The Beginning (4/5)
Bruce Banner was slightly more irritated than normal. Not angry, per se, and definitely no tinge of green, but his lab partner had been missing for just over a week, and he needed someone to break the silence.
"Dammit Tony, you've broken thirteen years of solitude in less than three weeks. I hope you're happy!" he muttered as he stomped out of the lab, palming the door controls with a bit more force than necessary. Darcy, the recently acquired all purpose lab minion and coffee retriever, gave him a Look.
"Don't break the door again Doc, Miss Potts almost stabbed me with her shoes last time." She popped her gum and huddled back into her desk chair, resuming her solitaire game. She glanced up again, and tilted her head sideways. "Dude. Chill. He'll be back later." She handed over a note that was written on what was hopefully an old Mach IV suit analysis, but was probably the newest compilation of gamma radiation data he'd finished last week.
Bruce, found some important stuff. Need to find some more info. Be back at 7 –T
Vaguely, Bruce wondered if in another life, he was able to get mad at Tony and smack him around for being an idiot without turning into a giant green rage machine.
After a relaxing evening of meditation, Bruce's calm went back on strike the second he walked in the lab door. In a fit of insanity some two months before the Avenger's Initiative really got started, Tony had picked up the violin and despite having no aptitude for an instrument and an apparent case of the tone deafs, hadn't given it up. Bruce, on focused!Tony days, avoided the lab for this very reason; the screeching made his inner Hulk wake up and pay attention in a very ominous sort of way.
"Just because the Captain is off chasing his mysteriously returned nemesis doesn't mean you can just fall off the grid like that. What if there was an attack? What if I accidentally triggered a response with no one around to distract the Big Guy?" Tony turned to Bruce and glared unrepentantly.
"I needed to find the original research files on the Tesseract, OK? There was—I have—my father was working on it when I was very young. I… my brother—" he trailed off, uncertainly. Bruce, aware now that things were a bit more delicate than previously assumed, changed his approach.
"I've never heard you talk about your brother, Tony," he hedged.
"I didn't… I didn't know, until recently. They—HYDRA, they ki—captured him when we were really young. I found a journal when I had the palladium poisoning, it talked about the Tesseract research, and then I picked it up again, it was here on the desk beneath some files Pepper was looking for… but Mom and How-Dad, they lost him, and that's why everything was so bad…" He stopped, looking through Bruce at the possibilities. "If Schmidt could come back… couldn't my brother? We hardly know anything about that thing's powers, and it stands to reason if it happened once, it could happen again?"
Bruce decided to take the optimist route, so that horrible shattered look would leave Tony's face. "Well knowing you and your nature, if he had been sent to the future, he would have been driven to use his DNA and find his family, then worked or conned his way into SHIELD to either meet you or find the Tesseract and somehow join you now. So then, we can say with a good deal of certainty that he is somewhere in the past. Now, the better question is what do you want to do about it?"
"That's what I thought, too. I know there is an answer, and that the answer is staring me in the face, but I'm pretty sure my coffee fumes aren't going to do much more for me." They shuffled out the lab door and took the meandering pathway towards the kitchen, tossing ideas back and forth. "We've seen the Tesseract open a portal towards another dimension, so it looks like he could be literally anywhere. That sort of power implies an easy transport to as far back and as far away as we can imagine."
"Yes, but you're forgetting our example. Schmidt only traveled, what, 65 or 70 years? Factoring in the mass of your brother in comparison—we'll say Schmidt was maybe 80 kilograms, and your brother was closer to 10. So, an eighth of the energy, but all of the research you dug up, the theories say it takes around four times as much energy to travel backwards. So, we can bracket ourselves to the last… 150 years, rounding up. Hey Thor," Bruce maneuvered around the bulky god and attempted to claim the coffee pot.
"Wait. Wait wait, wait, wait. Thor, your people created the Tesseract, right?" At Thor's nod, Tony started bouncing on his toes. "Theoretically, could you find someone in a different time?" Thor gave Bruce a confused look at the non sequitur, but answered Tony anyways.
"My people long ago discovered the secrets of the so-called time travel. Is there something the matter, friend Stark?"
"Would it be possible to find someone in a different time who had interacted with the cube?"
"I suppose I could, yes."
"Then, Thor, you should definitely help me find my brother!"
"Man of Iron, your brother wouldn't be in a separate timeline, separated from you by the force of the Tesseract would he?"
Bruce grinned at that. "I told them you weren't as stupid as you look!"
"Ah, thank you? Well, I would be happy to find your brother, but then what shall you do? I am no sorcerer, and travel through the timestream is something only the greatest of magicians attempt."
Bruce fought back the urge to break the nearest object (the oft abused coffee maker). Tony's face had That Focused Look.
Bring on the horrible violin screeches.
It took another month before Tony's newest invention was ready for the testing phase. It was a glass and steel monstrosity, awkward and clunky and ready to take a passenger or five to a different time and place. Powered by the Tesseract and based in part on a few helpful scrolls Thor just "happened" to have in his pocket when he last arrived from Asgard, the time machine needed only a short test trip before the three men set off for parts unknown.
Tony's SHIELD database hacking, Thor's charming interrogation, and Bruce's misleading comments ensured their first trip was both a success and completely unremarkable to the tower's other occupants. They carefully placed Cap's birthday present in his room, so he would see it as soon as Hawkeye brought him back from a reconnaissance mission in Brazil later that evening.
"Alright Thor, what do you need to do? If it helps, we're assuming that he is somewhere in the 150 years before I was born; most likely in the 1800s, since landing any closer to the correct time, his physical similarity to a widely known family would have been noticed."
"H-Dad's journals said we were identical twins, too—that should make it easier to know for sure who we are looking for."
"Indeed, that will make the entire process much simpler. I shall endeavor to find your brother quickly, Man of Iron. I will return shortly," Thor took a deep breath, and launched off the roof of Starkvengers Tower. A brutal thunderstorm rolled over the previously clear sky, and Bruce and Tony huddled anxiously beneath a ledge. What felt like hours but was really just short of fifteen minutes later, Thor touched down with an anxious look on his face. "I have found your brother, but there is something wrong… he was injured, though not mortally, when suddenly he disappeared from my sight. Some danger lurks in hiding, we must go now!"
Tony, on edge since the entire saga began, launched himself into the Iron Man suit and flew down to the thirtieth floor, blasting out the window of his own lab to get to his time machine. Thor, holding on to a disgruntled Bruce, arrived seconds later.
"Where and when, Thor? And I probably should have asked this first, but do we need reinforcements?"
Shaking his head, Thor strapped himself awkwardly into the machine. "No reinforcements, I think, although a few medical supplies would not go amiss, Dr. Banner. The place was covered in ice and snow—Reichenbach Falls, in the realm of Switzerland. The year was 1891, on the evening of December the 16th. I am certain." Tony grappled with the control panel, turning knobs and flicking switches until, with a jolt and a bang of displaced air, the lab was left empty.
Darcy, having heard the bang, grabbed her taser and was greeted by the empty window frames. She kicked the wall and sat down with a huff, putting in the call to maintenance to "fix the windows; they've got a Tony shaped hole in them again!"
The machine landed at an angle, tilting it's passengers towards the icy waters below. The three men climbed carefully out before Thor carefully pulled their only way home to a less dangerous position, several feet from the ledge. Tony had zipped off, skirting the edges of the deep pool at the base of the falls as he searched, while Bruce started a fire and took stock of the lab's first aid kit (it was unsurprisingly thorough).
"THOR! COME GET THE OTHER ONE!" Tony's mechanical voice shouted as he raced back over to the impromptu camp. Bruce tried not to look too hard at the nearly perfect copy of Tony, bleeding out on the ground in front of him, and slipped into professional mode to wrap up his wounds as a silent Iron Man handed over bandages and antibacterial ointment as necessary. Assuming this man fell from the brightly lit building several hundred feet above them, he considered them all lucky that the worst of the injuries were a fractured wrist and a concussion, although Bruce puzzled for several moments over the grisly wounds in the shoulder area.
The second man, an older man with a beard who reminded Bruce uncomfortably of an old calculus professor, had an ugly head wound and was already too pale and too cold. Shaking his head, Bruce silently wished they had arrived just a few minutes earlier so they could have gotten this mysterious stranger some much needed medical assistance. As it was, he gently drew a blanket over the body, and turned back to the eerie sight of two silent Tonys.
Carefully, Thor lifted the unconscious brother into the time machine, as Bruce bullied Tony into turning his suit back into a briefcase and sitting quietly in the seat. Grateful he had the forethought to learn how to pilot the strange machine, he brought them safely back to Starkvenger Tower in the midst of a window replacement. Darcy, ever the cool and collected politician, glared at them and continued shouting at maintenance for mixing up some of Jane's and Bruce's notes.