Chapter Text
The next morning, Isadora woke up to her phone blaring. There were notifications coming in for every single news and social media outlet there was. She rubbed a hand down her sleep riddled face, and picked up her phone.
“SHIELD has been dismantled, HYDRA secrets revealed.”
“HYDRA = SHIELD ???”
She clicked on a Youtube video link that had just popped up.
“Sources confirm that Captain America and Black Widow were just seen in DC destroying SHIELD property in the middle of the Potomac. Authorities say they’re looking to apprehend the two to answer for their crimes. Sources also claim that sensitive files and information directly from SHIELD’s database have been leaked by an anonymous source. Everything about the intelligence company has been shared for the world to see. I personally haven’t begun my deep dive, but I cannot wait to see what juicy secrets were hidden deep in SHIELD’s walls.”
Isadora’s hand came to cover her mouth. She immediately dialed Natasha. The line went dead, her call not even going through. Then came the rage. She felt her powers surge, then she just saw red.
When she emerged from her state, her father was standing above her. He was wearing his suit, and he looked ready to shoot.
“Please don’t make me do this Izzy.” he whispered.
Her hands came up to shield her. “Wait dad, wait!” she yelled.
He gasped, and immediately stepped out of his suit. He fell to his knees, and grabbed her, checking for injuries.
“Wh-What happened?” she asked.
“JARVIS alerted me of your elevated stress levels, so I came to see if maybe you were having a nightmare, but instead I arrive and you’re destroying your room, and there’s a dust cloud of rage behind you,” he says.
Isadora swiped a hand across her forehead. She felt exhausted. The company she worked for had been outed, all of her secrets and dirty deeds were out for the world to see, there was no work for her to strive to go back to.
“What are we going to do?” she croaked, tears brimming in her eyes.
“We just have to keep on keeping on, sweetie.” Her father said, brushing a rogue tear from her cheek.
“Can you find them?” she asked, knowing he’d know who she meant.
Her father sighed and looked to the ceiling for a second. “I don’t think they want to be found right now.”
Isadora sat up, wiping the tears from her eyes and looked around her room. It was a mess. It looked worse than the helicarrier after Steve destroyed it. It was then that she made her decision.
“I won’t be needing you to look after me anymore, Dad. I’m done crying over someone who left me.” she sniffled, the last tear she swore she’d ever cry over Steven Grant Rogers.
Tony grumbled, but put an arm over her shoulder. “I’ll be here when you need me, babygirl. I’m not going anywhere any time soon.”
~~~
Steve
The park was quiet that morning. A thin veil of mist clung to the grass, and the air smelled faintly of wet earth and exhaust from the city beyond. Joggers passed by, dogs tugged at their leashes, and for once, everything felt ordinary. Too ordinary, after everything that had happened.
Steve sat on the bench, hands clasped loosely between his knees, the sunlight catching on the faint bruises along his knuckles. The world had shifted again, HYDRA, SHIELD, everything in between. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t sure what direction to run toward.
Natasha approached quietly, the same way she always did. Black leather jacket, dark sunglasses, hair pulled back. She looked like she belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Not the best place for a meeting,” Steve said, glancing sideways at her.
“That’s why I picked it,” she replied, lips quivering faintly. “Public. Peaceful. No one’s trying to shoot at us for a change.”
She handed him a small manila folder, edges worn from being handled too much. “I thought you might want this.”
Steve looked at it but didn’t take it right away. “What is it?”
“Everything the government has on the Winter Soldier,” she said, her voice quieter now. “What’s left of it, anyway. HYDRA didn’t exactly keep clean records.”
His fingers brushed the folder at last, hesitating over the weight of it. It wasn’t heavy, but somehow it felt like it might crush him anyway.
“Why give this to me?” he asked.
“Because I owe you,” she said simply. “And because I know you’re not the kind of guy who can walk away from something like this.
Steve studied her for a moment, trying to read the look in her eyes–half weary, half amused, all guarded. “You could’ve kept it,” he said.
“I could’ve, especially since you’ve been away from Izzy for so long I know you’re hurting,” she agreed. “But then you’d spend the next six months hacking every intelligence database in the world just to find it. Thought I’d save you the trouble.”
He gave a small, humorless smile. “You think she’s mad at me?”
Natasha slid her sunglasses back on, her gaze sweeping over the park. “You know she is.”
Steve nodded once, slowly, eyes dropping to the folder again. Bucky Barnes. The name felt like a wound that hadn’t healed right.
When he looked up again, Natasha was already walking away, her hands in her jacket pockets.
“Where will you go?” he called after her.
“Someplace new,” she said over her shoulder. “Find a new cover, maybe a new life. That’s what I'm good at.”
He almost said You could stay, but the words caught somewhere between his gut and his throat.
She stopped just long enough to glance back. “You’re gonna go after him, aren’t you?”
Steve’s jaw tightened. “Yeah.”
A small smile ghosted across her lips. “Then you’d better suit up.”
She walked away, fading into the crowd as easily as smoke dispersing in the wind.
Steve sat there for a long time after, the city’s heartbeat steady around him. Then he looked down at the folder again, thumb tracing the crease in the paper.
When he finally stood, he tucked it under his arm, squared his shoulders, and started walking.
~~~~
Isadora
Her room was chaos. Not the kind of chaos that came from laziness or clutter, but the kind that pulsed with the aftershocks of her power.
Shards of glass glittered like fallen stars across the floor. The deep mahogany bedframe leaned against the wall at an odd angle, one leg snapped clean through. Pages from her sketchbooks fluttered faintly in the breeze slipping through a cracked window, their edges curling from the heat of what had once been a desk lamp that was now a twisted ruin on the carpet.
In the center of it all stood Isadora.
Her hands trembled as she exhaled, the faint blue shimmer that had hovered around her fingers finally flickering out. Silence fell heavy, broken only by her uneven breathing. She’d done it again. Lost control due to the soulmate bond beating in her chest and the mark thumping on her hip.
“Great,” she muttered, dragging a hand through her hair. “Real productive, Izzy. Smash first, deal with the fallout later.”
It wasn’t the first time her temper had turned destructive, but it was getting harder and harder to reel it back in. Her powers had a mind of their own sometimes. The power to her felt like chaos given shape. But Tony had reveled in her powers, filled with the Stark-brand pride as if it were a new invention.
She bent down, picking up a broken photo frame. Inside, Steve smiled out at her from a mission briefing months ago–clean-cut, steady, reliable. The kind of person who made the world feel safe just by being in it.
Except he wasn’t anymore.
Steve had vanished. No reports, no sightings, no body. Just…gone.
The other Avengers (minus Natasha, who had fallen off the face of the Earth after that morning’s press conference) kept searching, of course. Izzy had tried to find Sam (a man she knew Steve had been going to PTSD meeting with), but the man kept evading her at every turn. Her father had thrown himself into his lab, as always, pretending the silence in the tower didn’t echo.
Isadora traced a thumb along the photo’s cracked glass. “You couldn’t just stay put, could you?” she whispered, swallowing the lump in her throat.
She’d forget about him. She was good at that. Forgetting and pretending the hole in her heart wasn’t because of America’s number one superhero.
With a resigned sigh, she set the frame aside and knelt to start cleaning. Broken glass, splintered wood, the smell of burnt plastic. Her power hummed beneath her skin, restless but obedient this time, and with a slow breath she reached out. Pieces of debris began lifting themselves into the air, circling around her before settling neatly into a corner pile.
Cleaning was mechanical, almost soothing. Until her hand brushed something buried under a fallen bookshelf.
A box. The box had been forgotten. She remembered it being on her bed, and deciding not to open it. Then Steve left. Then she was kidnapped. Then the trauma came.
It was pale silver, edges engraved with faint, intricate lines that shimmered like circuitry. She frowned, pulling it free. She didn’t recognize it immediately. Stark tech had a look, and this…didn’t.
Curiosity stirred, tugging at her despite the mess around her.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, turning the box over in her hands. There was no hinge, no seam. Just a small etching of what looked like a starburst at the top. When she pressed it, the box clicked softly, unfolding like petals.
Inside was a stone.
Small. Perfectly smooth. It gleamed faintly blue, pulsing like it had a heartbeat.
Her breath caught.
“Dad’s gonna kill me if this is another prototype,” she murmured.
But the moment her fingers brushed the surface of the stone, the air shifted.
The floor vanished.
Light exploded behind her eyes, a blinding, soundless rush that tore through her senses. She gasped, reaching out instinctively, but there was nothing to hold onto. Just wind, light, and the low hum of something ancient.
Then, silence.
When she blinked, she wasn't in her room anymore.
The air smelled different, crisp and metallic, tinged with magic. The floor beneath her feet gleamed like gold, cold and smooth. Ahead of her stretched a vast chamber, all shimmering light and carved pillars. She barely had time to take it in before she heard a voice.
“Well,” a smooth, dry tone drawled from the shadows. “You’re certainly not one of Odin’s guards.”
Her gaze snapped toward the sound. Behind a transparent wall of shimmering energy, a man lounged on a bench, his dark hair falling in sharp, unkempt waves, green eyes glinting with lazy amusement.
Loki.
Even sitting there, clearly caged, he radiated an unnerving calm. Like the entire room belonged to him anyway.
Isadora’s heart hammered. She stumbled back a step. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Trust me, I wish I were.” His lips curved into a faint smirk. “Tell me, little mortal, how exactly did you end up here?”
“I–” she looked down at the stone still glowing faintly in her palm. “I don’t know. I touched this and –”
He raised an eyebrow. “And the universe decided to drop you into my charming company. How delightful.”
She shot him a glare, trying to steady her breath. “Where am I?”
“Asgard,” Loki said, voice lilting. “Though from your expression, I gather this is your first visit.”
Her mind raced. Asgard? That was impossible. The teleportation, the stone. It had to be connected to her powers somehow, or maybe something her father had been working on.
Loki tilted his head, studying her like she was a particularly interesting puzzle. “You’re not ordinary,” he said after a pause. “There’s something…humming in you.”
Isadora was brought back to the last time she’d dreamed of Loki. He was in her dreams, asking her to come with him/ Now she was here, in Asgard, with Loki.
“Yeah, it’s called panic,” she snapped, gripping the stone tighter.
His smirk deepened. “Amusing.”
She took a slow breath, forcing herself to think. She needed to find a way back. Back to Earth. To Stark Tower. But for some reason, her gaze lingered on him. On the faint shadow behind his eyes, on the way his smirk didn’t quite reach them.
"Why are you in a cage?” she asked before she could stop herself.
He arched an eyebrow. “Apparently, ‘attempted conquest’ is frowned upon here.”
“Right,” she said softly, half to herself. “You and my dad would get along great.”
Loki’s grin faltered for just a heartbeat, curiosity flashing across his face. “Your…father?”
She lifted her chin. “Isadora Stark.”
The silence that followed was heavy, charged.
Loki leaned forward, eyes glinting dangerously. “Stark,” he repeated, tasting the word like it was a memory. “Well, this just became far more interesting.”
And as the stone in her hand pulsed again faintly, like a heartbeat syncing to her own, Isadora couldn’t help but to think that her day had just taken a turn from bad…to cosmic.