Nick Fury sat at his desk on the helicarrier, absently clutching the scepter and trying to plan. His head was full of yellow static, harder and harder to think through. It had gotten worse and worse the more of his staff he'd had to use the weapon on. In the beginning, they'd kept the circle as small as possible, but SHIELD agents were trained to notice discrepancies in behavior. Even the technicians took classes on it at the academy. Past a certain tipping point, none of them could miss the growing collection of blue-eyed leaders and strange orders.

He thought he had it under control now, but the weight of so many minds was more than the scepter had been designed to carry, dumping cognitive dissonance onto its wielder rather than letting the control fail. Fury regretted that he'd allowed Loki to leave him with the device. It had been essential, he knew that—they'd have lost the helicarrier by now without it—but he was worried the stress of maintaining it was keeping him from making the best decisions.

Deep inside the yellow fog, the small part of Fury that was still free waited for an opportunity.

Reports scrolled across his screen. Hill had managed to acquire enough iridium seemingly without anyone noticing. The leadership at the research universities she'd commandeered a supply from would probably complain to someone soon, but hadn't yet. And their fake NDAs and flimsy story only needed to hold up for a few more hours before it wouldn't matter. Selvig's team was in the bowels of the helicarrier installing it already. Loki had balked at keeping the most essential team within the flying battle station, lest they lose everything at once, but the mobility and facilities were a huge advantage. And there were no signs that anyone had found the enormous vehicle.

Not that they hadn't tried. He hadn't accounted for Alexander Pierce putting the pieces together so fast. And he'd hoped to have multiple Avengers Initiative candidates causing havoc across the world to draw off additional SHIELD resources and give him justification for unusual actions. Instead, until he'd instituted a total communications blackout and co-opted anyone that could hack through it, people throughout the station had been quietly communicating with the Secretary. They'd had to go dark much earlier than anyone had hoped.

The part of Fury deep inside that wasn't obsessed with the Mission involving the Tesseract had noted how odd it was that there seemed to be a collection of individuals onboard with a line to Secretary Pierce that didn't pass through him. The messages were most intense when he'd invented the story of Tony Stark trying to revive Hydra, to sell Rogers on the doomed assault. Almost as if that idea becoming public made them suspiciously anxious.

While his information was woefully incomplete, as his sources on the ground were contacted and subjected to the Havana protocols that he, himself, had instituted, he had a name for his problems: Harry Potts. Their VIP had been strangely reticent to share intel about the boy that had appeared behind him in the Tesseract lab. Fury could have forced the issue now, given the boy's demonstrated powers at the fight in San Bernardino, but he didn't have Loki to force it with. Before that, there had only been the suspicion that it was unusual how quickly Coulson and Romanoff had turned, how Barton had escaped, and how his dragnets for both Stark and Banner were so easily foiled. If his head weren't so full of golden wool, he might begin determining what possible connections they all had.

The thing he had noticed was the pictures on the news of Thor himself seeming to instantly take to the boy. The masked outfit wasn't fooling anyone in SHIELD, for all that Fury didn't see a current advantage outing the boy to the public: the spy core of him would die before casually giving away a secret identity just because it might cause Stark a bit of trouble in the media. The young teen had managed to assist in the fight at the warehouse, at least distract Loki, and quell any conflict that could have surged at the meeting of the three headstrong and mistrustful men that were at the top of his list.

Perhaps Loki had been right, that the scepter being on the scene could have served to get the men fighting. But if it hadn't, he'd had to admit that the boy would have argued to bury it in the deepest pit they had available. And then where would they have been?

It was still salvageable. They just needed to pull any defenders away from the juncture point long enough for Selvig to install the machine. And if they could recover the VIP at the same time… well, even if they couldn't, the scepter was starting to wonder if Nicholas Fury might not make a more level-headed administrator for a conquered Earth.

The part that was still fully Fury was horrified at the idea of being installed as a planetary dictator. Public leadership was a trap for other people…

Not as far from the helicarrier as they thought, Alexander Pierce and Gideon Malick of the World Security Council were having a private conversation. With the levels of security and anti-eavesdropping involved, it was perhaps the most private conversation on the planet. And once anyone involved actually got around to writing up eyes-only reports about Potts' "astral projection" that allowed him to invisibly spy on anyone in the world, they'd have to improve their methods yet again.

"This is a problem, Alex," Malick insisted in his gravelly voice, absently swirling the glass of expensive scotch that was de rigueur for clandestine meetings of wealthy older men. The imposing gray-haired man was the very picture of old money.

"It's a mess, is what it is," Pierce agreed. It was a testament to his respect for the other man that he'd managed to sit in one of the overstuffed armchairs rather than pacing for the conversation. His own scotch was untouched. "I'm just hoping it could become an opportunity."

"We're at least five years out from Insight. If we'd had it today, we could have just waltzed into control as heroes."

The Secretary shrugged, "If Stark survives, we might convince him to help with the designs, so nothing like this happens again. His repulsor tech alone would make staying airborne so much easier. I think we could move up the timetable to two years with his assistance."

"If he survives?" Malick raised an eyebrow.

"It was always going to be in our interests to wipe the Avengers Initiative list out before we made any moves. None of their profiles suggest they'd be amenable to working with us. They're finally all in one spot. If they stop this alien invasion cold, fine. Party at Stark tower. Unfortunate explosion. Blamed on sabotage by the aliens. If they don't, and we have to fight for the planet, I think we let them contain the opposition and then, well, clear all our problems with one nuclear explosion."

"It's the only way to be sure?" the Councilman chuckled. "I think I could sell the rest of them on the nuclear option if this goes tits-up. But it could be in a major city…"

"Gideon, if it would take Fury, his people, and the Avengers Initiative candidates off the board, I'd give up New York City or LA. DC is a harder sell, but if we can get the important parts of government into bunkers, that might be another opportunity."

"Rather America-centric of you. It could be London, Berlin, Paris, Beijing, Moscow…"

"Even better. Just make sure it's a world decision, rather than perceived as a strike from the United States. We'd have likely needed to nuke one of them eventually, anyway, with how many fewer people we have in those governments. But, realistically, it's going to be here. It's always here."

"What about the magic boy?"

Pierce sighed and admitted, "Still even further out of our understanding than Thor. I think he's too connected to the other people on the list… Stark, in particular, obviously. But he has at least four friends that almost certainly go to the same school. And they might be easier to persuade. I just wish that we were in touch with Sitwell and Rumlow. They must have gotten onto this planet, Vanaheim, last year. Are they prisoners there? Are they gathering intelligence and waiting for an opportunity to get back? Are they in touch with the same forces trying to attack us, and able to broker a deal?"

"We have to assume they're inaccessible for the duration and proceed as if they're dead," Malick suggested, to his friend's nod. "I'll start working on the rest of the Council about the nukes. You make sure to have your people ready to get anything we recover to Strucker and List. No more of this ethical research under the control of Fury."

"Agreed. I don't know how much Nick has figured out, anyway, and how much he'll remember if he gets freed of mind control. I think, either way, he may have finally outlived his usefulness."

Both men, course agreed upon, closed their meeting with a simultaneous, "Hail Hydra."

Impossibly far away save for the folded space of the World Tree, another member of Hydra the two men had been discussing was twenty minutes into a conversation in the dusk of a forest on Vanaheim. Jasper Sitwell had made up his mind two of those minutes in, but he figured he'd get as much information as he could from the man in the black robes and silver face mask that had come to meet him.

The problem with Death Eaters was that they weren't fanatics. Sitwell was a fanatic, if he was honest with himself. Most of Hydra was. If the Death Eaters had been fanatics, he'd have had more faith that they'd push their agenda through to the last wizard standing, and make the government of Vanaheim bend before their beliefs. But he was already aware that they'd simply rolled over and gone back to their lives when they'd lost a dozen years or so earlier. One figurehead was defeated and the movement was over. They lacked conviction. At best they were rich men hoping for a bigger piece of their government. At worst they were sycophants.

They weren't fanatics, but they were racists. It was a weird thing to be mad about, working for an organization that had come out of Nazi Germany, but the modern Hydra had a reasonable amount of diversity. The story they told themselves was that Schmidt's Hydra had just been doing to the Nazi party what the current one was doing to SHIELD: if they'd succeeded in taking over the world back then, it wouldn't have been under Hitler's ideology for long. As a Honduran-American who would never pass as the Aryan ideal, it was a story that Sitwell needed to believe, and so he did. And the Death Eater he was talking to clearly thought anyone from Earth was barely sentient. It was at least a new condescension that Sitwell had never experienced before. But it didn't seem like Hydra would ever be equal partners with these people.

He'd also read the whole CIA playbook on rebellions, insurrection, and regime change. Hell, he'd been involved in a few conflicts in Central and South America, in his early days as a spy. Ideally, you'd help a revolution if you either thought it had a good chance to succeed and would have the new government indebted to you, or if you just thought that any chaos in the country was good for you compared to the status quo. But after months learning about Vanaheim's current government, he wasn't sure. It seemed to mostly be a stable aristocracy that wouldn't care one way or another if Hydra took over Earth, as long as their secret former-nationals living there weren't harmed. If portals could be set up, they might even be interested in trade.

Working on admittedly-limited knowledge from the local peasants, his intuition was that the Death Eaters might manage a coup, but they had no real grassroots support. The best they could hope for was a regime change that wound up looking more or less the same to the common people, but which would not enjoy the protection of Asgard (Sitwell had met Thor—or at least watched him defeat the giant robot that had burned through a SHIELD cordon—he was under no illusions that the gods of Vanaheim were simply myth). Most likely, the cult might seize political power briefly, and then be soon ousted by a true insurgency with the support of their gods.

He'd have loved to get approval from the Secretary, but sometimes you were the most senior agent on the ground, cut off from your superiors, and had to use your best judgment. "I think we can come to a mutually-beneficial arrangement," he lied to the Death Eater, who'd tailed off on some topic that wasn't very interesting. "But I can't deal with a man in a mask. My name is Jasper Sitwell, and I'm a level six agent of SHIELD. Can I know who I'm speaking with?"

Sitwell was good at rapport, and for all that the Death Eater thought he was little more than an animal, he couldn't see the harm; it wasn't like a Midgardian's word against him would matter in Vanir courts. He was a little more worried about the marauder who'd brokered the meeting—a nonmagical Vanir named Albert who'd been a common highwayman before the arrival of alien warriors—but trusted the wretch enough. "Very well," he lowered his cowl and removed the silver mask, "I am Xavier Goyle, and I am of the second circl–"

His pronouncement was cut off by the loud bang from the dark treeline to his left and the sudden explosion of his brains out of the hole in his skull.

To give Albert credit, the bandit understood they were under attack, and even picked the right direction of attack to try to crouch behind his center-grip shield against. He was probably very surprised when Sitwell, to his side in the direction he wasn't defending, calmly drew a sidearm and put two bullets into his torso and one in his head.

After a few moments to make sure there didn't appear to be any other backup they hadn't spotted, Rumlow emerged from the shadows, the compact rifle he'd managed to bring to Vanaheim lowered but ready. "Told you I'd get him to take the mask off," Sitwell gloated.

"Good thing," his companion nodded, inspecting the mask that had fallen from Goyle's hand. "Who knows what kind of bullshit magic armor is on it."

"It was a good shot. Looks like the robes stayed clean. Let's strip him and see if he has anything else useful. We can probably hide the robes and mask and use them if nobody manages to magically track them down in the next few days."

"You do that while I bury the kid. I'll be back for that guy," Rumlow agreed to the plan, letting his rifle fall fully on its strap so he could drag Albert's body out of the clearing and toward the shallow graves they'd already dug. There had been a chance that they wouldn't have needed them.

"Hopefully Black is still in town," Sitwell mused. They'd recognized the man that had visited Harry Potts the previous summer on Earth when he returned on the train and started organizing the local defenses against the marauders. "He'd probably love our help riding out to clean up the rest of Albert's camp…"

If there wasn't much benefit to destabilizing a government, you could still win points by helping to stabilize it.

Harry was blissfully unaware of all the plotting that was going on. Whatever the trigger for the visions that sometimes came to him was, it was not present as he snatched a few hours of sleep in his bed in Stark Tower. Tony had gotten back to the Tower before them in his backup armor. They'd hung out for a few hours with Natasha, Clint, Bruce, and Steve (who insisted on not being "Rogers" if everyone else was on a first-name basis). Thor had been sad to miss a party, but refused to leave Loki where he was sedated over at the SHIELD offices. By nearly midnight, no new crisis had popped up and Bruce thought his search for the Tesseract was still a few hours from any results (though he felt like he'd at least narrowed it down to within a few hundred miles of them). So they all went to bed. Steve had even turned in early: while everyone basically trusted his word, he knew he wouldn't be completely trusted until he'd slept off any potential mind control. Even Tony had gone to bed by one in the morning after putting in the last adjustments to the Mark VII armor and starting its production within the automated machine shops within the Tower.

They woke to the sound of explosions.

Late-night in Manhattan wasn't exactly quiet, and the bedrooms at Stark Tower were well away from street level and pretty soundproofed because of this, but missile impacts were shockingly loud even blocks away. Harry was probably slightly less hypervigilant than most of the adults, but still managed to find himself free of bed, mostly awake, and staring out his window in time to see a fourth missile strike the SHIELD offices. Rapidly reaching full crisis-mode consciousness (and realizing he'd accidentally gone to sleep in his contact lenses because of how well he was seeing), he even thought he could make a quinjet-shaped shadow out against the other lights of New York where it was bombarding Coulson's headquarters.

"Agent Coulson is requesting assistance at the SHIELD office," JARVIS' voice understated through his room's speaker system. Harry assumed everyone else was getting the message as well.

If they were under attack with missiles, Harry wasn't going to rush out half-dressed. He wasn't the only one, and had some experience in hasty-armoring for early morning quidditch practice, so by the time he hit the hallways with all his armor mostly-correctly donned and buttoned up, he was joining a parade of Tower guests in similar sleepy near-perfection.

"I knew we should have stayed at the office," Natasha groused, her hair somehow looking sexily-disheveled compared to Harry's bird's nest.

"I can fly one person," Tony's voice sounded over the speakers in the floor's breakfast nook. He was presumably already upstairs, where his armor-donning machinery lived.

"On my way," Steve announced, sprinting for the elevators. Somehow, woken up in the middle of the night, he looked perfectly rested and barely-tousled.

"Uh, probably me too, if they're not too big," Harry realized. Even if Thor had been around, their tandem flight capabilities didn't extend to the whole team. "You need to make everyone rocket boots or something, Tony."

"Noted," the billionaire's voice sounded over the intercom.

"You're not too big," Clint noted to Natasha. "Banner and I take the streets?"

"I… uh… I'd only make it worse," Bruce objected. Unlike everyone else, he'd barely gotten dressed.

"But they're playing your song," Harry told his former professor. He gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder as he raced by, pulling his mask on, brain half-fritzed by the idea that he'd be riding with Natasha on the back of his broom. "I think the Hulk knows what he's doing more than you think? JARVIS, is there a faster way out than Tony's office?"

"Opening the breakfast nook window," the AI confirmed, as the seemingly-fixed oversized plate window near them shuddered free of its brackets and began to hinge inward, immediately exposing the room to the winds above Manhattan.

Harry pulled his Firebolt free of the armor's hidden pocket, glanced at Natasha who just smirked and left the joke implied, and got on. The cat-suited spy obligingly slid on behind. "I'll get there when I can!" Clint announced, running for the elevator, as Harry and Natasha rocketed out of the window.

He caught himself imagining that it was Fleur riding with him about halfway across the skyline, and was really fortunate that he spotted Thor erupting out of the building on a bolt of lightning to distract him from that weird thought. "Follow Thor or go to the building?" he asked, over the comms. It wasn't like Natasha would be able to hear him over the thunder and wind anyway.

Iron Man, somewhat awkwardly carrying Captain America, was right above him, and Steve suggested, "Building. If you want to go after them after dropping us off, we can help with search and rescue."

"Yeah, I didn't design the armor for couples dogfighting," Tony confirmed.

It seemed elementary, anyway. By the time they'd covered a half mile and were just having to weave through the skyscrapers on 47th and 6th, there was an explosion as Thor caught up to the quinjet and smashed out a wing with his hammer. The God of Thunder at least had the decency to shove the jet down into a rapidly-clearly Broadway rather than letting it crash into one of the other buildings nearby.

"Did they just send one jet?" Harry asked. "Even with the missiles…"

"Is Thor on comms?" Coulson's voice broke in. "I've lost cameras on Loki. And injured on floors two, three, and five."

"I didn't get him an earbud, no," Tony confirmed. "But four of us incoming."

It was chaos in the SHIELD building when Harry landed, Natasha rapidly dismounting. They'd landed inside the third floor, the east side of the building only so much exploded debris that let him fly right in and land in the middle of a destroyed office. Tony and Steve landed higher, on the fifth floor. "How many people were still here?" Harry asked the comms, at least not seeing any immediate bodies in the room they'd landed in. But a significant amount of square footage was just missing in the vertical crater made by the missile. At least it wasn't actively on fire.

"I'm checking the duty roster," Coulson's voice said over Harry's earpieces. "Wait. None of those people were supposed to be here tonight. A dozen agents just badged in a few minutes ago…"

"Last registered on the helicarrier?" Natasha asked. She'd moved cautiously into the hallway, looking for enemy agents or injured. Sirens were starting to be audible nearby, as New York dealt with its first late-night explosions in at least a couple of years.

"So a flashmob from the helicarrier, Loki's cameras going dark, and a very loud distraction…" Tony figured. Harry could hear the whine of his repulsors cycling as he cut through debris two floors above.

"And a motorcycle on the street," Harry realized, not having yet followed Natasha into the corridor. If the traffic on Broadway hadn't been stopped by the jet Thor brought down, he probably wouldn't have even noticed it. But as soon as he was looking at it… a trio of figures rushed out of the building carrying a third, unconscious form. "They're taking Loki! Wait, did we leave him in his armor for some reason? Whatever. I'm after him!"

Leaping back onto his broom, Harry was dropping to the second floor when the motorcycle driver gunned it, Loki's body slumped across the bike. The other two agents opened fire, and his deflection enchantments kicked in, causing the broom to spin to avoid the attacks. He really hoped someone in a building on the other side of 48th wasn't having a really bad morning from stray bullets.

The agent on the motorcycle was racing south into Times Square, the souped-up bike managing an impressive off-the-line speed even compared to Harry's ludicrously-fast broom. He was still catching it up quickly, but then he realized, "Did nobody notice another jet parked right in the Square!?" The black plane was honestly a little hard to notice, even in the well-lit center of Times Square: it was late enough that there really wasn't any foot traffic, and, at a glance, it was just an odd shadow.

Well, it was more visible because it was beginning to lift off as the agent on the motorcycle managed to wipe out in a way that threw himself and Loki up the quickly-closing ramp and into the back of the jet. Harry probably could have made it into the cargo compartment of the plane, but thought he spotted multiple other agents waiting inside and wasn't that confident in his close-in combat skills. He hooked his Firebolt sideways to brake as the quinjet loudly launched itself from the middle of Manhattan's most famous tourist spot and made a dash for the sky.

"Loki's in a quinjet!" he told everyone on comms. "I'm following. Iron Man, you might need to catch me up if they're going supersonic."

They weren't. He had to push his broom to its limit, but he was able to keep up with the jet as it rose into the night sky over the city… and then was suddenly angling as if it was about to land. As Harry reached the same level, he realized that what he hadn't been seeing was the camouflaged bottom of an immense vehicle floating in the air above New York City. But he could now make out the runways, buildings, and lights on top of it.

"Guys… I think I found that helicarrier everyone's been talking about."