Chapter Fourteen

Ethan Hunt heard it from a long way off. It was a sound he'd heard more than once in his lifetime. A low, droning sound from above his head. He glanced up. Jane looked at him questioningly. "Fighter jet," he told Jane. "Wonder if they're bringin' in the National Guard?"

Jane shook her head. "They just radioed, it's gonna take them three hours to get anybody here."

"We might not have three hours," Ethan said. He took a deep breath. "Never thought we were gonna go out like this," he admitted finally. "We've beaten arms dealers, terrorists, nukes…"

"All that normal stuff," Jane cut in dryly.

Ethan chuckled shortly. "But this…" He waved a hand around. "I can't see an end. They just keep on coming."

"Then we're gonna keep on coming."

Jane recognized the familiar Brooklyn accent and looked up to see the guy with the shield and a blonde man in body armor coming up to them. "It's not over," he told them. "Not yet."

"I know you," Ethan frowned.

"Captain Steve Rogers," he introduced himself. "You must be with Agent Brandt."

"Yes, sir," Ethan replied.

"We're not finished here," Rogers continued. "It's not over. We're not done."

"We shall fight until they are dead, or we are," the blonde man in the armor said.

"Not exactly comforting," Jane pointed out.

"The measure of a true warrior comes when it seems as though there is no hope. He is the one who finds it," he replied. "The battle will go on."

Jane glanced at Ethan. He nodded.

"Then so will we," Ethan told them.

Something went streaking by their heads, and Ethan caught the flash of red and gold that was Iron Man headed out to sea.

"Where the hell is he going? Steve muttered. "Stark? What's going on?"

Ethan couldn't hear the response, but he didn't like the way Rogers' face paled as he listened to the voice in his ear.

He looked up at Thor, Ethan and Jane. "We have a…situation," he said finally.

Inside the building's fire exit stairs, Brandt's feet froze on the cement stairs. Incoming nuke…oh God. He slumped to the stairs, his back against the wall. This was it.

Well, if he was gonna die, it wasn't gonna be alone. He pushed himself up and burst through a door.

"Clint?"

The sprinkler system had come on, and he was soaked through. He didn't know how many floors he'd cleared at this point. All he knew was he hadn't found Clint yet, but he wouldn't stop until he did. "Clint, buddy, come on. Where the hell are you?"

"Here," a weak voice answered him back. Brandt took off at a dead run and found his brother lying on his back in a puddle. Clint grimaced but managed a weak smile. "Hi Will."

"Jesus," Brandt said, kneeling next to him. "Are you okay?"

Clint shook his head. "Can't feel my legs," he said. "Landed pretty hard on my quiver...think I mighta broken something..." He grimaced. "And there's that pesky concussion from earlier…"

Brandt looked at his brother's boots. "Move your left leg, Clint," he commanded.

Clint chuckled. "Which one's that..."

"Ah, good you're still cracking jokes, you asshole. Move your leg, damn it."

Clint frowned. "Aren't I?"

Brandt's blood ran cold. "Don't screw with me, big brother," he said.

"M not..."

Brandt looked at his legs. They lay still. "One last time," he said desperately. "Come on, man."

"I probably…deserve this," Clint groaned.

"Say that again?" Brandt gaped, looking down at his brother. "You can shut your mouth right now, big brother, 'cause you heard Natasha. None of this was your fault."

"I screwed up, Will. Couldn't fight him off…"

"Neither could Selvig! Or any of those other agents." He looked into his brother's matching eyes. "Just because you're stubborn doesn't make you invincible." Brandt grabbed his brother's hand. "You can't spend all your life up in the rafters, Clint. Eventually you'll have to come down and face what happened. But that day won't be today, because goddamnit we need you. We go home for Christmas, you and I will take a week and throw you your damned pity party. But not today."

"I almost killed her, Will," Clint said. "Almost killed you."

"But you didn't. And neither Natasha or I would have let you anyway. You're not as tough as you think you are," he joked. His brother gave him half a smile.

"Can't tell…Mom and Dad about this."

"Mom would never let us leave the house again," Brandt agreed. "We'll just let her give us the deathgrip and hold onto us and put up with the 'remember when' stuff and old movies until she feels better." He looked at his brother. "Speaking of feeling better. Move your goddamn leg."

Clint's face scrunched in determination as he willed every nerve in his body to connect.

Brandt saw Clint's left foot twitch. He let out the breath he'd been holding. "Thank God," he said. "Come on, can you sit up?"

"Hey, one victory at a time," Clint said. He grabbed Brandt's forearm as his brother pushed and pulled him to a sitting position. He gently worked the quiver off his back and set it aside. His bow lay two feet away.

"Stark...you know that's a one way trip," he heard part of Cap's response to something Tony was doing.

"Don't wait up," Tony replied, then cut communication.

Clint froze, grabbing Brandt's arm. "What is Stark doing?" He asked him.

Brandt paused. "Fury radioed about seven minutes ago. We've got incoming nuclear missile."

His brother's eyes widened. "And so Stark is..."

"Near as I can tell...hes FedExing it to the Chitauri...same day delivery."

"That's suicide!"

Brandt nodded. "Yeah...I think he knows..."

It was as if time stood still. On the ground, Steve, Ethan, Jane and Thor hustled the remaining people from Midtown into the subway tunnels. Steve kept trying to raise Tony on the comm but the billionaire either wouldn't-or couldn't- answer him. "I pushed him to this," he said miserably as they took cover in the subway entrance.

"How do you figure?" Ethan asked him. "Seems to me he made his own choice."

"I told him I never saw him making the sacrifice play," Steve said slowly.

Ethan considered that. "You make hard choices as a leader," he said after a minute. He glanced at Jane. "You push your team to give you their best 150% of the time. Our jobs…" He looked around at Steve, Thor, and Jane. "We all make the sacrifice play when we need to." He thought of Julia, and wondered where Brandt was. "And you trust that your team's got your back."

"Do you remember-" Brandt paused for a moment, and chuckled to himself. He looked at Clint. "When we told Mom that we were both gonna be spies for a living?"

Clint smiled, remembering. "Yeah. I thought she was gonna ground us, even at eighteen." He sighed. "I hated making her worry. I hated coming home after a mission, I tried so hard to clean up, to wait until the scars and bruises had faded but…she always saw through it."

"She always knew," Brandt agreed. "We never told her anything about what we did. But it was always like she knew."

"Did we make the right call?" Clint asked. "I mean, you and me. Dad was already a cop, she worried enough about him on a Baltimore street beat. And then you went to IMF and I went to SHIELD…" He chuckled. "Special Forces," he teased, imitating their father's gruff voice.

"You don't know how special," Brandt finished the joke. He let out a breath. "Mom knew we'd have never made it with office jobs. We were Dad's kids, even when we were little."

"Robin Hood and Little John," Clint grinned, then grimaced. "Ow." He looked around. "How long?"

"Four minutes," Brandt said.

"I haven't heard anything," Clint said.

"Nobody's listening for anybody but Tony," Brandt said. He wondered where Bruce, and Natasha were. He thought about Ethan, and Jane and Benji. "I shoulda said goodbye," he said after a moment.

"Yeah," Clint agreed. "Me too."

Then, "Guys! I can close it!"

Clint jerked at the familiar voice. Natasha. "Nat?" he asked.

"Where the hell have you been?" she demanded.

He laughed. "Busy doing stupid stuff."

"So nothing new then. Guys, I can close the portal!" Clint heard her pause. "What do you want me to do, Cap?" she was asking Steve.

"Stark just blew through the portal," Steve reported from his spot on the ground. There was silence. Then, "Do it."

Clint and Brandt heard a blast of static. Both brothers threw hands to their ears as the sound rocked their eardrums.

"Aim it there," Selvig was telling Natasha. "Right at the base."

Benji stood close to the doctor. "You sure you built in the failsafe?" he asked him.

Selvig pounded furiously at the keyboard. "We'll find out in a moment, won't we," he said flatly.

Natasha thrust Loki's spear into the energy field. It touched the Tesseract, then, as Benji watched, the whole thing seemed to collapse in on itself. A blast of energy shot sideways, knocking Natasha, Benji, and Selvig to the rooftop. Natasha's eyes looked skyward.

The hole was getting smaller.

On the ground, Steve, Thor, and the IMF team watched the portal above them start to shrink. "Come on, Stark," Steve willed his teammate to appear.

"Look," Ethan said, pointing up. They all saw it at once. The Iron Man was falling through the sky. Jane frowned.

"Something's not-"

"He isn't slowing down!" Thor beat her to it, and whipped Mjolnir into a frenzy to take off after his friend. Just as his feet were about to leave the ground, the Hulk roared into Midtown, snatching Tony midair like a major league outfielder. The beast half climbed, half slid down the side of the building before launching himself off and landing on his back, clutching Tony to his chest. The ground shook.

Steve and Thor rushed forward as the Hulk threw Tony unceremoniously to the side. Thor ripped off the faceplate and threw it. It skidded across the street to land in front of Ethan and Jane.

Tony wasn't moving. His eyes were closed. Steve could see the arc reactor flickering in his chest. He didn't understand the technology, but he understood the concept. If the light goes out…

Hulk roared. It echoed down the side of the buildings and rattled windows.

Tony snapped awake with a yell. "What the hell?!" he yelled, his eyes looking around. "What just happened?" He looked at Steve and frowned. "Please tell me nobody kissed me."

Steve looked around Midtown, to Thor, the Hulk, Ethan and Jane, and then Tony. "We won," he said, as if he couldn't believe it.

"Mission accomplished," Ethan muttered to Jane, and she smiled.

"You guys ever tried shawarma?" Tony asked, and the two IMF agents turned. The billionaire was still lying on his back. "There's a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don't know what it is, but I wanna try it." He looked sideways at Ethan and Jane and frowned. "I don't know who the hell you are, but you're invited too."

Jane chuckled. Then she looked at Ethan. "Where's Benji and Brandt?"

"I saw Agent Brandt headed into a building about four blocks up," Steve told her.

"Your teammate is on the roof with the Black Widow," Thor told her. He looked over at Steve. "We have some business to attend to," he told the American hero.

Steve nodded, looking back at Stark Tower. "Yeah," he agreed. "Yeah we do." He looked at Ethan and Jane. "You guys are welcome to come. Far as I'm concerned, you deserve to see this through to the end."

"Thanks," Ethan said. "But we need to go find Brandt."

"Anybody heard from Clint?" Natasha's voice sounded in Steve's ear.

"Wherever they are, they're probably together," Steve said. He pointed. "That building, there."

Ethan and Jane took off at a run. "Natasha and…Benji?" Steve frowned. "They'll meet you there!" He turned to Thor. "Let's go find Loki."

"I could use a hand, guys," Tony said from the ground. But it was the Hulk who picked him up and set him, surprisingly gently, on his feet. He looked in the great green monster's eyes. "Thanks, big guy."

Maybe it was the fall, or the killer pain, but he swore he saw the Hulk smile.