Vows were held sacred on Asgard. They were unbreakable assurances of aid or favour and one who broke a vow was the utmost of despicable. Loki had never liked this concept – his exceptional talent for lying rather set him up to fail in this regard. He was the trickster god, after all. So, it came as no surprise to him when he found his most recent vow, one he had made to himself, in pieces – 'I will never again set foot in the Avengers tower'.
He had only transformed into Cap once – the righteousness was too much to pass up on – and only thought of enslaving small portions of humanity a few times. He was, by his own admittedly dubious standards, practically a saint.
Distrust still lurked behind Tony's eyes, even after all these months of impeccable behaviour.
But, right now, he was alone.
The stones still held fast in their newfound home – the inner pockets of his coat – and glowed with unused potential that occasionally mingled with his magic and ignited something rawer than he'd ever known. If he were honest – which he wasn't, he was the god of lies, after all – this type of magic, uncontrollable and wont to leave nothing in its path, was not strictly his thing.
But it might just have to be.
… … …
Every single one of them had missed this.
Blood pumping, the Avengers moved as one unit, sprinted through the heavy snow of Sokovia. Shots came at them from all directions – someone was really determined to keep them out of this HYDRA base – but their formation never broke.
Tony's suit collided roughly with the base's protective shield. "Shit." Steve knew his reply would be used against him forever, but it was out before he could stop it. Letting his shield fly, he grinned as it found its mark against the skulls of two foot soldiers. Behind him, Nat and Banner dipped in and out of his awareness, although Banner's battle techniques really gave Steve no choice but to pay attention. Bullets flew alongside his shield – and whatever was coming from Tony's armour, Steve never had wanted to ask – and their progress continued.
Nat never failed to chuckle internally at the surprised cries of HYDRA soldiers who discovered the hard way just how accurate the moniker 'God of Thunder' was. Lightning crackled against the cold ground, filled with every ounce of Thor's mounting stress.
The walls of the base came into view. Only a few feet separated the team from their target. But the air had started to move differently. Something whipped it about, sending pulses of it that hit people as if it were solid.
Clint let out a groan of frustration.
"You didn't see that coming?" a smug, bright face met his and winked before vanishing in a cloud of stretched light. So dazzled was he over this interloper that the blood soaking his shirt was the first indication that he was not alone. Nat called to him and he really did think he returned her shout.
"Does someone want to deal with that bunker?" she snapped to no one in particular, kneeling in the snow beside Clint and cringing as the same burst of warped light took Steve out. Banner complied rather nicely, destroying it in one fell swing of his fist.
"Thank you."
The pressure grew to tangible at the arrival of this assailant. Tony rolled his eyes almost painfully as Steve pointed out the incredibly obvious – 'we need to get inside'. Even the blasters on his suit seemed to protest at the presence of the energy field.
"I'm closing in," he replied, mentally crossing his fingers, "JARVIS, am I... closing in? Do you see a power source for that shield?"
"There's a pathway below the north tower," God, where would he be without JARVIS. Dead, probably, killed by being sarcastic at the wrong moment. Though he still couldn't rule that out.
Letting go of a blast, he hit his mark in one attempt and applauded himself as the shield collapsed, leaving him an open pathway to the base's interior. His team fought behind him, but his focus shifted fully onto the base's entrance. The air whipped around him as he shot past Strucker's defences, bullets flying and making chinks in his suit. He cursed them out, mortally outraged that they might even dare.
Nat's voice in his ear that Clint was hit brought panic to his throat. Pressing it down, he loosed a forceful breath and pushed on, battering through the brick into the base. Triumph bloomed quietly in his chest.
The room was eerily silent against the raging of battle outside. Early opposition taken care of, he stepped out of his suit and left JARVIS to keep watch, feeling around the walls at his instructions.
"Please be a secret door, please be a secret door." That childlike glee that drove his more out-there escapades flared to life. His hands danced over panels until he took a chance and pressed one down. To his eternal joy, a door flew open.
"Yay."
His joy was short-lived, however. Steve's voice in his ear – he would later argue to the point of genuine anger that this was not, in and of itself, the death of his joy, but Steve would never be sure – brought him out of fantasy land.
"We have a second enhanced. Female. Do not engage." The words were followed by a grunt of effort and chuckling, then, "Guys, I got Strucker."
"Yeah," Tony's voice was barely louder than a breath, "I got something bigger."
His stomach gurgled and he suddenly lost his certainty that he would keep his breakfast in his body. Spread out across the cavernous room was a collection, a museum, if you will, of his worst nightmare writ large. A leviathan, thankfully still, stared at him in open-mouthed malice. His own armour, his own creation, did much the same, its expression somehow tortured and hopeless.
The sceptre crowned it all. Panting, he felt his breath leave his lungs and an urge to touch its stone gripped his muscles with shocking speed. Shaking himself, he bristled as a sudden surge of understanding for their prisoner/fugitive last seen lounging over a very expensive sofa took hold. The stone almost called to him, desperate to be wielded.
"Thor, I got eyes on the prize."
The presence behind him made herself known too late to shake the twisting that invaded his mind.
… … …
Desolate was the only word for what he saw. Nothing but bodies littered the ground, both human and otherworldly, covered by layers of some faceless enemy's soldiers, writhing through the sky. No light met his eyes, only horror.
People cried out beyond. Begging and pleading for their lives.
Tony's knees buckled. At his feet, before he could collapse, he met Steve's eyes. Any colour had drained from them, leaving behind that helpless kind of pain that Tony had only seen a handful of times before. His lips were bloody.
Although the words didn't come from Steve's mouth, Tony head them, clear as day, in his ear. "You could have saved us." Death swept over his face, swift and final.
Head pounding, Tony screwed his eyes shut and groaned deeply as the picture cleared itself.
… … …
"Tony Stark," a girl spoke to him from the shadows in a thick voice that dripped with angry curiosity. He was drawn, hopelessly, to seek her out.
"Yeah," he gulped, desperate to keep the coolness of his voice. His hands shook. A rush of air and he was on his back, reeling from a blow to his knees. Laughter rippled in the air around him. His head pounded viciously, the memory of Steve's death still bitter in his mouth. For a moment, his vision spun and then two people stood over him, smiling smiles that did not reach their eyes.
"You killed our parents." There was very little emotion behind the girl's voice, but her eyes flickered with pain as she knelt beside him and watched him. Tony swore that red cloud of energy danced around her face. The boy, her brother, did and said nothing, only smirked.
And then they were gone. With another flicker of red and rippling air, they both vanished as if they had been pulled from the aether. Which, Tony mused without a trace of lucidity, they may well have been. As he shook his head in a desperate bid to regain his senses, he wrote them off as another hallucination, although it sat hugely uneasily in his mind.
Steve's voice cracked over his earpiece. His purpose there came flooding back and Tony leapt to his feet, brushing himself off and exhaling. Grabbing the sceptre from its pedestal and casting a last look around for any sign of genetically enhanced superhumans and suchlike, he made a hasty exit from the base, making it back to the ship just in time to hear Thor make a real mess of trying to comfort Banner.
"Not the screams of the dead, no," he began to stammer, Nat barely holding back a laugh as Bruce cradled his head in his hands.
The sceptre grew unnaturally hot under his grip. He placed it cautiously onto a rack in the centre of a research desk, setting up JARVIS to run a rudimentary scan of its components before they made it back to headquarters. He would ask Thor later if he minded him taking it for a bit.
… … …
"Incredible," Thanos chuckled deeply and shut off the display of his ship as it approached the edge of the planet the humans claimed for their own. Quill and his bounty hunters sat, draped, over a set of chairs playing a version of chess that left far more room for cheating than did the original, barely hearing a word of Thanos' musings. Until he slammed a balled fist against the console, Rocket and Groot were barely aware of his presence.
"What, my master," Maw's grovelling had well and truly grown from hilarious to sickening in the weeks they had been drifting through space, but the edge in his voice drew everyone's attention.
"The humans – Earth's mightiest heroes, no less – are collecting the stones. To keep them safe," this last part he said in a rare fit of mocking. "There are now five in one city. Four in one building. Three, I suspect, about the person of one traitor."
"Great, so that makes easy work for us," Quill replied, knocking Groot's king from the board when he wasn't looking.
"Not so," Thanos said, remarkably calmly, "no. The stones have claimed themselves a master and they will not leave him easily. It just so happens this is the sorcerer I want killed. So – your task is to steal the one that the Avengers do not have. Find it and retrieve it. Get back here quickly."
With raised eyebrows, Quill nodded his acceptance and lazily moved to don the questionable looking space suit he'd been provided with. Groot and Rocket by his side, Quill seated himself in a pod, turning over in his mind whether this latest heist might have, after all, been a terrible and ill-conceived idea that was going to get him killed.
No Stark Industries missiles in sight, Thanos smiled. The pod entered the atmosphere seamlessly and distinctly un-exploded, disappearing from view without so much as a drone strike.
In all his years of intergalactic genocide, Thanos had heard and seen many things. Almost nothing surprised him, least of all when it came to his ship, which he knew like the back of his hand. Imagine, then, the unending well of surprise that presented itself when, light years from the nearest planet of space-travelling species' capable of breathing in space, there was a knock at the door.
Sheer curiosity is a fatal thing in the showier of conquerors. Loki had never dealt with this problem – for he kept his conquest sights on planets he was physically on. Nor had even the Dark Elves or Ronan the Accuser. No one but Thanos had ever been bowled to the ground by Carol Danvers in an act preventable by merely not opening the door to her.
Spluttering with well-suppressed anger, Thanos demanded an explanation of her presence.
"An old – well, an old enemy came grovelling, told me about some thief. Apparently, he took something real important. Tracked him to Xandar. Met your daughter there, said you were up to something way worse than stealing from Kree." She leant casually against a high-backed chair, chewing her lip and watching him from beneath her brows.
Baffled, Thanos beheld her for a moment. Now, it is a sour pill to swallow that the whole fate of the universe may have been different if he had not been displaying his gauntlet prototype on the console at that exact moment in preparation for a meeting with maw.
Before he could move to respond, the woman hit him with a dizzying array of light that, as it pulsed through his body and swept his feet out from beneath him, he recognised with no small amount of concern. Her whole body burned with the energy of the space stone.
He was starting to stretch himself too thin – a man, even a Titan man, could only make so many enemies. The sorcerer could be dealt with later, as could the Avengers.
Stone-given powers could not be ignored for long.