Saga

by Teyke

Tony falls into the closing portal, but he doesn't make it out the other side before it snaps shut. Trapped in a universe where time runs oddly when mortals blink, and accompanied by a Not-Quite-Dead Steve Rogers, Tony mouths off to a goddess of death, goes cross-dressing with Thor and Loki - and may have caused the end of the universe as they know it.

1. Gylfaginning

The transition was almost instantaneous.

One moment, Tony was riding a nuke in a straight line up, barely missing the glass of his own tower (if it was his tower anymore; four letters gone and only the A remaining, and if he wasn't so good at math, he might think that probabilistically interesting). Then the colour blue intensified and the arc reactor hiccupped. He didn't have time to snap anything to JARVIS, not that there was any point, anyway, when the trip was one-way. Light and colour vanished into black: space, dark and terrible, completely unlike the space he saw from orbit whenever he went up to bring cookies to the astronauts on the ISS and hijack their equipment (in his defense: they were really good cookies). The only up was defined by the gravity from Earth leaking through the portal, but there was nonetheless also a sense of down, as the alien mothership loomed over him.

"Sir, Ms. Po..." JARVIS apologized, already going, going, gone. The portal had – done something. He could feel the arc reactor cycling down, derailed by interstellar transit – huh, who knew that the two wouldn't mesh? Part of him itched to take the problem down to his workshop and fix it, already considering the type of interference it could be and new ways to shield against it. Part of him regretted that he'd never get the chance to do so.

The nuke soared forward even as he fell back and the mothership bloomed into light, so bright that the stars faded as his eyes adjusted. The lack of sound reminded him of the old black-and-white reels of weapons demonstrations from eras gone by – death in near-perfect silence, interrupted only by the faint clicks of the film reel, of the armour's movement. He was far closer than any living person should be to ground zero of a nuclear detonation, but that didn't matter. At this distance, the armour would be sufficient to protect him from the radiation. That wasn't why it didn't matter.

The battle would go on without him, but Pepper would be safe. A few thousand foot soldiers and a couple of tank-ship-worms made for a pretty paltry planetary invasion force – she'd be fine, she'd be okay. Tony just wished he'd made the leap that Natasha had earlier – he could have grabbed Loki's sceptre long before she had, shut down the portal and limited the casualties to maybe a couple dozen. Of course like energy couldn't be shut out. He'd gotten sloppy in his science.

The arc reactor stuttered to a halt. Tony closed his eyes and let death pull him downwards.

Below him, out of sight, the portal began to close. If he'd seen the delay, he would have snapped at them for not closing it earlier – Manhattan was right there and if the fall-out reached the portal it would kill a lot of people, including Natasha and Selvig, standing directly beneath the entrance. He would have wondered why they'd waited.

Tony fell through in the same instant the portal snapped shut. Blue light burst over him, blindingly bright, so that even through the faceplate and his closed eyes it caused spots to dance in his vision. He jolted back to full awareness – the oxygen-rich onboard air supply helped immensely with that, even if it made his nose itch – and blinked furiously. When he could see again, he was staring at something entirely new.

"JARVIS, what're we – " he said before he remembered himself. A forgivable mistake: it took even him a moment to process what he was seeing, a moment to look before the stars – which were still the wrong stars, but were no longer wrong, the way they had been behind the Chitauri ship. Now instead they seemed a great deal more magnificent, and it was easy to see that each was its own sun, although they shed no more light than the average set of stars viewed from Earth. But in front of them, lit by their brilliance, was something that looked remarkably... wooden? "What the hell?"

It extended far below and above his field of view, twisting and winding like some giant root. A tree root. Tony gaped at it, tried to tilt his head and change his angle of view, and was reminded of his imminent death by the way that the unpowered armour resisted his movement.

With effort, he managed to turn his head from side to side and saw two more roots, one over each shoulder, stretching out downward in the same direction that he was still falling. Without a reference for size it was almost impossible at first to tell how large the things were – but if he was falling with any appreciable speed, then they were – Tony swallowed. They were cosmic. Well, how fitting.

No, really, how fucked up. Yggdrasil, seriously? Trees did not grow in space. No matter how tree-like the thing looked, it was clearly not a tree. He contemplated, briefly, the old-age possibility of seeing something in 'a form he was comfortable with' – but one, if he was going to face his cosmic doom, he would not imagine it as a goddamned tree, and two, he'd never been one to believe in that bullshit. The subconscious took stimuli and made it comprehensible, but it didn't take good old electromagnetic radiation and tune it to completely different frequencies that just so happened to match up with those reflected by a tree unless he was on some serious shits and giggles, and he hadn't gotten around to putting an auto-inject med system into the Mark VII.

Pepper probably would have loved the sight – he wished he could have taken a picture to show her. She always liked the shots of weird things that he saw while in the armour – well, when they were kept G-rated, anyway. Not that he was ever going to get the chance to pass on another picture, but – awkwardly, he twisted around, examining the various repulsor nodes of the armour. Sadly, all of the lenses were dim – whatever had drained the suit's arc reactor, along with his own, had also taken out all of the tertiary reserves. There was nothing left to power the camera with.

He huffed out a laugh, even though there was no one around to hear him – well, there were the stars, and the giant tree roots he was falling past, but sound didn't travel in space. It came out tinged with bitterness despite his best efforts. "So fitting," he muttered. "Not even the alien invasion that did it, no, it's some trigger-happy military extremist dick with a hard-on for nuclear power, and now I get to die looking at a giant hippie shit – "

Reflexively, Tony gasped the last word and nearly ended up choking on it. Something had moved out in the distance. He could see only one curve of it, curling out from behind one of the massive roots, blocking off the light of a few stars. The others nearby seemed suddenly feeble, diminished by the presence of the thing. The curve edged outward, and he realized it wasn't a curve, it was an impossibility, a true impossibility, way beyond a mere tree in space: the edge was that of a non-infinite Koch snowflake, a differentiable Weierstrass function, smoothed out but he could see that it wasn't –

His stomach heaved and he shut his eyes tight, fighting down the urge to vomit – he was dying, but if he was going to get his heroic death after all, go out in a blaze of glory, then he refused to do so and also drown from his own puke clogging up his helmet. And like hell was he going to manually pop the faceplate and let his eyes explode as the moisture ripped from them. Even if he'd been willing to ignore that indignity he wouldn't have been able to; his eyelids made scant protection against the sight of that thing, and the faceplate not much better, but it was some protection, any, and now, yes, he could understand why kittens had hatched in Loki's brain. Thor had reported that he'd fallen from the Bifrost, fallen through worlds, and if this had been what Loki had seen there – Tony was pretty sure he'd have gone crazy too if he wasn't about to die. He could only squeeze his eyes shut and hope, desperately, that the thing didn't come out from behind the root, that he died first, that he'd be spared the full sight of it. His brain scrambled through the files he'd read, desperately trying to distract him from comprehending what he was sharing this strange space with, and finally threw up a name, just before he hit the ground he hadn't seen coming up beneath him.

Níðhöggr.

---

His vision had gone grey.

Blurry and aching, it took Tony a minute to realize he'd been unconscious: the transition had (probably) not been instantaneous. How much more time had he lost? Thirty seconds? A few minutes? Although if the alternative was staring at the dragon – and not one of those fire-breathing, princess-kidnapping, knight-eating sorts – then he had to admit that unconsciousness was the kinder alternative. But if the distinct greyness above him was any indication, then he was no longer falling between the roots of Yggdrasil.

It took more effort than Tony would have liked to admit, but he sat up. Every damn time he wanted to be able to add on more toys to the armour, and forced himself to scale back, to keep the weight parameters within what he could physically move on his own – yeah, it was worth it. He'd go to his death mobile, thanks.

"Anthony Edward Stark," a voice intoned. He couldn't tell from where; the internal speakers weren't online and the voice seemed to vibrate right through his helmet. But she wasn't in front of him – in front of him was a whole fat lot of nothing – so he struggled to his feet and turned around. A moment later he was wishing that he could power at least one repulsor. Most of what had been behind him was mostly just nothing as well: bland, grey landscape, filled with bland, grey mist; he might as well have been standing in the Construct – darker than usual version, maybe, but equally featureless. It made the only anomaly stand out – not that said anomaly needed any help with that. The woman was undeniably other. Even sitting down it was obvious that she had the height of an Asgardian, or maybe even something larger; she'd dwarf him in the suit, if she stood up.

She was dressed in furs which hung lank and uncared for, and Tony swallowed hard and took a moment to appreciate the fact that he didn't have to smell them. It was impossible to tell what colour her skin was supposed to be. Sickly blotches covered it so thickly that it could have been pale spatters across darker skin, or dark scarring covering lighter skin; he had no idea which. More disturbingly, both her skin and hair – the latter of which was brown-grey, dull and lifeless – was covered in the waxy sheen of a corpse. Her skin stretched over her bones so tightly that she almost matched the grinning skulls carved into the armrests of her high-backed chair.

Well, he'd meant to go to his death standing. He just hadn't realized that he'd already arrived.

"Hel," he said conversationally. Before he'd become an expert in wormhole physics, he wouldn't have recognized her – but, hey, that night had been long and disappointingly Pepper-less, and he'd done his homework thoroughly. Plus, the Norse myths? Were insane. The idea of meeting guys that wacko had been intriguing, right until it actually happened.

But during the brief, awkward conversation he'd gotten to have with Thor as they'd flown Loki to the helicarrier, the god of thunder had claimed that much of the myths were just that – and he'd stated specifically that Loki had no children, sounding confused at having to clarify this. And yet here was Hel. So either Thor had lied, or he hadn't known, or there was something very weird going on.

(Granted, a lot of Norse mythology was pretty damn weird to begin with. The conversation with Thor had gone like this:

"So, what was with the, uh, eight-legged horse?"

"My father raised Sleipnir from a colt; he is the fastest beast in the Realms, capable of outpacing any of your Midgardian vehicles."

"Okay, but I mean – his mom?"

"Ah, she was a fine mare! Before she bore Sleipnir, the only horse that could outpace her was Svaldifari, the mighty stallion that bore my father in his youth."

"But she wasn't – okay, never mind, there's no good way to ask that question while we're standing in a tiny aircraft." And people said he had no tact.

"I am surprised your myths remember Sleipnir at all. From what I have read of them, they are much amiss, forgetting a great many truths and spinning falsehoods whole from the air."

"So, you're not an uncle?"

"Not to my knowledge." Thor had looked unnerved at this, but then, so had Loki – which was at least something; the psychotic bastard was wigged out by the thought of having kids. That was good, because the last thing they needed was a bunch of mini-Lokis running around.)

"You death has come to you, mortal," Hel pronounced, setting one hand down upon the armrest of her – throne? Yeah, Tony decided, that was definitely a throne, though it looked damned uncomfortable – shouldn't thrones have, oh, cushions, or something? This one could have been carved from stone, except how it probably wasn't.

When she put her hand down on it, though, the air rang as though something heavy had been dropped. The featureless space to Tony's left seemed to become even more featureless, until it resembled nothing so much as complete vacuum, and hey, yet another thing he hadn't known it was possible to see.

"Uh, not yet – I mean, wait a couple minutes, I'll be right along, but I'm still breathing right now so I figure – " It was harder to argue with her than it had been to mock Thor. Thor was a guy with a hammer and a fondness of lightning; Hel, according to the myths, could control the Níðhöggr, and the thought of that thing made him want to curl up into a little ball, clap his hands over his eyes, and scream until he couldn't hear anything. Then again, he was nothing if he couldn't persevere in the name of being annoying...

"Your actions in life have decided your doom," Hel said before he could really start working on that, her voice – although feminine – somehow deep enough to just drown him out. Tony didn't like being drowned out; with effort, he raised his hands to gesture a protest, but Hel ignored him. "You shall have oblivion. Go unto your reward, Midgardian, and be naught."

Well, that explained the void to his left.

He turned to face it fully. Everything he could see and hear told him that there was simply nothing there. Almost unconsciously, his hand rose, stretching out toward it – the need to handle, dismantle, and rebuild to understand taking over. He snatched his hand back as soon as he realized what he was doing. That was of non-existence, and if he entered, then shortly, he, too, would be non-existent.

Oblivion.

It was just as much of a temptation as it ever was. How often had he longed for just that? In the hour before dawn, when the rest of the world was asleep and he was too drunk, too tired, to be able to focus on his work – it called to him, then. The sweet lure of being able to close his eyes and rest, slip into a dreamless sleep, rather than nightmares of numbers and dark water. Before Afghanistan, it appealed as a way out of pointlessness, but after – after, when he had a tumbler of scotch in his hand and his brain was stubbornly calculating death tolls no matter what he threw himself at for distraction, sometimes he was just so. Damn. Tired.

But. But. He'd always had reasons to go on, before – lack of willpower, sheer inertia keeping him from taking that step; a new project to look forward to; the opposite of apathy, at times, sheer damn stubbornness, a refusal to give up and roll over like he was expected to do. And right now he had the best damn reason in the world, because Pepper was going to see 1 missed call and Jesus, he couldn't do that to her.

And hell (hah!), a goddess of death was ordering him to step forward and die. That seemed a damn good argument for living.

"Yeah, no," Tony decided, turning back to Hel. She regarded him with dull eyes. Did she even have any other expression? "Come on, riding a nuke up and saving a couple million people doesn't even net me a ticket to Valhalla? Or, hey, what's the other one, Fólkvang? Party with Freyja," he tossed out, mangling the pronunciation and waggling his eyebrows as he slowly turned in a circle to survey the rest of his surroundings. They were... very grey.

Oddly, despite his recollection of meeting the ground with considerable force, he was not standing in any sort of crater. The ground all around was flat, mostly grey rock with occasional loose bits covered in tufts of wilting, green-grey grass, which looked like they would have been thankful for a chance at oblivion. The mist obscured his vision, preventing him from seeing any features other than Hel and her throne – unless there really was just nothing else here, and if that were so Tony was going to have to pitch a fit, because he was standing on an alien world and fuck, it was boring.

He briefly took a moment to appreciate the fact that he was standing on an alien world. Then it became boring again.

"Do you really believe, son of Howard, that after all you have done, you are worthy of those feast halls?" Hel asked quietly.

Okay, that. That maybe hurt. A bit. But, really, if people were going to ask him damning questions, why did they always, always manage to phrase it so as to hand him perfect openings? Seriously, she was as bad at this as the good captain.

"Yeah," he replied after a brief, incredulous pause, the length of which was perfectly timed to convey the maximum amount of, 'Duh.'

"And yet you came instead to my realm," Hel said dispassionately. "I do not choose my subjects, mortal. Your soul made its own way here."

"Not through the usual method," Tony retorted, wishing that he could fold his arms over his chest. Unfortunately the armour made that gesture awkward even when it was powered. "Why're you so keen for me to step into your existential acid bath?"

Was that an actual expression on her face? Irritation – or, no, amusement? Tony let himself smirk triumphantly. Seriously, if he got the actual queen of death to thaw out a bit, how cool would that be – not that he meant anything by it, because Pepper, duh,and he never meant anything by it these days, but people were a challenge just as much (so much more so) than any machine he'd ever laid eyes upon. Pepper knew him well; she just rolled his eyes when he started reflexively flirting. If she could see him now no doubt she'd be doing the same thing –

Well, no, she'd probably be tearing up, because he was dying, and Jesus, what the hell had he been thinking, to accept JARVIS's offer to call her? He was going to be dead in a few minutes, his feelings wouldn't matter, but she'd be left staring at 1 missed call and how fucking selfish was he? His smirk faded away into a grimace.

"It is a favour, man of iron," Hel stated, causing his eyebrows to climb.

"What, for me? Uh, as romantic as Mark Chapman thought he was being, not the best inspiration. I am actually in a deeply committed relationship with Pepper – and with living! Funny how that works out, and I don't think either of those two darling girls – "

"You requested it."

" –would take it well if I – what?"

He really wished that she had some sort of facial expression when she said that, vocal inflection, anything. This was like talking to a stone, except worse; no, really, he had seen blocks of stone with more expression engraved on them. Case in point, her armrests.

"If I was going to toss myself into oblivion? I wouldn't need anybody's help with that," he snapped.

"You are a man who knows naught of souls, nor of how to destroy them – only how to damage them beyond repair. You requested a true ending, the peace that your afterlife is unlikely to grant you. Do you think that my counterpart there shall be so kind? You have not earned the favour of so many of us, o Merchant of Death."

Blood on his hands. So much goddamned blood. Norse gods and magic and aliens from across the universe – maybe from another universe, if he'd been understanding the full implications of 'the Nine Realms' properly – of course there was an afterlife, never mind what an atheist thought (hoped for. Prayed for). And just what did he expect, when a goddess of death knew his name, knew his title, knew just how many lives he'd destroyed in his greed?

And, apparently, owed him a favour.

Tony met her gaze squarely. "If I've got room to be requesting doors, then I'm going to ask for one back to Earth instead."

Because when it came right down to it, he was never going to deserve oblivion. Oblivion was just another way of saying that he gave up – that he wasn't going to keep trying to fix his mess. Oblivion was irresponsible in all the ways he was no longer able to ignore.

"That was not the reward you asked for," Hel refused, and he barely – barely – managed to restrain himself long enough to let her continue. "You asked for oblivion. Peace... in return for your absence from the realms. You may go to your rest," she lifted one mottled arm and waved it at the nothingness, "and grant your world reprieve from all the mistakes that you will otherwise make. Consider this gravely, Anthony Edward Stark, as gravely as you did before, when you knew what your actions had wrought. Will you condemn Midgard to bear your inadequacies and misjudgement?"

The shrapnel finally ripping itself free couldn't have hurt any more than the flat, bald truth in her voice. It was only a lifetime of being in the public eye – of being aware that everything he did, ever, would be analyzed to death, then resurrected and flagellated into a pulp – that prevented him from falling to his knees.

Well. That and the excellent structural engineering of the armour, which kept him balanced upright even when it was unpowered and he wasn't paying attention.

Part of him wanted to – well, to step to his left. The rest of him analyzed, and came up with results. He narrowed his eyes as he examined them, coming to the inevitable conclusion. Because really, he'd done enough stupid shit, lost enough time to alcohol and engineering, that it was entirely possible he might have started talking to the air at one point and made such an asinine request. And maybe she thought that his work as the Merchant of Death was a favour to her. But back then – back then he hadn't known, in his gut and his heart, what he'd done. The death toll was easily ignored, shoved to the back of his brain, until he'd woken up, captive, had his head forced out of the mound of sand he'd buried it under, and into a barrel of water instead.

So he knew, now, in the same way he knew he'd never be able to repay what he owed – even if he saved every damn person on the face of the earth, he couldn't tally them up and say that was equal to lives lost; lives were more than goddamned numbers, they were none of them interchangeable – he knew that wasn't what Hel meant. And Thor had said that Loki had no children, anyway – but did that just mean, yet?

Huh. It looked like there was more to the whole 'based in the future' aspect of the Norse myths than anyone had thought. But if some future him had done Hel a favour, and asked for this in return – if some future Hel had thought that killing his previous self might fix the timeline – then that meant that the timeline wasn't fixed. Future knowledge could alter the present. He was not doomed to screw up and crash and burn, no matter what Hel might like to insinuate, and he was not going to fucking give up here, not now, when the Avengers had finally become a team, just in time to be Earth's only hope of repelling an alien invasion – and then succeeded in that lofty goal. Not when his continued existence - now that he was starting to think there was some hope of that – might be the only thing between another nuke and Manhattan someday.

"I'll get back to you on that," Tony said, the flatness of his voice matching her own. He turned away from Hel, surveying the rest of the place once more, but it all looked depressingly the same. Well, he'd always had good results from picking directions at random. Occasionally he got fucking horrific results, but on average they were positive.

Hel said nothing to stop him as he left. When he looked back after a few seconds later, the mists had swallowed her up – or she'd already left some other way, apparently taking her throne with her. He wished, yet again, that the suit was up and running, so that he could have had the sensors analyze how she'd pulled off that trick, or better yet, flown away himself. Walking in the suit was an effort; if he had to go very far at all, he'd have to stop and remove some parts of it. He had less than fifteen minutes of an onboard air supply remaining – the suit was designed to give him supplementary oxygen at high altitudes, not for extended underwater trips, at least not without additional air supplies. Without the armour's sensors to tell him if the atmosphere was poisonous, removing the helmet was a rather extreme gamble.

It probably didn't matter. The exertion was making his heart rate increase, which should only kill him faster – but minutes passed without the tug of shrapnel in his heart, and finally, when he wasn't sure if he'd run out of O2 yet or not, he just flipped the faceplate up.

And promptly yelped in surprise.

Where a moment ago there had been nothing but more dullness, now there was exceptionally concentrated dullness. Captain Rogers stood directly in front of him. If Tony's naked-sense was correct – and it always was – he was not wearing anything more than a flag. And it wasn't even an American flag!

"That's just unpatriotic," he babbled, trying not to let himself choke.

Rogers glanced down at himself. He was holding the flag – it looked like a flag, anyway; it was long, sheet-like, made of glossy material, and seemed to have one large blue star adorning it – rather carefully about his shoulders, and yeah, Tony knew he was right about the naked-thing. Although he hadn't thought that Rogers would be such a prude about showing a little skin – and it wasn't like anyone was likely to object; Tony knew what the super soldier serum did to a body, and day-um. But seriously, the man had been a soldier and an experiment – even if he was an uptight ass, shouldn't he be used to walking around with his shirt off? It would drastically improve the scenery – although Rogers managed to do that even totally covered in the flag, by virtue of not being made of grey mist.

Unless he was actually made of grey mist, and Tony was just hallucinating him to add some colour. Although if that were the case he was pretty sure he would have hallucinated him with his shirt off, at least. Maybe wearing nothing at all. Although at that point, why wouldn't he be hallucinating Pepper, who was not only also gorgeous, but witty, funny, and not a total –

Tony's train of thought was abruptly derailed as Rogers shrugged, pulled the flag from off around his shoulders – wow, that was a nice view – and then knotted it about his waist like a skirt, leaving his hands free, even though it showed a whole lot more skin. He wondered if Rogers would be bothered by the cold. "I think I'd feel bad doing this to an American flag," Rogers replied easily.

"No one else would mind," Tony's mouth said before his brain could stop it. "You are totally not actually Captain America."

"What, because I'm wearing the wrong flag?" Not-Rogers sounded exasperated.

"No, because I didn't go flying through an alien wormhole with a nuke just so that you could end up dead only a couple of years later," Tony snapped. "What, you thought I wasn't even worth enough to crawl over, decided to get your own piece of wire to play with?" He was being selfish, he knew. Selfish and an ass and a complete liar, because he hadn't done it for Rogers, he'd done it for fucking Manhattan – but maybe he'd entertained this fantasy in the back of his head that he'd saved the day, and the world would be safe, and every year the team would assemble on top of his 'big ugly building' (he could not believe Rogers had called it that; wasn't the man supposed to be an artist? No appreciation for modern style, he supposed) and drink to his memory.

Of course it was a ridiculous idea, but that didn't mean that seeing his teammate dead – a few years older, yes, but in Helheim and wearing a flag instead of his spangly outfit, so definitely dead before his time – again. Of course, given Rogers' general propensity for throwing himself into danger, him living a long and full life had always been a pipe-dream, but even ridiculous dreams hurt when they died. Tony had a lot of experience with that.

"Usually I follow more of what you're saying, unless you're talking about science," Rogers was saying bemusedly while Tony took his hurt, balled it up, and tossed it over his metaphorical shoulder into the recesses of his mind. They were cavernous recesses. God knew they needed to be, with all the stuff he had stashed back there.

"Really? Because you sounded just a little bit too happy about those flying monkeys," Tony said. Okay. Maybe he hadn't managed to ball up all the hurt. But he was done now, really, cross his heart and hope to die – oh, wait.

"Tony," Rogers held one hand up in a stalling gesture. "I'm not from your universe. I'm pretty sure I'm also not dead," he added, more thoughtfully.

Seriously, Tony sort of wished Pepper were here to see this – she was the one who appreciated art, after all, and really Rogers could have been something from a Greek statue, half-clothed and with rock-hard abs. Having Pepper as a girlfriend had, even more so than becoming a suited superhero, convinced Tony to spend a good two hours in the gym every day, even when JARVIS had to shut off his work to get his attention. Pepper had a thing about abs, and really, she was gorgeous, she really was, and he knew she put a tonne of work into her appearance so he sort of felt he owed it to her to do the same. (And if him being in good physical condition reassured her somewhat, when he took such crazy risks – well. It was worth it. She was always worth it.)

The vast majority of his brain was not stuck on ogling Rogers' hunky, hunky body. Really, he'd never needed a majority of his brain for that. He could design (had designed) rocket engines while having sex, and it hadn't even been bad sex – it had been pretty good sex, in fact, inspiringly good, and the patents had made the board happy with him for entire months. But the point was that simply appreciating something was never going to take up more than a fraction of his brainpower. He had a mind that was meant to break down and build, not stand around looking and saying, 'Oh, that's nice.'

So while his eyes appreciated the fact that he had a living work of art standing in front of him, his brain subdivided further. Part of him relaxed as Rogers pronounced himself not dead. The bulk of him began strolling through every paper he'd ever read on multiple universes – but so much of that was pie-in-the-sky stuff, old work that had been overthrown by experimental verification of the Foster Theory's solution for FTL travel (even if the authors didn't yet know it – but that's what Foster got for working with SHIELD).

"So you're older, in your dimension," his mouth carried on, never needing (or heeding) the full direction of his brain even at the best of times.

Skirt-Rogers – because he couldn't call him Flag-Rogers, not when Rogers-Rogers already wore stars-and-stripes, if not exactly in the same proportions as an actual flag – frowned at him. It was an interesting frown. Tony might not have had the HUD in front of him, but he'd always had an eye for angles; he could analyze facial expressions in minute detail, even if he sort of failed atunderstanding them every time it ever really mattered. Well, thanks to Pepper it was usually only maybe half the time, now. But when it didn't matter, he could step back, think, Eyebrow lowered by 0.7 centimeters, head tilted forward by three degrees, mouth curving on a radius of – and yes, he used metric; it really was the superior system. SI had used imperial for years, but these days they were all metric, all the way, baby – too many international contracts causing too much confusion in-house otherwise.

The expression on Skirt-Rogers' face was – it was softer than the way that Rogers had frowned at him before, back on the Helicarrier, even later, when they'd stood in the room where Phil had died. It was – kinder, Tony hesitated to think. Mostly, though, it was reminiscent of Pepper, or Rhodey, and the way they looked when –

"You're younger, in my dimension," Skirt-Rogers interrupted his train of thought, again.

Tony threw up his hands – or, well, it was more of a sort of slow crawl to put them up, because even after he'd expended all of the non-free-energy weapons he stored in the arms of the armour, they were still proportionally much heavier than the leg components. "That's just not fair," he complained. Because really – Rogers gained a few years and he looked like he'd just passed thirty, whereas Tony was uncomfortably aware of the fact that he had more than a few grey hairs, now. He could only hope that he escaped the horrors of male pattern baldness, because if he lost all of his hair on top, he'd have to shave the entire thing or lose what precious little dignity he had left (JARVIS and Pepper would say none), and then he'd look like Obidiah, and then he really would have to kill himself.

"No, it's a – a good look on you," Rogers said, and Tony was about to cross his arms and huff, "Thanks," but then he continued, "You look – you know. Settled. Stable." That was – wistful.

"Stable – " Tony narrowed his eyes. "Christ, Rogers, what did your version of me do – oh, hell, I killed you, didn't I? Or got you killed, at the very least, I think if I'd gone so far as to actually kill you, you wouldn't still be just standing there in your skirt – "

"What – no, Tony, it wasn't – you didn't – " But there was a peculiar mix of anger, sadness, and guilt on his face that told Tony all he needed to know.

"I got you killed!" he exclaimed, gesturing emphatically, if slowly. (One might argue that the slowness added an air of majesty – but only if Tony concentrated on blocking out the added air ofimpotence, because that was never a word he wanted to be associated with, thank you, no.) "I got you killed – and we were friends! You called me 'Tony', instead of Stark," he accused, "Don't give me that about not being dead, you're wearing a goddamned flag and it's not an American flag – "

"Tony," Skirt-Rogers had stepped forward and placed his hands on Tony's upper arms, stilling his attempts at grandiose flailing. "It really doesn't matter."

There was something about the way Rogers said his name – something almost like how Pepper said it – that caused him to still, and meet Rogers' gaze. It was... unsettlingly piercing, Tony decided. Regular-Rogers was too out of depth to be able cut glass with his eyes (don't think about what he said in the lab) but this man was clearly at home in his skin, even standing in Helheim wearing nothing but a un-American flag.

Then Rogers' lips quirked, and he ruined it by adding, "You're shorter than him, too," and Tony smacked his hands away with a huff.

In the armour like this, with Rogers barefoot, they were eye-to-eye; that was just cruel, really, the universe was just taunting him, to create a reality where he didn't have to wear goddamned lifts all the time just to be on eye-level with Pepper and pretty much every other industry leader out there because they were all taller than him. It was not his fault. Both Howard and Maria had been taller than average – it wasn't fair, damn it.

(The fact that Bruce was even shorter was, Tony could admit – if only to himself – part of the reason he'd immediately taken a liking to the good doctor. Aside from his brilliance and the whole rage monster thing – well, first impressions did make a difference.)

"So. Why the unusually coloured toga?" Tony asked, definitely not just to change the subject, not at all.

Rogers shrugged, looking down at it uncomfortably. "It's the only thing that sticks with me," he explained, looking a bit lost. "I keep – slipping in and out..."

"Slipping how?" Tony asked, continuing on forward into the grey mist. Now, at least, he had a travelling partner – and they would have this discussion while walking. After a moment's hesitation, Rogers followed him. If the ground beneath his feet bothered him at all, he gave no indication – but then, he'd run around New York (1940s New York, but still – New York) barefoot and lived to debrief afterward, so he probably thought that hard-packed dirt and a few dismal clumps of grass were as soft as mink carpets.

"Through time, I think," Rogers said, thoughtful. "I see things, but – I haven't been able to affect anything, so far. You're the first person able to see me, the first person I've been able to touch at all, without my hand going straight through them." He reached out again to lay a hand on the armour.

Tony irritably batted him away again. Not that he didn't usually appreciate getting felt up – armoured or otherwise – by gorgeous half-naked blonds, but Rogers was – different (the sort to throw himself on the grenade – it wasn't fair, Tony had draped himself across that damn wire – ). He did feel, maybe – just a bit, a teeny bit – guilty, when he saw the way Rogers' face twitched as he brushed him off.

"Through time and through realities, apparently," Tony corrected him, because really, that was the more interesting bit in this mess, whether it was him or Rogers that had gone skipping across the universe. Or, Tony considered, perhaps it was something about this place. If Hel could be done a favour by a future him, and consider annihilating his present self to not be an enormous temporal fuck-up... what if it was just that this world, wherever – no, 'wherever' was meaningless; whatever was more to the point – it was... what if it just worked differently?

Rogers was watching him, Tony noticed out of the corner of his eye – because he was not watching Rogers, damn it, it didn't matter. Pick an infinite number of possible other universes, of course there would be some where he was even more of an asshole and Rogers had died. It didn't matter.

Except that the expression on Rogers' face was... fond.

"So how did you get here, then?" Rogers asked after a few more minutes of walking in semi-awkward silence.

"Drove a nuke through an alien portal."

"Ah." Infuriatingly, Rogers didn't seem at all surprised by this – if anything, he was resigned. "So being older doesn't mean you've stopped pulling really stupid stunts, I guess."

"Hey! It was aimed at Manhattan!" Tony objected.

Rogers stopped, and turned to face him with a frown. "So there was no other way than to go through the portal with it?" he demanded. "You couldn't let go of the nuke right before it went through? Or get the Hulk or Thor to play darts with it instead? What about letting Bob deal with it – that's the type of thing the Sentry does best!"

Clearly, there were some differences between their universes. Tony filed away the latter sentences to be examined at a later time. Not understanding a reference made by Steve Rogers: what a turn-about. "I had to be sure," he snapped. You couldn't toss a guided missile through a portal, it was still guided. Idiot. Rogers was an idiot. "You want to gamble with the lives of a couple million innocent people just so I might come home safe?"

"I want you to be as smart as you are when you're building stuff, and come up with a solution that doesn't rely on you thinking you're expendable. Different universe, same old Tony," Rogers said bitterly. "Always so willing to throw yourself in front of a bullet that you never notice that sometimes there's nobody standing behind you."

It was the exact opposite of what another Rogers – younger, but with those same clear azure eyes, angry and piercing, able to cut right through his defences – had said mere hours ago. Here and now, Tony stared at a man from another reality, quietly floored.

Rogers' gaze softened. "Sorry," he muttered, turning away. "You didn't deserve that."

"No, it's..." Tony cleared his throat, "...fine."

The other man turned back to him, concerned – then cocked his head to one side, swivelled about and came alert. "Do you hear that?"

Tony listened, but with the armour's sensor suite down, his hearing was even worse than normal – and it hadn't been great for years. Too many long hours pulled in the workshop listening to music at a volume that most people would call ungodly had done his ears no favours. He was lucky to be able to hear enough to carry on conversations; it wouldn't have been possible if he'd been wearing the Mark VI, which, when unpowered, was basically a fancy coffin, sealed off from sight, sound, and mobility.

"Sounds like a horse," Rogers declared, striding forward into the mist determinedly. He stopped after a few paces, looking chagrined as Tony slogged after him, fighting the suit every step of the way. "Sorry."

"You can stop apologizing for everything, Rogers," Tony said. He tried to make it into a grumble, but it came out half-hearted.

"And you can call me Steve, you know," the other man rejoined mildly. Tony glanced at him, eyebrows raised exaggeratedly high, but Rogers – Steve, then, fine; he was nicer than the Rogers back home anyway – was peering off into the fog, no doubt looking for the source of the sound, still. Tony fumbled at the release catch at the back of his neck, his gauntlet-encased fingers feeling awkward and clumsy, before he found it and managed to pull off the helmet.

Huh. That was definitely a horse – or somebody with a pair of coconuts. Tony only actually had a frame of reference for the latter. And there was something else, over and above the sound, like – a creaky wheel?

They walked along – well, Steve strode; Tony clomped – for perhaps a half-minute more, before finally Tony spotted a darker-shaped section of fog. Steve had tensed a few seconds earlier, his enhanced eyes obviously picking out the shape before Tony's could – and then, well, he'd been a bit distracted by the way Steve's muscles rippled when he went on alert, which might have delayed him a bit more in spotting the new arrival. Sure enough, a few moments later the fog between them thinned, and Tony was able to see that it was indeed a horse, plodding along quite sullenly, despite or perhaps because of the finery bedecking it. It was pulling behind it a cart that was equally decked out in bling, built of finely painted wood, gilded with silver, and hung with furs that would have, on Earth, required a small fortune to buy and a larger fortune to fight lawsuits from PETA.

A woman stood upright in it, wearing more pelts – though thankfully, because Tony still had his helmet off, these were in better condition than Hel's had been – and carrying a spear that looked about as impractical as Loki's sceptre – so that meant that it could probably shoot lightning or turn people into frogs (or both). Tony whistled appreciatively. Her long, red hair was even brighter than Pepper's, although Pepper would never have allowed her hair to get into such a tangled state. The colour was made all the more prominent by paleness of her skin; she could have been carved from ivory. On her head she wore a crown that had to weigh at least twenty pounds, judging from the sheer amount of gold and jewels stuck onto the thing. On a lesser woman, it would have looked ridiculous (scratch that: a lesser woman would have ended up with a broken neck), but on a two-metre tall Asgardian, or whatever this woman was, it looked like a crown fit for a queen. She certainly carried herself like one: head held high, unbowed by the weight of the crown, her chin up and her shoulders thrown back (a posture which, Tony noted with appreciation, highlighted the fact that she had a truly impressive rack), as if she was one step away from proclaiming the long list of her many valorous deeds in full verse. Possibly with a minstrel accompanying her on a lute.

The horse came to a stop, apparently of its own accord, when the cart was about two metres from them. "Ma'am," Steve said. Tony was willing to bet he hadn't once let his eyes stray below her neckline, except for general threat assessment. Honestly, sometimes Tony could believe that Rogers – or at least certain parts of him – was still an icicle. Tony frowned. Had anyone actually checked? Surely, if he'd gotten frostbite, it would have affected his fingers and toes first, but on the other hand the tissues around the groin were more delicate than –

"The living are rare in this realm, but I think your kind is more rare still," the woman announced. "I recognize neither your features nor your apparel; tell me, whence come you?"

'Whence come you?' And he'd thought Thor talked like a Shakespearean production gone awry. He was still mouthing the words when Steve answered, "We're from Midgard – er, not from the same one. May I have the favour of knowing who asks, my lady?"

Tony spent about a quarter-second boggling at him, and then shrugged in resignation. Of course Steve would be perfectly fine with addressing a woman as 'my lady'. It apparently didn't please the lady in question, who lifted her chin a fraction higher, and answered, "I am Brynhildr, daughter of Budli, and a shieldmaiden; no lady am I, for he who would have been my husband was faithless, enchanted by the foul wiles of a witch's daughter. Now I journey to meet him, for in Hel's realm, freed of the burden of suffering that is the lot of the living, we shall never again be parted."

"Um," Steve managed, after this declaration had hung in the air for about ten seconds. Tony was rather enjoying the flabbergasted look Steve was currently sporting – and maybe that was unfair, because god knew Rogers was probably flabbergasted all the damn time, but since he mostly seemed to ignore it in favour of obliging the stick up his ass, Tony still felt somewhat justified in finally getting to that look on another Captain America.

When further words seemed to still elude the good Captain, Tony took pity on him and decided to try the direct approach. "Well, I'm sure you and he will be very happy here, then!" he said brightly. "I don't suppose you could point us in the direction you came from, lend us a hand in getting out of here?"

Brynhildr didn't frown at him – that would have required wrinkling her flawlessly alabaster skin (seriously, Tony was beginning to get a bit creeped out by her pallor; skin wasn't supposed to be that colour except on a corpse, and while apparently she technically was a corpse, given that she was currently talking to them that didn't help with the creep factor at all). Instead, her eyes managed to become a shade colder than they had been before, which was, wow, that was an accomplishment, all kudos to her, seriously, because they'd been pretty glacial to start with. Forget chilling a cooler full of beer with the iciness of her gaze; a mere glance could have kept his house in Malibu cool for a year.

"The dead may only enter this realm by Gjallarbrú, the golden bridge that spans the river of knives, the most deathly cold of the eleven rivers that spring forth from the Élivágar. But you, being of the living as obviously as the colour in your cheeks, are not bound to only depart by that road; and if you know it not, then t'was not your entrance and so shall not be the method of your departure. That path leads only to one realm, and I know that realm: it is not the origin of creatures so strange as you." She lifted one pale hand to gesture in their direction.

"Thank you, ma'am," Steve said politely, and he stepped to one side. Then all of them stared at each other for another few seconds, until Steve stepped back, grabbed Tony's arm, and hauled him to the side as well, whereupon Brynhildr, satisfied that they were out of her way – apparently going around them was beneath her dignity, or something – gave a regal, if displeased nod, and the horse started forward, again without apparent instruction. Tony spared a moment to feel sorry for her husband, even if he had brought it down on his own head. That was not a happy woman.

"River of knives, great," he grimaced after a moment. "What do you want to bet that's as literal as the rest of the myths have been so far?"

"Oh, I don't know," Steve mused as they began walking again. Tony had the vague feeling that Steve was probably doing something like following the wagon tracks – but while maybe Tony could have picked up on them if he'd had the armour's sensor suites available, Boone he was not. And Steve had enhanced eyesight, anyway; it was hardly a fair contest. "She called the ruler of this place Hel? I guess this universe's counterpart of Hela is a man..."

"Uh, no?" Tony said, raising an eyebrow. "Hel's definitely a woman, just like the myths, trust me – though not one I'd want to get up close and personal with." He shuddered. The whole looking-like-a-corpse thing was creepy enough on its own, and the shadowy thought of the Níðhöggr – not to mention the possible temporal problems of this whole... place. It might not have been his future self that Hel had been referring to – maybe it was his counterpart from another universe, where he was older. Except that he didn't think Hel was the type of lady to be confused by a twin from another universe.

"Huh," Steve replied. "This match up closely with the myths from yours, then?" He gestured at their foggy surroundings.

"I guess?"

"I've heard of the Gjallerbrú before," Steve said. "That's the same in my universe."

Tony shrugged, as much as he could, trapped inside the armour. It really was quite awkward. He could stop, take it off now that he knew he didn't need the air supply, but then he'd be left this place without any protection at all. And it might very well come in handy if he needed to build, oh, anything; the small onboard toolkit wouldn't help with any of the power issues, but it'd let him strip components. There would still be the question of power – but this was a place with aliens advanced enough to build interstellar portals...

"I should be dead," he said abruptly, because he should have been by now.

Steve was about a quarter-step ahead of him, so Tony got a good look as his shoulders tensed. "No, you shouldn't," he said quietly. Tony watched in fascination as the tension rippled down the muscles in his back. Once he got back, he was going to have to redesign Rogers' uniform to be more skin-tight, because damn, the man had a lot to show off.

Once he got back. Which, since he totally should have been dead by now, was looking increasingly likely. This might be a different universe, but that didn't mean he was trapped here. He was Tony fucking Stark, and he had just decided he was going to get home, and hug Pepper, and then have one of those Epic Kisses just like William Goldman had gone about, and then do that thing Pepper had mentioned (which Goldman had certainly not gone on about, thank god, that was a kid's book) so good fucking luck to whatever decided to get in his way.

"Well, apparently not," Tony agreed cheerfully. "I just don't know why I shouldn't be dead. I've got a chest full of shrapnel and no active magnetic field to keep it from ripping my heart to shreds, rather more literally than some of my past dates have done – well, that was mostly robotics, though when they stopped funding the Desertron I cried, I admit – I tried to fund it myself but there were concerns that if I got involved the black holes would be of a troublesomely large size." That had come from Obie (why couldn't he stop referring to him with the nick name, even years later, damnit, he'd meant Stane) who had been more concerned about the financial black hole of such a project, and had thrown distractions at Tony hard and fast until the SSC had been forgotten.

Steve, apparently, also didn't approve of the Desertron, or Tony rambling on about it; before Tony's last sentence was done he'd grabbed Tony by the shoulders again – seriously, what was withthat? – and begun inspecting his face frantically, having first glanced at the armour and then apparently given it up as beyond understanding (though it had taken him a second longer than Tony would have predicted Rogers to take – although, if this Steve was older, and knew Tony well, then it was probably that he'd been out of the ice for years, more than enough to become comfortable with modern technology, and the Iron Man technology in particular, if they actually... got along, which considering that that Tony had probably not-quite-killed him, maybe not). "Why didn't you say something before?" Steve demanded. He had a look that said that if he hadn't been a well-trained soldier, he'd have been shaking Tony – but, right, bad idea to shake somebody you thought was dying, even if though Tony had just declared the opposite, hello.

"Well, unless you were hiding Mjolnir under that flag – fair dues to you, you might be – or some other power source capable of generating an output equal to or greater than that of the average car battery – not one of those tiny Smartcars – "

"So you need a power source. You've got your entire armour with you, you must be able to rig something up – or we can... find..." Steve looked around, his brow furrowing with frustration.

"Steve," Tony said patiently, waiting until Steve met his eyes again before continuing. "If I needed a power source to continue living, I'd already be dead. So either I am dead – and you are too, in which case hi, denial – or I'm not, but in either case, no power source needed, stop getting your flag in a wad." He waited until Steve opened his mouth to protest against the 'we're dead' part before adding, "And if we're both dead I'm going to sue whoever designed this afterlife, because seriously, this is fucking boring."

Steve's mouth closed, and his lips twitched.

Awesome. Steve-lecture averted. Tony started plodding forward again, pulling himself from Steve's grip. "I just don't know why I'm not dead. The arc reactor failing should have done it by now."

Steve made a thoughtful noise. "This is... the realm of the dead. Brynhildr said that the dead could only enter by the Gjallerbrú."

"...and?"

"So," Steve thrust one hand out to indicate their surroundings, and Tony was a bit disappointed that the light was so mild and constant, because he would have loved to see a gleam run across those muscles, "if you died here, then you wouldn't be entering that way."

Tony stared at him. He closed his eyes and sighed, silently. "Steve, that makes zero sense," he managed to say after another moment, with what felt like commendable patience.

Steve shrugged. "Different realms work differently."

"That's not – physics doesn't work like that! I mean, yes, you could have a stipulation that says that biological lifeforms that fall within certain parameters are all affected by crossing over the bridge in numerous ways, but by implying that the parameters are exclusive instead of inclusive you're assigning it sentience – "

"It could be sentient," Steve pointed out. "Maybe Hel is keeping you alive."

"Doubt it," Tony muttered, momentarily derailed. "She didn't seem too happy that I wasn't about to throw in the towel."

"What did she – " Oh god, Steve sounded protective, derail, derail!

"I pissed her off, she told me to go away," Tony lied quickly. Thinking about her corpse-like skin brought to mind that impossible curve, coiling out from behind Yggdrasil's root; he barreled onwards. "That's not the point! The point is your suggestion is terrible!"

"It could be magic," Steve suggested, and Tony stopped dead this time as he struggled to make his mouth work. He nearly dropped his helmet.

"Did you – did you actually just suggest that it was – " Steve grabbed one of his arms and started them moving forward again while Tony struggled to convey his deep unhappiness with this most recent statement. "I mean. Come on. Magic. You are not actually, seriously, putting that out there – "

"My usual version of you hates magic, too."

"What? No! No, no, I would say something about age and wisdom and all that crap, but you know what, no, I was not that much of an idiot at any age, has your me taken brain damage or something? Too many fights? Magic is science not understood, and if you're going back to applied science, you're going back to sentience – "

"Yeah, my Tony got over that about the first time Loki blasted him with magic," Steve said cheerfully.

" – Loki does not do fucking magic!" Tony exclaimed, and if it were closer to a shriek than a declaration, then he thought he could be excused, because this sort of idiocy was the worst and here he was stuck with only Steve – no, goddamnit, Rogers – for company, blathering on about things that they couldn't understand. Because that was the whole thing about magic: magic meant mystical bullshit, the stuff people obscured because they didn't want to look at it too closely. Magic meant giving up, calling it a day, and agreeing that it was just all too complex for your poor little human brain, and he was Tony fucking Stark, there was never going to be a single damn thing he couldn't take apart and put back together twice as good. Saying something was magic was just insulting.

"He has a fucking staff which is clearly some form of energy weapon, and I don't know how the Chitauri speeders work or how their whales fly, but then nobody else on earth knows how the repulsors seem to let me violate conservation of momentum, which, big clue, they don't, they get around it, I don't fucking break the laws of physics, if I break the laws of physics then it means whoever made up the law was wrong, we rewrite them, we don't break them, they're how things work – " Steve was actually laughing at him, and it just made Tony angrier, " – calling it magic is a cop out! Clarke's Law, advanced beyond our understanding, Loki is not a fucking magician, he's a scientist from an alien culture – "

"And this? Tony, we're standing in the realm of the dead!" Steve threw his arms out wide; he didn't seem to care that they'd both stopped walking, anymore, but at least he'd stopped laughing.

"Their dead, not mine!" Tony snapped back.

"And maybe their laws are different, and maybe there's more chaos in them, and maybe we call it magic!"

Tony buried his face in his hands – which, ow, he had to remember he was wearing the gauntlets, he'd just smacked himself in the face with a double palmful of metal. "Just – stop," he begged. "God, it's like listening to Palin talk about Russia."

"Fine," Steve said, sounding exasperated. "Fine. But Tony, if you're – if you're dying, we need to figure it out. Neither of our homes is on the other side of the Gjallerbrú, but if being on this side is what is keeping you alive, we're going to have a big problem as soon as we cross."

Tony breathed out through his nose, slowly, and tried to remember what Pepper had said once: Just because someone is an idiot about something doesn't mean they're an idiot about everything – oh my God, Tony, if your intelligence were limited by your knowledge about art, you'd be getting fed through a tube. It was okay, Steve could be an idiot and he could still be the only other person here, and Tony didn't need to pick a fight with him, he could –

Jesus, he wanted to go home, bury his face in Pepper's hair and just hold on.

"Right. Okay. Fine!" he said, perhaps a shade too cheerfully, if the sudden uncertainty that crossed Steve's face with any indication. Well, watch him care. "Well, you know the saying, cross that bridge when we come to it – a bit more literally in this case than in most, I admit, but first we have to find the thing, so lead on, MacDuff." There was no way he would be able to follow whatever trail Steve had picked up on his own.

They walked for a while in silence. Tony had no idea how long it actually was; he could reel back the exact number of steps he'd taken, his capacity for numbers helpfully keeping track of that, but walking in the armour threw off all his estimations for speed. The mist and the lack of anything else to look at had him studying Steve's musculature for a while, but that was either going to get boring fast or make walking very uncomfortable. And he had to admit, the first was never an option, because Steve was a work of art: forget Newman and Potluck, any toddler could do abstract expressionism. Steve was – well. He was the paragon of the American dream, and although Tony had never been one to dream big, that was usually because he tended to turn ideas into reality before they could linger in his subconscious long enough to start working their way into his dreams.

"So, uh," Tony said instead when the twinges of discomfort began to get a bit bigger than just twinges – haha, so to speak. "Who's Bob? I don't think we have a Bob in my universe. Well, we have Bobs, but not the one you meant."

"Bob Reynolds? The Sentry?" Steve suggested, looking thoughtful when Tony shook his head. "He might be forgotten where you come from – uh, he was a comic book character, but then... it's a bit complicated." He backpedaled under Tony's disbelieving stare. "Weirder things happen to us all the time."

Tony snorted. "Maybe in your universe. Weirdest thing to happen in mine was when Hammer managed to recruit somebody with actual talent."

"What other superheroes do you have, then, besides the Avengers?"

"Besides the Avengers?" Tony raised an eyebrow. "Are superheroes supposed to be a dime a dozen? Doesn't commonality rather diminish the, uh, superness of the job?"

"You don't have any others?" Steve squinted at the ground a bit; Tony couldn't tell if he was having problems reading tracks, or comprehending what Tony had just said. "Huh. Maybe that explains your problem with magic."

Tony sighed, but remembered not to facepalm in time to avoid worsening his headache.

"Sorry," Steve said hastily. "Just – I guess our universes are a bit more different than I thought."

Breathe deep. Tony squeezed his eyes shut, and managed to keep himself to a strained, "They can't be that different."

They went back to silence, again, after that, mind-numbing dullness that was boringboringboring, but Tony thought that he might crawl out of his skin (without even crawling out of the armor, first) if he had to listen to Steve go on about magic, again. It was bad enough that they were up against aliens with access to things like wormhole technology and mind-control; no need to compound it with voluntary stupidity. And honestly, he found himself rather disappointed with Steve. Sure, he knew that Rogers, back in his world, was religious, which was - well, hardly something that Tony could get behind – but he hadn't thought him so dense as to think mysticism could be practical, stick up the ass or not.

After a while – which might have been more like five minutes – Tony was on the verge of asking another question just to break the monotony of the surroundings. The drab greyness seemed to press in on him, constantly reminding him that without Steve, he was completely, utterly lost – and even with Steve, he was lost. The silence was enough to start driving him insane; his fingers itched for his tablet, his modelling programs, something to do. But the only thing to do around here was to walk and listen to Steve.

Thankfully, before he could give in and ask something that might lead to yet more discussion of David Copperfield's relevance, Steve cocked his head to the side, and said, "Huh."

"Huh?"

"Water," he explained, turning slowly back and forth before settling on a direction just a few degrees shy of the one they were heading in. "That way."

Tony swore. He'd been hoping the Gjallerbrú would be fairly close by, but if Steve was just barely hearing water now, then unless their surroundings suddenly got a lot more sound-dampening – or unless the Gjöll was a lot punier than the legends made it – to be fair, 'creek of knives' didn't have quite the same ring to it – then it was still a long way away. Tony was tired and sore, not to mention sweltering in the suit... but taking it off still didn't seem like a good idea either.

He kept up a grumbled commentary of invectives for the next few minutes, drudging up cursewords from languages he spoke fluently, spoke brokenly, and didn't speak at all beyond those particular words used to express his ire. After the first minute that Tony managed to keep swearing without repetition, Steve began to look amused. After the second, he started looking admiring, but by the third, his expression had taken on shades of alarm. By the end of the fifth, he'd circled back to amusement, and at this point Tony could admit to himself that he was mostly just continuing to see what Steve would look like in another few minutes. Okay, so admiration for his filthy vocabulary was not exactly a declaration of his awesomeness, but he would take what he could get, especially when it meant he got to break the monotonously dull landscape that –

One step further, and the mist thinned. Two more, and it vanished. Tony twisted around and stared backward; the mist loomed like a tangible wall, and Tony shuddered. Despite knowing full well that a great many deadly gasses were completely colourless, that he was just as likely to be breathing something toxic now as he had been three steps ago, there was something about the gloomy weight of it that made him want to hack up his lungs until all trace of the mist was cleared from his system.

Out of the mist, the noise of the Gjöll was deafening – so, sound-dampening: check. Tony turned forward again, in time to see Steve walking closer to the edge. The featureless ground had grown rocky and jagged, just as suddenly as the mists had lessened – lessened, but not entirely ended, Tony realized. As he looked into the distance, over the cliff edge a few meters away, and across the great stretch of foaming water that was the Gjallerbrú, everything gradually faded into grey-white again.

He clomped forward to join Steve in looking over the edge. It was a mild overhang, at about a five degree angle, with enough jagged protrusions of rock that a serious climber would have had no difficulty scaling it, but it was enough to give Tony a dizzying sense of vertigo – or maybe that was just his day catching up with him. It wasn't as if he had any problem with heights, after all. Perhaps it was the waters below; they foamed with rapids, but also he caught flashes of light, like off of metal, and had to swallow as he remembered its name.

River of Knives – Jesus. Maybe he'd better reconsider Steve's sentience idea.

"Come on," Steve said, after they'd spent a while staring over the side – Tony out of sheer cursed determination, because he wasn't going to let any height beat him; start with that and the next thing he knew he'd be unable to take running leaps out of airplanes, and then where would he be? But he couldn't ignore the faint sense of relief that curled in his stomach when he stepped back from the edge.

Their objective, the Gjallerbrú, was easy to find. Whichever bard had described it as having a roof of gold had been spot on. Despite there being no apparent sun – the sky was simply grey, so Tony might have been able to blame it on clouds, if any clouds had ever looked so uniformly blank as that – it gleamed brightly, a straight span that extended out into nothingness, seemingly without support. There were no pillars beneath, no suspension cables: it was just a beam. It didn't even have the good grace to curve. Something in Tony felt vaguely offended at that. The rest of him just wanted to know how. If it was a material – or something else, invisible, like the force nets he'd sketched out for adding to the Tower roof, but hadn't gotten around to implementing –

Near where the bridge met the cliff, there were a few low, squat buildings, made of what looked like the same nondescript grey stone as the ground. Two splotches of colour stood out against the grey: one large splash of green, standing directly in front of the bridge, and a smaller dark red blob that bobbed about one of the buildings – which, Tony realized as they got closer, weren't so much squat as they simply gave off that impression, perhaps due to the size of the woman standing in front of the bridge. She topped three metres, easily, her green sleeveless dress showing off cords of muscle that were the equal of Steve's – but just like Hel and Brynhildr, her skin was corpse-white and waxy.

"Not often do the living come by this way," she called out as they neared. Her voice was stern and echoing, with all the weight of the river behind her. "And you are very far from home, mortals."

"Do you know where that home is?" Steve asked eagerly.

"Aye, for it is the task of all those who watch the bridges to know the origin of all travellers, even those who do not possess sight to equal Heimdallr's. I am Móðguðr, guardian of the Gjallerbrú, the bridge over the river that flows past the base of Yggdrasil's third root – and you are of Midgard, which sits at the base of the second."

"Great, so... how do we get there?" Tony interrupted, before she could tell them something particularly creepy, like how she liked to watch carts full of dead people pass by, or something. Or maybe the over-sharing had just been Brynhildr's thing.

Móðguðr considered this, folding her arms across her ample bosom. "The bifrost bridge connects all places within these Nine Realms, but methinks you come from a different set. How you might get back would depend on how you came. Should it be sorcery you seek, then you are advised to look to Asgard, for despite the enduring stupidity of the Aesir, they nonetheless breed the greatest of magicians; should it be craft that brought you here, then you would do well to cross this bridge, for Svartálfaheimr lies soon beyond it, and the Dvergar are the cleverest at such things."

"I'm not really sure how I got here," Steve said.

"Then you would do well to look to both. You, at least, have the look of the Dvergar's craft about you," she said to Tony.

"Yeah, I don't – I just... fell," he said, barely managing not to trip over the words. Sorcery and magicians, goddamnit. Was that actually just what they called their version of science, or was the mysticism the key to it? No, it couldn't – he couldn't believe he'd actually just let himself think that, shit, he was the person who swept up other people in his wake and drove them insane, but this nuthouse was getting even to him. He wanted to go home.

The giantess looked taken aback. "Then your only way home may simply be to fall again; but I have no knowledge of how you might set upon the right realms, instead of falling past the roots forever. Nor would such an attempt be wise, for the things that dwell within the Ginnungagap are not a sight for sane minds."

"Yeah, I... got that," Tony sighed. "Dwarves it is, then."

"If the Dvergar cannot or will not help you – for they will demand payment – " Móðguðr warned, "then look to Heimdallr, for he is the greatest of watchers, and has seen even into the Ginnungagap; if his Observatory cannot locate your home, then nothing can."

"Thank you, ma'am," Steve said sincerely. "You've been the most help we've gotten in all this."

Móðguðr smiled. "The bridge sings to me of those whose passage shall make it ring with thunder," she said, and okay, that right there was just as creepy as Brynhildr's entire spiel. Tony was starting to get really sick of aliens. "The price of passage is your name and purpose; without, I cannot let you pass, and with, I cannot bar you."

"Steve Rogers, and I'm looking to go home," Steve said instantly, far too trustingly, because wasn't there something in every myth and legend about not giving out your name? That part at least wasn't entirely crap; the brain responded instinctively to the name it claimed as its own.

But the giantess was turning towards him, and, well, the suit was dead and he was not looking to disprove Steve's theory of 'a wizard did it' by getting squashed by a statuesque Amazon, really, he wasn't. Tony sighed. "Tony Stark – also looking to go home."

Móðguðr stepped to one side peacefully, and gestured for them to pass onto the bridge. Steve gave her a respectful head bob as he did so, while Tony more gingerly tested whether the span would hold up – and there had to be forcefields holding it up, because even buckytubes, even diamond would have arced under the weight over that distance; it was impossibly long. He wondered what they did for an energy source. Alien energy, he could make an absolute fortune – more of one – get even further ahead of the game, figure out something that would be Loki's stupid 'warm light for all mankind'. Stark Tower's reactor was a marvel, but it was just a prototype; he knew that he could light up the eastern seaboard, if he could just get his calculations right...

There was the sudden loud sound of a rooster crowing behind them, and Tony put one foot down a tad too hard – but it didn't even dent the material. External forcefields or no, it was made to take a beating. Some sort of alloy similar to his armour's? But even the armour got dented...

The rooster crowed a second time, then a third, before falling silent. Something about that tickled a memory in Tony's brain, part of the late-night reading he'd done that had been a bit further off the map than most of the legends – stuff that started getting contradictory, with multiple tellings, that wasn't directly related to Thor and Loki. But there had been something about a rooster – he remembered, because the text had used the word 'cock'. It had been four in the morning and he'd started giggling like a schoolgirl – oh, who was he kidding, he'd have started giggling like a schoolgirl if it had been four in the afternoon. What had it been? "'...crowing... sooty-red cock, from the halls of Hel,'" he mumbled to himself. One of the heralds of –

"Well, that certainly is a large red cock," Steve said, pausing to look back over his shoulder at the thing.

Tony stared at Steve. Steve looked back at him, innocence personified. Tony felt his eye twitch.

"You!" Tony exclaimed, pointing an accusing finger at him. "You have been holding out on me!"

Phil – Tony felt his heart twist as he made that comparison; why did Phil have to be such a goddamned idiot, anyway, dying, especially if the afterlife was this miserable place – but it was a fair comparison: Phil would have been proud by how completely bland Steve managed to keep his expression. "I have no idea what you're talking ab– "

Between one syllable and the next, he was gone.

"Steve!" Tony lunged forward, looking about wildly – but Steve hadn't slipped or fallen, he hadn't moved at all, he was just gone. Nothing met Tony's fingertips but empty air. Breathe, he reminded himself forcibly – breathe, Steve had appeared in this exact same way, he'd probably be back in just a second – would he? What had Steve said – he'd said he'd been 'slipping in and out', slipping through time... had this just been one more stop on his trip? Would he come back?

The sudden weight of loneliness made him physically stagger. Desperately, he looked back the way they'd come, to see whether or not the giantess still stood watch – but that end of the bridge, too, had been swallowed by the mists. Vertigo washed over him. If he turned in a circle three times, would he be too dizzy to know which way he'd come from, and which way he was going? It hadn't bothered him when he'd walked away from Hel – but as soon as Steve had started following those tracks, he'd gotten a sense of direction, and now, although he was confined to but two paths, the ease by which he could become disoriented stole his breath. The thought that walking back to Móðguðr wouldn't be all that bad – they'd hardly spent more than a minute walking along the bridge – was no consolation. Even just thinking about retracing his steps made him feel uneasy.

Mind control? Back to the sentience theory. "Shit," Tony muttered, clamping one hand down on the bridge's handrail. It dented beneath the gauntlet, and he let go of it quickly – it wasn't made as the same stuff as the floor, then. Good to know before he decided to put any real weight against it.

He only had two real options: wait, or don't. If he stayed – well, he wasn't all that thirsty yet, but eventually he'd need food, water, and to take a piss. Without the filtration system hooked up – since he was wearing regular clothes underneath it – that last one would require a fair bit of dismantling. Steve was much quicker than him on foot, and would doubtless be able to track him, if he'd been able to track Brynhildr's wagon – he'd catch him up, if he reappeared. And if he didn't... well, Tony had no idea how to judge time, here in the mists, without a single working toy to his name. How long could he wait? How long would it take, if Steve was going to reappear? Delaying felt – wrong.

But he didn't just want to abandon Steve – he couldn't just leave him behind –

Captain America's a big boy, and this one's got more experience with the weird than you, the first part of his brain snapped at his doubts. He'll know what happened.

Hah, you think? How relieved did he look when he realized you could see him?

He's slipping through time and universes. What are the odds he'll reappear? I don't owe him anything.

Don't you?

He wanted off the damn bridge, enough to stuff the tiny, protesting voice in a box and shove it to the back of his head with all the other detritus. It was something he was practised at; guilt was useful for self-flagellation and therefore for motivation, but uncontrolled, quickly became a liability. And it wasn't like he didn't have a lifetime's practise at ignoring his conscience.

Gingerly – he didn't want to snap the railing off entirely – he scraped at the golden rail with a jagged edge on his gauntlet, where it had sustained superficial damage. The metal gave way easily beneath even minimal force; it could have actually been pure gold, but Tony resisted the urge to rip off a chunk and test its weight. When he'd finished scratching out the arrow, he added his initials, and then turned and followed it. Steve – if he reappeared – would understand it. Of course he would, he'd lead men through warzones, through wilderness, he was all over all that 'leaving signs' or whatever shit.

The one bit of advice on the subject that Tony remembered from childhood bubbled up like a nervous giggle. If you're lost, stay where you are, so that people can find you more easily. Yeah, that had worked so well for him in the past – he wasn't about to start following it now. Steve would understand.

He wasn't sure how long he kept trudging across the bridge. Below, the rush of the river was a constant background roar, and the grey mist ensured that no matter which way he looked, he only saw the same amount of bridge each time. It could have been a half-hour, or it could have been a full hour; Tony had never been good at judging time when he didn't have an external reference (which was more often than most people realized; they didn't know how easy it was to get lost in his head. Though that was really because they just didn't have brains as massive as his own – who could blame them, when the space inside their heads was mundanely small?). Distance, yes, but he was, as Rogers might say, pants at judging time. Possibly it had something to do with how he found it difficult to maintain a steady pace when doing... well, almost anything.

When the other side finally appeared, he felt his breath leave him in a rush that he wouldn't acknowledge enough to call a sigh of relief. In the distance, the mist stretched out endlessly, until it didn't: the transition was just as jarringly sudden as it had been when they'd reached the Gjöll. The mist rose up like a blank grey wall, dreary and foreboding, and Tony clanked straight into it without pause. Since when in his life had he ever cared about where he was unwelcome?

A moment later, he cursed as he nearly overbalanced, his right boot coming down a good decimetre below where he thought it would. There were stairs leading down, cut into the rock – and it was definitely rock, Tony realized as he squinted at it, of the same sort that the cliffs were made of. The dull grey made it difficult to tell where the steps were unless he stared straight at them, and he'd nearly done a header down the entire flight, without his helmet on. How far they went, he couldn't tell; they were swallowed up entirely by the mist after a few yards. He shoved the helmet back on and re-engaged the locks before hitting the manual release for the onboard oxygen supply. Without Steve to talk to, there was no point in keeping his head unprotected. Freedom of movement wasn't worth the risk of a broken neck.

The same thing that made the average calculator useless to him kept track of the number of stairs as he descended, without him having to consciously think about it, and gave him little updates whenever he hit a landmark. It was what he'd based the suit's HUD systems off of, but those he used to keep track of things that he couldn't necessarily see or hear for himself. At about five hundred stairs, he found himself hoping that he wasn't going to have to climb back up an equal number of stairs at some point. When he veered either left or right, grey rock walls loomed up in front of him, like they'd been summoned from the mist for just that purpose. They were rough enough that Steve probably could have climbed them, but in the suit there was no way for Tony to even try – which wasn't to say he didn't make an attempt. But despite whatever malleable material the bridge rail had been made out of, these were not just for show, and without power he wasn't going to be able to punch hand-holds in solid rock.

At about a thousand steps, the light started getting dimmer. Tony kept his breathing as even as he could. This matched up with what he'd read, in the same section that he'd skimmed over about the Gjallerbrú. Valleys so dark and deep that no light could penetrate their depths, which didn't mean he couldn't wish for a flashlight. The Mark VI had some LEDs that he could have used to throw together a crank-powered light, but he'd done away with those on the Mark VII when he'd upgraded the night vision, because external flashlights were never going to look anything but tacky. Really, he should just have allotted a bit of storage space – but he'd used the extra space to make room for the new-and-improved hand-lasers-of-doom, fat lot of good that they'd been.

Space, unfortunately, was always going to be a problem – unless he could figure out where and how the Hulk's extra mass got stored when Bruce wasn't being big and green. The initial extra mass had come from the energy, of course, the stupendous amounts put out when half a nuclear core had burned up. The appearance of the Hulk hadn't just saved Bruce's life. But him absorbing the vast majority of that radiation still didn't account for his bulk – there was just too much. He pulled it from somewhere else. And while how it attached itself to his existing mass was absolutely fascinating, it was really more biology. Tony was more interested in where it was stored, and how to get more of it.

His clean energy sources could run themselves for years. But if he could combine those two ideas – well, he could scratch the words 'energy supply' forever off of humanity's list of problems, and 'world hunger' while he was at it, too, along with, oh, 'water supply', 'global warming', and probably every other problem on the list other than 'chronic assholishness'. But Bruce and him – they could do amazing things together. Bruce was already working on the problem, but from SHIELD's dossier Tony had gathered that he was looking at the entire problem of how the Hulk worked, and getting slowed down every time he ran off to play doctor in third-world countries. Give him a set of labs, the chance to really focus, combine his brilliant ideas with Tony's – what couldn't they do?

Two thousand steps, and Tony's footsteps were slower, now, less sure. He couldn't see the steps in front of him anymore; he could barely see the way forward, and then only as a slightly lighter grey patch than the walls. He kept his right hand on the wall, now, using it as a guide and also as support. The path had curved back and forth several times, and he had no idea which direction he was facing, now. Was the curve just natural in mountains, or was he actually not going anywhere? Given how the light was dying it seemed that 'cave' would be more accurate a description than 'valley', but it was impossible to see if there was a roof through the damn mist.

At four thousand, six hundred ninety-one steps, when the last of the light had long since faded, the stairs ended. He found this out when he stumbled, bringing his foot down too hard. But when he walked five paces beyond that, there were four steps up, nearly tripping him with their suddenness – and then beyond that, a little way, more stairs, in brief intervals as the passage continued to twist and turn. The little stumbles made him aware of all his aches – pulled muscles, bruises that even the armour didn't keep him from having (and bruises that the armour had given him), the cut on his forehead that pulled every time he frowned. He was sweaty, hot, and thirsty, and he needed to take a piss.

It was the last need that finally forced him to stop, after ascending a few stairs, so that he could take the time to dismantle the armour enough to get his fly undone. He hoped that whomever came after him didn't mind – but, oh, hell, if these tunnels were as long as all that, he'd probably stepped in several piles of waste by now. The thought made him shudder – fuck other people, anyway. He did release one gauntlet long enough to carefully feel the step on which he was putting the disassembled bits of armour – that, at least, he didn't need light for, not when the schematics unrolled themselves in his brain like he was in front of one of his holo-tables. But he didn't want to be sticking the parts into anything... unwise, even if just the thought of taking off his helmet and breathing in other people's excrement made him want to vomit (and then he had to focus hard on not doing that, because that would mean he had to take off the helmet, shit, don't vomit, don't vomit).

Putting the armour back together afterward was just as laborious. The manual releases for this section had been tricky – joints and cabling and all sorts of stuff that wasn't easily disassembled – even if they were, as just proved, entirely worth it. Tony took a moment to enshrine this moment in his memory, just in case he ever considered designing another suit in the theme of the Mark III, which had only a minimal amount of manual releases.

He continued on through the darkness, with the wall as his guide; if there were any branching forks opening from the other wall, which was five or so metres away the last time he checked, he never had a chance to notice them. But going along trying to find them would be futile, and slow him down way too much, when he had no idea how long this path was supposed to go on for in the first place – he spent a while cursing at himself for not asking Móðguðr. She had a house – he should have asked for water, or supplies, if this was going to take a while – the myth he'd read hadn't specified any amount of time that he recalled, but vague memories of the Lord of the Rings and other bedtime tales, read to him in his mother's soft voice, floated up to his consciousness. Daysseemed to be a theme. Fuck, he was an idiot. He was so thirsty. So tired.

He didn't turn around. He couldn't. The reluctance that he'd felt on the bridge came back full force – he couldn't retrace his steps or he'd never get out of here. How long had he been walking? His brain hadn't been keeping track when Steve had been there – and why hadn't it, he wondered – but coughed up other information when he considered the problem: three thousand four hundred eighty-nine steps across the Gjallerbrú; four thousand six hundred ninety-one stairs, but the stairs were short and stubby, they didn't count as full paces; ten thousand nine hundred eighty-nine of mixed steps and stairs until he'd taken his bathroom break... hauling around the bulk of the armour was getting harder. Forget water, he wanted coffee, glorious caffeine to revitalize his brain and body. The night before last he'd slept well – he should have been in his lab, finalizing all the details for the Tower, but Pepper... well, but Pepper. But last night she'd been off to DC, and he'd been busy with homework. Caffeine and adrenaline had kept him going during the fight, no problem – it wasn't as if he didn't have practise working after an all-nighter – but at some point during this long walk through the dark, the adrenaline had worn off, and his last coffee had to have been hours ago.

At some point he blinked and the numbers in his head doubled. They felt fuzzy. How many steps had it been? Was it growing lighter? He tried squinting into the dark, but the only lights he could see were the imaginary ones from the random firing of his photoreceptors, flailing about without any input.

Tiredness made his feet drag. His next step was too incautious and he was off-balance when his boot hit a stair; he didn't manage to catch himself this time, the armour being too slow to respond while unpowered. Tony fell to his knees.

He hadn't rested on the walk out of Afghanistan. He'd fallen, a couple of times, sliding in the sand, but he hadn't stopped, he hadn't been able to stop –

But that walk had only felt like forever; he knew in his head it had been quite short. As soon as he'd lit up the depot the Air Force had scrambled, sent choppers out to see what was up. Tony had probably spent more time digging himself out of the sand where he'd landed than he had walking.

No one was looking for him out here. He wondered what his funeral would be like – or if there'd be one at all. He hadn't specified anything in his will, had thought he'd be considerate and let Pepper do whatever she wanted – and then promptly fucked up and called her right before he died, Jesus. Last time he hadn't had a funeral – last time they had only been ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-whatever certain that he was dead. But driving a nuke into an alien portal... that was pretty dead, right?

Exhaustion dragged at him. He'd have to stop sooner or later – and he was already down. In the armour, without power, he was probably just as safe unconscious as he was awake. He'd just grab... a couple hours' sleep...

---

Something pulled his faceplate up, the metal groaning before the manual release was suddenly triggered and his entire helmet was torn away.

Tony flailed, his arms oddly heavy and slow to respond. His right arm came up in a clumsy punch and was brushed aside. Everything was dark – someone had managed to get past JARVIS again, then, shit, they'd killed the lights –

"Tony!" Steve shouted at him, and Tony suddenly remembered.

"Shit," he coughed, his throat painfully dry. "Steve?"

"Yeah – yeah," Steve breathed, sounding – well, he sounded panicked, and that was never a good sign, Captain America panicking. Even when the Helicarrier engine had blown Rogers had sounded – well, actually a lot more in-control than he had been a moment before. So the ultimate soldier found a warzone easier to deal with than a social confrontation – who knew? "Thank god – I thought I recognized your armour, but I couldn't tell in the dark – "

"Copping a feel?" Tony attempted to put his leer into his tone, but the words ended up being more of a croak than anything else. He coughed a few times and swallowed uncomfortably until his throat only felt like the Mojave instead of the Sahara. "Gonna say this right up front, if you're still wearing that un-American flag, I am off-limits. No making out with fake patriots, I have – "

"Wait. Flag?" Steve asked, and everything in Tony's brain screamed at him, Shit.

Because Steve had been reality-wandering, popping in and out – what's to say there wasn't another Steve doing the exact same thing?

He scrambled for words to fill the silence, but before he could come up with a single coherent sentence, Steve continued, "You – you're still the same Tony as before? We were in Helheim, and you could see me, and now you can – well, you can still hear me – "

"Yeah, yeah," Tony agreed, nodding with more enthusiasm than the statement truly merited. It was possible, of course, that this was still some other Steve, who had just met some other Tony who was also wandering through Helheim – infinite worlds, branches, whatever, the Foster Theory had some experimental evidence but they'd been years away from actual travel – though if (when) he got back home he was definitely going to pull all of the latest stuff and start putting some serious thought into it himself. Really, SHIELD had to declassify it, they were doing the world a disservice by keeping it away from guys like Witten and Maldacena. Foster was off studying wormholes and SHIELD had Selvig doing the same thing, but her theory so obviously had enormous implications that they'd barely begun to explore, including some that they'd ignored entirely as being secondary concerns.

"Did you just – you just appeared back here?" he asked, levering himself upright – had Steve pulled him into his lap? – to a sitting position with a groan. Maybe taking a nap hadn't been the greatest idea. His mind felt a bit clearer, but his body – ow. It was one giant mass of stiff, and definitely not the good kind.

"Yeah, and then I tripped over you. I might not have realized you were there, otherwise – really? You're the same guy as before, older than my Tony – "

" – and more settled, you said," Tony interrupted a bit testily, because distinguished was all very well and good but right now he'd have paid a good chunk of his fortune to be as young as Steve, because he swore that nothing had ached this badly the morning after at that age. Granted, kinky sex was perhaps not a fair comparison to getting tossed around inside a turbine.

Steve breathed out something that sounded like a cross between a laugh and a sob. "Huh. First time I've reappeared somewhere I've been before," he said, and shit, was his voice wobbling? Tony tentatively extended a hand, making vague groping motions until he found an arm that he could pat awkwardly. Or, wait, maybe that was a leg – Steve was pretty flexible.

"Glad to see – uh – you, again," he offered. "Sorry about the lights. This part of the road's been... pretty dark."

"Not seeing anything might be nice for a while," Steve said, and yup, his voice was definitely wobbling, shit, what was he supposed to do with an upset super soldier, he knew exactly how to calm Rhodey down when he was mad (usually it was his fault Rhodey was angry in the first place) but attempting to be there for him whenever he'd lost comrades had been – mostly, he'd turned on a sappy, no-guns-no-explosions movie, and gotten Rhodey completely drunk. Right now he didn't even have a working phone, let alone a three-metre screen and a bottle of bourbon. He also had no idea what Steve might have – wait, that was a thing people did to be comforting, they talked – or should he not ask?

His train of thought was abruptly derailed, the re-railed, as Steve suddenly hauled him to his feet, which, ow. His body did not like that. Tony swore through gritted teeth, prompting Steve to ask anxiously, "Are you okay?" But at least that wobbly note had disappeared – well, right, of course Captain America was a mother hen, give him somebody else to worry about and he'd be fine –

"No, I'm fine, just – took a nap, but Jesus, I want an icepack, my bruises have bruises," he brushed him off, and then, with no input from his brain whatsoever, his mouth asked, "Where did you go?" He winced instantly, and shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked – but of course Steve couldn't see the expression on his face, because, well, Tony couldn't see what he looked like, either, and with the armour on couldn't tell if Steve had tightened his grip (at least, he hadn't tightened his grip as much as Thor had – if he was able to dent that plating, clearly, the Mark VIII needed to be started on soon– not that he hadn't known that already, given what he'd put the VII through today –

"Elsewhere." Steve's voice was low and as dark as the rest of this place. "There were – a few places. A lot of places. I saw some SHIELD scientists, discussing... me. The bullet that I was shot with – it threw up flags when they analyzed it, temporal anomalies." Tony had to give him credit – he was pretty sure Rogers wouldn't have had any idea what 'temporal anomalies' were, had science fiction even been invented back then? Asimov would still have been working in his parent's candy store... as Steve went on, though, he had to wonder if it wasn't just that Steve's life wasextremely weird – "They think it was meant to temporally dislocate me, but." The pause sounded like a verbal shrug, and when Steve spoke again, there was a quiet despair to his voice that Tony didn't like at all. "I saw my body. I guess it really did kill me – it only managed to unhinge my soul."

Tony kept his mouth shut. For once. Oh, religion might be the opiate of the masses – even if one religion, at least, was looking to have some basis in fact – but. Steve was – if he wanted to believe in souls – it felt cruel to say anything against that. What else did the guy have?

"Did they say why you keep appearing with that flag?" he tried to joke. It fell rather flat.

Steve replied with strained, fake levity. "Nah. Guess it's just patriotism. It really would be inappropriate to wear an actual flag like this," he said, and damn, he actually did sound disapproving about that. Maybe-dead, maybe-disembodied, and yet he still managed to hold true to the Righteous American Way.

Tony would have said something, to fill in the silence, but Steve went on first, before he could. "How long have I been gone?"

Tony shrugged, and gathered from the greater resistance he felt on his right shoulder that Steve was still holding on to him. Well, in the dark, he could let it go, maybe, just this once. "Dunno, you know me, bad at keeping track of time. At least a few hours. Less than a day?" he hazarded. He wondered how long he'd slept – long enough that he was going to need to relieve his bladder again, soon. Ugh. Steve was barefoot, walking through this place. And had sent his helmet rolling off – where?

"Oh. That's shorter, then. I think."

"You think?" Tony tried to pull away, to go look for his helmet, and then realized that if he pulled away from the wall there was a chance he might get horribly disoriented and end up backtracking. "Where'd you toss my helmet to?"

"I – oh, sorry," Steve said, and abruptly let go of Tony's shoulder. Tony staggered, not realizing how much he'd been leaning into Steve – no wonder the guy had been worried. He decided to lean into the wall instead. It was vaguely creepy, not being able to hear Steve pattering off – he knew the guy was light on his feet, but it wasn't like there was any other noise around here.

"It's around here somewhere," Steve said after only a moment or two. Maybe he was creeped out by the dark and the silence, too. Well, it was a possibility. "I shouldn't have just tossed it away, sorry – but you were just lying there – "

"Yeah, well, long day," Tony shrugged, keeping his voice lighthearted. "Pulled an all-nighter researching, then there was an alien invasion – you know how it goes."

"Yeah." The darkness – a sort of bitter grimness – was back in Steve's voice again. Well, shit. What had he seen? "Here, found it."

"Thanks," Tony said, as much from sincerity – well, hey, it was Steve's fault that it had been lost in the first place – as to just give Steve another indication of his location. It was too easy to get turned around in the dark. "But, well, hey. This bit of the journey's still in all the myths I've read – " something abruptly picked up his hands – he absolutely did not jump – and put something helmet-shaped into them, " – I'm just not sure how long it's supposed to go."

"Well, that could be a problem, if either of us needed food or water," Steve said wryly, but there were still far too many dark undertones in his voice for Tony to be comfortable.

"Huh? I need some," Tony pointed out. "Pretty sure you're supposed to need some more, what with your super-metabolism. Speaking of which, I need to use the little men's room, or what passes, so you may want to stand – over on that side." Bare feet. Oh god, just the thought made his skin crawl as he struggled with the armour again.

"I – really? I thought, because it was Helheim – "

"Oh, not this again," Tony snapped.

"Sorry," Steve said, a note of humour in his voice, and hey, he found irritating Tony funny, well, Tony found irritating other people funny, the least he could do was let himself be irritated if it'd cheer up Steve a bit. "But I've been wandering around like this for... a while... and I haven't gotten hungry or thirsty at all. Have you?" There was a rustle of fabric – Steve retying his skirt, perhaps.

"I would honestly be happier to see a bottle of Dasani than a bottle of whiskey right now," Tony said, his voice just as dry as his throat. His stomach rumbled, the mention of food suddenly reminding him that, while not as pressing a requirement, its absence was keenly felt. "I wouldn't say no to a cheeseburger, either."

"Oh," said Steve, sounding confused by this, which made no sense, because how on Earth was – well, that was the point, wasn't it? He'd been shot by a time-travel, reality-travel device, there was no telling how it might screw with his metabolism.

"How long have you been doing this?" Tony asked, narrowing his eyes as he finished reassembling the armour again. He needed at least one hand free to keep on the wall when they started walking again.

There was a hesitating silence. "A while," Steve repeated finally, and Tony rolled his eyes – somehow, Steve must have divined this fact (perhaps he just knew his version of Tony too well – although if that had been the case, how had the alternate him managed to kill him? How determined had that Tony been?) because he continued on quickly enough. "I don't know how long – it's hard to tell when I keep arriving at different times. I guess at least a couple of weeks." Steve's voice shifted, growing alert and hard. "Hang on – I can see something. There's light."

Tony looked around, even thought he doubted his (maybe possibly aging) non-supersoldier eyes would see anything new, because he'd been wandering in this darkness for god-knew how long and there'd been zilch. Only, all of a sudden, there wasn't: an outline appeared in front of him, just a shade darker than the rest of the blackness, but it was something. Tony blinked and the outline grew more obvious, turned into Steve, who, like Tony, was looking up, down, and everywhere for the light source. Beams of colour played over Steve's features and the mist surrounding them – huh, the damn mist was still there, although far less dense than it had been, and the terrain was just as featureless as ever.

There was nothing in the sky – and hey, it was sky, not a cave after all, unless it was a cave with a roof capable of producing light on its own, which, granted, aliens, couldn't rule it out. Tony kept an eye on it anyway, because he had always been a fan of the Alien movies and the things that wanted to eat you never forgot about up. As if to confirm this line of reasoning, Cap – who, from all descriptions, would certainly have the experience to know – was also staring at the sky – but then, a moment later, the mist above twisted and parted, glowing swirls of colour emerging from it like technicoloured storm clouds. Storm clouds which were swirling in a pattern familiar from tapes of New Mexico –

"The bifrost," Tony said, reaching out one hand to pull Steve away, because they were standing right under the funnel that was forming. Fortunately, Steve seemed to be of the same mind, and, being considerably quicker on his feet, was also pulling Tony along with him – which was excellent, because a moment later a rainbow slammed into the ground and vomited up a two-metre-tall blond norse god in a dress.

Tony blinked. The rainbow disappeared, although the clouds, and their lovely, blessed light were kind enough to remain. The cross-dressing norseman – well, really more like norse teenager; he had one of those scraggly beard things that happened when college freshmen decided they wanted to look older, not realizing that their utter fail actually made them look younger, and much more stupid –also stayed. Apparently he was rather unhappy about this, for he immediately turned his head up to the sky and roared, "LOKI! You have sent me astray!"