I Can Hear The Drums

Chapter 29

Alfheimr's sun glazed through the trees, putting frosts of light over the leaves that separated the world below, from the skies far above. The forest was not so thick in this part of the realm. The great oaks and hardy cyprus, the kwi kwi and vehla trees parted from each other to dot the landscape in intermittent copses. The land rolled with the underground root system causing rises and hollows. The depressions made perfect shelters for the sprouts of wild flowers. Juniper and rose mixed with the honeysuckle sweet scents drifting across the field. The spot was sheer heaven, which made the presence of the landed star cruiser all the more striking.

It took very little time for the Voiya Rose to find Clint Barton's ship after landing in the palace realm of Lakeheed. Tony, Natasha, and the elves took the smaller jump ship to cross the landscape into the adjoining region of Skydale in order to reach him. The larger vessel simply could not land in that great, mountainous region and it was made obvious Clint would not come to them. Tony tried to raise him on their ship-to-ship communication. He even considered exiting the Voiya Rose in space and taking his Iron Man suit directly to Clint's location, had he not been persuaded to show a little patience. Something great, powerful, and very deadly had affected the whole of the Nine Realms. It was wise for the group to approach the ship carefully, as a unit, should trouble be waiting there for them.

Clint Barton sat in the grass of a knoll, leaning against a tree which had fallen in the glen. Nearly thirty or forty yards away, the landscape had been dug up. Clods of dirt mounded up in an area roughly the size of a large rectangle. It wasn't hard to make the assumption that something, or someone, had been buried there. His back was to the approaching troop who sought him out. He said nothing, never turned, and simply continued to stare off into the warm sunlight dropping down from the clear blue skies.

A wind kicked up, bowing the tall grains of untamed grass and wild flowers. Clint closed his eyes, and breathed it all in. He wanted to hold onto it. Every scent, scene, and sweet memory.

Tony was the first of them to round the fallen tree, and stand in front of Clint. Iron Man's body shook. His eyes fell on Clint's face, and Tony reeled backward from the shock of it. A hand flew up to his mouth, speechless. Natasha threw herself over the fallen bark. She dared to kneel directly beside her husband. Her jaw clamped tight. She reached, carefully, forward and placed her hand on Clint's knee. Behind them, the elves jogged closer and slowly joined Tony.

Clint, at first, did nothing. He continued to rest, his eyes closed, face turned up to the sky. After a time, he began to speak, and his voice had changed to something strangely different. Younger.

"I didn't want to do it, but he gave me no other choice. Thanos… I was a fool to bring Pym along. Maybe that's what I was always supposed to do. Maybe that decision changed it all, and it's really just my fault. I couldn't let him take this place away from me, though." Clint's eyes opened, and he looked at his companions for the first time. The sight of them stunned him.

Tony had changed considerably. The salt and pepper hair had disappeared. The old rope-burn scars from where he'd been hung years ago, were gone. The furrowed brow, receding hairline, and marks of weather and age had all smoothed over to a face Clint recognized, but hadn't seen in nearly eighteen years.

"You've changed," Clint said, stating the obvious.

"I could say the same about you," Tony whispered. Clint was considerably different. He looked like a young man, fresh from his SHIELD days, new to the Avengers, still impressionable. Tony had seen his own reflection in the mirror, and nearly lost consciousness from the shock. Seeing Clint, the same as him, both young men again, affected him greatly.

"I didn't have a choice," Clint repeated. He looked away from Stark to stare at his wife. Natasha held his hand, scanned his face to understand the meaning behind his cryptic words. The elves had come over now too, and stood marveling at him. Those ancient beings had altered little since he'd last seen them, but nearly twenty years resembled only a few weeks in their eyes.

"Clint . . ." Natasha spoke his name, a question laced in the syllable. "Clint, what did you do?"

"Only what I had to," he told her. "Banner? Tell me, is he with you? He wasn't on Thanos' ship?"

"No, he's with Pepper. The evacuation, he wanted to help manage it." Natasha explained.

Clint leaned forward, dropping his head into his hands. "Oh thank God. Thank God, I thought—I couldn't forgive myself if he was on those ships. If he was trapped back there with Thanos. Tony," his head lifted. "Tony, I swore I must have killed him. I didn't think I could ever face you again!"

That broke him. The fear keeping Tony back, shattered. He came forward and dropped down beside Clint's knee. "Tell us what happened, Clint! We thought we were coming to find this place destroyed! I thought you were going to be dead, that we'd never find you again. I - " Tony swallowed back his words, speaking again in a low whisper. "I thought we'd lost you."

"I couldn't let Thanos take this place," Clint said. "Pym wanted to stop him with the Time Stone. I was careless. I let it drop out of my sight for a minute, and he snatched it right up like he couldn't stop himself. I'm not sure when Pym changed. I suppose maybe he'd been possessed forever, or it might have been in Cross Lake. The creature could have found him along the star lanes like we were. I suppose we will never know." Clint's voice trailed off, the panic in him rising as the images of what he'd seen and done struck through him. "I had to stop Thanos. I didn't see any other way."

Rinon whispered something beneath his breath like an elven prayer. He looked up into the clear Alfheimr skies, willing himself to see all that had transpired, but nothing waited for him. His mind was empty.

"The Herald had the Stone. I used the Gauntlet to get it away from him. I didn't see how else I might accomplish it. I'm not that bright. Not like you, Tony."

Tony's breath stopped in his chest. He grabbed Clint's shoulders in his hands, his fingers digging into the fabric of Clint's jacket. This wasn't possible.

"You should be dead!" Natasha exclaimed.

"I don't know why I'm not. I don't know how it didn't tear me apart. I took the Stones, every one of them, and I brought them right into Thanos' face. I used it on him, the entire armada, and I sent them away."

Tony pulled away slowly. "Sent them away?"

Clint's focus went past the fellow Avenger to look at the cluster of Elves. Rinon, Lirrie, Reylano, Linnor, and Faraday all stiffened.

"I sent him to the Dark Times, to the days when the Dark Elves reigned. The only power I knew that could swallow Thanos up in his own greed and malice. No mercy. No survival. I wanted to drown him in his own hate, and that was the only way I could see it done." Clint seemed completely at peace with the decision he had made. "I sealed his fate."

"Where's the Gauntlet, Clint?" Natasha asked gently.

Clint watched the reaction float along the elves' face as they soaked in the depths of what he'd told them. The Dark Times was the worst in the universe's history. It was the age where Celestials died, where Galactus rose to power, where the Dark Elves ruled with a bloodthirsty lust, and the civilizations fell beneath the weight of them. Thanos may have thought himself a great power in the universe today, but in that age, he would be an insect in the Dark Elf, Malaketh's, path. He would be annihilated; him and his armada.

"I felt so tired after what I did. I couldn't stop them both. Destroy an entire armada and a being as strong as what Galactus sent for me?" Clint shook his head, as if the very thought of it was comical. "I made my choice."

"Galactus has it," Natasha concluded.

"I held him off for as long as I could, tapped into the Tesseract to send me here so he couldn't exactly kill me. I wanted to see the land again. Alfheimr. It's as close as I get to paradise. But he took it, yes."

"Where?"

"Heaven's Keel."

Rinon paled. Neither Tony, nor Natasha, knew the place, and so they let the comment pass by them.

Natasha reached up, placing her hands along the sides of Clint's face. The skin was smooth beneath her fingers, so different from the rugged leather that age turned it to. Though she'd changed little physically, due to the super soldier serum she'd been infused with in her youth, Natasha still knew the difference in herself. She had a new vitality. Scars she'd held for years on end, faded to nothing at all.

"Clint, look at me," she said.

Slowly, his eyes moved to her.

"I don't know what's happened to us, or what's changed, but you aren't leaving my side. OK? Me," she motioned back to the elves. "Rinon. We're staying next to you. The Sarhorn said we could save you. You need to stick with us, understand?"

"No, I don't."

Natasha gave him a strange look.

"It's too late," he said, as if it were the simplest concept in the world to grasp. "Natasha, it's my fault. I used the Gauntlet because of what Pym planned to do. Our time is over."

Rinon approached. "You have sent time backward, Rellya, not forward. Why is it you say this?"

"Because I saw him."

Natasha sat back, pulling her hands against herself. Her blood turned cold in her veins. "You saw him?"

Clint nodded. "Galactus. He's already here. His Heralds have called him home."

:(:):(:):

"I could have done it, we would have been free. If he had let me, we might have been saved. Why didn't he stop Galactus? Why didn't he use that power against him? Give the Gauntlet back. One stone, and I may stop it all. Destroy the power against us! Do you hear me?! This is a mistake!"

Tony stood outside the door to Hank Pym's cabin. They'd sealed him into the ship he'd shared with Clint, in the belly of the Voiya Rose, to prevent his mania from harming someone, even himself.

Tony had spent the last hour diffusing the ship's electronics, converting it from a living vessel to a prison cell. Hank stood in the pilot's seat, leaning into the forward glass. He shouted at the top of his lungs.

At first, Tony tried to calm him down, but nothing seemed to work on him. He'd lost his senses, but gained his youth back. Hank had never been a young man while Tony knew him. Well into his fifties when Tony first met him at a Stark Industries fundraiser, they didn't start working together until Pym turned sixty. When they last met, Hank had turned a balmy seventy one. The man standing, manic across from him, could be no more than twenty. Tony hardly recognized him. Surely his protégé, Scott Lang, wouldn't know him at all.

"Commander Stark?"

Tony turned, catching sight of the elf named Lirrie.

"Forgive me for the interruption," Lirrie said, leaning over at the waist and slightly to the left. He lifted again, and looked over at Pym. "I am a Blankland elf. I'm not sure whether you have ever met one or not, but we have a unique talent for healing minds and soothing pain. While my talents with the mind are not comparable to other elves, I may still be able to assist him, if you wish it."

"Isn't that were the crazy venomous snake lives? the one that rots off all your flesh? Clint was shot with an arrow laced in that stuff once."

Lirrie inclined again. "The self same place. Thus the need for our talents."

Tony had long ago given up on understanding how exactly elves worked. He simply motioned over his shoulder at the ship. "Go ahead. He can't get any worse."

"I thank you. You are needed above. We are nearing Vanaheim. The first ships have come into view."

Tony nodded. It had been hours since they'd left Alfheimr with Clint and Pym on board. Clint was exhausted, overwhelmed. He'd seen things he couldn't explain, and his human mind tried desperately to rebel against it. He had yet to descend into Pym's mania, but it worried all of them to think he might soon fall apart. Plenty had come out in the time it took to get Clint settled and the Voiya Rose moving back to the heart of their fleet. Revelations on all sides, opened old sores and healed over new ones.

Tony stepped away from Lirrie and the ship, and headed for the upper decks. Before he slipped out, he glanced back at the elf and man. Lirrie took a seat on the floor, both legs folded up in front of him. He rested his hands on his knees, and quietly started into an elven song. Tony passed through the door, and started walking up the spiral stairs. His thoughts drifted back to Clint while he walked.

Natasha sat a cup of tea in Barton's hands as his eyes tried their hardest to focus. He was coming back to them, albeit slowly, after the great ordeal he'd been through.

"Cancer?" Barton asked quietly, squeezing the small cup in his hand.

Tony nodded against his chest. He sat, legs straddling a stool, a few feet from Barton's bedside as he attempted to explain. "I know I should have—"

"Come clean? Told me? Not let me run off with Pete and his gang? Let Loki stab me in the back and sell out Alfheimr? Yeah, that would have been smart. But it doesn't matter." Clint paused, brought the cup to his lips with both hands, not trusting just one to do the job. He finished the entire cup in a single gulp, and passed it back to Natasha. She handed it to Linnor, who refilled it. "Everything we worked to stop, it's already over for us. You just don't know it yet. I do."

Tony swallowed the lump in his throat, accepted the tea cup from Linnor, and guided it into his partner's hands. "Clint, I'm sorry."

"I don't care." Barton looked up, suddenly very lucid. He smiled, the first true look of his old self, and shrugged. "I'm not an idiot, Tony. You might be smarter than I am. I never graduated grade school, you know, but I'm not stupid either. I knew you were sick. Between the two of us, I was the spy. I could hide my cancer from you, but you can't hide something like that from me. It was cute to watch you try."

Tony's eyes narrowed. His head cocked back slightly, he looked over at Natasha, who threw her hands out. Obviously whatever Clint knew, he had not shared with her.

Clint smirked, sipped the drink, and winced as the hot liquid slid down his raw throat. "I'm your best friend, Tony, I know. Or I knew. But you're OK now."

Tony shook his head, trying to come to terms with it all. "Wait a minute, you knew?"

"You stole my drugs. Yes, I knew. I thought you were trying to get high. That's why I made you do the no-drinking pact. Then you agreed, promised to give up a vice; an addiction, like it was nothing. If you got hooked on pain medication, you wouldn't have done that. I made the next best guess. That, and I hacked into your JARVIS body scan. Like I said, I'm not an idiot, Tony." Clint tipped the tea cup toward Linnor. "This could use a shot of Jack Daniels."

Stark slowly sank down. Clint told the truth. He was thorough and honest. Tony should have guessed the man would have found out, and why the genius didn't even consider giving Clint that sort of credit, made his heart feel heavy in his chest. This entire time, the universe itself had underestimated Clint Barton. Everyone did so much to protect him, they'd kept the archer from simply surviving for himself as he'd always done. They, in essence, drove him into his own grave.

"I thought you didn't know."

"You not telling me, and me not knowing, are two different things," Clint said. "But you are fine now?"

"I . . ." his voice trailed off, thinking. "I think I am. My scars are gone. The ones from that noose that hung me back during our first war against the Kree, and my surgeries after." He turned over his arm, displaying where, at one time, a trail of white fibrous tissue extended from his wrist to his elbow. Banner gave him that scar years ago in a last ditch effort to save the use of Tony's hand, when all else on him had already lost function.

"You should be fine."

Tony looked up. He sounded so utterly confident. "Clint, did you do this on purpose for me?"

The two blue eyes, at one time had been growing darker with age, now were the bright cerulean once more, caught Tony's in a hard glance. "The Avengers need you. I need you. I also needed to be fitter than I was if I'm going to save us. Old Man Barton wasn't good enough."

"What about the rest of the universe? Do you think they went back in time too?"

Clint shook his head. "After the Herald took the Gauntlet, there's no telling what's happened. I don't know what he did, but it wasn't good. Prepare yourself. What we're going to see, is unlike anything we could have imagined."

Already, Tony had seen enough. He felt physically better than he had in a decade, and he had Clint to thank for it. He wondered if all the Nine Realms had been affected by the Time Stone rolling everything back, but Clint seemed so sure that it hadn't. After all, the Voiya Rose and modified Quinjet still existed. If they had gone back in time, the ship wouldn't be around, as far as Tony understood quantum theory mechanics.

They attempted to raise someone, anyone, from the Vanaheim surface, only to receive dead airspace in response. The considered the possibility of the Gauntlet interfering with the systems, throwing off gamma radiation or a magnetic resonance frequency which might decimate the communication relays between the Nine Realms. It was all conjecture. He wouldn't know for sure until they arrived. Which, it seemed, they finally had.

Tony stepped onto the bridge authoritatively. Clint and Natasha were there already, surveying the view with a mixture of awe and surprise. Clint angled away slightly to greet him.

"Looks like I win," Clint said.

Tony stood beside him, and looked out and the blue gem of a world. His emotions matched those of the others. Rinon stood stiffly against the large, vertical glass. His jaw was tightly clenched, his hands wringing behind his back.

His entire Alfheimr fleet, millions of ships strong, were gathered in precise formations around the Vanaheim realm. Drifting in time with the distant moons, were no less than forty individual portals, large enough for an entire squadron to fit through simultaneously. They were mere circles of blue light, their inner cores warbling the matrix of stars behind them like rippling water. Loki had indeed been very busy.

The elven armada comprised the first wave only. The second, third, and on to the tenth, belonged to the intermixing of millions more. Shi'ar, Midgard, Asgard, Xandar, Oore, Quivenrell, Nidavellir, and so many more systems for which they had no names, gathered in that endless sea of brute force. Sitting dead center of it all, was the one ship Tony could say for sure he recognized: the Bethlehem Star.

The Bethlehem Star had been his child since the moment the Sarhorn strode into his brain and showed him the plans for it. Now, fully operational and taking flight, she was a beautiful sight to behold. She had a signet-shaped appearance, like a man's college ring. The inner band bulged out with the fourteen decks worth of computerized, digital matrix which gave her life. An eight man crew of suicide fighters could run her relatively easily, but only with the knowledge that only death awaited them the minute they agreed to step onboard. There was no other way to operate her.

The outer ring was, in essence, a massive hadron collider. Eight thousand goliath particles, scooped from the trans-dimensional portals, were infused into the hollow rings. On the "Go" command, four thousand of those particles would shoot out of the right, and then the left, of the central command tower. They would hurl toward one another at the speed of light, slam into a partner, and set off a chain reaction of uncontrollable energy. Paired with Galactus' unique physiology, the fallout of the Goliath particles would simply suck him into their singularity, never to let go. He would be trapped and, if all turned out well, the human crew would be dead. If it went wrong, then the people would, similarly, be trapped in a state of suspense and agony for the untold future.

The ships were preparing for an invasion. Like a swarm of locusts, they shot forward in their squadrons, pouring into the waiting portals for whatever war waited for them in the great beyond.

In the cockpit of the Voiya Rose, no one spoke. They watched the ships filter into the portals and out of sight, abandoning the Vanaheim airspace at an incredible pace. A squadron of Midgardian and Alfheimr fighters broke off simultaneously to approach the flagship of the Elven world. A single golden trophy ship followed in their midst. It had all the looks of something created on Asgard.

"Thor," Rinon said. He turned, speaking to Reylano. "Open the lower deck, allow them aboard. We must understand the depths of what we now face."

awwwww crap...