A/N: I have decided that the best way to work with the new Iron Man movie is to treat it as I have the other movies to this point, which is to say that it already happened. So, in the time that Loki, Sigyn, and the others returned to Asgard, Tony managed to threaten his terrorist, get his Malibu house blown up, and rescue Pepper. He has not, however, yet managed to reverse the effects of Extremis or gone through the operation and Happy is not quite yet revived. Please note, I will also be pulling a few details from Ironman: Extremis as well as the movie.

With half the tablet screen in front of him full of equations and other notes concerning the Extremis project, Tony was only half paying attention to the board meeting that he was attending in Pepper's place. Beside it was the prototype of the phone he had tasked his engineering team to work on. Across from him sat his five other board members.

He idly turned the phone over again and studied its clunky casing and suppressed a sigh. Geoff really had no sense of style. "Looks a little too generic," he said, leaning back from his tablet momentarily to flip it on and thumb through the screen. "The Stark 99, hm? It could use an anti-glare screen." By the time that he found the notes section of the phone, he was muttering to himself and already revising how he could improve on this particular design. Send memo to engineering test department, re: ocular key-board, he typed out. The responsiveness of the existing keyboard was adequate and he did like the edge-to-edge screen, the waterproofing, and the fingerprint unlocking, but it was still clunky.

In his most droll tones, Jarvis said, "It may interest you, sir, to know that I have received one of our previous guests at the New York Tower."

Leaning forward to slide his fingers against the tablet's screen, he tapped out, I thought we decided we didn't need to lodge together since there has been no…supervillan…activity of late and Princess cleared out a couple weeks ago with Reindeer games in tow. Jarvis hadn't been fond of the nicknames he insisted on using "just in case" someone hacked his personal communications. It wasn't likely that it could happen, but with the events that had recently taken place, he felt justified in this precaution.

He wouldn't admit it, even to Jarvis, but he had hoped that she would return in time to help him with the Mandrin and sort through Extremis. Though he knew that he and Bruce were close to cracking the formula for reversing and stabilizing its effects, he wanted Sigyn to take a look at what was happening with Pepper and give him a second opinion on the amount of time that was left. That she hadn't already returned unsettled him a little. Sure, the mini-war they had left to rage would have taken time, but with Thor, Loki, and Sigyn heading it he would have thought it would be done by now.

"Sir," Jarvis said, interrupting his thoughts. "It is Sigyn. She teleported into the room that you gave her upon her last visit. Readings indicate that she is alone and scans taken of her vitals suggest that she is healthier than the last time that she was here. Currently, I am engaged in conversation with her."

Restraining himself from jumping up and running out of the room was one of the hardest things he had ever had to do. While still half listening to the other board members, he tapped out, Tell her what happened. See if she has anything to say about it.

"You've been out of touch," Geoff, from Stark Enterprises' board of directors, spoke for the other four that sat beside and across from him. Tony had to blink and recall the current topic he was actually discussing with his executives. "We're calling it the Stark Beam 01 now. We agreed with you to build in messaging functions that circumvent network settings. Phone companies will hate us, but there are a lot more consumers than phone companies. Your test handset there has a special stage of functionality. It connects directly to the Stark Zipsat Constellation."

"And it has satellite Internet access?" he asked, almost marveling at the ugly little plastic device now.

"Once we-well, I mean, Iron Man makes a few adjustments to the motherboard on the main Zipsat satellite, yes. The mobile will have Zipsat broadband access, faster than any phone than any phone network."

He spun the phone idly on the table and caught it again before he said, "Easy enough. I'll have Jarvis look at when there might be a suborbital space flight leaving the planet and see if I can arrange something with them to hitch a lift into the upper edge of the mesosphere. What other surprises does this phone hold for me?"

Jarvis chose that particular moment to relay, "Sir, upon arriving she asked whether or not you had completed the necessary transactions for the last request she made of you before departing. Judging by the urgency of the question, she has immediate need of the land. Her husband, it appears, has stayed behind to continue caring for their current predicament."

Uhhhh… he tapped out. Truthfully, between Pepper's situation and the Mandrin he had forgotten to do more than look at the prospect of buying a remote island or tract of land.

"With respect to the events of the last three weeks, I thought it best to handle the item of interest for you, sir," Jarvis said and Tony felt a rush of gratitude for his AI. "As such, I have transmitted the coordinates to her and she appears to be communicating them to her husband. After she has completed her communications, I shall brief her on the events that took place in their absence."

You're a life saver, J. Relay to her my congrats on the successful rescue of her son and the completion of her mini-war. With that, he felt free to turn his attention back to the meeting at hand. He frowned as he picked up where the thread of conversation had lead back to.

Geoff, not being privy to Tony and Jarvis' secure conversations, said, "You can also hook it up to any computer, wirelessly or tethered. Click on settings and you'll see options for different operating systems. This phone is going to storm the consumer end of the market, once we make a deal with a telecom company."

Across the tablet's screen, he tapped out, Any news for me, J? How's Bruce doing on his own?

"Nothing new as yet to report on working out the formulas," Jarvis answered.

Tony glanced up at his executives and took note of the closed, carefully blank looks that they were studying him with. To the board room, he posed the question, "Who's going to want to make a deal with us if we don't need them for half the functions on our phone?"

"That's a sticking point," Geoff admitted.

"Buy a telecom company, then."

"Tony, we're running low on funds. Cutting the military contracts and building the arc reactors for your current projects has almost entirely depleted our primary research funds."

He sat back in the chair, scowling at the executives. It was looking to be another fight on how the company was going to be run. Hell, he wouldn't have been surprised if the others had sided with Geoff. "Come off it, Geoff. How many times are we going to go at it? I'm not stepping down, handing control of the company to anyone else, licensing technologies elsewhere, or taking on military contracts. I won't trust Stark Industries to anyone save myself or Ms. Potts."

"And with your…responsibilities…as Iron Man and to the Avengers, you barely have enough time look twice at your company. You know that phone would have already been done if you'd been involved and it wouldn't have been so ugly, either. Handing control of the company to Ms. Potts was one of the best decisions you've made since you took control of the company, but with Ms. Potts' current condition…" Geoff said, pausing under Tony's glare before continuing, "Well, perhaps it would be best to hand temporary control of the company to someone else to allow yourself to focus your full attention on…researching her cure."

There was a pause before Jarvis said, "Ms. Potts has asked me to pass along an item that they may find to be of great personal interest to them. At the next board meeting, one of the items to be discussed would have been the budget cuts. According to the accounting department, clause sixty-three, paragraph two of the employment contracts shall be enforced wherein all Stark Industry employees shall take a salary decrease of at least five percent in times when the company's primary funds for research and development of staple products and designs reaches a critical point. The pay cut for each management level above that of a basic employee shall be taking an additional one percent cut."

The corner of Tony's mouth twitched as he did the math and came to the conclusion that each member of the board in this room-himself included-would be taking a salary cut of twenty-five percent or better. On the tablet he tapped to Jarvis, You were bidding your time on that particular new, you crafty bastard. To Geoff and the other board members, he said, "Ms. Potts will be fine and-in the meantime-might I suggest that all of us start looking at our finances to determine where we may trim some fat-" his hard gaze centered on Geoff particularly for that "-from our budgets. We are, after all, going to all be losing approximately twenty-five percent of our annual salaries until our current projects start turning a better profit."

Geoff turned a very interesting shade of purple while the other board members turned a nasty shade of green. "You can't-" Geoff began.

"Actually, I can," Tony said, standing and clearing the tablet's screen. "Clause sixty-three, paragraph two of your contracts. If you didn't read the fine print, that's not my problem. Don't like it? Get another job." He gave his executives his back as he said, "J, get the suit ready and let them know I'm on my way."

"Already done, sir. Mark (46?) is available and awaiting you outside the lobby doors, though I do suggest that you hurry. It is beginning to gather quite a crowd."

Sigyn had wanted to return to Loki and help him teleport the wolves and Sleipnir to their temporary home, knowing how temperamental her husband could get, but this had taken precedence as soon as she understood the scope of their situation. Loki, she knew, could handle a few hours of organizing the wolves and scaring them senseless if they tried to so much as look at Sleipnir wrong. With Fenrir there coordinating with him, she wasn't concerned about them at all. Pepper glowing a deep shade of orange did concern and slightly disturb her.

"It's…really not as bad as it looks," Pepper tried to assure her, but Sigyn pursed her lips and cast the spell again.

"Your organs are slowly disintegrating with the heat of your body at a rate that your enhanced healing abilities cannot cope with," she said, looking through the results again. "Humans generally emit a body temperature of...what was it Jarvis?"

"Ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit for a healthy adult female," he replied.

"That. Thank you. And you, Pepper, emit a body temperature approximately six degrees higher than is healthy for your kind," she said, looking sidelong at the other woman. "Your body may have accepted the chemical changes organically induced, but that doesn't mean that your species was meant to handle this kind of power and strength at this point in your evolution."

Caught in her own lie, Pepper turned her face from Sigyn and sighed. "Tony is working on it. A way to reverse it, I mean, and he's got the best doctors in the world on speed dial 'in case there's anything at all that you need'-as he put it. He's…doing the best he can and he'll do it."

Sigyn smiled slightly and laid a hand on Pepper's shoulder, power sparking at her fingertips. "I've no doubt of that, but at this rate I give you two weeks before your body starts to become unstable and you turn into a charged mixture of fluids and chemicals. One spark after that and you'd explode." Something flickered in her eyes, but it vanished too quickly for Sigyn to analyze. "In any case, I can't extract this…Extremis…from you without exchanging your blood and all of your bone marrow. I might be able to counter some of the effects its currently having on you if you are willing to allow me to cast spells on you beyond a basic diagnostic."

Something flickered through Pepper's gaze again. "What kind of spells? The diagnostic ones you used on me were observed and verified by Jarvis in the past."

It finally registered, the look that kept dancing through Pepper's eyes: mistrust. She dropped her hand from Pepper's shoulder and studied her. "These are fairly simple spells since I'm not entirely sure how well suited to your species and your situation they would be. A regenerative healing and cooling spell wouldn't conflict if cast together. If you would like, I can cast them on something and have Jarvis verify the effects that they have on the object."

The look flickered again before Pepper looked away again. "No. That's not…It isn't necessary. You've proven you mean us no harm and I've no reason to believe that you would go back on your word now, but…" she paused and Sigyn saw the familiar wash of memory roll through a different gaze and saw her lips tighten as lines carved themselves around her eyes.

"-but you remember the pain," she finished softly.

Pepper looked at her sidelong. "Yes, I do." She inhaled a sharp breath and looked at the far wall of the medical wing. "And I remember what I did with this…stuff…flowing in me. Will your magic mix favorably with the Extremis serum? Can I trust that it won't make me into something else?"

Fear not mistrust, then, she realized with a staggering sort of relief. "Jarvis," Sigyn said. "Have I given you any reason to doubt my abilities to handle situations like this?"

There was a reluctant pause before Jarvis answered, "You saved sir's life, but Ms. Potts life is another matter entirely. Sir is working on a solution. He…can handle this."

"But within the next two weeks? Can you assure that? I'm not going to be able to attend to you every moment of every day, Pepper," she said, moving close again and taking Pepper's hand. "Will you trust me, as a Healer, when I promise you this isn't going to go badly? I will swear on Fenrir's life, on my husband's life, that I know what I will not let this change you again."

"Now that's a promise I'll hold you to, Sigyn," came Tony's voice as he entered the medical wing. "You wouldn't bargain the lives of your family unless you were absolutely certain."

She frowned at him, her eyes trailing over his arms and chest before returning to his face. "I bargain nothing, Tony," she said before turning back to Pepper. "Do you wish to proceed?"

Pepper's gaze flicked to Tony and then she nodded. The spells themselves were easy enough to apply, but monitoring the fluctuation in her body for the next hour and adjusting for fluctuations wasn't the emergency that Tony had thought it would be. In the end, his help had been sidelined for Sigyn's and glad though he was for the help, he still fidgeted and kept thinking of the work he could be doing on producing a counter.

Finally satisfied with the way the regenerative spell was augmenting her natural healing abilities and the way that the cooling spell had lowered her body temperature, Sigyn stepped back and nodded. Pepper was examining her suddenly orange free skin and smiling slightly. "That should buy you two extra weeks before I have to start monitoring you on an hourly basis," Sigyn said. "I don't suggest that you try to breathe fire like you did in the past to expel the heat. I would also strongly recommend that you go easy on your physical stress. Cold showers should suffice for when your body temperature reaches an uncomfortable degree."

He was already running the odds and calculating the odds of different theories working before others. "Two weeks? That should be-"

"A month," Sigyn corrected him. "The spells will last for a month before her body will become unstable and I need to adjust them every hour."

Pepper saw the relief flicker across his face and felt something uncoil inside her. He was close, he was very close and that meant she wouldn't ever endanger him with the instability of her own body. Sigyn moved towards Tony and he stepped back, hands raised, and Pepper blinked at the guarded look he was giving the Healer.

"I'm going to want to check you over as well, Tony," Sigyn said.

"I'm fine, better than fine, actually," he said too quickly for either of their liking.

Pepper rose from where she had been seated and crossed the room to stand by Sigyn. "Tony," she began, the syllables drawn out in a way that made him look slightly panicked. "Have you been forgetting to sleep when I'm not looking? Bruce forgets to eat as much as you do."

Sigyn was still looking at him oddly, trying to determine the differences in his body without casting the spells. "No," she murmured. "That's not it. Jarvis, have you been doing scans for traces of magical signatures?"

"On a bi-hourly basis," the AI responded. "There has been no detectable activity. I have also been monitoring Dr. Banner and Sir's schedules and ensuring that they get enough nutrition and rest through approved and necessary means."

Tony cast his AI a sour look, remembering the last black-out that had occurred just after a major breakthrough. Jarvis had refused them access to anything electronic for a full twelve hours and even then they had had to eat two full meals before he turned back on the power for the hard-drives. Dummy had been under strict orders to spray them with the fire extinguisher if they came anywhere near the lab.

"Tony," Sigyn said and stepped towards him again. "Of the modifications that you made to your suit recently, did you add anything to your body? You seem…off to me. Not in a bad way. It's just…you're different than you were and I know how you were before."

He glanced at his forearms and sighed before running his fingers through his hair. "It's…a long story. Why don't you finish with your family and all that great stuff with moving realms. We can do dinner or something and I'll swap you stories." His gaze flashed to Pepper and he shared a smile with her. "Take out?"

"Already ordered, sir," Jarvis said when Pepper just chuckled.

Tony looked at Sigyn again and asked, "What food does your son take?"

Sigyn blinked, reviewed everything she had told him, and laughed. "Raw steak and grass." When he cast her a puzzled look, she elaborated, "Loki and I took from out fight more than one of our sons. My husband is teleporting Sleipnir, Fenrir, and sixty Siege Wolves to the coordinates that Jarvis imparted to me." The color drained from his face and she could only huff her amusement. "No, Tony, the wolves would not be accompanying me back tonight and I have no doubt that Loki will prefer to remain with the wolves to ensure they do not try to eat Sleipnir. My son is nothing if not diligent, but the instincts of a wild animal are hard to overcome even for a White Alpha."

"Oh!" Pepper said and Tony's eyebrows rose in his surprise.

"So…when you say Sleipnir, you mean the horse that he…uh…gave…uh…never mind," he muttered under Sigyn's sudden glare. "Right, not my business."

"Not, it's not," she bit off. "And he won't take kindly to questions like that, either, so do yourself a favor and don't ask. Fenrir and Sleipnir are ours. Anything else doesn't matter. Their other birth parents are a…a non-entity." She turned sharply from them and stepped away, magic rippling across her skin and making the air shimmer a little as she moved. "Loki is going to teleport me out in a moment, and I would ask that when I return please do not ask me of how our children were born. There are events in our past that we…haven't dealt with very well. The circumstances surrounding Fenrir, Hela, and Sleipnir's births are just a few of those events we would sooner forget. We love our children and we have each other and that is what matters."

Afghanistan and blinding terror and Obadiah flashed across his mind even as his eyes flicked to Pepper and he recalled the moments he had shut down questions about what had happened with her. "No worries. I get it," he said. "Wounds like that aren't meant to be poked at." He had barely finished speaking before she simply vanished, leaving an empty space where she had been standing. On an impulse, he closed the distance between him and Pepper, wrapped her in a tight hug, and tucked his face into her shoulder. She just returned the hug and settled her cheek on his shoulder.

When the darkness and the stars evaporated from the sudden teleportation, she blinked against the sudden sunlight and shaded her eyes against it. Squinting, she still didn't quite believe what she was seeing. The island around her was heavily wooded and showed no signs of having been altered by humanity. The lush green of the trees and the ferns stood out starkly against the browns and blacks of the dirt beneath her feet and against the reds, pinks, and yellows of the flowers she could see in the bushes here and there. That still didn't quite allow her to believe that she wasn't hallucinating the sight of Loki glaring at her from beneath the forms of no less than six Siege Wolves piled on top of him.

The wolves looked at her and immediately yipped their welcome before letting their tongues loll out in a happy sort of pant. Around the pile, the rest of the wolves had spread out and found different spots to sun themselves in their own smaller piles. Instead of ordering the wolves to get off her husband, she broke down into hysterics and sank to the ground clutching at her sides. Various howls and yips joined her mirth as she laughed herself out.

After a full minute, Loki said, "Amusing as this is, I need them off so that I may retrieve our sons." The venom laced honey tone in his voice told her she would pay dearly for her fun later, but it was with only a mild regret that she started gasping to try and control herself.

Wiping at the tears of amusement that had gathered at the corner of her eyes, she couldn't help continuing to chuckle when she pointed at the wolves laying on him and said, "You heard him, off. Go find another place to sun yourselves."

The wolves whined at her and seemed to curl in on themselves, conveniently burying him further beneath their fur and setting her off again until she was curled on her side in the dry dirt. "Sigyn!" came the muffled protest.

"D-don't make me t-turn it into an o-order," she managed to gasp out and the wolf on top of the pile finally slunk off and trotted away, ears pricked and tail high like she had done something clever. By the time that the last wolf had departed from their game of pinning Loki, she was on her back and simply grinning at the sunlight streaming through the shadows to touch her face. When his shadow cut through the sun to land on her, she tilted her head back to meet his glare and smirk at him. "Did you trip and fall into them or did you get ambushed?"

There was only the slightest of pauses before he answered, "The latter, though I see you have taken great amusement at my…mishap."

"The mythical god of Fire, Mischief, and Chaos caught beneath a wolf pile? Yes, of course I am going to laugh at you, darling, dearest husband mine," she chuckled.

The corner of his mouth was twitching when he said, "Mmmm…Yes, well. We'll see who takes amusement at the other's expense tonight, shall we?"

That had her grinning all the more before she rolled onto her stomach and kicked her feet up and under her, launching her three steps forward. He matched her smile and maintained the distance between them. She shifted her stance and followed his movement, but he held up a hand to stall the game before it could truly begin. "I must first retrieve Fenrir and Sleipnir and then we must erect the spells that will ward away unwanted attention from the humans. After that, we can…test…the acreage of this land and determine where we might find certain areas," he said, voice husky in a way that made her laugh and blush all at once.

When he vanished, he was gone for only a handful of moments. It was long enough for a few of the wolves to slit open their eyes to look sidelong at where he had teleported from and close their eyes again before he returned with Fenrir and Sleipnir in the final trip between Earth and Asgard. Fenrir merely yipped at her before he bounded off towards the nearest pile of wolves to join them and Sleipnir lipped once at his sire's clothes before he took off, tail streaming behind him, into a deeper part of the forest. A few of the wolves yipped at Sleipnir's sudden departure, but none dared to chase him when Fenrir growled in warning at them.

In the hour that followed, they started at one end of the island and cast the spells that would keep humans from prying too closely into their privacy. They shielded themselves from sight, from sound, from scent and warded against those that would come by sea. For all intents and purposes, the island shimmered in a haze of heat and disappeared from all scopes of sight. With that complete, they turned their attention to creating anchors to make the spell permanent.

At the first anchor site, he slid his hands along her arms and pressed his chest to her back while they cast the spell and pooled their magic together. When it was done, she caught his neck and stole a kiss before he teleported them to the next site they wanted for an anchor. Their game continued in light brushes against each other, the tickling of breath against her ear as he cast, the lingering way she caught his hand in hers to combine their magic, the way his hand rested on her hip when he pulled her close for the casting until they reached the final anchor point.

As the last of the magic fizzled and sparked between them, Sigyn rose on her toes and caught his shoulders. With a grin, she kissed him and felt the way his hands slid against her just before another spell wrapped around her and jerked her through the paths between time and space to deposit her before a startled…Clint.

Clint?

It took her brain a moment to process what Loki had done before she smoothed her hands down her shirt and smiled ruefully at the archer. They were, she realized, in the target range-as evidenced by the bullseyes that were peppered with arrows. Clint even had an arrow knocked on his bow. "You can teleport?" he asked.

"No, but my husband does have a warped sense of humor sometimes," she answered.

"Knew that," he grunted, lining up his shot again. "So, just for giggles-and because Cap wants us to be sure-what did I try the first night I met you?"

There was a pause before she chuckled and answered, "You tried and failed to approach me with hostile intent. We spoke briefly that night and you returned to your own quarters and never tried that stunt again."

Thuk.

The arrow quivered where it struck the bullseye. He relaxed his grip on his bow and set about dismantling it. "Why did you let me go that night? You could have killed me and Jarvis would have backed you on it being self-defense," he said without looking at her.

She studied him for a long moment as he put the bow away into his case. "I'm not a killer, Hawk. Most of the time, I leave the bloodletting to my husband, brother, and their friends and I'm the one to patch them up when they return. You weren't…out for one of them. That night, you came for me and that was something I could forgive. Had you gone for Thor instead, that night, I wouldn't have hesitated."

He only glanced at her as he straightened and shouldered the case. "Good enough," he said. "Thank you…for being honest."

"So…why are you here? I thought you lot had gone back to your own lives," she said, following him out of the room.

One of his shoulders rose in a jerky movement. "We weren't sure it was a good idea to send Darcy and Jane home with no idea of what your Enchantress was doing, but we had missions we had to complete for SHIELD and Bruce wasn't comfortable with being left alone with the girls so I stayed. Bruce did leave for about a week and then the Mandrin thing happened and Tony brought him back to help with Pepper."

"Well, then, I suppose it's a good thing we sorted Angrboda when we did," she muttered, almost to herself as she kept pace with the archer.

Clint glanced at her sidelong and almost smiled. "That's one of the things you're going to tell us about at dinner, right?" he asked.

"Of course," she laughed. "Stories and food and ale are the pastime of all good comrades." And when she smiled this time, he returned it.

Thank you to my reviewers: Maia2, wbss21, and The Creature.