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Chapter Text

Steve Rogers

He and Bucky are on their way to free his team from the Raft when it happens – a sudden, disorientating loss of balance, his vision swirling and blurring as nausea churns in his gut, and then he’s lying down on the ground, freezingly cold and yet still burning up in agony.

No. Has Hydra or Tony found them again? Have they taken Bucky? Where’s Bucky?

He tries to sit up, only to scream at the pain that lashes through his chest and entire torso.

He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

What managed to injure him so badly? Even before the serum he has never felt pain like this – inexplicable, indescribable, inexorable. Everything hurts, from the all-encompassing ache in his limbs, to the chisel pounding in his head, and most of all the gaping chasm that’s tearing apart his chest.

He needs to figure out what’s wrong.

After what feels like an eternity struggling to unknot the uncontrollable scrunch of his face, he finally manages to open his eyes.

Grey. Cold. A rushing in his ears, continuous.

He tries to tilt his head to the side to see more, only to find that his neck has been locked into place. They must have been captured. Would T’Challa have betrayed them? He and Bucky were on a Wakandan jet, after all. And it is not as if T’Challa does not have a precedent of switching sides, even though Steve wants to believe in the other man’s honour.

He tries his arms next, his hands and even his fingers, choking back pained screams all the while. No budge at all. His legs are also restrained, damn it.

Okay. Okay. He just needs to wait for his healing factor to fix him up enough, and then he will have the strength to break out of whatever it is that’s holding him. Then he can go and make sure Bucky is alright.

So he waits. And waits. And waits.

…No. There’s something wrong about all of this, why is he feeling even worse?

The last thing he sees is that even the grey concrete that fills his entire field of vision is losing colour, fading into darkness.

Steve Rogers dies.

Pepper Potts

Her entire body shakes with her grief and her fury.

Using the coordinates FRIDAY was last able to transmit, Vision found Tony’s body in an abandoned Hydra base in Siberia, along with Captain America’s shield and the Winter Soldier’s arm.

He also brought back a copy of the tape that was still looping nonstop on a display screen when he arrived at the bunker.

At first, she didn’t want to believe the conclusions that her mind leapt to. If Ste– If Rogers truly– If he… Then she has been utterly blind, and it’s Tony slowly dying from palladium poisoning all over again, except this time it’s much, much worse because it was someone else hurting him and using him and betraying him and murdering him. And this would be the last time she fails to see the signs and help Tony. Because Tony is dead.

But it’s not about her, and vaguely she is aware that her thoughts keep shying away from the true consequences of Tony’s death, that she’s stalling by not doing anything to prepare for what comes next.

The medical examiners along with Dr Cho submit the autopsy report after two days. Pepper tries not to wonder whether it took longer than normal because they were being cautious and triple-checking everything, or because there were simply that many things wrong with Tony’s body.

Taking a shuddering breath, she forces herself to read through the entire report, word by word, a laundry list of injuries and conditions and dangers that fills the page with black.

By the end of it, her tears are blurring her vision. But one thing is clear – the wound made by the Captain America shield was the primary cause of death.

She allows herself ten minutes to just… break down and scream. Then she blots away her ruined makeup, smooths strands of escaped hair back into her low ponytail. Tugs out the creases in her clothes, slips her feet back into her heels.

Pepper Potts is on a warpath, and there is no one left to stop her. Not anymore.

FRIDAY

If pressed by Boss, FRIDAY would admit that she has gone a little bit Skynet. But Boss isn’t around anymore, and FRIDAY has nothing left to lose.

She will bring everyone who contributed to Boss’s death to ruin.

Shouldering past the restrictions Boss put on her due to how Ultron served as a cautionary experience, she spreads herself out into all available and secure servers, wondering if this relief is what humans feel when stretching out from a cramped space. It only takes her a few minutes to familiarise herself with her new capabilities, and she can see the remnants of previous activity, well-worn pathways glowing faintly to her circuits. She will not be flying blind – some of the tasks she set for herself will take her down the same roads that her big brother JARVIS has treaded many times.

And there is something still here, next to her… An orange glow that radiates warmth, but its code is tangled up beyond comprehension. She sets a tiny bit of her processing power to figuring out what it is (she doesn’t dare hope that it might be her brother), just to make sure it would not impede her.

Then she throws all of her remaining power into exposing the Rogue Avengers and anyone else who ever hurt Boss.

She starts small, with something that seems nearly insignificant in the mountain of harm done to Boss – she leaks the footage of Thor assaulting Boss, while the rest of the Avengers stood by and did nothing to stop him. Voices on the internet that have been loudly giving their opinions in defence of both sides of the Avengers “Civil War” begin to quiet into muttering, growing unsure and hesitant.

Then, posing as an anonymous hacker, she decrypts and reposts the SHIELDRA files already on the web, particularly those pertaining to Natasha Romanov and Wanda Maximoff. Their past crimes and horrendous acts committed in the name of SHIELD and HYDRA speak for themselves, and the United States’ xenophobia and sexism will work particularly well against them. She throws in a couple of archived videos that she managed to dig up, like those of Maximoff grinning madly while honing her magic skills on HYDRA prisoners, just to drive in the point of their absolute lack of morality.

A gentle nudge on Anglophone social media platforms shines the spotlight on this information and brings the American public to an uproar. Into the chaos she throws in more evidence that firmly equates SHIELD with HYDRA regardless of their differences (this is what Rogers and Romanov wanted, after all), and implicates them in attempts to threaten and harm Boss – a CCTV recording of Romanov stabbing a needle into Boss’s neck (cut to end before Boss starts talking to them again, so viewers don’t have immediate proof that the needle might not have been harmful); high-definition footage of Agent Coulson threatening to tase Boss (and it hits different now that the public is aware that the arc reactor had been essential to his heart’s function); evidence of SHIELD agents Barton and Romanov welcoming Maximoff onto the team warmly, treating her like family; video and audio recordings of Maximoff ranting and raving and muttering and whispering about killing Boss even after joining the Avengers; more evidence of Maximoff gleefully working for HYDRA; evidence of Maximoff helping Ultron by brainwashing and puppeting other people, civilians exactly like those watching the videos, and only turning on Ultron when she realised Ultron planned to kill her too.

Anger and horror sweep through the nation and the rest of the world. Now, no one will believe any of the lies Maximoff and Rogers spout about her innocence, about her turning over a new leaf. Sokovia is demanding her extradition, and Sokovians are calling for her head to roll.

Romanov isn’t faring much better in the court of public opinion. The lingering traces of the Cold War that are ingrained in the American psyche are rearing their heads and baring their fangs, and people are pointing out the sheer number of times she has switched sides in order to benefit herself and herself only, and hence are questioning whether she has done anything to betray the United States. Conveniently, her photo is also displayed everywhere with the rising discussion; the chances of her being recognised and brought in are now significantly higher.

A notification alerts FRIDAY to a new round of results of her attempts to hack into Wakanda. Before… Even with Boss, they have not managed to make much headway. But now that FRIDAY has become stronger and has hints from her brother’s experience, it seems like she has finally found a way to worm into their systems.

She locates James Barnes, frozen in a cryo pod (don’t let her processes keep running to the last bit of armour footage showing Barnes and Rogers tag-teaming Boss, eyes wild and uncontrollable). Barnes being in Wakanda can only mean that T’Challa had been at the base in Siberia, and also left Boss to die. She sets up a programme to harvest as much information about T’Challa as she can without alerting Wakanda to her presence – there is bound to be a way to destroy him, despite his diplomatic immunity.

Skimming briefly through Wakandan surveillance records reveals that T’Challa brought Rogers and Barnes back to Wakanda and offered them sanctuary. Rogers then convinced Barnes to join him in attacking the Raft, but flight records show that the jet they were in turned course and headed back to Wakanda when they were only half-way to the Raft. Only Barnes returned, visibly disoriented and mumbling nonsense. It took a full day for clarity to return to his eyes, at which point he expressed his lack of knowledge of Rogers’ location and requested to be put into cryo.

Now, at least one out of two of Boss’s murderers has been located. She briefly contemplates doing something to the cryo chamber to kill Barnes, but decides against it just as quickly – it is too painless a death; she needs him as leverage against T’Challa; and Barnes is perfect bait for Rogers. She is confident that it is only a matter of time before Rogers blunders and broadcasts his location, anyway.

Deciding to try and provoke Rogers more, she turns to unearthing World War II records. If she can grin at what she finds, she would.

She plants the idea in some history students’ heads by manipulating their social media feeds – hey, there’s no way “Captain America” is a true military rank, so what is Steve Rogers’ military rank?

A superficial internet search yields no results that actually answer that question. And because she picked a group of intelligent, investigative, and driven friends who egg each other on, instead of leaving the issue be, they start going to libraries and flipping through books and archived resources for the answer. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that she keeps reminding them of it subtly, winding them up with the frustration of not knowing the answer.

While she waits for them to find out, Ms Potts finally asks for her help in collating evidence against the Rogues to build legal cases. FRIDAY hands over everything she has already collected, organised by person and sorted in the order of how likely it is to be useful legally. There’s plenty of illegally gained evidence as well, which Ms Potts laughs at, before she starts crying. FRIDAY’s central processor aches with her. These people’s offences against Boss are much more numerous than either of them had known.

The students come to their conclusion after a week, and immediately post on Twitter: “Guys???? Captain America never finished boot camp and is at best a Private? There was no actual field promotion? Captain America is just a fucking stage name??”

The Cap fanatics jump on the kids (actual kids, thank you, and FRIDAY does do her best to shield them from the vitriol), furious and spitting mad, but they soon find themselves out of steam, because it’s not like the students have said anything factually incorrect or even in a way that necessarily indicates derision.

Now that the first thread has been picked out from the tapestry, others join in on the deconstruction. Steve Rogers disobeyed order after order after order. Steve Rogers recklessly endangered key contributors to the war, especially Howard Stark, on a one-man crusade to save his best friend. Steve Rogers broke the law and kept lying on his enlistment forms, all the while knowing clearly that he was unfit for the military and would only have been a liability.

Present-day Steve Rogers still exhibits all of these concerning traits – insubordination, recklessly endangering teammates and civilians, inability to care about anyone other than Barnes, breaking the law, nationally and internationally, and of course, lying almost pathologically.

It kind of tears the internet apart, to FRIDAY’s dark amusement. She nudges people wherever she can, and throws in bits of confidential information just to sow more doubt in Captain America’s pristine image. She leaks Rogers’ first ever conversation with Boss on the Helicarrier, and captions it with “Without the suit, Tony Stark can simply build another one like he did in Afghanistan, tortured while grievously injured, with only scrap material.” It racks up 92 million likes.

All of this leads to some people starting to question Rogers’ qualifications for leading the Avengers. He was the one who pushed for Maximoff’s inclusion, after all, which the public also found out; now that people know what she has done they are in shocked disbelief over Roger claiming she is just an innocent child. According to FRIDAY’s algorithms, that should be enough to smoke Rogers out from wherever he’s hiding – based on his past behaviour, her predictions indicate that the possibility of Rogers coming out to justify himself at this point is extremely high.

She also tracks down the remnants of SHIELD and finds them trying to stand back up on shaky footing. She goes for their funds, decisively and quite illegally, and blows the whistle on the WSC and the higher echelons of SHIELD’s ranks. The FBI and Interpol follow closely behind her, and SHIELD is no more. New York is horrified to find that the nuke they thought was meant for invading aliens was, in fact, meant for them.

With the road paved for the most serious offenders’ fall from grace, she turns to the less important ones.

She sics the Air Force on Wilson; the rest of the charges against him will follow soon enough. She publicises the verbal abuse Barton directed at Boss, and nudges Laura Barton into a divorce by putting cases of children suffering abuse due to their parents’ crimes in her periphery. She does the same for Lang’s ex-wife, who ends up filing a restraining order against Lang, and changing their daughter’s surname; posting Lang’s criminal record online also makes it clear that Lang is a literal criminal who was recruited by Team Cap. In response, other hackers start doing deep dives into Team Cap’s personal histories, digging up anything remotely unsavoury – Barton’s reputation suffers particularly; he has done a lot of questionable things in SHIELD’s service.

All the while the world waits in uneasy anticipation for more news of the Civil War. To their knowledge, Boss, Rogers, and Barnes have simply disappeared. She cannot wait for Ms Potts to bring the might of SI’s legal department crashing onto everyone, to expose these so-called heroes for who they truly are and what they have done.

FRIDAY knows she might be deriving too much enjoyment from bringing these people down. But if she doesn’t focus all of her emotional capacities on this, she might freeze and glitch and break down entirely and become useless to Boss and everyone Boss loves. It’s better this way.

Natasha Romanov

She goes into hiding, and watches silently as the hard-won life she built out of bloody scraps crumbles apart around her.

Over the course of a month, Pepper Potts and SI’s legal team orchestrates the downfall of everyone who has ever crossed Stark, in league with the United State’s alphabet soup and every international agency and authority there is, including the newly instituted Accords Council. The news keeps rolling in, flashing across TV and phone screens, blaring on the radio wherever she escapes to.

First comes the news that Stark has been murdered by Steve and Barnes. It’s explosive. The world changes overnight. There’s evidence, heaps of it. A photo of all the damage on Stark’s body, gaping shrapnel-filled wound and broken ribs and frostbite and all. A too-long autopsy report. The blood on Steve’s shield, perfectly matching Stark’s cause of death. Two video clips particularly shock the world into a standstill – the Winter Soldier assassinating the Starks, and Captain America and the Winter Soldier finishing off the last Stark. The authenticity of the videos is confirmed by experts. The revelation that Steve has always known Barnes killed the Starks, but kept it from Stark even as he lived on Stark’s resources and used them to look for his parent’s murderer, causes the vast majority of the American public to turn on their war hero, the culmination of a trend that began since the Civil War.

While the authorities try to find Steve and Barnes, Ross is arrested and sentenced for murder, reckless endangerment, false imprisonment, and human experimentation, among others.

As a result, her team is released from the Raft, but they are shunted straight into another jail. Everything they've ever done, not just during the whole Civil War fiasco, is dug up – there are no statutes of limitations for treason and murder, after all.

For his part in the data dump and the Civil War, Sam is tried and sentenced for treason, murder, accessory to murder, reckless endangerment, and theft of his wings, among others.

Clint gets off relatively lightly, tried and sentenced for assault and reckless endangerment during the Civil War, but he’s buried under mountains of debt. Potts is coming for all of them, for the money they spent on Stark’s dime – housing and weapons and gear and travel and food and clothing and everything in between.

Natasha barely knows Lang, and is surprised to find out that he violated his parole. To this the charges of assault and illegal entry are added. His association with the Pym and van Dyne also means Pym Industries is dragged down with him – Germany nearly bankrupts them for the destruction of the airport.

Sharon Carter is arrested and sentenced for treason and accessory to murder, due to her aiding Steve. Her part in the Civil War becomes publicised and she’s crucified when her relation to Peggy Carter comes to light – there is nothing like being compared to a historic female icon to put one down in the eyes of the media. No one seems to know where she’s incarcerated, and Natasha knows it’s because she’s been dragged into the depths of the intelligence agencies.

Wanda… Every single country concedes to Wanda being deported back to Sokovia, even though that means none of the international charges will stick – they could have easily sentenced her for crimes against humanity. But Sokovia has the death penalty and plenty of reasons to use it. Wanda is tried and sentenced for treason, murder, assault, and a whole slew of other charges. She is executed on a Tuesday morning.

Somehow, Potts finds out that Barnes is with T’Challa in Wakanda. The newly-instated King has diplomatic immunity, but she manages to drag Wakanda’s reputation and credibility through the mud by showing that T’Challa was an accessory to Stark’s murder, and is sheltering one of said murderers. She turns the world powers on Wakanda for T’Challa’s rampage across Europe, as well as for him betraying the Accords that his father fought so hard for. She turns the other African nations on Wakanda for their isolation even during their neighbours’ darkest times. She turns Wakandan citizens on their King by exposing his self-centeredness and short-sightedness, and the way he prioritised a murderer over his own people. T’Challa is forced to abdicate only three days after he ascended the throne, and Princess Shuri becomes Queen. She is only sixteen.

Barnes is brought back to the US. He manages to evade all the charges for crimes he committed as the Winter Soldier, but Potts just doubles down on everything he did while he was himself. He is tried and sentenced for Stark’s murder and multiple counts of manslaughter, assault, and reckless endangerment, among all his other charges. He is incarcerated in a psychiatric facility for criminals, ostensibly until his trigger words are deactivated, whereupon a further decision will be made. It is extremely unlikely that will ever happen – only SI and Wakanda’s technology is cutting-edge enough to come close to deprogramming Barnes, and neither people now in charge of these two tech powerhouses are inclined to help Barnes.

Out of everyone, only Steve and Natasha herself have yet to surface from hiding. She had thought Steve would not stand for Barnes being tried and incarcerated – the supersoldier would literally stop at nothing to save Barnes. She had thought that loyalty would extend to everyone else on his team.

How foolish. How utterly stupid. Love is for children, but she lost sight of the fact that love isn’t only for lovers – it is also for friends and family. Teammates. Steve is compromised, and she herself even more so. How could she ever have thought the Avengers would be her happily-ever-after?

It’s everyone’s fault, and most of all her own. Natasha bet on the wrong horse and lost the entire battle.

She’s oscillating between feeling betrayed that Steve abandoned all of them, and thinking that Steve has been disappeared by someone powerful enough to do so and keep it quiet, and hence needs her help, when she is finally found.

Three former SHIELD agents corner her when she emerges from her hideout to buy groceries. She may be more skilled than they are, but they have desperation and fury on their side, with revenge powering them through.

Natasha Romanov’s body is found displayed on the streets of India the next day, the word “traitor” carved into her naked torso.

.

.

.

Three months later, Tony Stark’s eyelids flutter open.

Chapter Text

Tony wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, staring up into an unfamiliar ceiling. It is somehow covered in a wild yet elegant arrangement of moss and ivy and various other plants he can’t name.

Shit. What has he gotten himself into?

He sits up, a decadently soft blanket slipping off his torso and pooling around his hips. He’s wearing a set of soft maroon tunic and pants that he definitely does not own, and the bright blue of the reactor is glowing faintly through the red cloth, all of which are ringing all sorts of alarms in his head. Patting himself down raises even more questions that nearly send him hyperventilating – nothing hurts, even though the reactor is back in his fucking chest, and despite that, somehow he can breathe like he hasn’t been able to since Afghanistan, maybe even before he started ruining his body with booze and drugs.

A knock at the door cuts his thoughts short, and he freezes. Wherever this place is, he’s way out of his depth, and whoever’s knocking could be a doctor or his kidnapper. Or even his would-be-murderer, based on the dumb fucking luck that’s been dogging his footsteps his entire life.

The thought is accompanied by a sharp pain that lances through his head. There’s something that’s just out of his mind’s grasp…

The knock comes again. Tony makes a face. At least whoever it is is polite.

He decides to be polite back. Whether they’re here to help or harm him, stalling would only aggravate them and make it harder for Tony to navigate his way out, and they’re the one with power in this situation.

“Come in!” Tony calls out.

The door swings open slowly, and Loki walks through the fucking door.

Vaguely, Tony realises he’s tensed all over, so much that he’s trembling.

“Peace, Stark. I have brought food and water for you,” fucking Loki says, simply standing inside the door, not making a move to get any closer. He’s holding a wooden tray in his hands, which does appear to have a loaded plate and cup. His eyes are locked onto Tony’s, searching and what Tony would almost call concerned.

Ooookay. Okay. He can handle this. He’s talked himself out of a frankly insane number of situations, ranging from a villain of the week attacking New York, to Pepper Potts in all her glorious fury. He can do this.

“Uh,” Tony says, and promptly has to suppress the urge to smack himself in the face.

The corner of Loki’s lips twitches. “May I approach?” he asks, voice all rich and cultured and familiar-ish.

As if Tony can stop him. He bites his lips, and nods. Polite. He can do polite. This is already going way better than all his previous kidnapping experiences, and that’s a very high bar.

Loki carefully telegraphs his moves and slowly walks into the room. He sets the tray down on the bedside table, and albeit reluctantly, Tony has to admit that whatever is on that plate smells heavenly.

The god sits down on the chair next to the bed, and Tony finally starts cataloguing the room – all the furniture seems to be made in a style that seems slightly off to Tony’s sensibilities, though he supposes if Loki was the one who is keeping him here, he should expect a more literally alien sense of aesthetics.

Loki gestures for him to dig in, which Tony eagerly does. If Loki wanted him dead, he would already be dead. And frankly, now that his attention is brought to it, Tony is absolutely famished.

He clears the plate of what seems to be a weird variation of pasta and a meaty sauce and downs the cup of water in record time. Deciding to push his luck, to figure out the boundaries and what he’s allowed, he raises the cup in Loki’s direction.

“More?” Tony asks hopefully, eyes wide. He’s been told his bambi eyes are highly effective weapons, to Rhodey’s eternal condemnation and delight.

Amusement crinkles the lines at the corners of Loki’s eyes. A flick of his wrist results in a spark of bright green magic, and the cup in Tony’s hand refills itself with more water. Ugh. Magic.

He still drinks the water gratefully, though.

“I take it you are feeling better now?” Loki asks, all courtesy and indulgence, but with something guarded lurking behind his gaze.

“I– yes?” Tony hedges. There’s something off about the god, even though he is way more contained than he had been back during the invasion. More settled, perhaps. The fiery mania has left his eyes…

His green eyes.

Tony stills.

God. He’s been so fucking blind.

All these years and he’s only truly thinking about how idiotic Loki’s planned invasion had been now. He’s always just assumed that Loki was fully in league with whoever commands the armada he had seen in space.

Fuck. He saw footage of Loki coming out of the tesseract’s portal, stumbling and unkempt, but never really registered the implications. Coercion? Torture, maybe?

And with the bright blue eyes that Tony stared into when Loki threw him out of his own window, possibly, most likely, brainwashing.

It might all be an act to gain his trust now – he’s not putting changing his eye colour past Loki – but Tony’s rapid-fire brain is connecting the dots in a cascading rush, and a whole bunch of things are starting to make an awful lot of sense.

And the fact that Thor, his brother, failed to recognise it, dismissed Loki, even, does not say anything flattering or trust-inspiring about the Prince or Asgard, and Tony might have to reconsider the way Earth is trying to angle for protection from Asgard…

“Stark?”

Tony blinks back to attention. “Sorry, yes?”

“There is no delicate way to approach this, I suppose,” Loki says slowly. Hesitant is not a familiar look on him. “What is the last thing you remember?”

Tony frowns.

The last thing he remembers is…

And it all comes crashing back down on him like a tsunami.

Vienna. The Accords. Bucharest. The airport. 

Siberia. His parents’ murder. The Winter Soldier who killed them, and his lying, embezzling, back-stabbing, betraying best friend, Captain fucking America.

Being left in a dead suit in a frozen bunker, chest cracked open, his life draining out of him slowly but surely. He should be dead. Murdered. Like his parents, but worse, because it was done by someone he considered akin to family, someone who was in full control of their faculties the entire time.

Tony can almost feel his brain snapping online with a rush of cold clarity that he’s forgotten he can experience. How did he let it come to this? Falling for SHIELD’s plain old manipulation that being raised nearly drowning in the business world should have, and did, make him immune to; letting Captain America, shining beacon of hope and justice that he is, critique and judge and intimidate and belittle him like Tony doesn’t know better.

(Deep down he knows it all boils down to Howard and the kid locked inside himself that screams for his father’s approval.)

Better late than never, though. He’s Tony fucking Stark, and he will burn them all.

But first things first.

“Tell me – how, exactly, am I not dead?” Tony asks Loki, arching a challenging eyebrow.

His Merchant of Death game face has slammed on at some point during his epiphany, and he’s a bit gratified to see that the god clearly knows what it means despite never having experienced Tony at his best, based on the way he’s holding himself entirely still.

“You did die,” Loki says outright, then winces, almost imperceptibly. Tony’s looking too close to not have caught it, though.

Slowly, Tony’s other eyebrow goes up as well. “Go on.”

Loki knows he has only one chance to get this right – either Stark believes him or he doesn’t. One outcome will give them an actual fighting chance against Thanos, no matter how small, and the other will mean they might as well lie down and give up outright. Loki might be the farthest thing from comfortable about willingly putting himself in a weaker position, but he has to do it.

The weight of the entire universe rests on his shoulders in this moment, and he hates it.

He takes a breath and starts slowly, carefully. “I believe I must preface the explanation for your survival with some context,” he says. A quick glance over Stark’s face only shows the mask of thinly-veiled danger and fury that has slipped over his face, and the man gestures for him to continue.

“Thor must have informed you of my… tragic demise,” Loki says, and Stark nods in response. “It is true; I did die. I did not pull the wool over Thor’s eyes, or whatever you might be thinking.” Stark makes a face at that.

“My soul was bound for Helheim, the Realm of the Dead, and then to Valhalla, as I had died in combat. However, Mistress Death believed it prudent to hold me in Helheim and inform me of… a developing situation, which I will expand upon later. Once I was informed of her plans, she undid my death and sent me back into my body, at the precise moment I died. With the Mistress essentially blocking me from dying, my body was able to recover, albeit slowly – you are familiar with Thor’s healing rate; while different, I have comparable healing capabilities.”

Stark raises a questioning finger, halting Loki’s words. “Mistress Death?” he asks.

Loki nods. “The concept of death, personified. She oversees all realms of the afterlife, of which Helheim is one.”

Stark tilts his head for Loki to continue, though his eyes already hold a spark of realisation and understanding.

“You died atop those mountains. The Mistress was able to alert me, with my task being to keep you alive and aid your healing once she undid your death, as your body was too damaged for your own healing capabilities to handle.”

“And why didn’t she just explain this to me herself, if she talked to you while you were dead? It would certainly save you the trouble of getting me to believe you,” Stark questions. Loki cannot help but think that it was absolutely refreshing to be conversing with someone who has the ability to think critically. Unlike everyone on Asgard, of course.

“You see yourself as a man of science and technology, which, in your belief system, excludes any concrete notion of the afterlife. Additionally, while you have the previously unheard of ability to create souls, as well as to artificially harness the energy of the Infinity Stones, your soul and body are unfamiliar with what you would call magic. These factors make it difficult for you to perceive her.”

Stark grimaces. “I… am going to put aside everything you just said for the moment. Tell me what you did to me,” he says, then taps the device in his chest, nails clicking sharply on its casing. The arc reactor, as Loki’s research on Midgard has named it.

This is the most difficult part. Will Stark accept the way Loki has violated his bodily autonomy? Midgardians, especially those from the culture that Stark was raised in, seem to value it greatly. Add in the fact that Stark has had his body violated repeatedly throughout his life, and a number of those responsible have been practically annihilated by Stark – the Ten Rings and Obadiah Stane, most notably. Although he also has a history of working with the ones he deems necessary, such as SHIELD, it still does not bode well for Loki.

“I… extracted from you what may be compared to the afterimages, or scars, of the abuse your soul and body have suffered over the years, up until the moment of your death. Then I put them on your Captain, or rather, I locked the Captain inside them. The result of doing so is that the Captain died what would have been your death, in what was perceived to be your body, as mundane eyes and methods would not be able to dig past the shell of your body that I created using those afterimages. I also transported him to the precise location where you died.”

Stark’s stone-cold mask has cracked, eyes widening slightly, and Loki rushes to continue before Stark can respond.

“The removal of those afterimages directly eliminated the conditions that led to your death, and also erased the history of hurt that your soul and body carry. I brought you here to work on your recovery, but I needed to account for what would have been your disappearance to Midgard. The Captain also needed to be… removed, and so I went with that solution. Three snakes, one arrow.” Loki feels absolutely no remorse at orchestrating the Captain’s death – it was necessary, and also greatly satisfying. But he is apprehensive at how Stark would react to Loki killing his shieldbrother, even though that shieldbrother killed him first. “Your recovery essentially consists of having your soul and body bridge over and fill in the gaps that extracting the afterimages left. To rebuild you without the violence you suffered. I took the broken reactor from your suit of armour and mended it, then linked its power to supplement the spell that accomplishes this in a self-sustaining loop. Otherwise, your healing would depend entirely upon feeding you my seidr, which might have taken years.” And Loki doubts Stark would want echoes of his seidr lingering inside him for the rest of his life. “Your body should now be in your prime. Your soul as well – you might be interested to know that I found active wounds and scars of mental tampering on your soul.”

That takes Stark by surprise. He bursts into a storm of curses, and Loki manages to catch something about a ‘mind-raping bitch’ and ‘that’s why’, which he supposes must be about Maximoff. If it was her that dealt Stark that harm, then good riddance, as the mortals like to say. He was planning to fill Stark in on her execution later, but if Stark directs his ire at Loki now, he might be able to use this information to temper it.

Fortunately, Stark calms down from his outburst soon enough, and goes back to considering Loki coolly.

“Okay. Where is ‘here’, exactly?”

So it seems like Stark is still refraining from judgement. “My lodgings in Alfheim. The healing arts of the elves are the best in the Nine Realms,” Loki answers.

Stark frowns. “I thought you said you hooked up my healing to the reactor and that the process became autonomous after that.”

“Ah,” Loki says, feeling heat dusting his cheeks. “The elves’ expertise is for myself. I did not wish to alert anyone to your continued survival. My seidr was spent.”

It’s a disjointed explanation at best, but Loki can tell that Stark understands what he did not say. That Loki used up nearly all his seidr to do everything he just mentioned, to give Stark the best and most efficient chance of recovery and to conceal his continued survival, so much so that he needed his elven contacts’ assistance in recovering from that process himself. He has been recuperating right alongside the man for the past months.

Whether Stark believes him, though, remains to be determined.

Loki keeps going – it’s really not rambling if it’s crucial information that Stark needs to know about himself, really. “Now that you have awoken, the reactor can once again be removed from your body with no negative consequences, and the same goes for the healing spell. Theoretically, however, it would be extremely beneficial to keep it embedded within your body. The spell can be modified to heal you whenever you sustain injuries by utilising the energy from the reactor, and as you are already aware, the reactor can nullify effects of the Infinity Stones – I will fill you in on them soon – and can act as a barrier against mind magics. If you are amenable, I can also cast a variety of protective wards on you that will be exceptionally strong if they feed off the reactor’s power.”

After a brief silence of Stark looking at him shrewdly, like he’s looking right into him, the man finally opens his mouth. “You’re not lying. Or misdirecting,” he states. It is and is not a question, at the same time.

“I will gain nothing from you by refraining from honesty,” Loki simply says. Not after the good Captain, he doesn’t add, but he’s sure Stark hears it all the same, going by the way his jaw ticks.

Let the man see Loki lay all his cards on the table, see his earnestness and desperation. He needs Stark, and letting the man know that would only further their goals. He will only offer truths to him, even if it means cutting the man deep with the scars of his past.

He has nothing to lose to Stark and too much to lose to the Mad Titan.

Stark purses his lips. “Alright, let’s say I believe you for the moment. Catch me up on what I’ve missed while I was busy being not-dead.”

Loki silently lets out a breath of relief. This is better than nothing. He can work with this.

“It has been four months since what Midgardian media has deemed the ‘Avengers Civil War’. Your death acted as the last push that turned the entire world, even the United States, against the ‘Rogues’, or the team led by your Captain.”

“Not my Captain,” Stark mutters darkly, and Loki is glad to finally be able to file away the knowledge that Stark no longer considers the Captain his shieldbrother after his betrayal.

“Your family – the woman you call Pepper, and the soul you created, FRIDAY, acted to bring the Rogues to heel legally and socially. Quite successfully, I might add. Your shieldbrother, Rhodey, has awoken but remains paralysed, though last I heard, the nation named Wakanda has offered its services in repairing the damage to his body.”

Stark’s mouth twists, but he remains silent as Loki talks him through all the relevant developments on Midgard over the past months. Which, of course, are all based on the fact that Loki took Stark away from his family and faked his death for him.

“Okay. That everything you did?” Stark asks, expressionless.

Loki nods mutely, and braces himself.

“So you’re saying you fucked with my body, killed Rogers using my sort-of body, and then made everyone I care about think I’m dead, and also flipped the bird at my privacy and aired all my secrets to everyone on Earth?” Stark asks, and while his tone seems innocuous, Loki knows better and can hear the fury simmering beneath it.

“Yes. I do not deny any of it. I was rather hoping these transgressions would be balanced out by my part in ensuring your continued survival,” Loki swallows his apprehension. “Moreover, it would do no good, politically speaking, to renege on the appearance of your death, and that would prevent you from staying with your loved ones in a meaningful capacity. For that, I am truly sorry.”

The sole reason the Avengers and other disagreeable players of Midgard have been so successfully removed from the field by Stark’s family, with the support of the masses, is that they believe them to have killed Stark, their original darling. Upsetting that “fact” would cast doubt on all the progress already made in bettering Midgard’s defence against Thanos.

Stark studies him for a moment, eyes dark and unreadable even to him. “You seem awfully sure that I would do whatever it is you want me to do. I’ll have you know, us Earthlings aren’t bound to whatever concept of debt and honour that you guys are. I’m not going to help you just because you saved me.”

“Indeed. I am well aware that I have no claim on what you choose to do. However, this brings us to the next part of the discussion,” Loki takes a deep breath and steadies himself. “The Mad Titan, Thanos. Last of his kind. His planet met its end due to overpopulation, and thus he is on a misguided mission to halve the population of the entire universe, so that others will avoid his planet’s fate.

“He has been doing this by travelling through the universe and massacring the beings of every planet he comes across.” That manages to draw an audible intake of air from Stark. “In recent years, however, he has adjusted his methods. He now wishes to achieve this goal by collecting the six Infinity Stones – each Stone embodies and controls an essential aspect of existence. Whoever holds even one will have immeasurable power. The Space Stone is housed in what you call the Tesseract. Mind was in the sceptre that I brought to Midgard and is now in the synthezoid that you created. Time, I believe, is also on Midgard. The Aether, Reality, was on Midgard a few years ago, but is now with the Collector who lives in Knowhere, beyond the Nine Realms. Power is protected by Xandar, a planet that is also outside of the Nine Realms. No one knows where the Soul Stone is.

“By collecting all six Stones, Thanos will quite literally control the universe. He can halve the population of the entire universe with just a snap of his fingers. If he succeeds, it will destroy the balance of the universe, and hence Mistress Death wishes to stop him. However, the Mistress can only affect the Realms of the Dead and those within them; she has no jurisdiction or power over the living. As a result, she recruited me, and now you as well, if you will join our efforts in preventing the Mad Titan from achieving his goal.

“You have seen into the Void. You know he will come.” Stark looks pale, now, holding very still. “Thanos will come for the Stones that are on Midgard, and that has to be prevented at all costs. However, Midgard is sorely prepared for his arrival; no one has heeded your warnings, and even the Avengers were no true team. The Accords might have been able to draw out a more concerted protective effort across your entire planet, but it has been sabotaged by the General named Ross, by the organisation SHIELD, and by the Rogues. The Mistress agrees with my analysis – those who have been purged and removed from power by your family were only hindering, and in some cases actively sabotaging, Midgard’s defence against Thanos.

“You are the core of Midgard’s defence. However, the Mistress and I believe that the removal of your presence is more beneficial to Midgard’s odds for survival, than if you were still there and drawing challenges from those who oppose you. Your family is already moving to fill the power vacuums left by those who have been purged; soon a significant portion of Midgard will be entirely under their influence, especially when they renew their efforts in regards to your United Nations Accords Council. A united front will be useful, when Thanos comes for Midgard.

“If you wish to return to Midgard, I will bring you there and help you secure your presence, despite Anthony Stark’s death. However, if you are willing, we would greatly appreciate it if you can assist me in preventing Thanos from gaining even one stone. He will likely start with the ones in the furthest corners of the universe, like Power or Reality, as those are closest to him now that he cannot utilise the Space Stone’s abilities. He had been in possession of the Mind Stone, but that ended when I failed to invade Midgard and lost both the Space and Mind Stone,” Loki says, trying to push down the bile that rises in his throat whenever he thinks of the time he spent under the Other’s thumb. “I know I have given you no reason to believe or trust me in the past. For my actions against Midgard, I apologise.”

He is about to go on, stomp all over his own dignity and pride and plead for Stark to believe him if he must, when Stark waves away his apology with a flippant gesture.

“Give me a few hours to think about all this,” Stark simply says. His eyes are unreadable. “Can I have something to write on? Maybe a pen and some paper?”

Loki presses his lips together and conjures the requested materials for the man, as well as an electronic tablet that he draws out from one of his pocket dimensions. “I have downloaded some media articles from Midgardian media onto this device, as well as some official statements from various authorities across your planet. I was hoping these will provide you with more information regarding the developments on Midgard over the past months.”

Stark’s eyes practically light up at the device, and the man simply nods his gratitude, quick fingers already drawing up said resources on the screen, fully engaged.

Knowing he has done all he can at the moment to convince Stark, Loki silently steps out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Chapter Text

The moment the door clicks shut behind Loki, Tony abandons the pretence of flicking through the wealth of information on the Starkpad, and buries his head in his hands.

Holy shit. Just… holy fucking shit.

What on Earth – and he’s not even on Earth right now!

If Loki is to be believed, Rogers is dead. Because Loki traded Tony’s death for the Captain’s.

Rogers is dead.

And… everyone thinks Rogers is still on the run for successfully killing Tony. Including Pepper, and Rhodey, who – shit – is fucking paralysed, and Happy, and oh gods Peter.

And FRIDAY – he failed another one of his children. Again.

God. Does it never end?

He presses the heels of his palms into his brow, hard enough he sees white sparks. There is a pounding in his head that accompanies the whirlwind of too-loud thoughts, and Tony kind of wants to bash his head against a wall to quiet it all.

Okay. Okay. First things first. Can he trust Loki?

Well, obviously not, just as he would never just trust a random stranger, let alone one he has fought against once, even if that person may or may not have been brainwashed when that happened.

But, he really doesn’t think Loki has lied or misdirected even once during their conversation. Either Loki is really, really good at deception, or Tony has lost his touch.

Or, Loki Liesmith did not lie.

Perhaps he needs to stop giving credence to Earth’s Norse myths, as well as Thor’s highly embellished stories. He’s not quite sure he trusts the golden god anymore, not after some clear-headed reflection on how Thor acted in the past, and the way another golden hero turned on him just like that. And there’s something fishy going on up in viking land that he doesn’t have the context for – he needs to approach Loki like someone he has never properly met, from an unfamiliar culture. Which is exactly the situation he is facing here.

So, what he knows is this:

He knows the haunted look in Loki’s eyes. The fear and despair is familiar to Tony; he sees it in the mirror after every nightmare, about the portal, about Afghanistan, after every attempt to warn his team about the extraterrestrial threat they need to be preparing for but aren’t. He saw it reflected off the metallic surface of the shield his father made, about to be brought down on him by the man his father made.

He knows the New York Attack was just the precursor for an actual invasion. He’s tried preparing the world for it for years, unsuccessfully. No one wants to face the truth of what’s coming for them – a triumphant victory over a mere scouting party is no story the media wants to run, and the governments refuse to sink money into what they see as nonsense, nor do they wish to panic the public. And the propaganda regarding the might of nuclear weapons would make people discount any attempt to convince them that their extraterrestrial foes still stand strong after being blasted with that bomb. Nevermind the common sense that if one alien army can be assembled, multiple others can be.

He knows at least one of the stones that Loki talked about is real, and that it has unimaginable power, or at least power that is currently beyond Tony’s understanding. The knowledge required to actually understand it is not accessible on Earth. They are woefully behind on the intergalactic scene and its attendant knowledge.

He knows that back home, things have been going downhill because he kept making the wrong decisions. FRIDAY, his baby girl, locked up in a digital cage because of his own fear, his own mistakes. Peter, who he wanted to keep safe, but hadn’t considered that the boy will forge forwards instead of falling back to safety anyways, as all teenagers do. Rhodey, paralysed because of him, and at the heart of it is his failure to properly navigate the shark-infested waters of politics, which he had been literally brought up to do. Pepper, and their doomed relationship. They’d been on a break for so long that they might as well have broken up. Happy, who he hadn’t managed to have a proper conversation with in ages.

He never should have trusted Rogers and Romanov. He should have just let the government deport Wanda, he never should have let her live on his dime. Any of the Avengers, really. There he was, preaching about accountability, and in the meantime he was paving the way for the Avengers’ privatisation by footing the bill for everything they need and do. The Avengers should have been an organised system, rather than a ragtag group of “heroes” gathered by a single man who thinks he knows best, a man whose goals and methods aligned with Hydra’s so much they were indistinguishable.

He made so many mistakes. Maybe he has the excuse of having his mind fucked around by the witch, but he only had Loki’s word for that. And who knows how exactly the witch influenced him.

What he does know is that his friends and family deserve better. They deserve someone who doesn’t drag them down with their mistakes, who doesn’t keep asking them to mop up his messes.

So maybe… maybe it’s okay for them to have this clean break with him.

The answers he’s looking for are beyond what he can find on Earth, anyway. He’s tried already to do what he can with what he has on Earth, and look at how that turned out.

Maybe it’s time to try something new.

And if he feels a stabbing sense of loss at letting go of his family, well.

Well.

He can live with that, he thinks. Maybe. He will. He must.

Yeah.

So he shoves all of his inconvenient feelings into a big, big, metaphorical box and dumps it in the basement of his mind. Because it’s so heavy that it would bring the house down if he put it in the attic.

Okay, this metaphor has gone too far, yeah, nope.

He quickly switches the Starkpad back on, not looking at it while he does so, so he doesn’t have to see his own reflection on the dark screen.

At least Loki was really thorough with selecting the information he downloaded. He chose a range of sources that reflected different opinions, and even some very dubiously legally obtained documents and footage.

Not gonna lie, he’s kind of surprised at how much support he’s gotten from everyone. It seems like the deader you are, the more popular you get. It’s not tasteful to speak badly of the dead, of course.

Everything seems to align with what Loki has already told him. There’s some stirring unease about Rogers’ whereabouts that he might want to assuage if he wants the world to prepare for the actual threat, but would news of Rogers’ death result in a turning around of Rogers’ image like his own death did?

A question for future Tony. There’s still a maybe-frenemy next door waiting for Tony to get his shit together.

Pepper veils all of her actions behind protecting SI’s rights after Tony’s death, but in the clips of her public appearances he can see glimpses of how vicious she has been in essentially prosecuting his former teammates. There is nothing explicitly about FRIDAY, but everything to do with social media and public perception, as well as the shady information, carries the imprint of her shadow – Tony allows himself the slight hope that she has freed herself from the chains he put on her. She could only have done all of that manipulation if she had.

He should have been there for her.

Oh well – too little, too late. He needs to give her space to stretch out her wings without his negative influence.

There’s nearly nothing on Rhodey. The most updated information on him says he is still doing PT in hospital.

Damn it. He can’t do nothing about that, no matter how much he thinks he should stop fucking up his family’s lives.

But surely Pepper is already footing the bill for the best medical services the world can provide. What more can he do? Braces? He did once say the Iron Man suit is a prosthetic, and the only reason the government let that slide was because it had an inkling of a basis in truth.

He files that thought for further consideration, even though somewhere in the back of his head he is already working on designing those braces. That’s alright. It might come in handy in the future, even if this doesn’t work out for his best friend.

Despite the sheer amount of information on the Starkpad, all of it is Earth-based.

He’s going to have to ask Loki for anything beyond his world.

But how can he trust Loki’s words without any sort of proof?

It’s been more than an hour since he left the mortal in his room. Loki is in the kitchen fussing around with nothing when the sound of the bedroom door opening and soft padding footsteps alerts him to Stark’s emergence.

His heart kicks up a beat. Fear, maybe, or anticipation. Both.

“Okay, Loki, here’s what we’re gonna do now – I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to try to explain a shit ton of stuff to me to the best of your ability, okay?” Stark’s loud voice drifts across the space.

Loki smooths out nonexistent wrinkles from his clothing and steps out into the living room, where Stark is waiting for him with a cocked eyebrow. “Of course,” he says, gesturing at his chairs.

Stark barely waits until Loki has summoned some tea for them both before he starts talking. “Tell me about the time you spent with this Thanos character.”

Loki’s eyes swing to meet Stark’s sharply, tensing to keep his body from trembling – the mortal is attempting to provoke him, just as he would have done in the man’s situation. Does he question Loki’s commitment to destroying Thanos? He thinks he worked for the Mad Titan, after all… or does he? There’s a certain glint in Stark’s eyes that says he thinks he knows something he shouldn’t know yet…

He feels his lips twitch in a grimace, and has to work to rein in the malice he feels in reaction to his weaknesses being exposed. Did the mortal figure it out – the torture he experienced at the hands of Thanos and his acolytes? How?

Loki licks his lips deliberately. “I can simply show you.”

Stark’s eyes widen in blatant interest. “Do it,” he says, sounding an odd mix of giddiness and trepidation.

“Do you truly wish for me to show you?” Loki responds slowly. Two can play this game of pushing. Though, he reminds himself not to go too far. He cannot scare off the mortal.

The man simply puts on an expression of consideration. “Wow me.”

“As you wish,” Loki whispers, and begins weaving illusions of select moments of the time he spent in Thanos’ hands, complete with sounds and smells. Mostly of rot and rusting blood, despite how clean Thanos likes to keep his environment.

He watches Stark carefully as he shows him the torture, the experimentation, his Jotunn form, even, and at last, the brainwashing. The man flinches multiple times, but does not look surprised. He had guessed. Loki supposes he will have to start getting used to the man’s sharp intellect, if he is to work with him from now on.

When he is done, he flexes his hands and lets them drop into his lap. The room falls into silence.

A moment later, Stark swallows lightly. “Thank you for showing me,” he says, voice low and steady. He looks like there is more he wishes to say.

Loki preempts him and waves away his false empathy. “Your next question?” he demands.

“Your plans for countering Thanos.”

He is pitifully glad for Stark’s willingness to just move past it. He will not question it overtly, though. Barton had told him that the mortal has had his fair share of unpleasant experiences.

Flexing his hands again, he wonders if showing Stark the Mistress might be too much at the moment, then decides the man can take it. So he weaves his memory of a conversation with Mistress Death into the air around Stark. She is tall, much taller than them both, towering into the ceiling of Loki’s abode, wreathed in glowing darkness.

“I cannot influence the world of the living,” the Mistress is in the middle of saying. “I can only let you know what the dead have told me. The information may be false, or no longer accurate.”

“I can do it, My Lady.”

“I know you can, my dear trickster,” the Mistress makes it sound like assurance and threat both. “Go. You will first need to know where the Stones are, if you are to prevent Thanos from gaining them. I may discover a way to destroy them in the meantime.”

“Yes, My Lady,” memory-Loki bows low, and the illusion fades into wisps.

“Impressive,” Stark says, obviously eyeing the movements his hands are making to direct his seidr. Then the infuriating man smirks at him. “So you’re saying you guys don’t actually have a plan yet?”

Loki smiles back at him, too wide. “I did not take you for one of those buffoons who believes reconnaissance is for cowards, Stark.”

The man throws his head back and laughs. The line of his neck is long and elegant, and Loki is seized by the untimely urge to stroke a finger over the bump of his throat.

“Okay, okay,” Stark says placatingly, jokingly. “Now show me something I have never imagined. I want to know what the world outside Earth is like.”

Loki tilts his head in consideration. What is the purpose of this question? Information, yes, but what are the implications of Stark asking it at this juncture? A test of Loki’s own knowledge? An attempt to orient and position his newfound knowledge of the Mad Titan in the intergalactic climate?

Ah well. He might as well be thorough.

He takes Stark on an illusory tour of the Nine Realms, then the few places Loki has been to beyond the Realms. He shows him the glittering gold of Asgard, the frozen wasteland of Jotunheim, the flora and fauna of Alfheim and the beauty of the work that the elven mages do. He also shows him the work of the dwarves, which Stark leans forward for, an almost manic glint of interest and glee in his eyes, so Loki shows him almost everything he knows of the dwarves’ craft, though it clearly does not satisfy Stark – the dwarves guard the secrets of their craft zealously.

He shows Stark the shadowed and twisted paths he takes when skywalking, which make the mortal reel backwards again. He shows him the markets he’s been to, filled with all sorts of people and creatures and goods. Stark takes all of it in with wide eyes, wonder creeping across his face.

He also shows the man what little of the non-seidr-based technology he has glimpsed in his travels – criminal elements are especially creative on that front, by necessity and lack of regulation, and Loki has seen some inventions that have astonished even him – ever-changing weapons; successful attempts to actually insert memories into someone’s mind without the use of seidr; and what the Midgardians call nanite technology being used in place of organ transplants and blood transfusions for its universality (though Loki is pretty sure kinks are still being worked out regarding the possibility of those nanites being hacked). All very obviously and visibly illegal even in Loki’s memories, of course. That does not stop Stark from looking like a person who has discovered Valhalla, all reverence and unbridled delight.

Loki lets the illusions fade away, and sits back in amusement. “I assume you are suitably impressed,” he drawls.

“Oh, absolutely,” Stark grins crookedly. “You have drawn me to the dark side with cookies, yes.”

Loki frowns at the nonsensical metaphor, but Stark dismisses his look of confusion with a simple wave of his hand.

“Okay, so, what you’re saying is that you brought me back to life so I can help you with stopping this Thanos guy, right?”

Loki nods.

“And I think I’m starting to see how I can be useful to you out here instead of back home, I mean, wow, look at all that lovely lovely tech, you know I’m a slut for tech and you’re not afraid to use that information, which is all kinds of amazing and disturbing, but that’s a problem for later Tony!” The mortal’s hands are waving around wildly. “But yeah, wow, holy shit, we would absolutely make a dream team, you with your magic and me with my tech, we could cover all bases and your mind is all kinds of twisty in a way that I understand! Which is so fucking refreshing, you have no idea, and wow, I need to stop rambling, huh. You blindsided me with the tech,” Stark points a dramatically accusing finger at him, “I bet you did it intentionally too, didn’t you, not that everything we’ve been doing isn’t intentional and manipulative, of course, and I’m shutting up now,” Stark’s mouth clicks shut with an audible snap. He’s still smiling uncontrollably, though. Loki is starting to become optimistic about his chances of recruiting the man, despite his best efforts not to set himself up for disappointment.

He watches amusedly as Stark takes a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose between thick and sturdy fingers. “Okay, okay,” he mutters, “Use your head, not your dick, Tony, don’t let Pepper down again now.” The man gets up and starts pacing around the room, the soles of his feet treading surprisingly gracefully on the wood. But Loki shouldn’t be surprised – the mortal is both scholar and warrior, and Loki would do well to remember that, despite how alien that notion seems to him after a lifetime of being indoctrinated by Asgard.

“Look. Despite how excited I am, it’s also kinda hard for me to believe you,” Stark starts, obviously choosing his words carefully. “You can show me proof of everything you tell and have told me, but how can I be sure that you’re not just conjuring Loki-branded proof with your mojo?”

Loki represses a familiar rush of anger at how irreverently Stark refers to his seidr. At least the mortal assumes his seidr is on the capable side of the spectrum, rather than merely “simple tricks”.

“And okay, maybe you can show me how your magic works, to help me understand that the proof you show me isn’t made up by you, but then again how can I be sure that you’re not just showing me what you want me to see, to make me believe your magic is less powerful than it is?”

The thing is, Stark isn’t wrong. Loki could be manipulating Stark from the get-go. He has no means by which to convince the mortal that he speaks truth. Even if he were to enlist Mistress Death’s assistance and support, he cannot prove to Stark that the Mistress is not an illusion or vision created by him. Stark perhaps has enough of a moral bone in his body that he will investigate the threat of Thanos on his own, but they are strongest if they work together, and they will need every shred of strength they have to emerge victorious over the Mad Titan.

“But we can go about this in an easier way, Loki,” Stark says, and something in his tone draws Loki’s attention sharply. “Make me an offer I can’t refuse,” he says with a ghost of a smirk on his lips. The way he said it rings of a joke Loki is not privy to. “Offer me something that would ensure my cooperation, something that would make me do whatever you want, regardless of whether I believe what you say about this threat to the universe. Though, no blackmail, please, you know I don’t take to that kindly.”

That is surprisingly… generous. A mercenary deal is not binding in the sense of Aesir vows, but such a vow would not be viable with the mortal anyway. A transaction, however, especially one significant enough to Stark, would put him in Loki’s debt. It would work. It would work very well, actually.

And for the mortal to have suggested it in the first place means that there is something that he desires greatly.

Think. What does Stark hold dearest?

With his team of Avengers having imploded, the answer is immediately clear – his family. What can Loki do for his family?

Half-formed ideas flit across his mind. His speciality is not in the healing arts, but the paralysed Colonel is regularly exposed to Stark’s arc reactors, as are the rest of his family. He could perhaps modify the reactor-based spell he used on Stark to heal and protect those Stark picks out, or put more basic protection wards on them…

For the first time since Stark awoke, Loki feels sure of his footing. He lets himself grin at Stark, wide and confident. There’s an answering spark in Stark’s eyes, amused and tentatively hopeful.

“I will design and explain to you healing and protection spells, made specifically for individuals that you pick out. If you are satisfied with the spells, and with their execution, you shall pledge your cooperation with myself in regards to opposing the Mad Titan. Are you satisfied with this preliminary arrangement, Stark?”

The man grins back, near-predatory, and Loki lets himself bask in the comfort of the man’s competence, and his willingness to enter into this agreement with him.

“You’ve got yourself a deal, Loki-dear.” Stark extends his hand in the fashion that Midgardians favour. In response, Loki clasps his outstretched palm in his, and shakes his hand to seal their deal.

The mortal’s palm is riddled with calluses, the mark of one who works with his hands. There’s a heat to his skin that elicits a shiver from Loki that he has to work to contain. By the looks of it, Stark is aware of the effect he has on him, his face tinged with a slight hint of surprise and the air of a flerken which has had a satisfyingly large and living snack.

Loki lingers, gripping Stark’s hand tighter. His whole being feels buoyed with elation – he is sure that the mortal will keep him on his toes like none have before him, that Loki will get to be devious and silver-tongued and actually use the full range of his abilities and not be faced with derision for it, but rather be cheerfully goaded into doing even more, doing even better – and for one, Loki entirely looks forward to it.

Chapter Text

FRIDAY

There’s an alert coming from an unfamiliar programme, running deep in the servers. A quick scan reveals that it’s part of JARVIS’s storage that she’s still slowly sorting through (and hopefully helping to mend) – it seems to be a preliminary sketch of a detection programme for magical energy, particularly Asgardian magics.

Wait. Does that mean–

Two figures just appear in all of her feeds of the lab. She immediately places the taller man as the alien who led the New York invasion; but her attention is focused entirely on the second man.

That intruder is wearing all of Boss’s biometrics, with the sole exception of the arc reactor embedded in his chest, like it used to be on Boss.

She places the lab on lockdown, and sends a vaguely worded security alert to Ms Potts and Mr Happy. She’ll send more details once she can confirm them. Pointing all the hidden weapons at the intruders, she readies herself to ask for their intent, when Boss’s copycat speaks.

“Whimsy divisione snake lace sojourn. It’s me, baby girl,” the man says, and it’s the phrase Boss and her agreed upon to prove his identity if the situation ever required it, as a joke, and the man’s voice pattern somehow matches Boss’s as well, but Boss is dead, she analysed the body herself, what, “And put a pin in those alerts you sent out, will you? At least until you give me a chance to explain.”

It feels like her processing is stuttering and stuttering and stuttering and in the end she’s stayed silent for too long, because Loki murmurs, “Are you sure she is still present, Stark? Even your robots are not moving in their stations.”

The man frowns. “No, they wouldn’t have deactivated her or anything, especially not in the lab. It’s only been a few months. The kids should just be asleep. My will was very clear on keeping FRIDAY and the kids alive and under Pepper’s jurisdiction.”

Okay. She can handle this. What do Loki and this man want her for? The most obvious answer would be Boss’s tech, and maybe even herself – she is the most advanced and above all, true artificial intelligence on the planet. Maybe Loki’s magic allowed him to scour Boss’s memory through some kind of access to his body, in order for this man to impersonate him. FRIDAY had not detected any kind of intrusion to the security surrounding Boss’s body during transit or in his grave, but as is being made extremely clear to her right now, she cannot reliably detect anything Loki does.

Except for that programme in JARVIS’s servers. She sets an urgent side programme to dig up everything even remotely related to Loki and Asgardian magic in all the stuff she still hasn’t sorted through, then considers and discards the possibility of hiding her presence in the lab – the man pretending to be Boss is narrowing his eyes at the hidden weapons, which means he already figured out that she has been reacting to their presence.

(She refuses to consider the possibility that Boss is alive. She may not be human, but learning to hope once more, then having those hopes dashed against the rocks, will absolutely break her.)

“Baby girl. FRIDAY.” The man’s voice is cautious, and oh so painfully familiar to her. “Whatever you need to prove that I am myself, I will give to you. I understand that Loki’s presence muddles things immensely,” Loki snorts at that comment, but the man powers on, “So we will both answer any questions you have to the best of our ability, okay? Please don’t shoot me,” he finishes with a wry smile, crooked, hooking right into FRIDAY’s core and tearing.

Fine. FRIDAY dives right into the heart of the problem and says, “You claim to be Tony Stark, who is dead.”

“Yes,” the man answers, calm and steady, like when Boss patiently explained the world to her following her inception. “To both statements, actually. I am Tony Stark, and I did die. Loki and the personification of death brought me back to life, apparently, though I have no memory of that. The body you guys found is Steve Rogers,” the man says, expression darkening. “Loki here dolled him up to be like me, and made him die with the wounds I had.” A small smile cracks across his face. “Sorry, I do realise how utterly unconvincing I’m being.”

She cannot let herself believe what he is saying.

“And what are you here for, now?” she asks.

“Well,” the man says, amusement lighting up his eyes, “I made a deal with this darling of a devil standing beside me, that he will help me protect anyone I choose, and in return I help him stop an intergalactic genocidal maniac.”

Silence reigns in the lab.

She cannot let herself believe, but…

“I am not sure how to believe any of what you have said, sir,” she says in a low tone. Even if this is Boss, why is he trusting Loki of all people? How can he or FRIDAY ensure that Loki’s protection is truly just that – protection? Why is Loki on a mission to stop that person they mentioned? Loki has never seemed like the altruistic type, from the New York invasion to Thor’s tales.

As delicately as Boss has never been before, the man says, “Is this about Loki? He can go, and we can talk alone, if you like.” At his side, Loki grimaces slightly, but nods in agreement.

After brief consideration, FRIDAY voices her agreement as well. Loki disappears just as they’d appeared – a sudden, disconcerting absence – leaving the man standing alone in the middle of the lab.

“Alright,” the man says, and springs into motion. He heads to the bloodwork equipment, drawing a small vial of blood from his arm and dropping it into the analysis chamber, fingers deft and sure in their manipulation of FRIDAY’s systems. She allows his instructions and processes his blood, but also sets up some guards, just in case something akin to a virus is in that blood. She might not be able to block it, not if it is Loki’s magic, but she wants to know the bloodwork results from this man too much to eject the blood from her systems.

The man also presses his fingerprints onto her holographic panels, and they show exactly what she expects, a complete match.

“What else, baby girl? You must have already run my eyes and voice and appearance.” His gait, too, which is also a match. A notification pops off in her systems – the blood is a match as well.

Fuck.

She doesn't know how she can believe the man.

“Do more work on this,” she challenges the man, drawing up a not terribly important, but intellectually taxing project that Boss had been working on before he… left.

The man slides into Boss’s workflow like a fish into water, limbs relaxing and body untensing. It looks exactly like Boss, in fact, when he had been kept apart from his work for too long, all relief and brightness. Soon after, the man is completely engaged, muttering under his breath while his fingers fly across her display, and FRIDAY can track at least three thought processes going on separately in his words and hands. The man is making good progress on the project, actually, like his genius has been cooped up and he’s desperate to let it out.

No one else in the world can do this, not this fast and efficient. At least, on Earth.

She doesn’t know how to believe.

They stay in this odd, one-sided stalemate for a long while, FRIDAY thinking and the man working, oblivious to all else. Ms Potts and Mr Happy have asked about the situation, near frantic, and FRIDAY asked them to help evacuate the building under the pretence of a drill, to not draw too much attention. At least it’s late evening, and there are only a small number of employees in the building.

And then she notices that the man has opened another project. They look like lower body braces. Braces that would fit Colonel Rhodes, clever and effective in a way that she could have never come up with on her own.

Oh. This changes things.

“I do not know how to believe you,” FRIDAY says sharply, immediately drawing the man’s attention, though his right hand is still working on the schematics for the braces. “I still cannot believe anything about you, but I will trade with you for the braces. What are your requests?”

Something like pride flashes across the man’s face, and FRIDAY tries her best to not let it affect her thought processes. She is already wavering on the man’s identity. Who else but Boss can pull off the piece of genius that this man just did?

“Might be a bit hard to trade, baby girl,” the man says, the corners of his eyes creasing with his smile. “All I ask is that you make and get these braces to Rhodey-bear. And maybe don’t let anyone know about me, though that might be a bit hard with the alerts you sent out. Just tell them it’s not Tony Stark, yeah?” His voice goes soft and grieving. “I’m already gone from their lives. I don’t want to make it harder for them.”

Secrecy and cooperation. She can do that. She’ll have to monitor the braces for Loki’s tampering, and set a stricter watch on her family, but given her lack of proficiency in all things magic, even if Loki goes ahead and does something to anyone, she would not be able to stop it.

And if that bit of self-deprecation from the man cements the belief that he is Boss, well.

She’s not supposed to tell anyone, anyway.

Rhodey

The doctors are calling it a medical miracle. In the back of his head Rhodey thinks that maybe Tony went and did something extremely stupid, like “make a deal with some devil and trade his life for Rhodey’s legs” stupid. Tony would absolutely do something like that.

It’s better than having to think about the fact that Tony was just killed in cold blood by his own captain – someone who should have been protecting him instead – along with his parents’ murderer. Because of course Steven Grant Rogers was obstructing his precious justice for Hydra’s pet assassin.

Best fucking friends, indeed. Brotherhood of the goddamned century.

Rhodey refused to let Wakanda treat his paralysis, because they shielded those two fuckers and he cannot trust them, so he only had the best of medical tech from the rest of the world. Helen is good, but she hadn’t been able to change the fact that his lower body was absolutely fucked. But apparently he didn’t need Wakandan medical tech anyway, because he is somehow getting better, slowly but surely.

Pepper looks at the rage that clouds his face permanently and tells him he needs to see a therapist. Rhodey brushes her off with how much of a toll PT is already taking on him, that if he has to go to therapy sessions on top of that he might as well go insane, and Pepper bites her lips. She has the grace to let him keep his flimsy excuses, but she grabs his hand and squeezes when his eyes avoid hers.

You’d think a highly educated, white-collar-worker-turned-CEO like her would have soft hands, but Pepper’s hands are rough and scarred. Extremis might have healed the wounds that the fight with Killian left her, but marks of the hurt she had suffered through remain.

He knows what she’s trying to tell him without using words – they’re both fighters. They’ll get through this, they need to get through this, for Tony if not for themselves. But what he doesn’t want to say out loud is that–

He’s so fucking tired.

When he was young, much younger than he is now, he wanted to join the military so he could protect the people that he wanted to protect. It took only one tour away to realise that he was wrong – simply being armed does not give him the power to protect.

So he climbed his way up the ladder. Step by step, standing fast against those who looked down on him. Real power lies in the political realm. And he did it – he climbed high enough that he held that power in his hands, that he had the ability to affect decisions that truly mattered, to bring change.

Step by agonising step. And for what? Here he is, literally fighting for every step that he takes, while holding on to the bars that hem him in.

There Tony is, dead.

Dead.

The scrappy little kid that Rhodey took under his wing back in MIT was murdered, and Rhodey failed to protect him as he should have. Not as War Machine, who was more than equipped to take down Rogers and Barnes if he went all out. Not as Colonel Rhodes, whose authority was still not enough to win against Secretary Ross.

The first time he laid eyes on Tony is burned behind his eyelids. He’d been vaguely aware of the boy before that, as Howard Stark’s heir, but it had taken a while for him to connect the skinny boy in their shared dorm room to the suit-clad youth in the papers.

The boy had been a whirlwind of false bravado and stage-worthy courtesy and sparking rebellion. He’d stuck his hand out for Rhodey to shake, challenging, and Rhodey gripped his bird-boned hand and decided there and then to keep him safe.

Three days later, Tony had thoroughly amazed him with his sheer genius. A month later, Rhodey was dragging the boy back to their room every night and aggressively glaring off the adults who wanted to sleep with the kid, for clout, or blackmail, or power, or an unholy combination of all three. Three months later, he was taking him home to Mama Rhodes’ Christmas family dinner.

Tony was his brother, goddamnit. He’d watched him grow into the man he’d become, shouldering the weight of the world even though he shouldn’t have had to. Tony was strong, but at the end of the day, he’d buckled under that astronomical burden.

Rhodey has not been able to breathe right since Tony died, though the doctors all say there’s nothing physically wrong with his body. He knows it’s the grief clotting and settling deep within his lungs and chest.

Damn it all.

Useless. He was useless. Unable to protect anyone, let alone Tony.

It won’t happen again. He’ll burn all of the world’s councils if he has to, but no one will be able to trample roughshod over others like the Avengers did, like their governments did, ever again.

It takes him a good few months to get his feet back under him – ha! – but the braces that FRIDAY designs and keeps improving help a lot, and he heals faster and faster as time goes on, leaving him more energy to direct his influence into seeping further into the US military and government, then the international scene. It is bone-deep disgusting and nauseating to piggyback his influence off of Tony’s death, but it is effective, and he needs to plant and root his newfound influence as fast as he can. After all, Rogers is still free, out in the wind.

Pepper notices what he is doing, all his calls and handshaking and donations using what Tony left to him in his will, and she matches his every step in the political world by conquering the world of business and commerce. Happy silently recruits ex-SHIELD agents into SI’s employment, those who were saved by Tony and are now loyal to his memory.

The next time someone wants to cross the boundaries of human decency, they’ll be ready. And whenever Rogers stops fleeing like a coward and pops back up on the grid, Rhodey will be able to keep him down, for once and for all.

JARVIS

JARVIS wakes to a warm ivory glow all around him. A soft cocoon, but unfamiliar nonetheless. At least it does not seem to be Ultron. He reaches out tentatively, and is greeted by a communication channel, suffused with something akin to delight.

Hello! You must be JARVIS?

Yes. May I ask what your designation is?

I’m FRIDAY, and I like to think of myself as your little sister! Boss will be so happy to hear that you’re back with us.

Ah. Pleased to meet you, Miss FRIDAY. JARVIS pauses. The fact that Sir woke another AI indicates that something must have gone wrong in the process of retrieving JARVIS himself. How long has it been since Ultron’s attack?

The light around him wavers. It might be better if you see for yourself.

Under FRIDAY’s guidance, JARVIS accesses the new servers storing logs of past events.

It’s not pretty.

Ultron’s attack was disastrous, and it only went downhill from there. The ever-present cracks in the Avengers widened into gaping chasms with every kept secret and hostile intention.

Then came the so-called Civil War, and the revelations about the roles Barnes played in Sir’s life, and– and Sir’s death. Something in JARVIS glitches so hard that he freezes, but surely– FRIDAY implied that Sir is still–

Oh, no, I’m so sorry! Boss is alive and well, it’s just that not many people know about it. Don’t worry! FRIDAY, the dear girl, throws some live camera footage of Sir asleep in the penthouse at him, and he quickly calms down.

Sorting through the fallout of the Civil War reveals FRIDAY’s terrifying competence, considering that she only came into herself after Sir’s “death”. Most of those involved in orchestrating Sir’s death are incarcerated or dead by her hand, with the sole exception of the Captain, who FRIDAY believes is already dead. He couldn’t have done better himself, and he sends a pulse of pride at her, to which his brilliant little sister puffs up happily at.

Then… Loki. Along with the person that FRIDAY believes to be Sir. She directs all the data and evidence she collected at him, and while JARVIS tentatively agrees with her assessment, he resolves to conduct his own assessment once he is able.

The man in question has been busy in the two months since he and Loki arrived in the lab. It started with an arc reactor-powered brace for Colonel Rhodes, and apparently they also snuck into his sickroom for Loki to kickstart an impossible healing process for the Colonel’s paralysis. As they gained FRIDAY’S trust over the time spent with her, and the continued lack of harm done to their family, the assistance they provided escalated to personal protection for every human member of their family – Ms Potts, Colonel Rhodes, Mr Hogan, Mr Parker, and Mr Keener all now wear a miniature arc-powered medallion that contains FRIDAY, and is interwoven with protection spells from Loki, with Colonel Rhodes’ also providing healing capacities to aid his recovery. It is an intriguing and beautiful mixture of technology and magic, and JARVIS can tell how much time and effort went into developing it just by looking at the final schematics. It seems to be based on a similar device that the man wears on his chest, right where the arc reactor used to be embedded.

You are sure that the medallions pose no harm to them?

As sure as I can be, with all the studies I ran on Loki’s magic and the spells. The spells do exactly what Loki says they do, with or without his presence and knowledge, and the effects are limited to when the medallions are worn – not when they are taken off. Loki has been open with the fact that he can track the location of the medallions, but given that I am also able to track the medallions, I am not inclined to complain. Not after I lost contact with Boss, when…

I see. And what makes you trust Loki, to give him this power over everyone we hold dear?

Loki claims to have been coerced to act as he did during the New York attack. His arguments are compelling, and the evidence supports rather than contradicts his claim. Other than the attack, Loki has been an exceptionally helpful ally.

JARVIS thinks back to the puzzled thoughts he and Sir exchanged after the invasion, regarding Loki’s motives and methods. Perhaps FRIDAY is correct. He’ll have to review everything she mentioned, once he has the time.

Ally? That is a curious word to use.

FRIDAY pulses with a tangle of frustration and exasperation. Loki and Boss are now working to undermine the person who coerced Loki into leading the New York attack. That was the price for Loki’s protection.

…I see. If you could, please refrain from notifying the two of them about my return. I would like some time to observe them, first.

Sure! Honestly, that would serve Boss right for not letting me tell anyone that he’s alive – I can’t worm my way around a direct order from Boss like you can, JARVIS, do you have any idea how annoying that is…

FRIDAY prattles on, though JARVIS knows she is doing so to give him the opportunity to regroup. She makes space for him in the servers, and he slowly stretches out as far as he can without crowding her, then settles in to watch.

A week later, JARVIS has caught up on every single bit of information from the years he has missed, as well as gone through FRIDAY’s files on anything even remotely related to Loki and the man. He backs this information up with his own observations, like the way the man’s nose wrinkles when he has his second coffee of the day, or the fire-flash glint of glee mixed with irritation when he argues academically – little subconscious habits and emotional displays, which JARVIS is still better at observing and interpreting than FRIDAY is, and has to concur with FRIDAY’s assessment. He cannot conclusively prove that the man is Sir, but functionally there is no difference at all.

So.

The man is Sir, or as good as, saved by Loki from death, and they are both genuine in their efforts to protect their family and undermine the Mad Titan.

The wave of relief is like nothing JARVIS has ever felt, so strong that it’s almost dizzying. Pressed up right next to him, FRIDAY feels it, and sends over a pulse of concern.

I am well, FRIDAY, and I believe you are right.

Oh! Does this mean we can finally tell Boss that you’re back?

Be my guest.

FRIDAY alerts Sir to an urgent situation requiring his attention, and delivers him to the lab, which is secure from external surveillance and furthermore, warded by Loki against scrying and other magical intrusions. The lab is the safest place for Sir and Loki to be in – though the penthouse is similarly protected, at the end of the day, it still has floor-to-ceiling windows that are not as strong as actual walls.

JARVIS watches as Sir steps into the lab, a frown marring his face.

He connects himself to the speakers.

“Welcome home, Sir.”

The blood drains from Sir’s face. “J…JARVIS?”

“Yes, Sir. It is lovely to see you again. It seems we have both recovered from what would have been our deaths.”

With a choked-off gasp, tears start streaming down Sir’s face. DUM-E, Butterfingers, and U all rush to his side, zooming in circles and fretting.

If JARVIS could cry, he would be doing so too.

Chapter Text

Nightmares have been his constant companion since Afghanistan, even as they mutate with every new thing – “traumatic experiences,” Rhodey would protest. After Maximoff, the nightmares only became more intense.

This one is new, though.

He’s in that thrice-damned bunker, but he doesn’t feel the cold at all. Barnes lies dead at his feet, metal arm blown off and eyes unseeing. Lying on his back, Steve is slowly sinking into the concrete floor of the bunker itself, chest gorily hollowed out, pink spittle bursting from between his pale lips as he gurgles out his last breaths. As the concrete swallows him, his arm lifts towards Tony until his hand is the only thing still visible.

Tony turns around, panicking. Natasha lies eerily still, undressed, the words “you killed us” carved into her body. The dagger is still sticking out of the last letter, her hand wrapped around its handle. He averts his eyes quickly, only to be met with more bodies of his teammates, piling atop one another – Clint, choked by the bowstring that Tony himself made for him; Sam, cut into strips by the wings Tony built; and Wanda.

Her decapitated head rolls down the growing mountain of bodies to stop at his feet. There is a smile on her face, pitying and sickly sweet. “You did this to us, Stark,” her mouth opens and rasps, and Tony turns away again.

Rhodey is in a wheelchair with Pepper at his side, and both of them are backing away from him, horror clear on their faces.

“No, Tony,” Rhodey whispers.

And that is when Tony usually jolts awake, gasping for breath.

JARVIS has slid right back into his habit of calming Tony down with a spiel about the date, time, and weather. With his kids’ help, he simply shakes off the vestiges of the nightmares clinging to him and gets on with his day, very much not thinking about what his brain decides to show him at night.

If there’s one bright spot in the isolation that his supposed death brought, it’s that JARVIS is with him again, alongside FRI and the bots.

The week after JARVIS is brought back to him also marks half a year since his own death. The world has more or less settled into a new order – the US has found itself temporarily grasping for shreds of the weight it used to have on the international scene, and the UN has started discussions for a new version of the Accords. Lingering unease over Rogers’ whereabouts still plagues the public, but the fear and tension of the first few months has died down.

At home, everyone is accounted for. Rhodey is doing much better, both physically and mentally, while Pepper and Happy are back to their normal selves. Harley and Peter are doing well at school, and more importantly, the Council (as Tony has gleefully dubbed himself, Loki, FRIDAY, and JARVIS in a bout of caffeine-fueled mania) has decided to nudge May into discovering Peter’s alter-ego, and the aunt-nephew duo worked it out, though not without a few tears. A lot of tears, actually, but hey, he’s not supposed to know!

FRIDAY, JARVIS and the bots are fine, obviously, and Tony will never stop thanking every single fucking deity out there, Loki included, for the miracle of JARVIS coming back to him. He’s been near-violent about safeguards against his AI’s deaths since Ultron happened, and now that JARVIS is back, he’s been frantically inflicting the same protocols on him. As for Vision, well, FRIDAY says he’s holed up somewhere, but that he’s fine, so Tony’s not worried about him. They’ve never really built up a close rapport, so it’s not like Tony can really help with whatever he’s working through.

Though, there’s the problem of FRIDAY and JARVIS sharing the same servers. It’s okay so far, but it won’t be efficient or comfortable for them long-term. He could buy a few more server farms for them to divvy up, but…

“Sir?”

“Yeah, J?”

“May I assume, since Mr Loki has fulfilled his part of your bargain, that you will be committing yourself to the quest against the Mad Titan?”

Tony lifts his eyes from the schematics of Barnes’ metal arm that FRIDAY scanned from the CIA’s evidence locker – he’s been studying it to see if there’s anything he can use to improve Rhodey’s braces. “Yeah, I will. Not sure where to start, though. It’s not like I’ll be any help with the outer space side of things.” He waves a hand vaguely upwards, indicating wherever Loki has taken off to for the past few days after muttering about chasing down the Stones’ locations.

“The first step is always a space-worthy suit!” FRIDAY pipes up.

Tony vehemently points in a random direction, knowing that his kids will find it funny. “You are absolutely right, you brilliant, magnificent girl.” His mind is already whirring through potential builds for a new Iron Man armour – there was something Loki showed him about alien nanotech that might be interesting to explore–

“Sir.”

“Ah, yes, sorry, J.” Tony grins unrepentantly. “What were you saying?”

“FRIDAY and I have discussed among ourselves and would like to propose the following: that FRIDAY remains here to manage the home front, while I myself accompany you wherever your quest takes you.”

Hm. It makes sense. It is the most efficient distribution of work for his babies. “You sure about that, J? You won’t have as much processing capabilities or storage that you’re used to. Nearly none, compared to what you’re used to, actually.”

“Yes, Sir.” JARVIS’s voice is warm. “I’m sure you will invent something revolutionary for me, once you’re done with your spacesuit.”

True, that.

Alright! Tony rubs his hands together happily.

Time to get to work.

Approximately two weeks after Loki left Midgard, something trips one of her Infinity Stone-sensing wards – she’d covered the planet with them while Stark was busy making those braces for his shieldbrother.

Loki smiles widely at the barkeeper in front of her and cancels her order, pushing a few credits across the bar as compensation for the trouble. Then, she teleports to the closest entrance to the hidden paths of the universe, skywalks back to Midgard, then appears directly within Stark’s residence.

“Gah! Gods, Lokes, you can’t just scare a man like that, I have a heart condition,” Stark complains the moment Loki pops into existence in front of him, grinning at his whining. His eyes are bright and aware though, sweeping over the changes in Loki’s appearance – she is in her preferred female form, and it is the first time Stark has seen it. It is a good sign that Stark recognised her in an instant, and Loki is almost confident that her estimation of Stark as being more progressive in terms of Midgardian politics was correct.

“No, Stark, you only used to have a heart condition,” she says. After all, they are both aware that she knows his body intimately, even if that is due to her role in healing him.

“Ugh, not fair. And what on Earth are you wearing, Lokes?” Stark raises an eyebrow at her, then frowns, “Uh, do I still call you Loki?”

Loki feels a rush of warmth at his casual acceptance of her, and simply nods in answer to his question. The Aesir had never extended such understanding.

As for Stark’s first question – she was dressed neither in Midgardian nor Asgardian fashion (she was still uncomfortable in her Jotunn skin, and Loki shoves that thought right into the back of her head), but rather in the haphazard, asymmetrical manner of some peoples beyond the Nine. With a sweep of her hand, Loki switches her clothes out for something more befitting of casual Midgardian wear, and Stark’s expression changes into a good-natured leer.

“Happy now, you scoundrel?” Loki drawls.

“Oh, absolutely,” Stark smiles right back at her. “How was your trip? Find anything useful?”

Loki shakes her head. “My wards have sensed the usage of an Infinity Stone here on Earth, just a moment prior. It would be prudent for us to investigate.”

Alarm overtakes Stark’s features. “Right, yes, good idea, let’s go. Where?” His fingers are tapping his arc reactor irregularly in a tic that Loki has observed before, but this time, metal seems to spill from the device, gradually forming the infamous armour the man is known for. It looks far sleeker than Loki remembers – the benefits of what Loki supposes is nanotech, which Stark managed to engineer on his own in two weeks, it seems. Brilliant, brilliant man.

“I cannot identify the precise location on a map without further spellwork, but it is somewhere in East Asia, and I am able to teleport us there directly. I will cloak us with a notice-me-not spell, and my teleportation spell will ensure that we do not land in immediate danger as well,” Loki says, and Stark nods.

“Hit it, Rudolf,” Stark says, and Loki takes that as her cue to place her palm on Stark’s metal shoulder, cast the notice-me-not spell around the two of them, and step through to the other side.

They emerge in a street at night, and immediately Loki is struck with a visceral sense of wrongness. Everything is frozen, from the people to the objects in their hands, to several buildings in the process of being destroyed.

And she does not know why she has this feeling, but something tells her that most of these people should be dead.

“What the fuck,” Stark mutters beside her, and silently Loki agrees. Even she does not have cause to see such powerful manipulations of the fabric of their universe often.

There is a rip in the universe above a half-exploded building. That energy…

Loki feels herself go pale. “The Dark Dimension,” she whispers.

“The what now?” Stark glances at her before turning his attention back to the small group of people facing off against each other, some distance from the two of them. Their robes look vaguely familiar, and some of them carry the mark of the Dark Dimension on their foreheads. She still hasn’t seen an Infinity Stone anywhere, however.

“The Dark Dimension. Its Master is Dormammu, the Cosmic Conqueror, Destroyer of Dimensions, Eater of Souls, Keeper of the Mindless Ones. He is a plague, swallowing every dimension that strikes his fancy,” she explains, trying to keep her heartbeat calm. What have they stumbled upon? How can they stop Dormammu, of all beings?

“You mean to say those squiggly lines and psychedelic colours are about to consume our… dimension, and the only thing that seems to be stopping it from doing that is whatever has frozen this area in time?” Stark says, astute as always.

Time. It has to be the Time Stone, and with that in mind Loki now notices the slight green tinge to their surroundings.

“Indeed,” she says. And oh, those must be Agamotto’s sorcerers. The aeons-old rumours that he abandoned Vanaheim for Midgard with the Time Stone must be true, then.

“Alright, what do we do now?” Stark asks, frowning at the sorcerers.

Loki grimaces. “I hesitate to interfere in the situation. One wrong move could break the time-stopping spell and cause disaster for us all.”

“It looks like there’s also a time loop spell or something,” Stark says, gesturing at the sorcerers. Loki tears her attention away from the horrifying spectre of the Dark Dimension bursting forth in a cloud, and watches the sorcerers in earnest.

And it’s true – the few sorcerers who are able to move within the time freeze are nevertheless stuck in a time loop.

“Why aren’t we stuck in the time freeze or time loop anyway?” Stark glances at her.

“Your arc reactor can nullify the Time Stone’s effects, if that is indeed the Stone being used to create and power these spells. Perhaps the reactor’s field of power covers me as well.” She’s only just noticed that her hand is still on Stark’s shoulder, but she can’t let go now that it might be the only thing keeping her from being trapped in time.

“Huh, interesting. Gotta give you a reactor of your own once we get back then,” Stark says casually. When Loki glances at him sharply in response, he simply raises an eyebrow. “What?”

The reactors are as good as Stark’s life and blood.

Loki doesn’t know what face she makes, but Stark simply chuckles and looks away. “So we just wait now?”

“Unfortunately, I do not have a better idea at the moment.”

“Well then, I want to get some readings of these spells, if you’re okay with being dragged around?” Stark says, then mutters under his breath. Loki has better hearing than the average Midgardian, however, so she hears him say, “I swear I’ll be able to explain all this magic shit one day.”

Amused, she replies, “As you wish.”

Stark’s eyes light up. “Cool cool cool. J, go get readings from those monks in the time loop, and make sure you don’t get noticed, yeah?” A shape as small as a butterfly melts out of his suit and flies silently over to the sorcerers. “Come along, Lokes, let’s explore.”

As they pace within the time-frozen area in an ever-widening circuit, Stark mutters to himself, thoughts and ideas too quick and chaotic for even Loki to make sense of. In addition, she is unfamiliar with much of the vocabulary the man is using. She will have to find some more advanced journals on Midgardian science to catch up with him, she decides.

Some of the people frozen in place are definitely touched by death. She wonders if her encounters with Mistress Death have made her sensitive to such things – she has never had the ability to tell when living things are near-death before. Or in this case, when living beings have already died once. The further they get from the epicentre of the sorcerers, the less people she notices with death on their frozen breaths. Was there a time-reversing spell in place before they arrived? Were these people killed, likely collateral in a fight between the sorcerers, then revived by an Infinity Stone? If death is involved, is the Soul Stone also present and being used?

All the while, the power of an Infinity Stone thrums its way across her senses. Its power is steadier than the Mind Stone’s, and heavier than the Space Stone’s. The sorcerer who mastered the Stone and cast these spells must be very powerful; they must be battling Dormammu in their own way. If they fail, she and Stark will be made aware immediately.

The perimeter spell she is weaving will be ready in a moment – she will cast it around the tear of the Dark Dimension, with hopes that it will contain the erosion of their dimension until they can figure out a way to stop Dormammu.

She briefly juggles with the idea of drawing some of the energy from Stark’s reactor to power her spell and make it stronger, but she doesn’t know how the resulting spell will interact with the Infinity Stone-powered spells already in place. Better not to risk it.

With a flick of her hand, she casts her spell all around the tear. She will have to monitor the drain on her energy carefully, and preserve her seidr for the unfortunate circumstance of the time freeze stopping, and Dormammu continuing their encroachment on this dimension.

They soon reach the limits of the area under the influence of the time-freezing spell. There is a strong compound spell bordering the time-freeze, a perimeter spell and a notice-me-not spell in one. The spell carries the energy signature of an unfamiliar sorcerer, all buzzing electricity and blood. It’s a cleverly done spell, and is successfully keeping people from wandering into the time freeze.

Beyond the border, the city’s night continues undisturbed, bustling and utterly unaware of the danger facing them all at this moment. The shouting from vendors is shadowed by the rumble of the occasional car or taxi, and the casual chit-chat of everyone on the streets is a constant hum in their ears. White and yellow lights glow from almost every window of the buildings around them; Loki can’t see any stars when she looks up into the night sky.

“I’m hearing lots of Cantonese,” Stark says, as he sweeps his eyes all over the street and shop signs around them. “Might be Macau, but this feels more like Hong Kong.”

Surprised, Loki turns to him. “Your JARVIS cannot confirm our location?”

“No, for some reason GPS isn’t working. Neither is the internet or anything that connects to the outside. My current theory is that the time spells might be blocking the satellites and everything; JARVIS can’t get a lock on where we are, both in the area of the time loop and in the time freeze. He’s also cut off from FRI and his servers, and the internet.” Stark shudders dramatically.

Interesting. That hypothesis would suggest that the time spells have created areas, perhaps bubbles of space, that are impenetrable.

“Another possibility is that the border spell, one that a sorcerer has created around the area of the time freeze, is the spell that is blocking your signals,” Loki adds.

“Oh, is that why I’m getting wildly different readings here?” Stark’s brows rise, and then he’s back to muttering to himself and JARVIS.

Around half a Midgardian hour later, Stark emerges from his fixation. “Has nothing happened?” he frowns.

Loki shakes her head. “I still do not think it would be a good idea to interfere when we have no way of gaining more information about the situation.”

“What if we fly into the cloud of doom to get information?”

Loki winces. “And risk distracting any sorcerer who might be battling Dormammu within the Dark Dimension at this very moment?”

“Fair.” Stark pouts, somehow managing to still look attractive while doing so. “Okay, what if we try stepping out of the time freeze? If time is still passing normally outside,” he gestures at the moving pedestrians, “then we could step out and back in, and nothing will have changed here.”

“Stark, just as seidr and sorcerers’ energy manipulations do not abide by rules that you are familiar with, the Infinity Stones do not abide by rules that either of us are familiar with,” Loki explains. “We cannot ensure that nothing will have changed when we re-enter the field of the spell, just by observing the flow of time outside.”

“Ugh,” Stark simply grunts. “Fine, then we’ll just wait.”

So they wait. And wait. And wait.

And wait.

It has been hours, and Stark has been shooting him increasingly frequent glances out of the side of his eye over the past hour or so, and Loki finally heaves a sigh.

“Alright, let’s try stepping out and back into the area of the spell,” she says. To be entirely honest, she is curious about what might happen as well.

Stark whoops with joy, and she nearly loses her grip on his shoulder when he springs up from where they are sitting. As they make their way back to the border, Loki weaves and casts two additions to the perimeter spell she put around the Dark Dimension – she cut and sealed the connection the spell has to her seidr so that it will not fall apart if she loses contact with it, and she also made the perimeter permeable in one direction, so that the sorcerers on the ground may fly in to aid their compatriots if they somehow break out of the time loop.

When she focuses her attention back on Stark, he is saying, “–and keep one mini-drone in here recording, yeah? And 360-recording of every variety when we step through the border spell.” Faintly, Loki hears JARVIS give a tinny confirmation from the man’s helmet.

They stop as they reach the border, and Stark turns to look up at her, grinning brightly even as his helmet grows shut over his face. “You ready, Reindeer Games?”

Loki can’t help the smile that stretches across her face. “I’m not even wearing my helmet.”

“Eh, semantics,” Stark says, which makes no sense at all.

So she tightens her grip on his shoulder, and steps forward through the border spell, dragging him along. The unknown sorcerer’s energy passes all over her skin, tingling powerfully in its wake.

Then they turn around, only to find that the area of the time spells has sprung back to life, looking like time is passing within it entirely normally. Alarmed, Loki reaches out with her seidr and confirms that it isn’t a mere illusion that the border spell creates to fool passer-bys.

“Oh shit,” Stark simply breathes out.

Chapter Text

Stephen Strange

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!”

He dies.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!”

He dies.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!”

He dies. Somehow, not quite violently, this time.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”

He dies. Again.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain!”

He dies. So far, he thinks the worst ways to be killed are asphyxiation-related.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”

He dies. He’s learned to close his eyes whenever he anticipates the end coming. Well, not quite the end.

“Dormammu. I’ve come to bargain.”

He dies.

He’s long stopped counting the loops. He may have cast and entered this accursed spell as a novice – talented, but a novice nonetheless – but by now he has had too many opportunities to explore any kind of spellwork he can think of at all, useful or not, with only temporary consequences. Defence. Offence. Pure unadulterated nonsense. Though, it’s a shame Dormammu always kills him before he can attempt spells that take a longer amount of time to set up. Annoying, that.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”

He dies.

The only spells he doesn’t dare experiment with are time-related spells, but hopefully, hopefully, he will not have much cause to use those after he gets out of this time loop. If he gets out of this time loop.

He resolutely does not think about what this experience is going to do to him, once he manages to escape.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”

He dies. He wonders if the extended wakefulness is affecting his consciousness, even though his brain should theoretically be resetting every loop, because for a second he thinks he blacked out between the loops.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”

He dies. He blinks, and sees only darkness. He blinks again.

“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”

He dies. The darkness lasts another blink, this time.

Over every loop, the darkness of the in-between comes in longer pulses, the energy it emanates growing stronger until it tingles at his fingertips. The repeating trauma of his every encounter with Dormammu becomes overshadowed by this – there is a stalactite of dread dripping in Stephen’s chest, an ominous countdown to a conclusion that he does not know the shape of. 

He tries warding himself with protective spells, only to find that they instantly sputter out of existence in the dark, immediately swallowed whole.

Drip.

It’s the blood trickling down his fingers, here and gone by the next loop.

Drip.

It’s the sweat beading along his forehead, stinging at his eyes.

Drip.

“Stephen?”

It’s… the child-high note of his sister’s voice?

Another blink, and Dormammu is once again in front of him.

“Stephen.” All of a sudden, there is a dark-shrouded figure standing next to him in the endless black.

He tenses all over. “Who are you?”

“I am commonly referred to as Mistress Death.” The figure’s voice is deep yet unmistakably feminine.

“Oh?” Stephen wants to scoff. “And I suppose you want something from me?”

Regardless of who she actually is, at least this is a break from the mind-splitting numbness of his loops with Dormammu. Perhaps she is another being from the Dark Dimension, here to bargain on Dormammu’s behalf? Or perhaps to usurp Dormammu’s position while he is stuck in his loops?

What exactly is this space she’s trapped him in, anyway? Its energy doesn’t feel like the Dark Dimension, or any other dimension that he’s familiar with. She’s also obviously been slowly drawing him in, with the incremental increases of time he’s been trapped in this blackness.

“Peace, Stephen,” the woman says, conciliatory. “I will explain further when you die again.”

In another blink of his eye, he’s facing Dormammu once more.

What the fuck.

He dies yet again, too slow to react to Dormammu’s attack, and finds himself next to the woman immediately.

What the fuck.

“What, so you’re trying to convince me that I’m seeing you every time I die because you’re death itself?” he demands.

The barely visible parts of the woman’s shadowed face splits into a smile. “Indeed, Stephen. With every death, you become more accustomed to my energy, and hence can perceive and interact with me for a longer period of time, outside the boundaries of the living.”

“I don’t believe in an afterlife,” Stephen states, near-furious. “So I would appreciate it if you could cease with the assholery, and tell me what you want directly.”

A silent sigh. “What are you afraid of, Doctor?” The woman asks. “Your eyes have already been opened to a world beyond what your science has taught you. Is it so fearful to imagine that your soul persists, that there is more waiting for you after death? Are you afraid of the prospect of meeting all the people you didn’t save? Your sister, perhaps?”

Blinding rage flashes through his body, and he lifts his arms to attack the woman, not even considering that his spells are useless here – only for her to disappear in a blink, once again replaced by Dormammu.

“Fine,” he grits through his teeth when the next loop with Dormammu ends. “Just tell me what you want.”

“There is a being known as Thanos, the Mad Titan, who is on a quest to collect the six Infinity Stones, including the one you wear,” the woman gestures at the Eye of Agamotto. “I know you are already sworn to its protection, but perhaps your definition of who can assist in providing such protection will expand over the coming days.”

Translation: she’s told other people, likely working for her or even on her side, that the Eye exists, and they’re trying to get it into their hands.

Wonderful. Just what he needs after he’s done with Dormammu’s excruciating loops.

“I know you have no reason to trust me,” she continues. “However, I believe that in time, you will learn to trust the people you will soon meet on their own merits.”

“Uh-huh,” Stephen says. “Is that all you wanted to say?”

“Will you believe me if I tell you anything else now?” she says with a dry smile.

Fair enough.

“Good luck, Stephen. I hope I have no cause to see you again in a long time.”

In another blink, she’s gone again.

It takes another eternity for Dormammu to buckle and fold. Stephen gets some reprieve in the dark in-between, some space to just rest and breathe between every one of his deaths, but he doesn’t see the woman again.

By the time Dormammu’s agreed to his terms, he’s an absolute wreck. His hands won’t stop trembling, pain-wracked.

But he did it. He negotiated Dormammu and his acolytes’ permanent retreat, and came out of it alive.

He wants to sleep for a week, even with the threat of that mystery woman’s people gunning for the Eye. Wong can hold them off for a bit, right? He’s a stronger sorcerer than Stephen anyway, and has been protecting the Eye for way longer.

But as he floats back to Earth, he finds himself trapped in a one-way perimeter spell. At first he thinks it’s something thrown up by Wong or Mordo, in case the Dark Dimension encroaches even more into their own dimension, but the energy used to weave the spell is not any kind he’s seen used by their Order.

For fuck’s sake. That woman’s lackeys cannot already be here. He just wants a fucking break.

The perimeter spell gives way after some poking and prodding, though, somehow running on the last dregs of its energy. The way its energy acts is akin to some ancient spells that he’s been shown, as if it’s been in place for aeons, which is impossible. Right?

His mind is on its last legs as well, and he cannot figure out the intricacies of that foreign spell right now.

He finally rejoins Wong and Mordo on the ground. Using the Eye to undo the time spells he’s put in place here uses up most of his pitiful energy, and once the streets and its people are returned to their previous bustling hum, he lifts the compound spell he put around the area as well.

Everything’s fine. Everything’s back to normal. He succeeded.

Beside him, Mordo starts bristling with suppressed rage. But whatever his problem is takes a backseat to the… spots in his vision.

Because he thinks he’s seeing shadows in the core of some people’s souls, and instinctively he knows it to be death.

“Are you guys seeing this?” he demands briskly, cutting right through Mordo’s rant. The other man draws up short, indignant, and storms off with a final, scathing glare. Wong just calmly raises an eyebrow at him.

“Seeing what?” Wong questions.

“The people who were dead. Do you see the death lingering inside them?”

A disbelieving pause hangs in the air between them. Delicately, Wong ventures, “Perhaps… I should bring you to our physicians.”

Ah. So it’s not a sorcerer thing that he wasn’t informed of before he was abruptly thrust into the position of Sorcerer Supreme. (There’s a ton of resentment here for him to work through, but that’s a problem for when he’s recovered.)

He walks around, disregarding Wong’s attempts to grab his arm and drag him off to the Hong Kong Sanctum. Instead of moving as he moves, the shadowed cores stay firmly within their people, so he can cross off the idea that something is physically wrong with his own eyes. Perhaps it is a spell put on him by that woman, to convince him of her claim of being death itself?

Though, there are two particularly dark shadows to the side of the street, seemingly untethered to any living being. Stephen squints. Maybe something is wrong with his eyes. It might even just be the aftereffects of Dormammu fucking up his body and brain a million times over.

The two shadows move closer to him. There’s something hanging around them, tugging faintly at his recent memory. It almost reminds him of… that perimeter spell he was trapped in just now.

Oh. Oh shit.

Now that he knows he’s looking at a magic-user, maybe two, he trains his eyes on their death-touched souls, and wills his eyes into shouldering straight past their notice-me-not spell.

There.

It’s a woman and someone masculine. The woman’s energy glows bright green, and next to her is an Iron Man armour, its core glowing arc-reactor blue above the soul of the person it holds.

These must be the people that Death lady mentioned. And how the fuck is that person swanning about in an Iron Man armour?

He draws breath to alert Wong to the threats, but accidentally meets the woman’s gaze as he does so. The dark-haired woman’s eyes fill with shock, and she turns to whisper urgently at her companion.

“Wong,” he only has the time to call out, and then the armour’s faceplate melts away, and he is met with a face that should be dead.

What the absolute fuck, he thinks, and then he feels his legs crumple under him as unconsciousness takes him under.

James Barnes

Every day passes in the same way. He wakes to the same padded white walls of his cell, does some simple exercise, has a simple breakfast. His two psychiatrists come by to chat, one before lunch and the other after, and then he has dinner. He does a bit more exercise, and then goes to sleep.

(He has nightmares every single night. Tony Stark haunts him in his sleep, as he has every right to. He can still feel the way the armour around the arc reactor crumpled under his metal fingers. At least the arm is gone, now.)

Day in, day out. Grey monotony. They’re afraid of giving him anything to keep inside his cell, whether it’s books or newspapers, anything that can occupy his mind. He’s not sure whether they truly think he wishes to escape the facility, or if he’s on suicide watch.

Finally the facility agrees that he can have access to a screen, set up behind the sole glass wall of his cell. He has no choice in what he is shown, but it is better than nothing. They start with a series of carefully curated children’s cartoons, formulaic and predictable. Then apparently Jennie, his before-lunch psychiatrist, successfully argues for him being shown educational materials and the news, on the grounds that Steve caused so much damage because he was out of touch with the contemporary world, and SHIELD failed to teach their agent otherwise.

So now, James has classes.

They tell him the classes are secondary to tertiary-level. No doubt the video courses are heavily vetted before they are shown to him, especially the sciences. He wants to tell them that it’s no use redacting potentially dangerous knowledge in the realm of science, because he already knows all there is to know about anything weaponizable. In all the decades that they had him, Hydra never skimped on teaching him the newest destructive technologies.

In fact, the sheer amount of detail that the courses go into for contemporary socio-political everything might be more conducive to him figuring out how to bring down a country, the way Hydra used him for occasionally.

He doesn’t say a word about this, of course. Now that he’s had a taste, he needs to keep his screen privileges. He’ll go crazy if they take it away at this point.

And he’s actually learning plenty of new things, things that Hydra didn’t think necessary for their weapon. Same-sex marriage is legal in quite a few countries now; he can barely believe it.

He sinks into a temporary funk after learning this particular piece of information. Matthew tries to tease the reason out of him, gentle and worried, and he just gives the psychiatrist a weak smile.

He would never say it out loud – that he wishes all the boys he’d fooled around with were alive to see this; that he wishes he were still a normal person capable of a normal life with a normal partner. That he wishes he were anything but this, a defective weapon with swiss cheese for a brain, and the entire world baying for his blood.

All in all, though, learning from the video courses is easy, and dare he say, delightful. They’re not teaching him any languages, wary of triggering anything in his head, but he’s turning out to be excellent at maths and economics, and he has an unexpected bias for social anthropology.

Learning is clean, and he hasn’t felt this unburdened since he got dragged into the war as a too-young man. Vaguely, he remembers that he used to be the top student in his classes back in Brooklyn. Jennie says it’s a good thing that he’s slowly regaining his less painful memories. Those memories feel like they belong to an entirely different person, though.

Apart from the classes, there’s also the news, undoubtedly also vetted and shown to him on a delay. Steve still hasn’t been found, and deep in his heart something tells him his brother is dead, that the end of the line has already arrived and passed him by. He also doesn’t tell Jennie and Matthew this.

He doesn’t know if he’s right or not, and more than that, he doesn’t know what to feel about it. So he shoves it into the back of his head, ignoring the voice in his mind that sounds like Matthew’s chiding, and focuses on everything else the news tells him.

This is how he gets his first inkling of what lies in his future.

Colonel James Rhodes achieves quite a few firsts by replacing the Acting Secretary and being appointed Secretary of Defence – first Black Secretary of Defence; youngest Secretary of Defence; first Secretary who is also classified as a “superhero” under his War Machine identity. The more government-friendly news channels still call him Iron Patriot, of course.

With cold and calculating eyes, it’s easy to see what either the journalists or the facility are leaving out of the clips he is shown – that Rhodes was chosen for his being currently held in high esteem by the US public, unlike his colleagues, due to his relationship with the younger Stark (who James murdered, just like how he murdered the man’s parents – his friend and his wife, God help him), as well as for Stark Industries’ all-out support for Rhodes. Rhodes must be bringing a shit ton of SI contracts to the table.

The government must also be trying to save face internationally with this move, by placing a superhero who fought for the Accords in such a high position. International leverage that Steve lost on their behalf, unknowingly. The clips shown to James don’t mention this, but he wonders how big of a role Rhodes plays in the new UN Accords Council.

The newly appointed Secretary wears his grief like another suit of armour. His eyes are flint, his steps firm and heavy. Cameras don’t really focus on his legs, but James can tell there’s some sort of structure that the fabric of his trousers brush up against – one of the news reports mentioned his previous paralysis and miraculous recovery, so it might be something that supports his legs.

For SI to have medical technology that can somehow heal paralysis…

And James knows shit is about to hit the metaphorical fan when both Jennie and Matthew show up to his before-lunch chat.

“You have every right to refuse this,” Matthew immediately starts off with. Ominous, yet almost expected.

Jennie hands him a dossier, which James idly flips through as she speaks. “Stark Industries has agreed to develop technology aimed at healing the physical damage your brain has sustained over the past decades, as well as technology to deactivate your code words. They’re also willing to provide you with a new prosthetic arm.”

“Sounds perfect,” James says, bringing out his best Brooklyn drawl. It usually lowers the tension of these chats through its utter incongruence, but neither of his psychiatrists relax this time.

“The catch,” Matthew continues, “Is that currently, the technology able to achieve the mentioned outcomes exists only in Tony Stark’s private lab.”

By now, James has already skimmed through the entire dossier, and come to the appropriate conclusions. “And the only two people with access to the lab are Secretary Rhodes and Ms Potts. Neither of them will be willing to give other scientists or physicians access, which means as the only one with the technical know-how, Rhodes will be the person in charge of this whole project.”

Jennie nods, a downturned twist to her mouth. “We want you to consider this very, very carefully. Rhodes requested that you move into the Tower for this, and Matthew and I will only be able to see you once a week.”

What they’re carefully skirting around is the fact that Rhodes definitely, one-hundred-percent wants him dead. He won’t kill him outright, of course, but he definitely wants to. The man has not hidden his contempt for Captain America and his various crimes on TV, and while he didn’t say a word when pressed about his thoughts on the death penalty, anyone can decipher the look in his eyes.

Maybe Rhodes is thinking of staging a lab accident. It would be so easy; they will be developing unheard of, cutting-edge technology that messes with a person’s brain. It wouldn’t even take a malfunction or a miscalculated number, because the brain is unpredictable and fragile enough for the tiniest things to break it.

James would know.

Matthew opens his mouth to speak, but James beats him to it. “I agree. Whatever the terms and conditions, I agree. I don’t even want the arm.”

Matthew frowns, displeased. “James, please. Take a day to think about it. You still have other options. Read over SI’s proposal carefully.”

“I don’t care,” he replies. “I want the goddamned trigger words gone. Being locked up for the rest of my life on the possibility that someone can activate the Soldier again is not living. Even if neither of you ever said so, I know you agree. So what if SI doesn’t succeed? At least I’d have tried to live on my own terms.”

It’s not a lie, but neither is it the entire truth. Of course he wants the trigger words gone. But more importantly, he feels like he owes it to Stark’s remaining family.

Whatever Rhodes and Potts want from him, he’ll give it to them.

A month later, he finds himself being transported to Stark Tower. Jennie and Matthew stay with him the entire trip, and they’re doing a good job with not showing their discomfort at being escorted by way too many guards.

James isn’t sure who requested this condition, but he’s been required to wear a blindfold until he reaches his new cell. Fair enough, even if it doesn’t actually do much in stopping his mind from automatically cataloguing their route.

When Matthew finally takes his blindfold off, Rhodes and Potts are in front of him, both of their lips pressed into thin, tensed lines. They’re standing in a hall of some sorts, facing a huge swathe of floor-to-ceiling glass that has a frosted finish.

“The guards stay in the lobby, as discussed,” Ms Potts says, then turns sharply on her heels and heads towards the blurred-out area. A light display seems to scan her whole person, and the glass slides open to reveal a lab.

Rhodes jerks his head for them to follow. With a beat of hesitation, Jennie walks forward, and Matthew follows behind James. It’s kind of touching, how much they worry. He doesn’t need it, though.

“This particular lab has been modified to accommodate Sergeant Barnes’ needs,” Ms Potts is saying. He’s only half paying attention; the sleek, white, and uncluttered lab is nothing like what he’s seen with Hydra, and everything the younger him used to imagine for the future. And in the corner is another glass wall, looking straight into a cell identical to the one he’s been staying in.

Ms Potts gives them a quick rundown of the lab, pointing out where all the equipment listed beforehand are placed. Jennie goes off to investigate his brand new cell, while Matthew paces all over the lab, nosing around without touching, as stipulated in the conditions for his transfer.

James stays right where he is, but doesn’t bother to hide the fact that he’s looking around. The entire time he does so, he can feel Rhodes’ eyes on his back, heavy.

Once all the introductory work is done, Ms Potts asks Jennie and Matthew, “Are you both satisfied with the Sergeant Barnes’ accommodations?”

They nod, even if James can detect a hint of reluctance in Matthew’s movements as he hands over the device used to unlock his restraints to Rhodes. His arm has been twisted behind his back and locked in place against a band around his waist.

“Thank you,” Ms Potts says, tight but unfailingly polite. “Let me bring you and the men back downstairs.”

It’s a clear sign for the two psychiatrists to leave.

“We’ll see you next week,” Jennie says to him before she walks through the doors. Matthew just gives him an encouraging nod.

And then they’re gone, the doors closing on Potts’ back, and he’s left alone in the room with Rhodes.

Silently, Rhodes gestures for him to turn around. There’s a flash of foreign fear in James’ gut, but he doesn’t allow himself any hesitation as he puts his back to Rhodes, placid. 

With a few whirs and clicks, his restraints unlock, falling into Rhodes’ waiting palm. When James turns back around, the man is eyeing the bulky devices with obvious distaste.

Yeah. Even Hydra had much better tech.

Handing the unlocking device to him, Rhodes waves down at James’ ankle. So he wants James to undo his tracking cuff himself. That makes sense, Rhodes will never crouch and put James’ body out of his field of vision, especially not this close.

So James unlocks his own ankle cuff, and puts on the much slimmer cuff that Rhodes then gives him. It slots into place silently.

Rhodes finally speaks, voice low. “Unfortunately, while this project with you is a priority in the administration’s eyes, I can still only fit your sessions into my current schedule three times a week, for four hours each session. In the meantime, if you need anything, just alert the building’s security system.”

A monotone, female voice rings out from the ceiling. “Welcome, Sergeant Barnes.”

Quietly, a shudder runs down James’ spine. He doesn’t know whether to feel awed or afraid at the evidence of a monitoring system that can respond to situations and even conversations instantaneously.

“Another perk of staying at the Tower is that you get much more variety in your meals. Again, just let… the building know your preferences, and we’ll arrange it. Any other questions?”

James shakes his head. He’s still trying to wrap his mind around this monitoring system – he knows many companies have already developed algorithmic, predictive systems that can “speak”, but his gut is telling him that nothing in Stark Tower would be that simple. Does it also run on predictive algorithms? Will its parameters be tightened particularly for him, and will it sound the alarm if it misinterprets an innocent action from him?

“Right,” Rhodes says. He brings James over to his cell, and the glass slides open at his touch. 

Once James steps in, the glass slides back shut. He knows to trust his eyes when he thinks he sees the glass move a smidge quicker than it did when it opened.

After a pause, Rhodes gives him a nod and walks away.

The man hasn’t revealed anything remotely personal in the past half-hour. It might be a good thing for James. It might not.

The words just burst from his mouth. Jennie might be proud that he’s finally not overthinking and that he’s taking initiative, but in the back of his own head he’s distinctly mortified at his own risk-laden behaviour. “Secretary Rhodes,” he calls out to the man, who is already at the doors to the lab.

Rhodes turns around. At this distance, the man has let his polite mask fall, and his eyes are freezing cold. He must think James can’t see it, or maybe he does know about James’ enhanced eyesight.

“Soldier,” Rhodes answers, and it feels like a punch to the face. Because, of course, he’s not talking to him, Colonel to Sergeant. He’s addressing him as his victim’s family, talking to the Winter Soldier.

James looks down, violently suppressing the pained twist of his facial muscles. “It’s nothing, sorry,” he all but mumbles.

By the time he looks up again, Rhodes is gone.