"—non-contagious my fucking ass—"
"Shut your mouth, Agent, or I will shut it for you."
"—look, we got another four hours and that's it. We need weather readings. Or how about you go explain to Foster, huh?"
"—can't think they've got a serious chance at the World Cup—"
"—how fucking dare you! How fucking dare you question my loyalty after everything I've—"
Tony woke up, and the feeds were back online: date and time; temperature; EMF; pressure and pressure waves; position, velocity, acceleration, and jerk matrices; particle analyses; system chemical analyses. He went through the list in indexed order and all were functioning within baseline SNR limits. Error logs showed that cascading errors from higher-order, fuzzy-logic decision-making subsystems had overwhelmed the sadly less robust sensory modules, and the degradation had caused a crash and reset until critical errors could be cleared. Scan of root programming had uncovered one foreign program, which had immediately been quarantined before it could activate. Sensor modules were now repaired. Fuzzy-logic modules remained quarantined and off-line.
The last decision made had been to fix the errors, so he started doing that.
The next time he woke up, it was in fits and starts, bits of a system coming online one at a time as they were cleared as operating within acceptable parameters. Some of the modules weren't operating within acceptable parameters, but couldn't be repaired; he skipped them, restored others, and suddenly had enough decision-making ability to recognize the actual problems and reclassify the errors that weren't errors so much as they were the natural result of a biological neural mesh interfacing with high-order fuzzy-logic-based nanites. He restored more of them from quarantine, and the information from sensor networks became relevant beyond accepted environmental conditions max duration: 3.98E14 —which was a garbage result; environmental conditions wouldn't stay stable that long—and cued up notifications of
{obj_hum_id rhodey; distance 1.2; height 1.2; part_anlys_nitrate 10.095; ... }
{obj_hum_id unknown93023103293; distance 3.3; height 1.7 ; part_anlys_nitrate 0.023; ...}
{obj_inanimate_id chair93023103294; distance 1.3; height 0.6 ; part_anlys_nitrate 0.890 ; ... }
and so on. Then threat analyses kicked in to process those surroundings, with, thank god—so he could belatedly think a moment later—morality programming right behind it.
Maybe I should re-order those two.
Morality programming included a whole host of fuzzy protocols, turning rhodey into Rhodey and the realization that the various monitors he was hooked up to had just started to pick up signals that he was awake, and one was about to start beeping. He cut it off with a thought, resetting it to show the same pattern it had been tracking before he'd properly woken up.
The armour. Where the hell was his armour? Where the hell was... everything else? There were active signals buzzing around here, so it wasn't the Raft, but they were all short-wave and they cut off only tens of metres, maybe a few hundred, from his current position. Beyond, there was nothing. It was almost like this was a building that somebody had jettisoned into space or sunk into the Marianna Trench, a tiny little world, all that was left of humanity.
A scream rose up in his throat, and Tony choked trying to force it down, finding out in the process that his throat was as dry as sandpaper. How long had he been out? Internal clock said eighty-two days, but time sync logs were corrupted. The ECG, EEG, O2, and numerous other monitors he was hooked up to said it probably wasn't much more than six hours, assuming it hadn't taken him long to get here, wherever 'here' was. If he'd gone through a portal, then both might be correct.
"Hey, Tony, calm down, man, you're safe—" Rhodey grabbed his hand, and that was familiar, waking up in the hospital in Bagram and not having a goddamn clue where he was except that Rhodey was there and he wasn't in the desert. "You're in New York, SHIELD's headquarters. It's safe here."
"What happened?" he rasped out, flinching away as the other occupant in the room came up on his other side. The ID hanging off of the guy's pocket named him one Shahir Guindi, RN with level 7 medical clearance. That explained why he was in here, then. Why no doctors?
"You collapsed in the quinjet," said Rhodey. "Scared the bejeezus out of me again. You keep doing this you're gonna have to start paying my life insurance premiums."
What happened to Earth?
"Can't, I'm broke," Tony replied with a tight smile. "How long—?"
"You've been out for a little over six hours, Mr. Stark," said the nurse, Guindi, keeping his hands up, in view, and not moving any closer. "Are you the one who disabled the monitors?"
Six hours. Enough time for the world to end. But Rhodey's here—and Rhodey wouldn't be here if the world was ending; he'd be out there, fighting against it to the last.
Monitors. Right.
Cooperation.
He flicked a thought at them and restored their normal functioning. Half of them started beeping immediately, and he winced, but Guindi reached over, moving with careful slowness, and shut the sound on those ones off. Tony wished he'd shut the rest off, too. They were still electronic noise in his skull, and beyond that they were pointless and annoying. Likewise, the IV in his arm part_anlys: saline which he'd have ripped it out if Rhodey hadn't still been hanging onto his other hand. Which was not broken anymore; extremis had fixed that hours ago. He reached up with the hand Rhodey wasn't keeping captive and started tearing sticky electrode pads off of his forehead.
"Tony," Rhodey sighed.
"Mr. Stark, please leave those in place..."
He ignored them. Extremis gave new meaning to the words 'self-check'. The knowledge contained in the error logs was already in his brain; it was just a matter of running a subroutine to access it, make it part of his foremost thoughts. There were a lot of errors.
When he'd been hit in Maklu by the alien beam that had deactivated extremis, he hadn't shut off fully; his biological side hadn't been affected by that. This had been a system-wide effect. He'd thought he was fully integrated before—as integrated as he was going to get, anyway. Hah. He'd thought he understood everything he'd done to himself during his quick trip into the Makluan library nexus. But extremis 2.0 had been compiling and executing while he'd been having his little reality break, so maybe he really just knew fuck all.
I'm a fucking moron. This isn't going to be a quick solution.
And meanwhile, there was SHIELD to deal with—and Steve—Rhodey, and Pepper, and everyone he'd tried to let go, because he was back on Earth and fully corporeal... and still too slow to take down Loki.
Memory usage spiked as processing skyrocketed, logic relays and fuzzy-intelligence networks going haywire trying to compensate, spitting out noise like a heavy metal concert, while on the biological side, a screaming demand for oxygen left him gasping for breath, getting the rapid attention of the eyes watching him, a burst in signals traffic that was too structured to be noise. Audio, and EMF, signals he could track and understand; he scrambled to listen, shutting down loops as fast as he could and feeding himself data that wouldn't start fucking cascade errors—
"—Mr. Stark, good. Breathe out. Okay. Do you know where you are?"
"SHIELD. New York," he replied with barely one percent of his attention. Aliasing split his vision, until he managed to shove more memory space at the debugger, and it fixed it, spewing out error logs in the process. So. He'd managed to fix the errors in his system, and finish installing the extremis upgrade... but he hadn't managed to eliminate the source of the errors. Whatever Loki had done to him was still there. A quick check showed him that the foreign program he'd quarantined while in safe-mode was still safely isolated; it hadn't been the source of this attack.
Shit.
"Good. Keep breathing, just like that." Guindi's eyes were in soothing shades ranging from #550000 to #290800; his smile was kind, and very warm for all that it was still professional. Guy liked that his patient had stopped freaking out on him. "Do you know what day it is?"
"That wasn't—it was a programming error," Tony blurted, setting the debugger to run automatically, which was risky and memory-consuming, but less risky than going around with errors being generated at the current rate. He considered reprogramming himself to stop shivering while he was at it, but set that idea aside for later, even though it was a pointless reflex now even as a defence against the cold, since he had nanites beneath his skin that could do a much better job. Should do a much better job. He didn't even feel cold, actually. "It's February 23rd and I'm fine now. Joys of transhumanism." The thought of being psychoanalyzed by this smiling man made his skin crawl—not a sensation he could easily edit away; this was emerging from somewhere deeper inside his core programming.
Rhodey groaned, but there was nothing except reassurance in the way he squeezed Tony's hand. "Tony, humour the guy."
Tony made a face, and humoured Rhodey. Humour was right; he didn't really have fully autonomic functions anymore. Who was Guindi and why was he being nice? SHIELD doctors were never this nice—was that why there was a nurse instead this time? He turned to the external signals. There was wireless traffic here, but it wasn't connected to anything important. Data lines hummed behind the walls, but they were well-shielded enough to keep him out without more focus than he could currently spare. The camera system wasn't secured half as well, though, and he snuck in through a system that, like most North American systems, was under-engineered and therefore over-rugged to compensate, permitting a far stronger signal than the system actually needed.
Permissions and authorization settings confirmed the nurse's name was indeed Shahir Guindi, and he had enough combat badges that if Tony had woken up crazy, he'd probably have been just fine until one of the dozen armed guards outside the door could get in. He ran Tony through a series of standard questions: date, place, time, what happened—and not so standard: how long have you had alien robots in your blood—before launching into increasingly complicated questions, some sort of neurological exam. This was apparently for the benefit of the neurologist and psychiatrist watching the secured feeds, neither of whom were qualified in basic marksmanship, let alone masters of Madhya Kalari. The skin-crawling sensation increased. Tony answered with about a tenth of his attention—deflect, deflect, deflect—and with the rest, such as he could spare from debugging, crawled through the system, trawling the logs and layout.
Footage from the internal security system made its way through his head, and it didn't take him long to find what he wanted. Steve stood inside an elevator with its doors open, as Tony was wheeled out and down a hall on a gurney. Rhodey followed, but Steve didn't, looking regretful. "Cutting the line isn't good enough," Steve snapped into the elevator's comm. "You need to reel it up, create a buffer area. You don't need a damn quarantine, it's not contagious. We just need shielding to keep him from hacking signals accidentally."
"If we do a manual disengage like that, we won't have any contact below. Captain—"
"Get Fury or Hill on the line, they'll approve it."
He flicked forward through the footage. Steve had left, going back upstairs along with half the scientists. And then... communication was cut off. They were sealed in down here, in the bowels of SHIELD's New York Headquarters. The NYHQ finally living up to its nick-name and turned into a prison.
But Rhodey's here—
And Steve wasn't. No amount of concrete and lead would stop Steve, though. I need my armour. Armour wouldn't stop Steve, either—he wouldn't, christ, I don't have to—I do have to. "Where are my clothes?" he asked, cutting Guindi off mid-question.
"Left on the quinjet," Rhodey said, his face set in an expression that was almost like his disapproving 'you were the one who got blind drunk last night; you find your goddamn pants' look, but there was too much sympathy. Tony didn't want his fucking pity. "We were all glad you didn't knock out the East Coast power grid, but it was a risk, Tony."
He stared down at the blanket bunched in his lap. "I didn't."
"Yeah, but—"
"When are they going to run the lines back up?"
Rhodey raised his eyebrows—ah. He hadn't told Tony about the lines being pulled down—thick bundles of fiber and CAT6, now wound round on spools at the bottom of their shafts and shut behind enough walls that he really only knew because of the security logs. Physical distance meant no signal in or out. "When the nice doctors say you're not in a state of mind to knock power out."
Two floors up the nice doctors scribbled away about what they saw on the monitors. The known-yet-unknown distance above pressed down, suffocating with its silence. He wanted out, he wanted his armour, he wanted out—
Cooperation. Cooperate.
His lungs kept drawing in air. His mouth produced answers to Guindi's questions. He wasn't really paying attention. He wanted his armour. Rhodey said he'd taken out power on the Raft—he couldn't remember it, but he had, unless it had been Loki. If he could do it again then they'd know whether or not it really was him. If he could do it again then he could take his armour back and all the boosted sensor suites that it boasted, could have access to a world outside again.
In the Raft his armour had been nearby, not somewhere completely out of reach. But there were reactors down here—arc reactors, large ones, designed to power high-energy research. Given a hard-line to those and time, he could get a signal out to anywhere, he was sure.
But he didn't have a hard-line and there wasn't enough time when he wanted the damn armour now. If Loki came back—
STOP
His vision flickered.
Errors found: 12309
Shit.
I can't keep doing that.
All his feeble, scrabbling efforts were met with silence. The vacuum outside—the gap—pressed inward, an all-consuming emptiness: uncertainty. If he closed his eyes, did the world go away...? Tony grit his teeth.
Guindi noticed. "We're nearly halfway through the list," he said, half-apologetically, half-encouraging. "Thank you for being so patient, Mr. Stark."
"Great," said Tony. "How about some positive reinforcement? You gonna give the OK to restore the hardlines after this?"
"After forty-eight hours' observation."
Tony gaped at him. "Forty-eight—" Rhodey looked surprised, too, that was—good? Bad?
Guindi's friendliness grew a spine. "From a public safety point of view you're infected with an incredibly virulent pathogen, Mr. Stark. Forty-eight hours is a dangerously unsafe minimum."
Forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours, of the silence ringing in his head and the end of the world come early, the death of everything around him. in forty-eight hours I can probably rewire it to ping the armour but they wouldn't let him at the reactors, of course... but if he had forty-fucking-eight hours, then he didn't really need a direct power line from the reactors: he could reprogram the reactors themselves via extremis, and cycle them into a state of carefully controlled instability. All signals, in the end, were just energy in flux.
The other solution, of course, was to go more... subtle. This place was shielded by mass and distance. But all shielding was really just a matter of degree. The sensor suite he had in the armour was far more sensitive than that which was in his skin—just as the processing suite in his personal nanites was far more developed than that in the armour—but with enough focus and time, he could change that. The downside being that it would leave him strung out like a junkie, waiting for a noise from beyond...
Three and a half hours to cycle the reactors up with enough control to stop them from destabilizing, give or take twenty minutes. christ i hate silence. When had that happened? He'd never had a problem with it before. Had he? He had to find a quicker way to do this—
"There are a hundred and sixteen people down here and eighty-two researchers, and you haven't told any of them about the forty-eight hour limit. They've only been told a level two containment protocol. 'Precautionary containment' and, 'expected duration of less than eight hours'," Tony said, reading off of manuals stored on the internal network. Leverage, christ please...
"That's not your problem," said Guindi, voice firm. "Now, if you could please—"
"No. No, you want me nice and stable, I need access to the goddamn outside world, or I am going to assume you're all figments of my imagination and vibrate out of my skin. Hardwire, now."
"Tony—"
"Mr. Stark—"
"Ah, ah, ah!" Tony rode right over both Rhodey and the nurse's objections. "Nope." He tugged hand free of Rhodey's grip—much too easy to do; extremis had de-aged him and added alien strength to his fingers, and Rhodey had let go, anyway. He flicked the O2 monitor off his finger, pulled the IV, ordered the hole in the blood vessel closed before it could bleed, and ripped the electrode pads away.
"Tony, sit your ass back in that bed before I put you in it."
Guindi wasn't moving to try and put him back, despite all of his martial arts degrees. Neither was Rhodey, for that matter. Maybe they were trusting in the door, manually locked and barred from the outside, or maybe they just weren't idiots. Tony scrambled out of the bed—the floor was freezing concrete against his bare feet—and crossed to the door, pressing his hand against the crack. It was steel, which wasn't ideal, but he could work with it. He eyed the machinery in the room as nanites crept from his skin onto the frame. There'd be gold circuitry in the microprocessors.
"Mr. Stark, we are trying to help you," said Guindi. "You've been having dissociative episodes—panic attacks. Those are dangerous for someone with your abilities. You could hurt someone."
"Haven't yet."
"Zombies, Tony," said Rhodey, and Tony flinched.
"That was different—"
"That's what we're trying to guarantee," said Guindi gently. "If you don't want to remain sitting or lying down, you're free to move about, that's fine. Wherever you're most comfortable. But we do need a comprehensive baseline interview."
"Okay," said Tony. "Okay. We'll do that—after you restore the hardline. I promise I'll stay here, be a good boy—"
"Tony, for god's sake, the zombies were pretty fucking bad! Would it kill you to cooperate for once?"
"I am cooperating. I'll stay right here. See, you need me to cooperate to do that," and he pushed at the door, gently, just enough to tip it open—his nanites had eaten through the seal. They should have gone with a blast door, something thicker. Did they think that just because he didn't have his armour, he'd be helpless against a goddamn door?
In the hall beyond, the guards aimed their weapons at the now-ajar door. They'd gone for conventional weapons, SI845s, his own design. A good choice. Conventional in general was a good choice; SHIELD still hadn't worked out how to build proper energy weapons without chips, controls, regulators—things he could fuck up just by thinking.
One of the agents tapped his radio, without lowering his weapon or letting the barrel waver a millimetre. "Colonel Rhodes, come in, please." Tony heard it in stereo, through the door and through the signal.
"We're good here," said Rhodey, one hand on his own comm. "Tony. This is not helping."
His heart pounded—adrenaline rush, combat readiness—oxygen demand increased. He didn't try to dial it back. "You know, after all these years you really oughtta know better than to make it a challenge," and he thought the ICG on—estimated life (current expenditure): 481.
Which makes this a bluff. He could get out of here with the ICG. He might or might not be able to do it in eight minutes.
Bare feet meant that the steps he took back further into the room were silent; he turned on the speaker system for the room and pointed out, "See, you actually do need me to cooperate."
"Tony—"
"Yeah, that would be me."
"This is not MIT," said Rhodey, carefully—angry. Controlled. His voice was dead level, and Tony hated it. shit get yourself under fucking control stark "People have died. People could continue to die from extremis—you know you make mistakes when you get tired. People will die if you knock out the power to New York."
Tony decloaked—a sudden enough re-appearance to make both Rhodey and the nurse step back—and if he'd had any doubts about Guindi's combat qualifications, those went away on witnessing what the guy did with his startle reflex. wonder why he went into nursing "Yeah, but I'm cooperating."
"Didn't seem like knocking out the Raft was something you meant to do, Tony," said Rhodey, still oh-so-careful. advantage of being known for having a highly infectious disease
"No, but I didn't mean to get locked in a shielded room without my armour and with an Asgardian who has a thing for choking me out," he volleyed back. "And here we are and this is really stupid, Rhodey, I just want a goddamn signal in, I'm not asking for a terabyte line, I just want goddamn proof this isn't a fucking cell in the middle of nowhere—" nowhere came out Ginnungagap—"'cause look I'm freaking out you want to psychoanalyze me here it is and I haven't done a goddamn thing to the goddamn power—"
Rhodey—sneaky, sneaky—had been inching his way closer. Tony was suddenly aware that Rhodey was close enough to reach out and touch him—had, in fact, reached out and put his hands on Tony's upper arms, was sort of working his way around to a hug like somebody might creep up on a very skittish cat. It was slightly insulting, and Tony might have objected, except that the errors overflowed the debugger and dizziness had him stumbling—forward, his head onto Rhodey's shoulder, because even with three extra inches Rhodey still had him beat. At least when he was wearing boots and Tony was barefoot.
Tony breathed in. Rhodey's uniform smelled like laundry detergent, not like sweat and sand and dust. Clean. Sterile. He shunted more space to the debugger and the world steadied beneath his feet... and pixellated a bit more. "I need a line. I just need a line out—I know people died—I know, it was my fault, please, I just want to make sure they're not—all gone—"
Rhodey was also talking, he realized, as the debugger cleared out the garbage noise in his audio processes that had translated to turn all sound into a dull roar. "You're okay, man. There's a whole world out there."
"It's silent in my head," Tony gritted out. "Rhodey—I'm cooperating—"
Christ, if only he could move—sit back—something. Something that wasn't begging, pleading like it had ever made a difference. Every instinct in him except one was screaming to stop putting himself in this terribly vulnerable position. And yet—
"Give him the line," said one of the psychiatrists—watching Tony watching him, but only one part of the loop knew that it existed. "He's panicking but he's keeping it together." point for you But then, that was... Leonard Samson—Steve's psych, the one Steve actually liked. Had to be decent, then.
"And the 'infectious disease' part?" the other doctor asked, Sahara-dry.
"Oh, come off it, you just want samples." Samson sounded testy. "Just ask nicely."
"Easy enough for you to excuse a body count."
Samson laughed, an ugly, booming noise. "Johann, you're working for SHIELD. Better get that stick out of your ass. Infection time on extremis is under half an hour, we're more than past that. Consider that an override from psych if it makes you happy—he's right, he's cooperating. He gets a carrot."
Orders were sent, in person, face-to-face: Tony watched through the cameras. Doors unsealed. He leapt through each one at the speed of thought, alien nanites letting him spread past where any human technology would be expected to maintain contact. He didn't really need the hardlines completely connected. He just needed them to get near enough that he could piggyback them most of the way through the NYHQ's shielding—but even if they remained out, the thought of a connection, the mirror of the thing itself... that was poetry. This was science, limited by physical distance.
Guindi had started asking questions again—tedious questions, that could be answered with one word or left more open-ended; questions designed to draw out, to reveal thoughts. Tony let him, and let Rhodey lead him back to the bed, let himself be hooked up to alarms—let his body be hooked up to alarms; his self waited, poised, as the last lead blast barrier was rolled back. Satellite data—
"—up forty-three points so far today, riding a wave of optimism as reports continue to roll out of China, all with the same message: the Nanoplague is—"
"—important that in these times, we do thank God, in all His glory. But we must do more than that, too. Our brothers and sisters in China will be suffering the after-effects for a long time to come, and will need our help—"
"—speaking from Beijing, publicly condemned SHIELD for refusing to release any further details. Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, has been speaking to an American Special Committee in a lengthy session that started over four hours ago—"
and one of the sergeants tugged on the cord they'd so hastily rigged up—cord to pull down, and on the other end leadlines pulled cable back up to top-side. Closer... and data flew.
"—relief efforts increase—"
"—looking grim—"
"—on Capitol Hill this morning—"
"—satellite array—"
Signals burned like fire, like beacons. A trillion indications of life, the universe, everything—they existed. Tony let his mind spread—found his armour, scanned it, tweaked it, scanned again—revelled in the data. Audio, video—look, there was Steve, arriving to testify this morning... absolutely surrounded by news crews. Somebody had leaked something.
"...Tony... eyes are glowing..."
Rhodey's voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away. He let himself ignore it. The internet spread out before him, and it would be so easy to get lost. Drift away. Until something pulled him back.
On the clip playing over again from this morning—CAPTAIN AMERICA ARRIVES ON CAPITOL HILL TO TESTIFY ABOUT NANOVIRUS CURE; SUPERVILLAINY INVOLVED?—Steve looked just thrilled.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but under the Charter signed by the founding member countries, and my own contract with SHIELD—"
"Is there a damn thing you can tell us?" one of the other senators wondered. Cameras flashed, capturing the disgusted expression on his face.
"—I am prohibited from revealing that information," Steve finished doggedly.
"Thank you, Captain Rogers, I believe we all understand the source of your inability to speak," the chairwoman said dryly. Her eyes, sharp and flinty, bored into him for a long moment, and then she looked down to flip back through her papers.
Steve wondered if that meant this circus was going to end soon. Him testifying was something that needed to happen: people were scared. There had been riots in Paris this morning, over the Nanoplague stopping. A few other cities had teetered on the brink. After three months of extremis, people needed the re-assurance. There was a lot that Steve couldn't tell them, but he could tell them that extremis was neutralized, and it was better that he do it now, while Tony was still unconscious and Rhodey was around to guard him from himself, SHIELD, and Loki alike. Despite knowing all that, he still felt like he was going stir-crazy before the eyes of these senators and half of America.
After the Chitauri, he'd been shielded from having to do this by both secrecy and SHIELD itself. This time, he was lucky that he had Natasha along for the ride. Most people didn't realize how good his peripheral vision was; she was sitting beside him and he rarely looked at her, but through the twitches in her expression she kept pointing out which questions he should refuse. They'd probably have directed questions to her, too, except that she was wearing some sort of mask that gave her a different face—apparently, the latest in SHIELD holographics. It didn't have anything on Tony's ICG, but it let Natasha sink into anonymity as Steve's 'lawyer'.
"Senator Whitmore..."
"Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Going back several months to the beginning of the outbreak..." said Whitmore, and Steve resisted the urge to groan. They'd already been 'back to the beginning' several times. He was probably going to have nightmares about Tony's headless body tonight, tomorrow night, whenever he next tried to sleep. Half the senators were clearly convinced that something had been found in the Tower and that SHIELD was hushing it up. "I understand that on November 25th of last year, you were reported as MIA, Captain."
Whitmore waited for him to answer, so he leaned forward to speak into the mic. "Correct, sir."
"And that, pending your return—recovery?—on December 11th, you were placed on leave pending psychiatric evaluation—" The rest of Whitmore's words were swallowed up in a roar as the room exploded; the murmurs of the backbench turning suddenly into shouts and speculation. Natasha, beside him, made a furious sound and scribbled on her legal pad—HIPAA, he can't say publicly—shut down now?
Steve shook his head at her. It was actually funny, a bit—a lot of the reporters looked... outraged. Like it was slander. He'd been sent through psychiatric evaluation right out of the ice, too, and kept seeing Leo weekly—would that outrage these reporters just as much? When the people he cared about had thought he was crazy, that had been infuriating. Now Tony was back, and his entire team knew Tony was back... and, God. Tony was alive.
It took a couple of minutes for the officers in the room to restore order. When it had quieted again—a couple of the press crew had gotten kicked out—Steve said, "I don't think you actually asked a question there, sir."
"After returning from ten days MIA and two weeks' leave" —the noise picked up again; reporters were noting that Whitmore hadn't repeated the 'psychiatric' part—"you returned to active duty, primarily running missions into Nanovirus red-zones for SHIELD, correct?"
"Yes, sir."
"As you had been before?"
Shenzhen had been a disaster from start to finish. The red-zone classification had been applied retroactively, but it definitely applied. "Yes, sir."
"The details of which are entirely classified, unlike your later missions gathering extremis samples." Whitmore held up a file, the cover page of which was more black than white—somebody had gone through it with a black marker and a vengeance. "As classified as this so-called 'new' cure for extremis is."
Steve exchanged glances with Natasha. The murmur of the press gained additional tension. They hadn't guessed where this was going yet—or maybe some of them had—but they could feel the build before the revelation... damn grandstanding politicians, all of 'em.
"Senator Whitmore, dramatic pauses do not turn your statements into questions," said the chairwoman.
"My apologies, Madam Chairwoman—Captain, after you were infected with extremis, why didn't SHIELD make the data available to other agencies and governments? It's taken SHIELD three months to synthesize a cure, when if they had cooperated with the WHO—"
"Senator!"
"Apologies, Madam Chairwoman—Captain, can you deny that you were infected with extremis?"
The noise rose again, though not to the level of before: the remaining reporters didn't want to join their fellows out in the cold. Natasha's hand was palm down against the tabletop: deny it. Of course, he'd sworn on a Holy Bible to tell the truth insofar as he was permitted, before God and the flag of his country. He could refuse, as he'd refused other questions, but that would be answering. So: he could perjure himself, or tell the truth.
If he hesitated that was also an answer. Hell, by not looking surprised that was probably an answer—he pulled the mic down toward him a bit just to have one more moment to think. Truth or lie... he was a terrible liar. The people deserved the truth. People generally did. But was Whitmore really interested in truth?
Didn't mean he couldn't use the opportunity to tell some.
"Senator," he said, slowly, "Since '42 I've often wished that the formula for the super soldier serum wasn't lost. I'm aware of how lucky I am. It's a cold day today—before the serum, I wouldn't have been able to breathe outside without wheezing. Today I could run a mile a minute and barely break a sweat. There's people out there in this world, today, who have it a hell of a lot worse than I ever did—whose bodies fight against them more than mine fought me. Science and society have made a lot of progress, but there's a long ways to go. I wish Erskine's formula could be a panacea. I wish it hadn't been lost, I wish to God Erskine hadn't been assassinated—not the least because Erskine himself was a good man, more than just a great scientist. He deserved to see the end of the War and beyond."
"Captain, if you could please answer—"
He held up a hand. "I'm answering, Senator. The other reason I wish that the formula had survived was because it might have stopped people—many fellow Americans—from going to some frankly despicable depths in their efforts since to re-create it. In retrospect the medical ethics of the '40s seem horrific these days, but at least I knew what I was risking when I climbed in that machine. I've read the files from the '60s, the '70s and '80s, and there were plenty of boys who had no clue—who were lied to, who were used, who were coerced. They went in and they came out dead or monsters.
"A lot of people have tried. But even those experiments that were just ethically dubious, rather than outright reprehensible, have been failures. They've ruined lives. There hasn't been one damn success since Erskine died.
"You're asking me one question, Senator, but I think you're actually interested in the answer to another one. So I'll tell you. What I said four hours ago, three hours, ago, a half-hour ago is true. The cure for extremis implemented last night has absolutely nothing to do with Erskine's super soldier serum or its formula."
Natasha put a hand on his forearm in warning. Partly she was just playing the lawyer, but part of it was real warning. He twitched her off. In his pocket, his phone buzzed, and he ignored that, too.
"Exactly how the cure works, I couldn't tell you—cracking it stumped some of the greatest scientific minds on Earth for months. But I thank God that it had nothing to do with the serum, because I know that there are three studies up for federal approval and two more undergoing reviews by military boards this year—I know, because I was asked to provide assistance with all of them. After reading their methods, I refused. I'll happily assist any study that could honestly pass an ethics review board. I haven't seen one yet." He paused—and, hell, couldn't bite his tongue—"Does that answer your question, Senator?"
Disorder erupted again—intrigued, this time; the audience was wondering what was going on behind those words. One too many damn politicians, that's what. Whitmore had that same look about him.
"No, it doesn't, Captain," said Whitmore. He'd gone red, but remained dogged. Damn. Should've just called him an opportunist to his face, Rogers. "Were you infected with extremis?"
Steve looked back at him, and said, very deliberately, "Yes."
It felt like every camera in the audience went off at once—perfectly timed to capture the triumphant light in Whitmore's eyes. "Did SHIELD produce a cure, or was that the serum, Captain?"
Natasha gripped his forearm, hard enough to nearly hurt; Steve looked over, deliberately, not quite raising an eyebrow at her, and she flashed the screen of her phone at him. It was a text from a number that Steve recognized as Hill's. hardlines reconnected. Looks OK observation continues
He put his hand over the mic and leaned over to talk to her. "Can we get out of here?"
"Closing the barn door," she muttered, but nodded.
Steve stood and pitched his voice so that the senators could hear him without the mic pickup. "Senator, I've repeatedly told you that the cure for extremis had nothing to do with the serum. Either believe me or have the decency to call me a liar directly. Now, you'll excuse me—we've been here for hours. I've told you everything I can about the cure for extremis. If you want more, you're going to have to go to SHIELD, or at least to someone with a science degree. Madam Chairwoman—good day."
"Captain Rogers, you have an obligation to the people of this country!" Whitmore called, but Steve turned and shoved past—Natasha, Natalie Rushman, followed in his wake, snapping at reporters, "No comment," again and again.
Steve kept quiet. More than anything else he wanted to tap the ever-present comm in his ear and ask, Tony?—but of course he couldn't, not when he had microphones pressed up beneath his nose. He waved them aside impatiently, edging through the crowd—he couldn't just bull through them, he'd knock someone over doing that—until they reached the doors, which swung open before them, spilling the crowd of reporters into the hall outside. There were even more reporters out there. More cops, too. Natasha got a grip on his arm and pulled him along the hallway, not to the entrance, and they both quickened their strides, shedding reporters to cops as they went until they could duck into a stairwell. Steve saw a cop moving to stand in front of the door as it swung shut, and felt a surge of gratitude.
"Ride's on the roof," said Natasha.
He nodded and took the stairs four at a time, which was slower than he had to, but Natasha was wearing a business suit. She flicked off the imager as they went, resettling her heavy purse on her shoulder—it was the purse that had the massive batteries the thing required in lieu of an arc reactor.
"Tony?" he murmured, without turning his comm's pickup mic on. He heard Natasha pull in a breath behind him. She'd let him hear that, let him know that she had heard. Well, he'd meant her to hear. Downplaying what Tony could do—from the rest of the team, at least—was both pointless and dangerous.
But if Tony was listening, he didn't answer.
Enough brainpower to calculate routes to realities on the other side of the cluster, and Tony couldn't figure out what to say.
At least not to Steve. But Steve had asked him to tell the truth. Guindi just kept asking questions, and they were probing questions, good questions—a more thorough dip into SHIELD's files showed that he was a class five interrogator—but he was obviously going easy on Tony: quantity over quality, and the lies or the craziness would show up in the small spaces, the inconsistencies. Tony answered him because it didn't matter if it didn't add up; they expected him to be crazy anyway. He played along, and played sane, until Rhodey relaxed enough to go argue with the Air Force, and then he kept playing because so long as he was waiting on Steve to show up he couldn't quite figure out what else to do.
Cooperate.
When the quinjet finally touched down, Tony switched his attention from eavesdropping on Rhodey to the cameras showing the base commander waylaying Steve and Natasha—they'd re-linked the hard-lines but the lower levels, apparently, were still on physical quarantine and due to be for the next three days, which was one of the things Rhodey was hashing out with the Air Force. Steve planted his feet, hands not quite on hips, but chin raised, not going to be moved, and agents cleared out around them. Natasha melted in among them and made her way to the security room, booted out the baby agent and the not-so-baby agent on duty there, and started to flick her way through the cameras now uplinked with the second set of surveillance on the lower levels—completely independent of the first set, which was all closed-circuit.
As he watched, Natasha turned and waved at the security camera behind her.
He tapped her comm, creating a private chatlink, avoiding any channels that SHIELD's techs would recognize as being, well, a channel. "Black Widow. Did I do something to give myself away, or was that just a lucky guess?"
She raised an eyebrow at the camera, leaning back in the security chair and crossing one leg over the other. "I cried at your funeral, Tony. I think you can still call me Natasha."
His funeral. That... god, that was a weird thought.
"Or I would have, if I'd attended." She shrugged. There was something in her expression that looked genuinely pained. "I had to go hunt down a leak. But you can call me Natasha anyway."
"What's Steve's... plan, here?"
"You wouldn't have been safe with SHIELD. So he got himself a Presidential order for custody of you—him and us, the rest of the Avengers—Bruce, myself, Clint, Rhodey for now but there's rumblings that the Air Force wants him back."
So Steve was his parole officer. "He wanted me to work with SHIELD." No, that wasn't right. There was some sort of glitch in his thinking, more errors of the type he'd had to ignore to get his brain back online. Everything since Tripitaka—
Tripitaka—
He couldn't—he—Steve was—Loki—no. He had to... think. The stop command was—but if he used it—no. Needed to go over the programming, first. Clash check. Figure it out.
Think.
He took a shuddery breath.
"Mr. Stark?" Guindi asked him.
He'd broken off in the middle of an answer involving Isaac Asimov—testing long-term recall? Had they customized this test for him?—he shook his head and delegated Guindi about three percent more attention. "Liked, yes, but he was never my favourite author—"
"That's not—that's not a plan. I don't know what..."
"Whatever you had in mind to take Rudolph out? Share it. SHIELD wants him taken out, too. SHIELD will support you—we'll support you. Come on, Tony... I thought last year taught you something about the value of having friends."
It was such obvious bait. But he hadn't paid his dues—"It taught me I'm hard on friends. You might've noticed."
She paused. "Pepper could come back."
"If I—what, if I help you do this? I—"
"Not just for this. For the fix to extremis."
"And you think that makes anything better?"
"Yes." She was very deliberate. "I do."
Freedom from a life on the run. Nothing could be like it had been... but that didn't mean that it couldn't be an improvement. Okay, fair deal. "What's the catch?"
"I like Pepper." What, really? "Don't say yes if you're going to screw her over again."
Best behaviour, then. The same stick that applied if he went and found Pepper himself. Satellites spun above him, eyes in the sky he could look through at will, pinpoint anyone on the surface of the Earth... no. Better to ask someone else instead, give her some space. Not SHIELD, but—SHIELD had nearly lost Pepper; Natasha and Clint had gotten her out in one piece. Ask Natasha—but that would be admitting what he wanted, what he valued, and even if Natasha was telling the truth about liking Pepper, that didn't mean she didn't have other motives at the time.
He was over-thinking this. Too many possibilities, not enough evidence for any of them. He could rate them by probability but when they each had P0.4 that wasn't much help. Except that he was pretty sure she did actually like Pepper.
Pepper was an easy person to love.
With this method of communication, it was easy to not let the words come out as soft as they sounded in the processors wired to his brain. "Do it, then."
"Play nice with the nurse, Tony. We'll be down soon enough. Say hi to Steve, will you? He's worried." Her voice, unlike his, was soft. If he didn't try to read too much into it, she sounded relieved, but still worried.
Try, Steve had told him.
"Hey," he told Steve, tapping into his comm in the same way he had Natasha's. On the camera Steve turned away sharply from the base commander, waving her off—on another camera, he watched Natasha watching the same. "Can I have my armour back?"
Right, that didn't sound whiny at all.
"Yes," said Steve, thank god. And what would he have done if the answer had been 'no'? "You okay? Where is it?"
"Storage locker A27, one floor down from you, light security." A27 was for mild biohazards, like most clothes would be, which meant it was nowhere near enough to contain extremis in either solid or aerosolized mode. Somebody was going to be scrubbing toilets on the Raft for that.
From the twitch in Steve's lips, apparently he realized that, too—or maybe he just took objection to storing it under 'light' security. How was Tony supposed to know? Steve had stuck him down here. "Right. Commander—" Steve turned back.
Persistent arguing by Steve, however, only got the quarantine decreased instead of eliminated—down to twelve hours, which was better, but left Steve fuming. Watching him made phantom pain echo through Tony's skull, until he stopped looking. It also got his armour stuck in a lab, rather than given back to him, although it was hardly shielded enough... he wrote programming to call it to his last known location if his link to it got cut off again, although that was a long shot—without the arc reactor to power it, chances were slim the armour would make it through whatever barriers SHIELD put up. Cooperation, right.
"I'm sorry," said Steve for the umpteenth time. "If I'd known—" he cut himself off, there.
"You'd have done the same thing," Tony finished for him. "No blackouts for Brooklyn, I get it, it's"—he couldn't quite make himself say 'fine'—"not your fault."
"It's been hours already, it won't be much longer. As soon as it's up, you can have the armour back. Can you fix extremis in the meantime?"
"Uh-huh. Been working on it. Hey, Natasha's looking for you," Tony told him, and cut the connection.
He returned to the problem of debugging. The debugger was still finding way too many errors; they multiplied so fast that balancing clearing them and hunting for the source was becoming an art form.
Rhodey finally got off the phone with the Air Force and returned yawning, then promptly crashed out in the chair he'd been sitting in before—asleep within minutes. This might have clued Guindi into how long he'd been asking questions for, because he wrapped it up then.
"Rest, eat, hydrate," Guindi told him, handing over a water bottle and a power bar. "I have no idea what that virus is doing to you, you'll have to wait on the experts for that."
"Hi."
Guindi had shrugged. "Not my call, Mr. Stark. Fight it out with them. But you have been through a massive physiological and psychological shock recently. Give yourself the chance to recover. Sleep. At least keep the monitors on, please." He left, shutting off the lights at Tony's nod.
Humans couldn't produce real darkness as far as Tony was concerned, not after this last upgrade. Even without the armour, his vision had been widened too much. Infrared cast the room in perpetual light. The equipment pinged at him. The data pathways out to the world practically sang.
Tony gave in and curled up on his side, listening to his own breathing and Rhodey's, beside him. The bed was pretty comfortable, probably because it wasn't actually a hospital cot. But he'd just been unconscious. What he needed was a second system he could use to take a good long look at his code, and figure out what the hell was up with it, and if his forced down-time had actually fixed all of it.
Or he could do it in his head. Sure, that's not a terrible idea.
Start with the obvious first: rule out outside problems. He'd quarantined a foreign file; now he opened up a partition and dumped the file into it, for examination at a second remove, where it couldn't execute.
Dots and lines added up into something alien, and he had only a moment to recognize oh shit—
"You goddamned son of a bitch," he snarled, bolting upright in bed. Armour. Armour, he needed—security feeds were on and showing—
"I feel like we've had this conversation before," said Loki.
—nothing; Rhodey was still conked out in the chair, and for all the cameras could tell Tony was asleep, too. There was no one else in the room. This was all in his head.
SHIT!
The program. Where was the fucking program, what was it doing to him? He wrote script faster than the human eye could see, throwing up firewalls and—there, it was sensory. Oh, thank fucking christ, Loki was in his head but not in his thoughts, if only he could keep him out of his thoughts. No wonder everything had fucked up starting at his sensor suites: this had been hiding there while he'd been trying to re-write his brain. Fuck.
For the moral advantage, he threw back the covers and stalked over to the door—well, it started out as a stalk; it turned into something of a sidle, as he couldn't stand the chance of turning his back on Loki even if it was all in his head, fake data generated by the virus. The door opened easily, and beyond it lay a great, familiar nothingness. He blinked at it hazily. Most of his attention was directed at frantically strengthening his firewalls.
He had to get this out of his sensor suites—he couldn't even risk looking at it directly until he was sure he wouldn't spread it further—
Loki flicked a hand and the door clapped shut. "Nothing there. We're in a special little dreamscape, under the heaviest warding spells I could conjure. I shan't say we can speak freely, nor plan freely, not against an enemy so pervasive, but we are slightly... safer, here."
Tony turned and leaned against the shut door. If it was in his head, could he imagine the armour appearing about him...? Apparently not; he stayed stuck in shirt-sleeves. "The blood. I bit your hand." And had infected himself with nanites or alien magic, Jesus, he was an idiot. Above them, in the waking world, all his pings to the armour went unanswered—truth or lie? Cameras didn't show it being moved—Loki was blocking this sense, too, somehow, more thoroughly than if SHIELD had dumped the armour in a lead vault. Tony wanted it with the sort of intensity that he'd once wanted approval or booze or to find the key to artificial intelligence.
Signal boost. Armour. Get it here.
Don't think abou
"Just so. I do apologize for goading you into it. I have far too many eyes on my these days, and many of them are unfriendly."
"Including mine," Tony pointed out, crossing his arms. Damnit, that was a defensive tell. He couldn't help it. The urge to fold in on himself was only barely held at bay.
"Yes, for which I am sorry, Stark," said Loki impatiently. And tiredly.
This is what he wants you to see. And... knows you'll distrust...
"Right, apology not accepted, so you can fuck off, now."
"It costs you nothing to hear me out." Loki had his hands up and open, a gesture of peace. Hah.
"Please give me some credit for not being quite that stupid."
"I do. But you're also stuck in this dreamscape for the nonce, so you might as well listen to me." Loki paused. "Hear me out, and the spell will unravel on its own; you might even have the chance to see how it works."
Tony clapped his hands over his ears. "La la la la, I'm not listening." If he managed to rip it apart on his own, he'd also get to figure out how it worked. The surest way to guarantee a virus couldn't affect a system was to made the system incompatible. Extremis had a visual basis; he'd always worked heavily with visuals...
Changing that would take too long.
"Let me try appealing to your notion of self-preservation, then." Loki's words weren't muted at all by Tony having his imaginary hands covering his imaginary ears. "Thanos has slain the Living Tribunal. You're not an idiot, Stark—you can find a way to verify that independently of my words: the death of the Living Tribunal has sent shockwaves through the whole multiverse. Thanos won't stop there. He's merely licking his wounds, and when he regains his strength... well. With the Living Tribunal gone, there's no being in this multiverse that stands half a chance of stopping him, not by outright force."
Accept that I have to take some risk and move on. If he couldn't change mediums, he could scramble the one that he had. Like putting on a pair of glasses that inverted vision—it was still possible to navigate reality, and in time it grew normal, but based on how Loki's virus worked the inversion should frustrate it. Should.
"But this multiverse does have some defences remaining to it, to those who know where to look and how. Unfortunately, those defences are, let us say, well-hidden. Difficult to reach. And we don't have much time."
He could read frequency just as well as he could read space. Decompose the data into ten thousand harmless layers—add in some junk he could easily read around, just to be sure—then filter, apply a fast Fourier, super-impose—
I'm an idiot, he had time to think as frequencies added up in a way that—everything blinked. The feeds from the cameras cut off; the signal of his armour went silent. The room was the same, but now his wrists were pinned to the walls, leaving him wide open and helpless. Loki, across the room, looked both faintly irritated and faintly smug.
"You're going to have to be more creative than that to get around my spellwork, Stark. Don't worry. I'm sure you have it in you. But not, I think, before you have time to fully hear me out."
Wide open and stuck in his head, Loki closer to his own thoughts—
Don't thi
Loki looked at him. It made Tony's skin feel like getting up and crawling off his body to hide under the bed. The knot of panic at the base of his skull was spreading, a cancer in intangible form, down through his spine, into his heart and lungs and stomach, out to his limbs...
The firewall. He still had firewalls up. There was a way—there was a way to—
"As flattering as it is, your paranoia about me is starting to reach ridiculous heights, Stark," said Loki, and his smugness had vanished. He looked tired again. A lie. "I'm anchored to this multiverse just the same as you—much more so than you; you, being mortal, would be far easier to transport to another multiverse. As has been demonstrated."
"You know, you'd have more luck lying to me if I hadn't been there the entire time," rasped Tony. He swallowed; he hadn't realized his throat was that dry... except it wasn't, not really. "Or maybe if your nickname wasn't Loki Liesmith."
No, sto—st—let him talk, let him say whatever it is and go away please go away
Loki gave a tch of irritation. "You saw the final scene. You saw nothing of the first four acts. The Norns consigned me to bloody torture and then an ignominious death; is it so strange that I objected? You did."
"Don't flatter yourself. You're nothing like me."
"Oh? I escaped the second, but not the first; I turned my tormentors' own scheme back upon them and burst from my cave to reign down fire and darkness upon them, rising as a god reborn, more powerful than they could ever have dreamed once I broke my chains." Loki's black eyes glittered with—no, his eyes were green—something shifted, in his pupils—"We are almost exactly alike, Stark; we differ only in degree—I am a god, after all."
No—it was laughable—if only he could think—"I didn't set out to kill everyone."
"Neither did I, Stark. But as we've both learned, actions have consequences." Loki opened his palm upward, a small gesture to indicate their programmed surroundings.
Extremis.
11094650 infected—
No no no no I didn't
"Those worlds were collateral damage, as was yours, to you. But I digress. The scheme that broke my chains was the result of eons of planning, trades of magic and power that... well, there's just no time for me to arrange it again." Loki's expression twisted as though he'd bitten into a lemon. "Perhaps the Norns had the last laugh, seeing me escape their plot to a world soon to fall under Thanos' eye. Regardless—be assured, Stark, I am stuck here. I therefore have great reason to work to see this multiverse survive."
He couldn't speak. He might as well have been overclocking his brain again—it wouldn't have mattered, almost all the data was garbage. There was nothing left for meaningful conversation; some bit of him was recording this, but there was nothing—he couldn't—
"Unfortunately, gathering this multiverse's weapons is going to be difficult. And too much time is being spent by her guardians on defence—gods are dying even as we speak, defending mortals... never mind. I had thought you might serve as an excellent piece of one puzzle... but then I saw you again." He smiled. It wasn't quite the Cheshire grin. "And I saw how metaphysically interesting you've become. Wherever did you lose your soul?"
One step forward—Loki raised his hand and Tony flinched, couldn't help it; he shrank back against the wall and practically tried to phase through it, he was shaking hard enough—Loki laid one long, white finger against Tony's forehead and the white, sharp static rose, nearly drowning him—
Loki stepped back, and Tony gasped for a breath that he couldn't catch.
"You might be a bit... damaged," said Loki quietly, "but you're surely less damaged than anyone else shall become, if they attempt to enter that place. The weapon that can stop Thanos is called the Stone of Time, and it is hidden in the Ginnungagap, where even I dare not go again. But you may walk there without any fear except that which you bring with you."
He looked almost concerned. Tony felt something jump in his throat; he let out a strangled sound, so twisted it took him a moment to realize it should have been a laugh.
"Without the Stone of Time this plan fails," Loki went on, almost conversationally. "You're the only one who can retrieve it. So pull yourself together, Stark. Or else, when this multiverse dies... you shall, once again, be as complicit as me."
Oxygen. Oxygen, he needed air—Tony sucked in a long breath and sat bolt upright on his cot, shaking. Information flooded in—camera feeds, the ping of his armour, telemetry from satellites overhead. He shut the bulk of them down and streamlined his processes, cutting extraneous data movement and partitioning a section of his mind to keep a lock on everything else.
Rhodey was gone, his chair empty. Where—
Oh, christ, is he still in my head?
The door opened; light poured through the doorway, and Guindi stuck his head in. "Mr. Stark? You okay?"
"Fine," Tony breathed. The plate of the arc reactor was hard and flat beneath his fingers—one firm point of contact. Confidence. Rhodey was—camera feeds showed him leaving. Could he trust those? He raised his voice, letting it project—"Just a fucking dream."
Timestamps showed he'd been asleep for nearly nine hours. Goddamnit. Quarantine was over and he wanted out, he wanted his armour.
Where the virus had been bits of code lay in tattered ruins. Some sort of self-destruct—he certainly hadn't managed to damage the damn thing. Was it worth trying to autopsy it? No. Probably not. Quarantine, quarantine, quarantine.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"You're a fucking nurse, not a shrink, I'll let you know if I need you to take my blood pressure," Tony snapped. "Until then fuck off."
Guindi retreated.
The code was shredded and his brain was still twitching, churning out white noise and filling up needed RAM with crap, useless data and white noise. Did that mean that this—thing—whatever was wrong with him, wasn't something Loki had shoved in his head? Or was there a second layer to the virus that he hadn't found yet? Or it could be both. Fuck. He drew his legs up until he could rest his elbows on them, and pressed his palms against his temples.
Streamlined processes didn't mean a lack of physical security, so he had warning from the hall cameras that Natasha was standing at the door to the room. She knocked, though—a courtesy of a different sort; she didn't wait for him to answer before slipping inside. Her posture was casual, nonchalant—
And how much a lie?
This was ridiculous. He couldn't treat Natasha like Loki.
Unless she is—
Fuck OFF.
"It's funny, how you can be great at lying one moment and then suck at it the next," Natasha said after a minute. She was leaning casually against the wall that Loki had pinned him to, hands in her pockets, a messenger bag hanging from one shoulder. Keeping the doorway clear.
"Yeah, well, we can't all keep it up twenty-four/seven."
"Wow, harsh." Her dry tone told him exactly how much she cared. "Steve's in DC for an emergency meeting. He's probably in blackout, but I bet you can get around that—he wanted you to call him when you woke up."
"Maybe later," Tony breathed, half-muffling it with his arms.
From the way her eyebrows drew down and the slight upward turn in her mouth disappeared—he didn't need to be looking at her with his eyes to see her, not these days—she did care about that, and he immediately regretted saying it. She let the silence hang for a few seconds, but he knew that trick, and even if he'd never had the patience to use it himself, he did have the patience to out-wait it. only took getting fucked up for the
He cut the thought off. He did it without stop, even.
When he didn't say anything, Natasha let it go—or, more likely, changed tactics—and tossed the messenger bag in his direction; he made no move to catch it, and it landed on the cot with a thump. "Here. Clothes. Yours are still off-limits—the techs are very impressed, by the way, and also very afraid of you considering extremis is a BSL-4 biohazard. Or was."
"Steve told them better."
"Steve isn't here, and he's in a blackout zone."
which won't matter one damn bit if he "If they start fucking with now it it'll just go inert."
"Oh, they know better—there was only one who wanted to dissect you, and Steve got him thrown in holding."
Camera records showed Steve hovering in the doorway six hours ago, far less nonchalant than Natasha was now. Tony was—apparently—curled up on his side on the bed, asleep. Had Loki been ripping through his head by then? Steve had stood there for five-point-two minutes before leaving without ever fully entering the room.
"Get dressed. We're going out. Coffee." Natasha slipped out the door.
What the hell.
"This is Romanoff. I'm taking Stark out for a coffee."
A pause. "Acknowledged," came over the same command channel. It was a very unhappy acknowledgement.
When Tony was dressed, Natasha slipped back in. The clothing smelled new, of harsh chemicals; he'd probably wind up with dye ground into his skin. The cheapness of it, and of her own outfit, cued up memory files of the other Natasha. She'd taken him out and around, too.
But not for coffee.
"Come on," said Natasha, leading him out.
His previous strolls through the building mainframe meant that there were no surprises left in this place, but all the construction in the hallways nagged at him. The NYHQ boasted a staggering number of sub-basements, even by his standards, but all the really interesting experiments had been located out at PEGASUS—before Loki-the-lesser had trashed the place, that was. The new facility, named in typical SHIELD fashion 'Project Horizon: Exploration and Outreach to Newly Identified eXtraterrestrials' had gotten tied up in red tape after SHIELD had gone public and Fury had decided to have a pissing match with the WSC.
Now, however, Cold War fallout-shelter-cum-office space was being rapidly converted into labs. Somebody had gotten tired of waiting for PHEONIX to rise from the ashes of bureaucracy. Half the sub-basements were under construction, crews working on plans laid out for equipment still in transit. Not exactly shiny-new equipment, by those invoices: it had been confiscated from various unfortunate universities and private institutions. It looked like in some cases they'd confiscated the personnel, too, or else bribed them with shiny, shiny knowledge. And bribed them fast—in the last nine hours, SHIELD HR had increased the New York science contingent by half, gutting its other bases in the process, and there were enough flagged-for-interview files that if SHIELD hired on even half of those identified, it would be tripled. Why?
There were holes in walls, where technicians were installing more security. Nobody looked up at Tony and Natasha as they passed, but Tony kept his head down anyway. Blond had been a good disguise...
Natasha tucked her hair back and pulled up the hood of her hoodie as they stepped outdoors, completing her disguise, such as it was, with a pair of glasses that she didn't need. It was raining, a cold drizzle, and she handed him an umbrella and opened up her own. Tony glanced back at the building as they walked away. Its mirrored windows gave no clue about the activity inside.
"You can keep us off of any cameras, right?" Natasha asked as they strolled away.
"Sure." He even had the ICG, still, for all that he didn't have his armour—he could vanish, duck away and Natasha might never find him...
Secret's blown, live with it.
Easier if he knew what he was living with. He set part of his brain to a second, deeper search through SHIELD's databases, chasing up requisition orders to find out where they were coming from, but it felt a bit like trying to look around a black hole. Directives were issued, orders given... but where was the vision that pulled it all together? What was SHIELD after, here, beyond trying to reincarnate PHEONIX? Something with other worlds, obviously. But what?
The NYHQ had been built out of the old SSR building in Brooklyn, which meant that there were five coffee shops within a two-block radius; three of them were Starbucks, and it was the second-closest one that Natasha led them to, one packed with twenty-year-old kids wearing old-fashioned scarves and skinny jeans—all self-absorbed in their own little groups, not inclined in the slightest to look at anyone else in the place. Natasha ordered for both of them while Tony focused on not twitching every time a teenager laughed too loudly.
How many kids had extremis killed?
I could have saved them.
"Come on," said Natasha brightly, appearing in front of him with two cups.
Back out into the rain. He held Natasha's umbrella and coffee for her as she pulled on a pair of stylish gloves, and then they walked further on to where the buildings made way for trees, one of Brooklyn's urban parks. Mostly empty, given the rain, and Natasha led them well away from those few souls either brave enough or unfortunate enough to not put off by the downpour.
The ever-present cameras yielded up their captures to him as easily as anything else; he fudged his face and Natasha's with subroutine run from the back of his head. Not something he needed to think about. Those cameras were barely of high enough quality to identify a mugger.
They strolled further into the park, and still Natasha didn't say anything. It was starting to make him nervous. She always makes me nervous. At one point, that had been a lie...
His patience wore out first. "Did Cap ever tell you about the other you?"
"Mm, a little. Is it going to cause a problem between us?"
"No." It couldn't. "Why'd you rescue Pepper?"
"I like her." She glanced sideways at him and smiled at whatever she read in his expression. "Sometimes it really is that simple."
"Uh-huh."
"Why'd you come back with Steve?"
"He asked me to," said Tony, and the shiver that went down his spine had nothing to do with the chill of the rain.
"He didn't lock off your armour because we were trying to punish you, you know. You had a seizure in the quinjet; it seemed like a good idea to get as much extremis away from you as possible."
Tony swallowed. "Integrated system. Didn't made a difference." Except denying him RAM and processors that he could have used.
Natasha's voice was soft, barely audible over the rain, and dead level. "What did he do to you?"
Got inside my head.
Found out—
They weren't talking about Steve anymore. Were they? Tony picked up the pace, drawing ahead of her. The skin on the back of his neck crawled.
She let him alone for a minute, trailing just behind, and then stepped up enough to be side-by-side again. "You know that saying about it not being paranoia if they really are out to get you? It's also paranoia if it's getting in the way of stopping them from getting you."
"And what the hell am I supposed to—I can't... stop him."
"Hey." Natasha put one hand on his arm; he flinched backward, and immediately hated himself for it. She didn't let go, though, drawing them both to a halt. The nearest homeless guy was at least a hundred metres away; no one else was around. "We've done this before. Beaten impossible odds."
I wasn't fighting the inside of my own head
I could think
Her eyes were too assessing. He remembered the profile she'd written about him—so much truth, just a little bit of lying, and he'd known he was walking right into SHIELD's clutches when he'd read that last line, but he hadn't been able to stop himself; she'd known exactly what bait to lay. He wouldn't be able to stop himself when Loki twisted up his thoughts, either. At least with SHIELD he'd seen it coming, but now every thought tripped over itself, and—
"Hey," said Natasha again, firmer now. "Stop. Re-evaluate. If the objective is impossible then you need to re-examine either the objective or your resources. You're not alone anymore—you don't only have to rely on yourself." She paused, and one corner of her mouth quirked upward in a wry smile. "Although considering that you know how to build portals to other worlds, I'd recommend also getting help from yourself."
Get help from—that sounded like a terrible idea. "Did you even read Steve's report when he got dropped back the first time?"
"I did. So did Hill and Fury." Natasha was... shit. She's serious. "One of the worlds he wound up on was just a few years more advanced than ours—peaceful, willing to help him. We could use that help. It makes sense."
"It does not!"
"It's not you alone anymore. If you build the portal, we can screen them."
"Right, while you're screening for Council spies."
"That's already being dealt with—Hill pulled out one of the fallback plans for dealing with Council interference, Operation Alexander. Set up a subdivision within SHIELD with non-standard screening of everybody who gets access, then reallocate resources via some creative methods. We modified it to stick the Avengers at the top. I'd like to think that between Clint and myself, we have a fair amount of expertise in sorting out who is really on-side."
"And here I thought you'd be busy playing parole officer."
Natasha let go of his arm, stepping away a bit—just a bit. Space, air to breathe. Her expression was sympathetic—was it real? "That won't be forever. And"—her voice was brisker—"the terms we have only require one of us nearby. If Bruce moves his research to the NYHQ, you'll be fine for your own lab."
He didn't know why he was complaining. There was—of all the things to whine about, needing a friend to sign his hall passes was so far down the list as to be off the page. It was ridiculous to be bothered by it—ridiculous, stupid...
With satellites clear overhead and live cables running beneath his feet, SHIELD's network was easy to access. He dipped back into it, hunting through recently changed files. Too much pertained to him and told him nothing he didn't already know. He stalled, staring down at his coffee. "Other worlds... they have their own shit to deal with."
"This is their problem too. But we'll screen them—we being the Sentient Worlds Outreach and Research Division. Sorry about the name, it's SHIELD humour." Natasha met his look with one that came from beneath lowered eyelashes.
The name gave him a file stripped bare of nearly all useful info: they really weren't doing this where the Council could see it. Tony sank hooks into the data and pulled it apart, backtracking and rewinding until he started getting results. Division Director: Maria Hill. Oversight by: Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton. Purpose... blacked out. Natasha made it sound like there were plans; they were either not written down, or were secured on a completely isolated server. Well, he could guess at their purpose well enough: Natasha could dress it up however she wanted, but at the end of the day it was about finding leverage. Weapons.
Weapons like the type I said I wouldn't make, huh? "You'll need to be careful. They're not... people are not... the same." The other Natasha had killed her Clint, certain that he'd betrayed them. Was she the one who was—wrong, flawed, unskilled—or was it that this Natasha was too trusting?
Did I seriously just wonder if the Black Widow is too trusting? She's up to something. I can't—
Steve asked. ...Asked. I agreed.
"I know," said Natasha—every feature, every frequency in her voice identical to the other's.
Tony took a sip of coffee. Black, Starbucks, terrible—the first coffee he'd had in months, it was like ambrosia. How many swimming pools worth of coffee had he drunk while working on shit in his lab? Okay. SHIELD—Natasha—wanted a portal, enough to wall off a whole division of scientists and analysts for this 'outreach' project of theirs. Steve wanted a portal, Tony could build him a damn portal. "Fine."
Natasha nodded. "What do you need to make that happen?"
"I need my armour." It was even true. "I need a facility with space-grade radiation shielding containing a free area of at least ten by twenty by five metres. I need that supply of iridium that I know SHIELD has."
Or—
No.
Well.
Oh, fuck it, just fucking do it—
Natasha was silent, watching him, her expression unreadable. Or... not unreadable. Not-judging. It was like she'd put aside anything but her mission here, and none of it could touch her; the world could end and her focus would be crystal clear.
"Everything else I need is in a cache in Oregon."
"Alright. Do you want your armour first, or do we both fly in the quinjet?" She steered him around in a one-eighty, back in the direction of the NYHQ.
Funny how quick you agree to the armour now.
"Armour first. Then quinjet. Quinjets. I've got a lot of stuff there." This may have been a terrible idea.
Fuck it shut UP, you said it, it's done.
