A/N: Hello all my lovely readers! I did promise a start to this, and see how I've delivered? I'll admit maybe this is a bit soon, but it's at least a start, right? As a famous man once said, drop your socks and grab your Crocs, we're going to get wet on this ride.

Prologue: Now and Then

Now: January 2013, Avengers Tower, New York

"Knock knock, Doc."

Bruce Banner looked up at me, and I managed a bit of a smirk as I leaned in his open doorway. Behind him, New York was still clogged up with snow, turning the steel and glass into ice. Nice to look at, after everything that had happened only a couple weeks ago, and it was making it harder for me to sleep at night. Unlike Tony, for some reason. Whatever.

"Andy, come on in," Bruce insisted, and with that invitation I straightened up and sidled into his lab/office. Bruce himself cleared some things away while I looked around with a bit of a sigh.

"Kinda hard to think all this would've gone to a bunch of other researchers if Loki hadn't come around, huh?" I asked, more to myself than to Bruce, as I collapsed in a chair and tugging a little at my thick dark hair. "And then…everything."

"To you, maybe," Bruce said calmly as he settled nearby. "In a way it still is."

"Hey, be grateful you don't pay rent," I tried to joke, getting him to smile. "I'm still trying to get the place cleaned up, prepped for SHIELD support to move in. Top levels are still getting remodeled, and sometimes I hate it here enough I go out to Long Island but there there's five thousand and thirty-five other things to worry about…"

"…so go stick yourself to Tony for a while," Brice suggested, and I dropped my gaze quickly, shifting uncomfortably. "He…did mention something had happened, after the whole…thing."

"Mina told me you fell asleep through most of his retelling," I said, still with my head bowed but managing a bit of a lip twitch that could have been read as a smile. Really it was more like a grimace, a fresh wound that was hurting all over again. I heard Bruce chuckle a little.

"Okay, yes, maybe I need a refresher. I did see a lot of it on the news, so no worries there."

"But it can't just be the quick-and-dirty retelling, that'd be dumb," I retorted. "Might as well just tell as much as I can. It's the only way you'll get why…things happened."

"Does it start in ninety-nine at a conference in Switzerland?" Bruce asked, and that time my snicker was genuine. I looked up at him, the slight smile he was offering me getting mirrored onto my face.

"No, thankfully. Actually it starts up in my place, a week or two before Christmas."

Then: December 2012, Avengers Tower, New York

"Okay, Mina, show me the scans, I know you've been sitting on them all day before my lovely vacation," I declared to the newly-refurbished penthouse sitting near the top of what was formerly Stark Tower in midtown Manhattan. I had an amazing view of the Chrysler Building not five blocks away, though it was blocked by a lot of cranes that were still working on rebuilding New York after Loki and his Chitauri friends flew down through a wormhole six months ago. The view didn't matter, because I had the windows blacked out so the hologram copy of me was clearly visible.

"You're not going to like it," Mental Imaging Network Artificial – Mina – informed me uneasily as the image formed. On the surface, it was a complete copy of me: five-six, dark hair, light eyes, arc-reactor glowing in my sternum an inch or so below my collarbone. But I watched with a frown as Mina faded out the skin layer, down to muscle and bone. Instead of typical red and white, most of my innards were silvery in color: silver-red muscles, silvery bones, even my veins were silver. Well, veins of a sort. Some of them remained spindly and thin, but they wove through my body all the way back to the arc-reactor. Most of them were down my arms, collecting in the muscles of my palms as mirror-like arrays. Some experimentation had revealed that these arrays did indeed act like repulsors; hence some of the refurbishment work.

"How bad?" I asked as Mina began highlighting areas of interest: the reactor, my brain, and some more minor places I wasn't too worried about.

"Forty-five percent metallic in nature, though your weight hasn't increased on account of it," Mina reported. I nodded a little; that wasn't much changed from the forty percent last month. "I think it's holding steady; the serum should hopefully be done…fine-tuning you by now."

"Forty-five still leaves me mostly normal," I agreed, circling the hologram slowly. "Reactor?"

"It's been integrated into your biology," Mina reported, earning a sigh from me. "Pro: that shrapnel in your chest was translated into some of the metals. Con: the reactor can't be removed."

"Pro: not dying if the reactor gets pulled," I added, and Mina chuckled smartly over her speakers.

"True enough, Andy."

"Head?" I ask instead.

"That's the five-percent increase," Mina continued, banishing away the rest of the hologram and magnifying my very own brain. Though it didn't look much like a brain anymore, except in shape and liquid-looking substance. "As far as I can tell, it's becoming a lot like the hardware my primary consciousness is focused into. You can process information nearly tenfold of a normal human, though not so fast as a supercomputer. I put that down to the way you process, rather than the serum."

"So all the other special powers I've gotten?" I asked. "I think I heard Tony's email get into my inbox before I saw it."

"That's part of the improvement to your intakes," Mina clarified. "Like the inner-ear Bluetooth you have now, you've developed…information receivers, of a sort. I'm monitoring them to make sure you don't get overflow, but they've been becoming more refined."

"Pro: information gathering on my own, like how I was syncing up to satellites and such to track everything," I noted before waving my hand to clear the hologram and get the lights back up. "Con: I really don't want to overhear people on their cell phones."

"Pro: you have me to deal with those," Mina said, and I chuckled a little. "So, you get going, it's a four-day trip to Malibu and I've already got mark seven deployed on your bike."

"Just in case this Mandarin thing gets out of hand," I sighed. "Just glad the public doesn't know about the other six bombings."

I didn't like it when Fury sent me the Mandarin file; I had felt cold and dead when the Mandarin first hijacked the networks to announce the first public bombing, giving his first "lesson". I had seen the Ten Rings logo on the color bars, and when I called in mine and Tony's old friend James Rhodes it turned out he had been tasked to aid in the hunt. I'd done some investigating of my own: the Ten Rings were keeping their heads down, not even moving right now. I had given them a hell of a thrashing before the palladium reactors started failing, and obviously I had crippled them enough that it was impossible for a bin Laden-esque leader to be pulling off these bombings. Officially I was going to be on vacation from all SHIELD and Avenger work; unofficially I was on-call to blow the Mandarin sky high.

"Nevertheless, it's going to be your first SHIELD-funded vacation," Mina told me as she eased off the blackout mode, revealing all the lights of New York winking at me. "It's one you deserve; you've been running for, what, four years now?"

"…something like that," I answered as I climbed upstairs to my bedroom. I had moved out from Tony's place in Malibu after he signed over the tower to me and SHIELD, so my hacking nexus stood in the center of my room. A duffel bag was perched on the nearest desk, my bike jacket draped on one of the screens. Really last week had been the fourth anniversary of mine and Tony's capture in Afghanistan; for some reason I felt like I was still in that dark place, begging Tony not to leave me, to not die before me so I didn't have to be alone. I'd changed a lot since then. We both had. But I couldn't shake a bad feeling.

I looked up and found my gaze on a little vanity mirror I had clipped onto one of the desks I worked at. The one thing Mina hadn't included in the hologram scan of me was a scar around my eye, faded from the purple it had once been to a more normal-looking reddish color. It was a little souvenir from the trip through the wormhole with Tony, from the alien thing that had no doubt encouraged Loki into attacking Earth. Before then, Loki had threatened me with the destruction of everything I loved, and most especially Tony.

The bad feeling was that defeating Loki wasn't going to save him. But I had to hope otherwise.

I felt the elevator coming up to the penthouse long before I heard the door slide open. I hefted my bag and jacket and could help a smile to see my now-steady boyfriend there in the living room, grinning up at me warmly. Even if technically Captain Steve Rogers was old enough to be my father if he hadn't died he neither looked nor acted that way, especially when I came down the stairs to drop my bag and get folded warmly against his chest.

"Heading out west?" he asked while still hugging me, and I sighed a little.

"Yeah; it's Tony, and it'll be our third real Christmas together," I replied. "Plus someone has to make sure he doesn't do something really stupid."

"Like?"

"…something that is very Tony; I can't explain very well," I sighed, but it got Steve to laugh softly before he turned me loose and offered me a farewell kiss. Oh, yeah.

"Then get back here for New Year's; I'm looking forward to having someone here with me," he said hopefully when he pulled back. His arms were still around my waist, and my arms were conveniently settled on his shoulders.

"You just want to kiss me at midnight," I teased, and Steve's smile made me forget about my worries about Tony, the Mandarin, and my bad feelings about the near-future. Christmas in Malibu and New Year's in New York sounded fantastic; it was the perfect way to spend my vacation. I even got a perfect sending-off when Steve took my bag and jacket, then walked me down to my bike. I got another goodbye kiss before getting on my bike helmet, and I waved before driving out of the underground lot and onto the streets.

I didn't know it then, but I must have somehow sensed that none of my plans for the holidays were going to go right. Whenever I let Mina drive the bike so I could sleep in the saddle I dreamed about the wormhole, the Chitauri base, and the man in the throne. I could swear I heard his voice again.

It has begun.