His joints ache every time he moves. Distantly, he knows this is a good thing, but it's like his life is in fast-forward while his body falls apart in a frozen hole. He stays standing by the ice sheeting as long as he can stay upright, then curls sitting at the base of it. For a while his mind is wintry bright with fear, but that too begins to dull.

The wool helps a bit. Loki had made him take his coat... it's a curious thought, but he can't grasp the threads of it long enough to wonder why.

Pepper would know how to stay warm here. She'd rescue him like she always did. Rescue. Pepper would know...

He remembers to get up and move, though stiffly and with an arthritic gait. Rhymes he never learned from his father tumble through the fog in his head. Distracted, he crouches to study the fiber residue his shoulder had left on the frozen barricade, the wool a tiny blur on its surface. It takes him some time to understand what it is, and it's a trigger flooding panic and heat through his body. His mind is crystalline again, at least for a few minutes.

Keep moving.

Tony peels his hands off the ice.


What time has passed, he doesn't know. But there is a tremor against the ice and a blurred dark shaft stood visible from the other side. Drops of blood flash around the impact point—no, points of ruby light. Tony limps back inside the cave and shields his head as the ice blows apart.

The sound of that wall exploding is the sweetest thing he's ever heard.

It's the work of bottomless strength to walk himself out of the cave, triumphant, barely awake. But upright. He wouldn't fall, not from something as stupid as being a little chilled.

"Gonna put a bell on you," says Clint when he drops a weighted blanket around Tony. "You look like shit, but I figure you're used to that."

"Thanks, Barton."

"Anytime."

He hears Clint bark sharply that he's blue, people, get the lead outta your asses. I want the temperature on that tin airboat dropped until it's safe to raise it—don't look at me like that, just do it.

Tony insists on walking to the helicopter, though he's unsteady and needing to be steered when he wanders off a few steps. The people bustling over the snow are blurry, erratic. He takes comfort in their presence. It's a good presence, better than a crow and a cave, and it involved plenty of pretty women in full gear. He loves a woman in combat gear.

Clint puts an ugly toque on him. "Donation from Logan."

"Tell him thanks. Remind me to punch him."

There's snow on his pant legs when he looks down, but he can't feel the cold of it. Not a great sign. Clint helps him into the carrier with constant chatter and a hand on his back. Tony knows what he's doing, but is grateful for the distraction. "Better put your suit on first before you do that. Step a little higher, lazy bastard—there you go. No, don't sit there, it's reserved for the elderly and pregnant. Drink this."

"When's the baby due, Clintsy? Thought you've been getting plump."

"Ha ha."

Things fade in and out after that. He wakes from his shallow doze, finding the operatives watching him. His extremities prickle and burn, but it isn't overwhelmingly painful: they were handling the warming process well. His brain is still muzzy, but then the undercurrent of panic wasn't buoying it any longer.

"Not going to lose me that easily. Made of iron, remember?"

No one except Tony is amused. He's helped into a respiration mask, the life-giving air warm in his throat. It is thus that the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents successfully shut him up.


When they land, he gets out of the carrier like he'd entered it: on his own. Pepper is on him in an instant, a flurry of shaking hands and sharp questions aimed at anyone in her line of fire. What happened? Is he going to be okay? Why were you so slow coming back? It's been hours!

"Pepper," he croaks.

She ignores the feeble noise, pushing him off in front of her and out of the cool night air with clipped efficiency. Even the snick of her pumps is weighted with ire.

"Pepper, please, I'm a grown man."

A gusting sigh from her is all the reply he gets. It's the sigh of a barely-restrained lecture, one that she's planning as they walk but is too polite to attack him with immediately. She'll wait until she feels he's man enough to bear it, or disgraceful enough to need it. He's sure he deserves it this time.

Members of S.H.I.E.L.D. loitering in the foyer to drag him into a debriefing break like waves in front of them. Tony smiles apologetically, trying not to look like too much of a smug asshole. If he's lucky, he can put off the inevitable meeting with Fury for at least a day, and that thought makes everything just a little bit brighter. That is until Pepper fusses him into bed, calls in a team of physicians, and wheels on him.

"How could you do that, Tony? Are you having another episode?"

"Episode? What am I, a mental patient?"

She thinks about this for far longer than he feels is necessary.

"I was going right home, I just sent Clint off ahead of me." He tries taking a measured, sensible tone. She accuses him of going off half-cocked at least every other day, so this will surely be the best tactic.

She sucks in her cheeks and crosses her arms.

Right, bad tactic.

"There was no way Loki would show up, and look, every time I've done something immensely stupid and/or suicidal I've always lived!"

"But for the grace of God," Pepper mutters, opening the doors of his recuperation room to let the medics in. "Do what you need to, and please don't follow his orders. He's probably delirious, you can't tell what he might say."

That was low. Potentially accurate, but low.

The team handles him like some kind of living marionette while Pepper gets ready to leave, her bit said.

"You're a lion tamer, you know that? Watch the chest—hey! Yeah, that's right. Don't stick your fingers there."

"I see a barely-warm little man fighting the nice doctors, not a lion. In fact, geriatrics have more fire. Enjoy your IV."

She decides to leave then, but he doesn't miss the relieved slump to her shoulders. Tony smiles a bit when he's sure she won't notice.


He doesn't enjoy the IV in fact, and complains to anyone who comes to visit him. In this case, Thor.

"Do you have monsters with tentacles on Asgard, because we should totally hang out. Ugh, this stings."

The big blond is big and pensive for now, shaking his head. "There are such creatures in Niflheim, but they would not count you among their number, no matter how many tubes you have inserted into you. I am also noticing that you are talking to keep yourself awake."

"Bingo. Nobody will bring me coffee, so I need to improvise. Something about fluid levels and being healthy. Come on."

Thor sits on the side of Tony's bed, creating a gravity well that rivals the Sun's. His hands are laced across a broad knee. "You are stained with magic."

Tony chuckles, the muscles in his arms flexing as he considers trying to tuck them under the covers. The webbing Loki had left on him hasn't yet faded, and no one had once commented on it—until now. "If that's what we're calling caffeine withdrawal these days. Can we talk about something fun, like women?"

"My brother's work?"

So much for anyone paying him or his conversational suggestions any mind. Maybe he'd get to spit-shine Fury's guns as his next task as less-than-Avenger. "Yeah, I guess. He... teleported us? Or something. This stuff just never wore off. Can't test it since I'm apparently grounded for another day or two, but it's concentrated at my chest."

He maneuvers himself up to get his back straight and unbuttons his shirt, waiting until Thor leans in close to the reactor to say as smoothly as possible: "You know, at the third nipple."

The god lifts his eyes slowly and then lowers them, not deigning to reply. He reaches out his hand to trace the radiating green filaments that bunched and seemed to melt into the reactor. Tony feels an electric jolt at the touch.

"It is his aspect," Thor nods. "When a spell affects the entire body, it weaves such a pattern over the target, like a net. It usually lasts only a second, but here it remains. I am sorry I do not know more. Loki was always the master at..." He's quiet a few heartbeats and Tony fills the silence for him.

"You're the first person to say anything. I'm guessing that's not accidental."

"Perhaps certain of the Midgardians of the Clan of X may be able to see these traces, but those that are here in this tower seem to be blind to it."

Maybe he'll treat Logan to that punch earlier than he'd planned and that thought gives him an idea. He grabs vaguely at a nearby console until Thor brings it to him, pulling his shirt right off. He taps at the screen and starts to take pictures. The results are disappointing, not least because the only thing they emphasize is the discoloration on his skin from the cave adventure.

"So much for emailing nudie shots, these are coming up blank. Can't see the juice."

Thor is watching him the way children watch dogs doing tricks.

"Obviously, Tony Stark. Your recording lenses are like the mortals in this tower: insensitive to magic. This is no surprise, surely?"

When he put it that way. "It's pooling around the reactor, maybe that's what's keeping it around. JARVIS, set up a scan in 34A, I'll be right over."

"I am not permitted, sir. You are to remain in bed for another 42 hours."

"Not per—I can't believe this. Hey, Thor, can you go talk to Bruce? He needs to use those magic hacking fingers to give my things back to me. Namely, my AI. Whoever took it over must have been good."

Thor works his jaw and looks down at his hands, turning them over and tracing veins with a finger. Tony narrows his eyes.

"Bruce did it?"

"He was worried for you most fiercely and felt that hobbling your mist companion would be the firmest way of keeping you safe."

The yawning chasm of the next two days without either intelligent conversation or coffee splits open in front of Tony. Darkness pours into his soul. He deals with it by flinging his shirt from the bed to the floor and hunkering down under his covers.


Next chapter: Tests are run, certain scientists are spoken to sharply, and Stark Tower becomes the home of a murder. The missing Mark V activates?