"Housekeeping!" Black Widow announced, from outside the room that Maya Hansen had rented at one of the mid-tier hotels right outside of LAX. She clearly had money to get a short-term hotel room just to rest in before her late-night flight, but not enough to blow on one of the more expensive hotels closest to the airport.
The Russian super-spy didn't wait for the door to be answered. She was already badging into the room with a gadget that easily overpowered the consumer-grade lock's encryption. Barely bothering with a dark wig just in case Hansen looked out of the peephole, she was otherwise wearing her SHIELD uniform. With the Avenger redirected from another active op, there wasn't time for a long con.
Arcane was invisible behind her, ready to step in if needed, but otherwise letting the master work.
"I don't need hou–" the dark-haired geneticist said, clearly having been woken up from a nap on the room's single bed. She hadn't even turned down the covers or undressed, just taken her shoes off and laid down on top, with all the signs of someone exhausted by their last few days. It took her a groggy moment to realize that the woman entering her room was wearing a form-fitting black uniform rather than housekeeping scrubs. "Damnit." She didn't even try to get up to run, just laid back down and put her hands up.
"Not expecting SHIELD," Black Widow observed, rather than asked. She professionally scoped the room for surprises and didn't seem to think there were any. There was one carry-on-sized suitcase in the corner of the room, gray and white tennis shoes on the floor, and a thin black jacket draped over the desk chair. Hansen, herself, was wearing a blue-striped sundress with a grass pattern on it that would only be appropriate for someone spending December in California and Florida.
"He said you wouldn't get involved," she shrugged. Since she wasn't immediately being handcuffed or beaten up, she put her hands down carefully and moved into a sitting position on the bed.
The interrogation expert leaned casually against the dresser, far enough from the few personal effects in the room to not get caught in any explosions or other booby traps that wouldn't also get Hansen, and ready to pounce across the short distance to the bed if necessary. But she showed all signs of being totally relaxed. "Killian has someone highly placed that he thought could ensure it."
Arcane had no idea how she was making those inferences so fast, but it was neat to watch her work.
"I don't know who he's bought, or maybe the Mandarin has blackmail on somebody, but he probably didn't count on the Avengers connection," Hansen agreed. "I guess it was stupid to go try to warn Tony he was in danger."
"But you don't have romantic feelings for him. So you need him for something."
She winced, clearly having hoped to play the former-lover card. "I didn't want to see him get hurt," she tried, but realized that wasn't working and admitted, "and I really need his help on my formula."
"Because it's not supposed to make people blow up."
"Did you already know all of this or am I really giving that much up?" Hansen asked, impressed. "Because if you're just cold reading me, that's amazing."
Black Widow continued her party trick and explained, "You're in over your head. You were just in it for the science, but got stuck with the terrorism."
Honestly, with as calm as Hansen seemed, Arcane thought she might have been okay with the terrorism, too, but maybe the interrogator was throwing her a rope that she could use to climb out on. Or hang herself.
"Killian was in it for the science, too, in the beginning. I shouldn't have let him take Extremis. Exploding isn't the only side effect. I didn't realize until later that the parts of the brain that control the powers are the ones used for things like empathy."
"It makes you into a sociopath? Instantly?"
Hansen shook her head, "It takes weeks. I think. Killian hasn't really been interested in letting me study it to be sure. Doesn't think it's a problem. But I think as you learn to control the heat, it utilizes more of your brain."
"And you didn't take it yourself?"
"I didn't have enough wrong with me to make the risk worth it. Not like Killian, or the test subjects."
"How many sociopathic powered mercenaries does AIM have now?" Black Widow checked.
"Too many. And then, after the Mandarin got involved… I think he's compartmentalized, once we got the basic process down, and doesn't always tell me when he's adding new 'employees.' At least two dozen. Maybe more. I don't know how many… failed to survive the procedure."
"And he's making more, even without fixing the side effects?"
The geneticist frowned, clearly upset about him not taking her recommendations. It wasn't clear whether she thought she was really working for the Mandarin, as well, or suspected that was just a front. "He doesn't really care. We've gotten it down to 'acceptable losses' and the disabled vets are still lining up for the process. He'd rather sell it now than wait for me to perfect it. That's why I need Tony. He gave me a breakthrough twelve years ago to get it as safe as it is."
"The breakthrough that let you go straight to human trials, where people died."
"Killian persuaded me that we'd gotten it safe enough that he was willing to risk it. That he needed it. And after it worked on him… it was easy enough to do it again on the vets. They were severely injured. Most of them were really good people, before…"
"Before you made them sociopaths that can explode and kill bystanders," Black Widow showed that the rope really was for hanging.
"I'm close! Perfect regeneration. So many diseases! So many wounds and handicaps, just gone! Imagine the lives that could be saved in emergency rooms! I have to make it all worth the losses."
"But will it be in ERs, or just used to make powered soldiers and terrorists?" Black Widow asked, and Arcane caught a blip of concealed pain from her, using his own super-powered empathy. Honestly, he might be the only person the super spy interacted with with any chance of truly reading her. Maybe that's why he was no longer particularly worried about her ferreting out his own secrets.
"It could be both. It has to be both," Hansen sounded defeated, the Avenger's master spy calmly cutting through a decade of rationalizations with a few sentences. She'd unconsciously moved her limbs in on the bed, as if to protect herself from what she'd been a party to.
"We're going to bring you into protective custody. Expect this whole conspiracy to be taken apart, and you want to be on the side that made a deal. They'll ask you for everything you know. If there's any chance your life's work gets used for what you want, it's if you get yourself as legally far from Killian and the Mandarin as you can."
The woman thought it through, and she was smart enough to realize that if SHIELD was onto Killian, it didn't matter who the man had in his pocket. Their only hope had been not picking a fight with the Avengers, which was part of why she was so annoyed he went after Stark. "Okay," she finally allowed.
"Pleasure talking with you. You can come in," Black Widow signaled to the other two agents that had accompanied them in case they wound up taking her into custody. Or in case they needed cleanup.
As the two men escorted Hansen out of the room, Arcane let his cloak unfold, reappearing. "You… uh… if Tony does help fix this procedure…"
Black Widow pulled the dark wig off, finally, shaking her natural red hair out. She gave the kid a sad smile, figuring out that he'd noticed something. "I have a lot of scars. Perfect regeneration is… attractive." He didn't think she just meant blemishes on her skin. "But if there weren't any side effects, it really would just be used to make more super soldiers. There's no chance it would be available in every hospital in the world."
"Just because it wouldn't be fair, doesn't mean you can't ask to get special treatment," he told her. "Tony has scars too. If he fixes it for himself…"
"Huh. Maybe," she shrugged, not willing to open herself to the possibility. "What next?"
"Wait. Am I suddenly in charge for some reason?"
"This has to be an Avengers op. She wasn't wrong that someone's putting pressure on the US government to keep SHIELD out of it. And with Stark still out of contact, you're the one who started the show. Plus, I really need to get back on the other op soon. We're working to stop a pretty major arms deal."
Trying not to make it too obvious how surprised he was that he was getting to take the lead, Arcane leaned back against one of the walls of the hotel room and thought out loud. "Can we just go get them? Hansen has to know where their base is, right?"
She explained, "Maybe. She at least will know the obvious one that she works at. We already got from Agent 13 that Killian has a big mansion in Miami that's probably also a research hub from the power it draws and the number of vehicles that go in. We aren't sure Killian is there right now. Maybe the Mandarin broadcasts are from there. But if we go in and everyone's not there…"
"Then we don't know if they've fallen back to another place that she doesn't know about," he agreed, frustrated. "And then they're onto us and have a couple dozen bad guys with fire powers and nothing else to lose."
Widow considered the problem, her spy brain making connections, and eventually offered, "They're building to something. Some of these explosions were probably accidents. Extremis soldiers going off unexpectedly. The terrorism started as cover, so the government wouldn't realize what they had in common. But last night was deliberate, from what you told me. They told the man to meet at the theater, then gave him drugs that would set him off. The videos are phrased as 'lessons,' trying to educate President Ellis. If I was running this, I'd be working up to one big battle where I could have my people defeat the terrorists."
"Proving that the US can have its own super soldiers and doesn't need SHIELD or the Avengers," he nodded, following her logic. "So we need to figure out what the grand finale is."
"And where."
"But he knows that the Avengers are coming after him. He'll have to do the finale in a way that we won't get involved. Somewhere we can't get to before it's over."
"Hostages. It's in line with being a terrorist, so nobody would question it," she mused. "He'd go after someone that Stark would be afraid to lose. Someone he'd hold the rest of us back about."
"And they might take the hostages where they're doing the finale, or at least might give up a clue about where it is. Do you have that hologram mask thing working? Could you be Pepper Potts?" He was pretty thrilled with himself he hadn't almost called her Aunt Pepper.
She shook her head, "Maybe at a distance. They'd figure it out if they took me hostage, even if they didn't notice the mask up close. She's a lot taller than I am."
"Right, well since we're obviously not going to put the actual Pepper in danger, I can think of someone else we could use as bait…"
And that's how Harry Potts wound up standing in approximately the same place outside the hospital that Tony had been ambushed by paparazzi earlier, a little while before sunset on the same Sunday. Out of deference to the ambulances, he'd made sure to move his press conference out of the main driveway and over onto the grass, turning so the photographers couldn't easily block traffic if they wanted to see his face. He'd switched back into his cast and hospital gown, putting the Arcane costume back in the secure closet in New York, but at least put on a pair of jeans. With the expert help of Natasha, he had on makeup that made him look like he was lucky to have survived. He wasn't sure if he'd actually looked like that when he woke up, but when he'd looked in the mirror he'd believed that he'd suffered a massive head injury.
Natasha herself had managed to pick up one of the prototype hologram masks and was currently pretending to be Aunt Pepper not far behind him. She'd been right: even with the perfect recreation of his aunt's face and a pair of heels, she was still obviously too short, at least to someone that knew Pepper as well as Harry did. Hopefully having her back and up a slight hill would make it less obvious to anyone else for as long as the ruse had to last. If they managed to grab her, all bets would be off.
They'd given an hour's warning about the press conference to be sure that someone would try to grab them.
"Uh, thanks for coming out," Harry said, a little lamely. While he'd gotten a lot more comfortable with public speaking over the last couple of years, facing a lawn full of national news cameras was very different than a Boy Scouts party or an assemblage of Aesir and Vanir. He wasn't really sure who he was supposed to look at, or how loud he needed to be. "I just wanted to set the record straight about what I saw last night. I heard that while I was, er, knocked out, everyone kind of assumed the Mandarin attacked me and Happy… I mean, Harold Hogan… specifically."
The crowd was weirdly quiet. There would probably be a barrage of specific questions as soon as he came to a full stop, but he'd cut straight to the information that they were interested in and the press was hanging on his every word. He suddenly had a better idea of why Tony was like that. A lifetime of having that kind of power would probably warp how you interacted with people. Of course, he wasn't so distracted by his new level of fame that he missed the dangerous-looking trio of men shoving their way through the edges of the crowd to get a line of attack on him and "Pepper."
"We were actually following someone," he said. Natasha had come up with a basic script. It had just enough filler to give the bad guys time to act if they were going to, but was getting to the point fast enough that they couldn't wait to see what he was going to say. If they didn't want him to explain that Killian's bodyguard had been behind it, they'd need to move. "At the time, we just thought he was kind of suspicious, we didn't know he was going to try to blow up the theater. I'm glad we were there, because I don't know how many people would have been close to the explosion if I hadn't told everyone to run. And Happy—we call him Happy, he's head of Stark security and Tony's former bodyguard, back when he needed a bodyguard—tried to stop it entirely and got in a fight because of it. Because what we actually saw was–"
That did it. The presumed Extremis soldiers started charging, pulling on ski masks in smooth motions and probably hoping no cameras had been pointed at them before they were disguised and moving. "Harry!" Natasha yelled, doing a pretty decent impression of Pepper, as she ran back toward the hospital. Harry widened his own eyes and started to run, faking a slip and fall on the hill, as if he wasn't up to much exertion yet. He caught himself on his left arm, like he was trying to avoid hitting the cast. As the bad guys closed in on Natasha, it became obvious that she'd chosen the a path where they couldn't quite catch her, even with her in heels and them with powers.
"Pepper Potts" managed to get to safety in the hospital, crying out, "Harry? Harry!" as the assailants scooped him up and threw him into the unmarked van that tore up into the convenient loading area right behind where he'd been standing.
They probably thought they were very smart for figuring out how to grab him in broad daylight.
What he wasn't expecting was the van's other occupant. Before someone in the back threw a black bag over his head, he spotted Happy's comatose body taking up most of the space inside. They'd gotten some extra insurance by sneaking another of Tony's friends right out of the hospital. That was really going to complicate things for Harry. At least the bad guys had somehow managed to pack the equipment that was keeping Happy alive as well.
It was better to be an intended hostage than an assassination victim, all things considered.
He was manhandled and quickly secured in the back, the kidnappers trained in how to bind someone, though they had a little trouble with his cast. He felt them lift the phone from his pocket and heard it get flung out of a window so it couldn't be tracked. "C'mon!" he complained, through the bag, "that's not even a year old yet!" He heard one of them chuckle. It was a misdirect anyway, since they'd gotten him a dummy phone expecting it to get seized. If they'd tried to plug it into a computer to hack it, they would have regretted it.
The real tracking device was wrapped in his cloak and pulled tight around his neck, along with his sling ring and a couple of other holdouts. With the bag over his head, they probably wouldn't even bother feeling his neck and potentially noticing his invisible scarf.
Other than complaining about the phone, Harry avoided making conversation. While the urge to quip was deep-seated, realistically he should be scared. His captors might realize something weird was going on if he was making jokes. Between their military training and lack of empathy, nobody in the back of the van seemed to want to talk to him either. So it was a pretty quiet ride, though bumpy: they were pulling out every trick in the book to avoid expected pursuers in LA.
They must have lost whatever cops they noticed following them, and convinced themselves that nothing unmarked was after them, either, because eventually they slowed to a sedate pace and Harry could sense everyone in the van relax. Within a half an hour, they were pulling to a stop, and quickly hustling him out of the van. His feet hit tarmac, and he got a vague sense of being in an extremely large room. He was familiar enough with hangars to figure he was being slipped aboard a private plane.
It really was probably too easy to kidnap people across state lines if you had private plane money.
Sure enough, he was half-shoved, half-assisted up a few rubber-coated steps and into the thinly carpeted interior of what had to be a plane cabin. Behind, there was grunting as they figured out how to get Happy on board as well. Harry got pushed down into a reclined seat and handcuffed by his non-cast-wearing wrist. A man's voice suggested, "Don't try to leave the seat. We're watching you. It's a long flight. You should sleep if you can."
Honestly, with the day he'd had, Harry could use the additional rest. As soon as he felt the plane take off, he started to comply, letting his body recover from all the things he'd put it through in under 24 hours.
And he dreamed.
Across the country, Tony Stark was in a snowy street, the darkness lit with small town streetlights. And he'd already gotten himself into a fight without his armor. Killian's driver, Savin, and a redhead that Harry recognized from the Room of Requirement were doing their best to kill Tony, and he was managing surprisingly well without his tech. It was a good thing he'd continued to practice his martial arts. With a lot of luck and quick thinking, the billionaire managed to take out both Extremis-powered assailants, though it looked like they'd done tremendous damage to Rose Hill: shooting sheriffs, blowing up buildings, crashing through powerlines, and knocking over water towers. And Tony "Harry's too young to be my sidekick" Stark had enlisted the help of an even younger boy to survive.
As Tony stole Savin's car, told the new kid to keep him informed about the armor, and peeled out, Harry woke up. At the top of his mind was wondering why Tony hadn't sent for one of his other suits or Avengers backup in general. Maybe he wasn't thinking totally clearly after the attack on the mansion. Or maybe he hadn't expected there to be bad guys in the town and thought he was just doing an investigation.
Before Harry could plan out how to rectify Tony's resources problem, he realized that the kidnappers were talking quietly among themselves not far away. They thought (between him looking like he was asleep and the plane noise) they couldn't be overheard, but young ears were good at listening to things adults didn't expect.
"I wish I'd gotten to go to Pakistan," one of the men was complaining. "Kidnapping Rhodes is probably more interesting than these two."
"I don't think you'd blend at the sweatshop the way Becca will," another man argued.
"She's just going to be under a burka, so he doesn't spot that blond hair. I could wear a burka," the first fired back. "Fine. I could be in Tennessee instead of Ellen."
"All she's doing is overwatch for Savin. Boring."
"But she gets to pretend to be a federal marshal."
Another guy opined, "I don't even see why they needed two people to get a file from some old lady."
"Just in case Iron Man or SHIELD or somebody made a connection," one of them explained. "The Master wanted to make sure it was covered."
It was interesting that they didn't appear to have heard yet that the Rose Hill operation had gone bad even with two soldiers. But Harry didn't like the idea that there was another plan in play to capture Rhodey. After the two's chatter turned to something less relevant to his interests, Harry relaxed again and found the right meditative spot to astrally project.
He'd never left his body while on a jet before. No sooner was he projected than he found himself floating in midair somewhere in the middle of the after-dark US, the small private plane rapidly dwindling into the night sky. He could still feel the tie to his body, so finding it again shouldn't be an issue. The problem was finding Rhodey somewhere in Pakistan.
Fortunately, he had people for that.
"Hey!" Harry said, becoming visible, albeit translucent, in Aunt Pepper's safehouse living room. With all of her boys missing, she obviously wasn't likely to get any sleep herself. And it was relatively early in the evening in LA still, regardless. She'd put the news on the TV while obsessively checking her laptop.
"Harry!" she said, face in shock as she momentarily thought he was a ghost but then settling into relief as she remembered he could astrally project. "Are you okay? Happy is missing!"
"He's with me. We're on a plane. I think it's going east. And Tony's fine, too. Well, he got in a fight in Rose Hill, but he won."
"That was on the news!" she realized, looking at the TV as if the story should come back on just because it was relevant. "But it didn't say anything about Iron Man. Just some kind of powered fight that took out a water tower."
"Yeah… he didn't have his armor on. But he's fine!" Before she could start obsessing over Tony nearly getting himself killed going after supervillains without his armor, he asked, "Can you get on the phone with Agent Thirteen? I need her to figure out where Rhodey is. They're going after him too, and I need to warn him."
The process of getting that information took a while, including pulling up a map to give Harry (who'd never been to Pakistan) an idea of the terrain so he could potentially find Iron Patriot from the air. SHIELD wasn't supposed to be keeping track of where he was on foreign soil, but spies were going to spy. By late in the evening, LA time, Harry was flying invisibly over the morning over Pakistan. He was just glad he'd been to Dubai before, briefly, on one of Aunt Pepper's business trips, so he could quickly get there rather than starting out at Kamar-Taj. The wonders of Google Earth were helping him pick out the landmarks they'd seen near where Rhodey was supposed to be.
For all that the Iron Patriot paint job was silly, it was at least easy to tell apart from a drone as it streaked through the air, and once Harry got close enough he could latch on to Rhodey empathically. His timing wound up being perfect: the government hero was touching down in a bustling suburb of Karachi as Harry descended after him.
He caught up as a bunch of women in a sweatshop were looking scared and confused at facing down the Iron Patriot, weapons aimed. "Support Blue-Zero: Unless the guy pretending to be the Mandarin's next attack on the U.S. involves cheaply-made sportswear, I think you messed up again," Rhodey was complaining to his handler.
Judging the situation to be dangerous enough to risk someone spotting him, Harry made himself visible to Iron Man's best friend and a bunch of confused Pakistani women who were now seeing a ghost. "Ninja Turtle!" he said, to try to get Rhodey's attention as quickly as possible. "One of them is a bad guy in disguise. Super powers!"
That warning was enough for the Extremis soldier to realize she was about to lose the element of surprise and the advantage of close quarters, and she charged. "I told you something was wrong with the white lady!" one of the real workers noted as everyone cleared a path, Harry's implant helpfully translating. The black clothing she was wearing began to burn free as she leaped over sewing machines to try to grapple the Iron Patriot armor.
"Nuh uh!" Rhodey said, his own urge to quip failing him due to surprise, but Harry's warning was enough for him to get a repulsor in line. With the weapon's distinctive whine, the red hot woman was knocked out of the air by a blast of charged particles.
She recovered quickly, almost inhumanly, flipping over in the air and not caring that she crashed painfully into a sewing table. Harry's eyes widened at the heat she was giving off and he yelled, "This place is a firetrap and she heals fast. Fly!"
The older man's urge to argue that he could handle it was suppressed by seeing the civilians still stuck in the room, and he nodded and activated his flight systems. He managed to crash though the ceiling just as the blonde almost managed to lay a burning hand on his leg. She screamed in frustration.
"Now we just wait for her to come out," Rhodey said, hovering and trying to aim his variety of armor-mounted weapons at all the places she might exit the building.
Harry was flying right beside him, and explained, "Tony fought a couple of these guys and nearly burned down a Tennessee town in winter. If you fight her, she might burn down the whole city. Her name's Becca, and she works for AIM. You can probably pick her up later, somewhere safer. Now that you're out of the trap."
"AIM?! Is everyone who works on this armor going to try to hack it?"
"You really should just let Tony work on it," Harry shrugged. "Lots of bad guys in the military industrial complex. Killian has a formula to make super soldiers, only it makes them sociopaths. Anyway, I'm also currently kidnapped so I better get back to that. Don't let them get you!"
"What do you mean you're also kidnapped!?" Rhodey yelled, but Harry was already letting himself snap back.
He managed to stop just shy of crashing into his body, over a jet that was clearly descending towards its final destination. Hopefully, Harry would get a clear idea of where their ultimate base was located, so he could share it with everyone else. From the air he could see a wide expanse of water to the east, a huge swath of dark wilderness to the west, and a several-miles-wide swath of bright city lights extending up and down the coast in either direction. It took him a minute to figure it out, but he had drilled with Natasha on landmarks earlier. And what he realized made the entire getting-kidnapped plan seem like kind of a waste.
"Oh come on! We really are just going to Miami?"
