Revised 11/2/2023

Prologue

"You fought well." Thanos spoke gently, like a proud father of his young warrior son. "In another world, perhaps you may have been a match for me. But I am inevitable."

Harri snarled. Without divine artifacts, she'd have wiped the floor with the stupid purple maniac, but no magic was up to the task of defeating the power stone, the first he'd collected and the most impossible to overcome. This was her second chance. Thanos had killed Harry's body scant hours ago. She was wearing one of Arya's, built expressly for combat. It was unfamiliar to her and it showed.

"So long as you exist, my work will always be in jeopardy," Thanos mused. "Not even I can kill you, or so the Soul stone thinks." Harri tried to force her mangled arm into him, clutching a dagger under the Fidelius, a weapon that should have been imperceptible to all but Arya. Thanos squeezed her neck harder. Only her cybernetic augmentations kept her from passing out. With his other hand, he caught her wrist and snapped it in half.

"You're clever," Thanos whispered. "You may think to come back here. You're like me in that way. Never leave a job unfinished. Perhaps you'll return. This ought to prevent you, delay you." The Soul stone burned orange. Harri screamed in agony.

It was the most intimate violation she'd ever endured, an enemy reaching into the very core of who Harri Evans was. Thanos tore away everything he could reach, every modification, enchantment, link and bond. She felt Soulspace torn from her first, millenia of accumulated knowledge and technology, her arsenal, her storage, every item she'd stowed away. The enchantments fell away next. Her tools and tricks, links to repositories of spells and old magic systems, her wandless foci, everything was ripped away. A mooring strand that helped her resist the call of the afterlife when disembodied, an ever-expanding nametag with every alias she'd ever taken, every name she'd gone by, every person she'd pretended to be.

Harri scrabbled against his gauntleted fist, back arching in agony, cybernetic wings beating against the air uselessly. Her connections were torn away last. Thanos bared his teeth and clenched harder, orange light flaring in her eyes. Awareness of Elva went first, the dim thread linking Harri to her first daughter in some distant dimension. Then Nenya was gone, then Lily. Arya was already gone. Firnen keened.

Still, Thanos tore and shredded at everything he could reach until there was nothing left but the inviolable pearl of her identity, that which could be altered only by herself. Thanos stared into her eyes.

In desperation, Harri launched her mind at him, honed to the infinite point of desperation. For a single instant, the Titan flinched and his identity was hers to destroy. But then he flexed the gauntlet and her mental probe struck an immovable barrier of yellow.

Thanos shifted her to his other hand and held the gauntlet out, grasping at empty space. The Space stone flared blue, brighter and brighter until the broken planet of Titan was washed out in the glare. The world fractured before him, spiderwebbing cracks of blue in the very fabric of reality. It was unlike the billowing smoke of his portals entirely. Thanos stuck his gauntleted fingers into the crack, pulling at the rift, widening it. Harri gulped for the air he had been strangling out of her. "Avada Kedavra," she spat. The ghostly green energy leapt from her fingertips. Thanos merely flexed his grip and the green jet turned orange, dissipating harmlessly against his back.

Crumpled in half his nano-suit, Stark watched horrified as Thanos widened the tear, stepping half into it to force it wider with his boot and the back of his shoulders. Wind howled around the rift, sucking the dense atmosphere of Titan through in a vain attempt to equalize two planets. Tufts of ash whirled off the ground, sweeping across the emptied battlefield. Mr. Stark I don't feel so good.

The titan adjusted his grip, clasping her hands together behind her back with just a finger and thumb, gripping her waist with the other three fingers. Harri squirmed and bit, but nothing she could do even broke skin. Purplish blood she'd drawn earlier filtered into her mouth. She gagged.

"Fly, birdie," he murmured in her ear. The rift struggled against his gauntleted hand, the blue glare of the Space stone shuddering. Preoccupied as the titan was, he did not notice Stark struggling to his feet despite his impalement. Thanos hurled her like a javelin through the rift. Just as she was passing through, Tony caught her wrist and allowed himself to be dragged with her.


Down, down, down Tony fell. "Fri, give me boots and gauntlets," he gasped. "Come on, make it snappy."

Nanocells crawled up his back and formed around his ear. "Sorry boss, you've barely got enough for one boot."

"Plans?" he demanded. "One big booster?"

"I'm critically low on nanocells," Friday, reported. "Higher-reasoning is offline in archive mode. Advanced configurations unavailable. Forty percent of the available cells are devoted to data preservation. Reconfiguring will result in near total data loss."

Tony sucked in a breath. Harri had Ciri, but Thanos had done something terrible to the witch. If they lost both their virtual assistants, they could land in the stone age. She had wings, but they were broken and sparking, skewed at odd angles, and parts of her metallic spine were jutting through the skin of her back. She was unconscious and in no state to help. All the technology in the world wouldn't help if they died on impact.

The ground was darkened from horizon to horizon. Tony could barely make out the horizon, let alone the terrain. "Can you keep survival guides, basic configurations, and the most useful and hardest to replace information necessary to kickstart stone age society?"

"Those evaluations are beyond the scope of archive mode," Friday apologized. "I can list possibilities-"

"Do we have enough for a display or visor?"

The sturdy boot that had been forming around his right foot thinned. A trail of nanocells crawled up his leg and back, forming a sort of eye patch nestled in the ridge of his brow, nose and cheek. The ground continued to rush closer. 11000 feet.

His HUD bloomed into view over his right eye. Night vision filters revealed grasslands all the way to the horizon. An altimeter ticked down at the bottom. Tony scrolled through the options, adding as many plaintext files as he could. 32 gigabytes sounded like a lot for text documents, but diagrams on computer chips and blueprints for bloomeries and crude forges ate through his space. 7000 feet.

No matter how he reorganized or how brutal he was about trimming out nonessential information, he couldn't justify 17 gigabytes to preserve Friday's neural network.

"Sounds like this is goodbye, boss," Friday said gently. "Good luck."

Tony snarled. The ground loomed ever closer. He tipped himself towards Harri and held her as securely as he could manage, despite the agony in his gut. Anything to wake her, he prayed. Anything to stave off this choice. "Wait Friday," he growled. "Harri!" he shouted. The witch remained unresponsive. He peeled up her eyelids with shaky thumbs, straining against terminal velocity winds. Her eyes did not come alive. 2000 feet.

"Miss Evans is currently suffering from cardiac arrest," Friday reported. Tony growled. "It seems like you're out of options, boss."

Friday made the choice for him at 750 feet. Everything but the eyepatch receded from his body, the nanomachines crawling to his feet. Two paper thin boots formed, thinner even than the repulsors digging into his arches and jutting out beneath the soles. They roared to life.

Tony struggled to keep the boots below him. At first, Harri was a manageable weight to hold on to, but the G's kept piling on and soon he was heaving against effectively hundreds of pounds of deadweight. 250 feet.

At a hundred feet, the boots started to sputter. "No, c'mon c'mon," Tony urged. His arms burned like molten lead, his fingers straining to support the unconscious witch.

The repulsors cut at ninety feet. Tony tumbled down the next fifty, sixty, seventy, the ground rushing too fast, far too fast when at ten feet, the repulsors fired once more, dropping their velocity to zero just three feet off the ground.

Tony had no clue what to do. Harri had so many cybernetic implants and modifications, she resembled a human body in concept only. Her wings glowed faintly against grass, sprawled at broken angles. He had no idea if chest compressions would force her blood to circulate, or if she even needed CPR at all. Surely she had contingencies, protocols to kick on and restart her system.

I've no better options.

"Heh, heh, heh, heh, stayin' alive, stayin' alive," he panted, putting his weight behind every compression. Every time he pulled himself back up, his abdominal muscles shrieked in protest. The stab wound bled sluggishly. At least no arteries were cut. "Just septic shock to worry about," he giggled. Tony slapped Harri's cheek. "Come on, where's the magical healer when you need her?"

"Stayin aliiiii-iiiiii-iiiive," he chanted. "Don't fail me now, Beegees." Tony pried Harri's mouth open and breathed out as hard as he could, pushing to inflate her lungs. Every bit of pressure he put behind blowing life into her lungs was a stab in the gut, threatening to push his guts out of the wound. "Come on, I don't know how much longer I can do this." Hysteria crept into his voice. He slapped Harri again across the cheek, harder. A red handprint remained on her skin. "God, I feel like a domestic abuser," he muttered. "But we're both gonna die if you don't WAKE UP!" he screamed in her ears.

Harri shot up, wrist clamping around his neck, lunging to her feet and throwing him backwards, eyes fiery with fury. For an instant, Tony thought Arya's body really did house Arya. But the anger faded too quickly. The instant she recognized him, Harri released him.

He almost wished she'd stayed enraged. Her green eyes were dead, flat. Like Harri was gone and the cybernetics were just propping her up like a puppet. "You good?" he panted. "'Cause we're waaay up shit creek right now. Are you okay?" then in a tiny voice, as lightheadedness rushed to claim him. "I'm not."


AN: The x-over order is looking like Inheritance cycle - HP - ? - Star Wars - MCU - ASOIAF. Edited now that I have some idea where I'm taking this story.