Chapter Seven
The last of the victims infected with the symbiote virus had just been sprayed with Hank's antidote and subdued when a fresh group of people climbed the steps out of the 59th Street subway station, several of them with shopping bags from earlier in the morning already in their hands.
*I thought the subway was being shut down,* Tony snapped over the police and emergency personnel frequencies he'd accessed via the Extremis. *Are the MTA shutting the subway down or not?* There were times when he hated trying to coordinate things with city authorities, especially now that he no longer had the authority of SHIELD to back him.
Most of the time, the city's police and emergency departments coped surprisingly well with supervillains, but there were times, like now, when the wheels of city bureaucracy turned much too slowly.
*Affirmative, Stark, the 59th Street and Lexington station is being shut down. All available units between Central Park South and Times Square, report to 59th and Lexington. Acknowledge.*
Tony tuned the radio chatter out as ambulances began reporting in, and gave his full attention to the two men and three women who had just exited the subway station, all of them writhing convulsively as sticky black goo began oozing over their skin. His helmet's air filters kept all foreign particles out, but if he'd taken it off, he knew the air would be heavy with the thick, cloying scent of cotton candy and burned sugar that always surrounded the Venom symbiote.
"Just stay calm, people." Steve stepped forward, raising the shield he had lowered when the last of the previous victims had slumped to the ground, fully human again. "You've been infected with an airborne toxin. Just stay still, and we'll get you the antidote." The breathing mask over his face muffled his voice, but he still managed to project calm authority.
The woman on the left dropped her Museum of Natural History giftshop bag onto the pavement, a pair of stuffed dinosaurs spilling out of it, and turned on Steve, hissing. The last few square inches of dark brown skin visible on her face disappeared beneath a wave of oily black, and eight inches of tongue lolled out of her mouth, twisting in midair like a snake's.
The two men were the last to succumb, their greater body mass buying them an extra half-second of cognizance – the older one, a white man with thinning hair and one of those omnipresent paint-splatter sweatshirts all the tourist shops sold, screamed hysterically as black goo crawled up his torso, the sound raw and grating.
As he stepped forward to seize the nearest victim by the arms, Tony spared a moment to be grateful that it was a weekday, and the city schools were in session at this time of year. Hank's antidote worked as well on children as adults, but subduing a child in order to spray anti-toxin in its face was far, far down on the list of things Tony ever wanted to do.
The woman struggled and clawed at him, preternaturally strong, but unskilled and completely out of control, and for a moment, he was back in the dining room of the Meridian, trying to prevent desperate, fear-crazed people from killing one another and unable to use his armor at more than a fraction of its capacity. The tiniest misjudgment could kill someone, break their neck, burn holes through them, and then the sticky-sugar smell his helmet was sealing out would be replaced by scorched meat.
The woman bucked violently, ripping herself free of his hold, and grabbed him by the throat, just below the bottom edge of his helmet – stupid, so stupid, letting himself get distracted that way – and then he was airborne.
Something hard slammed into his back, and bright lights flashed in his head.
Time lurched, like a DVD freezing and then skipping forwards. He was lying on the ground, the world at a 90-degree angle. Steve was charging at the woman, shield raised. Beyond him, Carol was struggling with the larger of the two men, arm locked around his neck in a hold that would have immobilized any normal human; the newly created symbiote howled and lashed out at her with sticky black pseudopods, pulling at the breathing mask on her face. Clint was pinned to the ground by a mass of writhing black, an impossibly wide, toothy jaw snapping at his throat.
Tony struggled to get up, struggled to breathe, his chest a tight knot of pain. For an endless moment, his lungs refused to work, and then he managed to suck in a shallow, ragged breath. The sharp, suffocating pain was immediately cut in half.
He shook his head, trying to force the high-pitched ringing noise out of his ears, and reached out for the bent remains of the lamppost he had hit, his gauntlet clinking dully against the metal. The armor's damage reports scrolled through his head as he pulled himself upright; it was barely dented.
Old Shellhead was a lot tougher than he was. He'd expended a lot of time and effort making it that way.
As he let go of the post and stepped toward the fight again, a tiny black shape dove for the man Carol was restraining. A cloud of white mist surrounded his head and shoulders, and then Jan was darting upwards again, easily evading the man's attempts to grab her with hands and prehensile tongue.
*Those tongues were disgusting the last time we fought these things, and they're still disgusting,* Jan muttered via the comlink.
*I think they get worse with repeated exposure,* Clint said. *Fuck, someone get this thing the hell off me. Falcon? Falcon, it's licking me. Spray it already!*
Steve hit one of the venom symbiotes in the face with his shield, sending it reeling back into Tony's waiting hands. He locked eyes with Tony over the thing's head for a fraction of a second, his gaze flicking from Tony to the bent lamppost, then turned away to help Clint. His hand latched onto the thing's shoulder – or what Tony thought was its shoulder – and yanked it backwards just in time to keep Clint's face intact.
The thing's jaws snapped shut on empty air, and then Sam dropped from the sky and hit it full-force, the momentum of the impact knocking it away from Clint. Sam thrust the canister of antidote in its face, only to be brought up short as its tongue wrapped around his wrist.
Tony tightened his grip on the violently struggling woman in his arms, ignoring the lingering dizziness and raw ache in his lungs that made each breath an effort. Jan was there like magic, probably evidence that he still wasn't tracking completely straight, and then the woman went limp, the black coating melting away to reveal a torn and rumpled business suit and short blonde hair spiky with the remains of the dissolving symbiote-substance.
It wasn't alive, unlike the real Venom and Carnage symbiotes, but a byproduct of the toxin, which contained protein compounds from one of the symbiotes as well as a cocktail of biological and chemical agents. It was a nasty piece of work, originally designed by Doom as a contact poison and refined by A.I.M. into a more easily controllable airborne compound that entered the body via the respiratory tract.
*Can you hurry it up up there, Goldilocks?* Jan asked, tone closer to an order than a question. *That was the last of my antidote.*
"But a moment more, and the vapors shall disperse." Thor didn't bother to use the comlink, his voice carrying easily over the noise of the fight and the drone of his spinning hammer even without it.
Tony lowered the unconscious woman gently to the ground, beside Carol's man and the limp form of the woman with the museum bag, looked up just in time to see Sam's canister of antidote hit the sidewalk with a clank.
Sam was beating at the symbiote with his wings and free hand both, yanking violently on the tongue still wrapped around his wrist. Steve punched it in the kidneys, a hard jab that Tony could tell he pulled only slightly, and it howled, but kept its hands firmly locked around Sam's throat.
Clint had pushed himself to his feet, his hand moving automatically to his shoulder as if he were reaching for the quiver he wasn't wearing; he'd left the arrows in the quinjet, joking that the last thing he wanted was to be stabbed with one of his own weapons again.
The antidote skidded across the pavement, rolling toward the curb. Tony reached for it, and nearly overbalanced as the ground lurched under him. The canister skittered away from his fingers, his hands clumsy as they'd rarely been even when he'd been drinking. What the hell was wrong with him? He hadn't hit the lamppost hard enough to have a real concussion; he'd only been out for a few seconds.
He gritted his teeth and reached for it again, only to have it snatched out of his grasp by a blur of brown and white feathers.
With a harsh scream, Redwing launched himself into the air and dropped the canister into Carol's waiting hands. She sprayed it, covering Steve, Sam, and the sole remaining artificial symbiote indiscriminately with a white chemical mist, and the symbiote shuddered and went limp, gradually transforming back into a middle-aged tourist in a garish sweatshirt.
For a moment, everyone just stood there. Steve still held himself as if ready for an attack, whole body a study in coiled tension. Beside him, Sam rubbed at his throat with one hand, wincing.
Redwing landed on the unconscious man's chest, eyeing him first with one baleful golden eye, then the other; Tony wasn't sure if it was general suspicion, confusion over the fact that the monster of moments before was gone, or vengeful wrath because the man had tried to hurt Sam.
After a few long moments during which all of the victims of the toxin failed to move, Tony let himself relax, hunching forward to ease the ache in his lungs. Hank's antidote really did work, it seemed, even if the part of him that had seen one too many horror movies kept expecting one of the men or women who had been affected to suddenly sit up and try to bite someone.
His back throbbed hotly where he'd hit the lamppost; it was probably going to bruise. The armor made rubbing at the injury a useless gesture, but he did it anyway. Steve would probably tell him that bruises would remind him to pay more attention to the fight next time, and he'd be right. If he hadn't been wearing the armor, he could have broken his back.
"Is everyone all right?" Steve asked, looking first to Sam, then Tony.
"No," Clint grumbled. He rubbed at the exposed parts of his face with one glove, trying to scrape off the saliva that covered it. "I nearly had my face bitten off. And I've got its spit all over me."
Sam swallowed. "I'm fine," he said, voice hoarse. He held up one wrist, and Redwing hopped up from his perch atop the unconscious man to land heavily on it, talons digging into Sam's thick leather glove.
"The city's going to want me to pay for that lamppost," Tony said. It wasn't an actual answer, but he wasn't sure he could give one right now. He wasn't actually injured, beyond the bruises, but there was definitely something wrong with him. Maybe he'd hit the lamppost harder than he'd thought.
The Extremis had healed his body completely when he acquired it, erasing all the old damage. A new heart to replace the mechanical one, a new liver to replace the one he'd tried to destroy, new lungs to take the place of ones scarred by pneumonia and damaged by years of improper bloodflow. His body could be injured, or worn out by too little sleep or too much stress, but he didn't get sick anymore, couldn't suffer from any kind of cumulative damage, except, apparently, for damage to the Extremis itself. He'd barely been using the Extremis during the fight, though, so it had to be the impact.
There ought to be some way to increase the armor's ability to absorb kinetic force. Steve's shield's ability to do the same was an inherent property of vibranium and thus not replicable, but there were other things he could do. Force shields were too much of an energy drain, but maybe...
Sam turned to stare at the damaged lamppost, his eyebrows going up. "If it had been one of the old, wrought-iron ones, it wouldn't have bent like that."
"My armor's a titanium-steel alloy. It would still have bent."
The whine of Thor's spinning hammer abruptly ceased, and Thor landed in the middle of the street with a thud Tony could feel in his bones. "The last of the vapors have dispersed. The air is once more safe to breathe."
The others immediately pulled their masks off, Jan returning to full size after she did so.
"Good work, guys," she said. "Who wants to stay and talk to the police and the press?" The Doppler sound of an ambulance siren nearly drowned out the end of her sentence, as the first of the crews of paramedics arrived, swerving carefully around Thor to pull up next to the curb.
Carol took a half-step forward. "I can do it; I don't mind talking to reporters."
Steve didn't even bother to volunteer – he and Sam were already talking to the ambulance crew. As Tony watched, he gestured to the fallen pedestrians with one hand, saying, "Some of them may have minor injuries. We tried to be careful when we restrained them, but—"
"It was like that fear toxin thing all over again, huh?" the EMT asked. He folded his skinny frame down to peer at one of the victims, frowning, then turned to his partner. "DeSoto, can I get some help with a stretcher?"
Tony opened a link to Steve's com unit, making sure to broadcast just to him. *I'll see you back at the Tower. Hank will want a report on how his antidote worked.* And Tony needed to go sit down somewhere before he keeled over in front of a bunch of emergency workers and in sight of at least two news helicopters, not to mention most of his teammates.
The dizziness and pain were fading, but he still felt shaky, and while he could put on a smile for reporters while far more seriously injured than this, the others more than had this one covered. They didn't need Tony here to pose for the cameras.
Steve turned to smile at him, that recruitment-poster perfect grin that always made Tony want to smile back, even when he couldn't. There was a tear through the leather fabric of his pants, halfway up his right thigh, but he looked otherwise untouched by the chaos of the past twenty minutes. From the easy set of his shoulder and the open happiness in that smile, he was pleased with the fight's outcome.
He ought to be; they had been lucky today, despite Tony's slip-up. No one had been seriously hurt, not even the people affected by the toxin. A.I.M., unfortunately, had used a timed smoke bomb to release the formula into the air, so they'd been denied the dubious pleasure of helping the police arrest Headcase twice in one month, but compared to A.I.M.'s last poison gas attack, this one had been easy. Should have been easy, if he hadn't been so tired, hadn't let himself get distracted.
The gas main explosion three days ago had not been easy, and the subway accident yesterday had been an ugly, messy disaster all around – the Avengers hadn't been called in on that one, but it had been the top news item on every local news feed Tony had open until half an hour ago, when the venom symbiotes rampaging down Lexington Avenue had replaced it. Keeping all the datafeeds open made his head ache, the stab of pain over his left eye a familiar presence by now, but it was necessary.
Spiderman claimed to have broken up twice as many muggings in the past week as usual, and according to Luke Cage and Daredevil, there'd been an increase in domestic violence incidents throughout Hell's Kitchen, with the worst of the fights taking place the closest to St. Margaret's Cathedral. Chthon's presence was poisoning the city, slowly but surely.
They needed to stay on the ball. And they needed to keep public confidence in superheroes high, or the tension caused by Chthon and the apparently steadily increasing power leakage from spear would find a new outlet.
Tony hadn't sacrificed his integrity, his reputation, half his friendships, and far too many people's lives to have anti-superhuman sentiment break out all over again. Not when they'd finally managed to turn the tide of public opinion and get Registration repealed.
"I don't think I like this new A.I.M.," Clint commented. "It used to take MODOK at least a week to get his plans in motion after a jailbreak."
"That's because MODOK had plans," Tony said. With his helmet on, he didn't have to try to cover his exhaustion or add animation to his voice – the helmet's voice modulators covered a multitude of sins. "I'm not sure Maddigan does." A.I.M. had never had much in the way of discernible goals, aside from the pursuit of ever-fancier ways to destroy things via cutting edge science, but lately their plans had been even more random than usual, as if they'd switched from the pursuit of knowledge and weapons development at all cost to pure promotion of anarchy for anarchy's sake.
"He doesn't," Carol said. "Jessica's done some digging on him – he's pretty much A.I.M.'s puppet, more of a figurehead than an actual leader. Whatever they did to him to keep him, well, alive's as good a term as any... his sanity didn't come through the experience intact. Not that he was all that sane to begin with," she added.
"We weren't great at plans, when we were his age." Clint shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know. I think you and Spiderwoman should keep an eye on him. Sanity is optional for supervillains." He glanced back over his shoulder to where Thor and Jan were talking to two uniformed policemen and a woman with a microphone and a plastic smile. "Jan's waving at you," he added. "I think you're on deck."
Carol ran one hand through her hair, and tugged her sagging left glove back up her arm. "Reporters aren't really that hard to talk to, you know. It's all in how you spin it. You just have to be careful what you let them see." She strode towards the camera confidently, the two-inch heels of her boots striking hard against the pavement. Tony had seen runway models display less poise.
"Are you waiting to go back with the Quinjet, or do you want a lift back to the tower?" he asked, turning to Clint.
Clint shook his head slightly. "Considering how lovey-dovey it looks when any of you guys fly while carrying someone, and considering the camera crews right over there and how much fun the media had debating whether or not you'd ever slept with Henry Hellrung, I think I'll wait for the Quinjet."
Even after years' worth of experience trying to manage his public image, there were still moments when the need to constantly worry over what the media would think got extremely annoying. Especially when other people worried about it for him. "Just because you know those rumors are true doesn't mean the rest of the country doesn't think they were all baseless tabloid speculation," Tony said, not bothering to keep the irritation from his voice. It survived the voice modulation loud and clear. "No one will think you've caught slutty bisexual cooties from me."
"Wait, they're true? You and Simon's new boyfriend actually-" Clint made a vague hand gesture that could have encompassed anything from sex to Parcheesi.
"According to reliable sources." Tony had been drinking heavily enough by that point that he didn't remember much, beyond the fact that he'd thought Henry's initial greeting – "Hi, I'm Henry Hellrung, and I'm going to be playing you on television," – had been a clever joke.
"That's creepy."
Tony rolled his eyes, secure in the knowledge that no one could see his face. "There are times when you're even less mature than Spiderman, Hawkeye." He probably should have been amused by it; people had been reacting to his sex life with everything from envy to disgust since he'd been seventeen. He didn't feel like being amused; his head hurt, his chest hurt, and reporters were starting to cast glances in their direction.
He sent one more silent status update to Steve's communicator, and fired his boot jets.
Steve studied the image on the screen in front of him; the security camera still was blurry and pixilated, but he didn't need to see the woman in the picture's face to recognize her. The way she held herself, the gun she carried, the knife strapped to the outside of her thigh would have been enough even without the blurred glimpse of curly hair.
He didn't need to look to Sharon for confirmation – which begged the question; why had Nick actually called him to the Helicarrier today? Sharon, too, would have known the woman's identity as soon as she saw her, making Steve's ID unnecessary.
"Sin," he said. "It's definitely her. And at least one of the men she had with her when she attacked Bucky and Sharon – you can see part of his arm just inside the frame, there."
"Oh, we knew that," Nick said. "She left three men alive at the third installation she attacked. I didn't call ya up here for an identification. I was hopin' ya might have some idea of what the hell it is she wants." He stabbed an unlit cigar at the picture, using it like a pointer. "That was taken four days ago, at a SHIELD R&D facility in Jersey. Everyone in the facility was killed. We kept it off the news, and the same for the one before that, but we're not goin' to be able to keep last night's attack quiet. Which comin' on top of getting a Helicarrier blown to hell and gone last spring, is going to have Washington on our necks. Again. We need answers, people."
Bucky shrugged one shoulder – the right one, the one that was still flesh and blood. "She wants revenge. It's not complicated; we killed Crossbones, and his death wasn't pretty, or easy." The dark circles that had still smudged his eyes the last time Steve had seen him were gone; he looked fully recovered from the snake venom now, and though there were probably still bandages hiding under his clothing, you couldn't tell it from the way he moved. Seeing him now did a little to ease the memory of him leaning on Sharon, his side covered in blood, but not enough. It had taken half an hour for Steve to get all the blood off the kitchen table, counter, and floor. They had thrown the ruined, blood-stained dishtowel away.
Nick gave him a flat look. "Yeah, but why now? And why bother with those men when it's the people right here in this room that she wants? Little Miss Crazy's always been the impulsive type. These attacks are targeted, planned. Without Daddy to hold her leash, who's givin' her orders?"
"The voices in her head," Sharon muttered. Then, slightly louder and with significantly less sarcasm, "When she fought us, she kept saying, 'You killed me, you killed Brock, I'll make you pay,' over and over. She may not have any endgame beyond causing as much damage to SHIELD as possible, and with James up here recovering from her poison, any SHIELD employee might do as a temporary substitute."
"It's a little more complicated than that." Nick slid three pieces of paper across the conference table, one to each of them. "This is a transcript of her conversation with one of the men she very pointedly didn't kill last night. The part that starts with 'We are coming for ya, Fury,' is particularly interesting."
"Like I said," Nick went on, as Steve took the paper and quickly scanned its contents, "we know she wants revenge. What we need to know is what she thinks she's doing, and who she's doin' it for."
The transcript had several lines of asterisk symbols scattered through it, where portions of the conversation had not been picked up by the microphone, but the important part had been perfectly audible.
"We are coming for you, Fury. For you, and for Barnes, and Rogers, and Carter. You will pay for the good men you have killed, and the plans you have ruined. The Red Skull is coming for you. Daddy and I are going to make you all beg for mercy before you die."
God damnit, they had killed Red Skull. Even dead twice over, he was still reaching out from his well-deserved grave to try and destroy people Steve loved.
What hold had he had over Sin, that she would carry on fighting for his warped cause even after his death, to the point where she tried to become the father who had used and tortured and brainwashed her?
Unless... Steve shoved the thought away. Sin couldn't have meant that bit about 'Daddy and I' literally. Red Skull was dead. He had to be dead.
"Interesting." Sharon's voice was serious, with the slightest hint of something that might have been skepticism, or might have been unease. "She's probably delusional, but... when Red Skull was killed the first time, everyone in this room saw his corpse. SHIELD autopsied it. I touched it. And then he showed up in Alexander Lukin's body."
Nick gestured with his unlit cigar, the motion encompassing all of them. "I want your honest opinion. Do you think there's any chance that she's not just talkin' metaphors? That Red Skull really is still around somehow, and in contact with her?"
"No," Sharon was shaking her head. "The first time he died, the cosmic cube was right there. He was able to use it to transfer his consciousness. The second time, there was no way for him to escape. We checked Lukin's body; the cube wasn't there."
Steve was tempted to agree with her – surely even the Red Skull only got so many opportunities to cheat death – but there had been those last few moments before his second, final death when Lukin had been in control of his body again. Had approaching death given him the strength to seize control from Red Skull one last time, or had Red Skull already been gone? It was a question that had haunted Steve, at first, but as the summer had passed without any sign that Red Skull's death had been anything other than permanent, he had let himself relax, let himself believe, finally, that the Red Skull was truly dead and gone.
"It wouldn't be the first time he's cheated death," he said, reluctantly. "It does seem unlikely, though."
Bucky frowned down at the note in his hand, the paper white against stainless steel fingers. The black SHIELD uniform had finally stopped making him look like a stranger, but Steve would never grow entirely used to that metal arm, or lose the faint twinge of guilt he felt whenever he saw it.
"Lukin spoke to me, before I killed him," Bucky said, slowly. "He asked me to shoot him quickly, to let him die as himself. I thought – I hoped – I was killing both of them. But Lukin was the one I saw when I looked into his eyes." He swore in Russian, crumpling the print-out into a ball. "How many times do I have to kill him?"
"I've been asking myself that for years," Steve said. He had never like killing people, had hoped never to have to do it again, after the war had ended, but for the Red Skull, he'd always been more than willing to make an exception. Red Skull had earned death multiple times over, before the end, but had always seemed to escape it at the last moment, generally leaving a trail of innocent corpses in his wake.
"Damnit," Nick muttered. "I really want to believe she's just looney tunes. If she's not, this just got a whole lot worse."
"Oh, she's that, too." Bucky made a face. "She really enjoys torturing people. Really, really enjoys it. Most people don't, not really, or if they do, it's the power they enjoy, not the opportunity to lick somebody else's blood off their fingers."
Sharon shook her head, a wisp of blonde hair that had escaped her tight ponytail falling into her face. "Does it really matter if it's her or him? Our people are just as dead either way. And either way, she won't stop until we capture her or kill her."
They were all talking about killing just a little too easily, Steve thought. That was what fighting the Red Skull did to you, even if it wasn't necessarily him anymore. "The Avengers have a lot on our plate at the moment," he said, hating the necessity of it. Chthon was a worse threat than Sin, even if the Red Skull was still present somehow. His own personal stake in the matter didn't change that. "I can't leave the team right now, not even for this. Not unless Sin starts spreading her attacks beyond SHIELD. But if you need me-"
"Don't worry," Nick said, with a familiar wolfish grin. "I'll let you know."
Sharon met his gaze, her eyes solemn; Steve suspected that she, too, was remembering listening to Bucky wheeze while the snake venom shut down his lungs. "So will we," she said, and it had the sound of a promise.
Bucky nodded, once, offering Steve a flash of the old, fierce grin that made him look younger, more like the kid Steve remembered; a 'we' from Sharon included him, now. He and Sharon had belonged to such different parts of Steve's life, until he'd woken up to discover the two of them had formed a relationship of their own without him.
Bucky was a capable, competent, deadly adult – had been all three of those things even when he'd still been a kid too young to vote – and Sharon was likewise a grown woman with a life of her own, but...
He couldn't protect them both from Sin and the potential threat of Red Skull and also lead the Avengers, and he'd already made his choice about which responsibility came firSt. That didn't make the idea of letting them face her on their own, of being only the back-up, called in 'if they needed him,' any easier.
He hugged both of them before he left, giving Bucky a clap on the back and letting Sharon go, gently, when she stiffened slightly in his arms. "I mean it, Sharon, James," and the look in Bucky's eyes was worth the effort it took not to call him by the only name Steve had ever known him by, "if you need me, then unless Chthon's broken free and about to destroy the world, I'll find a way to come."
Sharon smiled at him, taking away the sting of that unconscious flinch. "We know you will."
No matter how many times Tony saw Hank shrink and unshrink lab equipment, it still looked like something out of Looney Tunes. He watched from the lab's doorway, carefully out of the way of expanding equipment, as Hank set a pocket-sized mass spectrometer and electron microscope on the floor, and began slowly returning them to their full sizes.
Hank had insisted on bringing over the entire contents of his lab at Stark Tower himself, claiming that he didn't trust anyone else not to screw up the calibration of the equipment, drop his shiny new three-dimensional molecular modeling unit on the floor, or burn or poison themselves with his supplies. Tony hadn't argued, even when Hank had brusquely turned down his offer of help, as well as his offer to recalibrate the lasers in the modeling unit to produce a greater degree of precision; he could empathize with Hank's reluctance to let other people interfere with his equipment. He'd only enlisted Hank's aid in moving a few piece of his own workspace because there was no way to get the anti-gravity hoist for working on quinjet engines out of Stark Tower's basement without using Pym particles, much less its even bulkier hydraulics-assisted back-up.
Installing it in the Mansion's main lab had been much easier – one of the benefits of his grandfather's insistence on buying a house that occupied an entire city block was that there was more than enough room for garage workspace, labs, quinjet hangers, and anything else the Avengers needed, even if they had to go below street level for some of it.
"You realize you'll probably have to recalibrate everything again after I leave," Wanda said, from her perch on one of the newly installed work tables. "Sensitive electronic equipment doesn't like me very much."
Tony frowned. Computers and other electronics tended to be temperamental around some varieties of energy mutant, as well as most people who used magic, but he'd never been convinced that there wasn't some way to predict, control, and use Wanda's effect on computing equipment. "I still think we could find a way to tap into that if I could design a system flexible enough."
Wanda raised her eyebrows. "Considering the results we got the last time you tried to synch my powers with a computer system, I think it might be better to leave it alone."
"Leave it alone," Hank snapped. "Half the equipment in here right now is in a state of dimensional flux. One surge of chaos power while it's still recovering the rest of its mass will fry everything."
"I wasn't suggesting we try it now." Tony resisted the impulse to go over and help Hank set up the newly-resized spectrometer and fascinating yet maddeningly inefficient laser imaging set-up. It would be so easy to improve it, just one or two small adjustments... He reminded himself that one or two small adjustments had gotten him kicked out of technical conferences and trade shows more than once, and stayed put. Hank was twitchy enough without Tony adding to it. "The house isn't even finished yet – I'd like to at least get all the walls painted and the furniture moved in before we blow it up again."
Wanda looked away, her shoulders hunching ever so slightly. "I'm sorry about that," she said. "I didn't mean to destroy your home, Tony."
"You didn't." 'I did that myself,' he thought, and in a vivid flash of sense-memory, could smell the drowned remnants of smoke and ash and feel Steve's hands holding him down, violent and angry and so painfully far from what he'd wanted. It had been strangely appropriate, in a warped way – the two of them fighting in the ruins of what had once been their home, now as shattered and broken as the Avengers had been. As their friendship had been. "Chthon did. And I helped, to be honest. I turned us into a giant target, getting involved in politics the way I did. And there should have been better guards in place against Jack of Heart's power, and against Ultron."
"Yes," Hank said, not looking up from the tiny screen he was staring at, "you should have planned for Chthon to reanimate Jack's frozen corpse and bring it back from orbit."
There was a long, awkward moment of silence, while Hank obliviously continued to work. Wanda looked stricken, her eyes wide and her face raw.
Jack had gone through hell for hours every day to try and keep his powers under control, to avoid hurting anyone else – or destroying himself – with an accidental discharge of energy. Nothing Chthon could have done to him could have been crueler.
Thank god he had never known, would never know, what his body had been used to do.
Hank tapped a rapid-fire sequence of keys, and the machine made a chirping noise as it came online – Tony could feel the machine's electronic signature flare in the back of his head, joining the constant reassuring presence of his dormant armor, and the bright chatter of SHIELD's communication's systems, which he'd never shut down or logged out of after Winter Soldier and Sharon Carter's late-night visit.
Fury, he was sure, knew Tony was monitoring his organization's communications. The fact that he'd said nothing, and hadn't had any of the various computer hackers Tony had personally hired or promoted into their current positions attempt to throw him out probably meant something. Maybe it was an apology for continually foisting Koening and Gyrich off on him.
Maybe he just suspected that nobody at SHIELD would be able to successfully shut Tony out for more than a few hours. It was just possible that Carl Santacruz could manage to lock him out for as long as a day – he'd been able to disrupt the Red Skull and the Mandarin's access to SHIELD's satellites, after all – but no digital system on the scale of SHIELD's could keep Tony out completely. Not these days.
Wanda was staring down at her hands, carefully encased in black gloves that didn't match her navy blue dress. If Jan had known that she was going to wear her old Wasp gloves with a dress that color, she probably wouldn't have lent them to her – not so much because the colors didn't match as because the outfit's ugliness made it obvious that Wanda was wearing them in order to hide her hands. Jan didn't approve of hiding one's powers, or anything connected with them.
Tony left the doorway and went to stand beside Wanda. "One of us should have realized that something was wrong before it was too late," he said, keeping his eyes on Hank instead of on her. "I should have realized – I know what mind control looks like. I've even worked on ways to screen for it," he added, remembering his stubborn refusal to believe that Hank's inexplicable manic behavior had just been Hank, and not some kind of outside influence, "and then never bothered to use them, even after Immortus."
They had been so young and stupid then, all of them except maybe Steve, who had already survived four years of war. It had even been useful, in a way, when Tony had been trying to hide his heart problems, his identity, his dependence on the armor's chestplate, and, later, his drinking. Unfortunately, they weren't always much smarter now.
Wanda shrugged. "They might not have worked. Supernatural possession doesn't work the same way that brainwashing or telepathic mind control does."
Hank looked up, setting aside the tiny screwdriver he'd been about to open the spectrometer's instrument panel with. "That's a good point," he said. "Remember how the clone's innate supernatural abilities interfered with Reed's mind control device?"
"Yes," Tony said grimly. "I remember." The clone of Thor had been skin-crawlingly wrong. Tony had expected it to be familiar in some way, to be essentially the same man as the friend he had lost, albeit with no memories of its own. Deep down, some stupid, irrational part of him had hoped that the clone would open his eyes and be Thor, that whatever supernatural essence gods were composed of would come back if they gave it a body to inhabit. What they had gotten instead had been something else. Something... emptier.
Hank sighed and looked down again, blond hair falling into his face. He always forgot to cut it when he spent time out of the field. "We fucked up." His voice was flat, tired. "You'd think it would get easier admitting that. It's not like we haven't had practice."
"Not everyone wants to hear apologies," Wanda said, "or explanations." There was a rustle of cloth as she shifted on the worktable; its hard, metal surface couldn't have been comfortable, but Hank hadn't moved the couch in yet. It, like the ants and other live specimens, would be transported last, after all the equipment was in place. "I... tried to call the X-Men. Only Beast would talk to me, and he won't tell me where Pietro is. He just wants to know how I did what I did, and if I can undo it more completely."
Hank shrugged one shoulder. "I could try to talk to him for you. I've been working on some X genome studies for him. They're fascinating; it's really a combination of genetic sequences, not a single gene, and-"
"No thank you." Wanda waved a hand, cutting him off. "It would be... I need to know where Pietro is, but I don't want to..." she trailed off, then added, "Crystal doesn't know. They share custody of Luna, so I thought maybe... He's alive. She knows that. He came and took Luna, and they disappeared somewhere."
"That's... good," Tony said, and there was a moment of heavy silence. Well, it meant that he was alive at least. "Pietro's a competent adult, and he's not going to do anything stupid or dangerous while Luna's with him; I'm sure they're both fine." It sounded like the lie it was. "At least she was willing to talk to you," he rushed on. "Blackbolt won't talk to any of us right now. Figuratively speaking, I mean. The Inhumans weren't pleased with Registration and the Initiative, or with HUSAC." Blackbolt never literally spoke to anyone, since the power of his voice could level cities, but he could convey a great deal with a look, and the look he'd given Tony the last time they'd met had been distinctly unfriendly.
Wanda raised an eyebrow. "Is there anyone in the entire superhuman community who doesn't hate us now?"
"Not everyone thought the Initiative was a bad idea," Hank said, an edge of defensiveness in his voice. "Some parents were glad to have their kids receive official training with their powers, and a lot of superhumans willingly signed up." He hesitated, then added, "And only some of them were supervillains, or just doing it because they were afraid."
"Of course they were afraid, Hank." Wanda spoke gently, voice serious. "Every time the government deals with mutants, you can hear the threat of 'do what we want, or the Sentinels will come for you again' in everything they say." She shook her head slightly, a lock of hair falling forward over her shoulder. "They're Magneto's greatest recruiting tool."
That had been one of the more surprising things about explaining the Registration Act to Wanda – she had understood. Tony had expected her to react with the same disappointment and anger Steve and Thor had shown, possibly more so, given the government's long and ugly history with mutants. Instead, she had nodded slowly, saying, 'You thought you could work with them, that if you were obedient enough, non-threatening enough, just making us all register would be enough for them. That it wouldn't go any farther.'
'You think I did the right thing?' he'd asked, surprised.
'No,' she'd said. 'I think you were unexpectedly naïve. But I understand why you did it. You were afraid the alternative would be worse.'
And it would have been. At the very least, whomever else HUSAC would have put in Tony's place would have had no qualms about dragging Peter into custody and turning him over to government scientists. And in the absence of Reed and Tony's work on the Negative Zone prison, captive superheroes would have been locked up in Genosha collars, forcibly depowered, used as experimental test subjects, or fallen victim to 'unfortunate accidents' as the superhuman facilities on the Raft became too overcrowded to keep superheroes and supervillains separate.
"The Inhumans won't talk to us, the X-Men won't talk to you, Thor hates us..." Hank ticked the points off on his fingers with the end of the miniature screwdriver. "I suppose it could be worse. At least we don't have to run off and start our own team this time."
Wanda's lips twitched, and some of the sadness left her eyes. "Poor Clint. He was ruined just by association with the rest of us."
"What about John Walker?" Tony asked, seizing on the new topic with relief. The dissolution of the West Coast Avengers had been humiliating and infuriating at the time, but compared to the past year...
"He asked for it. Literally." Wanda was smiling now, a real smile. "I don't think I'll ever forget him defending your dubious honor against Cap, though."
Tony shook his head, waving the statement away. "I was just a thinly veiled excuse for the two of them to get into a fistfight." USAgent and Steve were like oil and water; they respected one another, or at least, Tony knew John respected Steve, and was pretty sure Steve returned at least some of that regard, or he'd never have let John carry his shield, but they didn't actually like one another.
Hank put the screwdriver down and turned to face Tony and Wanda; he wasn't smiling, exactly, but there was a sort of rueful amusement on his face. "I still don't know what Steve thought he was doing. I mean, I know Jan was still angry at me, and I can't really blame her, but..."
"Punishing Tony for running away to the West Coast and leaving him all alone in New York." Wanda said as if it were self-evident. "He sulked about it for almost six months straight."
Steve would have denied that indignantly. He was convinced that he didn't sulk, despite all evidence to the contrary. In that case, however... "I don't think it was me going to California he was angry about. We had... a fight, before I left. When I was still drinking." Tony's memories of the exchange were vague – Steve's hard shoulder under him; smoke thick in the air, making him dizzy, or maybe that had been the alcohol; Steve yelling, demanding to know why, and Tony struggling to find words to explain, when even that took energy he didn't seem to have, and knowing that no explanation would be enough – and he didn't like to think about it too hard or too often.
Hank cleared his throat, and said, the words slightly awkward, "I wish I'd known about that when it was happening. You tried to help me – you were one of the only ones, actually." He looked away, down at the equipment he'd just finished adjusting, badly cut hair falling into his face again. "I owe you for that."
Tony shook his head, unsure how to respond. Hank wouldn't have been able to help him stop drinking, even if he'd tried. Rhodey hadn't been able to. Steve hadn't been able to. It had taken hitting rock bottom and the realization that maybe he didn't actually want to die after all, that he could do more good for other people if he lived, to do it. And even then, it had been a long time before he'd felt like anything approaching himself again. In some ways, he never really had. "You really don't," he finally said, after the silence started to become uncomfortable. "Especially since I slept with Jan while you were in jail."
Hank pulled a face. "Thanks for that, by the way. It's not like I have any right to complain, but seriously, you couldn't have waited a month?"
"Sorry?" Tony offered. In retrospect, that had not been his finest hour, no matter how pleasant spending time out of costume with Jan had been. "Steve took me to task for it like you wouldn't believe."
"Wasn't this before you told her you were Iron Man?" Wanda asked. "Because if so, I'm with Cap."
Smiling at her felt... strange. This entire conversation felt slightly surreal; discussing 'the good old days' as if they were any group of old friends reminiscing, as if the past year's worth of disaster and death hadn't happened. As if they hadn't all failed each other so spectacularly.
Wanda smiled back, a little wanly, but still recognizably like the woman – the friend – Tony remembered. Even tired and haunted, wearing the drab clothing that was all she'd brought back from Europe, and with the ridiculous-looking tattoos he knew lurked under her gloves, she was still Wanda.
It was unfair of him to doubt that, to worry that having her returned to them this way was too easy, too much of a relief, to come without a price.
Everything had a price. He'd always known that; he'd just thought, hoped, that the price for complying with Registration would be something he was willing to pay. Instead, Happy and Steve had paid it. And Pepper, and May Parker, and Bill Foster, and- Tony cut that line of thought off before it could go any further. That was over now; he needed to move on. He had moved on.
Except... talking and joking with Wanda and Hank, pretending that their own teammates didn't hate them and their dead friends and family weren't haunting them, wasn't all that different from watching the Negative Zone prison at three a.m. with Hank and Reed, pretending that Reed hadn't come to stare at the portal after putting his kids to bed because he couldn't fall asleep alone, and that Tony and Reed weren't both silently keeping track of Hank's anti-depressant and mood stabilizer doses after the disaster with the cloned Thor, painfully aware that there was no way to keep a suicide watch on someone who could effectively kill himself with his own powers. And that had been before the end, when they had still had no inkling of how bad it was going to become.
Both of them had been watching Tony, too, just waiting for him to start drinking again. It was probably not a coincidence that Carol had refused to leave him alone after Steve's funeral, or that Sal had made a habit of checking on him every hour or so when he'd locked himself in one of the Helicarrier's tech labs.
The gradual disappearance of those measuring, pitying looks over the past few months had been an unadulterated relief. All the more reason to avoid a repeat of his bizarre near-panic-attack the other day; falling apart now that everything was mostly okay again, without chemical prompting, would prove once and for all that he was just broken in some fundamental way, damaged and fucked up beyond repairing, regardless of Steve's or his own best efforts. And that was unacceptable.
"Well, if things don't work out here, I suppose there's always LA," Hank said, after a long stretch of silence broken only by the faint whirring and grinding of computer fans as he plugged in the two computer systems he'd brought with him and started booting them up. One was a heavily modified Stark Enterprises unit, its fan wheezing in that distinctive way that all the 2006 models' did, before they'd started using solid-state hard drives and solved the heat problem, the other a much quieter back-up system Tony had built Hank from scratch during the week after his toxin-induced hospital stay, when he'd been barred from doing any real work and desperate to keep himself occupied somehow. "That is, provided Chthon doesn't destroy it."
"That's Simon and Jessica's team now," Tony pointed out. "And Henry's. I can't crash his team after telling him that I trusted him to lead it on his own, especially not after stealing Pepper back."
"And anyway, Carol's on it." Wanda frowned, sharply arched eyebrows drawing together. "At least, I think she is."
Tony was fairly sure that Carol was on the East Coast team at this point, thanks to Steve and Jan's hints that she pick a coast and stick to it. "She and Henry had a... falling out, over Simon." Which was something he was going to have to ask Henry about, eventually, given that he'd only heard Carol's probably-biased side of the story. How exactly had he managed to lure Simon away from a threesome with two stunningly attractive women, one of whom had pheromone-enhanced sex appeal? "They're trying to avoid each other, but she went back to LA anyway because she and Jessica are in the 'ill-advised post-breakup sex' phase of a relationship."
Wanda's lips curved into a smile again. "I think Simon and I managed to stretch that out over at least four months." Then she winced, and Tony mentally kicked himself for bringing up Simon at all.
"I've had relationships that consisted of nothing but ill-advised sex," he said, deliberately light, as if Vision's all-too-present ghost weren't suddenly filling the room. The smile he forced took effort, but the momentary twitch of Wanda's lips made it worth it. "They were fun. Well, some of them were."
"Personally, I've always found that fighting leads to no sex," Hank said. "So, LA's out then. There's always New Jersey." From Peter, or Steve, or Luke Cage, or any of the other native New Yorkers who'd been on the team, it would have been a sarcastic suggestion. Hank sounded as if he were presenting it as a serious alternative.
Tony shook his head. "Steve refuses to entertain the idea of living anywhere outside the five boroughs, and he considers Staten Island's inclusion debatable. My chances of ever living in another city again are slim to none." People thought of Steve as the quintessential all-American poster boy, but he was a city kid at heart, and New York was his city, just as much as it was Spiderman's, or Luke's, or Daredevil's.
Hank took a step back from the computers, clapping his hands together. "Okay," he said, "time to get to work. Safety gear, or you're both out." As he spoke, he pulled what looked like a doll's safety glasses and mask from the breast pocket of his lab coat, both of them growing smoothly to full size in his hands.
He'd been using that trick more lately than he had since California – the fewer Pym particles Hank expended on himself, the more he had to spare for inanimate objects. And Hank had always liked showing off, if not necessarily in a flashy way.
Wanda climbed down off the lab table, brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt. "Do you need Tony's help for this, or can I borrow him for a while?"
Hank waved the hand holding the goggles at her. "Please," he said. "The second I turn my back, he'll be up to his elbows in my equipment's guts. I miss my mini-lab."
"I've always found that locked doors work just as well as tree forts," Tony told him. He gestured around the room, at the empty racks of shelving waiting to be filled, the lab tables, the newly installed equipments, the walk-in temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled freezer for storing samples. "You've got a whole lab to yourself."
"I know," Hank said. "I know. It's just... not the same."
Wanda nodded, slowly. "As if part of you has been cut off," she said, raising one hand a little to flash the black glove at him. "And knowing that you chose to lose it only makes it harder."
Tony shifted uncomfortably, rubbing at his chin with his hand and feeling the rasp of his goatee against his palm. As frustrating as the Extremis's new limits were, they weren't completely unmanageable – he'd functioned without it, been Iron Man without it, for years. Even if the Mandarin's rings had burned his Extremis abilities out of him entirely, the way he'd initially feared, he didn't need to sense the armor in order to wear it and control it. He would have missed it, though, like missing a limb he'd only recently grown but had already come to rely upon. Like missing the burn of alcohol against the back of his throat.
Wanda had had her powers for her entire life; they were a part of her, not some new, technologically implanted addition. And Hank's size changing, while not an inherent ability, had been a part of him for as long as the armor had been a part of Tony. It hadn't always worked properly, just like Tony and old Shellhead hadn't always gotten along smoothly, but it was his.
He'd given it up for Jan, Tony knew, as much as he had for himself. Tony had told himself, during those brief hours when he'd thought the Extremis was dead, scoured out of him by the Mandarin's lightning, that the armor was a small price to pay for having Steve back. And it would have been, but giving it up one day at a time, knowing all the while that all he had to do was change his mind in order to have it back again... It was hard enough to fight that knowledge every time someone at the next table ordered a drink, or every time Logan had sliced the cap off a bottle of beer; he wasn't sure he could have managed to do it when it came to the armor.
"It's safer this way," Hank was telling Wanda. "You get to keep your control over your own mind, and keep Chthon out of it."
"Yes," Wanda said. "That's why I asked Strange to do it." Hank either didn't pick up on the slight sarcasm there, or simply didn't mind it.
When Tony and Wanda left, a few moments later, he had already donned safety gear and was muttering to himself as he sorted through the collection of minute containers of assorted chemicals.
"You wanted to talk to me?" Tony asked, as he followed Wanda along the hallway to the kitchen. She trailed one hand along the wall as she walked, over the scuffs still left in the plaster from construction; it would need to be repainted once all the work was finished.
"In a moment. Let me get something to eat, first."
The kitchen, in contrast to the hallways and Hank's half-set-up lab, already looked lived in. Steve had stuck a clipping from the Daily Bugle to the fridge, a photo of the Avengers fighting the miniature army of Venom symbiotes that had attacked the city a couple months ago, and bracketed it with a US Army calendar – the tank featured in this month's picture still used old Stark Industry designs for its armor piercing rounds, the technology every bit as effective and deadly as it had been a decade ago – and a deliberately cartoony drawing of the cat sleeping in his shield.
Jarvis had 'suggested' that it might be time to move Matthew Churchill Patton/Avenger-cat/Redwing's Lunch over to the mansion at least three times in the past week, ruthlessly quashing Tony's objections that the construction work might frighten it and/or provide it with an entire new realm of things to break, get stuck in, or otherwise destroy.
Wanda pulled sandwich ingredients out of the fridge and began making herself lunch. She glanced at Tony questioningly, holding the bread out to him, and he shook his head.
"I'm meeting Steve for lunch when he gets back from the Helicarrier." Even had he not been, he simply wasn't hungry. An Extremis-induced headache had been wrapped around his temples all morning, ready to turn into the familiar ice-pick stabbing over his left eye if he accessed more than three streams of data at once.
Steve was probably busy trying to talk Barnes out of being Fury's private assassin right about now – he hadn't said much about it to Tony since the night Barnes and Agent Carter had shown up on their doorstep, fresh from eliminating one of SHIELD's problems, but Tony knew it bothered him, and not just because of the risk involved.
Eventually, Steve was going to ask a few more questions about exactly how deeply Tony had been involved in that side of SHIELD's operations while he'd been director. It wasn't a conversation Tony was particularly looking forward to.
A lot of things that had seemed necessary at the time didn't seem quite so self-evidently vital and justifiable when he imagined trying to explain them to Steve. Cloning Thor was just the tip of the iceberg.
Wanda made an affirmative sound, and finished putting together her sandwich. "Carol came by yesterday," she said, as she carefully spread butter on each slice of bread in a perfect, even layer. "She wants to talk to you about Loki."
"I know," Tony said. "She already did. She thinks accepting Loki's help would have been a bad idea."
That was actually an understatement – Carol had asked him bluntly how he'd expected to deal with it when Loki stabbed them in the back at the worst possible time, and had added that she'd 'thought he was finished being deliberately self-sabotaging.' Loki, she'd insisted, couldn't be manipulated the way HUSAC could, or negotiated with like Gyrich or Koening. Tony couldn't even disagree with that; you could trust Henry Gyrich to keep a bargain, could trust Secretary Koening to do what he thought was best for national security even if what he thought was in the country's best interests was frequently not in your best interests, and even if he wasn't above using blackmail and threats to accomplish it. As little as Tony liked the man, he could at least respect him for that.
Except that if there was one thing his handful of months as Director of SHIELD had taught him, it was that you didn't throw potential allies away, even if they personally scared the hell out of you. You never knew when someone significantly scarier was going to show up.
"She doesn't think we can trust her," Wanda said, "probably because we can't. She doesn't understand how much more dangerous Chthon is. She's never really faced him; I think she's thinking of him as just another magical being, like Morgan Le Fay or the embodiments of chaos and order that we ran into a few years ago. Something limited, human. Something that can be defeated." She took a bite of her sandwich, chewing it without enthusiasm, as if she were eating mostly out of a sense of duty.
"Anything can be defeated." The objection was automatic. "You just have to figure out its weak points. Admittedly, Morgan Le Fay had a lot more of those than Chthon." Standing there hovering while Wanda sat at the table and ate was awkward, so Tony gave in and took the chair opposite her, taking advantage of Steve's absence to lean his elbow on the table and rest his forehead against his hand.
Steve worried too much, and he'd never liked the Extremis.
"We know his weakness – until and unless he can break completely free of his prison, he needs a human host. Unfortunately, he's rarely had any difficulty obtaining one."
"At least we know it won't be you," Tony offered, reaching out to lightly touch the back of one of her gloved hands. "Not this time." They could be thankful for small favors there – short of Stephen Strange, any alternate host Chthon could possess would lack Wanda's innate magical powers, and at least wouldn't have a connection to the interdimensional Nexus and an omega-level mutant's power levels to augment his own vast wellspring of power.
"We hope it won't be me," she corrected. Another bite of her sandwich was eaten, and then she set it aside. Tony sympathized; the smell of meat and cheese was making him feel slightly sick. "Carol doesn't think you can trust me, either." Her dark eyes held Tony's steadily. "She may be right. If I lose control again, the consequences could be catastrophic."
"That possibility has been considered," Tony said carefully. There was no tactful or friendly way to tell her that SHIELD had had plans to kill her if she re-surfaced and was judged to still be a global threat, or that the Illuminati had discussed meting out to Wanda the same treatment they had to the Hulk – eliminating the threat she represented by sending her off planet or to another dimension, as far away as they could, and, if that was not possible, killing her.
Professor Xavier had confessed that he felt partially to blame for M-Day, that he had let his sentimental attachment to an old friend's child prevent him from stepping in when he should have. Most of his proposed solutions had chilled Tony even further than the thought of killing Wanda in cold blood had. Better true death than the sort of 'merciful' living death Xavier had proposed.
It had to be better. Even Pepper had agreed that it was.
"Good." Wanda's voice was quiet, but there was an odd fierceness to it. "I caused so much destruction, hurt so many people – without these seals, I could destroy the world." She tilted her head to one side, sweeping the heavy mass of her hair to one side to expose the glyphs tattooed at the base of her neck. "You have no idea how dangerous I'd be without this. Omega-level mutants are... unstoppable. You remember what happened to the Professor, and Jean."
Tony met her eyes before he spoke, making certain she knew how serious he was. "We wouldn't let that happen. Not again."
Wanda stared at him for a moment, searching his face for something. Whatever it was, she must have found it, because she nodded slowly. "I believe you. I know it's a terrible thing to ask, but if it comes to it, Carol on her own wouldn't be enough to stop me. Maybe at the height of her Binary powers, but not now. Not anymore."
"You have my word," Tony said, the words awkward and heavy in his mouth. "If it comes to it, I'll do whatever it takes." Another old friend's life, balanced against the world – such an obvious choice, in the abstract, but when it came down to it... Steve's body would be burned into his memories forever, a permanent reminder that some sacrifices were too high to bear. Happy's face still haunted his nightmares; the empty absence of signal after Tony had shut down his life support had echoed in his head for days, until he'd longed for the whisky or vodka that would drown the silence out.
But if it were him, if the Extremis were hacked again... Better death than to be used as a living weapon against the people he loved. He'd lived through that before, under Immortus's control, killing two women who had known and trusted him, and if one of the other Avengers had struck him down then, he would have welcomed it.
"I won't let him use you again," he promised, and part of him ached even as he said it, wishing it were a lie.
Wanda was silent for a painfully stretched-out moment, staring at him with a stiff, blank expression. Then her face twisted, her eyes going bright and glassy with tears, and she jumped to her feet, leaning across the table and enveloping Tony in a hug.
"Thank you," she whispered. "There was no one else I could have asked. Thank you."
Pepper had thanked him, too. Tony closed his eyes, forcing himself not to stiffen under Wanda's touch, and was suddenly grateful he had refused her offer of food as his throat closed up and tight pain seized at his chest. The air in the room felt thin and hot, suffocating.
Doing what had to be done didn't always mean doing what was right, and it never got any easier, except when he'd been too drunk to care.
He should have said something, told her that he understood, that it was all right, but he couldn't find the words.