Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“We always thought alien life would come from the stars, but it came from deep beneath the sea. A portal between dimensions in the Pacific Ocean. [...]  They counted on the humans to hide, to give up, to fail. They never considered our ability to stand, to endure, that we’d rise to the challenge.” — Raleigh Becket

***

There was a joke Bucky used to make about right and left hemispheres. Technically there was no real need to stick to one side of the Conn-Pod—the neural link of a Jaeger made you one mind, one body—but it was a practice most Rangers kept up out of habit. The old theory went that the left hemisphere was all logic and the right hemisphere was creativity. Steve certainly wasn’t thinking about that the first time he stepped into Howling Commando’s cabin.

Howling Commando was a breath-taking Jaeger; the second Mark-2 ever built but the tallest ever made, looming over its brothers and sisters at 260 feet high. It was a joint-effort by Germany, China and North America, painted in gunmetal grey and silver. The first time Steve and Bucky strapped in and synchronised—there were no words to describe the Drift, that connection. It was like taking the first deep breath of fresh air after a lifetime underwater. It was like seeing the stars filling up the endless void of space. It was pure empathy.

They fought to defend the east coast of Australia and killed the category-II Kaiju designated Red Skull. It stained the Great Barrier Reef with its toxic blood, its bloated body as big as their Jaeger, but they survived and returned to the mainland as heroes. Bucky was laughing so hard he was almost crying, and Steve couldn’t wipe the grin off his face if he tried.

Later, though, Bucky would say how it just made sense Steve went stood in for the right hemisphere. Steve was always the artsy one; before K-Day, Steve was going to study art, try to make a living from it. Steve always told Bucky to shut it, that he always read too deeply into stuff, that one day he’ll forget himself and start chasing the rabbit instead of fighting the Kaiju.

It had been five years since then, and Steve still can’t get that conversation out of his head. He could imagine it going so differently. He could have rolled his eyes and told Bucky that there was no time for that superstitious nonsense, could have insisted on switching sides the next time they were called up to fight to prove a point. If there was one thing Steve was, it was stubborn, he could have made Bucky switch.

The old theory about hemispheres was an old wives’ tale at best. Still, the truth of the matter was that the left hemisphere controlled the right side of the body and vice versa. Steve spent nights and days and the foggy moments in-between wondering if that would’ve made any difference, in the end.

The first category-III Kaiju ever recorded came out of the Breach nearly six years from K-Day, and Steve and Bucky had a whole year of Jaeger combat under their belt. Howling Commando was sent out first to spearhead the attack, with two other Jaegers in back-up. Sydney currently had priority-grade protection since they were busy building the first trial Jaegers to run on something other than a nuclear reactor.

Bucky synchronised for the left hemisphere and Steve went for the right. They headed out to fight the category-III Kaiju—codename: Hydra—with the cockiness only a pair of young men who didn’t fear death could manage. In the chaos—stormy weather rocking the waters, an unexpected civilian fishing boat, the fact that apparently category-III Kaiju could withstand blasts that knocked dead category-IIs—Steve, plain and simple, fucked up.

He fucked up, couldn’t hold on, and Bucky died.

Experts told Steve that bringing himself back to mainland was a miracle, told him that killing the category-III was an unexpected success, and that piloting a falling-apart Jaeger solo and living was a human impossibility. Steve knew better. His mistake forced Bucky to a world Steve was too cowardly to follow him into, and life without Bucky, well. Purgatory was too kind a word.

When Bucky died, they were still connected. Steve had relived that moment a thousand times since it happened. With a clarity that scared him, Steve remembered how it felt to die.

*

The television had been spewing out the same Anti-Kaiju Wall propaganda it had been for the last fortnight now. Steve saw the familiar stock footage roll across the screen, promising top-grade anti-Kaiju protection for cities behind it, as if any amount of cable steel and concrete could stop an enraged category-III from smashing it down. The President of the United States was on-screen, hands out in a placating manner, and even on mute, Steve could tell it was a clip from last week where he announced that North America was no longer funding the Jaeger program.

A lot of countries had been pulling out; it was hardly a shock, but still a disappointment.

It had been five years since Steve was in a Jaeger, but in those five years, nothing else had been invented that could stop a Kaiju on the rampage. This Wall was nothing but false hope. Steve took a deep pull of his drink, and looked away from the television. The rest of the bar was quiet—it had been quiet for a while now—and the bartender was only absentmindedly wiping down the counter. After tonight, Steve would be moving on. This town was still too close to the coasts; it was emptying as people migrated inwards.

“I hear there’s work out on the Wall though,” a woman was saying to her friend. Steve wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but alcohol was making her louder than she probably realised. “It’s dangerous work, but apparently it’s good money.”

Her friend wasn’t as loud, but Steve could still hear her say, “The Wall’s only taking in men. Calling women on the rigs ‘a liability.’”

“Fuck the world,” the first woman sneered. “Kaiju are taking down Jaegers left and right an’ they’re still worried about gender?” She stood, swaying. “I have a goddamn family to feed!”

Steve finished the last of his drink and stepped past the shaking woman and her friend, out into the cold. It was snowing here, as though he were out in a deep winter, even as the calendars read mid-August. Since K-Day, the seasons have never been quite right. His breath turned to fog before his eyes and he spent a moment watching it rise in front of him.

He should be feeling cold, he guessed, but it had been such a long time since he felt warm that it really didn’t make a difference. With a bitter resolve, he started walking down the empty bitumen roads. There were hardly any cars these days. Fuel for non-necessities was worth more than its weight in gold. If there weren’t Kaiju to worry about, there’d be civil war breaking out over fuel prices.

His best bet was to head for a train station and camp there. Trains were erratic at best, but they still ran, and if they had the room they would let you catch a lift. Steve wasn’t particularly fussed where they took him, so long as he went somewhere. Staying too still too long felt wrong somehow. He needed to be moving.

On foot, it took him nearly an hour to get to the nearest train station, which looked frozen in abandonment. There were no commuters milling the station, no travellers eyeing the schedules, no conductors patrolling the area. Silence pressed in heavy all around. The monsters hadn’t won, not yet, but it felt like the apocalypse had already happened.

It took a little elbow grease, but he managed to break into an office, which had the same empty, abandoned feeling, but at the least it was warm and sheltered from the snow. Steve set down his pack—a few clothes, mostly rations, and a thick sketchbook only half-full—and made himself comfortable on the small floor space available.

It was noisy, in the quiet. It was like his mind was stuck on a frequency only picking up static, only picking up screaming, only picking up the roars of nightmare monsters made real. He’d never admit it, but sometimes, just sometimes, Steve thought he could hear a whisper of a voice, the echo of Bucky’s last thoughts bouncing around his brain. Your life wasn’t the only thing a Kaiju could take from you.

Steve’s eyes were drooping closed when there was the unmistakable sharp ringing of a phone. Steve sat up, ramrod straight, and his eyes were locked on the landline phone he had barely even noticed before. It was still ringing.

Somehow, it felt like it was ringing for him.

Feeling electric with adrenalin, Steve picked up the phone and held it cautiously to his ear. “Hello?” he asked, feeling half like a fool.

“This is Marshall Fury speaking,” a man’s voice replied, managing to be gruff and curt in the same breath. “This better be goddamn Steve Rogers holding the phone or you’d better hang up right now and stop wasting my time.”

“This is Rogers speaking,” Steve said, immediately wary. As an afterthought, he added, “Sir.”

“Son, you are a hard man to find.”

“I wasn’t aware someone was looking for me.”

“I’ve been looking for you for a while now.”

“I can’t imagine what for.”

“Don’t act thick, Rogers, it doesn’t suit you,” Fury said. “Do you feel up to Kaiju-killing?”

Steve paused, choosing his next words carefully. “I thought the Jaeger Program was being discontinued.”

“Funding being cut and being discontinued are very different things,” Fury replied. “Are you heading out to the Wall to try your luck there? Or are you going to wander around like you usually do?”

“Can you cut to the chase, sir?” Steve asked tightly.

“On behalf of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, I’m asking you to rejoin the Jaeger Program.”

Ice shards were working their way into Steve’s veins. His heart felt like it was pumping sluggishly, and there was a roaring in his ears. “I’m going to have to decline,” he heard himself saying, as if from very far away.

“Can’t fit me in with that busy schedule of yours?” Fury asked, sounding wry.

Steve sank into the plastic office chair, still cradling the phone to his ear. He thought of the long, lonely treks where he’d sometime not even hear another human voice for days, weeks. When he next spoke, he sounded tired. “My co-pilot died when I was still in their brain. That’s not an experience I’m willing to repeat.” That’s not a sacrifice I can make again.

“Howling Commando, perfect kill score of eight-out-of-eight.” There were the sounds of papers shuffling. “For only being out on the field for a year, that’s an impressive count.”

“An old statistic,” Steve shrugged it off. “There are others you can ask.”

“Actually, that’s not quite true,” Fury replied. “You’re the only Ranger alive who’s had battle experience in a Mark-2. One of two alive that have piloted a Jaeger solo. Not taking you up as a pilot would be a waste.”

“Still—still no.” Steve swallowed around a crack in his voice. “Please, don’t.” Don’t make me do this.

“People die, kid,” Fury said, softer now. “Even people you love. Now you’ve got to make the decision whether to die with them, or to keep pushing forward past that hurt. Are you just going to keep shielding yourself or are you going to stand up and help everyone else who can’t protect themselves?”

Steve’s stomach swooped as though he missed a step.

He thought back to that first victory with Bucky. They’d had celebrated with greasy vinegar-soaked chips on an empty beach stained blue with Kaiju blood. They weren’t technically meant to be there; they had snuck off from the media frenzy to steal a breath of silence. Bucky’s smile was the brightest thing in the world then, couldn’t stop smiling even as he listed all the ways they could have died in that battle.

Not for the first time, Steve realised that this wasn’t the life Bucky would want for him. But for the first time in a long time, Steve realised he could do something about that.

“I’m not big on revenge,” Steve said haltingly. “Protecting people though... that’s something I can do.”

“That’s the spirit,” Fury said, sounding as gruff and as curt as before, though a little pleased, like he knew Steve was going to end up making the right choice.

Clearing his throat, Steve asked, “What do I have to do?”

“There are a few things I’m going to need you to do,” Fury said, “but before anything else, I’ll need you to catch a ride on the train that’s coming, oh, about now—”

Fury hung up as a sharp whistle pierced the air from outside. Before he even really registered what he was doing, Steve was shouldering his pack and racing outside, waving down the train. The cold air smacked his face and he felt alive, almost, for the first time in years.

*

The problem with Kaiju was their tendency to self-destruct. Once killed, their bodies disintegrated at a rapid-fire pace, soaking the earth and polluting the waters with poison. Even in death they managed to kill. Their blood ran electric blue, hence the nickname for the toxic run-off: Kaiju Blue. Few humans survived contact with it, and those who did rarely came out the unscathed.

Fury lost an eye to Kaiju Blue, thick ridges of indigo scarring marring the side of his face. An eye patch seemed more like a medal of honour rather than an attempt to hide the fact. Combined with an imposing leather coat that cut a sharp silhouette, Fury was a striking presence. Steve could see with little difficulty how Fury managed to hold command as Marshall to a division technically cut off from funding.

“It’s good to meet you, Rogers,” Fury said, shaking hands firmly but briefly. Steve could appreciate the lack of macho-posturing. “Did you want to rest up first or have the tour straight away?”

Getting to Hong Kong from Anchorage was a nightmare infusion of train, boat, cargo plane and helicopter, taking the better part of the day to travel to the Shatterdome. Steve hadn’t slept properly throughout, but he felt too keyed up to rest. “The tour, sir,” he said.

Fury nodded and turned to lead Steve away from the landing strip full of tired-looking fighter jets and an assorted motley of helicopters. Despite the cut funding, the place couldn’t have looked busier, with workers rushing about, fixing up or fueling up or unloading cargo. They were close enough to the ocean that Steve could smell fish, salt and brine in the air; that woke him up as much anything. The last time he’d been this close to ocean he had dragged the corpse of his Jaeger onto a beach and nearly died in the attempt.

Catching up to walk beside Fury, Steve said, “The more I think about it, sir, the less I’m sure about what you want me to do.”

“I thought I made it clear I wanted you to pilot again,” Fury said. They had reached the main building of the Shatterdome, a monolith of dirty grey like everything else, and Fury keyed in a code to open a large set of double-doors. Stepping inside, Steve realised they were in an industrial elevator of sorts. The elevator closed and groaned into motion without Fury touching another button. They were moving downwards.

“The thing is, it doesn’t matter if you had fifty Jaegers lined up for me to ride,” Steve said, “unless you have a compatible co-pilot in mind for me to work with.”

“One step at a time, Rogers,” Fury said, just as the elevator lurched to an abrupt stop. Fury raised a hand when Steve made a move to step forward. “Not our stop, son. We’re still heading down.”

The elevator doors opened to reveal two men and a woman dragging inside two giant containers on wheels. On closer inspection, Steve recoiled at the sight of preserved Kaiju organs. There was an eye the size of a car tyre floating in an amber liquid in a cylindrical tube, and something that looked like part of a much larger brain neatly stored in what looked like a very square glass coffin.

Once they all managed to squeeze in, the elevator rumbled and started moving downwards again. Steve managed to look away from the Kaiju parts to see that the woman and one of the men were in labcoats. The woman was petite, barely as tall as the brain container, with sharp features and long brown hair. The man was wearing glasses, and had curly black hair greying at the temples; he looked kind, and Steve would have called him soft, but the sleeves of his white coat were rolled up to show off that the skin of his forearms looked burned green—

“Side-effect of Kaiju Blue,” the man said, catching Steve staring.

Steve felt his face heat up as he stammered out sincere apologies for his rudeness, but the man shrugged and said, “If I got offended every time someone looked a little too long, I’d be angry all the time.”

Fury cleared his throat and said, “Rogers, this is our research team: Doctor Jane Foster, our top physicist working on the Breach; Doctor Bruce Banner, world-renown specialist in Kaiju biology; and Tony Stark, our chief technology officer.”

“I’m technically a doctor, too, Fury,” Stark said, but lazily, like he really couldn’t give a damn. Fury sighed and only gave Stark a flat look in return.

The last one—Stark—Steve hadn’t really noticed earlier. He had come in and leaned against the back of the elevator, half-hidden by the giant eye. He was a small, compact man, with a neatly trimmed goatee that spoke of vanity, but ratty jeans and an old t-shirt that showed a lack of. There was something familiar about his eyes, but Steve was only treated to a quick, dismissive glance, so there wasn’t much chance to figure it out.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Steve said to all three.

Foster, or more correctly, Doctor Foster, smiled in a way that lit up her features. “The Marshall’s told you about our jobs. What are you doing in the Shatterdome?”

“I—uh—I’m going to be a Ranger,” Steve said.

“Gotta love that confidence,” Stark snorted. Another curt look Steve’s way before he turned to Fury. Steve felt his hackles rise. “Anyway, Fury,” Stark continued, “once you’re done giving the rookie a lookaround, find us at the labs. Jane and I have something to show you, and Bruce is going to try something insane.”

“Tony’s just mad he didn’t think of it earlier,” Doctor Foster said, teasing.

“Looking forward to it,” Fury said, dry as a bone. “You’d better damn pray that your findings are important, or I swear I’ll have you disciplined for hacking my schedule.”

“It is important,” Stark insisted, cocky and assured. “And hacking’s just my small way to show you the failings in your security.”

“So keeping you in a cell overnight would just be my small demonstration of your failings in respecting authority,” Fury replied.

Stark laughed, short and sharp. “We’ll just see about that.”

The elevator stopped with a fraction more grace than before, and the doors opened to reveal a hallway the same shade of gunmetal grey that everything else was. Function, not design, reigned supreme here. Banner and Stark pushed out the brain, while Foster pulled the giant eye-container out with an unexpected ease for her size. They headed left while Fury pulled Steve right in the hallway.

“We’re heading to the hanger,” Fury said. “I think it’s about time you get a look at what you’re going to be fighting in.”

*

The hanger once held probably half-a-dozen Jaegers in its prime, but the Shatterdome’s glory days were faded in the memory of sponsors, so there were only three looming fighting machines. Despite the empty sectors, the floor was busy with people—even busier than the landing strip up top. For a moment Steve wondered if this was what it felt like to live in an ant’s nest, the push and pull of a thousand lives rushing around you. Hong Kong’s Shatterdome was the biggest in the world, the only one still running these days, and Steve felt swallowed whole by the size of it. Entire cities could live in here comfortably.

Steve recognised without prompt the gargantuan three-armed Jaeger, known better as Warriors Three. It was the only Jaeger in existence to be piloted by three, instead of the usual two. He knew it was Japan’s shining jewel, the standard that all other Mark-3s were put against. It was awe-inspiring to see.

Across from it was the unmistakable flashy red-gold paintjob of Extremis, a Mark-4 Jaeger. The arc reactor in its chest reminded Steve of the Jaeger that was being built in Sydney when he and Bucky were sent after the category-III Kaiju. It turned out that arc reactor technology was more costly than expected, so most Jaegers still ran on nuclear energy. It was a beautiful machine though; there really wasn’t another word for it. Perhaps fifty feet shorter than Howling Commando, but it looked faster, more flexible.

“Extremis and Warriors Three both have full crews, I’m afraid,” Fury said, amusement colouring his tone as he took in Steve’s wide-eyed look.  “What you’ll be hauling around is a little more old school. The only Mark-2 left.”

They stopped and saw the last Jaeger standing several hundred feet away. The first thing that Steve took in was the shining white circle in its chest—

“An arc reactor?” Steve asked. “In a Mark-2? How is that even possible?”

“It’s a matter of asking the right people,” Fury said cryptically. “It was mostly scrap when we got our hands on it, and needed a huge overhaul anyway. Does it look familiar?”

Looking away from the centre, Steve looked at the rest. It was painted red, white and blue, which Steve almost took for American patriotism before he took in the green and yellow highlights, the splashes of black for contrast.

“It’s painted in the colours of the Olympic flag,” Steve said, and Fury barked out a surprised laugh.

“I wouldn’t have put my money on that being the first thing you’d notice,” Fury said. “Keep looking, kid.”

“I don’t—” Steve froze, eyes unfocussing enough for a second to take in the silhouette of the Jaeger, ignoring the finer details. He couldn’t believe he didn’t recognise it earlier. “That’s Howling Commando. But there, it’s—not the arms of it, but that Conn-Pod’s unmistakable.”

“This is the Avenger,” Fury declared with pride. “Cannibalised from your former Jaeger and one of Russia’s former best, Black Widow. We had to make do with what we had, and building from the ground up is not as feasible as it used to be.”

Steve swayed for a moment, shaken. All he could think about was how Bucky died in that, how Steve himself nearly died in it—

“Is this going to be a problem, Rogers?”

“No, sir,” Steve said, throat thick with emotion. “Not a problem at all.”

“Good,” Fury said. “Because it’s time for you to meet your co-pilot.”

**

Natasha Romanoff was patient by nature and patient by design. She had been meditating in the combat room for nearly two hours now. Fury did not like the arrangement, but he was honouring their agreement by bringing Steve Rogers to the Shatterdome. Natasha took a deep breath and exhaled with great control. She focussed on keeping her hands still; the urge to fiddle with the arm guard on her forearm was overpowering.

Focus, she thought. Keep your eyes on the target. Let go on the exhale.

She heard them coming a long time before they arrived. Fury was not a loud man, but he was not someone who could be called reserved, either. Their marching footsteps echoed, too, thanks to the metal that built the Shatterdome.

“—Natasha’s inside there,” she heard Fury say, both of them pausing just outside the door. “She’s asked to fight you before she talks to you.”

“Not quite PPDC regulations, is it?” asked an unfamiliar man’s voice. That must have been Rogers.

“Natasha has her own rulebook,” Fury said. “Now step inside. Remember, no actual damage, but points for hits, first to four. You can choose a weapon or not, it won’t make a difference.”

“I’ll use my hands then,” Rogers said.

“Very well.”

The doors behind her opened. Natasha waited a heartbeat before opening her eyes. She could feel their stares on her back like a weight. She wondered what Rogers thought of her: sat on the mats cross-legged, dressed simply in a black singlet and black yoga pants. Fighting clothes, mourning clothes, it made little difference.

“Natasha Romanoff?” Rogers said. “I’m—”

“I know who you are,” she said, standing in a fluid movement. “Time for talking is later.” She turned on her heel and stood, legs braced apart and arms raised to fight. Steve took the prompt for what it was and stepped forward, not even hesitating before aiming a kick at her head.

She liked him already.

Natasha dodged easily; the move was not aiming to really hurt her and was loudly telegraphed in the swing. She rushed forward and attacked with a flurry of punches that Rogers blocked neatly. She aimed a knee to his sternum, and whilst he attempted to dodge that, Natasha was able to press the advantage. He lost three steps, but then managed to unexpectedly evade a sweeping backhand to the face.

In the same second, Rogers aimed for her throat and she aimed for the side of his head. He got there first though, the side of his hand gently pressing against her jugular. “One,” he said, stepping back, a smile in his eyes.

It took Natasha three moves to reverse their positions, her hand against his throat. She could feel the flutter of his pulse under his skin.

“One-all,” she said, and they broke apart, circling each other like sharks. The air hummed electric, and Natasha could swear she tasted a storm brewing.

This was an excellent idea.

Within a handful of quick-fire minutes, they’d levelled the score three-all. Natasha was liking Rogers more and more. He could have easily stuck to brute force as a technique, having both height and weight advantages, but he played it sly, played it clever, and managed a very fluid takedown that impressed her. When she took him down, made his knees buckle and slammed him on his back, forced him to bare his throat with his stomach arching upwards, she liked the fire in his gaze, that earnest respect he gave her.

Not once did he grab for her tits, either, so that already put him ahead of a few of the other candidates.

As much as she wouldn’t mind fighting for a while longer, Natasha saw an opening and took it. She forced Rogers to his knees, held him in a chokehold from behind. “Four,” she murmured in his ear, and loosened her grip when he started chuckling.

She moved back to let him stand and he turned to face her, smiling. He put his hand out to shake and Natasha allowed it. “I don’t think compatibility’s going to be an issue,” he said, and Natasha agreed.

It was nice when the paperwork matched the reality. She enjoyed having her research validated.

“You have good form, good technique, Rogers,” Natasha said. Sweaty and breathless was a good look on you, she didn’t add. “Perfect control.”

“Thank you,” Rogers said. “I don’t think I’ve ever fought anyone as skilled as you, Ms Romanoff.”

Natasha smiled. “Call me Natasha.”

“Then I insist you call me Steve.”

“For the record, I think there’s a lot that can go wrong here,” Fury announced from behind them. He started to step down to meet them at the mats. “Both of you are carrying a fuckton of baggage on you, and I need to know you can carry a giant robot on top of that.”

“We’ll do our best, sir,” Steve said, with a conviction that made Natasha think again that he was the right choice. He bled sincerity, and she wondered, briefly, what it would be like to share his brainspace in the Drift.

Fury looked past Steve and straight at Natasha. “Everything ready to go?” he asked, and Natasha could see he was asking something else, something deeper. Are you ready for this?

Few were authorised to know, and even fewer actually knew, but Fury was the one who helped her from being kicked out of the Jaeger Program He was well-aware of what kind of fallout Natasha was dealing with. He was also well-aware of how much red-tape and bullshit Natasha had to force her way through to get where she was now. Battle-ready and itching to fight.

She looked at Steve, blond and blue-eyed, a solid wall of muscles and American-bred earnestness. He wouldn’t be Clint—no one, she thought gratefully, could ever be like Clint exactly—but Steve would do. Natasha would be able to fight again.

She said firmly, “We’re ready.”

A mixture of resignation and pride coloured Fury’s features, but he quickly schooled his expression to neutrality. “Natasha, show Rogers where he’ll be bunking. I need to visit the brains trust—” he said it with a scowl, “—before we debrief on the plan.”

Natasha nodded, and pulled at Steve’s wrist, indicating he should follow her. The adrenalin from the fight was waning, and she could see the dark circles underneath his eyes. As they stepped outside the combat room, Steve quickly picked up a small pack he had left. If her research was right, which it usually was, that pack was his worldly possessions. There was no evidence Steve had settled down in any of the towns he passed through.

Grief, Natasha knew, either made you hold on tight or let go completely. There were some kinds of grief so bone-deep that it made you wonder why you should bother holding on at all. Clint liked poetry in the shy way some guys did, and words rolled about in her head until she remembered a fragment of cemeteries are just the earth’s way of not letting go—let go.

“Before, what Fury said about baggage,” Natasha said. “I think you need to know what I might be bringing on board with me.”

“I don’t know how much Fury told you about me, but that baggage comment referred to both of us.” Steve rolled his shoulders, lost in thought. “We all have our burdens to bear.”

“No, that’s what you need to understand,” Natasha said slowly. She took a deep breath. “There have only been two recorded cases of a Jaeger successfully being piloted home solo. You’re one of them... and I’m the other.”

**

The nice thing about the Los Angeles Shatterdome was that Tony had been working out of that long enough that it felt like a second home away from home. It was fashioned in the same concrete and steel of Hong Kong’s Shatterdome design, but with some warmth. Also in L.A., JARVIS was accessible from everywhere, rather than just in the K-Science Labs and mission control.

Unfortunately, Tony was in Hong Kong, not Los Angeles, and he was sorely missing the former. It didn’t help that this Shatterdome was the oldest in existence, and was in many areas annoyingly out-of-date, technologically speaking.

“Data is accurate to within plus or minus two hours, sir,” JARVIS announced from a tinny speaker, and Tony was contemplating pulling his hair out. He was running the numbers on the possibility of a Double- or Triple-Event for Kaiju attacks, and his algorithms kept spewing out the same facts.

The Events would be happening soon, far sooner than any of them were prepared for.

“You all right, Tony?” Bruce asked. He brought with him a cup of coffee, which was another reminder why Bruce was his favourite scientist. Though in fairness to Jane, he felt the same way about her when she brought him coffee. He was a man of fickle ranking systems.

“Numbers are giving me a headache,” Tony muttered. A throbbing pressure was building behind his left eye. Thinking about it, sleep deprivation might have been contributing to the migraine.

Bruce leaned against the table and looked at the screen of numbers. “Do you want me to call Jane over to double-check anything?”

“Don’t bother her, she’s working on the maths to figure out the size of the bomb we’re going to need,” Tony said. “The physics gets weird around the Breach, so she’s a little high strung at the moment. JARVIS is helping me out anyway, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS said dutifully. “Visitor alert: Marshall Fury has entered the K-Science Labs.”

“Finally,” Tony said. “How long does it take to show around a rookie?”

“Don’t bait the Ranger,” Bruce warned. “I know how you flirt, and half the time it ends up with you getting a black eye.”

Tony thought about the way the muscles of the rookie’s shoulders stretched his shirt out nicely. The problem about living where you worked was it made the pool of potential one-night stands much smaller, and the chance for unwanted social encounters much higher. And yet, there was a lot to be said about climbing that man like a tree.

“Well, we all have our ways to keep life interesting,” Tony said.

“Our lives are interesting enough,” Bruce muttered.

Tony snorted into his coffee, but didn’t say anything as Fury entered the room. He walked over to them with an air of impatience.

“What was so goddamn important that you hacked into my personal files?” Fury demanded. Rumour mill had it that he was actually capable of smiling, but Tony had yet to see any evidence of this. The frown that marred his face seemed like a permanent feature etched into bone and skin.

Cracking his neck side-to-side—bad habit, that—Tony stood up and announced, “JARVIS, pull up the graph of previous Kaiju attacks.”

The holo-board scattered points of light in a multi-coloured scramble before reassembling in a graph full of peaks and drops. Fury crossed his arms and looked unimpressed, but Tony pushed on.

“The last decade or so of attacks have been increasing steadily,” Tony said, waving at the data. He touched the air where some of the points were to set them glowing. “I have been working with the numbers, and I’ve figured out we only have maybe a day or so until the next Kaiju event, but forty-eight hours at the most, until we see a Double-Event.”

“A Double-Event—?” Fury caught on fast, grim with the prospect. “Two Kaiju at once.”

“Something we’ve never seen,” agreed Tony. “Except look at the spike in attacks last year. So many they’ve wiped out nearly all of our Jaegers. Except I don’t think it’ll stop at a Double-Event. Within a day or so of the Breach allowing in two Kaiju, I predict we’ll experience a Triple-Event.”

On the graph, the little red dot blinked almost innocently, as though it wasn’t marking the tipping point of the humanity’s fight to survive.

“What about after that?” Fury asked.

Tony tapped at the graph; let the light scatter and reform into a 3D rendering of the last category-IV Kaiju that Bruce had been working on. It had horns all over its body, and claws as long as a school bus. The tail had taken out three skyscrapers in one sweeping motion before Extremis had killed it. The civilian causality count made the record-books.

“I don’t think we need to find out about Kaiju events after that point, because we’ll be royally fucked if that happens,” Tony said bluntly. “Our Jaegers can barely take ‘em down one-on-one at this stage, and we only have the three left. If four come? No Walls are going to keep any of us safe, and three days aren’t enough to build more Jaegers, even with all the funding in the world.”

“Think of it like a rip in a seam,” Jane said, walking in with a coffee in one hand and a stack of files curled under her other arm. “The first couple dozen of Kaiju have been pushing it open, making it wider. Soon getting whole armies of monsters in through the Breach should be easier, quicker.”

“It turns from a narrow dirt road into a roaring highway,” Tony agreed. To Jane, he added, “Are you done with your calculations?”

Jane shrugged, brow furrowed. “Portal physics,” she complained, “is infuriatingly complex. I just can’t get why previous annihilation attempts have not worked out.” She set her files on one of the clear tables, a messy heap of papers sliding to the side. “If only it weren’t at the bottom of the ocean, we’d be able to take readings and find out more.”

“We’re going to have to try with whatever you’ve figured out,” Fury said, quietly, firmly. A man resolved to fight past the end. The atmosphere in the room suddenly felt colder.

Bruce cleared his throat. “There’s something else we wanted to try.”

“Something insane, if I remember Stark correctly,” Fury said.

“Insane is one way of describing this, yes,” Bruce said. He swallowed nervously. “I’d like to try form a neural bridge with this fragment of Kaiju brain.” He indicated to the frontal lobe floating in ammonia, already hooked up and ready for the connection.

There was a moment of silence where Fury was clearly trying to process the thought. “You want to... Drift with a Kaiju?”

“Yes.”

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

“He might be,” Tony interjected. “But I’ve looked over his work. The theory’s sound. It’s possible.”

“What’s the theory?”

“Kaiju are genetically identical,” Bruce said. He wiped away the holo-board showed the DNA sequencing he had done of over a multitude of Kaiju samples. “No matter where they attack—Panama, Tokyo, San Francisco—no matter what they look like—horns or wings or giant pincers—they are exactly the same. Yet they’re adapting. They’re getting better at fighting us.”

“How does this relate to you wanting to Drift with one?” Fury demanded.

“I’m getting to that.” Clicking his fingers, the holo-board pulled up a 3D rendering of a Kaiju’s secondary brain, the one they needed since they were so monstrously big that they needed another brain to keep their limbs in order. Bruce’s eyes were bright with conviction. “I think they’re a hive mind; when they fight us, they all learn how to fight us. Connect with one, connect with all. If I enter in a neural connection with one, I might be able to find out—something.” He slumped at little at the end. Even he couldn’t hypothesise what was in the mind of a monster.

“His findings are beyond remarkable,” Tony added. “If he ever publishes, they should restart the Nobel Prize committee just to give him one.”

“You, shut up,” Fury snapped. To Bruce, he asked, “Are you sure enough to risk your life for this?”

When Tony thought about Bruce, he brought together a collection of moments in his mind to form the image of the man he knew. The first time Bruce corrected one of Tony’s equations, and Tony realised he was working with someone on the same level as he was; that one time Tony accidently saw Bruce putting medicinal cream on his K-burned skin to soothe the pain of simply being; the day Bruce found out about the Kaiju attack hitting his home town while he was in L.A. with Tony—

All in all, there were a lot of moments. This one though, outshone them all. Bruce straightened out of his slouch and assuredness cloaked him suddenly, like a veil of strength. He looked Fury straight in the eye and said, without even a hint of fear, “This is a chance to finding answers about the Breach and the Kaiju. That, alone, makes it absolutely worth the risk to my life.”

It was a shame Bruce was straight. Tony would have given him the kiss of his life in that moment.

Fury held him in a staring contest for another beat before relenting. “So be it. Do you need someone else to help with the neural load?”

“No, I—” Bruce paused, clearly thinking it over. “This is only part of the secondary brain’s frontal lobe. One person alone should handle it.” He glanced over at Tony, and his eyes were saying, I don’t want to risk anyone else.

*

Everything was surprisingly easy to set up, and Tony stood beside Jane as they watched Bruce settle comfortably in the chair. Fury was standing as well, arms crossed and looking like he was carved out of stone.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony noted that Jane looked a little queasy.

“Bruce will be fine,” Tony murmured to her. He wrapped an arm around her, gave her a comforting hug. She was always so cold; she kept forgetting to wear jumpers, as though she were back in New Mexico rather than in the middle of the Shatterdome where temperature controls were always set ten degrees too low. “Kaiju Blue didn’t kill him; it’ll take a little more than some rancid Kaiju brain to knock him down.”

“It’s not that,” Jane said, biting her lip. “I’ve never been fond of watching people enter the Drift, even with each other.”

“It’s perfectly safe with other people,” Tony said, surprised.

“Perfectly safe,” Jane echoed, voice hard, “until it isn’t.”

Curious, Tony might have pressed the issue, but suddenly Bruce was counting down and everyone in the room was holding their breath. “Initiating neural handshake—in three—two—one—”

A handful of seconds. It couldn’t have even ticked over to half a minute before Bruce was convulsing and shaking off the chair and onto the floor. “Banner!” Fury shouted. Tony raced to Bruce to disconnect the neural connectors whilst Jane rushed to the computer, keying in the overrides.

Bruce was still breathing, and under Tony’s finger, his pulse was still strong.

“Come on, Bruce, you know better than sleeping in the lab,” Tony said, gently cupping Bruce’s face and lifting his head up. “Every time I try to nap in here, you chew my ear off about sleeping in a proper bed.”

“And you should,” Bruce groaned. He was stirring weakly, but he was back in the land of the living. Tony whooped and would’ve punched the air if Bruce wasn’t essentially lying around his lap. “Sleeping slumped over a desk is bad for your back.”

“Good to know, doctor,” Tony teased, but he was careful when helping Bruce back into his chair. Jane brought Bruce some water to drink, and Fury was looming behind them, watching Bruce like a hawk.

“‘One person should handle it,’” Fury quoted aloud, and Bruce winced, as if the words were too loud to bear.

“I technically did handle it,” Bruce said hoarsely, but even as he was smiling, his gaze was slightly unfocussed. The whites of his right eye had turned blood red and his hands were shaking. It was all he could do to hold on to the cup of water. Textbook symptoms of a neural overload.

“What did you see, Bruce?” Jane asked.

At the prompt, Bruce sat up in a jolt, spilling water over his pants but uncaring, panic washing out the hazy expression he was wearing before. “I saw—I saw—what I s-saw, it—”

“Deep breaths,” Tony said. “JARVIS, dim the lights.” The lab went from harsh white to something a little more sunset gold, and Tony noticed how Bruce relaxed by increments back into the chair.

After a beat, Bruce spoke, choosing his words carefully. “The Kaiju aren’t mindless. They’re here for a reason. They’re trying to colonise us—colonise Earth.”

*

Mission control had gone absolutely silent. Bruce still looked wan; Fury had dragged him straight here to retell what he’d said in the labs. In the sickly bright light of a dozen different holo-boards, Bruce looked positively unwell, gaunt and shaking. Tony was busy looking at the faces of everyone with a high enough clearance to hear the news. There were mostly the high-ranking PPDC members and all the Jaeger Rangers. Agent Hill, usually stern and unbreakable, looked more shaken than Tony could ever remember her being. In the back, Agent Coulson looked taken aback; shocked, like this was beyond his scope of understanding.

Even Tony himself could barely believe it.

The Kaiju were clones, monsters built specifically to terraform new homes for their masters—aliens—who only lived by wasting other planets. That they had come in the age of the dinosaurs and found Earth too pure; the atmosphere couldn’t hold them. That in a fit of irony, or perhaps, Karma, the rising pollution caused by humans had set something into motion, made the Kaiju masters decide now was the right time to unleash Hell upon the world.

It explained so much though. Why the Kaiju bodies broke down into toxic waste, why they always innately targeted the most heavily populated regions, how they seemed to learn even as they fought one-on-one. Humanity was being exterminated. Life on Earth was being wiped clean, with a reshaped slate to make the new outpost for the all-consuming alien race currently living on the other side of the Breach.

The still, funeral-home silence of the room broke as people collected into small groups to talk about the findings. Pepper came to Tony’s side nearly immediately, touching his arms and pulling him into a hug. She smelled of sea salt and cinnamon, and under that, metal. Since she fought as a co-pilot for Extremis, she always smelled a little of metal, like rust had buried itself into the roots of her red hair. She was as familiar to him as engine grease or fine whiskey, but infinitely more loved.

“Pepper,” Tony said, and he tried to smile. It felt plastic on his face, and Pepper made to rub gently at his cheek, as if to wipe it away and bring out his real smile.

“What are we going to do, Tony?” she asked, and Tony looked at her face, at the scatterplot of freckles he could’ve mapped out blind. He looked at the trust in her eyes and didn’t know what to say.

“We’re doing what we’ve been planning to do this entire time,” Jane said from beside Tony. “We’re just on an accelerated schedule.”

“Do we need more firepower?” Tony asked mildly, stepping aside from Pepper to allow Jane to talk to them both face-to-face.

“The thermonuclear bomb is more than enough to collapse the portal,” Jane said. “If it can get in, that is.” She ran her fingers through her hair, frustrated. Tony imagined he could see the cogs in her head trying to process the problem. She was a genius, in much the same way that Tony was a genius, only they worked in different fields. If anyone could solve the problem, it’d be her.

Pepper was frowning, looking at Jane with concern. “Jane, you need to sleep. You’re going to burn out at this rate.”

“I’ve done worse and survived,” Jane said dismissively.

“Bruce looks tired though,” Pepper prompted her gently. “How about you both go back to the barracks, get in a short nap?”

Jane bit her lip. Indecision warred on her features, but Bruce, thankfully, chose that moment to yawn loudly from across the room. “Fine, I’ll take him down,” Jane said.

Tony and Pepper watched Jane lead Bruce out of the room while the high-ranking officials ignored them, talking in low voices. “That was very neatly done, Pep,” Tony said.

“Years of practice,” Pepper mumbled under her breath, and Tony laughed.

Before all of this—Jaeger and Kaiju and the Shatterdome—before the world was turned upside-down and oceanfronts became war zones, she worked as Tony’s assistant, back when he was the head of R&D buckling under the weight of his father’s legacy. Technically now, they both held the same rank, and maybe that would bother a lesser man, but Tony had only ever thought of Pepper as his equal. In another lifetime, he would’ve tried to give her the world.

Instead he gave her Extremis, which she piloted with her husband, Happy. More than once, Tony had been kept awake thinking that if Extremis ever went down it’d take two of the people he loved most in the world with it. Safe to say, some of his best improvements were done in fits of blind panic. There was a reason why Extremis was one of the few Jaegers left standing.

“There are so many ways this can go wrong,” Pepper sighed.

“We only need to get it right once,” Tony said.

Over in a shadowy corner, Tony could see Rhodey talking to Fury, their heads bowed together and their expressions almost a perfect mirror of discontent. Rhodey was probably the only one in the entire Shatterdome dressed in military uniform; he was the army liaison, but lately he had also been trying to get the United Nations to rethink their budget cuts. It was a tough job, but Rhodey had a knack for playing politics.

Rhodey, catching Tony’s eye, waved him over. “We’re talking about the Wall. Hammer’s guaranteeing that they’ll withstand a Kaiju attack. What do you think?”

“Hammer as in Justin Hammer?” Tony laughed. “That’s who they hired instead of me? God, they must’ve been desperate.”

The Pacific Perimeter Project had approached Tony and asked for his help. He told them flat out that they were idiots and no defensive boundary would keep out the Kaiju. What he didn’t realise was that they were suicidal idiots.

“Honestly, getting Hammer to build the Wall is like issuing those stupid K-talismans to civilians and hoping for the best,” Tony said. “It might make morons feel better, but it’ll do fuck all for protecting them.”

“Why didn’t you help them build it, then?”

Tony turned around. Rookie Rogers had apparently been listening in. He looked disapproving, and even though he was all solid muscle and baby blue eyes, Tony did not appreciate disapproving looks. He had enough of that from his childhood, thanks.

“I didn’t help because there is no helping them,” Tony said, dismissive. “They could have a built the boundary a solid five-hundred feet high and made it out of solid diamond, and that still wouldn’t be enough.”

“You could have said something and made them listen,” Rogers insisted, with a naivety and earnestness that was kind of refreshing. Tony spent too much time around politicians to have that outlook. “They’ve been wasting all this time and money—”

“You think I didn’t try?” Tony asked, stepping forward. “That Fury or Rhodey here didn’t try to get it through their thick heads? Politicians don’t care about protecting the people; building this wall is boosting the economy and it’s driving up their approval ratings. They don’t care that it won’t work, and fair enough, we’ll all probably be too dead to criticise them about it later.”

“It seemed like they cared enough to find you,” Rogers pointed out.

“Rightly so, I’m the best there is for building stuff that works,” Tony said, “and I’m better kept here, working on what matters: the Jaegers. Or have you forgotten about that, rookie?”

“Don’t call me that, Stark,” Rogers bit out. “You might be building them, but I’ll be driving one.”

If you want to play it like that, then—

Tony sneered a little and said, “I’ll call you that until I see you successfully Drift with our resident Russian over there—” Natasha turned from a conversation with Pepper to stare at Tony with narrowed eyes, “—and even if you have Fury’s stamp of approval, that’s not a guarantee that you won’t explode spectacularly.”

Roger’s eyes raked up and down Tony’s body, and if the loathing was a little less blatant, Tony would feel as though he were getting checked out. His eyes were unerringly focused. As it was, Tony felt his hackles rise a bit, felt himself gearing up for a fight.

“Well if you’re the engineer around here,” Rogers said, “I guess I better watch out for it to explode.”

“Oh you’d better—”

Rhodey stepped in at that point and put a hand on Tony’s chest. “Let it go, man. We’re all a little high strung from the news.” He shot Tony a significant look, silently berating him with, think of the bigger picture. “Let’s not say anything we’ll regret. Same goes with you...” He trailed off when he realised he didn’t know Roger’s name.

“Steve Rogers,” Rogers said, and the words took a second to register.

“Wait, what?” Tony asked, with his voice a pitch higher than he’d intended it to be. “You’re Steve Rogers, as in Howling Commando’s Steve Rogers?” Without waiting for a response, he spun to point at Fury and hissed, “You.”

**

Steve felt jolted out of his argument with Stark, like he’d skipped a step walking down the stairs. The shock on Stark’s face was alarming; weren’t they introduced before? His eyes were wide; a mixture of emotions flickering across his features too fast to catalogue. Irrationally, Steve wanted to force the man to look back at him instead of staring at the Marshall.

“What of it, Stark?” Fury asked, wearing the same cool mask he always seemed to wear.

“A rookie is one thing,” Stark said, slowly, picking over his words with a growing momentum, “but you’re getting a decommissioned old veteran who hasn’t fought or trained for the last half-decade? Are you kidding me?”

At that, Steve almost stepped back. It was as if Stark had slapped him where he stood. It was almost worse that those words came out so casually, like he wasn’t even trying to attack, like he was merely stating the facts.

Fury crossed his arms, his posture relaxed, and said, “I stand by my decision.”

“Your decision to put a retiree in the shell of the robot his partner died in and where he nearly died himself,” Stark said. “Real smart, Fury.”

“You’re out of line, Stark,” Fury growled, a hint of real steel creeping into his voice.

“I can’t believe I’ve been saying this entire time that our plan isn’t a suicide mission,” Stark moaned, rubbing his eyes with the base of his palms. “We’re all going to die.”

“This decommissioned old veteran could show you a thing or two,” Steve said, voice as cold as ice. He felt brittle, suddenly, and a swell of anger rose within him.

“Then—” Stark was interrupted by wailing sirens. He looked up at the flashing lights of the Kaiju alert system, and then grinned at Steve. “Here’s your chance. Suit up and ship out. We’re going hunting.”

**

The drivesuit amour fit her like did before, a second skin and a reassuring weight. Black, too, like her old armour, similar in all but the scars. Her old armour had been completely wrecked.

Deep breaths, Natasha thought. The walk to the Conn-Pod was lonely, too quiet. It gave her a moment to centre herself, and when she stepped inside the Drivesuit Room, the quiet had become part of her, grounding her to reality. The Drift would not take her; she would not let it.

Steve was already inside, putting his helmet on as he turned to face her. “Natasha,” he said. He looked pale, but she could not tell whether it was due to the lights or due to his nerves.

“Steve,” she said, and then she watched where he stood. He was in-between, not quite committing to the left or the right hemisphere. She understood his hesitation, for a quiet part of her shared it, but she had thought over this moment a thousand times in her mind, and she knew how she would act.

“Senior pilots traditionally get the right side, pilot seat 01,” she said casually. “But tradition’s overrated. Go to 02, I won’t mind.”

Relief, or terror, rushed across Steve’s face, but he didn’t complain and quickly locked in. Technicians ran around them, making sure they were secured in place and were battle-ready. Only a few minutes later and they were left alone in the Conn-Pod.

Natasha started flicking off the pre-battle settings, getting them prepped. After a pause, she saw Steve begin to do the same. Being a Ranger was something you couldn’t forget, even if you wanted to. This Conn-Pod wasn’t quite like Black Widow’s, but they all had essentially the same features. She closed off all the safeties and double-checked the energy levels. Outside was dark, so she turned on the night vision settings, and beside her, Steve was doing final checks of balance calibrations.

“Warriors Three, deployed; Extremis remaining as back-up,” JARVIS said. Steve startled a little; she forgot to mention their on-board AI was British, thanks to Stark’s eccentricities. “Are pilots ready for the drop?”

“Ready,” Natasha said, settling back in position, ready to brace for the fall. She closed her eyes and caught an old fragment of poetry; our missiles always make too short an arc—

“Good to go,” Steve affirmed, and they were given a visual countdown of 3... 2... 1...

“Release for drop,” JARVIS announced, and then they were falling.

The Conn-Pod was what most referred to as the “head” of the Jaeger. They were where the pilots controlled the machine, and from a design aspect, they did make the Jaegers look far more human. However, it was detachable, partly for safety reasons, partly because it was easier to load up pilots away from the main body. This, unfortunately, led to the Conn-Pod drop being a necessary evil.

They landed safely, of course, but the lurch was always uncomfortable, like a sharp pull around the groin thanks to the armour, and there was always a moment where the ears would pop. Still, she turned to see Steve wearing the exact same grin she was wearing.

“Nothing quite like that,” Steve said, and Natasha agreed.

To JARVIS, she said, “We’re locked in.”

“Prepare for neural handshake in fifteen... fourteen...” JARVIS said, starting the countdown.

“Don’t chase the rabbit,” Natasha warned. She hadn’t been lost in a neural connection since training and didn’t want to relieve that experience. Steve had five years of downtime working against his self-control.

Don’t chase the rabbit. Don’t follow the memories.

“Regardless of what Stark says, I’m not a rookie,” Steve muttered.

“Stark’s an asshole,” Natasha said. After a pause, she added, “No offense, JARVIS.”

“Six... No offense taken, Ms Romanoff... two... one...” The screen changed from functional calibration readings to the neutral connection status. “Neural handshake initiating.”

“Right hemisphere, calibrating,” Natasha said, stretching her arms out.

“Left hemisphere, calibrating,” Steve said, mirroring her.

Then they were falling.

This was a different kind of falling. It was the mind-reeling backwards, inwards, folding over and under and attaching itself to another. Natasha caught a glimpse of her childhood, a flash of her mother’s red hair and then Natasha when she was little, in her first ballet shoes—she was thrown into a moment of Steve’s youth, and saw a skinny young man having trouble keeping up, an inhaler in hand—she was back in herself, the first time she held a gun—the first time a girl had kissed Steve, on the cheek, calling him sweet but not what she was looking for—Natasha seeing Steve for the first time—Steve seeing Natasha for the first time—

Entering the Drift with someone was like living two lives concurrently and then reliving them over and over. Clint’s face entered her vision like a storm, and Natasha held her breath, held it until she was almost choking, but the moment passed, and she was in the clear.

As she was turning to Steve to grin, camaraderie never higher than in this split moment of perfect unity, she felt her good will almost completely shift to an unexpected terror. Steve was staring blankly at forwards, but in her head, she was seeing a man—Bucky, brother, childhood friend, lifelong best friend—and there was a claw coming down to rip him out—

“Snap out of it, Steve!” she yelled, but it was too late and Steve collapsed.

Bucky in her mind was screaming. Steve was in her mind as Bucky and he was screaming. Steve in her mind as Steve was screaming. She was screaming but she was not in her mind at all.

“Natasha, I’m sorry!” Steve was yelling, except it wasn’t just Steve, it was Clint, too.

Don’t chase the rabbit. In the Academy, they couldn’t stress that enough. But what if the rabbit was chasing you?

Suddenly, there was silence.

*

Natasha was waiting. She was patient by nature and patient by design. Clint, however, took patience to a whole new level. When they were in the Drift together, their calm cycled until it reached Zen-like proportions. They were positioned in the East China Sea, with strict instructions to defend and/or lure the category-IV Kaiju from Shanghai, which was evacuating. The Kaiju warning had come three hours ago, and everyone was getting a little confused.

“Kaiju are never this slow,” Clint muttered, but he kept his keen eyes facing outwards. He was such a serious pilot, which was unexpected, because Natasha had lived his memories, his life, and knew him in person, and any other time, he would be laughing and joking around. In the Jaeger, though, he was sheer focus.

Let go on the exhale, they thought in tandem.

Calling in to Vladivostok, she asked in Russian, “This is Romanoff on Black Widow reporting. Status unchanged. Kaiju ETA?”

“Incoming,” was all mission control sent back. “Keep vigilant.”

Clint looked her at her when they ended communication with base. He shrugged and Natasha mirrored it. They could feel Black Widow shrug around them, and that teased the barest hint of a smile out of Clint. She remembered a time when he didn’t speak Russian and her English was horrific. They were paired despite that because they fought in such perfect synchronisation that it placed both their rankings at the top of their class.

Fortunately though, after entering the Drift a few times, language followed them as easily as the trust that grew between them. There was little you didn’t understand about a person once you went inside their head for a few hours on end.

“Shit, what was that?” Clint was reaching out, tapping at the screen. The sensors were going haywire.

Natasha was blinking, the scene whirring about slowly like taffy. Horror washed over her pre-emptively, and she knew something was going to go wrong. Tokyo should’ve taken this call, she was thinking, and then the air was split was a howl so piercingly cold it felt like jagged knifes were being pushed in all over her body.

“Natasha, you’re safe,” Steve was saying, except Steve couldn’t be in the Black Widow. The Black Widow only held two pilots, and she and Clint were kind of busy at the moment. The Jaeger was slammed backwards, and it was only by sheer, dumb luck they stayed on their feet.

Easy as breathing, they braced themselves and readied into a fighting stance. Nothing hit them again. Their sensors were still detecting no life forms, but the readings were everywhere. Natasha tried to call base, but something was jamming their signal.

Natasha frowned and said, “Clint, we have to—”

The reinforced glass of the mask cracked when the howl resonated again. Natasha slapped her hands against her ears as if she could force the sound out. Clint was trying to say something, but she couldn’t hear. There was no sound but the howling of the Kaiju. At this rate, the glass of the Conn-Pod’s visor would shatter into a thousand pieces. Their helmet visors were cracking.

Blood was running down his eyes, her eyes, their ears, the taste of copper on their tongues. This was worse than a nightmare, this was reliving every single moment in surround-sound high-definition technicolour—

She was trying to crush her head with her hands, like that would stop the howling—

“Calibration aborted,” said JARVIS.

*

“What was that?” Fury roared. He looked angrier than she’d seen him get in a long time. They were sitting inside mission control, which had a perfect view of the damage done.

It had been an hour after the failed neural handshake. They had entered the Drift but weren’t able to regain control of themselves. Apparently Natasha had been slamming the hand of the Jaeger against the Conn-Pod, and had done some damage to the Shatterdome, knocking out a chunk of the wall. She couldn’t remember a lot of the details, but when she came to, her head was in Steve’s lap and there was blood dripping out of her ears.

Natasha felt distant, removed from the room, but still, shame curled around her ankles and pulled at her knees, and all she wanted to do was sit down and just forget. She did none of that, however, and instead stood straighter, looking Fury straight in the eye.

“I’m sorry, Marshall,” Natasha said. “I cannot apologise enough.”

“It wasn’t her fault,” Steve spoke up. “My memories triggered hers—”

“Which was a risk she said she was ready to take.” Fury stared at her for a long moment, and shook his head. “I’m benching both of you until I know what to do with you.”

Steve looked as though he wanted to argue, but Natasha touched his arm gently and gave him a look that said don’t. They had been given a chance, and they messed up. This was hardly the worst Fury could have done. If he wanted, he could have removed them from the Jaeger Program entirely.

Fury exhaled sharply and turned away. “Luckily, Warriors Three was able to neutralise Frost Giant without needing back-up. Not quite as luckily, that Kaiju caused a lot of damage to the Wall before we reached them. A good chunk of the population is in a state of mass hysteria, and the governments are breathing down our necks again, as though it were our fault they had shut us down nearly everywhere.”

“Sir, can you just give us another chance—?” Steve asked.

“Do not test me right now, son.” Fury rubbed at his temple and said, “Can you step outside? I need to talk to Natasha alone.”

Steve hesitated, but Natasha nodded. “Go, Steve. Grab some food or something. I’ll catch up with you later.”

Steve held Natasha’s gaze for a long moment, and she wasn’t sure what he was looking for. She also wasn’t sure his eyes were this blue before; they were spectacularly vivid in the half-light. Whatever he saw in her eyes, he accepted, and finally stepped out of the room.

Coming out that botched neural handshake, Natasha realised he had a much calmer soul than she would have predicted.

Once Steve was gone, Fury indicated that Natasha should sit in one of the empty chairs in front of a control booth, and Fury took a seat beside her. His expression was concerned, but almost worse than that, it was kind.

“What happened, Natasha?” Fury asked. He pulled one of her hands in his, gently forcing her to uncurl her fingers from a fist. With a pronounced gentleness, he traced the indents her nails made in her skin, followed her stunted life-line across her palm. “I was worried we were going to lose you there. You got sucked in so deep that Stark had to pull the plug on you guys to get you back out.”

“I’m sorry, Fury,” Natasha said dully.

“Don’t apologise,” Fury said. “Just tell me what went down in your heads back there.”

“It was going fine,” Natasha said. She sucked in a stuttering breath. “Steve had a vivid flashback to when he lost Bucky—James Barnes—and I was caught off guard. I didn’t realise how easy it would be to forget Clint is—is dead. I thought I couldn’t fall back into that nightmare because I knew what happened, I’d never forget, but then I was there and it was like he had never left.”

She didn’t quite know when she had started speaking in Russian, but she appreciated Fury letting her talk it out anyway. His hand on hers helped keep her grounded. She was still wearing battle armour, and even if she didn’t even manage to get the Jaeger out of the Shatterdome, it felt like she had just come back from a war.

“I made you a promise,” Fury said, and his Russian would never be as good as his Mandarin or his French, but the effort was appreciated. “I want to see you fight again. However, I’m also the Marshall, and I have my duty to perform. I can’t send you out until you and Rogers know you’re ready.”

“There’s not that much time left,” Natasha said.

“There’s time enough to let you get your head in the game,” Fury said.

**

In a strange quirk of life, Bruce’s otherwise spartan room was decorated with dozens of K-talismans. Trinkets made of Kaiju bone, carved or set in amber, fashioned into amulets to be worn around the neck. They were meant to ward off Kaiju attacks, or bring good luck. Desperation led people to believe anything. Bruce never bought them, but he often received them. People saw his scars, and well. Sometimes prayers would accompany the talismans; sometimes hissed curses. It varied, from place to place.

Pepper was looking around the room with interest. She probably had not seen such a large collection on display before. One thing to be said in favour of the fear-mongers who pushed their wares: they were talented, for the most part. None of the carvings or amber moulds was identical. In truth, they were all really quite beautiful. Certain pieces could not have been made without serious skill involved.

“The tea is good,” Pepper finally said, and Bruce smiled.

“A small luxury,” he admitted. Tea had long been listed as a non-essential, and it was harder to get a supply of it, especially here in Hong Kong. Few wanted to trade to the Pacific Rim these days. “Still, if we cannot enjoy the small things in life, what can we enjoy?”

“You’re a wise man, Bruce,” Pepper said.

Bruce only inclined his head and raised his own cup in acknowledgement.

A comfortable silence fell. It was nice to find someone quiet. Tony was brilliant, in his own way, but he was the furthest thing from quiet. Sometimes Bruce just needed the simple pleasure of company, but with enough space for his own thoughts.

The last few hours had been hectic. First, the neural overload, then the revelation, and finally a Kaiju attack. Not to mention all the drama that went down in the Avenger. As a kid, Bruce had always wished for a more interesting life, and it was funny now that he was older, that he wished for things to be simpler.

Pepper cleared her throat softly. “Out of curiosity, may I ask why you keep these?”

Bruce followed her gaze to the K-talismans neatly strung along the walls. She was particularly fixated on a carved piece of bone in the shape of a bird taking flight. It was hardly the most interesting piece to be seen, but beauty was in the eye of the beholder.

“For all their... superstitious roots, they’re still Kaiju bones,” Bruce said, taking a sip of his oolong tea. “And you never know when those samples might come in handy one day.”

“I’d hardly think you’d need bone samples, though,” Pepper remarked. She set down her cup and turned to look at him. “You asked me to come here for a reason.”

“Your company, in part.”

“As delightful as I am, no doubt, I’m more interested in the other part of the reason.”

“Bone samples, I may not need, but I am sorely lacking in Kaiju brain specimens.”

“You’re going to go into the Drift with a Kaiju again,” Pepper said dryly, but there was no censure or shock in her eyes. “You’ve barely survived the first attempt; what makes you think I’ll facilitate another? I’m not sure you realise, of course, but I’ve grown quite fond of you, and I’m not keen on seeing you overload your brain.”

“It was you or Tony,” Bruce said, smiling when she scrunched her face up at the idea. “As you can see, I decided on the less risky option.”

“He would probably hijack a Jaeger to bring you back a brain,” Pepper agreed, running a hand through her hair. She closed her eyes, as if suddenly fatigued, and leaned back in the chair. It squeaked loudly in protest. Bruce only had the one; he was sitting across from her on his bed. The springs of the mattress creaked loudly as well. He spent money on small luxuries, but cared little for the state of his furniture.

A Kaiju brain though, he knew for sure, would set him back a lot more than a pot of tea ever could.

“I’m not in the black market trade,” Pepper said, pre-emptively raising her hand to stop Bruce’s protests. “But I know a guy you can ask. I can’t guarantee he’ll want to help, let alone if he has a brain or two in stock, but—” She hesitated, and frowned. “I may regret suggesting this, but you’ll want to bring Jane along with you.”

“Jane?” Bruce was surprised, to say the least. He wouldn’t have guessed a physicist would interest those running the black market trade in Kaiju organs. “Why?”

Pepper shook her head and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “That’s not my story to tell,” she said. For a moment it looked like she was going to say something else, but instead she picked up her cup of tea again, and inhaled in the sweet-smelling steam.

“Where do I have to take Jane?” Bruce asked.

“There’s a little place here in Hong Kong called Jotunheim,” Pepper said. “Ask for the Liesmith.”

**

The yellow mush on his plate was something that was trying to be scrambled eggs, but Steve felt it had gone a few steps too many somewhere along the way. He was picking at it listlessly, not quite feeling hungry, but knowing he should eat anyway.

He wondered how Natasha was doing with Fury. Steve couldn’t help but cast his mind back to what he saw in the Drift. It made him realise that when Natasha told him about her loss, about Barton and the Winter Tesseract, Steve really had no idea about the sheer scale of that tragedy.

Winter Tesseract was unlike any other Kaiju Steve had ever seen. It was also, in a strange twist, the smallest Kaiju Steve had ever seen. Black Widow must’ve had a good seventy feet on the monster, but size wasn’t what mattered that day.

The piercing howls. Jesus Christ, Steve didn’t understand how any living creature could make a noise like that. It was nails down a chalkboard; it was children screaming in pain; it was the high pitched whine of air being let out of a balloon. If it were possible to recreate such a noise, forget nuclear warfare, the sound would cripple entire armies.

Steve wasn’t surprised that Barton lost his mind. He was kind of surprised Natasha didn’t.

Lost in thought, he didn’t notice another tray being set down across from him until the slam of metal against metal. Steve looked up to see Stark looking back at him with the coldest expression he’d seen yet.

“What the fuck did you do to Natasha?” Stark demanded, cutting right to the chase.

“Excuse me?” Steve asked.

“I know her, and she wouldn’t pull an Alice in Wonderland like a goddamned novice without something setting her off,” Stark said. “And you, rookie, are the unknown variable here.”

“Didn’t realise you cared,” Steve said. He pushed the plasticised eggs away from him and leaned forward, both arms on the table, not dropping eye contact. If Stark needed to say something, better he do it here and now. The cafeteria was empty enough to be private, but full enough to keep them both in line.

Stark grinned, like a shark tasting blood. “Natasha once stabbed me in the neck with a hypothermic needle. While that doesn’t sound like the beginning of a loving friendship, I do owe her my life, and I knew Clint, that brilliant son-of-a-bitch, so I owe him that too.”

“Final stages of the neural uplink, I dropped the ball,” Steve said curtly. “I relieved the death of my co-pilot and that set Natasha on relieving Barton’s death. Do you feel better knowing that?”

“No, fuck—of course not,” Stark said, paling a little. Still, he leaned forward and asked, “Why the hell did you step up to the plate if you weren’t set to bat?”

Steve glanced away and shrugged. “Didn’t know until I tried. Anyway, it’ll be different next time.”

“I’ll be damned if you get in the Avenger again,” Stark said. “If you pull that stunt when Happy and Pepper are trying to drop the payload, you’ll get them all killed.”

Frowning, Steve looked at Stark through narrowed eyes. He was being perfectly serious. There wasn’t an ounce of the cockiness Steve had come to expect in the man. A cold trickle of anger started churning in Steve’s gut. “I think you’ll find that it isn’t up to you, but the Marshall.”

“Fury has a soft spot for Natasha, but you’ve only been here a day.”

“People make mistakes,” Steve said. “Natasha and I are Drift compatible.”

“Look, rookie,” Stark said, tone softening. “I know you’ve got something to prove, some kind of revenge hard-on to burn out, but those other Rangers are my best friends, and I don’t want to see them die because you can’t admit where you’re wrong.”

Steve’s fists clenched tight under the table, and he had to take a deep breath to reign himself in. “Don’t talk about me like you think you know me. I don’t have a revenge hard-on, I have a sense of duty, and part of that means I’ll be protecting your friends in the field while you’ll be standing behind steel and concrete, safe as we’re out there fighting.”

Amusement washed over Stark’s entire demeanour. It shifted how he sat into something more fluid, and he clasped his hands underneath his chin. “I believe in Natasha,” he said. “She’s a spitfire if I’ve ever seen one, and rumour has it that she was an assassin before all of this shit came down on our heads.” He caught Steve’s gaze and held it for an infinitely long moment. “Take away the Jaeger, old man, and what are you?”

The chatter of the cafeteria swelled, and the seconds ticked past. Steve let his hands relax, standing up from the table. The metal table creaked as he used it to push himself up. Stark watched him coolly, only flicking his eyes to follow the movement, his entire body posture otherwise unchanged.

“I’m a good man, which is more than I can say about you,” Steve said tightly. “Do you even understand the meaning of sacrifice?”

At that, Stark froze, in a stilted way that didn’t sit right on his body, like he was clenching every muscle in preparation for the fight-or-flight response. Even though it was immature to be so petty, Steve felt a small sense of satisfaction at landing a strike. Stark spoke like a man ready for the world to bend to his whims, and it rubbed Steve all the wrong ways.

What Steve didn’t expect was for Stark to start laughing, a choked off sound that felt more deranged than amused.

“Sacrifice,” Stark echoed. “Oh yeah, I’m more than familiar.” He shook his head in a jerky movement reminiscent of old wind-up toys. “Run off, rookie. I’ve got to eat my lunch.”

With that, Stark waved Steve off dismissively, and started eating with quick, neat bites, as though he couldn’t taste his food. A blanket of confusion fell across Steve’s shoulders, but he walked away. He didn’t want to stay a moment longer anyway.

Part of him though, and he didn’t realise how large that part was until the moment passed, had assumed Stark would take the barb and throw it back, keep the banter going until one or the other threw a swing.

It was probably for the best he let it go then.

As he was stepping out of the cafeteria, someone grabbed at the crook of his elbow. He turned, expecting Stark, but instead there was a black man in military dress. A colonel, one Steve vaguely remembered from earlier. He had intervened when Stark was butting heads with Steve in mission control.

“You’re not headed anywhere important, I hope,” he said.

“No, not quite,” Steve said. He had been planning to use the training room for a bit of stress relief, but this suddenly felt far more important. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“I was actually hoping to help you.”

Steve made a go-on gesture with his hand. The colonel indicated with his head that Steve should follow him, and they fell in step to head to a more deserted area, one of the empty hallways.

“So, Rogers,” the colonel said, “or do you prefer Steve?”

“I don’t mind either, if you care to tell me your name.”

“Call me Rhodey.”

Steve nodded, but otherwise stayed quiet. Rhodey’s face was set in a serious mask, his mouth turned down in displeasure. There were premature hints of silver in his neatly buzzed black hair. He still looked so young though, skin still smooth of laugh lines.

“I caught most of what you guys said in the cafeteria.”

Grimacing, Steve said, “We were just airing out our differences. No need to get involved.”

“I think there’s something you need to know about Tony,” Rhodey said. “He might be the chief technology officer to you now, but a few years ago, he was a Ranger.”

“He was?” Steve tried to imagine Stark in a drivesuit, but the images slipped away like water in cupped hands. The idea was too unthinkable.

“Tony used to have a policy about cars; if you’re going to fix them up, you’d better know how to drive them,” Rhodey said, tone fond. “That stretched to Jaegers, and he designed a lot of the Mark-3s. He even invented JARVIS, your onboard AI system.”

Leaning back against the wall, Steve asked, “What did he fight in?”

“Iron Machine,” Rhodey said, chuckling when Steve’s eyes grew wide.

Iron Machine was the very first Jaeger to pioneer arc reactor technology. Built in Sydney by an American think-tank, all those years ago. It was being built as Steve and Bucky defended it, and Bucky died and Steve barely made it back home alive. Iron Machine was one of the most simple, humanoid designs, coloured in bright red and gold like Extremis, but far more exuberant. It certainly made an impression when it first deployed; even in his haze of depression, Steve remembered the media frenzy over it.

With a dawning realisation, Steve said, “That would make him Anthony Edward Stark, of course... but his co-pilot...”

“That’d be me,” Rhodey said, without any ego. “Known better as James Rhodes.”

“I always thought you both died,” Steve said. “I mean—you just disappeared. Iron Machine was in the headlines all the time and then you just... faded out.”

“It was better that way,” Rhodey said. There was something distinctly uncomfortable about his expression. “Look, Steve, I didn’t tell you this to build up some hero-idol complex in you, or force you to think that Tony’s not an asshole. He can be, I know, I’ve Drifted with him. But you asked whether he knew the meaning of sacrifice, and I want you to know, he does, he knows it better than almost anyone would.”

“Would this have something to do with why you guys left the Jaeger Program?”

“Ask Tony and find out yourself.”

Steve watched Rhodey walk away. After a moment, Steve started heading to the training room. He wasn’t sure what to think. He hoped the Shatterdome had a good supply of punching bags; he had a tendency of breaking them when he needed to figure things out. Whilst he didn’t feel particularly compelled to apologise—not just yet—he did want to hear more of the story.

A fleeting glimpse of Barton’s face appeared in Steve’s mind. Only a few hours ago, Natasha’s head had been cradled in his lap, blood dripping out of her ears. It reminded him that sometimes the full story wasn’t what you’d ever expect—wasn’t what you’d want to hear.

**

To the uninitiated, the Shatterdome could easily be a labyrinth of endless hallways. Pepper still remembered the first time she got lost, and claustrophobia accompanied the disorientation. It was an unpleasant experience. She learned quickly how to tell directions in a maze of identical steel walls. Once you learned where to look, you see there were small markings that could give the floor level and the grid number of the section.

Pepper had a mind built for organisation, and once she grasped the logic of the map, she never got lost again. Still, not everyone had a maze runner’s mind, so when Pepper saw Natasha sitting outside her room, her first assumption was that Natasha had lost her way, as illogical as that was in hindsight.

“Natasha, what are you doing?” she asked.

At the sight of Pepper, Natasha gracefully stood up and brushed off her knees. “I was waiting for you,” Natasha said.

“Come inside then,” Pepper said after a beat of surprise, stepping around Natasha to open up the door to her room.

All the barracks looked the same for the most part, one roomed accommodation that was not unlike jail cells. Pepper didn’t decorate hers, kept it neat and simple, but there were a few photographs on the metal desk jutting out of the wall.

Natasha stood in the middle of the room, looking faintly uncomfortable, before Pepper indicated she could sit in front of the desk if she’d like. She took the seat, and Pepper moved to her bed, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders. The warmth she’d received from the pot of hot tea she had with Bruce had been lost on the walk back here, and she was shivering a little.

Natasha, on the other hand, sat very still on the chair. Her red hair was tied up in a high ponytail, face free of make-up, wearing loose, comfortable clothing. She looked as tired as Pepper had been feeling recently.

“Heard what happened,” Pepper said. All of the technicians couldn’t stop talking about it, to be honest. It wasn’t every day a Ranger nearly loses control. “How are you handling things?”

“Could be better, I suppose,” Natasha said. Her accent always came out more thickly when she was tired, or hurt. Perhaps both, in this case. “Fury benched me and Steve.”

“Did he do the right thing?” Pepper asked cautiously.

Natasha exhaled softly. “I think so. For now, at least.”

There were a lot of people in the Shatterdome who were intimated by Rangers. In particular, Natasha got treated with a high degree of caution; as if her experiences made her someone to be wary over, someone whose control needed constant surveillance. When Pepper looked at Natasha, she only felt a strong swell of admiration.

If she lost Happy in the same way Natasha lost Clint, Pepper wasn’t honestly sure she’d come out fighting like Natasha.

“I hope you figure things out,” Pepper said. “I’d always feel better fighting with you at my back.”

Natasha looked up and smiled. It made her look younger, softer.

“The strange thing that came out of this mess,” Natasha said, speaking haltingly, “is that I don’t blame myself anymore.”

“You blamed yourself before?” Pepper asked sharply. “It wasn’t your fault. Even Tony going through the black box couldn’t find a single thing to fault you. The only thing to blame is that damned Winter Tesseract.”

“I think I realise that now,” Natasha said. She rubbed her shoulders absent-mindedly. “Reliving that moment in the Drift. It was—traumatic, but going through it again, I couldn’t see or think of another thing I could’ve done. Clint was lost and I was trapped; that battle was over before it really began.”

“What happened, exactly?” Pepper asked, feeling too curious for her own good. She knew the broad strokes, but half of it was passed by word-of-mouth, and its accuracy had always been in question.

Natasha didn’t quite bristle at the question, but she tensed, her hands fidgeting with an arm guard. On closer inspection, Pepper realised it was one of the ones Clint used to wear.

“Winter Tesseract used sound in a way we weren’t prepared for,” Natasha said. She was taking in short, shallow, controlled breaths. “It drove Clint insane, and I was halfway there before we were able to gain anything close to control over the Jaeger.” A few muttered words, which were spoken in the universal tone of all swear words, even if Pepper didn’t speak Russian.

“Widow’s Bite killed the thing eventually,” Natasha said, “but it took too long to charge between attacks and it didn’t manage to finish the job before Clint started having fits in the harness. I felt them, too. Kind of like seizures, but different. Every nerve in your body was being scraped raw.”

Pepper released a breath she didn’t realise she was holding. “Natasha...”

“I dragged Black Widow back to the Tokyo base,” Natasha pushed on, staring blankly at the floor. “I kept screaming for someone to give Clint medical attention, but then they said—they told me he’d been dead for nearly an hour.”

A whispered oh my god escaped Pepper before she could consciously reign herself back. That wasn’t something she knew before. She didn’t even know if it was possible.

Ghost-Drifting was a phenomenon where after the neural connection was disengaged pilots could still retain a shadow of a presence within each other. Pepper knew about that, had even once thought she’d had that experience with Happy after a seven-hour long Drift session, but never had she considered the idea it could reach out to last past death.

She wondered what Natasha could have even heard in that last hour.

“I’m not mad,” Natasha said calmly, as if following Pepper’s train of thought. “Of course, that’s what a mad person might say.”

“Do you think... it was Clint making sure you got home safely?” Could your final wishes be strong enough to keep you inside the Drift?

“An interesting thought...” Natasha trailed off and smiled wanly. “But no. More likely it was some messed-up survival instinct putting off dealing with his death until I was able to.”

“Why would you ever go in a Jaeger again?” Pepper clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, that’s an awful question—”

“No, that’s a good one.” Pursing her lips, Natasha leaned back in the chair. “Before I reached Tokyo, Clint told me never to stop fighting. He might’ve meant never stop fighting to get back to the mainland, but I think he would’ve wanted me to keep up being a Ranger.”

“Natasha...” Pepper murmured, soft. “That wasn’t Clint. You said it yourself.”

“It probably wasn’t him,” Natasha agreed. “But it would have been what he’d have said to me, all the same.”

She was staring up at the ceiling with a grim determination. There were tears in her eyes, shining in the low electric light. Not a single one fell.

**

Finding Jotunheim was harder than Bruce expected. He had been redirected three times already by three different sellers of Kaiju-wares, all of which took a lengthy amount of time convincing that Bruce and Jane were not with the Hong Kong police officials. It was technically against the law to sell Kaiju parts, since they were listed as biohazardous waste.

It was little wonder that Pepper recommended bringing Jane. Her presence was more convincing of their innocence than any of Bruce’s bumbling attempts to assure them he wasn’t trying to arrest any of them.

“The paranoia is understandable, but this is getting ridiculous,” Bruce complained as they were sent from the fourth shop to what was beginning to feel like a ridiculous goose chase.

Jane shrugged. “It pays to be cautious when you’re in the black market.” She checked the street signs and the address they were given. “We’re here,” she said, surprised.

“That was quick,” Bruce agreed. They were standing outside a non-descript blue door. At closer inspection, there were faint carvings in the wood, curling and ornate. Glancing at Jane, who only matched his confused expression, Bruce reached forward and knocked, loudly, three times.

“Who’s there?” barked out a gruff voice beyond the door.

“Uh, we’re looking for the Liesmith,” Bruce said.

A long pause followed their words, but then the door creaked open. Taking a deep breath, Bruce stepped in first, hand held behind him if he needed to warn Jane away. He stepped into a long dark hallway. The walls were bare of decoration and wallpaper, and the carpet was threadbare and worn down to a dirty grey colour.

Jane followed him promptly, and the door swung shut behind them, startling both of them. They looked at each other once and silently agreed to keep walking. There were multiple doors along the hallway, but only one with light streaming out underneath the crevice of the door.

This time, Jane knocked on it, and they heard another voice—not the gruff voice of before—call out genially, “Enter.”

Bruce only caught it for a half-second, but Jane’s expression changed into something hard. She was pushing past Bruce and stepped through the door with a sudden wave of anger charging her demeanour. He followed her more out of surprise than anything, but before he could say anything, they were inside.

Past the door, they were greeted with a wide open room. The walls were lined with more Kaiju organs than Bruce—as a specialist biologist for Kaiju—had ever seen in his lifetime. They were floating in ammonia, perfectly preserved specimens, and a small part of Bruce wanted to whine that if this was what illegal trade got, he wanted to move out of government work.

The room itself was beautifully ornate, all gold leaf and rich greens. There were several dark leather couches, and a heavy oaken desk to the side. A Kaiju fang had been carved into the shape of a small fountain and sat in the centre of the room, the sound of trickling water breaking the silence. It sang of luxury, and juxtaposed with the monster body-parts, it made for a macabre kind of setting.

A man was lounging on one of the couches, lazily flipping the pages of a thick volume, not even looking up as they entered. He was tall, limbs stretching out before him; wearing a fine bespoke suit with an ivory-topped cane propped by his knee. His skin was pale and his black hair was slicked back. Of the items in the room, he suddenly became the most eye-catching feature.

“My minions tell me that a couple of government goons have been looking for me,” he said, sounding amused. The Liesmith, then.

Bruce stepped forward to say something, but Jane beat him to the punch.

“Loki, you utter bastard,” she bit out scathingly, arms crossed with a face like thunder. “This is where you’ve been?”

The Liesmith—or Loki, apparently—whipped up his head so fast it looked unnatural. If possible, he became paler than he was before, and something like terror filled his shockingly green eyes.

“Thor—what of Thor, Jane—?” he asked, with an urgency that alarmed Bruce.

“Thor is the same as he ever was,” Jane said, cold. “Which you would have known had you not run away like a fool.”

Loki closed his book quietly and unfolded himself with an inhuman kind of grace. His movements were too fast, too slick. The cane, it seemed, was strictly ornamental, as he walked across to them. His eyes were now cool, calculating, the fear all but gone. Bruce instinctively didn’t like him.

“If you are not here to deliver news about Thor, I have little interest in you,” he declared.

“Well, tough luck, mister,” Jane said. “You need to get us a Kaiju brain.”

“Has the PPDC stopped looking after their resident scientists?” Loki asked. “I had rather thought they were keeping you well stocked with monster parts.”

“Brains are in short supply,” Jane said. “Though I don’t know why Pepper told us to ask you. It’s not like you could spare any.”

“I wonder why you listened to her,” Loki said. “You must be desperate, coming to me.”

“Desperate?” Jane snorted. “More like misinformed. Neither of us knew you were at the end of this.”

Bruce cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I feel like I’m missing a good chunk of this story.”

“Oh, right, Bruce,” Jane said, biting her lip. Something deflated within her and her shoulders slumped forwards slightly. “You and Tony got here after everything went down.”

“Neither of them ever asked after your wedding ring?” Loki asked, suddenly amused.

Bruce turned his attention to Loki, frowning. “Neither of us asked because you don’t simply ask about that kind of stuff these days, not when so many of us have lost a loved one.”

He had wondered a few times before, of course, about the thin gold ring Jane constantly wore. She fiddled with it when she was stressed. Still, she had never volunteered the information, and even Tony at his worst had never forced the issue.

“Thor—my husband—” Jane shook her head. “He isn’t dead.”

“Then what happened?” Bruce asked. Something about the name pinged his memory.

Loki tapped his cane twice on the ground. “Thor isn’t dead,” he said bitterly. “He’s in a coma.”

Oh, Bruce thought, eyes widening with understanding. Thor Odinson, former co-pilot of Mighty Mjolnir, the Ranger who never disengaged from a neural uplink. In battle, something vital had been damaged and Thor had been trapped in his own mind, unable to escape. It was the kind of stuff nightmares were made out of.

Yet looking at the grim expressions of Jane and Loki, Bruce realised there had to be more to the story than just that.

**

Warriors Three was such a beautiful piece of craftsmanship that Tony still kicked himself some days for not being the one to think it up. It was the only thrice-piloted system of any Jaeger, inspired by the secondary brains found in Kaiju. There was still the primary duo for the hemispheres, and the third co-pilot would help the even the load some more, whilst also controlling an additional limb: a giant clawed arm from the back. It had a retractable sword feature, which was a detail Tony never stopped loving.

If you removed the whole aliens-are-literally-destroying-the-world element from the current state of things, Tony was essentially being able to live his childhood dream of building giant robots. This was his life now. It was ridiculous and terrifying in all the best and worst ways.

“Filtration units at ninety-eight percent,” JARVIS dutifully called out.

Tony grumbled under his breath. “Two percent off is not good enough.” He wiped his oily hands on a rag and surveyed the rest of the Conn-Pod. As damage went, there wasn’t that much, considering it got slammed into the Wall a few times. “How’s the synch-capability? Nothing’s fuzzy about the connection ports?”

“All seems in working order, sir,” JARVIS said. “Pilot seat 03 may require a manual check; recent data reported back minor stiffness in the joints of the motion rig.”

“Will do, JARVIS,” Tony said.

“Why did you make JARVIS British?”

Tony stilled, before turning around to see Rogers casually leaning against the wall of the Conn-Pod, looking at him with a strange focus. He was dressed down in comfortable-looking sweatpants and a tight-fitting singlet, with a thin sheen of sweat on his brow.

“Would you prefer an American accent?” Tony asked.

“No, I don’t really have a preference,” Rogers said. “That didn’t really answer my question either.”

Tony shrugged, stepped over to 03’s motion rig. He tried to keep the rig between them, but Rogers shifted so they could keep eye contact. Sighing, Tony said, “When I was younger, I had someone look after me. Not—not my parents, but he felt like family near the end. He was British, and when I was coding JARVIS for the first time, that voice was the most comforting thing I could think of.”

Rogers blinked, as if surprised by the show of honesty.

“I figured if we were going through hell and back, we deserved a little comfort,” Tony said, ducking his head. He started checking the joints, keeping his eyes on the metal under his hands.

“I’m meant to ask you why you stopped being a Ranger,” Rogers blurted out.

“Wait—” Tony cut himself off before the word had a chance to fully form. “Rhodey or Pepper, which one gave you the shake-down?”

“Rhodey.” Rogers smiled cautiously. “It was less a shake-down, too, and more a quiet word of advice.”

Even before the Drift, Rhodey always looked out for Tony. He wondered why this still surprised him, after all this time. As far as best friends went, he couldn’t have asked for more.

“You want to know why I quit piloting Jaegers?” Tony asked. He stepped out behind the rig and faced Rogers, mirroring that relaxed stance. “Well, you can tell me why you made yourself scarce for five years when the world needed you most.”

Rogers blanched, but instead of reeling back, he stared right at Tony, not with anger, but with—resolve, almost. “I’d lost my co-pilot. There was nothing I could do for the Jaeger Program when I was grieving like that.”

“Bullshit,” Tony said. “Try again.”

“That’s what happened,” Rogers snapped, frustrated. “What do you want me to say?”

“The truth, rookie,” Tony said.

“I lost my best friend,” Rogers said. “He was my entire life at that point, and I couldn’t handle it.”

Tony frowned. “That’s not the whole truth.”

“There’s nothing more to add!”

“The fact you’re still standing here tells me yes there is.”

“What do you want to hear?” Rogers roared. He stalked forward until he inches away from Tony’s face. “That I forgot why we should even bother fighting? That I forgot why we should risk our lives for ungrateful people? That I forgot why life was worth living?”

“Yes,” Tony said, electrified. “There we go.” Pressing a hand against Roger’s chest, Tony continued, “You keep telling the world that it was Barnes’ death that was keeping you down, you’re going to forget the deal with the rest of your baggage.”

Rogers pushed away Tony’s arm. “I’ve dealt with my issues, despite what you think. What about you then, Stark? What’s your baggage?”

The back of Tony’s mouth tasted bitter, but he managed to push out, “You know how the Mark-1s all had that radiation shielding problem?”

“The first string of Rangers all got serious radiation poisoning,” Rogers said, looking at Tony critically, like he was trying to tell from a glance whether that was Tony’s problem.

“Turns out, arc reactor technology can be pretty deadly,” Tony said. “Not the modern ones—” he adds at Roger’s shocked expression, “—those ones are fitted with vibranium, which cost a small empire to synthesise in the quantities they need. You’re lucky we were able to scrape enough for the Avenger to run on.”

Rogers was listening patiently. The earnestness grated on Tony’s nerves, and the rest of the story came out in a jumbled rush. “Early days, Rhodey and I—did he tell you he piloted Iron Machine with me? He should’ve if he didn’t: I couldn’t have done anything without him—well, anyway, we ran missions with palladium.

“It would have been okay, had it just been me. Using yourself as the lab rat is fine, scientific curiosity and whatever. But Rhodey was on board with me. I didn’t realise why we were getting sicker and sicker until I had JARVIS run a few tests. I kept thinking it was the relay gel, maybe, or that the drivesuits weren’t shielding us enough. I didn’t realise it wasn’t radiation poisoning we had to worry about. I’d have guessed food poisoning before blaming the palladium.”

Comprehension dawned on Rogers’ face. “Regulations benched you and the PPDC covered up the mess.”

It was one thing to forget radiation shielding on the Mark-1s, but if word got out that the Pan Pacific Defence Corps made the same mistake twice, well. The media, even in a post-apocalyptic world, could be vicious, and ranking officials wanted to save face.

“Too much radiation, nuclear or not, and you’re classified unfit to pilot,” Tony said. There was a certain peace to his tone; the anger had long been leeched out of the fact. “I couldn’t give a fuck about the lack of recognition at the end, but Rhodey deserved better than being brushed quietly to the side.”

“Did they scrap Iron Machine?”

“They tried,” Tony said, and he smiled viciously. “But I had enough sway to keep it and rebuild it. You’ve seen its legacy: Extremis.” He rebuilt what would have been the tool of his destruction—and, at one point, what he thought would be his coffin—and fashioned it into a weapon for his best friends to wear.

He was starting to understand why his dad only ever really had army friends. In a war, it was hard to make friends with people untouched by destruction. Maybe it was a Stark trait to bring them into the trenches with you.

Then he thought of Pepper’s face when he showed her the weaponry systems in Extremis’ gauntlets, how Happy didn’t even hesitate to take the offer, and decided some people were just born fighters.

“How bad is it?” Rogers asked, with the air of one trying not to offend. It almost made Tony laugh. He’d thought they were far past worrying about niceties.

“How bad’s the radiation?” At Rogers’ nod, Tony raised his hand in a so-so gesture. “It could be worse. I had resigned myself to dying in a Jaeger cockpit, and now I’ve gotta resign myself to wasting away.” Though if they don’t close the Breach, he might die by way of Kaiju regardless.

A silence followed the words, and Tony busied himself with greasing the joints for 03’s motion rigging. This kind of check-up could in principle be done by one of the general crew technicians, but a long history of control issues had Tony neurotically going over Conn-Pods after missions. It was soothing, in a mindless kind of way. He was getting sick of trawling through numbers that were only repeatedly telling him when they were all scheduled to die, anyway.

“I’m sorry, then, for what I said before,” Rogers said.

“Did Rhodey tell you to apologise too?”

“No,” Rogers said, and there was something tentative in his voice. “He only asked me to talk to you.”

Tony ran a hand through his hair, undoubtedly leaving streaks of engine grease behind.

“I’m sorry too,” Tony said, less haltingly than he would have thought. “I get protective of my friends. Though I guess it’s hypocritical of me to tell people off for putting their friends’ lives in danger.”

“Perhaps we just got off on the wrong foot, Stark.”

“Don’t call me that, it makes me sound like my father,” Tony said. “Call me Tony, practically everyone else does.”

“Only if you promise to stop calling me ‘rookie’ and start calling me Steve.”

“I can do that.”

Steve grinned, and it suddenly reminded Tony how stunningly attractive he could be when he wasn’t caught up being an asshole. Though, in all fairness, Tony had a knack of bringing the worst out of people.

“So you design Jaegers?” Steve asked, shy, hands in pockets like he didn’t know what to do with them, and Tony felt his own smile widen in response.

“JARVIS, bring up Extremis’ schematics on the HUD,” and the words were barely out of Tony’s mouth before Extremis was lit up on the main display. It wasn’t as impressive as seeing the design on the holo-boards in a thousand points of coloured lights, but it was still a technological marvel.

Without the end of the world bringing everyone together, this would be impossible. Before K-Day, Tony hypothesised he might have been able to make a miniature Jaeger, a personalised suit, maybe. With a smaller arc reactor, a smaller frame. Maybe even make it fly, since it’d be lighter. He could call it Extremis’ Mini-Me, or maybe Iron Man to play on Iron Machine.

If they survived the Triple-Event, it was something to consider taking up as a hobby.

“This is amazing,” Steve said. He was looking at the schematics with a kind of wonder; Tony suddenly wondered whether it was the same expression doctors wore the first time they saw into a chest cavity, all those hidden parts brought to the forefront. “It’s kind of like a work of art.”

“Anything can be art, with enough passion and love behind it,” Tony said. Reaching out, he swiped the screen and sent the schematic into a 360° spin. “You should hear Jane go on about her research on the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. It’s almost a shame she had to leave that work for the Breach. In another world, she would’ve torn the scientific community apart; her findings were controversial in the best way.”

“What would you have been if K-Day never happened?”

“Me?” Tony blinked, surprised. “I’d probably be doing what I was doing before. Research and design, tinkering with machines. I had a lot of interests.” He kind of regrets how much of his focus had been on weaponry before this. If he never had to design another weapon, even as one as cool as a Jaeger, he’d be pretty content. “What about you, ro—Steve?”

“I was hoping to study art,” Steve said. Tony raised his eyebrows in surprise; he wasn’t expecting that kind of answer at all. “Study animation, maybe.”

Tony opened his mouth to make a crack about Disney, but he never got it out before the alarms started sounding. Steve’s face was scrunched up in alarm—Kaiju attacks had never happened this frequently before—but a cold kind of terror was trickling down Tony’s spine. Numbers flashed past his eyes, numbers that couldn’t lie.

He met Steve’s gaze dead-on and said flatly, “We’re about to face a Double-Event.”