Benji wearily rubbed at his eyes, listing slightly in his seat. Ethan hadn't returned from the Seattle headquarters yet and Jane was parked in front of the TV, sharp eyes scanning every bit of footage for a trace of their analyst.

Or not their analyst. Benji still wasn't sure, despite what his tech was telling him. The facial recognition software had returned the expected result and it still blipped softly on Benji's laptop, drawing his eye periodically.

Match: Brandt, William, Analyst/Field Agent IMF

He wondered briefly if the fact that Will's title of "analyst" was listed first was somehow connected to what Jane said was noted in his file. And where the hell did SHIELD get off appropriating one of IMF's agents for their own use? More importantly, where did they get off dragging his teammate and friend into setting up some secret research facility that blew up nearly three days ago?

Which probably explained why Will hadn't been answering anyone's texts or calls. Benji just hoped it was because his phone had been smashed in the collapse, and not that Will had been smashed in the collapse. But if the Archer actually was Will, as Benji's eyes and the software were both telling him…

This was getting repetitive. They needed Ethan to get back with his portion of their information, so they could actually decide on a course of action. Things always worked better for Benji's team when they were in motion. Staying still never seemed to invite good things.

"Benji!"

Jane's exclamation, half demand for attention and half disbelieving gasp, had him scrambling over the coffee table – who cared if it was fragile and half made of glass, this was important – to collapse next to her in front of the TV. Jane grabbed his arm, never taking her eyes off the TV, face strained and stiff.

"Jane?" Benji questioned. The news didn't seem any different than it had been, just more aliens and screaming civilians and those six brave or insane – or insanely brave or bravely insane – individuals who were fighting them back where they could. Because somehow the Hulk had gotten involved in this, and was even smashing things that needed smashed, and not random civilians. Benji didn't know how that had happened, wasn't sure he did want to know, but he wasn't going to question it. He was fairly certain the unpredictability of the Hulk's movements and attacks was keeping their side – humanity's side – from being flattened like so much road kill. Well, the Hulk, and the red-caped man who seemed to be able to shoot lightning out of a hammer, of all things. Benji's brain started wondering about the logistics of the tech that could conduct that type of current but derailed when Jane inhaled sharply next to him.

Berating himself mentally for letting his attention wander, he refocused on the TV, where the news anchor was saying something about new footage from the attack. Jane's tense gaze never wavered from the screen as she spoke over him.

"I thought I saw…They readjusted several weather cameras to get some idea of what was going on without endangering their reporters by sending them into Midtown, but…" Jane's grip on his arm tightened almost to the point of pain. "There!" she nearly screeched in his ear as the feed cut to a live video. Benji didn't care.

It wasn't the best quality video. Weather cameras were not meant for close detail, but sweeping views of incoming weather fronts, after all. Benji spotted what had Jane so worked up not because it was easy to find, but because of the mass of aliens converging on one point in the video. Occasionally, one of the aliens would break off, flying a jagged pattern before crashing into a building or another alien, or their air sleds would explode, courtesy of what could only be the arrows Will was carrying. There were no small bursts of light from Iron Man's repulsors or the blinding flash of the red-caped man's lightning. The only other distance weapon available was the arrows.

Benji felt as if his stomach had dropped through the floor. "Please," he whispered, voice wrecked. "Please, tell me that is not Will."

Jane's grip tightened, her nails digging sharply into his skin, and the top floors of the building the aliens had converged on erupted into flames.

Ethan quietly closed the door to Benji's apartment, feeling the frustration that had started to mount halfway through his conversation with the Seattle director of operations boiling just under the surface of his control. If he wasn't careful, it was going to erupt into full-fledged anger and send him off half-cocked to demand answers from SHIELD itself if he had too.

But that wouldn't be helpful, and would likely result in more blocks being put in his way instead of less. So that option was out.

"Agent Brandt may be a member of your team on occasion, Agent Hunt, but he is also one of the best analysts we have. You knew he wouldn't always be available for your team's missions when you insisted on including him. Brandt is first and foremost an agent of the IMF and you do not get to dictate how the IMF utilizes its agents. We needed him as our link to that SHIELD project. Now, I have already confirmed that Agent Brandt was not present when the facility imploded. That's all you need to know."

"Sir, I-"

"I have entertained your ego long enough, Hunt. You have your confirmation of life. Unless you would like to be assigned the next mission to Siberia that comes up, get out of my office."

Ethan shook his head, and clenched his fists, glaring at the floor. Okay, if the IMF wasn't going to help him find the missing member of his team, he and Benji and Jane would just have to do it on their own. They'd operated under worse circumstances before without the benefit of the security net that the IMF's resources provided. And even if most of them had walked away with some variant on a serious wound, they had all come back alive.

He'd gotten confirmation that Brandt had been alive as of five hours ago, and he'd already seen the footage out of New York, that suggested Brandt was in the middle of that chaos. Benji would have a positive ID by now and hopefully Jane had managed to get more useful information than he had through her contacts.

"I don't give a damn about Iron Man! Go back to the-"

"Jane, you yelling at the TV is really not helping my concentration!"

"If they would focus on what's actually important, I wouldn't be yelling!"

Ethan moved so fast through the hallway into the sitting room that he didn't consciously register the movement. In Benji's living room, a tableau Ethan was more familiar with in the middle of missions reigned. The TV was flashing images of the battle in New York periodically, interspersed with a flustered looking news anchor and slightly panicky "experts" who had no idea what they were talking about. Jane had a notebook open on the coffee table, notes and times and scribbled diagrams covering most of the two open pages, while she alternated glaring at the TV and at Benji. Ethan tilted his head and then decided that he could ask her about the diagrams later. From the fierce look on her face, anyone that got in her way was going to get his head bitten off, no matter what he said. Benji was camped out in front of two different laptops. Ethan could see the blinking results of a facial recognition scan on the one facing the doorway he stood in. He didn't need to be able to read the text to understand the implications of the photo on the screen and the green lined results box.

Damn it. There went the idea that they wouldn't have to fight aliens to get their analyst back, however faint that hope had been.

"It's not like they know we're more worried about Will than Stark, Jane!"

"Stark isn't news! Not right now! He stopped being news ten minutes into their coverage, after they repeated themselves for the eighth time in a row!"

While he was relieved that nothing seemed to have gone wrong here, which had been his first assumption, this verbal sparring match between his remaining team members was not very enlightening. Something had gotten them even more worked up than the footage out of New York had.

"What happened?"

Benji jerked enough that he bumped the computer he had never stopped typing furiously on even as he argued with Jane. It wobbled precariously before Benji rescued it. Jane spun, notebook clenched tightly in one hand, pen in the other.

"Ethan!" resounded through the air in a two part chorus. The sheer desperation he heard underlying their words made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

"What happened?" he repeated, cautiously stepping further into the room.

For a moment, there was silence, and then both of them started speaking at once.

"I got a match on the facial recognition-"

"Aaron told me that Will was acting as liaison to-"

Jane and Benji glanced at each other; Jane bit her lip and Benji rubbed the back of his head. An unspoken agreement passed between them. They turned back to Ethan, who raised an impatient eyebrow at them.

"Well?" he demanded.

"They blew up the building Will was on-"

"I'm searching for a way to track-"

Ethan tensed as his agents spoke over each other again; not liking what he had heard Jane start to say. He held up a hand before either of them could start for a third time. He pointed at Jane.

"You first. Start at the beginning. What did you get from your contact?"

Jane took a deep breath, visibly resettling Agent Carter around herself before she spoke. Ethan waited mostly patiently for her to speak.

"Aaron looked up Will for me. The installation he was helping set up is a SHIELD research facility, and he's listed as a liaison for the IMF. There's a note in his file that puts priority on his liaison duties over missions for the IMF and the facility he was helping with is a crater in the New Mexican desert right now." Jane's eyes were haunted as she stared at him. "I have the satellite footage."

Ethan gritted his teeth. He didn't like the sound of that note, but it fit with the impression he'd gotten from his conversation with the director earlier and he'd already known about the fate of the research facility. He nodded. "Benji, go."

Their technician launched into his report as if it had been a physical effort to hold it back while Jane spoke. Ethan really couldn't blame him. "Most of the coverage is focusing on Iron Man. There's a portal of some sort over Stark Tower that these things are coming from but no one can seem to shut it down. I found a channel that managed to get a picture of Will and the woman helping some people escape a bus that got caught in the crossfire. One of the passengers was a reporter for the station and she took the pictures. I cleaned up the photo and sent it through facial recognition and it came back positive for Will." Benji paused to queue something up on his laptop and turned it to face Ethan. "Jane's been keeping an eye on the TV coverage since she got off the phone with Aaron. She saw something and I've found the video to try and boost it, but there isn't much I can do with a weather camera."

Jane took over, face grim. "We've ascertained that there are three distance capable fighters of the six facing the aliens," she told Ethan, not a twitch betraying the oddity of her statement. "Iron Man has his repulsors and any missiles he's built into the suit. The large man with the red cape has some sort of electrical charge he can shoot from that hammer he's using." She swallowed, hand tightening enough on her notebook to crinkle the pages. "And Will has those arrows."

Benji spun his laptop to face Ethan. "As far as I can tell, this was recorded about half an hour ago."

With the rundown the two had just given him, it was easy to determine that the reason some of those hostiles were veering off suddenly or exploding in balls of flame was arrows hitting volatile materials in the sleds – or the arrows themselves were explosive – and that meant it had to be Brandt they were converging on.

Benji had been correct; there wasn't much he had been able to do with footage from a weather camera. Ethan was obscurely grateful for that fact, even as the agent in him cursed the lack of clear details. He had enough nightmares. He didn't need to add seeing a teammate blown up by aliens to the list.

"Is…was that…" Ethan cleared his throat, and brutally throttled down the reactions that were fighting to get out. He could not run off half-cocked. He needed facts and a plan of action. Depending on the type of building that was, there could have been cover for Brandt to duck behind or under. He might have even managed to get back through the roof access door. It wasn't like he could have missed them coming for him. Brandt wasn't an idiot. He knew heroic last stands were a thing of movies, not real life. He'd have been looking for a way out, some way to minimize the damage.

And Brandt was very good at spotting the small things that could make or break a mission. If there had been a way to avoid being killed in that explosion, he found it.

"We don't know. Not for certain," Benji answered his half-asked question. "I'm still trying to find independent confirmation, and I'm trying to find out what SHIELD has to do with all this, but…" Benji spread his hands, expression a mix of rueful and frustrated.

Ethan took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. Then he squared his shoulders and met Jane and Benji's gazes in turn. "Pack what you need to blend into the relief efforts in New York and make sure you're both armed. Whatever this is, it'll be over by the time we get there." Hopefully, it would be over with a victory for humanity. Ethan didn't really want to think about the alternative. He felt his mind settling into mission mode, assimilating the information they had and twisting it into something he could use to get his agent back. "The IMF is determined that we not poke our noses into Brandt's missions outside of this team, and this most recent one in particular." Ethan held up a hand to stop Jane's question before it could start. "I'll tell you both more on the way. But if we don't want to get drafted into something that will make it impossible to go find Brandt, we have to be in the wind before the orders come down."

Jane nodded solemnly. "So we're doing this without the IMF's support."

Ethan met her gaze calmly. "Yes."

Benji broke the tense silence with a slightly shaky laugh. "Well, it's not like it can be as bad as the last time we did that, can it?"

Ethan blinked, and felt a small smile spread across his face as Jane giggled quietly.

Yeah, how much worse could it get than that first mission? Ethan was fairly certain this would be weirder than their first mission – there were aliens invading New York! - but he doubted it could be more of a disaster.

A/N: I applaud all authors who can write Ethan well. I was arguing with him and myself all throughout his section. I have a feeling he is going to be a challenge for me.