Many thanks to miapia1955 for favoriting and following, and pococo for following. This has been my pet project for a long while, so knowing people are seeing it is wonderful.

Disclaimer: I own nothing under copyright.

Chapter 2: Deal with the Devil

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving."

― Albert Einstein

In the Alaska Shatterdome, Marshall Stacker Pentecost reviewed the footage from Portland. Chrome Brutus had been ready and raring to go, but there had been no need for them because these strange people had managed to defeat it on their own. No jaeger, only one of them had any kind of armor, and they killed it.

How?

And wasn't that the question of the day, Pentecost thought as he analyzed the three who actually fought. One was the man in the armor, a red and gold blur through most of the fight. Miniature missiles were launched from seemingly everywhere and beams of light shot from his hands. A man in red, white and blue assaulted it with a round shield, jumping impossible distances and showing amazing strength as he drove the edge of the shield in hard enough to actually wound the kaiju. The last was a man who used a bow and arrow of all things from a rooftop, though he was helped by the explosive arrows he seemed to favor.

There was a woman as well, but she did no fighting and so was of less interest. Though she too was extraordinary in her endurance and the quickness with which she climbed the building that the archer was on.

When he got to the section where the armor went down the kaiju's throat and assaulted it from the inside, Pentecost shook his head. It was an idiot's gambit. Even he made a face when the armor blew out the beast's stomach and flew around it.

The people all obviously knew each other. It was in how the man with the shield jumped off the shoulder of the kaiju over a hundred feet above the ground and the armored man caught him mid-air; how the other two joined them as soon as possible. Looking closer at their movements and the words they spoke, it seemed that the man with the shield was their leader and gave instructions through small comms systems.

"Where are they now?" Pentecost asked Choi, who had brought him the footage.

The man grimaced. "The one with the shield is in hospice, nasty case of kaiju blue," he answered, fiddling with his rosary. It was easy to remember that he had watched his grandfather die of kaiju blue several years ago.

That wasn't good. "And the others?" Pentecost prompted, mind working a thousand miles a minute.

"Refused to leave his side," Choi said instantly, "They're in Beaverton."

It was an easy decision for Pentecost, on what to do. "Get me any information you can on these people, Mr Choi. I expect results in an hour," he ordered and went back to staring at the footage from different angles and newscasts.

They were all American from their accents, two from New York, one from the mid-West, and the woman he couldn't identify the origin of. She sounded like she may have been from somewhere between New York and Chicago. It helped that one looked like a walking flag, though Pentecost realized with irony that it had more resemblance to the Puerto Rican flag than the United States.

Otherwise there was no recognition. Shouldn't he have heard if there were people like this? Now if the man in the armor would just take it off…

One of the crews had managed to catch an image of the people with their headgear off. The walking flag was blonde and could be called classically, obscenely, handsome. The second one left Pentecost off balance.

Just to make sure he was seeing this right, he rewound and then paused when the armored man's face was onscreen. There was no doubt about it. Tony Stark was alive and piloting an armored suit the likes of which had never been seen before.

When Choi got back, the mystery only deepened. "We have facial recognition hits from two of them," he said, dropping printouts onto Pentecost's desk in four piles, "You probably already recognized Tony Stark." The genius's picture smirked arrogantly up at the Marshall from one of the piles of paperwork.

"And the other?" Pentecost asked patiently.

"Natasha Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna, Tatiana Sokolova, Maria Konn, Irina Zlataryova, the list of aliases is as long as my arm and we're not sure if any of them are real," Choi said, pointing at the other picture that was not taken from the fight. It was of a young woman with bright red hair and pale green eyes, unreadable and calm.

"She was a KGB assassin, but was brought in on our side," Choi continued, puzzlement in his every syllable, "She's got a record both for and against the US that would take a full day to read, except that most everything is redacted under orders of the late Nick Fury." He paused, as if not sure whether to say what he was thinking.

"Go on," Pentecost prompted, looking at his Chief LOCCENT officer over folded hands.

"The only thing that's certain is that she was on some kind of mission in Odessa in 2009. She was killed by another assassin there," Choi said with another look at the papers he had dropped off.

Pentecost rubbed his eyes and prayed for patience. Ever since he was diagnosed, he'd suffered headaches. This was providing one on its own.

"The other two are a mystery. The closest match I can find for Robin Hood there is a carnie that died at age fifteen in Minnesota in 1991," Choi said, tapping that pile of paperwork, before moving on to the last, "Absolutely nothing on the last guy. No facial, voice, nothing. The medical paperwork registers him as a Steven Grant Rogers, age twenty seven. None of them were carrying ID beyond Rogers's dogtags and those things look like World War II relics." The look he gave his superior was bewildered as he dawdled, tapping a pen against his hand in the familiar nervous tic.

It took a moment for Pentecost to think on what he should do. "Prepare a helicopter to head to Beaverton in the morning," he ordered.

"Yes, sir." Choi left the office, closing the door behind him.

Alone, Pentecost looked at the paperwork that had been prepared. The more he read, the less it made sense.

Like Choi said, everything but the death certificate and naturalization record of the woman were redacted by Nick Fury, who they couldn't even ask about it because he had died five years ago of kaiju blue. Moving on to the archer, the only record was of a carnie named Clinton Barton; he had died in an accident involving an out of control elephant.

The stack with Rogers's information was limited to the medical report filed today, diagnosing him with kaiju blue and predicting death in forty eight hours. Body charts showed that he had been exposed on his legs, groin, forearms, face and neck, but had no scars or other markings. Dog tags had been photographed laying on a well built chest, reading, "Steven G Rogers. Captain America. 0-704192 T42 43A. Brooklyn, NY C." That dog tag layout hadn't been used since World War II. His belongings were listed, including the shield, which had been signed into the custody of one Tony Stark.

It was Stark's information that really caught Pentecost's eye. There was no dearth of it, from his father's work with the Manhattan Project to his own weapons designs and romantic liaisons. The thing that interested him the most was the death certificate and associated news editorial.

Anthony Edward Stark had died in Afghanistan in 2011.

The large body on the bed wheezed and coughed, shivering even under all the blankets piled on him. Otherwise there was no movement or any sign of consciousness. Not even sleepwalking or nightmares. Steve was too still and Tony didn't like it.

Ever since the super soldier had descended into delirium and then unconsciousness, Tony had refused to leave his side except to use the bathroom. After he sneaked back in twice, the doctors and nurses gave up on kicking him out for the night and instead found him a camp bed. If he was going to be there, he may as well be comfortable.

Natasha and Clint spent most of their time at Steve's bedside too, only leaving to sleep or get food for the three of them. Right now they were on one of those food runs, trying to find anything that was edible and didn't require a ration card. That was a lot more difficult than it sounded, apparently.

It was three in the afternoon two days after the fight and Tony was ready to fall asleep himself. He had stayed awake the first night worrying about the super soldier and the second reading everything he could find on kaiju blue, only to get hit in the face with a hundred percent casualty rate every time. Between the buildup in their lungs and the circulatory shock, everyone who ever got it had died within two days.

All Tony could do was pray and pin his hopes on the serum doing its job. He hated doing either, didn't even believe in a god beyond Thor (and that was more an in-joke than anything) but desperate times call for desperate measures. That was how he found himself laying on the bed with Steve, hoping that maybe the other man could feel him there. Fight his way back.

A doctor came in and gave Tony a sympathetic smile. He loathed it. Every single time they came in they expected to have to call for corpse removal, only to be surprised when it turned out otherwise. Teach them right.

"Any change?" the doctor, a pretty young thing named Matherson, asked quietly. She pulled out her stethoscope and began checking anyways.

"Not that I can tell," Tony answered dully. He rested his head on a muscular shoulder as he read, making her work around him.

It seemed that she didn't mind. That was one of the reasons he hadn't had her banned from the room like that douchenozzle who talked so casually about it just being a matter of time. Luckily the rest of the staff were much more competent than him.

"His lungs are starting to clear up," Dr Matherson commented, surprise in every syllable.

Hope shot into Tony's throat. In every case study he had read about they had died with their lungs clogged, almost choking on the excretions. There had never been a report of it clearing up, even slightly. The stethoscope was handed to him and he sighed in relief when he listened first to the left lung and then the right. There was wheezing and rattling, but not as bad as when Dr Daniels allowed him a listen last night.

The smile on Dr Matherson's face put the murky sun shining in the window to shame. "I'll be back in an hour to check on him," she said as she put the scope around her shoulders and began jotting something down on a clipboard. She walked out the door still writing.

Once again alone, Tony paused in his reading. He hadn't been allowed in the labs because he had no medical license or any other paperwork proving that he knew anything about the human body. Nothing he was doing was helping and he had never felt so helpless. "Come back, Steve," he whispered.

When that produced no results, Tony sat up and glared down at the ridiculously handsome face that was so lax with sleep. If it weren't for the tubes providing oxygen, it would have looked like he was taking a nap after getting caught in one of Clint's pranks. "You survived seventy years in the ice and weaponized septicemic plague and anthrax straight to the face," he hissed, "If you get killed by some goddamned alien blood getting up your nose, I'm gonna bring you back just so that I can kill you again." He poked the chest and was gratified to feel it rise against his fingertip.

"I think that you owe the world an explanation, Mr Stark," said an unfamiliar British accent from the door, "And not just for what I heard you say."

Tony turned his head to give the man at the door a dirty look. "Eavesdropping is rude, you know," he snapped.

The man entered the room and shut the door behind him. Between the haircut and the stars on his suit, this guy screamed military. And he wasn't cannon fodder either, four brass stars gleamed from his collar. What was he here for? What did he want with Cap?

"Is it eavesdropping if the door was open?" the man asked hypothetically before getting serious. "I am Marshall Stacker Pentecost. I run the Anchorage Shatterdome of the jaeger program." Dark eyes looked all around the room before settling on Tony again. "Where are your friends?"

Warily Tony positioned himself between the Marshall and Cap's vulnerable body. "Trying to get food," he answered roughly, "What's it to you?" His mind worked overtime, wondering what kind of shit was going to hit the fan now.

The man sat down without invitation on the chair Natasha usually occupied. "It took the military six days to take down the first kaiju. That was a Category One, the weakest we've seen. You and your friends took on a Category Three and won, within an hour," he stated, watching the genius carefully.

"We're just that good," Tony deflected sassily. He narrowed his eyes, putting the pieces together quickly. "You want to know how we did it. What's so different about us," he concluded.

"Our jaegers could be significantly improved, with your help," Marshall Pentecost said. He was asking for assistance, offering a job, without saying so.

It was too bad that Tony had stopped working with the government on weapons after his little trip to Afghanistan. "I don't do weapons anymore," he said bluntly.

Pentecost smiled, and it was a sharp one. "You know, Tony Stark died in 2011 in Afghanistan. A missile he designed hit him and the convoy he was with," he said mildly, "It makes me wonder… who are you?" The implication couldn't be clearer.

Even Tony's brain froze. Dead. In this universe he had existed, his entire life was probably the same, except that in this universe the terrorists hadn't gotten greedy. It was a sobering look at what could have happened to him.

Except that there were more pressing concerns right now. He was being accused of identity theft, except that it really was him. How could he…? Tony could only hope that Spangles and Widow wouldn't kill him for this. "Is there a word for when the truth is stranger than fiction?" he asked. It took an enormous amount of effort to not look as exhausted and aggravated as he really was.

"Not that I'm aware of," Pentecost answered with a raised eyebrow. He looked remarkably relaxed, all things considered. Time to shake that up.

"Well there should be. Because you won't believe me, even though this is the honest to Odin truth," Tony rambled. It felt like he was announcing all over again that he was Iron Man when he said, "We- me, Nat, Clint and Steve- are from an alternate universe."

The silence that pressed in on them made Tony itch to keep talking. He refused, instead meeting the Marshall's eyes stubbornly. Only the sounds of medical personnel from the hall kept it from being absolute.

"Prove it," Pentecost challenged him quietly. His eyes dared Tony to lie, to not be able to back up his ridiculous story.

"In our universe, there aren't any kaiju. There are a whole bunch of nutheads that like trying to take over the world, but none of this sort of shit. That's confined to comics and tv. You have jaegers and we have superheroes," Tony said, adding, "We are superheroes. You say that Tony Stark died in Afghanistan. You probably have pictures." He swallowed the bile that crept up his throat at what he was about to do.

In response, Pentecost showed him an autopsy photo. Seeing his own face and body on the slab was surreal. But it showed what Tony was looking for, the wounds that killed him. They were the same as the scars on his torso.

"Compare," he said, and pulled his shirts off over his head. The light of the arc reactor shone blue on the man's face, but it was the scars that he meant to show off. "My scars are the same as the injuries that killed the Tony Stark of your universe," he pointed out, fingering the raised lines with a tight smirk.

The Marshall analyzed them without a second look at the arc reactor, which was both a pity and a relief. "How did you survive where he didn't?" he asked, voice hard.

Self-conscious and vulnerable, Tony pulled his shirts back on. "We were both attacked by the Ten Rings on orders of Obadiah Stane, but I got lucky. They got greedy," he said with a shadow of a grin, "They made a doctor rig up an electromagnet that would keep the metal he couldn't remove from puncturing my heart, so that they could try to make me manufacture weapons for them. Instead I made a suit of armor and blasted my way out." He didn't say anything about the car battery or the crushing despair, the certainty that he was going to die there no matter that he had been kept alive for a reason. He didn't mention Yensin's death or the effect that had on him.

But the Marshall seemed to understand. The look in his eyes shifted and his voice was less combative as he asked, "And the others?"

"That all depends on what happened to them in this reality," Tony said reasonably. He wasn't about to give up information for free.

"The woman was killed in Odessa in 2009 on a mission for the CIA. Otherwise, we know almost nothing about her," Pentecost said carefully, "Not even her real name."

Tony snorted. No matter what reality they were in, Nat was a mystery.

Beside him, Steve panted harshly and coughed in his sleep. Blue flecked his lips. Was it getting lighter? Tony wiped it off with a tissue anyways.

"I don't know her real name either," Tony said with a roll of his eyes, "I do know that she lived through that. The scientist she was supposed to protect died, but help got there in time for her." A beat. "Wait, the CIA?" He frowned, not sure what was going on. Were there more differences than he thought?

"Yes, the CIA," Pentecost confirmed. He leaned forward now, a crease developing between his eyebrows.

"In our universe she works for SHIELD. Never the CIA," Tony said cautiously.

This time Pentecost was the one confused. "I've never heard of that organization. Are they a security force?" he asked.

Tony's breath went quick. Things were more different than he thought. "How about HYDRA?" he asked quickly. The moment that the Marshall shook his head, he was getting an idea of just how far back the divergence started. "The Tesseract?" he finally prompted.

"Never heard of it," Pentecost said, "Is there any reason you're asking?" He seemed doubtful that it was anything other than nonsense or a distraction.

"I think I've figured out where the divergences happened," Tony said with a sigh. He scrubbed his hands over his eyes, wishing that this was some awful dream and he would wake up to Dummy spraying him with a fire extinguisher.

The Marshall folded his hands and leaned back, getting comfortable for the story. "Go on," he said quietly.

"This will make me sound even crazier, but the Norse gods are real, at least in our universe. I don't know about this one," Tony said, making a vague gesture at the room around him, "They left behind an object called the Tesseract. It's… powerful. The most powerful thing I've ever seen and I'm in the energy business back home. That in turn led to the creation of HYDRA, the Nazi deep science division in World War II, led by a man obsessed with getting it and using it. He did find it, and did use it. In order to combat him, the SSR rescued the man who had been forced to turn that man into something more than human." He grimaced at the descriptions he had heard about Red Skull, from Aunt Peggy as well as the documents he had hacked.

The Marshall was making no indications of his feelings. Whether he believed the insanity spewing out of Tony's mouth remained to be seen.

To that end, Tony continued. "To combat the threat, the SSR, including my father, initiated Project Rebirth, to make their own super-soldier, and hope that it was a success instead of the mess that the other guy's attempt turned into," he continued, "That's where Steve comes in. He was the test subject, and it worked. He turned from a skinny asthmatic into this and led a team to take down HYDRA. He was lost in the final battle between HYDRA and the SSR and was the inspiration behind the founding of SHIELD. Clint didn't die however he did here and brought in Nat instead of killing her like he was supposed to. I didn't die in Afghanistan, we found Cap in the ice, and then the universe nearly ended but we, an enormous green rage-monster and the Norse god of thunder saved the day. We were putting a sorcerer in his place when we got sucked into a portal and ended up here." It didn't escape his notice that the Marshall's eyes narrowed slightly at the name Clint. Was he familiar?

"Clint, you say?" Pentecost asked.

"Yeah," Tony confirmed, "Know him?" If they had to deal with a second Hawkeye, he was gonna flip.

"The only match to come up for your archer friend is a carnie who died in 1991," Pentecost told him.

For a moment Tony was silent. "Wait, wait, a carnie," he said, hoping that he heard right.

"One Clinton Francis Barton," Pentecost read off a piece of paper.

Tony couldn't help it, not like he tried: he burst out laughing. "Oh, I'm never going to let him live that down!" he cackled, "Francis!" It was even better than the carnie revelation. Not that he'd let that go to waste either.

The look that Pentecost sent him only made him laugh harder. It was somewhere between flat and disbelieving, one eyebrow raised and his face otherwise completely straight. "Is there anywhere I can find records of your friend Steve? The rest I can understand there being very little information on, but there's no one by his name within his age range," he said with an analytical look at the unconscious man on the bed.

"Try looking for a Steve Rogers born on July 4, 1918," Tony advised with a grin. Oh, the look on Pentecost's face after he finds whatever happened to the Steve of this universe… If only he could see that.

The Marshall made a note of it on the papers he held. "I don't know why I believe you," he said solidly, "but I do. So I'm going to make you an offer."

"Is it an offer I can't refuse?" Tony shot back cockily.

From the smirk on the Marshall's face, he understood the reference. It was quickly cleared. "You say that your friend is a super-soldier and he lived through anthrax, among other things. If he either lasts through the night or wakes up, you'll have been telling the truth and the three of you will go to the jaeger academy. If not, the three of you will go to prison until you're ready to help design and build the jaegers," he offered.

The whole thing screamed of a trap to Tony. It would be reckless to take the deal. "Leave Nat and Clint out of it," he demanded, "I'm the one telling you this. If I'm wrong, go after me and not them." If the Marshall refused, the deal was automatically off. He was reckless, not stupid.

The man carefully watched Tony. He seemed to be making a heavy decision, weighing the pros and cons of what he was considering. "Very well," he agreed.

Tony took the offered hand and shook it. It felt like making a deal with Loki.

The Marshall left after that. With a last lingering look at the incapacitated super-soldier, he swept out the door.

In an hour Tony's life had changed. Again. Everything depended on Steve and his will to live now.

"You've never let me down before," Tony told the body laying still in the bed, "Don't start now." He went back to how he had been, using Steve's shoulder as a pillow and his pec to rest the edge of the book on. But he couldn't concentrate very well.

He ended up watching Steve's face for any sign of movement instead. Nothing happened, no matter how he willed it to. Either way, he didn't mind just running his eyes over the high cheekbones and golden eyelashes and strong jaw for as long as he could. It wasn't an option he had very often.

When Nat and Clint finally came back with trays of hospital slop, they stopped and stared. "What did you do now?" the Black Widow asked, ever observant, as she entered the room.

"Either I've saved our bacon or got myself put in prison," Tony said promptly, snatching one of the trays from Clint's hand, "But first…" He turned to the archer with an evil grin. "Why didn't you tell me that you were a carnie?" he asked, faux hurt.

Clint groaned and face-palmed.