With Bettany and Connelly gone, that left only Downey still handcuffed to the bed. He looked plaintively up at Natasha.

"Are you gonna make me promise to stay before you untie me?" he asked.

Nat thought about it for a moment – or at least pretended to, in order to make him squirm. "No," she decided finally, and got to work on his bonds with the cheese knife.

Meanwhile, Loki and Thor were still arguing. "Why must you ruin everything?" Loki demanded. "Every time something is within my grasp, here comes Thor with his ridiculously costumed friends to take it away from me!"

"Maybe you should stop grasping at things that make you look like a villain!" Thor retorted. "And I don't need my friends, costumed or no, to thwart your silly schemes. Darcy Lewis could do it with no weapon but a shoe!"

"Hey!" the girl in the blue bandanna barged in between the two men. "That's mean!"

"Yeah, why do you have to be like that?" asked the one in the costume. "Haven't you figured out yet that he just wants you to love him?"

"It's not his fault your father lied to him his whole life!" bandanna girl agreed.

"You're nothing but a big bully with a hammer!" said the one in the raglan.

Loki smiled proudly, arms folded across his chest. "You see? These young mortals understand! Why should you have a throne, while I do not?"

"If you were worthy of a throne, you would not need to seek validation from teenage girls," said Thor.

Steve gently steered the three women out from between the arguing brothers. "You ladies…" he began.

"Chloe," said the one in the costume, assuming he was asking their names.

"Kayleen," said the one in the raglan.

"Wendy," said the one in the bandanna.

"Your name isn't really Wendy," Chloe said.

"Yes, it is," said Wendy. "I had it changed."

"Ladies," Steve repeated. "I think you'd better go – this may take a while."

"But it's Loki," Kayleen protested. "All this time we thought he was just having fun in character but it's actually Loki!"

Loki was shaking a finger under Thor's nose. "I remind you," he was saying, "had you not broken the rune stone before I finished programming it, we would be in a proper universe right now, instead of this magic-less nowhere!"

"I remind you," Thor said, "that if you hadn't stolen the tesseract and run off, not only would we not have had to come after you, Thanos wouldn't be looking for you!"

"You still broke it! You break everything!" Loki said. "Remember when Mother gave me a toy flying ship big enough to ride? You said you would play with it for five minutes, and you crashed it into a wall!"

"We were six!" said Thor. "Are you going to hold that against me the rest of our lives?"

Hayley took Kayleen's arm. "Chris is right," she said. "Let's go."

Steve and Hayley together escorted the young women, gently but firmly, out the door to the elevator, then returned to the hotel room to make sure the door was closed and locked behind them. Meanwhile, Natasha finished getting Downey out of his cuffs – he thanked her, then sprinted for the exit. Steve and Hayley moved aside to let him through, but instead of leaving the suite he dashed into the bathroom and didn't even bother to close the door. Steve closed it for him, and then he and Hayley found themselves standing awkwardly in the little hallway, trying not to listen to Thor and Loki arguing.

"So, ah…" Hayley looked sideways at Steve. "You really are Steve Rogers, then?"

"Yes," said Steve. "Yes, I am."

She frowned. "Did you come to our Q&A panel just to ask me that question?"

"Yes," Steve repeated, then realized that wasn't true. "No. I wasn't going to say anything at first, I just… I wanted to see what you looked like."

"Surely you knew what I looked like," said Hayley.

"Yeah," said Steve. "I was… I was trying to leave and then you called on me."

"That I did," Haylee said. "I probably ought to apologize. I'm sure you were hoping the answer would be a bit more romantic than a scolding."

"No, don't." Steve shook his head. "That was… you're right, that's exactly what she would have said." Peggy would have cried while she'd said it, too, but they would have been happy tears. The future he could have had with her would have been full of happy moments, but he'd deliberately made sure it could never happen, because it didn't feel right for Steve to go home and live happily ever after when Bucky was dead. Bucky himself would have been the first person to tell Steve that was stupid.

"She never stopped thinking about you," Hayley added. "She always thought of you as the love of her life – everything she did, she always tried to live up to your legacy. I know it probably doesn't help to hear that, but the fans do love the tragedy."

Steve wanted to think of something to say in reply, but before he could, there was the sound of a flush. Water ran, and then Downey came out of the bathroom, zipping up his jeans.

"Okay, that's taken care of," he announced, not talking to anybody in particular. "Let's see what's left of Loki's dinner."

Steve could not have imagined Tony Stark, or even anybody who looked like Tony Stark, scavenging leftovers, but Downey crossed un-self-consciously to the dining table and grabbed a roll, taking a bite out of it as if it were an apple. Then he started picking bits of crab meat out of the remains of the shells. "Mmm… he likes good food, at least."

Nat came over to join Steve and Hayley. "So much for your romantic moment," she observed. "If this Stan Lee guy is right and magic can't help us…" she paused a moment, thinking about that. "Hey, Bob? Who is Stan Lee and why does he know everything?"

Downey made some muffled noises, his mouth full of food. "Stan Lee? He's the guy who wrote all the comic books they based your movies on. Kind of the creator god of your universe. Whatever he has to say about this mess, my money's on it being true." He stuffed the rest of the roll in his mouth and shook his head. "Listen to what I'm saying! It's finally happened! I've snapped! Just plain lost my mind. Somebody ask me." He pointed at Natasha, Steve, and Hayley. "Any of you, I don't care. Ask me if I'm Tony Stark."

Steve looked at the women. They seemed worried. "Are you Tony Stark?" he tried.

"No!" said Downey, and then sighed with relief. "Okay, good, I'm not that far gone yet. Susan might still take me back. I should write this stuff down. The Russos… no, no," he shook his head. "This meta shit is more Joss' speed. We can get around to it when we're done with Avengers: the Musical. Oh, or better yet! Wes Craven!" He grinned.

Not far away, Thor and Loki's argument was winding down but not quite over yet. "If we can find a way to return home, I will go with you," Loki said, "but if we are trapped, it is because of you."

"We are not trapped," said Thor. "The universe is infinite, and all things are possible."

"Indeed," said Loki. "Some things are merely very, very difficult."

"If we cannot pass between worlds by magic, then we must seek another way," Thor said reasonably. "Downey, what do people in this reality know of other universes?"

Downey was stuffing more food in his mouth, including the lettuce leaves the crab claws had been sitting on. He had to pause to chew and swallow. "Not much," he said. "There are a lot of smart people who say they exist but nobody tries to get there. NASA's probably playing with some stuff but I doubt any of it works."

"NASA?" Steve perked up. "Romanov – remember when we had lunch on the film set? Maddy told one of our co-stars that he had a call from his friend at 'Actual NASA'."

"That's right," she remembered. "That's an 'in' we could use. Have you got his phone number?"

"I don't know," said Steve. "I might." He took a look. Chris and Donny were evidently at least casual friends, since Donny had invited Steve to go bowling with him. When he flipped through his contacts, however, he couldn't find a 'Don' or 'Donny', and he couldn't remember the man's last name. Several of the contacts were identified only by nicknames. For a moment he considered just calling them one by one and asking, but then he decided he couldn't – they would think Chris Evans had lost his mind, and enough people seemed to think that already.

"It's getting late anyway," Hayley said. "Maybe you should stay the night and figure it out in the morning. You look like you could use a good night's sleep."

"That's a good idea," said Downey, mouth full. "We could have dinner, too."

Natasha frowned at him. "You're already eating," he pointed out.

"This is scraps," Downey said. "I missed lunch!"

"We can't just stop, not when there might be an alien invasion at any moment!" Steve protested. He hadn't stopped when he was in boot camp, he couldn't do it now no matter how tired he might be. If his body were failing him he'd just have to push it harder…

He looked at Thor and Loki, and found Thor yawning. That was right, wasn't it? In this universe, they were all just ordinary human beings – no powers, no enhancements. Captain America could go a couple of days without sleep, Thor probably longer, but these actors had no such abilities. If the four dimensional travellers were planning to return to their own bodies, they had a responsibility to keep their borrowed ones in good repair.

So they did stay for dinner. Downey went through the room service menu and ordered them a great big pepperoni pizza and pasta carbonara, and then demonstrated how to make sandwiches out of it by layering the pasta in between the pizza slices. It was the sort of thing Steve would ordinarily devoured, because his body demanded so many calories. At the moment, it looked kind of disgusting. He tried it anyway, as did Thor, while Hayley, Natasha, and Loki all stuck to the pasta and vegetables, which they ate with forks.

"Barbarians," muttered Loki.

"I'll give you all a ride back to Los Angeles," Downey said, "since there's room in the van and I'll be going there anyway. I'll also warn you, if we run into Mark or Tom – the other Tom – don't tell them anything. Bruce Banner and Peter Parker can keep secrets, Mark Ruffalo and Tom Holland cannot."

"Who is Peter Parker?" asked Steve.

Downey paused in his chewing and a moment of terror crossed his face. "Never mind. I've already said too much."

"It's the kid in the spider costume," said Natasha.

"See, now you've ruined it," said Downey. "What if in a future movie it's a big plot point that Captain America finds out Spider-Man's secret identity? But now he already knows!"

"Then it cannot be a plot point," Thor said reasonably. "If our two universes are so intimately linked, then these things must have a way of allowing for themselves."

"I wouldn't count on it," said Downey. "This isn't the kind of thing where anybody knows how it works. They put a lot of effort into those scripts, they don't just write down whatever occurs to them in a dream. They're already writing Thor 3 and Avengers 3, and what if the stuff you guys know when you go back changes that? I mean, would it change the movies, or does your universe diverge from the movies there, or what?"

"Does it matter?" asked Steve, who didn't want to think about it. It was one of those things, like time travel, that made his brain feel weird.

"Not really," Downey admitted, "but I'm curious. Come on, don't you have any questions about this mess?"

Steve had one, and it popped out before he could stop himself. "Did Stark really think the apology letter was douchey?" It wasn't something he could ask Stark himself, after all.

"Right now?" Downey asked, shoveling Neapolitan ice cream into his mouth. "I'm pretty sure Tony Stark thinks you're the douchiest douche ever to not actually be sorry. Like Prince Geoffrey levels of douche."

"I told you so," said Natasha.

The next thing the party had to figure out was sleeping arrangements. There were two bedrooms in the royal suite – a master with a king-sized bed, and a smaller room with a queen-size. Loki announced that as the man paying for the room, or at least as the god occupying the body of the man paying for the room, he was taking the big bed. Nobody felt like arguing with him, including Thor, who simply stripped to his underwear and collapsed into the bed next to his brother, apparently asleep before he even landed.

Downey asserted that being the kidnap victim gave him a right to the other bed. He put on a set of pajamas which belonged to Hiddleston and were therefore far too big for him, and managed to make it to the mattress before the pizza and pasta overwhelmed him in some kind of carbohydrate-induced coma. As Natasha shut the door, Steve heard him mutter something that sounded like, "it's okay, gonna train in the morning…"

That left Steve, Natasha, Hayley, and the sofa-bed. Steve's first instinct was to be chivalrous and offer to sleep on the floor, even though his sore ribs didn't like the idea. Fortunately, he was halfway through making the offer when Hayley shook her head.

"Don't be silly," she said. "I've got my own room a couple of floors down."

"You do?" asked Steve. "Of course you do! That's why you were in the elevator." He should have realized.

"Yes, I was on my way to dinner with Dom and Jim," she nodded. "I suppose I should check my phone – they're probably wondering what happened to me. I'll just tell them I hung out with you and Scarlett instead and blame the hotel wi-fi for not sending my texts."

"All right," said Steve.

There was a moment of awkward silence. Steve wanted to ask if he would see her again, but he knew he probably wouldn't. She wasn't a part of this and didn't deserve the danger that would come with being caught up in it. Anyway, she wasn't Peggy, he knew she wasn't Peggy, and the fact that she could pretend to be Peggy would only make it more painful. He needed to learn from Natasha's mistake, and avoid ruining anybody's life while he was here, including his own. Especially his own.

"It's directly below here, in fact," she said. "Before I left for dinner I could hear Tom… I could hear Loki talking to those three girls. I thought about shouting up to him, to see if he wanted to come with us, but I decided not to."

"Probably a good thing," said Steve.

"Probably," she agreed.

Again, they were both quiet for a moment. There didn't seem to be much to say.

"Well, goodnight, Steve," said Hayley.

"Goodnight, Hayley," said Steve.

She left, as of course she had to. The door shut behind her, but in the moment before it did, Steve heard her say, "are you three still here? For heaven's sake, don't you have homes?"

It was tempting to go look for himself, but Steve knew that was just an excuse. Besides, Chloe, Kayleen, and Wendy might have taken it as an invitation to come back in.

Steve therefore shared the sofa-bed only with Natasha. He climbed in with his clothes still on, since he didn't have any pajamas and wasn't going to sleep next to her in his underwear. She settled down beside him and immediately rolled over, winding the covers around herself.

"If you decide to cuddle up and kiss me in the middle of the night I'll probably kill you," she said casually.

"Why would I do that?" asked Steve.

"Clint did it once while we were sharing a room in Dubrovnik," Natasha said. "He was half-asleep and thought I was Laura. I have a bad reaction to being grabbed in the middle of the night."

"I'll stay on my side," Steve promised.

This was the second time he had slept since arriving in this universe – the first had been a sequence of short, fitful naps in the back of Downey's van on the drive to Canada. Sleeping in an actual bed, even when he only had one edge of it and no covers thanks to Nat's cocooning, was infinitely better, especially when he was more exhausted than he'd been in years and had just eaten a very filling meal. He nodded off quickly, and did not dream.

When he woke, it was very suddenly, to somebody giving him a shake. "Steve!" Natasha whispered in his ear. "Steve!"

"Huh?" he asked, blinking in the darkness. For a moment Steve didn't know where he was, and the first place his mind went was his bedroom at Avengers HQ in upstate New York… but that couldn't be right, because he wasn't an Avenger anymore and he felt… weird. It was like his brain didn't want to get started, like the skin on his head was too tight and his eyes were sinking back into their sockets. He hadn't felt that way in so long that he wasn't sure what it meant, until his thoughts finally managed to organize themselves enough to identify the sensations. He was half asleep – he had just been forcefully awakened, and some significant portion of his brain hadn't yet gotten the message.

"Natasha?" he asked blearily. "What is it? What time is it?"

"It's three-thirty," said Nat. "There's somebody in the hallway."

That helped a lot. Steve felt his heart start beating faster, and the surge of adrenaline cleared out at least some of the muddle-headedness, although his eyes still didn't want to stay open. "Maybe it's just those three girls," he said.

"It's somebody bigger," said Nat.

She wasn't in the bed, Steve realized. She was on the other side of him, standing up. She'd already gotten up and gone to the door to listen. He heaved himself off the sofa bed, then hissed in pain as he tried to put weight on his bad ankle. Nat moved to help him, but he declined, not wanting to seem like a weakling. As he limped to the door as quietly as he could, Steve couldn't help but observe that the next time it came to a fight, he was going to be completely useless.

He was almost there when somebody knocked. Dodger, who'd been sleeping in front of the door as if standing guard, stood up and growled.

"Down," Steve ordered the dog, and put his eye to the peephole.

"There was nobody there when I looked," Natasha whispered, "but I could hear them moving around."

When Steve looked, there was somebody. It was the girl who'd called herself Wendy, still wearing the green t-shirt and blue bandanna, and with her eyes red and her cheeks damp as if she'd only just been in tears. She lowered her head and fiddled with her cuticles for a moment, then looked back over her shoulder as a rasping voice said something Steve couldn't quite make out. Wendy swallowed hard, and then raised a hand and knocked again.

"Mr. Loki!" she called out. "Are you in there? There's… there's somebody who needs to talk to you! Please answer!"

"She's lying," said Nat. "Something's wrong."

"Obviously," said Steve – he wasn't that sleepy. He didn't know who might be waiting out there, just out of sight, but he had a very bad feeling about it, and as he'd already noted, he was in no shape to fight. "Wake the others," he told Nat.

She slipped soundlessly away to do so, while Steve looked around the room for a weapon – or better yet, for a chance of escape. Nothing looked promising as either. Other than the door, the only way out of the hotel room was the balcony window. Steve limped out onto that, and looked down. The hotel was at least twenty storeys, placing the street some two hundred feet below. Steve could have fallen that far and lived in his own reality, but not in this one, and he couldn't imagine climbing down the outside of the building on his bad ankle.

There might be an easier way, though. When Steve and Bucky had been kids, they'd once tried tying the sheets together to climb down from the window of Steve's room, just to see if they could do it. It turned out that they could, although not very gracefully, and Steve's mother had been very upset about how they'd stretched out the fabric in the process. The hotel probably saw worse things happen to their sheets, and in the absence of other realistic options it was going to have to do. Steve went back to the sofa bed and started tying knots.

"Again?" he heard Downey say. "We're running off in the middle of the night again? What is with you two?"

There was a third, even more urgent knock at the door. "Mr. Loki, please!" begged Wendy. "They say they're going to kill me!"

That seemed to wake Downey up properly. "What's going on?" he asked.

"We don't know, but we don't like it," said Natasha. She took in what Steve was doing, and apparently considered it good enough. "Help Steve with the sheets." She went to get Loki and Thor.

Downey rubbed his eyes. "Are we seriously climbing out the window?" he asked.

"You want to check what's outside the door?" Steve said.

Downey went and put his eye to the peephole, then jumped back with a startled cry. "There's… holy shit, there's a great big guy out there with, like, a skull for a face!"

The description was like a splash of cold water, both waking Steve up and intensifying his headache as he realized the situation was even worse than they'd thought. The Chi'Tauri must have found Loki's fans somehow, and had forced them to tell where he was. "Get more sheets!" he ordered.

"We won't have enough to go all the way down!" Downey protested.

"We'll have enough to go part of the way down," Steve said.

Downey ran back to the second bedroom. Steve took the ones he'd already knotted together and tied them to the balcony railing, using a British navy knot Monty had taught him. He gave it a good tug to make sure it was tight, then grabbed another sheet from the pile Downey had brought him.

Natasha emerged from the other room dragging Thor and Loki, the former in his underwear and the latter in green silk pajamas. Loki looked eager to leave, Thor rather less so.

"I do not like running away," he protested, as Natasha urged him out the balcony door.

"I don't like being completely outclassed and getting killed a parallel universe away from home," she replied. "Steve, how long is your rope there?"

"We can make it two, maybe three storeys," said Steve. That should be all they needed… but it was probably better to be safe. "Can you get the sheets from Loki's room?"

She would have done it, but it was too late. There was an explosion, and the door of the royal suite was blasted off its hinges, spraying fragments of burning wood into the room. Steve dropped the line of sheets, and Natasha swung herself over the edge to shimmy down it. Downey went next, with surprising agility, and then Loki, while Steve and Thor remained to face whoever or whatever was about to walk in.

The smoke cleared, and in strode one of the Chi'Tauri. It had a bruise on its chest, Steve noticed, right in the area of its visible biomechanics – this must be the individual Natasha had hit with the fire extinguisher. It was holding its plasma rifle in one hand, and in the other was carrying the sobbing Wendy by the back of her shirt, as if she were a misbehaving puppy. Steve tried to calculate the odds of rescuing her successfully, and realized they were basically nonexistent… but he couldn't leave her to be killed!

Dodger dashed back into the room and began barking at the alien.

"Dodger!" Steve shouted. "Come here! Bad dog!"

The Chi'Tauri dropped Wendy, who crawled into the bathroom and locked the door. It raised its plasma rifle to take aim at the dog, and Dodger realized he was in danger – his ears and tail drooped, and then he turned around and ran back for the humans. Steve gathered him up and handed him to Thor, who vaulted over the edge to climb down with one hand. Steve himself followed.

Even with knots in the sheets to cling to, climbing with a twisted ankle was very difficult. Steve had to support his entire weight with his arms and he could do it, but it was far more difficult than usual. He was only a yard or so down when a bolt of purple energy flew by over his head, vaporizing part of the railing and taking the knot in the sheets with it. The severed end of the cloth was on fire as Steve began to fall.