There was very little Tiresias could do while all this happened – she was in her tiny crew compartment on Brisingr, watching it all unfold in the holographic display and listening to people talking on the radio through Sacajawea's translations, which were not always as articulate as Pandora's had been. She was nothing but an observer here, trapped at arm's length from this life-or-death situation, and it gave her time to think about things she really didn't enjoy thinking about.

First there was her own helplessness. Tiresias was so tired of being a spectator to events that involved her intimately, but which she had no power to participate in. She was so tired of feeling helpless... she'd spent millions of years in space in a state of utter helplessness, fast asleep while Pandora steered the ark across the void. Now that they were nearly at their destination, it seemed like she should have been awake and working. She had been working, and at times she'd been working very hard, but all the most important things had been happening either on Earth or where Polyphemus was, millions of miles away. All she could do was watch.

Tiresias had tried so many times to take her fate back into her own hands, and she'd failed every time. Her attempt to deal with Polyphemus alone had bee disastrous – she'd had to sit back and watch while Jane Foster did it for her. Now here she was again, watching while the Avengers tried to protect her from their own people... only this time it wasn't that she was incapable of doing it herself, it was that if she did, she'd only kill more innocents.

All her life Tiresias had tried to be self-sufficient. Even when she'd been part of a living, functioning world, she'd always worked alone. The lone genius, changing the world with her discoveries – a romantic figure, the type in the stories grandparents told. Now here she was, more alone than she'd ever been, and what she most wanted was help.

Maybe help was what Tiresias had needed the whole time, and she just hadn't wanted to admit it. She certainly hadn't needed any help getting herself into this mess, so she'd figured she shouldn't need any to get out of it again. But she'd needed help with Polyphemus, and now as the Earthlings tried again to destroy her – and who could blame them, really? – she needed help again.

"Tiresias," the Vision said, bringing her back to the moment. "Are you still watching?"

"Of course I am," she said quickly, "but I'm not sure what's going on anymore. What is HYDRA?"

"HYDRA is the organization responsible for launching the missiles," the Vision explained. "They have no quarrel against you, necessarily, but they hope to prove that humans are inherently irresponsible and a single totalitarian government is necessary to rein in our destructive tendencies. They will force you to fire on Earth, and use the resulting deaths as an excuse to take the world under their protection."

"This... is is my bad," said Stark. "We told them you would hurt people in order to deter the UN from doing this, and instead HYDRA went oh, we can use that!"

"It's not our fault," Jane Foster told him. "Oppenheimer built the bomb, but Truman decided to drop it."

"Thanks for the analogy." Stark's voice was thick with sarcasm. "That makes me feel much better."

"That makes no sense," Tiresias protested. Maybe it was just a poor translation, but she couldn't figure out how one of these things was supposed to lead to another. "If they're the ones who fired the missiles against all advice, doesn't that only prove that they don't care about protecting your world?"

"They have already made arrangements to blame it on a group of 'insurgents'," said the Vision.

That still seemed entirely unreasonable. Anybody who would do such a thing ought to know that they weren't protecting anybody! Then again, Tiresias herself had thought she was protecting people when she'd tried to take on Polyphemus alone, and she'd seen how that had turned out. "I will not fire on your world," she said firmly. "You helped me when you had every reason not to trust me. I won't repay your kindness with destruction."

The first time Tiresias had realized she might lose everything she had left, that she might have to give up the ark and its Cargo in order to save these alien creatures from the threat she'd created, it had nearly crushed her. She'd wanted to curl into a ball and never move again. Now, confronting the idea again, there was only a resigned calm. Maybe she'd truly accepted it at last. Her world had ended a long time ago. There were some mistakes that just couldn't be taken back. It was time to let go.

But then the Vision spoke again. "You won't have to," he promised, and although Tiresias couldn't see his face, she could hear the smile in his voice. "Thor, Stark, and Rhodes are going to stop as many missiles as they can from leaving the atmosphere. Any that make it to an altitude of two hundred thousand feet, we can destroy without doing any help to the Earth at all. I'm setting up a transmitter to tell you where to aim."

Sacajawea registered a signal coming in, and Tiresias brought up a holographic display showing the positions of Earth, the Moon, Brisingr, and a point in space where the beacon was coming from. She asked for a magnified image of what was there, and realized it was partially familiar.

"That's the satellite you went to Jupiter," she said. Humans gave strange names to things, but she quite liked the one they'd assigned to the largest, most turbulent planet in their solar system. It meant Father of the Sky-Gods. What a wonderful name for such an object!

"I'm afraid it's time to tell yet another secret," the Vision said apologetically. "Nemo was designed initially not to attack Polyphemus, but in case we had to attack you. We fitted it with equipment that we hoped would be able to reflect the gravity waves from your weapon. If you fire on the beacon, Nemo should be able to re-direct the wave and destroy the oncoming missiles without causing problems on the ground. If it fails, all we will lose is the satellite itself."

Sacajawea's translations were sometimes clumsy, but in this case it was good enough for Tiresias to pick out the turns of phrase he'd chosen. "Should and if," she said.

"We've had no opportunity to test it," said the Vision. "We can't generate gravity waves. Dr. Foster and Dr. Selvig had some limited experience with an approximately similar phenomenon, and we used their data. There is no reason I'm aware of why it shouldn't work."

If it didn't work, the missiles would destroy all or part of the ark. It wasn't as if Tiresias had anything to gain by refusing. "Are you sure nobody will be hurt by this?"

"I promise," he said. "It will not claim so much as a single human life."

She nodded. "When do you want to fire?"

"The exact time and angle will depend on how many missiles leave the atmosphere," said the Vision. "I will let you know."


There'd been sixteen missiles launched – only HYDRA, Tony thought, could even have that many – so three Avengers weren't going to get them all. They were definitely going to try, though.

"Four!" Thor declared, as a rocket dropped to crash in the forest far below. Tony was going to have to send some people in there to clean up the bits. Nobody wanted uranium 235 just lying around in the woods of eastern Europe. That was a good way to end up with three-eyed, glow-in-the-dark squirrels or something.

"Yeah, you work hard to keep that head start," said Rhodey. "You're gonna need it!" He roared higher into the sky after another missile. They had to work quickly now. The air was thin up here, and the suits weren't sealed for space travel. In a few minutes, Tony and Rhodey at least would have to turn back. Thor might be able to go a little higher, but even the mighty Son of Odin couldn't go longer than three or four minutes without oxygen.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen, it's not a contest!" Tony managed to grab a ladder rung projecting from another missile – this would be his third – and began climbing towards the nose cone. This would probably have to be his last one. It was getting hard to breathe.

"Yeah, you only say that because you're in third place," said Rhodey.

"I'm not in third, I'm tied for second," Tony corrected him. "Or I would be, if it were a contest. It's not a contest."

"Yeah? What if you had four and we had two each?" Rhodey asked.

"Well, then it would be a contest, obviously!" Tony told him. He paused to breathe deeply. Climbing was making his shoulders ache – the limited oxygen supply meant his muscles were building up lactic acid. That was going to sting tomorrow. "FRIDAY, what's our altitude?"

Twenty-five thousand feet, the computer replied.

"Aw, we haven't even hit the summit of Everest yet!" said Tony. "Come on, how many more can we get?"

He tried to start climbing again, only to find that he couldn't move his left hand.

Tony looked down. The gap between the rungs and the rocket was meant to be just big enough fir fingers to get through without compromising the aerodynamic shape of the missile. It was not designed to be clung to by an oxygen-starved man in an Iron Man suit. His fingers had slipped in too deeply, and the narrow rung had gotten wedged in the joint at the base of them.

He tugged on it, but it didn't want to move. Firing the repulsors wouldn't free it – his hand was facing in the wrong direction. As stars began to come out in the sky above him, Tony wedged his boots against the side of the rocket and pulled harder. Destroying the missile was no longer his priority. It would just have to keep going up and the gravity wave detector would hopefully get it. Tony had to get himself unstuck before he ran out of air.

Thirty thousand feet, said FRIDAY.

"Working on it!" Tony paused for another deep breath, then disconnected the gauntlet from the rest of the suit and tried to just yank his hand out of it. With the rung stuck in the joint, however, he couldn't straighten his fingers, and the metal dug into his flesh until he yelped out loud. He was going soft, he thought. With the constant ache of the arc reactor gone, he'd lost his pain tolerance.

Again, he stopped to close his eyes and take a few deep breaths, trying to get more oxygen into his blood. Passing out – or freaking out, if he thought too hard about how similar this was to being stuck underwater in a leaking suit while the debris of his house fell on top of him – wouldn't do him any good. He had to stay awake and not panic. If he didn't get himself unstuck, he would lose consciousness and just hang there until he died of oxygen deprivation, or be disintegrated when the gravity wave hit. Neither of those were ways Tony was willing to die. When Tony Stark died, he would die as a hero saving the world, not as an idiot who got stuck to a missile.

Try again. He wiggled his fingers, trying to force them out. There had to be a way he could do this without ripping his hand off. Pull harder. Find the right angle. Tony was starting to see spots, bright yellow flashes dancing against a world that was fading off into a uniform gray.

Forty thousand feet.

The voice made Tony blink in confusion. Maybe it was the lack of air, but it didn't sound right. "JARVIS?" he asked. "Is that you?"

Sir?

"JARVIS," Tony repeated. His head was spinning, and there wasn't much voice left in him. "Help me."

Then the gray swallowed him up.


JARVIS had saved Tony's life many times. Once he'd become part of Iron Man, Tony's safety had been JARVIS' primary function, above and beyond all else. The Vision knew that, because quite a bit of that code was still a part of him. So were the protocols that controlled the Iron Man suits – and when Tony said help me, both sets of programming leaped into action.

It was a simple task to over-ride FRIDAY and take control of the suit. First the Vision checked Tony's vitals. The readings weren't good – he was rapidly running out of oxygen as the missile ascended, but not yet to the point of irreversible brain damage. There was still time.

He disconnected the other gauntlet from the suit and used its rockets to wedge it into the rung of the ladder and twist. The metal bent, and then broke, and Tony's limp body dropped as the missile continued up. It was now fifty thousand feet to the mountains below.

The Vision slipped out of the suit's circuitry again, letting the autopilot come back online – FRIDAY would now send Tony back to the place where the quinjet had crashed. At the speed of light, the focus of the Vision's consciousness was back in space, monitoring the oncoming missiles.

"Not yet," he told Tiresias. "Almost."

Thor, Rhodes, and Stark had destroyed nine of the missiles between them, but that left seven still on their way, heading for Brisingr's infra-red signal. The Vision moved behind Nemo's dish for a better angle to access the satellite's CPU. He had promised Tiresias that even a failure would not claim any human lives, and he'd meant it. After all, the Vision himself was not human.

"Stark! Rhodes! Thor!" he heard Captain Rogers' voice on the radio. "I need you guys down here. We gotta round up all these HYDRA guys before they scatter into the woods."

"Just a sec," said Rhodes. "I'm looking for Tony. Thor, you see him?"

"I fear not," Thor said. "It would take the eyes of Heimdall to see something so small at such a distance."

"Tony is fine," said the Vision. "He is unconscious, but FRIDAY is returning him to the quinjet crash site to wait for you. Go help the others."

"Thank god," said Rhodes, and then added, "no offense."

"None taken, James of Rhodes," Thor replied.

The missiles were still climbing. They reached eighty thousand feet, and then a hundred. This was above the altitude they were designed to operate at, but a lack of air was no impediment to a nuclear reaction. Their engines had run out of fuel and they were coasting, gently slowing in Earth's gravitational field, but with plenty of speed left to reach Brisingr before they detonated.

"Halfway there," the Vision told Tiresias. He double-checked the equipment on Nemo. All functional.

"I'm watching," she replied.

A hundred and twenty thousand feet. A hundred and forty.

"If this doesn't work, will you be all right?" asked Tiresias, but she answered the question herself before he could speak. "Oh, of course you will. You'll just dematerialize and let the gravity wave pass through you."

"Precisely," said the Vision, but it was a lie. He was here to operate the equipment. Tony could have done it remotely, but Tony was no longer in a condition to do so. It would have to be the Vision who turned on the gravity reflector. If he told Tiresias that, however, she might refuse to use the Dislocator, and would be destroyed. The Vision's life alone was less important than the lives of all the embryos aboard Brisingr. As Dr. Selvig had quoted from Star Trek: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one.

A hundred and sixty thousand feet.

The needs of the many... that was exactly what Wanda had been thinking, the Vision suddenly realized. She had never been suicidal. She had never been hoping to reunite with her brother in some hypothetical afterlife. She merely thought her one life was less important than those of billions of humans and Brisings. He hadn't believed it at the time, but in the end she'd been right about everything else: it was her and Jane Foster who had saved the Earth from Polyphemus.

A hundred and eighty thousand feet.

"Almost there," the Vision said. "Wanda, can you hear me?"

"Yes," her voice replied over the radio. "You're not allowed to say goodbye," she added. "You're not going to die."

"I' not planning on it," said the Vision. "But I do want to apologize for doubting your motivations. You are very much a hero, Wanda, and I... I am very attached to you emotionally. Perhaps more than is logical. You were among the first to treat me as anything but a curiosity."

The radio connection hissed with the sound of an explosion.

"I love you, too, but maybe we can talk about it when I'm not trying to shield everybody from HYDRA weapons," Wanda suggested.

Love... was that really what he felt for her? There was no time to sort it out now, though. The missiles were at a hundred and ninety-five thousand feet. So all he said was, "of course. Tiresias, you may fire now."

The Vision saw the sensors spike as the gravity weapon fired. Quickly, he calibrated the anomaly creators and rotated the dish. The angle would have to be exactly right, the beam focused precisely, so that there would be no damage to Earth. He had only a couple of seconds to do it – and then the wave hit. The satellite groaned and warped as the space around it distorted, condensed, and then bounced back the way it had come.

The stars above and the Earth below seemed to ripple like a reflection in the surface of a pond as the fabric of the universe bent. The edge of the atmosphere shimmered, and the remaining missiles, one by one, dispersed into clouds of hot atoms. The Vision counted the puffs of disintegrating matter: four... five... six... and then it was over. Nemo had functioned perfectly, and the threat was neutralized.

"It appears we have succeeded," said the Vision, pleased. "My compliments to Dr. Selvig."

"Oh, no," Dr. Selvig said. "I designed the things to detect gravitational anomalies. It was Jane who retooled them."

"My compliments to as well, then," the Vision said. "I will return to Earth – and Tiresias, you may continue on your way to Venus."

"Will I be allowed to get there?" she asked anxiously.

"We will do our utmost," the Vision replied. He could not promise, any more than she'd been able to promise Tony he would not regret helping her. Maybe, if nothing else, this fiasco would have helped the UN Security Council to see reason.


Jane heard the Vision's congratulations, and it should have made her want to celebrate, but she was honestly just too tired. She managed a soft "woo-hoo," and then tried to lean back – only to remember that she was sitting not on a chair, but on a rolling stool. She ended up leaning all the way back and lying awkwardly with her lower back on the seat and her arms and legs hanging as she stared at the ceiling.

"I meant to do that," she announced, knowing Darcy and Eric wouldn't believe her.

"Of course you did," said Darcy. "Congrats – what is this, your third time to save the world?"

"Her fourth," said Thor over the radio. "Had she not inspired me with the desire to protect your realm, I would never have been able to regain my powers and defeat the Destroyer."

"Nice!" Darcy nodded. "Quadruple congratulations!"

Jane lay there a few moments longer then began to ponder getting up. Just sitting up from this half-hanging position, she decided, would be too much effort. Instead, she rolled off the stool onto her hands and knees and picked herself up from there, her head spinning a little as the blood that had rushed to her head flowed out of it again.

"We should turn on the television," she decided. "See how the media manages to turn this into bad news."

Darcy brought up a holoscreen – these had been hard to work with their first few weeks at Avengers HQ, but now they were as intuitive as using the touchscreen on a phone – and asked FRIDAY for the news feed. Several channels popped up, showing protests and parties happening in various places around the country and around the world, and Jane stared blankly at them for a moment. She had to wonder if this would ever really end. It had been months now since Darcy had first asked about the smudge in one of Jane's images of the gravitational lens she wanted to study, months since they'd noticed both Brisingr and Polyphemus. At the time they'd thought the Avengers would just blow up the oncoming comet and the whole thing would be over. Now here they were after months of panic, politics, trial and error – lots of error – and it still wasn't over yet! Every exhausting victory had brought them a new list of challenges.

Jane chose the channel showing the party in Times Square, still going on as the sun was rising, and enlarged the image. The audio came on with it. Last night, people had been dancing to REM's It's the End of the World as we Know It. Today, surprisingly, the choice of music was Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now. People were pouring cheap champagne, she realized, and car horns were blaring. The atmosphere was one of celebration.

"Ladies and gentlemen," a startled reporter was saying. "Word is coming in that the Brisings have managed to destroy the oncoming missiles without doing any harm to the Earth! This is an astonishing act of mercy from the creatures who created both the gravity weapon and the..."

She was cut off by a joyful whoop as a man wearing absolutely nothing but a red and black hood ran past her, waving his arms in the air and yelling wordlessly as he vanished into the crowd. All Jane really got to see of the streaker was a back and buttocks covered in scars.

The reporter stood there in shock a moment, then collected herself. "Um, as I was saying," she began, only to be interrupted again as a man came up and handed her an index card. She looked at what was scribbled on it, and her eyes grew even wider. "Well! According to this," she said, "the Avengers are in touch with the US Embassy in Warsaw, Poland! They have the group responsible for the nuclear launch in custody. These are apparently a cell of the organization known as HYDRA!"

"Looks like the Avengers are gonna be back in everybody's good graces tomorrow," Darcy observed, smiling.

"Yeah." Jane sighed heavily, and shut her eyes. It was too early yet to be properly relieved, but so far this seemed to be turning out okay. "There's probably gonna be more debate about the Brisings, but maybe people will finally realize they're not as bad as all that."

"We can only hope," Eric agreed. "Jane, I know I say this so often that you've probably learned to block it out, but... you really look like you need some sleep."

"I have," Jane agreed, "but for once I think I'm gonna listen to you."


Hours later, while Jane was still sleeping, Tony woke up.

He tried to roll over, only to find he was tied to a bed – which immediately set off panic bells in his head. His heart began pounding as he looked around, trying to figure out where he was and how he'd gotten there. A white room filled with dim, dark figures and murmuring voices... was he dead? If so, he was pretty sure he wasn't about to be welcomed by an angel...

"Good morning," said a familiar voice.

Tony's eyes managed to focus, and he made out a red face, a yellow gem, and blue eyes... the Vision.

He was in a hospital room. The shapes he could see were the Vision and a nurse who was checking machines. The voices were a foreign-language program playing on a television, and Tony's head hurt way too much for him to be dead. Somehow he must have gotten off the missile and survived the fall back to... hadn't he done that before?

"Deja vu," he muttered, letting his head drop back onto the pillow. He wasn't actually tied to the bed, but his left arm was elevated, with a number of stitches across the top of his palm – that was what had been tying him down. "Hey, Vizh. Two questions: where am I and where is everybody else?"

"You are in the Czerniakowski Hospital in Warsaw," the Vision replied. "The others are busy delivering the HYDRA operatives to Interpol. You were unconscious for about four hours," he explained, "but then slept for another fourteen. Nobody wanted to wake you."

"Wish you had," Tony grumbled. If he'd awakened sooner, maybe his head wouldn't have been aching like this. "What happened? The last thing I remember is my hand getting stuck in the ladder." He must have gotten it out somehow. Why couldn't he think how?

"I took control of the suit and wedged the rung open with the other gauntlet," said the Vision. "Then FRIDAY flew you back to Earth on autopilot."

"Wedge the..." Tony pictured it, then groaned and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. It was such an obvious solution, why hadn't he thought of it himself? Why had he just braced himself and pulled instead of doing something intelligent? "Apparently, I'm an idiot."

"You were suffering from oxygen deprivation," said the Vision. "It impaired your brain function."

That didn't really make Tony feel better. "Eh, I didn't need those neurons anyway," he said. "Thanks for the hand, by the way. Being torn apart by a gravity wave doesn't sound like a fun way to go." It seemed like the natural thing to say, but part of Tony still couldn't believe he was saying it. The old Tony Stark, the one who hadn't yet been to Afghanistan, had simply never bothered.

"You would have suffocated long before that," said the Vision, "but you're welcome." He turned to look out the window for a moment at the trees and apartment buildings across the street. The sky was blue outside, and a soft wind was ruffling red and yellow autumn leaves. Strange, Tony thought, how such cataclysmic events could happen, and yet the sun still rose and set, and plants carried on photosynthesizing like there was nothing wrong in the world.

"I think you ought to know," the Vision suddenly spoke again. "It wasn't me who saved you. JARVIS' protocols, which dictate that your life must be preserved above all else, are still a part of me. Those algorithms knew exactly how to save you, and all I did was follow their instructions." He reached out and took Tony's hand. It was a surprisingly intimate gesture, the one JARVIS would probably have performed if he could. "The day I was born, I said I was not JARVIS, but there is more of him in me than I thought."

Tony shook his head. "Nah, you're not JARVIS," he said with a sigh. "JARVIS is dead. I'm sorry if he's kind of hanging around haunting you, that's not what I was going for." There, he'd said it. JARVIS is dead. He'd said it and now he could move on. "So yeah. Thank you for saving me, Vision."

"You're welcome," the Vision replied.