TacSit: safe(89,00.00)
Queues dumped info into Tony's conscious awareness as he opened his eyes. Information on his surroundings: SHIELD HQ, New York, Sub-basement nine, his lab; Steve was doing paperwork at the desk that Tony had never used; somebody had dragged in a shit-ton of medical equipment and hooked it up to Tony—he turned all of it off before it could register him as awake. Tagged persons: Steve—three-point-three metres away; Bruce was Brucelike and debating with Foster one sub-basement down; Natasha and Clint were off-planet—according to the logs, they had portalled out with the alternate-reality doubles two-point-three hours prior; no Asgardians detected on Earth. Security updates on locations of interests: green lights across the board where installation was complete, and yellow lights within acceptable parameters for those areas undergoing upgrades.
Extremis staggered it so that his waking mind could swallow it down without difficulty. By the time he blinked, he was alert and oriented to the present situation.
"Hey," Tony said, sitting up and wincing, not because he hurt—he actually felt great—but because the info-scroll had gotten to the repair reports, and, wow, getting electrocuted had really done a number on him.
On the other hand, the casualty report had come back with the damage his stunt had done to other people: 0 fatalities, thanks to the truly heroic efforts of various doctors and a couple of SHIELD pilots.
But there'd been close calls. He should have found another way.
Story of my life.
"Tony!" Steve said, looking up. The beginnings of a smile immediately turned into a frown. "Did you just turn off all the monitors?"
"I'm fine," Tony assured him, doing a scan of Steve in return. Discreetly. The records were showing that Steve had been cleared by medical, after all.
"You were electrocuted."
"Yes, and now extremis fixed me and I'm good." He felt, suddenly, like grinning at Steve—and did, although the cameras showed him that it made him look slightly unhinged. "You came and rescued me."
"Of course we came!" said Steve indignantly, but his eyes had softened, and he didn't immediately say something more about electrocution—
"Yes, but you came right away. Bonus points for you. And for the successful rescue. And for making me look bad, Jesus, I was supposed to be rescuing you."
Steve grinned back at him, somehow managing to look both relieved and concerned at the same time. "It was a team effort."
"Yeah, I know," said Tony, and it was probably really damn sappy but, shit, it was also true. He could see it all over the video logs that extremis had just finished processing for him. He could also see it because he actually had an email from Bruce, the timestamp putting it just after the email from .
"How'd the Chinese take it?" he asked, pulling open both emails at once. Toni's was a mess—their two versions of extremis weren't entirely compatible, which fit with the logs stating that her version was wholly designed by Hansen and herself, and hadn't had anything to do with aliens. That was humbling; he had to give them points for that.
Hansen might get the chance, someday, to prove that she could do the same. Tony paused to pull the most recent updates on her, and reconsidered his estimate of how long it would take her upwards. SHIELD's preliminary position was that she'd blown it, releasing extremis before it was ready, and then failing to fix it in the months since. She was considered too much of a risk, too uncontrollable.
What it really came down to was that she didn't have anyone like Steve to speak for her. Or anyone who held enough over her head to guarantee her compliance. Aaand that was one way to kill the endorphin high he'd gotten from knowing that Steve had come through for him.
Loki had taken Steve, and shortly thereafter somebody had used the—had used the mantra. It didn't take a genius to put the two together, not when Loki could look into your eyes and pick thoughts out of your brains, leaving you wondering what he'd seen. It wouldn't have been Steve's fault. It wouldn't have been. Steve had to know that—Tony should tell him that. Steve, being a too-decent human being who valued his word, was probably blaming himself for breaking it even by proxy, but even Tony knew it wasn't his fault.
Tony licked his lips. He should say that. He could think about the damn mantra now, Gaia's water had done that much, he should be able to say it.
Steve wasn't saying anything either, and the silence stretched out for one second, two.
Does he know what Loki picked out of his head?
When Loki had done it to Tony, he hadn't been able to tell what Loki had grabbed, but he'd known Loki had done something. He'd warned Steve about it. Surely Steve must realize what Loki had gone for.
Steve's smile faded, and he studied Tony just as intently as Tony was studying him back, but there was no trace of guilt in his eyes. Had Tony gotten it wrong? No—the timing was too suspect, the whole thing was too damn suspect. Who else would Loki have gotten it from? The Time Gem's perspective on the Makluan time loop only vaguely made sense, but it had only taken one run through to get the idea that Tripitaka was deader than dead, and good fucking riddance. In fact, most of Maklu was pretty damn gone, which likely ruled out Kuan-yin, although Tony didn't doubt that she could given Loki a run for his money in mind-screws. And if Loki had gotten it from him, picked it out of Tony's own head back in that cell in the Raft, then why the hell had he waited so long to use it?
He hasn't come after the Space Gem. Yet.
He had to break his gaze away from Steve's to be able to keep thinking.
It was possible Loki just didn't give a damn about the Space Gem, and only needed the Time Gem for his plan, whatever that was. Or maybe Loki was just letting him hang onto it until the time was right to take it from him. Trying to out-think Loki made his brain itch. Trying to think of resisting him, now that he had to have the mantra, just made him feel sick. If Loki was after the Time Gem, then leaving it in the Gap was likely the safest path.
But there were other monsters in the Gap, and he didn't know if Thanos would be as averse to treading there as Loki was. And now that Tony had put the Time Gem back together, anyone who wandered in might find it.
Should have found another way. Idiot.
"—Tony?" said Steve, and Tony blinked back into his head to find Steve waving a hand in his face.
"Be right back," he said in a rush, and activated the subspace inducers in the sleeves of his jacket. Black light flared and popped, and the Gem dropped into his grasp. Then, without bothering to pull on the armour—there was nothing there that could hurt him—he used the Space Gem to flip himself into the Gap.
He existed there as a bit of reality in nothingness. Looking for other bits of reality was just as easy as it had been before—but the Time Gem wasn't there, either whole or in pieces. Shit. Where did it go? He hadn't had it when he'd fallen back to Earth. Had somebody come and taken it? Or had it fallen somewhere else, on one of the myriad worlds he'd fled through while trying to outrun the mantra?
If there had been any reality to sigh in, he would have. There wasn't. Tony buried his face in his hands, and flipped himself back to Earth before Steve could start to worry, reappearing back on the cot, this time on top of the covers.
Too late. It had been maybe five seconds, but the furrow between Steve's brows was deep enough for five hours. "What was that?"
Tony doublechecked the settings on the Silencer. "I, uh. I dropped the Time Gem, in the Gap, accidentally, before. The way it came together, it, um, was a bit hard to hold onto it."
"You told us before—wait, you got it back?" Steve sounded startled, but there was no sign that he didn't believe what Tony was saying.
"No. It's not there. If it fell out someplace, it could be anywhere, maybe anywhen. Finding it again'll be a needle in a cosmic haystack, but hey, Loki'll have the same problem." Tony shrugged and made himself look up to meet Steve's eyes. There was nothing there that said that Steve knew what Loki had done, or why it would have been hard to hold onto it—no, Steve didn't know anything about it. Of course he didn't. He would have apologized. He would have at least mentioned it by now.
Loki must have had the mantra all along, and just been fucking with Tony all this time. Fucking bad timing in yanking the damn chain, then. Suspiciously bad. But—fuck.
"You should probably take this," Tony made himself say, holding out the Space Gem. Extremis let him actively prevent muscle tremors and ensured that his hand was rock-steady.
This felt wrong. The timing felt wrong.
You're being paranoid. Just ask him.
"That's... a point of contention."
"Oh?"
Steve grimaced. "Where would we keep it? Loki... we didn't have one of Foster's Silencers in the jet. If he was listening... odds are he knows we have it."
"Shit." Shit!
"Yeah. Toni said the security on your subspace pocket was better than anything she'd seen before—she couldn't get into it, at least. And you're a mobile target. Loki can walk through walls no matter how deep we bury 'em, we put it in a stationary subspace vault and the vault door becomes his target. And"—Steve held up a finger—"the space aliens gave it to you."
"And," said Tony pointedly, "Loki knows about—" He gestured at his head, the words cutting off at the last moment. The rest of the sentence wouldn't form. He couldn't make himself add: He's used it.
"Fury agreed it's still safest with you."
Because Fury thought Steve could keep Tony under control. Fury didn't know that that was only partly true. The override that Tony had given Steve wouldn't stand up to the control the mantra offered, not in the long term, unless—No, he wouldn't. Damn it, I have to stop suspecting him.
He wouldn't. He didn't. And Loki might be able to root around in people's heads, but he'd never shown any sign of being able to rearrange them. He wouldn't need such overly-convoluted plots if he could. This was baseless paranoia, it was just fucking bad timing.
But the words wouldn't come. He couldn't say it. Instead what came out was, "I'm surprised he's trusting Natasha's opinion."
"She told us there were alien drugs. And yes, I was worried. Still am. The last person I was around who could read minds... I made sure not to meet his eyes."
There it was: Steve's word. It was coincidence, then. It was Loki fucking with Tony's head: he knew and always had known. Tony slumped.
Then he realized that Steve was waiting for him to respond to that, and scrambled for something else to say. "Gaea was different." Christ, that was an understatement. "It was... there was nothing I could have given her." Oshtur and Chthon hadn't even cared about the Space Gem, it was useless to them.
It might be useless to Loki. Loki could retrieve it whenever he wanted.
Loki was an arrogant son-of-a-gun, and Tony felt a sudden deep need to make Loki pay for the mistake of leaving the Space Gem in his hands. So I've got it for now. What can I do with that?
"You're still going to have to be cleared by the shrinks. And you're still going to therapy."
Saw that coming. "To be fair, alien gods really do have a leg up on the pharmaceutical industry." And yet even they can't fix the fuck-up that is my brain.
"I still can't believe either of you accepted it."
"You'd take aspirin from your mom, right?" Tony asked, and then winced. It hadn't sounded creepy in his head, but aloud was a whole other story. "I didn't mean it like that."
"I really think you did," said Steve, watching him closely. "I guess, except for Natasha, I can understand it best. And you've got extremis, so I think Medical's half washed its hands of you by now. But... God, Tony," he said, and then stood up and crossed the gap between them in a few strides, so that he could fold Tony into a hug.
Tony squawked—he couldn't help it, he hadn't been expecting it—and then, sort of, hugged back. And then, because Steve deserved to hear it, "I'm glad you got away from Loki."
I really hope you got away from Loki. But that a baseless, ridiculous accusation that he couldn't even make himself say aloud. Stop being so fucking paranoid.
Steve laughed, low and slightly stressed. Tony could feel the tension in Steve's frame, all wound up with nowhere to go. "Yeah, well, read the report," Steve said, stepping back and holding Tony at arm's length—literally, his hands were still on Tony's shoulders."He's apparently got ideas for the Infinity Gems—they're a set of six total. Loki thought we could help him get the Power Gem, but it was gone when we got there. Our new allies have some experience with the gems, by the way, or at least their reflections. I'm still not sure I understand the difference."
Was that what was in the email from Toni? Tony brought it back up in his mind's eyes, but when he sorted out the errors caused by different operating systems, he discovered it was a gaggle of energy efficiency calculations instead. There was something about the layout that made it feel like a taunting note. At the bottom, in lieu of a signature, were the words Your move and a brief segment of emotional coding that, when Tony unscrambled it, proved to be a feeling of good-natured challenge-slash-ribbing.
Her math was so blessedly clear and free of uncertainties that he could have cried over the beauty of it. "You know, I think I like her."
"Natasha?"
"What? No—I mean, yes, I like her, but I meant Toni." He started drafting a reply in his head—nothing alien, that would be cheating; he went in for the first-generation cloaking instead, because even if it wasn't as efficient it was his, and, anyway, he had the feeling that if he'd had the time to take it further, instead of switching to a more Makluan approach, it could have actually been a more elegant solution.
"Fury will be thrilled to hear it."
"I'm sure he thinks the more of me the merrier," Tony said, and hesitated, re-reading the much shorter email that Bruce had sent. It wasn't anything personal, just two sentences: Prize is up above two million now. Take a look.
There followed a series of links, and only some were to math forums and wikis. The leading ones were news articles regarding a massive IT security clusterfuck that had occurred two weeks ago:
...Hoffmann is the first to proclaim that her work is not a solution to P vs. NP. "It takes us closer," she says. "It shows that there are classes of primes and it increases the likelihood that P vs. NP is solvable. But it's not a proof; it doesn't show the general picture clearly enough."
From a mathematical perspective, the Hoffmann Algorithm may not be worth the million dollar prize, but to cyber-security its discovery is worth at least thirty-two trillion USD. That's the amount VENUS Cybersecurity estimates would have been lost to cyber-theft before stop-gap measures could be implemented, had Hoffmann not forewarned IT experts in the field in advance of publishing her paper last Tuesday. "Just as thieves could use Hoffmann's Algorithm to detect 'vulnerable' primes and exploit them, we can use it to detect and avoid using those primes in our security," said Arturo Marcelo, head of Security Services at VENUS. "We have had teams working around the clock and have closed this exploit."
But it may soon be re-opened. Hoffmann developed her estimation algorithm based on work she'd done in trying to solve the 'Euclid Paradox', which made shockwaves in the mathematical world when it first appeared earlier this year. Developed by a still-anonymous author, the problem was first presented on the University of California math forums only six weeks ago. On its face, the Euclid Paradox doesn't look like a problem. It was presented in the form of two opposing theorems, each apparently logically continuous, that resulted in two conflicting statements. Initial reaction to the theorems—either of which might be groundbreaking work in the field of elementary mathematics—was that at least one had to contain an error. But no error has yet been found, despite the steadily increasing monetary prize for its discovery. (At time of publication of this article, the joint awards offered for the solution total to $2.2 million.)
Hoffmann, like many who are working on the Euclid Paradox, tried to find where the error lay by extending the results. Instead, she identified a new classification for prime numbers based on the dual-contradictory 'proofs' of the Euclid Paradox theorems. "From a mathematical perspective it's not sound," she says. "It's based on something that defies formal logic. But practically speaking, it has real, applicable results, and if this one thing can, then I think it's very likely that other extensions of the Euclid Paradox will, too."
On the forums Bruce had linked, those extensions were already being posted: ones with less immediate implications, but IT security wasn't the only part of the mathematical world undergoing a war between the purists and the engineers. Surfing for recent academic furors wasn't part of extremis' wake-up functions, but he was going to have to consider making it one—he clicked through, and through, absorbing the discussion of a few weeks in a heartbeat. There had been two serious contenders for a go at resolving the paradox, but competitors had shredded both within a few hours of posting. SHIELD had offered both jobs.
"The math still doesn't work."
"What?" Steve said, now sounding very concerned, and it occurred to Tony that to Steve, this was a lot of conversational jumps in a very short period of time.
Unless he's—
But the thought of Loki wearing Steve like a skinsuit was horrifying and paranoid enough that Tony actually did manage to set it aside, because if that was the case then there was no point in doing anything except playing along. And hadn't that been what he'd been doing from the beginning, since Steve had pulled him out of the Raft?
"Sorry. I'm checking emails with my brain. Toni and Bruce sent me things—Bruce's been working on the math problem, the incompatible one. Hell, everybody's been working on it."
"Yeah, Bruce said it actually stopped the music war in Gateroom Two—now they all argue about your math," said Steve, and there was that smile, back on his face again. It made part of Tony's brain relax in relief, still thrilled with the knowledge that they had, in fact, managed to get him out of Borjigin's clutches. They'd come for him.
"I saw it. In the Gap, when I was using the Space Gem, and the Time Gem was breaking. Or I thought I saw it. Brains aren't really made to see it, it's kind of fucked up." And immediately after his brain had been fucked over. Maybe the entire thing had been a hallucination. Maybe not.
It wasn't like SHIELD's monitoring equipment could tell, so he took it for an excuse to start stripping leads from his skin. And if that gave him a reason to not be looking at Steve, then, well.
"Can't help you there, it makes no sense to me."
"I... I think I should speak with Bruce. And Foster." It felt almost shameful to admit it.
When did your head get stuck so far up your ass that consulting with somebody else was shameful?
Or so paranoid that it was terrifying...
Steve's eyebrows had climbed upward, but he looked pleased. "You need to debrief first."
"Wrote a report," Tony replied, which was jumping a bit ahead of himself; he was writing a report, in his head. He set up a location to upload it to on the SHIELD servers and then padded the location so nobody could see it was empty, just locked. He'd have the report finished in a minute, anyway.
"A report's not a debrief," said Steve, but he sounded amused and happy enough to ignore it. "Let's go see what they have to say."
He was half-immersed in a pool of extremis when his visitor decided to stop by. Tony sat up, combat systems primed before he realized who it was—he hadn't seen it from this end before. Nobody else could use the portable bridge, and whenever he'd used it he'd had illusions up, scrambling camera surveillance.
His older self dropped into existence surrounded by black flickers of the void and the kind of total silence that only came from using a Foster Silencer. He hadn't even bothered with any armour, which was pretty stupid considering that Tony had nearly fried him before he'd realized what he was.
"You realize that the Time Gem breaks the laws of causality, right?" Tony asked him, although he was pretty sure he was going to be made to look like an idiot in a moment because of it. "And even if it didn't, I could still accidentally kill you and it wouldn't be a paradox." Then he blinked, as some part of him that didn't have anything to do with extremis' sensor suites determined that future-him hadn't used the bridge just for funsies. "You don't have it with you. Either of them."
"Nope. Sent 'em on and portalled over here the manual way. You'll need to send me to my next stop."
"Why?"
He received a smile that was as mocking as any he'd ever given. "Better to avoid temptation. You know."
"I don't have to do this the way you've done it."
"Don't you?" Future-him shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned back on his heels, casting a derisive glance around the lab. There wasn't much to look at, considering he'd re-purposed it out of a squat, one-story office building in Maine. No need for impressive subbasement layouts here: these were hardly high-energy experiments, and just buying an existing office meant he didn't have to install his own water main.
The body in the corner was probably the most interesting thing present. Future-him sauntered over and twitched back the sheet covering it. Beneath, his clone was lying on a block of extremis that contained all the original armour protocols, breathing slowly in and out, eyes closed. At present that was about all the body could do: autonomic functions were working perfectly fine, but the personality and memory matrices were still in the black box. Tony didn't want to risk loading them until the last possible moment.
"Come on, like I don't know what you're thinking," said future-him. "What are you going to do? Let this slab of meat rot? Toss the Gems in a volcano and never look back? We're so close, don't fuck it up now."
Tony swallowed. He wanted to argue—wanted to bite back, words as vicious as he could make them, tear into his own soft spots. He rubbed at his face instead and stepped fully from the pool of extremis, separating it out from the armour's makeup and shooing it away. "Why are you here, then? Part of the plan is to go gloat with myself?"
"No, I'm here to tell you to stop sitting around on your ass."
"So, not here to be helpful."
"Oh, no, I am. You're stalling." Future-him bared teeth. "You can lie to yourself about it, but you can't really lie to yourself."
"Stalling? I have the Time Gem. Considering what's at stake if I screw this up, re-checking my work is a pretty damn valuable use of time—"
"You're evading. It's perfect, it's been perfect the last twenty checks, you don't need—"
"Oh, stop it, I'm blushing—"
"—to re-check it, you're just wasting time—"
"Yeah, Time Gem, time's not a problem—"
"—you don't have an infinite amount!" his future-self shouted, and Tony fell silent. "The Time Gem doesn't matter when it's you that's the problem. Drag your feet for another couple months and you'll convince yourself to avoid it entirely, to try something else. Look at us! You're going to throw it all away and get everyone killed because you're tired"—and his sneer was Obie's, was his Dad's, not grandiose or frigid with ice and all the more cutting because of that—"because you don't want to be the bad guy, because you don't want to make the hard decisions. Well, too bad. This is what we are."
They were standing nose-to-nose now. Perfect mirrors, firewalls up, code guarded. A decade and a half he'd been at this, and somewhere along the line it had turned from being about figuring out how to avoid Loki's trap into figuring out how to fix everything, and he'd broken every promise he'd made to Steve—but once he'd realized he could fix it, could he have chosen any differently? Fifteen years of working on this, alone and with Dyson, and he'd had more doubts in the past week than he'd had in the last ten years. Christ, he was such an asshole, and yeah, he was fucking tired.
This was the first conversation he'd had with another person since he'd left Dyson behind.
Tony turned away first, and his future-self said, more restrained now, "Come on, I'll give you a hand. Make the final transfer and you can ship this guy off." He waved a hand at the clone. "And then... talk to Pepper. We're nearly done."
"Is that when you've come from?" Tony asked, not looking up and not bothering to hide the bitterness in his tone. What would be the point? "Convincing her to lie down on the wire?"
"A reputation's just a reputation," and he sounded just as exhausted as Tony felt. No shit.
"She doesn't deserve it. Any of it."
"Of course not, but she'll live. Cut your losses. Cut her losses, come on. Work with me here."
"Yeah," said Tony. "Yeah, alright. Get me the—you know how this goes."
Transferring the matrices was easy, with the help of somebody who knew his own brain inside-out. They worked in silence, completed the transfer checks and then checked each other's own check-work. Tony pulled the Gems from his pocket and looked at his clone, still unconscious. He hesitated.
Future-him tilted his head. "Timer's set. He'll wake up in five, four, three—"
"Fuck you," said Tony tiredly, and he shoved his clone and all the relevant nanites through time and space. For a moment longer he kept his awareness there, double-checking that everything was as it should be. It was, of course.
And then his clone was booting up and he had no excuse to linger.
"Where are you going?"
Future-him offered a crooked smile. "Last stop."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"Well." What did he say to that? "Don't fuck it up."
"Same to you." Then he was gone, too, as Tony sent him on his way with no more than a thought.
Tony stayed a minute longer, packing all the lab gear into subspace and then just standing there, thinking. The Gems felt almost weightless in his palm—they always did, even when he was actively using them to bend Time and Space to his will. Was it to his will? With the Time Gem he could see how Reality was wrinkled out so that causality could, in certain cases, be ignored. It was all too possible that he was fooling himself, that he wasn't the force behind any of his actions, that it was someone or something else—
So, what? Gonna test it? Could toss 'em away. Pick a volcano, drop 'em down the Marianna Trench, think 'em into the centre of the sun...
Tony shook his head violently. His future self was right: delay any more and he wouldn't do this at all, he'd talk himself out of it, and wouldn't that fuck up everything. In the end, what did it matter if it was his choice or not? All that mattered was the results.
He closed his eyes and willed himself into the past.
Tony had kinda forgotten how much fun it was to discuss physics with other people. To toss around ideas, scribble math on the board, root out the rules of the universe. In deference to Jane, who was still eyeing him warily, he did use the board rather than putting equations up holographically with his brain. When he and Steve had first arrived in the lab, newly released from debriefing, she'd half-frozen.
"Can I talk to you for a sec?" he asked Jane quietly, at one point when Bruce was the one scribbling over the board. Not quietly enough for Bruce not to hear, but quietly enough that Bruce kept scribbling, playing the escort looking away... giving them the illusion of privacy.
"I... what?"
"I'm—sorry." Christ, he was terrible at this. "I—the research, and it... occurs to me I haven't been—"
"No—you know, it's fine." She shifted uncomfortably.
Tony studied her without looking at her, even if that was sort of a low trick. He wasn't sure if he should say the next thing, but she deserved his consideration. "I'm sorry about Ms. Lewis, too."
She shook her head and sniffed, her face doing that weirdly rigid-not-rigid thing some people's faces did when they were trying to compose themselves. Tony folded his arms across his chest and looked down, turning inward to try and give her some privacy. Among the follow-up reports from Loki's abduction of her and Steve had been medical records. Tony hadn't broken the privacy seals on those, except to learn that the first casualty, the barista, had woken up an hour later confused but in perfect health. Jane's assistant, on the other hand, had been moved to a regular hospital's ICU.
"It—never mind."
Don't push it. Tony swallowed a sigh and looked up as Bruce stepped back from his whiteboard—and blinked.
"Did you just disprove Pauli's Exclusion Principle?"
"I think so, yes," Bruce agreed. His eyes had gotten rather round behind his glasses.
Jane sighed and buried her face in her hands. "The universe is falling apart," she moaned. It only sounded a bit forced.
"Uh-huh," said Tony. The sky hadn't caught fire yet, they still had time to pretend it wouldn't. Just a little bit longer. The equations tickled something in the back of his head. He let it simmer, and grabbed up another marker to start adding to Bruce's work, pulling it in a few more practical directions. "How do we use that?"
"You are such a fucking engineer," Jane muttered.
Eventually, Steve came back to collect them, this time accompanied by Natasha, Clint, and an invitation-slash-command to take a break and grab some dinner. Jane glanced between the five of them, and started to make an excuse to leave—"You had a time-and-space breaking adventure, you can stay," Natasha told her.
"I've never had a time and space breaking adventure," Bruce said mildly.
Clint, leaning in the doorway, snorted. "You break time and space every time you Hulk out, Doc."
"No, that's a subspace-inducing mass-shift effect," Bruce corrected, putting his glasses away.
"It might not be," said Jane suddenly, pausing in the act of shutting down some of the monitors. "Anymore, I mean. I mean, considering that formal logic is breaking down—"
"Break," said Steve firmly, cutting off the thought. "Science after eating."
Tony wound up holding up a wall as the others filed out, and after a brief exchange of glances with Steve, Natasha lingered, too. He raised his eyebrows at the pair of them—Do you think I missed that?
"That wasn't subtle," Tony informed her, falling into step with her far enough behind the rest that none of them, aside from Steve, would be able to hear what they were saying. And for Steve—Tony was pretty sure he could modify his duplicate of Jane's Silencer to prevent any sound from leaving. But, hell. He was already keeping one secret from Steve, he needed to stop before it became a dangerous habit.
"Wasn't trying to be," Natasha returned.
"Sorry." He wished he could close his eyes, but he could feel all the security feeds, watching him. It was a stupid impulse anyway. Closing his eyes had never made anything go away. "I—sorry."
"You did okay." Her smile was small, but forgiving. "You think I don't get it?"
"It wasn't something somebody else put in my head. It was all... me."
"So?"
"I just thought... you should know." He glanced up at Steve ahead—no, better that Steve heard this. "Gaea, she... Christ, it was—"
"I was there; I know. You're doing... better," Natasha added, and... well, fuck. It wasn't like he could deny that one.
He lengthened his strides so that they could catch up to the others by the time they reached the lower commissary. Not his ideal place for dinner, except that the cameras showed that it had been cleared out an hour earlier, save for a load of pizzas and beer that Steve had dropped off. Steve, the secret party-planner. It was a scene only slightly spoiled by the addition of Hill, sitting with slices of pizza already claimed and paperwork—actual paper—surrounding her.
"Give me ten minutes," she said as they entered. "Romanoff, Barton, I need your run-down about Earth-3490.10."
"Allies," said Natasha instantly.
Clint nodded, grabbing a beer. "Yeah, they're not faking it."
"Their technology is several years ahead of ours. We're closing the gap fast, but while they're cautious of us, too, they have a lot of advances they wouldn't mind sharing."
Tony felt his eyes slide away. Should he—what a goddamned question to be asking now. "Toni sent me some algorithms, gratis."
There was a pause as Hill scribbled things—paper reports, Jesus. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. Or maybe it wasn't actually a precaution against him. Toni had her own version of extremis, after all.
"They gave us a whole stack of files on the Mandarin's rings to take back," said Clint, breaking the awkward silence. "Handed it off to the techies in lab four." Where the rings were being held—to be studied at something of a distance. Borjigin himself was sedated in holding, until they had verification that they could block him from controlling them remotely—something else Toni had warned them about. "I wouldn't say gratis, though, Tony. They want that thing you used to shut off Borjigin's tech."
That's not surprising.
"It shut off Natasha Stark's extremis, too," said Steve. He'd loaded up two plates with pizza, but to Tony's surprise, he came and handed one over instead of having them both for himself. ...That shouldn't have been surprising, either. "I've been debriefed about it, already, and the counter, but that defence needs to go global, Tony."
Tony nodded, looking down at the plate in his hands, and let Steve prod him into taking a seat. "The virus... it spreads with the signal. It's stickier than the counter. Goes places. I'll have the global defence up by tomorrow, something for handing out to allies... in a report. Later. I—sorry."
At this rate, he might actually get decent at apologies. He wondered if they'd ever stop feeling like failures.
But... lesser failures, if he could only get past them.
"Captain Rogers already fell on that grenade for you, Stark, and in fact we'd prefer if you kept your mouth shut about it," said Hill. Hmm, maybe not improving on apologies, then. "Moving on. The Mandarin's rings are showing marked differences to the readings on them that 3490's given us."
"You go to their world, you'll see some pretty marked differences in the entire thing."
"The physics might actually be different," said Jane, twitching a bit as she got the full attention of this bunch—except for Tony, who kept staring down at his pizza, thinking. The back of his brain watched through the cameras instead. "Uh—I mean, it's one of the things we've worked out." She gestured between herself and Bruce, and then included Tony almost as an afterthought.
"So it may or may not have any use," Hill noted, pen scratching.
"Or it could let us be more flexible in our solutions," said Bruce.
"We'll need to exchange more scientists," said Steve firmly. "That's always been the plan. Deputy Director, do we have approval to go ahead?"
"If we don't, we risk losing both initiative and control," said Natasha. "Toni Stark with extremis was wandering around our world most of today. 3490 is a player now and they will act to respond to Thanos." She wasn't saying it to Hill, Tony realized. She was saying it to Steve—and she wasn't saying it to try to convince anyone. It was just a statement of fact...
Does she think—!?
No, he realized when Steve and Hill both nodded, playing along in the same fashion. Tony made himself look down, resisting the urge to directly tamper with his heart-rate to bring it back to baseline. This wasn't anything more than the usual power-plays of SHIELD. He should have wondered earlier why Fury had let an unknown factor with extremis loose with so little debriefing. Hell of a gamble.
Well, Fury made those.
"Fury's meeting with the Council now," said Hill. "I'm sure he'll have that argument in mind." She pointed her pen at Clint and Natasha. "Synopsis, now. And no input from either of you," she added to Steve and Jane.
Tony picked at his pizza—real New York pizza; it deserved better than the attention he was giving it. Most of his brain retreated down to lab four. The scientists' readings on the Mandarin's rings were were giving a whole ocean of data that didn't make a drop of sense... by the rules of physics as they knew them, anyway. But either Thanos was twisting those, now, or something else was. It wasn't just formal logic that was changing; things at the fundamental levels of physics were now—wrong. Illogical. Contradictory. It hadn't affected anything on a macro level yet, but...
He took a bite of pizza so that he had an excuse to swallow the lump in his throat. If everything was changing—he started setting up loops, simulations, branching off part of himself to hook into the extremis banks in his own lab and run them from there, constant updates, but he saved a copy in his own hardware in case he needed to go off-world again, too. If things changed too much, everything they had could fall apart—
Hang on before you convince yourself the sky is falling. It's not like the numbers changed.
Things were wrong, paradoxical—but it wasn't like they were finding contradictions between now and what had been. If reality was breaking down, it was doing so—already had been doing so—
The time-differential shouldn't matter.
He set the simulations to run anyway. No point in being caught off-guard.
One of his watchdog programs pinged his attention, drawing him aside, and he abandoned what he was doing with lab four's computers, spinning his brain out until the underground commissary seemed very far away. His mind was in the neon lights, the flash-bulb glare... the cameras rolling on Tonight with Montegue Hale as the titular show-host said, "—with the most insight on the planet into the infamous creator of the Nanovirus—please welcome Ms. Virginia 'Pepper' Potts!"
She walked onstage to applause that was half-hearted, more shocked than anything else. God, she was beautiful. All confidence and command, not a hint of nervousness, even though she was flushed beneath the heat of the lights and her makeup and her immaculate white business suit. She didn't give a damn what the live audience was doing, and every person in that room could feel it... every person watching live in on TVs across North America.
"Thank you, it's good to be here," she said, shaking Hale's hand and then—because Hale was a pig—accepting the hug that he pulled her into, kissing his cheek with complete decorum. "It's good to be back in America, and not be running from my own government anymore."
Hale leaned in eagerly as they found their seats. "Wow, okay, we can start there. You're saying that all those crazy rumours, about you being 'disappeared'—"
"They were very nearly true," she agreed smoothly. "I was detained without charges, and in the hours before my escape I was restricted from access to lawyers. All my assets were illegally seized and frozen—everything I have now is, you could say, 'borrowed'—"
The alert was pinging him steadily now: announcements on Twitter, mostly. His watchdog didn't track all mentions of her—she had whole hateboards dedicated to her, just like he did—but rather sightings and feasible threats. After a moment of frozen shock, he disabled alerts relating to the former. He damn well knew where she was now.
"Okay, okay, but hang on, back up," said Hale. "Start us at the beginning, Pepper. This begins with the nanoplague. What everyone really wants to know—I mean, you probably told the government the answer to this question, but good luck getting them to release anything to the public—did you know? And was Stark's death really a suicide?"
Somebody passed him a pizza-box, headed toward Steve. Tony took it without thinking and handed it over.
"Tony blew his head off with one of his own weapons," said Pepper. She blinked twice, rapidly, and that was it. "I can attest... that was definitely suicide. What surrounded it—leading up to it, and the nanoplague—"
"So did you know something about the nanoplague leading up to it? They were linked," said Hale, and he was leaning forward eagerly now.
A nudge to his ribs: somebody's elbow. "Hey, Tony. Break-time."
"The nanoplague—god, you know, I just, I hate that word—" And for a moment she looked righteously angry, and everything in Tony's brain was throwing up warning signs. But she wasn't wearing an earpiece, and he couldn't say anything to her. "Look, whether or not I knew, it wasn't a plague. That was a bunch of disgruntled ex-con employees, and frankly the greatest tragedy to come out of this entire thing is that the work being done on the extremis enhancile will now be shelved for another ten, twenty years because everyone is freaking out about it. With this type of nanotechnology, world hunger could have been eliminated in less time than everyone's now, instead, going to spend freaking out about this—I can see you think that's crazy."
Actually, Hale looked like he was having a dream come true, the celebrity ex-CEO of Stark Industries fucking up beyond belief on his show, and he made little mollifying gestures indicating Pepper should keep going, even though she'd already just kept on talking. "Extremis would have allowed us to overcome the limitations of the body: disease, old age, so-called human limits. In two years—which you might say is ambitious, but it would take less time than you'd think—everyone on this planet could have had extremis, and it would be a gift. This is a game-changer, and this set-back may have slowed it down, but eventually we as humans will have to embrace this technology. It's not a plague. It's the future."
Far away: Steve was starting to look concerned. Tony opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it again. If SHIELD cut the broadcast now, they would—no. SHIELD wouldn't cut the broadcast now. There was not a single damn 'accident' that they could have now that wouldn't send the entire media up in flames. He should say—something—
Hale looked over the moon. "That's a pretty radical view, I have to say. I mean, there's a body-count for this thing, and it's not small—"
"Tony wanted to get out of weapons technology because he didn't like feeling responsible for the body count," Pepper cut across him. "I told him no. I still think he was wrong—what we had then was an criminal cutting through the system. If not for Obadiah Stane, we would still have weapons contracting as our main line, and frankly, considering the situations that our soldiers in combat zones face, yes, I think that was the wrong decision. But it—"
"—Tony!" Steve snapped, and half of his attention pulled away from the show and back to his physical body.
"What?" he half-snarled back, while in his head—
"Obadiah Stane? Let's be clear, Pepper, are you saying—"
"Obadiah paid and arranged for the hit on Tony that resulted in his capture in Afghanistan in 2008," said Pepper, and Tony felt the words like a punch in the gut.
She'd just—given it away. To the whole world. Just like that. The one secret he'd kept back, even when he shouted everything else from a podium, because he hadn't wanted to admit it—because he'd trusted Obie, for decades.
I should have cut the feed. I should have cut the damn feed—
He'd brought this on himself.
"Report," said Steve. "What the hell are you looking at?"
"Pepper," he said, somehow managing to keep his voice from catching. Bruce and Jane, who had clearly been expecting some sort of mathematical or scientific problem to be occupying his brain, both sat back; it wasn't quite a recoil. Natasha's attention, however, became somehow more total, shifting from viewing him as a target—which, fair, he'd earned—to puzzle. "She's getting interviewed. Live."
"She's not cleared for media contact," said Natasha. "Surveillance should have stopped her, or at least cleared it—"
"Get me media relations," snapped Hill into her earpiece. "I need an immediate evaluation on—"
"Fox. Yeah, you're too late," said Tony, closing his eyes. The interview continued to play out in his head—he wanted to shove it away, but he couldn't bring himself to tear his attention from it.
"Kinda impressed she managed to slip that one by her surveillance," Clint remarked to Natasha. "Wouldn't have thought it of her."
"She's resourceful," said Natasha.
Resourceful. And angry. He could see it now, the way that her fingers moved when she pushed hair away from her face. All her grace, all her poise, was the exact same mask she'd worn for years, whenever she had to deal with—well, him being a jackass—or pushy reporters, or anyone else being out of line. Tony couldn't look away, even when her hands started to shake, and her voice raised, and her flush deepened. Her hair kept coming loose, and—christ.
What was she doing?
The answer was obvious on the stage, and yet—yet—she was reaching a pitch that was getting described as 'shrill' all across Twitter, and—
This isn't supposed to be her!
"Tony," said Steve, "Stop watching. Focus here."
#starkgate2 was beginning to trend on Twitter—a far more neutral term for it than #bitchofdeath. Somebody had started linking macros—the interview wasn't even over yet, that was fast—based on an image of Pepper leaning forward, her jaw 'shopped to look like it was half rotting off—In the future, we're all zombies, said one, and another, Don't you think I'm pretty?
Tony disabled the watchdog program, backed off his link into the feed, and scrambled to his feet. "I'm going to go—lab."
"Tony..."
"It's off, it's—fine, it's—I just have a fucking idea, leave it," he said, not looking back over his shoulder as he stalked out.
He didn't need the armour around him to go invisible, but the only people on this level were those who had been invited to the commissary pizza-party. He shouldn't need it—
He didn't, but he sure as hell wanted it.