Chapter 4: Tony
If Pepper weren't sitting beside him right now, Tony was pretty sure he'd be drinking himself into oblivion.
He was tired of being the responsible, got-it-together leader of the team while Rogers was AWOL, too consumed by his grief to take charge. Tony didn't care if he was being selfish. He wanted a chance to grieve too, and so far he'd had none.
He'd been the team's front line of defense against the media and government these last few days, along with Fury. The task was enough to leave him worn at the best of times, but with Rhodey gone, things took on a whole new level of hard.
At the funeral, Tony had promised the world that the Avengers would do everything in their power to keep Earth safe. So far, all they'd done was hang around the Tower waiting for an alien friend of Fury's to hopefully show up and Thor to make contact with Asgard. Neither had happened yet.
In short, things were a mess.
And then Tony's phone began to beep, telling him that there had been a breach on the lab level. JARVIS informed him that the intruder was a woman with superpowers and Tony was happy to let Fury take it from there.
Now, as the elevator doors opened with a soft chime, he looked up, assessing the new arrival as she stepped into the room with Fury and Rogers. Fury introduced her and Danvers smiled, raising a hand in greeting. "Hi."
The others responded with varying degrees of warmth. Tony was sure most of them felt as apathetic as he did. Losing to Loki had done something ugly to team morale.
Tony didn't bother to introduce himself as the others moved forward to do so. He fiddled with his phone as Nat, Hill, Banner, and the Maximoff twins greeted the newcomer.
"Say hi," Pepper said quietly.
"She broke a window, you know," Tony said without looking up. "See?" He showed Pepper his phone screen. A diagram of the Tower showed one of the lab windows highlighted in flashing red. His tone turned sour. "Honestly, I don't know why I bother fixing this place."
Pepper sighed. "Tony–"
Thor's bellow of, "Heimdall!" cut her off.
Danvers looked inquisitively towards the doors to the Tower's flight deck.
"HEIMDALL!" Thor bellowed again from outside.
"He's still at that?" Fury asked.
"Yup," Natasha replied grimly.
Tony followed as the others moved out onto the flight deck. Thor stood near the center, Mjolnir in his hand as he stared up into the night sky. He turned as the others approached. "Heimdall won't answer me," he said, the frustration evident in his tone and expression.
"We guessed," Tony muttered. The Asgardian had only been trying for the last ten minutes.
"Then we'll have to go to Plan B," Fury said heavily.
Thor nodded, turning to stare back up into the clouds.
Danvers looked between him and Fury. "What's Plan B?"