Brave New World
Summary: Sol 3 made its appearance on the field of interplanetary politics in a big way. A songfic-style set of vignettes on the Avengers growing into themselves as a team and their roles in the wider world.
The Laughing Phoenix does not own The Avengers and makes no profit from this work. This was inspired by jessirosee's masterful video 'The Avengers | This is War', which can be found here: watch?v=9gCBiJ3QJnk. Phoenix also does not own 30 Seconds To Mars' song This is War.
WARNING: Violence, language, and mayhem.
A warning to the people, the good and the evil: this is war.
If anybody in SHIELD had believed the Chitauri to be an isolated incident, they were rapidly disabused of that notion in the months following the formation of the Avengers. Alien encounters began happening on a semi-regular basis, and each time SHIELD ended up mobilizing. Sometimes, their extraterrestrial visitors were benign or neutral, merely curious about this new world and its peoples. Sometimes they weren't, although luckily they had yet to deal with devastation on the scale of the Chitauri incursion.
Needless to say, the sudden rise in alien activity was a subject of interest to many, and SHIELD's analysts, occasionally aided by comments from extraterrestrials, quickly came to a reasonable if disturbing conclusion: Earth, Sol 3, Midgard, Terra, whatever they chose to name their home world, had become a new player in the interplanetary games of war and politics, exploding onto the scene in a way that made their neighbors very curious.
These visits were only the beginning. More would be coming, and the lid to this particular Pandora's box was long gone.
Compounding the issue was the way Earth's own natives began moving in response: certain organizations and individuals SHIELD had only really been monitoring began to move, stretching them thin as they tried to stay on top of everything. Almost overnight SHIELD went from a mostly quiet division kept on reserve for the unimaginable worst-case scenarios and spending most of their time on R&D to a more or less active fighting force.
"There was a time," a senior SHIELD agent remarked once, "that the order to scramble might just be a drill."
"It's sure not like that anymore," her subordinate muttered, stuttering a little on the last word as he corralled a handcuffed suspect, leading him into lockup.
"We were a peacekeeping force then," the on-duty officer told the younger man, opening a cell. "Now, not so much. You'll get used to it. Or, you know, wash out."
To the soldier,
It was a bit of a relief to get back into combat, as horrible as it sounded. Steve knew he shouldn't wish for battles, but they were familiar, and he felt more at home in the middle of a firefight than almost anywhere else these days. When he was being honest, Steve would admit to himself that the same had been true back then, before he fell into the ice and woke up in this bizarre facsimile of the world he'd known.
Steve was devoted to his country, to service in the protection of others, to the defeat of the monsters of the universe, from the grotesque aliens to the men who hid their depravity behind a smile. Someone had to take out the trash, and it might as well be him. He also liked the discipline the armed forces imposed, the order inherent in its structure. It helped simplify things, provided grounding in a confusing world where he didn't always know what he was doing.
All he'd wanted to do for as long as he could remember was protect people. At least he could keep doing so, even if his new team took his old team's level of insanity and expanded on it. It wasn't always easy – within the first month alone he turned around five times to comment to Peggy or Howard or Bucky on the Avenger's shenanigans, only to remember that they were all long-dead.
Steve was adjusting, though. Once, when another nightmare of falling into the ice woke him, he went into the main kitchen to find Bruce sitting at the table, papers spread everywhere and a cup of something steaming at his elbow. Bruce raised an eyebrow at Steve's disheveled state, but thankfully refrained from speaking. They spent an hour sitting quietly, Steve nursing a glass of orange juice, the only sound the hum of the electronics and the scratch of Bruce's pen.
The civilian,
As the only noncombatant associating with the Avengers on a regular basis, Pepper often felt like she was kept wrapped in protective packaging. And while it sometimes annoyed her – she was far from fragile, thank you very much – she understood it. She wasn't a warrior. She didn't belong on the battlefield.
So while Tony and Steve and the others fought in the streets to protect the Earth, in service to the cause Phil had died for, Pepper prepared for a very different type of battle. A war in which armor came in the form of high-quality tailored suits and words and smiles and stocks were the weapons. A war where the fact that she only very reluctantly learned how to use a gun because Tony asked and often "forgot" to carry the thing didn't matter as much as her ability to terrify the board of SI and coax investors.
She wasn't a fighter; in fact, she was pretty close to helpless if any of the Avengers' myriad enemies decided to take her on physically. But Pepper didn't give a damn. She didn't have to be in the field to watch the team's backs.
The martyr,
Photos of Agent Phil Coulson found their way to the agents' break rooms in the Helicarrier and SHIELD's permanent bases. All of them were casual shots, cribbed from group images or surveillance video, blown up and enhanced to the best quality possible. The closest thing among them to a portrait shot was the picture taken from his ID badge.
A handful came from Tony Stark, who'd had JARVIS go through the surveillance feeds for good shots after he saw the first one. One from Hawkeye and two from the Black Widow, posted silently during the middle of the night. Hill managed to get a picture of Coulson in a T-shirt and jeans that was awarded pride of place in the break room nearest the Helicarrier's bridge.
Slowly, quietly, a gentle superstition developed among the more junior agents, as they started to take glances at the photos before they went on ops. It became a ritual, checking in with Coulson's image before they left in a bizarre sort of homage to the man who would openly confront a god armed only with an experimental weapon. Even if it killed him.
The victim.
Natasha is glad that she does not have to deal with the survivors. Looking into the faces of those caught in the crossfire, or occasionally all-out rescued by the team, is too much like looking into a mirror some days. She'd been the traumatized victim as a child and adolescent, and had no inclination to go there again. If she's going to get caught up in the darker battles between superpowers, both terrestrial and alien, then she's going to do it on her terms.
One of the SHIELD psychologists, the only one she'll deal with, calls this healthy, saying that Natasha is exercising her own agency after being robbed of it for so many years. Natasha thinks this is probably so much psychobabble bullshit, but it's nice enough to hear. Either way, dealing with trauma victims is not her thing.
So when Hill sent her to get information out of the only survivor of a raid, a local woman who'd been forced to cook for her captors before being liberated by SHIELD, she was tempted to refuse. Hill took one look at her face, told her matter-of-factly that the woman clammed up around anyone with a penis, and sent her in anyway. To Natasha's very great surprise, the task wasn't as onerous as she thought – she got the necessary information quickly, and after about fifteen minutes of talking the woman was making corrections to their earlier maps.
It still came as a shock when, at the end of the interview, the woman looked up at her and asked "Does it ever get any better?"
Natasha sat back down slowly, then said "Yes, I think so. It's hard work, but it does."
The woman nodded. "And everything worth having is worth working hard for. Thank you." She looked around the room then glanced up at Natasha. "Give those sons of bitches a kick for me."
"Right where it hurts," Natasha promised, an odd little flower of amused hope blooming in her chest.
This is war.
"Widow? Cap?" Tony called over the comms. "You'd better check in, because I think Bruce is about a minute away from letting the Other Guy go in to find you and I'd really rather he didn't because there's another two squads of Doombots coming out of that building and I can't be in two places at once. I'm not quite that awesome."
"This is Widow," the feed was staticky, "I'm moving on what looks like a control booth now, should hopefully be able to figure out where the 'bots are coming from and shut it down."
"A bit ahead of you there," Steve sounded a little short of breath. "I'm on the second basement level, about thirty yards back from the main bank of elevators, and I think I've found a fabrication unit. Tony, I want you to have Thor take your position and get down here."
"On my way." The comms were filled with the noise of battle for about five minutes, then Natasha spoke up.
"I've gained entry to the control booth and am shutting down the 'bots hooked into the building's infrastructure. It looks like about forty are loose, mostly outside."
"Make that twenty," Clint said, "a bunch of them provoked the Hulk and he snatched up two of them and is using them to beat the crap out of the others."
A warning to the prophet,
"Shit," Clint hissed, snapping his phone shut. "Shit, shit, shit."
"Something wrong?" Natasha asked, glancing back over her shoulder at him from where she was examining her personal arsenal.
"Maybe. Yes, probably." Sighing, he moved to run his fingers through the fletchings on his arrows, checking to make sure none were bent or cracked. "Two of my contacts in the Czech Republic have gone silent, and one of my contacts in Poland just turned up dead."
"You think they're all related?"
"I hope not." If they were, that would be very, very bad for everyone involved, and Clint did not need the extra stress on top of a mission that was already listing towards FUBAR. He pulled out his bow and began examining it again – the odds of something having gone wrong with it since the last time he checked were slim, but it'd make him feel better.
"Stark would hack just about any database or communications network you asked him to," Natasha commented idly, not looking up from her Widow's Bite.
Clint shook his head. "Pepper would probably kill me if I interrupted their anniversary. Besides, Stark would start to hover, and this is supposed to be a quick and quiet mission."
Natasha chuckled.
Two days later, when they were hiding in a shipping container while HYDRA goons ran about and shouted, Clint cursed under his breath. "Should have had Stark do his tech wizardry after all," he hissed. "Knew this was going to hell." At the elbow in his ribs he shut up, and followed Natasha's lead as they ghosted through the warehouse on their way to the rendezvous point.
The liar,
Loki smirked at the Midgardians as he watched them scuttle around, looking for the source of the latest breach in their defenses. When it came to entertainment value, SHIELD was second to none. Oh, he never got to interact with them as much as he might have liked, bouncing as he did from enemy to reluctant ally and back again as his plots dictated, but it was always a bit of a treat.
He had to give the Midgardians this much: as inaccurate as their stories of his extended adoptive clan could be (they thought he'd personally birthed Sleipnir, when in fact he'd been midwife and nursemaid only), they sometimes got the tales right. Loki Lie-smith, they called him, Loki the Silver-tongued, and there they were completely correct. Loki prided himself on his ability to bend words as easily as he breathed, and enjoyed twisting truth and misdirection and outright lie into webs with which to trap his enemies.
It kept people on their toes, and life was always far more interesting that way.
The honest.
"Agent Hill, tell me that the Avengers haven't gotten tied up fighting giant goldfish on the East River."
"I'm afraid I can't do that sir." Maria told Fury as they watched the live feed.
"Then get ahold of Stark or Rogers for me, and ask them what the hell they think they're doing. We don't have time for this shit."
Maria did so, judiciously editing Fury's remarks. It was always best not to cause offense over a comm. channel. Fury could get away with it, as could the Avengers, but it was distinctly unprofessional for an Agent, and if asked to clarify, she didn't want to be pressured to lie.
Lying was, as far as she was concerned, a waste of her time and energy, and right now she had bigger things to worry about. "Captain, I need you to send some of your team to the harbor, a creature looking like cross between a giant squid and the Loch Ness monster is attacking the ferries."
"You're kidding."
"I don't kid in battle zones, Mr. Stark. Trust me, this thing is as weird as it sounds." Thor would later identify the beast as the Hafgufa, and Maria just raised an eyebrow as the Asgardian began reciting lyric poetry describing the Hafgufa's marauding ways. After that, the team stopped doubting her intel when she played spotter – which is why when she reported that a group of aliens dressed as the Elves of Mirkwood and speaking Sindarin showed up, nobody did more than blink.
This is war.
Steve retched into a trashcan, Tony folded miserably in half beside him, still wrapped in the armor. The Hulk stood nearby, growling at anyone who got too close despite his sickly pallor. He didn't know where Hawkeye and the Widow had gotten, but he doubted they were far, or handling this much better than he was.
Their mission had involved a group of alien scouts from a species they didn't even really know the name of – Thor was the only one who had even heard of them before, and admitted that he only knew them as distant cousins of the Skrulls. The scouts had selected people from all strata of society and…leeched onto them, taking on their identities, even their skins. The Avengers had learned that the hard way, when a chitinous-looking figure peeled its way out of the body of the barista Clint had been observing and attacked him.
The resulting fight had been messy, but SHIELD believed they'd gotten all forty of the scouts. That was cold comfort to Steve, knowing that that meant forty people were dead, even if he technically understood that they'd been dead for days or even weeks, since the aliens had targeted them. Shuddering, he turned a little, not wanting to see the body of the thirteen-year-old girl, blue-black chitin visible through the rents in her skin.
To the leader,
Fury had been with SHIELD since so close to the beginning that he may as well have been there the entire time. He knew the organization inside and out, knew exactly what its capabilities were, where it needed to grow, and had a pretty good idea of how to get it exactly what it needed.
They needed the Avengers – that was without question – as they needed a quick-response team who could handle the extreme situations SHIELD typically wound up in the middle of. That meant the odd talents, the risks, those independent and intelligent enough to adapt to orders on the fly. And with the superhuman population on the rise, as well as the number of alien encounters, it also tended to mean the so-called superpowered.
The problem with the Avengers was exactly what made them so valuable – they were a goddamned bunch of loose cannons. Thor was an alien, which meant Fury had zero control over him. Banner was so determined to keep from hurting anyone that he tended to disappear, and his intelligence meant that he was getting to be too damn good at going off the radar. Stark was a thorn in everybody's sides, and Fury knew that if he didn't like what SHIELD had to say he was capable of and willing to screw up their operations just to make a point. Cap may have been a good soldier, but his first field operation had been a direct contravention of orders, and there was no doubt he'd break the chain of command and ignore orders if he thought it necessary. Even Romanov and Barton, who had been SHIELD agents for years and theoretically those Fury could trust to behave, were notorious for creatively interpreting their orders.
That they listened to him at all continually surprised Fury.
The pariah,
Bruce was used to being on the fringes – even before the Other Guy, he'd been isolated from his peers, who were often put off by his intelligence. He'd worked with it as well as he could, letting the loneliness become shield and armor, minimizing the number of people at risk. Sometimes it was liberating – as outcast, he could go almost anywhere, could use his skills to care for those who desperately needed help but often couldn't afford it. He loved the happiness on people's faces when he successfully treated an illness or injury. Other times it left him feeling disconnected and drifting, lost without an anchor or even a compass. He was doing better, he'd never gotten so low again as to reach for a gun or other weapon, but it still hurt.
Being part of the Avengers gave him that anchor again, even if of all of them he had the least active social life – and that was counting the two assassins. Just because the Other Guy was useful in a fight didn't mean people wanted him at parties. That was mostly okay with Bruce – he had the team, and Tony kept insisting on giving him lab space "with all the cool toys, you're gonna love it Bruce," and he kept busy enough.
The phone call came from out of the blue. "Dr. Banner," JARVIS said one lazy afternoon, when Bruce was in the lab recalibrating the GCMS in an attempt to figure out where the bizarre peaks on the most recent analysis had come from. "There is a video call for you from Kolkata. Would you prefer to take it here or upstairs?"
Bruce frowned. Who would be calling him from there? "Just a moment, JARVIS, I'll take it in the lab kitchen." Putting down the test tube and stripping off his gloves, he trotted over to the kitchen, really a glorified kitchenette mainly used for making coffee. Settling down on Tony's beat-up couch, he pulled a screen monitor towards him. "Okay, I'm ready."
The screen flickered to life, and Bruce found himself facing a SHIELD agent. "Dr. Banner, my name is Agent Misra. I have here a number of individuals who approached SHIELD wishing to express their gratitude for your work. Would you be willing to see them?"
"I – ah, yes, yes of course." Nodding, the agent stepped to the side and gently waved a young woman carrying a toddler into the chair in front of the camera.
"I am Dipika," she said in broken, heavily accented English. "You save sister's life. Thank you." She coaxed the toddler to wave at the camera.
Fifteen others followed Dipika – a young man whose leg he'd stitched up, a father whose children he'd treated for infection. The last was an elderly man who spoke fluent English, sitting with quiet dignity in the rickety folding chair. "You are a good man, Dr. Banner." He smiled at the look of confusion on Bruce's face. "You know what it is to be different, and to be unwanted for your differences. So you helped those who were themselves unwanted. Only a good man would do such a thing."
The victor,
Thor stripped off his cape with an irritated huff, letting it drop to the floor next to Mjolnir. Their mission had gone less than successfully today – while they had managed to prevent major damage or any loss of life, the instigator of the villainy had escaped, and they had no means of tracking him to his lair. Unaccustomed to defeat, he felt the roiling frustration under his skin, and ran a hand through his hair, contemplating a trip to the gym to work off some of his energy.
As a child he had been the frequent champion of their games, and when he had been old enough to take to the training fields, he quickly proved his prowess there too. His wins were never handed to him – Odin would never have stood for that kind of behavior – but he'd grown used to simply being superior to his opponents. For much of his life he'd accepted it as his due, but life among his comrades the Avengers was, perhaps, teaching him some humility.
That didn't mean he would accept less than victory from himself, but perhaps he'd learn to take defeat with more grace.
The messiah.
Tony was used to being labeled – it was practically par for the course when you were as public a figure as he was. Some labels were more comfortable than others, but as a general rule he tried to ignore them as much as possible, as he had absolutely no desire to be constrained by what everybody else thought of him.
To be fair, there were some he liked. Philanthropist was a good one. Billionaire was a simple statement of fact, and Playboy was useful for tweaking the noses of the more conservative set. Genius was occasionally a double-edged sword, because while it meant recognition it also meant the weight of expectations.
Others were, well, less enjoyable, but once Pepper had told him what the media thought he tended to ignore them, because people were fickle and they'd be singing a different tune eventually, and if he paid too much attention to what people thought he'd end up a neurotic headcase, or worse, a poser like Hammer.
Which is why it came as a complete shock when Pepper informed him that people were calling him a savior. At first, he thought she was kidding, but then she had JARVIS pull up a YouTube video and Tony just had to stare. The narrator was out of the frame, but the voice was male, probably in his mid-twenties or so. He'd somehow gotten his hands on footage of the battle against the Chitauri, a bit shaky and grainy, but the red-gold shine of the Iron Man armor was unmistakable. Tony watched as on the screen he charged up the energy stream from the Tessaract and into the portal, carrying a large, white oblong on his back.
"You can see, here, how Iron Man's carrying a bomb," the narrator said, before freezing the footage and zooming in. "I did a little digging, and a source I can't identify confirmed that that was a nuclear warhead, courtesy of a United States government agency. Apparently it was also armed." Tony briefly wondered who the kid's source was. "So to recap: An armed nuclear warhead was in flight over Manhattan, and Iron Man hand-delivered it through what seems to have been a portal that the aliens were coming from. The destructive capabilities of that weapon are immense –God only knows what would have happened if it went off over the city."
The narrator stopped talking and ran the footage once again, and Tony watched himself soar upward with his armful of WMD. "Don't get me wrong, that team's full of heroes, but I think we may owe Iron Man a special debt, because he saved our collective asses. Mr. Stark, thank you."
The clip ended, and Pepper had JARVIS display some of the comments. They were the usual varied mishmash, flavored with a dash of the idiocy that plagued YouTube comments, but among the vitriol and the rumor mongering and other crap were a surprisingly large number of comments calling the Iron Man a savior. Calling him a savior.
Tony had JARVIS shut down that display, then set about distracting Pepper with building schematics. Among the many names he had been called in his lifetime, Savior was one he definitely didn't want.
This is war.
BOOM
Tony would later point out that he had been innocently minding his own business when the explosion hit, blowing out the windows on the corner building and sending everyone in the immediate area flying. He coughed as he landed, waving a hand in front of his face to dispel the dust, and reached for his phone. "JARVIS, patch me in to SHIELD."
Seconds later, he was listening to SHIELD chatter as agents reported in and a picture of what was going on began to appear. The dust began to settle on the street, and a few bystanders darted into the rubble to help those who'd been knocked down to their feet. One, a tall and skinny teenager, refused all offers of help, snarling at the woman who'd offered a hand and pushing her hard in the shoulder, knocking her down. When an older man told him off, brushing by to help the woman to her feet, the boy hit him as well.
Tony stared. The man had been nearly twice the teen's weight, and he'd still been sent sprawling. And then he realized the boy's shadow was pointing the wrong way. Interrupting the chatter, he quickly described what he was seeing, then muted his microphone and spoke to JARVIS. "Do me a favor and let the team know we may have a situation, would you? Oh, and put the Mark VIII on standby."
Fifteen minutes later, the Mark VIII was wrapping around Tony, the HUD lighting up with an influx of data as Iron Man took the field. An explosive arrow whizzed past him as the faceplate came down, deflecting a chunk of rubble being lobbed his way, and he took to the sky, joining Thor on aerial bombardment as Steve and Natasha attacked from the ground. Bruce's voice in his ear read off data and observations, Hawkeye calling targets.
"Only you, Stark, could find a hostile while on a coffee run." Fury growled into the comms.
"O brave new world, that has such people in't!"
Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, sc i.
A/N: A hundred thousand thanks to Rusting Roses for the beta.
My first foray into the Marvel multiverse, although I've been reading fics from it for about eight months now. I hope you like.