Two

The Coming Dawn

Five hundred years before Krypton's destruction, Loki Odinson sat in a chair by one of the roaring hearts in the halls of Asgard, his fingers steepled and a sour expression on his face. Nothing. It had all been for nothing.

"Brother!" Boomed a voice that filled the halls. Loki slowly turned to see Thor Odinson, his brother and best friend, striding toward him with mighty Mjolnir bouncing off his hip, his winged helmet under one arm, and his red cape billowing with every step. As Thor approached, Loki could not fight the smile that the sight of his brother brought to his lips, weak as it was.

"Hail, Brother," Loki greeted with as much pleasantness as he could manage, "What brings you to me?" He had to stop an instinct to wince as Thor clapped a massive hand onto one of Loki's shoulders. Thor smiled as he looked down at him. Thor was always smiling, as if he knew some great jape that he had not yet decided to let the rest of the nine realms in on.

"You have missed the call to sup," Thor explained, "Come, sit with me! The brother of Thor should not go hungry!" Loki smiled but only shook his head.

"I fear I am taken ill, brother. I would not want to bring a plague onto your friends. Lady Sif hates me enough as it is." Thor threw his head back and let out a booming laugh, his perfect teeth shining white in the firelight.

"As if the Prince of Thunder or Sif and the Warriors Three might be laid low by a mere cold!" He shook Loki's shoulder eagerly, perhaps over eagerly. "Come now, brother. Sif has grown accustomed to the new black hair that the dwarves crafted for her. She may even thank you. I know that I do, for a certainty." Loki smiled and waited for his eyes to stop spinning in his head before pushing Thor's hand away.

"I appreciate your kindness, dear brother, but I find I have no appetite." Thor frowned and took the seat across from Loki.

"I can see something troubles you, brother," Thor said. Perhaps, Loki thought, his brother was more perceptive than he had given him credit for. Or maybe he really did look as miserable as he felt. "You know that can always tell me these things, do you not? And father as well?" Loki said nothing and Thor looked at him with eyes as blue and fiercely bright as a clear afternoon sky before he stood again and patted Loki's shoulder. "I shall make sure a plate is saved for you, brother, for when your hunger returns." Then he walked away and, as soon as Thor was out of eyesight, a single tear rolled down Loki's cheek. It had all been for nothing.

OoOoOoO

Three weeks beforehand, Loki had endeavoured to visit the Oracle and so had ventured to Olympus, home of the Dodekatheon, to find the nexus point that would take him to where she would be closest in Midgard. It had taken Loki nearly a day to find the hooded crone, sitting in a stone circle on an old wooden chair and with earthen cauldrons of herbal steam rising and obscuring her. Loki knelt before her and put the bag he had brought with him at her feet, offering it to her as payment.. The Oracle reached down slowly with her shriveled, claw-like hands and pulled the drawstring to run her fingers through Lady Sif's hair of spun gold.

It was not enough for one to present the Oracle with something merely valuable. If that were the case, she would be drowned in rubies and sapphires and diamonds from wealthy mortal lords desperate to avoid their gristly fates or learn how to crush their enemies. An offering must be valuable to the one giving it away, but it must also be a sacrifice. Loki had loved Sif's golden hair. It highlighted the shape of her face and heightened her beauty. There was its value to him. Cutting it had deeply damaged their friendship as well as what little goodwill he had earned with the Warriors Three, and worse still strained Thor's relationship with them all for continuing his friendship with Loki. There was the sacrifice.

The Oracle inclined her head ever so slightly and the bag vanished inside her cloak. "Speak," she croaked out in a voice as dry and papery as the very concept of time.

"Oracle," Loki said as he looked up at her from his knees, "I beseech you. I know the ways of prophecy. I know that I am fated to betray my brothers and my father, that I am fated to bring about Ragnarok and bring an end to all of Asgard. I know these things… and they break my are my friends. My people. I could never betray them. Please, help me. How can I change this? How can I make it so that this never comes to pass?" A long time passed. For a moment, Loki worried that there was no answer. There was nothing to do. He looked down miserable at the ground

"The Star-child," the Oracle whispered, and Loki's head snapped up to look at her with rapt attention. "The Star-child will come. He shall change the world." Loki nodded eagerly and leaned forward.

"Then if I find this Star-child, he will help me stop Ragnarok?" But she did not seem to hear him.

"He will be mighty beyond mortal knowing. Yet it shall not be his strength, but his heart, that is his greatest power. When others talk of bringing Vengeance, the Star-Child shall bring Justice." Justice? What was she prattling about? Loki felt his anger begin to build the longer she spoke. "The Armored Man shall hate him. The extraordinary ones shall love him. The shifters will cower at the sound of his name."

"What are you saying, damn it?!" Loki demanded as he rose to his feet. "Answer my question, you miserable hag!" She continued to ignore him.

"Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple. Superman."

"What the hell is a Superman?!" Loki snarled as he grabbed the Oracle's shoulders and shook her furiously. "Answer me, damn you!" But she did not answer. She just kept saying that word, over and over.

"Superman. Superman. Superman. Superman." Loki flung her back into her chair and raised his hands to cast a spell with killing intent… then the blue sky instantly turned black with stormclouds and rumbled with thunder, snapping Loki out of his murderous rage. Loki sighed and dropped his hands in disgust and trudged back to Asgard in a black fury. A waste of time.

OoOoOoO

"Superman." Loki spat contemptuously. What the hell was what? Armored men and shifters and extraordinary ones. The babbling nonsense of a senile old woman. That had been his last, best chance. He stared miserably into the fire and for the briefest flash, he was certain he saw the face of Surtur. Perhaps that was the only sign he was meant to see. That there was no point in fighting it. That he was damned to play the villain and bring about the end times. 'If evil is my destiny,' Loki thought as his face twisted into a murderous sneer, 'Then evil I shall be.' And if this "Superman" would dare cross him, so much his folly.

OoOoOoO

As Tony Stark's Corvette pulled into the parking lot of the Triskelion, he hoped that this trip across the country to New York was worth the effort. New York looked like crap compared to San Diego. He hopped out of the car, humming Jimi Hendrix to himself as he twirled the key ring on one finger as he walked into the building, dressed in jeans, a suit jacket, and a Metallica T-shirt.

"All along the watchtower…" he muttered under his breath as he was led through security checkpoint after security checkpoint and wanded half a dozen times. Honestly, he thought it was a bit of overkill. He was Tony Stark, for crying out loud. Why would he steal from SHIELD? If he wanted something from them he could just buy it. Eventually, though, the last person in the chain of agents, a chipper young woman named Maria Hill, brought him to the science building.

"Director Fury and Professor Hamilton are right through this door, Mr. Stark," Hill explained with a smile and a quick salute. Not really sure what to do with that, Tony gave a half-hearted salute and walked through the door. Sure enough, Nick Fury was on the other side of that door with Emil Hamilton next to him. Fury with his hands behind his back and his feet planted, Hamilton with a file folder filled to bursting with papers under one arm. Neither of them looked especially happy to see Tony, which was fine. He didn't need people to like him. They were standing in front of a giant cube of some kind of black glass. Tony guessed that Nick would push a button and then the glass would turn transparent, showing him whatever Nick was hiding.

"I just want you to know, Stark," Fury began, "That I'm not happy it had to come to this. Your father was a giant pain in my ass and, from what I've read, you'll be one, too." Tony gave him a smirk and shrugged.

"Yeah," he admitted, "But you need me. 'Cause I'm objectively smarter than your whole science division. Heck, I'm the smartest guy on the planet." Hamilton bristled at the assertion, as all smart men do when someone smarter than them shows up. There was that Richards stringbean who lived around here, but despite both being from California and both going to many of the same colleges, they'd never met. So Tony hadn't had a chance to prove he was smarter yet. Which he knew he was. After all, the guy ate shrooms and smoked who knew the hell what. He'd said as much in that one Time interview. Not that Tony'd read it. Breezed through it, really.

"Actually," Fury said, "I tried calling that Von Doom guy first. But no one's heard from him in years and he's apparently left the country, went back to Latveria or somethin'. So, here you are." Tony smirked despite the obvious attempt to puncture his ego. That would drive up his price point. "Five years ago, SHIELD came into possession of an alien spacecraft. For the past five years we've tried to catalog all the information we could get from the craft to try and implement its technologies but we've hit something of a wall. So…"

"You called me," Tony cut in, "To take the wall down, because, hey, smartest man alive." He took the folder from Emil Hamilton and smirked at his continuingly-reddening face. "Oh, I'm sorry, how many degrees do you have?" Hamilton huffed as Nick Fury rolled his eye and tapped a button on the surface of the glass. As Tony had suspected, it instantly turned clear to reveal a spearhead-shaped enormous blue-white crystal. That was a spaceship? Tony was already impressed before he started flipping through the folder. Due to his accelerated intellect, the childlike glee at seeing an actual goddamn alien spacecraft right in front of his face and immediately switched into his natural state of mind: the tinkerer, the problem solver. It took Tony maybe a minute to read through the files and the lack of real information he had to work with almost gave him a migraine. He let out a groan as he pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned as he dropped the useless folder to the floor. "This is all the information you've compiled in five years?" He asked.

"Yes," Hamilton told him firmly, as though he'd been challenged, "The result of meticulous collection and categorization of informat–"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Tony muttered as he took a small flask out of the inside pocket of his coat and took a quick swig out of it. "So what happened to the crystal and the cloth that were inside with the baby. Where's that kid, by the way?"

Emil's face reddened slightly and he looked down at his shoes. Oh, that was just a wonderful sign, wasn't it? "I gave the cloth and the crystal to the agents who wanted to adopt him."

"And where are they?" Tony asked, arms crossed over his chest and one eyebrow raised.

"Missing," Fury cut in with a tone that said he didn't appreciate Tony's tone on the subject, "Presumed dead. We lost track of the kid, which means we lost track of the stuff that came with him." Tony let out a frustrated laugh and shook his head as he looked up at the ceiling.

"O-okay," he sighed, "Let me try to explain why you people are fucking idiots." Fury and Hamilton stared at him, bug-eyed with their mouths wide open. Clearly they hadn't expected that. Which was the least of the things he was about to tell them. "You had access to artifacts from a non-human civilization, not to mention an actual goddamn alien lifeform under your fucking noses! This whole file," Tony gestured to the folder by kicking it across the room, "Is half-filled with redundancies and guesswork, because no one's talking to each other. This is why you people are incompetent and why espionage should stay out of the sciences. You're keeping secrets from each other so the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. And what has the left hand been doing for the last five years?" Tony got right in Hamilton's face at this point. "Jerking off, that's what! Five years, you've lost three extraterrestrial bodies, and all you've got to show for it is a fucking paperweight!" Tony took a few seconds to catch his breath, take a step back, and slick back his hair.

Judging by the tightness in Nick Fury's jaw, the director would have liked nothing more at that moment than to shoot Tony right between the eyes. "Well, smart guy," Fury said dryly, "Now's your chance. I'll give you one year to give me everything you can find on this craft that can be useful for SHIELD. If you think that you're smarter than the entire science division, go ahead and name your price." Tony smirked and picked a piece of paper up off the floor from when he'd kicked the binder and took one of Hamilton's pens. He scribbled a number onto the paper, added a few more zeroes for that Doom comment, then folded it in half and handed it to Fury. Fury unfolded the paper and Tony couldn't suppress a chuckle as his eye widened and his eyebrows jumped up. Then his face returned to its neutral disgruntled expression and he tucked the paper into one of the pouches on his suit. "How about we start there," Fury told him, "And then I'll deduct from the price based on how disappointed I am?"

Tony smirked. "You won't be disappointed," he assured Fury. Fury smirked right back and for some reason that scared Tony.

"Y'know something, Stark," Fury began to say before Tony cut him off.

"I know a lot of things. That's why you called me."

"One of these days, your attitude is gonna bite you in the ass and things are gonna blow up in your face. I hope to God I'm still alive when it happens because I'm going to laugh my ass off." Tony rolled his eyes and gave Nick a pat on the shoulder. The rest of that day was filled with Tony filling out nearly a thousand pages of confidentiality forms and nondisclosure agreements and spent the night soaking his wrist in a bucket of ice. Yet all the while he was just thinking, thinking, thinking about that crystal ship.

That year whizzed by, almost every day a rush of scientific discovery. The crystal technology allowed for a massive upheaval in the way SHIELD could store data in its computer servers, giving SHIELD the most powerful and most secure computer technology on the planet. Tony also cracked the propulsion system of the ship, which allowed SHIELD to bring the idea of their Helicarrier from fantasy to reality. That one he decided to make a mental note to put in his back pocket for himself, as well as the structural component of the ship's outer shell to make the strongest metal outside of adamantium. That would definitely come in handy for something, even if only as an additive component in alloys. The stuff would be absurdly expensive to manufacture. Tony filled a book with all of the information and technology he'd collected from the ship but the most interesting piece actually wasn't from the ship. Scattered all over the outside of the ship were thousands of tiny particles of radioactive material. Tony collected the particles and fused them all into a ten pound rock about the size of an ostrich egg. SHIELD kept that little chestnut for themselves, saying that they were going to use it for an alternative energy source. Tony kept his bases covered, though. He slipped one of the scientists a couple grand to send him a copy of the mineral and atomic makeup of the rock once they'd discovered it themselves. He always wanted to synthesize an element of his own. In the end, Fury still decided that he was "disappointed" and stiffed Tony… by fifty cents. Petty bastard.

Tony's favorite little invention was one he kept for himself, however. A radar device that he kept on the roof of Stark Tower that would go off whenever another piece of Kryptonian technology was detected as going active. Whenever that kid popped out of wherever they'd lost him, Tony'd be the first to know. He was kind of hooked on this Kryptonian stuff. It was almost dull to go back to his regular weapons contracts. He hoped something interesting would come along again.

OoOoOoO

"Peter Parker!" May Parker shouted as she pounded on his bedroom door. Honestly, how could a boy with his kind of hearing sleep through an alarm like that? If he didn't shake a leg soon, he was going to miss the bus, and the boy had been talking about this field trip for the past month! "Peter Parker, get out of bed! You're going to be la–" There was a whoosh of air as a Peter-shaped blur rushed past her, zipping back and forth from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen and then out the front door. "Peter, wait!" May called after him, "You forgot your gla–" The blur returned to the house and into Peter's bedroom, then back out again. May sighed and shook her head in bemusement, rubbing her cheek where she suddenly felt that Peter had kissed her. "I'll never get used to that boy," she muttered as she looked back at the tornado alley that had been Peter's room.

"Yeah," Uncle Ben said with a chuckle as he reshuffled the blown-around newspaper he'd been reading at the kitchen table, "That's our boy, alright." May grinned and took the paper out of Ben's hands. "Hey!"

"You're going to be late, too," she told him as she flipped to the crosswords, "And you don't have super speed. So you'd better get going." Uncle Ben gave her a lopsided and good-naturedly annoyed grin before he stood up from the table and gave her a kiss.

"I guess I'll get going, then." Ben told her, picking up his suitcase and his suit jacket before heading out the door and going to his office job. That left May alone in the house and, with the time to herself, she started to clean up the house. As she busied herself, May thought of how the last five years had changed their lives, and how much Peter had grown, both literally and figuratively. The boy was only fifteen years old but he was already six and a half feet tall, although they'd made sure to help him take steps so that he didn't look it. For nearly a year after the deaths of Peter's parents, he was a very shy, shut-in boy. As time passed, though, she and Ben began to see the smiling, happy, good-hearted boy they knew, helped in no small part by the friends Peter made at school, including Randy Robertson and Gwen Stacy. Ben helped impart his love of comic book heroes onto Peter, even sharing his old Captain America books, back before they were discontinued for apparently being in "bad taste", which had given Peter a love of comics all his own. Which, of course, had led to a few questions when Peter was about twelve.

First and foremost was "Why can I do all of these things", which May supposed was the most important question when you sometimes accidentally looked through people, or when Peter froze his sixth birthday cake to the wall. They'd had to explain things to Peter as best they could based on the letter Richard had written Ben before he and Mary's disappearance. From that very day, May could see the wheels began to turn in Peter's head. It had all started when the Fantastic Four's ship had crashed. Peter had been glued to the television set on that fateful day and May would never forget the look in his eyes. It hadn't been one of grief or shock or horror as someone else might have felt. Instead, May recalled, Peter had just looked so painfully… guilty.

"I could have done something," Peter had told her as they watched the news. "I know I could. I should have." May had thrown her arms around Peter and hugged him to her chest, telling him that he couldn't blame himself for these sorts of things. Not everyone can do everything, after all, and Peter would drive himself crazy if he spent his life musing over could haves and should haves. Within the next few days, once it was revealed that the Four had survived and now had incredible powers, Peter's guilt was alleviated slightly. That day seemed to be a moment that triggered a shift across the whole world, and with each successive event, she could see an idea form in Peter's mind.

Tony Stark returned after he'd gone missing a year prior in Afghanistan and, apparently, decided to call himself "Iron Man", with a gaudy suit to match. An undisclosed military event had turned a scientist named Bruce Banner into a walking natural disaster called The Hulk. Gods fell from the sky, mutants went to war with one another, devils and cats roamed New York City, and Captain America came back from the dead. May still smiled when she remembered what Peter had said to her Ben just last year.

"Do you think I could be like them? Do you think I could be a hero?" So they'd already started helping him with his "secret" identity, how to act and look and carry himself. Not to lie to people, of course, but to tell them a different kind of truth, to show them a different side to himself.

Not everything was roses, of course. The mutants made Peter worry. Not about them, of course, which was more than what May could say for most people, but what it might mean for him.

"Will people hate me too?" Peter had asked. "At least mutants are from Earth."

May recalled when those horrible green men, the Skrulls, first attacked and when the Fantastic Four had fought them off, and that Blastaar fellow that the news had said came from the "Negative Zone", whatever in God's name that was, or the Kree, or that big purple horror named "Galactus". On those last two occasions, Peter had done what he could to help people, stopping buildings from collapsing and rescuing them from being trapped in their cars and putting out fires and that sort of thing, but she would always remember the terror in Peter's eyes after the events, the question he was thinking but didn't dare to say out loud.

"Am I just like them? Am I going to be bad?"

May knew, of course, that it would never come to that. In her heart she knew that Peter Parker was the kindest, sweetest, gentlest boy the world had ever been given, and when he was finally ready to step out into the world, there was no telling how much good he was going to do.

Once the house was finally back to May's standards of spic and span, she went back to her and Ben's bedroom and dug out her sketchpad. In the upper lefthand corner she had jotted down Peter's measurements while the center of the sheet was dominated by various designs. None of them had felt quite right yet, but today she was feeling especially inspired.

"No mask," she muttered to herself as she chewed on the end of her pencil, "And a pentagon instead of a triangle…" That Ultiman whose comics Peter liked to read so much had a blue suit. Maybe she should do that...

OoOoOoO

My name is Pietro Maximoff. Some of you may know me as the mutant "Quicksilver". I have recently discovered that I am the son of Erik Lehnsherr, the man you call "Magneto". Also recently, my sister Wanda, who you call "Scarlet Witch", and I have been invited to join a group known as The Avengers, joining the likes of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, and Wasp. I suppose there's an archer in there as well but I struggle to remember his name. The facilities at the Avengers Tower provided by Mr. Stark allow me to push myself to the limits of my speed.

I suppose it is prudent to mention that I run in excess of several times the speed of sound.

My new colleagues have often asked me why I feel the need to push myself to be faster. In truth, I have never had a reason before. It was simply to maintain myself and keep my skills sharp, motivated by what a simpler man might call "vanity", yet what I know to be self-worth. Now, however, everything has changed.

I am no longer the fastest man alive.

This morning, as I was taking my morning laps around the continental United States, something… impossible happened. Someone passed me. This doesn't happen. This should not happen. I put on speed, trying to catch them, faster and faster. By the time I caught up to this person, to this blur, I could make out their body language and posture well enough to see that I was being passed… by a jogger. Then, whoever this person was, they broke into a sprint and left me far behind, somewhere at the southern tip of Florida.

For an entire hour I was filled with a numb, existential dread. If someone was faster than me, then what was my purpose? In time, however, I saw that this was not a condemnation, but an opportunity. It was something that I had craved for so long. A challenge. Something to strive towards, a mountain to overcome for the first time since my X-Gene activated. So every day, I run. Every day, I push myself to the limits, because I know I must break them down.

My name is Pietro Maximoff, and I am not the fastest man alive.

For now.