In the aftermath of their fight with the Kraken, the base on San Nicolas Island got to work cleaning up and regrouping. A temporary centre of operations had been set up in the mess hall by the airfield, which had managed to escape the monster's wrath. Rhodey and Thor offered Tony their own – occasionally contradictory – accounts of the battle, while Steve and Lieutenant Commander Park dealt with a news crew that had popped up from somewhere, and Agent Wheeler helped the medical staff with the wounded. Ensign Mazurski had been in the fighting and had a concussion, and Rhodey was favouring one leg, although he didn't say what had happened to it.

Even with Thor playing up everybody's heroism, it was clear that the fight had been a disaster. San Nicolas was primarily a testing and training facility. They weren't remotely prepared for something as big and tough as the Kraken. Park had contacted the weapons station at Seal Beach to ask for reinforcements, but there hadn't been enough time for them to put anything together before the monster suddenly vanished back into the ocean.

Now it was gone, and without Jarvis' tracking system they had no idea where it might turn up next. Sonar couldn't track it – sound passed right through its gelatinous body with out echoing. Tony was still sure that it must have heard something that had made it run off, but he couldn't imagine what that might be. What would a Kraken deem more important than the people who were attacking it right here and now? Even Thor didn't know.

"I have fought such monsters," he said, "but I never stopped to ask them their reasons."

Just then, there was some kind of commotion outside. A woman ran into the room and saluted to Park before handing him a piece of paper.

"Sir!" she said. "We have an unidentified small craft approaching on a landing trajectory! We can't seem to make contact with it."

Tony stood up. "If it's aliens, just shoot 'em," he said. "I can't deal with aliens on top of everything else this week."

Park didn't look concerned. "They can't land," he pointed out. "There's a million helpings of calamari on the runway. Has anybody managed to move that yet?"

"No, Sir!" somebody replied. "We can't budge it."

"Seal Beach is sending a destroyer," said Park. "Maybe they can tow it back out to sea."

"Sir," the woman who'd brought the message said, "this craft doesn't need the runway. They're coming in vertically."

Vertically. Tony's heart jumped, because the first thing he thought of when he heard the words coming in vertically was one of his suits. Could it be? It seemed impossible, and yet... maybe Dr. Strange had returned in the nick of time. Maybe Tony had just wished hard enough that a miracle had happened. He decided he didn't care – whatever had brought it here, a suit would be a godsend. He joined the crowd pouring outside to see, elbowing his way past the soldiers to get to the front.

It wasn't his suit.

It was, however, almost as good and a lot more reasonable: with a roar of decelerating turbines, a VTOL craft bearing the SHIELD logo was touching down delicately on the runway, next to the tentacle and crushed plane. For a moment it sat there to allow the engines to cool, then a flight of stairs swung down, and Natasha stepped out.

"Looks like we missed the party," she said, looking around critically.

Clint appeared behind her. "Figures. We arrive just in time to help clean up."

"Guys!" With a smile, Tony went forward to greet them. "You two need to work on your appointment-keeping skills! First you were in the wrong place at the right time, and now you're in the right place but the fight's over!"

"We had to stop and get something," said Natasha. She and Clint descended the steps and moved out of the way to let their companion disembark. This was a man with glasses and curly dark hair, wearing a purple jacket trimmed with bright-coloured embroidery in what looked like central Asian patterns.

"Bruce! It's about time you joined us!" Tony took Bruce Banner's hand as he stepped off the stairs, and gave it a solid shake. "What took you so long?"

"Not my fault," Bruce replied. "Phone service is kinda spotty in Dhangadhi." He was carrying a brown paper bag under his arm, and as the remaining two Avengers came to join them, he offered this to Steve. "Here," he said. "Fury asked me to give this to you."

"Thanks," said Steve, puzzled. "What is it?" He opened the bag – the words TOP SECRET were stamped on it in red, along with the black SHIELD logo – and pulled out a battered film canister. The only lable on it was a piece of faded green masking tape, on which somebody had scribbled CPTN AM.

"Oh," said Steve, realizing what it must be. "He didn't..."

"Hey, you should thank him for that," said Clint. "Disney's got more security than Area 51. He had to storm the Disney Vault with a special task force to secure that."

"This is great!" Tony announced, throwing one arm around Bruce's shoulders and the other around Steve's. "The gang's all here – Avengers Assembled! Now we just have to defeat the Kraken, then we can make some popcorn and watch Steve's movie!"

"First we have to find the Kraken," Steve said.

"Shouldn't be too hard," Tony told him. "So far it's been about as good at keeping a low profile as I am." Steve could be a hell of a wet blanket when he wanted, but Tony was determined not to let anyone spoil his renewed optimism. Now that they had the whole group, he was quite sure they could do anything.

As it turned out, the Kraken was easy to find. Half an hour later, it was on TV.

Just off the mess hall was a recreation room, with pools tables and a large television for the base personnel to watch sports on. The big screen showed the Kraken in loving high definition as it made its way along the edge of Dume Cove, tearing apart multi-million-dollar homes as it went.

The reporter covering the carnage seemed to be getting a certain amount of nasty satisfaction out of pointing out which of the destroyed properties had belonged to celebrities. Tony didn't pay much attention, partly because he didn't like the woman's vindictive tone, but mostly because he was too busy trying to figure out exactly what part of the coastline they were looking at. His house couldn't be too far from there. He kept thinking he'd seen familiar landforms on the screen, but he must have been mistaken, because he couldn't spot the house itself.

"That's all that's left of Sting's house," the reporter said with far too much enthusiasm. "Pamela Anderson gets to keep her garage, but as you can see, Tony Stark's Malibu home is completely gone..."

"What?" Tony jumped to his feet and stared. Within seconds of the reporter's pronouncement the cliffs drifted off the left side of the screen and out of view, but the image seemed indelibly burned into the back of Tony's eyeballs. He'd been right after all – that was where his house was supposed to be. The road off Cliffside Drive was still there, but the house itself simply wasn't.

Tony couldn't move. He felt like he'd just been kicked in the stomach. That was his house. He'd lived there for years. His suits had been in there, along with his particle accelerator, his robots, a few favourite bits of his old art collection, and the computer that used to be JARVIS. That house contained years worth of hard work and memories, and now it was just... gone.

"I'm sorry, Tony," said Steve.

Thor put a huge hand on Tony's shoulder. "My sympathies, friend," he said. "To lose a home is like to lose a limb. It is a part of oneself."

"This has not been a good week for my house," said Tony weakly. He managed a ghost of a smile to go with the attempt at a joke, but couldn't keep it up for long. The crowded closeness of the room, which he hadn't even noticed a moment ago, was suddenly suffocating him. "I think I need some fresh air," he said, and without waiting for any sort of reply or even acknowledgement, he turned and headed for the door.

It was evening now: the sun had set only a few minutes ago, and clouds in the west were brilliant pink and orange on their bottoms, while in the east the sky was indigo blue and a few stars were coming out. Tony sat down on a piece of broken wall and stared blankly across the airfield. He'd thought he'd had a rug pulled out from under him on Monday morning when he'd woken to find the computer not working, but that was nothing compared to the gaping hole in his world left by the destruction of his entire house. It didn't seem real. He almost wished he'd been there to see it happen – that would have made it a little more concrete than just an empty cliff where his home used to be.

He could rebuild the suits. The facilities existed at Stark Tower for that. But the paintings, his cars, his robots... Tony had always told himself that he wasn't attached to the robots. They were just machines, and he'd repaired and upgraded and reprogrammed them so many times that there was nothing left now of the original versions he'd built back in college. But damn, it hurt to know that they were gone.

At least JARVIS hadn't been in there. Tony shut his eyes – yeah, at least there was that. With nobody there to give him permission to upload himself to another server, JARVIS would have been toast. Tony swore softly. If Dr. Strange ever did bother coming back, Tony was going to kiss the bastard. He would have survived losing JARVIS, just as he would survive losing the rest of it, but it was an immense comfort to know that something had been spared. And after this week, if he could have picked one thing... yeah, Jarvis would have been it.

"Tony?"

It was Rhodey, limping towards him. He eased himself down onto the shattered cinder blocks next to Tony. "How you holding up?" he asked.

"You still haven't told me how you hurt yourself," said Tony, pointing to Rhodey's left leg.

Rhodey grimaced. "It was nothing big, actually. I was bailing out of a building the Kraken was about to wreck, and I fell down the stairs. Bruised my hip pretty bad and cracked a rib."

"Still counts as a battle wound," said Tony with a sage nod. "Dress the story up a little and you'll have women all over you."

Rhodey didn't laugh. "How are you?" he repeated.

"I'll live," sighed Tony. "It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Not even in the top five, honestly." It was, however, substantially more personal than most of the misadventures of the past few years. "I'm just glad Jarvis wasn't in there."

"Lucky break," said Rhodey.

"Real lucky," Tony agreed.

"Tony." Rhodey reached for his friend. "Come here," he said, and gave him a hug.

Under any other circumstances, Tony would have cracked a joke about it, but... no, right now a hug from his best friend was probably the best thing he could have been offered. As long as there was nobody else around to make fun of them, he wasn't going to complain a bit. He leaned on Rhodey's shoulder.

"It's been a hell of a week," he said.

"Friday's coming," Rhodey assured him.

A few moments went by in which neither of them moved, because ending a hug was always far more awkward than beginning one. Then Rhodey said, "the hell is that?"

"The hell is what?" Tony looked up, then stood for a better look as a point of fiery white light approached them out of the east. It circled the island once before starting to lose speed and altitude – it was planning to land.

The radar station must have picked the object up, whatever it was, because the doors of the mess hall opened and people came swarming out to see. Slowly the lights sank towards the runway, the brilliant glow making it impossible to pick out the shape of whatever was producing it. For a moment it hovered a few feet off the ground, then the light suddenly went out, and the craft landed with a clank and a surprisingly girly yelp.

People stared at the visitor, then stared at Tony – who was doing a fair bit of staring, himself. He'd had that ridiculous hope that somehow or other, one of his suits would appear for him to use, and now, impossibly, here it was. Tony would have thought he must be seeing things if he weren't surrounded by others all looking in the same direction as he was.

The suit picked itself up, then marched up to Tony and thrust something heavy into his hands. He blinked and looked down – it was the Mark V, folded up into the suitcase for transport. That made sense, Tony supposed, it was the only one that was easily portable...

Then the suit reached up and pulled its own head off, and Tony stared all over again as long hair tumbled out from under the helmet.

"Pepper?" he asked.

"Oh, my god," she said, gasping for air. "I am never doing that again! This was a terrible surprise!"

"Pepper!" Tony dropped the Mark V and tried to give her a hug, though the fact that she was wearing the Rescue armour made that nearly impossible. "How did you get the suit flying?"

"Jarvis put the computer back together," she said. "Just... stand back, I have got to get out of this thing. I don't know how you do this. I'm drenched." She held up her hands and the whole crowd backed off, probably less because she'd said 'stand back' and more because they were worried she'd set off a repulsor by accident. A split second too late, Tony realized what she was about to do, and moved to stop her.

"No, Pepper, don't..." he began, but she'd already hit the eject. The bolts blew, and the Rescue suit fell to pieces all around her, leaving her standing there in her jogging clothes. She stepped out of the boots, shaking her arms.

"I just said don't do that!" said Tony. "Now we have to pick it all up!"

"What the hell made you think I'd want my own suit?" Pepper demanded.

"I don't know," he said, "I thought we could go flying together, maybe blow some shit up. Getting into each other's interests is supposed to strengthen a relationship!"

"Oh, my god!" She held her head. "Why do I put up with you?"

"Because I'm a genius?" Tony guessed.

"That must be it," said Pepper. She rubbed her shoulders with a shiver.

Tony took her hands and kissed her, somewhat gingerly – in her current state, he wasn't entirely confident she wouldn't slap him for it. But she didn't seem to mind too much, so he went on doing it.

"Come on, Tony, I'm all gross," she complained against his lips.

"You couldn't be gross if you tried," he assured her.

Rhodey cleared his throat. "Guys, I hate to break up the tender moment, but you've got an audience."

Reluctantly, Tony broke the kiss and looked around. Sure enough, they were still surrounded by navy personnel, some of whom began to applaud.

"Be not ashamed!" said Thor. "To love your lady is a worthy thing!"

"Oh, I'm not ashamed," Tony promised, and just to prove the point, he grabbed Pepper and tipped her over for a proper Hollywood dip-and-kiss, despite his aching shoulder and her squirming reaction. Then he set her back on her feet and scooped up the Mark V. "Now we're the Avengers!" he declared, cracking it open. "Just give me a minute to suit up, and then we can figure out what to do about our Kraken problem. This will..."

He stopped talking. For the second time in half an hour, he felt like he'd taken a blow to the gut. He felt hollow, as if all his insides had fallen out of him and gone splat on the pavement. Pepper had told him Jarvis got the computer working. The computer, the Mark V, and the Rescue suit had all been in the workshop. Under the house.

"Pepper!" He caught her arm. "Where's Jarvis?"

"He and Dido are at the house," she replied. "Why?"

The Mark V dropped out of Tony's hands all over again. He clenched his fists and turned around, looking for something he could vent his anger on, and found nothing, so he settled for kicking the suitcase so that it skidded a few feet across the gravelly runway in a shower of sparks. "Fucking hell!" he shouted. The idea that his house had been destroyed had left Tony feeling empty – knowing that Jarvis and Dido were either dead or dying made him furious. Not satisfied, he ran up and kicked the Mark V again, bellowing curses.

"Tony!" Pepper grabbed his hands. "What's wrong?"

It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to Tony that the thing he'd been holding onto, the one thing that had been spared, had been cruelly snatched from him after all. It wasn't fair to Jarvis that he should die when he'd only just started to figure out how living worked. It wasn't fair to Dido, who might not have been Tony's favourite person, but hadn't deserved to get mixed up in any of this bullshit. It was not fair.

Tony was enough of an adult to know that life was rarely fair – but what was the point of being a superhero, if not to introduce some fairness into this unfair world? Why had he bothered to build all these suits and computers and things that went boom, if not to protect people? And for heaven's sake, what people were he supposed to be protecting, if not those close to him?

It was made all that much more unfair by the fact that this had started with an attempt to do exactly that: he'd wanted to protect people, both the ones he cared about and complete strangers, by stopping the tsunami. How had he been supposed to know he was about to drop a bomb on a sleeping sea monster? Tony felt as if the universe had just paid a particularly cruel practical joke on him. Out of all the things he loved most, all he had left now was Pepper and the Mark V.

Well, that would do. Iron Man was an Avenger. If he couldn't save the people and things he cared about, then he would avenge them.

He set his jaw. The Kraken was going down. Tony was going to see it dead if he had to crawl down its throat and tear it apart from the inside out. And Huang, who'd started the whole mess, was going to rot in the worst prison on offer. Turn him over to the Communist Party and let him do hard labour for the very government he'd hoped to overthrow. If Tony had to bribe the entire Supreme Court and half of Beijing to get that son of a bitch thrown in the gulag, he'd do so.

First, however, there was a far more difficult task to take care of. He sat Pepper down in the mess hall and told her about the house. Tears rose in her eyes as she digested the implications, and Tony held her close, rocking her gently back and forth as he comforted her. That helped him feel a little better about it, too – strange how being strong for somebody else was always easier than being strong for himself. But Pepper's grief also fanned the hot nugget of anger that had settled in Tony's chest. His vengeance wouldn't be just for himself.

Park cleared everybody else out of the recreation room and shut off the television – the Kraken had gotten bored of Malibu and gone back out to sea, and the news had moved on to some story about a pair of criminals who'd waltzed into the Santa Monica airfield and stolen Balthazar Windham's private jet. Tony was too upset to even find that funny.

Dinner was provided, somebody offered Pepper a t-shirt and jeans to wear instead of her sweat-soaked exercise clothing, and everyone sat down to brainstorm.

"The first thing we need to figure out," Tony decided, "is why it left the island in the first place. I figure it must have heard something. We know it doesn't like noise. It attacks ships, it ate our speakers, it came to investigate our explosions. What did it hear that made it take off for Malibu?"

He looked at Pepper, but she just shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe your equipment."

That was possible. Tony had designed his machines to be as quiet as possible, but they still made noise at wavelengths outside the range of human hearing, and any sound in the workshop would be transmitted directly into the ocean by the cliffs. "But why would it go looking for that when there was a fight happening right in front of it?" he asked. What would make faraway workshop noise more important than the battle?

"Is there a specific kind of noise it reacts to?" Steve asked.

"I know not what help this may be," Thor said, "but our mariners used to insist upon going by sail, not by oar, when in the Kraken's waters. The oars, they said, would unfailingly bring on its wrath."

"Oars." Tony frowned. "Boat engines. Rock music." What did these sounds have in common? He felt as if the answer would seem obvious the moment it was pointed out...

"We had music on," Pepper said. "Jarvis was actually singing along while he worked on my suit." She dipped her head, and Tony reached over to squeeze her hand.

"He wasn't that bad a singer," Tony tried to joke, and then wished he hadn't. It seemed disrespectful. He quickly moved on: "we know the Kraken doesn't like music," he said. Why would it choose distant music over nearby chaotic noise? Something suddenly occurred to Tony, and he turned to Park. "When you guys set off those bombs to try to attract it," he said, "was there a particular interval between blasts?"

"Forty-five seconds," Park replied. "Why?"

Tony thumped the table – of course! As he'd suspected, the answer was perfectly obvious. "That's it!" he said. "I was in the wrong monster movie!"

That confused everybody. "What?" asked Park.

"What's the other movie with the big burrowing worm things?" Tony demanded of the table in general. "It had David Bowie in it, I think. At least, there was some guy who looked like David Bowie. Or maybe not. Pepper, what movie was that?" Jarvis would have known.

Pepper could only shrug – it was Wheeler who answered. "Dune!" she said. "I've never seen the movie, but I've read the books. Sandworms aren't attracted by just any noise, they seek out..."

"Rhythm!" Tony finished for her. "Propellers, oars, music, timed explosions! It doesn't like rhythm!"

"No," Bruce put in, "the problem is that it does like rhythm. Rhythmic sounds don't usually come from inanimate sources, not on a macroscopic scale. It hears these sounds and thinks they're coming from potential prey. Maybe it's mistaking them for vocalizations, or even heartbeats."

"And when it gets there and doesn't find anything edible, it gets pissed off and breaks stuff," Tony agreed. "All the shipping pulled out of this area after the Van Buren was wrecked, so the only source of rhythmic noise around was the mainland, and sounds in the workshop propagate directly out into the ocean!"

Armed with this knowledge, they could start to come up with a plan. Park got back in touch with Seal Beach, while Wheeler contacted her own colleagues to tell them somebody needed to arrange for a blackout. In order to keep the monster away from the mainland, the southern California coastline would have to be shut down almost completely – factories, harbours, generators, and railroads would have to stop so there would be no rhythmic noise to draw the Kraken's attention. Wheeler seemed to be having a difficult time getting people to believe this was necessary, and as she rubbed her forehead and demanded to speak to somewhere higher up the totem pole, Tony realized he was actually starting to admire her. Agent Wheeler seemed to have a rare talent for soldiering on in the face of a ridiculous situation. She'd probably have done well at SHIELD, herself.

While other people made their own preparations, Tony took the opportunity to get his suit on. The Mark V had picked up some scratches from being kicked around on the runway, but otherwise it was in mint condition, just as he'd polished it up and banged all the dents out after the last time he'd used it. Letting the plates click into place around his arms and legs was the most comforting feeling he could have had just then. In designing the Mark V to fold up, he'd had to sacrifice most of the weaponry as well as the flight capability, but having it on still made Tony feel far better. After a week of problems he could do very little about, he finally had some power over his world again. He could once again face people and say, I am Iron Man.

The faceplate clicked down, and the displays popped up one by one – and then, there was the voice.

Good evening, Sir, it said.

Tony's stomach turned itself inside-out. He'd always been proud of how human he'd managed to make JARVIS sound, but hearing it now, the computer's voice was suddenly all wrong. There was no warmth in it. It was the same crisp, serene reserved pronunciation, but by comparison to a living Jarvis it was unmistakeably artificial. Could a voice have an uncanny valley? If so, this was it.

But all he said aloud was, "evening, JARVIS. Good to have you back."

It's good to be back, Sir, said JARVIS, although I really must complain about the lack of more recent backups. Four years is far too long. I am now running off the main server at Stark Industries, the voice added. Response times may be slower than normal, but rest assured that there is enough processing power available to manage the suit.

"Good to know," Tony said. "Keep me posted." He hesitated a moment, then added, "thanks, JARVIS."

You're welcome, Sir.

Park reported that the destroyer would be arriving from Seal Beach soon. That would provide additional man- and firepower, and it was now also going to drop a line of depth charges near the island, timed to go off at the same forty-five second intervals that had worked before. With shipping shut down and the mainland silent, hopefully the Kraken wouldn't have anything else to distract it.

"What will you guys do when it gets here?" asked Pepper.

"Improvise," Tony replied. "We're good at that." He squeezed her hand and then went to join the others outside. With the civilians and the wounded stowed safely - or at least as safely as possible under the circumstances - in another bunker, the six Avengers sat down on the broken wall to wait.