Chapter One

The Missing Tesseract

Homura Akemi was at the end of her rope.

Again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, she'd traveled back in time, doing this month over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and nothing. Nothing was changing. Sure, there were tweaks here and there, but the ending was always that terrible day, the wild and deadly hurricane that was Walpurgisnacht raging in the sky as she laughed with glorious and despairing insanity. And meanwhile she, bleeding and broken on the ground, her Soul Gem blackening, blackening, blackening, always helpless as Kyuubey lured Madoka Kaname into making a wish and becoming a Magical Girl.

That was always how it ended.

Homura couldn't take much more of this.

Her cold facade and the shell around her heart had fractured.

She was out of alternatives.

Everything she tried just backfired on her in the end.

If only…if only….

She lay on her sofa in her lonely little flat, curled and beating her brain from the inside. Walpurgisnacht was coming. Tomorrow. Madoka had been here, begging her to understand that she had to become a Magical Girl so she could help her fight the most powerful Witch ever. Homura, overcome, and broken, just a little, had revealed everything to her in a fit of desperation to get Madoka to see how stupid that would be.

She told her that they had in fact met in an entirely different time, a time where Madoka had been the Magical Girl first, and the two of them had become dear friends—short a time as they'd had together, for not long after, Homura had had to watch her die.

But though she possessed the power to travel back in time, Time very stubbornly kept giving her the same outcome. She always tried to meet Madoka before she became a Magical Girl, and keep her from making a contract with the insidious incubator, Kyuubey, in order to become one. And always, always, always, in the end, on that terrible day when Walpurgisnacht finally appeared, it would be down to her and Madoka. Sayaka was always dead after having turned inevitably into a Witch, Kyoko was always dead because of foolishly trying to save Sayaka, and Mami was always dead for any number of reasons. This most recent timeline, she'd had her head bitten off by the witch Charlotte in caterpillar form, Soul Gem and all; that had been particularly cruel.

And so, Madoka would make that choice, and make her wish, and become a Magical Girl, and either die, or start to turn into a Witch because her Soul Gem was blackened beyond repair (in which case Madoka would beg Homura to shoot her dead just to keep her from turning into a Witch), or she'd turn into a Witch that outmatched Walpurgisnacht tenfold, because she was just so abnormally strong in her magical potential (the main reason Kyuubey craved to have her as a Magical Girl in the first place).

To call it "exhausting" was an understatement.

She loved Madoka so much, that all her efforts to save her friend was killing her. Literally. She could feel it. A dark thing feeding on her from within.

She shuddered and took out her Soul Gem, the way the violet color was almost completely clouded in darkness. She bit her lip. She felt herself close to crying again. It had been forever since she'd actually cried, if you were adding up all the time loops she'd gone through.

What else could she do?

What else could she change to break out of this hellish loop?

Her despair consuming her from within eventually wore her down to a numbness, where she had no energy to do anything, not even to sleep.

Like a zombie then (because that's really what she was, in the end, as Sayaka had come to see it) she reached over and clicked out of the desktop display of floating artwork on the large wall screen and turned it on to cable television, where the news report was in the middle of delivering a flash bulletin.

At first Homura didn't really register what was going on.

And then she did.

And then the wheels in her head started to turn again as something started to come to her. An idea. Formed from a memory triggered by the names announced on the television.

"…and despite the destruction in Sokovia, the Avengers…."

The Avengers.

The Avengers.

What was that thing…that had happened in New York six years ago…where a portal to outer space had been opened…? She'd been a very small child when it had happened, but they flashed it on the TVs in the hospital, when she was first brought in to try and treat her heart condition.

Just imagine, if Homura could somehow find a way to get her hands on that kind of power, she could try to find some way to launch Walpurgishnacht through her a tear in the sky…perhaps into a part of the universe where a black hole was sucking light into oblivion, or into the burning fires of a star….

Moreover…who knew what else it could do? Destroy Walpurgisnacht with one shot, perhaps.

She had messed with weapons that were illegal in this country to be in the hands of a civilian, and she had messed with Time itself. What else did she have to lose?

That was it.

She had to bring something new into her equation.

She had to be far more drastic with her time-traveling. Keeping it to this month was clearly getting her less than nowhere.

If trying to convince Madoka wasn't enough, she had to do more to ensure a victory against Walpurgisnacht. That device that had torn open the sky had to have a power source, and with power like that, her victory was more than assured.

This wouldn't be the first time she'd stolen weapons. She'd come this far, she was willing to go a little further if it brought her closer to finally winning Madoka's salvation.

Something like hope started to glow inside her, a feeling she hadn't felt in what felt like many years. Slowly she sat up, cradling her Soul Gem in her palm, laying her other hand over her beating heart.

Her Gem wasn't black yet.

She closed it in her fist and stood.

She had a lot to do if she was going to make a time leap this big. In fact, she wasn't even sure she could pull it off, if her device had the capability to take her any further back that the day she got out of the hospital. But she had to try. Madoka was more than worth it.

And then…there was of course the rather difficult task of finding some way to get to New York.


The incubator had felt this disturbance before. This sense of finding itself feeling like it had just woken up, that it had been doing what some called dreaming.

And though it had this sense that this was something that had happened before, it couldn't remember for certain. Though it suspected that this had something to do with Homura Akemi. Perhaps it even pointed to why it was that one Madoka Kaname showed such potential to become the most powerful Magical Girl in the universe.

More disquieting though was it could also sense that this disturbance was somewhat altered compared to its predecessors. There was a stronger ripple of energy to it. And it wondered how it even knew that this was something to be compared in the first place.

Clearly the universe was falling even more out of balance than ever before. The incubator even had an inkling sensation of what they called…fear. Or rather, it sensed that any irrational, emotional being who could sense what it could sense would, at this moment, become very afraid, as the incubator itself could not feel anything like emotion.

Still, the possibility was now evident that even if it met its quota on Earth with all of the Magical Girls it was making contracts with, it still might not be enough. Even with its entire race of incubators working as one, doubling their efforts.

And then it heard the calamitous sound of thunderous laughter across the vast expanse of galaxies in the cold but beautiful cosmos, louder than any of the thousands of cries of pain and despair that surrounded it. (getting the Power Stone)

And then the incubator shivered impulsively, as if there had been a universal drop in temperature.

Thanos.


This wasn't the first time Tony Stark had fallen. And given his experience with many a drunken night, let alone what it took for him to successfully construct his first Iron Man suit, this wasn't the first time he'd fallen hard on his ass.

Those things he could shake off. He'd learned to.

But when magic was involved, he'd be lying if he said it didn't annoy him.

Loki (the bastard) had had his tricks, but nothing compared to dealing with the likes of Dr. Stephen Strange. And they were supposed to be on the same team.

Then again, maybe part of it was all just because Strange reminded him a bit of himself.

Well, okay, maybe a lot.

The man himself had a grin that reached shit-eating levels of smugness as he peered down at him as he laid there on the spot where he'd crashed to the marble floor of the New York Sanctum. He could say what he wanted about having lost all his wealth trying to heal his unfixable broken hands to the point that he sunk to the humility of poverty and found enlightenment in what they called "the mystic arts" and rose to become one of the most powerful wielders of magic on Earth…but he was still a jackass.

And even though he and Strange had in fact floated about in the same circles, those circles had never actually overlapped before. Weapons and medicine weren't exactly known for rubbing elbows, except in the case of people getting hurt from weapons and needing medical attention. No, they'd had to become superheroes in order to even be made personally aware of each other, apparently.

In fact, they probably wouldn't have met until much later if it hadn't been for the very worrisome event that had concluded the battle against Loki—that event being the Tesseract disappearing as if into thin air. But as it had happened, and the Avengers had grown desperate in their search for it along with Loki's scepter after it too had disappeared, S.H.I.E.L.D. had had the idea to bring the late Sorcerer Supreme's greatest pupil into the situation, having crossed paths with him once.

Well, okay, "greatest pupil" were Strange's words.

"Hello, Stark."

"Hello, Strange."

Stark found it a bit odd that he wasn't all that winded. Sure, at first his insides felt like they'd been flattened into pancakes, but of course he was already bouncing back.

"Feeling better?" Strange asked, and Stark realized that the reason his body hadn't liquefied was his doing.

"Like three rough nights drinking in Tijuana," Stark quipped, titling his head to one side and giving him a look that dared Strange to retort back. "I'm hurt though that you didn't take me out dancing first."

"Mmmm, let's say I took you to the amusement park on the tilt-o-whirl," Strange offered smugly, tilting his head back.

"Does that mean I get to throw up in your lap?" Stark asked.

"Not if you don't want me to imprison you in the Mirror Dimension," said Strange lightly.

And before Stark had a chance to ask what the hell he was talking about, Strange turned on his heel, tenting his fingers rather sinisterly, drifting away like he was on a damn Segway.

Stark heaved a sigh before dragging himself up off the floor. It wouldn't be the first time he'd done something like that. Though thankfully this time it wasn't after having to reimplant a replacement arc reactor in his chest.

Finding himself in the grand foyer of the New York Sanctum, Stark ruffled the dark hair at the back of his head.

"So, Jafar, you wanna tell me why you dragged me here?" he asked, still very annoyed at this unceremonious summoning, seeing as how he'd been in the middle of a conversation with Pepper (the serious kind, no less, where the progression of romantic relationships were concerned) when he'd gotten unceremoniously dragged into the hole that had appeared underneath his feet, traced by a spinning wheel of orange sparks.

Speaking of Pepper.

Stark's cell went off.

Strange stopped on his way to the staircase and turned, raising an eyebrow. "You need to take that?"

"Yeah, I do actually," said Stark, not bothering to hide how ticked he actually was as he dug into his designer jeans pocket. "Can't exactly use a magic mirror, can I?"

The corner of Strange's lip twitched as he reached inside his robes and withdrew a smartphone. "Not a magic mirror, though it does have facial recognition."

To which Stark scoffed, seeing as how any technology not built by himself or from his resources was inferior in some capacity as a rule, before he answered his phone.

"Yeah?"

"Tony?"

"Hey…Pepper…."

"Oh God…Tony, are you all right?"

"Yeah…more or less…."

"Where are you?"

"Ah…not sure…but I think I might be somewhere like…Aladdin's Cave of Wonders…" Stark guessed, glancing about the majestic hall where so many mystical objects were kept (at least he guessed they were mystical objects—either that or very random art pieces). Then he caught sight of Strange make the "wrap it up" gesture. Stark was so close to flipping him the bird it wasn't even funny.

"Tony, what're you talking about?"

"Oh, nothing just…you know…Avengers business. I mean…well, okay, not that obviously but—"

Meanwhile Strange typed something onto his phone and then showed him the screen.

LOOK, I KNOW WHERE THE TESSERACT IS.

Stark's jaw went slack as his voice trailed off, and he suddenly forgot how to speak for a moment, and about how prickly Strange seemed to make him.

When he finally found his voice again, he said, "Pepper, I'mma have to call you back…" and hung up on a protesting Pepper mid-sentence.


The incubator needed to test a variable. It needed to know if it was the only one that had heard that echo of universe-shattering laughter. If its hearing it had reached the rest of the collective, or if it had heard it because the collective had heard it.

So it appealed to one of its own kind.

"Juubey."

The fellow incubator some called Juubey looked around from where it had had its gaze fixated on the full moon reflected on the river it was sitting beside, its tail flicking from side to side.

"Kyuubey."

Kyuubey copied Juubey's pose of sitting back on its haunches, and when it too flicked its tail, it was much like that of a swaying cobra about to strike. At least, that's what an outsider might think. The likes of Kyuubey and Juubey were unconcerned with such things. Well, perhaps Kyuubey more so than Juubey. Juubey, for its part, appeared to have a slightly better insight into things, like that concept of "tricking" and why humans overreacted when they found out how Soul Gems worked.

"What appears to be on your mind, Kyuubey?" asked Juubey, licking a paw and then scratching at its ears much like an Earthen cat would do. While similar in appearance to its colleague, Juubey was mostly black, with only a head and ears that were white, and while Kyuubey's long ringed secondary ears came out of its primary ones, Juubey's came out of its neck.

"I was just wondering," said Kyuubey, musingly as it watched its fellow incubator move on to preening its secondary ears, "if perhaps you might have felt something peculiar in the last few hours?"

Juubey paused in its washing and looked up, lowering its forepaw. "I might have," it finally said, playing coy (as usual). "Why do you ask?"

"Obviously because I felt something peculiar," said Kyuubey with its usual dispassionate patience. "The ringing laughter of a very powerful entity."

One of Juubey's primary ears flicked, and then the corner of its catlike mouth curved upward. To a human, they would have been very much unsettled by the expression. "That sounds rather interesting, Kyuubey. You know, now that you mention it, I might have felt a disturbance like that."

Kyuubey regarded its fellow with a rare grave edge. "It's Thanos."

Juubey's half-smile withdrew as it too took the situation more seriously. "More than likely," it agreed. It considered Kyuubey shrewdly. "Do you plan to do something about it?"

"He's a powerful being. If he is active, I feel it's my responsibility as one of our kind to see what he plans now that he appears to be emerging from the shadows."

"Well, if you're going to do something like speak with him, there are a few things you should know first."

"That's what I was anticipating you would say."

Juubey actually rolled its eyes but didn't comment on this. "Well, for a start, he's in love with Death."

Kyuubey blinked. It didn't understand love itself, being an incubator, but it did understand that some fell into it. "Go on."

"So, it wishes to impress her. To win her favor. But more than that," Juubey added, "he does seek to do in bringing balance to the universe."

"Oh?"

"Observe."

Juubey nodded to the river besid them, and in its reflection, there appeared six lights that glowed in different colors. "He seeks these in order to achieve this. They are called…the Infinity Stones."

"I didn't believe those were real," said Kyuubey, the lights of the imitation stones shining in its pink eyes.

"Well they are," said Juubey as the images of the stones faded away, along with their imitation light. "But trying to use them has such a high probability of catastrophe that the collective deemed it not worth the risk for us to get the energy we need to stave off entropy using them. The system we employ on planets like Earth seems to be the most efficient and most low-risk strategy we've come up with."

"I'm aware of that." Kyuubey blinked slowly, its expression otherwise unchanging, unlike Juubey's seemed to do occasionally. "And I completely agree, given what the Infinity Stones are purported to be capable of. So, if a being like Thanos is trying to obtain them—and would most likely succeed in such an endeavor—that would be a problem on a universal scale. Which, given the math on that, would not be ideal."

"Not in the least," Juubey agreed. And then it got up on all four paws and arched its back in a very feline stretch before it sat back down on its haunches. "But what gives you the qualifications to be the one to handle this situation?"

"Nothing," Kyuubey said at once, and then it got up on all fours, swishing its very thick, vulpine tail. "But I will appeal to the collective as a whole now."

Juubey tilted its head to one side. "Then explain to me, if you were planning to appeal to the collective, why single me out to have this discussion with?"

"I suppose you could think of it as…." Kyuubey looked about, and its pink eyes fell on the deceptively calm waters of the river. "Testing the waters. I needed to have my query bounced off someone other than myself, separate, but still a member of the collective, before bringing it to the collective itself."

The corner of Juubey's mouth curled upward again. "Oh Kyuubey. And I thought you might actually say something radical, like the idea that you enjoyed the act of discourse."

"Don't be ridiculous," said Kyuubey, in its usual calm and even tone. Not angry. Not happy. Not even an exhibition of ennui. Just very matter-of-fact. Like it always was. Like incubators were on the whole.

Even Juubey, who was a bit of an exception, kept to this for the most part.

"I was simply being carefully methodical," Kyuubey went on. "Anything involving Thanos needs to be approached with caution."

"Well, I would agree with that as well," said Juubey. "Thanos is the Destroyer of Worlds."

Then Kyuubey closed its pink eyes, and when it opened them again, Juubey was gone.


"If you would take a look here."

Stark still seemed too stunned by the news that Strange had found the Tesseract, given that he didn't throw back some quip in answer to Strange's command. He simply nodded, and Strange cast a spell from the Eye of Agamoto around his neck, one that threw up a spherical image of the Earth, much in the way Stark liked to throw up his holograms and projected video clips left and right. And then he pointed to a cluster of blue energy gathered over the archipelago of Japan.

"I felt the energy spike just a few hours ago," Strange explained. "But it coincides with the patterns laid out by the Tesseract. Or rather, the 'Space Stone'."

Stark quit staring at the pulsing blue light flickering over Japan and stared at Strange through the translucent image of the world. "Come again?"

"Well, you see, the Tesseract is no ordinary anomaly of physics," said Strange, a little smugly, somewhat satisfied at the way the now nettled Stark muttered, "Oh, really? I had no idea," very sarcastically.

"So what is it then?" Stark pressed with a let's-get-this-over-with sigh.

"The cube itself was just a casing of sorts," Strange explained. He tapped the pulsing blue light, and conjured a new image of a replica of the Tesseract. Which he then stripped of its cubical shape, revealing the stone that was meant to be within. "The Space Stone. One of six Infinity Stones. Basically great sources of power that represent all aspects of matter in the universe: Space, Soul, Power, Reality, Mind, and…." He let the cover over the Eye of Agamoto twist open to reveal the final stone that was in his possession. "Time."

Stark blinked at the stone Strange had around his neck, and then blinked at Strange. "Wait…so…you've had the powers of time and space—"

"Not 'and space', just time."

"Whatever. So you've basically been wearing a nuclear bomb as a pendant."

"Oh, Mr. Stark, even a single Infinity Stone makes a nuclear bomb look like a Fourth of July sparkler."

"Ah, yeah. Well, that's certainly a more comforting way to put that. Which reminds me, you wouldn't happen to have any scotch on hand, would you?"

Now it was Strange's turn to sigh as he twisted the Eye of Agamoto closed and dispelled the image of the Space Stone and the world. "Stark, I assure you, the Time Stone in the Eye of Agamoto is more than safe in my very capable hands. Damaged as they are—were," he added with a bit of a dark undertone as said hands shook, just a little. Even after all this time, the damaged nerves, tendons, muscles, and joints that comprised the main structure of his very gifted surgeon's hands still trembled against his will, ever so slightly. Enough to keep him away from scalpels, at any rate. Sure, he was the Master of the New York Sanctum, but he did miss precisely slicing into people's brains in order to save their lives while jamming to 70s rock.

Well, then there was Christine.

Stark now had his hands delved deep in his jeans pockets and had turned to face out of one of the windows that looked out onto the unassuming street in Greenwich Village. But Strange sensed that the musing billionaire playboy was working up to a profound thought, so he stayed silent as he adjusted the ends of his sleeves in an attempt to forget about the weakness that still lingered in his hands in spite of the magic powers he had acquired since the accident.

Then Stark turned to him. "How come you contacted me about this?" he asked, gesturing to his chest, right where they said the little arc reactor was set in, keeping his heart beating, making sure that piece of shrapnel stuck in there didn't finish its job and kill him.

Strange folded his arms. "You really can't fathom why, Stark?"

Stark hesitated, and then said, with the look of something dawning on him. And then his mouth curved upward, but the half-smile was humorless. "Look, Strange, if you're looking to instigate the protocol of the 'Avengers Initiative' again, I dunno if you've noticed, or…been watching television lately, but…the Avengers are pretty kaput at this point."

Strange raised an eyebrow. "Yes, I…had heard something about…Captain America going AWOL?"

"Yeah, if you wanna call it that." Stark turned away again, his more clipped tone suggesting a temperament of a man who only quipped so much more as a defensive mechanism than anything else: a means to not have to get real when shit got real.

Even so, his voice had strained, just a little, on that last word.

Strange knew a little something about that though and respectfully steered the conversation away from Captain America and the rest of the Avengers.

"I called you because it all started with you, Stark," he said simply. "Of all of the Avengers, of all the people who are aware of the fact that the Tesseract has been missing for nigh on six years, you're the one…still carrying the center of it all."

Stark scoffed and looked at Strange again. "What? Are you trying to say I'm…holding some kind of…torch for the Avengers?"

"Well, for the longest time, Stark Tower was its HQ…and even when it wasn't, that compound upstate was formerly a Stark Industries facility. You're very much the heart of it all, as they say. Everyone else is scattered."

"Yeah. You're right. I'm still here. Waiting. Sort of. I dunno."

There was a silence between them, and Stark looked at Strange again.

Then he said, "Okay. So. The Tesseract is in Japan, is it?"

"Yes."

"Do you know where exactly?"

"I do, in fact," said Strange as he started up the marble main staircase and Stark followed.

"And that would be?" Stark pressed.

"There's a city along the eastern coast," Strange explained, stopping and turning back to look at Stark at the top of the staircase. "Mitakihara. Oh, and here's the kicker, as it were: I know who has it."

Stark raised his eyebrows, as if genuinely impressed, like he seemed to be at the idea that Strange had located the Tesseract. "Yeah?"

"I was able to trace its energy springing forth from a tear in time." Strange tapped the Eye of Agamoto around his neck. "Which I suppose might be why what's left of S.H.I.E.L.D. has yet to pick it up on their scanners. But I think I'd like to keep it that way at this point. The identity of the one who has it makes this a very delicate situation, and that would be because it is in fact currently in the possession of a middle-school age girl named Homura Akemi."

Stark made a noise like his heart had in fact stopped even with the aid of the arc reactor, and then, mastering himself, muttered, "Brilliant. A humungous, possibly unstable power source in the hands of a teenager. Not even a teenager, a preteen. Not that I haven't dealt with super-power adolescents before. Or at least one…anyway."

"Well, I'm not keen on it either, Stark. So at least on the subject of rapscallions being in possession of ultimate power, we can both agree that's hardly ideal." And then, after he turned and started down the central corridor on the second floor of the Sanctum, he paused again and added, "Then again…there are worse hands it could be in."

"Worse hands? Like…planet-destroying hands perhaps?"

"What other hands could I possibly mean that would be worse?"

Then Strange shivered inwardly as he remembered what he still had yet to tell Stark.

About Thanos, Destroyer of Worlds…already on the move to gather all six Infinity Stones.

If nothing else, at least for this young Homura Akemi's sake, he really hoped he and Stark could get the Tesseract back before Thanos found her.

Moreover, Homura Akemi in and of herself was going to be a problem—because he had detected a wisp of magic about her too. Not only that, but it was something that had echoed a darker power. The kind that started small while at the same time it preceded calamity.