Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The dawn sang in Stephen Strange’s ears when he was born. 

Its low, quick notes were his earliest memory, and its rhythmic occurrences marked his days clearly within the haze of infancy. His parents told him he used to reach small hands toward the window and gurgle musically. Stephen remembered that song, streaked like tally marks in an undefined youth. 

He remembered more clearly when he’d been old enough to walk. He remembered burying his hands in the rich soil of a newly ploughed field and singing. The dirt had rippled outward in a wave, concentric circles of runes carved into the field with Stephen in their epicenter. 

That was the first memory he had of his father’s voice. “God have mercy.” 

His parents didn’t tell him about that, but he knew they remembered. 

For a long time, Stephen didn’t understand what people meant when they told him to be quiet, when they talked about silence. He assumed they were speaking about their nightmares. Why would they tell such horrible stories of a world where the corn didn’t sing of its ripening harvest and the cars didn’t hum sandy rhythms on the roads and dawn didn’t harmonize with the passing clouds? How silly, that suggestion. The music was there, as Stephen was. Would never go away.

So Stephen wasn’t quiet; there was no such thing. Stephen laughed and ran with the music of the world, and it was only when Donna was old enough to play with Stephen in the barn that he realized the horrible words were not stories at all.

“How can you not hear it?” Stephen asked, his eyes wide.

Donna’s smile dimpled chubby toddler cheeks. “Just don’t,” she said. “Like you just do.”

Stephen wrinkled his nose. “Maybe you’re just weird,” he huffed. “You’re deaf and weird.” 

“Dad, Stephy’s being mean!” 

Stephen had a hard time listening when he was being scolded. He always had a hard time listening to people’s voices—the symphony of the world was so intoxicating that it took effort to pull his mind away and hear the things Donna said other people heard. 

But Donna was right. Stephen’s parents didn’t hear the music, and neither did little Victor, or the children at school. It shocked Stephen. The music only stopped in death, and even then, there was the quiet ring of decay and endings that sounded like empty space. Not hearing anything at all was… beyond death. Like it had never been alive at all. 

How could people bear it? Bear to live in this silent state of un-life?   

The first time Stephen demanded answers of a teacher, he was sent home for being disruptive. He was already problematic at school—they scolded him for being rude, for not paying attention, for taking four or five repetitions to hear what was said to him. Stephen yelled this furiously at his mother in a young, shrill voice, and she gathered him into her arms and shushed him. 

“It’s okay, little butterfly,” she whispered into his hair. His mother sounded cool and clean, like the packed dirt of a riverbed and the bits of quartz that shone beneath it. 

“‘M not afflicted,” Stephen said, squirming in her arms.

“No, you’re not. You’re a very special boy, Stephen. But you mustn't talk about the music to anyone, okay?” 

“Why not?” Stephen bit his bottom lip, feeling it tremble. 

“Because… because people who can’t hear it will see you… changing it, and they won’t understand. They’ll think it’s something bad.”

“But it isn’t! I can show them, I can—” 

“No, Stephen!” His mother’s voice climbed, and Stephen jerked in surprise. His mother grabbed his shoulders, looking into his eyes. “Listen to me. You are not allowed to use your music where people can see. Understand?”

Mutely, Stephen nodded. The weight of his mother’s anger sat heavy in his chest, and its intensity scared him. And if Stephen kept quiet about the song of the cows and the tune of the well behind the house from then on, it was because he didn’t want to make Beverly angry again.

It was years before he understood what she meant about other people. 

Stephen was walking to the bus stop, and there was a squirrel chittering in the tree beside the sidewalk. The creature sounded like bright sunlight and quick footsteps. A little like Donna, Stephen thought. Beneath its claws, the oak tree hummed with deep, rich notes, and the two songs harmonized perfectly. Stephen closed his eyes to hear it better.

He was so entranced by the noise that he didn’t check to see who was around. Stephen opened his mouth and sang ‘here’ into the tune. It was so easy to change notes, always had been. A quick thought to shift ‘dirty’ to ‘clean’, or ‘there’ to ‘ here’. The squirrel looked up at him from where it sat suddenly between his fingers and chittered. Stephen smiled. He ran a finger over its ears. 

Something screamed.

Stephen’s head jerked up, mind spinning as he thumped back into the real world. One of his classmates was staring at him, a boy with a song of bricks and slick puddles, and his eyes were wide with fear and suspicion. 

He spat something at Stephen, but Stephen didn’t catch the words. 

“What?” he said, taking a step back.

The boy spoke again, and again—but the squirrel and the tree and the brick-slick songs were so wonderful. Stephen couldn’t hear. He stared, uncomprehending. 

The boy’s face twisted. He knelt, grabbing a fistful of stones from the ground beside the sidewalk. They sang sharply, heavily, in Stephen’s mind. 

Then the boy hurled them at him, and Stephen started and sang ‘stop’. 

The stones obeyed. They hung in the air, unmoving, frozen in time. The brick-slick boy’s face went white, and he took a stumbling step back. Two. He screamed again, like he’d seen the devil, and fled to find help. To spread truth. 

Stephen let the stones fall to the ground with a hum. He was shaking. 

The next week, the Stranges moved to New York City. 

The city was loud. 

Stephen hadn’t known silence ever in his life, but he’d never known noise like this, either. A million songs from a million souls assaulted his ears. They layered on top of the deep, steady song of the buildings and the leaping, screeching notes of the cars and the trains. Stephen could only vaguely hear the sunrise, and even then it was only in the reflection of light of the windows. 

“I can’t live here,” Stephen said, his hands mashed over his ears as he looked up at the sea of apartments stacked on top of each other.

But he would. In this place of bright noise and brighter thoughts and clashing melodies, where the people were unmindful and without superstition, Stephen would live. He learned to stay quiet. It was easier to concentrate on people’s voices enough to hear them if he didn’t speak to interrupt them. Stephen threw himself into listening—and then, when he was old enough to be determined instead of afraid, he threw himself into questions. Surely there was a reason for this. Surely, Stephen could learn what it was. 

And if he learned everything else along the way, well. That was a bonus. 

When Stephen was nine, Donna bought him a watch. It was an analogue face set into a thick, silicon band that didn’t slip when Stephen picked it up. He blinked at the hands when he fastened it around his wrist. Curiously, he focused on its song. 

And every melody met in crescendo around him. 

There was a softness everywhere, singing beauty and order and answers all around Stephen. The music of his family, of every soul within the city, of every soul within the universe, fell into rhythm with it. Like this was the song they had been crafted from, minute instruments of a greater melody. It swept Stephen up. Cascading through every part of his mind, the music started soft and rose until it was a symphony of a current. Stephen didn’t fight it. 

Stephen. 

The resonate hum of the music wrapped Stephen within an embrace of right, of home. It was so beautiful. So very beautiful. Stephen reached for a reality he could hardly remember, wanting to share it. 

“Stephen!” 

A sharp voice pierced through the wonder of the song and sliced Stephen’s feet from beneath him. He collapsed into the strong arms of his father. Blinking open his eyes, he saw fear on Eugene’s face. Stephen didn’t understand. What was there to be afraid of?

“Dad,” Stephen said. “Uh, sorry. Must’ve zoned out for a minute.”

“A minute?” his father’s voice shook. “Stephen, you’ve been gone for hours.”

Stephen blinked. He looked around—the light was gone, and his family was crowded close around him. Donna’s face was red and puffy, like she’d been crying quietly for a long time. Victor clutched tightly to their mother’s hand, nervous when he met Stephen’s eyes.

“Oh,” Stephen said, the music in his mind louder than his voice. He harmonized with it unconsciously. He stopped when he saw Beverly flinch and Eugene cringe. 

“Sorry,” he said again. 

He didn’t listen to the watch’s song again, after that. At least, never as deeply, and never where his family could hear. But it was impossible to ignore completely. After that day, he heard stitches of the same melody beneath everything. It was stronger beneath the smoke and silver tune of clocks, and the cold and delicate song of screens. Stephen heard it in the changing of seasons. He heard it in the sunrise. 

And if Stephen could hear his own song, he would have heard it in himself. 

A year later, he was brave enough to reach out to the watch’s song. Ensconced safely within the trees of Central Park, Stephen broke a stick in half between his hands. He wasn’t listening to the crack it made—no, he heard its solid tune and knew immediately which tree it had fallen from. 

Alone, Stephen carefully hummed a note of the watch melody. It rang pleasantly in his head. Stephen hummed again. He opened his mouth and whistled. Of course, he wasn’t even close to recreating the swooping and magical tapestry of sounds. This was as much as he could do, however, when he could only sing one note at a time. 

And it was enough. The watch song wound around Stephen, played with him, and Stephen let it. Slowly, his apprehension of it drained away. 

So Stephen changed a note. He reached out and plucked a string of the universe, as he had done when he was a child to change a motion to ‘stop’, to exchange ‘here’ with ‘there’. It was harder to change more than one note; the more layers of melody Stephen tried to interlace, the more effort and concentration it took. Green leaves could become brown if Stephen combined the sound of ‘trees’ with the sound of ‘brown’, skillfully combining the songs. He knew what ‘dark’ sounded like—with practice, he could make it sound light instead, and voila, Donna, of course I don’t need a flashlight.

But this was different. Stephen didn’t know what the watch song was, what its notes corresponded to. He closed his eyes and listened, allowing it to pluck at him. He plucked back. Rewrote the music, and heard its resulting ripples with delight.

When Stephen opened his eyes, the branch was whole in his hand. As if it had never been broken. 

Stephen didn’t sing the timesong again. 

But he didn’t take the watch off, either. 

Central Park was one of Stephen’s favorite places. It’s song was peaceful, as uninterrupted as one could get in the city. He often took his books to one of the picnic tables to watch the bicyclists and puzzle out the secrets of the universe. 

And it was in the park that Stephen first met the boy. 

It wasn’t a coincidence that the place where Stephen had sung the watch’s melody was the place where he tripped over the boy with the clever eyes. Stephen had been walking the round trail when he’d heard it—a gorgeous song hidden within the hum of the trees. It sounded like a soaring eagle, the melody of flight layered atop a ticking: like machine parts and rust. The notes combined as clear and right as sunrise. 

Stephen had never heard anything like it. He stopped in his tracks, body swaying in the direction of the noise. He stole a glance at his parents and siblings in front of him. They were laughing, thoroughly distracted, and Stephen hadn’t been listening to their physical voices in a long while. He knew he shouldn’t sneak off. But Stephen’s curiosity had him ducking into the woods all the same, the steady natural melody closing around him. 

It was easy to follow the new song. Stephen wove between rocks and between well-groomed trees until he saw the small figure bent over handfuls of sticks and pebbles. Stephen paused between the trees behind the other boy, cocking his head. The boy looked perfectly normal. A little older than Stephen, maybe, with a mop of curly brown hair and a tick to his fingers that stilled when Stephen stopped behind him. 

Stephen took a step forward, tripped, and went sprawling. Because of course he did. It was fitting—the only way he could introduce himself to this specific soul. 

He sat up, cheeks burning, rubbing the knee he’d skinned when he fell. The flight and sunrise boy was laughing at him. 

“You surprised me,” Stephen grumbled.  

“No I didn’t,” said the boy. “You were watching from those trees.”

Stephen stared. His hands had frozen on his knee. The boy’s voice was clear—like the music was parting to let it through. Stephen didn’t have to concentrate at all. His embarrassment forgotten completely, Stephen clambered forward, suddenly wanting nothing more than to hear that voice again. 

“What are you doing?” Stephen asked.

The boy crossed his arms haughtily. “None of your business.” 

Stephen glared. The boy glared back. The ground around his knees was littered with twigs and rocks, and when Stephen looked closer, he realized they’d been carefully stacked and assembled. A little city, spreading cleanly at the boy’s feet. 

Stephen resisted the urge to sing the stones and wood into a more stable position. Instead, he wrapped his arms around his knees and cocked his head at the boy, trying not to get distracted by his music. The kid raised an eyebrow at him. Stephen tried to mimic him and failed. 

A bit of a smile cracked across the boy’s face. “What are you doing here?” he said. 

Stephen heard him the first time. “Just walking,” he huffed. “It’s a public park, you know.”

“You’re supposed to stay on the paths.”

“So are you.”

The boy smirked. “I can do whatever I want.”

It was really quite annoying that his song was beautiful enough for Stephen to fully believe that. Still, Stephen mimicked the boy’s turned-up nose. 

The boy looked angered by that. “What do you know?” he huffed. “You’re like five.”

“I’m nine.”

The boy stuck out his tongue at Stephen. “And I’m twelve. So you have to do what I say.”

Stephen squinted. He was skeptical, but the music seemed to agree with the boy. There was something he was supposed to do… wasn’t there? 

“Go away,” huffed the boy.

The trees purred their soft carbon song, and the dampness of the grass sounded like falling rain. Far away, Stephen could just barely hear Donna and Victor. The city spun in a rumble beneath them. Stephen’s watch hummed a constant, beautiful melody, always there and always echoing—and the boy’s voice carved right through it. 

Go away.  

Stephen stood, inclined his head, and left. 

It would be a long time before he saw the boy again, but when he heard engines or the sound of birds flying, Stephen remembered his song. 

Stephen and Victor shared a room in their tucked-away apartment until Stephen was old enough not to have a room in that apartment at all. 

They were the boys, and Victor took up space without being cluttered while Stephen hardly took up any, so it was a logical pairing. Neither of them minded. They scuffled and complained and drew lines in elaborate borders throughout the room of course, but it wasn’t spiteful or vindictive. At worst, they were petty, arguing and pranking each other. 

And at best, they would lie awake together in the middle of the night, parallel boys on parallel beds. They would speak. They would stay silent. And the nightmare tears would give way to laughter, to sleep once again, for whatever brother they were being hidden from. 

“What did you dream about?” Victor asked. His voice was quiet and high and fuzzy with sleep. Stephen hadn’t realized he’d woken him. 

Stephen dreamed with force enough to shake his brother awake, every time. Each time, Victor reached out curiously. So Stephen spoke of each vision with exhausted honesty, too tired to hide the truth of things like he did for his parents who looked fearful at the mention of the music. 

He had dreams in bright colors and bright sounds, and others that were blackened and hollow. Stephen dreamed of strange creatures reaching out to scoop him into their palms. They watched him with eyes the color of the cosmos. 

There would be quick dreams and long dreams, happy dreams and sad ones. Most often, they were simply peaceful. Neutral. Stephen floated in observance over the gears turning beneath a volcano. He watched a shaking hand lift a heart-shaped herb from a nest of leaves, a cat’s footprints trailing behind him. He saw a lasso around a frozen star. He dreamed of flying armor, of a city made of gold, of dinosaurs. 

In the stranger dreams, he saw bizarre images of twisting creatures leaping from beneath cracked earth and snapping chunks out of his flesh, though they left him feeling neither pain nor fear. Bones, still wet from the flesh they should be within. An orange sky. A human fetus. The rotting exoskeleton of a beetle in the eyesocket of a man who grinned at Stephen from an otherwise human face. 

But they didn’t scare him. Not really. And besides, the dinosaurs were Victor’s favorites. 

Stephen didn’t like them any more than the others, but Victor’s enthusiasm made him try to remember them better when he woke up. He could cling better to the faces of creatures in his dreams because of it. He and Victor named the species they didn’t know, which was a great many of them. 

The only dreams Stephen didn’t speak of were the nightmares. 

In them, there was pain under his skin, pricking at his face. There was cold pressure around his wrists and pressing against his neck. There was a voice asking him the same question, over and over and over, a question Stephen could always hear, could always hear because there was nothing, nothing, else to hear.

In the nightmares, the music was gone. Stephen sang until his voice was gone, scraped his fingers against the unnamable surfaces around him until they were bloody, but the noises couldn’t pierce the silence in a way that mattered. Metal glowed emptily. Fire danced without lightsong, ice scattered across his eyelids without coldsong. Color and sight and touch and magic had no meaning. 

And Stephen knew he was dead, in the nightmares. 

No, he kept saying. No, no, no.

When he woke, he didn’t know what he’d been denying. He remembered neither the question he’d been asked nor his surroundings, but he remembered the silence. Like a warning. Like a story.

But it was only a dream. Stephen watched the vague green shadows on the hardwood ceiling and breathed. The world sang. In no world would it ever stop—he knew that.  

“What did you dream about?” Victor asked. 

“Nothing,” Stephen whispered, tears streaming down his face. 

“Oh.” There was a rustle as Victor turned over in his bed, the springs squeaking. “Want to talk about dinosaurs?”

Donna had made a new friend, and Stephen was glad for her. What he wasn’t so glad about was the escort their parents required for her to visit her friend—a role most often assigned to Stephen. When he was Donna’s age, he’d insisted he was old enough to travel on his own, but Donna had no issue with a twelve-year-old Stephen chaperoning her. 

They stood on the subway, hand in hand, as Stephen tried to listen to her questions over the banging cymbals of the underground network and the litany of tired soul songs of their fellow passengers. Donna pestered Stephen with those questions constantly. Her song played in his dreams afterwards, and Donna just laughed when he complained about it. 

“What does this sound like?” was Donna’s favorite question. This could be anything. The sound of the rain. A book. A plastic bumblebee. The broken pieces of a ceramic dish spread out around her like moon phases. A key. 

Stephen would answer in long rambles, spiderwebs of adjectives and nouns in attempts to describe the music. When those weren’t enough—which was often—Stephen would be silent for a long time. He’d listen, and think, and he would tell Donna a story. 

“What does my jacket sound like?” Donna asked, grinning cheekily up at Stephen from the side of the subway car. 

Stephen turned his hand over in hers, brushing his fingers over the hem of her coat. It was an old thing. Ratty. The buttons at the front were mismatched: the top one shaped like a plastic flower and the lower ones clear silver plastic. It was still soft on the inside, Stephen knew. That was why Donna liked it. 

“It sounds…” Stephen began. He licked his dry lips and Donna watched him with eager anticipation. Stephen concentrated, listened.

“Once, there was a little songbird egg that wouldn’t hatch,” he said finally. “Its mother fretted and worried but its father was certain and patient. The egg would hatch, the father bird knew, and indeed it did. And the bird that broke through the shell was the color of Little Red Ridinghood’s cloak and had an annoying little cackle that could be heard all through the forest.” 

“Hey!” Donna said, and Stephen grinned at her. 

“The little bird was fluffy and beady-eyed and its feathers stood on end. It only sang in the early mornings—and that little whistle is what your jacket sounds like.”

Donna swayed, looking pleased. “Wow,” she said. “You really hear that?” 

“Of course.”

“And what can you do with it?”

Stephen shrugged. “I could make your coat a different color, or mend the hole in the armpit. I could get your button stuck or make one go missing.”

I could make it brand new, Stephen thought but didn’t say. I could unravel it until it was decayed and dusting. 

“Weird,” Donna said, wrinkling her nose. 

“Strange,” Stephen corrected and grinned.

Donna slapped him, and the questions continued as they always did. The subway stopped and started and stopped again, and Stephen and Donna wandered onto street level. Clammy sunlight slicked the backs of their necks. Donna lead Stephen through the tree-lined streets with purposeful intent, not letting him dawdle. Not even when a soothing melody broke through the bustling music of the street and stopped him between one step and the next.

Stephen cocked his head, eyes drawn to a building tucked away on the street. It had old brick walls and a greenish roof, and there was a round window set far above him at an angle Stephen couldn’t quite see through. There was a lilt to its song that set it apart from the buildings around it. A low and fluttering melody, drawn out.

And a woman stood on its steps.

She wasn’t looking at Stephen as she pulled a yellow hood over her head and reached out to the door of the calm building. If Stephen concentrated, he could pick out her song. It was like a tree, like a star. Old, burning, indomitable. 

“Come on, Stephen,” Donna said insistently, tugging at Stephen’s hand. He turned away from the building. 

“Coming, coming.” Stephen broke into a trot to match his sister’s pace. 

He only looked back at the calm building and the circle of stars woman once—and by then, they were gone. 

Donna lead Stephen into the foyer of an apartment building, festooned in enough expensive new Starktech to give Stephen pause. But Donna pulled him along, not letting him stop to crane his head to look up and up and up toward the roof that seemed to fall in on them. She let out a squeal of excitement as another girl leapt up from a waiting chair. They hugged tightly, already breaking into chatter. Stephen smiled to himself. Job well done. 

The other girl’s mother stood slightly to the side of them, a pleased look on her face. She looked up at Stephen with a nod. Stephen gave a little bow in return. 

“You’re Donna’s brother?” the woman asked. She offered her hand to shake.

Stephen took it, about to answer, but the words dried in his mouth. His hand froze around the woman’s, his eyes glinting wide. 

“You’re sick,” he said, the words surprising him. 

The woman pulled her hand out of his, but it didn’t silence her song. Stephen realized too late he’d said something wrong. He took a step back. The memory of the last time he’d done so twisted in his chest, and Stephen cringed at the woman’s quick movement. 

She seemed to notice. The shock in her eyes fell behind a carefully controlled expression of reassurance, as mothers seemed so adept at doing. She smiled at Stephen.

“I’m alright,” she said. “I’ve just been headache lately. I’m going to the doctor later this week.”

Stephen shook his head. He knew he shouldn’t—knew he should walk away with his secret and leave his sister to have a good time, but the touch to this woman’s song was deep. Stephen didn’t like it. 

“No,” he said. “No, you need to go now.”

The woman frowned again. “What?”

“There’s something—” Stephen broke himself off. “Nevermind, just, can I—”

He reached out, grabbing the woman’s wrist. Confused, she didn’t shake him off. Stephen listened. The music, a brush of wildflowers and wildfires, reeled him in and swirled around a dissonant cord of ‘sick’.

Stephen hummed, low in the back of his throat. He separated the music, a dark string of notes suspended from the silver edge of a scalpel. They hung in his mind like dewdrops on a spiderweb. 

The reverberations in his chest echoed up into his skull, and Stephen let them pool on his tongue as song. The note for ‘sick’, hidden in this woman’s music, snapped away under Stephen’s clumsy and inexperienced hands. He left in its place the bright note of health. 

Someone gasped, and Stephen opened his eyes. His vision was blurring, his head suddenly thick and smoky and exhausted, and his legs buckled as the woman yanked her hand out of his. Stephen’s knees struck the ground, and he couldn’t hear it over the music. He breathed. Blinked. Tried to focus on the towering shape above him.

The woman was speaking. The sharpness of words stemmed from surprise and maybe fear. The urgency in her voice was concern and maybe pain.

Stephen had just enough energy to know he’d gone too far and shown to much. But still, he smiled, listening to the changed song. It was stunning, despite the effort that it had taken. Clean and bright. Saturated and swinging. And it felt normal, in a way most of Stephen’s changes never did. 

He’d put something back. He’d righted something, not shifted it—returned something, not lost it. This song, the song of wellness and care, was a harmony to the life music. And it didn’t always take the pain and effort of changing the music with his power to heal . There were other ways.

Maybe the healing song wasn’t as rich as time’s. (Nothing could be, could ever be.) But this one was safer. 

And Stephen thought he could spend the rest of his life listening to it. 

“What was that?” came the woman’s voice, sharp and scared. 

Stephen stumbled to his feet and ran before the fear could turn to something else, something more dangerous. But he wasn’t fast enough. 

It was the second time in his life Stephen was called a demon.

Donna was never permitted to see her new friend again, and she only resented Stephen for it for a little while. 

She argued with Beverly and Eugene when she thought Stephen couldn’t hear. Her words, defending him, defending herself, met only twelve years of conviction. Twelve years of stubbornness built to cover a son’s unexplained sins and their own unanswered questions. 

“He didn’t do anything wrong!”

“But he is wrong. Something is wrong, and it’s going to get one of you hurt someday.”

Donna stomped away, angry and offended and protective, and Stephen felt nothing for himself. Sometimes, Donna asked him why not. He had no answer.

He was who he was. The words of a world he could hear so deeply did not anger him, no more than the dawn angered him. Sadness and acceptance were not mutually exclusive.

He did not like to see his sister angry. So Stephen, no longer thinking himself hidden by the symphony of the city, stopped singing. When the lonely music became too much, he would make himself scarce and hide within the layers of his own humming. And the next time he was at the library, he found a book on anatomy.

It was winter when Stephen first laid eyes upon a relic. 

(He didn’t know what it was, of course. He wouldn’t know its proper name for a great many years to come. But he knew it had a name, somewhere in the hooded swirls of the music around him, and it called him.)

Stephen pushed open the squeaky metal door with only a slight struggle against the wind. The cold, dirty sleet dripped down the back of his collar. It took conscious effort not to seize the notes and sing his clothes into warmth. But there were too many eyes on him; he could feel them. 

His breath fogged the glass in front of him as he slipped as quickly as possible into the antique shop. Dusty air, like the texture of old keys, coated the backs of his teeth. Stephen ran his tongue across them. His small hands twitched in his pockets, brushing against the wad of bills he’d managed to collect over the past few months. It was his father’s birthday. Stephen hadn’t had time to make a gift, so he came to the shop looking for one. 

Perhaps he sought a pocket knife or a pocket watch. Perhaps he was after an old beer mug or clockwork trinket. Stephen brushed his fingers over old buttons, across gilded picture frames, through the grooves of mismatched silverware. Dishes and furniture and books, dripping their rust and brass melodies like strands of paint. 

Stephen looked at them and listened. He paused at scintillating low tones, leaving his fingers atop those objects for a little longer. The songs that would harmonize with his father’s melody would lead him to a better gift than any practicality could dream to. 

He followed the curves of the shelves to the back of the store. A hollow in the wall, scooped from the skeleton of a staircase, contained even older objects. Even more beautiful sounds. Stephen knew, young and practiced in the art of exchanging allowance and change for sweets and toys and watches, that he hadn’t the money for them. But there was no harm in looking. No harm in listening. 

It was here that he heard the silence.

For a moment, Stephen choked on fear. Silence was unnatural, impossible—beyond dead and beyond evil. But he’d been mistaken. What he’d thought was an unnamable lack of the music was instead a song that had hidden itself. 

Hidden itself alongside Stephen. 

He couldn’t hear his song, so he could hardly hear this one. But no two melodies were the same, and so as Stephen concentrated, this new music took shape. It shifted as he moved. Reflecting things. Reflecting songs. 

Stephen reached out, his fingers landing on a thick brass chain. He traced the length of it, freeing a polyhedral cage of metal from behind a nearby photo frame. The cage hung between his fingers. It was strangely heavy and slitted like some sort of lantern, though the chain was more like something that might hang a chandelier. It hummed to Stephen. At him.

It knew, without a mind. Sang, without a consciousness to direct it. An object of the music. 

Stephen knew what it was. What it did. This was an instrument—an instrument to make songs alongside the universe, for those who could not hear the music. 

It could do anything for someone who could hear. Stephen could play anything he wanted with this instrument. He could weave magic aided by something forged for the song, designed within it. 

He let the object’s reflective song draw him close. Let it filter through his head. He twisted its song, changed it as he changed light to dark, and listened it run across the music of the shop. 

Stephen opened his mouth to sing. 

A hand fell on his shoulder. 

Stephen jumped, the chain falling between his fingers and clattering to the table below. He shook his head. His focus was scattered, his ears filled with music. A voice in the physical world, the real world, was speaking to him. Stephen couldn’t quite hear it. 

He took a deep breath and bit the inside of his cheek. Raising his eyes, he searched out the figure beside him. The vibrations of the stranger’s voice thrummed through his shoulder. 

There was a young man standing beside him—Asian, maybe six years older than Stephen. He had suspicious eyes and a stocky form, and he wore a strange robe of red and brown that somehow didn’t look at all out of place in this dusty corner. Gloves disappeared beneath the cuffs of his sleeves, and he was still speaking to Stephen.  

The man’s song reminded Stephen of book spines and candlelight and the hilt of a sword. Stephen couldn’t hear his voice. He focused on the man’s mouth instead, reading the words from its shape. 

“You are not careful,” the man said. “These things are costly, boy. And dangerous.”

Stephen, only slightly ruffled by the boy comment, jumped to the important question. “What is that?” 

The man regarded him. Stephen met his narrowed eyes with far too much confidence; his blood was still humming from his momentary dip into the music, and he wasn’t scared of this strange man and his even stranger clothes. 

It was this that convinced the sword-hilt man to speak again; the look in Stephen’s eyes when he was curious.

“It’s a very special lamp,” the young stranger told him. 

“Who are you, then? How do you know?”

“I’m its rightful owner,” the man said gruffly. “Or at least, I am one of them.” 

Stephen looked at the chain, hearing the way it shifted to match the cool music of the stranger. “Are there more instr—lamps here? Will you come back for them?”

“No.” From the curl of the man’s mouth, he said it shortly, impatiently. 

He turned, his hand lifting from Stephen’s shoulder to twine around the chain. He lifted the lamp into his hands. A frown brushed his features as he looked between it and Stephen. 

“It’s not supposed to do…” he began, but shook his head and pursed his lips before he finished. 

“What?” Stephen felt unmoored. “What is—what will you do with it?”

The man ignored him this time, striding away through the dusty store. Stephen raised a hand. His chest was filled with the urge, the need, to stop the stranger. But he swallowed it. He’d learned his lesson. 

“Wait!” he yelled, finally able to hear his own voice again.

But the young man and his song of books and swords was gone. 

(Stephen wouldn’t know the name of the relic for a great many years to come—but he would, someday. And someday, too, he would learn the name of the man.)

When school got out, year after year after year, Stephen would take Donna and Victor to celebrate with donuts. 

On the very limits of the subway’s reach was a tiny bakery. It was local and stood outside the traffic and crowd-songs of the rest of the city. The interior was homey, and there was always a constant hum of physical sound from the radio above the counter. It was Stephen and his siblings’ favorite. With some small and donut-specific thread of self control, they saved this shop for their end of year celebration and kept it secret otherwise. 

Each summer, there would be new flavors—wild flavors, the kind the kids never expected and were always excited for. And each summer, they would try as many of them as they could fit in their stomachs. Or as many as Stephen’s carefully budgeted funds could afford.

Donna liked the ones with rich chocolate or hidden aftertastes of coffee, and she’d taken an unexpected liking to the green tea donut the shop had served the summer she entered eighth grade. Victor always hoped they’d bring his favorite lemon pistachio twist back. Stephen liked the way powdered sugar sounded, and the unexpected taste of cinnamon and pineapple made this year one to be remembered.

“You can’t graduate,” Donna informed him through a mouth smeared with chocolate.

“Why not?” Stephen asked. “High school sucks, you’ll know next year.”

“But you’re only fifteen.” 

“I won’t be in December. I can slip out between semesters and avoid all the fanfare.” Stephen took another bite of his donut. 

He’d climbed his way through the school system with a tight grip on the music, ever since Nebraska. No one knew what to do with him—the boy that didn’t listen but read at unreal speeds and hummed tunes no one recognized. Stephen let knowledge settle alongside the melodies around him. It seemed to fit, always fit. 

And he loved the feeling. Loved it almost as much as the murmur of the watch on his wrist, the way the music felt when he understood. It felt like singing without the limits of his voice, of his physical form. 

So Stephen studied math and writing and science, studied how to appear normal, and knew that someday he’d learn what the music really was. 

“I think you’re cheating,” Donna told him. Behind her, the radio chattered about the death of an esteemed military engineer and his wife, though the music was too thick for Stephen to pay much attention. 

Stephen grinned at Donna. He chewed through the zinging taste of his donut. “Is it cheating to be good at something?”

“It’s cheating to be magic,” Donna laughed. She wadded her napkin into a ball and threw it at him. Stephen heard the oaky tenor of recycled paper. 

“Can’t help it,” Stephen said. 

Donna hummed. The teen had recently learned to curse when their parents weren’t in earshot, and she did so cautiously. “I just wish I could, y’know, tell people the truth. It’s so goddamn frustrating.”

Stephen winced. “Are the rumors bothering you again?”

“Bothering me?” Donna chomped aggressively on her donut, her fingers smeared with glaze. “You’re the one they keep calling all those… things. Why don’t you ever say anything?”

Stephen shrugged. “They’re not worth it,” he lied. 

Donna heard the whispers, sometimes, when he walked her and Victor home. Not once had she ever heard Stephen snap back. He knew it unnerved her when he was usually so quick with wit and insult, but Stephen didn’t like to tear people down on falsehoods. And the things the children said might be cruel, but Stephen couldn’t know for sure if they were really wrong. 

As long as the music sang in his ears, he didn’t mind. It was the world. The universe. It was who he was. Stephen wouldn’t give the music up for anything, not even answers. Not when silence lurked in his nightmares. Not when death would be so much better than that quiet.   

“Still,” Donna insisted. “I just wish I could tell them what you really are.”

Stephen’s mouth twitched up. “What am I, then?” he asked. 

(He wished he knew.)

“Awesome, of course,” Donna huffed. 

Stephen laughed. There was powdered sugar dusting his fingers, and Stephen licked it off and reached out to take his sister’s hand. “Don’t worry, Donna,” he said. “Soon, I’ll be out of here. I’ll be where I belong. Someday.”

I’ll know the truth.

For as long as he heard the songs, he would hope. 

When Stephen was a child, he thought no part of the music was ugly. 

The sound of cold was silver and clear, ringing like light through a prism. Hunger crawled in unique and twisting tones. Even sickness, the way it soured other music in unexpected ways, had a resonance that harmonized with the rest of the world. If these could be part of the symphony, surely the only ugly sound was the lack of any sound at all. 

Stephen had always thought that. But that was before he’d heard the song of death. 

It was worse, almost, because death’s song wasn’t horrid, not really. It was low and soothing and uncomplex, like a lullaby sung in darkness. Glowing eyes in an open throat. In the sea of unique life songs, death moved like an unnoticed, creaking wind. It had claws of ivory and harmonies of beauty. It was not like sickness. Death didn’t change notes, prowling with a rhythm like a heartbeat, never subtle. It didn’t possess songs like illness did. 

It just silenced them. 

“No,” Stephen said. The word spilled from his bleeding fingers and knees as rough as the music in his ears. “Stop, stop it, stop it—”

Lukewarm water stung his scraped skin. It was tinged red. The tile beneath him shone as white as bone, and Stephen knew it was, knew he’d peeled the skin back from the sticky surface of a skull and left bare ivory as the flesh of the earth. 

Under his hands, calm notes constructed the rhythm of a stopped heart. They were so slow, so slow they were nonexistent, and Stephen’s breath spilled from his mouth in gasps, in sobs. His panic turned the whole sky emerald. 

He could always hear the songs when he listened. He could always hear her song. 

But there was no songbird music or spring flower laughter to fall back on, anymore. There was no young soul to reach for. There was only the lullaby, sung in the voice of a child, sung in his own voice, as the waters rose around his ears.

“Help me!” Stephen screamed through the haze of music, his eyes wide. He didn’t know what was around him. Who. There was a body beneath his hands, and that was all that mattered. 

(It was supposed to have been fun. It was supposed to have been special. Donuts for his high school graduation and a fun day out to the pool today. It was supposed to be—it was supposed to—)

Stephen’s shoulders shook. He curled his hands around the fragile neck of the death song and felt his sister’s skin under his fingertips. 

“Donna,” he mumbled, his voice thick with water. 

She didn’t answer. Only the lullaby replied to Stephen, sucking the tones of the very universe into its abyss. 

“Shut up,” Stephen snarled through his panicked breaths. His eyes swam with water—his tears, the pool, it all sounded the same. 

The song didn’t listen. The songs always listened to Stephen—he would make them. Fingers digging deep into cold skin, Stephen opened his mouth, and magic joined his breaths. His own voice, bellowing a physical version of Donna’s song.   

It rang in his ears. But not in the right way, not in the fabric of stars and universe, and it was not enough, so far from not enough. Laughable, in its futility. Stephen sang as his voice choked off, rough and desperate, and the death song filled the negative space. 

Stephen pulled at it, wrenched at it. He changed its notes, with the same ease he changed ‘light’ to ‘dark’. But here, there was no song beneath that of death to uncover. No healthy song to reveal under sickness. Not anymore. Donna was only silence, and changing the notes of death only carved torn-flesh symbols into her body in strips. 

And when Stephen had exhausted his voice, exhausted his power trying to recreate Donna’s one of a kind music, he reached for the watch. 

He didn’t think. He didn’t have to. The timesong pooled in his body like his own life’s blood, and his heart pumped it just the same. Stephen poured the melody through his fingers, tugging at its overlaying strings, restitching its universal pattern. 

He rewound it. Commanded it. 

The lacerations left Donna’s body. The bruise she’d gotten falling from the apartment stairs two days ago disappeared. Stephen pushed her back through time, back to when she was okay. Alive. 

Back to when everything was how it was supposed to be. 

(“Race you to the far side, Stephen!”)

Back and back and back, Stephen chased the death song from his sister’s body. He left the reverse of age in his wake. But though time was built into his cells, he could not purge this orange sound completely. He could not control a soul.

That power belonged to something else. 

Tears ran down Stephen’s cheeks, the color of jade, as hands tore into him somewhere between the physical realm and his own mind; he couldn’t tell the difference anymore. He didn’t stop. Wouldn’t. Donna didn’t breathe, didn’t sing, and Stephen was terrified beyond nightmares that he would have to listen to that lullaby. 

Time skipped, respooled. Just for her, always for her. The song Stephen wrote pulled her back through her own life, no longer hers, and it sounded like the universe itself. It sounded like a little boy's sobs. It sounded like everything. 

(Anything.) 

And it was nothing more than a scream.

Eugene and Beverly found Stephen ringing with exhausted silence, blood dripping down his face, staining the bone around him. He was humming a broken song, and he didn’t speak. His spine hunched so far around himself that they mistook him, at first, for the one who had died. 

In the palms of his hands, limp and dead, he held a human fetus. 

“She wouldn’t come back,” he rasped. 

His mother screamed. The horror in the sound didn’t reach Stephen—hardly any sound did. Eugene’s hand on his shoulder, gripping tight enough to bruise, was the only thing that kept him from dropping into the watch’s song completely.  

The sky was still emerald. 

(It was the third time in his life that Stephen was called a demon.)

They told him to leave two weeks later. 

Beverly and Eugene spoke in voices soaked in grief, their eyes steeped in guilt, but their words were as clear as Stephen had ever heard them. The room was so loud, but Stephen knew it was quiet to them. Knew it had been quiet to them since Donna died. 

Stephen tried to make it better—or perhaps he’d been trying to make it worse. Every day, for as long as his breath lasted, Stephen sang. Sang, so he didn’t forget what she’d sounded like. Sang, so Beverly and Eugene and Victor couldn’t forget what he’d done.

What he was. 

So when they broke, Stephen wasn’t surprised. He’d expected this. He’d pushed for it, filled their home with strange colors and unnatural patterns, to see just how far he could push. How long they’d last. 

Two weeks. Stephen was worth two weeks. 

“We love you,” they said, their voices muffled thunder where Stephen lay at the bottom of the sea. 

Stephen didn’t say it back, eyes blank as he read the words off their lips. He didn’t promise he’d be fine. Later, he wished he had. 

Time moved on as he did. And time always left people behind. 

Medical school started as a prison, for a teenager in ratty jeans and hands curled over his mouth to keep in a song. But study was an escape. A refuge. A joy. Stephen never noticed until it had already turned into success—never noticed until he had already built it into the foundation of his spirit. Degrees and grades, knowledge and curiosity and understanding.  

Understanding sounded so much like the watch’s song. 

Stephen didn’t speak to his parents. He wrote letters, and Eugene and Beverly wrote back, and Victor did too. It was easier when they couldn’t hear each other’s voices. Easier when they didn’t have to see him listening to their souls. 

Stephen thought fear was too much work, now. Sadness was all he had room for; he liked its song better anyway. So he sang, even if it was without magic. He tapped the beats of his professor’s melodies on the sides of his desk. He learned sign language for when he couldn’t hear anything but the music, and he learned other languages for when he could. 

The first time he saved a life, it sounded like being born. 

Oh, Stephen thought, the scalpel slipping from his hand when he’d stepped back. 

So this was how things were supposed to be. 

He liked it. The music, the knowledge, the independence. He liked the way money sounded and the way the notes of tailored suits harmonized with clear windows and respect. He liked the sounds of watches. 

Stephen called his success memory and talent and it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth. But what use was the whole truth to someone like him? What use was it to the songs that still continued because of Stephen, to Stephen that still continued because of them? It was dangerous, that truth.  

And when his parents died, Victor was the only one who knew it. But Victor had been young, and he would forget. Stephen would be safe. 

Safe.

Demon was the wrong title. Stephen was something else, something beyond else. But for his purposes, demon would do. 

Doctor Stephen Strange stepped onto the streets of New York, and the singing universe moved aside. 

Chapter Text

Tony counted his breaths in a series of fives. 

Five had been his favorite number when he was a child and still stubborn enough to care about such things. Five was a single hand held up to brace a blueprint, was weekdays he’d get to spend away from the house, was his senses and primary body systems. Tony was born in the fifth month. He’d thought the number was lucky.

Tony held five close to his chest until he’d had to fill that space with more important things—until he’d learned not to save space in his identity for innocent things, childish things. 

So when he counted his breaths, it was to a number of convenience. Tony had gotten rather used to that. The convenience and the counting. 

He hadn’t realized just how many rhythms a human body maintained, how much his mind relied on skeletal muscles to perform their functions until the weight in his chest disrupted those rhythms. His fingers played over the clear surface of the arc reactor. His arc reactor. His broken curse and self-built blessing that had put just as much effort into trying to kill him as Ivan Vanko and Justin Hammer had. 

Tony took a conscious breath—all his breaths had been conscious since Afghanistan—and pulled his gaze away from the bottle on the table. He wanted a drink. Badly. His head pounded like a son of one, and the nicks and gashes from the joints of his armor stung. But despite the new element pulsing cleanly in his chest, there was still too much shit in Tony’s bloodstream to be adding alcohol. 

At least his varicose veins had begun to fade, now that they’d stopped pumping palladium. His chest was fucked up enough as it was.

Glancing down at his ribs, Tony spied a flicker of movement. A breath in his peripheral vision. For an instant, he thought arc reactor’s blue light took the shape of a pirate ship, sailing jauntily through a sea of black wallpaper. It was gone, replaced by a simple circle of light as soon as Tony looked for it. He sighed. 

He’d gotten rather used to that, too. 

His mind couldn’t decide, it seemed, what it wanted the weight in his chest to be. A tool, a weapon, an extension of himself—Tony saw the arc reactor differently each time he glimpsed it. He’d watched its blue-phantom glow on the ceiling of a cave, once, while a dead man asked him what he was.

A tool, a weapon, a boy who loved the number five. 

Tony buttoned his shirt back over his chest, obscuring the reactor’s light. His hands pulled frustratedly at his grimy hair. Dried blood flaked off across his face. When had this become his question? When had his remarkable attempt to stay alive become the catalyst to multiple idiots’ psychotic breaks and attempts to kill hundreds of innocents at an expo? 

Seriously, the damn thing wasn’t worth the fuss. Make your own wings if you wanted to fly so badly. 

Tony’s vision swam, and he reminded himself to take a breath. He pushed himself to his feet. That eye-patched SHIELD director wanted to meet with him the day after tomorrow, and Tony should get at least a few hours of sleep before then. 

Now that he wasn’t dying. 

“We’re really gonna have to make a new rule about that,” Tony said to the ceiling. “From now on, all my hazardous acts have to be spontaneous. Extended dying is just so damn embarrassing.”

JARVIS’s voice, ever smooth and unflinching, rippled through the room. “Yes, you do tend to hire spies when you are too sick to pay attention.”

“Rude,” Tony huffed, pressing a hand to his chest. His arc reactor was warm through his shirt. “And I didn’t hire her. Legal did.”

“Yes, sir.” 

“What’s that I hear in your voice, hm?” 

“Only my unflinching loyalty to you, sir,” JARVIS said, and the ceiling lights blinked.

Tony snorted, his smile coming back. His breath count continued in the back of his mind. 

“How’s Rhodey?” he asked, shifting the subject. “My platypus was dealt a few blows back there.”

“There has been no word from Colonel Rhodes, sir,” JARVIS replied. “Do you wish me to call him?”

“No, don’t bother.” Rhodey was probably asleep anyway. Like Tony should be—hadn’t been in far too many days, afraid that if he did he would never open his eyes again. Afraid that he’d forget to breathe. That the arc reactor would finally be too heavy and he'd finally run out of borrowed time. 

One, two, three, four, five. 

He spent so much time being afraid, and for what? To fight back against the feeling in tenfold? To chase the thrill of life in the moments he thought were his last?

He wasn’t dying anymore—and truly, Tony had no idea what to do with that. 

There was no threat, no waiting evil plot. Vanko was dead and Rhodey was safe and Pepper was a wild and unpredictable beat in the center of his chest. Something he’d wished so terribly to touch when he thought he’d never have the chance. 

And now he had his whole life again.  

What did he want? 

In the corner of his eye, Tony thought the shadow of his arc rector formed a pair of wings. 

“Hey JARVIS,” Tony said, turning his eyes toward the ceiling. “Do you think I’ll get a medal?”

“I’m sure that can be arranged.”

Good. Shiny things were comforting—shiny things made sense. Symbols. Tony could work with symbols. It was all this abstraction, feathers and pirate ships and omelettes that never got made, that tied his thoughts into knots.

Part of him wanted to wander into his workshop and tinker new pathways through his mind. But his father’s research was still there, laid out on screens. Tony didn’t think he could… he didn’t know what he thought. 

He wasn’t used to not dying. 

His breath was a cold weight in his chest, a rhythm of five written into his ribs. His heart was tired but his mind was racing. An engine without something to power. A bird in a cage. Tony wanted to race something, wanted the timeline back. Wanted the purpose back. 

Why did he need to be dying to feel like he could do anything worthwhile? 

Tony’s thoughts sputtered and turned over, useless. He wouldn’t be getting any sleep until much, much later. So he did what he always did when the light in his heart became too much. 

He put on the suit, and he flew.

Tony often felt like he’d already lived a very long life. 

He was a boy on a pirate ship and a man in a flying suit, and he’d already done everything in between. He’d had his crisis and his rebirth. He’d fallen in love and fallen out of it. He’d mourned family and buried friends and changed the world. He rubbed hands already cracked from work and slept with eyes already shuttered with experience still wide open, and he hoarded years that he’d never thought he’d reach like a dragon and its gold. 

(He had lived a long life, if time really meant anything. Tony didn’t realize just how much it did mean—and just how much closer he’d walk beside it.)

Age was something Tony pondered, sometimes, high above the inverted skyline of New York City. He walked the ridges of skyscraper roofs and wondered if he’d ever really grown past eight years old. If all this, this high-flying superhero drama he’d wound around his soul, was just a dream written into a hidden pirate’s diary.

He’d thought about that, too, with the bitter tang of his death in the back of his throat. He’d lay awake, weakened and soul-sick with the palladium in his blood. If this was a dream, could he die? If this was a dream, could he do anything but die? 

Tony had lived, and he didn’t know what that meant about dreams. He didn’t know what that meant about time. 

And this—the flight and the suit and the battles—this was not a dream. Tony might not ever believe that, but it was true. 

Tony stepped off the windowsill of a building on the edge of Queens, repulsors whirring against his hands. He’d repaired them just hours ago when he should’ve been sleeping. He felt the vibrations up to his elbows. The warmth of the electric metal, plated and pressing against him, was warm through his clothes. Tony didn’t notice anymore. 

The thermals of the city brushed against him, flipping him onto his back. Tony let them. He breathed, a rhythm of fives, and watched the windows flash past as he pushed himself ever-faster. Beneath his visor, he smiled. 

It was light—morning still, or perhaps early afternoon. Tony couldn’t remember. The hours since the fight, since the drones and the fire and the explosions, blurred together. Tony had hardly had the chance to think ‘huh, maybe I’ll live to my next birthday.’ 

He thought it now. And what a wild thought it was, even if time didn’t mean anything to Tony Stark.

Not yet. 

“JARVIS, plot me a course to the Expo, yeah?” Tony said, curving sharply beneath the slats of a bridge. A car honked to greet him, and Tony flashed his repulsors in reply. He smiled wider. 

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS replied. 

Tony took off again. The suit was still slightly worse for wear from the night before. Paint had been scraped off in long streaks, patterned like the claws of the creatures Tony only imagined existed in his universe. Wires pricked at his skin from a broken chink in the suit’s shoulder. Still, it had been through worse. Tony had, too. 

The starburst lawn of the Expo’s venue was still streaked in debris. It was streaked with a hell of a lot shit, if Tony was being honest, and it was mostly his fault. The fires weren’t burning anymore, at least. The ash settled in uneven layers across the seared bricks and scorched grass. Tony traced it with his eyes.

“Damn,” he said. He landed more heavily than he’d intended on a nearby roof. “Property damage, much? At least I own this building.”

“Sir, you’ve lost your count.”

“Right.” Tony reminded himself to take a breath, falling back into his normal rhythm again. 

A lot of people wouldn’t , Tony caught himself thinking. Too many people. 

Tony wasn’t dying anymore, and he knew he was one of the lucky ones. Or maybe not. 

He sighed, turning away from the Expo and hopping down off the ledge of the roof. There were blast footprints from where he’d flown the suit over the shattered windows the night before. 

“Damn,” he said again.

Tony shouldn’t be here. He should be on the phone with companies and news sources and politicians, should be asking lawyers to fly in from distant states and dangling money in front of those who would make too much fuss. But instead he was standing on a roof, trying not to think about what he’d pulled the last time he stood here while the wreckage still burned. 

Wrong, Tony’s thoughts whispered. Roared. He shook his head, drawing breath around the arc reactor’s weight in his chest, but the knowledge didn’t dissipate. Tony didn’t think he’d done right the night before. He didn’t think he’d done right by anyone. By himself, certainly. 

(He’d forgotten the little boy he’d saved—the boy who’d maybe been trying to save him—but if he hadn’t, perhaps he would’ve thought differently. But that was another story that wouldn’t matter for a long, long while.) 

The lights of the visor flashed. Tony blinked, wrinkling his nose on instinct, and he refocused on the ruin of the Expo. Somewhat morbidly, he tried to compare it to other battlegrounds he’d witnessed in the past. 

It measured up to a couple. Tony rubbed the shoulder of the suit and sighed. 

He’d built a convention for innovation and turned it into a weapon. Was this how the world would always see his work? Was this the real shadow he’d built for himself?

Maybe it was. Maybe he’d been built to be a weapon himself. 

And yet, it wasn’t very often that the shadow of his arc reactor looked like a sword. 

“Sir,” JARVIS said quietly. “Would you like me to plot a course back home?” 

Tony knew that if he lived, he lived to build. 

“No.”

“Sir?”

Tony turned his eyes to Manhattan. “You know that old block on Park Avenue in midtown, yeah?”

“I know everything,” JARVIS said smoothly, and Tony rolled his eyes.

“I want you to buy it.”

JARVIS flashed. “Perhaps this is not a decision to be made when you haven’t slept in multiple days and are still recovering from significant injury and the adrenaline exertion of a life or death situation.” 

“No, I’m sure.” Tony flicked his fingers within the suit, the newly repaired repulsors whirring back to life. He took off before JARVIS could speak again, before his thoughts could catch up with him. 

He was still alive. He wasn’t going to forget that. 

“Never surer, actually.” 

Tony had met Virginia Potts when she’d threatened him with violence. Naturally, they’d been friends ever since. 

She’d burst into his office, fiery and recently unemployed and undeterred by every security measure in the entirety of Stark headquarters. She’d bluffed her way past half the room with nonexistent pepper spray. There had been numbers on her fingers, corrections blazing in her voice. And she’d been right. 

All that for the sake of a few projection errors. Pepper was like that—looking for precision and finding pride in the mere act of living. (If Tony had known how to listen, he would have heard a melody of an oncoming storm and citrus from her. But Tony couldn’t hear the music, so it would be some time more before anyone heard Pepper Potts’ song.)

On the spot, Tony had made her his assistant. And from there she’d been press coordinator and briefly CEO and now… now he didn’t know what they were. 

She was coming up the stairs—Tony pretended he could hear her footsteps, though he only knew because JARVIS had told him. He did sleep for a few hours after returning from his flight, but now it didn’t feel like enough. 

His legs dangled off the edge of the counter. The tile was cold against his knees, his pant legs rolled up to let the wounds on his shins air. There were still calls left on hold in his office—Tony intended to leave them on hold for a while longer. 

Pepper swept into the room, and she’d known he was here, too. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Waiting for him. Tony kicked his legs and took a breath. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, meeting her eyes. It was always easy to meet Pepper’s eyes. Always. There was always an honesty in the way she sought out the faces of those around her, like she was piercing through their masks to the true forms beneath. 

“I know,” Pepper replied. She poured herself a drink from the bottle Tony had left on the table last night. She didn’t sit. 

“I shouldn’t have done that at the Expo.” Tony bit his cheek, knowing his voice didn’t sound nearly as sure as it should’ve. “I feel like I’ve ruined everything. You mean everything to me, and I—” 

Pepper put a finger to her own lips, shushing him quietly, and Tony smiled and shook his head. She took a sip of her whiskey. It painted the lip of the glass in vague amber patterns. “You didn’t ruin anything, Tony. I know you needed to kiss me to realize. I needed it too.”

Tony felt the characteristic urge to argue. “You did fire yourself. And I had just almost died. There was a lot of adrenaline all around.”

“We both almost died, and it seems like we only ever fall in love on adrenaline,” Pepper said. 

Tony crossed his legs and blew out a breath. “I do love you,” he said. “Just…” 

“I know,” Pepper said again. She rolled her glass between her palms, and Tony wondered how she could look so natural. But she’d always known her thoughts. She’d always been two steps ahead of him, and Tony wished nothing more than to walk those steps behind her for the rest of his life, speaking and laughing and working and nothing more. 

She was his equal, his partner on the dance floor, and they’d stepped together and questioned what that meant for a very long time indeed. But Tony didn’t care for the answer the world told him he was supposed to find. 

He loved his pepper-spray executive and his war-machine pilot and his frowning bodyguard, and he didn’t want anything else. Maybe someday—but Tony had been saying that for years, and he thought ‘someday’ had just past. It wasn’t fair to walk away again.   

“Okay.” Tony smiled. “Thank you.”

“Mmm. Still can’t make me quit, though,” Pepper said over the lip of her glass. 

Tony pushed himself to his feet, finally allowing himself to break eye contact. “I’m not dying anymore,” he said, “but would you like an omelet?”

It was a visceral, instinctual, physical struggle for Tony not to do everything in his significant power to piss off Nicholas J Fury. 

(Usually Tony failed said struggle.)

Fury was not Tony’s favorite person in the universe—Tony had little appreciation for spies. Especially the ones who used their abilities on him and the people in his care for questionable reasons. But Fury had admittedly been a significant factor in the saving of Tony’s life, and Tony would give credit where credit was due. 

Still an asshole, though, he thought as he flipped through the file spread out on the desk in front of him. The SHIELD logo swirled pretentiously on its cover. Fury’s whole lair was dreadfully cyberpunk—holographic maps spread around Fury’s chair, self-dimming glass pretending to be dirty warehouse windows, an eerie blue light with origins unseen—and Fury still had the audacity to hand Tony a physical file. Tony was almost insulted.   

No, scratch that. He was definitely insulted, but he’d be damned before he told this spy-of-spies so. 

“Tony Stark not recommended, huh?” Tony said, easing the tightness in his voice with a grin. His fingers traced the SHIELD insignia, and he didn’t think about Howard. 

Tony continued, “That’s a logical fallacy, you are aware? You can’t approve me but not approve me.”

Fury raised his eyebrow—could it still be an eyebrow without the eye in question?—and set down the file he held on the Avengers Initiative. Tony wished he’d managed to catch a few more words of it before Fury snatched it out of his hands and replaced it with Natasha Romanoff’s assessment of Tony. Tony wondered if psychology was another one of that woman’s secret skills or if he’d managed to fool a spy. 

He didn’t bother trying to read Fury’s file upside-down. This base, or wherever the hell they were, was dusty and half-abandoned. On purpose, Tony knew, but it still made him feel like bugs were crawling beneath his clothes. 

“I have a new ticker,” Tony said, tapping the light in his chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he almost thought it looked like a crown. “I’m single and stable and lacking, I don’t know, conflicting interests? Never mind, we both know that’s bullshit.”

Fury smiled at him wanly. “Which leads us to believe that, at this juncture, we’d only like to use you as a consultant.”

Tony stood. He had a feeling this conversation was reaching its end. Fury extended his hand and Tony, vaguely considering that he hadn’t touched anyone with his bare hands for days, shook it. 

He patted Fury’s wrist and gave a bared-teeth smile. “You can’t afford me,” he said. 

Or maybe Fury could—Tony hardly knew anything about SHIELD or the people behind it. That was going to have to change, of course, though Tony didn’t know how effective digging would be. He was almost certain he’d end up in the Senate again on an espionage charge before you could say ‘spyception’ if Fury found him poking around. 

Fury or anyone else. This man might be SHIELD’s director, but Tony wanted to know what was going on under his nose—and what was creeping around behind his back. Tony knew better than most that any organization, no matter how trusted, had things its leader didn’t know.

(There were quite a few things Fury didn’t know. Quite a few things Tony would help him find out, in these next few years.)

Tony stopped his retreat. Sighing and turning back to Fury, he spread his arms in admission. “Then again,” he said, unwilling to make his decision without some small amount of fanfare, “I will waive my customary retainer in exchange for a small favor. Rhodey and I are being honored in Washington and we need a presenter.”

Fury’s smile shifted. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. He nodded to Tony, letting the file in his hand fall to the table. 

Tony crossed his arms. “Is this the part where we exchange phone numbers?” 

Fury rolled his eyes. “Just get out of here, Stark.”

Tony grinned, bowed exaggeratedly, and stalked away. He had a tower to build.

In an operating theater, everything sounded like crystal. 

Stephen knew the personal flare of this one very well now, after years stacked upon years and the ease of success. It sounded like blood and silver-lined clouds and pride. Stephen loved the way it reflected the shift of the healthsong back at him, reverberating and exaggerating its single purpose. 

If it were up to him, he’d do all his work here. Only occasionally was Stephen pulled into the ER on the lower levels of the hospital, less and less frequently as he grew in prestige by the day. The last time he’d done a full shift anywhere but his wing of surgery had been the influx after that fiasco with the Stark Expo half a year ago. 

Stephen sang quietly under his breath. Here and there, subtle shifts in his voice shifted the tones of the music around him: keeping the light that should’ve been replaced the night before from flickering and cleaning excess fluid from his gloves as he worked—if he was sure no one would notice. He could change small notes like this without much effort.

He tried not to risk anything more prominent, which meant no interacting with animals, no rewriting health, and no teleporting objects. It certainly meant no time-singing. Stephen had grown skillful at hiding things—very skillful.  

Skillful enough that no one still living knew his secret. 

Music swirled around the pin in his steady hand. Stephen’s slow movement through numbed skin was smooth, precise. He shaved carefully away at the restrictive tissue pressing the superior cerebellar artery to the trigeminal nerve, relieving pressure enough to gauge the size he was working within. His patient, Landor Hezca, was a high ranking international business dealer. He was paying the hospital an arm and a leg—which was the only way anyone got to lie on Stephen Strange’s surgery table. 

Stephen never looked up from the exposed white matter before him, holding out his free hand to the nameless resident beside him. Her song reminded him of ice cubes melting. Quick fingers passed Stephen an electrode needle. He needed it only for a moment, his retreat leaving the compressing vein cauterized and the trigeminal nerve fully prepared. 

Stephen peered at it. He didn’t stop singing beneath his mask until he barked a measurement for the sponge he’d be inserting.

“Doctor?” The resident’s voice was muffled beneath the song. 

“Actually, make that sixteen.” Stephen only needed enough teflon to keep the offending artery away from the nerve root, after all. Isolating it would result in a higher chance of surgical failure, so Stephen was careful. 

Inserting the teflon sponge was the most challenging part of a microvascular decompression—and the part that sent Stephen sliding deeper into the swirling focus of his work than anything else. The correct size, positioning, and shape of the sponge determined neurovascular separation. Without it, chronic pain continued or was even exacerbated. 

Still, Stephen didn’t second guess himself. He could hear the shape of the incision he’d made, and the blood and tissue of the brain sang its salt and copper song alongside his humming. Stephen pressed the shining material between the artery and nerve, tweaking only once before returning. Instruments slick with cerebrospinal fluid, Stephen plucked the retractors from the brain tissue. The corridor to the trigeminal nerve closed. 

Stephen’s shoulders relaxed. He concentrated; through the haze of music, he could make out the sound of applause. 

Stephen smirked. The material of his mask rubbed against his cheeks. He stepped back, tossed his instruments into the tray at his side, and spun away. 

Another doctor jumped into the space he’d just filled, suture supplies in hand. The task of prepping tissue regrowth was relatively simple, Stephen’s precious presence unnecessary. He was needed elsewhere. With a nod to the intern, Stephen swept out of the room. 

Stephen closed his eyes as the door slid shut behind him. His smirk softened, slightly, as he listened to the music behind the door. He could hear injury but no pain—health, returned slowly as skilled people could give it.

Skilled people like him, obviously. 

It might not have been easy to hear the universe in medical school or in job interviews or in a hospital internship, but Stephen had found it was easier to be skilled. To be the boy with the good memory, the young man with the eye for diagnosis. Metro-General Hospital had quickly become his realm. Had quickly become safety. 

(Ten years ago, Stephen had needed a little safety. And soon, he would no longer find it here.)

Stephen stripped off his gloves. He could hear Christine Palmer down the hallway, so he tossed the nitrile into the waiting hazard disposal instead of singing them clean. The other doctor waved to him. Stephen returned the gesture and considered calling out—but he was far enough away that he might not be able to hear her response. 

There would always be time to banter with his (only) friend later.  

Stephen strode down the hallway, humming. Post surgery routine went quickly. Stephen’s physical and digital paperwork annoyed him to its completion, and his obligatory email exchange with the patient’s family was as sparse as his signature. Trigeminal neuralgia wasn’t a particularly high-brow operation. But the patient certainly was, and that made up for it as far as Stephen was concerned. 

In the end, Christine sought Stephen out—determined to catch him between hospital stories. He took the stairs. 

“Your break is shorter than your temper,” Christine said. She fell into step with him, nearly two heads shorter. 

“I would say ‘luxurious’ if I weren’t actively scarfing this muffin to fit within timeline.”  

  Christine had a kind song, a patient one. She sounded like footsteps and something unique that Stephen couldn’t help but associate with the sparkle of stars through fog. It was fitting; Christine was nearly as knowledgeable about astronomy as she was about medicine. 

She asked too many questions. But she didn’t mind his constant singing or pry into why Stephen occasionally didn’t respond to her words unless she spoke in sign language.

She’d hated Stephen the first time they saved a patient together. The second and third times had gone just as smoothly and with even more insults traded over paperwork afterwards. Stephen had been under the impression Christine Palmer was a waste of his time. 

As it turned out, mutual disdain was a rather fragile emotion. Change a few notes and it ended up sounding like fondness. 

“Someone re-uploaded the talk you gave at your last convention,” Christine said. “Did you authorize that?”

Stephen didn’t spend much time online. When screens had become more common, he’d realized he couldn’t hear the music from their images. He could hear a recorded voice but not the soul that came along with it—just the silvery sheen of the computerized song.  

“I’ll look into it,” he said through a mouthful of muffin. “That’s another point for me. When’s the last time anyone tried to steal your research?” 

“Watch yourself, Strange.” Christine jabbed him with a finger. “I invented that technique.” 

“I distinctly remember being there.”

“You were there to mock me and… oh, yeah, literally nothing else.” 

Stephen pressed a hand to his chest exaggeratedly. “Christine, darling, I would never dream of mocking you. It’s like drinking too much bourbon—fun at the time, but the day after is hell.”

Christine rolled her eyes. “I’m sure. Shut up and eat your muffin.”

“You know that’s against my basic programming.”

“Shutting up?” Christine repeated. “Yeah, I’m definitely aware of that.” 

Stephen took a bite of his muffin and cringed. “God, these give me flashbacks to my thesis. Remind me to have my sense of taste strung up for its inconsistency as soon as I finish my shift.”

“I’ll put it in line after your humility,” Christine said, her lip twitching upward. 

“Don’t be absurd,” said Stephen. “I haven’t had any of that in years.” 

“You got rid of it to make room for self-congratulatory scientific achievement.” 

“Exactly. Priorities.” 

Christine chuckled, and Stephen held the door open for her as they stepped onto the lower wing of the hospital. “Song stuck in your head?” she asked. She brushed past another doctor. 

Stephen stopped his unconscious humming. “Always. I was going to—” 

Someone grabbed Christine’s arm, speaking before Stephen could finish. The man had a familiar song; he must be one of Christine’s coworkers. 

“Did you hear the news?” he said, out of breath.

“What news?” Christine asked. She locked into professional mode before the words had left her mouth, and Stephen straightened beside her.

“Two beasts just rampaged through Harlem! First responders are up to our necks! The details are still coming in, but…” A shrug. Someone called the doctor’s name down the hall, and she ducked away. 

Christine crossed her arms, and Stephen listened to the sound of the hospital change. The other doctor was already swept up by the change in traffic in the hallway. Stephen and Christine glanced at each other. 

“See you at the ER,” Christine said. 

Stephen sighed, tossed the rest of his muffin into the nearest trash can, and reached for another set of gloves. “Yep.” 

When Tony was forty, he met God. She was in his bathroom. 

This was the first of many encounters with this specific individual, but it was the only time that he mistook her for anything but what she was. The woman was not God—at least, not in the fashion Tony imagined at the time. 

His day went well, though it was generally uneventful. By his own definition of the word, of course; for Tony, uneventful spoke of a full workday spent surrounded by newly patented holotech as he blueprinted his separation of the aptly named Stark Tower from the NYC network. His head ached pleasantly from the challenge. The weather had just started to get warm again after too many months of drizzly not-quite-spring, and Tony had fewer floors of the tower to complete with each passing day. 

He set his phone aside and shed his suit coat coming into his room. He didn’t bother to turn on the light in the bathroom—enough glow came through the skylight from the street outside to illuminate his toothbrush. Tony hummed a Black Sabbath song and reached for the toothpaste. His arc reactor, for a moment, almost looked like a falcon flying across the wall. 

“Good evening, Tony Stark.” 

Tony shrieked. The toothpaste fell from his hand as he whirled, brush extended like a weapon toward the figure standing in his shower. 

She was tall, pale skinned, and sharp featured. Her long yellow robe trailed across the ceramic behind her. Slim fingers curled around the shower curtain, which still swayed from where she’d pulled it sharply aside. Looking for all the world like she was descending a palace stairway, the woman stepped out of Tony’s empty bathtub. 

She inclined her head slightly to him. She was completely bald. 

“How did you get into my house?”

The woman smiled. Her eyes were dark and warm and knowing—carved from something that made Tony’s instincts scream. “Hello to you, too.”

“How did you get into my house.”

“Relax,” said the woman. “If I intended to harm you, I would have already done it.”

Tony covered his arc reactor with his hand and tightened his grip on his toothbrush. “Who are you and what the hell do you want?”

“To talk.”

Tony’s face hardened. “Official consulting hours are every other Thursday, eight to five.” 

The woman pulled the shower curtain back into place, the shadow of a strange ring visible on her second two fingers. Tony flicked the bathroom light on. Unfortunately, the ethereal individual did not, in fact, wink out of existence. 

“I have a heart condition, you know,” Tony said. “You can’t just go springing up on me from bathtubs. Who in the name of fuck are you?” 

The woman clasped her hands behind her back. “You may call me the Ancient One.”

“No.”

The woman looked unruffled. “Suit yourself.” 

Tony didn’t take his eyes off the woman, raising a hand to gesture to the ceiling. “JARVIS, lock down the building.”

No answer.

Tony tensed again. His fingers curled on the surface of his arc reactor. He looked up, nearly frantic, toward the grave-like silence where JARVIS’s voice should be. Something must’ve shown on his face, for the woman raised her hands non-threateningly. 

“It’s temporary,” she said. Her tone was effortless, lilting, and powerful. “I cannot afford to have myself recorded.” 

“How did you get through my firewalls?” Tony demanded. He was moments from calling for the suit. “If I find one line of JARVIS’s code out of place—”

“I didn’t harm your friend, and I will not harm you,” the woman repeated. “All will return to normal when I take my leave.”

“I would like to repeat, with passion, what the fuck?”

The woman’s lip twitched up. “It's taken me a long time to put a face to your destiny, Tony Stark."

“My what?” 

The woman lifted her hand, flaring her fingers in a pattern Tony couldn’t follow. “I had hoped you would turn out to be someone less… visible, but time works in strange ways. We’ve found you now, and you will lead us to the Eye of Agamotto.” 

“The what?” Was he being accosted in a bathroom by an insane woman? Was that how he spent his Tuesday nights now?

The woman’s eyes flickered across him. “So you haven’t found them yet.” 

“Found who? When? You’re talking like some sort of psychic.”

“Oh no, Tony Stark,” the woman mused. She looked softly amused, and Tony felt like a child who’d asked a spectacularly stupid question. “Not a psychic. My divination is far more specific than that. It can be vague when it comes to specific events, however.”

“Your divination?” Tony scoffed. The fear in his chest shifted to disbelief and scorn. And yet, looking at the phantom of a figure in front of him, Tony couldn’t shake a clawing sense of unease. Something was more than human, here. Something was extraordinary. 

“Yes, Stark,” the woman, this Ancient One, said simply. “My divination. Do you take issue with that?”

“I don’t believe in…” Tony trailed off. His hand curled into a fist at his chest. 

“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” the Ancient One told him. “The future exists either way.”

“You’ve seen the future,” Tony said doubtfully. He braced himself against the sink, wishing that he’d kept the light off. 

“Not for a long while, no.” The Ancient One slipped the ring from her hand, passing it between her fingers. “Without the Eye, I can’t perceive the whole of the timeline tapestry. But I can divine aspects of it. The Eye shields itself within the gathaurupa darsana, but I have managed to separate it long enough to find you.”

(Long before, this woman had seen timelines and shaped possibilities like a sculptor, like a conductor. Not anymore. Death and enchantment and dimensions and fate had stolen that power, that instrument of listening, in an attempt to end all that she protected. 

But she had protected it anyway. She would continue to, even if she did not yet know what it was that needed her safety.)

Tony, for his part, had no idea what to make of the words coming out of this woman’s mouth. “Me. I have something to do with this… you know what, what?” 

The Ancient One drew in a breath, dropping her hands to her sides. “You are a very important man, Tony Stark. There is a force in this universe that cannot stay hidden forever. And you are going to help bring it to my people—where it is meant to be. Where it can be protected.” 

“I don’t know anything about forces or Eyes or gatha- whatevers,” Tony protested. His head spun. 

The Ancient One gave him a smile that, for a moment, looked pitying. “You will,” she said. “And when you do, remember that not all of it is your enemy. Remember that the Eye needs your help. My people are not the only ones who seek it.”

That sounded ominous. Tony blinked, shoulders hiking—out of the corner of his eye, the flash of his arc reactor looked like a key. 

“How am I supposed to know when I find it?” he asked. “Not that I’m agreeing to any of this, mind you.”

“Of course not,” the Ancient One said smoothly. Tony had the feeling he was being humored. “It will find you, Stark. And when it does, I hope that you are kind as well as brave.” 

Tony opened his mouth to speak. He blinked. And his words fell on emptiness, on the flicker of the bathroom lights shorting into darkness. 

Just like that, the woman was gone. As if she’d never been there at all. 

“Sir?” JARVIS said. “I believe my code just glitched.”

Tony found his mouth was dry. Slowly, he leaned into the hollow of the doorway. “Yeah,” he said. “Mine too.” 

In the grand scheme of things, Tony figured he should have realized Natalie Rushman was more than a notary when she first stepped into his office. 

Sure, she was the best spy in the business. Sure, he’d been generally distracted at the time. Tony still disliked the notion of being unobservant enough to hand the inner workings of his company and life to someone with ulterior motives.

It really was ironic, then, that this woman would end up one of his most trusted friends. 

There were many bridges to cross before then, however, and they started with a flash of red hair on the second floor of Stark Tower. Tony had just finished wiring the arc reactor generator to the rest of the building’s mainframe. He only noticed because he went back to the second floor to check the connections at the main mechanism, and for a moment, he forgot what name he was supposed to call. 

“Romanoff!” he finally yelled, catching the disappearing figure before the hallway swallowed her. 

The woman turned. She hadn’t the decency to look sheepish at being caught. The construction uniform somehow managed to look elegant on her, which Tony thought was marginally unfair. 

“Stark,” she said.

“What are you doing back here?” Tony resisted the urge to cross his arms. “I thought Nick’s whole mission was over. Consultant, over and done with.”

“It is,” Romanoff said.

“And you’re back here for…?” 

“Gathering intel on one of your hired engineers,” Romanoff replied calmly. She held herself lightly, and Tony could read nothing from her expression. He had no idea if she was lying. No idea if she cherry-picked the truth. 

“And this is something you have to pursue by slinking about on my property?”

Romanoff raised an eyebrow. “You have enough of it that I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

Tony huffed. “Are you going to explain yourself?” 

“Remember who I am and ask that question again,” Romanoff said mildly. Her eyes flashed with utter immovability, and Tony thought she’d be perfectly willing to knock him out, suit or no. 

“I could arrest you.” Tony said it without much weight—they both knew he wouldn’t. He owed her far too much for that. Jumping through SHIELD’s hoops wasn’t worth the effort, and Tony wasn’t sure he had anything he could actually charge her with anyway.

“Fine, James Bond,” he sighed. “Just try not to insult me too much, this time.” 

Romanoff grinned at him. “It’s good for you,” she said. “Builds character.”

Then, with a flick of her wrist and rustle of footsteps, she was gone. Tony didn’t bother trying to see where she’d gone. He didn’t believe a word of what she’d said, but there was no use tailing or trying to investigate her. Natasha Romanoff did not give information—she took it. Tony would learn nothing from her.

But he would from a computer. He always could. So Tony went to work hacking instead.

Really, it was SHIELD’s own fault he found out, over secure networks and firewalled messages, about the discovery in the arctic sea. About the unfrozen man and the mythical gods and the project in his father’s name—P.E.G.A.S.U.S. 

Really, it was SHIELD’s own fault Tony found out about the Tesseract. 

Perhaps it was luck that had Stephen out of the operating theater on the night Loki Laufeyson awoke the power of the Space Stone. Or perhaps it was something altogether more knowing. 

24-hour shifts didn’t bother Stephen—at least, not as much as they bothered Christine. She spent their between-appointment minutes complaining beneath her song of footsteps and starlight. Stephen read her lips idly. He had preparation in fifteen minutes, but nothing major until tomorrow afternoon. No one wanted a brain surgeon exhausted. 

“Throwback to my intern days,” Christine sighed, reaching out to refill her coffee. 

Stephen smirked. “Not so very long ago, were they?”

Christine was too tired to smack him, luckily. “Put that eidetic memory somewhere where it doesn’t make your head bigger every three words.”

“As you command.”

Christine jabbed her coffee cup into his hands to free up her own, fiddling with the additives—or whatever the hell people put in coffee. Stephen wasn’t fond of the stuff. He preferred to get his caffeine allotment in other ways. 

He lifted the cup to take an experimental sip. And then something, neither here nor anywhere, shifted. 

Sang.

Stephen’s mind filled with a sound so deeply fundamental it nearly struck him reeling. The music of the universe didn’t combine with this melody so much as it incorporated it: drawing back to expose a heartbeat that had always been within the music, but Stephen had never known to look for before. 

Now he did. Now this song had been thrust into his hands, a door opening somewhere across the country. Stephen heard its call in a way he’d never known before, a way that was nearly vulnerable, nearly crippling. Something in him cried out after the melody. 

He thought it might be his soul. 

The cup slipped from between Stephen’s fingers. 

This new song wasn’t truly new . It was a thread within every song he’d heard before—like the watch’s song had been, though this one was less intimate to Stephen. Stephen listened. He thought it was beautiful. 

Fractals and lavender and the depths of a thousand oceans echoed in Stephen’s ears. Endlessness and infinitesimal grains. The song wasn’t playful when it danced around Stephen’s own music, but it was elegant. He was drowning in it, parched for it.

(The coffee had painted hot stains across his pantlegs, and it sounded like heat and brown and plant. Christine was staring at him. She spoke quickly, reaching out, but Stephen didn’t feel it.) 

Another song leapt into Stephen’s perception. As deep and indomitable as the first, it guided him into his imagination. It sounded like gold leaf and people’s thoughts and the instinct to cringe from a passing shadow.

They were physically close, the two songs. Not to Stephen, but to each other. Stephen wanted to be close, too. He did not want these human limbs and this human body contained by the walls of a hospital so far away from the heart of the universe. Not anymore. 

The music sounded like kin. Like family. He reached out to it.

He knew he’d be unable to change these notes—they ran too deeply for Stephen to influence. They were too like Stephen for him to influence. But he reached out all the same, because the lilting melody made him feel unbearably lonely in a way he’d never known. 

Pain filtered through Stephen’s awareness. He blinked. Blinked again. 

Christine had her hands on his shoulders. They dug in deep, screaming with a song of their own. She looked concerned. She looked terrified. 

“Stephen?” He could hardly hear her voice. 

“I have to go,” Stephen sang, his voice in tune with the music. 

“What are you—” 

But Stephen was already gone. He left footprints in the circles of runes blasted into the hospital floor. 

Chapter Text

Tony broke a world record on the 2nd of May, 2012, and the universe decided to reward him with a global apocalypse. 

“Dick move,” Tony muttered, flipping through his packet on Erik Selvig’s Extraction Theory for the third time since last night. The calculations soothed his prickling nerves. He felt the eyes of the other inhabitants of this particular SHIELD quinjet settling across his neck, and they set his teeth on edge. 

Mere hours ago, Tony had lit Stark Tower up on its beautifully designed, brilliantly executed arc-reactor generator. An entire building had slotted into the New York skyline completely cleanly. The press would be slavering at his heels right now, desperate to capture the renewable energy sensation, had Tony not been accosted by Agent Coulson in the penthouse the moment he’d gotten inside. 

An agent who apparently had a first name. That Pepper knew. Betrayal. 

He and his friend had been sharing a lovely bottle of champagne over what Tony had hoped would become a violent game of cards when the world had decided to end. Really, Tony had thought it would’ve gotten tired of that by now. 

(It wouldn’t get tired of that for a very long time, but Tony would find that out. Eventually. This world had personified destiny, and time always had consequences.) 

Coulson offered Tony information on the situation and the Avengers Initiative, and if he remembered that Tony was only a consultant, he didn’t mention it. They both knew Tony would fight for this. They both knew he couldn’t help it. 

His arc reactor had looked like a shield out of the corner of his eye. 

There had been, in pages and pages of pale government paper and stuffy blacked-out documents, a story. There had been a relic from the deep sea—a Cube. The notes on it were in Tony’s father’s handwriting. There were tests, discoveries, attempts to harness the possible energy that the Tesseract generated. And then someone else had harnessed it, using it as a gateway into Tony’s world; Loki of Asgard. He’d held a scepter and a grin of violence and he’d taken the Cube and fucked off to Germany. 

Tony thought that might be a little lame of a reason for SHIELD to jump to declaring global war, but whatever. He didn’t sit in the spy chairs. 

He didn’t even sit in the Avenger chairs. But he’d researched who did, and he now stood beside half of those people as he flew back from Germany where he’d recently met Loki’s acquaintance. 

Tony knew of the others Fury was roping him in with. Spies and sharpshooters and soldiers and gods and Hulks. Tony had his opinions on their personalities—and his opinions on them as a team with and without his influence. 

His opinions mostly came down to the fact that he’d played Dungeons and Dragons during his college years at MIT. He knew what a party of a rogue, a ranger, a fighter, a paladin, and a barbarian needed to be balanced—and he was pretty sure he himself was as close as Fury could get to filling that missing class.  

Would still need someone to play the wizard, though, Tony thought vaguely. He flipped another page in Selvig’s research. He’d taken it with him when he’d flown to Germany, along with a packet of blueberries he’d stuffed in his pocket. 

“This guy’s pretty bright,” he said loudly. It was self-defeating, as he really didn’t want to talk to any of these people, but he couldn’t stand the quiet. “Shame you had to kidnap and mind-control him to do your mysterious-evil-scientist bidding, eh, Loki?” 

Loki, handcuffed to a wall in the quinjet as they rumbled over the Atlantic Ocean, just smiled. It was a wolf’s smile. An inhuman smile. 

Tony’s unease gathered. 

“Are we sure he can’t get out of those?” he muttered to Natasha. The spy was in the pilot’s chair, though the ship mostly flew on autopilot. 

“If he can, he hasn’t,” Natasha said. Dreadfully noncommittally. 

“Nick have anything to say?”

Natasha’s lip twitched up. “‘Stop calling me Nick’.” 

Tony flipped off the communicator on the dash of the plane. “Fat chance, Nicholas. You called me away from the grand opening of my world-altering innovation of energy and architecture, which was going to get me very drunk on my own ego with all the acclaim. And now I’m here in this grimy old plane with a supervillain and…” He hesitated, but only for a moment. “A thawed American flag.” 

The flag in question was standing in the back of the jet and glowering at Loki. He hadn’t stopped frowning since Tony had first seen him, shield in hand on the Stuttgart stairs. 

Steve Rogers was perfectly and utterly exactly how Tony had always imagined him. It was disappointing. He’d hoped all the stories and lectures of his father had been exaggerated and Rogers might end up being just enough of an unconventional bastard to be worth Tony’s time. But he was all chiseled obedience and soldier's scowl, built to the bone of heroism. Irritating, patronizing, and so fucking boring. 

(One day, Tony would learn the rule-bending and authority-biting edges of Steve Rogers and realize he’d been wrong about that, for better or for worse. But not today.)

Rogers felt Tony’s eyes on him and looked up. His frown deepened. Tony smirked as provocatively as he could manage, a surge of dislike making the edges brittle. Rogers didn’t even blink. 

He went back to watching Loki. Tony sighed, sank back against the wall, and did the same. It was a long way across the Atlantic. 

The universe music captured Stephen twice more before he realized he needed some sort of plan. 

He came back to his physical form for real, shaking off the last curls of the beautiful spacesong and thoughtsong from his mind, and found himself standing against the fence on the East edge of Manhattan. The river washed along the channel far beneath him. He didn’t know where along the footpath he’d wandered. The late spring air chilled the tips of his ears. Stephen sang them warm, instead. 

Plan, he needed a plan. The music was coming from far away, beyond the curve of the horizon. Stephen couldn’t get there fast enough. He doubted he could maintain any shifts in the notes long enough to keep from drowning—he’d fall unconscious before he even swam across. 

He’d have to use human methods: a plane or a boat. If there was anything leaving tonight, he had the money to get himself onto it. 

Or he could turn around. Block the songs from his head and think of a convincing lie to tell Christine and go back to the hospital. To his life. Where he was a doctor, a savior. Where he was a young man with a photographic memory and a bright future and no need for anyone. Where he wasn’t a demon, but Stephen Strange.

A note rang pure and clean in Stephen’s mind. Just one of a thousand, a million, countless others. Notes he’d heard since he was born and would hear until he died. 

Stephen still had nightmares about silence. 

Would he ever understand, if he turned away now? Would he ever learn the answers he wasn’t sure he even wanted to know? Would he ask these questions forever?

Could he bear that?

Stephen’s hand closed loosely around the watch on his wrist. 

Then he reached into his pocket for his cell phone and went to buy a plane ticket to Germany. He didn’t know how he knew where to go. It was the same way he knew, moments before emptying his latest paycheck into the nearest airline, that the songs had moved. Whatever was making those melodies— fractals and lavender and honey and thoughts— was no longer in Germany. 

They were louder. Closer. Coming toward Stephen. 

Though something in his chest leapt and danced with hope, Stephen knew better than to think they were coming to him. Nothing and no one in the universe knew what he could do. Where were the space and thoughtsongs going? Where were they being taken? 

How could Stephen get there in time to meet them?

Stephen watched the river meandering through the city, singing its deep music. His phone was loose in his hand. The clock at the top clicked to the next minute. Stephen heard it, like a string plucked in the tapestry of the songs.

He hummed alongside it. Closed his eyes.

(If he turned away now, he would ask these questions forever.)

For the first time since that day on the poolside with his dead sister’s body in his hands, Stephen sang the timesong. 

The tone started low. A whisper, nothing more. A quiet teasing of the tangled strands of the music around him. The timesong lay beneath everything, shining between spider-web strands of a universe rendered in silvery colors. 

Stephen wound though it, and his fingers twined to the music in his mind. He sang,  tangling turquoise wings in the strands of song. His voice rose. It bloomed like the leaves of a cottonwood tree, and Stephen sang himself into the future. For just an instant, he saw. 

Lightning. Upstate. Eagles flying and engine rust. 

He snapped back into his body, breathing hard. The whole world looked green. Stephen blinked, and the haze disappeared—the patterns glowing on the concrete took a few heartbeats longer.

Stephen took a deep breath. He let it out slowly, waiting until his skin and the sidewalk was dark, until the night around him had gone quiet. 

Then he turned, and he ran as fast as he could toward his car. He had to get upstate. 

The air tasted of electricity.

Tony smacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to drive the tingle out of the roots of his teeth. He really hoped SHIELD’s jets were up to snuff. He didn’t want to be electrocuted halfway over the New York forest line. 

Fury was speaking to Natasha over the headset in the navigation room. Tony stood beside Rogers and watched Loki watching him. He tried not to feel like a canary watching a cat. 

Loki’s eyes were… off-putting. His style and the glint of his magic made Tony think they should be dark—brown, maybe, or a deep green. But they weren’t. They were light and colorless, and when Loki blinked Tony thought he saw a tinge of blue.

If Tony hadn’t already been certain Loki was bad news by the dead bodies he’d left in his wake, that would have convinced him 

“I don’t like it.” Rogers’ voice almost made Tony jump. Almost; he had self control. 

“What?” Tony asked flippantly. He had a hard time sounding any other way. “Rock of Ages giving up so easily?”

“Just… I don’t remember it ever being that easy. Did you see his power? Even now that we have his scepter, he still seems completely in control. He shouldn’t have given up.”

Tony couldn’t help himself. “Hmm,” he said, “maybe. But you are pretty spry, for an older fellow. What's your thing? Pilates?”

The look on Rogers face almost made losing the world record worth it. “What?”

Tony wrinkled his nose. “It's like calisthenics. You might have missed a couple things, you know, while you were doing time as a Capsicle.” 

“Fury didn't tell me he was calling you in.”

Tony thought about spies and energy competitors and project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. He said, “Yeah, there's a lot of things Fury doesn't tell you.”

Rogers didn’t get to reply before a jolt of lightning shook them all where they stood. Natasha’s hand flew up to grab the handrail beside her. She glared through the windshield as if she could wrangle the weather back into something reasonable with sheer force of will, and Tony kind of believed her. 

Another crack, and even Loki jumped. His eyes had gone wide. 

“What?” Rogers said patronizingly. “Scared of a little lightning?” 

Loki spoke, for the first time since they’d boarded the plane. He had a voice as smooth and silvered as a lie told on a deathbed, but there was a note of monotony beneath it. As if some small part of the personality it might once have had was burned away. 

“I’m not overly fond of what follows,” Loki murmured. 

The words had summoned him, Tony decided later. Or at least, both Asgardians had an acute sense for the dramatics. 

A boom of thunder, so loud it made Tony’s ears ring, struck the ship, and then the gangplank was flying open from outside force. A figure strode in. He carried a club—no, a hammer. His gait was as casual as if he’d boarded in a SHIELD hanger and not materialized out of literal storm clouds. 

He grabbed Loki by the throat, turned on his heel, and leapt from the ship.

It happened in the span of a lightning strike. Tony blinked.

“Well,” he said. “That might as well happen.”

He lifted his hand to his arc reactor—in the corner of his eye, it looked like a gladiator on a horse—and slammed his face-plate back down. His repulsors were still humming with heat. JARVIS flickered in the corner of his visor. 

“Do you think he’s a friendly?” Rogers asked, leaning toward the now gaping hole in the side of the jet. Tony considered pushing him, but just for an instant. 

“Doesn’t matter,” he said curtly through the Iron Man helmet. He glanced toward the silver case they’d locked the scepter within, then readied himself to leap after Loki. “He could free Loki or kill him; the Tesseract's lost either way.”

“We need a plan of attack!” 

“I have a plan. Attack.”

With that, Tony leaped from the jet. 

He’d never fought a god, but his interesting experience with the must-have-been eldritch being in his shower almost a year ago had prepared him for a good deal of weird. And Thor was weird. Weird as in two hundred pounds of wired muscle and golden hair and accented English, with a hammer that stole the voice of electricity out of the sky. 

He was fun, Tony thought, as he blinked away the shock of lightning that leapt through his suit. Not that good with the mid-battle back and forth, but Tony had yet to meet someone who could truly keep up. The god of thunder made a damn good sparring partner. 

Focus, he reminded himself. He was supposed to be saving the world. 

He pounced forward to strike again—but a flash of metal knocked him aside before he could. Rogers’ shield, damn thing, ricocheted off a tree and back to the old man’s hand. He stood atop a fallen tree, glowering at both of them. 

 “Hey!” he barked, leaping down to ground level. “That’s enough. Now, I don't know what you plan on doing here—”

“I’ve come to put an end to Loki’s schemes!” Thor roared. It echoed. 

“Then prove it! Put the hammer down,” Rogers said, because he was an idiot. 

“Yeah, uh, bad call!” Tony raised his hand. “He loves the hammer—”

An inhuman backhand sent him flying as Thor lost the last strings of his tolerance. His hands glowed with lightning. He snarled at Rogers: 

“You want me to put the hammer down?”

Tony did the sensible thing and closed his eyes. 

When the impact of hammer on shield had stopped reverberating, he blinked. Every tree in the area had been felled. He looked like he was in the middle of a crater. Both Thor and Rogers had been blasted backward. The combined force of their strikes would’ve killed mere humans, and Tony could feel his headache rising.

Slowly, he pushed himself to his feet. A very real sense of awe stole the words from his tongue. 

If this was what they’d done fighting each other, what could they do fighting together?

“Are we done here?” Rogers wondered. He stood. The shockwave had left his helmet askew. Thor stared at both of them. 

A cricket chirped in the distance. 

Tony lifted his face plate and raised his hands. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “Point made.”

Rogers rubbed his face with his hand. “Get Loki back to the jet,” he ordered. 

Thor glowered at him, hammer twirling around his wrist. He was airborne a moment later, presumably to retrieve Loki, and Rogers sighed and reached to secure his shield back to his arm. Tony watched Thor disappear beyond the wreckage of the blast zone. Tony itched to join him. He shook out his repulsors, the hum barely lifting him off the ground, before something stirred in the woods.

Tony froze. That lightning would’ve killed even the bugs. 

Right?

He raised his hand, palm facing into the dark. Slowly, he crept forward. A shadow stitched itself out of broken tree limbs and faraway city lights. 

It was a man. 

He was a skeletal thing, all sharp bones and sharper edges. His clothes and footsteps fell elegantly. He would probably have looked put together if this entire area hadn’t been recently obliterated, but now his hair was tangled and his fingers were shaking. A bruise marred one side of his face, and his shin was dripping blood. None of it slowed him down for even an instant.

When his eyes met Tony’s, he froze. Like he was surprised to see him—not just surprised to see anybody, but specifically Tony. Tony wondered if they’d met somewhere. 

And if they had, he wondered what the fuck any reasonable individual was doing strolling through a battlefield at 4:00 AM in New York state. 

“You have an instrument,” the man declared suddenly, with all the utter confidence of a scientist—or a madman. His voice was deeper than Tony expected. “Where is it?”

Tony found himself speechless for the second time in too few minutes. 

Stephen did not forget songs.

He tried, sometimes. He tried when his family left Nebraska to forget the clear way the sunrise had sounded, a song he’d never heard the same way since. But the notes were still clear. It stayed clear, as clear as anything else did in his memory and his disobedient mind. 

(Stephen had tried to forget Donna’s song, too. But he could no more lock that away than he could the sound of death.) 

For being nearly blown up a moment before, Stephen thought he took coming face to face with two entirely separate cultural myth-figures rather well. By which he meant he didn’t give a shit about cultural myth-figures. He could still hear the space and thoughtsongs. The other music hardly caught his attention.

But it did. It did, and he remembered one of those songs. 

One of them was stunning, melodies of falcon wings and machinery, of freedom and innovation and something far deeper that Stephen wouldn’t understand for a long, long while. It made his breath catch in his throat. It made him think of a child’s frown, of pebbles and twigs, and the only voice he’d heard clearly in his entire life. 

Stephen had thought he’d only ever seen Tony Stark on the news. Only through screens, which did not sing. He’d been wrong. 

Was Stark the source of the changed music?

Stephen asked as much. He got a very blank, very shocked look, and his medical brain wondered how recently Stark had been blown up. 

The other figure demanded something. Stephen was almost certain he was some impossible reincarnation or variation of the old war hero Steve Rogers. Rather less dead than originally anticipated. He held a shield somehow threateningly, and he was spring-coiled for a fight. His voice was drowned out by the combined music of the area, but Stephen saw his mouth move.

“You’ll have to say that again,” he said flatly. He rubbed his ear.

“Who are you?” Stephen read from the maybe-Steve-Rogers man’s lips. “What are you doing here?”

Years of secret-keeping kept Stephen from even considering the full truth. ‘Following the music’ was so laughably far from a safe answer. He settled for, “You have something of mine.”

“I guarantee you we don’t,” Stark said. “All we have are a couple of aliens, apparently.” 

He signed the words alongside his voice. The sleek joints of his armor didn’t restrict his movement at all, and the sign language was perfectly understandable. He must have caught Stephen reading lips. 

Aliens? Stephen frowned. His ankle zinged with pain as he took a step forward, and he half-crumpled before limping back to his feet. He glared at his leg. If he’d been able to hear his own song, he could have changed notes to heal it, but he couldn’t. He’d never been able to heal himself. 

“Aliens?” he asked at the same moment Rogers said, “You’re injured.”

“We just blew up half the forest, Cap. Of course he’s injured,” Stark huffed. “What I want to know is what the fuck he’s doing here.”

“I was… sent here,” Stephen said carefully. “And I asked you a question.”

“Very audacious of you,” said Stark. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I know everything. I just don’t care.” Stephen raised an eyebrow, still half-signing. 

“You still haven’t answered our question,” Stark told him pointedly. His song chimed. 

“My name is Doctor Stephen Strange,” said Stephen. “And whatever alien, otherworldly objects or creatures you are currently in possession of is what I’m here to investigate.”

“—civilian,” Rogers said. Stephen only caught the last word. “This is none of your business.” 

Stephen, who could hear the curling notes of the thoughtsong reverberating nearby and the faraway spacesong pulsing, begged to differ. If he focused, he could pinpoint their respective directions. The directions were not the same.

“I’m afraid it is my business,” Stephen said calmly. 

“Doctor Strange?” Stark hummed, squinting at Stephen. “I think I’ve heard of you.” 

Stephen threw the man’s words back at him. “Very audacious of you.”

Stark’s lip twitched up. 

“We should go,” Rogers said. 

“Yes,” Stephen said, sliding his hands into his now dirty, ripped coat pockets. “We should.” 

Rogers and Stark shared a look, but Stephen could tell they couldn’t read each other very well. 

The light in the heart of Stark’s suit flashed. He lifted himself pointedly a few inches above the ground, and Rogers nodded. He raised his shield, less a warning now and more a threat.

“Listen,” Stark said. “Much as I enjoy the nonspecific and ridiculous threat a random dude in the woods thinks he poses to us, neither of us have time for this.”

Then they turned away from him. Turned to leave. 

Unacceptable. 

Stephen knew, with more certainty than he should, that he couldn’t let that happen. He didn’t have the energy to search the music again—if these two left him here, there was no way Stephen could follow. He didn’t know how to twist the music after Stark and Rogers, didn’t know what notes he needed to change to accomplish anything. He hadn’t experimented in years.

But there were a few things he still knew. 

Stephen listened to the shattered sounds of the wood shards around him. With a hiss, he shifted them. He rewrote their tune, just slightly, and the area shuddered. 

Stark froze. Rogers had paused mid-step. 

The splinters around Stephen, long blades of shrapnel torn into points, hung suspended beneath the stars. One pressed to the joint of Rogers’ neck. Another tapped the glass of the light in Stark’s chest. 

Stephen hurriedly sang them back a few inches. A headache burst behind his eyes. He forced his face and voice to remain strong, breaking a smirk. “Specific enough a threat for you, now?”

“How are you doing that?” murmured Stark. He raised his hand, curling it around the wooden shaft. Stephen’s musical hold wasn’t particularly strong. He didn’t know what notes to change to keep the spears in place when a physical force was pushed against them. 

“I want to see the instrument,” Stephen said again. “Whatever it is—I’ll know it when I see it. Please.”

“‘Instrument’, huh?” Stark cocked his head thoughtfully. Stephen felt like he was being analyzed. He couldn’t tell what it was that made Stark nod, once, and settle to the ground. 

“Are you part of the Avengers Initiative?” Rogers wondered, glancing edgewise at Stark.

Stephen hadn’t the faintest idea what that referred to. “Of course,” he said. 

“You’re not, but stab me now if I’m letting you disappear back into the woods after that,” Stark said flippantly. It was undeniably a threat. Too late, Stephen thought of his mother’s constant warnings growing up, the things he was never supposed to risk.

The reason no one knew what he could do. 

Stark crossed his arms. “You’ll get your instrument, Strange; and in return, I want some answers.” 

Rogers and Romanoff had already shepherded Loki and Thor into the cockpit of the quinjet and out of view by the time Tony made it back into the hull. They weren’t taking any chances on their hitchhiker. Not when the world was ending.

Tony caught himself watching Strange’s slim and bleeding form limp up the gangplank into the aircraft and wondering what this could possibly do to them. But there were still splinters of wood in the cracks between his suit. Tony made a habit of underestimating people, but not usually to a dangerous extent. 

Strange’s limp had gotten more pronounced, but he hardly seemed to notice. Or at least, he was stubborn enough not to show he had. He put a hand on the side of the jet, then froze as he stepped over its threshold. One of his eyes flickered shut. 

“Don’t be animating any of the shit in here,” Tony warned him.

He remembered to sign last minute, albeit with simpler words. Tony had learned ASL in high school, though he’d forgotten most of it in long years of disuse. He still remembered enough to get by. 

Strange jumped, as if shaken from some sort of trance. His hands were fluttering at his sides, and Tony could see him humming. It was a nice tune. Tony had no idea where it came from. 

“It’s here,” Strange said, and to Tony’s surprise, he sounded completely delighted. 

“What?” 

Strange rubbed his leg. When he trotted to the other side of the jet, he left drops of blood on the silver tile. Tony glanced toward the cockpit, where Natasha was standing guard. She watched Strange, expression unreadable. 

Strange’s hands moved lightly across the seats and cubbies of the quinjet until he paused above the silver scepter case. He sighed. Deeply, as if he’d been suffocating moments before and the wire had just fallen away from the bruises on his neck. The song he was humming changed. Tony heard it like someone might hear a single role in an orchestral piece—like there was so much more to the song than what Strange could convey with the human voice. 

“Don’t touch that,” Natasha said suddenly. 

Strange paused. He looked like he might ignore her—no, like he hadn’t heard her—before his eyes fell on the gun at her hip and the repulsor whirring on Tony’s palm. He nodded. 

“Good choice,” Tony snorted. The repulsor light danced along the walls when he signed.

Strange glared at him. “Any other arbitrary rules I should know, or can I sit down?”

“Better go ahead before you faint,” Tony told him. “How bad is your leg?”

“I’m fine,” Strange said. He was a doctor; Tony wondered if he should trust his self-diagnosis or doubt it even more. 

He nodded to Natasha, who slipped back within the cockpit to fly them to SHIELD’s rendezvous. Tony could watch things in here. And Rogers would be able to tell her what they knew about Thor and Strange from the forest. 

Tony watched Strange slide down the wall and arrange himself primly on the nearest chair. He slid his hand along the side of his shin. Grimacing when his hand came away bloody, he probed carefully at the space around him. His fingers paused over an inlaid SHIELD logo. 

Starting to think you bit off more than you could chew? Tony signed. 

“You don’t have to do that,” Strange said. “I can hear you.”

Tony was only half-surprised. Strange seemed quite quick at reading lips, and though Tony might’ve thought the humming was a way to map vibrations, it was considerably musical. 

“You didn’t hear the Capsicle,” Tony said, jerking his chin back toward the cockpit.

“It was—loud,” Strange explained haltingly. “His voice got covered up.” 

 Tony took a seat across the plane, leaning over his knees to peer at Strange. “Covered up by what?”

Strange was quiet for a moment, his throat bobbing. “The explosion,” he said. “Whatever it was… screwed with my hearing for a moment.” 

Tony narrowed his eyes. “Hm.”

Strange looked away. “So what’s in there?” he asked, pointing to the silver case under the seat. 

“One of the many gathering signs of the end of the world,” Tony replied. 

“But what, specifically?”

Tony scoffed at him, gesturing to the ship. “You wandered into the woods, got blown up, threatened the most powerful man in the world, and let a bunch of spies kidnap you for this thing, and you don’t even know what it is?” 

The glare was back. It was impressively aloof. “I know enough,” he said. “What’s in the case? You promised me answers.”

“Did you really think I meant that?” Tony raised his eyebrows. 

“I didn’t,” Strange admitted snappishly, “but I had hoped you would capitalize on some shred of your honor instead of just an opportunity to sweep another inconvenience under the rug.” 

Tony scoffed. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Strange cocked his head again, as if he was listening. “You’re Anthony Edward Stark, though you prefer Tony because it wasn’t used often near the beginning of your life. My guess is that it’s because you don’t want to be called by the name your parents used most often. You were born May 29, 1970, in Manhattan, and you pride yourself on your knowledge and success, though what really matters to you is the control you’ve gained over yourself and your environment. You’re friendly with everyone, but you only have a few truly close friends. You’ve never been in a long-term relationship. You have been emotionally committed multiple times, only once reciprocated. You like to fly—like a falcon—and you sound like an engine turning. I know who you are.”

Tony, who had started to feel very cold indeed, gritted his teeth. “You forgot I’m a Gemini.” 

“I thought that was implied when I included your birthdate,” Strange replied. His eyes fell calmly, challengingly, on Tony’s. “I’m a Scorpio, though I don’t assign any weight to it.”

Tony wondered if he knew exactly how close he was dancing with the burn of a full-powered repulsor. “How did you know?” 

Strange sat back against the wall. He was smirking again, and Tony clenched his fist within his armor. “Tell me what’s in the case.” 

“I could kill you right now.”

“Could you?” Strange clasped his hands—surgeon's hands. “Do you want to take that chance?”

Tony knew he was bluffing; he could see the exhaustion in the doctor’s eyes. He felt off-balance, like he’d just missed the last step of a stairway. Strange’s nonchalant truths still echoed. Most of them were public knowledge, but some… 

Tony took a breath. Even though his vision was tinted with anger, he didn’t plan on killing any humans today, no matter how creepy they happened to be. 

Strange sighed. When he spoke again, a musical lilt Tony hadn’t noticed had dropped out of his voice. “Look,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be… violent. I’ve just—I’ve been looking for answers for a very long time.”

Something in his voice made Tony think of the pattern of arc reactor light in the corner of his eye—pirate ships and swords and keys and falcons. The blue light of his heart, never quite knowing which form to settle in. 

Tony hoped the world didn’t end before he figured it out. 

(It would.) 

Tony watched Strange, silence lying thick between them. The moon was bright through the small windows around them. Tony could see the clouds passing like smoke rings. The SHIELD helicarrier would be floating alongside them now, he knew, as Natasha shifted the ship into a smooth landing curve. 

Strange tensed. There was still blood on his clothes.

Tony sighed, reached into the cubby beneath the seat, and tossed the doctor a roll of bandages. 

“Here,” he said. “You won’t find any of those answers if you’re dead.”

And besides. A balanced party needs a spellcaster. 

Stephen had never liked spy movies. They so often felt black to him, filled with secrets given away too easily for the sake of convenience. The requirements of the narrative steered through loops and into allies that came together and made too much sense too quickly.

And they killed so casually. At least in a mystery, a death was something to be avenged. 

Stephen was beginning to think he didn’t much like spies, either. 

He had just finished tying off the bandage around his leg, quick and practiced, when the back of the ship creaked open. Stephen heard a rush of air and then the crackling notes of huge engines and people— as if he was back in New York, not a thousand feet above the earth. 

Stark stood, gesturing for Stephen to do the same. He wasn’t in his suit anymore. The light in his chest was still glowing, however, and Stephen remembered what he’d heard in the news. 

Stephen glanced behind him at the door to the cockpit. There were more songs behind it, and one of them sounded off in a way Stephen couldn’t place. He was reluctant to leave. He was reluctant to part from the comforting hum of the thoughtsong, beside him where it should be. Singing with him, as it should be.

“Come on,” Stark said. “Can’t unload the aliens until the guard gets here.”

He gestured outside. They’d docked within a now-sealed bay area, and the lights glowed almost green on the whitened walls. The green song clashed with the metal, screeching a warning in Stephen’s ears. He cringed. 

A dozen men in black uniforms surrounded the base of the ship. Their songs were nearly obscured through their thick helmets. Goons. Henchmen. The first to die, the stories always wrote, and Stephen hated the thought. The men were armed to the teeth, and multiple weapons had been focused on Stephen. 

He wondered if he could sing fast enough to stop a bullet.

“Better not find out,” he muttered, and followed Stark off the ship.

He did his best to focus beyond the music, catching a few stitches of conversation. Someone put a hand on his shoulder to keep him in place. Stephen almost flinched, but caught himself before he could give anyone the satisfaction. 

“Found him in the woods,” Stark said, gesturing at Stephen. “I think Fury ought to meet him.” 

Stephen clenched his jaw. I’m still on the clock, he thought vaguely. What sort of doctor fucked off in the middle of the night to infiltrate an espionage organization? What was he even doing?

The lilt of a honeyed song answered him. It made him lose the rest of the conversations around him, focusing sharply on the gloved hand hauling that locked silver case from the ship. Stephen felt himself flinch toward it involuntarily. 

The hand on his shoulder got tighter. Stephen almost sang at it, before he remembered the guns. 

Stephen tracked the case as it changed hands—from the nameless agent to the calloused fingers of a man with an eyepatch. He turned the case over in his hands. Stephen tensed as he flicked the latch, but he didn’t open it.

When Stephen looked up again, everyone was staring at him. He blinked. 

None of the faces around him provided any answer to what he’d missed, and in the sea of weapons and glass faces and black uniforms, Stephen glanced toward the only thing that could possibly be considered an ally. Stark raised his eyebrows.

“He wants to know what you’re doing here and why you should care,” he repeated. 

Stephen watched the flimsy lie he’d told the man about why he hadn’t heard Rogers crumble to pieces at his feet, and he tried not to regret this plan of his. 

He looked at the man with the eyepatch—Fury, if he was extrapolating correctly—and lifted his chin. “I’m what’s going to help you find the sibling to what’s in that case,” he said. 

Fury’s face didn’t change. His song reminded Stephen of cat’s eyes and fountain pen ink. “What’s in the case, then?”

The thoughtsong purred. Stephen took a gamble. “A powerful relic that can… manipulate thoughts.”

Fury watched him. Eyes never leaving Stephen’s face, he jerked his chin, and the hand on Stephen’s shoulder lifted. 

“Take him to the bridge,” Fury said. He shot a cold glance at Stark. “You too. We’ve got work to do.”

Stark gave a mocking bow, and Fury snorted and strode into the belly of the quinjet. He was still holding the case. Stephen dragged his feet, but he was led out into a long hallway anyway. The whole place thrummed with the vibrations of propellers. Stephen’s unease only rose. 

Stark fell into step with him. “The explosion screwed with your hearing, huh?”

“I don’t deign to listen to anything not worth my time. You should try it—it saves time.”

Stark snorted—then cut himself off, seeming slightly surprised. “Alright, Strange. At least tell me what’s up with the music.”

It was phrased like an order. Stephen had to grit his teeth against the pull of the song around him. The sudden, nearly instinctual feeling that he should do as this song commanded. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Stark pulled him sideways, out of the hall. He spoke quickly, like he didn’t want their escort to hear. “How did you know what was in the case?”

“I was right? Fantastic. Let me go, please.” 

Stark lifted his hands up, stepping back. “You can sense them, I’m guessing. The scepter and the Tesseract.” 

The scepter and the Tesseract. 

Stephen hummed. He stopped when Stark narrowed his eyes. 

“I can. You’re looking for them, right? The aliens you’ve been hiding from me brought them, and now you want them for yourself.”

“Asgardians.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what they call themselves. The aliens. They’re Asgardians, the root of the Nordic myths.” Stark sighed, running a hand over his face. “This is all so much weirder when I say it aloud. What am I doing? I’m supposed to be celebrating breaking a world record tonight.” 

“Tell me about it,” Stephen snorted. “I’m still on my shift.” 

He’d left his phone in his car. Idiotically, but at least it kept Christine from trying to call him. 

Stark continued, “The scepter came along from outer space, yeah, but we’ve had the other instrument—” he used the word pointedly— “here on Earth for a while. Loki woke it up last night and showed up to kill some people and begin his plan for world domination, and it’s been active ever since. As far as we can tell at least. Must be why you can sense it now, but not before.”

Gods? World domination? That was… somewhat beyond Stephen’s normal job description. He’d come here to find his songs, not fight in some cosmic war. 

“Starting to realize what you got yourself into?” Stark said with a rueful smile. 

Stephen straightened. “Thanks for taking your time to tell me what’s going on here,” he snapped.

“Yeah—you haven’t returned the favor.” Stark crossed his arms, staring Stephen down. He was shorter, but it didn’t soften his scorn. “You’ve walked yourself right into the lion’s mouth, and you aren’t getting out of it with lies. Whatever it is you’re hiding won’t stay hidden much longer.”

Stephen spun away from him. “When you come up with a convincing argument, get back to me. Maybe then I’ll deign to listen.”

“Strange—”

Stephen wished his infuriatingly beautiful spirit song would drown out his words like it did everyone else's. 

He pushed into the crowd of agents that flanked them, trying to keep track of the twists and turns of the hallway. This vessel—impossibly loud and hanging in the sky like the world’s largest bumblebee—was full of storage rooms and jet hangers and navigation systems. Stephen saw a man in a purple shirt glance at them through the glass window of what looked like a research lab. 

When Stephen was finally steered into a wide, bay-windowed hall, his headache had grown to encompass the whole of his frontal lobe. He kept one eye closed. It was easier to balance his visual input with the music that way. Stark stood behind him, in step with a friendly-looking agent that Stephen remembered seeing on the right hand of Fury. They spoke lowly. It wasn’t hard for Stephen to ignore them. 

The bridge was a forest of screens and souls, all calling out and flashing with data, and it nipped greedily at Stephen’s attention. There was a curving table set in the back of the room. Rogers, Romanoff, and three others Stephen hadn’t seen before sat scattered around it. Huge windows looked out onto the dark sky beyond them. Stephen could see stars through the clouds, and thought vaguely that Christine would be able to name them if she was here.

He didn’t realize he’d stopped dead on the threshold until someone tapped his shoulder. 

“It’s a stabilizing agent,” Stark said as he brushed past Stephen, in answer to a comment Stephen hadn’t heard. “Means the portal won't collapse on itself, like it did at SHIELD.”

The group around the table raised their heads. One of them, a huge man who seemed to take up more space than his physical form, frowned at Stark. He sounded like thunder. Like the explosion in the forest. 

“No hard feelings, Point Break,” Stark said, patting the man’s muscled arm lightly. “You’ve got a mean swing with that hammer. Anyway, the iridium means the portal can open as wide and stay open as long as Loki wants. If he’s bringing an army through to invade Earth, he’ll need it.”

He spun around himself as he spoke. Stephen would’ve thought it was casual had Stark not locked eyes with him pointedly when he said army.

“You again,” Romanoff said to Stephen. She rested her chin in her palm and looked him up and down. 

“Me again.” Stephen grinned. 

“Why are you here?” she asked. “You should be in a holding room where we can deal with you after we’re done stopping Loki from conquering the Earth.”

“I impressed your director, and now I’m permitted to sit at the adult’s table,” Stephen said serenely. There was a bite to his smile all the same. 

“Hm.” Romanoff didn’t look away from him. 

“Doctor Strange, here, is going to help us find the Tesseract.” The friendly-looking agent, Coulson, raised his hand. “Fury’s orders.”

The man in the purple shirt looked up. He looked nervous. “I thought that was what I was doing.” 

“You are, Doctor Banner.”

Shifting, Stephen looked away from them. The bridge was still bustling, and he had to close one eye again. He listened to the conversation. He gathered the names of the people around him slowly. Stark was still talking—chattering, really. Stephen wondered if he was wasting time on purpose. 

“How does Fury even see these?” Stark asked. He gestured to a set of screens scattered around him. He covered one eye with his hand. 

“He turns,” said one of the agents, Maria Hill. Stephen couldn’t tell if she was amused or not.

“Sounds exhausting.” Stark turned back to the group. “The rest of the raw materials for the portal, Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. Only major component he still needs is a power source. A high energy density, something to kick start the cube.” 

Hill raised an eyebrow. “When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?”

“Last night,” said Stark, perfectly seriously. “The packet, Selvig's notes, the Extraction Theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?”

Rogers looked up, tapping his hands on the table. He was quick to interrupt Stark. “Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?”

Doctor Banner hummed. He had a song like origami and a striated stone. A secret. “He's got to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier,” he said.

Stark perked up. “Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect.”

“Well, if he could do that he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet,” Banner scoffed. 

“Finally, someone who speaks English!”

Stephen just barely caught Rogers’ mutter. “Is that what just happened?”

With a dramatic edge to the movement, Stark shook Doctor Banner’s hands. There was a shine of respect in both their eyes that Stephen recognized. Other surgeons got it when they met him.  

“It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner,” said Stark, sounding honest. “Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.” 

“Thanks…” said Doctor Banner, awkwardly. “And Bruce, please.”

Stephen thought about the long days he’d spent on call in the emergency room after the Harlem incident almost a year ago. He and Christine had drunk the whole of his wine collection during that week. He’d been trying to age it. But it had probably been better spent relaxing the spring-coiled nerves of a couple of doctors enough to rest, anyway. 

Stephen wished Christine was here now. Or, at the very least, some of that wine. 

“Doctor Banner is only here to track the cube,” said Fury’s voice. It was so abruptly close to Stephen that he jumped. Fury strode into the room, effectively blocking Stephen from the exit, single eye taking them all in. 

“I was hoping you might join him, Stark,” he continued. “And you. Doctor Stephen Strange, is it?”

“Yes,” Stephen said. He didn’t add sir. 

“My agents thought you potentially useful enough to bring along. I will trust their judgement for now—not because I make a point of it usually, but because I don’t have time. But the moment I ask, you’re either signing your tongue away or in the next open block in a federal prison. Is that clear?”  

Stephen considered pretending not to hear him. In the end, he simply inclined his head. 

“Good.” Fury rubbed the butt of his gun. “Well. Welcome to first contact.” 

SHIELD had a good lab. Tony would admit that, grudgingly, as half a dozen agents dumped him, Bruce, and Strange behind doors that locked from the outside. 

“Wow,” Tony said, whistling lowly. “This place has all the toys.”

“I know,” said Bruce. It held significantly less enthusiasm. 

Tony ran his hands along the ridged edge of a table. Three holographic screens blinked into place around him, reacting to the slightest flick of his fingers. Only his own were better. The data banks streamed into order behind Bruce, and Tony knew he was looking at everything SHIELD could reach.

So, the entire world. 

In MIT, when Tony had first met Rhodey, he’d been in a workshop. It was his first year, his first time with the college equipment, and he’d loved it. The gadgets in his lab at home had been better, of course. But they’d been his father’s, and these were bright and shiny and covered in the sweat and thoughts of so many kids as eager as Tony, and they were beautiful.

Rhodey had laughed and shook his hand. A fifteen-year-old Tony had built a toy robot that whirred and clicked and shook its fists at the professor in order to hear that laugh again. 

He met all his friends, it seemed, through labs. 

Loki’s scepter was already here. Gold and blue, it had been braced on a winding tripod between window panes. It almost seemed to hover. 

“So, you know how to use all this?” Bruce began, turning to Strange. 

He was surprised, though Tony wasn’t, when the doctor lurched into a run to where the scepter rested. Tony watched him carefully. Cautiously. Waiting for an attack, a revelation, a demand.

But all Strange did was sing.

It was low, a nearly inaudible breath, but it made the jewel between the scepter’s points glow. Tony raised his hand to his arc reactor. Bruce shot him a questioning look. With a shake of his head, Tony raised a finger to his lips. 

Wait. 

Strange had closed one eye. He carefully reached out, touching the handle of the scepter lightly. His fingers traveled up it. They ticked, one inch at a time, in synch with the notes spilling so very softly from his throat. He pressed them to the blue jewel. 

The lights in the lab went out. 

Bruce jumped, Tony hissed a curse, and Strange’s head snapped up as if he’d been shot. He sang a sharp note. As quickly as they’d gone, the lights came back.

Bruce, very slowly, removed his glasses. “What,” he began, “was that?”

Strange swallowed. “I haven’t seen anything like this before,” he said. “It’s very… it’s very beautiful.”

“That beautiful thing has taken over the minds of two of SHIELD’s sharpest,” Tony told him. “Do you know how?” 

Strange hummed. “This is definitely powerful enough to do a vast number of things. But who is powerful enough to use it?”

“A god.” Tony grabbed one of the detection scanners from the table and flipped it to Bruce. “Loki, specifically. Did he… you called these things ‘instruments’ before. Did Loki play it?”

Strange shrugged, and it would’ve been snide had Tony not seen the hitch in his throat. “If that’s the analogy you want to use, sure.”

“I love analogies,” Tony said. “Huge analogy fan, me.”

Strange looked over his shoulder at the scepter again. Something was dancing in his eyes; not a light so much as a calmness. An understanding. He was comforted by the scepter—no. He belonged with it. 

He looked taller when he was relaxed, Tony noticed. His eyes were brighter too. Tony tried to remember that a relic that could bring that kind of ease to a man could still be evil, somewhere. 

“You said there was another one of these?” Strange asked, gesturing to the scepter. 

“More like an angry cube,” Bruce replied with a half-smile. “The Tesseract, which Loki is currently mind-controlling Erik Selvig into turning into a portal to bring his alien army through.” 

“Ah,” Strange said.

He was taking all this remarkably well, Tony thought. Really, it was impressive. 

Tony looked over Bruce’s shoulder as the data began to flicker across the screens from the detection scanner. Gamma radiation. Tony cast his mind back to the reading he’d done the night before. A test tube danced on his chest where his arc reactor’s light should be. 

“The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract. But it's gonna take weeks to process,” Tony said.

Strange snorted. “You don’t need weeks,” he said. 

“Oh?” Tony raised an eyebrow. “And why don’t you enlighten us?”

“I might,” Strange replied. “But… what are you reading from the thought—I mean, the scepter?” 

“Just a couple of high energy waves and radiation, and a dense sort of schematic that’s probably some type of alien tech to direct power,” Bruce said. 

“So Loki can harness it.”

“Yep.” Tony wondered if the blueberries in his jacket were still any good. 

“Can I see him?” 

Tony and Bruce glanced at each other. “Uh,” Tony said. “Why?”

From the look Strange gave him, you would have thought Tony the height of human idiocy. “So I can figure out how he used this to take over two people’s minds.”

Tony raised his hands, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “I’ll ask the Director.”

And if Fury didn’t say yes, then he’d think of something else. He was far too curious now.

There was an escort when Stephen passed back through the halls of the helicarrier. Of course there was. Stephen wondered if SHIELD let kidnapped scientists into the restroom without bugging them first. The half-dozen agents spoke in harsh tones and kept eyeing him every time his steps caught from the pain in his leg, as if Stephen was going to reach for a gun.

Idiotic. Even if he was going to hurt someone, he wouldn’t touch a gun.  

They were, according to the maps, keeping Loki in a docking bay near the back left engine of the helicarrier. It wasn’t far from the lab. Stephen could still hear the scepter. He set his hand on the looming, reinforced door to the docking bay when they arrived, listening beyond it to the alien was pacing the interior of a cylindrical cage.

“I know it’s hard to go against your nature, but do try not to antagonize him,” Stark said. He didn’t bother to say so quietly. The agents could hear them. 

“Thanks for explaining your idiocy. It’s instinctual, then?”

“Genetic, I would say.”

“Stark’s right,” said the head of their entourage. “He’s dangerous.” 

Stephen gave the agent his best glower. Something sounded off about Agent Rumlow to Stephen, but it might’ve been the warped wind sounds from the nearby propellers catching up his natural tune. Still, Stephen didn’t like the man.

“I’ll be fine,” Stephen said. He pressed his hand harder into the door, and it got out of his way. 

Loki turned when the door opened, already sneering. The glass threw faint reflections around him. Green and black and gold, the Asgardian seemed like he’d been sliced out of the dark water beneath ice and never permitted to thaw. 

Stephen didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Perhaps this was exactly it. Perhaps Stephen had already pieced Loki together from his half-obscured, pain-blurred ride in the quinjet. Or perhaps he was surprised, left reeling by the being that had wielded thoughts with such violence. 

Stephen couldn’t tell when he met the eyes of the creature in the cage. He didn’t care. 

Loki’s song was like any other soul’s. Like Thor’s, it had a brush of wildness, but there was nothing inhuman about its composition. Loki sounded like ice and fangs and bright emeralds. Somehow, the notes seemed frigid and warm all at once. 

But what made Stephen stop in his tracks was how quiet it was. 

Loki said something, his tone scathing, but the syllables blurred together. Stephen stared at him. He’d never heard anything like this—like a tape winding down, or an echo losing its power. Muffled by something more than the glass. 

Stark had said Loki used the scepter to control the thoughts of two agents. Stephen had a twisting, uncomfortable feeling that it had been used more often. 

“Hello,” Stephen said. He almost sang it, just to see how Loki reacted. “What are you?”

“I am a god,” Stephen read from Loki’s lips. They were spiteful. “I am a sorcerer and the future ruler of your pathetic planet. The rightful ruler.”

“A sorcerer?” Stephen said, something hopeful bursting unwelcomely in his chest. “Can you hear it too?” 

For a moment, Loki looked taken aback. Confused. Then he laughed. “What dull thing have they sent here to interrogate me? What use are you in the game you don’t belong in?”

Stephen raised his chin. The fleeting hope that he was not alone with the music had died as soon as it had come, but the quiet suffocation of Loki’s song did not. Stephen could hear it scrabbling within itself. Discordant notes broke weakly through whatever had walled them in, stamped them down, and chained them into a structure they were never meant to be. 

They sounded desperate. Somewhere under all this summoned hatred, they sounded desperate . 

Loki stepped up to the glass, his words snarling from between his teeth. “What can you possibly hope to do to me, little human?”

“I can free you,” he said. 

Behind him, a half-dozen SHIELD soldiers and Anthony Stark straightened as if struck by lightning. Stephen didn’t notice. He’d forgotten the cage. He’d forgotten that the only way these deafened creatures could take his words was betrayal. Guns lifted into hands. Yells of warning and alarm fell unheard around Stephen’s feet. 

He was already singing. 

He felt them stretch deep, the notes he forced his perception to change. He felt them shudder against the roiling leash of control that bound ice and emeralds down. It sounded like the thoughtsong. Like the thoughtsong meddling with notes just as Stephen did—two axioms of the universe clashing and refusing to balk. 

Stephen could see his reflection in the glass. His eyes were shining green. Loki’s had gone wide, then slid closed. The Asgardian clenched his hands at his sides. 

In Stephen’s ears, his heartbeat was too quick. He was exhausted. His mind fought to control too many notes, but he didn’t release them. 

Yellow flickered around Loki’s song. A third eye of green lines and dark patterns had formed on Stephen’s throat, between his collarbones. 

Loki’s face fell into something pained, and he threw his head back. His fingers splayed wide. Energy rippled in concentric waves around him, smashing into the glass around him. Cracking it. 

Someone yelled. Stark. His voice was still so crystal clear within the haze of song. 

“Stop! I thought you were helping us!” 

Stephen was. Someone had sent this army, sent this alien. Sent the scepter. An instrument didn’t play itself. Couldn’t they see they were fighting the wrong threat?

“I can hear the scepter,” Stephen sang, trying to explain. 

Something slammed into the back of his head. Stephen stumbled. Distantly, he threw out a hand to brace himself against the nearest railing. Sensation crawled beneath his skin. His concentration broke. The music slithered back to snap at Loki’s form, herding it into its wrongness. 

Stephen felt himself shaking. The whole world was alight with color, swimming across his vision, darkening it. That was strange. He’d never seen the music before. 

“He’s being controlled,” Stephen tried to say. His words wouldn’t cooperate. Metal pressed against his knees. 

Stephen threaded his fingers through it. His chest was burning. Sound warbled and reached out for him, but he was tired. Something pressed against his mouth. He couldn’t breathe through it. 

I left my phone in the car, Stephen thought vaguely, and blinked. 

He didn’t open his eyes. 

“What did you do to him?” 

Tony’s ears rang, the memory of music so vivid he could almost imagine he was still hearing it, and the words came out hollow. He tried to step around the wall of agents that pressed him back into the hallway. They only seemed to grow denser. 

“Stay back,” someone told him. “The cage may not be secure.”

Tony had had enough of orders. Enough of all of this. He could see the cracked cage, just barely, and he remembered the way it had broken. Strange had looked so determined. So convinced. 

Had this been Loki’s plan all along? His reason for letting himself get captured? Tony had a hard time believing he somehow managed to give otherworldly powers to some random doctor, but not all chess strategies were clever. 

Still. Tony had… he’d brought Strange here. He’d dared to take a chance on him, dared even to like him. 

He was usually a better judge of character than supervillain. 

Nothing connected. The equation didn’t balance; the variables didn’t make sense. But Tony couldn’t push past these agents, and he couldn’t see. Rumlow, hand lifted to direct his team, slid tensely into the room. Almost immediately, he told Tony to leave.  

“Did you kill him?” Tony demanded. He wished he had his suit. 

“No,” Rumlow said shortly. “We’ll deal with him.”

“It doesn’t make sense—” Tony began. 

“Make yourself useful and find Fury,” Rumlow told him, and turned back into the docking bay. 

Tony weighed the advantages of throwing a punch at someone to get them to tell him what in fuck’s name just happened. But they didn’t know any better than he did. They’d just narrowly stopped someone from freeing Loki, after all. Someone Tony had been stupid enough to bring right to him. 

And yet… it didn’t make sense. 

‘I can hear the scepter.’  

An agent curled a hand around his upper arm. She looked apologetic when she tugged Tony back, away from the sealing door and his chance at answers. Tony almost struck out. He got close enough that the poor woman flinched. 

“Do yourself a favor and do as Rumlow says,” the agent told Tony. 

“There isn’t time for this,” Tony snapped. “We have half a day at the most before Earth is at war!”

“Exactly! So go get Fury and find that Cube! Sir.”

The hastily added honorary did nothing to dull Tony’s vexation. He glared, yanking his arm out of the agent’s grip. He could still remember that song. 

The commotion had spread along the veins of the helicarrier when Tony finally turned his back on the docking bay. Tony pushed past more agents racing toward the scene and tried to avoid intentionally getting in their way. Someone accidentally jabbed him in the ribs with the butt of a gun. Swallowing the unease in his throat, Tony forced himself to keep walking. 

Still, his mind kept returning to an unreal night with a cryptic old woman telling him about destiny. His instincts kept telling him that he was missing something—that he was wrong. 

Tony was wrong about people. Tony was wrong about people a lot, more often than he should be, more often than he could admit to being. 

(Despite everything, Tony Stark still wanted to believe in people.)

He’d been wrong this time, too. Hadn’t he?

  It didn’t matter. Whatever the layers of this problem had become, there was still an army coming, and the world needed saving. Again. 

Think, Stark. One problem at a time. 

He took a conscious breath and kept moving. He should go back to the bridge and find Fury, but he took the leftward path back toward the lab instead. Bruce was still there. The scepter was, too, and Tony had more than a few questions he wanted answered about it. 

Disturbance had spread like wildfire through the helicarrier, words and warnings tossed like bombshells across hallways. Tony nearly ran into Rogers and Thor on his way back to the lab. They looked ruffled. Ready to fight. Tony had to raise his hands to keep them from rushing off.

“It’s no use,” he said. “They won’t let anyone in.” 

“They won’t allow what?” Thor demanded. “That is my brother your people have locked up.”

“I really hope his more homicidal traits aren’t genetic, then!” 

“What happened?” Rogers asked. He raised his hands placatingly, but it only exacerbated the frustration in Tony’s gut. 

“I don’t know,” Tony said. It felt like sandpaper to admit it. “But Loki almost broke out a moment ago.”

“What? How?”

Tony clenched his fist, then released it. Fuck if he was admitting he’d made a mistake in front of Rogers—esspecially if he wasn’t sure it had been a mistake. He averted his eyes and pushed between the two men, swatting Thor’s shoulder as he passed.

Tony hadn’t been sure what they’d do, but after a moment of hesitation, they turned to follow him. The lab wasn’t far. Through the window, Tony could see the back of Bruce’s shirt wrinkle as he wrung his hands. He was speaking to Fury—who was unfortunately quite present. 

Tony didn’t slow, bursting back into the lab with too much force. The door banged. Bruce jumped. 

“What the hell, Nick?” Tony demanded. He gestured, vaguely, to the hall behind him. The scepter was glowing. 

“Why don’t you tell me?” said Fury. He set something on the table between them—a communicator, buzzing with Rumlow’s voice. 

“Threat neutralized.”

Tony swallowed. Hard.

“We have a looming alien invasion and two dangerous, compromised individuals on the loose,” Fury began too slowly, “and you find it necessary to take a field trip?”

Tony crossed his arms. “I left Bruce here, didn’t I?” 

“Yes, in order to bring one of Loki’s underlings right to him!” Fury said with a hint of a snarl. 

“What?” Rogers took a step forward. 

“The subject you picked up in the forest was one of Loki’s,” said the communicator. Rumlow sounded solemn. “We dealt with him.”

“He wasn’t one of Loki’s,” Tony said before anyone could open their mouths. 

Fury stood. “He tried to free him.”

“You weren’t there,” Tony insisted, finding he actually believed it. “I think… he said he could hear the scepter.” 

Fury glanced behind them at the weapon. “Because it’s controlling him, Stark. You didn’t think of that?”

Tony bristled. “I didn’t see any of you jumping to test Strange for signs of mind control that, oh yeah, no one ever told me about.”

“What did—” Bruce tried to speak up. Thor interrupted him. 

“What, precisely, did this Midgardian do to my brother?”

Tony’s eyes moved to Rogers’ flinty ones against his will. “He said he could… free him,” Tony explained. “And then he started to sing, and everything went to shit after that.”

“He sang in the forest,” Steve said. “That’s how he does—whatever it is he does.”

Fury stood, dismissal in his stance. “SHIELD has dealt with that. What matters now is—”

“Dealt with him how?” Tony asked, without much hope of an answer. He didn’t get one.

“What matters now is the Tesseract. We’ll be relocating Loki soon; and please, no more detours.” 

He left, and Tony made no move to stop him. ‘An old lady who materialized in my bathroom told me some weird shit and now I have a gut feeling that contradicts explicit evidence’ was hardly a valid reason to keep endangering the mission.

The door slid shut on Fury’s heels. Tony saw him stride away, head bent close with Agent Coulson’s. Spinning back toward the scepter, Tony reached for a sensor—but found his wrist caged in a supersoldier’s grip. 

“Did you know?” Rogers demanded.

“Did I know what? That the injured man who had no idea who Loki even was when we found him in a crater in the woods would betray us? Are you stupid as well as tasteless?”

“You brought him to Loki.” 

Tony resisted the petty urge to punch him. “Yeah, to get information on this.” He gestured to the scepter. “And I’m not convinced Strange wasn’t intending to help us, just—whatever, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

“It does if you’re endangering this team.”

“Steve,” said Bruce sharply. “Let go of him, alright? I didn’t think anything was up with Strange either, besides the whole… humming thing.”

Rogers set his jaw, but let go of Tony’s wrist. “Just—focus on the problem.”

“You think I’m not?” Tony snapped. “Why did Fury even call us in? Why now and not before? This is all wrong— this equation doesn’t even have half its variables.”

Thor crossed his arms, looking interested. “You believe the director hides his true intentions?” 

Tony shrugged. “He’s a spy. He’s the spy. His secrets have secrets. And I’m not just talking about the Tesseract here; all anyone is telling me about Strange is that he’s been ‘dealt with’. It’s bugging Bruce too, isn’t it?”

Bruce shifted uncomfortably. “I, uh, I just wanna finish my work here and…” He didn’t finish, trailing off with a sigh as he eyed the scepter. 

“Doctor?” Steve prompted. 

Bruce took off his glasses. “'A warm light for all mankind’. Loki's jab at Fury about the cube.”

“I heard it,” Steve said.

Wringing his hands, Bruce nodded to Tony. “Well, I think that was meant for you. Your tower lit up last night—it's powered by arc reactors, a self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for what, a year?”

The subject still pleased Tony, even with his thoughts in knots. “That's just the prototype. I'm kind of the only name in clean energy right now.”

“So why didn’t SHIELD bring you in on the Tesseract project before?” Bruce wondered. “I mean, what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?”

Tony whistled, patting down his jacket. His blueberries were still good, thank god; he dumped a few into his palm. “I should probably look into that once my decryption programmer finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files.”

Steve blinked at him. “In—your what?”

“JARVIS has been running it since I hit the bridge,” Tony said lightly. He didn’t think anyone had noticed, not even Strange. “In a few hours we'll know every dirty secret SHIELD has ever tried to hide. Blueberry?”

Rogers scoffed. “Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around?”

Right. Of course. “An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome,” Tony said, a little more sharply than he’d intended. 

“I think Loki's trying to wind us up,” said Steve. He glanced at Thor, who looked thoughtful. “This is a man who means to start a war, and if we don't stay focused, he'll succeed. We have orders. We should follow them.”

Tony gave into the urge to sneer. “Following’s not really my style.”

“This is far from productive,” Thor interrupted. “If the scepter can corrupt without our noticing, we must be vigilant. I…” He squared his shoulders. “I will speak to Fury about my brother.” 

Tony inclined his head in agreement. Thor considered him, then gave a small bow and reached out for one of the blueberries. Looking pleased at the taste, he trudged out of the lab. 

Rogers turned on his heel to follow, and Bruce called out after him.

“Steve…” said the doctor. “Tell me none of this smells a little funny to you.”

There was a moment—one, hanging moment, where Tony thought he would admit it. But Rogers just straightened his shoulders, shot Tony a glare, and left. 

“Just find the cube.”

Tony forced himself to relax his fists, and his shoulders fell as soon as Rogers was out of view. Bruce sent him a questioning look. Dismissing his concern with a wave, Tony set his blueberries on the table. 

That song was still stuck in his head. Tony rolled it over in his mind, and though it seemed familiar, Tony couldn’t place it.

Aloud, he said, “That’s the guy my dad wouldn’t shut up about? I’m wondering if they shouldn’t have kept him on ice.”

Bruce’s smile was strained. Tony knew he should stop poking and prodding at the peacemaker, but he could see it beyond Bruce’s eyes: he didn’t want to be the peacemaker. This calm was a façade, a mask. Bruce was afraid of himself, and Tony couldn’t keep himself from drawing attention to it. 

Maybe it would help the man. The rest of the world seemed to agree with Bruce, tiptoeing around him and indulging his self-terror, and Tony knew it was perfectly justified. 

But it didn’t always have to be that way.

“Steve isn’t wrong about Loki. He does have the jump on us,” Bruce said.

Tony thought of the surprise in Loki’s eyes as Strange had reached out to him with the notes of a song, and pushed the image from his mind. “What he's got is an ACME dynamite kit. It's gonna blow up in his face, and I'm gonna be there when it does.”

Bruce’s smile relaxed. “I’ll read all about it.”

Tony flicked his fingers across the screens around him, but there was no motive behind the movement. “Or you'll be suiting up like the rest of us.”

“Ah, see, I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare.”

Tony turned. He raised a hand to his chest, forcing Bruce to meet his eyes. “You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart.” 

Right now, the arc reactor was playing its tricks on Tony’s eyes. It looked like a hand, curling its fingers. 

“This stops it,” Tony said. “This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a... terrible privilege.”

“But you can control it.”

He’d been dying, two years ago. He’d been dying. “Because I learned how.”

“It’s different.” 

Bruce reached for the nearest holoscreen, trying to focus on the data spilling across it, but Tony stepped in front of him. He brushed the screen aside. Bruce set his jaw as he looked at him. 

“I read all about your accident,” Tony said. “That much gamma radiation should have killed you. Would have.”

Something sparked in Bruce’s gaze. Something real. “So you're saying that the Hulk— the other guy saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment.” 

There was a hint of fury in Bruce’s voice, and it shone double in his eyes. It didn’t scare Tony.

“Saved it for what?” 

Tony smiled. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Tony had tried, many times after the encounter with the entity in his bathroom, to learn what an Agamotto was. When that had gotten him nowhere, he’d tried to find the entity. He’d scoured the web and investigated every hidden lead and dead end that he found, but he’d found nothing. It was like she’d disappeared into thin air.

Well. That wasn’t quite true. 

About three months after the incident, Tony’s search functions had found a wifi router. It was wired with the name ‘Kamar-Taj Guest’, and it had pinged Tony’s program when it’s password changed—likely as a practical joke—to ‘ancientonesteaprophecy’ for a day and a half. Tony had laughed. He’d hacked further into it anyway. 

And he’d come upon a firewall, inscribed with a smiling Iron Man helmet. 

‘Not yet, Tony Stark!’ scrawled across the bottom of the screen in cheerful font. ‘Come again soon.’

Tony had been unnerved enough to do as he’d told.

Now, he regretted that decision. He’d left the lab under Bruce’s watch again, much to the man’s nervous doubt, to find Fury. Hours after the incident in the docking bay, the bustle had died down. Everyone waited with varying degrees of patience for Tony to find the Tesseract. 

He planned to find a lot of other things, too. JARVIS was cracking through security measures even now, and what he’d found so far made Tony queasy. 

Fury looked annoyed when Tony stopped him in the hall outside the bridge. Tony didn’t think he had any other expressions. He’d been deep in conversation with Thor, who looked almost happy to see Tony by contrast. It made Tony feel a little better—not that he’d ever admit it. 

Crossing his arms, Fury watched Tony catch his breath and opened his mouth. Tony spoke before he could. “Yes, I’m finding the Tesseract. That’s what I’m here to ask you about, actually.”

“What is it?” Fury said flatly.

“It’d be faster… Look, back in New York, we didn’t just randomly pick up Strange. He followed the scepter. He knew it was with us, and he knew the Tesseract wasn’t. He could tell us where it is. If we—” 

“Not an option,” said Fury. 

“But—” 

Fury raised his hand. For a moment, Tony thought he looked weary, but it was only for a moment. “It’s not under my jurisdiction,” the director told him. “I already have the Global Security Council on my ass about these alien things; I can’t manage both this and mysterious, destructive, enhanced individuals.” 

Tony clenched his jaw. “Whose jurisdiction is it, then?” 

“The Council,” Fury repeated. “Secretary Pierce is back up in terms of legality.” 

Secretary Pierce was definitely, wholly beyond Tony’s range of easy influence. It would take weeks, maybe months, to convince him of anything that was even remotely questionable. Tony weighed the benefits of honesty. 

“Look, Nick,” he said. “I think we’ve got this wrong. All wrong.”

“I know you do,” Fury told him. He fixed his eye on Tony. “And I do, believe it or not, trust your judgement. Which means as soon as this motherfucking alien invasion is under control, I will reopen the investigation.”

It was more than Tony had expected. But it wasn’t enough. “That might be too late.” 

“If we don’t deal with Loki, it’ll be too late for all of us,” Fury said.

“Come on, I thought spies were supposed to be good multitaskers.”

Fury raised his hands, almost far enough to slap Thor. “End of discussion, Stark,” he said. “I don’t have the resources for this, and I forbid you from turning away from the Tesseract project.”

And really, that was his mistake. Nobody forbade Tony Stark anything. Tony’s lip curled as he squared his shoulders, and Fury’s expression flickered with exhaustion as he realized what he’d said. Thor looked confused. Tony winked at him, though it didn’t ease the tension beneath his skin.

“Sure, Nick,” Tony said. “Whatever you say.”

Fury muttered something that sounded like ‘for the love of god…’ before he paused, suddenly. He raised a hand to his ear, and Tony could hear the quiet buzz of a communicator. Natasha’s voice filtered through it. 

“Loki means to release the Hulk. Keep Banner in the lab, and send in Thor.”

Tony blinked. The glare Fury sent him was almost a dare—almost a challenge to be stupid enough to try to keep wasting his time. Tony raised his hands in surrender. Fury shoved past him, retracing the path to the workshop that Tony knew by heart, now. 

Sharing a glance with Thor, Tony followed. He tried to force his thoughts back in order. They didn’t cooperate, filling his head with theories and calculations and questions, always questions. He wondered if this was all really Loki’s plan at all. He wondered what Earth had that the universe seemed to want. 

He wondered if that WiFi router would let him through the firewalls, now.

‘It will find you, Stark.’ 

Tony reached out and caught Thor’s sleeve. Fury was out of earshot now, and Tony didn’t dare hesitate lest he think better of this. 

“What is it, Man of Iron?” Thor asked. He could pull away from Tony without a hint of effort if he wished, but he waited. 

Tony took a breath. “I don’t think Loki controls the scepter,” he said. “I think it controls him. I think that’s what Doctor Strange meant when he said he could hear it. He was, quite literally, trying to free him from it.”

Thor looked down at him, eyes bright and face unreadable. “What proof do you have of this?”

“Nothing,” Tony said. He held Thor’s gaze. “Just my word.”

There was silence for too many uncomfortable beats, and then Thor inclined his head. 

“Thank you,” he said. “If there is any chance my brother… if there is any chance I haven’t yet let him down completely, I will take it.”

Relief broke across Tony’s face in a grin. “Good, Point Break. I’ll see what I can do about it.”

Thor smiled back at him, shifting Tony’s hand so he was clasping it with a crushing grip. He shook it with too much force. Tony’s teeth rattled. But he could feel the agreement in it, the contract, and he knew he had made an ally.

Thor let go and strode down the hall without another word. Tony followed, running to keep up, and entered the lab only a few steps behind Thor.

Bruce had stopped working on the Tesseract code—which Tony could see was fully operational. Fury was a different story. He crossed his arms accusingly, his gaze snapping to Tony as he reached for the nearest screen. JARVIS’s code was still running across its surface. Tony didn’t think Fury would be able to identify the program as snooping, but he didn’t want the spy looking at it for too long just in case. 

“You're supposed to be locating the Tesseract,” Fury said with the tone of someone who was over repeating himself to a disobedient child.

“We are,” Bruce told him. “The model's locked and we're sweeping for the signature now. When we get a hit, we'll have the location within half a mile.”

Tony tucked the screen between his arms. JARVIS flashed a welcome at him—and then, to Tony’s increasing dismay, began sorting files across the surface.

“You'll get your cube back, no muss, no fuss,” Tony said. His words sounded heavy. “And what, pray tell, is phase two?”

Something cracked against the table, and Steve’s voice broke through the space. “Phase two is SHIELD uses the cube to make weapons,” he snapped. A gun lay glowing beneath his hand. The brush of its energy through the space was anything but Terran, and Tony almost wanted to reach out to touch it. 

Weapons. It was laughable, how Tony could have missed that. How he’d been so eager to imagine the Tesseract was a source of clean energy, was a thing of peace and building. Pathetic. 

There was always a weapon, no matter how much Tony dreamed otherwise. 

His arc reactor, in the corner of his eye, looked like crossed swords. 

Fury didn’t flinch under Steve’s words. It was impressive, Tony thought vaguely. “Rogers, we gathered everything related to the Tesseract,” Fury said. “This does not mean that we're—” 

“I’m sorry, Nick.” Tony spun the screen in his hand, a blueprint etched into the blue light. “What were you lying?”

Fury looked at him, the same man who had told Tony he trusted his judgement just minutes ago, and Tony felt a flare of guilt. Then he thought of Obadiah and Vanko and Hammer and tightened his fingers on the edge of the screen. 

“I was wrong, director,” Rogers said. “The world hasn’t changed a bit.” 

Tony was still looking at Fury when Natasha materialized beside him, halfway between Thor and Bruce. There was flint in Bruce’s gaze. His knuckles turned white where they rested deceptively lightly on the edge of the counter. 

“Did you know about this?” he asked her, too flatly.

Natasha replied evenly, “You wanna think about removing yourself from this environment, doctor?”

Bruce laughed brittlely. “I was in Calcutta. I was pretty well removed.”

Natasha extended her hands, saying, “Loki’s manipulating you.”

“And you've been doing what exactly?” 

“You didn't come here because I batted my eyelashes at you.”

Bruce straightened, ice in his eyes. “Yes, and I'm not leaving because suddenly you get a little twitchy. I'd like to know why SHIELD is using the Tesseract to build weapons of mass destruction.”

Fury threw a hand out. “Because of him,” he declared, pointing at Thor. The room went silent. 

“Me?” Thor said, taken aback.

“Last year, Earth had a visitor from another planet who had a grudge match that leveled a small town,” Fury said. “We learned that not only are we not alone, but we are hopelessly, hilariously, outgunned.”

“My people want nothing but peace with your planet!”

Fury took a step forward, turning in place. He met each of their gazes as he spoke. “But you're not the only people out there, are you? And you're not the only threat. The world's filling up with people who can't be matched, can't be controlled.”

Tony thought of green light spilling through a docking bay and the sound of a baton connecting with Strange’s skull. Of music and scathing, defensive sarcasm and a magic that SHIELD didn’t want to understand, not so much as they wanted to leash. 

A magic Tony had delivered right to them. 

“Like you controlled the cube?” Tony said. Like you controlled us?

Thor gestured to him. “Your work with the Tesseract is what drew Loki to it—and his allies. It is the signal to all the realms that Midgard is ready for a higher form of war.”

“You forced our hand. We had to come up with something.”

Tony scoffed, throwing the screen onto the table beside him. “Nuclear deterrent. `Cause that always calms everything right down.”

The alliance Fury had extended to Tony in the hall splintered completely. There was pure intention in his words when he said, scathingly, “Remind me again how you made your fortune, Stark?”

“I'm sure if he still made weapons, Stark would be neck deep—” Rogers began.

Tony had just about had enough of this ignorant, presumptuous hypocrite. “Hold on,” he demanded, “how is this suddenly about me?”

Rogers crossed his arms. “Oh, I’m sorry; isn’t everything?”

Tony almost snapped back at him, but Thor’s voice cut him off. 

“I thought humans were more evolved than this.”

Fury rolled his eye. “Excuse me, did we come to your planet and blow stuff up?”

“Did you always give your champions such mistrust?” Thor shot back, giving Tony a nod. 

“Are you all really that naive?” Natasha said. “SHIELD monitors potential threats.”

“Captain America is on the potential threat watch list?” Bruce leaned forward. 

Tony turned, unable to resist. His blood was singing nearly violently. He felt like he was coated in mud, like someone was letting a laser fry away the membrane of his thoughts. “You’re on that list?” he asked Rogers. “Are you above or below ‘angry bees’?”

“I swear to God, Stark, one more crack…” Rogers reacted just as Tony had hoped. 

“Threatened!” he sang mockingly to Fury. “I feel threatened!”

“You speak of control, yet you court chaos,” Thor said. He shook his head, stepping back.

The room was humming, now, waiting for something to snap. Tony wanted it to. Couldn’t fucking wait— he didn’t know if he wanted to hurt someone, or if he wanted someone to hurt him. 

Bruce scoffed, and the sound cut through the space like a physical blade. “What are we, a team? No.” He laughed. “We're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're a fucking time bomb.”

An unbalanced party, Tony thought. Conflicting roles, conflicting classes. The kind that tore itself to pieces before the quest was over.

“You need to step away,” Fury warned Bruce.

They were scared of Bruce—scared, until he stood up for himself. And then they were angry. Tony wanted to throw something.

“Why shouldn’t the guy let off a little steam?” Tony said lightly, and it was venomous.

Rogers grabbed his shoulder, pulling him back. “You know damn well why! Back off.”

“Oh,” Tony purred, “I’m starting to want you to make me.”

Condescension dripped from Rogers’ words, from his entire form. Scorn and judgement and disappointment, so much like Tony’s father. No wonder they got along. “Sure,” Rogers said. “Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?”

“Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,” Tony listed, refusing to let his voice rise.

“I know guys with none of that worth ten of you,” Rogers said. He was face to face with Tony now. “The only thing you really fight for is yourself. You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play—to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you.”

You don’t know anything about me. Tony’s hands clenched, and he stuffed down the urge to list instances, to defend himself. Rogers didn’t deserve those truths. Tony had nothing to prove to him. 

“I think I would just cut the wire,” Tony said evenly.

“Always a way out. You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.”

Tony had never called himself that. Tony had never asked for that, never once presumed it. A year ago, Fury had rejected him from the Avengers Initiative. Had found him unworthy—at least until there was a problem that needed solving. At least until they needed Tony.

And Tony had come. He’d come, because of course he had, and he’d given everything he could to this entitled soldier who wouldn’t see past a genepool. He’d come, and he’d gotten a doctor who had only ever asked for his help imprisoned. 

Tony was very, very good at lying to himself. But not about this. 

Tony’s hand dug into the edges of his arc reactor, and he snarled. “A hero? Like you? You're a lab rat, Rogers. Everything special about you came out of a bottle!”

Rogers bristled, puffing up like a pigeon. Tony didn’t move. “Put on the suit, let's go a few rounds,” Rogers said.

Thor laughed, a jolt of lightning through an already electric room. “You people are so petty... and tiny.”

Tony forced himself to take a step back. He itched to run, to fight, to roar. 

“Yeah, this is a team,” Bruce scoffed. He had backed himself up against the scepter.

Fury stepped toward him threateningly. “Agent Romanoff, would you escort Doctor Banner back to his—”

“Where?” Bruce jabbed a finger over his shoulder. “You rented my room, and then let some neurosurgeon destroy it.”

“The cell was just a precaution—”

  “For if you needed to kill me, but you can't. I know, I’ve tried.”

The air left the room as definitively as the silence after a gunshot.

Bruce’s chest was heaving. “I got low. I didn't see an end, so I put a bullet in my mouth and the other guy spit it out.

“So I moved on,” Bruce hissed. “I focused on helping other people. I was good, until you dragged me back into this hell hole and put everyone here at risk!”

He was speaking to Natasha, to all of them. “Do you want to know my secret, Agent Romanoff? Do you want to know how I stay calm?”

The temperature in the room had changed, cold and warm and stifling all at once. Romanoff and Fury had their hands on their guns. 

“Bruce,” said Tony, very quietly. “Put down the scepter.”

Bruce blinked. The scepter in his hand, glowing with a cheeky light that Tony refused to match to a hazy memory of music, dropped to the surface of the desk. Bruce’s fingers curled back.

In the silence, there was a beep. It took Tony a few moments to remember it was a computer alert. 

Tony turned, reaching out to brush his fingers across the screen. He could feel every set of eyes in the room, and if he listened, he could have sworn he could hear every heartbeat. Part of him still wanted to spin and plunge his fist into the nearest person’s sternum. 

“Got a location,” Tony said.

And then, rippling through the helicarrier like an asteroid connecting, there came an explosion. 

Stephen’s world swayed tauntingly as he opened his eyes. 

It was a long moment before they focused on anything, and an equally long moment before Stephen recognized anything else. Too distracted to sort through the music and try to identify the melodies, Stephen tried to remember the names of colors and shapes. Tried to remember anything, really.

He felt lonely—achingly so, but he couldn’t recall why. The sensation of movement around him made his thoughts scatter. Stephen tried to exhale, and was surprised when it came out as a groan. There was something clogging his mouth, pressing between his teeth.  

Ugh, his head. He tried to turn it, and it sent pulses of pain down to his heels. Stephen froze, breathing hitching, as tears sprung to the backs of his eyes—surprised by the intensity of the pain. He knew about concussions, about how much he was risking. The music rustled around him. 

Nausea crawled up his throat, forcing Stephen to work up the strength to move. He couldn’t afford to be sick now, with whatever was stuffed in his mouth. That would be a death sentence—and not a pleasant one. 

He lifted a hand, but found his wrist pressed against something cold and metal. It looped tight and kept his arm pressed down to the horizontal surface beneath him. Stephen tugged, but the resistance didn’t give even a millimeter. 

Something a little sharper than fear caught Stephen’s breath. He couldn’t sing through the blockage around his jaw, but he didn’t need to make physical noise to change the notes. It was simply an automatic reaction. Stephen closed his eyes and focused, and the restraints broke away from his hands. 

Immediately, he curled them into his chest. Pins and needles seared through his hands. That scared him too, more than he wanted to admit. He needed his hands, needed what they let him do—it was what proved he was human.

Stephen clawed at the thing in his mouth. Wet fabric bunched around his fingers, and he almost laughed. A gag? Someone had gagged him? 

Where the hell was he? 

Stephen sorted through the pain and white noise in his mind for his most recent memory. It made him stiffen. Loki’s wide eyes and surprised power, Stark’s horrified expression, sharp pain— 

And then nothing. 

Stephen looked over at the slender manacle that had been closed around his wrist. He swayed. The world was still rocking, forcing him to swallow down bile, and Stephen felt like it was pulling him apart. 

The sting of loneliness behind his heart was that of isolation. The thought and spacesongs were faint, so far away that they were practically background noise. He was alone. He had abandoned them.  

And… fuck. He’d given himself up. Given himself away. For nearly twenty years, he’d kept this secret safe. Kept himself safe. Kept himself from ending up deep in the bowels of a government facility, never to see the light of day again. 

He was an idiot. An idiot. What had he thought? That he might’ve been helpful? That he might’ve managed to fix something, that his power might even have been something good, just because he’d heard space and thought and stood beside Tony Stark? 

How many times did he need to learn his lesson?

Stephen looked around the dark, his fingers still tangled in the gag, and wondered if this would be the last mistake he ever made. 

His eyes were stinging again. Stephen snarled internally, swallowing the tears down, and deftly untied the gag from around his neck. He threw it aside into the dark.

He didn’t have time to feel sorry for himself. If Stephen didn’t have the security of his secret anymore, he could at least have the security of the next best thing; knowledge. Stephen focused on the music, picking through its notes. 

He heard ‘dark’, of course, and the glint of metal and engines. There were soul songs hidden behind them—people in nearby rooms. And above it all was the rhythmic hum of water.   

A boat. He was on a boat, somewhere far removed from the scepter and the Tesseract, from the people who knew him, and from the single person who might care. 

He wondered if some SHIELD lackey would tell Christine he was dead. Would offer condolences and lies so she wouldn’t look for him. It was almost funny.

Well. No it wasn’t. Rather the opposite, in fact.

Stephen pushed himself upright, wincing at the pain splintering down from the base of his skull. He raised his hand to prod lightly at the wound. There was no blood anymore, though his hair was stiff and flakey. It wasn’t serious, but it was distracting enough that he’d forgotten about his leg and the other injuries he’d gathered from the forest. 

“Okay,” Stephen whispered into the dark. “I know you’re watching, assholes. I’m watching back.”

He reached out to the music and shifted it once more. ‘Dark’ became ‘ light’ , and Stephen took in his surroundings. The room was tiny, no more than ten feet from wall to wall, and completely windowless. A camera in the corner and the table Stephen currently occupied were the only furnishings. They all sounded like disinfectant and ivory. 

Stephen let his legs dangle off the edge of the table. He ghosted his fingers across the now-broken restraints that had held his hands, tugging at the seams where they met the metal surface. They were electromagnets. Efficient. 

He wasn’t disillusioned enough to think he was in any state to stand up, so he only leaned vaguely in multiple directions to try and catch more of the music. The walls all sounded identical. Stephen couldn’t find so much as a hint of a door until he looked up. A trapdoor rested square above him, high enough that Stephen would only be able to brush his fingertips against it if he stood on the table. 

Clever , Stephen thought. Even if he managed to sing it unlocked, he wouldn’t be able to reach it. 

Stephen looked back at the camera. He flipped it off and didn’t feel any better.

Settling in the uniform color, he waited. The music ebbed and flowed around him. Water rocked against the hull of the ship, and Stephen hoped he wasn’t one for sea sickness. He was feeling nauseous, but that was likely the head injury.

He’d only been on a boat once before. And really, it hardly counted. The ferry to the Ellis Island museum had only been for show and fun, but it felt magical to an eleven-year-old who’d never been out on the ocean before. Stephen remembered how much Donna had loved it. She’d always loved water, right up until the day she died. 

Stephen waited, the light almost uncomfortable in a room built for darkness. Someone would come, surely. Now that he was awake.

Someone would come.

(Nobody did.) 

It came together at Tony’s hands, and then it fell apart. 

He knew what death felt like. He knew the way it hung in a room, knew the way it sucked the past and future up into an undefined cyclone of impossibilities and lost potential. Tony had killed before. Tony had stood at deathbeds and watched blood spill onto pavement, and it never really mattered if it was the blood of someone he knew. It had been, this time. 

Death felt like a stranger when it came for someone you knew. 

There was no time for the hate and tension that had grown in the lab when Agent Barton and the rest of Loki’s goons had attacked. If there was anything a time-bomb of conflicting superheroes were good at, it was compartmentalizing. Thor and Natasha had faced Bruce. Steve and Tony had kept the helicarrier in the air. Not for lack of difficulty, of course. 

Tony remembered rushing wind and the screech of metal against his suit, the turbine blade sucking him into their interiors to tear him to pieces. He remembered calling out to JARVIS in words he didn’t think through.

‘Lever! Now!’

Steve had needed more time to slow the blades, and Tony hadn’t had it. But he’d lived. He’d lived, and the helicarrier was still in the air, though Loki wasn’t. Tony had lived, but not everyone had. 

He stood in the empty docking bay that had held Loki’s cage, staring at the smear of blood on the far wall. It just barely traced the shape of a figure slumped against the wall. The body was gone. The silence it left behind wasn’t.

(Tony thought Agent Phil Coulson’s death was an accidental, meaningful one. What he didn’t know was that it had been weaponized. It was the last line of an argument that Fury had just started to win. 

He didn’t know that, and he never would. But years would pass, and he would start to think that in its own horrible way, it had been worth it.)

Tony kept his hands clasped behind him, his fingers brushing over his own knuckles. The bright light of the docking bay kept flickering. It made him feel like he was fading in and out. Maybe he was. He was so tired—so tired of insults and accusations and failure. Failure and the guilt that came with it.

Loki had escaped. Bruce was gone. Coulson was dead. Strange was locked away somewhere. Thor was missing. And Tony was standing on a metal balcony above a hatch into thin air, unable to stop knowing. 

He didn’t hear the footsteps, but maybe he should’ve. Someone had to come for him eventually. 

“Was he married?”

Rogers. Tony felt too hollowed out to be surprised by that. His armor rose, his defenses locking down—the words in the lab still echoed.

‘You’d better stop pretending to be a hero.’

Are you happy now? Tony thought, stripped of its venom. A man is dead and a friend is missing and this entire damn mission has gone to hell. You proved me wrong; are you happy now? 

“No,” Tony said. He’d spoken to Coulson earlier, but he’d been distracted by Strange. He’d let both of them fall out of safety. “No. But there was a cellist, I think.”

“I'm sorry,” Rogers said. “He seemed like a good man.”

Tony laughed, and it came out bitterly. “He was an idiot.”

“Why? For believing?”

How could he still manage to speak with so much judgement when Tony was standing here, leaking failure all over the floor between them? “For taking on Loki alone.”

“He was doing his job.”

“He was out of his league,” Tony snapped. “He should have waited. He should have…”

He should have done what, exactly? Tony had spent all day waiting, holding off for the right moment, prioritizing the Tesseract. Where had that gotten them? Where had that gotten any of them?

“Sometimes there isn't a way out, Tony,” Rogers said softly.

Tony couldn’t tell if he was being mocked. He didn’t know if sincerity would’ve been worse. Looking down, Tony turned on his heel to stride away, pressing himself against the railing of the balcony. The empty space where Loki’s cage had been loomed. There was blood on the metal where Tony rested his hands, long since dried. Not Coulson’s. Strange’s. 

Tony closed his eyes. 

“Right. How did that work out for him?”

“Is this the first time you've lost a soldier?”

“We are not soldiers!” Tony whirled, his voice coming out in a yell. “We are not—what is it you think we are, Rogers? A battalion? A team? Fine. But I’m not. You told me in no uncertain terms what I was, and you don’t get to turn around and change your mind now that you need me.”

Rogers frowned. “What are you—”

“I’m not one of you,” Tony said. “Fine. If that’s what you want. I’m used to it.” 

“I never said that.”

Tony’s hands clenched on the rail. “Remind me what it is you said, then. Because I don’t think we’re speaking the same language.”

I don’t know if we ever can.

Rogers didn’t answer for a long moment. When Tony glanced over at him, he’d moved closer, eyes trained on the blood beneath his fingers. He reached out, probably to grab the rail. Tony flinched anyway.

Rogers stopped. Froze. Something in his expression shifted. 

“Tony.”

“Don’t call me that,” Tony said tiredly. “We aren’t friends.”

“Stark. I… didn’t think it mattered.”

Tony snorted. “You didn’t think I’d care? That’s fair. I don’t.” A lie, but hey, Tony was good at those. “Forget it, it’s fine.”

“I’m sorry.”

Tony flinched again, lifting his hands from the rail. He wiped them on his T-shirt. His arc reactor was obscured completely, just the faintest impression of blue light.

Rogers looked down again, shifting awkwardly. He looked off balance. “You never take anything seriously. It’s a point of pride for you—everything is. I wanted to make you react to something like a human, for once.”

Tony nodded. A man was dead; the least he could do was nod. “Usually people that don’t want to put up with me aren’t forced to. You have no choice.”

“And vice versa,” Rogers said with a quiet, brittle laugh. 

“Yes, you’re horribly infuriating,” Tony told him. “And condescending, judgmental, and stuffy.” 

“And you’re unbearably egotistical, facetious, and superior.” 

Tony let out a breath. “Those are some long words, Rogers, I’m impressed.”

A snort. “You can’t even have the good grace to be insulted?”

“Nah.” Tony smirked, and it loosened something in his chest. “You’re just reading off my Wikipedia page.”

There was a pause, awkward and intense, before Rogers said, “Your Wikipedia page also says you’re one of the smartest, most future-minded people alive today. It has lists and lists of scholarships and charity foundations and recovery and outreach programs.”

“Googled me, did you?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of Googling.”

Tony nodded slowly. “There must be a lot of things you’re left out of,” he realized. “Parts of this world that come naturally to us but make no sense to an old geezer from the 40s.”

“Half the time I have no idea what anyone’s talking about,” Rogers admitted. “You, especially. All your references and your tech and your public relations.”

Tony looked at him. “I scare you.”

“You threaten me, there’s a difference,” Rogers said. It sounded slightly defensive. 

Tony didn’t stop looking at him. “You said otherwise, back in the lab. You said I wasn’t a threat.”

“Not to this world. Not to SHIELD. Apparently…” Rogers smiled, helplessly. “Apparently you’re too good for that.”

Tony stared at him. There was blood on the wall and blood pounding in his ears, and for a moment, utter disbelief overwhelmed the grief and shame and anger in his chest. The grime on Tony and Rogers’ fingers had smeared on the metal of the railing, dirty olive branches painted into SHIELD's prison. 

Alright. Alright, then. Tony had made enough mistakes today. 

He crossed his arms, stepped into line with the captain, and took a chance. 

“I am not marching to Fury's fife,” Tony said. I will not be his weapon. 

Steve nodded, straightening back into his soldier’s stance—but not before Tony saw the relief on his face. “Neither am I,” Steve said. “Fury’s got the same blood on his hands as Loki does. Right now we've got to put that aside and get this done.”

He took a step back, thoughtful and determined, and Tony followed. Steve mused, “Now Loki needs a power source, if we can put together a list—”

Tony’s thoughts sparked. He looked at Coulson’s blood on the wall. “He made it personal,” Tony said. 

“That’s not the point.”

“That is the point. That's Loki's point.” Tony gesticulated, nearly smacking the back of his hand on the nearest support post. “He hit us all right where we were most vulnerable. Why?”

“To tear us apart,” Steve replied.

“Whatever his motivation, whatever is influencing him, Loki knows he has to take us out to win. That's what he wants. He wants to beat us and he wants to be seen doing it.” Tony’s words ran together, running up the sides of his voice. “He wants an audience.” 

Steve’s eyes brightened. “Right, I caught his act in Germany,” he said.

“Yeah.” Tony snapped his fingers. “That's just a preview; this is opening night. Loki's a full-tilt diva. He wants flowers, he wants parades, he wants a monument built in the skies with his name plastered—”

Oh. 

Fucking hell. The universe had such a sick taste for irony. 

“Son of a bitch,” Tony said articulately, and took off toward his armor. 

Stephen had locked himself in a closet once, when he was a child. He’d never really considered himself sensitive to small spaces. And he wasn’t, not in any way that made him fearful of them, but as he sat with one knee pulled up to his chest in an empty cell he couldn’t help but think of that closet. 

The light felt wrong after a while. The dark would have been worse, but Stephen’s skin crawled the longer the illumination that came from no visible source lasted. The changed music was very clearly unnatural. 

It wasn’t so bad at first, being alone with the music and his own thoughts. It was simply that after a while, Stephen ran out of things to think about besides his questions. His mind ran itself aground off mental storytelling and games and recitations of the bones he remembered from anatomy classes, and started wondering where he was being taken and what awaited him when he got there. Stephen’s fingers drummed unhappily on his knees. 

Singing softly under his breath, Stephen wondered what harm would come from telling the truth. These people already knew there was something wrong with him. He was already surrounded by the cold metal walls of the worst-case scenario. If he told SHIELD about the music, about the space, thought, and timesongs, perhaps they’d help him find answers. 

Before they killed him. Or whatever the hell they were planning. 

“This is what you get for trying to help spies, apparently,” Stephen said into the empty space. His voice was rough and sounded as sick as he felt. The walls swallowed his words. 

If not for the music, it would have been utterly silent. Stephen shivered and drew his other leg up. This cell hadn’t been designed with sanity in mind. 

He wasn’t surprised when the vague movement he could sense ceased. He’d heard vegetation songs faintly growing louder for a long time now, and had hoped it was a good sign. It made the spinning of his injured head calm, but only slightly. 

As he waited for the hatch to open above him, Stephen closed his eyes. He pushed his awareness as far as he could, out and out and out through the competing symphonies around him. He ignored the pain in his physical form. It dulled and disappeared beneath his focus, stretched to the limits of what songs he could quantify. What could he reach? The planet was so stunning in strings of notes. 

Stephen searched, through the boat's sounds and the soldier’s melodies, for the edge of his aura. It didn’t reach much further than the shore. But the ever-present hum of the thought and spacesongs still reached Stephen. They were as faint as they’d been when he first heard them. 

Good. That was information—he was on another continent. 

Where no one would know to look for him. Not that anyone would. 

Stephen shoved the thought away and listened. The spacesong was quieter than its sibling, nothing more than an echo of presence behind the honeyed music of thought. It almost sounded like a doorway. 

Stephen knew he couldn’t change it, not the axiom of space and certainly not from so far away, but he tried anyway. Letting out a breath, he relaxed into his bones. He sang. Slowly, automatically, he fell into the tune he was most comfortable with. 

If he’d been looking, he would have seen a brush of green reflecting off the metal walls. 

It was because he was listening that he heard the music change. Another song clawed at the unusual harmonies of space, one Stephen recognized. 

Tony Stark’s. 

Stephen stood, forcing his injured leg to support him. “What the hell?” he demanded. “What is—” 

There came a strangled note within the music. Stephen winced, reaching for his head, but the sound eased as soon as it had come—along with the eager energy of the spacesong. The door had closed, and the music settled in swaths of calm, sheer fabric across the back of Stephen’s mind. 

He blinked. Would someone like to explain to me what just happened? he asked the universe, and the only reply he got was the hatch in the roof opening. 

Stephen froze. 

Tony’s face slammed into the concrete hard enough to make his teeth rattle beneath the helmet. He hardly noticed the blow. A thousand gunshots couldn’t shake him like Fury’s voice in his ear.

Tony blinked blood out of his eyes and threw his hand sideways to fry an alien bastard through the eye socket. He thought he’d been doing a remarkably impressive job reacting to all this. His new armor was working beautifully— “not ready for deployment” my ass.  

Everything had been working beautifully, in fact. The alien army was a bit of a downside, but every silver lining had a grey cloud. Tony wasn’t dead yet. That was certainly a plus. And Loki had listened to Tony’s threat long enough for Tony to cement his certainty that Strange had been right about the scepter. Bruce had shown back up, just as Tony had known he would. He’d smiled at Tony, and it might’ve been a ‘thank you’. 

But the army was still pouring through the swirling wormhole far above, and Tony didn’t know how much longer they could last. Somebody needed to shut down the Tesseract. Fast. 

(To think Tony had been thinking he’d have a quiet weekend. He’d bought reservations and everything.)

The Iron Man suit sparked and scraped at its joints as Tony tried to fight. The blue beam from the top of Stark Tower was blinding, bright enough to leave a halo even in the bright daylight, and that really hadn’t been what he meant when he said ‘revolutionary.’ 

None of this had been what he meant. None of this.

And Fury had to go and make it worse. Had to go and stop Tony’s heart in his chest with three sentences.

“Stark! You hearing me? You have a missile headed straight for the city.”

Tony raised his head—only to be smashed into the concrete again. Fury was an asshole, but in that moment, it didn’t matter. Fury could have tried to kill everyone Tony had ever loved and he would have still asked, “How long?”

They were all on the same team at the end of days. 

“Three minutes, at best. Stay low and wipe out the missile.”

There were blows coming from every angle; Tony didn’t even have enough breathing space to make a quip about Fury giving him orders. His visor flashed with data and light, and JARVIS had already pulled up a countdown in the corner of his vision. 

“Put everything we’ve got into the thrusters!” Tony told him.

JARVIS didn’t need it. “I just did.”

Then Tony was in the air, spiraling around the skyline of the crumbling Manhattan square and throwing himself toward the bay. He could hear his breath inside the helmet. It was ragged—no doubt something in his chest got fucked up trying to take on half an army on his own. 

The voices of the Avengers crackled in his ear. Tony tuned them out, searching the skies for any sign of a missile and hoping to the gods he didn’t believe in that he wouldn’t find it, that all this would be some sort of false alarm. 

But Tony did find it. JARVIS’s sensors zeroed in on the sleek, white shape of a nuke. It threw smoke and particles behind it like the tail of a comet—a comet trained to wipe out millions. Tony clenched his teeth and threw himself toward it. 

He didn’t ask if it was armed; he could already tell. From the readings, his repulsors would be too risky a reaction to destroy the nuke mid-air. Diverting it wouldn’t get the missile far enough away from the city to make the detonation harmless. That amount of radiation underwater would be catastrophic. 

JARVIS’s count ticked down.

“I can close it!” It was Natasha’s voice, strained and disrupted. “Does anybody copy? I can shut the portal!”

“Do it!” Steve called. 

Tony looked at the skyline of New York. It gleamed, a jewel of futures set against the horizon, filled to the brim with possibilities and unanswered questions. Tony thought of the people on street corners and laughing in their restaurants and homes and businesses and lives, children with stories to tell and old humans who had already told all they would. Tony thought of the sea and the sky, the world he’d been so delighted to build himself a part of.

There was no calculation. No question at all.

When he didn’t look at it, his arc reactor looked like a shooting star. 

“No,” Tony said. “Wait.”

“Stark, these things are still coming,” Steve panted, his voice traced with pain. 

Tony really hoped he was alright. He really hoped they were all alright, all these spirits he’d found himself giving his life to on this day stretched out into a lifetime. They deserved to live—they really did. 

Tony wished he’d gotten to live beside them a little longer. 

“I got a nuke coming in, it's gonna blow in less than a minute,” Tony said. His voice was remarkably calm, and his conscious breaths beat a rhythm of fives. “And I know just where to put it.”

Tony caught the missile against its course, securing it against his shoulder. The metal was hot, even through the Iron Man suit. It hummed against his ear. Tony’s heart beat in synchrony. 

Clenching his jaw, Tony threw the power of his suit against that of the missile. A cry of effort wrenched itself from between his teeth. JARVIS’s voice went fuzzy for an instant, and then Tony’s power finally broke across the nuke and hauled it off course. Tony immediately pressed himself upward, forcing them both toward the sky, toward the wormhole.

He could see the stars through it. 

“Stark,” Rogers began, and Tony already knew what he was going to say. “You know that's a one-way trip?”

Tony swallowed. He didn’t reply—didn’t know what he’d say.

“Save the rest for the turn, J,” he ordered.

JARVIS’s voice was soft. Mournful. “Sir,” he said. “Should I try Colonel Rhodes and Miss Potts?” 

For a moment, Tony hesitated. For a moment, his own future unraveled beside those of the citizens of the city, and Tony wanted it so desperately it felt like a blade beneath his ribs.

“Might as well,” Tony choked. The blade twisted and twisted and twisted. 

His best friends’ faces appeared on the side of Tony’s visor; Pepper’s hair gleaming and her eyes sharp, Rhodey’s smile blinding and chin lifted. Tony didn’t hear the ringtone. His pulse was too loud, beating against the body of the nuke. He wished he could hear theirs.

The thrusters kicked to life at a steep angle, and Tony forced the nuke upward. For a moment, the missile resisted. Tony hit vertical a hairsbreadth before he slammed into the face of Stark Tower and ended the fight in failure, skidding against the edge of the building. The horrible screech of metal on metal echoed, and then he was free. Rising into the open. 

Soaring into the black maw of space through the ring of blue that crowned it. 

Tony didn’t close his eyes when the blackness of the universe swallowed him. He couldn’t. He couldn’t even breathe, his count of five falling to pieces as infinitesimal as his own body. The nuke lifted free of his arms in zero gravity and billowed toward the gathered spaceships in the abyss.

And Tony…

Tony was weightless. 

His repulsors died first. Space was heavy and empty all at once, and it crushed them to nothingness with glee, with power that left Tony awestruck. He might’ve made a noise when metal clamped down dead around him. He might’ve bled out when Pepper and Rhodey’s contacts flickered and failed, when the visor turned to blackness, when JARVIS called his name for the last time.

He might’ve prayed. 

(Only one person heard him, so very far away now. Not in words, not in the simple English pleas Tony almost articulated—one person heard the song of a ruby falcon closing its wings.)

The missile struck the hulking vessels above, below, beside Tony. It devoured them in a gold so striking Tony shrank to nothing in its wake. Above him, the end of the world disintegrated inches from its victory, and Tony thought it was good, really, that death wasn’t drawn out this time. 

He didn’t have months to think about all the things he’d regret. He didn’t have long, sleepless nights in terrible pain to consider all the questions he’d never get to answer. He only had heartbeats to hope his friends would forgive him, that the Avengers wouldn’t give up, that Strange would be alright. 

Tony slid down through the empty edges of the void. There was nothing in his chest but starlight. There was nothing in his lungs but numbness.

His suit dragged sparks through the abyss. It turned to mist. To nothing. Meaningless.

Tony hadn’t wanted to die meaningless.

In the reflection of the visor, he saw the gateway to Earth. It was green and blue and white, shining in shades of sterling silver. It was beautiful, and miniscule, and kind. Tony felt like a lonely god drifting separate from it. He felt like an empty soul.

Was this what he was? Was this his destiny, truly? Was this the sum of bricks and mortar that he’d lead up to, all his fighting, all his learning, to die here? 

He hoped so. The thought that he’d had a destiny and let it down was worse, in a cold, bloody sort of way. 

His arc reactor didn’t look like anything anymore. Just a circle, set into his chest, as simple as the last notes of a human song.

I don’t want to die.

He’d only ever wanted to be someone. And in the end, he’d die for everyone.

They’d remember him, and that would have to be enough. 

Tony closed his eyes. 

Stephen stopped singing the blindfold loose after the fourth time. 

The agents were stubborn, and Stephen had lost intermittent hours to unconsciousness beneath the sharp pricks of tranquilizer that seemed to gather heavy in his blood. He knew as the music skewed within his head that he needed to save his energy. He was exhausted. An ache like he’d never known radiated from the top of his spine. And he hadn’t sung this much in one day since he was a child, singing until the notes blurred together in frantic self-defense against darkness, against violence.

So Stephen stopped. He hoarded the dregs of his power, what little ability he still had to change any notes at all, and kept it safe until he needed it. If he was going to meet his end, he wasn’t going to do it lethargically. 

The air was cold—cold enough that Stephen lost track of any impression of where on the entirety of planet Earth he could be. He’d never thought that would be as terrifying, as utterly and completely helpless as it was. There was nowhere to go. There was no one to remember. 

Stephen curled his hands into fists and remembered anyway. 

He couldn’t see, so he couldn’t read lips. The music was distracting in his ears, deafening the words around him. It was almost funny that he knew the sound of these brutal, small-minded people’s souls, but couldn’t hear their words. 

“I can’t hear you,” he repeated, calmly, time and time again when he heard the muffled hum of questions but not the words they meant. 

I can hear so much more than you. 

He heard them getting angry. He heard his own voice, locked down with cold tones and sarcasm, as he tried to explain anything at all. “I’m a neurosurgeon. I’m not trying to hurt anyone; I heal them. I’m a doctor. I can’t hear you.”

Hands pressed against the wound on his thigh, against the bruise on the back of his head. Stephen didn’t remember if it was supposed to hurt. 

“I can read lips. I can’t hear you.”

It was as if they couldn’t hear him either. Maybe they couldn’t. They couldn’t hear the music, after all, and Stephen wasn’t one of them. Who was he to try and understand the pulse of a human heart?

Who was he to be anything more than the spinning numerals of time?

Tony opened his eyes, and it wasn’t on purpose. 

The Hulk roared, searing through the fog in Tony’s mind and shoving the impressions of world and sky and life into him, and Tony gasped. He tried to sit up. The dead limbs of his suit weighed him down too heavily. 

“What the hell!” Tony gasped. “What just happened?”

He wasn’t dead. That was… unexpected. And he’d made it home, which was even more unexpected. Natasha had closed the portal just in time. 

(Most of him had made it home, at least. But there was work to do, so much of it, before Tony would realize just how much he’d left behind in the cold jaws of space.) 

“Please tell me nobody kissed me.”

Rubble and dust and blood streaked the faces of those around him. Thor was standing above him, and Tony saw him smile with enough genuine relief to light a city block. Steve brushed the grime from his face. He knelt over Tony, and he slumped back on his heels when he saw Tony breathing. 

“We won,” Steve said. 

Oh.

Tony should really stop having so little faith in himself. He wasn’t going to die today; he was going to save the world. Get with the program. 

“What are you?”

They were flying now, across skylines and over mountains to the sound of jet engines, and the air was a haze of fog in the air, and Stephen wasn’t sure they were SHIELD anymore. 

“Wish I knew,” Stephen mumbled through the blood in his mouth. “Wish I knew.”

No one came to sign Tony off on his multiple world-record breaks of the last few days, but that was alright. 

Instead, Secretary Alexander Pierce showed up in his lobby to demand they hand over the Tesseract. And Tony watched his too-kind smile and reaching hands and utter lack of explanation, and remembered just how much work he still had to do. 

Loki stood at Thor’s side, and his scepter had already been spirited away by SHIELD’s goons. Tony watched Thor puff up with righteous stubbornness. He almost felt sorry for the Secretary, truly. 

“Loki will be returning to Asgard to face magical analysis of the corruption he is under,” Thor declared. “And he will answer to Odin himself.”

“Oh, he's gonna answer to us,” Pierce said with a sharp smile. “Odin can have what's left. And I'm gonna need that case, that's been SHIELD property for over seventy years.”

Tony looked down at the case in his hand. It was silver and padded, nearly identical to the one they’d shipped the scepter around in. There was a faint blue light around the hinges. The Tesseract, no longer active, no longer dangerous. Pierce looked eager. 

Strange had looked eager too. But not like this. There was calculation, cunning, behind Pierce’s words, and there had only ever been curiosity behind Strange’s. 

Most of Tony had lived through the wormhole, and that meant there was still destiny waiting for him. 

Fuck, Tony thought. 

“Not until you tell me what you did with the neurosurgeon,” Tony said. “He’s a civilian.”

Pierce smiled that same friendly smile. “I’m afraid that’s beyond your clearance level,” he said apologetically. “Now, hand over the case, Stark.”

“He will do no such thing!” Thor declared. He put a hand on Tony’s shoulder—Tony flinched, and wondered why. “The Tesseract will transport my brother and I home. It belongs out of your hands—you people have used it undeservingly so far.”

Pierce’s eyes hardened. “That’s not for you to decide. Stark.”

Tony decided, right there and then, that he disliked this man. So it was with no little glee that he handed the case to Thor, raising his hand in pretend regret. “I'm not gonna argue who's got the higher authority here, all right?” he said. 

Pierce opened his mouth, but Thor was already striding away. A somewhat surprised Loki gave Tony a questioning look. The gag of magical convenience glinted around his jaw, though Tony was nearly certain Loki could have removed it with enough effort. In comparison to a good deal of the other things still pumping adrenaline through Tony’s veins, Loki was downright amicable. 

‘Don’t look at me,’ Tony mouthed to the god. Loki shrugged and made haste after his brother. 

Tony went to follow them, but Pierce placed a hand on his chest. Right atop the arc reactor. Tony’s limbs froze of his own accord, the wormhole breathing down the back of his neck. 

“I know what you did, Stark,” Pierce said. “It was very brave of you, going against orders of SHIELD for the sake of the city.”

Tony smirked to hide the speed with which he stepped back. “Are you threatening me, Mr. Secretary?” 

“I would never,” said Pierce. “Just… do try to stick to your own circles from now on. I wouldn’t worry about anyone or anything you encountered during your mission now that it’s over; you deserve to rest. SHIELD has its own business, and it would do you no good to overextend yourself.”

“Of course,” Tony purred, clenching his teeth behind his smile. 

Bastard. What did you do with Strange?

Pierce stepped back, gesturing to his agents. “Glad we understand each other.” His smile was completely friendly, and it made Tony’s certainty that something was still very, very wrong grow tenfold.

“Tony!” Steve called. “Are you coming?”

“Yeah.” Tony moved away, never once taking his eyes off the secretary. Someone had sent Loki here. Someone had controlled that scepter. And someone other than Tony had kidnapped a doctor. Improperly.

Tony had just died in space; it took a lot more than the threat of governmental action to frighten him. He was going to get answers if it took treason to do so. 

“Yeah, I’m coming,” Tony said, and his smile was poisonous. “After all, this isn’t over.”

“You couldn’t have the good manners to give me a coat?” Stephen wondered, voice rough, head pounding. The few moments he’d spent in the open air had already chilled his neck and shoulders to the point of numbness.  

Agent Rumlow looked at him over one black-clad shoulder. He had a gun in his hand. 

“Someone get our guest appropriate outerwear,” he said casually. 

“Is that what I am?”

Rumlow turned to him, the bloody remains of the blindfold still dangling from his gloved fingers. “I’ll tell you what you are, doctor. You are a threat to our organization. We’ve known we would need to eliminate you for a long time.”

Stephen closed his eyes. “So you’re going to kill me.”

“No,” Rumlow said. “I think it’s much better that we find a use for you, instead. Welcome to the Himalayas, Stephen Strange. You had better get used to the cold.”

Chapter Text

The end of the world was a lot of work after the fact. 

Tony dragged his hands across his face. At least if the Chitarui had managed to obliterate humanity from the face of the planet, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the paperwork. Or the insurance. Or the public relations. Or the costs— by which Tony meant the actual monetary fallout of an alien battle in downtown New York. 

There was a lot of it. Tony kept the Avengers out of the path of the avalanche as best he could, though he’d been pleasantly surprised by the way they handled the few snowballs that burst on their clothes. Bruce, especially, was remarkable when writing statements. Even Pepper was impressed. 

The scientist stuck with Tony in the tower, and Natasha and Steve had started to drop by more and more often. Barton had disappeared somewhere undisclosed. Good for him, honestly. The others seemed magnetically drawn by the increasing frequency of Tony’s stress headaches. Natasha was always handy with the best coffee he’d ever tasted—and she wouldn’t tell him where she got it. 

He might as well just subsist on the stuff. Tony hadn’t been sleeping well since…. He hadn’t been sleeping well. And the entire world still falling to pieces over aliens didn’t help. 

Tony listed data and wrote speeches and delegated responsibility and established programs—programs for cleaning, for researching, for protecting. It turned the eyes of the world to him. Again. And though he had every right to shoulder most of the legal dealings onto SHIELD and duck behind their protections, he didn’t exactly hold the organization in high esteem. 

He still raised his voice at Fury the next time they met in person. 

“Nothing?” Tony demanded. “What do you mean nothing?”

Fury steepled his fingers on the desk between them, his eye flashing. He’d shown up like some sort of one-eyed vampire in Tony’s office a few hours before. His patience while Tony finished his meetings and strategizing for the morning was only slightly strained. 

“I mean that I have pursued every avenue available to me,” he said, “and uncovered no relevant information.” 

“It’s been months, Nick!” Tony said. “Your fucking prevention agency has had a civilian in custody for nearly eight weeks.”

Fury looked genuinely troubled, but Tony was too thinly stretched to care. “He must have been shifted outside of SHIELD,” Fury mused. “The World Security Council works closely with more than just me.”

“So figure out who!”

Fury glared at Tony, who stood with his hands braced on the wood, his knuckles going white. He didn’t balk. “You don’t think I’ve tried? You don’t think I’ve pulled every card I have? I’m trying to help you, Stark.”

That was probably true, but Tony still snapped, “you’re trying to clean up your own mess.”

“No, I’m trying to clean up yours.”

“Careful, Nick—you need me far more than I need you.”

Fury sighed, his elbows knocking on the polished surface of Tony’s table. The holoscreens winked on automatically, casting the director’s face in blue light. He looked just as tired as Tony remembered him. Just as tired as he’d sounded when he’d told Tony New York City was about to be blown up. 

Tony had to concentrate to remember the five-count of his breath. 

Fury’s eyes held a layer of understanding when he said, “I do need you. Your team, your loyalty. If you don’t believe I’m trying to help you, at least believe that.”

Shoulders hiking, Tony let himself fall back against his chair. He dragged his hand down his face. His arc reactor danced in his chest, a hummingbird. 

“He can’t be dangerous,” Tony found himself saying. “I mean, maybe he can. Strange. But not enough to warrant this, surely. His word that he wasn’t trying to free Loki should be enough to keep him from… from a death sentence.”

“You’re right,” said Fury, his fingers laced together. 

“I’m always right.” Tony grinned, but the usual energy behind it was gone. He hadn’t managed to make his smiles feel the same in his chest since the wormhole.

“Have you found anything?” Fury prompted. “You do have a unique angle on such things.”

“You mean genius intellect and a fuck ton of money? Yeah. And I’ve found… well, I’ve got nothing from the SHIELD databases, and if your clearance level doesn’t wring answers from those files, I could probably spend a year hacking behind the firewalls and find nothing at all.”

And Tony had been busy. Busy in the way that sucked your legs out from beneath you, leaving you swaying on dry ground and trying to remember the names of your close friends. Strange vanishing was another mismatched puzzle-piece on Tony’s desktop table. Another loose end that burned like a fuse. 

Tony pinched the bridge of his nose with a numb hand. His hands were numb a lot these days. 

“If SHIELD wants to keep secrets, we can,” Fury said, ruefully amused. “And yes, even from the great Tony Stark.”

“I found Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S, didn’t I?”

Fury raised his brows, his eyepatch shifting. “Stark, that project literally has your name stamped on it.”

Fair. Tony didn’t reply, staring up at the lines folded across his palm. There was grease under his fingernails.

“Stark.”

Tony counted the burn scars across the base of his knuckles. “What, Fury?”

“What is your status? Yours, not everything else’s.”

Tony snorted. “Is that spy director speak for asking me if I’m alright?” 

Fury didn’t look away, his calm demeanor remaining. “Yes.”

“I’m pissed off,” Tony said, bringing his hand away from his face. He clenched and unclenched it, then set it against his knee. “Everyone and their mother wants cleanup and representation and money. I can’t keep them away from the Avengers. I can’t even find one doctor— and then I had to go and get myself stranded in space.”  

“I sent you up there,” Fury said. “That isn’t your fault.”

Tony threw a pen at him. “Come on, don’t be stupid. You tried to stop the nuke.” He paused. “You… did try to stop the nuke, right?”

“Of course I did,” said Fury, and he even seemed offended. “The strike was the Council’s order.”

Tony blinked. 

“It was, was it? Got to say, I’m liking this Council less and less the more I hear about them.” 

Fury squinted at Tony. He could probably see the scheme coming to fruition behind Tony’s eyes, and he had the decency to look askance. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“Don’t worry,” Tony said innocently. “My lips are sealed.”

Fury raised his eye to the heavens. 

There was a patch of lichen on Stephen’s wall. 

In an otherwise comfortable, well-kept room, the patch of fungus was a sharp and strange contrast. Stephen didn’t know its species. Somehow in all his years of study, ‘coloration of local lichens in remote government hide-outs’ had never once become relevant. 

The lichen wasn’t very pretty, nor was it vibrant. It grew like a stain out from the corner between the floor and the leftmost wall. It sang like wet earth. 

Stephen hid it carefully from the view of the cameras. He didn’t know why. He’d failed to keep far more meaningful secrets than this, a scrap of outside life reaching through the musty air to grow stubbornly on bleached stone. This was nothing special. Nothing important. 

Still, the thought of coming back from a round in the petri dish and finding the lichen gone had started to grow as terrifying as the phantom concept of silence. 

Stephen was pack bonding with fungi now. Great. 

He hadn’t made it back to his bed after yesterday, and he didn’t know if it was worth trying now. The stone floor was cool against his cheek. He still felt feverish. His head was pounding. It made him think of ice packs and medicine, and that in turn made him think of nitrile gloves and scalpels and magnifying lenses, and that was almost worse. 

Stephen lay on his side, fingers playing distractedly with a stray loop of the throw-rug’s yarn. It covered about a fourth of his cell. If he curled up, he could lay mostly within its borders. 

Really, this was quite a well-furnished prison—not that Stephen had much to compare it to. The bed was comfortable and the blankets heavy enough to keep out the cold. He had a bathroom, and reasonable hygiene supplies, which kept him trimmed and clean when he had the energy to reach them. There was also a desk, empty but for a cheerful-looking metal lamp. 

(Stephen had tried to break it a few times. A long time ago. His scream of rage when it had refused to do more than dent on the edges and slice into his hands had echoed through the hall.)

The area was dotted with Stephen’s own touches, too. List didn’t seem to take any issue with the bits of fabric Stephen had ripped into cheerful shapes to hang around the space—though it had taken him longer to accept the shifts in color Stephen had sung into the walls. Loops of blue here, whirls of green there. Occasionally, Stephen would etch the New York skyline into the base of one of the walls as best his memory could provide. 

Most of the time, though, he just let the stone leer. It wasn’t the only thing watching him, after all.

Stephen’s stomach did another nauseating flip with his lungs, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t have the energy to sit up enough to spit out more bile. He listened to the lichen stain and tried not to think about anything.

Not thinking wasn’t his strong suit. Weak notes had already started drifting out between his lips before he realized he was doing it.

“Hey.” There was a bang on the glass behind him—a soft, slightly apologetic one. Stephen knew which guard it was instantly. 

“No singing outside the lab, remember?” the guard said, sounding tired. 

Stephen rolled over and managed to bite down on the groan that crawled up his hoarse throat. “C’mon, Aleksei, let a guy have a little fun. You know I don’t need to sing to use my powers.”

Aleksei made Uncomfortable Expression #3. It was the one he wore when he thought Stephen was right about something but was too scared of List to say it. 

Stephen didn’t mind Aleksei, though the kid was a cowardly bastard to his core. He had a song that reminded Stephen of cornfields. The bar was spectacularly low, at this point, but Aleksei was neither cruel nor curious. He did his job and dared to think his charge might be human. And he wasn’t afraid of Stephen—probably because he’d been the one outside the cell on the first night. 

That was a very, very long time ago now.

“What time is it?” Stephen asked. 

“You know what time it is.”

“I’m just trying to make conversation,” Stephen huffed, rolling his eyes. His chest was tight with pain.  

Aleksei chuckled and leaned up against the far wall again. He was playing something on his phone; Stephen could see the reflection of his screen in the goggles he’d pulled up against his forehead. 

“How are you holding up?” Aleksei asked. 

Stephen rolled his eyes again. “I’m lying on a throw rug in some godforsaken secret laboratory, talking to my bullheaded captor because he’s the only one who will talk to me, physically poisoned. Just a normal weekend.”

“If you’re insulting me, it means this was a better experiment than the one with the brainwaves.” 

Stephen flinched. Aleksei noticed, and made Uncomfortable Expression #2. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to—sorry.”  

“I’ll be sure to fuck with your system most agressively now that I know you measure my wellbeing off how bitchy I am.”

Aleksei turned off his phone screen and tucked it away. “I don’t think you have any other mode of interaction.”

“Or maybe you’ve been torturing me for months and I have no reason to engage in any other modes of interaction.”

That comment got him Uncomfortable Expression #3 again. Stephen counted it as a success. Aleksei shifted where he leaned against the wall, watching him curled in the shadow of the cell. Stephen wondered if Aleksei had a hard time reconciling his words with the ever more pathetic image Stephen posed. 

“You should get some water,” Aleksei told him. “I’ve heard that helps.”

Stephen’s stomach roiled again. He closed his eyes. “Too far away.”

“Hey, at least you won’t have to go through this one again. Photographic memory means you can memorize the songs, and now that you know which plants are toxic, you can identify them.”

Stephen didn’t want to talk about this. He never wanted to talk about anything that happened in the petri dish, but it wasn’t like he and Aleksei had much else in common. 

“Sure,” Stephen said, though Aleksei was wrong. Doctor List’s tests were never about situational answers. He always wanted the core of the question, the broadest possible understanding. Stephen might’ve admired that trait in a fellow scientist—had he not been the thing under the microscope.

This wasn’t about knowing which random mountain plants would poison someone. This was about whether or not all toxic plants shared some similar pattern within their songs, and if Stephen could recognize that similarity consistently. And then, of course, if he could recognize that pattern in industrial poisons. In assasination tools. In war gases. 

Aleksei seemed to read the resignation in his tone and sighed again. He glanced both ways down the corridor, then sank down against the wall, folding his hands into his lap. 

“I don’t see why they have to use you to judge that. Doctor List knew which ones were harmful already.”

Stephen listened to the autumn-field notes of his song. The yellow Stephen couldn’t help but associate with Aleksei was just enough to make something in him believe the sun was still out there, somewhere. 

“I can’t lie, that way,” Stephen said quietly. “Because they don’t believe I’d tell the truth about the extent of what I can do.”

“Would you?”

Stephen smiled, and it pulled an old wound on his cheek.

Aleksei saw, and asked a different question. “Do you?”

Stephen had started, in the blurring weeks, to realize things. Things he’d pretended he didn’t know. Things he’d pretended weren’t true. Things that made pain a little more of a challenge, a little more of a dare, than something to fear. 

Stephen Strange was not a violent person. And beyond that, in a heart he’d walled up and deafened, Stephen Strange was not a coward. 

“They have you carrying a gun, Aleksei. Ask yourself why that is.”

They weren’t nightmares, not really. Not until two and a half months after the Battle of New York. 

At first, Tony’s dreams were only flashes—feelings, symbols, and the way the emptiness crushed the light in his chest when Tony’s eyes flickered open. They weren’t nightmares. They were just… just reminders. Calm and lurking, like predators stalking Tony in the dark, reminding him that he still owed his soul to the stars. 

(It would take him a very, very long time to pay that debt.) 

The dreams changed the night after Tony’s new prototype suit went dead with him in it on the floor of his workshop. Which didn’t mean anything—a coincidence, it had to be. Tony needed it to be. 

He didn’t sleep well, and it wasn’t helping his focus. Nothing was. So Tony took a Saturday morning off. He shoved away the meetings and the politics and the fallout of the Battle of New York, and instead found himself following a wild hair idea about Strange.

Metro-General hospital was a sharp, professional place, from the moment Tony walked in to the moment he bullied the individual at the front desk for access to the upper floors. It had only taken a little bit of Avengers flexing. When he reached the neurosurgery wing, he found it busy and efficient. 

Tony knew nothing about hospitals. It showed as he wandered, a little daunted, through the bright white area. 

He didn’t know what he was looking for. The people he spoke to seemed just as confused about Strange’s disappearance as Tony was, and the hints he dropped about the whole… music thing went right over their heads. It seemed Strange had done a better job keeping his cover than Tony ever had. 

Not wanting to return to the Tower, Tony made himself conspicuous. Annoying even, if he did say so himself. Hours passed as Tony drank the worst coffee he’d ever tasted, ignored blatant hostility, and took up space. 

He got nothing from it. 

When Tony’s frustration overtook his determination, he sighed and tossed his empty coffee cup into the trash. Someone’s hand closed like a vice around his wrist. 

Tony looked up. There was a doctor standing before him, petite and pretty, with hard brown eyes and a mouth tightened thinly. She didn’t so much as twitch as Tony flashed his most charming smile.

“Follow me,” she said. It left no room for argument.

“By all means.” Tony inclined his head, and the woman stalked away, leading him through the halls. The woman’s eyes followed the others around them, stalking the hall until there was no one within sight. 

Then, without warning, she shoved Tony through a random office door and pressed it shut behind her. 

Tony stumbled, throwing out his arms to keep his balance. He turned. “What the fu—” 

“What do you know about Stephen?” the woman hissed. 

Tony blinked. The doctor had her hand wrapped tightly around a constellation-patterned lanyard, one of the keys secured between her fingers and shining sharply. She was threatening him. Him. Iron Man. Now that was bold.

“You know Strange?” he asked. He kept his voice level. 

“We’re colleagues,” the doctor told him sharply. “I’m Christine Palmer, and you’re going to tell me what you’ve done with him, right now.”

Tony raised his hands. “I haven’t done anything. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with the man.”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” snapped Doctor Palmer.

“I’m just trying to help.” Tony spread his fingers further, trying to sound genuine, though he wasn’t sure how out of practice it sounded. “I want to figure out what happened.”

Palmer’s hands tightened around the keys. She didn’t look convinced.

Tony tried again, raising an eyebrow. “I’m an Avenger.” It wasn’t legally correct, but no one would argue after what happened two months ago. “If anyone has any insight into… the things Strange can do, it's me and my team.”

 Doctor Palmer blinked. “You— Whatever you saw him do, it’s not what you think. Stephen isn’t like those people you fight. He’s not a danger Earth—for fuck’s sake, the man wouldn’t hurt anyone—”

“Wait. You know about what he can do?”

Palmer looked uncomfortable. “Not really,” she admitted. “I just saw… something, on the day he disappeared. We were having coffee, and something happened, something magical. But Stephen’s always been, if you’ll pardon the word choice, strange. Always singing, always somewhere altogether other than Earth.”

She snapped her gaze back to Tony and squared her shoulders. The keys came back up, gesturing pointedly. “Start talking,” she ordered. 

Tony looked at Doctor Palmer, trying to decide how much of this he wanted to risk to a civilian. This had only happened because he’d made the mistake of involving an outsider. But the woman already knew, didn’t she? And she was the only connection Strange seemed to have, family or otherwise. 

Tony sighed. “I think he might be in danger,” he said honestly. 

“Yeah no shit; he’s been missing for ten weeks.” 

Fair. “The idiot man showed up and stowed away during my mission to save the world a few months back, you remember. He levitated some sticks, gave me a palm reading, and did a psychology assessment on a god, and it got him into a hell of a lot of trouble.” 

Tony rubbed his hand across his face, glancing around the room. Doctor Palmer’s shoulders had relaxed, but her face was tight with concern—and maybe a touch of relief. She’d been in the dark for months. It wasn’t something to envy.

“This is… confidential,” Tony eventually said. “And quite possibly dangerous. Are you sure you want to involve yourself?”

Palmer hesitated, but only for an instant. “My friend is in danger,” she said. “So I’ll tell you what you can do with your confidentiality.”

Tony looked at the doctor and her steady hands and flinty eyes and made his decision. 

“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll explain everything.”

Stephen had never, outside his dreams, been inside a spaceship. He imagined if he did, it would feel a little something like this. 

The lab—or as Stephen called it, the petri dish—was one of the largest, most versatile spaces Stephen had ever had the misfortune of being in. It was sleek and silver, plated with glass on most sides. Machines littered the space. Stephen couldn’t hope to understand the functions of most of them, though he kept track of which were most likely to inflict severe pain.

As a whole, the lab sounded like cold, impersonal moonlight and the layer of determination at the core of a tree’s rings. The floor had grooves and rails to make it easier to change the layout. Like a living creature, the lab shifted to accommodate any plan, any test. 

It was here that Stephen earned or lost the privilege to call himself human. 

He stood tensely on the threshold when the doors closed behind him. The room was empty today—those were always the worst days. Stephen’s eyes flickered up toward the one-way glass, a mockery of a surgery theater, as he tried to pick out any sign of those who watched him. They were far enough away that he saw nothing. 

But he could hear them—the guards and the watchers and the slimy melody of Doctor List. They could do a lot of things to Stephen. Could do anything to Stephen. But they couldn’t take the music, couldn’t control silence. Stephen was still alive, and that was enough. 

Or so he told himself. 

He knew, despite the lack of humans in the lab around him, what he was here for. He’d known since last night. Stephen had been thrown awake by a familiar melody, joining the symphony of the base as if to mock him. The thoughtsong. 

So Stephen wasn’t surprised to see Loki’s scepter lying carefully on one of the large tables in the lab. The table’s surface had been haphazardly cleaned of bloodstains, enough that the scepter was sharply reflected in its surface.

Stephen wanted to close his eyes and listen, let the thoughtsong ease the loneliness in the back of his mind. He didn’t. He was being watched, and he wouldn’t give them more than he already had. 

“Very dramatic,” Stephen called dryly, looking up at his reflection in the windows. “Going to tell me what you want me to do with this?”

There was, predictably, no response. Stephen’s wrists ached, and he rubbed at them, trying to ignore the instinctual urge to flinch away from this room, to stay as far away from its interior as possible. It took more effort than it should. 

Carefully, Stephen padded across the room. A machine creaked in the corner. Stephen froze. He caught a note-shift between his teeth, waiting to use it, to fight back. 

Nothing happened. The room’s music continued as it always had, and Stephen slowly retracted his immaterial hands. 

He’d gotten better at pacing himself. After months of tests and exercises and questions, his control was refined. He could sing longer, hold more changes at once, shift more complicated melodies. It wasn’t enough to help him, but it was enough to keep him useful. And it was almost enough to be dangerous. 

List seemed to think he already was. 

Stephen circled the scepter’s table, inspecting it, and when nothing tried to harm him, he risked reaching out. The thoughtsong felt as cool and comforting as the metal beneath Stephen’s fingers. Against his will, his shoulders relaxed, his spine straightening. 

“Hello,” Stephen whispered. 

The music churned around him. Stephen looked up again, trying to read a sign or an order or a punishment. Nothing.

Stephen began to hum. It was painful in his abused throat, but the relief of harmonizing, even in this small way, with the thoughtsong made it worth it. He listened. Before, there’d been no chance to really hear the myths the scepter sang of.

If he let the notes carry him away, Stephen could almost forget where he was. He could put himself back in that bright SHIELD lab with Stark and Banner. The scepter had asked them all questions, told them all secrets.

Stephen assumed, because the earth was still here beneath his feet and the sky still theoretically existed outside the walls of the base, that Stark and Banner had saved the world. Maybe they’d even survived while they were at it. Stephen had pretended, for a while, that he hoped they hadn’t. 

This wasn’t their doing. Stephen couldn’t blame them for his fate, even if he did resent them for leaving him to it.

“Can you tell me about what happened?” Stephen asked. 

The scepter swirled. Its music changed, just slightly, calling Stephen toward it. Though it wasn’t language, Stephen felt it in the back of his mind. Understood it. 

“Oh,” he said. His eyes flickered closed. “Thank you.”

He’d tried to escape before. Four times, and he was planning a fifth—though he knew, like a bored snake in a terrarium, that it was no use. Maybe he could sing open a lock, stop a bullet. Maybe he could paint illusions onto the walls. Maybe he could plunge everything into darkness.

Maybe he could sing ‘injury’ into a human being’s soul. 

But even if he had the stamina and knowledge to fight through one wing of this building, his music would fall to pieces before he reached any true exit. The space was built to keep unknown threats within it. List had discovered Stephen’s reliance on his mental energy within the first week—and you could sap anyone’s energy through pain and deprivation.  

(That had been the first and only time Stephen had cried in this place.) 

The thoughtsong seemed almost concerned as it danced around Stephen. Its golden shapes made him smile. 

“I don’t know what they want me to do with you,” he admitted. He sang the words. 

Then he made the mistake of setting his other hand lightly against the table.

Electricity jumped, sharp and agonizing, up his limb. Stephen jumped back, eyes snapping open, gasping soundlessly at the sudden pain. When it faded, it took any sense of relief he might’ve gathered away with it. Stephen felt an irrational surge of betrayal as he snapped his gaze toward the windows.

Green text was scrolling across them. List had stopped actually speaking to Stephen when he figured out Stephen couldn’t hear him half the time. 

‘How did Loki use it?’ said the windows. 

“Is he gone?” Stephen asked. “Loki? They didn’t kill him, did they?”

‘That is none of your concern.’

“It is when he was trying to destroy the world,” Stephen snapped, already frozen in anticipation of what List would do next. “I live in it, you know.”

‘Not anymore.’

That shut Stephen up. He looked down, trying to rub the pain out of his burnt fingers. It stuck around, like it always did, clawing down beneath his skin. Humiliatingly, he was trembling.

Stephen glanced back at the scepter. The blue gem between its points flashed slowly. Stephen knew that was the source of the thoughtsong—the rest was simply ornamentation. Like a body. 

How had Loki used it? 

Stephen hummed, tapping against the shaft of the scepter. It pinged. The scepter was an instrument, a way for Loki to change the music without knowing how to sing. But it had certain capabilities—certain limitations, just as Stephen did. He couldn’t edit minds, not like he could with time. The scepter was the other way around. 

The table sparked again.

“Would you calm down, please?” Stephen said, glowering up at the green text again. 

‘I asked you a question.’

“Yeah, you do that a lot.” Stephen’s wrists were aching again. “I never saw Loki use it. And it’s not like the music has a built-in instruction manual.” 

‘How did he use it?’

“Are you deaf? I don’t know.” Stephen stepped away from the table as it sparked again. His hands shook. 

‘Well. We will have to remedy that, won’t we?’

Stephen closed his eyes. 

“You lost the first neurosurgeon, so you kidnapped another one.”

Tony let his head drop down to the kitchen table with a thunk. “I didn’t kidnap her,” he sighed. 

“He’s right. If anything, it was the other way around. And I’m not a neurosurgeon,” Doctor Palmer said. She’d insisted he call her Christine, and though she’d put the sharp objects away after an hour of proper explanation, Tony still thought it smart to acquiesce. 

Natasha laughed, but there was a note of doubt behind it. She didn’t trust the newcomer. Which was sort of her job, so Tony appreciated it. 

“If she’s here to help, then she’s here to help,” Steve said redundantly. Tony snorted, lifting his head from the table.

“Wise words, Cap.”

“Shut up, Stark.”

Tony grinned, then looked back at Christine. “So, I’ve told you what I know. I have Fury working on finding Strange too, but he’s gotten nowhere. The computers are running loops around me.”

“From experience, governments are impressively secure when it comes to their secret experiments,” Steve said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “But things always leak out eventually.”

“We don’t have that kind of time.” Bruce pulled out a chair at the table and sat, passing Tony an actually decent cup of coffee. 

Christine looked a little off-balance by the presence of more than half the Avengers sitting around her at the large table in Tony’s dining room. Her fingers drummed on the arm of her chair. Still, she held her chin high when she spoke. 

“Aren’t you spies? Some of you, at least—and others, some of the most influential and powerful people on the planet?”
“Unfortunately,” Tony said.

“In my experience, people say a lot more than any file,” Christine said. “And I understand we’re not talking of local politicians or field agents, but council members and secret leaders. But there has to be somewhere we can start, right?”

Tony rubbed a hand across his face. “If you were the highest security officer in the world fresh off the panic of a global apocalypse, what would you do with the kind of mystery Strange provides?”

He thought of swirling sound and bright colors and an eye etched onto pale skin. When he’d seen Stephen use his power on the helicarrier, having seen what Loki was capable of, even he had been afraid. There had truly been no other alternative. Something in his instincts, programmed into the very core of him, had known that power. Had understood just how staggeringly beautiful and dangerous and fundamental it was. 

(‘It’s taken me a long time to put a face to your destiny, Tony Stark…. We’ve found you now, and you will lead us to the Eye of Agamotto.’ The old woman’s words drifted through Tony’s mind. 

 How did he get himself into these situations?)

“I’d want to know what he was capable of,” Steve said in answer to Tony’s question. 

“And if I were the kind of organization dedicated to making weapons out of one-of-a-kind cosmic energy sources,” Bruce added, “I’d want to see if I could replicate or control them.”

Natasha sighed. “The weapons again? Are you still on about that?”

“That,” Tony found himself snapping, his hands forming fists on the table, “sent me on a suicide mission through a wormhole, so I’d stop commending it.”

Natasha raised her hands, apologetic. Tony forced himself to relax. 

“Anyway,” he said, “the point is, they would need people. People smart enough to study an anomaly like this.”

“Don’t call him that,” Christine said quietly. 

Tony glanced at her. For a moment, the anxieties and images and worst-case-scenarios drifted to the front of his mind. They were all reflected in her eyes.

“My point,” he continued, a little more solemnly, “is that there will be signs. Leads. We have to find out who they lead to, and from there, maybe where.”

“I’m on it,” Natasha said instantly. “I’m looking for scientists? Affiliated with Pierce?”

“Yes.”

Natasha nodded. “Banner, you in?”

“Sure,” Bruce said awkwardly. He fidgeted. “I can’t speak spy but at least I'm fluent in scientist.”

Tony chuckled. Steve leaned forward, humming, eyes thoughtful. “I might be able to use my clearance to get into the SHIELD vaults, see what physical things they’re hiding? It’s a long shot, but maybe I’ll find something.”

“Good idea,” Tony said. He looked at Christine and smirked. “And the replacement doctor and I will handle the big fish.”

Christine paled. “I’m doing what?”

“Hey, you’re the one who said people say more than data,” Tony said, grin widening. He liked this Christine woman, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t enjoy drop-kicking her out of her comfort zone. She had pulled a knife on him. Well, a key. Whatever. 

“We’ll see what the other Council members can tell us,” Tony explained. “Pierce will be tight-lipped, but maybe…”

“Aim for the weak points,” Natasha said. “Fury didn’t order the strike on New York.”

Tony snapped his fingers, then pointed at her. “Blackmail! I like the way you think.”

Natasha rolled her eyes, smiling, and finger-gunned back at him. Looking baffled, Christine slumped back into her chair. 

“You know,” she said, “I thought you guys would be different.”

Steve looked at her. “Really?” he asked. “And do we disappoint?”

Christine thought about it for a moment. “No,” she finally said, “you’re just… human. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Looking a little amused, Steve pushed himself up from the table, gathering his sketchpad. Tony had seen it a few times after the apocalypse. The drawings inside were memories, battle scenes and long-dead faces—many of one man with a crooked smile and laughing blue eyes. Steve was very skilled. 

“Not all of us are human, though our god is off-planet currently,” Steve joked. Then he nodded to Tony in farewell. “I’m going to call Fury, see if he can get me into anywhere there might be evidence.”

“Good.” 

Natasha and Bruce took his lead and stood as well, silent but with pursed lips as they thought through their approach. 

They were all determined to help. Eager to. When Tony had first approached them about this, way back at the end of May, some had already been poking around on their own. They all remembered Strange. And eve`n if they hadn’t seen what Tony had, their instincts were enough to tell them that something was wrong. 

Something was very, very wrong indeed.

Tony watched the Avengers go. Then he sighed, glancing up at the ceiling. JARVIS was installed in every room, and he helpfully darkened the overhead lights so Tony didn’t blind himself. As Tony tipped his head back, his arc reactor’s shadow seemed to form the shape of a compass. Tony lifted his hand to rub it.

It hurt sometimes. Lots of times. After the wormhole, however, Tony rarely paid much attention. 

“Why are you doing this?”

Tony jumped. He opened eyes he hadn’t realized had slipped closed and glanced at Christine. “What?”

“This is… you could get in global trouble. You could go to prison. You could be hurt or targeted or persecuted for investigating what happened to Stephen the way you are.” 

Tony shrugged. “I’ve had worse.”

“That’s not an answer,” Christine insisted. “You don’t even know him! And he’s an asshole to people when he meets them—so the few conversations you had wouldn’t have warmed you to him. Why all this?”

She squinted at Tony then, looking suddenly suspicious. “Unless,” she began, like the thought had just occurred to her, “you wish to replicate and control what he can do just like SHIELD.”

“What? No!” Tony reached over to turn his chair so he was looking at her. “That’s not what we’re doing.”

“Then why?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Tony snapped back. “Strange tried to help us. In return, I got him kidnapped. And yeah, he’s remarkable, but he’s still a civilian. An innocent man. He didn’t sign up for this, not the way the rest of us did, and if he had the contract certainly didn’t include governmental experimentation.”

Tony sighed, running a hand through his hair. The light from the windows was catching off the dust particles in the air. It made his vision seem cloudy, like he couldn’t see the whole picture. Not yet. 

“So maybe I’m helping because Strange is dangerous in the wrong hands. Maybe I’m helping because that’s what I do. Maybe I’m helping because some occult old woman showed up in my bathtub a year ago and told me this was my destiny,” Tony said. He rolled his eyes at his own memories, at these circumstances that stacked up like skyscrapers. 

“Or maybe the reason I’m helping is as simple as the fact that you need it.” 

Christine stared at him. Neutral, Tony stared back, letting her decide whether or not she believed him. 

“You’d really do this.” Christine shook her head. “For a stranger.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “I guess I would.”

He ignored the voice in the back of his mind, the one shaped like music and patterns and green light, that called him a liar. That seemed convinced this wasn’t for a stranger at all. 

“Come on,” Tony said. “We’ve got work to do.”

In the cold and the cruel, colorless light, pressed up against a concrete wall, Stephen dreamed. 

Some nights, every night. He hadn’t dreamed like this, like he did in the cell, since his childhood. He hadn’t startled himself awake with strange, captivating images since he was a little boy, listening to his brother’s breathing in the other bunk.

He missed listening to breathing. To the heartbeats and soul music of people who were kind. Who loved him, maybe, once, before he became who he was. 

The dreams began the first night in the cell, the first time he’d truly slept since hearing the space and thoughtsongs. It felt so very long ago, now. Stephen wished that knowledge wasn’t so lonely. 

Some nights, every night, Stephen dreamed. 

Once, a vision. Comfortable wooden walls and knotwork door frames, the weight of a quarterstaff in his hands, the bite of fire under his command. Books that smelled of dust and sandwiches that tasted of fish. Calloused fingers laced with his. A woman’s stern voice, speaking directly to him, loud and unignorable. ‘Wake, child. Wake.’

Once, an image. Black light and electromagnet earth, the flash of gold and the signature of infinity. Pain, fear, and triumph. A song, a timesong, louder and closer and more natural than anything Stephen had ever heard, drowning out it all.

Once, a memory. The lab he’d been in, just the day before. The scepter heavy in his hands as he pulled the large gemstone free from its nesting and tried to see the thoughtsong inside. It’s imagination-music, golden yellow, made it so easy to dream of things that hadn’t happened. Not yesterday, at least. 

(Stephen dreamed he lifted the gemstone to his forehead. He dreamed he felt an unspeakable pain, racing beneath his skin, separating his muscles from his bones and dripping long streams of green from his hands, his eyes, his mouth, his soul. He dreamed it tasted familiar.)

Now, he dreamed a scene. Familiar shackles clamped heavily on his wrists, songs buzzing in his ears. Aleksei glanced toward him. Confusion and concern brushed through his wide, boyish eyes. Lift’s words, written into the walls, warned Stephen. The sharp, cold bite of a gunshot was still surprising, still unstoppable. There came a scream, his own voice, desperate and horrified and choked by water— I can’t I can’t I can’t—  

Stephen dreamed. They were stronger, in the days after the scepter was placed in his hands. They were mightier, in the days after he stopped fearing being discovered. 

In the nightmares, he dreamed of silence. 

In the nightmares, he felt the terror of vision. 

When he woke up, gasping, eyes wide in the empty cell, his fingernails had carved streaks into his arms. They bled green. 

The World Security Council was far less intimidating than Tony had originally anticipated. 

The six members, each representing a chunk of global land and acting as oversight for the actions of SHIELD, were vocal. Tony probably didn’t need Natasha’s help to profile them. She certainly made things faster, however—and timing was key. 

Heads bent together, they sorted the councilmembers by their stances. Where did they usually fall on security and SHIELD issues? Which of their peers did they agree with? Which did they disagree with?

More specifically, which disagreed with Pierce? 

It was a process of elimination to find the councilmember with both the most hostility toward the Secretary and the furthest international station. The US was not the best place for what he had in mind. Tony couldn’t have Alexsander walking in on his private blackmailing sessions, now could he?

Which was how he found himself sitting across from Councilwoman Jennifer Hawley in her London office. 

He’d arranged everything perfectly lawfully. The meeting had been arranged through the proper channels and scheduled for a teeth-grinding three weeks after his first correspondence. But Tony couldn’t afford to show his hand too early. Until he was here, sitting in front of her, his business with Hawley remained purely professional. 

That broke the second Tony closed the office door behind him. 

Perhaps the smile that he flashed when he turned to Hawley was a little too viscous. Perhaps the glint in his eye was a little too sharp. But the memory of that missile, that wormhole, was too close to the front of his mind for anything else. 

“Councilwoman,” Tony said, polite and lethal. “Might I ask for a word in private?”

She saw it in his eyes. The color left Hawley’s cheeks, and just for an instant, her hand flickered toward her jacket. A gun. 

Then she stopped, and her shoulders fell into a calm, professional stance. There was barely a hint of tension in her words when she ordered her escort and secretary from the room. She even smiled. Tony would’ve been impressed, if he weren’t too busy being furious. 

Christine waited outside to ensnare Hawley’s working team, playing the role of Tony’s own secretary. He’d called her by the title in jest on the way here, and she’d hit him with her surgery textbook. Tony probably deserved it. As the door closed behind Hawley’s team, he heard her begin smooth small talk instantly. 

Alone with the councilwoman, Tony pulled out a chair and took a seat. Hawley didn’t move. Tony didn’t invite her, and he didn’t speak. The silence was his control, his weapon. 

“The entire building knows you’re here,” Hawley said finally. “You are being visual- and audio-recorded, and there are records of this meeting. Kill me, and you will not get away with it.”

Tony pressed a hand to his chest, right over his arc reactor. “Why, Councilwoman, do you begin all meetings with that? Of course I have no intent to harm you.” 

He flashed the camera in the corner a smile and a jaunty wave. Hawley’s jaw tightened. She didn’t go for her gun again, though Tony half-wished she would. 

 “What is your intent, then?”

Tony leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table. His arc reactor, heavy in his sternum, lit up when he took his hand from it. Hawley’s eyes flicked to it. It was a curious look, a knowledgeable one—this woman was a scholar, somewhere. 

The knowledge that she had tried to kill him, the whole of the Avengers, and every citizen in New York destroyed any kinship he might’ve felt with that before it could become more than a fleeting observation. 

“I have some business with your boss,” he said. “The Secretary. You see, I have reason to believe he is taking advantage of his position.”

Hawley looked at him, eyes level. “Yes, he mentioned that you might have formed a grudge against him.”

Tony’s jaw clenched. “I’m afraid this is a little more than a grudge.”

“And yet, you don’t go to your government to accuse him of unlawful acts.” 

It was true. Tony had nothing on Pierce, not in terms of legality. The Secretary of the council could do just about anything he wanted, so long as it fell within the boundaries of upholding security. He could silence SHIELD. He could kidnap a neurosurgeon. 

He could order a nuclear strike against a civilian population. 

“I am not here about what is legal,” Tony said, and he let some of the simmering rage show in his voice. “I am here about what is wrong. Fundamentally, morally. And you’re going to help me.”

“Are you threatening me, Mr. Stark?”

Tony smiled. “Yes I am. You see, your position as an elected official hinges on the trust citizens have that you will preserve their well-being. How do you think you would fare if the knowledge that you prematurely ordered the deaths of over twenty million people came to be public?”

Hawley stilled. 

Tony leaned forward, the light of his arc reactor casting his hands in cold blue light. “I’ll say it again,” he said. “I have reason to believe Pierce is taking advantage of his position.”

“I don’t know anything about his affairs.”

“I doubt that. What does he do with enhanced individuals unregistered to SHIELD?”

Hawley’s brow furrowed. Genuine confusion shone in her eyes as she said, “no extra-human individuals have surfaced since Bruce Banner. And I suppose Loki.”

“None?” Tony pressed. “If there were, where would they end up?”

“SHIELD, of course. That is their job.”

That didn’t make sense. Why would Pierce keep his actions secret from the rest of his team? He’d found Strange a threat. Imprisoning him was an attempt to understand and mitigate the danger the Council assumed the doctor posed to the world as a whole. No matter how misguided his methods, Pierce had done this to protect the security of the Earth. 

Hadn’t he?

Tony’s fingers were slick with the residue of something far, far more dangerous than he’d originally assumed. “What organizations, besides SHIELD, is Pierce involved with?”

Hawley narrowed her eyes at him. “Most world governments. Does this line of questioning have a point?”

“You’re a smart woman. Figure it out. Your boss is shady, and I need to figure out exactly how dangerous that is before it blows up New York again.”

Hawley took a step back, raising her hands. Her curt voice was frustrated and still touched with helplessness. “I truly don’t know what to tell you.”

“Something. Anything. Things about Pierce that don’t mesh with his usual stances on issues. Contacts he has that seem out of place.”

“I don’t…”

Tony’s hands curled. "Any strange dealings? Suspicions? SHIELD agents he's buddy-buddy with? Come on, Princess Leia—I really don't want to have to upend world politics.”

Hawley’s eyes flashed, but she finally pulled out a chair and sat in front of Tony. “He… usually deals with the STRIKE team field commander, as opposed to most of the other foot agents in SHIELD. I wouldn’t think much of it, except Pierce has begun to use the agent nearly exclusively as his contact with SHIELD, aside from Fury.”

Tony swiped a pen from the center of the table. “Which agent?”

“Rumlow. Brock Rumlow, if I recall.”

Rumlow. That was the man that had ‘dealt ’ with Strange on the Helicarrier. Tony felt sick. 

“I know him,” Tony heard himself say quietly, before he shook himself out of his reverie. “Tell me; what sort of information did Rumlow give him? Remember, your entire career and future is on the line.”

“I will find a way to make your life hell, Stark.”

“You already have,” Tony snapped back. You sent me to space. You killed me amongst the stars. “Give me something useful, or you’ll see how much more I can return the favor.”

Hawley looked like she wanted to reach across the table and strangle him. Instead, she placed her hands flat on the table and took a long, deep breath. “It was nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Think harder.”

“I’m telling you the truth! The only thing that seemed strange was the name Rumlow called him once, when he thought I couldn’t hear. I thought it was a pet name, that maybe they were together—but Pierce laughed me off when I tried to confirm.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “And that name was?”

“Alphard.”

Tony blinked. That certainly didn’t make things any clearer. It was certainly a damn weird candidate for a pet name. 

“I don’t know what it means,” Hawley growled before Tony could press. “I have nothing else to offer you, Stark.”

Tony studied the woman. She met his eyes stubbornly, and he couldn’t see anything deliberate in her expression. Maybe he could get more from her if he dug into more specific questions and situations, policies or experiences or management drama, but he had no idea what questions to ask. And he had no idea how long until she finally snapped and went for that gun. His protection only lasted as long as she believed her secret would remain safe. 

“Alright,” Tony said, pushing away from the table. “Thank you, Councilwoman. You’ve been very helpful.”

Hawley just sneered at him. “To think the world entrusted its safety to someone like you.”

Tony paused for just a moment, his hand a hair's breadth from the door. The darkness of the stars pounded just behind his eyes. 

“At least I died for them,” Tony said quietly, “instead of killing them.”

Then he left. The door banged shut behind him, frosted with the weight of his anger, and he stood in the threshold and breathed for a moment longer than he should. His head began to ache again. He felt unbearably stifled. 

“How did it go?”

Tony raised his hand to his arc reactor before recognizing the voice as Christine’s. The doctor looked at him with earnest eyes. 

Glancing around, Tony nodded once and took off down the hall. Christine followed. They navigated through the building and out onto the ground floor of the bustling London afternoon before he spoke. 

“Pierce isn’t working with the Security Council on this. Whatever he’s doing, he has his own motives for it. His own connections. A SHIELD agent might be involved. He’s been in contact with Rumlow often.”

“Rumlow?” Christine frowned. 

Tony winced. “He was the one who… he neutralized the threat.”

  Christine bit her lip and nodded. “Ah,” she said, sounding angry. 

Tony continued quickly, not wanting to remember that day any more than he had to. He’d thought about Loki and the wormhole enough in the past half an hour. “Rumlow seemed to have some sort of code name for Pierce. Something. ‘Alphard’.”

“Huh.” Chirstine watched Tony as he walked to the driver’s side of their ride, fishing his keys out of his pocket

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“Not really.” She shrugged. “It’s a star, but that’s all I can think of.”

“A star?” 

“Yeah,” Christine said, leaning against the door of the car. “The brightest star in the constellation Hydra.”

Tony froze. The sound of his keys hitting the pavement was swallowed by the sound of traffic around them.

“What did you say?”

“You look like hell.”

Stephen wiped his bloody mouth on his sleeve and glared up through the glass. His cell was dark. He’d blown the compound’s lights screaming a few days ago. They hadn’t replaced the bulbs in his rooms yet. 

“Dreadfully sympathetic as always, Aleksei,” Stephen growled, his knees bruising on the cold floor. 

Aleksei knocked lightly on the glass, rhythmic. He probably thought it was reassuring to Stephen, enough of a remnant of music to be calming. Stephen hated that he was right. 

“You’re… what even happened?”

Stephen glanced down at his form where he sat, curled around himself on the concrete. His patch of lichen still sang of life in the corner. His head spun, singing “Feels So Good” by Chuck Mangione for no reason he could distinguish. 

He’d had another dream, last night—one of the thoughtsong, loud and demanding within the scepter’s gem. So today he’d tried to follow that demand. 

He wasn’t supposed to change the scepter in any way, but maybe isolating its magic didn’t count. The thoughtsong had squirmed under his skin when he’d touched the gem. Had burned, otherworldly painful, beneath his palms. And it had been so loud. So loud when he’d pried the gem from the scepter that he hadn’t seen the words on the walls. He hadn’t heard List. 

The blows didn’t hurt as much as the skin flayed off the palms of his hands from the scepter. But they had lasted… quite a while, this time. 

Stephen closed his eyes and pushed himself to his feet. He made it a few steps before stumbling into one of the walls and sinking down it with a groan. Aleksei’s eyes were fixed on the concrete where he’d touched. 

Stephen glanced at the streak of blood he’d left. “Oh,” he mumbled, nonsensically. “Sorry. I’ll…”

He changed the notes, quick and practiced. It wasn’t audible. Stephen didn’t sing aloud anymore, didn’t hum. He hadn’t the energy to clean the wall, but the blood changed to match the color behind it, and the difference was noticeable. 

“Shit,” Aleksei said. He made an Uncomfortable Expression that Stephen had never seen before. It was a little more urgent than Uncomfortable Expression #3. 

“What?” Stephen rasped. “It’s not like it’s the worst I’ve had.”

“Yeah, but…” Aleksei looked guilty, nervous. “They usually send you with aid. Dressings or bandages or anything, really. Did they know how badly…?”

“Their mistake for not paying attention,” Stephen said. He was dizzy.  

“Are you dying?” 

“Hopefully.”

That would be lucky. Aleksei was laughably terrible at judging the severity of injuries, though, so Stephen wasn’t sure if he should believe him. Maybe he should. It certainly hurt enough. 

“Fucking— I don’t understand— damn it.” Aleksei was pacing in front of the cell, now, and it only made Stephen feel more light-headed. He wanted to sing. But he couldn’t; it always hurt more when he sang. 

Instead, he closed his eyes. 

“Shit.” There was a sound, a familiar one. The cell door swung open, and though Stephen knew it was far too soon to be taken to the petri dish again, every one of his muscles seized. 

“Woah there,” Aleksei said, gently moving Stephen’s raw, bleeding palms out of the way. A hint of an accent had begun to slip into his voice. “I’m just going to help bind some of these cuts, okay?”

“I hate you,” Stephen told him.

Aleksei gave him a small, uncomfortable smile. “I know,” he said. “You should.”

“You’re a coward. A useless, selfish coward. I don’t want your help, this pathetic attempt to ease your conscience when you’re the one keeping me here,” Stephen slurred. 

“I know.”

Stephen was too full of cold and the slow build of agony to summon anger. He was too tired. Too tired of all this. Even the music wasn’t a comfort anymore—just a reminder that he should have kept his damn mouth shut. 

No one cared. No one was coming. Stephen would be here forever, listening to the timesong in his soul, and List would never get what he wanted. 

Aleksei was pressing a wad of fabric to the gash on his back. A metal-toed boot had caught the edge of his ribs and torn, if Stephen remembered correctly. It hurt. Aleksei had to tug him forward to reach the wound. 

He was close. A mistake. 

Stephen’s hands flashed out, and he curled bloody fingers around the gun in Aleksei’s belt. It was smooth. Its song was mostly obscured by Aleksei’s much louder cornfield music, and it felt too heavy when Stephen pulled it free. 

He lashed out with one elbow, catching Aleksei in the throat. The young man cried out. Stephen kicked him hard, throwing him back, and stumbled to his feet. Blood was gathering in his mouth. He felt like he might choke on it.

The gun shook as he leveled it on Aleksei, staring up at him with wide eyes from the floor. He didn’t move. Fear shone bright in his eyes, even in the dim light. His song was saturated with it.

The residual sweat on the gun’s trigger burned Stephen’s raw finger. His breathing was harsh in his ears.

“Strange,” Aleksei said quietly. He looked at Stephen, not at the shaking weapon in his hands. 

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. 

Stephen had started, in the blurring months, to realize things. Things he’d pretended he didn’t know. 

“Doctor.”

A harsh cry, hopeless and inhuman, tore from Stephen’s throat. He dropped the gun. It clattered to the ground with a sound like bones breaking. Aleksei didn’t move, watching Stephen spit blood into the hands he raised to claw at his face. 

He hadn’t cried in this place after the first week. He didn’t now.

“Help me.” He couldn’t hear the words, the music suffocating, his heartbeat deafening. 

Aleksei raised his hands, slowly climbing to his feet. “I will,” he said. “I promise you, I will.”

Stephen sunk back to the floor. Everything was cold. Everything was burning. The thoughtsong had shredded him when he’d gotten too close to it. The timesong was still there, ever louder. Aleksei spoke, and the vibrations reached Stephen clearer than the words did. 

He didn’t want to dream again, but he slept anyway.

Even the air of Avengers Tower felt black when Tony sat with his fingers on a keyboard and did what he did best. 

“I can’t be sure,” Tony said again. “It could be a coincidence.”

Beside him, Steve Rogers laughed too bitterly. “Cut off the head, two more grow back. I should have realized. I should have known.”

“No one could have seen through him, Steve. This man is Fury’s trusted friend. This man turned down a Nobel Peace Prize. No one could have known.”

“I should’ve.”

Tony sighed, his movements jerky across the keyboard. He’d spent the past few days elbow-deep in the SHIELD databases once again, picking out everything he could on Brock Rumlow, STRIKE, and its relationship with Pierce. Its missions held up to its promises. STRIKE was a special mission unit of SHIELD, consisting of the organization’s most specialized and efficient agents, dedicated to counter-terrorism and protection. Rumlow was its leader. 

“All these people seem clear,” Tony muttered, passing through another firewall. “How many are aware of what’s going on?”

Steve’s jaw feathered. He leaned forward next to Tony, scanning the text across the screen. He shook his head. 

Tony watched him out of the corner of his eye. The tension rolling off of Steve in waves was enough to make Tony slightly nauseous. He didn’t know what to say to ease it.

“Alphard is just a star,” Tony began awkwardly. “It might not mean anything. It’s not evidence, not really.” 

Neither of them believed it. 

But Tony couldn’t exactly go accusing one of the most powerful men in the world—a loyal and well-respected politician—of being a head of HYDRA without a little more than a circumstantial codename. He could still be jumping to conclusions. He could still be wrong. He prayed he was wrong. 

Because if he wasn’t, that meant Strange might not be in one piece anymore when Tony found him. 

“Have you tried Rumlow’s personal reports?” Steve asked.

“Yeah, and cross-checked their stories with the others in the SHIELD database to find any contradictions. Lies, omitted information, things that didn’t match up. Took me all of yesterday and guess what I found.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Tony agreed with a sigh. He turned back to the screen, but his hands—clumsy, unlike him—slammed into the empty mug on the edge of the desk. Only Steve’s quick reflexes kept it from shattering on the ground. 

Tony cursed. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, a groan climbing out of his throat. 

Steve looked concerned. “Are you alright?” he asked, setting the mug back on the desk.

“Fine,” Tony said. “Just… didn’t sleep well last night.”

Steve set a hand on his shoulder. “Nightmares?” 

Straightening abruptly, Tony shrugged him off. His nights bore the cold, hopeless signature of dead space, stars sparking just out of his reach. It was… lonely. Awful. 

“Last I checked, it wasn’t any of your business,” Tony snapped. 

“Tony.”

That was Steve’s I-just-want-to-help-you tone. Absolutely infuriating. “Fine, yes. I’m… I just… I want to concentrate on this. I need to keep my head on straight. These people aren’t playing a low-brow game. They made security and secrets a profession.”

Steve still looked slightly concerned, but he let the subject drop. Running a hand through his hair, he refocused. 

They were silent, time passing in the frustrating clack of computer keys. JARVIS periodically informed Tony of the time, and beeped every time Christine sent him a message demanding an update. The doctor was on shift at Metro-General all day today. There wasn’t much she could do to aid the hacking run-around, anyway. 

SHIELD’s network led Tony in clever circles back to its main data centers time and time again, happily strangling Tony’s algorithms before they could sneak through. He wasn’t getting anywhere. He wasn’t getting anywhere.

“Guys?”

Tony and Steve looked over their shoulders as one. Natasha stood in the now-darkened doorway, looking triumphant. 

“What is it?” Tony asked tiredly. “Please tell me you brought coffee.”

“Better than that,” Natasha said. She slipped into the room, so smoothly Tony almost expected her not to cast a shadow. “Are you guys working on investigating SHIELD?”

“What else would we be doing? HYDRA has Strange,” Steve growled. His eyes flashed. 

“Any luck?”

Tony shook his head. “Please tell me you had more.”

Natasha grinned, raising her hand. It was curled tight around a flash drive. “Bruce and I did a little digging,” she said. “Pierce’s communications to the scientists employed by SHIELD are secure, even to Fury—but the scientist’s accounts aren’t. With a little violation of digital privacy, we took this from the other direction.”

“There are thousands of employed researchers,” Steve pointed out.

“Yeah, I never said it was easy.” Natasha tossed the thumb-drive across the room to Tony. “The researcher that has exchanged the most communication with Pierce is named Doctor Walter List. We couldn’t access the content of those communications, but we found the name.”

Tony turned the thumb-drive over in his hand, his energy returning. “What’s all this, then?”

“Everything Bruce, Fury, and I could scrounge up of List’s research. Most of it is what he reported to SHIELD, but some is more personal. Things mentioned by his colleagues, requests he put in for equipment funding that seemed suspect, that sort of thing.”

Natasha grinned. She looked confident, more confident than Tony had felt in over four months. Tony wanted to whoop. Still, he didn’t dare get his hopes up as he slid the thumb-drive into a nearby port and let JARVIS pull its contents up on the screen. 

His eyes went wide. 

“Natasha…” he breathed. “This is…”

“Pretty damn suspicious?” Natasha supplied.

Tony combed through the files, drinking in the information inhumanly quickly. Beside him, Steve gave up trying to keep up. 

“The scepter. He’s studying Loki’s scepter!” 

Natasha crossed the room to look over Tony’s shoulder. He picked file after file, sorting through them at random and in sequence. They were impressively organized, each neat and professional, and Tony almost admired the sheer detail placed into the extensive research. The scepter had been picked apart and laid before him. Data readings, numbers and calculations, theories on Loki’s power prerequisite to wield such a weapon—

There.

A note, scribed beneath a diagram in a cut-off photograph. It was written in German. But JARVIS translated even as Tony leaned forward to squint at it. 

‘Large gemstone centerpiece origin of scepter’s power. Body lacks previous properties once the gem is removed. Subject 12 adversely affected by—’

The photograph cut off the rest of the note. Tony swallowed, leaned forward, and read it again.

Over his shoulder, Natasha whispered a Russian curse. “Do you think…”

“JARVIS,” Tony ordered, “bring up any mention of a ‘Subject 12’ in this material.”

“Right away, sir,” JARVIS replied smoothly. In the background, the screen began to whir. 

It was barely thirty seconds before another scrap of text appeared on Tony’s screen. Another, and then another, each out of context; side references in margins and labels on coded files that hinted of far, far more. 

‘—responses to verbal stimulus reduced by another 40% upon the arrival of the scepter—’

‘—undetectable outside Subject 12’s descriptions of the sound—’

‘—increasingly affected by corporal punishment. Stall testing until risk factor decreased—’ 

‘—described as ‘like imagination and gold leaf’. (Note: Subject 12 unwilling to part with this information without significant pressure. Abstract likenesses seem to be—’

 ‘—unsuccessful escape contributing to—’

Tony closed out of the files quick enough to stall JARVIS’s search program. All the air had been sucked out of the room, leaving his heartbeat loud in his ears. 

“He could hear the scepter,” Natasha said quietly. “That’s what he said. He could hear it.”

Bits of data spread across the screen as Tony’s hands clenched into thoughtless fists on the table. He thought of sharp eyes and sharper sarcasm and a song. 

He’d let this happen. 

Tony placed his hands flat on the table, forcing his breath through his teeth. His lungs felt tight. “Where is List stationed?”

Natasha just shook her head. “I… don’t know. I don’t know.”

Tony locked his jaw. “Let’s find out, then.”

Something was different today.

The petri dish had been soaked in a tight, anticipatory tension for hours. The whole compound resonated with it—making the guards quick to stick to regulation, Stephen off-balance, and Aleksei jumpy. 

The thoughtsong still dominated the petri dish’s music whenever Stephen entered, but this time it was muffled. Locked away. The scepter’s mysteries were not List’s focus today—which was more a curse than a respite, because it brought List out of his nest and into the lab proper.

Perhaps Stephen should’ve felt more intimidated by the man’s face than his words flashing on screens. But he already knew List’s song. It had a catch to it that had taken Stephen nearly a month to properly compare to anything; List sounded like aluminum-backed mirrors. His voice and face were nothing of import when that song hung oily over Stephen every day, a string of notes around his neck like a clawed hand. 

The petri dish was crowded today. List was once again on his useless crusade to find out what was different about Stephen—what wasn’t right. They’d long since given up on physical indicators, and so they turned to the music. 

Stephen couldn’t hear his own song, but List was certain he could still discover and analyze it. Every one of the descriptions and readings he’d pulled with prongs from Stephen’s throat were referenced in comparison to Stephen himself. By mapping how Stephen interacted with the songs of others, List hoped to find the negative space of Stephen himself. 

Like dark matter, Stephen thought vaguely. Unseen but for how others changed in its wake. 

It wouldn’t work, of course. Partly because they had no way to capture the subtleties—and partly because Stephen had lied about most of the music around him. 

Stephen blinked up from where he’d focused on his hands. They were scabbed over now and no longer distractingly painful, though Stephen had plenty to be distracted by. Time was flitting distractedly back and forth. His awareness followed. 

But… there were voices. Somewhere, people were speaking. 

Stephen blinked again, trying to navigate back into his physical form. It felt less and less like his, these days. Like he didn’t need it. (Maybe he’d never needed it.)

The voices cleared and faded. Stephen clenched his fists and focused, trying to listen. He felt like he was underwater. He felt like he was skydiving. 

“It’s gone too far. I need to put a stop to it.”

That was a new voice. A new song. It sounded like carbonation and old silverware. 

“It will be… very public,” List warned. “Assuming you kill him.”

“What else can I—” Stephen lost the next few words beneath the music. “—powerful enough that one word from him will bring people sniffing around my business. Important people. He already has; Fury is suspicious, though he thinks I haven’t noticed.”

“If he knows as much as you think, why isn’t it already all over the news?” List wondered.

The new voice paused. Stephen lifted his head, focusing on the speaking figures. He was curious now, through the haze, and it made his gaze sharp.

“As soon as he spills the beans, he loses his leverage,” said the new voice. It came from a silver-haired man with a square face and a professional manner, matching his song in a way that felt… slimy. Stephen thought he recognized him. A politician? The fog in his brain wouldn’t provide Stephen with anything more.

“Alright. Then it must be quick, Alphard.” 

“I know.” The man sighed, his whole manner sparking with a simmering sort of fury. An insane sort. “I should have killed the meddling rat as soon as he mentioned your subject.”

Stephen straightened. That was him. What was—
“He’s looking at us. Is he listening?” Alphard’s cold eyes found Stephen’s, analyzing, dispassionate. 

“It doesn’t matter,” List said with a shrug. “Do you plan to wake up the Asset?”

Alphard looked back at the scientist, nodding slowly. “Like parents, like child. Stark’s mistake; I told him to stop looking, and yet here he is.”

Stephen stood. 

Upright before he remembered doing so, he steadied himself with a hand splayed on the nearest table, gaze fixed on List and Alphard. Their voices cut off, eyes surprised. 

“Sit down,” List barked. 

Stephen didn’t. “They’re looking for me.”

“I gave you an order, 12.” 

“Someone’s looking for me.”

Alphard put a hand on List’s shoulder. “I thought you said it didn’t matter,” he said. 

“It usually doesn’t,” List replied hurriedly. Stephen had never heard him sound nervous before, and it delighted him in some dark, still-bleeding place in his chest. 

He stepped forward again, letting his energy flash out to paint the walls around him in opposing colors. They were going to make him regret this—he knew it with enough intensity that a large part of him screamed to sit down and shut up and not make it worse. Every part of him trembled in anticipation of it. 

He didn’t care. Someone was looking for him. Tony Stark, in all his engine parts and falcon flight stubbornness, was looking for him. 

He smiled, blood on his lips. “I can hear you,” he said. His hands flickered—signing along to his words for the first time in over four months. “I was listening.”

“You think Stark is going to find you?” List asked, his voice amused, condescending. “You think you can hope for that? Maybe he was looking, but he will be dead by the end of the week.”

“I’m important enough to kill an Avenger over?” Stephen said with a bared-teeth smirk. “Why, List, I’m almost flattered.”

“He has attitude,” Alphard noted. He smiled at Stephen, and it wasn’t kind. “Your time here isn’t finished. There are still questions we need to answer, things we must learn to best protect this world.”

Stephen laughed, rasping and dark and fake. “Don’t dress this up like you’re doing something noble. Not in front of me; that’s bad form.”

Alphard looked at him and didn’t answer. Turning to List, his voice became authoritative once again. “The Asset will be deployed by the end of the day, his work done by the week’s close. He’ll make it look like an accident, but that comes second to making the kill quick.”

Stephen hardly heard the words. The music was rising again. “Who do you think you are?” he interrupted. “How could you possibly justify killing the man who saved your world because he went looking?”

“Quiet,” List said.  

“Go to hell, List. Go to hell.”

List just looked at Stephen, impassive, calculating. He jerked his chin to the guards. “I like you better when you’re afraid,” he said. 

It was only seconds until the footsteps reached Stephen. He knew the name of every soldier that reached out with their gloved hands and conflicting songs, and his shoulders shook with silent laughter. It meant nothing. It meant everything. 

Tony Stark was looking for him. And even if List was right, as he always was, as he always became, and no one ever found Stephen…  

He would still know. He would still live and die here knowing that someone had tried. 

Someone had cared.

At 11:46 PM that Saturday night, Tony found him. 

The scepter was his key. JARVIS’s readings of it were still in his database, after all. The search models Bruce and Tony had used to scan satellites and global networks to find the Tesseract during Loki’s assault on Earth were still functional. It was like dusting off an old toy from storage. 

The days since sorting through Doctor List’s files had been a blur of adrenaline and determination, so intense Tony hadn’t had room for nightmares. He’d finally slept once the programs had begun their work, and after thirteen hours of unconsciousness he woke to their success. 

“Oh my god,” he said into the empty penthouse, his hands in his hair. Air hissed somewhere nearby. “I’ve… he’s there. Strange is in the Himalayas. JARVIS?”

“I’m already contacting the Avengers and Doctor Palmer, sir,” JARVIS said instantly.

Tony fell back into his chair. Four and a half months. Four and a half months and here he was, sitting in the dark, knowing where Strange was. 

The utter and complete relief in his chest felt blown out of proportion compared to actual time he’d spent with the doctor. But all these days of knowing the odd, intriguing, unprepared man was suffering had made things real to Tony—more than any logic or strange woman’s whispers of destiny ever could. 

And maybe all his dedication had been a distraction, a way to focus on anything but the weight of space that still fell across his chest. Maybe it had, but it still mattered. It had still become personal. 

Tony dropped his hands to the table and let a smile fall across his face. The light of his arc reactor looked, for an instant, like a key on a ribbon. 

“Transfer the calls to my phone,” Tony ordered. The hissing was growing louder. “And get me scans of the base; I want to know everything within the hour.” 

He swiped his phone off the table, standing and flicking Doctor Palmer’s contact to the top. Steve and Bruce were in the tower tonight. He’d meet with them on the way down to his workshop; he needed to dust off his newest suit and start—

The back wall exploded inward. 

Tony covered his face on instinct, thrown across the room to slam into the back of the sofa. He hit the ground hard, gasping. Fire crawled along the carpet toward him. The windows were shattered, and glass lay in glistening patterns around him, 

Tony’s hands scrambled beneath him, catching on shards of the windows as he pushed himself upright. His head spun. What—what—

A figure stood on the broken edge of the wall, nothing but a blackened silhouette against the hazy sky. Firelight glinted off metal; a mask, an eye, a weapon. Tony blinked. His first thought, smoky and disoriented, was ‘I’m 93 stories up, what the fuck?’

Then the figure raised their gun on him, and Tony’s instincts took over. 

He rolled aside, fingers curling over the suit’s bracelet. A gunshot made him wince. Glass broke on the other side of the couch—that was one strong weapon.

As Tony ducked for something, anything to use as cover, sounds began to filter through his ringing ears. He heard a voice. Christine was calling his name; the call must’ve gone through. 

“Uh, found the doctor! Gonna have to call you back!” Tony yelled as a bullet embedded itself into the toppled back of the chair he’d rolled behind. 

“What the hell! Is that gunfire? What should I—”

The chair went flying, breaking into pieces against the burning wall. Tony got a look at the figure, then, looming above him, wreathed in silver and red. His hair was wild; the lower half of his face covered by what was almost a gas-mask. What little of his eyes Tony could see were dull, emotionless. He looked like a phantom. Like death itself. 

Tony raised his hands as the creature raised his own. He caught the muzzle of the gun and shoved it aside, leaping in the opposite direction. The warrior recovered quickly, his other arm flashing out. It was entirely metal. 

Pain lashed up Tony’s hip. A knife. He cursed, dropping behind the sofa and throwing up an arm. 

Metal closed around it just as another gunshot split the air. The bullet clanged off the vambrace of his suit as it closed around him, and Tony rolled to his feet with his repulsors already charged. 

The warrior stilled in the glare of blue light, pale and cold, and Tony bared his teeth.

“Fair fight now, huh?”

Tony fired quickly, trying to get a read on his opponent’s speed. He’d already seen his formidable strength. And how, by all the unanswered questions Tony still had, did the warrior get up here?

The figure raised his arm, shielding the exposed part of his face as he rolled into Tony’s laserfire. He made no sound of pain, even as the bolts of energy struck his shoulder and side. He raised his gun.

A spray of bullets broke the furniture behind Tony. They glanced mostly harmlessly against his suit, and Tony swept toward the figure to snatch the gun from his hand. 

It didn’t seem to bother the warrior. His empty eyes snapped back to Tony—and he struck him across the face with a steel hand. The screech of metal on metal echoed through Tony’s helmet. The force of the blow, impossible, sent him sprawling.

The suit sparked. Tony rolled out of the way as the figure approached him again, fingers splayed like claws. Tony’s repulsors whirred. The building was crying out in alarm around him, and JARVIS flickered to life in his visor. 

“JARVIS!” Tony yelped, throwing himself backward. “I did not have this written into the schedule for today! Give me something!”

“I can’t run recognition on him,” JARVIS said as cooly as ever.

“Do you need the face? Can you not work with, I don’t know, the metal arm?”

“It’s vibranium.”

“It’s what?”

“That metal is worth fortunes,” JARVIS said. “Even for you.”

“Great, I’ll be sure to comment on his excellent taste when he’s finished beating my ass,” Tony hissed. He dodged again, making an expert shot toward the shoulder of the man. The blast sent the man stumbling. Light diffused through the veins of his arm, blue and forked. 

For an instant, the man seemed distracted. He looked at the laserfire, watching it dissolve, but as Tony raised his palms to strike again, he moved. Tony leapt up into the air, and the man threw himself downward. He slid beneath Tony. One hand reached up toward the suit’s ankle, but Tony shot it away before the man could pull him to the ground.

The room was dusty. JARVIS began to highlight in infrared, and Tony ignored the haze in the air. The roof was low—too low for good mobility. Tony hadn’t designed this room as a battleground.

 The figure came at Tony again, pulling another gun from his belt. The movement was supernaturally quick. He shot twice, quick and precise, toward Tony’s palm. The repulsor burst in a spray of reinforced glass.

Shit. Tony rolled to the ground, the skin of his hand numb from the sheer force of the blow. Tony spared a glance down. The bullet hadn’t broken through to skin, thank god. 

Another bullet struck the suit’s shoulder. The armor would protect him from a gun, but if that arm was vibranium…

Tony jumped backward again, grabbing the man’s more human arm to knock him off balance. His left hand raised toward the warrior’s face. He threw himself aside before Tony’s repulsor could sear through his mask. 

“Sir,” JARVIS said as Tony and the ghostly cyborg slammed each other around the burning penthouse, “Captain Rogers and Doctor Banner are approaching.”
“Took them long enough!” Tony yelped. He ducked a punch, and his foot nearly punched through a weakened area of the floor. 

Right. That. 

“Patch me through to them!” Tony yelled. 

JARVIS did; the others had taken the initiative to grab their communicators. Steve’s voice filtered through the line.

“Stark! Are you alright?”

“I’m—” Tony hissed and ducked another blow. “—Fine. Currently being attacked. Maybe pick up the pace?”

“We’re coming,” Bruce said.

“Try not to destroy my whole building again,” Tony told him, then focused on the fight. 

He turned into his attacker’s next strike, sweeping his legs out from under him. Another two repulsor blasts had the man curling out of the way. He flipped back to his feet, favoring one side, and came at Tony with single-minded intent. 

Tony didn’t know what to make of the empty-eyed stubbornness. It reminded him of an attack dog—a beast that would tear itself apart until the order came to stop. 

What could do that to a human being?

Metal fingers gouged into the arm of his suit, tearing a chunk free. Tony stopped feeling curiously empathetic and started worrying about his physical health again. 

The other Avengers burst through the far door in a shower of sparks and embers not thirty seconds later, though the time slowed to a crawl in the midst of the fight. Steve’s shield was clutched tight in his hands. Bruce stood behind him, eyes hard and skin tinged green. 

Locked arm-to-arm with the warrior, Tony could only think about waving cheekily. Steve jumped forward. The figure released Tony and rolled aside, ducking under the shield as if expecting it.

Orange light made the man’s face seem sunken, sickly. He was still, spring-coiled, as he glanced between the three of them, assessing the threat. Tony couldn’t see his eyes through his ragged hair. 

(If he could, he might’ve glimpsed the confusion there. The recognition.)

Faced with three armed, angry Avengers, the man went defensive. As Steve lunged and Tony leapt to block his path to his fallen weapon, he lurched into a limping run. Bruce still stood in the doorway. A harsh smile curved Tony’s lips. There was nowhere to go. 

Or so he thought.

The man ducked back, smoke and dust swirling behind him. Steve’s shield didn’t slow him, his movements quick as he flipped above it. He didn’t slow, not even when he reached the burning, creaking wall—

And dropped out of it. 

Tony stared. Then he moved, shaking out his still-numb hand and soaring past Steve into the empty sky outside. 

Only the New York skyline reached beneath him. The night colored the windows of the skyscrapers. They seemed impossibly far away, the ground impossibly far down, but not even a flicker of movement caught Tony’s eye. Darkness had snatched the figure away as quickly as he’d arrived. 

Tony dropped back into the burning penthouse like his strings had been cut. He didn’t dissolve his suit as he knelt, gulping down long breaths. 

Bruce still stood in the doorway. Between Tony and the blasted wall, Steve still held his shield tight to his chest, tense. They waited. Nothing broke the silence but the sparking of fire. 

Tony slowly raised his head, bracing his hands against his knees. 

“What the fuck?” he managed, wincing at the pain that made itself known in his side. 

“Who… how did… the explosion?” Steve shook his head.

“The gas lines were tampered with,” said JARVIS’s voice. “I didn’t realize it in time. I am sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Tony told him. “Not your fault; I didn’t notice either, after all.” 

He slumped back against the couch as the fire measures kicked in. They should probably get out of here, out of danger, but Tony made himself comfortable anyway. Only the penthouse seemed damaged. Tony’s mind absently ran figures for repairs as he let his suit fall away. 

He pressed a hand against the cut on his hip and hissed. It wasn’t deep, but it was long, and it stung like a son of one. 

Bruce took a lurching step forward. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m alright,” Tony said. “Bastard took a swipe at me with a knife, is all. I’ll stitch right up.” 

Bruce knelt beside him anyway, and Tony slapped his probing hands away. Nearby screens were flickering back to life. The blue light caught the smoke curling from the newly extinguished room. 

“Really,” Tony sighed, leaning back against his destroyed sofa. “Did he really have to make such a mess? If you’re gonna try to kill me, at least don’t make me pay money for it afterward.” 

Bruce hummed. “JARVIS said he tampered with the gas. Why? He was a good shot.”

“It was supposed to look accidental,” Steve said with certainty. 

Tony blinked. “Why on earth would someone try to assassinate me and then not take the credit for it? I’m sure the payout would be millions.” 

“The money of these things always on your mind?” Bruce said with half a laugh. 

“I’m being pragmatic.”

Steve shrugged, finally stepping back from the window to stand on the other side of Tony. His shadow fell across the two scientists, and Tony tried not to make a smart comment about looming. 

“You tell us,” Steve said with a shrug. “Why would someone try to kill you?”

“It’s the same as kidnappings usually.”

Steve gave him a look, half amused, half concerned. “Every day I am reminded what very different lives we lead,” he said. “What reasons are those?”

“Money,” Tony allowed, “though that’s off the table now.”

“Tech,” said Bruce.

Tony nodded, pointing a finger at him. “To get me out of their hair. I am somewhat of a threat nowadays—”

He broke off, his hand still in the air. Fingers curling back into his chest, Tony cursed. 

“What?”

“I have been making myself a nuisance to someone who definitely wouldn’t want any assasination attempt to come to light,” Tony ventured. 

“Shit,” Bruce said eloquently. “You think…”

“I mean, it seems like a pretty large coincidence. And if we’re right about HYDRA, Pierce would go to a great deal more lengths than we originally thought to keep Strange sequestered away in the Himalayas.” 

Steve and Bruce’s faces changed sharply. “Where?” Steve demanded.

Ah. Right. That message had been somewhat delayed. 

“I found him,” Tony said. The words brought a thrill up his chest, even with the destruction around them. “JARVIS has coordinates. And I think… well. If Pierce was willing to kill me over this, I don’t think there’s any chance of getting our neurosurgeon out of there legally.”

Steve’s face darkened. “We wouldn’t negotiate with HYDRA anyway.”

Tony raised his hands, his left slick with blood. “Sure, but this does somewhat complicate things.”

“Maybe so.” Steve leaned back onto his heels, blowing out a breath. “But you really found him?”

“I did.”

“Thank god,” Bruce breathed, head falling back against the overturned sofa. “Now we just have to get there before the next attempt at your life succeeds.”

List stood too close to Stephen, his pen clicking rhythmically in his fingers. Stephen resisted the urge to flinch each time. Cold eyes focused on his, and Stephen listened back. 

He felt raw, fragile, and he hated it. Even after all these blurring, awful months, he wasn’t used to being in pain. The ache of every movement still made him bite his lip and hiss his frustration when he was safe. Or as close to safe as he got in this place, in his cell while Aleksei stood guard. 

Those moments were few and far between lately. Aleksei’s guard duties had shifted, leaving him stationed on the edge of the petri dish to gain increasingly uncomfortable facial expressions. Stephen watched him, sometimes, during the experiments. 

Now, Aleksei was holding his gun tight. As if he was keeping himself from raising it. 

“You cannot control the scepter,” List said, repeating what Stephen had told him. He sounded dubious. 

Stephen shook his head. He didn’t have the energy to be afraid of List’s reaction—didn’t have the energy for much of anything. These last weeks had been strange. He couldn’t keep track of his emotions, his energy, and it hardly ever seemed to make sense. Sometimes he was defiant, like he’d been on the day he’d learned Stark was looking for him. Sometimes he couldn’t swallow through his terror. Sometimes he found everything unbearably funny. 

Sometimes he’d go into the petri dish one way and emerge different. Like a switch had been flipped, somewhere in his music. Those days made Aleksei jumpy, even more than the days Stephen couldn’t seem to contain his harsh laughter. 

“I can’t,” Stephen said. “I can hear the scepter, and I can speak to it, but I can’t use it. Maybe because I can hear it.”

List said something, and Stephen lifted his eyes fast enough to read the words from his lips. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Welcome to the club. 

Stephen shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not lying. You can’t beat me into something I’m incapable of doing.” 

List looked at him like he was considering doing just that—but then, Stephen always saw violence in the man’s eyes. Near the door, Aleksei shifted. His uniform made him look identical to the other guards, but his song gave him away. 

“Why is this different?” List asked. “Why can you…change notes, as you say, of some objects, but not this one?”

“Because I’m not trying to change the thought—the scepter.” Stephen should stop talking, but he was so tired. Lies were so much work. Denial was so much work. Couldn’t Stephen just stop thinking, just for one moment? Just for long enough that it didn’t hurt as much?

List looked at him, pen spinning in his fingers. His stance ordered Stephen to continue. Shoulders hiking, Stephen did. 

“The scepter is like me,” he said. “It changes people and objects and songs. T changes thoughts.” 

“You don’t change thoughts.” List sounded certain about that, which was fair. If Stephen could do that, he’d have gotten out of here by now. 

“Exactly,” said Stephen. “I don’t.”

Comprehension flickered in the doctor’s cold eyes, and he lifted his hand experimentally. Stephen flinched, but List wasn’t reaching for him. Instead, he gripped the blue gem Stephen had pulled out of the scepter. It didn’t burn him like it had Stephen. It didn’t do anything except sing just slightly louder. 

Stephen was beginning to hate that honied, one-of-a-kind melody. 

“It is like you,” List repeated. He turned the gem over thoughtfully in his fingers. “So, if I puzzle from you what gives you your power, it will allow me to harness this power as well.”

Resigned, Stephen didn’t bother thinking through the hypothesis. He wouldn’t answer anyway. List wouldn’t believe him, no matter what angle he believed. Stephen was a lab rat, and lab rats didn’t get to make predictions. 

Turning back to him, List grabbed his weapon from a nearby tray. It was sleek and black—like a taser. Stephen didn’t know if it felt better or worse. There was a gun on the tray, too, lying innocently like a clean scalpel in a surgery theater. List spun the taser like he’d spun his pen. Then he lowered it on Stephen. 

“The scepter changes thoughts. Testing has shown…” he looked at his notes, “that both you and the scepter’s power source have similar influences over things like light and color.”

The testing showed other things too. Not all of them Stephen had let become obvious. 

“What is it you change that this power source cannot?”

The answer came to Stephen’s mind immediately, and almost to his lips. It was a monumental effort to haul it back behind his teeth. 

“I don’t know,” he said. 

List flicked the weapon. It’s connection was quiet, but Stephen’s harsh, tired scream was not. It cut off quickly. Stephen’s hands had clenched tight enough for his fingernails to dig into his palms. 

When his vision swam back into clarity, List’s mouth was moving again. Stephen didn’t try to piece together the words. He coughed, his already sore muscles nearly paralyzed by the aftershocks of pain. 

His body was being very dramatic, Stephen thought vaguely. It wasn’t even that long a hit. 

List spoke again, and this time Stephen only half-heard him. “What is it you change—” 

“Doctor List.”

Stephen looked up. Aleksei had stepped up behind List, his hands raised placatingly. 

“Back to your post, soldier.”

“Yes sir. I simply—well, he’s still recovering from the… incident after the Secretary’s visit, and—”

List turned, just slightly, and Stephen’s apathy drained away when the doctor’s coal eyes focused on Aleksei.

“I said, back to your post.” 

Aleksei fidgeted. Stephen felt a flash of disorienting déjà vu, watching the expression shift across Aleksei’s face. It was as if he was seeing something from a dream. 

“It’s just, much more and he could be, er, damaged more severely,” Aleksei said. “Compounding injuries are real, I read about it—sir.”

Stephen tried to catch the young man’s eye, shaking his head as subtly as he could. Aleksei still didn’t move. His fidgeting fingers, for once, were still.

Maybe Stephen should’ve felt gratitude, even triumph at the offered words. The offered distraction should have meant something. But all that Stephen’s mind provided when List’s lips twisted in anger was a pure, white-hot panic.

The doctor did not like to be disobeyed. You couldn’t disobey List, not directly, not like that—

Aleksei took another breath to speak, and List tightened his hand around his weapon. Stephen’s logic shorted into nothing. 

“Time,” he said.

List paused. Aleksei took a step back, surprised. 

“Time is what I can change that the scepter can’t,” Stephen repeated. He didn’t know how loud his voice was; he couldn’t hear it. 

“What?” Aleksei’s mouth formed the word. 

“I can manipulate it,” Stephen said, hesitating. He’d never once spoken that truth aloud before, hardly even thought about it. The timesong was there, of course, always. But Stephen could only pretend it was just like all the others for so long. 

He could see the moment List forgot about Aleksei completely, his aluminum mirror song touched with sharp interest. Turning to Stephen, he cocked his head. His jaw set. Stephen recognized that look, weary. 

“In what ways?” List asked.

It was easier to omit parts of the truth. “Stop it. For specific objects at least.”

“And?” 

Stephen was silent. 

List sighed exaggeratedly. “You know,” he said, “this would all be so much easier if you simply answered my questions. Truthfully, 12.”

Stephen was so tired of this. So very tired. He wished List would get around to the torture—it didn’t take any energy on Stephen’s part. He didn’t have to do anything to be in physical pain. It could just happen. 

“Can you turn it back?”

Stephen looked straight through the doctor. A cold, ringed hand slapped him across the face. 

“Can you turn it back?” List barked. 

“Yes,” Stephen replied robotically. 

A smile. The shudder that went down Stephen’s spine when he noticed was instinctual. 

“For specific songs or the whole symphony at once?” List asked. 

Stephen couldn’t imagine the kind of practice and energy it would take to turn back every song simultaneously. Mending broken pencils and doing medical paperwork took enough out of him. 

He couldn’t remember how graphite smelled. A curious thing to think about. 

There was another flash of pain, and Stephen was yanked bodilly into the present by the neck. He hissed, a mostly animalistic sound. A long time ago, he would’ve tried to flinch away. He would’ve had to pry his seizing body from restraints, but List had trained him out of that. Trained him out of running, and then out of the need for chains. 

There was nowhere to go. 

Stephen forced his eyes to List’s. “Specific songs,” he said raspingly. 

“How far back?”

“It depends. I haven’t tried very often.”

List shook his head, tutting. “To think, such a world-changing gift, given to someone too weak to even see it for the wonder it is.” 

He spoke like such a thing was tragic. Maybe he was right. He was always right, after all. He always became right. Stephen’s views of existence were irrelevant, unimportant, cracks in a good data set. 

List looked over at the tray, then reached out a hand and knocked it off the table to the ground. The metallic plate and the gun it had contained went clattering across the petri dish’s floor. Aleksei jumped. He took another few steps back. 

“Put it back,” List said. 

Stephen glanced at him, then down toward the fallen objects. He took a breath. In the back of his throat, in the back of his mind, a melody itched to be sung. Stephen paid it no heed when he rewrote the music. 

He hated this. Using his power without making any noise alongside it made him feel separate, isolated, from the rest of the symphony. It left his physical body here, alone, while he followed music. 

(Stephen had always feared that one day, he wouldn’t find his way back.)

The timesong swirled as he spun it backwards. It resonated in Stephen’s every cell, every edge and facet of his soul. It was fitful, unbalanced. It sounded like Stephen felt—trapped and forced and unwilling. The thoughtsong, nestled on the table beside him, reflected it. Time rewound in a cascade of notes. A shudder passed through the space, all the way into Stephen’s physical form. 

When he dropped back to awareness, the tray was back on the table. Aleksei and List were staring at him; the former with nervous wonder, the latter with awestruck greed.  

“Oh,” List mused. 

Stephen’s head dropped between his shoulders. He felt an illogical flare of violation when List reached out to feel the edge of the gun and the tray. It made him grit his teeth as he flinched ever-so-slightly forward. 

List noticed. He didn’t acknowledge it, of course, as he splayed his grimy mortal fingers across the residue of a power that was not his to chain.

“Like it never changed,” List murmured. “And I still remember that it was moved.”

“The timesong is both personal and universal,” Stephen said, his voice empty. 

“So every object can be manipulated. Perhaps every person?” List sounded excited, and he wasn’t speaking to Stephen, not really. Stephen wouldn’t have answered anyway. 

Was this what breaking felt like, Stephen wondered, as he watched List flick through his secrets like an accountant through file folders? Had he failed? Had he lost, now? 

You’re too late. The thought was emotionless. Simply an observation, as the next wave of experiments planned themselves in List’s mind and etched themselves into the song of Stephen’s future. Stephen’s lies were pointless. His determination was useless in the face of a lifetime here. 

List tapped his fingers and looked at Stephen. Questions fell from his lips, but he didn’t want Stephen to answer. He wanted to yank the demonstrations out of him through blood and silver metal because that was what he trusted, that was what he knew, and Stephen couldn’t even bring himself to care—

He didn’t hear the gunshot.

One moment, there was the bright light of the petri dish and the impersonal smirk of Doctor List. One moment, Stephen’s hands were in his lap, pale skin cleaned meticulously—the next, they were splattered with white-hot blood. The patterns it made were fractaline. 

The gun sat lightly in List’s grip, almost casual. List dropped it to his side and just… kept smiling.

Aleksei glanced down at the stain on his chest, stumbled once, and fell to the spotless ground. 

No.

Stephen didn’t remember moving, his knees bruising against the floor when he reached out to turn Aleksei over, to stop the bleeding, to buy time, anything—

Hands caught his elbows, dragging him back. Aleksei’s wide eyes looked only surprised as they glazed. His cornfield song, the yellow of the only kindness Stephen had ever received here, began to bloom with an entirely different melody. Wind. Ivory. Death.

“No!” Stephen roared, wrenching against the iron-tight grip. “Let go of me!”

“Tell me,” List said calmly, “can you hear him die? Can you reverse that, too?”

Stephen didn’t breathe, forgot the need to. “You killed him,” he gasped, words running over each other, as he stood drowning in the unstoppable tones of death. 

“Bring him back.”

He was in the operating theater again, losing his first patient. He’d held in his tears that day until he was alone, and only Christine had ever seen that he cared. He was a boy again, crouching on the edge of a swimming pool, a still fetus in his hands. 

A demon, he was a demon again.

Stephen reached out to the music and yanked , the light disappearing and reappearing in shades invisible to the human eye, the walls painting themselves with runes and streaks of dark, ugly patterns. Time respooled. The hands on his arms fell away, the dropped gun suddenly back within them, the blood abruptly cleaned from Stephen’s hands and repainted on List’s face as Stephen spun with his fingers curled into claws.

List screamed. His hands rose to his face in a desperate attempt to pull Stephen’s gouging fingers from his eyes, but there was already fluid under Stephen’s fingernails and black blood sliding down List’s cheeks. The sound was choked, agonized, unending.

Stephen felt the pain reflected in his own skull. In the sickening twist of this last line he’d sworn he’d never cross. 

He pulled back, coughing on his own horror, Aleksei’s song still so absent from the music around him. Like a color ripped from a tapestry, or a spice left out of a dish. Gone. 

Stephen turned and ran.

He made it further this time than ever before—but in the end, he never even saw the sun.

In a room edged with shadows and traced with leaves of bronze, a man ran his finger along the spines of books. 

They were warm against his skin, though they weren’t his yet. “His” in the loosest sense of the word—the knowledge here belonged to no one. And Master Wong of Kamar-Taj was not yet its guardian, though it was, unquestionably, his destiny.

“One might worry for Master Azara’s health,” Karl Mordo said wryly from where he leaned against the edge of a bookshelf.

Master Azara was the current Kamar-Taj librarian who would guard the knowledge here until his passing. Wong was too experienced to be called an apprentice of the Order, but he learned the traditions of the library from Azara after the man’s original apprentice had been killed on a mission. 

Wong curled his hand back to his side and shot Mordo a glare. “Nonsense.” 

“Yes, you have always been the most patient of us,” Mordo said. “You could ask Cil if you wanted to take over a little faster, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if Azara lived another hundred years, at this point.” 

Wong’s expression didn’t change. He didn’t appreciate jokes that weren’t funny. He would die before he wished harm on Master Azara, and the Ancient One would almost certainly ensure it. 

Mordo just smiled his quiet smile and brushed past Wong, patting him on the shoulder. Neither Mordo nor Kaecillius thought highly of Wong’s choice to study the traditions of the librarians, but they had come to a resignation to it. His destiny was his choice, after all. His friends had no claim to it. 

The soft sounds of Kamar-Taj filtered through the walls around them. Lightbulbs buzzed, magic channeled through their wires, and left the whole place with a warm, storm-like glow. The burnished chains protecting the books shone silver. Kamar-Taj thrummed with energy, aged and busy. 

(It wasn’t far. It wasn’t far at all from the peaks of the Himalayas, just on the edge of catching the eddies of changed music. It was set with tension. With anticipation.

Wong could feel it, though he didn’t know its origin. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t joined the mission today, leaving Kaecilius and Mordo to investigate on their own.)

“If Azara is meant to live that long, he will,” Wong said gruffly. “There is plenty to do until then.”

“Yes,” Mordo agreed. “Always so much to do. We could’ve used your expertise today. That relic nearly took my head off.”

“It would have been an improvement.”

Mordo snorted. “Cil appreciated the chance to show off, at least. We neutralized the brazier, but I still think you should take a look at it.”

Wong hummed his agreement. Of the three of them, he had always had the best intuition for relics. He could almost hear them, in a way, when he let his magic drown out everything else. They had purposes, and Wong knew how to find what those purposes were. 

He’d been the first to bond with a relic. Mordo had accepted the Staff of the Living Tribunal nearly five years later, and Kaecilius had only recently bonded. He created his own relic. Nameless, Kaecilius’s daggers were an exercise of more personal power than Wong had seen from anyone besides the Ancient One. 

Wong was not usually the first of their trio to master skills or overcome challenges. Where Cil and Karl raced, Wong moved slowly. He was often distracted by the paths magic took when a spell was done incorrectly, diffusing naturally into the environment around him. Usually, it would take him weeks or months longer to perfect something than it did his friends. 

But it never mattered. Kaecilius, Mordo, and Wong had been trained as a team, weaknesses and strengths slotting together; enough that for years, if you saw one, you saw all three. They’d explored dimensions together. They’d fought demons at each other's sides. Wong had lost count of the number of times Mordo had saved his life.

And then…

Then Kaecilius had drawn away from them, angered by something he wouldn’t speak of. Then Mordo had stood aside and let a blood-borne monster nearly kill the novice who had used forbidden magic to summon it. 

And then the Ancient One had handed Wong a book. One of her own, loosely bound and written in her old language, as if she’d meant it originally for no eyes but her own. 

‘I cannot say why,’ she’d said, ‘but you are the only one I can trust with this.’

So Wong had learned the care of books, the magic of preserving them. He’d learned the patterns they left in the Mystic Arts tapestry. He’d learned the rituals of the librarians, and they fit inside his soul far deeper than his disciple’s duties ever had.

(In the pages of the Sorcerer Supreme’s journal, Wong first read of Infinity Stones.)

Wong tapped his fingers against the inside of his arm and watched Mordo reshelve his studies for the night. He didn’t regret his choice. He hadn’t looked back once after stepping into the library… but he would regret what it would do to Mordo. He would regret stepping away from his friend, leaving them both alone and waiting—though he knew Karl refused to admit it—for the day Kaecilius would abandon the two of them completely. 

It hurt to know Kaecilius would kill for Wong. Would die for Mordo, without question. It hurt to stand in the middle and watch that decay until it was no longer true.

If it is meant to be so, it will.

“Sling-ring,” Wong found himself saying. He held out his hand.

Mordo understood the movement and the offer behind it. He slid his sling-ring from his fingers, tossing it to Wong’s hand. “Thanks,” he said. “I know it’s filthy.”

Wong sat behind what had started to become his desk, pulling a rag from the outer pockets of his robes. His own sling-ring joined Mordo’s on the desktop. Wong wiped his fingers on the rag, then began to carefully clean the blood and soot from the grooves of Mordo’s ring. 

They were quiet. Kamar-Taj whispered and breathed around them. Mordo sat against the bookshelves, tilting his head up toward the lights. Wong saw them flicker—Mordo must be spellcasting, playing with their light. He was good with that sort of magic. 

Wong wondered if he could feel it. If he could tell something had changed in the wind today, or if there was another reason his fingers formed fists at his sides where he lay. 

When the sling-ring was nearly spotless, they heard footsteps. Mordo glanced at Wong, then scrambled upright. Wong clasped his hands behind his back to stand in front of the desk. He inclined his head as a woman in yellow robes brushed through the pressed-paper door to the library.

“Ah,” the Ancient One said with a smile. “I thought I’d find you here.”

“Welcome,” Wong greeted. 

“Is everything alright?” Mordo added quickly, stepping up next to Wong. 

So he had noticed. From the look in the Ancient One’s eyes, she knew too. 

“We are going to have guests,” the Ancient One said softly. “I am sure of it, this time.”

Mordo frowned. “Master?”

She looked at him, and Wong waited, feeling like he was about to hear the answer to a riddle he hadn’t realized he’d been asked.

“We will need the infirmary,” the Ancient One said. “And Wong?”

“Yes?”

“How long has it been since you read the Book of Cagliostro? You may want to brush up.”

Chapter Text

Tony counted timezones out the window. The glass fogged in a circle, the diameter uneven. 

He liked when he could see his breath. It was easier to remember and keep a rhythm that way, the weight in his chest nothing more than a distraction. Tony counted to five and watched time move backward from above. 

Interesting, Tony thought, that counterclockwise was the direction of dawns. The earth’s rotation defined hours, days,and  years, did it not? But humans measured it oppositely. With watch faces and hands spun in the wrong direction, as if trying to claw into place a tiny shred of ownership over the concept. 

Time left a bad taste in his mouth. Four and a half months did, more accurately.

“You should get some rest. While there’s still time before we put your imbecile plan into place.”

Tony snorted, rolling his head sideways on the window. “Your faith in me is astonishing.”

Natasha was right—he should likely snatch a few hours of sleep. But the frequency of his dreams had only increased, and there were too many people to see, here. Too many that would ask questions.  

Natasha looked over at Tony from the pilot’s chair, an eyebrow cocked upward. She was the only other person in the cockpit. Steve and Bruce were preparing in the hull, and Christine was on a more commercial mode of transport to their designated rendezvous point Kathmandu.  Rhodey was on standby back in the States, already working with SHIELD to find out all they could about Tony’s mystery assassin. 

“The last time you tried to be stealthy, Tony,” Natasha said, “multiple buildings exploded. I am actually a spy.”

“And you’re a stranger to our target,” Tony replied. “I am too, but at least Bruce and I actually spoke to the doctor. It needs to be someone he recognizes.”

Natasha didn’t argue. Logically, of course, she was the best choice for an interior job, but it had been four and a half months. After three months in Afghanistan, if anyone but Rhodey had reached out to take Tony’s arm after that first crash landing…

It had to be someone Strange would recognize. 

Once Tony and the others had a location, Tony and Bruce made quick work uncovering photos, coordinates, and as many specs of the hidden base as possible. They had a vague floor plan that JARVIS had extrapolated from aerial scans. Tony knew the names of a few of the guards—who were permanently stationed, more often than not. No one new ever entered the snow-covered compound. 

At least, not unless they were Alexander Pierce. 

Anger rose in Tony’s chest again, and he didn’t try to swallow it down. He rested his head against the window. The data he’d read and the building layout he’d studied were fresh and searing in his mind. It had been monstrous. Tony felt monstrous. 

“You’re sure the suit can reach you?” Natasha asked again, breaking Tony from his thoughts.

Their plan was a simple one; Steve and Natasha would secure Tony an opening and an outfit, and Tony would enter the compound in disguise. He wore the call bracelet for his suit—in the inevitable but hopefully unnecessary event that things went terribly wrong—and would need to work fast. Very fast. With the Avengers as reinforcement, he could fight his way out if that became necessary, but Tony would need to get to Strange first. They couldn’t take the chance that List would kill him before letting him escape. 

“It’d better,” Tony snapped. “God, we should blow the whole place to a cinder.”

Natasha’s fingers played across the wheel of the jet. “You said yourself,” she reminded him, “we aren’t prepared to declare war on HYDRA until Pierce has no leverage against us in return.”

“I think past me was an idiot and we shouldn’t listen to him.”

Natasha laughed. “Unfortunately, I think he was thinking clearer than any of us are currently.”

Tony clenched his fists and pounded one lightly on his thigh. He said, “that doesn’t mean I have to like it. What can Pierce do that he hasn’t already tried? He sent an assassin after me, for god’s sake.”

“We don’t know that was him.”

Tony gave her a look.

“I mean, you can’t prove it to the world public,” Natasha sighed. “We find the phantom soldier and things change—but until then, we have nothing on Pierce. He’s authorized to do this, sick as it may be. Revealing what he’s done with Strange will make people angry, maybe enough to remove him from power, but it won’t stop HYDRA.”

“And we can’t prove HYDRA,” Tony finished with a sigh.
“Bingo.”

Tony growled and raised a hand to his arc reactor. It fluttered hot under his hand, and he imagined it reaching out of his chest, singing in a voice Tony couldn’t hear. 

I’m coming. Hold on.

“Did you know he speaks German?” Natasha asked suddenly.

Tony looked at her. “Who? Pierce?”

“No, Strange,” Natasha said. “Mandarin Chinese, too. I researched him a while ago—it’s a habit.”

Tony hummed. He hadn’t known that. But of course he hadn’t. 

“Why do I care so damn much?” Tony wondered, voicing the question Natasha hadn’t asked. “This feels… It doesn’t feel like a job. I’m not going against HYDRA, not really.”

“It’s personal?”

Tony shrugged. “It feels that way. I don’t have any right to that, though.”

Natasha looked out over the clouds, the dawn sending streaks like huge fingers across the sky around them. “Someone needs to,” she said quietly. “Someone needs to burst into those frozen stone walls and say ‘I’m not here for the fate of the world, I’m here for you.’ Because maybe Strange was thinking of the fate of the world at the beginning, but he isn’t anymore.

“No one would be, anymore.”
Tony watched time pass backwards beneath them, and when the clouds parted, he saw mountains. He could already feel the cold, the adrenaline of a disguise, the ill-fitting duty to torture a man that he’d have to pretend belonged to him. 

“You had better get me that jumpsuit,” was the only reply Tony had to Natasha’s words. “If I have to do this like A New Hope, so be it; I am a little short for a Stormtrooper.”

It was freezing outside the compound. 

Tony rubbed the bracelet on his wrist, heavier with the simple robotics he’d outfitted it with. He thumbed the button that would summon his suit. It would fit over the warm uniform he now wore. Not comfortably, but he’d manage. 

He peered around the edge of the wall into the snow as Steve ducked into the alcove next to him. He wiped his brow with his hand. Snow dusted his eyebrows.

“Natasha?” Tony asked quietly. JARVIS was looping the surveillance around them, but they still didn’t have long. 

“Back on the jet,” Steve replied. He propped the unconscious guard against the wall, pulling a hat down over his head to hide his face. He’d been smoking out here when Steve had jumped him; hopefully that would buy them a little more time. 

“How’s your distance?”

“After they get systems back online, we’ll be seven minutes out,” Steve replied.

Tony winced. “That far?”

“You saw how hard JARVIS had to work just to get us close. The radar is very specific—HYDRA specific. You’ll have to be careful.”

“I will do my best not to die,” Tony replied. He folded the visor of his guard’s helmet over his face. It felt strange when the glass didn’t immediately light up with data; Tony felt like he was looking at a dead computer screen. He wrinkled his nose.

“How do you people live like this?” he grumbled. The helmet didn’t fully cover his face and ears, so it didn’t muffle his voice. “You can’t even get an infrared display.”

“You’re spoiled. I could still go with you, you know.”

It was a real offer, but there was hardly a real expectation behind it. They both knew that was too many layers of risk to something that was already practically a coin toss, and the only person more recognizable to HYDRA soldiers than Steve Rogers was probably Hitler.  

“Come on, trust me,” Tony said, punching Steve on the shoulder. “I’ll get this done. You just be ready to keep things from spiraling into chaos afterwards.” 

Steve glanced around again, tracking the pace of the rotations around the walls. Tony’s targets were nearing the interior gates. This edge of the compound faced a towering cliff, ice dropping off like it had been sliced away. The quinjet waited for Steve beyond it, efficiently working to obscure Tony’s entry. 

“I’m worried,” Steve said, every muscle tensed as if to leap into battle. “Without the suit…”

“I have the suit.” Tony raised his wrist. The bracelet blinked beneath the heavy cover of his black coat sleeve. “Thirty seconds at worst. And we’re wasting time.”

“Yes, fine. Are you ready?”

Tony nodded. He would need to merge with the guard patrol as they entered into the interior courtyard of the compound. They moved quick. Tony didn’t blame them; this outdoor shift was miserable. Once inside the main building, he’d be reliant on his earpiece to communicate with the quinjet in a worst-case scenario.

“Let’s go,” he said, and ducked around the corner. 

He understood the shape of the visor and helmet instantly as he turned into the wind. He ducked his head, hissing, and began to move. In his ear, Steve wished him good luck and retreated. 

Tony’s blood buzzed. He could practically hear the firewalls dragging JARVIS back into conventional webspace, leaving Tony alone and exposed. 

Tense, Tony trotted to fold into the rest of the soldiers. The cold, thankfully, kept any of them from trying to speak to him. He mimed a cigarette at their questioning looks and got a few eyerolls in return. 

No one looked too closely at him—indeed, at any of the guards—as they moved inside the outer walls. Tony looked up from under his lowered helmet. The structure looked old, its blocky stone architecture no doubt originally intended for military purposes. It wasn’t that far off now. Every edge reeked of weaponry and trigger boredom and danger. 

Tony swallowed, tracking his footprints in the snow. The courtyard was muddy from so many pathways, and it sloped up to the compound proper in its heart. Tony could see the sloping walls, and knew this place reached far, far beneath his feet. No light. No sun. 

Tony crossed the space in a neat line with his not-quite-fellows, surreptitiously taking stock of the supplies his outfit provided. He had no shortage of weapons, and the uniform was well-insulated against the cold. But what settled Tony’s nervous thoughts was the ID card he felt pressed against his left breast. He pulled it free as he approached the door, miming a fidget as he checked the name. 

Sydney Evin. Lame. Steve really couldn’t have picked him a better alter-ego? 

As if his joking thought had summoned him, Tony’s earpiece crackled. 

“We’re pulling back,” Steve told him. He was breathing hard from his plunge through empty air to the quinjet. “You’re on your own.”

I’ll be fine, Tony thought back. Just work on pulling every ounce of HYDRA evidence from this place as you can. 

Straightening his shoulders and trusting lights to scan green, Tony stepped through the doors. 

Being a guard, it turned out, was boring as shit. 

Tony sighed, straightening his weapon on his shoulder. A proper gun felt unwieldy now—not that Tony had ever been good with a gun to begin with. Sydney must be, though. His gloves were worn in all the right places.

For a bunch of HYDRA goons in a creepy mountain fortress, the guards certainly didn’t get up to much. They rotated and patrolled, but the rounds were based on level. Tony found himself stuck on the ground floor for what felt like hours, watching nothing at all happen across a hall containing nothing at all.

By the time Tony had located and slipped away to the nearest bathroom, he was buzzing with apprehension. So little was happening. They couldn’t possibly have the wrong HYDRA base, could they? Where was List? What were any of them doing? Had Tony simply not ventured far enough into this silvery maze of sinister intents and henchmen to see it?

And where, for the love of all the explanations Tony didn’t have, was Strange?

He gripped the edges of the ceramic sink, taking a breath and resisting the urge to raise his helmet. Reaching for the faucet, Tony let the fingers of his left hand brush the tech concealed within his cuff. He felt the hiss of it powering up. 

In the mirror, he searched for a gap or inconsistency in the room. For a terrifying moment, he saw nothing. Then his eyes settled on a shadow cast from a well-concealed air vent. It was small—no more than eight inches on each side, and just barely raised from the wall—but it was all Tony needed. He ducked into one of the stalls and let his small probe whir to life.

Tony cooed quietly to it as it flexed its tiny appendages. He couldn’t help himself. This was a bathroom; whatever poor bastard was responsible for monitoring security footage here wouldn’t be dealing with sound. The drone was sleek and quick and it stuck to the shadows when it moved. Tony had modified a SHIELD device to create it. 

What do you know, Tony thought with amusement as the machine disappeared into the vent. Fury was useful after all. 

He left before his lingering could become suspicious, waiting for information to reach him. He heard Bruce’s humming before he heard his voice. 

“Alright, we’re getting visuals over here.”

Tony didn’t react, keeping pace with the patrols of guards that passed around him. He listened to Bruce parse through the flow of data from the drone. It should be sketching a more accurate map of the place, giving Tony a place to start looking, but it was written in ‘revolutionary tech genius’. What could Tony say, he’d been pressed for time. 

“Third level,” Bruce said finally. “There are only a few rooms down there, but the signatures and spread of people seems to revolve around them. A focus point.” 

Tony clamped down on his urge to respond with affirmation. His team was trusting his silence. 

Bruce relayed what he could of the drone’s directions, telling Tony enemy counts and activity. The more he spoke, the more confusion leached into his voice. 

“This is… weird. I don’t know what it means, but there’s nothing happening. It’s like all the scanners and researchers are taking the day off.” 

Tony glanced around, noting the way the guards moved. The lights were bright on the first level. The cold of the mountains still penetrated the walls. Tony could see doors locked tight. No one but the few circling soldiers were in the hallways. Maybe that would make sense for a military facility, but this place was more than that—or should be. 

His unease boiled into something that felt significantly like dread. 

Was he too late? Could he have failed by weeks, by days?

Tony bit his lip and refocused. His heartbeat its scattered rhythm against the inset of his arc reactor, his breath held for too long. Tony counted to five and wished he could see the glow in his chest. 

He skirted through the hall, risking falling out of synch with the other guards. His footsteps were far too loud in the long concrete halls. The constant brightness from the stretching lines of incandescent lightbulbs made him feel exposed, a traveler beneath a searchlight. Tony swallowed and sped his steps. 

Come on Bruce. A stairwell. I need a stairwell.

He tried to remember what he’d seen of the hacked floorplan. The warren of halls blurred his sense of direction, but he could recall the vague structure of the underground space. He remembered thinking how much it looked like a cave-in. 

Tony’s search drew him past a few pairs of soldiers. He kept his head down, avoiding their suspicious looks. The air was growing staticy in his mouth. Tension clicked in the back of his skull. But he was getting closer, Bruce’s voice in his ear assured that—   

“You there!”

Tony froze. The voice came sharply from behind him, and he turned. The wall beside him reflected the movement, and he realized he was beside a row of darkened windows. 

“Yes, sir?” Tony said, his expression flat. 

“You aren’t cleared to be here. This area has been secured to all routes.” 

Here was someone without a guard’s uniform—though the man still carried a weapon and a key-card at his side. He had no helmet. A coat with a patch of red and black drew Tony’s eye, but he forced himself to watch the man’s face instead. He had calculation in his eyes: the spring-coiled look of authority. 

“Ah,” Tony said, swallowing hard. “I was curious, is all.”

“Curious of what?” the man snorted. “You won’t catch a glimpse of it. This place is locked down until we receive the order to re-enter testing phases.”

Tony glanced at the windows again, suddenly understanding. There were lights on behind them. Tony could see, just vaguely, the room the windows looked over if he squinted. It was huge. Empty but for a single light glowing blue on a table far below, the room echoed with a shadow all its own. Tony knew a laboratory when he saw one.  

No, laboratory was too kind a word. Tony clenched a fist, his hand itching to reach for the bracelet that would summon his suit. 

“I know,” Tony said, trying to sound sheepish. “It’s just…”

“Just a breach of your contract and a step out of your place?” the officer snapped. 

“Yes, sir.”

“Come on. Get back to your post and maybe I won’t report you for this.”

Tony lowered his head in what he hoped looked like obedience, sliding over to the officer. The man raised his chin with a dismissive sniff as Tony past. A mistake.

Tony moved quickly, instinct driving the cut of his hand. He struck up. It was a skilled movement, one that had come second-nature after practice, but the officer had his own instincts. He stepped aside, barking in surprise. He caught Tony’s wrists, fingers curling tight enough to bruise. Tony hissed, yanking back. 

The officer used his momentum to throw Tony against the far wall. He connected with nauseating force, his helmet the only thing preventing more damage than he could afford. Tony’s head pounded—he could feel blood dripping down his ear from where the helmet strap had caught on his communicator. 

The guard yelled something Tony’s ringing ears didn’t catch, and he raised his wrist to his mouth. Sounding the alert. 

No. Tony lunged again. This time, he was faster than his opponent. The heel of his hand slammed into the base of the officer’s chin, snapping his head back. The man crumpled. 

Tony panted, standing above him, shoulders trembling with tension. His head swam. The whole thing had taken less than five seconds. 

The sprawled guard groaned. Tony shook his head, raised the butt of his gun, and slammed the man into unconsciousness with definitive force. 

Then he raised his hand to his ear. It stung. His hand came away slick with blood—and something else. 

A sparking smear of silver metal.

Shit. He’d lost the Avengers, he’d lost his map—he was flying blind. 

Tony shook himself back into focus. He needed to move. He’d just started his own self-destruct timer, and it was time to improvise. 

Tony didn’t bother pausing to drag the unconscious man out of the hall. He just ripped the key-card from his belt, turned away from the light behind the laboratory windows, and ran as the alarms began to blare.

The door screeched when it closed behind Tony.

Tony shouldn’t have been able to hear it, not with the screeching of the alert on the upper floors. Somehow though, as the door closed behind him, everything dulled. It was s if sound was simply not welcome here. Not allowed. The concrete walls had turned to chiseled stone, and the barred lightbulbs became round ones. Shadows fell strangely, stretching the wrong way, almost as if they weren’t cast by those bulbs. 

Tony lifted his hand from the door. His fingers tingled, the blood on his skin cold enough to numb them. Long black stripes painted the floor of the corridor, drawn around corners with no discernable purpose. They made Tony’s skin crawl. 

He moved carefully down the hallway, counting his breaths. Each of his steps sounded thunderous in the empty, lifeless silence. 

He had to hurry. And he had to kill time, time until the suit got here. If it got here. 

Tony had never doubted is calculations before.

The door from the stairwell had been locked. Every keypad along the hall flashed red, and the further Tony went, the more complex the locks became. The ceiling seemed to fall lower. Tony resisted the urge to raise his hands over his head to protect him from the weight. 

He wiped at his ear again, fidgety with nerves as he followed the curve of the hall and dreaded what he’d find. At the end of the space, he thought he could make out glass. Dark glass, blackened by the reflection of a floor and ceiling that was utterly soaked in paint. 

It bled out across the corridor, like pigment splattered within the very stone. Tony had just long enough for his eyes to go wide—

Before every light in the hall went dark. 

“Shit!” Tony hissed. The sound escaped before he could strangle, his sight dampened completely. It was an unnatural dark, a dark so utterly impenetrable Tony was, for a moment, weightless. He expected to see unfamiliar stars in its clutches. He expected to see a wormhole’s sparks behind him—

No. 

No. 

Tony reached out, grounding himself on the glass he felt beneath his hands when he stumbled forward. It was cold. No, that was his own skin that was freezing. He had to focus, he had to notice. 

Tony’s breaths hitched, and he counted to five. One hand lifted to splay across the front of his chest as he turned. 

He felt the barest echo of movement against his forearm. 

Tony grabbed it on instinct. He caught the texture of fabric and the warmth of feverish skin. A noise clawed out into the space around him. 

Tony didn’t realize it was a voice. He couldn’t reconcile that sound with those of a person: the axiomatic demand behind it, the too-human grief. Tony’s wrist flashed with pain as something tore from his grip, and he stumbled back from the force of it. 

Footsteps in the dark. His own blood still coating his hand. Time, slipping by—his chance, slipping away.

“Wait!”

Tony closed his eyes. The dark behind them was more familiar than the swallowing empty around him. He took a step away from the wall. Hands raised, he tried to keep his panic from seeping into his voice. 

“Wait,” he said again. “I’m—you know me. I’m here to help you. I’m Tony Stark.”

Silence. Tony slowly raised his hands to lift the helmet from his head. 

He tried not to think about how wrong the quiet felt, in a way he couldn’t explain. There should be sound, should be something. 

(He knew, to the right of his heart, that he’d expected not silence, but singing.)

“I’m going to help you get out of here,” Tony said. 

He heard an inhale, almost too quiet to be any kind of breath at all. Eyes still closed, he thought he felt the cold shift. A sliver of light reached beneath his eyelids.

Carefully, Tony cracked an eye open. A shadow stood in front of him, glare written sharply across the negative space of its form. 

Tony swallowed. He felt the cracks in the air around him, the tension in every edge and facet of it. 

“Hi,” he said, because he had nothing else. 

For a long moment, there was only stillness. Then, with a tone like an engine refusing to start, the shadow said, “You’re late.”

Tony’s relief nearly made his knees buckle. “At least I’m not dead. Not for lack of people trying.”

“Alphard sent someone to kill you.”

It was Strange’s voice—Tony could hear the low pitch and sharp words, even though the intonation was nearly unrecognizable. There was no melody to it. No song anymore.

Tony rubbed his side where his wound was still healing and winced. “Yeah. And he very nearly succeeded.”

He could see Strange sway toward him, see the way he listened with such intensity to Tony’s words. Tony wanted to reach out. The effort of keeping his hands to his sides was almost painful.

(His was the first clear voice Strange had heard in many, many months now, after all. It was the first ray of clarity between storm clouds. So easy to forget. So intense to remember.) 

“Why are you here?”

“What?”

“Why?” Strange repeated. The lights flickered, returning to their original brightness. And Tony could see, then, everything that had happened in these months. Everything, written into the skin of this doctor, this creature. 

“You should have been faster,” Strange said.

“I know.” Tony’s voice left him. 

Strange didn’t look away, head cocked as if listening, stance set with equal parts strain and exhaustion. Tony could see the countdown in his eyes. It snapped him back into the mission, and he nodded and stepped forward.

“Will you come with me?” he asked. He would give Strange no orders, no ultimatums—not right now. Not here. 

The dark turned cleaner, somehow, when Strange jerked his chin in a nod. His steps made no noise in the hallway when he moved. It was as if this place swallowed even that. When he crossed the black stripes, his footprints glowed green for a few seconds. Tony tried not to stare. 

 “I knocked a supervisor out upstairs,” Tony said. Not a demand, just information. “The compound will know where we are.”

Strange nodded, glancing down at the colors on the floor. He blinked once, and the black disappeared. “They’re not prepared for us yet.”

“Should I ask how you know that?”

Strange didn’t look back at him, and Tony was careful to let him lead the way to the far door. His loping gait became more even and relaxed the further they moved from the room—the cage. 

“They’re staying away from this side of the compound after what I did to List,” Strange said. “It’s easier to stop me when I get out of the cell that way.”

Tony blinked. “You’ve gotten—”

“Out? Many times. It’s how far that’s the experiment. How many soldiers needed, where to place them. How far they can push me. It’s always an experiment.” A sharp-edged, haunted note of satisfaction touched Strange’s voice when he added, “but they miscalculated.”

Tony could still hear the faraway sound of alarms, the tension in his muscles humming to the same rhythm. Not one of the devices made a noise on this level.

Unusual , Tony started to think. Then he glanced at Strange and found the man looking back, eyes just a little brighter than they’d been before. 

Tony stopped being surprised.

The countdown in his head chimed a warning, mirrored by the bracelet on his wrist. He refocused. “I’d suggest moving out of the way,” he said.

Strange cocked his head. “What?”

Tony couldn’t contain the hint of smugness in his smile when the crash broke through the doors at the end of the hall, shattering the lock that might’ve kept them here. He raised his hand. Metal slammed against it, enveloping it. A familiar weight, a known weapon, a certainty. His gauntlet expanded in a spidering canvas of red and gold. It crept, something alive and seeking, toward the pulsing power of his arc reactor. 

Tony rolled his neck, stepping into the embrace of the rest of the suit—and it sealed around him with the ring of unmistakable, unavoidable confidence. Warmth tickled his throat. Vulnerability turned to protectiveness. He was a weapon again, had his wings again.

“So dramatic.”

Tony paused. He turned to glare at Strange, who watched him beneath raised eyebrows. “Really? I go full Iron Man and you’re gonna call me a diva?”

“I can call you whatever I want. I’m sure you’d find some way to make it accurate.”

Strange reached out, his hand hoving a few inches from the shoulder of the suit. The metal glowed where his shadow fell across it. Something bright flickered in his eyes. His expression relaxed, minisculely, and Tony felt almost reassured when a hum broke the quiet between them.

It was a quick tune, maybe three notes. Strange hummed, and it felt so familiar Tony swore he could place it, if he had just another moment. Three notes—

And then violently, almost brutally, Strange cut himself off.

Tony nearly stumbled. Strange didn’t seem to notice; his eyes had shuttered again, turned to flint in the muffled dark. He turned. 

“Strange,” Tony said. “Maybe you should let me—”

“I can give us time.” 

There wasn’t a sliver of doubt in the declaration. It was as complete and final as the blackness had been, and Tony’s repulsors still seemed so bright down here. Strange rolled his shoulders back, fingers flexing. It was a practiced motion. A vein of green light crept down beneath his collar, tracing the shape of an eye. 

Tony felt the tremor of instability on his tongue. It tasted like lightning. 

“Does that scare you, Stark?”

Tony looked back at Strange, hesitating too long. Then he pushed past toward the stairwell and said, “I came all the way here; you might as well call me Tony.”

When he was free of this place, hours and days and years free, Stephen would wonder what the point was.

All the questions that never mattered seemed so glaring, later. The withdrawal from adrenaline gave way to ideas—to curiosity that was a luxury of those who were safe. Reasons that were never relevant became essential. But it was all so inconsequential now. Like the opening scene of a mystery, Stephen didn’t wonder what conclusion these months had determined until he reached the last pages. 

He didn’t care about what had been decided of his soul until it belonged to him again.

Why would he?

What made up a soul? What parts built it up from sparks of thought and spidering neurons and shadows of emotion into a spirit, a self? Could it be offered, freely? Could it be taken, forcefully? 

Music could be rearranged; silver could look gold with the right light. Anything could look gold with the right light. Anything could sound like hope with the right desperation. 

Anything at all. 

When he was free of this place, Stephen would wonder why anyone had cared so damn much about what hope sounded like. They’d hoarded explanations like jealous dragons. They’d coveted answers like crusaders. Why did humans yearn so deeply for control, looking at something unknown and wishing, needing to pick it apart until its mysteries were nothing more than the dust of what had once been magic?

What would they do with it all, anyway? Stephen should’ve told them they were already creatures of time. They were already beings of mind, shaped and struggling and flying. 

They did not need to be infinite, too.

“Wait.”

Tony Stark stopped, his impossible armor a second skin across the uniform he’d stolen. Perhaps killed for. Stephen felt next to nothing at the prospect, the parts of him not overstretched and underextended still too tentatively testing the possibility of hope. 

There was a hole in the wall. It blew frozen air into the stairwell, a simple, cosmic breach in the skeleton of a mountain. Stark reached out to it. He looked tense—or maybe that was how he sounded, in his strange and beautiful music. Tense, nervous, anticipatory. The danger of this place was new to him, Stephen had to remember; Stark still cared about the sound of those alarms. 

Wait.

Stephen couldn’t look directly at the broken wall. He couldn’t let himself glimpse what might be sunlight, what might be freedom, and still expect himself to continue up these stairs. 

“Wait for what?” Tony prompted. His voice sounded metallic beneath the suit’s helmet. And wasn’t that just wondrous? Stephen could hear his voice clear enough to realize it was being modified. 

“There’s something you’re forgetting,” Stephen said. 

“Yeah, the fifty-something armed guards swarming toward us and the fact that my team is still twenty minutes out, even if they’re psychically able to sense I’ve done something stupid,” Tony said tightly. His gauntlet was shining in what had to be the sun, the sky, the universe, so close so—

“SHIELD still has the scepter.” Stephen jerked his chin up the stairs. He held himself in place by force. 

A tremor whispered through Tony’s song, a catch of something that was mirrored in his stance. “You still think—right, why wouldn’t you? Strange, these guys ain’t SHIELD. I swear to you, if they were, I would never have—they aren’t SHIELD.”

In the very limited space that remained to Stephen for caring , he couldn’t find any sort of emotional weight to that. It seemed important to Tony, though. He decided to remember it, at least for that reason.

“Regardless,” Stephen said, walking stiffly up the stairwell toward the second floor, hand on the wall. He could see the clawed paint from the route he usually took. “They have the thoughtsong.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not here for the scepter, I’m here for you,” Tony said. 

Stephen’s hand curled into his chest. 

“It doesn’t want to be here either.” He concentrated on keeping the words clear, despite the rising songs. “It shouldn’t be here, either.”

“The scepter.” Stephen could hear the eyebrow raise in Stark’s voice, and it almost made him roll his eyes. 

“Yes, that is the subject of our current time-wasting discussion,” Stephen said. He kept walking up the stairs, knowing Tony would either be forced to start yelling, let him out into the hostile upper levels alone, or follow. 

“What do you think you’re going to do?” Stark demanded, catching up. He didn’t reach out to touch Stephen. 

“Go to the petri dish,” Stephen replied matter-of-factly. “It’s where they had the scepter locked up the last time.”

The last time. 

No.

He would not think of that, not now. Not when he was certain Stark would be able to taste his weakness in the frigid air between them. 

Stephen listened, seeking out the sounds of the nearest guards. Close enough to fire. Close enough to be waiting. Stephen dispassionately reached out to the door handle anyway. 

“It’s a stick!” Tony protested. “A glorified flag pole— shit!”

He raised his gauntleted hands when the door opened, blasting the two guards backward just as they hollered out an order Stephen didn’t hear. One of the thumps might’ve been a gunshot. Stephen blinked, reaching out to the timesong, and flicked this small portion of it to a stall. 

Bullets looked so small, suspended like this. Stephen looked at the metal, inches from his shoulder. Not aimed to kill, never to kill.

That would break the suspension, after all. 

He reached out and flicked the thing away, then continued across the hall to the familiar windows. “It’s not just a stick. It’s the single most powerful artifact on this Earth, now that you’ve taken the spacesong from its surface.”

“That doesn’t mean we aren’t presently wasting our window of escape.”

Stephen pressed his hands against the windows, flat and aching. The glass burned. Stephen forced himself not to flinch away as he looked into the lab beneath, as cold and sharp as the last time he’d seen it. 

There was still blood on the floor. 

A thunder of footsteps reached them from the second floor, and Tony cursed. He ducked away from where he’d been peering around the corner of the petri-dish. Artificial light danced on the surface of his armor. 

“Get us in,” Stephen said, jerking his chin to the window.

There was no reply. Stephen realized, as voices swam more into focus around him, that his voice had been lost within yelling. He gritted his teeth and turned. The butt of a gun swung for his forehead, and he reached out to its song— 

Blue energy knocked the weapon aside before he got the chance. Stark stepped in front of him, too close; trying to move Stephen back toward the stairway. 

Toward the sun.

But he could still hear honey and thoughts. His kin, his harmony. So he pressed back against Stark and yelled, again, louder: “Get us through those windows!”

Tony shot another guard, his repulsors flashing. “You aren’t going to let this go, are you?”

“It doesn’t deserve to be trapped here either,” Stephen replied.

“I’m going to regret this,” Tony grumbled, somehow audible over the haze of songs. He tore himself away from his opponents. For the bare instant he focused his repulsors on the reinforced windows, Stephen was exposed.

He didn’t need to count the soldiers. The volume of their songs and the way their shadows crowded the corridor was familiar—was so often the last thing he saw before waking up in his cell with a drugged taste on his tongue. The muzzles of weapons trained on him, drawing his focus. Guards fanned out, moving to surround the two of them. Stephen couldn’t sing every song at once, after all. All they had to do was overwhelm him. 

He raised his hand against the crack of gunshots, pushing back all that he could. Something reached for the back of his neck. He spun, dodging back, following the edges of the music. A stranger’s voice hissed an insult. 

Another wave of cracks split the air. Glass broke. Notes tangled. A sharp pain burst through his lower leg. 

“Go!” yelled Tony, the clarity of his voice a beacon. 

Stephen dived sideways, shards of glass sliding beneath his feet. He curled in anticipation of striking the ground. Tony caught his wrist before he could, softening the landing into something merely jarring. 

Tony stood, hands already raised again. “Alright doc, this was your brilliant plan—” A bullet pinged into the side of his helmet, making his words stutter— “so get to it!”

Stephen pulled himself to his feet, hissing as his leg protested the weight. He half expected to find List glaring down at him when he raised his head. The bloody absence of him was enough to—

Not. Now.

“Friendly reminder that I am not a one-man army!” Tony yelled over another spray of shots.

Stephen curled his fists and listened. A wave of spirit songs reached him—guards and officers, converging on the lab, ready to drown them. More than Stephen had ever heard in one place in the compound before. But this was as close as he’d ever got to freedom.

The two were proportional, it seemed. 

Beyond the stampeding enemy, Stephen could hear the scepter. He pinpointed it, stumbling across the lab toward the lilting melody. Tony kept close to cover him. 

He made it not six steps before the doors banged open across from them. Stephen’s heart jumped, and he ducked on instinct. A tiny half dozen metal splinters struck the ground beside his feet. 

Ah. So now they didn’t have to worry about killing him. 

Tony sent a laser across the doorway. “Darts, I hate darts,” he panted. His voice was strained with pain. One of the vambraces of his suit was dented and cracked—Stephen couldn’t help but diagnose the damage it would do to the arm within. “No class.”

“And bullets are classier?”

“At least that way you’re dead. Way less exhausting end result.”

Stephen opened his mouth to respond as they raced forward. But behind Tony’s words, figures flooded into the lab. Their empty visors looked like Stephen’s own shadow. So many long weeks of grasping, gun-barrel fingers chaining him in place splashed across the floor when they ran forward. 

Stephen ran, and he wished. He wanted them dead, he wanted to be far from here, he wanted to be nowhere at all. He wanted to take time by its edges and turn it back and back and back until he’d never heard the dawn. 

Until he’d never heard anything.

The curious thoughtsong dragged him forward, Tony’s unusual melody protecting him from behind. Stephen set his shoulders against the memories of pain and ran. 

The thoughtsong rose like a question as he fumbled with the lid of the heavy silver case in the corner of the room. It muffled the music only slightly—like the SHIELD tech on the quinjet when Stephen had first doomed himself to this. 

The hinges clicked, the lid clanged open, and Stephen’s injured leg sent a spasm of pain up his side that nearly buckled his other knee. Tony laced an arm around him, barking another curse as the crack of a projectile knocked his shoulder plate free. The metallic touch still made Stephen flinch despite himself.

“Go go go!” Tony said, voice strained. “There’s only so many— aaa!” 

Stephen reached for the case again. The disassembled parts of the scepter glinted at him. The blue jeweled centerpiece whispered of consciousness, and it was stained with dark. Blood. 

Stephen froze.

His head was aching, his bruises fresh, his thoughts scraped empty from these last hours in the petri-dish, and List’s green-written words scrolled across the one-way glass, laughing at him from behind an impenetrable wall of Stephen’s own conscience, Stephen’s own arbitrary morality; as corn-yellow blood dripped down his chin and sprayed across his front and Stephen betrayed his secrets and then his music and then his promises and then himself—

“Doc. Stephen!” 

Stephen coughed, his hands splaying on the table as flight and engine gears pulled him into his body. A gunshot broke the air like the crack of his heartbeat restarting. 

He moved to grab the case, but a bullet slammed against the interior lid before he could. It sent the object spinning. The shards of the scepter scattered as the case clattered to the floor, the thoughtsong rolling across the burned, bloodstained, spotless floor. 

It stopped against a guard’s boot. A gloved hand reached down to snatch it, just one of a wall of enemies, impersonal as the complex around them. 

“Don’t!” Stephen yelled. It sounded more frantic than angry. 

Weapons bristled, projectiles zinging back and forth above his head like thousands of sparrows. He turned, for an instant, toward Tony. The man’s hands flashed out in wide arcs, trying to clear himself enough space to take off. No. Trying to keep their blows from landing on Stephen. 

He was failing. There were simply too many angles, too many shots. Too many.  

Stephen had heard the deathsong enough in these weeks. Stephen had heard the deathsong enough for a lifetime. He would not listen to it dissolve the one-of-a-kind melody beside him. Not now, not ever. 

It was never supposed to happen like this—but Stephen would make sure it didn’t end like this. 

He took a breath, the thoughtsong reverberating around his mind. Then he turned, shielding his face uselessly against the hail of blows and biting his lip against the pain in his leg, and sang, ‘here’. 

He hadn’t changed notes like this since his first days in the compound. But it was as natural as always, as natural as a curious boy reaching for a friendly soul. 

A blink passed. Then the gemstone was between Stephen’s hands. For a moment, the world was numb. 

And then it all started to burn.

Tony was going to have to make a list, when he got out of this—if he got out of this. It would be a very thorough and detailed account of ‘Times I Should Have Listened to Natasha Romanoff.’

Adrenaline ran hot in Tony’s veins as he fought, barely keeping his frustration abated. His instincts roared to kick the suit into motion; to fly, to gain mobility against a hail of shots, to do what his armor was designed to do. He could see a strategy that might keep him alive. 

But not one that would save the man behind him. 

He called out, unable to do so much as turn without risking exposing Stephen to the soldiers. He wasn’t even sure what the words were. Perhaps an order. Perhaps a name. Perhaps he simply hissed anger and determination and resignation into the air around them, ears reverberating with the sound of gunshots. 

It took him too long to hear it. The shift in the battle sounds around them—a bone-deep ringing taking root.

Tony’s suit seemed to freeze beneath the sound. It made him gasp, searing against his skin. His repulsors spluttered out, and so did the guns. One heartbeat at a time, that ringing rose in intensity until Tony could feel nothing else. 

Someone cried out. He thought it was his own voice, muffled by the helmet, for a moment. Then one of the guards lifted their hands to their ears, desperately clawing at the straps that sank against their skin, and their hands clenched on their weapon.

Tony realized, and in the moment before the ring broke like the crest of a wave, he turned. 

Stephen stood behind him. Or rather, someone did; someone built of offset shapes and colors inked into the transparent air. Hands that seemed somehow too material clutched a star. It glowed. No— that couldn’t even begin to describe the sheer, unrelenting light that poured into the room, as yellow as the heart of the sun, as golden as the first spark of an idea. 

In its shadow, it left green. Tony took a gasping breath as energy crawled upward, a fuse burning, a rubber-band stretching, an alarm clock in its last seconds. 

Then there was nothing but light, nothing but energy, as a force erupted across the space. It sent Tony flying. The soldiers, desperately trying to raise their weapons against something that tasted of infinity, were scattered just as easily. 

A yell ripped out of Tony’s throat. Half terror, half pain, the sound broke off when his body slammed against the wall of the lab. The force cracked through his suit, forcing the plates out of order, their edges slicing through wiring and still, impossibly, freezing. 

Tony crumpled, his vision filled with light, his head filled with sound. He was at the heart of a lightbulb, seeing only brightness and feeling only ice. The right side of his armor was unresponsive, overloaded by energy where it’s wires hadn’t been completely severed from the rest of the matrix. Blood tinged his tongue when he licked his lips. 

It was too much. Too much, too focused, too cold. 

And within it, Tony thought he heard Stephen scream. 

Aching, Tony fought through the pressure of exploding energy and draining thought and raised his hands to shield his face. His right gauntlet fell, dead, from his hand. The sound of it hitting the floor was completely drowned out.

Tony looked into the supernova and lurched to his feet.

“Stop!” he yelled. He didn’t know what use it was—how could anyone hear him over this, this pounding of the universe against all their bones?

 Light streamed through his fingers. He could see the patterns it left against the back of his palm; whorls of gold, sparks of emerald. Heavy, useless armor weighed him down. Tony’s leaden fingers shoved at it, exposing himself as he moved, yet somehow certain there would be no more weapons raised on him. 

No one could. The light promised that, at least.

Another step, another blink against the glow. Lines were resolving, burned into Tony’s eyes; the shape of a fallen gun, the broken edge of a visor, a vaporizing patch of once-dried blood. A figure, his head thrown back and three eyes wide, as green peeled through the skin of what might’ve once been material hands. 

No.

Tony ran, his steps a percussion beat to the music around him. 

(When you find it, I hope you are kind as well as brave.)

Tony reached out and gripped Stephen’s shifting hand in his, heedless of the blood, of the inhuman cold. There was a gasp, and a flicker, and a searing blink within that golden light, and the hand grabbed back. 

When he was a child, Stephen had dreamed of the universe from above. 

He had dreamed of belonging, and he had dreamed of home, and the songs that he’d created had been of two places at once. Fates strung on starry garlands, and footprints in dust and corn stalks. Futures playing catch with dying dimensions, and the dawn’s reflection off skyscraper windows while he stood in the street.

The universe from above sounded like this. 

He’d dreamed of futures and pasts, dreamed up myths and the feathers of dinosaurs. Dreams just as real as he was. Futures just as certain as the histories. He was time ticking endlessly, confined and unconcerned. Thoughts twined their tails around the edges of his consciousness. Words, a familiar language he’d never learned, invited the part of him that was made of music to dance between the breaths of gravity. 

So here is where you have been hiding. 

He’d been looking for a reason to hide. Always, looking, watching, observing. Souls tumbled past eternal eyes that were his and not his, Stephen but not, and he’d wanted to do as they bid. 

The universe sang. It asked him to join it, dragged him to join it.

What need had he to hide, now? What need had he for this body of viscera and matter, when the songs stretched beyond the reach of this world? 

He was, somewhere, aware of cold. Of loneliness and failure, of inhumanity, and why would he ever want to return to that?

Stephen sang, and it sounded like screaming. 

Thought burned beneath his skin, carving it away, exposing him to the core of the universe. Physical form was a barrier and a distraction. He should let it all turn to atoms, follow Mind up into the symphony of the universe. But he… 

He’d needed a body. He’d needed a soul. He still did.

Why?

Time remembered a future and a past and a promise. He’d needed a body—

And now, he couldn’t get back to it. Now he was Stephen Strange, timesong, and he’d been alone for so long, so long. Mind sang of space, and Space sang of Soul, and they swore he’d never be alone, never have to care who he sang for, never have to fear silence. 

He was never going to hurt again. And in exchange, he would know everything. He would be once more a weapon. 

No. 

The universe called to him. The universe called, and he’d come to Earth anyway. He’d needed to be human , he’d needed the sky and the world because something was coming, something that would end every song and silence every star. He’d needed Stephen Strange. 

Stephen Strange was not a lab rat, not a weapon. From the very first time he’d heard the sunrise, he’d been a healer. 

Time turned away from the shimmer of omniscience, and felt a hand in his. 

When the light dimmed, Tony’s eyes were bleached with its afterimages. He was half metal and half vulnerable, and Stephen sagged against him. A yellow gemstone slipped from his hands. 

They bled. They bled and bled and bled, eviscerated like nothing Tony had seen before. The liquid that dripped between Tony’s fingers as he tried to stop its stubborn escape was the color of jade. 

“Alright,” Tony breathed, his heart beating a jackrabbit rhythm behind his ribs. He didn’t look at the fallen bodies of the guards. These heads of HYDRA weren’t looking back. 

“Time to go.” 

Tony scooped the golden stone from the ground and made for the moonlight. 

Oh. 

Oh, he remembered this feeling. He knew it, an old friend he’d laid luminescent footprints beside, bird bones and cats’ paws. This was agony, wasn’t it?

The snow molded into the negative space around Tony like it was fighting against him when he stumbled through the hole his suit had left in the stairwell. He blinked into the icing-sugar whiteness. Sparks burst against his chest from where his suit was still flickering, trying to recall itself for repairs without anywhere to go. 

He’d lost all but his left gauntlet, chestplate, and half his left hip and leg plates. No time to retrieve the fallen sections; no time for anything but fleeing, the residual sound of that ringing still haunting his ears. But as he struggled against the wind, black and white fighting in equal strength to take over his vision, he wished he’d kept the armor. 

Tony moved slowly, because it was so cold the lenses of his eyes felt like glass and he had a sickening sort of feeling that if he let the snow cover the sun, he’d never find north again.

Stephen’s stumbling form was too warm held against his side. Tony didn’t want to look. He thought he knew what he’d see. 

He thought, ‘please don’t die,’ and moved. 

He kept his steps slow, controlled. His hand was cramping around the yellow gemstone, and he had to force himself to place it in his pocket. The wind covered his footprints as quickly as he made them. What it didn’t cover was the blood. 

Tony hissed, staggering another few steps. His left hand still curled over Stephen’s. The ragged, patterned cuts had stopped bleeding green, at least, but they still pulsed wet and cold when Tony twined the tattered sleeve of his jacket around them. 

“Come on, Strange,” Tony bit out against the cold. “Almost there. Once we’re out of view of the cliff, we can stop. Just hang on.”

He didn’t expect an answer. It almost made him lose the rhythm of his steps when a quiet, shattered voice coughed, “don’t patronize me.”

“You almost went supernova on me, and that’s your first comment?” Tony said, trying to keep his voice light. It still trembled, slightly. He would never lose the memory of that light, that scream. 

He shook his head. Focus. Focus, Stark. “As soon as you can stay lucid for two fucking minutes, I’ll stop,” Tony compromised. He tried not to think about the frozen wetness creeping through his sleeve. 

It was too damn cold. Too cold to think about anything except not freezing solid where he stood. Tony let the very human part of him that knew how not to die take over, and kept moving. 

He tried to time his steps to the uncertain, catch - check rhythm of Stephen’s breathing. He was so aware of it, so laser-focused on the sound of the man drifting further and further from consciousness, that he knew the exact moment it shifted. Not stopped, like he’d been dreading, but—

Evened out. Stopped wheezing through his teeth. Tony hoped that was a good sign, hoped until Stephen slid from his grip, suddenly unmoving. 

“What are you doing?” Tony hissed. “We’re still—we’re still in danger. Come on, Stephen, we need to move.”

Stephen lifted a finger to his lips. He didn’t seem aware that it was slick with blood. “Always so impatient,” he snorted. His voice was still wrecked. “We both know you don’t plan to sleep anyway.”

Tony reached out, carefully, not knowing what to do with the words. Stephen didn’t know anything about him, had nothing to sound so familiar about, and yet…

 “Come on,” Tony said, hesitant. “Just—just this once, don’t try to argue with me, alright?”

“The weather’s going to be nice tomorrow; they got the predictions wrong. You should come with me and Peter.” 

“Who?” The cold froze Tony’s words. 

Stephen wasn’t looking at him. He was looking past him—at some Tony that wasn’t covered in blood and ice and the rubble of an Iron Man suit. His blood had started to glow green again. 

Tony saw his eyes glaze, and hurried to ask, “What’s going to happen tomorrow, then?” Could he keep Stephen at least conscious? 

“You don’t usually want to know,” Stephen said, sounding almost comically confused. It was… terrifying. 

 Tony could damn well say the same. He was itchingly aware of how exposed they were; he needed to get Stephen moving. 

“I do this time.”

Stephen stumbled a couple of steps, and Tony wrapped an arm around him again. He hauled him through the snow. The boulders and frozen trees loomed around them like skeletons fossilized on the surface of the earth. 

Stephen spoke, half-singing, but his voice was inaudible with the wind. Tony could make out the rhythm of it against his ribs. He realized Stephen was speaking to the beat of Tony’s heart. 

By the time they’d collapsed behind the half-cover of the mountain boulders, out of view of the base, he couldn’t feel his fingers. Stephen’s eyes had gone cloudy again. When Tony let go, he folded gently around himself, broken hands fluttering. The roots of a fallen pine warped and extended around them. 

Tensing, Tony waited until they stopped. He remembered the sound of bricks crunching through the metal of guns, and had no desire to get himself speared by an unstable wizard’s animated tree roots. 

Stephen looked up at him. He cocked his head, closing one eye.

“You with me, Strange?” Tony asked softly. 

“How did we…” A slow blink. A wince. Ravaged hands curled into Stephen’s chest. “Yes. Fuck. Yes.”

“Good.” Tony sank down beside him. “The Avengers are coming. They’ll be here in… less than ten minutes.” They had to have heard the alarms, the fight. They wouldn’t let him down here. They couldn’t. 

“Just—don’t do anything to bring the base down on us before then, alright? And please don’t stab me with a tree.”

 “I won’t,” Strange promised. He winced again as he leaned back. When he looked at the blood on his clothes, it was as if it belonged to someone else. He was shivering, finally, as parts of his body seemingly came back online from… whatever that had been.

Tony could’ve sworn he’d seen infinity, just a moment ago, in the light that had saved his life. He’d heard the barest hint of something. And he thought he might understand, now, what he was supposed to be looking for.

“You’ll be okay.” The words sounded weak to Tony’s own ears. “You’ll—you’ll be fixed up soon.”

Stephen didn’t smile, and he didn’t sneer at Tony’s lie, either. He looked down at his hands, his face startlingly blank. 

“You must think—” Stephen began, before his voice died. “You must think I’m—”

“I don’t know what to think,” Tony interrupted him. “All I know is I should’ve fucking been faster. You shouldn’t have been here. I can’t believe SHIELD would let this happen.” 

But he could believe it.

“It’s not your fault,” Stephen told him. He sounded distracted, utterly captivated by the glare of the sunlight off his slick hands. There was blood on his lips. “I didn’t expect anyone to come at all.”

Tony swallowed a lump in his throat that tasted like the sands of Afghanistan and couldn’t hold Stephen’s eyes. 

Stephen blew out a breath. He leaned against the cushion of tree roots he’d created, and his eyes fluttered. Leaves pressed into the frozen ground beneath him, colorless and frostbitten. He was pale, even in the snow. It was red in splatters around him.

“Ten minutes,” Tony told him again. There was a franticness to his words he couldn’t contain. “I didn’t come all the way to the fucking Himalayas to have you die here. Talk to me. Sing. Something.”

He knew, instantly, that he’d said something wrong. Stephen’s form locked down. Even the exhaustion slid off his face; Tony was looking at a statue, at a sketch in a lab file, and it made his chest cave in. 

“You don’t want that,” Stephen said emptilly. 

“What?”

“For me to sing. You don’t know what I’ll do, and it should scare you. It scared you before.”

Tony heard the edges of the words, the shadow. He heard four months of torture and experimentation and trained rules, so many rules. The ones that kept you alive, the ones that kept the parts of yourself that mattered most somewhere protected. Don’t provoke them. Don’t lie. Don’t show care. 

‘It should scare you.’

Tony’s words flopped in his tongue. But he had to say something—he had to make Stephen understand. 

“No. No, I’m not scared, and I’m not—I’m not curious, not like that. I just don’t understand what you can do. I don’t understand why they brought you here, why they thought you could be dangerous. I’m not scared, just confused.” 

Tired eyes looked up at him. There was a swath of colors behind them, not all of them of Earth. Not all of them human. 

Tony thought about bullets stopping mid-air. He thought about darkness and colored walls, about green patterns and weaponized tree branches and the endless, unquantifiable weight of time. And he found it was true. 

He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t scared at all. 

“Can you explain it to me?” Tony asked quietly, as if the snow wasn’t drowning them, as if the compound wasn’t crumbling on the peak of the cliff. As if the space between them wasn’t painted with blood. 

Slowly, achingly, Stephen sat up. “I’ve… I haven’t told anyone in a long time.”

“Try?”

There was a moment, pinned in the cold, that Tony thought he’d gone too far. That he’d stepped beyond his place in his universe, his place as an ally. The chasm of events between now and the moment Tony had taken a gamble to bring Stephen to the helicarrier stretched between them. It was almost a condemnation. 

But then Stephen nodded. His blood streaked through the frost-covered ground as he lifted a frozen, half-decayed aspen leaf into his mutilated fingers.

“I hear things,” Stephen said, so quietly Tony almost missed it. “I hear everything—the sky and the ground and the snow and the souls of people, and it sounds like music. I can’t describe it, not really. It’s like trying to tell someone who cannot feel about texture.”

“Music,” Tony repeated. Of course. It made sense, in an infinite sort of way, after everything.

“The songs of the world,” Stephen said, voice faraway. “All of them are beautiful, but some… some are fundamental. Axioms of the symphony, you could say.”

“Axioms? Like what?”

“Like thought,” Stephen said. “The scepter—it holds the song of thought. And the Tesseract sounds like the very embodiment of space. They called me to them, back in… May.” 

His voice faltered on the word, and Tony understood. He nodded, remembering. In the back of his mind, he counted seconds, praying the others got here early. “You told us you needed to see the ‘instruments’. Why did you call them that?”

“Because they’re like tools for people who can’t hear the music. Letting you… change it, I suppose, if you have the skill for it. The universe creates them so that normal—so that people who aren’t like me can sing.”  

“But you can sing without them.”

“Yes,” Stephen said, with that stained-glass smile again. “I can.”

And like a bird fluttering to life, the aspen leaf lifted into the air between them. 

It spun, idly, between the gusts of wind and the bars of moonlight that fought through the clouds. Tony felt himself reach out. Only one of his hands was still gauntleted, and the leaf cast a reflection on it. 

“And I have an axiom of my own, too,” Stephen said. 

The scars on his hands flashed green. Tony could almost imagine sounds, notes pouring into the space between them, illuminating the snow in resonance and echoing in a rough and bloodsoaked voice. Just offset from the physical silence, the aspen leaf began to stitch itself back together. It’s decayed edges furled back into place, crackled and dried instead. Then the brown gave way to the yellow of new autumn. Like time spooling back. 

Tony’s eyes widened. A healthy green leaf hovered in the space above his hands, bright against the snow. 

Stephen’s scars were highlighted in emerald, patterns of runes creeping into the ground around him. Lines of power stitched the design of an eye into his forehead. He looked like filigree. Like he was some impossible spirit, red soul streaked green on skin as pale as the snow. 

Tony caught the leaf when it fell, as the sound of a quinjet’s engine reached his ears.

He knew. For the first time since the Expo, he knew what he was supposed to do.

(In the corner of his eye, his arc reactor looked like a bird spreading its wings.) 

Wong believed wholly in coincidences. 

The multiverse was vast, and probability was so incomprehensibly numerous that ‘odds’ had no meaning to him, anymore. How could they? When you had infinite rolls of the dice, what did probability really matter? 

Wong believed in coincidences—at least until the Ancient One got involved. 

So he wasn’t surprised when the woman the two of them knocked over on the way out to the Ancient One’s favorite street market introduced herself frazzledly as ‘Doctor Christine Palmer, and do either of you happen to know where I can find Stark Industries KTM?’. Intrigued, maybe, but not surprised. He simply glanced at the Ancient One, raised an eyebrow at her slight smile, and waited for the web of events to tangle itself.

And tangle it did. 

Wong straightened, his breath hissing out between his teeth, his ears still ringing. In the corner of his eye, the Ancient One's hands were forcibly uncurling from their white-knuckled grip on the tablecloth. She raised two fingers pressed together in a gesture of sensing. 

Christine Palmer looked concerned. She pulled her hand away from where she'd reached to check the Ancient One's pulse. Just as instinctual a reaction as the sorcerers' collapse had been, Wong imagined. 

"Are you alright?" Palmer asked. "Can you hear me?" 

The Ancient One clasped her hands on the table before them, looking as untouchable as ever. "Yes," she said evenly. "Do not fear; the flare has burnt out now." 

Palmer’s eyes were flickering between Wong and the Ancient One—she'd worn an expression of disbelief for most of their conversation, but it had morphed even further now. Wong really couldn't blame her. It wasn't particularly unusual to collapse in sudden conversation with other sorcerers, but the speaking partners of civilians didn't usually double over themselves during tea. 

Wong gave the Ancient One a look, his sandwich forgotten. "Should we not, perhaps, investigate?" Wong said, though he already knew the answer. 

"We're already too late," the Ancient One said easily. She took another casual sip of tea. 

"Right," Wong said. Years of experience kept him from feeling as baffled as Dr. Palmer seemed to.

"Alright, not that you people haven't been… questionably helpful and vaguely interesting, but I really need to go," Palmer said. "If I miss— I really need to go."

"We will come with you." The Ancient One stood, gesturing widely to the city around them, and Wong followed the sweep of her hand. The only thing he saw was Karl, as expected. The sorcerer tailed them without much subtlety, happily browsing the street shops as he waited. Wong wondered where he kept getting all that money. 

"You act like you know what I'm here for," Palmer said. She didn't sound quite as disbelieving as Wong expected— just cautious. Perhaps the Ancient One's bearing made the prospect less impossible. Or perhaps Christine Palmer had quite a bit of impossible in her life already. 

"I have an idea," the Ancient One agreed. 

"Confirmed now, I expect," Wong said. The residue of the flare— the explosive, violent, beautiful cry of magic that had reached them from every direction— still rang in his ears. 

"What business could you possibly have with Tony Stark?" Palmer demanded. 

Wong snorted before he could stop himself. The Ancient One raised her eyebrows at him, and Wong raised his in return. 

"Mr. Stark and I have met," the Ancient One said. 

"You broke into his house," Wong noted.

"It was necessary." 

"It always is," Wong agreed. 

"You did what now?" Palmer paused, arm halfway through the sleeve of her jacket. 

The Ancient One waved dismissively. "He needed the direction, even if I wasn't sure what it meant, myself."

"You— he—" Palmer raised a hand to her brow. "You know, this might as well happen." 

Wong waited behind a few steps as the women swept away along the street. When Mordo looked up again, Wong beckoned him away from the booths, then turned to follow. 

The Ancient One might be sure of what they were doing, but Wong certainly wasn't. He was far from unobservant; this was a question of Time and magic. His readings had stitched together an image of a relic, a treasure, that the Order had once protected. And then lost, according to the tired handwriting of the Ancient One's journal.

The future was no longer something to be seen with clarity. The past was out of their reach. All the sorcerers could do was watch for the omens that filtered through the universe's threads and try to decipher them before it was too late. 

Wong understood this. He'd encountered a few signs during his training—sharp paint-splashes of awareness in the texture of magic around him. He remembered trying to explain them to Kaecillius and Mordo, when their studies kept them up late into the winter nights. ‘Musical’, Wong had called them. ‘The signs of the future are like getting just the opening notes to a song stuck in your head.’

Mordo had laughed at the description. Kaecilius looked thoughtful, and asked Wong how he knew.

It was a hard question to answer. Omens were rare, even to the Ancient One. The most notable signal Wong had caught, and the first, had been when he was young. Barely of age, really. He’d finally tracked down the Lamp of Icathon to an old antique shop in New York City, and an eager resonance had panged into him. It reminded him of secrets and books. Of snow and bandages. Somehow, it had felt like the future. 

Wong remembered rushing through an encounter with a rather determined boy, eager to retrieve the Lamp and return to Kamar-Taj to study it. But there was nothing unusual about the Lamp once he’d left New York. 

“What are you thinking about?”

Wong nearly jumped at Mordo’s sudden, low voice. He hadn’t realized how far he’d drifted behind the Ancient One and Doctor Palmer, navigating the streets toward the Kathmandu branch of Stark Industries. There was one in every major metropolis, as far as Wong knew. 

“Do you know…?” Wong began. He couldn’t finish. He hated asking questions aloud when he couldn’t even word them properly. 

Mordo read it from him. “She thinks we’ll find it. Whatever it is she’s been looking for,” he said, nodding toward the Ancient One. 

“Why Stark?” Wong wondered gruffly. “He has nothing to do with us.”

Mordo shrugged. “He chose it, like we all did. Whatever this is… we followed our destinies to reach it.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in destinies.”

“You do, don’t you?” Mordo gave him a half-smile. “I’m making an effort.”

Wong glowered in return, and Mordo snorted and kept walking. The buildings were changing as they crossed between sectors of the city. Wong didn’t recognize this part of it, as much, but he didn’t tend to walk places often anymore. 

They were so close that Wong could see the shining windows of their destination when he felt it. Again, like a low crackle of exposed wire, Wong sensed something. Mordo, beside him, grew stiff. 

It wasn’t a sharp feeling—a quiet aura of warmth from a campfire, as opposed to the abrupt and intense burn of heat from an explosion. They were close to something. Wong’s fingers tingled with a strange excitement. 

Ahead of them, Doctor Palmer broke into a run. Wong jerked forward—but his urgency faded almost immediately. 

Christine was grinning from ear to ear.  

"They made it. Oh my god, they made it."  

And as the quiet hum of power reached him, as the universe dropped the crossroads of future into his lap and started running, Wong looked at Mordo and thought he had better start believing in destiny. 

“So I’m not dead, then.”

Stephen blinked, drifting slightly sideways of his voice. His words came out of someone else’s mouth as pain bit at the corners of his perception. Even so distant, it made him hesitant to move. The tilting of his head was automatic—an instinctual attempt to seek out the subtle song of the mold growing in the corner of his cell. 

He didn’t hear it. Instead, his ears filled with an overwhelming, exotic array of souls and materials and movements. The hum of an engine rumbled through the surface he laid on. Sparking voices were bickering, then exclaiming, and he thought he could hear the sun beneath the horizon. 

It sounded like freedom. 

“No, you’re not dead,” said a now-familiar voice. “You gave it your best shot, though.”

Stephen let the voice guide him back into his body—and wished he hadn’t. He hurt. A bone-deep sort of hurt, like liquid gold had scorched through every vessel in his body and pooled in his hands. 

He didn’t have to glance at them to know. He could feel the pressure of bandages, the haze of shock still breathing down his neck, and he knew.

There was no going back. There would never be comfortable, safe humanity again. 

Not for Stephen. For whatever string of notes and knowledge called itself Stephen. 

“Where am I?” Stephen asked. He kept his eyes closed; he didn’t need to see. The music was enough. 

“My useless team’s quinjet,” said Tony. He was close. “If you can’t hear them, they’re glad you’re awake.”

“Oh.” Stephen couldn’t hear them, and it made his throat clench uncomfortably. “I’d rather be unconscious for another… eight years. Give or take.”

Tony snorted. “Yeah, I don’t blame you. How do you feel?”

He meant physically, Stephen knew, but he answered more generally. “Different.”

A spark of surprise shifted Tony’s song. “Meaning?” 

Meaning… distilled. Fired, like glass. Like he did in his dreams; like he was looking a little deeper, seeing a little further. Like humanity had invited him in willingly, but was keeping an eye on him to be sure he was no threat. 

“How far are we from the mountain?” Stephen asked instead of replying. 

“A few hours, as the multimillion dollar quinjet flies,” Tony told him. “We’re stopping in Kathmandu to meet your doctor friend. Palmer.”

Stephen did open his eyes, then. 

“Christine?” he said, voice shaking. 

His eyes found Tony’s face, and the man smiled at him. “Yeah. She was worried about you. We wouldn’t have found you without her.”

Something warm and relieved bloomed in Stephen’s chest. Nothing was the same, and, there was nowhere he belonged anymore, but at least he’d have Christine. He’d have his friend, and the sounds of constellations. 

“I thought she’d—” Stephen’s words felt vague. “I thought she’d be afraid.”

Tony’s eyes became just a little angry when he looked toward the back of the quinjet.  “Did you? Or did List carve it into you over four months?”

Stephen flinched. It sent a burst of pain up his form, and he swallowed a hiss. The words in his head did sound like List. Who else could they sound like, truly, but that didn’t mean anything, it had never meant anything. Stephen needed Tony to understand. 

“You don’t know if I’m human,” he said. 

You don’t know. 

Mortal souls looked into the abyss of Infinity and felt awed, felt separated, felt afraid. How could Infinity blame them for that?

Tony looked back down at Stephen, his hand flat across the arc reactor at his chest. Stubbornness set the winged notes of his song dancing. 

“So what?” he said. “I met two princes of a space kingdom this year. I learned magic existed and let aliens nearly kill me. ‘Human’ is a rather more specific distinction nowadays, and it doesn’t matter .”

“But—”

“Different doesn’t justify abuse, Stephen. You don’t deserve to be feared because you aren’t known.”

Stephen closed one eye, squinting up at Tony. Smooth metal reflected other figures as Tony sat back against the curved wall of the quinjet. The gaze that met Stephen’s was clear, certain.

Someone came to find me, Stephen thought. Someone came looking. 

List had been wrong. 

Stephen blinked at Tony again. Then, abruptly, he became aware that his face was covered in blood. It flicked an old, dusty switch inside Stephen out of survival mode and into something entirely more his. “You’re hurt,” Stephen said.

“That’s what happens when an idiot doctor drags you into a firefight after a rock,” Stark snorted. “You get a little beat up.”

Oh, shit. “The Mindsong?”

“The rock is fine.” Tony jabbed a finger at him. “You almost died.”

“But I didn’t,” Stephen reminded him. 

“Irrelevant! You’re lying on my fucking quinjet, nearly hypothermic, having lost enough blood to fill a swimming pool!”

“Free,” Stephen said, the word slipping out distractedly. 

Tony’s face softened slightly. “Yeah,” he said. “As it should be, time boy.”

Stephen closed his eyes again. His energy was waning. He could hear the sky. He could hear the sky, and he’d forgotten how wonderful it was. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “I was.”

He heard Tony wince. “I’m sorry. We tried… We didn’t know how to save them. There wasn’t anything more to do. Your hands looked halfway to vaporized.”

Unneeded. Physical matter stripped away under the contact of Infinity. 

“It’s alright,” Stephen said, even though it wasn’t. Even though it was so far from alright that he couldn’t even conceive a next, couldn’t even think about who he’d have to be the next time he opened his eyes. “I’d already gone too far to come back.”

“I’m still sorry, Strange.”

“Don’t be.” Stephen’s voice was strong, even when his mind drifted heavily toward sleep and Tony opened his mouth to argue. “Don’t be. You came. And I’m not dead—so we still might be able to save the world.”

Confusion flickered through Tony’s song. “What?”

“The universe told me.” I am the universe. “I’m not—I can hear the sky.”

That was suddenly, strikingly, wildly important. “I can hear the sky, and maybe it’s going to be okay. Maybe I came here for a reason. Maybe I won’t hear the deathsong, anymore.”

“Stephen?”

Another voice just barely differentiated itself from the melodies. “Let him sleep. We’re almost there, and god—the man deserves not to be in pain for a few more hours.”

Stephen wanted to open his eyes again, wanted to identify the spider-web song to a face. But the rhythm of the universe was already drawing him into a dream. 

In the end, he followed willingly, accompanied by a song of engine grease and falcon’s wings. 

Tony leaned against the windshield of the quinjet, watching the city as Natasha carefully circled them into land. The glass was cold against his bruised face and shredded forearms. He could see Steve shooting him side-eyed glances.

Tony couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to Kathmandu. It had been long before what happened in New York—long before Iron Man, even. This branch of the company saw Pepper far more often than him. 

“Tony,” Natasha said quietly. 

Tony blinked at her . He probably looked like shit—hell, so did she. He felt like his bones were being held together by scotch tape and staples, his arc reactor making his breath feel too shallow. 

Offering Natasha a wobbly smile, Tony said, “Mission accomplished.”

Steve, beside them, raised his eyebrows. His face was streaked with barely concealed concern, and there was something a little sharper there, too. Guilt. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Tony huffed. 

“Like you nearly died? Again?” Steve rested the side of his head against the wall, watching Tony. The sun was finally starting to light up the ground beneath them, and it made it easy to read Steve’s eyes. 

“But I didn’t,” Tony said. “And I didn’t—I didn’t last time either.”

Steve scrubbed his face with his hands, and Natasha set her jaw. Tony squinted at them.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded. “We’re alive. We’re out of that goddamn mountain, and we have Strange.”

“We should have been there,” Steve blurted. “We should’ve—I’m sorry. You both almost didn’t make it out, and I was just sitting here.”

Tony’s face softened. He turned, his smile slight, and pressed his hands against the glass to watch the landing pad approach. “It’s okay.” 

“Tony.”

“Really,” Tony heard himself say. “It’s… okay. Something tells me this happened exactly as it was supposed to.”

In the silence that followed his words, Tony slipped his hand into his pocket. It was slightly damp from melted snow and still stained with patches of blood, but he hadn’t been able to convince himself to take it off. The gemstone in his pocket whispered against his fingers. 

It was… alien. More alien than Tony had expected, somehow dwarfing Loki’s power and stretching into something deeper. Something that balanced the very universe in its facets. 

And now, Tony knew why.

He glanced over his shoulder at the curled form of Stephen, once again unconscious on the gurney they’d fixed to the side of the jet. His chest rose and fell evenly. Tony hoped he’d wake up again—he didn’t know what possible hypothermia could do to a malnourished, tortured body, let alone what extensive nerve damage might do to one. 

But he didn’t know what it might do to time itself, either.

“Did someone text Christine?” Tony asked. 

“I did,” Natasha said. “She’s waiting for us. And she says… she says she found someone? Someone who might be able to help.”

Tony tensed. “We can’t let anyone see him. No one can know—not until we figure out Pierce.”

“Haven’t you done that already?” Steve said with a quirk of his lip. “HYDRA is pretty damning evidence. 

“You have not spent nearly enough time in the 21st century, Cap, if you think it’s that easy.” 

But Tony felt a warmth somewhere in his chest. It was a little deeper than determination, a little more intense—it was satisfaction, and Tony knew this time he could trust it. 

There was work to do. There was so much work to do, but it was work Tony could do. 

And he’s always worked better with a bit of music. 

“That’s a smile,” Natasha noted. “Had an idea?”

“Just thinking,” Tony replied, shifting as they began to coast toward the landing pad. 

“Or you’re concussed,” Steve pointed out.

Tony waved a dismissive hand. “Go back to being guilty,” he said. “It’s way easier to deal with.”

Steve laughed, and Tony relaxed as the quinjet finally touched down. He could hear the beating of his heart in his ears, sounding like relief, like the air itself was relieved to have settled on solid ground. 

Really, Tony was getting overly dramatic lately. It was probably the injuries and lack of sleep. That always tended to do it. 

He moved to the back of the quinjet, standing in front of Stephen to block any view of him through the opening door. Though he was sure Christine wouldn’t do anything purposefully risky, he’d rather not have a repeat of the helicarrier. Stephen twitched in his sleep. Tony saw his eyelids flicker. 

Then the door was open, and the cool early-morning air was whipping dust and bits of dead leaves around his feet, and Tony had other things to think about. Namely Dr. Palmer—

And Dr. Palmer’s ‘help.’

“You!” Tony exclaimed, taking a step back. He flared an arm protectively over Stephen’s unconscious form. 

“Hello, Tony Stark.”

On the flat concrete roof of the StarkTek building stood a woman. Stood two women, actually, and two unfamiliar men—but Tony’s attention focused wholly on the yellow-robed figure waiting, hands clasped behind her back, beside Christine. She looked exactly as Tony remembered. 

Same quietly knowing expression. Same slight satisfaction in her eyes. Same suspicious circumstances.

Tony squinted at the single weirdest individual he’d ever met, and could only think, At least she’s not in my shower this time.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Tony demanded. Behind him, Stephen made a quiet sound—a note. 

 The two men blinked. They swayed slightly, in synchrony, as if a cold wind had just blown across them. 

Tony took a step back. Steve and Natasha fell in at his sides, forming a barrier along the opening of the quinjet. They’d picked up on his tension. It was echoed in their own spring-coiled stances. 

But neither the shower-woman ( the Ancient One, Tony’s mind supplied) nor her two companions tried to push aboard the plane. Instead, Christine practically teleported beside Tony. She slapped his arm away from the gurney, and Tony stepped away obediently. 

He was quiet as Christine reached out to brush Stephen’s tangled hair from his eyes. Her hands were shaking. A silent exhale shook her shoulders, and Tony saw her eyes fill with tears above the smile on her lips. 

He saw when the smile fell away. Saw Christine reach, ever-so-carefully, for the hastily bandaged hands curled against Stephen’s chest. 

When she looked up at Tony, her jaw was set tight. “What the hell happened?” she demanded. 

Tony raised his hands. “Hey, I’m not the world best at field medicine, okay? I did what I could.”

Christine’s glare didn’t soften. “Something like this doesn’t just happen.”

“It was—I don’t even know, okay? There was something with whatever was inside Loki’s scepter, and I swear it was like being next to a supernova.”

“You do know.”

Tony jumped at the sudden voice mere inches from his ear, and reflexively sent a punch toward the Ancient One’s face. She sidestepped and continued like he hadn’t moved.

“He told you, didn’t he?”

Tony squinted at her. “Confidential information.”

The Ancient One just smiled at him. She raised her hands placatingly when Tony bristled, stepping to the side and laying one finger on the edge of the quinjet. “Don’t fear,” she said. “We mean him no harm.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” Tony snorted. “So you can just take your dollar store fortune telling somewhere else.”

One of the men on the roof bristled. “You speak of things you don’t understand,” he said lowly. 

“Mordo,” said the Ancient One, a hint of warning in her tone. 

“Who are you two?” Tony asked. He pointed a finger at each of them, noting the way the shorter one didn’t seem to notice. He was focused very decidedly at the middle distance, and for a moment, Tony thought he saw sparks weaving between his fingers. 

“Wait, I thought you knew them,” Steve said. 

Tony gestured to the Ancient One. “I know this lady. She appeared in my unused shower a year and a half ago and then disappeared without a trace.”

“She what?”

“I appeared in his shower,” the Ancient One said easily. “Keep up now, Captain.”

“I… you never mentioned this?” Steve asked Tony, eyes flickering rapidly between the two of them.

Tony shrugged. “Honestly I thought I dreamed it. Weird shit happens to me all the time.” He flicked a hand over his shoulder to the man on the bed. “Case in point.” 

Stephen shifted again, and Christine moved to support his shoulder. One of his eyes slid open, gazing unseeingly toward her. The doctor gave him a smile brimming with tears, and Tony found himself pushed unceremoniously out of the way again as the Ancient One strode past him. 

“Hey!” Tony yelled, and was ignored. 

The Ancient One raised her hands, her fingers forming a pattern against each other. She flexed her wrist. Stephen's unaware gaze turned slowly to stare at her, and the shadow of five bodies fell across his face. 

There was a hanging moment, on the threshold of the plane and the city, where it was just that. An unconscious prisoner and a curious old woman and a once-pirate with a glowing heart, never quite looking directly at each other. 

And then something clicked, like a faraway lock falling into place, and the air exploded with light. 

Tony threw a hand up to shield his eyes instinctively. Ribbons of green and gold spiraled around him, dancing along the edges of the air, pricking at his skin, settling around him. They curled into runes and circles and swooping shapes. They drifted around a familiar eye on Stephen’s forehead. The Ancient One's hands formed the sparking colors, but it was this that was their epicenter, this that was some world's epicenter. 

Christine's eyes were wide. Steve looked shocked. Even Natasha's poker face had broken, her hands flickering as she reached up to touch the magic. 

"You found the way here," the Ancient One said. "Welcome back." 

Tony looked at her, at the smile dusting her features when she looked at Stephen, the familiarity of a joke between friends. The power around them was warm. It made his arc reactor buzz pleasantly in his chest. 

"Who are you?" Christine asked, her voice shaking slightly. "Who… who is he?" 

"I am the Ancient One," she said simply. "Sorcerer Supreme and guardian of the Mystic Arts. And this is Time—Time that built himself a soul."

The magic dissolved. Tony heard himself holding his breath, but he didn't release it. 

The Ancient One looked up, meeting Tony’s eyes. “I will help him,” she said. “Come with me.” 

“So you’re like, wizards then?” 

Wong lowered his hand with a sigh, his sensing spell breaking for the third time in as many minutes. Kamar-Taj’s infirmary—close enough to the library that Wong knew the soft eddies of its magic quite well indeed—was usually quiet. With Tony Stark inside it, not so much. 

“Masters of the Mystic Arts,” Wong corrected. “We study and harness the energies that flow throughout dimensions, speaking the language of the universe, to create magic.”

“So… wizards.”

Wong turned to Stark, fixing him in his gaze. The man’s jaunty grin faded slightly. 

“Fine, alright, Masters of the… whatever. It’s a mouthful, is all,” Stark said. 

“‘Sorcerer’ is also an acceptable term.”

“This is weirdly pedantic.” Stark shifted where he sat, fingers drumming like overactive insects on the wooden armrest of his chair. The soft golden light pooled in the corners of the room, and Wong could see the way Stark eyed it like he thought it about to come to life. Perhaps he had more experience with magic than he let on. Usually, civilians didn’t pick up on the magic inherent to the walls of Kamar-Taj. 

The infirmary was a concentrated place, in all fairness. Sorcerers bled more than just physically; this room had soaked up generations of unfiltered and uncontrolled spells that leaked off injured magicians while they recovered. Wong himself had contributed no few of the mystic stains on these walls. 

“So what do you do?” Stark asked. “If you’re so powerful, why have I never heard of you?”

Wong gave him another look. “Not all of us project our identities to the surface of the world, or invite danger into our homes.”

Wong didn’t wish to be known. In truth, it scared him—though he would follow what was best for the Order until his own end. Seeing his own identity from the eyes of others was always something that left him off balance.

Kaecilius felt otherwise. He and Mordo’s avid, mostly friendly debates over the subject of the Order’s secrecy had accompanied Wong’s studying for many a night when he was younger. 

“Don’t you ever need help, though?” Stark wondered. 

Wong blinked. That wasn’t the question he’d expected next. 

He’d exchanged quite a few back-and-forth answers with Stark over the last few hours. Stark’s companions, the other Avengers, had followed the Ancient One and Christine to the foyer upon their return after she promised them explanations. Wong had expected Stark to do the same, but he’d refused to leave the sleeping Time Stone alone with, as he’d put it, ‘sketchy fortune-telling carnival employees.’ 

Wong still couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. Around hundreds of years of strange, skewed histories, of spells missing components and rituals missing words, of time being gone from Kamar-Taj. He hadn’t realized how long he’d been looking for it. How long they all had. 

The Ancient One’s journal had told him of the dangers of the Infinity Stones. She’d written of their powers and the weighted, careful game they played with the universe. 

But she’d not written of this. Of the way they felt— the gold magic Stark thought Wong didn’t know he hid in his pocket, and the scale-less heartbeat of the man unconscious on the bed before them. 

He’d opened his eyes, just once, when they’d arrived. He hadn’t been awake, but he’d looked at Wong, and Wong had felt every one of the Ancient One’s secrets suddenly fall into place. 

Infinity had returned to Kamar-Taj. Had returned, and brought a body with it. Wong didn’t understand how it had happened. He didn’t know what it meant, for the past or for the future, but he knew his duty. 

“Help,” Wong repeated, rolling his shoulders back. He sighed. “On occasion, we encounter… an obstacle that cripples us. But we always recover. That is our way.”

“The world’s always changing,” Stark said with a shrug. He tapped his chest, and the circle lit up through his shirt. “You could change too.” 

Wong had heard those exact words many times before. Kaecilius pointed to time and said it justified nearly anything. Maybe it could. But Wong drew the line where it might endanger magic. 

“No,” he said. “You and your heroes protect the world from physical dangers while we work against other threats.” 

Stark frowned. His eyes flickered toward the man on the bed, and Wong elected to clarify, “That is not what your friend is.”

“He’s not my—whatever. What threats?”

Wong looked Stark up and down. The man held himself carefully, precisely; but Wong didn’t care to be fooled. 

“You are not ready to know,” he said simply.

Stark, predictably, bristled. “Don’t pretend like you—”

“You are injured,” Wong said, voice calm. “You are exhausted, and overwhelmed, and it is not my place to explain these things to you. If you wanted secrets, you should have followed the Ancient One.” 

“And left you alone with Rip Van Winkle here? Absolutely not.”

Wong raised an eyebrow and continued, “You should have trusted us enough to give you those secrets.” 

Stark didn’t answer after that. They sat in silence, the shadows of Kamar-Taj dancing across Stark’s knees. He didn’t meet Wong’s eyes, though Wong was sure he knew he was being watched—analyzed, really, as Wong took in the wounds Stark had mostly ignored and the trembling frazzledness of his aura. All along, the slow and strange presence of the Time Stone curled against Wong’s perception. Waves, rhythmically washing along a horizon. 

After a moment, Wong took a shred of pity on the tired man. He stood. Stark flinched when Wong turned to him, but only minutely. 

“It was honorable,” Wong said. “What you did.”

“What?”

Wong jerked his chin to the unconscious man on the bed. “You found him. You chose this role, this song, when you didn’t have to. You chose to be our ally. We are… thankful.”

Stark scoffed. “I was reliably informed of my destiny. I was always headed here.”

Wong didn’t smile, but it was a close thing. “You saved Time himself, Stark. I think you can choose any destiny you wish.” 

Tony lay awake in the cocoon of magic from walls that knew more than his bloodline ever had. 

Long hours had slipped passed, and more still danced between his exhausted fingers. He’d curled up against the armrest of the old chair beside Stephen’s bed, slowly coming to terms with what he already knew. Coming to terms with the wounds that had scabbed over, and the ones that still gaped in blue wormhole colors across the back of his mind.

The golden gemstone, pulled from Loki’s scepter, was warm in Tony’s hand. He’d been rolling it through his fingers before. Now, he simply let it rest there, weighing its color. Its song. 

Maybe we can still save the world. 

Tony knew so little. Knew more than he’d ever known before. He felt like a child told that magic was real, still too excited to remember how much it hurt. 

Tony felt hidden behind these walls. From the eyes of the world, from the assassin that hadn’t managed to land the killing blow, from the politics that still raged under the watchful single-eye of a spy. From himself. 

He could think clearly here, watching Stephen’s chest rise and fall, as slow runes of green etched themselves across the walls with his breaths and then faded. Over and over, a cycle of reaching and retreating, of writing and rewriting. Time, healing peacefully after Tony had rescued it.

Tony Stark was still alive. Tony was an Avenger’s consultant and a frozen soldier’s friend and an assassin’s partner. Tony was the shredded edges of something that space had swallowed and spat back out. Tony was here. He would fight for that. 

Right now, though, he was mostly just tired. Right now, he was ready to dream. 

His eyes drifted half-closed, his fingers curling around the gem in his palm. The thoughtsong. The gold against green, sunlight and seasons gathering in droplets along his eyelashes beside four other colors. 

It doesn’t matter what you believe. The future exists either way. 

His arc reactor looked like a circle out of the corner of his eye. Just a circle. Nothing more and nothing less than what he’d built it to be, what he’d promised it would be. When his gaze shifted, it didn’t change. 

Tony fell asleep in the cocoon of magic from walls that knew more than his bloodline ever had, and breathed to the count of five. 

( You came here for a reason. 

I need this world. 

You think it can save us?

I know it can. 

Heal then, sibling. Rest now. We will not leave you alone again.)

The dawn sang in Stephen Strange’s ears, coloring the tears on his cheeks gold, and he remembered how much he’d missed it. 

Months and months spread heavy beneath his mutilated hands on the windowsill. Months in the dark. Months under cold eyes and colder questions. Months paying the price for living amongst physical creatures, of the worst of what they could show him. Months, and the sunlight was still so beautiful. 

He felt the shadows of mold in the corner of a cell. He remembered deathsongs and blood and gunshots he hadn’t stopped—but they didn’t touch him. Not right now. Right now, he could listen, and no one was hurting him for it. 

He could listen to Time, and know why he’d thought he couldn’t hear his own song. 

Stephen knew what he was, now. Still, here and now he felt more human than he had in years.

He couldn’t bring himself to sing—not yet. The mountains and the green text scrolling along reflective windows and the mythical name he’d nearly accepted were still too close. But he did let his throat vibrate with a conscious, quiet hum, and the bright world seemed to relax as he reached out to it. 

We missed you, the songs told him. The notes and the sky and the symphony welcomed him back. 

Stephen was one of them. But maybe, for a little while, he could be human too. 

He stepped away from the window, his hands wrapped tight and immobile as he carefully favored his leg. Pain was strange. Familiar, and yet he was untouchable. Pain, not silence—death, not silence. 

The world kept turning, and Stephen would fall back into his role within it. 

He walked through the space, his shadow thrown out long from the window behind him. The infirmary was empty. The days Stephen had slept didn’t matter; it hadn’t even occurred to him, truly. But he could hear he wasn’t alone. He could hear…

Dusty books and swords. Ancient trees and knowledge. Constellations and fish scales. Falcons and engine parts. 

Stephen pushed open the sliding door with his shoulder. His steps were uneven, but his gaze was sure, and he stepped out into Kamar-Taj with the fingertips of the sun drifting quietly down his back. 

Hallways like heart chambers opened around him, all cream floorboards and carved window sills and wrought door frames, catching light like rivers. Stephen saw worn furniture changing shapes in corners. Doorways set with pressed-paper windows separated irregular, asymmetric rooms, built as if to capture angles instead of straight lines. Vines of inlaid gold flashed in the shadows where the walls met the ceiling. 

And it sang. It sang like nothing Stephen had heard before, sang in clear and direct tones, ever-shifting, ever-changing. Every note seemed purposeful. Every harmony was chased with intent. There were songs hung in ribbons and pressed into the curtains, songs written into book pages and streaming from balconies like flags. They lingered like lamps on single tone strands and reflected his eyes in green.

He breathed it in, magic lingering on his tongue. It was different than thought, than space. This was smoother, like wax dripping down the side of a candle, like warm tea splashing off a silver spoon. Stephen could hear the moon phases in the copper plating on the light fixtures. He could hear the seasons change in the way faraway footsteps over through the space. 

Stephen heard them reaching out to him. Inviting him to change them. Welcoming him. 

“Hello, Stephen Strange.”

Stephen blinked, finding himself in the doorway of a sprawling room. A woman stood a few steps in front of him. She was familiar, but Stephen couldn’t remember how. When he looked at her, she smiled, inclining her head in greeting. Stephen followed suit. 

“Is that still my name?” he asked. 

“If it is the one you came here with. It belongs to you just as much as all the other names you’ve had,” the woman said. She signed as she did, as if she knew how deeply her ancient song rang in Stephen’s ears. 

Stephen cocked his head, considering. “I think I know you.” 

She smiled. “We go a very long way back, Doctor Strange.” 

“Tell me everything,” said Stephen. 

And there, in the singing room at the center of Kamar-Taj, the Ancient One did. She told him of Infinity Stones and magic, of sorcerers and Eyes and all the questions she had yet to find answers to. She told him about her divination. She told him what she’d seen of Tony, vague and immaterial images of what could come to pass.

“I couldn’t see the future while you were gone from this place. The Time Stone is the root of futurewalking, and without it I can only make guesses. See omens. It’s like a puzzle, I suppose. I put it together badly.”

“I lived, didn’t I?”

“That was primarily you and Stark’s doing, not mine.” 

Stephen listened carefully, feeling as though someone was telling him a bedtime story he had known once. And it didn’t scare him. He’d spent his whole life wondering about the truth, after all. 

This was one he could live with. 

The Ancient One drank tea that sounded like faraway lands and didn’t offer Stephen a cup he couldn’t hold anymore, and she told him his own story. Stephen believed her. He rested his bandaged hands on his knees, sitting on the shifting tiled floor, with only one question at the end of the Ancient One’s speech. 

“What do you want from me now?” 

The Ancient One set down her tea. “You owe me nothing, Doctor Strange.”

Stephen raised an eyebrow. “So for hundreds of years you’ve been waiting and searching for what you once had, and now that I’m here, you’re just… what? Going to let me leave?”

“You’re not a prisoner,” the Ancient One said with a smile. 

Stephen sat back, cocking his head as the sounds of Kamar-Taj washed across him. He almost spoke—but another sound caught his attention before he could. 

“Stephen? Oh my— Stephen.” 

Shooting upright, Stephen spun toward the familiar voice. His heart leapt up his throat. 

In the doorway, Christine Palmer stood and stared at him. Familiar figures flanked her, one of which grinned at him with his familiar hawk-song smile, but Stephen paid them no attention. He lurched into a run, catching his friend in his arms halfway into the room. 

“I thought you were dead!” Christine hissed at him, her face buried in Stephen’s shoulder. 

“Hi,” Stephen said hoarsely. 

“You idiot! You fucking—stupid—how could you lie—I’m so glad you’re alive, goddamn it. I missed you.”

Stephen closed his eyes. Christine sounded like all the constellations he hadn’t seen in months, like the parts of his old life he’d been so scared about leaving behind. “I missed you too.”

“I always thought it was me who’d end up wanted by the government,” Christine mumbled. She was grinning. “God, did you one-up me.”

“I’ll repay you with a muffin.”

“Oh, anything but that.”

Stephen took a step back, letting Christine bounce on the balls of her feet twice. She nodded with familiarity toward the Ancient One, and Stephen idly wondered how long he’d been asleep. 

“Alright, then, the surgeons have been reunited.” Tony’s voice came clear through the wood and booksongs. “Should we be concerned? I think we should be concerned.”

Stephen glanced up at him, and because there were no noises of captivity in his mind and no hopelessness in his bones, he smiled. Tony blinked. Then, a little hesitantly, he smiled back. 

“Hey, tinman,” Stephen said. “How’s your concussion?”

Tony threw up his hands. “Why are you all always going on about this? I’m fine, thanks.”

Stephen raised an eyebrow.

“Kamar-Taj did some shit to me and now I feel weirdly good,” Tony amended, rolling his shoulders. “Like I went to a chiropractor or something.”

“There’s that disrespect again,” the Ancient One said sagely.

Tony looked unbothered. “That’s me. Disrespectful.”

“Oh stop.” One of the other figures—Stephen identified her as Natasha Romanoff—waved a dismissive hand at Tony. She moved toward Stephen, inclining her head slightly in greeting. “Nice to meet you again, I suppose.”

A pang of discomfort made Stephen’s answering nod sharp. “You aren’t going to report me to your boss again, are you?”

“Fury isn’t involved in this,” Romanoff told him. Her voice was unexpectedly earnest. “That I can promise you.”

“No one will get through these walls that we do not trust,” the Ancient One said. She laid a hand on Stephen’s shoulder; he half-consciously noticed the way she broadcasted her movements, almost like signing. 

“Except for me.” Tony raised his hand.

“Always the special one,” Christine snorted. “God, you’re insufferable. And I owe you thanks, a thousand times over.”

Tony shot her a smirk. “Couldn’t have done it without you, constellation girl.”

Stephen’s eyes snapped to him. “You know what she sounds like?”

They stared at him. The Ancient One, reflected in the old windows, smiled slightly. Wincing, Stephen swallowed the memories trickling down through his skull and said, “Sorry. I guess you learned she knows stars.”

“Well, yeah,” Tony said. “It was the only reason we found you. But she sounds like them?”

Stephen averted his eyes. “Always has.”

Christine ran a hand through her hair, blowing out a breath. “Still can’t believe you’ve been… I don’t know, magic, all this time. Can you hear everyone like that?”

“Everyone and everything,” Stephen admitted. “You’re stars. Romanoff is a spider-web. Tony is… flight and internal gears and something avian.” 

“That sounds beautiful,” Christine said quietly. In the doorway, Tony looked slightly stricken. 

“The gathaurupa darsana,” said the Ancient One. “The song of the cosmos. Inconceivable to mortal minds.” A tiny smile grew across her lip. “At least, to most.”

Stephen tucked his shaking hands into his sleeves. He thought about silence. About how the simple concept, the simple beauty of time and perception and people, kept him from regretting his long-ago decision to walk amongst them. 

The Time Stone had never once wished to be normal, even when he wished to be human. Even when he wished it would stop hurting.

You’re not a prisoner. 

“I want to stay here,” he heard his voice say. 

Kamar-Taj settled into tune around him. The wood and its vines fluttered as Tony nodded, a circle of light set comfortably into his chest. 

“It suits you.” Christine didn’t look at the building when she spoke. She looked to Stephen, and he thought she might understand. He thought they all might understand, though they were mortal, though they were deaf and small and caring, though the truth still sounded like that empty cell in the seconds he wasn’t brave enough. 

I watched them die, Stephen thought. I killed them myself. I couldn’t save them. I broke to them. 

I’m not a prisoner. 

“I want to know everything. I want to learn everything about this world.” I want to know who I am. 

The Ancient One’s shoulders relaxed, her form swathed in sunlight against yellow cloth. “Then do so. We’ve been waiting for you.” 

Stephen looked down, at hands that had wielded scalpels and washed in blood and held gemstones, swathed in white, and saw runes along his skin. Songs along his veins. The green of time falling and rewinding and unspooling. 

The patterns of himself, no longer hidden. They were curious. 

“Welcome home,” the Ancient One said. 

(In the echo of her voice, the universe sang.)