucked something up by killing anthropomorphic aspects of the universe, no point dwelling. So you’re saying that Sif has nowhere near the magical abilities or know how that you do so how the hell did she get through if not by utilizing Tesseract energy.”

Loki blinked. It looked like his brain needed a second to get out of shameful memory lane. “Er, yes. That is exactly what I am saying.”

Tony leaned forward on the table as his big, beautiful brain started suggesting things to him that he wasn’t sure how he felt about. “What’re you proposing to do with this information?”

Loki leaned forward too, his face set and serious. “We leave Midgard. We never return.”

Silence hung in the library.

“You’re gonna need to repeat that,” Tony said.

“We leave,” Loki said excitedly. “You, me, Pepper, A-Block, B-Block, every block—we open a portal inside the Underground and we transport all organic matter to Asgard.”

“We abandon Earth.”

“The Chitauri have already won it. Midgardians, by any metric, are an endangered species, and their habitat is dwindling.”

“So we abandon our habitat.”

“If that’s what it takes to survive. Do you think you have any chance of reclaiming Midgard? There is none. You have been beyond decimated. Your air is poison, your atmosphere is no longer your own. Have you seen the plant clippings Steve and Natasha brought back from Chicago? What grows there now is utterly foreign to your planet. You have been colonized. Now you are being exterminated.”

The words rang in Tony’s ears. He couldn’t think, but he could, but he didn’t want to, but his brain did anyway. What Loki said was true. Tony, who was so practical about the world, so forward thinking about the world, so willing to handle the ugliness of the world, had ignored the central fact of it: They had lost. There was nothing to save except the people who still, despite all the odds, lived.

But to abandon the Earth, to abandon the largest, most all-encompassing definition of home that Tony and every other human being on Earth had—“How?” Tony asked.

Loki rubbed his forehead, between the rough and strange ridges that marked him. “The wards that protect the Underground by keeping magic out keep magic in as well. That provides a natural boundary for the spell. We can magnify the magical energy by bouncing it off the steel walls of the inner core, similar to placing a candle by a mirror so that it shines more light. That still would not be enough in a typical situation, but the free-floating Tesseract energy amplifies any magic done in the area. I will need your help with implementing Dr. Foster’s suggestions, but I swear to you, I can take everyone in this base to Asgard within a week from today.”

Tony glanced over the science. That was doable. That was all very much doable. He was so caught up thinking about just how doable that was that it took a moment to register the most important thing Loki had said. “A week? Isn’t this plan of yours dependent on being in an area where Tesseract energy is high?”

Loki just looked at him, his lips pressed together.

Sif came through here. Her portal opened here. Not in Chicago where they knew the Tesseract had been in overdrive.  She came to New York, right inside the Underground.

“How long?” Tony asked through the numbness of his realization. “How long has the Tesseract been working its magic in New York?”

“I cannot be sure,” Loki said. “I’d wager it’s been a week.”

Tony rubbed his eyes and wished that he was drinking something. “Why a week?”

“Barton started nicking himself around then when he has never injured himself before. Natasha believes that Barton degenerated because she wasn’t there, but we both know that he cannot tell one human from the next. The agents of infection do not fester in the body. The symptoms do not progress without further exposure. Barton has not left F-Block these past nine months.”

“But Barton has progressed.” Tony dropped his head in his hands. “Jesus.” He was breathing it in. He was breathing it in right now, and soon he would be mute, be deaf, be stupid and wild and, and, and Chitauri. But only a little Chitauri. A defective Chitauri. If he was far enough along, the Chitauri would recognize him as one of their own, a sick and ugly brother who didn’t know how to behave. They’d take him into their hive—Stark Towers, he could finally live in his home again, wasn’t that just so fucking funny—and they’d care for him until he died, and he would die because their food wouldn’t nourish him, their air wouldn’t sustain him, and when he died, they’d keen for him, their high-pitched shriek of mourning, before they devoured his body for nutrients.

“Breathe, Tony.” Loki’s voice sounded as if Tony were floating underwater and Loki floated on the surface. “You have no symptoms. Barton is progressing because Barton is hypersensitive to infection.”

“Our canary in the mine,” Tony said. For some reason, his head was between his knees. Oh right. Panic attack. Tony breathed until it felt natural again and straightened. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?” It came out as harsh and accusatory. Tony meant it that way. Loki had nothing to fear from infection, but he’d hidden this.

Loki leaned back, and Tony could see coldness drop across his face like a mask. “It only occurred to me last night,” he said, his words clipped. “Recent events made me consider the possibility.”

“Recent events? Like your pissed off ex-girlfriend saying that this is all your fault?”

Loki jerked his head and fixed his eyes on the wall. “I believe you said that I was too incompetent to be evil.” The words dripped like venom. “How quickly your opinion of my abilities has changed.”

Tony sighed (and the air he exhaled was poison, was killing him, was turning him). “I’m on your side, asshole.”

“Yes, right now, I am really feeling how very much on my side you are.”

“Fuck you, Loki. This is why everyone finds it plausible that you’d try and destroy a planet because you were having a temper tantrum.”

In an instant, Loki was on the other side of the table. He yanked Tony’s chair back and raised his hand. He looked truly monstrous then, his blood red eyes burning with rage while his hand shook in the air. Tony sat there, perfectly still. Except for his left hand, dangling beside him. His left hand was getting ready, just in case.

Loki’s hand curled into a fist. He pressed that fist against his mouth. His other hand still gripping Tony’s chair, his fist warping the metal, but it seemed almost as if it was to keep him upright. “I am not who Sif thinks I am.” The words came out haltingly and quiet. “I swear that I am not.”

Tony could feel his emergency repulsor whirring noiselessly in his left fist. He’d put it on before he’d come to the library to find Loki. For the first time, the thought of being alone with Loki had made him nervous. Loki’s eyes darted down to Tony’s fist. Tony tensed.

“Stop.”

Loki and Tony jerked their heads to the doorway. Natasha stood there, her arms crossed, leaning against the frame. The three of them regarded each other for a moment.

“How long have you been there?” Loki asked.

“Just a moment,” she replied. “But a better question would be how long was I listening.”

Neither of them asked the question.

“Clint’s worse.” She did not say it as if it were a question. “In Asgard, can they heal him?”

Loki pried his hand free of the back on Tony’s seat and straightened. His face was always hard to reach, so alien to Tony, but he could swear that shame flitted across it now. “They have the best healers in the Nine Realms.”

“Does that mean they can heal him?”

“It means they have a better chance than anyone else.”

Natasha looked away, her faded brown hair hiding her face from them. Tony thought for a moment that she was going to cry, but he instantly thought better of it. He had no doubt that Natasha could cry. She was not a robot. But she’d cry when no one could see her, not even Barton. She wouldn’t want to see him do nothing as she wept.

“We need to discuss this with Control,” she said. Her voice was perfectly level. “Steve’s already requested a meeting tonight. Seventeen hundred hours. Level seven classification.” She flipped her hair out of her face to raise her eyebrow at Loki. “Everyone’s attendance is mandatory.” 

She left, and the door slid shut, and Tony and Loki did not look at each other.

***

The meeting was a long, quiet, bitter affair. Natasha told Loki to repeat what he had figured out, and the room absorbed that incoming tragedy with the air of people with too much experience. Steve explained his theory, his suicide attack to save the dead. He kept looking at Tony while he spoke. Tony studied the walls.

“That’s insane,” Hill said when he was done.

“I know, ma’am,” Steve said. “But what other choice do we have?”

“More than just that one,” Loki drawled from the corner.

“So we fight for the Earth,” Pepper said when Loki was done explaining his plan, “or we leave it.”

Natasha sat with her arms folded on the table, her head half-bowed. “Or we die.”

Hill looked to Tony and Loki. “How long do we have?”

“We can’t be sure,” Loki said. “We don’t know when Chicago started to collapse. We only know that it did. When healthy people begin to succumb, we’ll have a better idea of the timeline. Right now, I would estimate three, perhaps four weeks before we begin to see notable numbers of infected progressed enough to disrupt the Underground.”

Hill dropped her head into her hand, covering her eyes. “One month.”

“Then this is the bottom of the ninth. This is the last charge,” Steve said. “If the Tesseract is in the city, we can throw everything we have at it without fear that we’re risking lives we can’t spare because those lives would be lost even if we did nothing.”

“Or we save ourselves by getting the hell out of here,” Tony said. “Say ‘so long, Earth, sorry that didn’t work out,’ and rip ourselves a portal to Asgard.”

“You’d run?” Steve looked honestly shocked. 

“I’d retreat,” Tony said pointedly. “If that’s what it took to save the soldiers we have left.”

“This is our home, Tony. Not just this city or this base or the people in it. Earth is our home. Every moment that you have been alive, you have been on this planet. That’s worth fighting for.”

“There’s no fight, Steve! There was one five years ago, and if you haven’t noticed, we’ve been licking our wounds since. The people we have left? Cap, that’s worth fighting for.”

Pepper raised her hand for attention before she rested it for a moment on Steve’s arm. “We can’t risk everything and everyone we’ve managed to keep safe for the sake of hope.”

“What about the people that we haven’t kept safe?” Natasha said.

“We mourn them,” Pepper said firmly. “And we move on.”

Natasha straightened and shook her head. “Do you understand what this chance means? Any of you?” She looked around the table, stopping on each of their faces. “The chance to undo your greatest failure. That is what we have before us. There is no atonement more perfect than making sure your crime never happened in the first place.”

“What crime have we committed?” Hill asked.

“It was our job to protect the Earth,” Natasha said. “We failed.”

“Then it’s our job to protect what’s left of it,” Pepper said.

“Not all of what’s left of it.” Steve gestured to Loki. “Only the New York Underground, right?”

Everyone turned to look at him. Loki sat there, his fingers laced on top of his head. “At the moment, yes.”

“Maybe once we’re in Asgard, Loki can pop back for everyone else,” Pepper said.

Loki grimaced. “Perhaps someone in Asgard can. There is a legitimate chance that opening a portal wide enough to transport three thousand one hundred eighty-seven people might kill me—”

Pepper’s head snapped towards him. “What.”

“It’s not Plan A, I assure you. Whatever happens, I will be out of commission. Perhaps there will be another mage, perhaps the circumstances will work out.” Loki ran his fingers through his long black hair. “I can only promise the Underground.”

Steve nodded as if something had been confirmed. “We can’t leave our other bases to die.”

Tony threw up his hands. “Maybe we have to, Steve. Maybe trying to save everyone is going to get everyone killed.” Tony rubbed his hands over his face, his head pounding like someone inside was trying to punch their way out. “It’s easy,” he said eventually, “to sit there and tell us what the noble thing to do is. It’s easy to be the guy who says, ‘Hey, maybe things will all work out the best possible way.’ But Steve, you have nothing but the word of woman you just met, a woman who admits herself that she’s not sure what will happen. That’s it. That’s all.”

Steve smiled a little sad smile. “I have faith.” He said it like he knew how weak it sounded. He said it like he didn’t care.

Tony couldn’t return Steve’s smile, apologetic as it was. “You know that’s not enough.”

“Enough.” Hill steepled her fingers together and peered over them. “At this point in time, we have no viable third option, and we have no consensus on which of the two actions to take. Evacuation has majority, but I am not convinced.” Her eyes darted to Steve. “I have some faith too.” Her mouth quirked. “And I know my predecessor would charge without hesitation. But he’s dead. We’re not, and I have to believe that at least part of the reason that is true is because we are not stupid or inflexible or short-sighted. Loki, the portal spell takes time to prepare, correct?” Loki nodded. “Prepare it. Tony, scan for the Tesseract; give me a location we can attack. Steve, Natasha, draw up your battle plans. Pepper, you draw up the supplies we’d need for either evacuation or attack.” She surveyed them, a commander sizing up her troops. “We’ll take a breath. We’ll collect ourselves. We’ll gather what information we can. And when we act, it will not be in haste or panic.” She spread her hands. “Any objections?”

Everyone else started talking at once.

“Good to hear,” Hill said, standing. “Meeting adjourned.”

***

The few days were pretty much the last five minutes of the Control meeting stretched to the breaking point. Strictly speaking, the Chicago situation, Sif’s information, and the danger to New York was classified—and to their credit, everyone in Control kept the specific details to themselves—but it was hard to hide anxiety in such a small place, and nerves spread like wildfire. A constant low-level fear permeated the Underground at all hours, spread by the mass of people who did not know why they were feeling that way and were starting to be quite sore about that. Tony did what he always did when life started to weigh too heavily—he threw himself into his work.

After twelve straight hours recalibrating the scanners with the sporadic input from Foster, he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples for awhile. Then he called up Hill on the radio. “Filtered out the false energy peaks we’ve been getting and pinpointed a location. Within five feet. Yeah,” Tony said, his hand still over his eyes. “Take a guess where it is. Take one guess.”

In retrospect, Tony thought as he hung up, there hadn’t been any point in searching for the Tesseract. Where else could it be? New York City had almost no intact structures save for three hives being built in a one mile triangle around the main one, the only intact structure. The Tesseract was on the rooftop of Stark Towers.

Of fucking course it was.

Now that he had a place to attack, Steve was off. “The shield surrounding the Tower is our first obstacle, but we might be able to turn it to our advantage.” Steve told Tony when Tony told him. Tony grunted in response. “Only the Chitauri can go in and out. They won’t be expecting an attack.”

“No, they won’t,” Tony said. Something in his voice made Steve shut up about it. At least for the three minutes it took him to find Natasha.

“The shield doesn’t matter,” Loki said when Tony told him. “We’re not attacking the Tower, and the shield clearly is not blocking the Tesseract energy.”

“Yeah, but if you were going to attack it—”

“But we’re not,” Loki said, and now it was Tony’s turn to shut up.

It would be easier if he had someone, anyone, he could talk to right now. Tony wasn’t big on “feelings” and “sharing”, but he just need someone to shut up and listen to him rant. His usual go-to person for this was Steve, but considering that what he wanted to rant about was Steve, that didn’t seem like a great choice. Loki wasn’t much better right now since any mention of any plan except leaving made him go cold. Pepper would help, she was good at helping, but Pepper was busy herself, coordinating for two possible plans. Anyway, she was spending what free time she had with Loki these days. Tony didn’t begrudge them that. Loki needed her more right now. At least Tony was only dealing with one world’s emotional problems. The problem was, that was the end of the list of close friends.

Happy was dead. Rhodey was dead. Tony didn’t like thinking about it because it felt like his arc reactor used to feel, like he’d had something organic ripped away from him and now there was just cold machinery. He didn’t like thinking about it, but sometimes he couldn’t avoid it. Happy died in Malibu when California was hit. Rhodey died in action, in a suit half-painted red, white, and blue. The government had been thinking about renaming him the Iron Patriot. At least he’d died War Machine. Tony wasn’t sure how much he was joking about that.

Tony’s circle of friends had always been small. He didn’t say that in a ‘boo hoo, woe is me, kind of way.’ It was fact. Tony knew exactly what he was and what that meant, and there was a limited amount of people who could put up with that. Who could, in turn, appeal to him. Tony was luckier than most. He’d had less people he loved to lose. But Rhodey was dead and Happy was dead and Pepper was different and Loki was distant and Steve was his opponent.

Steve was the one that hurt the most right now. The other wounds were old ones he’d sampled a hundred different ways. But Steve was new. He could be stubborn, self-righteous, proud, combative, and convinced of his own morality, sure, but those were the flaws that made him worth knowing. And even at his most god-awful annoying, he was Tony’s ally. He was his rock. He was his foundation. Whenever Tony pictured himself dying in battle (sometimes fearfully, sometimes wistfully), it was always Steve at his back. And whenever Tony thought he was actually about to die in battle, there Steve still was, bringing him home. Steve’s friendship was such an easy given that Tony could not tell you when it had begun, when it had become essential. But ever since Steve had come back from Chicago, their friendship had felt awkward like it never had before, like a well-worn coat that suddenly didn’t quite fit anymore. And if Tony was truthful, reluctantly so, he would have to admit that it wasn’t just the fact that Steve was advocating a suicide run that made Tony not know what to say around him anymore.

The one time in three days that Tony went to bed, he thought long and hard about walking past his door, down the next corridor, and finding Steve’s. He could stand silently in front of it for ten minutes. Knock. Wait. Maybe Steve would just lie there, like Tony had lain there, and wait for Tony to get the hint. That’d be fair enough. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d open the door and blink up at Tony, framed in the light of the hallway, as Tony’s mouth went dry at the memory of the taste of Steve’s mouth.

Tony went to his own room that night. He stared at the ceiling and jerked off to nothing in particular and fell asleep a minute after he was done. In the morning, he went back to work.

“It’s not that much to ask that all my friends not be in direct conflict with each other and or me,” Tony said as the open chest of the suit sparked underneath him. It seemed like a good idea lately to upgrade the weapon tech. “I mean, just because some people are correctly dealing with the super complicated and totally classified plan that you know nothing about and other people are incorrectly dealing doesn’t mean that we’ve got to make breakfast meetings awkward, you know?” Tony nodded. “You know. You get it. You’ve been there.”

“Shh,” Max said, staring down at a stack of wards on her side of the workbench.

“You’re right, I’m just making noises, you aren’t supposed to be hearing this anyway. Forget that it left my lips. But come the fuck on, everybody. Whatever happened to solving our problems by getting drunk and fighting? I miss college. And the days when ninety percent of the Earth’s population hadn’t just been killed in a week.”

“Shh.”

“You gotta admit that last grievance is a valid one.” Tony flipped his wrench in the air a few times as he thought. He glanced over at Max. She wasn’t even looking at him. Whatever. He didn’t need her vindication of his awesome wrench catching skills. “Seriously, Max, thanks for listening to all this for the last...” He checked his watch. “Three hours. It feels good to get it off my chest.” He wagged the wrench at her. “You know, most people just zone me out when I talk this long. Their loss is what I say. I’m fucking charming.”

Max looked down at her wards. She seemed to be swaying. No, she was definitely swaying.

“Max?”

She shook her head slowly as she raised it. Her eyes scanned the room like she didn’t recognize it, like she didn’t even see it. She opened her mouth. A little whimper came out. Tony dashed to her side of the table and forced her head up so he could look in her eyes. In the bright room, her pupils were blown so large they hid almost all the green of her eyes. “Ah hur em,” she said, her mouth and tongue limp. “Ehn meh ed.”

Tony fumbled with his radio, snapped it on. “Stark here,” he barked into it. “Garage Alpha, in A-Block. We need a med team down here stat.” He gripped her by the shoulders and shook her. “Max, honey, sweetheart, stay with me.” Her head started to droop back down. He grabbed her by the chin and forced her to look at him. “Here. You’re here. Stay here.”

“Whispers,” she said, her eyes wide with terror. Of what? Of him? Of what she heard in her head? “Whispers.”

Between that moment and the med team wheeling her off to Med Bay, Max didn’t speak another word.

Hill came to Max’s bedside with flowers. Synth flowers, of course, cheap and cheap-looking, made from the leftover or ruined supplies in Textiles and Plastics to sell for a few credits to whoever wanted to brighten up their room. Max would hate them. Tony thanked Hill for bringing them and told her to put them right on the bedside where Max could see them. It wasn’t like Max would care anymore.

“She was always at higher risk for infection,” Hill said, her hands clasped behind her. “Working with magic is known to lower resistance.”

“I know what lowers resistance,” Tony said. He sat slumped in the chair by her bedside, where he had been for the last two hours. Her illness was highly classified. She wouldn’t get any other visitors. “Our second canary in the mine. The other magelets will start dropping soon. The Mathematicks and Metaphysics Division is gonna get real small real quickly.”

“We’re not going to let that happen.”

“No?” Tony snorted. “Isn’t that a relief.”

“We decide tonight.”

Tony lifted his head. “Are you joking?”

“Do I look like I joke?”

Tony didn’t answer that. Instead, he said, “What’ll it be then? Fight’s got the current majority, I’d like to point out, though I’m sure that if you vote for flight, you’ll say your vote counts as two.”

She smiled like she knew a joke that Tony didn’t, and she still didn’t find it that funny. “Everyone’s vote counts the same.”

“Then what’s yours?”

Hill’s back was straight as a ramrod as she walked around Max’s bed. She looked down at her sleeping form, dozing in her medically induced coma. “The Underground was a SHIELD base. The majority of the people hand-selected to enter it in the case of emergency are SHIELD personnel. This is, for all intents and purposes, a military base, and we have run it as such. I have run it as such. But the decision that we must make does not just affect Control. Every single living person in this base will live or die, one way or another, because of the events that must unfold.”

Tony straightened in his chair. “Exactly what are you proposing?”

Hill raised her eyes from Max’s still body. “It’s radical.”

Tony held up his fist with thumb and pinky extended. “I’m radical.”

“Democracy.”

Tony dropped his hand. “Not that radical.”

***

“Ma’am, we’re go for base-wide broadcast on your command,” the communications engineer told Hill with a crisp salute.

Hill checked her watch. “We’re scheduled to begin in one minute. Start the countdown.”

Pepper straightened Tony’s collar, for all the good it would do for a radio broadcast. “You’ve got your notes?” He waved them in the air in front of her. “And you’ll stick to them?”

“I’ll glance down at them, sure,” Tony said.

“Stick to them,” she said. “Loki wanted me to tell you that he’ll skin you alive if you mess this up.”

“What a charming guy. He could have given the speech himself.”

“No, he couldn’t have. Not according to him.” Pepper brushed invisible dust off Tony’s shoulder. “He says that you’re much more beloved here than he is. And since he’s in one of his fits of self-pity, he said that he’s the opposite of that.” 

Tony smiled to himself. “Behated?”

Pepper raised an eyebrow. “You two are weird.”

“Ten seconds!” the engineer called out. Pepper backed away and gave him a thumbs-up. She saw Steve looking at them from his chair on the other side of the small room. After a second, she smiled at him too. The engineer held up three fingers, then two, then one. The red light by the microphone placed in front of Hill turned on.

“Citizens of the Underground,” Hill said, “this is your Director speaking.” Her voice would be booming through every Block, every work station, every hallway, but in the soundproof communication hub, it sounded like she was just speaking to the people in the room. “As you are aware, six days ago, an Asgardian broke through from her realm to ours. What you have not been made aware of is the information she provided. Nor have you been made aware of what Captain Rogers and Agent Romanov learned on their reconnaissance mission to Chicago. We kept this information classified in the hopes of preserving calm while Control prepared our actions. However, it is clear now that Control alone cannot decide the fate of this base. This evening, I will tell you what we know. Captain Rogers and Mr. Stark will present two distinct plans of action based on that information. Then when we all have the same level of intelligence to draw upon, every member of this base will vote. Simple majority will carry the day.”

Tony and Steve glanced at each other as Hill talked. Steve gave him a small smile, but he clenched his notes in his hands like he was wringing something’s neck. It was good to see that Steve wasn’t quite ready for democracy in action either. He’d liked the plan more than Tony had, of course. Captain America was predictably jazzed for voting. To Tony, this seemed like the worst time to start experimenting in popular politics, but he had been, ironically enough, out voted by the rest of Control. (Loki, obviously, had been against voting too, although the argument “Kings don’t consult peasants about battle plans” didn’t really help Tony’s case.)

Nervous? Tony hand signed to Steve.

Steve shrugged sheepishly. A bit, he signed back. Marni Waters taught ASL to a surprisingly large class on her off-shift for extra credits. It passed the time.

Christ, Tony’s free-time was so wholesome these days.

You’ve given speeches before, Tony signed.

Scripted ones for the USO aimed at children, Steve signed back.  My reputation for speeches is overrated.

You don’t have a reputation for speeches.

And it’s still overrated.

Tony started to laugh and stopped as Hill gave him a death glare as her own speech rolled smoothly on.

She’s leaving Loki out of it, Steve signed when Tony looked back.

Pepper didn’t tell her about him. And if Hill found out from Sif on her own, Loki’s not relevant to what they need to know. It would just distract them.

I wasn’t questioning the decision, Steve signed. I was just remarking on it.

Tony rubbed his eyes. I know.

You’re protective of him.

I don’t want to ride his dick, if that’s what you’re asking.

Now it was Steve’s turned to be glared at by Hill. It’s not. He paused. I did wonder. You two seemed closer than when I left.

“He’s blue!” burst out of Tony’s mouth

“According to our informant, these actions caused a fracture in history,” Hill said while her fingers snapped out, Shut the fuck up or I will shut you the fuck up. Apparently Hill also took classes with Marni.

Tony and Steve didn’t sign to each other after that. Hill’s part was almost done anyway. They’d flipped for who went first. Tony had the honors. He wasn’t sure if he won or lost. His stomach flopped as Hill gestured him up to the microphone. He wasn’t a nervous public speaker, God no, but there was something intimidating about knowing that your words would tip history the right way or the wrong way.

“Stark here,” he said the engineer gave him the thumbs-up. “I know nobody’s plans for the evening involved a Fireside Chat so I’ll keep it brief.” Tony glanced down at his notes. He crumpled them and shoved them in his pockets. Fuck it. He knew he wasn’t much of a writer, but Tony was one hell of a bullshitter.

Why?! Pepper violently mouthed at him.

“I’m supposed to explain the evacuation plan to you. You know the evacuation plan. We’re here, there’s magic, we’re not here. That’s it. There’s not much more to it than that. So I’m not going to waste your time with the hows of it—you know me. You know Loki. It’ll work. And if there’s one thing we can take away from this week, it’s that we don’t have enough time to waste any of it.

“But we knew that already, didn’t we? We know that because we’ve spent the last five years on borrowed time. There’s no reason that we had to be the ones that survived. When a city’s crumbling around your head, the debris doesn’t stop to ask, ‘Oh, are you good with bio engineering? Can you synthesize heart medicine with some expired pills made around the time that Sputnik was the only thing in the sky that we were afraid of?’

“We survived because we were lucky. The right place, the right time, we ran faster than the person behind us or we stumbled out of the way of a gunshot. There’s nothing special about what we did to get into the Underground.” Tony closed his eyes. He imagined his audience. By this point, he might not have known all of their names or all of their stories, but he knew all of their faces, and he pulled them up one by one. “That’s before, though. That’s the prequel. Because once we were here? Once the universe handed us the smallest amount of control back? And we took it and we ran with it? Damn straight we’re special. Damn straight we’re the best. And damn straight we exceed every expectation we had because, I’m not sure if you guys remember this, those expectations? Not high.

“We didn’t just carve out a living for ourselves down here in the asshole of New York. We carved out a life. I’ve seen our children grow. I’ve seen our community thrive. I’ve seen 21 Jump Street at least four times. That’s gotta be a mark of culture. Some kind of culture. Our kind of culture. At no point in the last five years was any kind of happiness likely.” He opened his eyes again, and there Steve was, looking at Tony like—like—like Tony made him happy. “You’ve made me happy,” Tony said. “When I had no right to feel that way. We’ve made each other happy when logic dictates how impossible that should have been. And if that doesn’t sound like an accomplishment, take it from someone who spent the first forty-one years of their life stumbling through it—there’s nothing better. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve done the extraordinary. So let’s feast at Valhalla. Let’s walk in the sunshine. Let’s get the hell off this planet, fuck some hot Vikings, and die of old age. We’ve earned nothing less. We deserved life.” And then, because that didn’t quite feel complete, “Stark out.”

He wished he was in the same room as his audience. He needed to hear if they were cheering or booing or sitting in rapturous silence. The quiet that followed him as he stepped away from the mike made his stomach churn again. But he smirked and strutted his way back to his seat. He knew if he faked it long enough, he’d feel it. As he passed Steve, Tony grabbed his hand and pulled him in for a one-armed bro hug. “And that’s how you do it,” he said in Steve’s ear, too quiet for the mike to pick up.  

“Always nice to see a master at work,” Steve replied. Tony started to move away so Steve could walk passed, but Steve held him tight in place. “I’d vote for your plan,” Steve murmured so quietly that Tony almost thought that he’d misheard him before Steve stepped away and readied himself to speak. He took a breath, his head bowed as if in prayer. Tony waited for him to become Captain America.

“Captain Rogers, speaking for Plan B,” the engineer said and gestured for Steve to go.

But Steve didn’t, not for at least ten seconds as he stared down at the notes in his hand. Then he folded them up and tucked them away. “This isn’t the speech I had planned.” It wasn’t the Captain voice, wise and old as George Washington himself. It was just—Steve. And he looked only at Tony while he spoke.  “But Tony did so well improvising that I thought I’d be at a disadvantage if I didn’t speak from the heart. Nothing he said was wrong. I can’t stand up here and tell you that you don’t deserve peace. You do. And I can’t tell you that my plan’s going to work. I don’t know.”

Not the best approach, Tony signed.

Steve waved him off. “He did a gracious thing right now. He didn’t tell you all the ways my plan will get you killed for no guarantee of anything. Except death, something that we all know too much about. It’s true, there’s nothing that says destroying the Tesseract will change anything. We’ve asked every expert we could think to ask, the few that we could find, and they all said the same thing. Maybe. Maybe not.”

Steve, if you wanted to vote for my plan, you could have just done that from the get-go.

Steve was silent for a moment. Out of the corner of his eye, Tony could see Hill shifting uncomfortably.

“I’ve lost a world before,” he said, his voice soft. “I woke up to find that everything I knew was gone and everyone I knew was dead. Then three months later, I lost the world again.” He smiled sadly. “But your world still wasn’t mine. My world died a natural death. Your world was murdered. Over the last five years, you have told me about the faces that come to you when you least expect it. You have lost so many people that grief must seem impossible. How do you cry for an entire world, killed too soon? Over the last five years, I have witness pain that I can’t imagine. What I lost I lost too quickly, but I lost what you are supposed to lose over the course of a long, long life. My world faded with time. Yours was ripped from you.”

Without seeming to realize that he was doing it, Steve stretched his hands in front of himself and gripped them tight. “We have a chance to rip it back. You’ve lost so many people. Tony says that we survived at first because we were lucky. How many people that you loved weren’t? Don’t think of all of them. You can’t. You’ll drown. Just think of one. We all have that one or that two or that group. Their faces float up when you forget to not think about them. Maybe they are your mother. Your brother. Your best friend. Your wife. Or they were someone you were just beginning to love when they weren’t… lucky.

“If the Lady Sif had never come, maybe I could have supported evacuation. Then again, maybe not. I think I’d want to die on Earth, defending my home. It’s still our home. Someone else has moved in, but that doesn’t make it theirs.” Steve shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Sif came here. She told us about the Tesseract. Maybe she’s crazy. Maybe she’s wrong. But I keep picturing my faces. The faces that float up for me. And I know that even if there was the slightest chance that I could have saved them, there isn’t a chance in hell I wouldn’t jump on that.

“We have an opportunity that nobody gets. We have the chance to undo the wrongs of the past. We can make it like it never happened. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe we’ll just die. I don’t know. But I do know that I’ve spent so much of the last five years thinking that I was trapped in a nightmare. Let’s make that true. This isn’t the world you were meant to have. Let’s wake up. Let’s wake up beside the people that we’ve lost and not remember why we missed them so much. We can do it. I have no proof, but I have certainty and enough evidence that makes me think I’m not just crazy. This is not the way the world is supposed to be. We can change that.”

The way Steve said it, Tony wanted to believe it. He almost did for a moment.

Steve ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck. “And if that’s not what happens, let’s take down as many Chitauri as we can with us.” He stepped away and sat back down, this time next to Tony, so close that their legs bumped. Neither moved. Steve leaned over close enough to whisper in Tony’s ear. “It’s hard to end when nobody claps.” His warm breath made Tony shiver.

“Yeah,” Tony said. That was about how articulate he was feeling right now. “So has it really been that bad for you?” The sentence was supposed to come out jokingly. Tony wasn’t sure how successful that was.

“Not all of it,” Steve whispered.

“Ms. Potts has set up ballot boxes in each Block’s caf,” Hill said, her voice cutting through. “Everyone must vote within the next four hours. No exceptions, no abstentions. You will have three options.” Tony and Steve both raised their eyebrows at that. Three? “To support the assault on Stark Towers with the aim of destroying the Tesseract. To escape Earth to Asgard and set up a new colony there. Or the third option, which states that you prefer to evacuate, but if the vote approves the attack, you will stay on Earth to support it.”

Compromise, boys, Hill signed to them as she laid out voting procedure. It’s not that hard.

“Consider your options and cast your vote,” Hill said. “And choose wisely.” She ran her hand across her neck in a slicing gesture, and the engineer cut the feed. “Let’s hope they get it right.”

“And which one’s the right one?” Tony asked.

“Whichever one results in the greatest good for the greatest amount of people,” Hill replied as she walked to the door, Pepper at her heels. “If someone could just tell me which one that was, that’d be fabulous.”

As the door slid shut behind them, Tony said to Steve, “Hill’s getting better with her dramatic flair. That must be mandatory for a director of SHIELD. I’m pretty sure Nick Fury used to lurk in dark rooms for hours so he could pop out at the most dramatic moments.”

“She has gotten good at her job,” Steve said.

“Can’t disagree.” They sat quietly together for a moment. Outside this room, three thousand people were deciding their future. It wasn’t in Tony’s hands anymore. It wasn’t in Steve’s either. It was in everyone’s and so, in a way, no one’s. Tony wasn’t sure if that was terrifying or freeing. A bit of both. A lot of both.

“They’re going to vote for you,” Steve said.

Tony shook his head. “They might vote for my plan, but they aren’t voting for me. If this was based solely on who gave the speech, you’d win in a landslide.”

“You really do underestimate how much people like you.”

Tony smiled. “I know people love me, Steve. I’ll bitch about how they don’t show it enough, but that’s just me. I bitch about things. It’s who I am. And that’s not what I meant.” Tony tried to figure out how to say what he was about to say. In the end, he went with just saying it. “Being near you,” he said, “makes remaking the world seem possible.”

Steve went pink in the cheeks. For a moment, he didn’t seem to know what to say. “We’ve been on the opposite side of this issue almost since the moment I got back,” he said. “I think it’s time both sides came together.”

Tony clasped Steve on the shoulder. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “if we’re gonna fight, you know I’ll be at your side.”

“That’s worth so much,” Steve said. “But that wasn’t what I meant.” He put his hand on Tony’s thigh. “I think it’s time both sides came together.” He said the last bit very pointedly. On the other side of the room, the comm engineer spluttered. A second later, Tony did too.

“You got smutty in Chicago,” Tony said as he stood, grabbing Steve by the hand. “I like it.”

“Thanks,” Steve said. “Truth be told, I thought of that two days ago. I was trying to pick the best moment to use it.”

“Good moment,” Tony said. “Great moment.” As he pulled Steve out of the room, he turned around and waved. “Later, Lenny!” he shouted as the doors closed.

“He’s going to tell everyone,” Steve said. He didn’t sound alarmed by the idea.

“Fuck it. Let him,” Tony replied. “In the meantime, it’s gonna take four hours to vote and two hours to check. And I—I’ve missed you.”

Steve replied by pushing Tony against the wall, right there in the corridor as a dozen people walked passed, and kissing him until his legs stopped working.

On the one hand, by any reasonable measure, six hours was a long time to have sex. But on the other hand, Steve had a super soldier’s stamina, Tony hadn’t had sex for six months, and neither one of them liked to be the first one to back down. And in truth, it wasn’t six continuous hours of sex. Hell, they were both so primed by the time they finally made it back to Tony’s room, that the time between the door closing and both of them coming was about four minutes.

“Like I’m a fucking teenager,” Tony grumbled when he could talk again. “Like I’m fucking a teenager.”

Steve grinned at him. He wasn’t even all the way naked yet. They hadn’t even gotten that far. “That just makes the next time last longer.”

Tony groaned as Steve rolled over on top of him. “Okay, so I’m going to say something that I promised myself I’d never say,” Tony started as Steve kissed his way down his chest, “but I’m too old for this shit.”

Steve nipped at Tony’s hipbone before he looked up at Tony through those Bambi lashes. “You’ve said that before.”

“Have I?” Tony was having difficulty remembering as Steve’s tongue darted in the dip underneath the bone. “Damn. I am too old for this.” Steve’s hands stroked Tony’s thighs, slowly spreading him wide. Tony ran his hands through Steve’s hair and tugged. “Whippersnapper.” Tony felt Steve’s grin against his skin. “I’m not like you,” he said as Steve moved even further down. “I need more than three minutes between rounds. You can’t just send me back into the ring.”

Steve paused, his lips so close and miles away. “Is the great Tony Stark saying that he can’t do something?”

Tony tugged Steve’s hair. “My ego’s not what you’re supposed to be stroking right now. You’re missing the—ngh.”

Steve had remembered what he was supposed to be stroking. Conversation stopped after that.

Tony laid on top of Steve as they dozed. It wasn’t his choice. With the size of the room they were working with, you had to get cozy, but Tony had never been a cuddler, not with one night stands and not with Pepper, and Steve was like a furnace. Combine that with the fact when you press two naked, sweaty bodies together, the result is akin to glue. But on the other hand, this was Steve lying underneath him. Steve’s arms wrapped around him. Steve’s heartbeat filling his ears.

Steve’s ridiculous body heat.

“Nothing’s simple with you,” Tony said as he tried to find a way to lay in Steve’s arms without burning to death.

Steve hummed, half-asleep. “Sorry.”

Tony tried to settle into the crook of his arm. He failed. So he pushed Steve on his side until Tony was pressed against his back, one arm under Steve’s neck, the other thrown over his chest. “You complicate things,” Tony said against Steve’s back. “You always have.”

Steve reached up and squeezed Tony’s hand. After a moment, Tony squeezed back.

They sat side by side in their underwear, passing back and forth the alcohol Tony kept stored in the drawers above his headboard. Hill had woken them up ten minutes ago with the news that the votes were tallied. They would double-check the numbers and make the announcement momentarily.

“It’s gotta be close,” Tony said. “They wouldn’t recount if it wasn’t close.”

Steve took a swig from the flask, grimaced, and passed it back without comment. Super human abilities, still couldn’t stomach whiskey. “I’m not surprised. It’s not an easy decision.”

Tony thrummed his fingers against the almost empty flask. Real whiskey from the surface, salvaged from the rubble. The owner hadn’t survived. The drink had. Tony’d been nursing it for three years now. “When you said you’d vote for my plan, did you mean it?”

Steve paused and nodded. “Does that make you more or less angry with me than you’ve been for the past four days?”

“Too confused to be angry,” Tony said. “Why the hell would you support a plan you don’t support?”

“I support it, I do. I think that it’s the right thing to do.” Steve ran his hand over his face. “But I wish I didn’t. I wish I knew for certain she was right or wrong.”

“Or if we could even get to the Tesseract,” Tony said.

“We can,” Steve said firmly. “If we have nothing holding us back, then there is nothing this base can’t do. But. Ah.” He shook his head and laughed humorlessly. “I don’t want to lead everyone I know to their death.”

“But if your plan wins,” Tony said, “you’re going to.”

Steve looked at Tony with a solemn little smile that made him look so much older. “Someone has too.”

The intercom overhead clicked on. Tony felt like his heart had stopped. “I’ll help,” Tony said quickly. “If we attack, I swear to God, I’ll take down as many of those motherfuckers as it takes to get you to the Tesseract.”

“The votes are tallied,” Hill said.

“You don’t need—”

“Fuck that.” Tony grabbed Steve’s shoulder. “I’m voting for the third option.”

“The winner with fifty-one percent of the vote—” Hill took a breath that seemed to last ten minutes. “Plan B. The mission to destroy the Tesseract.”

It was like Tony heard her from a great distance. As if he had already been in Asgard, and she was pulling him back. Pulling him to his death because, whatever the outcome of the battle, that would be the effect. This Tony would die. Maybe that Tony would live.

Okay, Tony thought as he remembered how to breathe. That was okay. He’d tried to die for worse causes. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.

“Control had prepared plans to deal with those who chose evacuation,” Hill said, and Tony had almost forgotten about her in the infinity, the second, since she had last spoken. “Those plans will not be necessary. The remaining votes were unanimous. You said that you would fight, though you would prefer not to.” This time when she paused, it was not just Tony’s mind that made the silence stretch.

“As per Captain Rogers and Agent Romanov’s prepared battle plans,” Hill finally said, “we will redirect every aspect of the Underground into preparing for this fight. We won’t keep any gas in the tank. There is no point in that. And we won’t waste time. Every day we prepare, we risk losing our fighting and work force to infection. We go to war in five days time. For better or for worse.”

Steve put his hand on Tony’s leg and squeezed, as if he needed to remember where he was.

“On behalf of Control, I thank you for your generous courage.” Hill said it almost gently. Tony hasn’t known she could do that. “The people you have loved and lost—they are proud of you. Whether or not you save them. If your courage ever fails, remember them. ”

Tony barely heard the work assignments she read out. He didn’t need to. He knew what his work would be. People always needed weapons. Obadiah had been right about that. Tony shook himself out of the past and looked at Steve; he wondered why he had ever thought that Steve looked old. He looked almost childlike now.

Steve caught Tony looking. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I learned a long time ago to keep uninspiring emotions off my face in front of people. No one wants to see Captain America looking scared. It’ll be gone by the time we leave this room.”

Tony remembered when his mother handed him a wineglass to hold for the first time. His mother had not told him not to drop it. Tony had known at first touch that you had a responsibility to such beautiful little fragile things. You held them tight. You kept them whole. Steve wasn’t a delicate wineglass, Tony knew that. It’d take more than one drop to break him. But all the same, Tony felt that old feeling in his chest. Responsibility. Because when there was something good in the world, you wanted to keep it there.

“Then we’ll wait until it’s gone,” Tony said, and when Steve rested his head on Tony’s shoulder and told him without words all the ways he was afraid he would let everyone down, Tony gripped him tight.

Chapter Text

They didn’t lie around long. About an hour later, Tony and Steve hurrying down the halls of B-Block, off to their assigned duties. “It doesn’t matter if Sif’s sword can cut through the Tesseract if we can’t get her to the Tesseract,” Tony said. He’d already come up with half a dozen plans and rejected them in the time it took the two of them to get dressed.  

“Could we go up under the Tower?” Steve asked.

“Shield goes underneath the building too. It might be a good place to infiltrate when we figure out a way to get past the shield, but that’s not my number one pick.”

Steve nodded. “If the Tesseract is back on its old array on the roof, then there’s no point entering through the basement.”

“Pretty much. And honestly, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that we’re going to be able to avoid detection once we’re within the inner perimeter. Even if Loki wards us up the ass, the Tesseract’s output had the annoying tendency to fuck up both magic and tech. Even if it doesn’t, a Norse goddess hacking at their energy source is probably going to be noticed.”

“We’ve already got a plan to reduce the number of Chitauri at the Tower,” Steve said.

“Attack the three hives in progress?” Tony asked. Steve nodded. “Good idea. They’re all insect sons of bitches, but they look out for each other. One of the perks of the hive mind.”

“That doesn’t solve our number one problem, though,” Steve said. “We can get every Chitauri out of the Tower, but we’ve still got to get ourselves in.”

“I know. The impenetrable shield,” Tony said. “I’ve spent five years trying to penetrate it.”

Steve and Tony paused outside Loki’s library. Tony was going in; Steve was walking on, down to Security. “Now you’ve got five days,” Steve said.

“That’s helpful, Steve.” Tony threw his hands up. “Whatever. I’ll tell you all the ways this plan is horrible at the meeting. I’ve got to consult with the magic half of our magic tech. You’ve got to tell people to shoot things. My preferred working mode is blind panic anyway.”

On the other side of the library door, something hit the wall with a massive thud. Steve and Tony looked at each other. There was another thud. “And I should probably deal with that,” Tony said.

 There was a third thud. “Yup,” Steve said.  

Tony grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him down for a kiss. It was a good kiss. “See you at the meeting,” Tony said, pushing Steve away.

 “Right. Yes. I go. To that.”

“Well said, Cap,” Tony shouted down the hallway as Steve walked away before he pounded his fist on the library door. “I’m coming in,” he shouted. “Whatever you’re doing, don’t hit me.” After a moment, when Tony didn’t hear anything else on the inside, he braced himself and went it. Books covered the room, some thrown whole, some just empty covers slumped against the walls as their torn pages littered the floor. There was still paper fluttering to the ground as Tony shut the door behind him. Loki sat at the table and stared straight ahead. His hands were in fists.

“That’s democracy for you,” Tony said as he sat down at the table across from him.

“You’re all going to die,” Loki said, still staring ahead.

Tony nodded and grimaced. “To be honest, I have no idea no idea which way this’ll go. My gut tells me to expect the worst.”

“But you intend to help them do it.”

Tony spread his arms. “We’ve spent five years doing nothing but fighting for each other. It’s a hard habit to break. You know that.”

“You want me to help you change the world?” Loki asked lowly.

“We need you.”

“To fight my brother again, should he show up?” He scoffed. “How well that went last time.”

“Don’t pretend that fighting him is the only value you have,” Tony said. “And don’t whine about how you didn’t accomplish anything trying because I can tell you that you fought against him for so long and without dying gave people a hell of a lot of hope when we needed it the most.”  

Loki looked down at his hands. “Hope. I can’t tell if this base suffers from too much of it or too little. I could save you all, and you have decided unanimously that you are not interested.”

“Lo, it wasn’t personal.”

“I know that. I am trying very hard not to take it that way. That’s been my sin in the past, has it not. Viewing something as a personal affront when it has nothing to do with me.” He smirked, and it turned into a grimace. “One of my sins, at least. I would hate to exclude something from the list.”  

“Loki—”

“If you succeed in this, what a life waits for you on the other side,” he said so bitterly it stung. “What life waits for me?” Tony had no answer for that. Loki stared at his fists balled on the table like he had never seen them before and was horrified to discover that they were his. “Do you know where I was the night Thor killed my family and friends?” Loki asked quietly.

“It doesn’t matter where you were.”

 “I was in Jotunheim. Teaching frost giants how to sneak into Odin’s palace so I could ruin my brother’s big day.”

Tony didn’t tell Loki that he’d guessed. “Maybe Sif exaggerated.”

Loki looked at Tony at last. His eyes were wet with grief and rage. “Do you think I know not what I am?” Loki said, each word a bite. “Do you think I know not what I am capable of being? I have eyes, the same as you, and a better view of what I must see. I am not the hero of this story. I am the monster that parents tell their children about at night. I am what you slay for the happy ending.”

Tony leaned forward; Loki jerked back. “Then don’t be that,” Tony said. “We’re already remaking history here. What’s one more tweak?”

Loki scoffed.  “You know what will happen should Sif pierce the Tesseract. And here is a fact to soothe your gut I learned when I examined that weapon: her sword could cut the Tesseract in half. The same dwarves that forged Mjolnir from a dying star forged that blade. Besides Mjolnir, it has no equal. And should that peerless sword pierce the Tesseract, the last five years become a dream we forget when we wake.”

The bitterness in Loki’s voice was hard to listen to. Hard to respond to. Hard to know what to say that would help. “Sif remembers,” Tony said.  

Loki’s laugh was utterly humorless. “That is no mercy for her. I wonder which fate is crueler—forgetting or being the only one who remembers.” Loki’s fists clenched and unclenched.

Tony shouldn’t be the one here. He wasn’t good with comfort. He was never one to pat someone on the back and go there, there. Especially not when he agreed with everything the person who needed comfort was saying. “Look on the bright side,” he said lightly, hoping he could draw Loki out without getting sucked down with him. “Maybe it won’t work and we’ll all just die instead.”

Tony immediately regretted that comment. Loki stood suddenly at that, his chair toppling over behind him. “If you want to die,” Loki spat, “die. I will not help you do so. Not again.”

Tony stood and reached for Loki. Loki twisted away and raised a finger warningly. Tony stepped back and raised his hands. “Loki, we need you. We’ve always needed you. I don’t give a shit if you’re frost giant Hitler in another world. You have helped save our lives here. You’re a part of this family just as much as everyone else.”

“I am not!” Loki shouted, bordering on hysterical. He took a shuddering breath, raised his hand, dropped it, looked away. “I am not. And I have never been. You have no need of me for this.” Loki jabbed the door panel. “You Midgardians have proved good enough at dying on your own,” he said as he stepped out.

Tony ran after him. But the hallway was empty in both directions. “Loki!” Tony called out, his voice echoing off the steel walls. “Come back!”

Silence was his only reply.

***

They all drank coffee with cream and sugar at the strategy meeting that night. They drank the wine that had been stored down here almost twenty years. The cafs served cake and steak at every meal. If you asked nicely and it was possible, they’d cook you whatever you wanted. For dinner, just for the hell of it, Tony ordered a pint of ice cream and tried to lick it all off Steve’s body before it melted, with dubious success. Tony wasn’t even into food during sex. It was just the first time in years that he was able to combine them.

(And Steve? Apparently very much into food during sex. It seemed like a crime that Tony hadn’t known that before.)

In a different week, Tony and Steve’s open sexual interest in each other would have caused a hell of a lot of gossip. Tony liked to think that it would have been the news of the Underground for at least a few months. But this week? They were practically the tamest couple around. Everyone was fucking everyone. Apparently men and women were staggering out of Maria Hill’s bedroom in packs, which made a lot of sense once Tony thought about it because she was still the women who tried to ban drinking and dancing. Someone that concerned with setting a good moral example would not sleep with a subordinate, and in this base, everyone was her subordinate.

“Four guys! At the same time,” Pepper reported to Tony the morning of day two. “I’m torn between impressed and confused.”

“Confused?” Tony asked as he ate his second banana of the morning. It was a bit underripe, but the chocolate he was drizzling over it helped.

“She only has three orifices.” Pepper shook her head as she dipped her bread into her coffee. “What was the fourth man even doing?”

“Wishing that he was one of the first three men, I guess.” Tony swallowed a mass of banana. “What about you? You looking to hop on any dick before we kamikaze our old home?”

Pepper glared at him, but it was one of her playful glares. Those kinds didn’t make Tony’s balls want to retract up into his body. “You gave up any right to ask me that when you broke up with me.”

“Um, okay, pretty sure that’s bullshit.” Tony pointed at her. “You definitely broke up with me.”

“You were the one who said that you didn’t want to see me anymore.”

“Yeah, because you’d just dumped me.” Tony tossed the banana peel in the trash behind him without looking. “Seriously, is it Sitwell? Are you grabbing a ride on that classic car?”

“You missed, by the way,” Pepper said. “Someone’s going to step on that and fall and be unable to work and then we will be behind schedule.”

“Not Sitwell then. You’d be more offended if it was Sitwell. Karl J? Bradley? Little Joe? Joey? Broseph? Fourth Joe who doesn’t get a nickname? Zach Cooper? Bryan Cho? Will Armstrong? Alan Irons? I’m just gonna list men in this base until you stop me. Nick Lee? Aziz? Any of the Corys? Danny Mac? John Mac? Big Mac? Do you even hang out with anyone outside of Control? Pizza Guy? Amish Beard? Asian Michael Douglas? Loki? Star—” Tony paused in horror at the look that flashed over her face. “Oh my god.”

“No,” Pepper said firmly. But not convincingly.

He flailed. “Oh my god, you preemptively denied it. It’s definitely true.”

“No. It’s not like that.”

“No?” Tony looked around to make sure no one was listening. “Loki? You’re sleeping with Loki?”

Pepper made a face like the time Tony had caught her eating raw cookie dough at three in the morning. “It’s not a big deal.”

“What? Why? How? Yes, it is. Is he even still in the base? Is he good? Is that satisfying? How does that even work?”

Pepper honed in on the one question she cared to answer. “I don’t know where he is, Tony. Since you were the last person who spoke to him before he disappeared yesterday, I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I don’t know, he magicked his way out of the library last night,” Tony said. “I thought what he needed was alone time, mostly since there’s no way to find him to give him not alone time. He’ll be back, trust me. He’s stormed off before, and he always comes back with thirty new books and pretending like it didn’t happen.  Seriously, how does the sex work?”

This particular glare was withering. “The traditional way.”

 “He’s fucking blue with horns, Pep. I don’t know what’s up with his dick. There could be literally anything down there.”

Pepper shielded her face from him. “We are not talking about this.”

“We are never going to talk about anything else.” Tony sat up straight as epiphany dawned on him. “You took him from the party to do translations,” he said accusingly. “This is not just a last week on Earth thing. You were having sex with him then!”

“Yes, congratulations, Tony. You solved the big mystery.”

“You’ve been working with him one-on-one for a long time.”

Pepper just sipped her coffee.

“How exactly long have you been smurfing Loki?”

Pepper raised her eyebrow. “How long have you been saluting Captain America’s flag?”

“Nice one, and either six months or two days depending on your perspective,” Tony said. “It’s weird. I don’t know. Tell me how long.”

She sighed and put down her mug. “I’ve been sleeping with him since about four months after our breakup.”

Tony’s jaw dropped. “That’s nearly four years. Was he even likeable yet when you started hitting that?”

Pepper made a so-so gesture with her hand. “He was on the cusp.”

“Wow.” Tony rested his head in his hands and digested this information. “Wow. He never told me.”

“I asked him not to. I didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Did he want people to know?” Tony asked.

Pepper winced. “I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s always been complicated,” she said. “When we were together, you and me, it wasn’t a question of…it wasn’t a question of whether I cared about you. It was a question about whether or not caring for you was good for me anymore. It’s never been like that with Loki. Sometimes he’s a friend I have sex with, and sometimes he’s an incredibly annoying person I have sex with, and sometimes…” She bent her head and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Sometimes I’m amazed how much I like him. I don’t think I want to be with him forever, or I didn’t but now things are different, or—” She looked up at Tony and shrugged. “I don’t know if I love him or he loves me or either of us loves anybody,” she said, “but he makes me happy. When he’s not making me miserable.” She smiled wryly. “If nothing else, being with him has reinforced what dubious taste I have in men.”

It was funny how Tony had thought he was going to marry her someday. He couldn’t remember when he’d stopped thinking that. There should have been jealousy curling in his chest, but the embers that would have caused that flame had died out a long time ago. That was a bit sad, he could admit that. But he could also say, “I’m glad for you, Pep,” with complete honesty, and that felt pretty good.

“Thank you,” Pepper said. She smiled at him the way she used to. Then she glanced around and leaned in. “I’m going to say this, and you’re never going to ask about it again, but—bumps. Up and down the shaft.”

“Really?”

Pepper nodded.

 “Is that even appealing?” Tony asked.

Pepper widened her eyes and nodded even harder.

“Wow. Okay. We should definitely have a foursome.”

“Tony, no.”

“Three guys, three orifices, Pepper, it’s perfect.”

She snorted (in a dignified manner, of course). “As if we could get Loki and Steve in a bed together without listening to them spend the entire night debating whether or not Orson Scott Card’s later books are worth reading.”

Tony could picture it perfectly. Except for Loki’s penis. That was still a big question mark. “Wait, is that your only objection to this plan?”

“Tony.”

“Because I am no longer joking.”

“No.”

“I’ve missed talking to you so much.”

“I know you have. We’re still not having a foursome.”

“You’re a cruel woman, Ms. Potts.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I missed you too. Pick up your banana peel.”

That night, the base went on high alert after an unexpected surge of Tesseract energy spiked within B-Block. In a matter of minutes, Tony and JARVIS traced it to Pepper’s door. He flipped up his faceplate when he saw her standing there, shaken but unhurt. “What the hell just happened?” he asked.

She rubbed her arms as if she was cold, and she might have been, wearing nothing but an oversized sleep shirt and the standard underwear, but her eyes blazed. “He’s gone.”

“Who?” Tony asked, though he couldn’t think of what the answer could be besides the obvious.

“Loki. He wanted me to go with him to Asgard.”

All the words made sense, but the sentence didn’t quite compute in Tony’s brain. “But we need him. We need his magic.”

Pepper looked at Tony so coldly that he knew she wasn’t thinking about him. “I told him that. When he asked again, I told him to go to hell.”

“I thought he’d come through,” Tony told Steve that night as Tony once again played the little spoon. It was easier to talk about things like this when Tony didn’t have to look anyone in the eyes. “I knew how much he was against this plan, but I didn’t think he’d just leave. He could be talking to Thor right now. He could be telling him everything, and there’s nothing we could do.”

“He’s not talking to Thor,” Steve said.

Tony knew that was true. Loki would never prostrate himself before his brother. It didn’t help. In a different life, we were enemies, Tony thought numbly. Maybe there’s only so far you can go from the path you were supposed to take. Maybe everything’s always what it’s supposed to be. You try too hard to make something change, and it just digs its heels in to spite you.

Then Tony sat up. “Holy shit.”

Steve tensed like he was readying himself for battle. “What? What’s wrong?”

Tony shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. I just know how to get us into the Tower.”

***

The next morning, after he stopped by Med Bay to leave Max a better bouquet of flowers, Tony leaned in the doorway of the planning room and waited for Natasha to say something to him. When she didn’t, Tony got tired of waiting. “Something, something, red, red hair, I eat men like air,” Tony said as he came into the room.

Natasha didn’t even look up from her stingers, disassembled for maintenance in her lap. “Poetic.”

“It should be. It’s Sylvia Plath. Mostly. I think. Seemed appropriate, new dye job considering.” Tony eyed Barton, sitting on the floor with that ever-present distance in his eyes, as he walked over to Natasha’s work station. He put the camera down and flipped through her papers on troop coordination. “I missed you as a redhead. It’s a great look. Interesting thing to do for your last three days on Earth.”

 “So is Steve Rogers,” she replied.

 “Touché.”  Tony flipped the folder shut and turned to her. “We need to talk about your addendum to my idea.”

“It’s not my addendum or your idea. It’s Control’s plan. We all agreed on it.”

“‘Agreed’ is a strong word. I’d go with ‘we all felt too uncomfortable to say no.’”  

She snapped her stingers back together with a determined grimace. “And yet here you are now. How good of you to overcome your discomfort.”

“Natasha, he’s still got mittens taped over his hands.” Tony gestured at Barton. Barton didn’t react.

“Because he’s still in the early stages of infection. Even the polluted air now hasn’t been enough to progress him to the later stages. Right now, he is a brain-damaged human; we further expose him to the infection, he becomes a wrong-bodied Chitauri,” Natasha said. “You know that infected in the open air can fight, hunt, feed, survive on their own, until the disease progresses too far. The disease won’t have time to progress too far. And Clint is the only one the Chitauri will admit inside their shield. You know they rescue infected humans. Their hive mind recognizes them as part of the swarm.” She tested the shock and was rewarded with an arc of tiny blue lightning in her fist. “They won’t hurt him. Not until it’s time. And before then, he can do a lot of good for us. He is a valuable part of the plan.”

“I’m not questioning his value. I’m questioning—” Tony broke off and rubbed his eyes. “I just don’t understand why you want him to do this.”

“Everyone should have a chance to fight for their home. But that’s not your question.”

Tony sighed. “He doesn’t even know we’re here. Why do you think he’s capable of doing this?”

“You’re right,” she said softly. “His brain has been irreparably changed by infection. He’s not quite human anymore, and not Chitauri either. If we stopped caring for him, he would die without lifting a hand to stop it. But look at him, Tony.”

Tony glanced down at Barton, still sitting cross-legged on the floor, his gloved hands curled in his lap. Barton stared up at Natasha like he always did, the familiar blankness in his eyes. Natasha stood. Barton’s head tilted back. Natasha stepped to the left. Barton’s head turn to follow her. She stepped to the right. Barton’s head followed. She bent down and kissed his forehead, her fingers tangled in his short blond hair that she cut herself. Then Natasha looked up at Tony through the curtain of her blood-red hair. “There are two things Clint will never forget so long as he lives,” she said. “The first is how to shoot a bow. The second is me. And believe me when I say, no matter what has happened in his mind, he will use the former to protect the latter.”

“You would have loved Bucky if you knew him,” Steve said. They lay on their backs together, staring up at the dark ceiling.

“I feel like I do know him after everything you’ve told me about him. I’ve got five years of anecdotes about him.”

“It’s not the same, though.”

Tony had known what a pointless statement it had been when he said it. “I guess it’s not.”

Steve spent a few minutes making shadow puppets in the light form the arc reactor.

“You know,” Tony said as Steve made a particularly impressive rhino, “Rhodey would have pissed himself with joy if he’d met you.”

Steve laughed. “Oh no. I better be careful when I meet him after the battle.”

Tony’s jaw clenched as the good feelings slipped away. “He’s dead, Steve. And if he’s not, you won’t remember this.”

After such a long silence that Tony thought Steve had fallen asleep, Steve said, “I don’t want to forget this. Any of this.”

But they’d learned a long time ago that wanting something didn’t make it so.

***

Hill surveyed the supplies silently, marching up and down the perfect rows while Tony sat on the table behind her and twitched, debating with himself on whether or not he was going to ask what he needed to know. “You know about Loki, don’t you?” Tony asked eventually, when restraint got a bit too boring.

“Yes,” Hill said. She held up one of the hundred helmets Tony and his team had thrown together today. “Sif was more than eager to tell me everything. Are these sides going to cut off periphery vision?”

“Of course they are. They’re modified biohazard suits stitched together with SWAT uniforms that we’ve mass-produced in three days for people on a mission with low emphasis on long-term survival. You can’t look right and left as much as you’d want,” Tony said. “Why didn’t you do anything about him?”

Hill still didn’t look satisfied with that explanation, but Tony didn’t begrudge her that (much); her perpetual disappointment with the people around her was one of those quirks that had probably helped them survive. “He didn’t give me any reason to do anything about him. Before,” she added pointedly. “Now that he’s abandoned his post, I’d shoot him between the eyes the next time I saw him. But when he was still doing his job?” She quirked her eyebrow at Tony. “I’m not the kind of bitch you think I am.”

“I saw you make a twelve year-old cry because she was hoarding food.”

“Hoarding food that throws off carefully regimented dietary allotments. Hoarding food is dangerous. An alternative past? If I’d known about it when Loki first arrived at the base, yes, I would not have shielded him from his brother. Most likely I would have ordered his execution while he was still infirm to be on the safe side.” Hill put the helmet back down in its row and straightened it until it stared forward, just as the others did. “What risk would I lessen by punishing him now? Nothing, except to create an enemy that we don’t need. Hell, if we weren’t on such a short timeline, I would have used my willingness to accept him to make him more loyal to the Underground.”

Tony whistled, impressed if not wholly approving. “Make people love you because you didn’t kill them. It’s elegant, I’ll give you that. Fury-esque, I’d even say.

“He had some good ideas, now and then,” Hill said. “Hell, I respect most of them a hell of a lot more now that he’s dead than I did when he was alive.” She rapped her knuckles on the forehead of a helmet, her mouth a pressed, straight line. “Of course, he died in the first wave so I take his philosophy with a grain of salt.” She was silent a moment, surveying the heads of her troops. “The big guns?”

“Stationed at the uppermost floors of the corner buildings surrounding the hives,” Tony said. He’d spent the last day and night hauling the six energy cannons, two for each auxiliary hive, to their places himself, strategically disguised by their surrounding debris. If they’d had about a hundred of those when the Chitauri first invaded, that day might have gone very differently. “I sent you a memo.”

“No, you didn’t,” Hill said. “And we have Bradley’s boys placing the charges as we speak. Between the cannons, the charges, and the chaos of total war quarantined within a one-mile radius, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of friendly fire damage when this goes down.”  

“If this was a good battle plan, we’d have done it before,” Tony said.

Hill pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know. But I swear to God, if any bullet intended for a Chitauri bastard ends up in my ass, I’m taking everyone down with me.” 

Tony grinned and shook his head. “Glad I’m fighting far away from you.”

“So am I, civilian.” Hill planted her hands on her hips and stared back down at the helmet in front of her. “Do you realize that if it succeeds, I’ll have to go back to being second-in-command? I don’t think I can do it.”

“You’ll stage a coup within a week,” Tony said.

Hill glanced up and smiled slyly at him. She did not deny it. Then she flicked her head and slid effortlessly back into the role of Director. “Taking into account the time crunch and the massive amount needed, these helmets will do,” she said briskly, as she turned on her heel and marched off. She paused in the doorway and shot a look over her shoulder back at him. “However, Mr. Stark, the next time I commission your services, I expect my boys and girls to be able to see left and right.”

Tony saluted as the door slid shut.

“What are we doing, Tony?” Steve asked that night as Tony tried to catch his breath.

“You’re lying there, being smugly superhuman,” Tony replied, “while I’m recovering from a modified Reverse Cowgirl.”

Steve grinned, but he said, “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know that’s not what you meant. I’m glib about feelings, haven’t you picked that up by now?”

“You’re generally glib,” Steve said, “but I was hoping for a little sincerity right now.”

Tony sighed. “Steve, it’s the second to last night on Earth, one way or another. There’s no point talking about our future.”

“Then let’s talk about our present.” Tony groaned, and Steve rolled over and clenched Tony’s hands. “I love you,” Steve said earnestly. “I didn’t realize it before Chicago. Maybe I didn’t feel it before Chicago. But every minute I was there, I wanted to come back to you.”

Tony didn’t say anything.

“I know you don’t feel the way I do,” Steve said quietly. “I just wanted you to know.” It was a surprisingly tender voice, one that offered comfort and didn’t ask for it. The voice of someone apologizing for asking for more than the listener could give. It made shame flare up in Tony’s chest—or not shame, but a gentler cousin of it that came without guilt but still made left a bruise. It made him honest without needing the truth to be pried out of him.

“I don’t love you like you love me, Steve,” Tony said. Steve swallowed, a dry clicking noise in his throat; he accepted it. “I do—” Tony grimaced at what would be the inadequacy of his own words. “I do love you. The way I loved Rhodey. Or I did. But now—it’s not the way I loved Pepper. That’s  really my only metric for romantic love, and it’s not going so great for me right now. But I—you—I—things. They’re different. Then they used to be. You know?”

The look on Steve’s face said that, no, Steve did not know.

Tony sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The timing—it’s not right. I could love you that way. Your way. I know I could. I can feel it starting, and it’s not there yet, and if we spent the next few months avoiding each other, it could comfortably die down as just a crush that got out of hand. Or, or, or we could spend the next few months like this and put in an application for a room in C-Block and become that couple that makes-out in the halls and everyone hates them. But we don’t have the next few months, whatever happens, and if we fail, we die, and if we win, I wake up next to Pepper not remembering any of this and you wake up in SHIELD still thinking I’m an arrogant prick. So.” Tony shrugged and looked away.

After a moment, Steve put his arm around Tony’s shoulders. “It’s not too late to run away to Asgard, is it?” he asked.

“Dick, you better be joking,” Tony said.

Steve laughed and buried his head in the curve of Tony’s neck. “I’m sorry there’s not enough time,” he whispered, before he pressed a kiss against Tony’s shoulder. Tony’s arm tingled down to his fingertips.

Tony gripped him by the chin and pulled up until Steve was looking him in the eye. “We’ve got two more nights,” Tony said. “Let’s work with that. I’m sure between the two of us, we can make some memories even this magic bullshit can’t wipe out.”

They both knew that was impossible. But their entire plan was an exercise in hoping for the impossible, and a suicide run was a hell of a lot less fun than what Tony and Steve planned for the rest of the evening. And lying there with Steve, on Steve, in and out of Steve, and beside Steve again, the impossible always seemed a bit more possible, a bit more in grasp than logic said it was.

I hope I remember this, Tony thought. It was the first time that Tony had thought something like that. Not that it was the first time that he had a memory worth saving, but that it was the first time that Tony thought that the end result of this battle would be the loss of them. The first time that Tony thought, really believed, that they might actually win.

***

“Tell me the truth,” Steve asked Tony as they got dressed for the party. “Did we need five days to unroll these plans?”

Tony sifted through the six tee shirts he owned, trying to decide which one of them was worthy of the last party on Earth. “No,” Tony replied. He sniffed his Black Sabbath one. Yolanda had charged an arm and a leg for that fucker, and Tony had saved up to buy it for two months. Which was, in many ways, the most surreal part of his new existence in the Underground. “It was just a matter of timing. We could have been good to go with two, maybe three days tops. You know as well as I do that this won’t be a long battle. One way or another. We didn’t need to prepare for entrenchment. It just seemed like people needed more time to get ready to die.”

Steve buttoned up his crisp white shirt, bought specially for this occasion. “That was smart. And compassionate.”

“Hill’s idea.”

“It’s a good one.” He tugged the wrinkles out of his shirt and tucked it into his pants. Living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland hadn’t stopped Steve like dressing like it was still the 1940s. “Would it sound insensitive if I said that this has been the best week I’ve ever spent in the twenty-first century?”

“Considering the sheer amount of drunken, wild, uninhibited debauchery that everyone’s been indulging in for the last four and a half days, I doubt you’re the only one who feels that way.” Tony pulled on the Black Sabbath tee and slung his arm through Steve’s. “Hell of a way to end the world.” Steve smiled and rested his hand on Tony’s.

Maria Hill’s Last Karaoke Night Ever was technically only in the A-Block caf, but it sprawled out into the hallways and quarters so far that it was hard to tell where it ended. Nowhere, maybe. Joanna’d been working day and night, pouring out old formula and new, and the kitchen poured everything they had left into this night. A-Block hallways Four, Five, and Six were playing best of the decade songs, and Tony had to pull Steve from swing to grunge as they headed to the caf. The halls were a press of bodies, everyone of them reaching out to you, patting your back, ruffling your hair, shouting, “See you in another life!” like a high school graduation cranked up to a thousand. (Not Tony’s, of course. He’d spent his high school graduation pretending not to be a pre-teen in a mass of people who knew exactly what he was. The alcohol was about the same quality, though.)

“Nice knowing you, Tony!” some guy shouted.

“Who are you?” Tony shouted back, before Steve dragged him away. The caf was so full of people it was almost hard to breathe. The air had never been so hot as hundreds of people crammed themselves in and jumped, swayed, danced, shouted, hugged, and sang along to the off-pitch wailings of everyone who had always wanted to do karaoke but had never had the courage before. Tony was already signed up to do “Dead or Alive” in a few minutes. Someone—surprisingly not Tony, but only because this mystery person had gotten there first—had signed Steve up to do Christina Aguilera’s “Candyman.” Steve seemed alarmingly game.

“There you two are,” Natasha said. Tony hadn’t noticed her sidling up. Unsurprising. She passed them two bottles of beer, or at least a pretty good replica, and the three of them toasted.

“I didn’t think you’d be here tonight,” Steve shouted over the music.

“You mean you thought I would be with Clint?” Natasha replied. She shook her head, her long red hair flaring out around her. She’s drunk, Tony realized with glee. He wondered how much moonshine that had taken. “I let him out this afternoon.”

“Are you worried?” Steve asked. Considering how loud he had to talk, it sounded like he was bellowing with concern.

Natasha shook her head again, and then nodded, and then shrugged. “It’s out of my hands,” she said. “I know he’s as safe out there as he would be in here. Out there at least, he can do some good. He doesn’t want to die cowering with the children. And I think having his bow back made him really happy.”

“That’s good,” Tony said.

She looked at him and smiled, bopping to the music. “You don’t believe me,” she said. “You’ve always thought there’s nothing left of him.”

“I think that if there’s anything left of him,” Tony replied, “you’d be the only one who’d know it.”

The difference between her fake smiles and her real smiles was startling, and Tony was rewarded with the latter now. “You’ll like him,” she said. “You won’t remember I told you this, but you’re gonna like him so so so much.”

Tony opened his mouth to reply when a hush fell upon the crowd. He looked around to find the source and saw Maria Hill, for the first time ever, walking into her eponymous party, up onto the stage with Pepper at her heels. The room was quiet. Tony’s mind raced. Something was wrong, something was happening, something was off plan. How quickly could Tony get to the suit? He glanced at Steve, ready to tell him to help him force his way through the crowd, and paused at the sight of Steve’s face. Steve looked shocked, but he didn’t look scared. Just the opposite. He looked gleeful. “They’re going to do it!” he whispered to Natasha. “I signed them up, but I didn’t think they’d do it.

“I didn’t think,” she whispered back. “I didn’t hope.”

“Okay, what?” Tony asked, but then Hill picked up the mic, and everything became clear. “Oh my god,” he muttered in time with about fifty other people.

“This was a special request,” Hill said, her voice echoing through the empty room. Pepper stood beside her, a pillar of prim grace. “It also happens to be,” Hill continued, as the piano started, “my favorite song.” And then, with a look of intense concentration on her face, she sang, “Don’t go breaking my heart.”

Pepper leaned into the mic. “I couldn’t if I tried.”

“Oh honey, if I get restless—“

“Baby, you’re not the kind.”

“So it’s definitely the end of the world,” Tony said as Steve grinned and looped his arm around his waist.

“Don’t go breaking my heart,” about five hundred people sang in unison. “You took the weight off of me.”

“Stop singing, Steve,” Tony said.

“Honey, when you knocked on my door—”

Tony shook his head. “Nope. I'm not doing this.”

Steve grabbed Tony’s hand and swayed them to the music. “I gave you my key.”

“HOO HOO!” Natasha shouted and sang. “Nobody knows it!”

“You’re an assassin!” Tony shouted back at her. He turned to Steve, who was still grinning and dancing. “This doesn’t even sound like the original.”

“No,” Steve said. “Octavia ripped it from the Ella Enchanted movie.”

“Wow. We all deserve to die.”

“So don’t go breaking my,” Pepper and Hill sang with more enthusiasm than Tony would have ever dreamed, “don’t go breaking my, I won’t go breaking your heart.”

“Come on, Tony,” Steve said, pulling Tony closer against him as everyone danced and laughed and jumped around them. “Last day on Earth, you can’t be a little uncool?” Tony rolled his eyes and Steve laughed. “You don’t love this song even a little?”

Tony reached up and cupped Steve’s face. “Steve, I’m telling you this with the understanding that it’s too late for you to use this against me—I am afraid of how much I love this song.”

Tony and Steve stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. “HOO HOO,” they shouted along with everyone else. “Nobody knows it.”

“Nobody kno-oh-ows.” Pepper fucking nailed that high note.  So did Tony.

There were probably more dignified ways to face death.

It was the end of the world, and Steve was pressed against him singing a cover of a cover of Elton John’s campiest song while an incredibly shit-faced Natasha bounced next to them, fistbumping to a beat that only she could hear. Pepper and Hill had tossed their arms over each other’s shoulders as they sang their respectable little hearts out to a crowd of some of the greatest minds the world had ever known, the people you literally valued over others as worth saving if it ever came down to having to choose people, and every single one of the brilliant people in this room and this base and the entirety of New York was acting like such a fucking idiot. The only thing that was missing was Loki, but Tony couldn’t even muster up anymore rage at him for that. He’d lose more than anybody else if this new world came to be. 

Tony loved them all. God help Tony, he loved every idiot in this place and what they did when they all got together. And they loved him, and they loved each other, and it was strange, really, but Tony had never liked so many people before in his entire life. That was why they were all fighting, after all, even those who had no grander hopes than taking down the Chitauri with them. You didn’t leave your family to die alone. The very least, you died with them and you killed their murderers as you did.

They couldn’t protect the Earth. But you could be damn sure they’d avenge it.

Who you’d die with, who you’d die for, Tony thought as Steve dipped him. It may not be the answer Steve wants, but that’s the best working definition of love I’ve found so far.

Chapter Text

Tony threw up twice that morning. “Should have said no to that fifth glass,” he grunted when Steve came to check up on him, but they both knew what was tossing Tony’s stomach. Steve got suited up four hours before he had to and spent the early morning hours pacing the hallways of A-Block. He’d start to work out, stop, start again. Tony, on the other hand, obsessively checked and rechecked his suit’s upgraded combat capacities. It’d been on stealth mode for the last five years. Now just hours from battle, Tony was wondering if he could remember how to fight at all.

Still, if everything went according to plan, he wouldn’t need to.

Tony checked the suit’s combat capacities again.  

“Potts on the Control frequency. Can you hear me? Potts coming in. Tony, can you hear me?”

Tony put down his screwdriver and wiggled the small radio tucked into his ear into a more comfortable position. “For the fifth time, Pep, I hear you. The radios are fine.”

“More battles are lost because of poor communication than poor armament,” Pepper said, also for the fifth time this morning. “I’m set up in the comm room. We’re running at full staff, all systems go. Japan waved us that they’ve been broadcasting Tesseract frequencies like we requested, and they’ve confirmed that Thor is in the area. Pyongyang and Tokyo will keep his interest as long as they can.”

“Tell them we won’t need them to hold him off for that long. The goal’s to keep the battle as quick as possible.” Tony leaned against his workbench and crossed his arms. “The other bases still think we’re suicidal idiots?”

“In those exact words, yes. Funny thing is, I think they meant it as a compliment. Either way, they all know now what’s going on with the terraforming. So if we don’t succeed, everyone else can have their turn. And Los Alamos—” Pepper paused. “Dr. Foster told me personally that if they lose radio contact with us today for more than twenty minutes, or if we sent out the right code, she’ll aim their last nuclear missile right at us.”

“Well, thank god for small comforts,” Tony said. “Tell her they should either fire the instant radio contact’s lost or six hours later. The only way that’d happen is if the Chitauri got into the base, and there’s no point nuking them while they’re in our bomb shelter. Get them before they’re all in or get them when they come out.”

“Already passed that message on,” Pepper said.

“Enough chatter on the comm.” Hill’s voice cut in. “Stark, the troops are in position for Phase Two. Are you go for Phase One?”

Tony’s stomach flopped again, but at least nothing came up this time. “Will be in five.”

“Good to hear,” Hill replied. “Romanov’s waiting at the North Gate.”

“Tony…” Pepper began.

“Don’t say your goodbyes, yet,” he said. “We’ve still got a long day ahead of us.” He flicked off his radio and closed his eyes for a moment, in something like prayer. Then he opened them and patted the suit on the chest and said quietly, “It’s you, me, and JARVIS, old girl. Always knew I’d die in you.”

Natasha was waiting at North Gate, a quiver strapped across her back, her scarlet mane unbound and tumbling around her shoulders. Tony was pretty sure her metahuman ability was being able to keep her hair out of her face without tying it back. Steve was there too, decked out in the colors of the flag and running his fingers over and over again along the edge of his shield. Sif, freshly bounced from jail, rounded out the trio, and she thrummed her fingers against the hilt of her wondrous sword, her face set. Neither Steve nor Natasha looked abnormally anxious, but next to Sif, they were practically flop-sweating. I guess after a dozen centuries, what’s one more battle? Tony thought.

Tony flipped up his faceplate as he walked up. “So this seems fun.”

“That’s one word for it,” Natasha said. “Everyone’s just waiting on us now.”

“Then let’s not hold them up,” Tony said. He glanced at Steve. “Got the tracker?”

Steve held up the little palm-sized computer, still faithfully beeping. “I don’t think I’ll need it, to be honest. The trail of debris should be enough. Got the power source?”

Tony knocked his fist against the small storage compartment in the suit’s left shoulder. “Just ripped it out of the big arc reactor. The Underground is officially running on generator power.”

Steve tucked the tracker into his belt. “Good. I’ll be ready to rendezvous with you at the Tower whenever you’re ready. Call me when you need to be saved.”

Natasha punched Steve in the arm. Tony was pretty sure it was affectionate. He was also pretty sure that he never wanted Natasha to be affectionate with him. “Thanks for the faith, Cap.” Then she held her arms wide. They hugged wordlessly for about a minute. Tony and Sif looked uncomfortably at each other; for the first time, he felt like he was one the same page as her. Steve and Natasha separated, their arms still on each other’s shoulders. “Knock them dead, capitalist swine,” Natasha said.

Steve gently chucked her chin. “Stay safe, Commie bastard.”

“You guys spent too much time together,” Tony said.

Natasha patted Steve on the cheek. “That we did.”

Steve turned to Tony, and Tony’s mouth went dry. “Tony, I need to tell you—” 

“Spare me,” Tony said. “You know I’m not good with goodbyes or the final speeches or emotional speeches or earnestness.”

 “Trust me, Tony. I know. And this isn’t goodbye. I’ll see you at the Tower soon enough, and then every day that comes after this.” He pulled off his glove and stuck out his hand. “I was going to say that it’s been an honor to fight beside you all these years. It’ll be an honor to fight with you today.”

After a moment where he found he couldn’t bring himself to move, Tony pulled off his own gauntlet and grasped Steve’s hand. “It’s been an honor, Cap,” Tony said, shaking his hand. “Do you know why?”

Steve gave him a smile right off the recruitment poster. “Enlighten me.”

“Sometimes, Cap, you do the impossible.” Tony shrugged and made a face like ‘what can you do?’ “You humble me.”

Steve looked at him for a moment, their hands still clenched. Then he grabbed Tony by the back of the suit’s neck and pulled him against him. In the suit, Tony was taller than Steve, and his hands could crush Steve’s bones, and he knew that, but it still took all his determination to stop himself from grabbing Steve around the waist as hard as he could as they kissed. Steve’s mouth tasted nothing like apple pie, and at the same time it did because it tasted like the warm, sweet past that never existed outside of commercials and nostalgia, a home that never but should have been.

They broke apart and leaned their foreheads against each other. “Don’t be humble,” Steve murmured, bumping his nose against Tony’s. “I always liked you proud.”

 “Oh my God, I’m so glad we’re about to die,” Natasha said. “Are you two planning to storm the castle at some point or just stare into each other’s eyes?”

“You weren’t afraid of feelings when you were the one hugging him for ten minutes,” Tony said as Steve drew away. Steve pressed one last chaste kiss against Tony’s mouth.

“I’m ready,” Steve said. He pulled up his cowl and looked at each of them. “Are you?”

Natasha tugged her stingers tighter. “For the last five days.”

Sif’s hand tightened on the hilt of her blade. “For the last five years.”

Flying with two other people was cumbersome but not impossible. Sif dangled from Tony’s arms; Natasha perched on his back, so serenely that it felt like she was steering him. Despite the fact that they were dripping in stealth tech and magic, Tony kept them close to the ground. He didn’t want to risk raising the alarm in the first five minutes because a Chitauri patrol spotted them ahead of schedule. They’d chosen this hour, when the majority of Chitauri were outside their nests and out on the streets, because that was the only time this plan could work, but damn if that didn’t complicate actually getting to where they needed to be.

In the brightness of early afternoon, the shimmer of blue around Stark Tower was almost invisible to the naked eye. JARVIS’s sensors, on the other hand, began firing as Tony landed them in an alley about a block away. “Well, the Tower’s shield is on,” Tony said to the two women. “Because the suit can’t see a damn thing.”

“There is a squadron on the north side,” Sif said. “Ten strong but unfocused. They are not looking for anything.”

“Another squadron about two blocks to the west,” Natasha added. “They’re circling around this way, as far as I saw. They’ll see you in an instant. How long do you need?”

“At least three minutes. Five if you can get it,” Tony said.

Natasha and Sif nodded at each other. “Remember,” Natasha said to Sif, “we need to be interesting enough to lure them away but harmless enough that they don’t call for backup.”

“I remember, Lady Natasha. Do you think I don’t know how to seem harmless?” Sif said with a wicked grin on her face that made her look anything but harmless.

“Let’s go!” Tony said. Natasha peered out of the alley and ran west; Sif, north. Tony crouched down, running last minute diagnostics on the probe until Sif’s voice crackled in his ear. “I’ve lured them a minute’s flight away.”

“I’m keeping my bugs busy,” Natasha added. “Go.”

Tony went, staying low to the ground as he scurried over to the outer edge of the shield. The suit wasn’t meant for an action as low as scurrying, but this close to that much Tesseract energy, magic and tech were sketchy propositions at best, and he couldn’t count on them keeping Chitauri eyes away. He huddled between the two cars Natasha has helpfully crashed here for him over the last few days. To the Chitauri eyes, he’d just look like another heap of metal trash. Hopefully.

“Come on, baby,” Tony said as he extended the probe. The shield crackled as the tip pressed against it, and Tony winced at the sparks. “JARVIS, redirect probe power source to secondary reactor and pump in the insecticide, five percent power.”

“Three percent power, sir,” JARVIS confirmed. The killer energy crackled through the probe into the energy force of the shield. Tony held his breath. “Shield at one hundred ten percent power.”

Tony exhaled. “That’s my girl. Fucking up just the way you should. Keep it coming, JARVIS. Ratchet the insecticide up to one hundred percent over the next three hundred seconds.” Tony monitored the power levels for a few moments before he patched through to Control. “Phase One nearly complete. Phase Two troops should be fully locked and loaded.”

“Aegis, Ancile, and Priwen battalions are outside their respective nests,” Hill said. “We’ve got stealth-cloaked advance guards surrounding the Chitauri clusters outside the nest. Aegis says they’ve got eyes on at least four hundred of their brood playing in Central Park, and they’re ready with the firebombs.”

“And you’ve got people—”

“Ready with charges around the shields, yes. I know the plan too. When the Chitauri start fleeing back to their nests, we’ll blow them sky-high before they get in. Just tell me when.”

“About three minutes until the shield’s done,” Tony said. “Give me, Nat, and Sif another minute to get in position. Speaking of.” He added Steve to the frequency. “Steve? Now would be a good time to start heading our way.”

“Roger that,” Steve said like he was sprinting. “Might be a slight delay.”

“How slight?”

Something in the back of Steve’s radio roared. “Very slight,” Steve said. “Everything’s under control.”

“Tony, Maria, I just got an emergency wave from Pyongyang,” Pepper broke in, as if summoned by Steve’s confidence. “Thor’s dropped off their radars.”

“What? Why?” Tony asked.

“Tokyo confirms,” Pepper said. “I’ve sent out a worldwide wave to tell people to look for him, but right now, he’s a ghost.”

“Shit,” Hill said. “Shit, shit, shit.” Tony swore he heard her growl. “It doesn’t matter. We stick to the plan, it won’t matter where Thor is. Not even he can cross the Earth in ten minutes.”

“Tony, I’ve got at least thirty Chitauri on my tail,” Natasha said. He could hear the sounds of her running over the radio. “They’re calling for backup.”

“JARVIS?” Tony asked.

“Shield power at three hundred sixteen percent, sir.”

“Give it another minute, Natasha,” Tony said, “and I’ll guarantee you’ll be much less interesting to them.”

“There’s a warded spot a block east of me,” Natasha said. “I’ll try to lose them there.”

“Sif?” Tony asked. “Sif, how are you doing? Where are you?”

“I’ve slaughtered a dozen so far, and I have two dozen still standing before me,” Sif replied. “I’m doing marvelously.”

“Sif, no,” Natasha said.

“My blade is hungry for blood.”

“I’m coming to get you.”  

The probe beeped. “Sir, shield power has reached a plateau at three hundred ninety-four percent.”

“You sure?” Tony asked, scanning the data himself.

“Extra energy is unlikely to have another more than a negligible effect.”

“Three ninety-four,” Tony said, snapping the probe back in. “That better be enough. Sif, Natasha, lose your tails, get in position. Hill, sixty seconds on the clock and then the battle is yours. Try and keep yourself alive for awhile. No one can do anything around here without you.”

“I’ll do what I have to do,” Hill said, but it sounded like she was smiling. “It’s been an honor, Stark.”

“Right back at you,” he replied. He ducked lower as five Chitauri scuttled by.

“And Pepper?” Hill said. Tony ran back to the alley and slid into the safety of its shadows.

“Yes, Maria?”

“You were the only person worth knowing in that whole damn base. And I’m going to remember that, and when we’re back where we ought to be, I’m stealing you from Stark Industries. You’re wasted in the private sector. A woman like you should be saving the world.”

Pepper laughed, the way she did when she was crying. “You should have offered me a job before I became CEO. Like hell am I giving that up now.”

“I’ll win you over,” Maria said. Through her receiver, Tony could hear the sound of a gun cocking. “If I have to spend the rest of my very, very, very long and well-lived life to do it.”   

Natasha and Sif slid back in the alley next to Tony. Sif’s armor was splattered with blue blood. Her sword shone like lightning in her hand. “That went well,” she said. Tony grabbed her under her arms while Natasha jumped onto his shoulder and they flew up in the shadow of the alley to the highest floor of the wrecked building. “We’re as close as we can get,” Tony said to Hill. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Then I’m switching over to the troop frequency,” Hill said. “Get ready for the fireworks, boys and girls. Hill out.”

There was a faint click over the radio as Hill switched away. Tony, Sif, and Natasha crouched in the silent building, waiting. The dust their landing had kicked up swirled in the sunlight streaming through the holes in the ceiling. Natasha’s body was taut as a bowstring. Sif shifted from side to side. All three of them had their eyes fixed on the horizon, past Stark Tower in the direction of the old financial district. That was where the largest Chitauri nest had sprung up, where Hill was placed with the Aegis battalion. When the battle started, it would start everywhere at once. But it would start hardest with Aegis.

“Why isn’t—” Sif began to say before the sky turned orange with flames. Nearly a mile away, Tony could still feel the shockwaves of the first barrage shaking his bones. To Aegis’ right, at the second point of the triangle that centered on Start Towers, Ancile started its bombing, with Priwen at the third nest right on their tail. Even through the helmet, the explosions were awesome in the old fear of God sense of the word. Tony’d forgotten what battle sounded like, what slaughter sounded like. After an extended peace, the Chitauri were playing with their children in the park when humanity rained fire down on them. Seemed fitting.

“Tony.” Natasha pointed to the Tower. Inside the shield, the Chitauri were massing, writhing, screaming. What did the hive mind feel like when the minds linked in were dying? They leapt from the windows and scurried down the walls, an endless stream pouring and pouring and pouring. Tony, Sif, and Natasha instinctively shrank back further into the shadows. The first Chitauri out were almost at the shield. Tony didn’t hold his breath so much as he forget how to breathe altogether. This was it. Tony offered up a prayer to any gods who happened to be listening and felt like helping for once.

When the Chitauri hit the shield, it was like blue lightning struck the ground, the same blinding blue flash of the portals or the Tesseract. When the brightness faded, the Chitauri that had hit the shieldweren’t there anymore. JARVIS zoomed in for Tony; there was a black smear on the ground where it had stood. The hoard was running too quickly to stop, even as its mind told them the danger, and wave after wave of Chitauri crashed into the shield, like moths to a zapper. Tony whooped at the sight.

The Chitauri were figuring out the problem now, were managing to skid to a halt before they ran headlong into what had kept them safe these last five years. They scuttled around the perimeter, screeching and howling at the blue energy coursing around them. They were trapped. They were trapped, but their mates, their children, they were dying in flames just outside their walls, and these Chitauri could feel them dying. And the enemy, they must have been thinking, turned their shield against them to keep them from helping their hive.

They couldn’t allow that, now could they?

The blue light flickered for a moment and then, at last, it was gone.

For the next minute, the sky was black with Chitauri. They blotted out the sunlight as they flew en masse, thousands and thousands streaming out from the Tower. Tony had known that they’d been expanding tunnels down through the basement, but blocked as they were by the shield, Tony hadn’t had a clue how large they had grown. Large, was the answer to that. Very, very large if the mass of Chitauri indicated anything.

“No matter how valiant your warriors, against a force of this size, the battle will turn quickly,” Sif said.

“Then let’s move quickly,” Tony said, bracing himself for flight.

Natasha pulled him down. “When they see us, they will attack. I’d rather fight a hundred than a thousand.”

“If we pause too long, they may raise their defenses,” Sif said.

“Wait,” Natasha said. “They won’t raise them with so many still inside.

Tony knew that. He knew that. But it was hard to wait when he could see the glimmer of light of the roof, now the only sheen of blue energy near the Tower. Sif’s sword and the Tesseract were within eyesight of each other, and success now seemed shockingly, tantalizingly real. It was taking all of Tony’s self-control to stop himself from reaching out to grab it.  

The flow of Chitauri was slowing, thinning, the bulk of the swarm splintering off to their three hives. They were impeccable well-coordinated, another perk of instantaneous communication. Beside him, Natasha tensed. “Now?” Tony said. There was still a hell of a lot of Chitauri around the Tower.

She raised her finger and pointed to the flight deck, above the unlit STARK. In the midst of Chitauri, one lone pale and pink figure stood, as if he too planned to fling himself down the walls and couldn’t figure out why his body wouldn’t move like everyone else in his hive. Tony knew who it had to be, but he couldn’t believe it. He’d never seen Barton move with purpose before. He moved like a Chitauri, for all that he had his soft, human skin and his bow against his back. “Now,” Natasha said, her hands going to the strap of the quiver. “Drop me there.”

“Nat—”

“You guard Sif from above. I’ll guard her from below.” Her face was a cold mask that brooked no argument. Tony had none to offer. If Natasha said she could hold off the hoard, Tony believed her. He looked over at Sif, and Sif nodded before he wrapped his arms around both of them and took off. At least forty Chitauri flew right past them without stopping. The best thing Tony, Natasha, and Sif had going for them is that no one would expect three people to be stupid enough to fly into the Chitauri center of power in New York. Hell, that wouldn’t have been Tony’s first plan. But Tony was the only one who could fly, and Tony couldn’t only carry so many, so three it was, and their small numbers worked well at least at the beginning of the plan. They baffled their way past the rushing Chitauri.

But the Chitauri didn’t stay confused long. It took thirty seconds to reach the balcony to Tony’s old rooms, and by the time Natasha patted the helmet’s cheek and leapt, the Chitauri were circling around for them. Natasha landed and rolled to her feet at Barton’s side. He looked at her, his body tensed for battle. There was a new distance in his eyes. He looked at her like her was an alien creature.

Natasha slipped the quiver off her back and held it out to him. Barton looked down at it. Like he didn’t realize what his body was doing, he reached up and curled one hand around it. The other lifted to Natasha’s neck. Its knuckles brushed across the skin before his fingers tangled in her red hair. Without speaking, Natasha reached behind him and pulled free his bow. She pulled his hand out of her hair, brought it to her mouth for a kiss, and pressed the bow into it.

All this happened in a matter of seconds. Even faster than that was the speed with which Clint had an arrow notched. A Chitauri who’d seen them fly in dove at Clint and Natasha. With animalistic savagery, Clint fired, hit it between the eyes, winced, and notched another arrow. Natasha, with an almost euphoric look on her face, pulled out her pistols and began shooting.

Tony pulled up, aiming himself at the glowing blue on the roof. This close to the Tesseract, his sensors were going haywire. It hadn’t been so bad the day of the invasion, but Tony’s suit had been brand new five years ago. These days it was held together with salvage, hope, and a hell of a lot of genius, and the Tesseract was cutting through all of those. But he got Sif close enough, and she leapt from his arms as he circled around to take out the dozen Chitauri swooping down on them. Three exploded before they got close, courtesy of a well-aimed trick arrow. The next three were knocked out of the air by repulsor shots.

A flash of blue light nearly blinded him, brighter even than the Chitauri hitting the shield. Tony looked down and saw Sif staggering back from the Tesseract, one arm flung over her eyes as her sword arm dangled by her side. She shook herself and raised her sword again, her arm shaking before she brought the blade down, right on the center of the blue cube. Another blinding flash, and this time when the light faded, Sif was on her knees, pushing herself to her feet with the sword like it was a cane.

“Incoming, Sir!” JARVIS said, and Tony fired missiles at a cluster of Chitauri diving right at Sif. He got most of them, the two survivors retreating, no doubt to circle around and try again. Ten more were coming from the west side, eight were coming from the south, and Tony aimed a glove at each other them and fired. He didn’t need them dead. He just needed them to stay the hell away from Sif.

On the horizon, Tony could see the Leviathans rising from the New York Harbor, the water sleeting off of them as they flew into the city. Two were up so far, with eight, minimum, rising. At least one of them was pointed towards Stark Tower.

“Faster, Sif,” Tony said. “Faster, faster, faster.”

She grunted in response as she swung the sword again. “Do you think I don’t know that?” She staggered to her feet gains and raised the sword above her head. It hit the Tesseract with a crack so loud and so sharp that Tony’s ears rang as if you’d fired a gun right beside them. The surrounding Chitauri hissed and jerked away. When the light faded, Sif was on her knees again, sweat-soaked and shaking, but the sword was still embedded in the Tesseract, a cut at least an inch deep.

“Yes!” Tony shouted, firing at another squad bearing down. “You’ve got it, Sif. You just need to keep going.”

She didn’t need his encouragement. She was already on her feet again; she swayed and shivered, but she yanked her sword free and raised it again. She hit it in exactly the same spot, and this time the crack was so loud that the pain of it stunned Tony for a moment. The gun wasn’t fired next to Tony’s ears this time, it was fired into them, and Tony could feel blood trickling down the side of his face. Sif was flat on her back, blood gushing from her own ears, but she climbed to her feet again, pushed herself up with bleeding hands, and again grasped her sword, embedded still deeper in the Tesseract. One more blow, Tony thought, his inner voice bordering on the hysterical. Just one more blow.

She raised the sword above her head.

And though Tony knew it was impossible, he swore he heard the thunder before the lightning struck her body.

She crumpled Tony couldn’t tell if she was dead or not, but she was still, perfectly still. The sword lay smoldering beside her body, still bright and gleaming. It could still cut the Tesseract, all Tony had to do was get to it, but between him and it, lowering slowly from the heavens as the grey storm clouds formed around him, was this world’s greatest monster.

Thor hovered in the air above Sif’s body. She jerked and raised her shaking head like she’d never moved such a grand weight. She stared him down and spat blood at his feet.

The second bolt of lightning did kill her.

Tony fired his strongest weapon, a miniaturized Jericho, at the back of Thor’s head. Thor caught it. He tossed it over his shoulder as he turned to face Tony, and when it landed on the roof of a nearby building, the explosion leveled it to rubble. 

“You intend to die fighting then,” Thor said. His cold eyes burned as blue as the Tesseract. “As you wish.”

He raised his hand, and Tony rolled to the side just in time to dodge the lightning that arced from it. Tony could practically feel his heart battering against his arc reactor as he fixed targets on Thor and fired three missiles. Five years ago, at this very place, Tony had fought this same battle, and he had lost, everyone had lost. The three missiles hit Thor now just as they did then, and just as he did then, Thor shrugged them off as if they’d been nothing more than snowballs. Thor raised his hand and fired again. Tony barely dodged this time. Thor was playing with him. Thor could fry him at any moment.

“You bore me, human,” Thor said, his voice surprisingly soft for such a force of nature. On the rare occasions Loki talked about his brother, he said that he was loud, but the Thor Tony knew never once in battle raised his voice above a murmur. He did not have to. The world was already listening to him. Thor cocked his head as Tony bobbed and weaved above him. “In all the time I have given you, you have found no new tricks?”

Behind Thor’s back, one large green hand shot up and grabbed the edge of the roof.

“Well,” Tony said as the Hulk pulled himself onto the roof, Steve jumping off his back, “we do have one.”

Thor barely had time to raise his eyebrow before the Hulk roared and tackled him. Thor and the Hulk hit the roof and skidded off, lightning flying in random directions as the Hulk grabbed Thor’s hands. “SMASH!” Hulk roared as they toppled of the roof.

“You got a knack for timing, Steve,” Tony said as Steve hurried across the roof to Sif’s body. “There’s nothing you can do for her. Get the sword if you want to save her.”

Steve ran his hand over her face, closing her eyes, before he grabbed the sword. Behind him, a squad of twenty Chitauri was racing back now that Thor wasn’t here to scare them off. Tony shot forward into the mass of them before they could register what he was doing. He activated the pulse, a bomb of energy with himself at the center. It fried all of them in a second. Damn shame it drained the battery so much, but there was another blinding crack, so painful that Tony dropped a dozen feet before he got the suit back under control. Tony didn’t need to hold them off for much longer, he though bitterly as he boosted back up to the roof. Steve wasn’t as strong as Sif, he’d need more hacks with the blade, but he could do it, he could do it.

“You’ve got this, Steve,” Tony said as he shot another Chitauri out of the sky.

Steve was bent double, panting and coughing. “That’s one opinion,” he gasped out as he lifted the sword again. He hit the Tesseract again, and this time the screaming in Tony’s head didn’t stop when the light faded. It just kept screaming as Tony shot down every Chitauri that came his way. Thank God Clint and Natasha were sniping them out down below. A stiff breeze could take Tony down right now.

The something significantly worse than a stiff breeze entered Tony’s line of sight.

“Oh fuck,” Tony said.

“What?” Steve gasped.

Tony charged the lasers in his gloves. “I forgot about the space whale.”

The space whale had not forgotten about him. It roared as it crashed towards them, knocking off a chuck of the roof as it swept by. Tony flew backwards in front of it, luring it away from Steve and the Tesseract. “Come on, come on,” he muttered as the Leviathan snapped and roared after him. The lasers beeped their readiness and Tony fired them at the bastard’s eyes. The Underground hadn’t been able to study these shits as well as the Chitauri, but everything was weak in the eyes. Leviathans were no exception, and this one roared and thrashed. Tony didn’t let it get away, keeping himself firmly in front of its face. When the beast roared in pain again, Tony fired a missile down its throat.

The Leviathan screeched and lunged, clipping Tony who hadn’t dodged quickly enough. It sent Tony crashing into the side of the Tower, his jets faltering as they smacked against the steel. Tony shook himself and lunged back out, shooting down one of the Chitauri who’d taken the opportunity to dive at Steve. Steve took care of his partner himself with a quick decapitation. Apparently the sword was a hell of a lot easier to use against Chitauri than mystical, timeless energy sources.

Blind and wounded, the Leviathan crashed through the open sky as it searched for Tony. If any of the old buildings had been standing, it would have knocked into every one of them. There was another vicious crack of the sword hitting the fissure in the Tesseract, and the Leviathan screamed so loudly that it shook Tony’s already shaken bones. It lunged forward, just where Tony had been, and crashed into the side of the Tower. It backed up and crashed again, and again, and again. It wasn’t hunting Tony right now. It just knew that the Tesseract was hurting it, and this might make it stop. Only problem was, Steve was still on the roof with the thing.

Tony landed on the back of the Leviathan’s head and fired down into the skull. The beast seemed too far gone to notice, and it wasn’t enough to incapacitate it, even as Tony reached down into the wound and started tearing away the skin. The creature was crazed with pain, but it was pain from a different source. It smashed into the Tower again, and the entire building shuddered.

“Tony, that thing will bring this entire place down!” Natasha shouted over the radio.

“Kinda noticed!” Tony shouted back.

“Tony!” Steve called. “I need backup.”

Tony planted his boots into the skull wound he’d carved out and blasted off. On the roof, Steve was holding off a dozen Chitauri, sword in one hand, shield in the other. He was barely standing, but he was surrounded by corpses. Tony used almost the last of the laser’s juice to slice the Chitauri in half. The building shook, and Steve fell to his knees as the Leviathan hit the building again.

“Natasha! What grenades do you have left?” Tony shouted, arcing down to the nearest building.

“Two frag, one fire, one chem, one blitz, three Jerrys,” she replied. “Won’t be enough to break through that shell.”

Tony cut through a steel girder and tore it loose, leaving one end with a jagged point. While he was down lower, he scanned the ground for Thor and the Hulk. Lightning arched across the ground, from car to building to light post, electrifying the entire street. The Hulk did not seem to give one shit. Dr. Banner, you’re my new favorite person. “Better than what I got. I’m out of all my heavy stuff. How’s your aim?”

“Impeccable.”

There was another crack of the sword hitting the Tesseract, but even as Tony’s vision went white for a moment, he knew it wasn’t as painful as the last. Steve was weakening. His blows were getting shallower. One problem at a time. With the girder under his arm, a twelve foot, two ton weight that was trying to pull him down to Earth, he dragged the suit back up, flying past the observation deck. Natasha sprinted out and jumped onto his back as he went past while Clint shot Chitauri after Chitauri out of the sky behind them. The building shook and shook and shook as the Leviathan thrashed, but when Natasha landed on an intact window ledge a floor above where the Leviathan was hitting, she perched securely. Tony looped up and aimed the girder down. Falling with it was a hell of a lot easier than flying.

Between the suit’s thrush and gravity’s natural effect, when the jagged point hit the beast’s head wound, the force was enough to drive the beam deep down into the skull. That got the Leviathan’s attention. It reared back, bellowing with pain as it tried to shake the girder loose while Tony punched it in deeper and deeper. With its head back, mouth open, Natasha ripped free the string she’d strung through each grenade’s pin and tossed them down the beast’s throat. Tony took off instantly and snatched Natasha away. They were sheltered on the other side of the building when grenades went off. Natasha jumped back down to the deck and sprinted to Clint’s side. The Chitauri were swarming to him, teeth snapping and claws slicing. Tony wondered if they could feel betrayed.  

Tony kept circling on his way back up to the roof and saw the Leviathan falling to the Earth, most of its head gone. “I think we got this!” he said as he circled up to the roof, before he saw Thor—Thor, bloodied and battered but very much alive, holding Steve aloft by the throat.

Tony didn’t have time to panic. Thor looked Tony in the eye and tossed Steve over the edge. Tony dove to catch him when a bolt of lightning hit him in the chest and sent him tumbling down afterwards.

It felt like getting kicked by a mule. It didn’t feel like dying. “Power at two hundred percent, sir,” JARVIS said, as the suit geared up.

“How about that.” Tony scanned for Steve. He was nowhere, nowhere. Or nowhere in the air, at least, and that meant, by process of elimination, that he was on the ground over a hundred stories below. Numbness spread through Tony like frost through his veins. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. So Steve was dead. It didn’t matter. They’d be dead or saved soon enough.  It didn’t matter. If you lost a soldier the war still went on.

Thor wasn’t expecting Tony back on the roof. He was standing there mildly, feeling the heft of Sif’s sword in his hands, when Tony tackled him. The sword clattered to their feet. Thor started and threw Tony off, but it was harder to throw a man who could fly to his death. Tony caught himself in midair and rocketed towards Thor, the suit juiced up to beyond its normal capacity. Thor spread his arms in challenge. “Redirect power to chest repulsor,” Tony said.  

As Thor’s arms wrapped around him, the metal of his suit beginning to bend, Tony fired from the arc reactor. It blasted Thor off of his feet, and he hit the gravel of the roof with a tremendous crash, almost skidding over the edge. His chest was an open, bleeding wound. He stared down at it like he didn’t know what he was seeing. Then he smiled up at Tony, his teeth red with blood. “Well done, mortal. You were one of my favorites.” Let Thor talk. The suit had enough power for a second shot if it had time to charge.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Tony said.

“I know you as any artist knows their creation. All you do shines upon me.” Thor rose easily to his feet, paying no mind to the blood flowing from his chest. “But there are limits to my pride.”

The suit pinged. “Chest repulsor ready, sir.”

Tony rocketed towards Thor, but this time Thor was ready for him. Tony fired himself to the left, dodged, Thor’s lunge forward, but he caught the suit’s right elbow, squeezed, and pulled him down. The metal joint of the elbow crumpled under Thor’s fingers, and Tony stumbled away with his right arm now perfectly straight, trapped like that. He raised the damaged limb and fired a repulsor shot that caught Thor in the leg. It didn’t buckle in the slightest. Thor grabbed Tony with both hands by the throat, and Tony could feel them metal denting, pressing too closely against his skin. Tony shot both his arms upwards and spread them out, forcing Thor’s hands off his neck, then grabbed Thor by the head and slammed his forehead against his. Thor’s head snapped back while Tony’s pounded. Then Thor straighten and smiled. He smashed his face against the helmet, and the metal crashed into Tony’s face. His nose shattered along with the viewfield. “JARVIS. Natasha. Steve,” Tony gasped as he stumbled away, but his helmet was silent. The speakers had broken too.

Thor grabbed Tony while Tony was still stunned and dug his fingers under the cracked faceplate. He pulled it away and dropped it to the floor. For the first time since the last time Tony had been at the Tower, Tony breathed in the open air of the outdoors. Infection, infection! the dumb part of his brain that still had hope cried. Tony didn’t listen to it. He wouldn’t live to be infected. The air smelled beautiful. It felt beautiful. Thor let him go and Tony collapsed to the ground. If he stretched his left hand, his fingers just could brush against the sword. Thor stepped over him, his feet pressing against the hips of the suit. Tony fired the second chest pulse. Thor dodged it without moving his feet. He looked down at Tony as if he was a strange new specimen that he wasn’t sure was worth studying. Then he stepped away. He walked over to the sword, picked it up again, ran his thumb along the line of the blade. “This is a very good sword,” he said, something like genuine admiration in his voice, before he came back to Tony and plunged it up to the hilt through Tony’s stomach.

Tony screamed so loudly it felt like it scraped his lungs raw, as if every bit of pain he’d endured before now was just preparing him for this moment. For Tony didn’t know how long, his world became the metal in his stomach and the burning nerves it sliced. When the shock of the pain subsided, and Tony was left with the miserable stabbing ache, he raised his trembling left hand at Thor and fired again.

Thor dodged easily, as Tony knew he would, and bent down by Tony’s side. He tapped the arc reactor in Tony’s chest. “The color of energy,” he said before he dug his fingers into that as well and ripped it out.

In the distance, the orange of humanity’s fires had given way to the blue flames of the Chitauri. It blanketed the city as the Leviathans circled lazily overhead, ready to act if the rebellion sprung up again, but the rebellion was dead. Some Chitauri were even flying back home. “You’ve lost,” Thor said simply, as he turned the still glowing arc reactor over in his hands. It too was the color of his eyes. Tony wished that he’d gouged them out.

“Still made you work for it,” Tony gasped, each word excruciating to force out. Blood bubbled out of his mouth as he spoke. “Made a god bleed.”

“All flesh bleeds,” Thor said without looking at him. “That is its charm.” He closed his fist around the reactor and crushed the light out. He dropped the little ball and walked over to the Tesseract, still serenely glowing that same bright blue, even cut nearly halfway through. Thor’s hand hovered over the wound. “The soul alone endures, and in the end, it escapes all restraints we force upon it.”

Tony tried to keep his eyes on Thor, but holding up his head hurt too much. Against his will, it tipped back further and further until he shut his eyes as the back of his skull hit the gravel of the roof.

He wondered if Asgard was nice this time of year.

Sorry, Rhodey, he thought. Sorry, Happy. Sorry, other seven billion plus people. Not many people get to disappoint the dead twice.

“I should warn you,” said a voice to Tony’s left. Tony’s eyes shot open, and he jerked his head to look, the pain taking a backseat to surprise. Crouched beside him, decked out in a long green and gold coat over extravagantly intricate armor and topped off with a golden horned crown, was Loki, his mouth twisted in something like a smile. He looked—he looked good. He looked godlike. “I intend to be smug about always having to save you.”

“Holy shit,” Tony croaked. “You’re white.” Which might have been Tony’s last words if Loki had not rested his hand on Tony’s cheek. Tony’s pain died quietly away. Tony would follow it soon, he knew that. He’d seen Loki help people die before, when their suffering made death a kindness. It would be a kindness now. He smiled up at Loki through half-lidded eyes. “I fucking cherish you.”

Loki patted his cheek before he grabbed the sword in Tony’s gut and pulled. Tony felt nothing but a rush of warmth as his own blood soaked him before the stomach wound knitted itself closed. Loki stood, Sif’s crimson blade clenched in his hand. Thor regard him coolly, his body still turned towards the Tesseract. “I killed you, brother,” Thor said.

“Evidently not,” Loki replied. “And you are not my brother.”

Thor tilted his head. “Do you think the bonds that bind us can be so easily rent?”

“You are not my brother because you are not Thor,” Loki said. “I know that now, and I should have known it all along. It was pettiness and hate that blinded me. You’re the Tesseract, are you not? How accurate my lady Sif’s description of me was, I know not, but she was certainly correct that Thor never studied magic. Not the way I did. He never learned that when you wield it, it wields you, and the bigger the wish, the bigger the price. You gave him what he wanted, and you hollowed him out as your fee. Wore his skin in the new world he wished into being and reaped your bloody cost. I imagine he’s still in there, or at least his memories are. Why else would you have struck where you struck?”

Thor’s blue, blue eyes flashed in the light. “Clever,” he said. “More clever than you used to be. Pray, what finally opened your eyes?”

Without looking at her body, like he could not bring himself to do so, Loki pointed the sword at Sif. “Once she told her tale, it was obvious. I don’t deny that a universe exists where Thor could be monstrous and cruel, but he wouldn’t be monstrous and cruel the way you are. He would have asked his family and friends to join him. He would not kill them while they feasted and slept like a coward in the night.”

Thor, or the thing calling himself that, regarded Loki in silence for a moment. “If he had asked you to rule with him, what would you have said?”

“When he first invaded, yes,” Loki said. “If only so I could take it from him later.”

Thor’s mouth twitched. “Do you mean to take it from me now?”

Loki shrugged one shoulder. “It’s already mine. I claimed it. You saw it first, but I like it more, and I think Mother would agree that I’ve treated it better than you have. This planet is mine. These people are mine. Their lives are mine. I mean to make you pay hurting what does not belong to you.”

“How eager you are to kill your brother.”

“To set him free,” Loki said so coldly that Tony swore the temperature dropped.

“Five years ago, we fought, and you lost. Though you did not die, you must have spent the years with poison pumping through your veins. You’re weaker now than you were then.

Loki’s sword hand tightened. “Five years is a long time. Much can change, trust me on that. Five years ago, I was weakened and you were whole. Look at us now. As for the poison…” He lifted his head higher as his ceremonial armor shifted into something more battle ready, as his skin turned blue, a deeper and richer hue than the sickly light of the Tesseract. “You stabbed me with a blade intended to kill a Jotun. I survived because my father used quite a lot of magic to convince my body that it wasn’t Jotun, even as the poison forced me into that form. But as it happens, Jotunheim knows how to cure its own. And there are Jotuns more than willing to help their ignorant kin. With healing and with other aspects of the Jotun anatomy.” He raised his free hand. Ice grew from it, one long sharp spike extending from his hand. He quirked an eyebrow at Thor. “It’s been a very educational few days.”

Quick as a snakebite, Loki jerked his hand forward and the ice flew off, hitting Thor in the shoulder. The force knocked Thor back, and when he straightened, the icicle was sticking out of his chest. He grabbed it and snapped it off. “Clever trick, Silvertongue,” Thor said. “It will take more than cleverness.”

“That’s what the sword is for,” Loki said and swung it at Thor’s head. Thor dodged, but barely, the tip of the sword grazing across the bridge of his nose. Thor drew a dagger from his waist, the first time Tony had seen him deign to use a weapon on an enemy, and lunged at Loki. Thor was stronger; Loki was quicker. Thor couldn’t get his hands on him as Loki weaved his way around him, sending ice dagger after ice dagger at him. Not all of them hit. The ones that did didn’t go as deep as the first. But enough did that Thor roared with rage and lunged too close to Loki. His dagger pierced Loki’s shoulder. Jotuns still bled red, apparently.

“Too slow, Silvertongue,” Thor hissed in Loki’s face.

“Too close, cube.” Loki twisted his feet and ice spread out from underneath them, shooting towards Thor’s. When Thor jerked back, the black ice behind him knocked his feet from under him. In a flash, Loki stuck the sword beneath Thor’s falling body. It pierced him through the heart as Thor fell to one knee, then the other. Loki lifted the sword until it held Thor’s weight aloft and looked his brother—or his brother’s body—in the eyes. “Get out of his body,” Loki hissed.

Thor raised his head, his blond hair matted with blood from so many bodies, and laughed. He grabbed Loki’s hand on the hilt and squeezed. Tony heard Loki’s bones crack before Thor pulled himself off the sword. He kicked Loki away from him, and Loki sprawled next to Sif, cradling his hand. Paying no mind to the massive sword wound in his chest, Thor rested his hands on the Tesseract—or on the glowing blue cube that was also the Tesseract; Tony was dying, his terminology was a bit muddled—and sighed as his body began to pull itself back together. When he let the cube go, his chest was whole. “If I was only Thor, you could have killed him,” the Tesseract said through Thor’s mouth cheerfully. He waggled the sword at Loki before he snapped it over his knees. “Well done. Well done. You can die with your head held high. No one can say you didn’t do your best. In the end, however, that was not enough. In the end, you are still unworthy.”

Loki raised his head like he had heard something Tony had not. With his hand still curled against his chest, Loki rose to his feet with a look of intense concentration on his face. With his whole hand, he reached out beside him like there was something in the air that he could grab. The Tesseract Thor gave Loki a pitying look. “This body is but a vessel,” he said. “I am energy from the beginning of the universe. I am the spark that existed before the explosion. That I have struggled today is nothing more than my desire to have what fun I may have.”

Tony’s vision was going black. The last of his energy was almost gone. Loki’s magic had taken the pain away, had taken the fear. Now there was just the weariness. Try as he might, Tony couldn’t keep his head up. This would be the last thing he saw then. The cube in front of him, Loki to his left, Thor to his right. Sif’s body lay looking at him. Tony was glad Steve had shut her eyes.

“You cannot kill me, Loki, son of Odin and Frigga, son of Laufey and the bitter winter,” the Tesseract said. “I was born before Death entered the world, and I will be here when she reaps her last star. I am immortal, unchanging, unending.”

“You are all those grand things, true” Loki said. Then he smirked. “But you are not worthy.”

With the speed of an oncoming missile, a hammer flew into Loki’s outstretched hand. He spun it once to get a better grip and smiled at it like it was an old friend before he flung up his other hand to cover his face and brought the hammer down on the cube with a shattering crack. For a moment, it looked as if nothing had happened. And then, as Tony and Loki and Thor stared, a fissure split from the heft in the center. Then another and another like the cracks on thin ice before you fell to the icy deeps. Tony’s vision wavered, blackness biting at the edges, but Tony wouldn’t let himself close his eyes, wouldn’t go gentle into that good night. Not while the Tesseract was fracturing, and Thor suddenly swayed and fell like he’d been hit by lightning. In a flash, Loki caught him, and they fell to the ground together beside their shield sister.

The Tesseract splintered and splintered, and the light that came through the cracks was the most blinding blue Tony had ever seen. He twisted his head away from the light, but it was everywhere, burning his eyes whether he opened or closed them. If he squinted, he could just make out the shape of Loki and Thor in the light. With the last of his strength, Tony pulled gauntlet off his left hand and stretched as best he could. As the light swallowed everything, as it become so bright that it spilled over into the other senses until Tony could taste and hear and smell and touch it, he felt other hand’s fingertips brush against his own before the world went blue.

Chapter Text

There were three boxes of donuts on the Tower’s lobby counter, courtesy of the Dunkin’ Donuts on 46th Street.  Every open food place in New York City was showering free food upon the heroes who just yesterday closed the hole in the sky, to the point that SHIELD had started to reject donations after only twelve hours. Other people needed that food more than the Avengers did, they said.

Five years after he had started chewing, Tony swallowed his bite and put the glazed donut back in the box. He walked past the agents milling in the lobby as they waited for assignment. He walked past the volunteers distributing Stark Industry water and food rations to everyone willing to line up for them. He walked out the front doors of the lobby and stood in the shadows of the Manhattan afternoon, as the skyscrapers lived up to their names and blocked out the sun. The wind funneled down the streets smelled like trash and gas and sizzling meat, cooked a hundred different ways.

 “Son of a bitch,” Tony said. “We won.”

Despite having been at the center of the invasion, Stark Towers was remarkably undamaged, and within an hour of the end of the invasion, it had became the official in-city SHIELD headquarters for overseeing reconstruction of the city and relocation of the Chitauri dead. “It’s a damn shame they all died,” one SHIELD xenobiologist had told Tony as they’d carted off the first load of Chitauri corpses. “The chance to study an all new species, evolved completely apart from Earth? There’s never been anything like it.”

Her name was Megan Katz. She’d written six books on the Chitauri over the course of the years; for her fiftieth birthday, Loki’d had them printed and bound.  She’d thanked him profusely before asking another overly invasive question about the Jotun reproductive process. She had to still be here somewhere. In this world, they’d spoken only twelve hours ago, so surely she still had to be in the city. Tony wanted to run her down, grab her by the arms, kiss her full on the mouth, and tell her, “Apparently, bumps are involved. I don’t get it, you should probably ask Pepper about it, but Megan, oh, Megan, bumps.”

But Megan wouldn’t remember him, not as anything more than Iron Man, not as a colleague she’d once lost ten credits to because she hadn’t believed he could shotgun that entire can of meat paste. Megan hadn’t been near the Tesseract as the world changed so she wouldn’t remember him, and neither would Yolanda, and neither would Octavia or Joanna or Lois or Karl or Zach or Aziz or Agent Moore or Agent Brand or Asian Michael Douglas or Jane or anybody that he had met after the end of the world. He’d only spoken to Hill once. Pepper still thought they were dating.

In this world, about three thousand people died in the invasion. A conservative initial estimate. Three thousand people, with the damage almost entirely limited to New York City. Three thousand, and the rest had lived. What would the world think if it knew how that number made Tony want to cry with relief?

When Tony sat slumped in one of the armchairs in a side conference room, no one came to bother him. They still held him in awe, even those that should have known better. He’d flown into the hole in the sky, after all, and lived to tell the tale. He helped save the world. They could only imagine how bad off they’d be without him.

I wonder which fate is crueler—forgetting or being the only one who remembers, Loki had said. But he hadn’t said that now, had he? Not anymore.  

Tony rested his head in his hands and didn’t move for a long, long time.

Then there was a small knock on the door. Max Chang stood there, looking so very young, one hand grasping the opposite elbow. Tony gawped at her with her baby face and her bright alert eyes. He knew he shouldn’t, that she was supposed to be just another agent that Tony didn’t know, that she was supposed to be nothing special to him. Tony couldn’t help himself. He gawped.

“Tony—Stark. Mr. Stark,” she said cautiously. “I don’t mean to overstep my bounds, but I need to ask you something. Um. Sir.”

Tony’s heart was pounding too hard in his throat to get words out. He jerked his head. Yes.

She tossed her hair out of her eyes, a gesture he’d seen a thousand times, and suddenly she didn’t look so young anymore. Suddenly she didn’t look so alien. “Do you still need that lecture on keeping an eye on the suit’s power level or have we sorta solved that problem?”

In an instant, Tony was on his feet and across the room, throwing his arms around her. She hugged him back, so hard it hurt. Tony returned the favor. “You remember?” he said as he squeezed her tight.

“I thought I was crazy,” she said, laughing and crying. “Lord, I thought I’d gone mad.” They stepped back, though she kept her hands on his waist and he kept his on her shoulders. “What the hell happened?” she asked. She gestured to the window—glassless, battered but looking out on a city that was so very alive. “What the hell is this?”

“Right, yeah, you were napping during all the exciting bits,” Tony said. He was practically vibrating with energy now. “But you didn’t die, did you? Safe down in F-Block, in the good old Underground, which means the Chitauri never found the base or didn’t get through it or didn’t slaughter everyone inside it, take your pick. And that’s good news, Max. That’s the best news. You know why?”

Max looked at him like now he was the one who’s mental stability she was questioning.

“If you survived, some others must have survived,” Tony said. “And if you remember, then why the hell wouldn’t they? Right?”

“I still don’t know what in God’s name is going on, but you clearly want me to say yes.”

He kissed her on the forehead and whooped before he lunged for the door. “I need to find some people. I need to—I need to know. I’ll give you the Cliff Notes later, kid, I promise. You just became the head of the SHIELD taskforce on practical magic application that I just formed; we’ll be spending a lot of time together.”

“What the hell is happening?” she shouted after him as he ran out into the hallway.

“Great things!”  Tony shouted back, two dozen SHIELD agents staring at him as he sprinted out.

Clint wasn’t who Tony was looking for, but he was the first one Tony ran into. In a very literal sense. “Where are you running to? There another invasion happening, Stark?” Clint asked as he picked himself up off the floor. He glanced at Tony’s face and went for his bow. “Wait, is there another invasion happening?”

“You didn’t make it, did you?” Tony said, standing up as well. “For the best, probably. Your memories couldn’t have been worth hanging on to. Still, Clint, I’m sorry. I doubted you because literally all the evidence supported that, but I shouldn’t have. You came through for us, man. Even if archery is a ridiculous specialty skill in the twenty-first century.”

Clint looked at Tony like he was crazy, which Tony couldn’t begrudge him since that was more than reasonable from Clint’s perspective, but damn if Tony didn’t grin at Clint’s confusion. He’d never seen the man’s face so expressive—hell, never seen the man express anything but blankness and loss. “Thanks?” Clint asked.

“No, no,” Tony said. “Thank you. Also, you’re welcome.”

From behind him, Tony heard rapid footsteps pounding up the stairs. He turned in time to see the staircase door burst open, Natasha in full Black Widow gear gasping on the other side. She’d been on the Helicarrier, Tony remembered. She’d been debriefing with Hill. It looked like she’d sprinted all the way across New York to get here now. “Clint,” she panted, her eyes wide, her fists clenched. She drank him in and was left speechless. “Clint,” was all she said again before she took one staggering step forward like her legs couldn’t support her. But she took another and another, and Clint met her halfway, rushing forward to catch her in his arms as she fell to her knees.  

“I’m here,” he murmured into her hair, stroking her back as she sobbed. “I’m here, Tasha.”

“I did it. I saved you.” Her voice cracked as tears streamed down her face. She buried it in his chest.

“You did, you did,” Clint said, and maybe he thought she was talking about the mind control or maybe he did remember something or maybe he didn’t know anything at all, but he held her close as she cried like a child, clinging to him like she was afraid he’d disappear.

“I saved you,” she said again and again.

Clint lifted her head and kissed her damp cheeks every time a tear rolled down. He kissed her a lot. “You saved me.” Then the two master assassins held each other wordlessly, there on the floor of a quiet hallway, with what they’d fought hardest for wrapped in the safety of their arms.

And then Tony looked past them, back to the staircase where Natasha had come from where Pepper stood in the doorway, one hand over her mouth as she silently cried. Their eyes met. You remember? her eyes asked. You too? Something in his face must have told her yes, because a laugh and a sob slipped from her lips as she kicked off her heels and sprinted to him, throwing herself into his arms.

“So many people died,” Pepper said on the long elevator ride up to the penthouse. They stood so close their arms pressed against each other. She had not kissed him. She remembered that too. “I thought for sure you were one of them.”

“How many did we lose?” Tony asked. “Though it’s not like it matters now.”

“Even monitoring all the broadcast, it’s hard to say. I think everyone in Priwen battalion, and at least half of Ancile. The majority of Aegis as well. So that’s at least two thousand people. In twenty minutes.” She shook her head. Then she started and bumped her elbow against Tony’s arm, grinning. “Hill made it,” she said, grinning.

“Wait, really?”

“I got off the phone with her a few minutes ago. She got both her legs and arms blown off, but she survived long enough to live through the change. She says she’s been doing jumping jacks for the last hour just for fun.” Pepper grabbed Tony’s arm. “Tony, how on Earth do I remember? How does Hill remember? I thought you had to be right next to the Tesseract to keep your memories.”

“We basically blew it up. I guess that skewed the results.” The image of Loki in full god regalia bringing the hammer down flashed in Tony’s mind, and now it was his turn to grab her arm. “It was Loki, Pepper. He came back to save us. He destroyed the Tesseract.”

Between her freckles, Pepper’s face went white. “Loki?”

Tony nodded.

She put her hand over her mouth and looked away. Then she snapped her head back. “Did he die?” she asked urgently.

“No, no, I don’t think—”

“Then he remembers. He remembers the other world.”

“The penthouse, sir,” JARVIS said as the elevator doors slid open. Tony patted the voice box affectionately.

Pepper strode out, all frantic energy. “Loki’s memories were changed even earlier than ours. He never brought guards into the palace, he never tried to kill Thor, he never razed Jotunheim, he never invaded the Earth.”

Tony gestured at the broken windows and the broken city beyond that. “We’ve got some compelling evidence to the contrary.”

Pepper shook her head. “No, no, that was the other Loki. Not our Loki. And our Loki is sitting in a cell in the realm of fire for the next thousand years. We need—we need to call Asgard, to tell them they’ve made a mistake, or the correct decision they made is now a mistake, or, or, or—” She froze, staring at the flight deck, where Natasha had never made her final stand with Clint. Tony followed her line of sight.

There stood Thor, clad in the red and silver armor that he had worn only the day before, when he’d summoned lightning to fry the Chitauri out of the sky. His back was turned to them as he surveyed the city. His shoulders had a sad slope that hadn’t belonged to either of the Thors Tony’d known. In his right hand, he clenched Mjolnir.

“Which Thor is that?” Pepper asked, her voice low and dangerous like the wrong answer would make her run over and stab him herself.

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “I think he’s like us.”

“And what are we like?” Pepper asked.

Tony paused for a moment, looking for the right word. “Different,” was the best he found. “But he’s holding Mjolnir. Evil Tesseract Thor couldn’t do that.”

Pepper didn’t look doubtful so much as hateful as she shot daggers at Thor’s back. Tony couldn’t blame her, but that wasn’t what he needed right now. “Do you remember when you took Loki away from Sif because his anger wasn’t helpful at the moment?” Pepper glared at Tony before she went back to glaring at Thor. Tony rested his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. “We need to know how many people remember, Pep. How far did the blast go? Does Jane Foster all the way in Los Alamos remember? Or Tokyo or Moscow? We told every base what we planned to do, but every base might not have told their population. The world could be full of people who with trauma that no one else remembers and no explanation why.”

She shot Thor a bitter look before she looked back to Tony. “And what are you going to do?”

“Have a really weird conversation, probably,” Tony said. “And if he’s evil, you know, push him off.”

Pepper sighed and shot Thor one last venom filled look before she nodded. “Don’t die in the process. Not when we made it all the way home,” she said, giving him a slight push. Tony gave her a lazy salute and walked out into the open air of the balcony. If Thor heard him coming, he gave no indication. He didn’t acknowledge Tony until Tony was by his side, just out of arms reach for all the good it would do if Thor attacked, and his acknowledgement was just a slight dip of the head. So Tony started the conversation.

 “So how the hell did you get here without the Tesseract?”

Thor’s eyes shut for a moment. “You remember. Good. I feared you had died before the change.” His voice was a low rumble. The Thor who’d decimated the planet, his voice had rumbled too, like the clap of thunder right above your head that shook you down to your bones. This Thor, not so much. His voice sounded like the rumble of a distant storm, the kind where rain pattered on your roof when the lightning arched, and you counted to seven Mississippi before the sound followed—danger turned soothing by distance.

“I’m hard to kill,” Tony said.

“A fact for which I’m grateful. My hand was the instrument, and it had shed too much blood already.” When Thor turned to Tony, his eyes were not blue. “The shattering of the Tesseract had wider waves than simply reverting to the original world. It released all the latent energy that had been stored in the cube since its creation.”

“What was inside of you.”

Thor’s eyes closed again, and he nodded. “Though that was just a fraction of it. No flesh body could contain all its power. When my brother destroyed the cube, he did not destroy the Tesseract. He freed it. The memories, those will linger for all who were alive to see the change. To those furthest away, that other world will be a strange lingering dream, like a shadow in the corner of their minds. For those closest, it is just as any other memory. As for travel, just as the walls between worlds became weaker when the Tesseract was shifting your planet’s atmosphere, so they are now, permanently. My father informs me that your world can expect a far greater presence of magic in your world.”

Tony rubbed his face. “Joy.”

“Another change I have wrought.”

For the first time, Tony looked at Thor’s face, really looked at it, and Tony relaxed muscles he hadn’t known he’d been tensing. This man—or god or alien or whatever—couldn’t be evil, not with that face, those lines etched into it that hadn’t been there a day ago. Thor overlooked the city with gleaming eyes and a twisted mouth. Guilt. Shame. Tony knew what those looked like, and Thor wore them well. He wore them as he should.

“There are no words sufficient to express my apologies,” Thor said. “I am sorry. For the damage and pain you and your species have endured because of me, I am sorry to the core of my being. I will spend the rest of my life atoning for my crimes, and I fear I will always fall short.”

“Well, you were possessed by a magical blue cube from the dawn of time,” Tony said. “It happens. And look.” He gestured over the city—wrecked and corpse-ridden but not by Thor’s hand. “It never happened.”

Thor shook his head, his eyes heavy with grief. “I opened myself up to magic I did not understand to get what I wanted. No one whispered in my ear. Nothing compelled me but my anger and sorrow. As a result of my selfishness, my body killed all whom I loved and razed the planet I swore to protect. All for the sake of a child’s wish.”

“What did you wish for?” Tony asked. “It couldn’t have been what you got.”

Thor’s smile was a jagged one. “I wished that none of my brother’s crimes had been committed by his hand. Then I wished he might find redemption. Then I wished that they hadn’t happened at all. Loki would scold me, if he knew. That’s sloppy wishing.”

“Huh.” Tony put his heads behind his head. “I guess you did get exactly what you wanted.”

“And so I must make things right,” Thor said. “Even if the damage has been undone. Even if none remember that it ever was. I must find a way to earn forgiveness for crimes that never happened, done by my hands as though I were a puppet.” He looked down at the hands in question and curled them into fists. “I do not know if such redemption is possible. But I must seek it until I die.”

Tony let that sink in for a moment. “Good,” he said. “That kind of thinking’s why you’re a good guy. In this universe, at least. And you’ll do fine, you will. You’ll feel like shit for a long, long time, and that’ll keep you in line, doing your good deeds, but you’ll balance your books. You’re the hero type. It took a cosmic cube to make you go darkside. I’ll think you’ll turn out alright” And maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but Tony said it anyway. Thor needed someone who remembered his crimes to forgive him for them. Tony could do that. Treating people like monsters seemed to be a pretty quick way to make that so, for one, and for another, if it wasn’t true, then Thor would still trust him. Tony could use that.

He’d spent five years in an enclosed space with three thousand SHIELD agents. Duplicity had rubbed off on him.

Speaking off—“Thor, where’s Loki?” Tony asked. “He was the only person on that roof who didn’t get a sword through him. If anyone remembers—and apparently everyone remembers—then he should. Is he still in prison?”

“Not exactly,” said a voice behind them. Tony and Thor spun around, and leaning against the frame watching them, was a tall pale man with slicked back red hair and a goatee of the same color. Attached to the lapel of his crisp black suit was a SHIELD badge that read Consultant. It looked very, very new. “By which I suppose I just mean ‘no.’ Spending five years perfecting illusion and evasion spells on an extremely limited magical budget makes you eminently qualified to break out of prison.”

If you tilted your head and squinted, you might think the man looked something like the madman who had just attacked the city, though your mind would whisper to you that it was nothing more than an unfortunate similarity. Magic, probably, though evidently there wasn’t a magical spell in the world that could disguise that smug smirk. “Luca Smyth,” he said cheerfully, tapping the badge. “Consultant to the new SHIELD taskforce on magic. The once and future Director Hill balked at my hourly rates, but she had to agree that there was no one better.”

“You little shit,” Tony said, positively glowing with affection. Thor looked stricken beyond words.

Loki smirked at Tony, but when he turned to Thor, his bravado slid away. He looked very young, with hunched shoulders and hurt eyes. Thor’s five years had aged him terribly; Loki had come out of them looking like a scolded child, who finally understood what he did wrong.  “And to answer your other question, brother, regarding redemption for crimes you have and have not committed,” Loki said quietly. He held out his hands helplessly. “That is a mystery to me as well. If you are culpable, imagine my guilt. My crimes have not been undone, and I have nothing to blame but myself.”

Tony pointed at the city behind him, where a dead Leviathan still lay slumped over three buildings and the air still smelled like smoke. “Do you remember doing that?”

Loki’s nod was so small that it might have just been a wince. “I remember everything. From both worlds. Everything.”

You killed Coulson, Tony thought. You killed agents and killed civilians and killed Chitauri too, in your own way when you led them to their slaughter because their deaths were useful to you. You did it because you were jealous, you did it because we were nothing, you did it because you could, and you thought it was fun.

All true.

But he’d saved Tony, Loki had done that too, more times than Tony could count. He’d kept their home hidden when he’d hated everyone in it, and yes, that was self-preservation, but so was building the suit with Yinsen, and that had been one of the best things that Tony had ever done. He scavenged books from across New York City because some children were bored. He had lunch with Tony almost every day. He’d come back. When it mattered most, and Loki had the most to lose, he came back.

That wasn’t the same as redemption. But it was a damn good start.

“Then you should tell Pepper you’re back,” Tony said. “I’m pretty sure she’s ready to storm Asgard on your behalf.”

Loki’s shoulders relaxed, and he gave Tony a small, grateful smile. They’d have to deal with this later, the question of what Loki was going to do in a world that thought him pure evil and what he was going to have to do to make them wrong. But that was later. They were alive now when everything said that they shouldn’t be, and the problems of the future seemed very surmountable.

“I already informed Pepper on my way out him,” Loki said. “We reunited in your elevator.”

“Is that a euphemism for something?”

“We were only alone for a moment. But yes. In this world, you and she are still broken up, correct?” Loki asked. “Because if you were not before, you are now.”

“You’re gross. That’s gross. Everything’s gross.” Tony smacked Thor on the bicep. “Even when he’s not evil, your brother’s still a dick.”

Thor looked down at Tony in surprise, and then he smiled, bright and beaming as the sun. “He's still adopted.”

“You held the most powerful energy source in the world and could not form one coherent wish,” Loki said. “Truly, I am glad we share no blood.”

“I’ll point out that when I attempted to conquer Midgard,” Thor said, “I succeeded.”

“You were possessed. That does not count. And you seem to have quickly forgotten that I did stab you through the heart about an hour ago. I think that earns me some valor.”

Thor scoffed. “I let you stab me.”

“You let me stab you. Lies,” Loki said scornfully.

“I wanted you to feel good about yourself.”

“I’ll stab you again.”

“You may try.”

Loki smiled, but something flickered over his face, and it turned into a grimace as he stared down at his feet. “Brother,” he said, his voice suddenly solemn and pained, “I am sorry beyond—”

For a moment, Tony thought Thor had tackled his brother. After a second, Tony realized it was a bear hug. Loki clung to Thor, their faces buried in each other’s necks. They said nothing to each other. They did not seem to need words. The intimacy was so strong that Tony had to look away, the way he’d had to look away from Natasha and Clint. Open, raw love was like an eclipse; avoid looking directly at it.

Tony looked away, back inside the suite, and it felt like his heart stopped for a moment. And Tony knew that feeling better than most. There stood Steve, dressed like a grandfather who’d found a brown leather jacket. His blond hair was combed and parted to military perfection. Over his back, in a leather case, was his shield. Tony had forgotten how young Steve had looked back then. Now. Tony wondered if he looked younger. He didn’t feel it.

He walked towards Steve, his hands shoved in his pockets, his face studied and blank. Steve fell from the roof, dead five minutes before the world changed. He didn’t know Tony, not the way he should. He didn’t like Tony, not the way he should. They were barely on a first-name basis. But the entire time Tony approached, Steve never took his eyes off of Tony’s face. Tony wanted the grab the hope fluttering in his chest and smash it like a bug.

“Nice view you’ve got up here,” Steve said.

“Yeah. You don’t have to see the new ugly building when you’re standing on it.”

Steve nodded which, okay, he wasn’t supposed to agree with that, but just two days ago this Steve thought Tony was the scum of the Earth. So this was progress. This was progress. “Of course, it’s not as nice as the view you get falling off it,” Steve said casually. “You really get to experience the city from top to bottom that way.”

Tony stared at him. He stared some more. “You lived.”

Steve nodded again, the littlest smile on his lips. “I lived. Barely. The Hulk caught me on the way down, and he fought off any Chitauri that tried to come near.”

Tony let out a shaky breath. “You just keep coming back from the dead. Props to Dr. Banner. I wonder if the Hulk remembers anything.” And it was probably time to do feelings talk, Steve clearly wanted to do feelings talk, but when Steve opened his mouth, Tony said, “So are you going to be smug about this for the rest of our lives?”

Steve blinked at that before he shook his head, smiling wryly. “It barely worked. I don’t think I can be smug about that.”

“You’ll find a way,” Tony said.

“How? I’m not you.”

Tony sighed. “If only.”

“Is that what you’re into? Yourself?”

Tony winked. “God, all this flirting and dying and coming back, and you still haven’t kissed me yet.”

Steve’s ears went red. “You’re still a committed boyfriend in this timeline. I didn’t want to overstep my bounds.”

“You still dislike you in this timeline,” Tony said. “But here you are. And trust me.” Tony jerked his thumb over his shoulder, back in Loki’s direction. “I can safely say her interests lie elsewhere now.”

“They are a cute couple,” Steve said thoughtfully.

“Did you know about them?”

Steve shrugged. “Of course.”

“How—what—why—whatever. Whatever.” Tony glanced over his shoulder at the gods. “How the hell are they still hugging?”

“It’s an emotional moment.”

“It’s been a very long emotional moment. It’s like they’re trying to smash themselves into one body.”

“It’s natural to want to hold the people you love when you get them back.”

Tony looked back at Steve and stepped closer. “Feel like holding me?”

One of Steve’s hands went to the back of Tony’s neck. The other held his chin. “Naturally.” Tony tilted his head back as Steve dipped his. When their lips pressed together, Steve sighed against Tony’s mouth, and Tony breathed him in. His arms encircled Steve’s waist, and when he tightened, their bodies were pressed so close together that Steve’s heart hammered in Tony’s chest.

When they finally broke apart, their arms still around each other, Steve bumped his forehead against Tony’s and gave him a cheeky grin. “Do you love me yet?” Steve asked.

Tony gave him another quick kiss, dry and sweet as sugar. “More than I did yesterday. Just wait til tomorrow.”

For they a moment, they just leaned against each other and breathed in the open air under the warmth of the sun. Tony had forgotten what they felt like on his skin.

It was Steve who broke the silence as he shifted his arms up to Tony’s shoulder, one hand cupping the back of Tony’s head. “What do we do now?”

“In what sense?”

“All of them, I guess.”

 Tony hummed as he thought. “Seems we’ve got two options,” he said. “One, collapse under the weight of remembering a tragedy that maybe, at most, point one percent of the Earth’s population has any inkling of and most of those just think it was a bad dream. Or two.” Tony stepped back from Steve. One hand slid down to slip into Steve’s. The other swept over the New York skyline, more whole than Tony remembered but still too full of gaps. “Rebuild the city. Get ready for the next crisis. Have panic attacks and crying jags on our time off, then get back to work.”

“That’s optimistic,” Steve said.

“Yeah, it is.” Tony squeezed Steve’s hand. “You’re the one who wanted to reclaim the Earth. Now look. We reclaimed it. What do you want to do with it?”

Steve was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said at least. He looked at Tony and laughed. “I don’t know. All I can think is that we have to keep it safe. Make sure nothing hurts it again and bring to justice anyone that does.”

“Good plan,” Tony said as he leaned his head on Steve’s broad shoulder, something deeper and fuller than just happiness warming his chest. “I vote for that.”

The city, their city, sprawled out in front of them as the sun tipped behind the tallest buildings. There would be no stars tonight. The city would be alight, alive, as it ought to be, and beyond it, the world kept spinning. Another disaster would come, perhaps branching directly off of this one, but that disaster wasn’t here yet. Tony was. Steve was. Natasha and Pepper and Hill and Loki were. The survivors who remembered, dead who had never died, they were here, and they would endure and build homes where there had been rubble, build lives where there had been ghosts.  

They'd had a hell of a life under the Earth. God help Tony, he missed it already. But here he was, five years older and five years younger at the same time, with concrete evidence that the future could be changed and the past escaped and happiness found in the worst of places, and Tony thought--he'd adapted to stranger lives than this. He'd adapt again and live to see what world he had won.